by FRANK BARAT
(In the video Lia Tarachansky is talking to Paul Jay)
Your film On The Side of the Road premiered in Tel Aviv on 28 November during the International Film Festival on Nakba and Return. Can you tell us about this festival, and the subject of your film?
The film festival is the first in the world that focuses entirely on the return of the refugees that were expelled and fled in 1948, and the Nakba itself. Being held in Israel is revolutionary on its own. My film opened the festival. It’s a film that has never been done here in Israel before. It includes my story: someone that grew up in a settlement, deep inside of the colonial mentality and colonial project of Israel, who wakes up to the Palestinians and the Nakba. It profiles the soldiers who perpetrated the Nakba, who expelled and massacred the Palestinians. They talk about what they’ve done and return with me to the places that they have destroyed. The film focuses on the concept of return not from the perspective of the refugees, but from the view of the perpetrators. In that way, the film connects 1948 and 1967 to today, as one continuous project of dispossession.
Only two former Israeli soldiers testify in the film, even though you got in touch with many more. So how difficult is it to talk about the Nakba in Israel?
It’s incredibly difficult. As soon as you start talking about the conflict – whether it is with Israelis or Palestinians – you inevitably end up at 1948 within five minutes. It is not just something that happened, it’s an entire ideology, a mentality. The Israeli fear is based on the fact that what we did to the Palestinians in 1948 will be done to us. When I contacted other veterans, most of them did not want to talk about it in a critical light. They wanted to talk about it as this miraculous victory in a war where all odds were against us. Now that historians have started digging up the facts of the war, we’re starting to discover that what we believed about the State of Israel is pure mythology. When you talk to Israelis, if you start talking about the Nakba, it brings up this intense fear. In fact, veterans tend to be a lot more honest, because they did those things, but for their children or their grandchildren, for whom 1948 is just a concept, it brings this deeply embedded fear. The strongest element of Israeli DNA is knowing what questions you cannot ask. Once you start touching these questions about 1948, everything else starts to unravel. It’s an incredibly violent and terrifying process.
The film shows a scary side of Israeli society, racist and violent. Is it really that bad?
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(Thanks to Feroz Mehdi)