Tirzah Agassi

Hany Abu-Assad

    The upscale, Marin County audience is in shock.  A suicide bomber from the Occupied West Bank has just driven into its collective lap, dragging along his mother, his best friend and the woman who would love to love him.
    
    The lights go up after the West Coast premiere of Paradise Now at the 2005 Mill Valley Film Festival. Dutch-Palestinian filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad, 44, stands in front of the now empty screen.  This film won both the Amnesty International Award and the Award for Best European Film at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, yet Abu-Assad seems unassuming, even reserved. Tall, with close-cropped dark hair, he faces his wrought-up audience with an inscrutable, remote expression.
    
    The awkward Q & A begins.  Several people in the mostly middle-aged audience thank him for making the film, and then begin asking questions that seek a shred of hope.  What influence, someone asks, does Abu-Assad expect this film to have on the horrifying reality it portrays?  
    
    “Films change nothing,” he answers in a distant voice. “If they did, things would already be different.”

    Such pessimism is hard to take.  We’ve just witnessed a marvel of filmmaking, a neo-realist thriller, whose creator has stormed into the agonizing, surreal chaos of the second Intifada and managed to duck back out with a gem that includes both laugh-out-loud humor and serious political debate.  This man is clearly a risk taker, a problem solver, the ultimate can-do guy.  In a Hollywood movie, he’d triumph against all odds.  But here he is refusing to pretend that he can even make a dent in the bleak Palestinian reality in which he has just rubbed our noses.

    It’s an alarming introduction, not what I’d expected after reading the film’s tagline: From the Most Unexpected Place, Comes a Bold New Call for Peace.  Still, I dare to hope that in our interview, scheduled to take place in couple of days, Abu-Assad will be willing to enter a dialogue, perhaps offering some answer to the audience’s unspoken question: “But what can anyone DO?”
    
    Paradise Now evokes downright visceral reactions.  The filmmaker’s stated aim is to put a human face on the chilling phenomenon of Palestinian suicide bombing.  And it certainly succeeds, showing us, in fact, many haunting faces of a people so desperate that it produces warriors who see their own bodies as  “the only weapon we have against Israel’s Occupation.”    
    
    The first Palestinian face we see is that of Suha, a returning expatriate, like Abu-Assad himself, who argues passionately that such bombings only provide Israel with an excuse for continuing its own violence.  Suha is a modern young Palestinian woman who’s just been dropped off at the checkpoint that blocks entry to her hometown of Nablus.   
    
    Paradise Now’s emotional “establishing shot”, meanwhile, is Suha’s interaction with an Israeli soldier who plays a game of keep-away with the identity card she gives him for inspection – just to make sure she knows who’s boss.  Abu-Assad elegantly uses that one small on-screen action to illustrate all the humiliation that has poisoned the lives of his next two Palestinian “faces.”

     Said and Khaled are two young auto mechanics. They seem like pretty regular guys, though there is a certain intensity about Said that captures the feisty Suha’s interest when she shows up at the garage to get her car fixed.

    That same evening, the two young men learn that they have been chosen for martyrdom in a joint operation against the Israelis.  Their dream has come true.  The rest of the film chronicles what may or may not be the last 48 hours of their lives in a careening psychological thriller that would put Hitchcock himself on the edge of his seat.

    Again and again, we are taken back to close-ups of Said’s eyes as we discover the details of his fluctuating motivation.  Forget tales of ninety-nine heavenly virgins.  Zoom in instead on the torment of a young man burning to blot out the shame of his father, a traitor executed for collaborating with Israel, who, according to Said’s mother,  was actually a good man who wanted only to provide for his family.

    It’s a devastating family portrait, one that makes me just about desperate to pick Abu-Assad’s brains on the subject of how on earth we’re to stop this madness. He may indeed, as he claims in Mill Valley, still be so traumatized by the experience of making this movie that if he’d known what he was getting into, he would never have taken on this project.  But the fact is that Abu-Assad pulled it off, becoming an instant role model for getting the impossible done.
       
    Just consider the feats of diplomacy it took to shoot the film.  First Abu-Assad had to get friendly with the Israeli army in order to get his international crew into the West Bank town of Nablus.  Then he had to establish good terms with the armed Palestinian factions inside the city - behind the backs of the Israelis.

