Memory, Identity and Otherness

Tijan Ramahi

This article deals with the appearance of an independent stream of Palestinian documentary cinema, during the 1990’s, and its specific characteristics. This it does through concentrating on three films: A Chronicle of Disappearance (Suleiman, 1996) Ustura (Hassan, 1998) and 1948 (Bakri, 1998). The argument is supported by a number of theoretical anchorages – examination of early cinema as a Lacanian mirror of self and other, the use of Ethnotopia, a concept used by Nichols and Russell, and the Freudian use of mourning and melancholia in order to deal with personal, social and national loss, as well as an examination of narrative methods and narrativity in the three films. In all three films one element appears to rise and focus our interest – story, storytelling, and narration – the narrative processes appear crucial to films which work within the documentary tradition, but also hover over the boundary with narrative cinema. This central characteristic, separating them distinctly from the mainstream of documentary film in Israel, also connects them with other strains of documentary, and specifically with Third World cinema and Arab cinema. On this basis, the article locates the role of storytelling as a structure of identity, evidence and memory, after a long period during which this memory was repressed by the Israeli occupation and its atrocities. It seems that this memory produced in the films is capable of displacing and neutralizing some of the power of the processes of melancholia which typify the loss referred to, and may herald a new form of cinema, as well as a new form of discourse within the Israeli and Palestinian areans.

A psychoanalytically inflected analysis of the animated film, "Waltz with Bashir," that attempts to splice several theoretical approaches to elucidate the relationship between the representation of trauma, the structure and function of collective memory and the historical event of the Holocaust.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, approximately 450,000 Holocaust survivors immigrated to Palestine and after 1948 – to the nascent State of Israel. The complex encounters of the newcomers with the Jews who had already been living in Palestine were reduced to a series of superficial representations in Israeli feature films. The robust Zionist ideology dominated Israeli filmmaking of the 1940s and 1950s. Films made during that era presented a biased worldview, emphasising the Holocaust’s Zionist “lesson”: the importance of a Jewish state in the land of Israel. As part of this narrative, survivors were often portrayed as people broken in body and in spirit, who could be healed and transformed into strong “new Jews” only in Israel. During the 1961 Eichmann trial, Israelis were exposed – some for the first time – to numerous testimonies which made them more cognisant of the complexity of the Jewish experience during the Holocaust. Following the trial, initial attempts were made at producing feature films which depicted a more multifaceted image of survivors. The article argues that the euphoria that followed the 1967 Six‑Day War resurrected the image of the “new Jew” and cast Holocaust survivors into their former role as the antithesis of the powerful Israeli. The rupture of Israeli society following the Yom Kippur War in October 1973, which opened the door to renewed identification with the suffering of Europe’s Jews under Nazism, did not restore these first cinematic attempts of the early 1960s. The article discusses these themes through the analysis of two prominent films that were produced in the decade following the 1967 war: He Walked through the Fields (Hu halach basadot, 1967) by Yosef Millo and Operation Thunderbolt (Mivtsa Yonatan, 1977) by Menahem Golan.

Maastricht University Faculty of Social Sciences Maastricht, 29th of June 2011 Name: Ramahi, TK ID Number: i182087 MA Arts & Sciences Supervisor: Dr. Ihab Saloul Second Reader: Dr. Jan de Roder Words: 21.270 Master thesis 1. ....................................................................................................................3 2. ............................................................10 3. ....................................................................................15 4. .....................................................................................17 5. .................................19 6. ...........................25 7. ................................................29 8. ................................................35 9. ........................................................40 10. ...........................43 11. .......................................................................................................................49 12. ...................................................................................................................52 2 !"#$%&!'# In this thesis I will analyze two movies that represent the memory of second-generation Israelis and third-generation Palestinians in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Salt of this Sea (2008) and Waltz with Bashir (2008) are the accounts of a Palestinian woman and an Israeli man trying to make sense of their memory based on intergenerational narratives and real life experience. The origin of the conflict goes back to the end of the 19th century and the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, known by Palestinians as al-nakba (Arabic for the catastrophe). These events signify historical and family memory for both protagonists and deeply influence their everyday life. My overall objective is to show the ways in which Palestinian and Israeli communicative remembrances are visually represented in cinematic media. I will argue that such visual representations share the protagonists’ post-memory/anamnesis and influence the audience’s opinion. The comparative analysis of a Palestinian and an Israeli film and their connection to post-memory/anamnesis of the 2nd and 3rd generation will help me to elaborate on the convergence from communicative remembrance and cultural memory to collective memory and the affect on the audience’s opinion making of the conflict. Salt of this Sea narrates the story of a third generation American-Palestinian woman (Soraya) returning to Palestine. Her account of trying to make sense of cultural memory experienced and communicative remembrance is giving great insight into post-memory’s metamorphosis into anamnesis. The animation movie Waltz with Bashir is the account of a second generation Israeli soldier (Ari Folman) who is tormented by his memories of the Lebanon invasion and the massacres in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. The core elements of this thesis focus on understanding the narratives of both films, especially their symbolic and autobiographical character, by selecting the most important scenes and analyzing them with reference to their effect on the audience. Looking at both movies’ affect, applying Orientalism ([1978] 2003) and concepts of postcolonialism creates a link between Israeli and Palestinian communicative remembrance and their influence on establishing one collective memory of the conflict. To arrive at such collective memory, dialogue is indispensable in line with the following quote stating the only two certainties about the conflict: “The Jews of Israel will remain; the Palestinians will also remain” (Said, [1992] 2002). Edward W. Said’s statement implies that mutual understanding is a prerequisite for a peaceful future. 3 Samuel P. Huntington on the contrary propagated an inevitable clash of cultural differences. In his article “Clash of Civilizations” borders of culture rather than borders of states will determine the battles of the future: “The great divisions among human kind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural” (Huntington, 1993). He claims that the differences between cultures are unbridgeable and that the West has to prepare for a fierce competition against the Orient (excluding Israel) including Asia, Africa and the Arab countries also known as “the rest”. Despite his anxiety of other cultures he recognizes that Western intellect and potential is not the basis of its dominance. “The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do” (Young, 2003). He acknowledges through this statement that the West’s conquests, including the creation of Israel, are a result of organized violence. This confession is an indirect invitation for those who despise organized violence and embrace peaceful dialogue. One of the West’s “gains” was Palestine, conquered with organized violence effectuated by Britain, France, Russia and the World Zionist Organization. The conflict that was caused and is ongoing until this day is partially depicted in both films. The protagonists substantiate Huntington in his assumption that the West’s organized violence is often (purposefully) forgotten by Westerners (including Israelis) while non-Westerners (including Palestinians) by no means forget, because their present is a constant reminder of the past. Therefore writing back is necessary to overcome this dichotomy. The main problem Orientalism ([1978] 2003) and postcolonialism identified during the 20th century was that knowledge of the other, the Oriental, the Palestinian was produced almost exclusively by the colonial powers, in this case Israel. The Palestinian as an expert of her own narrative, history and politics has hardly been listened to during the 20th century. A new dialogue on the Israel-Palestine conflict is emerging in the 21st century and international film making, especially when including memory accounts of the otherwise excluded Palestinians living in exile plays an important role. A very careful description of the motivation of post-colonial discourse and its intentionally vague boundaries is given in Postcolonialism: A very short introduction (2003). The movie Salt of this Sea is a postcolonial attempt to deconstruct an ongoing colonial project, which at least in terminology seems rather contradictory. Young explains postcolonialism through several accounts of colonialist subjects expressing their opinion. The most relevant explanation in relation to the films analyzed here claims that postcolonialism merely tries to intervene by forcing its alternative knowledge into 4 the power structure (Young, 2003). Culture and Imperialism (1993), a continuation of Orientalism ([1978] 2003), speaks in great detail about these themes of resistance-culture, which are considered core to the motivation of Palestinian artists. Resistance against orientalism is understood as the deconstruction of the imperial project’s portrayal of the imagined other as villain, inferior and oversexed. Postcolonial theory is concerned with “a political practice morally committed to transforming the conditions of exploitation and poverty in which large sections of the world’s live out their daily lives” (Young, 2003). Its objective is to intervene into the power structures and disrupt the ruling paradigms of academic discourse by means of out of the ordinary knowledge. Palestinian films belong to a stateless cinema of an exiled population representing seventy-four percent of Palestinians worldwide (Said, [1992] 2002). Their films are engaged with Palestinian colonial and postcolonialist struggle i.e. dignity, statehood and right of return “…the formerly silent native speaks and acts on territory reclaimed as part of a general movement of resistance…” (Said, 1993). Palestinians are still subject to colonial oppression while most of the formerly colonized countries are currently engaged in a postcolonialist struggle and therefore both apply. Prior to Salt of this Sea other Palestinian films received international attention as explained on the website of the Trans Arab Research Institute (TARI). For example Elia Suleiman submitted his film Divine Intervention (2002) to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts but was rejected with the words: “Palestine is not a country” (retrieved on 3 June, 2011 from www.tari.org). In 2006 however, Hany Abu Assad’s film Paradise Now (2005) got accepted for the category best foreign language film, with country designation Palestinian Authority. The same holds for Salt of this Sea in 2008 resembling the longing for a more transparent Palestinian quest echoing Said’s words: “The whole history of the Palestinian struggle has to do with the desire to be visible” (retrieved on 3 June, 2011 from www.tari.org). The stated aim, as is the case with Salt of this Sea is to affect the perception people have about others e.g. Palestinians and to affect the actions they subsequently take to arrive at a more equitable situation between the different peoples of the World (Young, 2003). Writing back and voicing what has been hidden affects foremost the pro-active audience that has already been critical of the information that they have received in the context of a dominant paradigm of the other. Both films are relating to postcolonialism; Salt of this Sea by raising a rarely heard voice of the colonialist subject and Waltz with Bashir by continuing the colonial discourse and muting the oppressed other instead of giving her a voice to make dialogue possible. 5 Through mediation, textualization and acts of communication collective memories are produced and established. Collective memory consists of two distinct phases that develop towards a more recognized memory of past events (Rigney, 2005). The first phase in which the more blurry memory is gathered is called communicative memory or communicative remembrance. It is used in both films, defining the earliest phase of memory recollection accounting for parallel narratives from eyewitnesses that compete with each other for an approximation to historical facts. The second more stable phase is defined as cultural memory and refers to a more established interpretation of recollected accounts of history, presented through mass media (Rigney, 2005). The Israel-Palestine conflict has been dominated in Israel and the West by what Assmann (1997) calls cultural memory, in which a “recognized” version of Jewish immigration into Palestine has been established through history books, movies and the mass media. Cultural memory refers to a paradigm wherein institutional archival information, alas often falsified and distorted, is presented to the public as factual history, thereby dominating the perception of the conflict. It is the quest for an authentic cultural memory in which both movies participate. They present memory recollection from two sides of one conflict and this paper analyzes how their depictions influence the audience’s opinion making of the conflict, in turn affecting cultural memory to arrive at one collective memory. By providing opposing versions of memory and relating them to historical facts the reader has the means to form a more balanced opinion about the conflict. At this point it is important to explain why cinematic films have been chosen to present the diverging views of both sides of the conflict. Cinematic representations, unlike literature do not give the audience the choice to pause at will. The observer is inundated with life-size images to which she must submit and respond to in a bodily, mimetic way “…cinema has the capacity to bring us into intellectual and emotional contact with circumstances that lie well beyond our own lived experiences…and force us to confront, and enter into a relationship of responsibility and commitment toward others” (Landsberg, 2009). The audience’s reaction is more intense than with other mediums because film affects through three dimensions namely discourse, figure and ground (Ott, 2010). First, discourse in cinema refers to narrative and language including recording, selection, sequencing and editing. The preceding elements are part of cinematography and always presuppose the audience as separate but all perceiving subject. Identification with the presented discourse determines the audience’s position from 6 which the affecting and perceiving disposition toward the narrative and the protagonist is established. Second, and often contradictory to the organized and ruled discourse, figure refers to those elements in movies that exceed rationality by means of music, sound, speech and moving images. The audience’s senses are affected simultaneously absorbing their emotions rather than intellect into the storyline, triggering the intensity of experience (Ott, 2010). Third and final, ground refers to the experiential environment cinema produces, causing that the audience reacts cognitively and sensorily to a world within the motion picture as if characters and plot were instant and not mediated (Shaviro, 1993). Based on the intensive affect of the mentioned dimensions in film this medium has been chosen, because it has a unique ability to make a difference on the audience counter-intuitively and become part of their archive