Three eighty-year-old olive trees are supported by three steel columns, fifteen meters above the ground. This environmental sculpture, called The Olive Park, on the outskirts of Kibbutz Ramat Rachel sits in what was once no mans land,  on the border of the green line with the West Bank.
To its right is a lucrative field of organic cherry trees belonging to the nearby kibbutz and maintained by foreign workers from Thailand. Between the cherry trees  and the Olive Park, a narrow road leads to the Palestinian village of Sur Baher on whose lands the cherry trees are now planted.

The park  is deserted.  I have always been amazed by this major public space placed ironically in one of the most contentious areas of the city.  Only five years ago, these  olive trees had the mesmerizing view of the single mine-field left by the municipality in place since 1967.  If one wonders how the Olive Trees survive, they are connected to an internal drip nozzle irrigation system.  I searched on-line for what the artist had in mind and found the following quote “The work deals with concepts of rootedness and disconnection that mark the complex relation of our civilization with the earth …Olive trees, ancient symbol of strength, fertility and peace, continue their life in a transplanted and disconnected state.” ( Ran Morin,  Environmental Sculpture.)

I discovered the park about ten years ago,  I had a motor bike at the time, and a particular hobby was to ride through unexplored areas of Jerusalem.  I was attracted to the seemingly afloat trees from afar, a dramatic view of the desert behind them. It was a hot summer day, and rather late in the afternoon.  I drove my scooter on to the dirt road leading to the pillars of concrete. I reached them, and looked around, listening to the crickets and watching the small  lizards racing about.  I felt I was in the opening chapter of  Camus’  “The Stranger”.  Then, in the distance behind me, under the Olive Trees I saw a young man. Just like in the book.  I must have been standing there for a few minutes when  the young man came up behind me.  The encounter did not feel particularly friendly, but, as I was studying Arabic at the time, I could think of nothing else to do but try speaking it,  Maybe  out of embarrassment or having nothing better to say.

After a few unsuccessful attempts at what was obviously coming out all crooked, he grabbed my cell-phone from my overalls pants and within seconds I was on the ground.  The man was now on top, emptying my pockets and trying to rip my clothes off.   I remembered his clear blue eyes looking past me, nothing behind them but a terrifying emptiness. There is probably a moment when one realizes that other people’s horrors become their own and this was one of them. I screamed a scream I did not even know existed within me, scratching and kicking him off as hard as I could. I managed to run. I ran and ran and ran without looking back, not at him, not at the scooter, through the trees to the narrow road leading to the village. Cars drove by without stopping; maybe understandably so -after all I was a hysterical young woman running out of a field crying for help. Finally one car stopped, two young Palestinians got out, and offered me a cigarette. One took out his cell-phone and called the police.  He asked me what had happened, and walked towards the trees. The scooter was still there. He wanted us to go back. Then the man turned to me: “ I am not the man who attacked you. “Repeat that,” he said, “And remember it when the police come”.  I started to cry.  A few minutes later, the police arrived. Their first question was about the man with me, “what is he doing here?”

Ten years later, we live five minutes away from the same park.  It is still deserted. The Olive Trees are still alive.  We have a membership to the swimming pool in Kibbutz Ramat Rachel and my children walk to the pool alongside the field of cherries. At 5 Am every morning the lifting sounds of the muezzin at prayer wake us up from a soft sleep. We rented a house in the desirable neighborhood of Arnona, a one-story house with a garden.  It seemed like a tolerable place to live, at least according to the liberal book: it had never been an Arab house, it was still within the Green Line,  there was nothing about it that reminded me of my childhood. It was only when the landlord arrived to introduce himself that he asked me if I knew the story of the house. Why? He told me it had belonged to a man named Tubol, he was killed by suicide bomb in a café in the German Colony while having dinner with his wife.

