Fauda

We've been watching a series called Fauda (Chaos) on Netflix over the last week or so. Very intense and often extremely suspenseful.
It concerns the ongoing war between the Israelis and the Palestinians. In this case the focus is mostly on a crack group of soldiers set up to infiltrate the Palestinians and undermine their terrorist attacks. All the soldiers in this group speak Arabic like natives and can pass for Arabs. Their main target is a terrorist who was supposed to be dead - in fact the main character of the series had understood that he'd killed him a couple of years before. But the terrorist is alive and well, and is almost killed (again) early in the piece, only just escaping once again. In the process, however, a wedding is disrupted (the terrorist's younger brother is the groom) by the soldiers (in disguise as the waiters providing the sweetmeats) and tragedy occurs. From then on it's a question of who will win: the soldiers, who want to rid the country of the terrorist, or the terrorist, who is planning a massive attack on the Israelis.
Because the series is made by Israelis, we're rooting for them even though they don't necessarily come across as full of integrity at every point. They're not out for revenge, they just want to keep their country free of a terrorist who they thought they'd already finished off. The Palestinian side is well-presented even though it's hard to empathise fully with them because their cause isn't just revenge, it's outright slaughter. But they come across as human beings, caught up in a seemingly timeless war between two peoples, in which they are basically carrying on a fight that has gone on for centuries in one form or another.
There are a host of characters, several of whom don't survive the crossfires for various reasons. There are some wonderful big set-pieces, and scenes of considerable anguish (from both parties to the war). The Palestinians (many of them played by Israelis - though the terrorist himself is actually a Palestinian actor) tend to present a kind of thinking that is so imbued with hatred that it's hard to empathise fully with them. On the other hand, the behaviour of the Israelis isn't always the best, and there is some laxity in the sexual department between some of the main characters. This didn't seem necessary to the plot, for me, but since a second series is being made, perhaps these elements affect what is yet to come.

The Promise

Over the last few days we've watched the four episodes of Peter Kosminsky's TV film: The Promise. Like much of Kosminsky's TV work, it's quite provocative, and your sympathies change as the story unfolds.

Two stories interweave: one is set in Palestine just after the Second World War. A young sergeant is caught up in the historic events of the time, when the British were keeping the peace - as far as possible - between the new Jewish settlers who'd returned to their homeland after the horrors of the concentration camps, and the Palestinians who had lived in the area for centuries and were suddenly finding themselves kicked out of their country by a people who apparently forgot, very quickly, what it was like to be treated badly because of who you were.

The second story is set in the present day: the Sergeant is now an old man dying in a hospital. His unsympathetic daughter and his granddaughter (who's barely known the supposedly grumpy old man) set about clearing out his house. The daughter, Erin, finds the old man's diary, with photos and newspaper clippings. Against her mother's orders, she keeps the diary, and takes it with her to Israel where she's going with a friend whose Israeli background means she has to go into the Army for two years. Erin is a typical know-all teenager who begins to find out a great deal more about the Israel-Palestine conflict than she would ever have learned in her native country, and also matures quickly as a result of trying to repair something that had gone wrong back when her grandfather was a young man.

The two stories gradually cohere. There are perhaps too many coincidences in the plotting, and the filmmakers slide over some questions about motivations that probably should have been asked, but for all that the film carries you along as you increasingly struggle - like Erin - to make sense of a country where a people who were hated almost universally for centuries (the Jews) and then were slaughtered in their millions, show almost no care or concern for a people who by accident live in the country the Jews claim as their homeland.

Kosminsky doesn't offer us easy answers: we begin by thinking that the Israelis are a pretty reasonable bunch of people, but gradually discover - as both the grandfather and the granddaughter do - that they have almost no sympathy for the Palestinians, and show little concern about killing them or destroying their property if the need, or mood, arises. Try as you might, by the end of the movie, it's likely your opinion of the Israeli people may be much less sympathetic than at first. Whether this is a more one-sided view on Kosminsky's part than is fair is left to our judgement.

