Yesterday morning we
awoke to the news of the death of Shimon Peres, a former Israeli Prime Minister
and President and recipient of the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize (shared with Israeli
Premier Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat). He was 93 and had
suffered a massive stroke.
This death came on
the heels of the release of a new documentary we had just seen a couple of days
earlier, “The Ruins of Lifta,” which tries to look at the two alternative
narratives of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Lifta is an Arab village whose
residents were scattered in the 1948 War of Independence. There have been
recent proposals to raze what remains of the town’s buildings and construct a
new Israeli development, but there is now a coalition of Israelis and
Palestinians who are trying to work together to preserve what is left of the
town from before 1948.
The film was directed
and written by Menachem Daum and Oren Rudavsky, who released another
documentary, “Hiding and Seeking: Faith and Tolerance After the Holocaust”
about ten years ago. Although Mr. Daum had long learned from his parents and
community to hold the experiences and opinions of non-Jews in low regard, he
questions this conclusion and begins to understand the extent to which tragedy
can lead to more tragedy.
Mr. Daum becomes friendly
with Yacoub Odeh, a Palestinian in the coalition trying to preserve Lifta. In
an effort to begin a dialogue, Mr. Daum introduces Mr. Odeh to Dasha
Rittenberg, a Holocaust survivor. It is not easy, and there are no simple happy
endings here. While the developers’ plans are delayed by the courts, the future
is far from clear. And this is, after all, just one small village, with
hundreds of others that would need to be settled as part of a more wide-spread
plan for peace. So although the film seems to be straining to end on a positive
note, it is nearly impossible to see just what that positive note can be.
Have a wonderful
weekend.
Love,
Rebecca
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