Review of Route 181 (2003)
Still from Route 181
Route 181, recorded in 2002 in Palestine, is an important documentary for anyone who wishes to understand the psychology of the perpetrators and victims of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Filmed by Michel Khleifi and Eyal Sivan, the premise of the documentary is to travel along the borders outlined in UN Resolution 181, attempting to locate the destroyed Arab villages marked on the map upon which the resolution was drawn. The documentary itself is structured as a series of interviews, interspersed with some scenes recorded on camcorder provided with no commentary. The documentary utilizes no archival footage and provides no narrative, allowing the watcher to simply perceive the scenes and dialogue for themselves, placing the emphasis on the lives of the people in the present and their memories of the past. In this, the film allows the perpetrators of these crimes to indict themselves in their own words.
The documentary is split into three sections, each just under an hour and a half in length. The first is of the route along the proposed southern border, just outside the current border of Gaza, the second of the proposed central border, which surrounds the current West Bank and Jerusalem, and the final being of the northern border, which is in the Galilee. Each section differs in the nature and political attitude of the people present, their demographics, and the level of militarization.
The first section opens with an interview of two Israeli construction foremen, lamenting the fact that they have to hire Thai workers rather than Arabs due to the heightened restrictions on Arabs since the intifada. When the interviewer prods them further on what seems to be a praise of Arab work ethic, or perhaps simply criticism of Thai workers, asking him, “You say Arabs are better?” they immediately shift their attitude, stating simply that there are no good Arabs, “a good Arab is a dead Arab,” and that the Arabs should be expelled elsewhere, to Saudi Arabia or Kuwait. Immediately after, they conduct an interview with an Arab construction worker at that same site. When questioned on the history of the Arab villages in the area, he tells them that he does not know of any villages that were where they are currently, but that his family was expelled from the village of Eilabun, where he states that fourteen people were lined up and killed by Israeli forces before the rest were expelled. They then talk about the ease of finding a girlfriend in Israel and his aspiration of moving to the United States to reunite with his siblings and find work. This dichotomy sets much of the tone for further interviews. Where Palestinians simply wish to be able to live their lives in comfort, the Israeli aspiration is to be masters of others and to subjugate the land.
A key theme of the first section is the attitudes of the Israelis to the land itself. An elderly Israeli, a Polish Jew who immigrated illegally during the Mandate, explains that there used to be about 400 hectares of vineyard where they are, formerly owned by Arab farmers, which, after the expulsion of the Arabs, was left abandoned by the Israelis for financial reasons. He states candidly, “There’s no money in grapes.” Of note is that, even to this day, much of the land that was formerly occupied by Palestinian villages and farms lies abandoned by Israelis, left to ruin. Afterwards, they interview a factory owner who produces barbed wire for the Israeli military for deployment around Gaza. He explains for the camera that they have developed a proprietary system to deploy barbed wire at unprecedented speeds, and that the type of barbed wire that they produce there is used at no other border in the world for humanitarian reasons, as the design is specialized to cut as widely and deeply as possible. Another Israeli, more sympathetic to the Palestinians, decries the border wall, which he describes as having grown from a permeable line in the sand to an impenetrable barrier.
The next interview is with the owner of a museum memorializing the settlements established by the Haganah, a Jewish paramilitary organization, in the Negev desert. These settlements utilized deep underground reservoirs for their water. He boasts with pride that he himself was an officer with the Haganah and helped to organize one of these settlements, bragging about the flowers and plants that they grew with these waters. When questioned further, he admits that multiple of these desert kibbutzim have been abandoned due to overuse of the aquifers, an ongoing issue in Palestine. At a time where the aquifers he proudly exploits are at the point of irreversible damage, he brags about how his museum has water flowing throughout its transparent floors and up through fountains, how he grows thirsty flowers that require intense watering, and even fantasizes about having an outdoor pool which pumps groundwater to emulate geysers he’s seen in Canada. His interview ends with him mumbling on about how he needs a donor to give him a million dollars for this project.
