Israel

AFTER THE 1977 POLITICAL TURNOVER

The threatening social and political processes that began to ripen during the early 1970s erupted into the Israeli consciousness and found filmic expression only after the political turnover that brought the right-wing Likud party to power in 1977 after the sixty-year hegemony of Labor parties. The change resulted from the disillusion with a government that had failed to predict the outbreak of the 1973 October war and remained undecided on the future of the occupied territories, as well as from the resentment toward the Labor party felt by low-income Jews from Islamic lands. This overturn shocked the Labor-leaning populace to which most of the filmmakers belonged and led to their radical politicization. The main focus of fiction films produced during the 1980s was criticism of the Israeli occupation of the densely Palestinian-populated West Bank and Gaza Strip following the intensification of Jewish settlements in these territories and Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982. This criticism, however, was confined to a narrow and melodramatic moral resentment, reflecting the overall paralysis of the left in its dead-end conception of reality. Most films

offered a similar story line: a Palestinian Arab and an Israeli Jew, driven by a vague idea that solidarity between the two peoples is possible, decide to act accordingly. However, irrespective of the grounds upon which this solidarity is based, whether academic as in Fellow Travelers (Judd Neeman, 1984) or class-revolutionary as in Beyond the Walls (Uri Barbash, 1984), their coming together generates reactions from Israeli secret agents, soldiers, and policemen, as well as from Palestinian terror groups, which invariably lead the protagonists to a bitter end. This storyline is played out in jails, mental institutions, or army barracks presented as claustrophobic, labyrinthine, shadowy, and violent, depicting a society under constant threat, whose members are suspicious of each other's conspiracies. The films evidence the split in Israeli society and the paralyzing fear engendered by this split.

The outbreak of the first Palestinian intifada (uprising) in 1989 ended this focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, perhaps because Israeli filmmakers recognized that their moralistic stand was futile. Israeli films from the 1990s on, produced by a new generation of filmmakers, depicted a decentered Israeli culture through a self-representation of ethnic others that previously had had no voice, evidencing the splintering of Israeli society into various power groups. Jana's Friends (1998), directed by Russian-born Arik Kaplun, focuses on the 1990s Russian immigration to Israel, while Shchur (1995), scripted by Israeli Moroccan-Jew Hanna Azulai-Hasfari, exalts the return of its protagonist to the mystical aspects of Jewish-Moroccan ethnicity in reaction to her forced secular Israelization during the 1950s. Late Wedding (2003), directed by Georgian-born Dover Kozashvili, furthers this splintering trend in its representation of a peculiar Georgian-Jewish ethnicity without any mention of an Israeli-dominant national culture. Most of this film is spoken in Georgian, and most of it is shot in ethnically decorated Georgian interiors, while the few exterior shots are of parking lots, empty sidewalks, and building staircases alien to the characters. These contemporary Israeli multicultural films mark the dialectical evolution of the representation of ethnic relations from a desired intermingling in the 1950s to today's ethnic splintering, perhaps also implying a dissolution of Israeli cinema's traditional forging of national identity as being that of a besieged nation.