    On top of this, the rivalries between Palestinian factions meant that approval from one faction caused definite disapproval from the other - a situation that eventually resulted in one faction’s gunmen kidnapping his Palestinian location manager and ordering the film crew to get out of town.
      
    It took the intervention of the late Yasir Arafat himself to save the production manager.  But, after an Israeli missile hit a nearby car, a third of the film’s European crew did in fact quit and hightail it out of the Middle East.  After this, Abu-Assad, who was obsessed with the gritty impact created by shooting in completely authentic locations, reluctantly relocated the filming to his birth town of Nazareth, within the safety of Israel’s Green Line.
    
    The fact that authorities on both sides of the conflict collaborated in the making of the film provides a noteworthy counterbalance to this extreme violence.  Abu-Assad and his Dutch co-writer and producer Bero Bayer even had an Israeli co-producer, Amir Harel.  And the Israel Film Fund is underwriting the film’s distribution in Israel, beginning with its opening at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque to good, if sensationalist press.  

    For example, Ha’aretz’s interview with the filmmaker sports the headline "If He Weren’t A Filmmaker, He Would Have Become A Suicide Bomber" - a statement that writer Goel Pinto’s says Abu-Assad agreed  with, apparently after having told Pinto of the personal experience which spurred him to make the film.   

    The incident took place at Gaza’s Kalandra checkpoint.  Abu-Assad was ordered to stand with his hands up against a wall for three hours in the blistering sun, three hours during which he feared for his life every second.  The utter humiliation he felt led Abu-Assad to understand what makes Palestinians volunteer for an act that he likens to that of the Biblical Samson.   

    Abu-Assad went so far as to confide to Pinto that he was literally impotent for a month after the incident.  He also admitted that the six months spent under Occupation have put him in a serious depression, saying that all the accolades the film has received help as little as aspirin helps a migraine.  Pinto, in turn, admits to being shaken up by having been so caught up in the film that he identified with the would-be bombers.
    
    Our interview takes place in the imposing Ambassador room of San Francisco’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel, a setting financed by Warner Independent Pictures, which expects Paradise Now to become the biggest Arabic-language film ever released in the U.S.

    One on one, Abu-Assad is more willing to engage than he was when faced with the alarmed, festival audience.  Having mentioned that I’m an Israeli-American, I inquire about his two lead actors, Kais Nashef and Ali Suleiman, who also have credits in Israeli productions.  Apparently they are part of the longstanding theatrical collaboration between Jews and Arabs within Israel.  He explains, in somewhat broken English, that both actors come from towns within Israel’s Green Line.

A scene from Paradise Now, courtesy of Warner Independent Pictures

TIKKUN: So they are Palestinian-Israelis?

Abu-Assad:  They are Palestinians with Israeli passports.  Israel as a state considers itself a Jewish state.  "Isra-el" means “Soldier of God.”  Why should I be associated with a state called Soldier of God?  I don’t want to be associated with God.  I don’t want to live in a Muslim state either.  In a Jewish state, you can only see the non-Jew as a threat.

TIKKUN: What if, in the future, Israel becomes a pluralistic secular state whose state religion is Jewish, say the way England’s state religion is the Church of England?”  

Abu-Assad: Why not?  I believe that Jews have the right to be in the Middle East.  But you have to make an equal partnership, whether it’s two states or one. And the one who can do this is Israel for the simple reason that it controls the money and the borders.(Yet) Israel demands that we be the ones to stop the violence first.   But after 60 years of nakba  (catastrophe), what do you want, a model civil society?  We are an unhealthy society.  We can’t stop the violence.

TIKKUN: Does the Geneva Accord, for example, look like a starting point for the equal partnership you want?

Abu-Assad: A lot of Israelis and Palestinians are convinced that we must create equality and partnership.  But general politics has no interest in this. I don’t know why.  Corrupt generals who benefit from misusing the fear? What I hope for is that I will live in a place where part will be an Israeli state with an equal, fully recognized, Palestinian state beside it.  We are still far from this.  We will be there only when the Israeli state is ready to say “I want to share it and to help your weaker economy.”  I think we are moving in that direction, but will not get there any time soon.  Because the way we are still going is a disaster.