Great, I thought. I thanked him for the “useful” information about our house. Now I constantly think about the interior design of cabinets, closets and bathroom décor Mr. Tubol made when building it. We were living in his space and  surely he never intended others to live in his “dream house”. We are the first renters of the house since then, the fact is too eerie to contain.  I take my sons to the pool of Ramat Rachel, I like the idea that we can walk there alongside the park and cherry field. The walk is often too tense to bear. Young Palestinian kids walk down towards the industrial area of Jerusalem while joggers and a few other dog walkers make their way up the hill.  The Palestinian kids know they can be intimidating, I have no way of being anything but what they wish to see me as, just like ten years earlier when running out of the fields.

Ala, a friend whom we recently met, lives in Sur Baher. I told him about what had happened to me ten years ago. He asked me what the man  looked like, the color of his skin, he smiled, was it like mine? Ironically I told him, he did have bright skin, just like him. “then he is surely  from Sur Baher” he said.   Ala,  a former soccer player married a Russian woman who made aliya and fell in-love with him. They have two kids  and his dream is to play professional soccer again. I told him I’d never gone beyond the trees and he offered to take me “in” as he put it.

A few weeks later we met by the Olive Tree park. What looks like a village from the outside, is a little city from within. Hundreds of houses spread out into the valley and over the hills.  On the Eastern side beyond the village lies the Separation Wall which at this part is a fence flanked by a paved patrol road used only by the army. We visited a few families living in homes under the constant threat of demolition. The municipality does not give them a permit to build for enlarging families, and when they must, they are, instead given a monthly fine to keep the house from being demolished. On the right flank of Sur Baher is Har Homa, Wall Mountain, the grandiose settlement built in the late 90’s.  The suspicion is that a main highway will now be built to connect the settlement of Har Homa and East Jerusalem.  Given the logic so far, it makes sad sense that this is what city planning has in mind.

We reached the border. The fence is still within the municipal area of Jerusalem.  A few men were watching a group of horses let free to mate. They were hoping the female would conceive through a beautiful Black Stallion who was making his rounds by the fence. These areas do not require a special  permit and to be developed one oddly needs to get permission from the Palestinian Authority rather than the Jerusalem Municipality, even if technically the houses lie on the Israeli side of the fence.  As we came to the border of the village I noticed a house completely surrounded by the fence.

Ala explains that the army  gave the occupants a special key which only they can use to get in and out of the fenced area. We asked to come in but when they saw the camera they refused,  The family is in constant fear of losing the “privilege” of the key.  I stood staring at the house, with the same disbelief I had ten years earlier seeing the Olive Tree sculpture alongside side the mine field.   Then  I heard a woman’s voice  calling out, “Hey where are you from”?   I looked up and with an almost survival instinct, replied “New York!” “Me too!” She said.  Afterward she told me half jokingly that the entire village suspected us of being prospective settlers coming to check out “available” land.

Jamila was born in the US, a Jew.  Today she lives with her three children in the village of Sur Baher, a Muslim. Before she came here she was, as it appeared, a typical middle class, well-to-do working mom, with a house in the suburbs, a fireplace, a two-car garage  a garden where her three kids could play, Picture perfect.   She left a psychotic husband and made “aliyah’. It did not take long before she realized that she did not fit in, after all, her kids were half black, and she was too smart and independent to buy “the dream”.

The High Cost of living, a rejection of her kids from Hand in Hand, the school my kids attend, for lack of space, and the harshness of a society that she found hard to accept, led her to find a place to live in Sur Baher among people she found easier to identify with.  It is a long complicated story how Jamila  the Jew became Jamila the Muslim; she is still an all American girl open and curious to the world, fighting all that she deems wrong and committed to sharing Palestine with the Palestinian people. One thing is for sure, she has mapped out her own truth. I admire her.  Jamila does not trust any school system and home schools her two younger children.

