In the spring of 2002 I helped run a campaign to gather the signatures of American Jews who took some sort of independent line on Israel. The initiative came from the physicist Alan Sokal, who had emailed me along with some other people and attached a draft text called “Peace in the Middle East: An Open Letter from American Jews to our Government.” The idea was to send the text out far and wide, collecting enough checks along with the signatures so as to take out an advertisement in the New York Times and perhaps other papers as well. The campaign worked better than we could have hoped; we very quickly took out a half-page advertisement, and then got more signatures and more money and in July came out with a full-page advertisement and 4,400 names. The advertisement got a certain amount of attention, perhaps because (this is the sort of coincidence that can be predicted with some accuracy) the day before it came out, the Israelis had sent an air-to-ground missile into a crowded Palestinian apartment house. The campaign caught on, and we published the advertisement in other papers inside and outside the United States.
The text itself of the Open Letter was not incendiary. Indeed, although it ended with a call for an end to US aid to Israel unless Israel agreed to abide by the relevant United Nations resolutions, it was quite balanced in its presentation of the rights and wrongs on both sides, perhaps too much so. On the morning the advertisement appeared I got a phone call from Edward Said. He seemed surprised (“You never told me you were working on this”) and quite pleased. But he added, “This doesn’t sound like you.” I replied, “That’s true. But if it had sounded like me, it wouldn’t have been as effective.”
The documentary film I am working on, “Some of My Best Friends Are Zionists" (film trailer below), comes out of this political campaign in a very direct sense—that is, financially. There was a little money left over, even after we did the whole thing over again in 2006, and the project of making a short film answered the question of what to do with the remaining money—what to do that would be consistent with it, expressing the profound feelings, especially the feeling of not being represented by the mainstream Jewish organizations, that had animated the campaign and so many of the grateful letters and emails we got. But the film also comes out of the campaign in the sense that it continues to keep me awake at night thinking about whether I want to sound more like myself, and exactly what sounding like myself on this subject would mean.
In terms of political position-taking, this would or will mainly come down to the choice of centering on 1967 or on 1948, diplomatically ignoring the right of return, as something even progressive American Jews do not want to talk about, or (like Judith Butler in her interview) insisting that it absolutely cannot be ignored. For the moment, the plan for the film is to focus as little as possible on the most divisive issues—one state or two, boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS), and so on—and to concentrate instead on the mystery of how people change their minds. It seems worth underlining that people can and do change their minds even on a subject as powerfully rooted in their identity as Israel is for American Jews. The film begins therefore with a series of accounts of Jewish childhoods, whether in the US (for most of the interviewees) or in Israel, for the prize-winning human rights activist Shula Koenig. The feminist philosopher Judith Butler, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner, and the journalist and theater critic Alisa Solomon all have extraordinary stories of what they were told about Israel growing up, how they came to change their minds, what it feels like to have lived through (and perhaps also to keep living through) so much of a self-division.
There is nothing like consensus among those interviewed up to now. Some still feel painfully “torn asunder,” as Butler puts it, and look for a grounding for their activism within Jewish tradition. Others do not see the point of speaking or acting “as” Jews at all and prefer simply to think of themselves as human beings, seeking justice for the Palestinians only because they believe in equal justice for all. Alan Sokal and Marilyn Neimark are eloquent champions of that position.
In turning this into a full-length film, our idea is to intercut the talking heads with flashbacks to the decisive moment of change, if there was one, or at least to the history that forms a backdrop to it. For example, the turning point for Jerry Koenig was 1967. Koenig, living in Israel, rushed to volunteer when the war started. But the Occupation that followed changed his attitude, and soon afterwards he organized a demonstration in which a letter from soldiers refusing to be part of the Occupation was passed hand to hand on a human chain from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. The flashback will use news footage from the moment, with representative statements by the press and by mainstream Jewish organizations as well as coverage of the demonstration in the Israeli press, as well as personal photographs and other memorabilia. For other interviewees, there are other moments of change, hence other moments to flash back to—for example, the 1982 invasion of Lebanon for Alisa Solomon. For Shula Koenig, who fought in the 1948 War, there is a loving evocation of the period before that moment when, as she remembers it, Jews and Palestinians lived in relative harmony. But the focus is on the shift itself—what brought it about, and what it felt like, and how it left the interviewees feeling—frequently, ambivalent and disturbed if also committed to change.
The title "Some of My Best Friends Are Zionists," taken from the interview with Hollywood producer and Columbia professor James Schamus, is intended to set a certain tone, a tone other than the predictable high-minded earnestness of many films which collide head on with received opinion. Schamus talks about the Jewishness of Hollywood (as does Tony Kushner when he discusses working with director Steven Spielberg on the film "Munich"), but he does not assume that Israel is an impossible topic for him to discuss in the company of those around him. Some of his best friends are Zionists: it is obvious that he can and does talk to them. Much of the effort of this film is to recognize criticism of Israel as a normal part of American Jewish culture and give it the kind of hearing that it does not get from more mainstream Jewish organizations. But the title is meant to be polyvalent. We recognize that statements of the form “some of my best friends are X” are usually considered to be racist. In choosing to pass through or to allude to a racist site of enunciation, we are of course being ironic, but in a serious way and in part at our own expense. We are trying to distance the film from the self-righteousness that is so difficult to avoid when one feels one has discovered a political truth that inexplicably remains obscure to those around one. We want to speak for justice without pretending that we, or the people we speak for, have entirely transcended the ambivalence that we know is felt by many in our audience.
If this film is going to be shown on, say, American television—and who knows whether it can find a place there, television’s allergy to anything genuinely controversial being so evident—then it will have to do something other than lay out a set of political propositions, however persuasive we may consider those propositions to be. It will have to tell a story with “human interest” that will draw the curiosity even of people who otherwise know very well what they think about the Middle East. That’s both a political challenge and an aesthetic one.
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