An American friend writes:
While I have your attention, I wanted to ask if you’ve watched Arna’s Children [readers can find it on Youtube here]. I saw it at the Brecht Forum last week, and I have to say I was somewhat disturbed by the event. Were the film a clinical look at the effects of occupation–the occupation can provoke some Palestinians to violence–that would be one thing. But instead, the film is framed as a tribute to the late Juliano Mer Khamis’s mother Arna and the school she established in Jenin, which, from the clips we see, employed a kind of violent pedagogy that a viewer might (unscientifically, but plausibly) conclude contributed to the future radicalization of its students. The movie ends with a group of children singing a paean to martydrom and resistance, as if this, indeed, was Arna’s legacy. As I said, I was disturbed by this depiction, and by its reception (albeit predictable) by the habitual denizens of the Brecht Forum, some of whom were wearing t-shirts that praised armed struggle.
You know me. You have a sense of my politics. I’m not a person who cries “incitement”–ever (even now). But the movie didn’t sit right with me. Manhohla Dargis called it “insulting to every Palestinian who struggles without a gun in hand”–and I think there’s something to this, as well. Where is Palestinian agency?
