Julian Schnabel. Miral. 2010. © Jose Haro

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Julian Schnabel. Miral . 2010. © Jose Haro. Miral : Miral –Miriam Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/OCTO_a_00049/1753524/octo_a_00049.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021

AVISHAI MARGALIT

In the war of 1948 our house in Jerusalem was directly hit and damaged. At the end of the war we moved to a new neighborhood. Not far from our new home was an orphanage named after Saint Vincent de Paul. It was run by the Daughters of Charity. The Daughters used to wear grim-colored habits with wimples. The orphans were Arab girls. Their dress was a bit different; it consisted of long, blue and white-stripped dresses and modest white collars. The girls always marched in groups, joylessly and noiselessly, in pairs and holding hands. I noticed their dress but never their faces. One day the procession of the silent orphans crossed the street. One of the girls lingered behind; her sandal was torn. The other girls noticed and started shouting her name, “Maryam, Maryam!” I was astonished. An Arab orphan girl with the name of my mother ( Maryam in Arabic is Miriam in Hebrew).

It was Maryam that awakened me, a child of ten, from my little moral slum - ber. It made me see the marching girls in an entirely new light; no longer a face - less waddle of penguins, but now human girls. All this happened, in the language of Dylan Thomas, “A grief ago.” It is a grief that has lasted over sixty years of continuous bloody conflict between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs.

The movie Miral is an artistic effort for radical change in our moral percep - tion of the Palestinians. Miral is meant to do to us collectively what Maryam did for me personally.

Orwell’s story of seeing a fascist soldier leaping from a trench and running half-dressed, while holding his trousers with both hands, is too well-known to be mentioned without embarrassment. Yet its point cannot be overstressed: it is the mundane gestures that make us see a fellow human being in the hurrying soldier rather than a Fascist. Orwell had come to shoot “Fascists,” not “human beings.”

The story of the orphaned Palestinian girl Miral is an effort to evoke the humanity of the Palestinians by using their predicament—education or violent struggle—rather than by counting on obvious human gestures.

The movie starts with the story of a remarkable, and immensely appealing, woman named Hind al-Husseini. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/OCTO_a_00049/1753524/octo_a_00049.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 Hind is the founder of the orphanage in which Miral was raised and educat - ed. The orphanage developed out of Hind’s rescue of fifty-five orphans during the 1948 war. It is not particularly hard to evoke a warm feeling of thick humanity in the presence of Hind.

But already, Hind’s family name, al-Husseini, indicates the complexity of the story. Al-Husseini is a highly-charged name for the Jews of 1948 in Palestine. Hind’s cousin, Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini, was the charismatic military commander of the Army of the Holy War in the war of 1948. I vividly remember my father coming home in the besieged Jerusalem telling us that Abd al-Qadir was killed by “our boys” in the Qastal (a village and a position on the way to our city in siege). The reaction was mixed; fear of retaliation and joy of getting rid of a formidable, yet respected, enemy. Indeed, the disintegration of the Palestinian forces in that war took place right after Abd al-Qadir’s death. It was Yitzhak Rabin who was the commander of the brigade that killed Abd al-Qadir.

This is all stuff about intimate enemies, and intimate enemies do not neces - sarily lose sight of the humanity of their enemies, even in intense conflict fuelled by bitterness and hatred. But the one who was never regarded as an intimate enemy but more like a demon was Amin al-Husseini, the uncle of Hind and Abd al-Qadir, and the Grand Mufti of Palestine. He colored the Palestinians’ humanity for the generation of my parents in Palestine and I guess for Miral director Julian Schnabel’s mother, a Zionist-activist in the U.S. The “Jerusalemite mufti,” as he was referred to by the Jews, was the leader of the Palestinian community under the British mandate. He was indeed a nasty piece of work; a strong collaborator with Nazi Germany. During the Second World War, he lived in Hitler’s Berlin and led the Nazis’ recruitment of SS Muslim battalions in Bosnia.

Miral does not dwell on the contrast between the two cousins Hind and Abd al-Qadir, and yet the two already represent the Palestinian predicament in the cen - ter of the movie: Education as embodied by Hind, and armed, violent struggle as embodied by Abd al-Qadir.

The term “education” must be understood as standing for nonviolence. So Miral : Miral-Miriam 199

the real predicament is between violent and non-violent struggle. Education is one way to carry a non-violent struggle. The question is: can the Palestinian predicament—education or violence— humanize the Palestinians for outsiders? Can outsiders feel the strong pull of vio - lence and the strong push of education? Miral is an effort to make them feel just that. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/OCTO_a_00049/1753524/octo_a_00049.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 This moral-artistic goal should be regarded as an end in itself. It should not be conflated with any other worthy goal, such as bringing peace to the Middle East. It would be nice if Miral could be of service to peace, but its artistic success doesn’t hinge on it.

What is relevant to the success of the movie is this question: can Miral humanize the Palestinians without losing sight of the Israelis’ humanity? In the movie, the Israelis are basically helmeted, soulless war machines; constantly engaged in tormenting Palestinians, most annoyingly in the form of a Stalag-like fat blond beast of a woman, lashing Miral.

Yet there are two gestures in the movie that aim at humanizing the Israeli Jews, one more successfully then the other. The first gesture comes in the form of a young Israeli woman, who is caught in a Romeo and Juliet –like love story with Miral’s Arab cousin in Haifa. But even this well-meaning young woman cannot escape having a metallic blue-eyed father who is nothing short of a red-beret paratroop colonel, with a cold and menacing tone of “I have to talk to you,” referring to her relations with Arabs. This father is meant to be sharply contrasted with Miral’s loving and affectionate father (step-father, as it turns out).

