RUTHFULLY YOURS

The outlook of these peace-minded Jews is expressed in a remarkable Jewish movie, “Miral,” which shows the suffering of Palestinians under Israeli military suppression.

The film begins in 1948, just after creation of Israel, when fanatical Jews massacred Palestinians in a village named Dir Yassin. Children fleeing the slaughter reached East Jerusalem, where a socialite of a rich Palestinian family begins feeding them, eventually creating an orphanage for 2,000 such war refugees.

Miral, named for a red Mideast flower, is brought to the orphanage as a little girl by her uncle, a Muslim imam. She slowly grows into a lovely teen, unaware of the Jew-Arab hatred surrounding her sanctuary. Then she is sent to teach children in a Palestinian refugee camp, where she watches in horror as Israeli troops rip down homes of families suspected of insurrection.

Miral sees zealot Jewish residents of West Bank settlements protected by Israeli soldiers, who treat Palestinians with contempt. She falls in love with a young Arab militant and is drawn into violent Intifada protests. In the end, her lover is killed by rival militants, and the orphanage operator persuades Miral to leave for a scholarship in Italy, rather than plunge deeper into Jew-Arab conflict.

The movie ends with Palestinian jubilation when the Oslo Accord of 1993 promised them a homeland. Today’s viewers know that the promise was empty, because Palestinians remain under Israeli military subjugation two decades later.  The number of ardent Jews living in illicit settlements on Palestinian land has soared from 200,000 then to beyond 500,000 now.

Footnote: The actor who played the Muslim imam, peace activist Juliano Merr-Khamis, received death threats after the movie was released and was shot to death in his car last April at a Palestinian refugee camp.

The film was directed by Julian Schnabel, a New York Jew born three years after the creation of Israel, whose mother once was president of the Brooklyn chapter of Hadassah, the women’s Zionist organization. Schnabel says “it’s very important that an American Jewish person tell a Palestinian story.”

The director made the movie in an attempt to show Jews that Palestinians are human, just like themselves, and are miserable under a half-century of Israeli armed domination. He said of Jews and Arabs: “These people live in the same house and ultimately they have to survive together.”

At the end of the film, a narrator says the movie is dedicated to “people on both sides who still believe that peace is possible.” We hope their number grows until the maddening Mideast cruelty finally is resolved.

For example, Paula Kaufman, daughter of Kanawha Circuit Judge Tod Kaufman, is in the occupied West Bank city of Nablus, teaching English to Palestinian children as a volunteer for a Canadian group called Project Hope. Humane efforts like this offer a chance for a light at the end of the long, dark tunnel.