Claire Foy plays the initially sulky teenager with ease - there are times when you want to wipe that sulky look off her face, even late in the film. Nevertheless, she makes the journey from sulkiness to a degree of wisdom effectively. Christian Cooke, as the Sergeant, has a face that often makes it look as though he's going to burst into tears, yet he convinces us that he's a man who can make wise decisions, is loyal, is strong in a crisis, and much more. He's particularly strong in his last scenes when everything he's tried to do for a Palestinian family goes wrong, and he's treated as a deserter and thrown into prison.

The rest of the enormous cast are superb, and with the film shot entirely in Israel (with places standing in for Hebron, Gaza, and the West Bank. Even the Ben Gurion airport stands in for Heathrow. The series in general received high praise when first shown, though there were a number of voices claiming that it was anti-semitic in tone, something which can be justified, if that's what you're looking for.

21.7.14
Since writing this review I've become more aware of the concerns that were raised over Kosminsky's series. This article goes into detail about these and provides some balance to the way in which Kosminsky nudges his viewers more and more into an anti-Israeli bias.

The Other Son

The Other Son is an intense, emotional film set in Israel and Palestine (there's a great deal of coming and going across the border between the two areas, and many views of the wall), and it's quite a tear-jerker, though in best sense.

It has a slightly improbable story, perhaps (although the starting point of the story is as old as the hills): two babies are literally swapped at birth because of fears of a Scud attack.One baby is Jewish but is given back to the Palestinian mother, and the other baby, of course, is Palestinian, and given back to the Jewish mother.This only comes to light when the 'Jewish' boy is about to turn eighteen and a blood test reveals that he couldn't possibly be the son of his parents. The other parents are informed, and there's a great deal of struggling to come to grips with the issue, both on the part of the two young men, but even more so on the part of the fathers. The mothers manage to begin to work through the problem much quicker than their husbands, of course, but even for them it's a major upheaval.

There are four languages spoken in the film: Hebrew, Arabic, English and French - the Jewish father is French by birth, and it appears that the family has spent some time there, but the 'Arab' boy has also been studying there.

The director is Lorraine Lévy, who also co-wrote the screenplay. She makes a fine job of bringing out the emotional aspects of the story (there's little 'action' in it), and is supported by a wonderful cast, all of whom are unknown to me, though plainly very experienced. When you see foreign movies you realise again and again what a vast world of actors, directors, writers there is out there whom we barely know about. We're so inundated with Hollywood and British movies and TV that we remain quite insular. 

This is a great story, and well worth catching up with. There's an interesting interview with the director here.

Echoes

We watched a DVD of The Conspirator last night.  It wasn't a movie I'd heard anything about, although it had a fairly distinguished cast: James McAvoy, Tom Wilkinson, Robin Wright, Kevin Kline, and a bunch of other reasonably well-known faces hidden under various 19th century beards and moustaches.   Robert Redford directed.

It concerns the trial of Mary Surratt, a woman who had the misfortune to be the mother of a young man aligned with John Wilkes Booth and the other men involved with the assassination of Lincoln (and the attempted assassinations of the Vice-President and the Secretary of State).  How much of what we saw was factual, I don't know, but it made a satisfactory drama.  (The story is told in great detail on Wikipedia.)

Booth and his crew used Surratt's boarding house as a meeting-place because of John Surratt's involvement with them.  This fact was used against Mary Surratt to charge her with conspiracy, although it seems likely she wasn't in fact involved in any way more than being a relative and a sympathiser of the lost Southern cause.   McAvoy played her initially unsympathetic lawyer thrown into the deep end with no witnesses on hand, and fighting against a military tribunal; the case was illegally heard by the military rather than a civil court.

The film connects the case in many ways to the state of affairs in American life that surfaced after 9/11, when normality was often overturned, and the military viewpoint allowed to hold sway.  While there is no specific reference to later events, it's evident that the scriptwriters had this in mind.

