Mustafa (Ali Suliman) lives with his mother in a West Bank village on one side of the border wall, while his wife Salwa (Lana Zreik) lives 200 meters away with their three children in a Palestinian village on the Israeli side. On a track field an average runner could cover the distance in 45 seconds. For Mustafa, on the day he needs to get to his injured son in an Israeli hospital, it might as well be a journey to the center of the earth, full of danger and treachery played out against the humiliating and sometimes deadly rules and regs of military occupation. A checkpoint mechanism fails to read his fingerprint and then a clerk informs him his work permit is expired. It’s a weekend so not renewable until Monday. In desperation Mustafa pays a smuggler and embarks on a 200 kilometer high risk journey to cross the border.
This is the premise for 200 Meters, a gripping, 96-minute thriller, written and directed by Palestinian-born Ameen Nayfeh and filmed in the West Bank. 200 Meters is Nayfeh’s debut feature film, and has won numerous prizes, beginning with the Audience Award (Venice Days) at the prestigious Venice International Film Festival, where it premiered in September 2020.
Currently streaming on Netflix in some locations, the film has made the rounds of many film festivals, most of them until recently, virtual festivals, owing to the exigencies of the pandemic.
Watching it for the first time at the 21st Annual Chicago Palestine Film Festival (which ran through May 21), I couldn’t help but think about the power of video for stirring up the sort of empathy that changes minds. In my own case such Palestinian documentaries as 9 Star Hotel (2008) and Five Broken Cameras (2011), helped to move me out of the paralytic bondage of Zionism and into activism.
Chatting with a volunteer afterward at the T-shirt concession, I was surprised to learn that 200 Meters had been part of the Chicago Jewish Film Festival last fall. Really? Are you sure? I asked and the volunteer checked with another volunteer at the table, and yes, they were sure.
A Palestinian-made film in a Jewish film festival is unusual. But a little Googling turned up the fact that 200 Meters has been screened by at least two dozen Jewish film festivals around the U.S. in the past 15 months. The first of these was February 2021 in Atlanta, where in what Bob Bahr of the Atlanta Jewish Times summarily termed “…a rare win for a Palestinian film,” it received the Human Rights Jury Prize.
A dubious distinction of getting a Palestinian film into Jewish festivals is that reviews will likely be written through a Zionist lens. There don’t seem to have been many, but the reviews I came across are steeped in micro-aggression and backhanded compliments that reflect an inability to see the Occupation for the brutal human rights travesty it is, and an inability to see Palestinians as equals.
There’s nothing new about that, but in the context of the arts—which at their best can be the most humanizing tool we have for building peace and understanding—it exposes a perversity usually kept well hidden beneath Zionist talking points.
In the Jewish News of Northern California, film critic Michael Fox first off assures readers that 200 Meters is “heartfelt” enough to likely not offend “even the most ardent American Jewish supporters of Israel.” Later Fox insinuates that in the hands of a less sensitive director, the circumstances of the story could lend themselves to “an indictment of Israeli policies…” and “demonization” of Israeli soldiers. He applauds Nayfeh for keeping “editorializing to a minimum,” as in the “blink-and-you-miss-it” moment in which a Palestinian expresses antipathy for Israeli settlers who are taunting Palestinians as they drive along Palestinian roads. Finally he says that “200 Meters is at its best when it relegates politics to the back seat and lets Suliman’s unwaveringly decent Mustafa carry the film,” whatever that means.
Reviewing the film on Variety.com, Jay Weissberg also seems to have trouble with its political context, whitewashing it away by calling 200 Meters, “part family drama, part road movie.” Like Fox, he says the movie works best when it focuses on Mustafa’s story. He faults the portrayal of the younger and more overtly angry Palestinians who Mustafa meets along the way, as not being “multi-dimensional.” Weissberg wonders—as if a critic of checkpoint scenes is sitting on his shoulder as he writes—if a checkpoint scenes in 200 Meters is necessary, “may feel like many other checkpoint sequences we’ve seen in Palestinian films…” He patronizingly decides, “This is daily life, often twice a day, so it belongs here.”
And then there is the question of the Israeli ID card that Mustafa refuses to apply for. Fox suggests that choice may have led this otherwise “go-along, get-along kind of guy who never (otherwise) evinces a political identity” into a crisis of his own making. The review, by the way, is headlined, “Palestinian father knows best in ‘200 Meters’….or does he?”
There is no telling whether an Israeli ID card would have been available to Mustafa, given unpredictable interpretations of the then Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law, which was just recently codified into permanent law. Or if once made available to him, could the card have been capriciously taken away? This is a feature film, not a documentary, so all we really know is that in the heat of an argument that reflects the stress of living under Occupation, Salwa tells Mustafa that their separate living situation is all his fault because he refuses to apply for the Israeli ID and he barks back that he doesn’t want it.
Bob Bahr, the Atlanta Jewish Times arts writer, seems to have deduced that if he did have the Israeli ID, Mustafa might never see his mother again back in the West Bank. Bahr doesn’t say it that way. Instead he extracts all political context from the film and offers this cryptic synopsis: “200 Meters…tells the dramatic story of the difficulties an Arab construction worker and father faces as he attempts to maintain a relationship with his mother.”
