From 1981 to ’87, the first Palestinian intifada (uprising) exploded across Israel and the occupied territories, threatening to drown the already volatile area in an unprecedented deluge of blood and tears. Beginning in 2001, shortly after Yassir Arafat rejected the peace plan laid out at Camp David, a second intifada was initiated, escalating the levels of violence to the far deadlier extremes that continue to this day.
In the relative calm between these two periods of intense bloodshed, a trio of Western filmmakers traveled to Jerusalem, a city claimed by both Israelis and Palestinians, and at the heart of their terrible conflict. The filmmakers took a unique approach to coming to grips with the impossibly daunting dilemma of the Middle East, tackling this colossal conundrum from its smallest vantage point: the children of the region.
The filmmakers gained the confidence of a half-dozen or so children, both Jewish and Arab, and then spent the next few years hanging out with them, observing their daily lives and listening to them do a whole lot of talking, much of which inevitably touched on the politics that inflame the area. These conversations were all filmed, and the ensuing 170 hours of footage was eventually sifted through and shaped into a quietly devastating documentary called Promises.
And don’t despair: Even if you missed Promises the first time around when it aired on the PBS series P.O.V. a few months back, the odds are that recent headlines — and the Oscar the movie was just nominated for — will have it back on the air or on video shelves in the very near future.
As for that magic solution to the Middle East crisis that almost everyone craves, don’t expect any easy answers from Promises. Do, however, expect more food for thought than you may be able to handle, even if you’ve already formed a hard and fast opinion on what’s happening between Israel and the Palestinians. Most of all, expect to be thoroughly shaken by the film’s ability to attach a human face to the pain and passion that consumes that tiny bit of faraway, contested real estate.
Promises begins by setting the stage, laying out the basic issues involved in the Middle East conflict (although, as if to avoid an argument right out of the starting gate, not in detail): We’re told how the problem essentially began with the U.N.-sanctioned establishment in 1948 of two states, one Arab and one Jewish, to accommodate the disparate populations living in the sliver of land between the Mediterranean sea and Jordan. The Jewish inhabitants of the region agreed to the resolution of the world community. The Arabs did not. The state of Israel declared its independence in May of ’48, whereupon armies from virtually every Arab nation in the Middle East immediately marshaled a massive attack on the fledgling Jewish state. In the ensuing chaos, some 750,000 Palestinians were displaced — getting out of the path of destruction at the behest of their Arab leaders or “forced out” by Israelis, depending on whom you’re talking to.
These Palestinians became refugees, living in camps set up in the West Bank and Gaza — areas designated as part of the intended Palestinian state, but administered and essentially annexed by the neighboring countries of Jordan and Egypt. Rather than ever finally declare a Palestinian state or do much to absorb or assist these displaced people, Egypt, Jordan and their Arab allies chose instead to perpetuate the refugees’ misery, exploiting their suffering as a massive PR tool in the Arab world’s ongoing spin war with the one non-Muslim entity in its midst.
The refugee’s numbers swelled over the years, and, when the Jewish state finally took steps to occupy the West Bank and Gaza after repeated attacks leading up to the 1967 War, Israel suddenly found itself the reluctant (or overly zealous, depending again on who’s telling the story) administrator of several million dirt poor and very angry Palestinians.
What Promises does is to show us what basically amounts to separate worlds, Israeli and Palestinian, consisting of people who live just minutes apart from one another and who, for the most part, never meet, never speak. The movie then proceeds to put us on fairly intimate terms with a few of the young inhabitants of those worlds.
We’re taken into the Jewish neighborhoods of West Jerusalem, where the bustling streets are filled with happy strollers, Dunkin Donuts, Burger Kings, and all other manner of commercial normalcy (again, bear in mind Promises was shot just before the current deadly cycle of attacks and counter-attacks). We’re introduced to Danny and Yarko, twin boys who are much more interested in soccer than in politics but confess that, like all Israelis, their daily lives are constantly shadowed by the possibility that a “suspicious looking” (i.e. Arab) individual loitering at the corner or sitting next to them on the bus might just turn out to be a human bomb. Danny and Yarko seem intensely curious about their Palestinian neighbors, especially the ones their own age, but don’t seem to have a clue as to how they actually live or why they suffer.
From there we’re taken into the Moslem Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City, a labyrinth of tiny shops and gathering places, inflammatory rhetoric graffitied on walls and everywhere the watchful presence of armed Israeli soldiers. There we meet Mahmoud, a likable and eloquent young Palestinian who becomes our first real indication of the multiple meanings of the movie’s title. Citing verses from the Koran, Mahmoud declares that the Jews are simply being deceitful when they claim that this is their land, since it is clearly written that the Prophet Mohammed himself flew from Mecca to the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. End of story.
Mahmoud’s Jewish counterpart is a boy named Moishe, a resident of one of those ultra-controversial Israeli settlements built in the occupied territories, surrounded by hostile Arab communities and cut off from them by guards and barbed wire. “God promised us the land of Israel,” he explains, employing a biblical non-logic as dead-ended as Mahmoud’s, “and the Arabs came and took it.” The little boy has already seen a classmate murdered by terrorists, and his most fervent wish is that all the Arabs would somehow just “fly away.”
It gets worse. The other young interviewees include Faraj and Sanabel, a pair of Palestinian kids living in a refugee camp 15 minutes outside Jerusalem. The boy, Faraj, has also seen a friend killed, reportedly by an Israeli bullet, and the girl, Sanabel, is distraught over her father, who’s been held in an Israeli prison without trial for years (he’s a leader of the PFLP, one of the main factions adamantly opposed to any sort of peace with Israel). The kids begin to seem all too bitter and fully formed for ones so young, although none are quite so radicalized as young Mahmoud who’s eventually revealed as an ardent supporter of Hamas and Hezbollah, because “they kill women and children, but they do it for their country.”
The remarkable thing about Promises is that it digs a moral and political hole so deep and wide and then manages to climb out of it. In its final half-hour, the movie performs a small miracle, as the filmmakers arrange a series of meetings between some of the Israeli children and Palestinian children we’ve lived with for the past hour or so. One Jewish and Arab kid have a friendly burping contest, while Faraj, Sanabel and the Israeli twins wind up having a grand outing together, playing games, sharing food, and, finally, being amazingly frank with one another and with themselves in an effort to get at some sort of understanding. The heart nearly bursts at how eager these kids are to get to know each other, even with all the enormous baggage they carry around. The walls between them seem to practically melt away when they eventually meet.
I would be lying if I said that the note the film ends on is quite so positive. There’s a coda in which we revisit the kids a few years later and, sadly, not all that much has changed. Still, the makers of Promises have acted as peacemakers of a sort, and, reading between the lines, we get the distinct feeling that some of those walls could melt away again. The film’s title refers to vows by God or Allah to grant a certain turf to a certain tribe, but those promises might just turn out to be promises of hope, too, between human and human. Maybe even promises that children can grow up to be adults who might consider living together without killing each other.
This article appears in Feb 20-26, 2002.
