East Jerusalem redux
August 22nd, 2007Just back from seeing “Jerusalem - The East Side Story”, which was being screened to a selection of Ramallah’s great and good, among them Rafiq Husseini, Mahmoud Abbas’s chief of staff. Unlike “West Bank Story“, an Oscar-winning musical comedy about rival Israeli and Palestinian falafel families, this is a worthy but relentless litany of the injustices Israel has visited on the Palestinians of East Jerusalem in its attempts to create a unified Jewish capital.
The film is largely (and tragically) accurate, but like most propaganda in this conflict, makes too few nods to the other side’s narrative to win over many viewers who don’t already sympathise with its message. For 70 minutes the narrator pummels us in the doom-laden tone that wildlife presenters usually reserve for the moment when a nestful of cute goslings is about to be devoured by a feral cat. You come out wanting to slit your veins, or preferably the narrator’s. Still, it has two good moments.
One is an interview with Husseini’s boss, the president of Palestine, recounting one of his favourite to-camera stories: how he showed the map of Israel’s separation barrier to George Bush in 2003. According to Abbas (though it varies slightly with each telling), Bush was furious and told Dick Cheney, “this is not a state”. Abbas looks proud and self-satisfied. The audience, until then respectfully transfixed, started laughing and jeering. They jeered even more when Bush appeared, awkwardly telling the press, “This wall is… uh… a problem.” I wished I could have seen Husseini’s face at that point.
The second is of an elderly Palestinian woman, with title deeds and old photos in hand, coming to see the house in West Jerusalem that she fled as a child. The camera follows her as a group of Israelis strolls past. She watches them recede, then sums up the whole conflict as well and as succinctly as anyone I’ve ever heard. “We live in fantasy,” she sighs, “and they live in denial.”