of experiences leading to the development of empathy through the identification with something foreign i.e. the other (Landsberg, 2009). Film can provide empathic access for a conflict unrelated audience to share the emotions and events that have been endured and continue to affect, to different degrees, stakeholders of the conflict. In the case of both movies, the directors’ experienced communicative remembrance is transmuted into an object of cultural memory i.e. film. Empathy requires direct action from the audience by imagining how the characters feel, while being conscious of their own self. Distance and contemplation are essential for empathy and determine the capacity to feel compassion for the other through an active engagement. The concept of prosthetic memory entails that one internalizes an indirect experience that is only related to the original event. For example Waltz with Bashir provides subjective experiences of the Lebanon invasion and the massacres in Sabra and Shatila. The audience wears these impressions as if they were an artificial limb, because they experience the event through the eyes of the protagonist (Landsberg, 1997). Watching the films’ events becomes part of the audience’s personal archive; an experiential relationship with the film’s characters is established. Rather than providing a purely cognitive approach the audience is immersed through empathy, both intellectually and sensorily. The experience feels so real i.e. prosthetic, that it can condition the way the audience feels about the events described and activate ethical and moral action by ideally advancing egalitarian social values (Landsberg, 2009). In order to properly analyze the films’ accounts I will also focus on theories of media analysis, mainly guided by Jack Shaheen’s critical account of Hollywood’s Arabs. Shaheen’s encyclopedical analysis in Reel Bad Arabs (2009) is very profound in providing a step-bystep analysis of exemplary scenes in movies. His book uncovers stereotypes in more than 900 7 Hollywood movies and acknowledges the very few that provide a rather neutral image of an Arab on screen. Hollywood defined Palestinians mainly by their appearances and categorized them as being at the heart of the Middle East problem, being terrorists and the embodiment of the rejection to Zionism (Said, [1992] 2002). Shaheen used the label Palestinians to refer to those films that vilify Palestinians deliberately. Throughout the analysis it will be equally challenging to find an account of Arab men, women and children living ordinary lives (Shaheen, 2009) in Waltz with Bashir and normal Israelis in Salt of this Sea. The ordinary exchange between friends and family portray the other as human and only by doing so can a peaceful dialogue be created. Critical close reading and textual analysis connect the consulted literature to both movies. Especially the perception of and position on the conflict is important for the analysis. Adequate contextualization in a subjective account of an ongoing and unresolved conflict is a very sensitive point with regards to its affect on the audience. In Waltz with Bashir and Salt of this Sea the political and historical context and the role of the narrator are very different, while their approach in making sense of their memory is very similar. The fact that one is a 2nd generation Israeli (Waltz with Bashir), while the other is a 3rd generation Palestinian (Salt of this Sea) provides different narrative insights in relation to the conflict’s development and the conflicting parties’ perception in the international community. In times of information overload and suspicion towards news channels and historical accounts especially among young adults, individual experiences representative of the collective, even if fictional, are important channels of insight and provide a more subjective, emotional experience that does not claim to be absolute truth and has therefore a more popular appeal. Conflicts, when presented in fictional or animation movies are more accessible for the mainstream, providing more tangible information for a potentially empathic broader public. Both films provide a rare insight that is hardly represented in archival accounts and even though one must be aware that distortion of historical events are a grave danger, fiction and animation cannot be ignored in the process of forming an opinion about the Israel-Palestine conflict. The effectiveness of these films for the understanding of the conflict and for dialogue between Palestinians and Israelis worldwide is getting as important as archival material. While memory is the only way of retrieving accounts of direct experience in the case of the holocaust, in the Israel-Palestine conflict the picture is more diverse. Even though first generation memory accounts of 1948 and before are decreasing due to aging, the ongoing conflict is providing just as significant information. Memory influences the present day per- 8 ception of the conflict and the conflict influences memory, be it communicative remembrance, cultural memory or aspects of a future collective memory. Hence, the research question focuses on identifying the methods affecting the audience’s opinion through moments of convergence from communicative (individual) to cultural memory (institutional). To compare the narrative pattern three key concepts i.e. memory, identity and otherness are applied to examine the films’ most relevant scenes. I will further scrutinize the films’ contextualization with regards to the Israel-Palestine conflict as historical and political event. The following sub-questions will also be answered. What is the role of memory in the Israel-Palestine conflict given that it is ongoing? What are the movie’s observations of the Israel-Palestine conflict and in how far do they hold opposing/similar views? What role plays the autobiographical motivation in these fictional movies? In what way do both movies provide access for dialogue? To answer these questions I first elaborate on the role of intergenerational memory and history. 9 !(")( ("*!'# *+ (,#"- '.!#"- Real memory secretes itself only in lieux de mémoire i.e. sites of memory where historical continuity persists (Nora, 1989). Films are mobile sites of memory that are growing in importance, especially in an ongoing, unresolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Memory on the one hand can be understood as authentic, social and unviolated in particular where an institutional selective memory i.e. collective memory has not yet been written. Palestinians in exile from around the world and those living under occupation have accumulated individual memories, collective and plural in significance. Such kind of memory is not fixed due to the absence of a national government and therefore remains in permanent development, fortunately open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, and unfortunately vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation (Nora, 1989). History is the reconstruction of the past, always knotty and never complete. History is mistrustful of memory, dominates over it and eventually seeks to destroy it (Nora, 1989). Israel’s national institutions have written its historical account representing the overarching version of a selected memory provided by its Zionist founders. Accounts of individual Israeli memories that are contradicting the official historical account do exist, but hardly achieve to influence the fixed and irreverent national history. The dissociation of memory by history is understood as the writing of history-by-history, infamous for the account or invention of a national history i.e. milieu de mémoire (Nora, 1989). The latter is treated as faultless and total in its all-encompassing history and has discarded its didactic role of questioning its own traditional structure, sources and procedures. In the context of this struggle for memory to take its rightful place in history, both movies are evaluated as individual memory accounts speaking for a collective group. Throughout the thesis it will be investigated whether both Salt of this Sea and Waltz with Bashir dare to break with the dominant cultural memory. Surely the latter film faces a greater challenge in opposing the official historical account with its memory representation for two reasons. First, because a former Israeli soldier (Folman) tells it, suggesting an approximation to the governmental version of history. Second, the movie has been produced and released in the state of Israel and given the exclusive claim on land, monuments and resources it deems legitimate, a different interpretation of history is unlikely to be submitted to the Academy Awards to represent Israel as a whole. 10 Nora puts it in the following words: “History’s goal and ambition is not to exalt but to annihilate what has in reality taken place” (Nora, 1989). In the spirit of lieux de mémoire and against the rejection of Palestinian memory Salt of this Sea aspires to shed light into historical darkness and create a broader understanding of the Palestinian narrative. Israeli historian Ilan Pappe (2006) obtained information from Israeli military archives for his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine in which he stated: “…the upsurge of electronic media, no longer allows human made catastrophes to remain hidden from the public eye or to be denied. And yet, one such crime has been erased almost totally from the global public memory: the dispossession of the Palestinians in 1948 by Israel. [The dispossession] has ever since been systematically denied, and is still today not recognized as an historical fact, let alone acknowledged as a crime that needs to be confronted politically as well as morally” (Pappe, 2006). Soraya, Salt of this Sea’s protagonist is telling her family’s personal story based on the traumatic exodus from their Palestinian homeland. Israel still propagates a different version of history despite the internationally agreed facts exposing Israel as colonizing force, breaching international human rights and committing war crimes. In a speech given at Maastricht University (Finkelstein, N., personal communication, November 13, 2008) on Gandhi’s theory of peaceful resistance and its non-applicability to the Palestinian struggle, historical evidence based on the United Nations General Assembly and International Court of Justice decisions was provided. Norman Finkelstein concludes: “It can be said I think that there is no conflict in the world today which is less complicated, less controversial, less intricate than the Israel-Palestine conflict…Hold on to the truth that what Israel has done to the Palestinians is wrong…Israel’s refusal, backed by the United States to respect international law and the considerate opinion of human kind is the sole obstacle to putting an end to their [Palestinian and Israeli] suffering” (Finkelstein, N., personal communication, November 13, 2008). Creative filmmakers generate fresh access to memory when revealing the protagonists’ emotional knowledge. However, this knowledge or memory is not undisputed. The Palestinian experience is still not recognized by the Israelis despite archival analysis from Israeli historians such as Pappe. With regards to the Israel-Palestine conflict an internationally recognized collective memory, vetoed by the United States and blocked by Israel and several Pacific Islands (Finkelstein, 2008) is obtainable at the United Nations archives. 11 The films analyzed here present different versions of communicative remembrance, which are contesting each other with regards to internationally recognized historical facts. They are expressing the expectations, experiences and emotions of Israelis and Palestinians respectively but provide an opposing picture in determining the role of the perpetrator and the victim. Waltz with Bashir depicts the Israeli soldiers as victims of the Lebanese invasion, while Salt of this Sea presents the struggle of the exiled Palestinian and the undignified life circumstances of those living under Israeli occupation. Both films give a remarkable account of a traumatic 2nd (Israeli) and 3rd (Palestinian) generation experience. Salt of this Sea gives an indirect-indirect account. The protagonist, Soraya, has experienced intergenerational memory as a third generation Palestinian. Her parents became refugees in 1948 and she has lived her entire life outside of Palestine. In this respect she has been passively affected and mainly experienced the conflict “out of place”. Waltz with Bashir gives an indirect-direct account. The film’s protagonist/director has lived intergenerational memory as a 2nd generation Israeli, whose parents were perpetrators during the establishment of the Israeli state, and lived in Israel his entire life. As a result of the obligatory military service, he has been directly involved in the atrocities committed during the Israeli invasion in Lebanon in 1982. The dichotomy of passive and active does not imply that the former is less authentic; it merely refers to an experience that is lived outside of the homeland. Both films are especially relevant for the Orientalist discourse, to analyze the construction and deconstruction of cultural memory. The Palestinians narrate their experiences through memory in a post-colonial manner to prevent a one-sided depiction of the conflict in the midst of an ongoing colonial project. Palestinians born in exile present their Palestinian case primarily to those they are living with. Hence the target audience is the Westerner i.e. Americans and Europeans. The relationship between the Western perceptions of Palestinians is generally analogous to the misguided perception of the Orient in general. The Israeli occupation and domination of Palestinians and Palestinian land since 1948 has been absorbed into an imagined, distorted and uncorrected representation of the other. The Oriental was produced and created in literature and mass media throughout European colonialism and beyond to maintain the image of the Arab as a savage. The imperialist oppression of Palestinians under the British Empire and later by Israel activates especially Palestinians in exile to inform their kin about Palestinian history, culture and traditions. Instead of having Westerners and Israelis talk about Palestinian identity and emotions, it is the Palestinian herself who reappropriates the discourse to create awareness among the European and American public. 