It becomes clear throughout this first section that the Israeli Zionist project fundamentally constitutes not just the expulsion of the Palestinian people, but also the rape of the land of Palestine, destroying its character and bending it to their will. What they do is not for their love of the land, but in spite of it. They have no care for the farmlands and the native trees which they trample. They mangle the earth with barbed wire, scar it with fences and concrete barriers, they pull up the land’s limited water reservoirs to build fountains and grow thirsty imported European trees and shrubbery for nothing else than their own egos. In the last interview of this section, an Israeli drives them around and shows them a stretch of land near the border with Gaza where nearly all the trees have been torn down, explaining to the cameraman that the trees were all cut down due to a military patrol being attacked there, in a practice he states is called “stripping” by the Army. The Israeli military here collectively punishes even the trees, as, in their eyes, the nature and the land itself is complicit with Palestinian resistance.
Today, soil of Gaza is irreversibly damaged, poisoned with the debris of destroyed buildings, heavy metals, and depleted uranium, the byproduct of multiple bombing campaigns, the ongoing one being the most destructive by far. The current campaign has also destroyed almost all farmland in Gaza, uprooting countless trees and destroying crops. The Israeli bombing has also destroyed Gaza’s sanitation and water treatment plants, damaging the water supply in Gaza. The land, along with its inhabitants, is punished by the inhuman cruelty of the Zionist machine. The ultimate foolishness in this is that the land itself punishes the Israelis in turn. How could they ever even wish settle a land which they themselves have destroyed, a land which they so dearly hate? In the documentary, an elderly Palestinian woman, the only of her village who had not been expelled, tells of a rain which had flooded and destroyed some of the nearby settler’s houses, even washing away some jeeps belonging to the army. As this happened, she shouted to them, as if in concert with the land itself, “Go to hell and never come back!”
The second section, covering the central border and the city of Jerusalem, concerns itself primarily with the apartheid and restrictions placed upon the Palestinians themselves by the state of Israel. They show how the Palestinians are subjected to both personal and bureaucratic cruelty, highlighting the violence and harassment of the occupation and the memories of the violence inflicted by the Jewish militias on those who survived the Nakba, as well as the legal harassment Palestinians face by the Israeli state.
A striking scene is one where a Palestinian lawyer in the city of Lod comes before the committee to plea on defense of a case of unauthorized construction by a Palestinian family. He is brought before a pack of 20 snarling dogs of people, shouting over him as he tries to calmly explain his case. He attempts to state that the Palestinians of Lod are never approved for their construction permits, that they have no option but to build without approval. The 20 committee members in response yelp obscene absurdities, such as that the Palestinians may not build on the lands they own because there are Jews in the city which struggle to find homes, or that no Palestinian is homeless and thus they have no need to build. Their true concern reveals itself in their madness, as they begin to detest, voice cracking and seemingly on the verge of tears, that the Palestinian population of Lod is too high, and that allowing them to build any more will surely encourage the growing of their population. The lawyer is continuously reprimanded by the head of the committee for not making his point quickly enough as well as making “provocative” statements, all while his fellow chairmen continue to shout and scream over him.
Cruelty is pervasive throughout this entire section, from draconian checkpoints at which no vehicle is allowed to pass, to the continuous presence of armored military vehicles and machine-gun toting soldiers on every street, to stringent curfews meant to disrupt Palestinian society, to arrests, and to the demolition of houses as collective punishment. A particularly heartbreaking scene is one shown of a young man taken from prison to court for sentencing. As he is brought before the judge, he is sat within view the holding room for relatives waiting to attend the cases of their loved ones, with only a partition to divide them. His mother comes to the partition to console him before his trial and to bring with her his brother so that he may see him. Of course, as any mother would, and any son would in kind, they reach to hold each others hand, and the mother reaches to caress her son’s face. This transgression inspires the protest of at least five military guards, who rush to pull them apart, barking at them that they may not touch one another. Even the slightest familial tenderness is forbidden by these cruel animals.
