Sympathy for the Devil: Palestine’s Tragic Collaborators

[Film still from Hany Abu-Assad`s Omar (2013). Image copyright the filmmaker. Courtesy of Film Press Plus.] [Film still from Hany Abu-Assad`s Omar (2013). Image copyright the filmmaker. Courtesy of Film Press Plus.]

Sympathy for the Devil: Palestine’s Tragic Collaborators

By : Sophie Chamas

Omar, directed by Hany Abu-Assad. Palestine, 2013.

Omar, the most recent film by Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad (of Paradise Now fame), opens with a traversing of obstacles—a prefatory homage to the resilient Palestinian spirit. Exuding youthful vigor, the titular character scales the portion of the separation wall isolating his West Bank neighborhood from that of his childhood friends, his resistance brigade, and his love interest. Omar fearlessly scurries along the edges of buildings and leaps across rooftops, exercising what has, by now, become his routine refusal to accept the limits on life, work, and love imposed by the Israeli occupation. We watch him practicing his regimented unwillingness to allow a concrete barrier to dictate his movements and, more importantly, to prevent him from carrying out his duties as a resistor—this, the movie tells us, is the stuff sumud is made of.

Those of us who champion the Palestinian people’s struggle for freedom and self-determination praise regularly this ineffable, untranslatable quality that the Arabic lexicon terms sumud—steadfastness, for lack of a better English rendition. It has transcended geographical, social, economic, and political differences to fashion its Palestinian practitioners into a territorially and experientially divided but viscerally united people who, through a stubborn, collective engagement in this contagious perseverance within the diversity of contexts in which they find themselves suffering, have been able to construct and maintain an anchor for the shared identity that politics has been threatening to wash away for decades.

We also speak often—as we should—of the destruction of bodies, lives, properties, and memories wrought upon the Palestinians by the state of Israel. We deplore this relentless aggression, these ceaseless, abhorrent crimes against an entire people, while remaining awed at the inability of this immaculately maintained atmosphere of oppression to break the Palestinian will to resist.

Paradoxically, we observe, Israeli efforts to physically undermine the notion of a Palestinian people—confiscating their land, killing their members, destroying their homes, arresting their leaders—has enabled their non-violent resistance. It has allowed them to shape themselves into samidun, as they celebrate the discovery of cherished family photos amid the rubble of their homes; as they designate their dead to be martyrs rather than victims; as they drag, wheel, and carry one another to hospitals instead of hiding individually in shelters; as they plant flowers in spent grenades.

The colonist’s goal, Frantz Fanon wrote, is to dehumanize its subject, to deform him into an animal. By practicing sumud, Palestinians resist this metamorphosis. They cling to the banal tasks, the personal possessions, the friendships, the poems, which help them preserve their humanity, making the cause they are not simply hanging on to but living for palpable and tangible.

It is easy to assume, however, that sumud has become second nature to the Palestinian people, that it has become so deeply ingrained in their being that no Israeli action can force them to abandon the practice and, through it, the humanity it allows a nation of otherwise perpetually humiliated people to hold onto.

While Abu-Assad’s Omar does extol the virtue of sumud, it concentrates primarily on its precariousness. Rather than focus on Israel’s destructive capabilities, the film draws attention to the productive power of its intelligence arm in particular. In doing so, it focuses on the transformative effect that manipulating Palestinians into collaborating with the state, into becoming the “enemy within,” can have on their subjectivities, on their ability to practice sumud.

Omar and his childhood friends Tarek and Amjad plot what, for many of us who have never experienced life in the West Bank, might appear to be a senseless operation—the murder of a random Israeli soldier. What could the Palestinian cause, what could these boys even, gain from this sort of attack? The three young men, we are shown, are persistently humiliated by the IDF. For example, after an encounter with a patrol team on the street, Omar is forced to stand on a rock with his hands fixed behind his head while the officers laugh at and mock him. Killing a soldier becomes a means of releasing pent up aggression, of momentarily redeeming the humiliated self, of asserting some degree of control over the antagonistic forces that have denied them the ability to influence even the most banal aspects of their existence.  

