Paradise Now

I saw a sneak preview of Paradise Now tonight. It is a movie by Palestinians about two men who are chosen (having previously volunteered) to be suicide bombers. The movie follows them through their lives and decisions over the next 36 odd hours.

This movie has gotten me thinking in a number of different ways. Firstly, it is a beautiful piece of propaganda. The majority of the characters are thoughtful, and in some manner sympathetic. This is of course, the point of the movie, to show the world that a suicide bomber comes from. To show that he or she is not an unthinking automaton, but that there are sympathetic reasons behind what he or she does. The poverty that I was able only to glimpse in the movie, if it is anything like what actually exists in Nablus, appears crippling. I would never want to live in such conditions. I am grateful that I don't have to.

People live in crippling poverty every day, and they go to extreme measures to feel that they are doing something to right the wrongs of their lives. I don't think it is any coincidence that terrorist organizations have the firmest hold on places of the world that are so often ignored because they are too difficult to look at, to think about. A treatise on global economic and social inequality is not the point today.

What I wonder most, having now seen the movie, is whether Israelis and Palestinians will ever be able to achieve peace. It is a very real, very sobering question in my mind.

I have friends who are Israelis, I seriously dated an Israeli man for over a year. I have good friends who have made, are in the process of, or are planning to make Aliyah (immigration to Israel). I would never dream of asking one of them to see this movie with me. I would tell most of them that they probably shouldn't, no matter how liberal they consider themselves. I would not ask my friends, these people that I love, to watch a movie that humanizes people whose very real mission is to murder them, my friends. This is not like watching a war movie. This is a movie about people who know, truly know, that they are committing murder, and they feel that they are justified in doing so.

Separate out the differences between the movie situation and the real world (I'll highlight a couple of them for you, there is an Israeli who helps the bombers, the bombers target soldiers and ignore a bus stop with civilians), and this is still a movie about people who are conflicted, who know that they are making a bad decision, but make it anyway.

I can't imagine a movie made by Israelis that would humanize the killing of innocent Palestinian people. As much as I would like to believe that everything negative that is said about Israel is lies and propaganda, I know that some of it is closer to truth than I am comfortable with. I live in the United States, I have had only the smallest taste of what it is like to live in Israel, and I will never fully understand it. I do know that like the US, Israel is far from being a perfect place. I hold Israel to a high standard, the same standard to which I hold the United States. I live here, and I vote, act and live those values. I do not live in Israel, and I will not vote in a country in which I do not have a daily responsibility for the consequences of that vote.

I wonder then, if it is impossible to expect Israelis to humanize Palestinians, and impossible to expect Palestinians to humanize Israelis, not just the best among our groups of people, but the worst, then how can we ever achieve peace? If a Palestinian person cannot look at an Israeli soldier and see past the uniform and gun, to them the symbols of their oppression, poverty, and the simple unpredictability of their every day, how can that Palestinian person truly make peace, and accept peace with the country that give the soldier a gun and puts him in a uniform? If an Israeli cannot look past a suicide bomber and see the poverty, the pain and injustice that the Palestinian person feels propels him (or her) to strap explosives to his or her body and detonate them, how can the Israeli person truly accept and make peace with Palestinians neighbors. Both will be expecting, and preparing, for their neighbor to do his worst.

There are a million more thoughts spinning through my head, and I wish I could make them all come out the way I intend them. For now though, I am left hoping only that the people of Israel and Palestine understand the grave complexities of their lives, and not just the black and white lines that are so easily drawn, I hope that because this is their lives, they will be able to one day see each other as I only dream of them doing.