Mesmerizing Israeli documentary goes inside the mind of the only Israeli journalist living in the west Bank
by Micah Sachs
Amira Hass is probably the most committed journalist in Israel, for better or worse. When first assigned to cover Gaza by Israel's best-known daily, Ha'aretz in 1991, she decided to spend part of each month living there. She permanently moved to Gaza after the Oslo peace accords.
In 1997, well before the current intifada, she moved to Ramallah, in the West Bank. She remains there to this day, braving power outages, squabbles with the Israel Defense Forces and the Palestinian Authority, tanks and stonings. During her time covering the occupied territories, she has come to a simple conclusion, fervently held: the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank is a travesty.
If you tend to agree with her, then Israeli director Yifat Kedar's documentary Between the Lines (2001), about Hass's life in the West Bank, will confirm your convictions. But even if you don't, you can't help but empathize for this lonely, courageous and angry woman.
One of the great powers of film is its ability to make us understand those we might normally demonize. Among other reasons, Schindler's List (1993) is a masterpiece because Ralph Fiennes makes the viewer understand how a person becomes a Nazi monster.
By showing direct evidence of the indignities, injustice and hate that Palestinians in the occupied territories endure, the film makes us empathize with them. But more importantly, it makes us - and hopefully Israelis - understand why one of their own would choose to live "behind enemy lines."
It would be easy to dismiss Hass if she had a cozy relationship with the Palestinian Authority. But she does not. She needles P.A. leaders about corruption and lack of democracy just as ruthlessly as she hounds Israeli military flaks about the destruction of Palestinian crops.
When she writes, it is with the passion and conviction of a prophet. Her articles are not possessed with the tone of calm evenhandedness that American readers are accustomed to; her work (available at www.zmag.org/meastwatch/amira_hass.htm) is scathing, judgmental and accusatory.
This is no surprise after seeing this film; Hass herself is scathing, judgmental and accusatory. While other journalists ask neutral questions of military spokesmen, she confronts a soldier at a checkpoint about the absurdity of requiring Palestinians to have a permit to get to work.
The film does a remarkable job of making the often tedious job of writing seem vibrant: as she taps away at the keys of her computer, the film cuts to scenes of Palestinians rioting.
While it's clear that years of working in the territories have fueled her anger over Israeli policy, the film also suggests that the anger was always there, just waiting for a direction.
She is the daughter of Holocaust survivors, but she seems more weighed down by the horrors of the Shoah than her mother. She rarely laughs in the film (except derisively), and almost never smiles. Aside from a warm reunion with a friend who used to be a leftist journalist, her happiest moment comes after she berates an Israeli soldier for bothering her at a roadblock. "It's always fun to annoy the authorities," she says. "It spices up life."
To its credit, the film spends much of its time trying to unlock the mystery of Hass's life-threatening dedication. From what the film shows, she apparently has no friends in Israeli society; her only connection to Israel is her mother, who she seems to enjoy her most idyllic times with.
She has some friends among the Palestinians (she identifies with the refugees' "permanent temporariness," she says). But the film shows her life as relentlessly solitary. In a scene of poignant perfection, after asking a Palestinian man a series of questions, he says, "You asked me questions. Now it's my turn." He asks her if she's married. She says no. He asks her if she has any interest. She says no.
Later, she says cryptically, "Not having kids was definitely a decision that had to do with the past." Ultimately, she says, she is always torn between the depressive side - "the feeling that there's no purpose in life" - and the militant side. Not a cheery combination, to be sure.
A stroke of ironic luck for the filmmakers, as they shot the film over the course of several years, is the outbreak of the intifada. The new violence, heightened security and increased polarization between Jew and Arab are an ever-present specter over the proceedings, which make for a terrific story.
The film's style suits the subject. It is filled with the traditional hallmarks of documentaries - slice-of-life documentation, talking head interviews and the occasional voiceover. But the camerawork is shaky enough (purposefully or not), that you get the sense that Hass and the crew are often in places they should not be.
But the most cinematically powerful scenes have nothing to do with the filmmakers. They happen after the outbreak of the intifada when the filmmakers' insurer won't let them into Hebron, so Hass takes a portable videocamera along herself. The subject and the spectator are now one and the same.
It is an apt metaphor for all the fusions in Hass's life: the personal and the political, the objective and the subjective, the journalist and the participant.
Moreover, by turning the filmmaking team into a crew of one, we can't but help feel her isolation. As the film ends, she looks over the night sky of blacked-out Hebron, filming an exchange of fire between Israeli and Palestinian forces. We see only what she sees: darkness and destruction.
Between the Lines
When: Thursday, Feb. 13, 5:45 p.m.
Where: AMC La Jolla 12 Theatres, 8557 Villa La Jolla Drive, La Jolla
Tickets $7.50-$10. For more information, call (8580 362-1348.