12 Salt of this Sea creates awareness in such a way that for the average American with migration background identification with the protagonist is possible. Soraya was born in Brooklyn, a popular immigrant area in New York. Based on intergenerational memory and her exilic existence she decided to re-discover her identity. Following her returning to her father’s land does not require prior knowledge. No historical understanding is needed as a prerequisite to empathize with the protagonist and to feel and see the situation as she feels and sees it. Salt of this Sea does not try to convince by appealing to historical facts but merely by appealing to humanistic values, emotions and inter-human realities and that makes the film so accessible for the Western audience. The very fact that Salt of this Sea and Waltz with Bashir are autobiographical i.e. that the protagonists are living the life depicted in the movies, and given that the conflict is still ongoing and unresolved converts the films into a door to reality. To understand the director’s intentions and memories as well as their real life accounts through a semi-fictional (Salt of this Sea) respectively animated (Waltz with Bashir) subjective description the idea of “conceptual messiness” (Bal, 1997) has been applied. Conceptual messiness is the undistinguishable relation between performance as a planned event e.g. a film, and performativity as an act in the now (Saloul, 2008). Performance is understood as a planned event that has been created with a certain intention and message. Film is a classical example of performance but affects often only until it finishes and then vanishes from the audience’s life. In Salt of this Sea performance is interconnected with performativity through memory (Saloul, 2008). Soraya’s subjective account of al-nakba is a performance relating to the immediate past of the narrated film and represents the Palestinian catastrophe as a whole. Accompanying Soraya in the process of returning to Palestine affects the audience as recipients of her private story, her personal nakba. Performativity is used to influence the level of empathy the audience can reach through a more holistic experience involving emotions, reason, historical archives and the appeal for historical consciousness. Historical consciousness arises from the interaction with the audience in the very moment of watching the film and develops into a catastrophe in progress i.e. Soraya’s rebuffed right to return. While the performance bridges the past with the present, the audience is experiencing every day’s nakba through Soraya’s life and empathizes with her as an individual and as an exiled Palestinian representing the collective whole (Saloul, 2008). The main affect on the audience is awareness of history triggered by empathy for the present situation. Both elements, historical consciousness and empathy, are crucial for the acknowledgement of the Palestinian narrative and locate the audience in the midst of it. They are no longer mere observers but are provided with the tools to carry their audiovisual experience into their own lives 13 based on the daily nakba of which they are the witnesses today and tomorrow until the end of the occupation. Performativity is constructively merged with performance via memory as interlocutor. Memory produces new knowledge and new possibilities with the audience as an extension of the performance, ideally resulting in participatory significance promoting dialogue. “When knowledge comes, memory can also slowly return. Memory and knowledge are one and the same thing” (Assmann, 2006). Especially Salt of this Sea gives the audience a clear impression of conceptual messiness, by transgressing the line between fiction and reality. Neither has the film a clearly dated beginning nor a clearly dated ending congruent with the ongoing occupation. Salt of this Sea represents an excerpt of the occupation that emphasizes the irrelevance of dates, because Palestinians in exile or under occupation have not witnessed any significant changes in sixtythree years. Despite the fact that no specific date is mentioned throughout the film a time indication in Salt of this Sea is the dividing Israeli apartheid wall that is already depicted. It’s construction started in June 2002 aiming to build a barrier twice as tall as the Berlin wall, counting currently (2010) 520 km in length i.e. 64% of the planned 810 km, approximately three times longer than the Berlin wall when finished (retrieved on June 5, 2011 from www.stopthewall.org). As a third generation Palestinian she has been in exile since birth. She spent her entire childhood in Brooklyn, New York and desires to return to Palestine to live her Palestinian identity. At the film’s end the audience does not know whether Soraya will return-to-return but they certainly know that the conflict is unresolved and therefore asks for the audience’s proactive behavior. Salt of this Sea is timeless in the sense that it does not only refer to a certain moment during the occupation but to its totality. For that reason it stays applicable as long as there is occupation and creates awareness for an urgently needed cultural intervention (Saloul, 2008). Palestinian memory has long been excluded from public debate to prevent a transparent confrontation for a required historical consciousness in order to arrive at a just and dignified solution. Salt of this Sea is an appeal for justice under conditions of history in denial, and pledges for truth to be told and acted upon. Before analyzing both films the contextual background information including a brief summary is provided. To facilitate the application of theories used and to make a comparison between the films more apprehensible for the reader Waltz with Bashir and Salt of this Sea will be jointly scrutinized in every chapter according to memory, identity and otherness. 14 %,* '/($ ."*(+' #+$'(". Waltz with Bashir is the story of the Israeli veteran Ari Folman who has flashbacks twentyfour years after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and in particular of the Sabra and Shatila massacres, which took place between 16 and 18 September 1982. His flashbacks start when his friend and former comrade, Boaz Rein-Buskila, calls him one night to tell him about his reoccurring nightmares. Subsequently, Folman starts meeting up with those soldiers that have fought alongside him in Lebanon. After having visited his former comrade Cna’an for a second time and on his way to Amsterdam Airport, Folman suddenly remembers his role during the massacres. He manages to reconstruct what has happened and finally concludes that Israeli soldiers were not aware of the massacres in the refugee camps, and only fired flares into the air to provide the Phalangists with sufficient light to commit the massacre. The film ends with an abrupt switch from animation movie into reality footage showing the massacred Palestinian people and mourning Palestinian women. Waltz with Bashir is an Israeli animation film spoken entirely in Hebrew. Director Ari Folman, who is also the film’s protagonist, described it as a “completely autobiographical film”, critics called it a “documentary animation” (retrieved on April 7, 2011 from www.imdb.com). Waltz with Bashir received many highly acclaimed awards, with the internationally highest-ranking prize being a Golden Globe award, given to Folman in Hollywood on the 12th of January 2009 (retrieved on April 23, 2011 from www.goldenglobes.org). While Folman celebrated his “animated documentary”, the Israeli army attacked Palestinians in Gaza. During the 22 days massacre committed by the Israeli army from the 27th of December 2008 until the 18th of January 2009 more than 1.300 Palestinians were killed (retrieved on April 15, 2011 from www.electronicintifada.net). The audience’s opinion of the conflict is influenced by Waltz with Bashir’s message and ought to be connected to the information available to get an accurate picture. I will analyze several scenes of the movie Waltz with Bashir in relation to three concepts: Memory, Identity and otherness. These concepts will serve as guidance in analyzing this film and in order to detect which methods have been used to affect the audience’s opinion of the conflict. Before starting with the analysis of the scenes two of the film’s core moments will be scrutinized that are symbolic for the message that it tries to convey and are vital to understand how the film affects the audience’s opinion of the conflict. 15 First, the Israeli state represented by Israeli soldiers is portrayed as utterly human and innocent in its intentions and actions. Sympathizing with the Israeli soldier is inevitable because there is nobody else portrayed as human, neither the Palestinian refugees nor the Lebanese Phalangists. Towards the end one phrase releases the Israeli veterans of their nightmares and the Israeli military of their responsibility. This phrase also gives the audience the impression that young and innocent Israeli soldiers suffer fighting wars as if they arrived at that situation by chance: “They did not realize they were watching a genocide” says Folman and his friend Sivan responds by saying “You were there firing flares but you did not carry out the massacre” (Waltz with Bashir, 2008, 73:54min.). Palestinian refugees and Lebanese Phalangists are muted and reduced to being savage-like supernumeraries who cannot speak for themselves whether portrayed as either victim or terrorist in the case of Palestinians or monstrous slaughterers i.e. Phalangists. Second, Sivan tells Folman in the beginning of their consultation about a psychological experiment in which he lays open the hidden meaning of which Waltz with Bashir is the embodiment. He explains that childhood images were shown to people in which one out of ten images was fabricated. While 80% approved the fabricated image as being part of their own personal memory only 20% could not remember it. When asked again, also the remaining 20% recognized the fabricated image as their own memory. Sivan concludes: “Memory is dynamic, it’s alive. If some details are missing memory fills the holes with things that never happened” (Waltz with Bashir, 2008, 10:30). Subsequently, it will be shown that Waltz with Bashir is that tossed in fabricated image with regards to the Israeli role and responsibility during the Sabra and Shatila massacres. 16 0( (!%" ' ) *+(.!' '* Salt of this Sea is starring Suheir Hammad (Soraya), Saleh Bakri (Emad) and Riyad Ideis (Marwan). The movie was filmed exclusively in Palestine and Israel (illegally), is spoken in Arabic, Hebrew and English and has been produced in a joint effort by five countries i.e. Belgium, France, Spain, Switzerland and Palestine. The film received various awards, the highest being the official selection at the Cannes film festival. Salt of this Sea was submitted to be Palestine’s official Oscar entry for best foreign language film but did not get awarded (retrieved on 17 May, 2011 from www.imdb.com). Salt of this Sea has been written and directed by Annemarie Jacir, a Palestinian filmmaker and poet, born in Saudi Arabia. Jacir can be considered an accented filmmaker whose creation outside of the mainstream film industries represents her liminal subjectivity and interstitial location in society (Naficy, 2001). Accented filmmakers are part of the society they are living in but at the same time do not belong to. Jacir is living in exile in the United States and produces films that are the result of a fusion between exilic and diasporic influences. Exilic refers predominantly to the ambivalent relationship with the country of origin. In the Palestinian case it signifies the desire to return without the actual possibility of doing so as presented in Salt of this Sea. Multiple experiences without a clear sense of nationality provide accented directors with the potential to transcend and transform themselves to create syncretic characters, capable of expressing the search for identity and justice. In a diasporic sense, Soraya seems to have an identity in Palestine even though she has never been there. Diaspora is always collective (Naficy, 2001) and transcends beyond the individual’s location to form an (always incomplete) identity. Salt of this Sea tells Soraya’s story, an American citizen with Palestinian origin returning to Palestine. She is interrogated, humiliated and discriminated by Israeli border control upon arrival, because she is of Palestinian origin. After finally arriving in the occupied territory, she visits the British Palestine Bank in Ramallah where her grandfather left his money before he was forced to leave the country on the 15th of May 1948, marking the establishment of the state of Israel and the Palestinian nakba. After several meetings with different bankemployees she is told that there is no way to retrieve the money. Together with two Palestinian friends, Emad and Marwan, Soraya decides to rob the bank and get the money her grandfather had left on his account including interest rate. After the robbery the three leave, disguised as Israelis to ensure they can enter Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and their ancestor’s birthplaces. They embark on a journey into their memories and the lives of their parents and 17 grandparents, discovering in Jaffa the house in which Soraya’s father was supposed to grow up. Through communicative remembrance she knows every detail of the ancient family house in Palestine, and her grandfather’s daily routine when he used to live there. Irit, a left-wing Israeli woman, is now living in the house. After she learns that Soraya’s family owned the house before the Israeli government confiscated it she invites them to stay as long as they please. However, after a few days Soraya requires Irit to recognize that the whole house belongs to Soraya’s family and that it is up to her to decide whether Irit can stay not the other way around. Irit considers these as baseless accusations; belonging to the past. By delivering the movie’s key message Soraya declares that Irit’s past is her everyday. The significance of this phrase will be thoroughly explained in the coming chapters. After the incident Marwan stays with Irit, even though Soraya and Emad leave. He is neither demanding empathy nor does he require historical consciousness. He is very pragmatic and befriends Irit regardless of her being Israeli and vice versa. Emad and Soraya continue their memory journey visiting Dawaymah, where Emad’s family had been living before Israelis committed a massacre on October 28, 1948 (Pappe, 2006). After few harmonic days in the ruins of Dawaymah the Israeli police imprisons both, identified through the license plate they had stolen from an Israeli car to cross over to Israel after the bank robbery. While Emad’s fate is not revealed to the audience, Soraya is shown in the film’s last scene waiting in the departure hall of the Airport having to leave Palestine against her will. Soraya’s return to Palestine is analyzed according to the same concepts as Waltz with Bashir i.e. memory, identity and otherness. 18 (,#"- #%" (- 1'!0#%! !0( ')0! !# (!%" This thesis is applying an adjusted format of post-memory as its main concept of memory analysis. First of all the original concept of post-memory will be explained followed by a clarification for adjusting it to the realities of the Palestinian and Israeli memory. Hirsch (2008) defines the concept “post-memory” in her article Generation of Postmemory. She compares it with postcolonial theory claiming that it does not signify the end of colonialism but rather the contrary “a critical distance to and an intricate interrelation with the modern” (Hirsch, 2008). Post-memory is not a method or a movement but rather a structure of interand transgenerational transmission of traumatic knowledge and experience (Hirsch, 2008). Transgenerational transmission of trauma refers to the way in which the “hinge generation” also called second (or third) generation transmutes what they have experienced into history or myth (Hirsch, 2008). The hinge generation is the living connection to their ancestors’ memory and in this respect post-memory is turning to the past. Hence, the hinge generation’s memory is determined purely by their ancestors conditioning and could not have evolved without them. Hirsch calls this “imaginative investment” (Hirsch, 2008) meaning that instead of a mediated connection the hinge generation has a visualized relation to this memory. The latter is emotionally strong and intimate and turns the hinge generation into special carriers of familial memories. Soraya for example is the guardian of a traumatic personal and generational past based on a living connection to her family. Jacir’s Palestinian film focuses on the transformation from intergenerational to transgenerational transmission. The latter eternalizes memory, being resilient beyond intergenerational family transmission and does not fade after approximately three generations. In the transgenerational transmission every viewer becomes a granddaughter or a grandson, an inheritor of the memory and helps it survive. Prothesizing the Palestinian experience onto an external audience triggers empathy with the Palestinian struggle. Contrary to intergenerational transmission’s dependency on the survivors, Palestinians could not fail to remember after their ancestors have faded because they are reminded everyday either by an undignified life under occupation or a dignified life in “freedom” but out of place. 19 For this reason and contrary to the original definition of post-memory the Palestinian and the Israeli memory are not remembered in the aftermath of the catastrophe only but more precisely while it unfolds in the present. The victims and perpetrators respectively are not just part of an aging and disappearing generation with reference to 1948, but the second and third generation Palestinians and Israelis still live under comparable circumstances today (Saloul, 2011). Post-memory refers to the violent uprooting of a people, their displacement or elimination and the following generations’ memory of this uprooting based on familial transmission. The Palestinian memory is quite different because Palestinians in exile and under occupation remember the uprooting of their ancestors from the position of an un-rooted identity day by day. Even if they would have feelings of being rooted somehow it is only temporarily and subject to the random Israeli atrocities occurring daily. Here, I want to differentiate between belonging and being rooted, since the former is not weakened by the absence of the latter. In Palestinian post-memory the “imaginative investment” is replaced by an associative identification with the uprooted and translated into the daily experience of every Palestinian subject. Their post-memory based on intergenerational memory doest not just continue into the present, it is the present. There is a causal relationship in the Israel-Palestine conflict between post-memory and everyday experience. While Israeli ancestors established the state of Israel in 1948 through an “ethnic cleansing” of the Palestinian people, the remembered postmemory relates directly to today’s settlement expansions, the Palestinian refugee question or recent incidents of crimes against humanity and war crimes committed by Israel e.g. during the Gaza massacre 2008/2009 (retrieved on June 6, 2011 from www.un.org). As a result of this significant difference to Hirsch’s (2008) original concept of postmemory an adjusted version of post-memory is applied to the Israeli-Palestinian case. Rigney suggests the term recollection as being more adequate than (post-) memory because it implies the active and constantly shifting relationship with the past. Even more precise, she argues, is the term anamnesis because it focuses on the fact that recollection requires overcoming oblivion and that forgetting comes before remembering not the other way around (Rigney, 2005, p.17). Anamnesis is a very accurate concept to use because the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict is shifting the relation with the past continuously e.g. when Palestinian monuments, olive trees, or archival evidence are destroyed irrevocably. These traumatic and tragic events should provoke a desire to forget in order to live but this longing of forgetting last only very short and, as Rigney states, precedes an even more conscious remembering i.e. anamnesis. 