Route 181, a controversial epic documentary about the state of relations between Israelis and Palestinians, scoops up plenty of reality on the ground, while history slips through its fingers.
Route 181 is one hot latke. Filmmakers Eyal Sivan and Michel Khleifi went on a road trip in the summer of 2002 from just outside Gaza in the south of Israel up into the Galilee in the north. All along Route 181, the original partition boundary established by the UN in 1947 that was abrogated by the 1948 war, they let their videocam roll on the theory that the vox populi would represent a greater truth about Israel than what we've heard to date. Sivan is an Israeli, Khleifi a Palestinian.
What they didn't do is as significant as what they did. There are no TV setups in front of the Knesset, the Dome of the Rock, or the Wailing Wall. They didn't talk to any big-picture players, thinkers, or scholars. The result is a decontextualization of history.
Forget the British. Forget the French. Forget Euro-colonialism. Forget the German rampage through a predominantly acquiescent Europe and the Holocaust that turned Jews into ashes or refugees. Forget oil and corporate statecraft by the U.S., Europe, and Russia. Forget Cold War political jockeying.
Forget Arab plutocracy and its pre-Enlightenment, fundamentalist resistance. None of it exists at the level of conversation Sivan and Khleifi engage with ordinary folk. “The Jews shot us like rabbits,” one old Palestinian lady weeps. “Deport them all,” an apple-cheeked Jewish bubbe and café owner says.
Sivan and Khleifi don't pretend to be even-handed, or ecumenical, or to mutually lament the sad death grip their peoples have on one another that as artists, they seem to say, they have transcended.
Perhaps that's because Sivan is in sync with Khleifi's point of view, which is to say a Palestinian viewpoint, that Jews from Europe and the U.S., over the course of the last 120 years, invaded and confiscated a land whose people had a culture and a history, if not a functioning state, and have tyrannized beyond all shame those they didn't drive to other countries, or into refugee camps, or kill in a clockwork war of daily terror.
If you start from zero, as Sivan and Khleifi do, there is really nothing to do but drive your car (and your polemic) toward a one-state solution in which displaced Arabs return to assume control of the new state of Palestine. Did King Solomon not prepare to divide a baby in half until the real mother relinquished her claim?, Sivan and Khleifi ask their subjects. Indeed, the tragedy Sivan and Khleifi record along Route 181 is that of loss (of peaceful coexistence between Arab and Jew) in a supposedly simpler, stateless time.
The testimony Sivan and Khleifi record from Jew and Arab alike over the two-month trip is intended to build a mosaic of unofficial evidence introduced at a kind of trial of Israel in the court of world opinion. At four and a half hours, the length of the film, you could drive from Eilat to Jerusalem and hear better for yourself.
For the most part, Israelis along Route 181 range from the merely disappointed to the grotesque; Arabs are depicted almost uniformly as benign victims. The closest one gets to any other possibility is a Jewish émigrée from Morocco, who reminisces with her Tunisian husband about the tranquility of Tunis. After a lifetime of feeling screwed by Israeli immigration propaganda, she huffs, “Sharon and Arafat should be shot with their mothers.” Would that there were more of her. The film is an insult to peace.
Source : Harlan Jacobson — Film Comment, 01.02.2005