Amjad takes the fatal shot, setting in motion an investigation that lands Omar in prison. An interrogator tries to break him through violent means: hanging him by the wrists, naked, from the ceiling of a dark room, shining a bright light aggressively in his eyes, hitting him repeatedly in the face with a large book, and burning his testicles with a lighter. Omar, however, refuses to confess or to implicate his friends. His silent resolve guards him against the humiliation the interrogator is trying to introduce into his naked body with each successive blow. 

Internally untainted by the physical abuse, Omar even manages to embarrass the interrogator, summoning the strength to instruct him, through bloody lips and teeth, to wipe his runny nose. Battered and bruised, Omar nevertheless remains steadfast, unaffected by the lingering promise of further punishment, proud of his righteous silence and also aware that it will soon set him free, since the Israelis do not have enough evidence to keep him imprisoned.

Unfortunately, an undercover intelligence agent tricks him into stating that he will never confess which, in Israel, is tantamount to a confession. “There is no going back from being a collaborator,” he warns Omar while still in disguise. “There is no end to it.” Fluent in colloquial Arabic and unsettlingly charming and tender, Rami the agent offers Omar two impossible choices: carry out a life sentence or deliver Tarek, the leader of his brigade and his lifelong friend, to the Israelis.

At first, Omar agrees to collaborate only to warn Tarek and Amjad, hatching a plan to ambush Rami’s forces, which he hopes will both clear his name among the Palestinians and allow him to escape the Israelis’ grasp. The ambush fails after someone within the brigade tips the Israelis off, and Omar is arrested yet again. In a telling scene, Omar meets with Rami in his office. Their conversation is interrupted by a phone call from Rami’s wife, who appears to chastise him, and is followed by one to Rami’s mother, during which he implores her to pick his daughter up from school.

Omar—and the film’s audience, for that matter—cannot help but recognize the humanity of the agent, to develop an uncomfortable, if temporary, sympathetic feeling towards him and the near universal work versus family dilemma he, like so many ordinary individuals, is burdened with. There is something about the conversation—which, for all we know, was staged—that imbues him with trustworthiness, that hints at a good nature or a purity of intentions.

Omar knows better, the audience knows better, but still we are all, to some degree, seduced—at least enough to believe Rami when he says, brow furrowed with concern, that Omar’s fiancée Nadia is harboring damaging secrets, and that the Israelis are aware of them. They do not want to reveal them—secrets should remain secrets, Rami says—but to protect Nadia and to rid himself of his life-annihilating sentence, to ensure they can have some semblance of a future together, Omar must hand over Tarek. “It’s out of your hands and it’s out of my hands,” Rami seems to be suggesting. Both he and Omar are victims of circumstances greater than themselves. Both have no choice. For a minute, it seems, Omar believes Rami is as helpless as he is.

It is never quite clear what Omar intended to do. He emerges from prison into a hostile environment, labeled a collaborator before he has even collaborated, distrusted by all, even Nadia. He discovers that Amjad had also been recruited, was responsible for sabotaging the ambush, and had dragged Nadia into the whole affair by, supposedly, impregnating her. Betrayal, mistrust, and paranoia rip Omar and Nadia apart, and corrode his friendship with Tarek and Amjad, leading to a climax that leaves Tarek dead, his corpse delivered to the Israelis, and a confused Nadia married to Amjad.

We eventually learn that, prior to their arranged marriage, Nadia and Amjad’s relationship had never evolved beyond friendship, and she was never pregnant. The details remain unclear, but we can assume that Amjad was coerced into lying to Omar to save his own life. Amjad betrayed Omar, Omar and Amjad betrayed Tarek, Omar abandoned Nadia, and the brigade crumbled under the crushing weight of what is revealed to be a justified paranoia—all of its members suspected of being collaborators, or of at least harboring the potential to become ones.