20 Palestinians remember their ancestors’ past in their daily tragedies under occupation, through continuous maltreatment or in exile “I can also remember the suffering not of others…but rather my own, my loss of home in the everyday in exile” (Saloul, 2011). Anamnesis will henceforth be used throughout this thesis to refer to the adjusted post-memory account of Palestinians and Israelis. Only occasionally will post-memory be used to refer to Soraya’s initial concept of Palestine based on intergenerational transmission. This application of both concepts implies a growing consciousness from post-memory to anamnesis. Soraya learns to understand her identity in terms of anamnesis rather than post-memory through face-to-face experiences and the dichotomy between her memory and reality. Salt of this Sea is analyzed best when structured according to three decisive core moments related to memory. The first core message refers to exiled Palestinians’ right to return. After Soraya managed to enter Ramallah she has dinner together with two Palestinian friends. They are wondering why she came to Palestine in the first place given that abroad everything is better. Soraya asks in return what exactly is better abroad, claiming that many people would return to Palestine if they could. Her reasoning is not taken seriously and is ridiculed at times. Some Palestinians can only smile at her naivety and idealism that formed the basis for her decision to return. Her friends ask why a pretty woman like her is coming to Palestine. She responds: “They deny us the right to return. I’ll take it!” (Salt of this Sea, 2008, 11:10min.). Both Palestinians are not convinced, trivialize her statement and subsequently give a defeated impression by saying that Jaffa is long lost and that she must accept that the country is divided into two lands, “their land” (Israel) and “our land” (Palestine). This statement is highly disputed because there is no empirically recognized land called Palestine yet. Salt of this Sea fails to show any Palestinian resistance against Israeli hegemony. Palestinians are portrayed as accepting the status quo, conquered and crushed by the colonizer. An authentic image of the Palestinian struggle for dialogue, peace and statehood must include the reality of violent and non-violent resistance. For example the first Intifada (1987) was as non-violent as could reasonably be expected and consisted mainly of protest marches and strikes, bringing the Palestinian struggle to the forefront of the international media. Moreover on the 15th of May, 2011 Palestinians were commemorating sixty-three years of al-nakba in which thousands of unarmed Palestinians marched to Israel’s borders from the Golan Heights, from Lebanon and from Gaza respectively. Even though they were shot at with live ammunition by Israeli military they stayed peaceful and insisted on their right of return to their homeland, Palestine. (retrieved on May 15, 2011 from www.economist.com). 21 The question of the Palestinian right of return is central to the film because it inquires about and elaborates on the actual possibility of returning, motivated by post-memory, and based on the Palestinian living conditions under occupation. Salt of this Sea, in line with the concept of anamnesis that has been defined before, focuses on the hinge generation Palestinians that were affected by a conflict whose root-cause preceded their birth (Hirsch, 2008). The hinge generation, to which Soraya clearly belongs, has the responsibility to keep memory alive via transgenerational transmission and make their anamnesis more accessible for a broader audience. Van Alphen (2002) investigates in his article Caught by images: on the role of visual imprints in Holocaust testimonies the significance of fictional memory to keep past events alive, when the majority of eyewitnesses have ceased. He also explains the intricate and relevant assumption that an eyewitness must have fully comprehended her situation or event at the time. The authenticity of fictional films in relation to an ongoing conflict that is not defined by one collective memory is at best controversial. However disputed Salt of this Sea’s message might be, its autobiographical character provides at least a first person account of the hinge generations’ emotional involvement as a collective group and is based on the inherited and daily acquired memory, serving as a reminder for the right of return. The second core moment refers to Soraya’s post-memory (acquired in exile) and Emad’s anamnesis (experienced under occupation). When Soraya’s imagined reality and Emad’s empirical perception clash for the first time, an insight into the different realities they are living in is provided. When Soraya and Emad travel to the furthest point within the West Bank that Emad is allowed to go to, they take a brake in the countryside. When she protests that her visa forces her to leave in two weeks, Emad proposes she lies and makes a return trip to Israel saying that she is visiting some Jewish friends. Soraya responds: “We have only truth and I will never renounce it” (Salt of this Sea, 2008, 33:20min). Emad’s proposition is based on his experience and refers to pragmatic and essential ways of living life in occupied Palestine. Soraya’s approach is based on communicative remembrance conveyed to her through her family while she was living in New York, distant from Palestinian actuality and romantic at times. Emad tells her: “Do you think truth is helping you with anything. Wake up. They won. You are wasting your time telling the truth. They [Israelis] do not deserve the truth. The key is to carry your head high [to survive with dignity]. You think that Palestine is oranges or Jaffa is oranges? That is just a dream” (Salt of this Sea, 2008, 33:50min). 22 This conversation is symbolic for Soraya’s imaginative investment into her grandfather’s memory of Palestine “full of orange trees”. She embodies the exiled Palestinian whose reason for returning is incomprehensible to most Palestinians living under occupation, because she is still idealistic and bases her claims on legitimate abstractions rather than the realities she encounters. Her view, based on communicative remembrance is clashing with the realities and she faces a dead end to any chance she identifies for residing as a Palestinian in Palestine. Even so, Soraya’s truth seeking and justice believing approach is appealing and deeply affects the Western audience. She takes them on an empathic exploration into the heart of Palestine to let the audience experience the impossibilities she encounters. The film provides an insight into Palestinians’ sense of belonging to Palestine based on family memory and the daily tragedy caused by Israeli discrimination and humiliation. The third core message is the clash of perceived history and lived presence based on the divergent life circumstances of Israelis and Palestinians. The encounter with Irit, who inhabits the house of Soraya’s grandfather is based on a political background to which neither of the two has contributed but was born into. She tells Irit that the house belongs to her because it was stolen from her family. The scene presents her strong belief in righteousness and the idea that understanding of Israelis and Palestinians based on historical facts i.e. one collective memory must be possible. Soraya demands her ancestors’ house based on values of international justice but absolutely alien to the reality around her, especially Irit’s reality: “You can stay if you admit that all of this is stolen…My grandfather laid down this floor, what does that mean to you?... Our windows, our doors, our fucking house. Admit it!” (Salt of this Sea, 2008, 76:00min.). While Irit claims that Soraya’s grandfather voluntarily left the house and therefore it is now legitimately hers, Soraya insists that he was forced to leave and therefore it belongs to her: “This is my home. It was stolen from my family, so it is for me to decide if you can stay, and you can…My father should have been raised in this house, not in a fucking camp” (Salt of this Sea, 2008, 76:36min). Irit reacts: “You want to speak about history, the past? Let’s forget it!” (Salt of this Sea, 2008, 76:57min). Eventually, Irit orders her out of her house. She is ignoring Palestinian history and is denying Soraya’s communicative memories their rightful place in the present. The exclusive Jewish rights even refute Soraya any chance of purchasing the house back, because it is forbidden to sell to non-Jews as explained by Irit: “You can’t, the state owns it and the Jewish National Fund, and they won’t sell to non-Jews” (Salt of this Sea, 2008, 75:30min.). 23 This scene locates the wide gap between Israeli ignorance of historical facts and Palestinian longing for justice. The latter is based on a determination to not let go of the struggle for dignity in memory, containing the evidence needed to return e.g. Soraya’s grandfather’s documents. In this discussion Soraya’s core motivation and what she has inherited as an exiled Palestinian is rooted. Soraya provides Irit and the audience in this scene with the movie’s key phrase explaining why she returned to Palestine and why everywhere she goes she clashes with Israelis who do not want to listen to the Palestinian narrative: “Your past is my everyday, my right now!” (Salt of this Sea, 2008, 77:40min). Soraya’s actions clarify that the Israel-Palestine conflict is not only a historical conflict or affecting those living under occupation, but it is also every day’s challenge for those living in exile. To better understand Soraya’s words, reference to an undisputed account of cultural memory is helpful. In History, Memory, and the Genre of Testimony, Assmann (2006) focuses on memory accounts of holocaust survivors. Contrary to the holocaust, in which perpetrator and victim, friend and foe, agree upon an almost unified collective memory of historical events, this is not the case in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Few accounts of Israeli historians e.g. Pappe’s (2006) are equal to the historical understanding and description of events provided by the international community and the Palestinian people. Until a unified collective memory of historical facts is unanimously agreed upon, as is the case with the holocaust, the production of subjective memory accounts will gain more importance to provide those involved and interested with the authentic emotional experience and not only with the clashing institutional versions of cultural memory. Focusing on the permeable border in fiction films between historical accounts and remembered past, as well as the impact of the latter on the former (Assmann, 2006) suggests a major affect on the audiences’ opinion of the conflict. In the context of memory studies and along the lines of the mentioned three core messages i.e. the right of return, post-memory verses anamnesis and perceived history verses lived presence Salt of this sea has been examined. Subsequently the concept of memory will be discussed in Waltz with Bashir. 24 *2"* *2"* 0*!'+* )( &- 3#" )'!*!($ (,#"- (+'(3 In Waltz with Bashir the overtly humane behavior and sensitivity of the Israeli military makes them vulnerable for nightmares and flashbacks based on guilt feelings. Their role during the 1982 invasion and participation in the massacres is causing the haunting images that prevent the veterans from having peace of mind. It is their exaggerated decency, the fact that they are too gentle and too soft, simply too human, which makes them relive the horrible atrocities time and again only to find out, at the end of the movie, that they were not the perpetrators. The latter elevates the Israeli soldiers to an even higher level that is equivalent to selfsacrifice for the sake of humanity by revealing to the audience what has happened during the massacres. Even before growing up, Folman already had to carry the 2nd and 3rd generation burden of anamnesis based on the horrible atrocities committed against his parents. While the massacre in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila are the cause of the film’s flashbacks and the reason for Israeli soldiers’ nightmares, the real preoccupation is Israeli torment, not the massacre of Palestinian people. The suffering of Israeli soldiers is at the film’s core while Palestinians only facilitate the search for a pacifist Israeli identity and serve as a reminder for the traumatic post-memory of Holocaust’s grandchildren. The Israelis are victims to identify with because their suffering is comprehensible for the audience. Palestinians are just fatalities of monstrous atrocities that are beyond human comprehension and therefore do not establish a relation with the audience that could draw sympathy. When Folman speaks to Sivan about his uncontrollable flashbacks, he expresses his fear of investigating them, because he might encounter things he does not want to know about. His friend, self-assured, tells him “the human mechanism protects us from entering dark places…memory takes us where we need to go” (Waltz with Bashir, 2008, 11:33 min.) and encourages him to find out about his role during the massacres at Sabra and Shatila. The tragedy of Sabra and Shatila very briefly portrayed in this animated movie is only used as a vehicle, not to disentangle the horrific circumstances that led to the massacre, but for a therapeutic self-treatment with which to release Israeli soldiers of their guilt-feelings. 25 For Israel’s representation in the media and cultural memory narrative nothing could be better than transforming a historical taboo, an outrageous massacre, into an insignificant event that only touches Israelis and the West on the periphery of their political consciousness because eventually the Lebanese were the perpetrators. The innocent image of Israeli soldiers is fostered by their somewhat shattered identity due to their military service but also due to their anamnesis. Apart from their active experience as soldiers, especially their memory as children of families who were brought to concentration camps during the 2nd world war is discussed. The holocaust is instrumentalized to trigger sympathy from the audience for an event that had nothing to do with Palestinians in general or the Lebanese invasion in particular. The trauma is ingrained into Folman’s identity according to memory-expert Sivan: “Your interest in the massacre [Sabra and Shatila] developed long before it happened. Were your parents in Auschwitz? [Yes]…So the massacre has been with you since you were six [years old].” (Waltz with Bashir, 2008, 62:30 min.). Israeli soldiers are shown as deeply traumatized already as children, because they have been intergenerational victims of the Nazi regime. Folman continues telling about his childhood: “When I was about 10 there was a war going on…All the fathers were at the front…mothers sat with their daughters behind closed blinds…Just waiting for a plane to drop a bomb and kill them all” (Waltz with Bashir, 2008, 45:00 min.). Here the movie refers to the 1973 attack of the Egyptian forces on Israel and Egypt’s only military success, presented without historical context of the occupation or the preceding three wars (1948; 1956; 1967) in which Israel devastated the Arab army and population with vital support of the British, the French and the Soviet army (Said, [1992] 2002). The Israeli soldiers’ image provided is that of a double burdened identity: First, the soldiers are innocent in the internal military structure. They do not know who the enemy is and have no bad intention; they are just following orders and fulfill their duty without knowing whom they are shooting at. This is demonstrated when Folman tells Cna’an that he, his friends and family always expected him to be a nuclear physicist in the future and to win the Nobel price with 40 years of age. Cna’an responds “By 20 that future was over” (Waltz with Bashir, 2008, 13:16 min.) indicating that their fate as soldiers did not allow dreams like these to come true. These statements are not put into perspective with regards to the Palestinian people and their future possibilities or better impossibilities, living under occupation or in refugee camps. 