The Attack

The fact that The Attack, Ziad Doueiri’s film of Yasmina Khadra’s novel, got made  at all is more heartening than the film itself. Jews and Arabs collaborated on making this Israeli film, that attempts even-handedly to examine the Israeli-Palestinian contretemps. In the film there appears no hope for the two warring sides to reconcile. Even more disturbing is the Arab nations’ ban on the film for its having been shot in Israel. 

If anything the film tends toward the Palestinian side. An early report has an Israeli policeman refusing to let an Arab enter a mosque unless he smokes a cigarette first. As it is Ramadan the Arab refuses, there is a scuffle, the cop is stabbed, the Palestinian arrested. However necessary the defensive posture, an exchange at a checkpoint shows Israeli abruptness almost trigger a fatal melee. The Arab surgeon hero, Amin Jaafari (Ali Suliman), is seen to grow as he shifts from being the Israelis’ house Arab to refusing to help the Israelis commit more suppression in the name of justice and peace. His suicide bomber wife Siham (Reymond Amsalem) strikes a powerful chord when she writes that she can’t bear bringing a child to live without a homeland. The Jews know about that, but that’s not grounds for their national suicide.

When the surgeon receives his Israeli medical award, the first Arab to receive it in its 41 year history, he recalls experiencing Jewish hostility. He considers that erased by the support he received in his medical education and career, culminating in this award. But we see he is still treated with hostility. A Jewish medical colleague snipes at the surgeon’s success as a doctor and in his investments. A Jewish bombing victim refuses to be touched by the Christian Arab doctor. The policeman investigating the suicide bombing abuses his power in trying to wring a confession out of the innocent doctor.

In his acceptance speech the doctor makes perhaps the film’s central point: we have to reexamine our certitudes. Having suffered prejudice, he has come to respect and to befriend his Jewish colleagues and patients. But as he tracks down the forces behind his wife’s astonishing double life he rediscovers the Palestinian side of the issue. As his wife’s cousin contends, the Palestinians want to live in dignity. 

Here the film perhaps stops too soon. The Palestinians could have lived in dignity in their own state since 1948. Instead they have refused the two-state solution in the hopes of eradicating Israel instead. Where Israel accepted the 750,000 Jews expelled from the Arab countries around 1948, the other Arab nations rejected the Palestinians, banning or expelling them or making them second-class citizens, preferring to keep them suffering as leverage against Israel’s existence.  A dignity that requires the elimination of another people is something quite other than dignity. Even in the current renewal of peace talks, any optimism must be countered by Abbas’s promise that no Jew would be allowed to live in the new Palestine, while the Palestinian rights to return to Israel remains a basic condition. The ”right to return” is a one-sided campaign, intended to eliminate the one Jewish state in a world with about 60 Moslem states. 

Finally, examining our certitudes cuts two ways. As the murders and vengeance continue the peacemakers may lose their zeal and hope. When the doctor reveals his new perspective he loses the Jewish woman colleague who had been such a supportive friend all along. The longer this war continues the more set the old certitudes will become and the more negative any change.