At some point in the midst of all of these developments, Omar attempts to scale the wall again, but this time he is unable to. He grabs hold of a rope and tries to drag his feet up the concrete, to no avail; his failure leaves him devastated. Collaboration, regardless of its roots, of how noble or necessary its whys, is the ultimate humiliation.

The collaborator can no longer express solidarity. He can no longer stand steadfast. These virtues, through the act of collusion, become impossibilities, and that which once made the Palestinian “Palestinian” is undermined, his will to resist stifled, a desire to serve himself cultivated in the soil where his devotedness to the collective once bloomed.

By creating the conditions that facilitate collaboration, by convincing the solicited that he should save himself and sacrifice the nation, that nothing will come of serving the whole, Israel enables the emergence of a tragic subjectivity among the Palestinians: the docile traitor loathed by his own, who has sold his perseverance to the devil in exchange for nothing. As the film makes clear, the Israelis will simply keep coming back for more.

Sumud is the Palestinian x factor that has allowed them to weather countless Israeli assaults, raids, arrests, land grabs, and calorie counts. No amount of Israeli destruction, it seems, can eradicate Palestine, preserved as it is within dispositions, expressed at as it is through shared, sedimented sensibilities. But by reconfiguring Palestinian subjects, by weaving a context that directs them towards collaboration, Israel is able to obstruct their ability to practice the sumud that keeps them human, that gives substance to the label “Palestinian,” that conserves their collective cause.

Perhaps that is why the film ends with a seemingly suicidal act; Rami returns two years after the depicted events to “request” Omar’s services once again—this time to help him trap the newest leader of his former brigade. Omar tricks Rami into loaning him a gun to carry out the task, only to shoot him with it. We know that Omar will be found and imprisoned for his actions, but through them, the character is paradoxically able to save and redeem himself by asserting a total refusal to live a false freedom as a collaborator, choosing incarceration and possibly even death over the repeated betrayal of his national cause. Declining to become a tamed beast, he reinstates his humanity through this sacrificial move, giving himself over to Palestine, hoping it will forgive him.

 

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Jan 6, 2014 Lebanon

Apples of the Golan: A Review

Apples of the Golan. Directed by Jill Beardsworth and Keith Walsh. Austria/Ireland/Syria, 2012.

A man places four apples on the ground in a rectangle. He paces back and forth between them. “The cell was seventy centimeters by 1.8 meters. I was sleeping with no mattress…twenty-four hours in darkness. I was there for seventy-three days.” He describes his torture: he was placed, exposed, in a tire, and lashed with a cable. He was lifted by his arms and tied up with ropes, left to support his body weight on the tips of his toes for hours at a time. Other prisoners had their entire bodies covered in cigarette burns.

Since what we are seeing is set in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, the viewer is led to believe the subject is describing his time in Israeli prisons. But Apples of the Golan is a film that undercuts the viewer’s expectations with each scene. While the scenes in which he describes his torments are explicitly cut so as not to reveal to us whose prison he was in, viewers familiar with “al-falqa” and “tashbeeh” (torture techniques used in Syrian prisons) become privy to the secret sooner. The interviewee, a Syrian Druze from the Golan Heights, is in fact describing his time spent in a Syrian prison as punishment for escaping across the closed borders in search of his beloved, who had left to Damascus. If this is a surprise to the viewer, it was no less of a surprise to him. “I expected to be interrogated, but the first question they asked me was, “Why did Mossad send you here?…They took me and we went downstairs…and to my surprise they started torturing me.” In this scene, and throughout the film, we are continually pulled in different directions as the complexity of a society is revealed, with each character contradicting others in ways that are sometimes subtle, sometimes glaring.

