A mural on the wall of the old Jerusalem train station.

POLITICS AND CULTURE

Thanks to Aviva Lori, senior journalist with Ha’Aretz newspaper, for an informative discussion this evening on the arts’ role in the collective political consciousness of Israel. Lori, who studied film and television at Tel Aviv University, covers events, people, and culture. She is also a professor at a college in Tel Aviv and has been a visiting professor at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts (teaching about journalism in a time of conflict).

Aviva Lori

Given the breadth of Lori’s professional experience, I hoped that she could help me better understand the social and political context within which cinema takes place in Israel. She also shared insights on generational differences between her and my generation and that of our students with respects to political consciousness and film tastes. Finally, she made a must-see recommendation: Waltz with Bashir, which isn’t screening at the Jerusalem International Film Festival but I expect to be able to see somewhere soon, perhaps at the Montreal World Film Festival later this summer.

I’ll share here a few points that struck me as noteworthy:

• To my question about how people formulate views on political issues in Israel, Lori cited the news media and education, and she added that required military service in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) essentially guarantees that everyone knows something about what’s going on between Israel and its neighbors. (Most men and single women are inducted into the IDF at 18, women for two years and men for three, and reserve duty extends to age 24 for single women and 51 for men. Source: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Society_&_Culture/IDF.html)

• Lori hastened to add, though, that increasingly youth are ducking out of service by feigning mental illness—not in numbers to constitute a trend, necessarily, but something that was relatively unheard of a generation ago, when failure to serve would have been the source of shame.

• Lori points to the Israeli war in Lebanon in the early 1980s as the point when Israel society failed to reach a consensus on the war effort. She recalled friends’ stories of coming back from fighting in Lebanon to find Tel Aviv café culture in full swing, contrasting with the Six-Day War of 1967, when away from the battlefields people generally put down what they were doing to pitch in.

• Naturally, I thought of my Champlain College students, wondering how required military service might shape their interest in world affairs. As Lori noted, the IDF is a melting pot bringing together Israelis of diverse ethnic, religious, political, and economic backgrounds. In my experience teaching in Tel Aviv, I found that people’s service in the IDF is when some form lifelong friendships. I’m not taking a position on required military service here, just mulling over this whole matter of motivation to learn about another part of the world and about other worldviews.

• When asked about the political culture in Israel today, Lori suggested that Israelis are generally media savvy—and “very involved emotionally in the conflict” between Israel and its neighbors. The tenor of political debate, however, seems to have softened a bit, she says, with people taking more moderate positions than they might have adopted even a few years ago. The past few days have seen relatively upbeat headlines about warmer diplomatic relations with the Palestinian Authority and even Hezbollah (and rather downbeat headlines about Prime Minister Ehud Olmert).

• That said, Lori sees weariness setting in among people who opt out of the political discussion. They're “sick and tired of the conflict and don’t want to be bothered with the reality,” she says. She remains optimistic, though she claims this can’t be helped. “It’s my personal fault that I’m an optimist,” she says. “It’s not a point of view. I’m optimistic about many things.”

A YEARNING FOR THE NATIVE PLACE

After our interview, Lori and I watched a documentary film called Lake 68 by Irit Shamgar, a friend of Lori’s. The film documents Shamgar's family reunion at a lake in Poland, where they reflect on what life was like for Jews there in the aftermath of the Six-Day War. Some of the family members left for Israel and other countries at that time, while the family patriarch, a proud communist, stayed behind despite the mistreatment he would receive.

As I made my way back to my hotel, I marveled at the intricacies and complications of Israel’s political history. One tends to think of the Six-Day War, for example, as pitting Israel against Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. A fuller understanding, however, must take into consideration the fact that the Arab parties to the conflict had the support of Eastern Bloc countries, hence the retaliation against Jews in such countries as Poland for allying themselves with Israel.

A CONFESSION

Finally, in the interest of full disclosure, one of the movies I saw today has nothing at all to do with the Middle East, not directly. I’m talking about Encounters at the End of the World, the latest from director Werner Herzog. The film documents the work and lives of a hardy group of people in Antartica. The underwater footage alone is worth the price of admission. In the narration, Herzog insists that this is not another movie about penguins, but one of the film’s most existential moments focuses on a penguin that seems to be questioning the meaning of it all.

Here’s a link to the Internet Movie Database trailer.