Land of the Little People

A guerrilla war over land in Israel would normally be waged between Israelis and Palestinians. Here it’s between two deserters from the Israeli army and four young Israeli kids. Their fight is over territory — an abandoned camp and dried well — and arms, specifically one soldier’s pistol. 

The obvious parallel is Lord of the Flies, where an isolated mini-society of children creates its own religion, power structure and savagery. Only the arrival of an adult military restores civilization. The Israeli setting makes this version less about the decay of civilization than about the effect upon children of the continuing presence of war.

Initially the children seem to be playing at being Hollywood savages, with their bows and cross-bows (however upgraded with laser). They whoop in triumph at trapping a field rodent. They’re not playing at being soldiers but at being mythic. 

When they drop the carcass down the deserted well, though, they are playing at something rather more serious and geographically pertinent. They are making up a religion, with their own goddess whom to satiate with sacrifices in order to preserve themselves. 

This turns the children’s savagery away from play and towards the more serious matter, religion. It makes them a more serious parody of the larger forces in their real world. Alternatively, it shows them turning away from the religion that is at real war and finding comfort in an invented ritual. 

The girl seems to have cast their well-dwelling deity as a woman, eschewing the patriarchal tradition. Her goddess may derive out of her father having died heroically at war. She survives. The children’s religious pretence gives them a kind of maturity, as if they are reliving the origin of one of the older faiths of the region.
     Conversely, there’s something childish about the deserters, their bantering, insults, horseplay, petulant excuses for deserting, and their ultimate helplessness. Far from conscientious objectors, they have failed to meet their adult responsibilities.

Israel doesn’t use child soldiers. Here the deserters are soldiers proven immature and the children play at adult missions. Both the real and the play warriors show the effects of growing up in this constant danger. 

The children in particular are at their most vulnerable, most period of life. A prepubescent couple, with two even younger friends, they are pre-sexual. They are verging. 

Sex is there but not for them. The older boy briefly spots a mother having sex then darts away. When the four see two naked swimmers on the beach they watch briefly then scatter them with a gunshot. Fascinated with photos of one soldier with his girlfriend, they use them as bait to draw him into the trees. The wounded soldier quickly assures the boys “I didn’t touch her” when they find him clutching the young girl’s arm. Two of the mothers are distracted by their pregnancy. This heightens the children’s vulnerability even as they assume an adult mission.

A lesser war here is familial. One boy stole and wrecked his older brother’s bike, so is targeted for violent revenge. “He’ll kill you.” He doesn’t help his cause when he urinates on him from a bridge. In another replay of Israel, then, on both sides of the main war there are violent internal divisions, between the brothers as well as between the deserters. The brothers’ battle is stopped by their army fathers’ return. Like the battleship that closes Lord of the Flies.

All this action unwinds under the shadow of an unspecified IDF action against some provocation, unspecified. “Are we at war?”  one kid asks, as planes roar by above. Israel is in an unending state of siege. That takes its toll. That climate is the film’s subject.

     Hence the Theodore Herzl quote that opens the film: People will live and die for a flag — if they’re taught to. Coming from the father of modern Zionism, that is hardly a criticism of Israel. Rather it’s a recognition of the gnawing costs of unending war. The micro embodies the macro. This is the land of little people indeed, small malevolences perpetuating an invented cause, violent games turning fatal.