Her oldest, has reached army age and the Israeli army wants him. He made a deal with a yeshiva and hid out in their kitchen for five years. He too was home schooled. He knows the literary references of my sons’ names better than any other graduate I’ve met lately. He is engaged to marry a girl from Bethlehem. Meanwhile they survive from organic gardening and Social Security.  The more people like Jamila I meet the more tolerable I find it is to live here. Makes sense? Totally not, but this is the only answer.

One wonders who the artist had in mind when he placed the three Olive Trees high up on the air and mused about the symbolism of their disconnect.  I personally muse on The drip nozzle  irrigation system keeps them alive, just enough to survive – high, disconnected, uprooted. Who are they? Will someone get us out of this state of hell.

Sometimes when I feel particularly lonely I read through my father’s journals, looking for answers, searching for his spirit. As I wrote these words, I did the same, he loved to write down metaphors and literary references and then use them in conversation, in his articles. The one I found gave some sort of a clue to this blog.  It is a reference to Popeye The Sailor: The “Identity Racket”. Popeye must have had them in mind when he said “ I am what I am and that is all that I am…” under the reference he jots down…The world is built out of stories .. .all the rest is theory…

436 days away from New York. I still cannot tell myself why we came back. We live in an environment that at times looks like a faded family album. Faces seem familiar as I drive by, older, aging, men and women in their  forties. Last time I saw them I wasn’t yet sixteen.  They seem to have never left, they are still here, the same faces older bodies.

As I walk the streets of Jerusalem, the city in which I grew up, my own children are experiencing the same smells; the ones I did not even like; a memory I keep wanting to go back and fix, knowing very well it is un-fixable. I wish I could feel easy with their presence in this place, feel pride in allowing them to shape their characters in the present. But it feels almost perverse to burden them with the weight of it all.

It is difficult to grasp its meaning on film. Here is an image. The entrance to the city. The new Calatrava bridge is out of frame. The bridge takes on its beauty once you get used to the awful architecture surrounding it. A grand new entrance into a “grand” city. It is not the only entrance, other entrances take on new forms too.

There is the entrance to the Jaffa Gate. I remember my father drinking coffee in one of the cafes overlooking the New City.  Jaffa Gate was once the entrance into a city that remained a mystery to most jews. Was it an entrance in to The East, the Middle East? A final takeover. Throughout my entire childhood I never understood what really went on behind the gate, inside.

The newly built and highly praised, yet equally controversial Mamilla Mall now leads the tourist comfortably into the Gate.  The entrance is clearly dominated by the agenda of City Hall, years of successful planning. Local Arab vendors are complaining about millions of shekels they have been fined for illegally selling in places they’ve been selling for tens of years.  But the authorities are cleaning them out, controlling the image and claiming control.  The Palestinian population of the city is encircled by Jewish settlements. The parks, the gardens that entice the tourists seem to be set up for this very purpose. Control the narrative of archeological sites, control the national parks, make it all appealing and disguise policy in the form of culture.

Nothing is as it appears.  The Holyland complex that brought  former mayor and Prime Minister  Ehud Olmert to trial is a landmark for my son. Who would have thought, when we first arrived I told him it ruined the city, he went ahead and remembered my words. A classmate of his lives in the  penthouse. When he had a play-date he told his mother that I said the building ruined the landscape. The family, citizens of this democracy, wanted to buy a home in a Jewish neighborhood to the South, looking over the desert.  When the French Jewish developer discovered that the family was Palestinian he refused the sale. The family decided not to go to court to face unpleasant neighbors. Instead they applied to live in the pariah Holyland at the height of the scandal, they were warmly accepted. I can’t argue, they have the best view of Jerusalem.  On the terrace, my son thought he was back in New York.

ARTE F mercredi, 3 novembre 2010 à 22:45

Rediffusions :
06.11.2010 à 02:00
Et si c’est un garçon ?
(France, Canada, 2009, 55mn)
ARTE F
Réalisateur: Danae Elon

Circoncision ou pas ? Une comédie documentaire et familiale où une réalisatrice enceinte enquête à travers le monde sur une question plus vaste qu’il n’y paraît.

