For My Father (2008)

Dror Zahavi’s For My Father is a thoughtful and moving Israeli film that balances the Jewish and Palestinian perspectives. As the title suggests, the two central characters take opposite positions vis a vis their duty to their respective fathers. 

Tarek agrees to become a suicide bomber to restore his father’s reputation in the Palestinian community. His father was assaulted when discovered to have served the Israelis in order to facilitate Tarek’s travel for his promising football career. His parents don’t know his plan but beg him to return home safely. 

The beautiful 17-year-old Keren revolted against her father’s orthodox Judaism and lives banished from her family. This mother too begs her child to return home. Their respective fathers’ positions prevent them. Though we don’t see Keren’s father, his grip is personified by the young orthodox vigilantes who physically threaten Keren if she doesn’t abandon her secular independence and submit to her father — and them. A lasciviousness and cruelty undermine their ostensible righteousness.

When the now ambivalent Arab terrorist and the Jewish beauty meet, both are outsiders in their own communities. Each is pressured to submit to the will of their respective forbears, their societies’ traditions — i.e., fathers. Having originally dismissed Terek, Keren comes to appreciate him, especially after he drives off her tormentors. Karen shows the strength to persist in her independence. But Terek cannot free himself from the dynamite strapped under his shirt. He can’t join her in her nocturnal swim. 

After their brief idyllic escape, her tormentors have their way. They persuade the neighbourhood deputy that Tarek wielded a knife against them (a lie) and that he must be the terrorist known to have snuck into Tel Aviv (the truth, but with an asterisk: he’s no longer certain about his suicidal and murderous mission).   

The pivotal supporting character is old man Katz. He initially appears as a madman, opening the public mains to waste the water. We learn he and his depressed, indeed suicidal, wife remain in despair over the loss of their soldier son. He died when the army, trying to toughen up their young men, denied him water. This father confronts the traditions that waste the lives of their youth — on either side of the Jewish-Palestinian divide.

In Katz Zahavi demonstrates how enemies can bridge their differences, hatreds, cultural inheritances. He figures out why Tarek needs to buy a new detonator from him. But instead of turning him in — as the jealous Jewish vigilantes do — he takes a fatherly interest in the young man and tries to talk him out of his mission. 

     Tarek, who during his enforced weekend in Tel Aviv has experienced the Israeli’s humanity, has already modified his mission. He leaves on the beach the nails that would have created massive losses when he blows himself up in the market. His bomb and the army snipers kill only him and wound Katz. To the madness of the continuing 1948 war Katz has lost his new substitute son as well as his own. Karen has lost a potential lover and witnessed another reminder of the extremists’ mortal futility — that freezes both sides.