Route 181: Fragments of a Journey in Palestine-Israel, directed by Michel Khleifi and Eyal Sivan (2003).
In “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” reality is inverted by image and media representation. Occupation is a “cycle of violence,” occupied territories are “disputed areas,” redeployment is “withdrawal” and “peace” is collective punishment, house demolitions, mounting death tolls, roadblocks and walls. An antagonistic, colonial relationship is passed off as a symmetrical conflict between two equal parties. The colonized are thus presented as responsible for the continuation and consolidation of the occupation. This ultimate inversion of reality becomes the justification for further repression.
How can one reverse the inversion, and surpass the vortex of cycles and symmetries? For renowned Palestinian director Michel Khleifi and Israeli director Eyal Sivan, the answer is radically simple: you uncover roots and causes, and rediscover the capacity of ordinary people for change. As ordinary people voice their own memories, contradictory beliefs and contrasting opinions in Khleifi and Sivan's masterful Route 181: Fragments of a Journey in Palestine-Israel, the historical truth of Palestine-Israel is gradually revealed like never before in a documentary film. Hence, Khleifi and Sivan adopt the virtual partition line of UN Resolution 181 of 1947 as a route of travel.
Such preoccupations are common to the previous cinematic work of both directors. From Fertile Memory (1980) to Forbidden Marriages in the Holy Land (1997), Khleifi has uniquely revealed the human condition of Palestine by capturing the actuality and history of Palestinian dispossession and struggle. Sivan's documentaries, most notably Izkor, Slaves of Memory (1991), have charted the way in which the past continues to structure Israeli social and political realities in the present. Route 181 brings together two deeply committed and profoundly humanist directors in an ambitious undertaking to comprehend the most enduring injustice of twentieth-century colonial history: the establishment of the state of Israel.
Shot over two months in the summer of 2002, Route 181 is divided into three parts: the South, from the port city of Ashdod to the frontiers of the Gaza Strip; the Center, from the Jewish-Arab city of Lyd/Lod to Jerusalem; and the North, from Rosh Ha'ayn, near the new “separation barrier,” to the Lebanese border. The probing directors excavate the depth and width of the conflict: partition, 1948, refugees, peace, old villages, new settlements, expulsion, immigration, frontiers, borders and the occupation. The film remains engrossing throughout its four-and-a-half-hour duration—quite a feat.
The directors set off on Route 181 from a building site in Ashdod, where an Israeli foreman comments: “We always say a good Arab is a dead Arab.” One of the directors asks whether it isn't hard for him to say that Arabs are “animals.” The foreman replies: “It's the truth. What can I do?” Such racist sentiments run deep, the film suggests. As one resident of Kibbutz Nir Oz, near Gaza, affirms: “South Africa is the model.... The fence is the symbol. The fence is Zionism.”
Yet, as is exhibited throughout Route 181, Zionism has never gone unchallenged by either Palestinians or Israelis. Such acts of resilience go against the grain of the logic of displacement and dispossession. For Khleifi and Sivan, these are the necessary elements for a future in common; indeed, such acts are what the future is made of.
The testimonies in Route 181 reveal an understanding of Zionism as destruction of actual and potential coexistence. Opposing such a vision are voices of togetherness and union. For Khleifi and Sivan, commonality, equality and mutuality are Zionism's irreconcilable enemies, and real peace is a future in which human dignity is safeguarded for all. Route 181 intervenes in favor of rediscovering the praxis of self-emancipation: only when we realize that the world is ours to change are we able to shape the future. On our journey there, Route 181 will surely educate, inspire and empower.
Source : Bashir Abu-Manneh — Middle East Report 231, Été 2004