In actuality, the Israeli ID would not have prevented him from visiting his mother. Mustafa’s refusal to apply for the difficult-to-obtain card more likely reflected a principled unwillingness to acknowledge the validity of the occupation, combined with a general distrust of the Citizen and Entry into Israel Law.
Of course this wonderful film received much unconditional praise in reviews by non-Zionist writers, none of whom questioned or misunderstood its political context or intent. When Human Rights Watch screened 200 Meters at its May 2021 film festival, the Jewish Forward ran an in-depth interview with Nayfeh. In it he discussed the autobiographical inspiration for the movie: his childhood in a West Bank village that had been split off from the Palestinian village, now in Israel, where his grandfather lived. He recalled how as a child he took a taxi every weekend to visit his grandparents and suddenly when he was a teenager there was a wall and the journey was impossible. Four years later there was the frantic moment when his grandfather was dying, the checkpoint was closing for the day, and he and his siblings prevailed upon the humanity of a soldier to get through.
Nayfeh told The Forward that he hopes his work will contribute to a growing conversation about Palestinian rights.
“I have a little bit of self-worth that I have a film that is talking about Palestine and it is being shown,” he said.
The power of film, as we learned from the video that ultimately convicted Derek Chauvin for killing George Floyd, depends on the power of the narrative the viewer is attached to. There were defense attorneys who watched that video and still insisted Floyd died from natural causes. And there were jurors who said, “I know what I saw.”
I can’t remember exactly now, but I must have already been letting go of my narrative when I saw my first Palestinian film. At the time I was in love with a man who supported Palestinian rights, a new concept for me then, and he brought those movies to my attention in the first place.
I can only hope that somewhere in the world, amid the tangle of virtual showings at dozens of Jewish film festivals, there were people also on the brink of change who saw 200 Meters and crossed a border.
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“Yet Exodus was not the product of a virgin birth; its origin has been described by a public relations practitioner named Art Stevens in a book called The Persuasion Explosion. He writes that ‘skillful public relations can speed up the acceptance of a concept whose time has come. A striking example of this involved eminent public relations consultant Edward Gottlieb. In the early 1950s, when the newly formed State of Israel was struggling for recognition in the court of world opinion, America was largely apathetic. Gottlieb, who at that time headed his own public relations firm, suddenly had a hunch about how to create a more sympathetic attitude towards Israel. He chose a writer and sent him to Israel with instructions to soak up the atmosphere of the country and create a novel about it. The book turned out to be Exodus by Leon Uris. His novel did more to popularize Israel with the American public than any other single presentation through the media.’” (Art Stevens, The Persuasion Explosion, Washington, D.C; Acropolis Books, 1985, pp. 104-105).
“’Stevens notes that unhappily for Uris’s pretensions to objectivity, Uris became carried away by the passion of his own propaganda. He followed Exodus with another book on the Middle East called The Haj, which an Israeli reviewer in the Jerusalem Post described as ‘a raving diatribe against Arabs, their culture & their religion,’ adding that it ‘depicts Arabs in a manner that would make Meir Kahane blush.’” (“The Passionate Attachment: America’s Involvement with Israel, 1947 to the Present,” by George W. Ball, undersecretary of state in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, US ambassador to the UN, and his son, Douglas, (W.W. Norton and Company, Inc. New York, N.Y., 1992, p. 200 and p. 348.)
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I very much look forward to viewing Ameen Nayfeh’s acclaimed film ,”200 Meters.” It is a highly acclaimed, most welcome & productive film that accurately presents reality for the Palestinians living under the boot of racist Zionists of foreign origin.
In 2001, renowned historian Edward Said called Leon Uris’s 1958 novel “Exodus” ‘the main narrative model that dominates American thinking’ about Israel. As Haaretz columnist Bradley Burston wrote in 2012 in an article entitled “The ‘Exodus’ Effect: ‘The monumentally fictional Israel that remade American Jewry,’ Uris’s narrative ‘Tailor[ed], alter[ed] & radically sanitized the history of the founding of the State of Israel to flatter the fantasies & prejudices of American Jews.’ Burston quotes American Zionist Jeffrey Goldberg, who served in the IDF as a prison guard, to the effect that ‘Exodus made American Jews proud of Israel’s achievements. On the other hand, it created the impression that all Arabs are savages.’ And he quotes none other than David Ben-Gurion: ‘As a literary work it isn’t much…But as a piece of propaganda, it’s the best thing ever written about Israel.’”
“Of course, even more Americans owe their education in Zionism to Otto Preminger’s 1960 movie version of the book, which has been ‘Widely characterized as a ‘Zionist epic’ [that was] enormously influential in stimulating Zionism and support for Israel in the United States.’ ‘It was Exodus, the movie, that really viralized (as we say now) the ‘Exodus-effect.’ (The Polemicist, Sept. 22, 2014, “Israel’s Human ‘Shield Hypocrisy,’ The Early Days”)
So The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is simply a drama about childhood friendships?
Ms. Zell writes that 200 Meters is currently streaming on Netflix, but my searches there over the last few days have not turned up any sign of it. If it’s really there, is there some magic to getting to stream it? If it’s not there, any suggestions about where to find it?