It's inferred in the movie that the conspirators originally only planned to kidnap Lincoln.  This isn't clarified to any extent, and the film opens with a long sequence in which Lincoln is shot and the Secretary of State violently attacked in his bed (the Vice President was supposed to be assassinated too, but the assassin lost his courage).   Redford produces an excellent movie that holds your attention throughout, even though it seems unlikely that Surratt is going to be let off.  The odds are stacked too highly against her.

Looking back you wonder why these men plotted as they did, when the Civil War was to all intents and purposes well and truly over (official peace is announced in the movie some time after Lincoln's death), but such situations have been a common after-event of wars for millennia.  I was reading again this morning in the book of Jeremiah (in the Old Testament) how, after the Babylonians had finally destroyed Jerusalem (it took many years of various states of siege) and had taken off its puppet king to Babylon, they gave over the governorship of the land into the hands of a Jew named Gedaliah.  Gedaliah seems to have been a man of integrity, trustworthy, capable of keeping the land in a reasonable state on behalf of its captors.   Jeremiah was one of the many poorer people who were left behind in his care.  Everything seemed to have come about as Jeremiah had prophesied, and a certain state of peace reigned.

Except that there was a bloke named Ishmael (he may have been a member of the royal line, as Gedaliah may also have been) who, not content with the state of affairs, plotted to kill Gedaliah.  The latter was warned of this, but chose to ignore the danger - probably as Lincoln himself chose, or had to choose, to ignore the possibility that there would be factions still unhappy with the state of affairs. and that his life might be in danger.

Ishmael assassinated Gedaliah, and many of his followers, and proceeded to slaughter a number of pilgrims who were on their way to what was left of the Holy City.  When violence is started, it spreads to innocent people who happen to get in the way - as we see in the movie where Government aides and others are injured.  Ishmael and his crew were eventually routed by people faithful to Gedaliah, but by that time it was too late for the unfortunate Governor.

The Debt

Note: some spoilers here...

Some while back I walked in on a movie that was showing on TV late one night.  Helen Mirren was fighting for her life with some elderly man who managed to stab her a couple of times.  Last night I watched the rest of the movie, which is a taut thriller based around three Israelis kidnapping a German doctor. They believe he was a Nazi who committed various 'research' atrocities on Jews in one of the concentration camps.  These three also appear, played by different actors, in sequences that occur thirty years later: this is where Helen Mirren is involved.

The film, The Debt, is primarily concerned with the decision the three younger people have to make when their prisoner escapes, and how they live with that decision for the next thirty years - until the doctor is apparently found again.  Jessica Chastain and Helen Mirren play the main female character in the story, with Sam Worthington and Ciarán Hinds pairing off as the Israeli whose conscience plagues him, and New Zealander Marton Csokas and Tom Wilkinson sharing the role of the other man who is able to put the past behind him very easily, even when things go wrong. 

So while it's a thriller, in that there are some excellent suspense sequences, it's also a story about relationships, people caught up in close quarters and struggling with the consequences of a botched kidnap.  The doctor is played by Jesper Christensen; he's brilliant in his role of a man still capable of winding up the Jewish psyche and coming out on top.  

The end of the film, which in some ways undercuts the values of the rest of the movie, is a bit of a female Jason Bourne sequence: not quite believable and all relying on split second timing.  Helen Mirren is, as always, superb in her role, but she's asked to make credible the stealing of documents from a newspaper office, the tracking down of the evil doctor, and a subsequent fight to the death with him.  This is Hollywood stuff that's not quite comfortable with what's gone before.  

Nevertheless, as a thriller this is well done.  Hinds doesn't get enough screen time - his character is killed off in the first few minutes, seen again quite a bit later on and then lost again.  Sam Worthington is the quieter of the two young men, a man with a mission who struggles to see beyond the borders of his intents.  Czokas is the wild man and fills the part easily, and strongly.  Chastain, with her tight angular features, has the major role, and does very well. 

