‘Shelter’ Shows the Arabs’ View to the Israelis

The naive Palestinian day laborer peeked out from behind the door of the shelter where he spent the night to witness one of a series of upsetting scenes that would change his life forever.

Outside of the hiding place, another Arab was making sweet talk to a Jewish prostitute. “For your green eyes and red lips, I will sell all the land,” the Arab pimp said.

The eavesdropper recoiled in disgust. He knew the man, who was from his home village, but never imagined him capable of saying such a thing. His alarm increased when he learned that the Arab outside had been illicitly selling Palestinian land to Israelis for years.

It was a scene from the low-budget unreleased film “The Shelter,” an unusual movie both for its subject matter--the underside of Israeli-Arab relations--as well as its production staff. A Palestinian refugee directed it, a Bedouin citizen of Israel produced it, and the actors and crew members are Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs.

The film is also rare because it tries to put the Arab point of view in front of the Israeli audience, at a time when the country is debating its future relations with Palestinians in rebellion in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Until now, popular expressions of Palestinian rebellion, mostly music and art, have been aimed at Arab audiences. On the other hand, recent Israeli songs and cabaret performances about the uprising--there have been no movies, novels or plays--generally center on how suppression of unrest in the occupied territories drains the moral resources of the country.

“We wanted to show this side of life to the Arabs who don’t know, but also to the Jews who don’t know,” said the producer, Bashir Abu Rabia, who is from a village in southern Israel.

“All the West and all Israel do not really know Palestinians,” said Rashid Mashawari, the director, who comes from the Shati refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. “Why, there are Palestinians who really don’t know how the majority live, who are tourists in their own country.”

The movie describes an encounter between Mohammed, an out-of-work schoolteacher from the occupied West Bank who comes to Tel Aviv to do construction labor, and Abu Samir, an Arab foreman who has worked 20 years for Israelis in such jobs.

Abu Samir has constructed a makeshift shelter on the building site to house himself and other laborers on nights when they do not want to make the return trek to their homes. It is illegal for a Palestinian to stay inside Israel without permission.

Although locked into the shelter, the residents can hear and, through a small porthole, see what goes on outside. For Mohammed, the scenes are shocking: the collaborator, who has given himself the Israeli nickname of Yossi, meets the prostitute; two Israeli vigilantes dump the badly beaten and limp body of an Arab at the door; a drunken and drugged Arab staggers by.

During the day, the experience of working for substandard wages is no less unsettling. Abu Samir, who has five children to educate, accepts the degradation passively. “That’s how things are,” he responds when asked why the wages are so low.

But Mohammed, who is new to the work and has no children to support, rebels and leaves for home to do battle with the collaborator.

“There are thousands and thousands of workers like this. And within every Abu Samir who goes along quietly, there is a small Mohammed screaming,” said Mashawari.

Some of the ideas for the film came from personal experience. Mashawari, 27, himself has worked at odd, low-paying jobs in Tel Aviv, commuting from his home in the refugee camp. The family of producer Abu Rabia, 38, lost hundreds of acres of land sold out from under them by an Arab dealer. They fought in court to get it back and failed, he said.

Mashawari and Abu Rabia have worked as set designers in the Israeli film industry. The impetus for the movie came from the intifada , as the uprising is called in Arabic, although the plot deals only indirectly with it.

“I don’t call the movie a way of fighting. The story has to be told, so we tell it,” Mashawari said.

“Would I join the intifada and throw a rock?” Mashawari asked. “Yes, if I had time. I go back to my home in the refugee camp. I see what is going on. I feel it. How can I not?”

Asked whether his neighbors in the camp understand his work as a movie maker in Israel, Mashawari replied: “They know I am trying to tell about their lives, so they understand.”

Mashawari and Abu Rabia gathered $25,000 to make the movie from their own savings and from friends. They need a few thousand dollars more for post-production work; for lack of money, they had to reduce the script to include just the interludes in the shelter rather than include Mohammed’s return to his home village. The film is 40 minutes long.

Cast and crew members were associates who had worked together on other movies. The ideal of Arab and Jew working together as equals on a movie set was partly the subject of a filmed documentary called “Eye to Eye” about production of “The Shelter.” In the documentary, Salim Dau, who plays the role of Abu Samir, commented: “If life could be like this, we would be happy. But it isn’t.”

“Eye to Eye” was shown last week at a human rights film festival in Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem. The festival was sponsored by the New Israel Fund, an organization that promotes civil liberties in Israel.

Outside of “The Shelter,” it is rare to find criticism of Arab society in Palestinian popular culture. Throughout the intifada , which has lasted 17 months, Arab songs have offered romantic and propagandistic visions of the battle.

A verse from one protest song goes like this: “With the Molotov cocktail, with the stones, I make my revolution. With the stones, we get rid of the enemy.”

Not long ago, Hakawati Theatre in largely Arab East Jerusalem displayed portrait after portrait of Palestinians killed in the rebellion. A recent play at the theater, “Waiting for the Savior,” depicted gross caricatures of Israeli soldiers harassing workaday Palestinians.

Israeli viewpoints of the intifada , on the other hand, have often involved bitter self-criticism. A comedian in Tel Aviv opened his act with the line: “Soldiers in uniform get in with a discount. Soldiers with clubs get in free.”

A parody by nightclub performer Dudu Topaz told of an army radio report of an incident that began when a young Arab urinated on a soldier’s leg. Soldiers arrest the entire family of the Arab and demolish their home. An announcer on the radio reports that “the youth was known as a potential terrorist.”

The guilty party, it turns out, was a child too small to talk.

During his show, Topaz stopped and pointed out that, as a reserve soldier, he is talking about himself too. “I wonder if I have the right to do this. I’m laughing at everyone, but I’m laughing at myself as well,” he said.

Israeli protest songs have also lamented the violence and Israel’s role. Singer Astar Shamir recorded a song called “A Moment Before the Storm” that lamented the difficult role thrust upon Israeli soldiers.

“My brother isn’t a cruel soldier, but he’s cold in his soul. He stands there with his hand on the trigger, but he hates the war. Don’t send my brother to the trigger,” the song goes.

Sometimes such lyrics trigger government disapproval, however. Last year, army radio banned a song by Si Hyman called “Shooting and Crying,” about an incident in which soldiers buried four young Arabs alive by bulldozer in a West Bank village. The victims survived, and the soldiers were punished with a year in jail.

“Have we forgotten our children were killed, too?” Hyman asks bitingly in the chorus, referring to the Holocaust.