The Zionist Idea

I have been thinking about this movie all day because Colliding Dreams is nothing less than a life changer. It affected me in an analogous way to seeing Shoah.Like Shoah, Colliding Dreams took a 360 degree walk around an integral part of my identity that had always been confusingly and troublingly blurred—and crystallized it. I grew up with an unasked for connection to Israel, but it was like a relative I never saw, didn't know, couldn't tell how to feel about. If I had any sense of Israel, it was through a very partial and distorted lens of my own teen experience getting kicked off kibbutz, paired with my inability to grasp the politics or currents of feelings. Jews going to Israel only told me I couldn't get it, that I merely had a reductive American take on things.

The people who spoke to the audience through the interviews were each awesome. I keep thinking of them! The one who looked like Ray Bolger with his comments about making a good state, and the guy who said "We are trapped!" The young bald guy. The Peace Now woman --what a spirit--with her anecdote about the stickers and the video of her when she was young, and other guys with messy hair. Orly, who moved away, as I have always thought I would if born there. The wonderfully articulate woman with the necklace. I really want to see it again so I can call them by name. What essential, valuable intellects for us to know--what great intelligences are brought to us through them. I knew that whenever someone came on camera I was going to want to hear what they had to say. The directors found the most profound voices and offered them to us in an astoundingly organized way, year by year, decade by decade. They literally spliced a century of time! And I loved the framing of the movie with the siren and the moment of silence, that freeze into motion. Absolutely perfect!

Thank you to the directors for this dedicated, most complicated, grace-filled film. It really made a difference in my life. I have more of a sense of Israel than I have had in my 58 years--and much more a sense of authentic connection because of that.

This film was written, directed and produced by Joseph Dorman and Oren Rudavsky. It should have much to recommend it. Zionism, the nationalistic movement that galvanized many secular Jews of late 19th and early 20th centuries, was one of a pantheon of nationalisms spawned in the later half of the 19th century. An ambitious film, "The Zionist Idea" ultimately fails to satisfy. The reason is simple. Rather than being an honest, serious film about Zionism, the film is at it's heart a polemic on the "roots' of the Jewish Palestinian problem. A better title for the film might have been "Two Peoples, One Land" or perhaps "How the Oppressed of Europe came to Steal and Occupy a Land that was Not their Own", or even "What went wrong with Zionism?"

Messrs. Dorman and Rudavsky are not really telling the story of Zionism, they are telling the story of what the Zionist vision did to the Arabs that lived in Palestine.

At the outset, the film clearly identifies the Arabs of Palestine had always been know as Palestinians. These people are assume to have enjoyed a long history of people-hood distinct from other Arabs. How this trite and perverse a distortion gets woven into the narrative is disturbing to say the least. Hanan Ashrawi (PLO spokeswomen) is pictured in the first 5 minutes of the film asserting the rights of Palestinians as if this people had existed for centuries. The plain truth is that the inhabitants of Palestine in 1900 were Arabs, Christians and Jews, all subjects of the Turks.

Not until 1967 when Yasser Arafat renamed his ragtag army the Palestinian Liberation Army where these Arabs awarded an identity. During the period of Turkish rule and then after under the British Mandate period the name Palestinians applied to Jews until 1948. "..it was common for the international press to label Jews, not Arabs, living in the mandate as Palestinians. It was not until years after Israeli independence that the Arabs living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip were called Palestinians. In fact, Arabs cannot even correctly pronounce the word Palestine in their native tongue, referring to area rather as"Filastin." Unfortunately, this is but one example of the rewriting of historical fact that is manufactured by Dorman and Rudavsky in order to tell their version of the truth.

Accomplished film makers perhaps, Messrs. Dorman and Rudavsky have little in the way of credentials for the narrative. Their knowledge of historical background of region is surprisingly thin, and much worse, it is quite selective. Important historical events are glossed over (the Balfour Declaration) or as is the case of The Treaty of San Remo, signed in 1920, entirely left out of the film. To take the absence of the Treaty of San Remo as an example, this Treaty ended the war between the Allies and Turkey and settled the future of the lands that had been ruled by the Ottoman Turks for centuries. This Treaty was ratified by all 52 nations in the League of Nations and gave Jews the legal right to settle Palestine while recognizing the rights of Arabs to create their own states in Syria and Iraq under the Mandate System. This Treaty assigned Palestine as a future home of the Jews and was welcomed by the leaders of Arab people of the day.

