Munich and Masada, Vengeance and Myth By David D'Arcy December 26, 2005 - 1:17 AM PST Interview with Avi Mograbi Why are you contrasting mythic rhetoric and ritualized language about the sacrifice of Jews at Masada with what's happening now in the Occupied Territories? It's very simple. Let's say I was to make a historical documentary - many were done - about the Masada story. How do filmmakers make historical documentaries? They have somebody present the story, and then they have footage that illustrates the story in different ways. The show archaeological remains, sites, and they have experts explaining, etc., etc. My film is not about present-day Israel or the Occupied Territories; of course it isn't. My film is a historical film. It tells the story of Masada and the story of Samson. To illustrate these historical stories instead of dramatizing the people under siege, I take contemporary original footage that illustrates - any dramatization that you do would be only an illustration. You don't know how it happened, you can never reconstruct. So I did the same with contemporary documentary footage shot in the Occupied Territories. [Mograbi pulls his lower eye-lid down] You may look at me and say, "Who are you kidding?" This is where this film has started. Of course there is a concern among myself and others about what has happened in the Occupied Territories, the siege over the Palestinian cities, the movement restrictions on Palestinians, and the restrictions on making a living, not having work permits. And then, when the discussion about Islamic death culture began, with the first wave of suicide bombings, I got in the heat of this discussion to think about our own death culture. It suddenly made sense. You don't have to dig deep. The Masada myth is present in our lives in Israel all the time. We study it in school. Our kids study it. The first footage I got for this film - I didn't use it - I got from my son, who went with his first-year high school class, like every kid in Israel. And what is the Masada story? It's a story of siege and death. It's a story of making a decision between life under occupation or a liberated life, but not in this world. Why is revenge at the center of your film? It's an uncritical application of our own values. This is why I made the film. Being forced to consider the "death culture" of Islam, that means our culture is okay, right? Wait, let's look at our culture. Let's look at Masada, or the killing of the first-born of the Egyptians. This is far-out. I don't know if I want to identify with that. We don't take a critical look at our culture, at our texts. I'm not talking about indoctrinating everybody into revenge. I'm talking about an uncritical look at our own culture. You were born in 1956? My first war was the Sinai War of that year. How has the use of the Masada story in Israeli society changed over that time? The use of the Masada story changed in 1967. Until then, the Masada story was the number one illustration of our story - brave rebels stuck in the fortress on a mountain in the desert, with a huge army, the biggest army in the world surrounding us, and we have to make a choice. Of course, the use of the story was not to make us commit suicide. On the contrary, it was used in order to elevate our spirits to fight, to get the rights for us to kill others, not to commit suicide. It's a reverse use of the values of the story. But in 1967, something changed. Israel proved itself to be the strongest state in the region, not to say empire. And the feeling of siege changed. Now we had the Wailing Wall. So the most important site to visit became the Wailing Wall, not Masada. You can find tourists now who visit the Wailing Wall, but not Masada. Still, I grew up on Masada. Both of my children were taught it at school. When you were growing up, was Masada counterposed to the Holocaust experience, to the perceived passivity of Jews going obediently to the Nazi camps? Yes. The Masada story was ignored by Jewiush culture for 2000 years. In the beginning of the 1940s, when Rommel was in North Africa, and there was a threat that the Nazis would march all the way down to Tel Aviv, and the Nazis would do what they planned to do to Jews in the Middle East, there was this educator/archaeologist, Shemariyahu Gutman, who came to Ben Gurion. His idea was to use this story to create a dichotomy of death versus liberty, and in that, to create a spirit of resistance. Ben Gurion did not think this was a good idea. Go back to the [Roman and Jewish] historian Josephus Flavius. Flavius tells you that these were extreme nationalists who murdered, who robbed, who murdered their own people, who went down from Masada to Engedi and slaughtered 800 people - Jews - to rob their goods and money. Even if they were heroic to the point of suicide, these are not the people that you want to identify with. Yet Gutman insisted, and started as an educator to take groups of Zionist youth movements to Masada, indoctrinating them with the story, which removed all the uncomfortable facts about who the Masada people were. The rest is history. Your scenes in the Occupied Territories show Arab men stopped by