The section comes to a final exclamation, that the only option the Palestinian people have is resistance. There is no other path, and it is the occupation which forces this conclusion. He interviews an elderly Palestinian woman, who says that with what she and her family had endured at the hands of the Israeli occupation, the humiliation, the dehumanization, that if she was able she would fight against them even if it would cost her life. No one fights and risks their life for its own sake, and no mother would wish to see her son die, but for the Palestinians, their only alternative is to live in humiliation, under a system which treats them as less than human, as animals to be thrown around and liquidated. The final scene of this section shows the resilience of the Palestinian people, as they defy curfew and checkpoints by hiking on foot between the bushes to attend a marriage in the next village. The occupation makes even the mere act of the marriage celebration itself an act of Palestinian resistance in the face of Israeli brutality, as it is a system which seeks to dismantle Palestinian society in its entirety.
Throughout the entire film one can see the foundational psychosis of Israeli identity, but it is brought to the forefront in the third and final section. Israel is a nation suffering from a clinical psychosis, a fundamentally schizophrenic society, burdened by the weight of cognitive dissonance. Their nations mere existence is indefensible, an affront to all morals and values, and it is known to anyone with eyes and a brain, yet they force their mouths and hands to act in defiance, continuing cruelty through their words and actions, while attempting to deflect any and all guilt. This, alone, threatens to pull apart Israel and the Zionist project at its seams.
Throughout the entire documentary is a continuous smugness of the Israelis, seated in their belief of superiority over others. In an interview in the third section, taken on an olive orchard owned by Palestinian Arabs, they speak with an elderly Palestinian man and a Jewish businessman who is inspecting the olives for kosher adherence on behalf of the government. The Jewish businessman is accompanied by armed guards, as he explains to the camera that even though many people are secular, they demand the imposition of kashrut, the Jewish dietary laws, and so the orchard may not harvest on Saturdays. Even in this detail, though simply given as an oddity by the businessman, one finds the contradiction in Israeli identity. Israeli identity is that of those who do not believe in God adorning themselves with ritual devoid of all meaning and intention, solely for the purpose of fabricated identity. Another interview is with an Israeli archeologist, a self-proclaimed “leftist,” who himself states that while the Muslims believe in Muhammad(?), the Jewish religion is rooted in historic right, whatever that may mean. When questioned on his faith and whether he believes in Judaism, he states bluntly, “Not at all.” He then elaborates that his disbelief has nothing to do with his support of Israel, as Israel exists as a matter of might makes right, that as Israel is strong, “it gets to do what it wants.” Religion not as belief, but as symbol, one that is solely used to justify the subjugation of another.
The discussion with the Jewish businessman continues as the cameraman asks about his bodyguard, who is armed with a gun and staring silently at the Palestinians. The businessman states, with a smile, that he travels with a bodyguard due to the region being “complex.” Upon learning that the documentary is on the borders of UN Resolution 181, he states with a chuckle that “We don’t get involved in politics,” grinning from ear to ear as he walks away with the Palestinian farmers, who are careful to keep their mouth shuts in his presence. In private, the farmer later tells the cameraman of the difficulty they endure, the economic hardship that is faced in Israel and the violent dispossession of his neighbors in 1948. Here, on display is the psychology of “reconciliation” through domination. The Israeli feels himself to be in agreement with the Palestinians in their subjugation because when he is among them, accompanied by his armed bodyguard, they cannot speak what they wish to say, they are forced under threat of violence to simply smile and nod lest they be persecuted. In the words of Ghassan Kanafani, it is a conversation between the sword and the neck.