26 Second, the enemy seems to be so overwhelming that they are shooting day and night into the wilderness around them as if it was a giant monster that is attacking. The director emphasizes that the Israeli soldier would like to live in peace but is being surrounded by terrorists: “The first day of the war. Barely 19, I haven’t even started shaving…We’re shooting everywhere at everything, until nightfall” (Waltz with Bashir, 2008, 22:22 min.). An officer orders him to bring all the dead and wounded (Israeli soldiers only) to the base and he, who had never seen an open wound, was transporting them shooting at everything without a clear target: “Shoot. At whom? How do I know? Just shoot” (Waltz with Bashir, 2008, 22:28 min.). Keeping in mind that during the Lebanon invasion according to the Red Cross 17.825 Lebanese and Palestinians were killed (mostly civilians) and “only” 368 Israeli soldiers (retrieved on April 23, 2011 from www.icrc.org) this isolated depiction is a willful distortion of historical facts. This scene gives the impression that the innocent Israeli soldier is just trying to survive through this grave horror. They are the victims, the ones who are wounded and dead and need empathy from the audience. A scene that reconfirms this shows the young soldiers arriving at the beach of Saida/Sidon in South Lebanon where Cna’an started shooting like a lunatic out of pure fear and anxiety. To the question at whom they were shooting? The standard answer in the movie is given: “How do I know!” (Waltz with Bashir, 2008, 18:52 min.), indicating that they are not responsible for what they are doing. An old Mercedes appears and they fire at it without clear reason. The next morning they find out that they have killed an entire family. Cna’an explains his memory of the accident: “Two years of training, and the fear, the uncontrollable fear…then the silence. The terrible silence of death” (Waltz with Bashir, 2008, 19:05 min). The Israeli soldier only surrounds around himself. No emotional time is dedicated to the slaughtered family in the car. He can only look at what has happened by referring it to himself and his own tragedy. The Israeli soldier is the victim of his traumatic memory in an untold political conflict. It is not the Israeli soldier who is responsible for what he does but it is the horrible war, with the terrorizing enemy potentially being everywhere, which forces the soldiers to kill. This historical distortion discredits Waltz with Bashir. The Sabra and Shatila massacres are not analyzed in their own right but only with reference to their significance for the psyche of the Israeli soldier. At no point is proportion with reference to the magnitude of suffering between Israelis and Palestinians provided. No concern for an inadequate mediation of memory can be identified. This connects to the film’s second core moment in which Sivan explains in what way fabricated knowledge is tossed into memory. The involvement of Israeli soldiers has been distorted to such an extent that it 27 becomes insignificant and that is the effect it has on the audience. The Israelis only provided light without knowing what for. Hence, the significance of Sabra and Shatila is nullified to an event of tribalism, religious fundamentalism and primitive slaughtering between Arabs. The film fails to humanize the muted other, the verbally and physically butchered Palestinians. It fails to give them a voice, a legitimate memory with which they could have told the Palestinian narrative for a more balanced view. In essence Waltz with Bashir preserves the dominant/dominated relationship that is well known from Eurocentric discourses. The film robs the Palestinians of their agency and qualifies as a classical Orientalist work by not seeking to include the voice of the colonialist subject. Folman denies the subaltern’s autonomous consciousness to create “history from below” (Prakash, 1994). His narrative approach is not recognizing Palestinian victimhood because it would undermine the victimhood of Israeli Jews that is so clearly depicted in the film and even worse confront Israeli Jews with the fact that they have become “the mirror image of their own worst nightmare” (Pappe, 2006). There is no effort to rethink institutional history told by Israel’s cultural memory and to consider the subaltern’s perspective. By ignoring the subaltern i.e. the Palestinian, Folman’s work is just another element in the colonizer’s monologue: “No need to hear your voice when I can talk about you better than you can speak about yourself…Re-writing you I write myself anew. I am still author, authority” (Hooks, 1990). Folman transcends the Israeli identity of a “neutral” and “courageous peacekeeper” out of the film and into the real world calling Waltz with Bashir an “anti-war movie” that challenged him foremost in recalling the dreadful war experiences. On the concept of identity it will be shown that the events’ depictions are flawed and that Waltz with Bashir does not make use of historical facts about the Lebanon invasion and the Sabra and Shatila massacres in portraying the events. It will be argued that Folman’s retrospective description ought to have provided this information for adequacy and in order to complement the naivety he suffered from, as a teenager and young soldier. 28 %(.! 3#" $( !'!- %(.! 3#" 44#"!% '!- Soraya believes in righteousness and equality. She will take justice into her own hands if necessary: “They deny us the right to return. I’ll take it!” (Salt of this Sea, 2008, 11:10min.). This is most evidently shown in her struggle for identity by the symbolic act of robbing the bank. Palestinian identity will be explained according to three characteristics, which can only be understood in a colonial context: “The Negro enslaved by his inferiority, the white man enslaved by his superiority alike behave in accordance with a neurotic orientation” (Bhabha, 1994). First, the mutual dependency for identity defines having an identity in a colonial context, only in relation to otherness. Being Palestinian means foremost not being Israeli and the other way around, exemplified in the film by the differences in living conditions and opportunities in life. Second, identification with place is a space of splitting that determines the substitution of identity by (the desire for) nationality or the absence of it in the case of the Palestinians. The fact that land is demarcated so clearly in the Israel-Palestine conflict and that being Palestinian implies not owning anything unless Israel permits it, defines identity according to the colonial dichotomy of master (Israeli) and slave (Palestinian), in which the latter fantasizes to occupy the master’s place e.g. when Soraya claims to own the house Irit is living in. Finally, identity is never a self-fulfilling prophecy but an image that is aspired or required to be fulfilled resulting in identification for another, not for oneself (Bhabha, 1994). It is a reaction against the absence of identity that Soraya embodies. Her quest for identity is conditioned by the colonial legacy she inherited as post-memory from her family and only when she liberates her inner self from the colonizer’s conditioning can she freely determine her identity. Emad refers to this inner space that cannot be occupied: “Why do you let them [Israelis] invade you as if they could occupy you…from inside?” (Salt of this Sea, 2008, 78:30min.). Soraya comprehends the significance of his words only at the end of the movie. A classical depiction of the dependency for determining her identity is shown when Soraya meets the British manager at the British-Palestine Bank, with which she tries to resolve the case and withdraw her grandfather’s money. The British government was the prime initiator behind the Zionist project’s stated aim of creating a Jewish state. The Balfour Declaration, drafted in November 1917 was sent to Lord Rothschild (the representative of the Zionist project) and the British government, which favored the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine irrespective and in disregard of the will or the rights of the 29 Palestinian people, resulting in the forced exodus of more than eighty percent of the indigenous population i.e. 750.000 Palestinians (Finkelstein, 1995). The British manager denies Soraya any right to get access to the money her grandfather had worked for and tells her in the context of the Palestinian occupation: “…there is really no need for stuns and dramatic stories” (Salt of this Sea, 2008, 17:40min.). He shows no sign of critically reflecting on Soraya’s situation and instead offers her to fill out a loan application like “normal people”. Some days later, in her final attempt to retrieve her grandfather’s money she discusses with the British-Palestine Bank’s director, but he only reiterates that she neither has a Palestinian residence permit or passport, nor family living in the West Bank or Gaza and without these papers, based on the “agreement” with Israel she is not considered a Palestinian: “Do you have a Palestinian identity? Do you have family from the West Bank? Or from Gaza? …We have to link a Palestinian passport to this issue to resolve it! On paper and according to the agreements they [Israel] decide this [whether she is considered Palestinian or not]. “Listen, you have an American passport. What else could you want?” (Salt of this Sea, 2008, 30:20min.). While Soraya wants to have a Palestinian passport because her visa expires in two weeks, Palestinians she meets envy her American citizenship. When her legitimate claim to withdraw her grandfather’s money is denied, despite the documents she presented, she realizes how deep the Israeli occupation penetrates into the life of every Palestinian, noticeably put by the British Bank manager: “Here you are coming from America for a few Palestinian pound, they do not even exist anymore” (Salt of this Sea, 2008, 17:20min.) Her grandfather’s money is declared fictitious, as is the case with Palestinian history. The fact that the Palestinian pound does not exist anymore is eliminating Soraya’s legal link with her ancestors and her legitimate claim to be Palestinian. The money left by her grandfather becomes a synonym of the denied Palestinian right to return and build their life in Palestine. Even though the same bank is still operating they act as if nothing existed before 1948, as if anything before was dead. Soraya is left with only one option, to self-determine her fate and to attain her identity symbolically. To retrieve the money she decides to rob the bank: “It is not stealing; the money belongs to my family, 315 pound [plus 60 years interest]” (Salt of this Sea, 2008, 36:25min.). Soraya, Emad and Marwan rob the bank located in the occupied territories and escape disguised as Israelis to Israel, the only place where they can enjoy the sea, the beach and the beauty of the Palestinian heritage. After entering Israel the film’s dialogues are substituted by harmonious music symbolizing relieve and (temporary) freedom. 30 Their time in Israel is depicted as most joyful, getting closest to Soraya’s initial idea of Palestine (picking oranges on the side of the street) and is being accompanied by stimulating musical breaks. The music played is from Arabic and Palestinian artists, some of which use lyrics inspired by the Palestinian narrative, building another bridge between fiction and reality. The bank robbery and subsequent escape to Israel is used as a metaphor for Soraya’s twisted fate and the irony of her struggle for a Palestinian identity. Getting hold of the money is a metaphoric recognition of Palestinian history. By robbing the bank she transcends the imposed denial of her identity and continues the struggle for the Palestinian right to return. She is willing to fight injustice but is trying to accomplish the impossible challenge. Singlehandedly she expects awareness, consciousness and reflection from the Israelis she encounters. To the audience her quest seems utopian when comparing reality with the magnitude of her claims. Salt of this Sea is created around two different groups of identities i.e. Palestinians, occupied and exiled and Israelis as occupiers. First, exiled Palestinians usually have better living conditions and future prospects than Palestinians under occupation. The former differ from the latter with regards to opportunity in life, social standing and status. Furthermore, exiled Palestinians do not determine their identity necessarily in mutual dependency with Israeli identity. The point of reference for determining their deficiency in belonging are the nationals in the respective country of residence. Second, Israeli identity is shown in different roles as military soldier but also as civilian and even as outspoken opponent to the occupation i.e. Irit: “It is terrible this situation, all this violence…Your grandfather left in ’48? It is so sad I wish they had stayed!” (Salt of this Sea, 2008, 69:42min). Soraya does not respond, still observing the house and comes across two cups in the kitchen cupboard stating “Peace Now - End the occupation”. However, Irit’s opposition to occupation has its apparent limitations. As soon as critique of Israel’s historical legitimacy and its state property is voiced, implying consequences for Irit’s personal property, she blocks any further discourse and orders Soraya out of her house. In the film’s beginning Soraya is interrogated at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport. Here the dichotomy of identities i.e. being Palestinian and being Israeli becomes blatantly obvious. If it is not the passport that decides over an easy entry into Israel or a meticulous interrogation and search of all belongings accompanied by repetitive and discriminating questioning, than it is the family name or the grandparents’ place of birth. Soraya is subject to such humiliating procedures because her grandfather was born in Jaffa. Once Soraya passes the control and meets her friend the latter expresses astonishment at the fact that she told the border control 31 openly that she is going to Ramallah: “you are lucky they let you enter” (Salt of this Sea, 2008, 10:53min). This expression, even though subtle, provides an insight into the standard Israeli attack on Palestinian identity. Exiled Palestinians returning to Palestine are often not allowed to enter the country and frequently are denied access to their homeland forever. In a recent Israeli article titled Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians, or, Democratic Israel at Work this reality of denying Palestinians the right to return was further elaborated: “By the time of the Oslo accords, Israel had revoked the residency of 140.000 [returning] Palestinians from the West Bank… 14% of West Bank residents…were expelled from their land and their homes. In other words: [ongoing] ethnic cleansing” (retrieved on 19 May, 2011 from www.haaretz.com). This treatment of Palestinians is not necessarily news to the Western audience but following every step of Soraya’s intention to return to Palestine triggers awareness. In this respect Salt of this Sea blurs the lines between fiction and reality, intriguing the audience to become pro-active and investigate about the conflict. Most Palestinians Soraya meets do not comprehend why she returned, mainly due to the privileges she already enjoys as an American citizen. The Question of Palestine ([1979] 1992) gives a detailed account of Palestinian identity titled “Toward Palestinian Self-Determination”. Here Said gives an account of Palestinians in exile and describes their sense of belonging and identity when it comes to the lost homeland. At no point does he express doubt that a Palestinian or better “thinking Palestinian” wherever he or she lives feels Palestinian despite a long way ahead towards self-determination and a fight for “self” in any individual case (Said, [1992] 2002). His detailed description is very useful for the analysis of Salt of this Sea to understand the protagonist’s motivation for returning to Palestine, and the director’s motivation for making the film. In effect Said claims that every Palestinian community struggles to maintain its identity in at least two ways: First, as being Palestinian and implying the loss of “Heimat” to Zionism; second, as Palestinian on a daily level to resist against pressure in the state of residence (Said, [1992] 2002). Identifying parallels of communicative remembrance among Palestinians living in exile and analyzing their experience in Salt of this Sea provides narrative coherence that empowers the third generation. Salt of this Sea presents Soraya’s decision to live in Palestine as straightforward even though her longing to live there is entirely based on post-memory and later anamnesis, which