A Breach of Promise

I must admit that I really fail to understand what could possibly have motivated Susan Sontag to release Promised Lands, a documentary shot in Israel last year from about the middle of October to the middle of November. Her reasons for making it are clear enough. She told the Jerusalem Post that she was sitting in New York worrying about Israel during the first few days of the war when she spoke to her friend Nicole Stephane in Paris (the producer of the film), who convinced her that they should go to the Holy Land to see for themselves what was really going on. They would have been better off staying home.

Perhaps I'm being uncharitable. Some parts of the film I enjoyed immensely. There were a number of out-of-focus, although clearly recognizable, shots of my neighborhood in Tel Aviv, right near Kikar Dizengoff (Israel's Broadway and Third Avenue rolled into one, but like nothing so much as a glorified Davis Square). There was also a nice number in the Super-Sol in Jerusalem, although I would like to point out that the Supermarket on Ibn Gvirol in Tel Aviv would have made the point about Israel's plastic culture after the Six-Day War much more tellingly. The obligatory Bedouin shots (you can almost hear the travelogue voice-over "And here these strange people of the desert...") had some nice colors too. And the last long sequence of a shell-shocked Israeli soldier re-enacting his trauma was a powerful statement of the human cost of war.

But beyond that, the pickings were pretty dismal. The opening sequence, implicitly indicting the British for the whole problem, was too cute and facile. The time spent in Meah Shearim, the Jerusalem quarter of the ultra-orthodox, and in anti-Zionist Naturei Carta, was overlong and boring, chiefly because it had no point, despite the implied connection with a voice-over talking about the anti-godliness of early Zionism. And all the little shots of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem which so delighted me must have been a crashing bore for those in the audience who had never visited Israel. The photography as a whole was lousy, poorly edited and badly lacking in basic elements of composition. Visually a washout.

The soundtrack wasn't much better. It was often very hard to hear what was being said, what with what I assume were "artsy" sound effects. You know, "well, it's such an unsettling place, with all the different sounds and all. Let's make the soundtrack unsettling in the same way," or something to that effect. What must have been especially annoying for many members of the audience was the ceaseless repetition of a set of five short bleeps, followed by a sixth long one. The cognoscenti of course knew that those bleeps were the signal for the Israel Radio news on the hour, sounds which stopped all activity for the duration of the broadcast. But I wonder what the people who hadn't been there made of those bleeps, since, like almost every other sight or sound (including two speakers who talked extensively about the nature of the so-called Arab-Israeli conflict), they were never concretely identified.

Now this point about identification may seem a bit picky, but it is really more important than it first appears. Israeli politics are highly ideologized, and after listening to each speaker's line for a while, it didn't take me long to figure out that one of them, the more "liberal" of the two, was Amos Kenan, the Israeli writer who serves as the Zionist apologist to the liberal/left press. The other one I think was Yehoshofat Harkavi, a right-wing Middle East specialist from Tel Aviv University, although I confess I'm not completely positive.

Now it seems to me only reasonable to ask that the audience be able to at least know who is telling them what, so that if they're interested, they can go and check the guy out after the film. If this were a film about South Africa, it would make a big difference if one speaker was Helen Suzman and another Prime Minister Vorster. Political personalities like Kenan and Harkavi are not just ordinary Israelis. They both have very heavy political and ideological stakes in what happens in Israel. Why aren't we at least given a clue as to what interests they may be trying to promote?

The answer lies in what I consider the major flaw in the film, namely Sontag's almost complete ignorance of the realities of Israeli politics. She doesn't tell us anything because she doesn't really know anything. Her quick montage shots are feeble attempts at providing authenticity through naturalistic detail.

Her political ignorance reveals itself in her uncertainty about how to deal with any kind of substantial political issue. Spending only about a month there, as anyone who has been there will tell you, is absolutely insufficient unless one is a Middle East scholar who is in touch constantly with not only the immediate political but the long-range historical issues as well. Smart as she is, Sontag simply does not fill the bill.

It's pretty easy to reconstruct what happened. After being wined and dined by the Israeli intellectual and academic elite (who were well aware of how important a good word from Sontag would do in stopping the drain of support for Israel on the American left), she seems to have classified Israelis into two groups, the hawks (here represented by Harkavi) and the doves (much more favorably represented by Kenan), a division which may make sense in an American context, but not in an Israeli one. By including both in her film, she could honestly say that, despite her disagreements with the hawks, she had allowed both tendencies in Israeli politics to have their say.

This done, she allowed herself to clothe the rest of the problem in a miasma of emotion, focusing on the very real sufferings of the Jews in Europe, accepting the premise of both Kenan and Harkavi that the struggle of the Palestinians against Zionism and the Arab states against Israel were essentially a continuation of the oppression of Jews in Europe.

It is this relapse into diffuse emotionality that I find most reprehensible in the film. I would be the last person in the world to deny the incredible sufferings of the Jewish people in Europe. I would also be the last person to deny the existence of anti-Semitism within the Arab world and Islam (although any honest Jew who knows the story of Joshua ben Nun, who destroyed the entire city of Jericho and all its inhabitants, must also admit the existence of racism in a number of Biblical stories--including that of the Amalekites). And having lived in Israel during the war, I can testify that indeed every family is directly affected by a war, either by death or serious injury.

But I also know that there has been great suffering on the Arab side as well, not a little of it inflicted directly on the Palestinians by Zionism. And above all I know that human suffering cannot be quantified, that no side or group can be said to have suffered more than any other group. Yes, six million Jews were murdered by Hitler, but he also murdered as many Russians, and Stalin twice that. Who can say which people suffered more. You may want to talk in percentages--but what kind of perverse scale would that be?

By falling back onto emotionalism and dwelling on the fact of suffering, Sontag fails in her political responsibility to make the situation clearer through a careful and concrete analysis. She injects into an already highly charged situation even more intense feelings, feelings which only harden the Israelis in their stubborn refusal to recognize the legitimate rights of the Palestinians, and thereby grant to them the very recognition as a people the Israelis demand from the already existing Arab states.

While Sontag's examination of Jewish suffering is occasioned by the highest motives, it is a disaster as a political act. Whether she means for this to happen is irrelevant. She does not understand the situation well enough to know that the point at which she ends, the suffering of the shell-shocked Israeli soldier, is precisely the point at which she should have begun. The task is not to describe how this soldier suffers--rather it is to determine why. In failing to perceive this, she has not just failed her audience, but has dealt a serious blow to her own political credibility and integrity as well.