The characters throughout the film are slowly placed into dialogue with each other, at first in an unclear, disjointed way. The film uses a complex, achronological time order, which prioritizes dialogue over sequence, and very effectively highlights the complexities and ambiguities of life in the Golan Heights. We revisit the same core characters throughout the film, at different points, with their conversations spliced and rearranged, in a way that eventually creates a conversation between them. But within each scene, each interlocutor is left to present her perspective on her own terms; most people are interviewed by themselves in their own home or work environments. In the beginning of the film, the viewer may not even realize that a given topic has a great deal more controversy around it than one interlocutor articulates until someone with a contrasting perspective readdresses the topic much later in the film. The interviewees are never brought into actual face-to-face conversations, but through the unfolding of the film, the presence of a larger dialogue between becomes increasingly explicit, as more perspectives and interviewees fill in the gaps, or completely overturn previous explanations.

For example, we also meet a mother, Fauzia Ali Khatar Zahwy, whose son Assem Abd Wili was imprisoned for twenty-seven years in Israeli prisons. He is released during the course of the film. Throughout his stay in prison, his mother keeps his clothes carefully hung in a closet, exactly as they were the day he left. Every fifteen days, she goes to visit him.

All the footage included in the film is from between September 2007 and July 2012, largely in the community of Majdal al-Shams. Through the course of the filming, its subjects, Golan Heights’ residents, found themselves trapped and involved no longer within just one conflict—the Israeli occupation of Syrian lands—but two, as the uprising against the Syrian regime came to the political fore.

Apples of the Golan does an admirable job of attempting to grapple with both. Israel took control of the Golan Heights during the June 1967 war, and it remains occupied to this day. Over one hundred and thirty thousand Syrians were forcibly displaced from the Golan Heights. Some twenty-two thousand Syrians remained, most of them Druze. Currently, there are also an estimated twenty thousand Israeli settlers in the mountainous region, who increasingly dominate the region’s cultivatable land and water resources. The 2011 uprising against the Syrian regime might seem disconnected from the Golan Heights, which is no longer under its formal control. Indeed, while the filmmakers Keith Walsh and Jill Beardsworth filmed in the area for five years, they purposefully chose not to travel across the Syrian border in order not to break with the reality of the Golani experience, in which the few instances of passing to the other side of the border are for Golanis, for the most part, journeys into the unknown.

Interestingly, the most moving scenes in the film are those of “crossing over” at the border, done very rarely in the case of cross-border marriages, Druze pilgrimages, or Golani youth leaving for university on the other side of the border. People weep at the borders as families are separated or just temporarily reunited—often never knowing if they will see each other again.

Weddings between Syrians across the border often offer a short window for families to come together in-between the Syrian and Israeli checkpoints. One Golani bride, wearing her full wedding attire must undertake a border crossing with a full bureaucratic change of status before she can meet her groom. As she and her mother sit clutching their bouquets of white roses, the border guard explains that he will be taking her ID and giving her Syrian residency, and “there are no visits” back across the border. She and her family are let across the checkpoint crowded by soldiers, and brought into a fenced-in paved area on the other side of the gate. Family and friends across the border approach singing wedding songs but the mood quickly changes as family members see each other and began running, embracing in tears and weeping as the border patrols watch on from a distance.

Despite this abject isolation from the rest of Syria, conflicting positions on the regime reach deeply into the community of Majdal al-Shams, where an exaggerated version of the familiar generational divide around the Syrian uprising seems to exist. In one scene, an older man unravels an enormous banner of the Syrian flag across the length of his house, passing through two rooms. In another scene, he stands with school children at a lookout point, inculcating them with his perspectives on the current events in Syria. “Over there,” he says, pointing across the border, “there are weak-willed people who accuse the President of killing his own people. This is a lie. All the Syrian people love him.”