is rather an abstract incentive. Instead of feeling American Soraya was always longing to return to Palestine: “I dreamt my whole life about coming here [Palestine] and I will not go back [to the US]” (Salt of this Sea, 2008, 32:02min). The concept of living a life directed by post-memory provides the audience with a glimpse of the exiled Palestinians’ 32 tragedy: “Every Palestinian has no state as a Palestinian even though he is “of,” without belonging to, a state in which at present he resides” (Said, [1992] 2002). Emad and Marwan portray Palestinians as victims barely coping with their frustrating life. Their only escape is dreaming about having a chance elsewhere: “I [Emad] did not go to the sea since 17 years, I did not pass beyond Ramallah, but I will soon leave”. Soraya asks him where he wants to go and he responds: “Canada, I have a scholarship from there. Everything is paid including the airfare. I am just waiting for the visa. Once I get it I am gone and I will never see a soldier in my life again” (Salt of this Sea, 2008, 25:10min.). Soraya and Emad lose their jobs after a confrontation with the restaurant owner, because he did not pay out the salary in weeks. When asked why he lost his temper, Emad answers that they have denied him the visa to study in Canada again: “It is the forth time they have refused me the visa, the fourth time…I do not want to undergo humiliation again” (Salt of this Sea, 2008, 40:20min.). These scenes clarify that identity is also defined by the possibilities one has and is inextricably linked to obtaining a visa or a passport that provides these possibilities, especially in the case of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. Also Emad asks Soraya: “Why exactly did you come? There is nothing here! ...Life is better elsewhere” (Salt of this Sea, 2008, 30:45min.). Emad does not understand her motivation and relates it to her romantic perception (“Jaffa is oranges”) based on post-memory compared to what the real Palestine has become. She neglects the fact that around her everybody is desperate to leave. Emad’s quest for identity is different than Soraya’s. He knows exactly who he is and where he is coming from: “I grew up in Camp Am’ari, I live in Ramallah and my family is from Dawaymah” (Salt of this Sea, 2008, 18:20min.), but his problem is twofold. First, because he is living under occupation he is subject to the undignified living conditions, which destroy the temporary stability he has developed e.g. when his salary is not paid. Second, he is caught in a vicious circle because he is Palestinian. Under occupation he is a second-class citizen but he cannot leave either, because his visas get rejected. Despite all frustration for not leaving to Canada Emad’s determination of belonging and identity is reconfirmed when he tells Soraya: “Why do you let them invade you as if they could occupy you?” to which Soraya responds “because it is an occupation” and Emad clarifies “but not from inside” (Salt of this Sea, 2008, 78:30min.). Their discourse shows the audience the lasting source for Palestinian identity and is a reaction to Darwish’s words “I want…to free myself from Palestine. But I can’t. When my country is liberated, so shall I be.” (Mena, 2009). Emad expresses the longing for an un-colonizable and un-occupiable space, free of historical borders. 33 He refers to the desire of renouncing the dependency of territory. This scene shows clearly that albeit Palestinians under occupation cannot change the status quo politically, they prevent the occupation from entering their minds and occupying their souls. The place where Soraya’s anamnesis took form is the territory inside of every Palestinian that Emad considers sacred, because it carries the key to a free life in dignity. Soraya has more options in life because she is an American citizen but her identity is incomplete. She knows from communicative remembrance with her family that she is Palestinian, but she has never got a chance to live it authentically, embedded in a Palestinian reality. She still searches for her identity in Palestine by holding on to her ancestors’ only evidence i.e. her grandfather’s money, left on the bank account before al-nakba. Her identity is caught between imagination of the ideal Palestine and neglect of the existent unbearable conditions for a life in dignity. The former was conveyed to her through her parents’ memories, while the latter is her protective reaction to the impossibilities she encounters when dealing with the authorities i.e. her limited visa that forces her to soon leave the country she has come to live in. The last but prevailing of her efforts over the destructive occupation is depicted close to the film’s end, when an Israeli soldier asks Soraya where she is coming from, to which she responds: “I am from here…[Here, Where?] Palestine! [How long have you been here?] I have been here all my life, I was born here! [It says here that you were born in the USA. Where were you born?] Jaffa, in Nuzha Street. [Do you have another passport?] Just Palestinian! [Show it to me] You have it in your hand!” (Salt of this Sea, 2008, 100min.). Based on a metamorphosis from post-memory to anamnesis, the territory inside of her cannot be occupied anymore and even though tragically she cannot live in Palestine (external occupation), she found the lasting source of her identity, the un-occupiable and un-colonizable confidence of being a Palestinian citizen. For Israel she remains the other, the antagonist, the enemy. 34 %'+!+(.. ."*(+' $( !'!- ',*+ . )# - The perceived identity of being an Israeli soldier is cause and effect for the protagonist and his comrades. The duty to join the military overshadows any feature of private life and is presented as natural without any of the soldiers objecting to it. Congruent with the definition of identity used for Salt of this Sea also Israeli soldiers are subject to three characteristics applicable in a colonial context i.e. mutual dependency for identity, identification with place and identity for another. The opening scene shows Boaz Rein-Buskila’s nightmare. He is a friend and former comrade of the protagonist Ari Folman who is also the director of the movie. Rein-Buskila’s identity is portrayed as being very soft and gentle. He has nightmares caused by his guilt-feelings because he shot 26 dogs in 26 villages during the Lebanon invasion to prevent them from alerting the villagers and alarm the “Palestinian fugitives” to leave the village before the Israelis could hunt them down. He was assigned by his superiors to shoot the dogs because he was not capable of killing humans. The dog’s suffering is shown in closeups: “They knew I could not shoot a person…26 dogs, and I remember every single one…Every face, every wound, the look in their eyes…26 dogs” (Waltz with Bashir, 2008, 5:14 min.). He smokes nervously evidently suffering from his two and a half years of nightmares. He is utterly innocent; a life-loving soldier who could not kill a human and suffers from nightmares more than 20 years after he has killed 26 dogs. The representation of suffering dogs affects the Western audience in particular. In Time magazine an article titled “Do we love our dogs more than people?” elaborates on the emotional ties with dogs stating that Americans have fallen in love with their dogs creating an industry including dog walker, dog groomers, dog parks and dog-friendly hotels. The article suggests that people, especially two-career couples, are leaning on dogs to fill the gap of social support that earlier might have come from their children (retrieved on April 23, 2011 from www.time.com). The Western audience empathizes with the dogs’ suffering for two reasons: First, dogs are the same everywhere and having dogs living amongst them makes them understand how they must have suffered. Palestinians they know, on the contrary cannot be like the Palestinian teenage boys depicted in the film, because they are shown firing rocket-propelled grenades like terrorists. Second, dogs’ suffering is shown in close-ups, emphasizing their facial expressions, whereas Palestinian suffering is never shown in detail. The audience cannot suffer with the Palestinians because they have no occasion and no voice to express their suffering. 35 Until Folman learnt about Rein-Buskila’s nightmares he had not suffered from any guiltfeelings in 20 years and the reason for his suddenly occurring flashbacks is not provided leaving the audience in doubt about the authenticity of his emotional account. He consults with a post-trauma expert called Prof. Zahava Solomon, and she tells him about dissociative events and a case of one of her patients. Again animals’ agony is shown based on an Israeli soldier’s feelings of sorrow and compassion. His war experience only turned traumatic after his camera broke when he was close to the stables in Beirut and he discovered all the slaughtered Arabian horses: “It broke my heart. What had those horses done to deserve such suffering” (Waltz with Bashir, 2008, 39:45 min.). No such pity is expressed for the Palestinians who got slaughtered, neither are close-ups of their faces shown during their suffering. No Palestinian is suffered with emotionally or at least a similar question is posed regarding the slaughtering of Palestinians when compared to the slaughtering of the Arabian horses: What had the Palestinians done to deserve such suffering? The film advocates that the Israeli soldiers did not know about the massacres and the examples with killed dogs and Arabian horses, is a way of showing Israelis’ sensitivity at the expense of compassion for Palestinians. If soldiers would have known about the massacres they would have done something, since they’re heart had already been broken at the encounter of slaughtered dogs and horses. Images of wounded and suffering horses and dogs and have a special effect on the Western audience. Seeing these creatures, innocent for sure, causes the audience to identify with Israeli soldiers who expressed pity for the animal’s suffering. Israeli soldiers are empathic for animals’ suffering despite brute killings of Palestinians and Lebanese, as shown by Cna’an’s arrival in Sidon “…we could see our destruction…the bodies of a whole family” (Waltz with Bashir, 2008, 19:30 min.). The contradiction of expressing compassion for animals while Palestinians are not emphatically suffered with stays faithful with the generally distorted depiction of Palestinians, either as terrorists or primitive victims: “I may not be doing enough to dispel the massive accumulation of lies, distortions, and willful ignorance surrounding the reality of our [Palestinian] struggle…” (Said, [1992] 2002). The film does not ask what brought Palestinians into Lebanese refugee camps. No information is given that could cause compassion or a willingness to inquire about the causes that led to this dreadful condition. The camera remains focused on the suffering of Israeli soldiers. Waltz with Bashir is not interacting with a proactive audience that searches and learns but delivers a closed-narrative for those who already accepted the Oriental image provided by the mass media. This kind of audience is neither aware nor concerned about the created picture of alienated and estranged Palestinians. 36 The film conveys the message that Israelis need not be troubled. They could not have massacred Palestinians like Nazis slaughtered Jews because they just shot flares into the air without knowing that this made them accomplices of the Phalangist Christian militia. Sivan therefore tells Folman: “You felt guilty at the age of 19. Unwillingly you took the role of the Nazi. You were there firing flares, but you did not carry out the massacre” (Waltz with Bashir, 2008, 73:54 min.). This is the film’s most important phrase and serves as a symbol for the suggested innocent involvement of the Israeli soldiers and their own quest with victim hood. The phrasing victimizes Folman suggesting that he was prepared to take the Nazi’s role even though he did not commit the atrocities. Not explaining Israel’s role historically as an occupier of Palestine and invading Lebanon, is one of the film’s major weaknesses; it is rather taken for granted that an Israeli army arrives at the shores of Lebanon and starts “shooting like lunatics”. Suggesting that Israel is a legitimate and centuries old state occults the very short and disputed history by which it came into being. To further cover up the lack of historical contextualization subtle indications of fabricated Israeli identity are provided. When Ari Folman travels to the Netherlands to meet his warfare comrade Carmi Cna’an the former tells him that he purchased a vast piece of land by selling Falafel for three years in a small stand in Utrecht: “Health food was in fashion. The Middle East too…Falafel is both healthy and Middle Eastern” (Waltz with Bashir, 2008, 12:55 min.). Both the origin of Falafel and the constitution of the Middle East, with Israel in its midst, are highly contested issues. Israel’s colonial founding in the “Middle East” in 1948 is questioned until this day. Especially well known to the Western culture is Arabic food originating from the bilad al-sham (Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine). A very famous dish from the region is Falafel and generations in Arab countries have been eating the dish. On the origin of Falafel a Lebanese restaurant owner therefore claims: “Foods like Falafel are certainly not Israeli. How can they be when Israel is only 60 years old” (retrieved on April 23, 2011 from www.guardian.co.uk). Israeli identity is described by mentioning these highly loaded terms without context or reference to history as if Israeli identity has always been part of the “Middle East”. 37 Israeli identity is portrayed in a quest for consciousness. Nonetheless, it is only to find peace of mind for the occupier, the colonialist, regardless of the horrible atrocities and the grief that the occupied and the assassinated must have felt. This can be seen in the following scene where the narrator’s fears and struggles are shown in detail e.g. when Ronny Dayag’s commander gets assassinated cowardly and the former hides behind a rock, unarmed and shivering of fear. Surrounded by Palestinian “terrorists” and eventually swimming through the dark sea to rescue himself, Dayag is representing the fascinating and thoughtful Israeli soldier, while no such insight is given of the Palestinians. The movie contains no single moment of an Israeli soldier questioning his reason of being in the war or desiring a dialogue with Palestinians. The humanist portrayal of Israeli soldiers combined with the authentic and shocking pictures of slaughtered Palestinians at the film’s end affect especially the Western audience, because the willingness of presenting “historical facts” suggests genuineness. Waltz with Bashir is touching on the dreadful massacres in the Palestinian refugee camps, but what is not shown is that during Israel’s Lebanon invasion in 1982 approximately 17.825 Lebanese and Palestinians were killed and 30.000 had been wounded according to the International Red Cross (retrieved on April 23, 2011 from www.icrc.org). Due to the extent of the disaster and the masses of rubble the exact number of Palestinians killed, states the Oxfam appeal (1983), can never be determined accurately (retrieved on April 23, 2011 from www.oxfam.org.uk). Arundhati Roy (2000) clearly depicted the cold blooded approach of the Israeli military when stating: “Since Palestinians are by definition all terrorists, or mothers of terrorists, or future terrorists so different from Begin, Shamir and Sharon for example- whatever was done to them was regarded as legitimate”. He mentions further when talking about the 11 hour bombing on August 12, 1982 “...the siege on Beirut seemed gratuitous brutality…The arsenal of weapons, unleashed in a way that has not been seen since the Vietnam war, clearly horrified those who saw the results…The use of cluster bombs and white phosphorus shells, a vicious weapon, was widespread (Roy, 2000). In their book Armies in Lebanon 1982-84 Katz and Russel (1985) put the Israeli casualties at 368 dead and 2.383 wounded (Katz et al, 1985). In spite of the wide gap between Arab and Israeli victims of war, and the horrendous destruction and terror caused by the Israeli army, the Israeli soldiers in Waltz with Bashir are unexceptionally shown in defense or in reaction to a previous attack. This further confirms that Waltz with Bashir is twisting the historical reality upside down. While the Israeli army had committed war crimes and crimes against humanity to an extent of abominable cruelty (Roy, 2000) Waltz with Bashir focuses on the suffering of Israeli soldiers only. 38 Waltz with Bashir does simplistically portray a deeply contested, if not falsified, version of history. Israeli soldiers are compared against the Oriental, the underdeveloped savage, be it the “monstrous” Arab Phalangists or the mourning and “terrorizing” Arab Palestinians. Both are incapable because they are Orientals, while the brave Israeli troops are “helping” by sealing off the refugee camps and sending Palestinians fleeing from the massacre back into it. The latter act has not been depicted in the film. In fact the film describes the conflict that led to the massacre only in terms of an isolated political and religious clash between Arab Lebanese Christian Phalangists and Arab Palestinian Muslim refugees. Phalangists wear crosses every time they are shown and Palestinian men got crosses cut into their chest by Phalangists, while Palestinian women are all old and veiled. The values and morals of the Israeli soldier on the other hand are intact, human and civilized paving the way for an Israeli national narrative. Israeli soldiers initially suffer from reflecting about and inquiring on “the truth”. An Exaggeratedly humanized Israeli identity in Waltz with Bashir is used at the expense of Palestinian otherness to camouflage the real political context. 