Before I move to the second, and better gesture, let me hasten to add that the issue I am raising is not the banal and irrelevant claim that the movie is politi - cally “unbalanced.” Why should it not be? It is the point-of-view of a Palestinian woman telling her most moving story in the way that she saw it. The issue, I repeat, is: can a movie with the aim of putting a “human face” on the Palestinian plight succeed, if it fails also to put a “human face” on the Israelis?

The movie ends with a redeeming gesture towards the Israelis as human beings, depicting them demonstrating in Tel-Aviv in support of the Oslo peace agreement, with a shot of Rabin, smiling sympathetically. There is even a Peace Now banner in the portrayal of the demonstration. My friends and I, who were active in Peace Now at the time, used to see a great deal of Abd al-Qadir son’s, Faisal al-Husseini, the PLO leader of the Palestinian community in Jerusalem during the first Intifada, and a thoroughly humane person. He was the nephew of Hind, and it was from him that I first learned about the inspired and inspiring woman. 200 OCTOBER

The real issue however, in judging the artistic and moral aim of the movie, is by the way it portrays the Palestinians, rather than the Israelis, to outsiders . The danger in the effort to humanize the Palestinian plight artistically is the danger of moral kitsch.

As a young man I worked for many years in a youth village in Jerusalem, Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/OCTO_a_00049/1753524/octo_a_00049.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 which was very much like Hind’s orphanage. It consisted of immigrant Jewish boys and girls from all over the world, many from the Maghreb. While there, I received a book, or rather an album of photographs, called The Family of Man, that was very popular at the time . The book was based on an exhibition that photographed peo - ple from different races and ethnic groups with exotically-varied ranges of physiques. The idea was to present what we all share as human beings: birth and burial, wedding and work, laugh and lament.

I showed the book to a woman who was working with me in the village. She was a tough Jewish-Hungarian survivor of the Second World War. She leafed through the book and then muttered, “It is well-done, but it is kitsch.”

I believe I understand what she meant. She viewed kitsch as closely associat - ed with sentimentality, and she rendered sentimental humanism as something prone to kitsch. The danger of “moral kitsch” is the tendency to humanize certain people, especially victims, by portraying them as objects of great purity and innocence. But humanizing people is truly needed when they are not pure and only partially innocent. Sentimentality distorts reality.

Richard Rorty made the claim that “the emergence of the human-rights culture seems to owe nothing to increased moral knowledge and everything to hearing sad and sentimental stories.” By his account it is Uncle Tom’s Cabin , and not Kant’s second Critique, that did the trick of humanizing other people for us.

Personally, I side with Jung against Rorty: “Sentimentality is the superstruc - ture of brutality” seems to me to be more true, since a threat to “the pure and the innocent” seems to justify any degree of brutality in return. “Kitsch morality” is bad, both aesthetically and morally.

Does Miral fall into the trap of “kitsch morality” in trying to humanize the Palestinians by turning them into creatures of great purity and innocence? My answer is No.

What saves the movie from falling into the kitsch-trap is the presence of three powerful, no-nonsense Palestinian women at the center of the movie’s plot. Miral : Miral-Miriam 201

They are very compelling as human beings, and so down-to-earth that they over - power the kitschy tendency in handling the sloganeering young Palestinian males in the movie. The humanity of these three women shines forth, not so much from the background of their sloganeering male society, but from the amazingly beauti - ful Cezannesque shots of the Israeli/Palestinian landscape. These shots are so seductive that they, perhaps unwittingly, convey the message that this landscape is Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/OCTO_a_00049/1753524/octo_a_00049.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 worth fighting for.

A good measure of a work of art’s success is the quality of the reactions that the work elicits. Judging by the two attached letters—one by Rabbi Irwin Kula, the other by Rachid Benzine— Miral is already a success. The two letters are very much worth reading. I would like to refer to only one point in Kula’s letter. It contains his assess - ment as to how Miral will be viewed and received by the organized Jewish- American community. He estimates the organized Jewish population comprises a third of the total Jewish population in the U.S. Benzine provides reflections on Kula’s account.

My personal guess, and a guess it truly is, is that the reception of Miral in Israel will be more favorable than the one anticipated by Kula in the U.S. If this is true, it shouldn’t be surprising. Organized ethnic communities in the States carry more rigid identity politics than the ones that prevail in their “old countries.” This is true about Ukrainian people, Poles, Irishmen, and indeed for almost every other American immigrant community. This, I believe, also holds true with respect to the Jewish-American community. Jews may still vote domestically, as the old saying goes, like Puerto Ricans and earn money like Episcopalians (namely being on the center-left of the American political spectrum), but when it comes to Israel, the need for a strong identity makes the affiliated Jews who are in need of strong identity side with the Israeli Right. This is true so long as the Right does not embarrass them by raising the issue of double loyalty in case of conflict between Israel and the U.S. People with a need for a clear and rigid identity cannot afford to understand the other side, and see its humanity. This failure is not a cognitive failure but a failure of will. A person with such a need makes an effort not to understand, because understanding the humanity of the other is too disturbing, since the group you identify with might be morally on the wrong side. Such people cannot afford empathy for the other side, let alone to extend sympathy. Miral is a plea for sympathy, but it is at its best in pleading for empathy.