In my post yesterday about Miral‘s opening I wrote that “[Director Julian] Schnabel’s eyes have been opened to the conflict in Palestine, and the basic inequity of a system that privileges Jews over all others.” Ummm, you can say that again.
Schnabel has given a wide ranging, and often rambling, doozy of an interview to Deadline.com on the the film’s politics and his experience in Israel/Palestine. Here’s his answer to a question of what “a peaceful solution in the settlement areas” would look like:
First of all, they have to stop building these settlements. Take them out. That’s not a military solution, it has to be a humanitarian solution. It is like black people living in the United States in 1960. It is apartheid, that’s what it’s like over there. It is shocking. I didn’t want to say these things when I made the movie. I wanted people to look at the movie as a work of art. But now I see it as a vessel, about opening your heart, understanding, and non-violent solutions. There are things that are controversial in the film, things that are shocking to see. But it is so light in the context of what really goes on. Under the guise of state security, a little girl can’t go to school. The orphanage depicted in the film had 3000 girls at its peak, and there’s hardly anybody in it now. Because of the wall, the security fence that goes all around these illegal settlements and makes life impossible for the Palestinian people. It kills any kind of industry they could have. Only Jewish people can drive to Jerusalem in 15 minutes. These other people, it takes hours for them to get anywhere. It is totally dehumanizing and unacceptable. I was so ashamed of my people, so ashamed to see somebody throw a rock at a young man, hit him in the head, while two soldiers are watching. A young Hasidic kid throws a rock at a Palestinian guy, who hits the ground. And soldiers are standing there, watching this happen, and they don’t do anything. Our tax dollars are paying for this. The government is paying for two soldiers for every settler.
He still seems a bit shell-shocked from what he saw. At one point he says to interviewer Mike Fleming, “I’m telling you Mike, if you and I were standing there, in Hebron, watching, you would be mortified. There are children who have to walk to school through a graveyard at 4 o’clock in the morning because they’ll get beat up if they walk through town.” He shares a personal experience about traveling with Palestinian author and screenwriter Rula Jebreal to demonstrate how making the film changed his perspective on the conflict:
It was an epiphany. I was totally naïve, totally in the dark and I believe so many of the American Jewish population are totally in the dark. We cannot believe that a Jewish person would behave like that. It’s not the Jewish way. We have suffered so much that if anybody should understand the Palestinian problem, it should be Jewish people. It was so disappointing and ashamed at certain moments. I was at the airport one day, leaving with Rula. I respect the security, when they check your bags. But they took her bags and put them through an X-ray machine not once but three times. We went to a second checkpoint and they made her strip and, the last minute, let her come on the airplane Jon Kilik and I were taking. And it felt just like apartheid, there was absolutely no reason for it. It was pure racism and prejudice. It was cruel and I was ashamed of everybody in that airport. We went to Egypt, where she did a television program because she’s a political analyst. She asked questions, and people from the regime censored her. She did not find paradise over there, either. There was a guy from state security who actually said, you can’t put that on television. Another time, she was told people would be arrested if she did. The people in Egypt couldn’t take that anymore. We basically have a democracy in Israel that deals with a dictator like Mubarak, who supports the borders. And you’ve got maybe 1.5 million people living in Gaza in what are open air prisons. Last week, a couple of fisherman got too close to the line where they’re not supposed to be, and they were shot. What kind of a thing is that? Is that human? But I didn’t know a damned thing about any of this before.
Schnabel takes on several topics in the interview from the Israel lobby (which he refers to as the Jewish lobby) to Obama’s UN veto and film co-star Vanessa Redgrave’s advocacy for Palestinians at the 1978 Oscar awards. Here he talks about his experience shooting in Israel/Palestine, and his ignorance of the history of the conflict before making the movie:
The school [ed note: Dar El Tifl, the subject of the film] was started in 1948, after the Deir Yassin Massacre, which I’d never heard of. The Irgun and the Haganah together wiped out a village and the Palestinians left because they were terrified they were going to be killed. I said to Rula, what did the Arabs do to the Jews for that to happen? She said, what do you mean? Well, it was a concept of depopulation. And when the Palestinians left, Nasser says, “Leave, and we’ll kill all the Jews and then you can come back.” That was a terrible, idiotic thing to say. It created the most famous line everybody spouts, that “they just want to push the Jews into the sea.” Basically because we have such a fear– we say “never again” about the Holocaust– there’s this overcompensation and it’s a justification for inhumane brutality. The battle is so uneven over there that we have just become barbarians. I spent January to June making this film all over Israel. Being there, there’s just such a flagrant disrespect for the dignity of the Palestinian people there. It’s really like they are not even second class citizens. It is shocking.
Although that Nasser quote has been debunked (PDF), the larger point stands that Israel has committed horrible intentional acts since the beginning of the state and it continues a daily assault on the dignity and livelihood of the Palestinian people.
Schnabel’s honesty is striking because it’s happening on a big stage, but his experience is similar to anyone who has spent time on the ground in Israel/Palestine and seen it for themselves. Once you’ve spent time in the occupied territories and Palestinian villages and cities in Israel, there is no way to deny the Jim Crow reality in Israel/Palestine. Notice Schnabel talks as much about the attitudes and structures as he does the conditions. While Palestinians certainly do suffer from material deprivation, it is the political structures that guarantee inequality. And it’s clear that Schnabel, like many before him, have seen that it is these structures that will need to change.
