Dancing Arabs

Eran Riklis manages a touching humanist film that should engage and expand both sides of the Arab/Jewish divide in Israel — and beyond.

It follows a bright young Arab boy Eyad, whose intelligent father — consigned by his earlier political activity to a career as fruit-picker — gets him into the country’s premier Jewish high school. With that family as its centre the film obviously reveals the Arabs’ difficulties in the (understandably) wary Jewish country. The Arabs make up 20% of the population, so they understandably chafe at soldiers checking their IDs and teachers’ snide remarks and the conviction the system is prejudiced against them. Arabs steam in the kitchen while the Jewish boys get the better paying jobs as waiters. As Eyad’s father summarizes it, “We want to live in dignity.” 

Eyad’s experience broadens when a community service project leads him into a friendship with Ionathan, a Jewish boy crippled with MS. He also has an affair with a bright, pretty Jewish student, Naomi, whose parents pull her out of the school to end their contact. To enable her to return, Eyad gallantly leaves the special school and studies for his exams on his own, while working in restaurants. His father disowns him in anger and disappointment.

Riklis is careful to present the Jews’ perspective as well. An Arab teacher teaches the map of Palestine — denying Israel — then unrolls the Israel map when the Jewish principal enters. Eyad’s father and friends are certain Saddam Hussein will repel the US attack and destroy Israel in a few days. His mother knows better. The Arabs dance on their rooftops when they see the scud missiles fired at Israel.
     Here lies the pathological disconnect in the Arabs' anger at government controls. If the Arabs did not persist in their desire to destroy Israel the government would not need the safeguards that affront Arab dignity.

The Arabs dancing on the roof does not explain the title. As Riklis told the Palm Springs festival audience, he had two other contexts in mind. Mainly the phrase suggests the Arabs’ restriction to servicing (figuratively: dancing for) the Jews, whether in the kitchens or cleaning up their mess (as Eyad more heroically does for his stricken Jewish friend). He also recalled the Jewish proverb about not being able to swing one behind at two weddings at the same time. Servant Eyad is indeed torn between two dances, the Arab and the Jewish, when he ventures beyond his enclave. At school his summary of the 1948 war is the Jewish version, unshaded, but in a later discussion of Jewish contemporary fiction he  details the conventions of Arab stereotypy.

The two boys’ mothers provide the film’s moral center. Eyad’s Arab mother — who has the stereotype Jewish nose — tacitly supports her son’s love affair with the Jewish girl. Her concerns give way to her love and support. Ionathan’s mother embraces Eyad for the comfort and life he brings her worsening son. When Ionathan nears the end, Eyad uses his passport to assume his Jewish identity, getting a waiter’s job, then opens a bank account in his name to deposit the checks. Ionathan’s mother is initially disturbed to discover that ploy, but when she confronts him she immediately softens at his need and promises to keep his secret. In response Eyad writes the high school exams both in his own name and in Ionathan’s, securing both their graduations with identical honours.  

Eyad loses his beloved grandmother. Naomi denies him to win a spot on the Special Intelligence army unit. Eyad goes to university in Berlin, returning for Ionathan’s last days. Then comes the film’s astonishing climax. It’s completely unexpected and yet perfectly inevitable. Ionathan’s mother gives her son a Muslim burial under Eyad’s name, to enable Eyad to pursue his life under her son’s name, freed from the stigma of being an Arab. 

     As Eyad’s mother accepted her son having a Jewish lover, Ionathan's embraced her son’s Arab friend. She asks him to live with them to ease her strain. Her climactic gesture reverses but fulfills the remarkable prophecy by Golda Meir: There will not be peace until the Arabs decide they love their children more than they hate the Jews. Both boys mothers’ realize that; Naomi’s doesn’t.
     The message is that peace will be impossible unless both sides abandon their traditions of hatred and war. This Jewish mother abandons her religious tradition, turns her back on the past, to ensure a better future for the next generation of Jew and Arab together. We know her feeling for her Judaism from their sabbath dinner with Eyad. So we gauge the sacrifice she makes for her son’s friend. Of course, in assuming the Jewish identity Eyad also abandons his past, including his family and culture. So profound is the schism that only a break with the past will bridge it. Eyad’s elementary school is visited by a fatuous presenter of some Children for Peace movement. The film’s climax plays out the deeper implications of that hope.