[THE LAW IN THESE PARTS screens Wednesday May 22nd at 7:30pm at the Cleveland Museum of Art.]
Review by Pamela Zoslov
Review by Pamela Zoslov
“The law is an ass.” The phrase,
grumbled by Mr. Bumble in Oliver Twist,
applies to the subject of Israeli filmmaker Ra'anan Alexandrowicz's
documentary THE LAW IN
THESE PARTS, an
examination of the laws used by Israel to justify its 46-year
occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and the differential treatment
of Palestinian and Israeli defendants in its courts. The film, which
has been very popular in Israel, is largely an indictment of
occupying Israel. It demonstrates how the treatment of Palestinians
is legal, as were Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa, but
unjust. In Bumble's words, an ass.
Alexandrowicz
attempts a technique similar to Errol Morris' The Fog of
War, which peered into the soul
of Vietnam War defense secretary Robert McNamara. The filmmaker
interviews a series of prominent Israeli lawyers and judges who
helped write and implement the laws. He seats them against a backdrop
on which he projects film clips of decades of Palestinian resistance.
The
technique is interesting but not particularly revelatory. The now
elderly legal men, who include Dov Shefi, retired Brigadier General
and Legal Advisor for the West Bank Military Command 1967-68,
military prosecutor Lt. Col. Abraham Pachter, explain with meticulous
reasoning the basis of laws enabling Israeli military rule over
Palestinian territories conquered in the 1967 war. “Overnight,
about a million people were subject to new law,” the film recounts,
raising a shudder at the echo of Nazi occupation. The law that
applied to the indigenous population was not the same as Israeli law.
To apply Israeli law, explains Dov Shefi, would have implied “that
you intend to annex the region and to grant citizenship.”
Under
laws devised by the Israeli military legal corps, Palestinians were
subject to rule by the IDF (Isarel Defense Forces) – “What the
IDF says, goes,” says Shefi. Demonstrators and insurgents were
tried by military courts, with IDF soldiers, some with legal
training, as the judges. Legal questions were decided by the Israeli
Supreme Court, almost always in favor of Israel. Defendants who were
members of Palestinian resistance groups were found to not merit the
status of legal combatants under the Geneva Conventions. A widowed
mother of five was found guilty of giving food to armed infiltrators
hiding in her village. The defense's argument that giving food is a
universally accepted human behavior was rejected because “human
values do not apply to infiltrators – “they are venomous snakes.”
The woman was sentenced to a year and a half in jail.
After
telling the story of the jailed widow, Irifa Ibrahim, the filmmaker
muses that it would be a good idea to interview her. We agree: an
interview with a Palestinian would make the film more interesting. As
it is, it's a lot of old men droning and the director ruminating
about his filming technique. No sooner has Alexandrowicz he raised
the idea than he rejects it. “I do not intend to interview her.”
That
is not to say the film isn't illuminating. It highlights the
inequities of a nearly half-century military occupation and expanding
illegal settlements in the Middle East's highly touted lone democracy.
Whenever Israel wants to do something, a legal way is found to do it.
International law prohibits Israel from taking Palestinian land for
its own use, so one legal expert saved the day, citing a little-known
Ottoman law that characterized the land as Israeli “state land.”
,Now, half a million Israeli settlers live on land in the West Bank
seized from Palestinian people. The Israeli settlers have a different
set of laws applied to them, and their crimes against Palestinians
are almost never punished. “You have to be practical,” says one
of the legal men. “You couldn't treat them the same.” It's clear
that the U.S., in its never-ending war on terror, was influenced by
Israel's policies – targeted killings of suspected terrorists,
“administrative arrests” of people arrested without being charged
and held indefinitely, as the men now are in Guantánamo.
One of
the retired legal men confesses to some sleepless nights over
decisions made and sentences issued. The others have no regrets. One
points out ways in which Israel's justice system is unusually fair.
Palestinians, for example, can appeal their convictions to the
Israeli Supreme Court. “Nowhere else in the world,” he says, does
an occupying force defend the population from its army.
Israel's
actions seem indefensible – Operation Cast Lead, the 22-day siege
of Gaza in 2009 that left 1,387 Palestinians and nine Israelis dead;
the 2010 Israeli raid on the Mavi Mara flotilla into Gaza, in which
IDF soldiers killed nine activists (one shot from behind at close
range). But the killings are always justified as necessary for
security. Scholar Norman Finkelstein, the noted critic of the Israeli
occupation, has pointed out that over a seven-year period, Israel
killed some 4,700 Palestinians and Palestinians killed about 1,000
Israelis, a ratio of about 4.7 to 1. “The ratio for civilians is
about three to four Palestinians for every Israeli civilian who has
been killed,”
The
film raises provocative issues, but it is stubbornly un-cinematic,
centering primarily on a succession of men sitting at a desk talking. However, the
vintage footage – early Palestinian uprisings, the violent,
fanatical zeal of the West Bank settlers roaming the territories with
guns -- is fascinating. Its existence confirms Finkelstein's
description of this as “the most heavily monitored conflict in the
world.” This Israeli-made film, like last year's excellent
documentary The Gatekeepers,
also demonstrates that the occupation is avidly debated in Israeli
society. Israelis don't accept what their government does without
question, unlike the proopaganda-influenced U.S., where any whiff of
criticism of Israel is met with bitter attack and denunciation. Two
and three-quarters stars
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