Live and Become
Written and directed by Radu Mihailenau
With Yael Abecassis, Roschdy Zem, Moshe Agazai, Mosche Abebe and Sirak M Sabahat
Screening nationally
REVIEW BY KIM BULLIMORE AND LACHLAN MALLOCH
Romanian-Franco Jewish writer-director Radu Mihaileanu's new film tells the true story of the Ethiopian Jews (Falashas, or "Outsiders") airlifted to Israel in 1984 in the secretive Operation Moses. Through the eyes of a nine-year-old Ethiopian boy, we discover the taboo topic of Israeli and Ashkenazi-Zionist racism and the struggle of the Falashas to retain their culture and unique Jewish identity.
Forced to flee famine and war, thousands of Ethiopians — Jews and Christians alike — trek hundreds of kilometres to refugee camps in Sudan. With little chance of surviving the refugee wasteland, a Christian mother convinces a Falasha woman, whose son has died, to allow her son to assume the dead boy's identity. The boy's mother tells him to "Go, live and become".
But Israel is far from being the land of milk and honey the Falashas had dreamed of. They discover that in Israel, not all Jews are equal. The Falashas, along with other Mizrahim (North African/Arabic Jews) and Sephardim ("Spanish" Jews culturally influenced by Islam) are forced by the politically, socially and economically dominant Ashkenazi (white European Jews) to shed their "Arabness" in order to be accepted as "real" Jews.
Mihaileanu's film sensitively draws out the issues of identity and Israeli Ashkenazi-Zionist hegemony and racism. In Ethiopia a young Falasha girl asks her mother "will we be white in Israel?" Once in Israel, the Falashas are forced to adopt Ashkenazi Jewish names because their traditional names "don't sound Jewish". The young Ethiopian boy is forced to adopt a new identity for a second time, now becoming Schlomo instead of Solomon.
Racism is a relatively taboo topic inside Israel and for Zionists outside of Israel. However, repeated studies have shown racism is prevalent within Israeli society, not only against Palestinians who are Israeli citizens or in the Occupied Territories, but also against non-white and non-European Jews.
A March 2006 study by the respected Israeli organisation The Geocartographic Institute found 68% of Israeli Jews would refuse to live in the same building as an Israeli citizen who is also a Palestinian-Arab. Nearly 50% wouldn't allow an Arab in their home and 41% want entertainment facilities to be segregated, while 40% of Israeli Jews believe that Israel should pursue a policy supporting the "emigration of Arab citizens".
Another study conducted in 2005 found 43% of Israeli Jews were unwilling to marry, or have their children marry, Ethiopian Jews, while more than 10% were opposed to their children marrying Sephardim Jews.
According to Israeli scholar Dr Sami Shalom Chetrit, "there is no such thing as a general Zionism of the Jewish people. Being Ashkenazi, or European, is the essence of Zionism" and the erasure of non-European and Arab traits from "Oriental" Jews "has a decisive role in Europeanisation of Israel and the whitening of Judaism".
Chetrit, a Sephardic Jew, notes that Theodore Herzl, the father of Zionism, wanted to establish in Palestine "a protecting enclave of Europe against Asia, a civilisation against Asiatic barbarism". Herzl's sentiments were adopted by subsequent Ashkenazi-Zionist leaders, including Israeli Prime Ministers David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir. According to Ben-Gurion, the Mizrahim lacked even "the most elementary knowledge" or "trace of Jewish or human education", while Meir asked, "Shall we be able to elevate these immigrants to a suitable level of civilisation?"
According to Chetrit, "after 50 years of indoctrination, [Israel] has whitewashed the Arab or Persian or other Middle Eastern identities right out" of the Mizrahim. Instead they learn "Jewish history is European Jewish history" and "Arab culture is inferior or bad and there's nothing to learn from the Arabs ..."
"You look at the Arab and actually you're looking in the mirror, and you've been taught that the reflection in the mirror is actually bad, negative, low, enemy, so you start spitting in the mirror", says Chetrit. "It's hard to live with self-hatred, you get sick, so what do you do? You channel everything to the Arab? ... That is how we all became Arab haters, because if we don't hate them, we're going to hate ourselves".
It is this racism and identity crisis that Mihaileanu explores expertly in Live and Become as we watch Schlomo grow from childhood to adulthood.
Schlomo is adopted and embraced by a liberal Jewish Franco-Israeli family after the death of his adopted Falasha mother, but still he experiences an extraordinary everyday struggle of survival. He conceals his real Christian identity on pain of deportation. He is confused by his new Jewish identity and as a black African he finds himself an outcast in Israeli Ashkenazi-Zionist society.
Live and Become is a beautiful film that poses sharp questions about the politics of identity and ultimately, the nature of the Israeli nation itself. Zionism is exposed as an ideology of power, domination and colonisation, not of liberation, equality and freedom.
From Green Left Weekly, May 3, 2006.
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