Israélienne et new-yorkaise d’adoption, Danae Elon est mariée à Philip, un Français, lui aussi d’origine juive. Aucun des deux n’est croyant, mais au début de sa première grossesse, Danae découvre à sa grande surprise que son époux veut absolument, si l’enfant est un garçon, le faire circoncire.
La réalisatrice entame alors une enquête personnelle, drôle et sensible, sur le bien-fondé de l’opération. D’une manif anticirconcision à Washington aux révélations d’un mohel (chargé de la circoncision rituelle juive) sur la famille royale britannique, de conversations avec son obstétricien à l’interview d’un psychanalyste viennois, elle nous fait partager aussi sa vie au jour le jour, alors qu’elle et son mari se préparent à devenir parents… Et ce parcours raconte aussi, avec sincérité et émotion, l’amour et les sacrifices qui construisent une famille.

This post is an experiment – testing the boundaries of documentary film storytelling. All those who will contribute and receive the newsletter will be part of an ongoing process of the making of a film and contribute to it’s outcome. I need your help and want to hear your voice.

I am now living in Jerusalem with my family. We moved here four months ago to make a documentary about the city. I would like to invite people to contribute to this blog by expressing their ideas about the uploaded content, that most likely will be about this city, it’s people, and my own family’s everyday life within it.  As the film is a work in progress I will be writing notes, uploading pictures, videos and ideas on a regular basis. I would like to make the experience of making this documentary interactive and keep in touch with friends and colleagues around the globe.

I hope you will take this journey with me.

Danae

The great foreskin debate

To snip or not to snip? That was the question facing new parent Danae Elon, who didn’t just wrestle with the controversies of circumcision — she made a documentary about it.

By Joy Press
April 30, 2009 | New parents face an endless barrage of questions: which prenatal tests, what kind of diapers, which nursery school? But one choice is irrevocable: to snip or not to snip? That is the daunting question, one freighted with intense cultural and religious meaning. And yet people often don’t give it much thought at all.

For someone like me, a nonpracticing Jew married to a non-Jewish husband, it was a confusing moment. Neither of us had been raised in a religious household, and neither had set foot in a house of worship except to attend the occasional wedding. But I felt myself tempted by the lure of ritual and tradition. Jews consider circumcision a commandment from God, practiced over thousands of years — who was I to cut my son off from that? My husband, meanwhile, considered it an antiquated ritual lacking sufficient medical justification (an opinion similar to that of the American Academy of Pediatrics). On top of that was the fear of robbing one’s child of something — nerve endings, sexual feeling — that can never be returned. It’s an issue that American couples continue to wrestle with; although the number of boys routinely circumcised in the U.S. has decreased dramatically (one study shows the rate at 57 percent, down from a 1960s circumcision rate of 90 percent), the majority of parents still opt for it.

Could so much really depend on this thin slice of foreskin? That’s what Danae Elon set out to explore in her documentary “Partly Private,” which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival this week. Elon lives in Brooklyn, but she grew up as a secular Jew in Israel with an American mother and an Israeli father, the well-known author Amos Elon. In her first documentary, “Another Road Home,” Elon went back to Jerusalem and to the West Bank looking for the Palestinian nanny who had cared for her as a child, using her own experience as a way to touch on deeply complex issues about class and Palestinian-Israeli relations. Likewise, Elon places herself at the center of “Partly Private,” making her own pregnancy into a fraught and funny investigation into circumcision.
Sitting in the filmmaker’s lounge at Tribeca, Elon looks both radiant and a little anxious. She says that she tried to avoid taking an overt pro- or anti-snipping stand in the film, preferring to survey the whole world of circumcision with an open — if amused — mind. She introduces us to a broad cast of characters, from the mohel (a Jewish specialist who performs the procedure) who keeps all of his clients’ foreskins in a jar, to the anti-circumcision activist who expresses his own penile trauma in a children’s book, to the employees of a skincare company who use discarded foreskins in their antiaging cream. “Every bottle is not a foreskin,” one of them assures the camera.

