Eyes of a Thief

Sad to say, Eyes of a Thief is not a very accomplished film. The performances are uneven, with the worst the male lead who doesn’t act so much as pose. The plot is shallow and predictable. There is no layering of significance, nothing beyond the basic melodrama. We know immediately that the spirited Malak is the hero’s long lost daughter, that he will win over her foster mother and that the older man who wants to marry her will be exposed as a villain. Villainy, of course, is collaboration with the Israelis in their theft of the Palestinians’ water.

The latter argument is, of course, a well-disproven calumny, not that that matters in the Palestinians’  campaign against Israel’s existence. Along with: "All we want to do is plant our potatoes."
     But the film’s most serious lie is the total omission of any references to Islam or its aberrant terrorist extreme. Instead the hero is a Christian, indeed the heroic sniper who killed 11 Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint in 2002. 

There are two problems here. One is why the villain thinks that information would demonize the Christian marksman among the Palestinians. The guy would be a hero. Two, Israel is the only guarantor of Christian freedom and life in the whole Middle East. Everywhere else Muslims are slaughtering Christians and conversions to Christianity and attacking their churches. As a historic film is as much about the time it’s made as the time it’s set (see Aristotle’s distinction between mere History and the more meaningful Fiction), this misrepresentation of the religious dynamic undermines the film.  It does the Palestinians no good in helping to perpetuate their present painful impasse.