Law and Sedition in Israeli Films: From the Assassination of Itzhak Rabin to the Hilltop Movement
In this article I analyze various Israeli fi lms and documentaries, and in particular Rabin, the Last Day (Amos Gitai, 2015), to discuss political sedition in Israel in the mid-1990s. This period is characterized most prominently by the assassination of Prime Minister Itzhak Rabin, but also by the creation of the political climate that made the assassination possible, and which ultimately helped stall the peace process. I discuss to what extent fi ctional fi lms (better than documentaries) can help the historian shed light on a particular historical period when primary sources are either unavailable or only partially available, and the relationship between primary sources and historically plausible fi ction. In this framework I also consider how cinema can help construct a narrative, and ultimately a collective memory, that provides an alternative to the offi cial one. The Settlers’ Movement in the Mid-1990s and Its Representation As is well known, the settler movement underwent a transformation and undertook a dramatic redefi nition of its aims soon aft er 1993, when the State of Israel and the newly established Palestinian Authority signed the Oslo Accords. According to the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics’ data for 1995, at the time the settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip (WBGS) numbered 138,000 (East Jerusalem excluded). For the same year, Peace Now gives the similar number of 134,300. Marcella Simoni | 185 What mattered most in this political shift in the mid-1990s was described by the late Michael Feige as the “long-standing fear [. . .] that an Israeli government would be lured by the promise of peace to sign an agreement with the Palestinians at their expense.” Th e Oslo Accords almost overnight created a diffi cult situation for the survival of many settlements, from posts in a frontier land to forsaken outposts in a dangerous periphery, “like fi sh in a shrinking pond.” Th is new situation led to the rapid surfacing of the most extreme branches of the settler movement, and therefore also to the emergence of more extreme forms of political violence directed at Palestinians on the one hand, and at the state and at its institutions on the other. Th is situation was not entirely novel: Israeli institutions and society had already witnessed processes of settler radicalization, for example, in connection to the evacuation of the settlement of Yamit in the Sinai peninsula (1982) following the Camp David Accords (1979). But from the mid-1990s onward, this phenomenon reached a new intensity and elaborated new strategies. Hebron is a good vantage point from which to observe them: Here political violence fl ourished through verbal aggressions, written graffi ti, physical clashes, episodes of vandalism against Palestinian or international individuals or personal/collective property, murder, and terrorism, in a continuum that takes us to the present day. Th e best known of these episodes is the massacre at the Ibrahim Mosque/Tomb of the Patriarchs by Baruch Goldstein in 1994, but other episodes are also well known. Th e assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 by Yigal Amir, a fervent admirer of Goldstein, did not take place in Hebron, but some of the roots of the complex chain of events that led to it can be found in the political violence cultivated in that milieu. Th e Hebron Protocol of 1997 divided the city into two unequal, contiguous zones under Palestinian (H1) and Israeli (H2) control, further exacerbating the situation. Indeed, most of the fi lms and documentaries that deal with this ideological shift of the mid-1990s pass through Hebron to explain the processes of radicalization and emulation for other settlers. Some footage fi lmed there made it to both domestic and international news broadcasts, and then into the world of fi lm and documentary. Th e well-known “sharmuta” video (originally caught on tape by activists of the Israeli NGO B’Tselem) was later incorporated into the documentary Th is Is My Land . . . Hebron by Giulia Amati and Stephen Natanson (Italy, 2010); the settler girls’ raids in the Kasbah—also shown in Th is Is My Land— appear as well in Testimony by Shlomi Elkabetz (Israel, 2011). Part and parcel of this redefi nition of the mid-1990s was the formation of 186 | Law and Sedition in Israeli Films the two terrorist groups, Kahane Chai and the much smaller Eyal, as splinter organizations aft er the Kach party had been outlawed in 1988 and Meir Kahane was killed in New York in 1990. Th is period also saw the initially scant beginnings of the Hilltop Youth movement and their fi rst outposts—another good example of religiously based political violence directed at both Palestinians and the State of Israel, which continues to this day. On the one front, they utterly disregard the state’s legitimacy—its laws, orders, and courtrooms—and regularly clash with the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF); on the other, they harass and carry out (so-called) retaliatory “price tag” attacks on Palestinians. All of this has fi ltered from the news into the world of documentary, as we shall see presently. Shortly aft er its beginnings, the movement received a boost and legitimization by then-foreign minister Ariel Sharon; in a famous declaration of November 16, 1998, Sharon encouraged “everybody [. . .] to move, run and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements, because everything we take now will stay ours . . . Everything we don’t grab will go to them.” Th is statement was originally pronounced at the convention of the now near-defunct right-wing secular party Tsomet as a way to sabotage Sharon’s own Likud party rival Benjamin Netanyahu in the broader framework of the redeployments discussed at the Wye River Plantation talks (October 16–23 1998). Still, Sharon’s declaration fi red the fantasies and inspired the actions of the youngest and most determined among the new generations of settlers. Th ey aimed for the collapse of the Wye River Plantation plan and indeed succeeded, also thanks to the changed broader domestic and international political contexts. From diff erent standpoints, Raya Morag and Yaron Peleg have discussed how, at the turn of the century, a progressively more religious Zionist movement has been represented on the small and large Israeli screens. Morag sees the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995—the tsunami of the mid-1990s shift in Israeli politics—as the watershed moment that brought Israeli narrative cinema, traditionally left -wing, to represent the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jew “as its ultimate other” during the years of the Second Intifada. Th is period corresponded to Netanyahu’s rise to power, when this population gained political power and infl uence, and campaigned for settlement expansion in the Occupied Territories. In Morag’s view, despite this polarized and highly political context, Israeli narrative cinema celebrated “this otherness as harmless entertainment,” as mainstream. Peleg discusses other aspects of the same phenomenon: the increasing presence of directors belonging to the Orthodox community, their limited dialogue with Marcella Simoni | 187 the outside world, and the distortion of “old Labor Zionist paradigms” through the explosive mix of religion and politics of the new century. In this new context, where narrative cinema generally failed to denounce—or at least represent critically—a process of political radicalization and of democratic erosion, Israeli documentary cinema undertook the task to expose the dangers of the spread of a fundamentalist worldview in some Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox groups. In the last decade alone, numerous visual and literary texts from Israel and abroad—fi lms, documentaries, novels—have looked at the transformation of the settler movement from the mid-1990s vis-à-vis the history of the settlement enterprise per se, in its relationship with the State of Israel and its institutions, and in how the settler movement dealt with the Palestinian population. Among them (in chronological order) are Soldier on the Roof (Esther Hertog, Netherlands, 2012), Wild West Hebron (Nissim Mossek, Israel, Palestine, 2013), God’s Messengers (Itzik Lerner, Israel, 2015), Rabin, the Last Day (Amos Gitai, Israel, 2015), Beyond the Fear (Maria Kravchenko, Herz Frank, Israel, Latvia, 2015), Th e Settlers (Shimon Dotan, Israel, 2016), Rabin in His Own Words (Erez Laufer, Israel, 2016), and the novel Th e Hilltop by Assaf Gavron (2013). All of them were screened and circulated in a rather short period of time. Th e picture is even more complete if one includes in this list documentaries and literary texts by non-Israeli directors on the subject: the documentaries Th is Is My Land . . . Hebron; Louis Th eroux: Th e Ultra Zionists (Andy Wells, UK, 2011); and Dan Ephron’s journalistic inquiry into the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, Killing a King (2015). Add to these the works that fall outside the time frame between 2010 and the present: Consider, for example, the well-known Land of the Settlers (Chaim Yavin, Israel, 2005) or the controversial fi lm by director and settler Shoshi Greenfi eld (Evacuation Order, Israel, 2001), and the autobiographical novels and diaries by the settler writer June Leavitt, author of Storm of Terror: A Hebron Mother’s Diary (2002). All these written and visual texts address one or more aspects of the ideological and political shift described earlier. Some are documentaries: With or without a script, they try to show a history of the present, employing archival footage to trace the beginning of the Gush Emunim—the Orthodox Jewish right-wing, nationalist, activist movement committed to settlement in the West Bank—which was established in 1974. Taken together, this material gives a comprehensive picture of the main political questions underlying the settlers’ enterprise in general, its 1993–1995 redefi nition, and the successive development of the Hilltop movement. However, the solidly structur