Capturing the fragments of a land shattered by politics, history, and colonialism, Route 181: Fragments of a Journey in Israel-Palestine, clocks in at about four and a half hours. The film's length is epic-worthy, but it allows the filmmakers to present oral history from a wide variety of people who live along the 1947 partition line, while at the same time allow for minutes-long footage of the monotonous grey concrete wall that quietly runs along one of the region's main roads. By portraying both the divide of the physical landscape and that of the humans that inhabit it, viewers receive a fuller understanding of this conflicted part of the world.
Like the text at the beginning of the film indicates, Route 181, a collaborative effort between Israeli filmmaker Eyal Sivan and his Palestinian peer Michel Khleifi, is truly a cinematic journey. Viewers meet Israelis and Palestinians of a wide variety of backgrounds and politics. Disillusioned Israeli Jews of Moroccan descent wish they had never emigrated to Israel in the first place, while adolescent Palestinian citizens of Israel, because they are educated with an Israeli curriculum, squabble over whether they are Palestinian or Israeli.
One of the common criticisms of the one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that it could never happen because the two parties hate each other. What this film shows is that there is indeed deep racial hatred, but amongst Israelis towards Palestinians, not the other way around. An Israeli construction manager says, “We always say that a good Arab is a dead Arab,” completely unashamed of his naked racism. What complicates this is that the man espousing such hatred is a Moroccan Jew.
None of the Palestinians featured in the film share the racism of many of the Israelis interviewed. Palestinian after Palestinian recalls a time when Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived together harmoniously, religion being a non-issue. Many of the Israelis in the film fail to acknowledge the root of the conflict to be the colonization of the land and the expulsion of its indigenous population. Another elderly Jewish Israeli tells how he helped kill Arabs and ran women and children off the land in 1948, describing the operation as “Matate” (broom), “because we swept out the Arabs.”
Of course, not all of the Jewish Israelis portrayed are as ignorant as those just described. An aging Polish Jew, who seems disillusioned with what the state of Israel has turned into, remembers how the old settlements didn't displace the Arabs. “We came as neighbors,” he says. And an Iraqi Jew storeowner says he would have happily lived with Arabs, and vice versa. “Some people in this country ... possibly don't want peace,” he observes.
Route 181 does assume knowledge of the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, so it might be difficult for newcomers to the conflict to access the film. But those familiar with the Palestinian narrative will find all three of the film's 84-minute segments totally compelling, because the filmmakers don't bother explaining and rationalizing the Palestinians' grievances. Instead, they cut right to the chase, interrogating the Israelis on their attitudes that are often incompatible with peaceful resolution. The filmmaker's sympathies towards the Palestinians are clear, and it can be easily inferred that they favor the one-state solution.
Maureen Clare Murphy, a recent graduate from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, is Arts, Music, and Culture Editor for EI.
Source : Maureen Clare Murphy — The Electronic Intifada, 13.06.2004