ideological criminal

While I was reading Ali Abunimah’s excellent book One Country, I came across a passage about Danae Elon’s film Another Road Home, which I put at the top of my Netflix queue and recently watched. Elon is the daughter of the noted Israeli author and former Ha’aretz correspondent Amos Elon, an outspoken critic of Israel’s policies toward Palestinians. The film centers around Danae’s relationship with Mahmoud Obeidallah, who she knows as Musa, a Palestinian man who came to the Elon house shortly after the Six Days War in 1967 looking for work. Danae’s mother, Beth, hired him on the spot, needing help with the young Danae. Musa worked 18 hour days at the Elon house for the next 20 years, essentially raising Danae. Musa had 11 children of his own and he used the money from working at the Elon house to pay for his six sons to attend university in the US and to build a home in Battir. Musa raised Danae until she left to attend NYU to study film in 1991, after which she lost contact with him. The documentary, which takes place shortly after September 11, 2001, chronicles her efforts to reconnect with Musa and the Obeidallah family, many of whom were living in Patterson, New Jersey, at the time.

She is able to find many of Musa’s sons in Patterson and reconnect with them. They share a strange relationship—estranged from their father by his long hours at the Elon house, they came to know and envy the details of Danae’s childhood, while she remained relatively ignorant of theirs (she didn’t, for example, know the correct spelling of “Obeidallah” or that Musa’s real name was Mahmoud) and was the object of Musa’s attention and affection.

Danae’s parents, who had been living in Italy, moved to New York when Amos is offered a visiting position at NYU and Danae brings them to dinner with the Obeidallah’s. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the film is seeing Danae’s father, Amos, deal with the situations and questions that Danae forces upon him. He is reluctant to meet with the sons. In the car before they arrive, he asks Danae if they are extremists, or if they have beards, which he takes to indicate being extremists. He is fearful of their politics and unnerved by the intimacy of the encounter. At another point he rationalizes why like-minded Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs don’t spend time together—it is too painful, he argues. You feel that he is apologizing for himself. He is able to see the injustice of the Israeli position, yet he can’t bring himself to engage Palestinians as equals. The film reveals several sources of hypocrisy in Amos—a hypocrisy he is clearly aware of and that causes him a certain amount of guilt. In a telling moment in the film he states that in many ways Musa is a better man than “we are”. He hesitates at the end of this sentence. Clearly, he began to say “I am”, but changed it to “we”. The “we” can be taken to mean either his family, whom he’s addressing, or Israeli Jews in general, but by abstracting the claim, he softens the self-criticism and absolves himself of personal responsibility.

Shortly after Danae meets with Musa’s sons in Patterson, Musa decides to travel to the US to see his sons and Danae. Unable to travel through the main airport in Israel, he must take the arduous path through Jordan. His journey highlights the inequalities between Israeli Jews and Palestinians in their freedom of movement. He eventually arrives, clearly bone-weary. He confides in Danae that he truly came to see her. You often feel sorry for Musa’s children who seem always to be of second import to her (and doubly sorry for Musa’s daughters, who are hardly mentioned and it seems to go without saying that they were not candidates for schooling in the US—the great prize they paid equally for by the absence of their father).

Danae brings Musa to dinner with her parents. Again her parents seem uncomfortable by the situation, although they act warm toward Musa. When Danae begins to broach the subject of her childhood, they jump to frame the conversation as complicated, political, and to a degree unintelligible. They are ever fearful of what is “political” and they essentially keep Danae from posing her questions about her family, its contradictions, and the relationship they share to the Obeidallah family. The conversation epitomizes a theme that develops throughout the film. Danae views the conflict as utterly personal and familial, whereas her parents see it as political and national. Danae always treats the occupation from a secondary perspective—as it affects her and the Obeidallah family, and never directly as a subject in its own right. When her father tries to place the sons into notions such as “extremists” and “radicals” she responds that she doesn’t know what those words mean—she knows only the people in question, not her father’s notions. She highlights Israeli home destructions only through its impact on the Obeidallah’s in Battir. Likewise, Palestinian restrictions on movement through road blocks and lack of access to airports is shown through Musa harrowing journeys to and from Palestine and the fact that the sons cannot return to Battir, even though they have built homes there.

In the end, Musa must return to Battir. Danae, being the only one who can easily travel with him, accompanies him on the trip. They must fly to Jordan where they spend the night waiting for the bridge crossing the border to open. They are interrogated for five hours by an Israeli intelligence officer—it is suspect to them that a young Israeli Jew who served in the army is traveling with an elderly Palestinian who has never been arrested and whose six sons have never been wanted by the police. Their cab navigates through the long lines at the checkpoints with uncertainty. Through the windows, the camera shows ambulances unloading their occupants who must take another ambulance on the other side of the checkpoint. Once Musa is safely home, Danae, a person of priveledge in Israel, is able to get on a flight out of the airport and return to New York.

The story is one of personal history and the reconciliation of two families’ past. Danae approaches the subject with earnest conviction and openness. It’s clear that the larger geopolitical conflict reverberates many aspects of the personal conflict; although I’m not certain this was the filmmaker’s intenion, it is surely effective. The Obeidallahs have every reason for resentment and vengeance, but they accept Danae warmly. Both parties address, rather than dismiss, their common history and listen to each other’s—often contradictory—narrative. It’s painful at times, but they emerge with a strong bond and respect for the other. Danae’s perspective is radically different from her parents, people who are very much on the side of social justice in Israel/Palestine, but who find it too painful to deal with directly. Danae and the Obeidallah’s represent what I think is a new generation of thinkers on the issue of the occupation of Palestine. They are willing to listen to each other to an extent totally unacceptable to the previous generation. They are willing to consider solutions which were completely unthinkable to their predecessors. If there is any hope for peace and reconciliation in Israel/Palestine, it is in this generation; those who are willing to question the existing assumptions, to listen to and value the narratives of their counterparts, and to find another road home.