TIKKUN: Is it important to you that Palestinians have the right to return to within the Green Line?  Or is that negotiable?

Abu-Assad: We have the right to return.  If there’s a right of return for Jews, there must be a right of return for Palestinians. The question is one of irrational fear.  If we want to live together in peace, the Israelis have to recognize that Palestinians have full and equal rights.  That doesn’t mean that they have to come back and live in the same place.  But we must be able to travel.  My grandmother just died. My aunt, who was afraid and ran away to Syria in ‘48, could not come back to see her mother before she died.  Why?  Why should we have to suffer for your fear?

TIKKUN: Then do you agree to two independent secular states, living side by side, with different names and different governments?

Abu-Assad:  It might be a good step to have two equal states.  But at the end, it will be one.

TIKKUN:  How about a confederation of two states?

Abu-Assad: A confederation.  Yes,  this is the best. Because then people can enter each other’s state.  Not having checkpoints.  Not having walls.

    I question Abu-Assad on the details of a couple of the film’s scenes that are set in Israel.  They strike me as inauthentic, containing discrepancies that raise my own fear of being taken in by propaganda.  

    I am not the first Israeli, it turns out, to object to a scene in which an endangered bus is filled with soldiers rather than civilians.  Abu-Assad defends his choice as representing how his character sees himself – as an equal to soldiers, not babies - and apologizes for having disturbed us,  pointing out that he made sure that the soldiers on the bus would be appealing.

Abu-Assad: They are young and beautiful.   Innocent.  Why should you kill them?  Even if they are soldiers.  They have no mothers?  They have no sisters? In the end, it is just a film.  But Palestinians are also disturbed (when) the film does not correspond to their sense of reality.  We have to get used to our real stories becoming theater. Otherwise we will still see it as a political weapon.

TIKKUN: But isn’t it?

Abu-Assad:  No. As a filmmaker, all I can do is tell stories, and capture reality like in a painting. If this allows you to have less fear of the other, "Ahlan Wa Sahlan" (welcome.)  After Palestinian screenings, one reviewer called the film “a masterpiece”,  (while) another said it’s “an apology for the West.” Most people found it to be a very honest movie.

    My second objection is more of a stumbling block between us.  It is of Abu-Assad’s depiction of the handlers who meet up with the would-be martyrs once they head down to Tel Aviv.  The handlers are portrayed as being modern, young, Israeli Jews motivated by money.  Such collaboration strikes me as extremely unlikely.

    Abu-Assad protests, referring to a famous, shocking case of a Jewish settler who helped a Palestinian bomber for pay, and to two additional incidents involving Jews that I am unfamiliar with.  Abu-Assad also points out that no other Israelis have disputed these facts with him.  Still, I get the impression we both know that odds are that a handler on the Israeli side would be a Palestinian with an Israeli passport.

    We move on to stories about Abu-Assad’s family.  My favorite is about his father, scion of a family that has lived in Nazareth for 400 years running a transport business that gradually upgraded from camels and donkeys to a fleet of vans.  

    Though the elder Abu-Assad never accepted Israel’s right to turn him into a second-class citizen, he was happy to do business with Jews and had friends who were ready to defend him in a pinch.

    Back in the early days of the state, when Nazareth was still under military rule, Abu-Assad Sr., offended by the insults of an Israeli soldier, socked him.  He took off and was eventually saved from serious consequences by the backing of a Jewish friend whose word was taken seriously by a close friend of his: Prime Minister David Ben Gurion .

TIKKUN:  When you look ahead now, what gives you hope?

Abu-Assad:  The conscience of the Jewish people.The Jews have been the conscience of humanity, always, wherever you go.  Not all Jews,  but part of them.  Ethics,  morality.  You invented it!  I think Hitler wanted to kill the conscience of the Jews, the conscience of humanity.  But this conscience is still alive…Maybe a bit weak…But still alive.  Thank God!

Tirzah Agassi is a former columnist and writer for The Jerusalem Post. She practices Clinical Hypnotherapy in Marin County, CA and lectures widely on her great-grandfather Martin Buber.

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