If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither, let my tongue cleave to my palate if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy. (Psalms, 137, 5-7).
Yesterday I finally watched Ô Jerusalem, from Elie Chouraqui (he was the director of Harrison’s Flowers). The movie, based on the 1972 book Ô Jerusalem by Larry Collins & Dominique Lapierre, covers the first days of Israel as a newly created state in 1947/1948, after the resolution 181 (full text) of the United Nations. During this historic event, two American friends, a Jew and an Arab, will both embrace their camps’ cause and fight again each other - while trying to preserve their friendship.
The movie itself was disappointing to me, as it ends on a cliché of a preserved friendship between the two, and tries to stay neutral when relating the events. But the movie is a message of hope, so I do understand why Elie Chouraqui wrote, filmed and edited it this way.
However, I think it’s an important movie to understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Beside the message of hope, the aim of the movie was: to understand a problem, you need to understand its cause and roots. And it does a fantastic job at giving a picture of what/how/when everything started - and what/how/when the worst mistake (that led to now 60 years and counting of conflict) was done.
It’s amusing (very VERY ironically, of course) to read, the same week-end, that the number of settlements in east Jerusalem will increase, the project been approved by the government. And the news only comes a few days after the shootings (8 dead) in a Talmudic school of Jerusalem by an Arab from East Jerusalem. The shootings happened during the Israeli assault on Hamas troops in Gaza, killing aver 100 Palestinians (including40% to 60% civilians). The assault was a response to the recent increase of rockets launched from Gaza on Israel, especially on Ashkelon. And we could go back on and on like this ’til the 1948 Deir Yassin massacre or the 1929 Palestine riots.
It sadly seems that history repeats itself again and again. It man capable of learning from his mistakes ?
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