Particularly is jarring is the Israeli response when, given that they accept that the Palestinians were violently driven from their homes and that it was a wrong, or at least unfortunate, they are confronted with the fact that the Palestinians are still present and can still be given back their homes and lands. The consistent response is a sadistic smile, one that betrays them as they wring their hands and go on about “Oh I wish it could be yet it cannot be done.” It is encountered in multiple instances throughout the documentary. In the first section, the third interview is with an Israeli woman, who when told of the former existence of several Palestinian villages where she stands, states with a toothy grin that it’s not right that the Palestinians may not return to their homes, but that they can’t do anything about it, that, as the Israeli people, it is out of their hands. In the second section, they meet some guides touring an American church congregation through Israel. A man and woman with thick western accents who struggle to speak in Hebrew claim that they have nothing against the Palestinians being allowed to return to their homes, but it cannot happen because it is not “realistic,” that it should be only relegated to the realm of discussion. The man elaborates, in broken Hebrew, “[the] Palestinians have the right to return here, but rights can’t always be honored,” then stating that he gets to continue to stay here, in their place, because the land belongs to him, no matter what may be right. This is the paradoxical rationalization of the Israelis, that it is out of their hands, that they, meekly and timidly, were cowed into unmentionable cruelty unto the Palestinians, and in continuing meekness, they “unwillingly” continue their cruelty. They claim to know that it’s wrong, but then feign ignorance on how to solve it, and feign inability to cease it as it is ongoing, all with a smile.
That is, of course, if they acknowledge the wrong in the first place. Today, the prevailing sentiment among Zionists both within and outside of Israel is that cruelty is not wrong, but that cruelty is in fact a moral right. Though less pervasive than today, this sentiment is present still throughout the documentary. In the first section a Jewish cafe owner states to the camera that all Arabs are a cancer that must be wiped from the land, that the state should censor media to assist its aims, and that the State of Israel is not violent enough with the Arabs. The walls of her cafe are plastered from floor to ceiling with images of fighter jets, missiles, and attack helicopters. In a particularly telling statement from her, she states that there will never be peace as long as the Israelis are present. In the second section, a museum keeper, whose museum focuses on the history of the Jewish National Fund, argues that the land was bought from the Arabs in a fair deal, despite acknowledging that the museum the village was build on top of was violently destroyed in the Nakba. When prodded further, he then says that the entire Arab population should have been killed from the start, as, in his words, “it would get rid of a serious problem.” He says that to have killed them would be better for all, as they would not exist to complain, and that the Israelis “would be living in peace.” In the third section, two settlers from the United States are interviewed, armed with machine guns. They say that the Arabs living there before had no right, claiming that as his last name resembles the name of the village they stand in, his ancestors lived there four thousand years ago. The Israeli solution to the cognitive dissonance and self deception of both decrying and participating in cruelty has been solved by no longer decrying cruelty, but in fact sanctifying cruelty as a moral duty.
The documentary, of course, was faced with controversy and outrage upon its release. This outrage became the subject of a libel case in France, which came to trial in 2006. Alain Finkielkraut, a Jewish-French writer, decried Sivan, calling him an antisemite and claiming the film was a “call to murder.” Part of the outrage was the film’s inspiration from an earlier documentary focusing on the Holocaust, by the title of Shoah. The methodology of Route 181 is definitely inspired by Shoah, that cannot be denied, but the claim of Finkielkraut and others was that by drawing the comparison, the film seeks to delegitimize the state of Israel and incite the murder of Jews, which is absurd. The film is simply a collection of interviews with no narrative, there is no explicit statement made by the authors as to whether Israel is right or wrong. When reading the transcript of the court case in which Finkielkraut and others justify their accusations towards the film and its authors, which was translated and published by Cabinet Magazine in 2007, it becomes clear that their outcry isn’t due to any issue of impartiality present in the film itself, but instead to the unconscious personal indictment of Israel and its supporters inspired within themselves by the film. Finkielkraut, when asked to explain how Sivan’s film constitutes incitement, states that the content of the film suggests that Israel itself is a crime, and concludes that, “If Israel is a crime, then [Israelis] are accomplices to the crime, and therefore violence is excusable.” In this is the tacit, and unconscious, admission that the film shows that Israel is a crime, and that his concern is not that a crime has been committed, but that the perpetrator may be punished. When faced with a crime, the only act that follows should not be one of justification, but of restitution and punishment.
Here is a link to the full documentary, I highly suggest watching it:
https://archive.org/details/route-181-north/Route181-chapter01-South.m4v
Here is a link to the transcript of the court case, as well as analysis by Cabinet Magazine:
https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/26/sivan_finkielkraut.php
https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/26/keenan_weizman.php