Worst still this lack of background, Dorman and Rudavsky took the Zionist story and used that as an excuse to portray Arabs solely as "victims". Their land was stolen, their property seized, their birthright expunged by Jews driven from an anti-Semitic Europe. With nearly 165 minutes of interviews, new clips and narrative, the Arabs of Palestine are incarnated as the latest version of a people colonized by the West, this time with the Jews as oppressors.

"The Zionist Idea" shows us educated Jews pleading with the audience to understand that the Jews who left Europe after the Holocaust had nowhere else to go (and by implication they are really sorry for the harm done to the indigenous Arab population).

But there is no balance when presenting the Arab side of the story. We are treated to Arab/ Palestinian politicians, intellectuals and historians that clearly are ever so pleased to proclaim that they are the real victims. They want their land back. Why can't these same Palestinian politicians, intellectuals and historians own up to the programs of real causes of the riots of 1290, 1923, 1929 and 1937. Or was there any mention of the clearly incendiary and anti- Semitic actions of the Mufti of Jerusalem. Or are we treated to a full throated apology from the Palestinian victims for the wholesale displacement of large scale Sephardic communities of the Levant by their Arab brethren. The Palestinian narrative comes across as one sided and unapologetic, given over without comment and presented as fact. Moral right in this story is painfully obvious

"The Zionist Idea" could have been so much more. Zionism truly inspired a nation. A nation of liberated Jews was reborn in their ancestral homeland. These Jews turned a neglected under- utilized wasteland, the backwater of a decaying Ottoman Turkish Empire, into an inspiration to Jews and non-Jews alike. Marginal lands owned by Egyptian and Syrian absentee land holders sold to Jews at exorbitant prices. Jews cleared malarial swamps in order to create a new Zion.

Palestinians are presently as they always are: not a people but a cardboard cutout of the "victim", the result of European Colonialism and Zionist racism. What a drab, inaccurate narrative. There are indeed many sad and heart breaking stories woven into the tragedy of the region. My Goodness, my heart breaks at the thought that these talented men can do no better "The Zionist Idea".

In this film we meet Israelis who have incredible histories, and through them we, as American viewers, come into deeper contact with the history of Israel. We start to feel a relationship with these speakers, without knowing, for most of the film, where they are on the political spectrum. The impossibly complex story of Israel is told through the personal stories of the speakers, and also from footage of the events. It becomes a very powerful telling and I think that everyone who sees the film will feel the the greatness of the country and the extreme difficulties of it's internal conflicts and divisions. The filmmakers made excellent choices of who to interview; there are some great people on screen. I wish this film could be seen by so many people who know only one side of the issues of the other. The filmmakers have done their best to balance a number of perspectives.

This film is an exhaustive three-hour exploration of the forces and ideas which compelled the creation of the state of Israel--the heroism, complexity, desperation, conflicts between Arabs and Jews, and ultimately the dilemmas and tragedy of the current situation.

Similar to Ari Shavitz' great book, "My Promised Land", this film takes the approach of interviewing people on all sides of this issue, and seeing the issue from different viewpoints. Even though it is a long film, there is no way that it could include every piece of this complex history. However, I think it does an amazing job of giving voice to all parties, and leaving one with an overall sense of what is going on in Israel and the occupied territories. There is great documentary footage which I had never seen before, and interviews with people like Amos Oz on the one hand; West Bank settlers, Palestinians displaced, etc.

This film is a powerful and informed contribution to the discussion of what is going on in the Middle East. It should be seen widely and discussed by everyone interested in getting a glimpse of the reality of what has made Israel what it is today.

Colliding Dreams is an excellent guide through the fraught aspirations and drives which have shaped Zionism and which flow from it. The complex history is presented with sympathy for all and a clarity and balance that allow the viewer to come away empowered to engage, at least, in informed listening. The film contains fascinating historical footage and nuanced and candid interviews with experts, historical actors and contemporaries with many different perspectives. As a result the viewer gains a layered and deepening understanding as the story moves from the roots of Zionism through Israeli history to the current wave of religious Zionism. While commentators, above, who want be proved right may be disappointed, viewers wanting to see how successive hopes have been fulfilled or foundered and what the costs have been are rewarded.