Jenin Jenin

Red Pepper, July 2004

“I didn’t plan to make the film. I’m not a director, I’m an actor,” says Mohammad Bakri, describing the genesis of Jenin Jenin. “The story was like this. I was standing with a colleague of mine, an actress, with a group of Arab and Jewish demonstrators at Jenin checkpoint. It was 10th April 2002, during the Israeli attack on the camp. We were trying to convince the soldiers to let food and medicine in. Because I am famous as an actor in Israel, the soldiers recognised me and they weren’t sure what to do. Some right-wing settlers were shouting at us, throwing stones at us, at Arabs and Jews together. And then this soldier who had recognised me pulled out his gun and started shooting at us and my colleague, the actress, was shot. We had done nothing. It was a peaceful, quiet demonstration. But he shot us. So I imagined: if this soldier will shoot us, what will he do inside the camp? From my anger, from my pain and disappointment, I started thinking about going inside the camp and making the film.”

Bakri’s film opened in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv in October 2002, but was screened for only four days before it was banned. Bakri challenged the ban in court, and more than a year later, in December 2003, won a judgement ordering the film’s release. But the film’s opponents appealed and quickly won a court order renewing the ban pending a decision by an expanded panel of judges. Bakri is still awaiting their ruling. Meanwhile, the film cannot be shown in Israel. Nonetheless, Israeli television has already screened several rebuttal films dedicated to discrediting it. As Bakri says, “They broadcast the answer but never the question.”

During a career in film and on stage spanning more than twenty years Bakri has won numerous fans among both Israeli and Palestinian audiences. But in the wake of the controversy surrounding the film, he has become a hated figure within Israeli society. “What hurt me is the massive attack by the Israeli media – saying I’m a terrorist and I’m supported by terrorists, saying my film is cheap propaganda. As an actor I was respected, then I became a traitor. Today it’s dangerous for me to go into the street. Every day when I leave my house it’s a very dramatic moment because I never know if I’ll be back.”

Ironically, Bakri made the film with an Israeli audience in mind. “During the editing I was thinking always how I could make a film about Jenin that Israelis could see without leaving the cinema, without saying just ‘No, I don’t want to see this’. I was trying to be delicate and not bloody. I tried my best to make it human and touching emotionally in order to convince people who are not yet convinced that the occupation is horrible. I tried but because of what’s happened, every child in Israel knows even without seeing the film that this is a bad film, an anti-Israeli, anti-semitic film. So nobody will be objective in watching it.”

Jenin Jenin has been criticised for failing to provide any context or historical background. There is no voice-over commentary, no experts dispensing facts. Instead, the film relies exclusively on images, sounds and above all on the faces and voices of individuals who lived through the horrors of the Israeli assault. “This is my way of working. I’m not talking about numbers, about how many people were killed, how many tanks were used. My film is about an experience, the experience of Palestinians in Jenin, how they felt, what they saw, what they are thinking. About people who pay the price when collective punishment is used against a whole community. When a suicide bomb goes off in a bus or restaurant in Israel, the people killed are innocent people, not Sharon, not military commanders, not ministers of defence. The same thing happens when the Israeli army is doing an operation on the West Bank.

“I believe in music, in images, in emotions, and I believe in human beings. This film was done from human being to human being, not politician to politician or institute to institute. I don’t care if they say, ‘It’s one sided, it’s not the whole truth’ – for sure, it’s not the whole truth, every truth has two sides. I’ve brought my side. They have been bringing their side for more than fifty years, but every time we put our side they say you are anti-semitic. I hate anti-semitism. I believe what happened in the holocaust was one of the biggest crimes in history. But I am not responsible for the holocaust. My people are not responsible for the holocaust. Why are we made to pay the price for it?”

The film’s method, its use of a poetic rather than an explicitly political idiom, endows the story it tells with a powerful universality. “This could happen anywhere in the world. People who are weak and oppressed behave the same everywhere. The weakness itself is the language. I respect weakness very much because I believe weakness makes us human beings – if we are strong, we are Nazis. I don’t identify with the strong, the rich, the powerful. I don’t have a language to talk to them. I don’t care if they are English or American or Israeli or Palestinian. I don’t like the people who sit upstairs and give orders, whether it’s Sharon or Hamas leaders or Bush or Blair.”

The film opens with a striking sequence of a deaf-mute miming incidents he witnessed during the course of the battle. He is animated and witty and his speechless reprise of the events vividly evokes the violence and chaos of the experience. Bakri was drawn to him because “he was full of life, full of smiles, and I like people who smile.” What’s more, the language of gestures he uses is “the language of the world”.

Perhaps the most haunting witness is a very young girl Bakri found sitting in a cemetery mourning a cousin who had been killed in the assault. She is articulate, coldly bitter, utterly determined. “This girl is very intelligent. She saw what was done in Jenin. The point is this kind of massive attack can kill childhood, can make a child speak like an old person. What you’re seeing here is a child stopping being a child – this is the price of the occupation.”

The film ends on a very different note. A street vendor amuses his customers by performing a comic skit in which he pretends to be having a telephone conversation with Bush and Kofi Annan. Here he recapitulates one of the themes of the film: the sense of abandonment felt by the people of Jenin. “They feel they were abandoned by the Arabs, the Europeans, the Americans, everybody – and in this scene they talk about it in a sarcastic, satirical way because that is the real mood of the community. I chose to make people laugh at the end of the film. Despite the desperation and feeling of being abandoned, I wanted to keep the hope. All over the world, all over the centuries people survive through humour.”

Since Jenin Jenin remains unavailable in Israel, its main audience will be in Europe and North America. Bakri is eager to visit the US and in particular to meet with Jewish groups. “I’m trying my best to meet Jewish people all over – because I believe Jewish people don’t really know what’s going on in the territories. I believe that if they understand this truth maybe, maybe, they will stop supporting this Israeli government, and if they stop supporting this government, if Europe and America stop supporting this government, maybe, maybe, then the people in Israel will make a cultural and political revolution to change this leadership – the worst leadership ever in Israel.”