All these films are a bit ingenious. They have some agenda,but it places Zionism itself within an uncomfortable framework; an imperial project based on the superiority of the western European white as superior being armed with all the arguments of the Liberal Democratic heritage of the Enlightenment, the tangled racism of Voltaire and Mill and then the conscious dragging of other Jews into the web by hook and crook with the Eastern European next grade on the pecking order followed by the Sephardic Jews of the Arab lands, with the remnant of the Palestinians in the crumbs-off-the-table category. Zionism was a smashing success in interrupting and transforming Jews in the Arab diaspora: The Lavon Affair and the Suez campaign in Egypt, the exodus in Iraq and Operation Magic Carpet in Yemen were hacked into propaganda to show a caring a just society reaching out to its own, but it was more cynicism than sentiment that should be the guide to understanding these initiatives.
Of larger consequence, is Israel’s and Zionism’s propensity to assert it is acting in the name of all Jews and thereby placing those communities in a weak position vis a vis asserting an independent identity. Israel’s invasion of Egypt in 1956 guaranteed that the lives of Egypt’s jews would be untenable, and arousing the inferiority streak in Arab nationalism that was as ready as dry kindling and pretext to vent spleen over myriad injustices from without and within their own states. In the end, the lion’s share of burden for the Egyptian jewish tragedy can be traced to Ben Gurion and the rest of the Mapai/Labor cartel ….
—The film is a history lesson. We learn that Ciccurel, owner of large department stores, was a close associate of Talaat Harb and involved in the establishment of Egypt’s first national bank, Bank Misr. There are mentions of important Jewish figures in the country’s history, their major achievements — Laila Mourad in music, Yacoub Sanoua in theater and Togo Mezrahi in cinema. We learn that communist Henri Curiel somehow got the plan of the 1956 Tripartite Aggression and showed it to Gamal Abdel Nasser, who then declared it a fake.—Read More:http://www.egyptindependent.com/news/forgotten-chapter-history-egypt-and-jews
( see link at end) …“Jews of Egypt,” an Egyptian documentary film that records the life of Jews in Egypt before their departure from the country in the 1950s, has stirred controversy after it was screened in a film festival in Cairo.
Amir Ramsis, director of the film, was accused of promoting normalization of ties with Israel through attempting to gain the audience’s sympathy for Jewish Egyptians, currently seen as Zionists by many Egyptians.
“Those accusations are absolutely groundless,” Ramsis told Al Arabiya. “Those who think the film promotes normalization either did not watch it or analyzed it very superficially.”
It is very obvious, Ramsis explained, that the documentary is against Israel and against normalization.
—New immigrants from Yemen. 1949.—Read More:http://livefromjerusalem.tumblr.com/page/4
“The film showed how Jewish Egyptians were against the creation of Israel before the July 23, 1952 Re
tion and that many Egyptian anti-Israeli institutions were actually led by Egyptian Jews.”
Ramsis noted that the purpose of the film is to set straight many of the misconceptions Egyptians have about Jews.
“Many people do not distinguish between being Jewish and being Israeli or Zionist. Many Egyptians automatically consider Jews enemies.”
Ramsis said the film does not seek to embellish the image of Jews either, but basically to “present the truth as well as his own point of view.”
—Salata Baladi, it turns out, stages the political agenda of the director Nadia Kamel under the guise of telling the story of her mother to her nephew. It is the liberal cosmopolitan impulse prevalent in the “multi-culti” discourse of liberal circles in the West that the Egyptian audience is being instructed in by the film. Here, one should keep in mind the important words of the postcolonial theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak who had once declared “multiculturalism is the new racism.” The struggle of the film is in fact the struggle of Nadia to convince her mother and father to go to Israel. She instigates the entire situation, which is presented to us as the mother’s tragedy. But it is Nadia who goads and pushes her mother (and father), who speaks for and represents her mother’s motives and concerns throughout the film. Salata Baladi unwittingly documents the process through which Naila is slowly but surely led down the road of going to Israel by her daughter-director. Nadia asks her point blank: “Tell me Mom, don’t we have relatives in Israel?” —Read More:http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2008/886/cu1.htm
Ramsis said that the people he interviewed in the film were either Jews who still live in Egypt or who are currently residing in Europe.
“Egyptian Jews were apprehensive about taking part in the film because they were afraid they would be hunted down by State Security at the time of Mubarak. They were actually given clear instructions not to make any media appearances.”
Despite the pre-production obstacles and the post-screening criticism, Ramsis said that the film was very well-received.
“I did not expect that it will be that much-admired by critics, journalists, and viewers alike when it was screened as part of the European Film Panorama in Cairo.”
The 95-minute film tackles the life of the Jewish community in Egypt in the first half of the 20th century, which is before their mass exodus following the 1956 Tripartite Aggression launched by Britain, France, and Israel against Egypt.
According to the filmmakers, the documentary seeks to address issues related to changes that Egyptians underwent in the twentieth century. This is done through shedding light on the shift from a general attitude of tolerance and diversity to mixing religion with politics and refusing to accept the other. Read More:http://english.alarabiya.net/articles/2012/10/11/243023.html
COMMENTS
