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The occupation is lead story in film at HRW festival. |
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 ….’” |
