Mas’ood Cajee posits “Imagine if we were in a parallel universe in which Hollywood gave Arabs and Muslims a fair shake,” and offers ten proposals for films “just waiting for Spielberg’s magic,” such as:
Hebron: A story of tragedy and torn loyalties. In 1994, Brooklyn Jewish doctor Baruch Goldstein opened fire on Muslim worshippers in Hebron, killing 29. Palestinian American Mazen Khalili (Tom Hanks), a State Department official assigned to investigate the massacre, struggles with his job responsibilities and his roots. Leah Rabinowitz (Meg Ryan) is a Jewish American journalist who discovers a dark family secret that will change her life forever.
If Spielberg were to take a camera crew to Hebron today this is the sort of action he could be filming:
Upon our arrival, they began plowing. Within minutes, about 60 settlers from Susya appeared, rifles slung over their shoulders, descending upon the few Palestinians working their fields.
We alerted the army which sent some soldiers to arbitrate between the settlers and the villagers. After initially talking only with the settlers, in order to avoid a confrontation – instigated solely by the residents of Susya – the army declared the area a closed military zone.
As we tried to explain to the soldiers what was agreed to, dozens of teenagers from the settlement approached the Palestinians and unleashed a string of verbal attacks that were nothing less than blood-curdling. They called an elderly Palestinian women “whore,” “pig,” “dirt” – vowing – “we will finish you off!”
Jewish Voice for Peace explores the Myth and Reality of Munich and concludes it does not make any sort of case for the Palestinians despite what its most extreme critics have been saying.
In other words, it doesn’t come close to showing this sort of reality that might stir empathy for its victims:
Yasmine is a grave, self-possessed 11-year-old. She emerged from her coma after a nine-hour operation to remove nails embedded in her skull and brain. An exploding pin mortar had been fired into her house. Her father was hit in the stomach and can no longer work. I’ve held this type of nail in my hand. They are black, about 1½ in long, sharpened at one end, the tiny metal fins at the other end presumably designed to make them spin and cause deeper penetration. We sifted through a pile of shrapnel at the hospital, all of it removed from victims. These jagged, twisted fragments, some the size of an iPod, were not intended to wound, but to eviscerate and dismember: to obliterate their victims. Yasmine lives a short drive away from Abu Saguer, in a ramshackle enclave with a courtyard shaded by fig trees. Across a sterilised zone lies her cousins’ house, but it remains inaccessible (the cousins, including the most withdrawn child Sue Mitchell has ever met, are also her patients).
On the other side of a coil of razor wire, laid within feet of Yasmine’s house, runs a sunken lane gouged out of the sand by tanks. When Sue first met her, Yasmine was terrorised, screaming and throwing up during the night. Such symptoms are common. In areas such as this, leaving your house day or night means risking death; staying there is no more secure. Nowhere is safe.
Daniel Day-Lewis visited Gaza in order to reach his own conclusions. What can be said of a culture that looks to moguls of entertainment for historical perspectives – a society that is willing to ignore what observers like Day-Lewis have witnessed first hand?
The late Lieutenant-General Rafael Eitan, the former chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), once likened the Palestinian people to “drugged cockroaches scurrying in a bottle”. In 1980 he told his officers: “We have to do everything to make them so miserable they will leave.” He opposed all attempts to afford them autonomy in the occupied territories. Twenty- five years on, it seems to me that his attitude and policy have been applied with great gusto.
Brava?
Thanks for shining light on these crimes.