39 *+(.!' *+(.!' '* !0(" (.. '!. &#% !(". Frantz Fanon’s definition of the other, the colonialist subject might seem far fetched to some but the implications of Fanon’s description are visible in both Waltz with Bashir and Salt of this Sea. Otherness is rooted in a deeply racist notion that is exclusive of any empathy and treats the colonized subject i.e. the Palestinians in the most violent and undignified manner necessary in order to maintain the hegemonic order. The colonial subject, the native, indigenous, nowadays often the Muslim is considered significantly underdeveloped and under talented when compared to the colonial master. The other is “declared impervious to ethics representing not only the absence of values but also the negation of values…A corrosive element, destroying…everything which involves aesthetics or morals, an agent of malevolent powers, an unconscious and incurable instrument of blind forces” (Fanon, 2004 [1963]). To understand the concept of otherness in the context of the Israel-Palestine conflict an excerpt of a speech by Israel’s Prime Minister is provided that clearly shows Palestinian rights and their struggle for a life in dignity is superfluous. This is not a new phenomenon. A prominent British Labor MP in the mid-1940s, Richard Crossman, put it like this: “Zionism after all is merely the attempt by the European Jews to build his national life on the soil of Palestine in much the same way as the American settler developed the West” (Finkelstein, 1995). The four main points at the heart of peace negotiations, including the right of return, the 1967 borders, the status of Jerusalem and an independent Palestinian state have recently been declared redundant by Israel. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister addressed the US congress on the 24th of May 2011: “…the border will be different than the one that existed on June 4, 1967. Israel will not return to the indefensible lines of 1967…This means that the Palestinian refugee problem will be resolved outside of the borders of Israel…Jerusalem must never again be divided. Jerusalem must remain the united capital of Israel…and it is vital that Israel maintain a long-term military presence along the Jordan River [Eastern border of the West Bank]” (retrieved on 24 May, 2011 from www.english.aljazeera.net). This speech officially depicts Palestinians as others by including deprivation of dignity and self-determination as the basis for dialogue towards future “peace” under Israeli conditions. 40 In The Wretched of the Earth ([1963] 2004) Fanon explains the colonial project as a compartmentalized world that segregates the subject and the ruler. The dividing line is represented by barracks and police stations (Fanon, 2004), as is the case in Palestine, where the master race (Israelis) is protected from the enslaved but “terrorist” other (Palestinians). Alienation of Palestinians is conditioned by checkpoints and through segregating walls. This system of racist division is clearly depicted in Salt of this Sea. The opposite i.e. the potential for encounter is indicated when Marwan befriends Irit and no sign of differentiating between Israelis and Palestinians impedes their human encounter. Unfortunately, the audience can only imagine the dialogue Marwan and Irit have after Soraya and Emad left, because the camera follows the latter two to Dawaymah. Salt of this Sea starts with the concept of otherness by presenting archival footage showing the destruction of Palestinian homes and the expulsion of Palestinian people by Israel. Alnakba caused 750.000 Palestinians to become refugees from one day to another (Said, [1992] 2002). A grandchild of one of these refugees is Soraya who is treated as the other upon arrival at Israel’s airport. When asked about her ancestors with the proposed aim of identifying Palestinian roots, the Israeli border control is shown as routinely discriminating and humiliating by repeating the same questions time and again. Soraya’s otherness is also revealed when she tells Irit that she wants to buy back her house to which Irit responds: “You can’t, the state owns it and the Jewish National Fund, and they won’t sell to non-Jews” (Salt of this Sea, 2008, 75:30min.). When Soraya and Emad spend some days at the ruins of Dawaymah, where the Israelis committed a well-known massacre in 1948, an Israeli history teacher who shows a group of students around discovers them one morning. His two decisive questions to determine whether he is talking to a friend or a foe are: “Where are you coming from? [Brooklyn, we are touring Israel]” and “Are you Jewish? [Yes]” (Salt of this Sea, 2008, 94:00min.). These questions clarify that her identity as a Palestinian is unwelcome and considered threatening, so that it is better for her to disguise herself as a Jewish foreigner. Her otherness is explained by the history teacher’s next words: “These are my students, I teach them history…they can climb here in these ancient ruins, learn about their roots, how we turned this biblical land into life again” (Salt of this Sea, 2008, 94:15min.). The Israeli history teacher is implying that there have never been any Palestinians or anything reminiscent of their culture i.e. “turned…into life again”. This eliminates all Palestinian heritage congruent with the famous meta-narrative of Zionist history claiming “a land without a people for a people without a land” (Saloul, 2008). Everything Soraya and Emad are fighting for was already dead in the Israeli history teacher’s eyes. He is representing Israel’s cultural 41 memory and his position makes any dialogue impossible and might be the reason why the film does not depict a single dialogue showing Israeli willingness to understand the Palestinian position. Compared to local Palestinians, Soraya is the other Palestinian because she is also an American citizen. Her Palestinian-American identity is dominating irrespective of the fact that she feels Palestinian, which she makes clear at the end of the movie: “ I am from here…Palestine…I have been here all my life, I was born here” (Salt of this Sea, 2008, 100min.). However, being a different Palestinian does not translate into animosity, as is the case with Israeli perception of her otherness. Being the Palestinian other merely implies that she is expected to make use of her chances abroad, instead of wasting her time in Palestine. Soraya’s representation as the other, coming from a “[dead] biblical land” is conveyed to the audience by means of emotions. Soraya does not act diplomatically, or politically correct. Instead, she expresses her thoughts and feelings freely when she is subject to injustice. The destiny of Palestinian refugees in exile appeals to the Western audience. They can identify with Soraya, especially non-white Americans, because they know what it means to be the other. Salt of this Sea is showing Israelis as humans, very friendly and welcoming indeed. They are shown as approaching Palestinians in a dignified way (e.g. Irit welcoming Soraya, Emad and Marwan into her house) but only as long as they do not question the status quo i.e. when Soraya claims to be the owner of Irit’s house. Furthermore, some Israelis (e.g. the history teacher) are shown as basing their perception of others on exclusive categories i.e. whether somebody is Jewish or not. Salt of this Sea’s arguable weak point, despite the fact that the film is spoken in both Arabic and Hebrew and is always subtitled, relates to the absence of dialogue between Palestinians and Israelis. All Israelis shown are ignorant of the Palestinian narrative. The political deadlock and havoc of Palestinian living conditions in the last six decades, going from bad to worse, is not indicating that a dialogue is possible unless Israel changes its position. In this context not showing dialogue is a logical choice. Nevertheless, some Israelis belonging to a “vocal and often very courageous minority” (Said, [1992] 2002) empathize with the Palestinians and could have been depicted in Salt of this Sea to indicate mutual understanding. To arrive at one collective memory dialogue is indispensable, in the words of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish: “The first step of real peace is to know the other side, its culture and creativity” (Mena, 2009). 42 %4(" %,("*"'(. 0( (".# '3'&*!'# #3 !0(" (.. In Waltz with Bashir otherness as a concept is present in every scene because of the absence of articulate Palestinians to dialogue with, and to provide the audience with their narrative. Palestinians are “…not only the absence of values but also the negation of values” (Fanon, ([1963] 2004) because they are not worthy of representing themselves. Palestinians appear in the film for the first time after eight minutes, when Folman has his flashback of invading Lebanon and a crowd of Palestinian veiled women with children pass him screaming but voiceless. No sound comes of their screams and their appearance is fictitious because they are only dark shadows in his flashbacks. This scene is symbolic for the absence of dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians. The Palestinian has no voice, no role other than as a terrorist or disoriented victim. Despite the traumatic childhood the Israeli soldier is portrayed as downright masculine and heroic, antagonistic to the cowardice Palestinians. The embodiment of heroism is the Israeli TV and military war correspondent Ron Ben Yishai who, while the other soldiers were covering themselves against sniper attacks in the centre of Beirut, is walking upright under bullet fire. He uses a military language and compares the Palestinians to the Native Americans when stating: “they were shooting rocket-propelled grenades and it sounded like a Native American arrow” (Waltz with Bashir, 2008, 55:24 min.), unconsciously giving an insight into the real gap between military force available to Palestinians and Israelis respectively. But his major achievement in the film is his “concern” for Palestinians in order to avoid their slaughtering. Given the Israeli army’s role in general and Ariel Sharon’s role in particular, the following request from Yishai to Sharon is ironic. After hearing from several Israeli soldiers that apparently Phalangists execute innocent Palestinians, even whole families, Yishai decides to call Defense Minister Ariel Sharon: “I’ve heard there’s a massacre going on, Ariel. They are slaughtering Palestinians. We have to put a stop to it”. Sharon responds: “Thanks for bringing it to my attention; Happy New Year” (Waltz with Bashir, 2008, 61:22 min). The representation of Ariel Sharon is kept to a minimum even though his real role in the massacres is well known. Sharon is shown as not being too keen on preventing a massacre, suggesting a hidden involvement but this remains unconfirmed. He is almost invisible and gives the floor to the innocent soldiers and Yishai the heroic war reporter, characters the audience identifies with. 43 For three main reasons however, it is paradoxical that the Israeli military, personified by Yishai, is shown as wanting to protect the lives of Palestinians. First, the atrocities committed during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon clearly show that Israel deliberately killed Palestinians “…the military doctrine of attacking defenseless civilians, described once again by Menachem Begin in connection with the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, derives from longstanding practice and was enunciated clearly by David Ben-Gurion in January 1948 (Roy, 2000). Second, the most recent massacre in Gaza from December 2008 until January 2009, killing 1300 civilians (retrieved on April 15, 2011 from www.electronicintifada.net) 27 years after the massacres in Sabra and Shatila gives no sign of the Israeli military being interested in Palestinian lives today. Third, since Israel’s establishment, Israeli soldiers clearly demonstrated that Palestinian lives are worthless and can be eliminated at will. Referring to the brutality of atrocities committed by Israeli troops during the massacre in Dawaymeh in October of 1948 (visited by Soraya and Emad in Salt of this Sea), preceded by massacres in Tantura, Safsaf and Sa’sa in the same year and followed by the massacre in Kfar Qassim in 1956, one Israeli historian states: “…babies whose skulls were cracked open, women raped or burned alive in houses, and men stabbed to death” (Pappe, 2006). Israel’s military neither cared about Palestinian lives before nor after the Sabra and Shatila massacres; why would it suddenly do so in 1982? The paternalizing role of Israelis in wanting to protect Palestinians against Phalangists conceals the horrible atrocities committed by the Israeli army. Nevertheless, the historical scene in which Yishai is contacting Sharon is noteworthy because it depicts two famous people with regard to the massacres in the Palestinian refugee camps. Yishai has been a journalist with leading newspapers and international media and was the first Israeli journalist to enter the Sabra and Shatila camps after the atrocities. He received an Israeli lifetime award for his journalistic works in 2008 (retrieved on April 23, 2011 from www.israelispeakers.co.il) and this heroic role is also given to him in the film. Sharon on the other hand had been identified as personally and partly responsible for the massacres but was re-installed as Prime Minister of Israel from 2001-2006 (retrieved on June 5, 2011 from Britannica Online www.britannica.com). After the massacres one of the largest demonstrations in Israel’s history led to the investigation of the Kahan-Commission which caused Ariel Sharon to leave his post as Minister of Defense. It concluded: “Israeli military personnel were aware that a massacre was in progress without taking serious steps to stop it, and reports of a massacre in progress were made to senior Israeli officers and even to an Israeli cabinet minister” (Roy, 2000). 44 The UN General Assembly, according to resolution 37/123 condemned the massacre at Sabra and Shatila and considered it genocide (retrieved on April 23, 2011 from http://www.un.org/en/ga/63/resolutions.shtml) and whether Israelis played an active or a passive role is disputed at best. Waltz with Bashir could have taken a different and more transparent stance when it comes to the historical facts surrounding the massacre but instead the director chose to further conceal the reality for another representation of Palestinian otherness. Israeli soldiers’ innocent humanness and adolescent naivety helps downplaying the involvement in the atrocities committed: “They did not realize they were witnessing a genocide” says Folman, referring to Israeli soldiers who “only” shot flares in support of Phalangists, who in turn carried out the massacre (Waltz with Bashir, 2008, 72:51 min.). Irrespective of ongoing international attempts to persecute Israel for its involvement and evidence of Ariel Sharon’s culpability, Waltz with Bashir contains none of these historical facts. Frenkel explained the daily routine during the invasion as follows: “…take a swim, back into uniform, then go after some terrorists” (Waltz with Bashir, 2008, 39:53 min.). The scenery changes to a harmonic one due to the classical music that comes with it, only to show two Palestinian teenage boys with rocket propelled grenades hidden behind the trees, attacking the Israeli soldiers. They destroy a tank and then get killed by Israeli artillery. They have no identity, do not speak and therefore can not be humanized. Palestinians are portrayed as terrorists and therefore the Israeli soldiers are shown as sensitive. This humanization of the Israeli soldier is mutually dependant to the suffering of his antagonist i.e. the Palestinian teenager. Palestinians always purposefully but cowardly attack while Israelis only defend themselves. Dayag’s commander gets shot first; A Palestinian boy in the field attacks Frenkel and in the centre of Beirut Israeli soldiers are targeted by Palestinian snipers. If an Israeli kills a civilian, as is the case during Cna’an’s arrival in Sidon, then it is by accident only. Another evidence for benign behavior of Israeli soldiers and the estrangement of the other is Cna’an explanation that he was not surprised that Phalangists committed these atrocities: “I knew all along how ruthless they [Phalangists] were”. He goes on saying that he also went to the “slaughterhouse”, a place where they interrogated Palestinians and then executed them: “They carried body parts of murdered Palestinians preserved in jars of formaldehyde. They had fingers, eyeballs, anything you wanted” (Waltz with Bashir, 2008, 39:40 min.). Cna’an’s report implies that Israeli military considers these actions horrible and inhuman and restrains from acting in a similar way. Israeli soldiers are dutiful, fair and humane combatants while Lebanese Phalangists are portrayed as monsters retaliating the killing of President Gemayel Bashir by all means necessary. 