Apples form a focal part of Golani identity. The steadfast apple orchards constitute the Golanis’ roots to their land, so to speak. Throughout scenes of the film, apples form a backdrop in all their stages of production, as they are sowed, harvested, exported, and eaten. Since 2005, the only trade between the Golan and other Syrian communities is through the export of apples, which is facilitated by the Red Cross. Syria pays better prices than Israel for these occasional shipments, which pass through Quneitra Crossing. Apples are one of the few ways the Golan stays connected to Syria in a tangible way. They are also a talking point for Golanis to define themselves as a region within Syria, distinctive from other regions whose climates are not as favorable to the cultivation of apples. It is thus no surprise that they are also a source of distinction from the Israeli settlers nearby.

The Golani sense of “belonging to the land” is strongly articulated through the planting and cultivation of apple orchards. At times, such articulation even takes a much more explicitly nationalist form, folding in the symbolism of state emblems. For the older generation especially, the unfurling of Syrian national banners serve as an articulation of defiance of resistance to Israeli rule and forced severing from the rest of their country. Though the filmmakers never venture across to the rest of Syria for the course of the film, there is a peek into the reciprocity of this sense of comraderie by Syrians across the border in a scene where Syrian protesters try to cross  into Majdal al-Shams on the 2011 anniversary of the 1967 Naksa, and are pushed back by Israeli fire. We meet a farmer in the Golan who slices open an apple down the middle. He counts the seeds: “One, two, three, four, five.” He goes on to explain the significance, making a connection to the Syrian national flag, which has a strong presence throughout the film: “Strangely, in the Jewish settlements, there are six seeds. The Syrian flag has a five-pointed star, and the Israeli flag has a six-pointed star.” Much later, the filmmakers meet an Israeli farmer on an illegal settlement. They ask him to slice open an apple, revealing five seeds inside.

However, the film also introduces young people with a less nostalgic relationship to a country they are a generation removed from. One young man declares: “the Syrians, who we are originally from, forgot about us....If they wanted to free us, they would have done it a long time ago.“ They describe an antagonistic relationship to the Israeli occupation, but they do not articulate it in their parents’ rigid language of Syrian Arab nationalism, depicted through marches in the street carrying Syrian flags and pictures of Bashar al-Assad. Rather, many of them choose to describe life under occupation through music—in particular, rap music: “Between me and my country, fifty meters to the east, every meter inside my heart, burns and desires,” one lyric declares, but continues, “all the Arab money does not bring us freedom, or any hope that we will see victory.” Even though the occupation “makes everything incomplete, everything has a limit,” Golani youth throughout the film hardly seem different than their counterparts anywhere else in the world. Despite the exceptional political situation they live in, they skateboard, dance, form rock bands in their cramped bedrooms, and make fun of their parents’ outdated values. Two of the main youths in the film drive aimlessly around the town at night, smoking cigarettes and, with a Golani twist, eating apples while listening to Arabic rap music about Damascus.

It is interesting to note that throughout all these discussions about Arab and Syrian identities, none of the film’s Golani interlocutors ever bring up their Arab neighbors under Israeli occupation, the Palestinians. The absence from the film is striking: it’s difficult to imagine that the residents of Majdal al-Shams do not define their identities in relation to Palestinians – whether in contrast or affiliation. Many of the daily struggles articulated by the Golanis in the film are the same as those of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza: the usurping of water and other natural resources by encroaching settlements, severe limitations on freedom of movement, and even shared prison cells. The question of Palestine’s absence from the film looms in the background, though it is never clear whether this is attributable to the interlocuters or a choice on the part of the filmmakers themselves. On a similar note, female interviewees seem to be somewhat underrepresented in the film, in contrast to the diversity of perspectives otherwise.

Apples of the Golan tries to show the many contested identities and narratives in the Golan; as a result, we can only catch a glimpse of each aspect. The film makes no claims to be deep study of any one particular issue or aspect of life in the Golan Heights. But it is worth watching, as a nuanced and sensitive sampling of life in a deeply contested slice of land whose intricacies are paradoxically unknown across both its East and West borders.

 *Editor`s note: Apples of the Golan will be released online through the film`s website in March.