Policy Budinskis should see more Israeli films

[Moses]

Thanks to documentaries, our minds are no longer rigid, but elastic with new ideas

by Heather Mallick
April 24, 2005

There has been a sea change in how we get our knowledge of the world and the means to interpret it. And no, I don't mean cable TV and BlackBerrys. I mean non-fiction instead of novels, and documentaries facing off against mainstream TV news and movies. We've been badly let down by industries that used to exist to reflect our lives back at us. Is it surprising that we want the truth and we'll go elsewhere to find it?

Life is so interesting, every minute of every single day, but you can't really tell that from magazines or the output of the entertainment industry, which appear to be writing fiction about fictional people like Paris Hilton. Do they really think our lives are so dull that we must turn to their fake entertainment to fill our days? Next week, Adbusters, as part of its TV Turnoff Week, plans to zap all TV in public places with a device called TV-B-Gone. They have a point. We don't see Canada: A People's History on elevators, just programs that scream at you to shop.

Virginia Woolf wrote that it's very dangerous to live even one day. She meant that there was so much to observe and interpret that you could write a novel a day and never tire. Thus were born her great diaries. And from Woolf and Joyce were born a fashion for novels set over the course of one day — most recently Ian McEwan's Saturday, about a bad day in the life of a brain surgeon, Michael Bracewell's Perfect Tense, about one day in the office, and Jon McGregor's If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, about a standard day on a nondescript street. They are improving on the novel by making it more realistic, more memoir-like.

Over the past eight years or so, I have increasingly moved away from reading novels, partly because so many of them are so bad, and into the kind of interpreted reality Woolf chose. I fell into Memoir World like falling into a pond thick with green algae and personal history. I remember one of my friend's little brothers confiding in me his artful scheme of happiness. He made friends by listening to other people's conversations and leaning over and saying to them, “That happened to me once too!” Memoirs are like that.

At the moment, most memoirs are better than most novels, and most documentaries are better than almost all Hollywood movies. This happened, I suspect, as media concentration in North America destroyed the quality of newspapers and TV network news. Young people began to turn to Internet sites and documentaries for their truthful news. Facts matter. I seek no spin. If you want BBC World on Rogers Cable — and believe me, you do — Rogers is now trying to force you to buy Fox News as well. Seriously.

As for novels, the notion that everyone had a novel in them is patently untrue. Or it may have been that the modern novel became so inward-looking that people turned to memoirs so they could say, “That happened to me once too!”

This year, I was asked to be a judge in HotDocs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival being held until May 1 in Toronto. HotDocs, showing 101 films from 23 countries, generously thought that a non-fiction writer might have a fresh sideways view of the great wave of documentaries now becoming the information transit station for news junkies.

Each year, the festival has a category that spotlights one nation. This year, it was Israel's turn and my category. I expected a giant slosh of propaganda from Sharonistas. I was wrong.

Although I have yet to discuss the 12 films with my fellow jurors, the fact is, I am overwhelmed by the quality of what I've seen. We'd all be better off seeing these Israeli documentaries.

Newspaper editors should see them. They'd hunger to reclaim investigative journalism and fill their pages with director Dan Setton's story, The Next War: Radical Zionists in the Holy Land. Mr. Setton, whose previous documentary was about Muslim extremists, films two terrorist Israeli settlers who just missed blowing up a hospital and an entire school of little Palestinian girls. Thanks to an Israeli cop who noticed something odd at 3 a.m., the girls lived.

The putative killers, now in jail for 15 years, laugh and are unashamed. Their wives, who back them completely, are treated as a lower form of life.

The documentary evolved. I realized I wasn't seeing only politics, terrorism or Israelis versus Palestinians necessarily. I was seeing the social sanctioning of mass murder. Mr. Setton had filmed an interview with madness itself. It was like watching Ted Bundy, if Ted Bundy had tons of friends and a taste for farming.

These men were simply Bundys who found a niche where it was acceptable to take pleasure in killing little girls, just like those IRA members who weren't really political, but took a secret sexual pleasure in kneecapping people. The screams, the bone chips, the severed nerves flapping — what fun.

Documentaries like this make us wiser. I watched Grace (a week in a hospice), Sentenced to Marriage (a stunning look at Israeli women forbidden by rabbinical courts to divorce their useless, hang-about husbands), Cry of the Owl (the graceful women of the Himba tribe in Namibia talking about their useless, violent husbands), Keep Not Silent: Ortho-Dykes (Orthodox Jewish lesbians), Watermarks (the story of Jewish women who as girls belonged to a swimming club in Vienna and as seniors return to the city that nearly killed them) . . .

I do not know how we can possibly select one winner. All hail documentaries. Thanks to them, our minds are no longer rigid, but elastic with new ideas.

