Mark A. LeVine

Mark A. LeVine (UC Irvine History Professor)

Let History Inform the Debate over Tel Aviv at the Toronto International Film Festival


It is not surprising that the organizers of the Toronto International Film Festival chose to turn a spotlight on Tel Aviv this year, the city's centennial. The city has featured prominently in many important Israeli films, and is home to what has become the archetypical Israeli identity—modern, hip, liberal and even progressive. Everything that Jerusalem—the other half of Israel's Jewish identity—is not. And as important, in myth if not in fact, free of Palestinians and their competing identity as well.

But a great film festival, like great art more broadly, is not supposed to uncritically mirror uncritical depictions of subjects and spaces. Rather, it is supposed to sponsor films that interrogate the most basic perceptions of reality, particularly when that reality is grounded in intense and long-term conflicts, in which various narratives of what is the “true” history and present circumstances are in conflict.

By turning a spotlight on Tel Aviv, the Festival intervened in an ongoing and deeply divisive conflict. Organizers had a responsibility to ensure that their intervention would encourage soul searching and the search for a more accurate representation of the city's, and country's past and present.

So it is disappointing that the Toronto Festival has largely uncritically accepted the official Israeli narrative surrounding Tel Aviv, even using it to inaugurate its new “City to City” program.

In framing the choice of Tel Aviv, the Festival's co-Director described the city as a “young, dynamic city that, like Toronto, celebrates its diversity.”

The reality is that to the extent the city celebrates its diversity, it has done so largely by marginalizing the city's Palestinian Arab heritage and present-day citizens.

A History of Exclusion and Erasure

From its creation in 1909 Tel Aviv's leaders sought to create a space that was “modern, Jewish... [and] European.” The bylaws prohibited sales of property to non-Jews, while Tel Aviv was depicted in Zionist poetry, art, journalism and literature as having emerged like a “reed inserted into a sea of sand”--that is, without any connection to Jaffa and the surrounding Arab environment. So powerful has this imagery of being born “out of the sands” remained that when it celebrated Israel's 50th Anniversary, the Economist described Tel Aviv as “having hardly any Arabs... it was built by Jews, for Jews, on top of sand dunes, not on top of anybody else’s home.”

The reality was quite different. While founded on a sandy region near the sea shore, Tel Aviv was from start deeply connected to Jaffa, which had its own, growing Jewish community that reached over 30,000 by the 1940s.

The new neighborhood was also part of a complex ecosystem that included citrus orchards and farms, Jaffa and its famous port, mills, bedouin encampments, and six Palestinian villages. The remnants of one village, Summel, are still visible along Ibn Givrol Street, not far from where Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was murdered. The former home of the sheikh of Sheikh Muwannis has long been used as the faculty club of Tel Aviv University.

Despite the many connections between the Jewish town and its Palestinian surroundings, Tel Aviv's leaders directed the town's development largely as if Jaffa an adversary rather than a neighbor. Tel Aviv rebuffed periodic attempts to plan its development “for the good of Greater Jaffa,” as the Scottish town planner Patrick Geddes advised in 1925, and instead became embroiled in an increasingly zero-sum conflict over territory and resources that led to the gradual absorption of much of the territory of the surrounding Palestinian Arab villages in the years leading up to 1948.

Nevertheless, the two towns development mirrored each other in many ways both in terms of architecture and town planning. Yet when UNESCO designated Tel Aviv as a “World Heritage Site” last year because of the large number of buildings constructed in the International Style there, it completely excluded Jaffa from its celebration. In reality, Jaffa is home to some of the best examples of the style in the country.

It is precisely the prevalence of the myth of Tel Aviv standing utterly apart and unique from Jaffa--“hyper-modern” and “cybaritic” versus traditional, clean versus dirty, “secular” progressive versus religious and backwards—that obligated the organizers of the Festival to offer a more accurate depiction of the history when they chose to focus on Tel Aviv.

A History of Violence

Despite its image of diversity and vibrancy, Tel Aviv has long been a site of significant intercommunal violence. The first major Jewish-Palestinian “riots” erupted along the border between the two towns in 1921, as did the “Arab Revolt” of 1936-39.

Crucial for the situation in the Occupied Territories today, during this period Tel Aviv's leadership developed strategies for gaining control over Palestinian land—creating new administrative boundaries, using town planning and architecture to separate communities and further weaken Palestinians' hold on the land, that are now staples of Israeli policies in across the Green Line.

In the four decades after 1948, when 70,000 Palestinian Arabs were forced to flee Jaffa and not allowed to return, the once grand town became a backwater, while Tel Aviv grew into one of the premier “world cities” of the emerging age of globalization—the city that the organizers of the Toronto International Film Festival are attempting to celebrate.

In the 1980s Jaffa was rediscovered as a funky and “authentic” place to live, and a process of gentrification began that has seen increasing pressure on the remaining Palestinian Arab population, who are being priced out of one of their homes through a combination of state policy and market forces. As the Dutch architect Peter Kook explains it, the appeal of the often faux-“Oriental” facades of the numerous luxury projects dotting the shoreline in Jaffa is their contrast to what he labels the “paranoid” and “fortress” style of architecture of contemporary Tel Avivan architecture.

That paranoia stems from a continued sense of unsettledness and unsure roots that is inseparable from the ongoing conflict with Palestinians, in Jaffa and other Palestinian regions of Israel as much as the Occupied Territories.

