Israel’s Inner City

W. Kornblum and L. Quart review Ajami

FOR THE last decade Israel has gone through a film renaissance. Israeli films have won awards at international festivals, and the work of directors like Amos Gitai (Kippur), Ari Folman (Waltz with Bashir), Eran Riklis (The Lemon Tree), Samuel Maoz (Lebanon), and Joseph Cedar (Beaufort) have received critical plaudits. Add Ajami and its co-directors and writers Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani to the list of Israeli films and directors garnering and deserving praise.

Ajami was one of the five Oscar nominees for best foreign-language film this year, and differs in subject matter and style from most of the other Israeli films that have received acclaim. It’s a first film by directors, Copti, an Israeli Arab, and Shani, an Israeli Jew, and it relies on non-professional actors (who spent ten months preparing for the film) and no scripted dialogue. In fact, this low-budget film contains many scenes where the actors don’t know what is about to happen and must react spontaneously. And the actors succeed in every scene in granting their characters an authenticity (if not emotional depth) that avoids the usual tinge of artifice.

The film is shot in a quasi-documentary style on the streets of Ajami, a neighborhood in Jaffa, which is the majority Arab port city that has now become part of Tel Aviv. Modern Jaffa has a heterogeneous population of Jews, Christians, and Muslims, and parts of its Old City have been renovated, turning Jaffa into a tourist attraction. But beyond the Old City and tourist sites, many neighborhoods of Jaffa remain poor and underdeveloped.

Ajami divides the narrative into chapters of interrelated stories. It richly evokes the texture of everyday life in this volatile, violent neighborhood. In Ajami, the noisy, littered night streets are filled with idle young men hanging out. These are streets where the Israeli police are viewed as the enemy and where neighborhood inhabitants protect drug dealers from arrest.

In some ways Ajami resembles the inner city of American films like Boyz ‘N The Hood, Clockers, or Precious, though with more intact families and less self-destructive behavior on the part of its characters. They inhabit a world where the political environment and ethnic conflict is a much more direct and powerful variable in their lives, and where seemingly intractable ethnic conflict threatens deadly violence at any moment. Discord arises from the problems of daily life in a community where many are in the process of either rapidly moving or failing to move from traditional values to modern ones.

Among the film’s major characters are Omar (Shahir Kabaha), a hulking, sweet-natured Muslim, who has become embroiled in a violent familial vendetta with a group of Bedouins and who is involved in a futile love affair with the daughter of his Christian boss. There’s also Benji (played by Copti himself): a bearded, lovable, and laid-back young man who has a Jewish girlfriend—a fact that rankles a friend who feels that Benji is deserting his origins. And then there is the Jewish cop Dando (Eran Naim), who is devoted to his family and searching for his younger brother—a soldier who disappeared two years before. These three, along with the film’s other characters, collide with each other in combustible ways. While the misunderstandings, honor killings, and vendettas are tragic almost beyond comprehension, the filmmakers help capture that Israel’s central conflict, between Arab Palestinians and Jewish Israelis, is by no means the only source of daily heartbreak.

The conflicts between Bedouins and Israeli Arabs, between Arab Muslims and Christians, are featured almost as prominently here as the violence between Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs–and Palestinians and Israelis. Revenge and sheer cultural misunderstanding are as often the immediate cause of bloodshed as is the long-standing loathing due to the historical legacy of expulsion and territorial occupation. The directors have taken pains to show how abrupt linguistic shifts heighten the sense of sheer difficulty people in the streets experience in getting along across the cultural divides. English speaking audiences will follow the dialogue through subtitles that translate the shifting uses of Hebrew and Arabic, but audiences in Israel will far more easily catch the origins of miscommunication in the heat of anger.

Ajami is a bleak film that refuses to offer hope or moments of redemption, and almost all the characters are guilty of actions that are far from admirable. But it’s not a nihilistic one. Co-director Yaron Shani, has stated: ”People live in bubbles unaware of each other. Each side has its narrative, each side has its dreams and sees the other as threatening those dreams. But if you enter the other’s bubble, you see his dreams, his inner world and his values. Our idea was to make the audience experience what it meant to be the other.”

Ajami does just that. It makes no judgments and takes no sides. And it also offers no answers to the roiling, seemingly insoluble conflicts between Arabs and Jews and Muslims and Christians. However, the film implicitly conveys, that whatever divisions exists, that all these groups are linked by a common humanity–a deep commitment to family and a yearning for something better in their lives. That fact may resolve nothing, and it’s a thin reed on which to build a lasting peace. But if little else, it’s a starting point towards a conversation.

William Kornblum, a member of the Dissent Editorial Board, is a professor in the Doctoral Sociology Program, The Graduate Center, CUNY. Leonard Quart is professor emeritus of Cinema Studies at the College of Staten Island and the CUNY Graduate Center, Contributing Editor of Cineaste, and co-author American Film and Society Since 1945(Praeger).

(Homepage photo: Andromata Hill, Jaffa, Israel / Avishai Teicher / Wikimedia Commons)