Truncheons and stanchions

A search through my clippings, and on my computer, reveals that I don't have any reference whatsoever to the word stanchion, likeable enough as it is as a word.   Which means I won't have any reference to the phrase plastic stanchions either.  In fact, the word is so little visible in my vocabulary that I had to look it up on Google to remind myself what it meant.  It sounds a bit like truncheon but isn't related, as far as I'm aware.  Which led me to look and see what truncheon comes up with when you go off to Wikipedia.  They suggest the obvious: a policeman's baton, but there are three other references there as well.  A truncheon can be a stem cutting off a plant which is then used as a means of plant propagation used by gardeners.  Well, I guess gardeners would know that use of it, though I don't (I'm too amateur a gardener, obviously).  Truncheon is also the staff of a spear, but this is so obsolete a usage that only someone like Tolkien would know it well enough to use it in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

HMS Truncheon

The word was also used as the name of a Royal Navy submarine that was commissioned in the last few months of the Second World War.   It served with the Navy until 1968 when it was bought by the Israelis and renamed the INS Dolphin.  She was eventually scrapped nine years later, so I hope the Israelis got their money's worth. Well, there you go!  Your bit of trivia for the day.   (We went to a quiz night at a local pub recently; it's surprising what you know, what you're pretty sure you know and have to argue for, and what you have absolutely no idea about whatsoever - sport, mostly, for me, although even there I managed to suggest some possibilities.)

Truncheon, as you might expect, is a word with some French history.  It first appeared in our language, as far as we know, around the 14th century, when it went under the Middle English umbrella as tronchoun.  Its parentage was the Anglo-French word, trunchun, and that in turn goes way back to the Vulgar Latin word truncion/truncio, which comes from the 'proper' Latin word, truncus, which means a trunk.  I suppose there's a connection between a trunk (the trunk of an elephant?) and the baton we know today, but it seems a bit of a distance.

Stanchion (to go back to where we started in this post) initially has a similar history: Middle English stanchon, Anglo-French stanchun or stançun.  These words, however, were alterations of an Old French word, estançon, which is apparently a diminutive of estance, meaning a stay or a prop.  At least stanchion starts where it ends, you might say.  [Thanks, Merrian-Webster, by the way.]  Estance is a fancier ancestor to have than truncio, I think, even if it's not quite a old.

It just occurs to me that in our usual English spelling fashion we have managed to make one of these words end in 'ion' and the other in 'eon'.  Ain't English fun?

Perhaps because stanchion has retained its original meaning rather more, it tends mostly to relate to things that stand upright and hold something else. Those little things you see in restaurants where they hold the number of your order are a form of stanchion, I suspect, though I don't know if they're actually called that.  Stanchions appear in restaurants more as a form of crowd control: they'll often have a rope dangling between them to stop unworthy patrons from joining worthy ones.  [See the fancy model to the right.]  I notice them mostly in banks where they force people to form queues, and where children delight in dropping the connecting 'rope' (of whatever form) off one stanchion, find they've just received a disapproving look from a parent, and then have to figure out how to put it back again.  

Footnote

It's almost impossible to write about the Israeli movie Footnote without telling you the major crisis in the story, and the review that I read yesterday in the ODT gave it away, as does Roger Ebert in his review.  The major crisis centres around a 'simple' mix-up of names - a father and son obviously both have the same surname, both are professors at the same University.  That's probably all you need to know for me to write about this marvellous movie.

It swings between tongue-in-cheek humour and serious drama.   The most wonderful scene takes place in an academic's tiny office, where half a dozen academics are squashed together around a table they really could have done without.  They've called in the son to explain the details of the dilemma they're in, and the scene shifts from hilarious comedy to comedy so subtle you only just perceive it to a nasty confrontation. All within five minutes.  There's one lady academic - it's her office, and she's being as pleasant as possible (she gets about one line in the whole scene); there are several ancient male academics, including the antagonist, whose forehead (often seen in close-up) is like a dried-up desert where once water ran: it's full of deep creases.  To get into the office, with a chair, everyone has to move and pull the table back; in spite of this a physical fight briefly takes place as well.