45 The way Phalangist militia and Palestinians are described reminds of the genocide committed in Rwanda between Hutu and Tutsi (1994). Similar to Gemayel Bashir’s assassination in Waltz with Bashir the slaughter of Tutsis, perpetrated by Hutus was caused by the assassination of the Rwandan Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana on April 6, 1994. The segregation of the population started with the distribution of identity cards in 1916 by the Belgian colonizers who considered the Tutsi minority superior to Hutus and provided them with preferential treatment over Hutus injecting otherness as a concept into the Rwandan society (retrieved on June 5, 2011 from www.bbc.co.uk). In the case of the Lebanon invasion (1982) and the Rwandan genocide (1994) the dehumanization of both the perpetrators and the victims was essential in giving the impression that savages are fighting each other. It occurs that the more evil, alien and brutal the atrocities committed, the more human appears the 3rd party. Israel’s role is covered-up throughout the film by exemplifying soldiers as sensitive, innocent and naïve, not knowing or seeking the brutality of war. To conclude, in Waltz with Bashir the Palestinians kill on purpose while the Israelis kill in defense only. This greatly affects the Western audience, because Israelis like the blue helmets were “apparently” not aware of the horrible atrocities committed during their presence. Both massacres could not have been committed without otherness as racist ideology. When Folman tells of the sole moments in which he can remember everything in detail i.e. during furlough, the tough life of an Israeli soldier having to fight against Palestinian terrorists is explained. Folman’s father was a Russian soldier during world war two against Nazi Germany and received only 48 hours leave after one-year service, just enough to take the train home, hug his beloved ones and take the train back to the front. However, Ari Folman had to go back already after 24 hours into his furlough because of an increased risk for “terrorist attacks”. Even though his father was also doomed to fight under horrible conditions, the Israeli soldier has to face an even harsher situation than during World War II exemplified by receiving only half of the leave time of a Russian soldier 40 years earlier. This scene suggests to the Western audience that being an Israeli soldier is more burdensome than having been a soldier fighting against the Nazi regime. What does this make of the Palestinians? Explaining why he had to abruptly cancel his furlough Folman says: “Back then, a new trend started: car bombs” to which Rein-Buskila reacts by saying “Still popular today [2006]” (Waltz with Bashir, 2008, 48:15 min.). 46 These subtle references to “Palestinian terrorists”, cowardly assassinating with the help of auto bombs, further widens the gap between the sympathetic Israeli soldier and the dubious and dangerous Palestinian, assuring that the audience is not identifying with the latter. Towards the end of the movie it is shown how Phalangist soldiers bring Palestinians away from the refugee camps to an unknown location. The TV correspondent Yishai tells the audience about what he had seen when he arrived at Sabra and Shatila: “You know that picture from the Warsaw ghetto...that is just how the long line of women, old people and children looked” (Waltz with Bashir, 2008, 72:12 min.). Mentioning the Warsaw ghetto suggests sympathy, because it implies a comparison between the persecuted Jews and the persecuted Palestinians but it is softened when Yishai reduces it to the similarity of the people cuing in front of the camp only, not to the genocide committed. Furthermore, the statement is based on the film’s assumption that only Phalangists slaughtered Palestinians and that Israeli soldiers did not know of it, which makes the association with the Warsaw ghetto possible. Another sign of aggression against the other is the language used in the “anti-war-songs” that introduce the scenes of Israeli military invasion. Their lyrics are explaining that “otherness” is a familiar concept to the Israeli army and provide an insight into the military harmony with which the invasion was executed: “Good morning Lebanon…You are torn to pieces…You bleed to death in my arms” (Waltz with Bashir, 2008, 27:30 min.). The music is accompanied by images showing the effectiveness of a tank driving over cars, breaking buildings and protecting Israeli soldiers. Other lyrics further degrade Lebanese and Palestinian people singing “I bombed Sidon today” or “I bombed Beirut today…I bombed Beirut everyday…At the pull of a trigger we can send strangers straight to hell” (Waltz with Bashir, 2008, 38:50 min.). They are mere strangers not human beings and can therefore be bombed at will and be sent to hell. Israeli air raids and other attacks are shown in which civilians get killed, and the destruction of war in general is presented but it is again a reaction to Palestinian terrorist action only. Contrary to the Israeli army, Palestinian and Lebanese “terrorists” kill only cowardly from e.g. a driving car while the Israeli soldiers are having a drink in front of a restaurant. 47 At the end the animation turns into recorded documentary footage showing the mourning and loss, devastation and killings in the refugee camps and the Palestinian women and children in the middle of their destroyed camp. Their suffering is so abstract that the audience cannot sympathize with them. Nothing is known about the Palestinians and maybe they even deserved what happened? The Israeli soldiers did not ask, as in the case of the Arabian horses, what the Palestinians did to deserve such suffering, maybe implying that they were guilty. In fact, the movie makes Palestinians responsible for the assassination of Bashir and thereby provides a potential reason based on which Phalangists slaughtered them. Compared to the horses there was a rationale, Palestinians were not innocent. This logic affects Western audiences decisively because Palestinians are potentially the cause for their own disaster. They assassinated President Bashir first and then Phalangists retaliated. The authentic political and historical context needed to understand how such animosity between Lebanese and Palestinians could have arisen is not provided. Classically categorizing Palestinians as primitive Muslims in the Western eye in the form of older veiled women helps to reduce the greater political context of the Lebanese invasion to a religious conflict between Phalangists and Palestinians: “…no Oriental was ever allowed to be independent and rule himself. The premise there was that since the Orientals were ignorant of selfgovernment, they had better be kept that way for their own good” (Said, [1978] 2003). The savage-like depiction of both, the Palestinians and the Lebanese, serves the purpose of alienating them from any potential identification by the audience. Waltz with Bashir desires to be registered in cultural memory as authentic and covering historical facts on real historical events as exemplified by the real footage. Showing reality in its harshness and brutality lets Waltz with Bashir’s account appear more credible. The only moment that a Palestinian speaks is during the real footage shown at its end, when an older woman screams without articulating herself. The entire movie is subtitled from its original Hebrew, but at the moment when the Palestinian women addresses the camera her Arabic words are not translated, no subtitles are given. This confirms the assumption that Palestinians are such subject to otherness that their expressions are mere noise and not worthy of being listened to. Their sounds have no words of meaning compared to the Hebrew speaking characters. 48 # &+%.'# The two movies are memory accounts bridging the gap between an abstract academic approach and the personal and emotional experience. Waltz with Bashir’s core impact on the audience triggers feelings of initial guilt and remorse, developing in the course of the movie into neutrality towards and pity for the other. The protagonist and comrades identified with by the audience are eventually innocent and morally decent, unlike the other. Waltz with Bashir mutes the Palestinian. He is non-existent other than as a victim or terrorist. Since the movie is mainly concerned with memory and feelings of Israeli soldiers it is the only identifiable prosthetic memory for the audience at the expense of a Palestinian or Lebanese perspective. Waltz with Bashir seems to be belonging to the critical and pro-active genre that connects with postcolonial theory but after a closer look and deeper analysis, as we have seen, the film only further distorts and complicates the quest for a more just discourse of the conflict concealing historical facts and transparent images. Rigney’s distinction between recollection and memory respectively anamnesis is relevant for the analysis of Waltz with Bashir because the motivation to re-tell the events came from Folman who deliberately chose to engage with his burdening memory. It might be that forgetting comes before remembering as Rigney claims, but if actively retrieved remembrance is distorted to comfort guilt and manipulate historical facts as is the case in Waltz with Bashir, the efforts made to remember might only result in an uncontested version, guiltless, making the audience forget the event altogether. Historical events, in this case the Lebanon invasion and the Sabra and Shatila massacres are subject to historical revisionism due to a one-sided presentation of its happenings. A skeptical audience does not accept a predigested message as conveyed by Waltz with Bashir, denying them to actively engage with the subject matter. There is no need for praise of self-criticism of an Israeli director for opening a dark chapter if the conclusion is that the atrocities committed exclude Israeli involvement and were a consequence only of Arabs’ lack of capacity to live peacefully together. Many historical facts have been presented that disprove the innocent role given to the Israeli army1 and raises the question whether the audience has also identified this distortion conveyed by means of communicative remembrance. 1 See, for example, Pappe (2006) 49 Extrapolating Waltz with Bashir’s narrative method to the Holocaust would be like telling the story of Jewish extermination through German soldiers only and focusing on their feelings and hardships during the events at the expense of empathizing with the Jewish suffering. This comparison might be unacceptable for the Western audience but it shows that taking historical reality and distorting it, seems to be uncontested particularly in the case of Palestinians because it is taking place in an Oriental context. For example the Lebanese prohibition of the movie’s distribution had no affect whatsoever on the critics to curiously inquire on the reasons for doing so but was ridiculed altogether. The seemingly self-critical Israeli account presented in Waltz with Bashir gives unfortunately just a one sided observation of the isolated Israeli suffering that the perpetrator encounters even decades after the killings have been committed. The film suggests a willingness to discuss what has happened but there is no dialogue with the other, with Palestinians. The needed dialogue, especially in retrospect, is nonexistent. The storyline begins with an appeal to the Israeli soldiers for responsibility and is resolved towards the end of the film with a clear ‘No’, which does not invite further questioning. The movie’s closed narrative of a first person account describes an event in the past without performativity as a window to the present. Salt of this Sea is an account of a Palestinian writing back through a semi-fictional film with an autobiographical character. A voice is raised explaining how the Palestinians feel and what is going on beyond the too often deceiving fence of the mass media. Salt of this Sea causes the audience to empathize with Soraya’s loss of homeland initially and denied right of return eventually. Her case symbolizes the continuing nakba that Palestinians under occupation and in exile experience every day. Even though different Israeli characters are exclusively portrayed throughout the film as ignorant toward the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, its narrative provides the emotional basis for the audience to inquire themselves about the conflict. In the same notion Salt of this Sea is providing an account that is based on Palestinian intergenerational transmission. Also the clash between an imagined memory of Palestine and the “real Palestine” is presented through the dialogue with Palestinians living in the West Bank. The contradicting Israeli characters represented indicate the lack of social cohesion in Israeli society. Even though the occupation’s reality is depicted, Israelis are throughout shown as human beings. The possibility for friendship between Israelis and Palestinians is exemplified by Marwan, who is staying in Irit’s house despite her clash with Soraya. 50 The distortion of cultural memory by Israel’s historical meta-narrative is presented by Irit claiming that Soraya’s grandfather left voluntarily and the history teacher’s argument that Israel had settled in an “empty land” and “made the desert bloom” again. Salt of this Sea affects the audiences’ opinion making of the conflict in at least two ways. First, it triggers curiosity to inquire about historical facts, not least because the movie ends with the Israeli occupation continuing until now. It refers to a “timeless present” that has no connection to the past because of Israeli oppression penetrating into every Palestinian life and denying the Palestinian narrative from being transformed into cultural memory. Second, Salt of this Sea is told as an open-ended narrative and therefore raises more questions than answers and invites the audience for a dialogue to inform themselves about the conflict. Soraya’s human and very emotional behavior appears irrational at times but very real. The act of robbing the bank is more a symbol of return against all odds than an intention to represent authentic behavior. The money of Soraya’s grandfather means to her, in her personal nakba what the houses, monuments and archives mean to the Palestinians i.e. “the right of return”. They are proof of their ancestors’ existence and create the bond for their legitimate return. The determination to obtain the right of return whatever it takes, is presented most intensely at the end of the film, when Soraya remains steadfast and self-confident about her Palestinian identity because she has learnt from Emad that occupations are only external and therefore do not last. The danger of distortion and a false depiction of historical events in films is always a risk and therefore a generally conscious and critical audience is needed that welcomes pro-active interaction with the subject matter covered, and rejects receiving a ready made contentious answer in a closed narrative e.g. “…You were there firing flares, but you did not carry out the massacre” (Waltz with Bashir, 2008, 73:54 min). In line with the films’ affect on the audience and their opinion making of the conflict the following quote represents the point of reference from which Israeli and Palestinians films ought to focus on the necessity for dialogue: “The Jews of Israel will remain; the Palestinians will also remain” (Said, [1992] 2002). 51 '2+'#)"*40Alcoff, L. M. (2003). Introduction: Identities: Modern and Postmodern. Identities: Race, Class, Gender, and Nationality, Editorial Blackwell Publishing Ltd., Massachusetts, 1-8. Adwan, S., Ben-Ze’ev, E., Klein, M., Saloul, I., (2011), Zoom in. 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Memory, Identity and Otherness

Memory, Identity and Otherness

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