Farha

 

I watched Farha, as a film its very good. The sets, locations costumes and acting are very convincing, I could say I enjoyed the movie very much, but that feels wrong. Fahra is about a young Palestinian girl trapped in the nightmare that was 1948s Nakba, the massive campaign of violence that destroyed many Palestinian communities. So it feels wrong to use wordslike enjoyment and liked. The beginning of the film was pleasant enough seeing Fahra and the village children playing in the last days of the Mandate, but the conflict isn't far a way and many sequences are brutal and extremely unpleasant to watch. 

I recommend watching it, but only if you're in an appropriate mood to do so, its hard viewing. I wasn't planning on watching it, I had not heard about it until yesterday. I was browsing social media when I saw the tail end of the argument about it. Several screenshots of article titles and journalists reacting very hostilely to it. In particular I remember a screenshot of some journalist I didn't recognise making a statement that pushed to seek out the film. I've tried finding it again but that's an impossible task so from memory it went like "I have no issue with criticism of Israel. I just don't like seeing all Jews being depicted as bloodthirsty monsters" or words to that effect. 

That comment decided me for a couple of reasons, firstly I doubted that Netflix would stream a film that did depict all Jewish people as monsters, but more seriously because I understand the sentiment. I also really don't like it when communities and groups I'm connected to or feel connected to are shown to do horrible things. But, here's the issue its a film about the Nakba, and is based on the accounts of a survivor of the Nakba who ended up in a refugee camp in Syria.

From the credits of the film

After watching the film I looked up background details, and found that the director Darin J. Sallam was told of the account by her own mother. So while I can understand not liking how the Israeli soldiers are shown to be behaving, in fact I would be alarmed to encounter someone who wasn't disturbed by their behaviour. Like all films based on true accounts the film adds or changes details, unless we get a recording we'll never know for sure that the real Farha or Radiyyeh saw the murder of a family of refugees while the officer cracked jokes about it. But even if that's an embellishment, we do know the depiction of how the soldiers are behaving was accurate to the time, not only because of the testimonies of the Palestinians, 800,000 refugees is a lot of witnesses, but also the testimony of Jewish people and Isrealis. 

One of the most popular entries on this very site is a 1948 open letter to the New York Times by Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt and a dozen other prominent Jewish people denouncing the campaign of terror being carried out in the villages. 

A shocking example was their behavior in the Arab village of Deir Yassin. This village, off the main roads and surrounded by Jewish lands, had taken no part in the war, and had even fought off Arab bands who wanted to use the village as their base. On April 9 (The New York Times), terrorist bands attacked this peaceful village, which was not a military objective in the fighting, killed most of its inhabitants—240 men, women and children— and kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem. Most of the Jewish community was horrified at the deed, and the Jewish Agency sent a telegram of apology to King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan. But the terrorists, far from being ashamed of their act, were proud of this massacre', publicized it widely, and invited all the foreign correspondents present in the country to view the heaped corpses and the general havoc at Dein Yassin. The Deir Yassin incident exemplifies the character and actions of the Freedom Party. Within the Jewish community they have preached an admixture of ultranationalism, religious mysticism, and racial superiority.

Bolding my own.

And as time has gone on, more and more accounts have surfaced of similar atrocities in the other 400 villages that were attacked and pillaged.

“The Jewish soldiers who took part in the massacre also reported horrific scenes: babies whose skulls were cracked open, women raped or burned alive in houses, and men stabbed to death,” the historian Ilan Pappe wrote in his book, “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,” describing accounts of a massacre that took place in the Palestinian village of Dawaymeh.

The Intercept 

So even if the Israeli militants weren't present in the original story they're conistant with the period.

And while I can't be 100% certain of every word in the reaction I did note it said Jews, and not Israelis. Which is an interesting substitution. Not every Jewish person is Israeli, and to be blunt not every Israeli citizen is Jewish, there's strong overlap but the Venn diagram isn't a circle. In Fahra there are less than a dozen onscreen Israeli characters. They're all armed and they're pretty nasty people doing horrible things, but I would argue that has more to do with them being members of a radical military organisation that's open aim was to expand its borders by driving out its neighbours, then being Jewish. I don't have to qoute the Einstein-Arendt letter again do I?

I do understand why Israelis don't like this movie and wish to belittle and minimise it. While there was an existing Israeli movement and identity, and a network of communities in the Mandate it was the military campaigns of 1948 that cemented the existence of Isreal as a nation state. This means that the campaigns of violence were integral to its establishment and its founding myth. So acknowledging the darker parts of those episodes is an attack on the nation itself.

But that's just nationalism. There is nothing unique about Israel and its national history nor its people's sensitivity to criticism. Americans venerate their war of independence and founding fathers and really don't like people talking about slavery, and wars with the natives. British nationalists take pride in the Empire but will not be pleasant if the conversation goes beyond train travel and military vigour. Irish nationalists love the 1916-22 generation of heroes but will not welcome an accurate accounting for the campaigns of terror by the Free State. Algerian nationalists are proud of their nation's hard won battles against the domination of the French, but aren't interested in discussion the legacy of independent Algeria's discrimination and forced expulsions of its minority populations that were deemed not Algerian nor loyal enough to stay.

Keep going with the nationalist group of your choice, it does not matter which one you pick it never ends. If watching Farha makes you feel targetted then the problem isn't the movie, the problem is nationalism and the divisions and misery it causes. 

Palestinians are allowed to explore and come to terms with their traumas and their history just as Israelis and everyone else is. I've seen comments by Palestinians praising the film for helping them do that which to me is the best praise it can get.

This is a perfect summary of the emotional experience of Farha.