A Haunted City that has Yet to Confront Its Past

Perhaps the most celebrated recent Israeli film is Ari Forman's critically acclaimed 2008 Waltz With Bashir. It's worth noting that the movie begins with a friend of the director recounting a dream in which a pack of wild dogs, their eyes glowing orange, chase him through Tel Aviv's nightscape. These dogs don't just represent the ghosts of the dead Palestinians and Lebanese killed during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the Sabra and Shatila massacre. They also symbolize—whether consciously or not for Forman—the ghosts of the tens of thousands of Palestinians exiled from the Jaffa-Tel Aviv region in 1948.

It's unlikely that most of the ghosts of 1948, never mind their living descendants, will ever be welcome home, whether to Jaffa, Tel Aviv, or anywhere else in present-day Israel. But unless their existence, and the historical reality of Tel Aviv's Palestinian past can be recognized and appreciated, it's hard to imagine how the next generation of Tel Aviv's soldiers, or citizens more broadly, will sleep in peace.

It must be pointed out that the organizers of the Toronto International Film Festival have not avoided films that depict the less pleasant aspects of life in contemporary Tel Aviv, as there are at least two films which depict life in Jaffa in a less than celebratory manner. But exhibiting films that offer particular challenges to the a larger identity don't relieve a curator of responsibility for ensuring that that identity is fully interrogated and not uncritically rehearsed.

In this sense, it's not surprising that the programmer for City to City, Cameron Bailey, defended his framing and choice of subjects by arguing that it was “curated entirely independently. There was no pressure from any outside source.” There doesn't need to be outside pressure, so well-established is the image of Tel Aviv that, unlike Israel's actions in the Occupied Territories, it rarely if ever needs to be defended.

In fact, the image is so well-worn that even the inclusion of two fine critical films about Jaffa, Keren Yedaya's Jaffa and Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani Ajami, that clearly challenge many of the assumptions underlying the City to City narrative surrounding Tel Aviv, didn't cause the Festival organizers to question the way they Tel Aviv was being portrayed more broadly, or whether it should be celebrated (it also didn't prevent them from offering a plot summary for Samuel Maoz's film Lebanon that uncritically repeated the Israeli myth that its 1982 invasion of Lebanon was an act of self-defense and that PLO fighters were nothing but "terrorists," when in this case it was Israel that massively violated international law with its invasion and 18-year occupation of the country).

This too is not surprising, for as with dissent in the United State in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq (to take just one example), a few examples of art that challenges the dominant view of society serve to reinforce the self-congratulating image of Israel as tolerant and self-critical, even as the Occupation grinds on, in Jaffa and the Occupied Territories each in its own way.

Most important, in focusing on the grittiness of life in Tel Aviv's “Arab neighborhood” without any larger historical or political context, such films, however fine and perceptive they are on their own merits, can be used to reinforce the erasure of Jaffa's modern heritage, the negative stereotypes about contemporary Jaffa (and Palestinians more broadly), and allow the role of the Israeli state in fomenting and sustaining many of conflicts and problems they depict to remain in the background, uninterrogated.

The image of Tel Aviv remains worthy of celebration, warts and all, precisely because its role in the project of Zionist “colonization”--as the movement's leaders openly described it—of Palestine, and to Israeli state policies of “Judaization” (to use Ariel Sharon's terminology) on both sides of the Green Line, are left outside the frame.

The Consequences of Boycott Calls

Whether or not one supports the proposed boycott, those who have called for it have laudably forced those who have programmed and will attend the Festival to grapple with issues that would otherwise have been left, as it were, on the cutting room floor. And the filmmakers behind Jaffa and Ajami could use the controversy to make a more sustained critique of Tel Aviv and Israeli policies at the Festival than would have otherwise been possible.

Indeed, leading Arab intellectuals like Elias Khoury oppose cultural boycotts in favor of using gatherings like the Toronto Festival aggressively to challenge Israel's image and myths.

Yet however opportunistically artists or activists might respond, Festival organizers still had the responsibility to be critically engaged enough to use Tel Aviv's centennial to shape a much more sober and accurate, if uncelebratory, portrait of the city.

They could have brought not just critical Israelis but Palestinian artists, scholars and activists from both sides of the Green Line, who have for so long been excluded from Tel Aviv's imagined identity, to confront that image with narratives that would force all of us—Israelis, Palestinians, their Diaspora supporters and the public at large—to consider what it means for a city's self-image and its actual history and present personality to be so overwhelmingly at odds.

Perhaps then Festival-goers might have come to a better understanding of why it remains so difficult to achieve a final peace between the two peoples despite the fact that everyone seems to know what the contours of such an agreement must be. 

Instead, in framing their presentation, Festival organizers chose to continue the century-long pattern of ignoring Tel Aviv's Palestinian past, present and ultimately future. In so doing, however, they not only tarnished its critical impact but have given its intellectual and artistic imprimatur to the continued marginalization, or at best ghettoization, of Palestinians from aesthetic depictions and discussions of the most important issues facing their shared homeland.

Equally sad, the Festival narrative of Tel Aviv will make it harder for attendees to begin the much needed conversations—within themselves as much as with others—about why Israel is rushing headlong into a future of full-blown apartheid that other former settler colonial societies have worked hard to escape.

As long as the Festival refuses to engage these hard issues, artists of good faith should not feel guilty if they choose to join their colleagues from Israel, Palestine, and around the world, who have refused to participate in the Festival. And those who attend have a responsibility not merely to ensure that a very teachable moment does not pass by unexploited, but to help ensure that the next festival that focuses on a conflict-ridden city or country creates a much stronger intellectual and aesthetic foundation for its programming.


Posted on Saturday, September 12, 2009 at 11:21 AM 

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