soldiers and forced to stand on stones. It evokes some uncomfortable parallels. Were you thinking of German soldiers humiliating Jews, making Jews kneel or stand holding books? We're not allowed to think this way. It's too dangerous. When you see those images, you think of Abu Ghraib. But using similarities to Germans soldiers, that cannot be done in our culture. You lose the discussion. People start talking to you about what kind of anti-semite you are to compare our soldiers to the Nazis. Politically it's not correct to do it, if you want to get people to listen to you. Are you saying that, as a practical matter, if you want this debate to continue, you don't raise this kind of parallel? Absolutely not, because it ends the discussion you want to start. It starts a new discussion about anti-semitism, and about comparisons about making people stand on stones and sending people to gas chambers. Things are horrible enough without saying that the Israeli soldiers are Nazis. When you are filming Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, soldiers try to stop you from filming, or they taunt you. Usually they end up leaving you alone. Is this typical? Isn't this what one might expect from teenagers, which is what most of these soldiers are? It's not about security. It's about harassment. The presence of the camera does one of two things. Either the presence of the camera softens them, or they try to block me. They know their limits. This what is really sad about Israel. Israel is an apartheid state. Israeli soldiers treat me the way they treat me because I am Jewish and Israeli. Had I been a Palestinian, I don't want to think what would have happened there. This is horrible, because at this moment I used the advantage of being the preferred class of apartheid, and knowing they can't do anything to me. If they did, it would be a scandal. If I were a Palestinian, Israeli or occupied, it would have been different. This film was at Cannes, it's now at the New York Film Festival, where it got a good response, but you've said to me that it opened in Israel and no one went to see it? Is this just a marketing problem? In Israel, there was good exposure, the critics were wonderful. I was on television and radio. Maybe it is a marketing problem in that sense that, when your customers don't wash, you can't sell soap. Maybe we should say that when your customers don't want to consume what you want to sell, you won't sell it. I distributed this film myself, with a lot of my own money. It's the classic situation of not wanting to look at the mirror. Harsh material is painful, and when it's painful, you have to do something about it. You either ignore it or do something about it, and people prefer to ignore it. Author's note: I wrote to Avi Mograbi to ask him for a comment on Munich but he declined because he hadn't seen it. He did forward a letter that the co-screenwriter, Tony Kushner, had written in support of five Israeli conscientious objectors who were released from prison, after two years, in 2004: I want to add my voice to the many people in Israel and all around the world in rejoicing that five men of conscience and courage have been freed from prison, and to express my support for their brave refusal to take part in an illegal and immoral occupation. I believe that those who resist participating in the inhuman war of attrition against the Palestinian people are the real Israeli patriots; those who work for peace, who truly want peace, are the real defenders of the spirit and sanctity of the Jewish people. I'm sorry that the situation in the region has deteriorated to such a degree that a person's choice to follow his humanity and morality brings about such draconian punishment, but an unjust order will always crush dissent with a severity commensurate with the degree of its injustice, and the Jewish people have never lacked for martyrs. When I go to shul this Yom Kippur and ask G-d to forgive me for running to make war while crawling to make peace, part of my prayer will be gratitude for people like these five guys, whose heroism contributes to the redemption of us all. back to past articles >>> Index Munich and its critics Interview with Avi Mograbi back to past articles

David D'Arcy Besides reviewing art and film for National Public Radio, David D'Arcy has also written for the Art Newspaper, the Economist and other publications. February 6, 2007. Mark Savage & the D.I.Y. Aesthetic by Jeffrey M. Anderson February 3, 2007. Seeing the Humor in Sexual Identity by Michael Guillen February 2, 2007. Grindhouse: Chapter Five - The 1970's by Eddie Muller January 29, 2007. Smokin' Aces with Joe Carnahan and Jeremy Piven by Sean Axmaker January 26, 2007. Include Me Out: Interview with Farley Granger by Jonathan Marlow January 25, 2007. Grindhouse: Chapter Four - The 1960's by Eddie Muller January 19, 2007. Charles Mudede: Zoo Story by Andy Spletzer January 19, 2007. Mark Becker: Merging the Personal and the Political by Sara Schieron January 19, 2007. Micha X. Peled: The Lives of the Sweatshop Youth by Hannah Eaves January 16, 2007. Djinn: A Taxi Driver Dreams of Perth by Jeffrey M. Anderson view past articles