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The
occupation is lead story in film at HRW festival.
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Rachel
Leah Jones, Israel, 2002, 48 min
An
ongoing tender, wry, candid conversation between Palestinian refugee
Muhammad al-Hayja and his daughter Lina that is the essential
metaphor for 500 Dunam on the Moon, an insightful documentary
by Israeli director Rachel Leah Jones that had its world premier at
the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in New York last week.
Lina
and Muhammad study a picture of the moon and discuss its division of
property. And what starts as a playful exchange between father and
daughter becomes a metaphor for the state of Israel and its
thousands of displaced Palestinian citizens who are now treated as
nonexistent entities in a country that was once theirs.
Muhammad
sees the moon as a symbol for Ayn Hawd, a 700-year-old Muslim
village in the Southern Carmel Hills of Israel. In 1948 Israeli
forces expelled nearly 950 Palestinians from Ayn Hawd. While most of
the villagers scattered to Jordan, some 150 managed to remain in
Israel and relocated to a new Ayn Hawd less then two kilometers
away. They were given the euphemism of “Present Absentees,”
rather living ciphers.
500
Dunam on the Moon explores what happened to Ayn Hawd, now
transformed into an artists’ colony called Ein Hod, and the
village’s original habitants. It is a story of dispossession and
displacement, of a land-based identity brutally stripped from a
people who still generations later trace their roots Ayn Hawd. Most
surprisingly, it is an Israeli filmmaker’s sympathetic
representation of the nearly 150 Palestinian villages that were
uprooted when Israel staked its claim in 1948.
Jones
is perhaps significant of a new class of Israeli citizens who
acknowledge what happened in 1948 and feels for the plight of
Palestinian refugees. But as for giving the land back, that’s a
question ringing in the air without a definitive answer. “The last
10 years in Israel there is a lot of acknowledgement of what 1948
was all about. … But a disinterest in taking responsibility.
It’s like ‘finders keepers losers weepers,’” Jones said
following the film.
Jones,
who visited Ein Hod as a child, learned of its true history as an
adult in Tel Aviv. She was inspired to make the film by an Israeli
short story, “Facing the Forests,” which tells of an elderly
mute Palestinian man and his daughter whose job it is to prevent a
forest fire. The Jewish National Fund planted the forest in 1948 to
cover the ruins of his destroyed village. In the end he is
instructed to set fire to the forest by an Israeli fire scout.
Similarly
in October 1998 a fire broke out in the forest surrounding Ein Hod,
causing mass destruction to the colony as well as the new village of
Ayn Hawd. Israelis across the nation were shocked and blamed
Palestinians for the fire, which was never the case. “You must
wonder why? Why would a Palestinian of Ayn Hawd set fire to a
village they still believe in their hearts is theirs?” That belief
of original possession keeps the Palestinians going, though they
suffer humiliation after humiliation.
The
film slices interviews with al-Hayja and other Palestinian
descendents from Ein Hod living in the Jenin Refugee Camp with a
look at what the village has become. In 1953 Marcel Janco, a
Romanian painter and founder of the Dada art movement transformed
the village into a Jewish artists colony, preserving the original
architecture of the Palestinian mosques and homes but using them as
art galleries.
At
one point al Hayja said, “We built a mosque in the new Ayn Hawd so
[Israelis] would know there were Arabs living here. In the original
mosque they opened a gallery.” The film then cuts to a
pretentious tourist guide in Ein Hod standing in front of the
mosque, which is now a bar/restaurant modeled after the Café
Voltaire in Zurich where Dadaism was first conceived.
She
flippantly tells a group of tourists that there were “such parties
[at the former mosque] that I can’t tell you what we did here.”
It’s a sad, tragic portrait of the demise of religion and national
identity for the displaced Palestinians of Ayn Hawd and the rest of
Israel.
The
original villagers have been reduced to preserve the beautiful
Palestinian architecture for the eccentric, bourgeois artists of Ein
Hod, which enjoys an epiphany of cultural stature in Israel. The
village is treated as an unearthed jewel for Israel, much like the
early Europeans who landed in North America and “discovered” it
from the Native Americans who were there all along.
Some
of the Nuevo-riche Israelis in Ein Hod go to vast lengths to
preserve the original stone-distressed look of the Palestinian
buildings. One Israeli takes Jones on a tour of his house built to
replicate the exact architecture of the original Palestinian homes
of Ayn Hawd. He is proud of what he has accomplished but strangely
is lost to the absurdity of his work: A preservation of culture at
the expense of dispossessed people.
Jones
said she questioned the man and his mother later on if the
displacement was fair for the Palestinians. Though the man felt the
Palestinians had received a raw deal, he was unwilling to offer a
solution. Jones told the audience at the screening, “As the saying
goes, ‘The road to hell is paved with ….’” 
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