Elon also ventures further afield, visiting the Italian town that once supposedly housed Jesus’ foreskin (it was stolen) as well as a Turkish party hall called Circumcision Palace, where she films dozens of little boys (aged 6 to 9) dressed in white suits going under the knife in front of their families and friends. Finally she journeys to Hebron on the West Bank, looking for the exact spot where Abraham is said to have received the order from God, and finds instead a wasteland decimated by war and religion. As she says in the documentary, “Did he really say to Abraham, ‘Cut off the tips of your dicks?’ What if we got it all wrong?”

All of this serves as research for Elon’s own charged decision, which she has to make not once during the film but twice. When the movie opens, she is pregnant with her first child. Her husband, Philip, a French-Algerian Jew, feels the strong pull of tradition, and she ambivalently goes along with his desire. But when she gets pregnant with another boy after several years of immersion in the topic, she is forced to decide what she really believes is best for her son’s penis.

Was it always your plan to make a movie about circumcision?

I had always wanted to make a film about it. I thought about extreme rituals, things that might be anthropologically interesting and contradictory, but I could never find a story structure that made sense. So I kind of let it go, until one day I was two months pregnant with my first child and Philip came through the door. We used to live in the East Village in a railroad apartment with a bathtub that was in the kitchen. So he comes through the door, and I’m kind of in this pregnant bliss in the bath, and he says to me, “What are we gonna do about the circumcision?” with a really solemn face — knowing what I was gonna say to him. So at that moment, it clicked. That’s the film!

You come from a secular Jewish family. So was your resistance to circumcision a matter of wanting to shake off that element of religious tradition?

Well, everything in my family is political and to me, creating the mark of circumcision meant also identifying with something I had a very hard time with. So it wasn’t so much the issue of, am I harming the child or not? It’s: What kind of a mark am I giving him? As someone who was born in Israel, that took on a very deep meaning.

In the film, I decided not to make a political statement. But when I went to Hebron, and I realized that this tradition comes from here, and [I saw] this ritual taking place in one of the most conflicted, horrible places in the world and it’s done in such a primitive, very nationalistic way — I was basically saying, you know, why is [what we are doing] different? We’re all doing this because we believe that we belong to this group. And I don’t want to belong to this group, but I do.

Whereas Philip does want to belong. He wants to feel part of this Jewish tradition.

He doesn’t come with the baggage that I have, being from Israel and having such strong reactions to the politics there. He emigrated from Algeria when he was just a month old, came to France to a very hostile environment, and his parents clearly hung on to what they brought with them from Algeria, so for him it’s not even a Jewish rite. Belonging is what it means to him. For me, my belonging is highly politicized.

I know a lot of people who have had these issues come up, but it’s usually from intermarriage. In this case, you were both Jewish, but it was two very different upbringings colliding.

This whole idea of intermarriage was also one of the major forces in my very deep enthusiasm to explore the subject: why it meant certain things to him and why it meant certain things to me. For Philip, his father had died when he was a very young boy. So it was, this is what my father would have wanted.

And on the other hand, your father called your decision to have your first son circumcised “sheer conformity.”

He did call it conformity. But you know, my father, he’s a well-known intellectual — and he would have left it up to my mother. He would not have faced this question. It’s an uncomfortable thing to question, and even the most rational and intellectual of us feel insecure as to what is the right thing to do.

Did either of you have regrets about it afterward?

Both.

Both of you did?

Yes. I think it’s a question of — there’s a certain degree of courage that you need in order to face up to who you really want to be. And I think that having circumcised our first son was the initial mistake. Because it took on so much meaning and we’d documented it and really blew it out of proportion. I was making a film, so of course we became representatives of a certain kind of argument or issue.