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Heather Mallick's column is in The Globe and Mail each
Saturday. It appears on Sunday in rabble.ca.

[Moses]

May 30, 2005

Israeli Newscaster's Documentary Courts Controversy

By STEVEN ERLANGER

JERUSALEM, May 30 - For nearly 40 years, Haim Yavin has been the calm, objective face of Israeli news, the anchor of Channel 1's broadcast since the founding of Israeli television in 1968.

Now 72, and known here as "Mr. TV," Mr. Yavin is about to deliver himself of a documentary about Israel's settlements in the West Bank that is pessimistic, angry and intensely personal.

"Since 1967, we have been brutal conquerors, occupiers, suppressing another people," he says in "Yoman Masa," ("Diary of a Journey"), which he filmed by himself, with a hand-held video camera, in the West Bank and Gaza over the last two and a half years.

He speaks to settlers, Palestinians and soldiers. While Israel is planning to pull its 9,000 settlers out of Gaza this summer, Mr. Yavin sees no end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, where more than 230,000 Israelis live beyond the 1967 boundary lines, plus another 200,000 or so in East Jerusalem, annexed by Israel after that lightning war in which he fought.

Talking of the missed chances of many governments, both Labor and Likud, to end or reduce the steady occupation of the West Bank, Mr. Yavin says astringently, "This merrymaking will never be stopped."

His own employer, the state Channel 1, which Mr. Yavin helped to found and where he had also been director of television news, chose early on not to televise the documentary. So Mr. Yavin, who has his own company, sold it to Channel 2, a commercial channel. Its licenseholder, Telad, has lost the franchise to another group, and beginning Tuesday night, for five weeks, it will run Mr. Yavin's cri de coeur as a kind of goodbye to Israeli television.

In an interview in the dim cafeteria of Channel 1, Mr. Yavin, tall and genial, says he sympathizes with the settlers, but his portrait of them and the security network to protect them is harsh. He describes a woman giving birth while waiting at a checkpoint and tells a settler, "It's not Jewish, what we're doing there."

He films a soldier who complains that the settlers keep pressing him to shoot Palestinian children. When a settler tells him that if the army can keep the peace, "Muhammad" will make the Israelis coffee, Mr. Yavin retorts, "I'm not willing to rule another people, not willing for 'Muhammad' to make me coffee."

The more he traveled, the more obsessed he became, he said, with the cycle of "occupation, settlements and this terrible terrorism of the Palestinians, which no explanation can condone and which harms themselves, their cause and the Israelis."

"I call it a Greek tragedy, because I don't see any solution," he said. "The settlers are so strong. In a way, they run the country, or run the agenda of the country. I don't see anyone undoing what they've done" in combination with Israeli governments, which is "an annexation of land that goes against a viable state for the Palestinians."

Asked about government involvement, he said: "A settler said to me, 'What do you think? That we had the money to do this ourselves?' "

Much of the international community regards Israel's settlements and annexation of East Jerusalem as illegal. Mr. Yavin says that many Israelis admire the settlers as the real Zionists and pioneers in a soft age. "I also have sympathy for them," he said. "They are idealists. But they are wrong, and they are endangering us."

Mr. Yavin has been criticized for making such a personal film and yet continuing to anchor the nightly news. "There's already a tumult about it," he said. "But I have my answer. I reject being personal when you report the news. But a personal travelogue is transparent and is a different matter."

Mr. Yavin, who worked in Washington, remembers the impact of Walter Cronkite, who visited Vietnam after the 1968 Tet offensive to make his own documentary and judged that the United States was failing in Vietnam. "We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds," Mr. Cronkite famously intoned. "We are mired in stalemate." President Lyndon B. Johnson later reportedly told an aide: "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America." Five weeks later, Mr. Johnson said he would not seek re-election.

Mr. Yavin has no such ambitions, and the conflict is entirely different, he says. "Don't compare me!" he said, laughing. "This will not have such strong repercussions."

"Who am I?" he asked. "I don't think I can move things. I don't pretend to have solutions. It takes more than another book or film or series to make this change. You need something more cataclysmic. I hate to say Yom Kippur" - the surprise attack by Arab armies against Israel in 1973 that caused major soul-searching in the military and society - "but some trauma to hammer this into the minds of people, to gather ourselves and take ourselves in our own hands and decide the boundaries of Israeli power."

With the Gaza pullout, he feels some change in the air. But he is not optimistic. "If the Israeli citizen knows he'll really get peace with the Palestinians - like U.S. and Canada - he'd give up half of Jerusalem," he said. "But there is such an abyss between Israelis and Palestinians, and this distrust is so big, on both sides."

Mr. Yavin trailed off, then asked: "Is Israel really and sincerely doing its best to compromise?" And then he said: "I'm not sure any power on earth can move a people to give any land to your enemy, one that really wants to harm you."

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Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company