Kedma

Kedma (2002)  Directed by Amos Gitai

“Kedma” is the name of the ship bringing Shoa survivors to Israel in May, 1948, a week before Israel became a state. We can take this film to be the antidote to that other Jewish refugee ship and film, Exodus (1960). Unlike Otto Preminger’s film of the Leon Uris novel, however, Gitai’s film expressly denies us any heroes and takes a far more flinty approach to the subject. Not for Gitai the simplistic Zionist cliches of Uris and Preminger. There is no stirring musical theme here, just long periods of unaccompanied action and a doleful string score that doesn’t distinguish between the violence, romance , hope and absurdity behind it.

For Kedma is not really about 1948. It uses that setting to dramatize the irresolvable conflict in Israel that if anything has increased today. It’s a retrospective prophecy, explaining what’s going on there now by purporting to reveal its roots.

The opening scene suggests that Israel allows no personal retreat from the community’s situation. An ostensibly personal moment turns out to be most public. The first shot is a woman’s back as she prepares to drop her cotton slip and join her lover Yanush (Andrei Kashkar) in bed. When he shortly leaves her we see this intimacy has occurred not in private but in a crowded below-deck on the refugee ship. In the camera’s slow track through the surprising crowd the personal story dissolves into the national.

The film shifts from the romantic promise of that first shot into the absurdities and shock of war. The refugees -- hungry, tired, all their possessions in a bag or suitcase -- disembark into a shooting match between a hapless British military unit determined to keep Jewish refugees out of their mandate and a small, armed unit of Israelis trying to help them in. 

Often a character we’ve just met and learned about is abruptly killed. An especially telling one is the Russian cantor, who speaks Yiddish but no Hebrew, who is too young to have a beard, and who itches to get a gun to start killing for his homeland. In him Gitai may have anticipated the current activism of the Haredim, despite their eschewal of military service. 

Unlike Uris/Preminger, Gitai includes the Arab case and perspective. First  a group of women bewail the loss of their olive trees. The new immigrants’ first clash with Arabs ends in a delicate standoff, as the Jewish leader stops the young cantor from throwing a rock at the Arabs who are themselves refugees from the Jews. The Arab woman leader urges her followers to “let them pass.” But then a gunfight between displaced Arabs and the internationally displaced Jews erupts, shockingly brutal.

The film’s first scene has no dialogue. The film has very little. What dialogue we get is often a demonstration of non-communication, the ostensible community shivered by its division into Polish, Arabic, Russian, Yiddish, Hebrew, and even the odd military English. In this generally sparse screenplay, the reticence sets off the explosion in two core speeches. The first is an Arab’s railing at the Jews. He begins angry at their seizure of his donkey to  cart off their dead ends. He works up to an ardent vision that whatever the Jews will do to the Arabs they will remain on their lost land a constant, indomitable, irreconcilable doom, “like a wall.” That doesn’t promise an easy negotiation of a two-state solution.  

The second speech trumps even that. Having wept in joy at being in his promised land, Yanush is driven mad by the battles, their tolls, and the crushing of his hopes. He rages like an Old Testament prophet against what the Jews have been made by all their persecutors and the folly of their messianic lore. (For a transcript of his speech check the film’s entry on www.uk.imdb.com). 
     The two speeches taken together present the poles that appear to preclude any peace today, even as they prove the necessity for some conciliation. Their passion, terror and candour quite outstrip any other film treatment of the situation and expose the triviality of Exodus and any other other one-sided approach -- whether from the Left or the Right. 

In the last shot the surviving refugees and Israelis, including the broken prophet Yanush, disappear into the winding road -- they actually do go round the bend -- into the desert, whose surprising hints of fertility tacitly attest to the garden that the Israelis would develop and to which the Arabs would cling.