The academic father, whose claim to fame is fairly insubstantial (he was pipped at the post by the antagonist many years ago), appears at the beginning in one of the most immobile shots you're likely to see - his son is droning on in the background telling a story that seems on the surface to reveal something of value between their relationship; in fact it's about as cruel as you can imagine.  The son produces academic works of a popular nature and knows that he doesn't have the acclaim of his own father.  Worse, he's passing on his anger to his own son, who's at that stage of life when he just doesn't know what to do with himself.

That all sounds fairly heavy, but the film is leavened by the subtle acting of the male leads and their seeming lack of self-awareness as regards each other.   Or maybe they have too much awareness of each other and of themselves.   That's one of the many questions the film raises.   And the opening half hour includes several sequences in which the background to the story is revealed in a series of 'slides' with a narrator or text giving the information.  These are the tongue-in-cheek sections, and they're accompanied (as are other parts of the movie) by a delightful score that stops and starts and plays with our ears while we catch up with the history.

However, there is one almighty shock in this film, and that's the ending.  Just when we feel as though things might at least appear to begin to be sorted out, the movie stops.  The credits roll, and roll, and there's just no more.  The audience gasped when the credits began, realising that there probably wasn't going to be any more, and all of us, insistently, stayed on till the very end of the credits just in case there was a last minute reprieve.  Nope.  The film was done.  It's up to you to discuss it with your spouse or friend or whoever and see how you think it all panned out given the information you now have.

Some reviewers have found the film too sour for their taste; some see as a serious piece that's undermined, or underlined, by comedy.  I enjoyed it, though I really, really could have done with an ending...

Name tags

Ouch!  Yesterday Eva Radich, on the midday programme, Upbeat, got told by the person she was interviewing that her interruption had made him 'lose his train of thought.'  Today she's actually arguing with the person she's interviewing: Avi Shoshani, the Israel Philharmonic Secretary General.  I find Eva tends to not let her interviewees just speak; she's always telling them what she already knows and what they should be saying to the listeners.  Which is a pity, because she has a great run of interviewees on this programme.

However, in regard to this programme one thing has improved, and that's that the Radio NZ website now lists the people Eva is talking to each day.  Often in the past if you missed the introduction you might have no idea who she was talking to.   In those days we could have done with audible name tags.

Monday the Rabbi Took Off

Finished another Harry Kemelman yesterday: Monday the Rabbi Took Off.  It’s one I started to re-read a while ago and didn’t get into at the time.  It’s a big long-winded compared to the Tuesday book in the series, which I read earlier in the month and enjoyed.   

In Monday the Rabbi literally takes off to Israel, leaving behind the usual group of disgruntled board members trying to decide whether they want him back or not.  We have this subplot going on throughout, but the main story takes place in Israel with a couple of bombings and two deaths and a lot of stuff about what it’s like to be an Israeli in the homeland, and what it means to be religious there and so on.   The murder is solved a bit perfunctorily right near the end, but the victim isn’t really a major character and so you feel a bit disconnected from that part of the story.  There are several other elements to it that make it all a bit like too much story for one book.  It’s still an interesting read, and gives insights into the feelings of Jews in and out of Israel, and perhaps that’s what the book is more about: Kemelman trying to 'write out' his own feelings about how he stands as a Jew in the time the book was written....

Accurate reporting

Two posts from GetReligion.org today show the difficulties of reporting the news accurately - and why it's always worth asking questions about reported pieces. Furthermore both of these pieces involve the difficulties inherent in clearly understanding religious issues as opposed to sectarian ones.

The first discusses various clashes between Muslims and Christians in Egypt since the removal of Mubarak. The second looks at a particularly horrific attack on an Israeli family, allegedly by the Al Aqsa Martyrs (who at first took credit, then later claimed they hadn't done it).

In both cases, the writers attempt to clarify who is who and who did what to whom. In neither case are these things as clear as they should be in the original news reports, and the reports often leave out vital facts.

Sometimes the problem is publication policy; sometimes it's inept reporting; sometimes it's a biased use of language. Whatever the problem, it shows that in a world where we can actually compare reports, it's worth doing so before we make up our mind about what we've been told.

Two extracts from Finding Sanctuary

Finding Sanctuary is by Abbot Christopher Jamison.

In February 2004 BBC Television broadcast a programme entitled 'What the World Thinks of God.' As part of their research they commissioned Bradford University's Peace Studies Department to carry out an audit of wars over the last hundred years, with specific reference to the role of religion in causing those wars. Looking back at history, they analysed the actual mechanisms by which religion might case war and found several possible ways in which this occurs. These mechanisms might be the promise of salvation to those who fought the infidel, or the intention of religious leaders to seize holy places - both key factors in the medieval crusades. Or they might be the desire ot convert the enemy, as in the wars of the Reformation.

The researchers then analysed the thirty-two wars of the twentieth century. Their conclusions were that only three had a significant religious element. They considered the Israeli-Arab wars, for example, to be wars of nationalism and liberation of territory (and I would ad that the same is true of the Irish wars and conflicts). They noted that the current campaign being waged by Arab terror groups is largely about political order in the Arab countries, especially the presence of foreigners there. These groups use the language of religion, but the use of religious language to justify terrorism is disowned by mainstream religious leaders.

Political leaders use differences in confessional faith as a way of mobilising support for political wars, and it is mainly in this way that religion becomes a factor in war. Furthermore, the main wars of the century (the two world wars, the Russian civil war leading to Stalin's regime, the Chinese civil war leading to Mao's regime) claimed seventy-five percent of all casualties of war in the twentieth century: they killed 150 million people. None of them is attributable to religion. The recent conflicts in which religion has played a significant role have killed only one per cent of the number of victims of secular wars.

This study provides evidence that religion is not a major reason for war in modern times. But the two great moments of violent religious conflict in Europe, the Crusades and the Reformation, have cast a long shadow over the popular mind, so that even though there have been no truly religious wars for many centuries, even intelligent commentators still insists that religion causes wars. The reality, however, is that in the modern world it is governments, and not religions, that cause wars. (pp 165-6 Weidenfeld and Nicolson edition 2006)

And on another tack entirely:

I offer a final story from the desert fathers and mothers. A young monk once went to see his superior: 'Father, ' he said, 'I must leave the monastery because I clearly do not have a vocation to be a monk.' When the older monk asked why, the younger monk replied: 'In spite of daily resolutions to be good-tempered, chaste and sober, I keep on sinning. So I feel I am not suited to the monastic life.' The older monk looked at him with love and said: 'Brother, the monastic life is this: I rise up and I fall down, I rise up and I fall down, I rise up and I fall down.' The young monk stayed and persevered. (pg 172 ibid)

And in spite of the title of this post, one more:

You may be wondering whether such an approach to scripture is only for monks, so I offer you this thought from St John Chrysostom, the great fourth-century Archbishop of Constantinople. "'I am not,' you will say, 'one of the monks, but I have both a wife and children, and the care of a household.' This is what has ruined everything, your thinking that the reading of scripture is for monks only, when you need it more than they do. Those who are placed in the world, and who received wounds every day, have the most need of medicine." (pg 66 ibid)

Is this world our home?

At church on Sunday the person preaching talked about the book of Lamentations and its relevance for us as Christians today. That is, the sense of exile that the writer of Lamentations feels is one Christians share in this world, where things are plainly not right, and where evil abounds.
But to think of this world only as a place where we are refugees is to make it a place to hate. And whatever else it may be, it’s also the world God created, spinning in an enormous Universe, and decked out in such a fashion that there’s no end to its wonders.
This world fits us like a glove. There is no other known planet where we could survive. We match the nature of this world intimately. To see ourselves as exiles within it is to see it as a place to fight against, to be at cross-purposes with. But it’s not the world’s fault that things are at cross-purposes. St Paul writes in Romans about the whole of creation groaning as it waits its release from whatever it is that holds it at present.
To say, as the hymnwriter does (if I’m correct) that ‘this world is not our home’ is only partly true. This world is our home, but it’s only our temporary home. We’re expecting eventually to go to a place that’s even more our home than this one. That’s the difference.