The Zionist project at the turn of the 19th century was meant chiefly as a solution to the “Jewish problem”—a rescue mission whose dictum became “the ingathering of exiles” in the Land of Israel. However, early Zionism as a movement heavily informed by colonial and national European sentiments, engaged in another undertaking—the modernization of the indigenous population of Palestine. In this sense, Zionism heeded the Jewish biblical call to be “or lagoyim” (light to other nations). The escalating Arab-Zionist strife in the late 1920s deemed this patronizing position untenable. Then, with the mass immigration of Oriental Jews (also called Arab-Jews or Mizrahim) to Israel in the 1940s and 1950s, the Ashkenazi (European) Jewish elite of Israel revived that rescue mission, only this time its patronizing discourse targeted the putatively primitive Oriental Jew. Over the years, with the relative assimilation of the Oriental Jews into Israeli society at large, this discourse gradually lost its sway. Yet again, with the increasing presence in Israel of migrant workers from Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe, that trite rescue mission finds it expression in contemporary culture, including cinema. Some recent Israeli films about migrant workers depict the economic and personal hardships these laborers face in their respective homelands and in Israel. However, it is ultimately the benevolent Israeli who, out of moral conviction, determines to solve the problems these workers have been facing. In some documentary films, the filmmaker facilitates the positive denouement where the migrant finally reunites with his/her family back home. Addressing films such as Noodle, The Journey of Vaan Nueghn, and James’ Journey to the Holy Land, this talk examines the problematics of the rescue mission of the other in contemporary Israeli cinema, and, specifically the paradox that this intervention involves spewing the others/the migrants away from Israel back to their countries of origin.

Benny Torati’s 2001 film, KIKAR HA-‘HALAMOT [DESPERADO SQUARE] is commonly read as a radically subversive film. In its local-national Israeli context, the film is regarded as an endeavor to rewrite cinematic representations of Mizrahi (Oriental) Jews in Israel and, further, to imagine Mizrahi identity outside of the Israeli nation state. Crucial to this endeavor is the dialogue the film maintains with both the Israeli formulaic comedies of the 1970s and 1980s and with “world cinema.” Critics consequentially hold that Torati turns to “world cinema” to undo local models of representations. A close examination of cinematic references throughout DESPERADO SQUARE would show, however, that the case is the opposite: the film follows the Israeli cinematic tradition while subverting models derived from its trans-national references. The subversiveness of DESPERADO SQUARE is commonly located in its depiction of a world sans Ashkenazi (European) Jews. In this, the film is said to depart from the tradition of ethnic representations in Israeli filmic comedies which tie together the Mizrahi and Ashkenazi characters and insist on reconciling the ethnicities within the nation state. Yet, a re-examination of the filmic canon would show that other films also excise the Ashkenazi from the Israeli film-space and, accordingly, we should rethink the film’s subversive power. In its recurrent gestures towards such “international” (from the local, Israeli perspective) films as Tornatore’s CINEMA PARADISO and Kapoor’s SANGAM, Torati’s film manifests a desire to be inserted into a cultural space beyond the Israeli nation state. Curiously, it is here that the film performs a much more radical re-writing. A central aspect of the plot of CINEMA PARADISO and SANGAM is military service, which marks the intrusion of the nation upon the local. This aspect, however, is completely elided from Torati’s film. Inasmuch as Tornatore and Kapoor root their characters in the nation, their “trans-national” films are, in effect, quite national. Torati, on the other hand, refuses and defies such “nationalization.” DESPERADO SQUARE thus calls for the reassessment of the relationship between local, national, and trans-national cinemas. It further raises the question what is at stake by reading a film within its “national” context versus its “trans-national” one.

This article examines cinematic treatments of intercultural encounters set in spaces which challenge fixed national and historical conceptualizations of identity and animosity. THE BAND’S VISIT dramatizes the encounter between a police band from Alexandria, Egypt, and the inhabitants of a small, peripheral town in the Southern desert of Israel, who have forever been longing for some exciting turn in the course of their barren lives. The desert- an iconographic cinematic space for negotiations of identity- becomes a symbolic site for a quest for authenticity and personally meaningful lives on both “sides” of the historical national adversity between Egyptians and Israelis. In LOST IN TRANSLATION, Americans in Tokyo get lost in translation not only across cultural, lingual and national barriers, but within their own families and inter-personal relations. In the media saturated and consumerist postmodern urban environment constructed in the film, the very notion of culturally or nationally valid boundaries is ironically challenged. The intercultural, diasporic spaces in both films negotiate cultural identity in a world where homogeneity and image replace traditional identifications on the one hand, and exilic identifications create bonds across historical national borders on the other. In those “stateless states” both films create, past visions of national, ethnic, generational and gender identity dissolve; they are replaced by liminal and contradictory spaces, in which the human condition of forlornness, foreignness, and alienation is accompanied by a deep yearning for origins, ties, and communication across obsolete boundaries.

In recent years Israeli cinema gained an increased popularity at home, and at the same time realized a considerable move on its path to international awareness. This growing interest in Israeli films in leading international film festivals and among distributers that appeal to niche markets worldwide coincides with a consistent growth in interest and market openness to emerging cinemas at large. The paper posits that such films are “minor”1 films, constructed in the classical tradition of narrative storytelling, while subverting its form from within to enunciate that which is unique to their culture. These departures from the representational model parallel their political standing which seeks a de-territorialization of the national to an expression that is creative rather than reflective of identity. Over the past decade, the emergence of local cinematic texts has formed a transnational web of themes upon which national cinemas thrive and assume their mobility across cultural borders. In this web, the fragmented national forgrounds local particularities that engage global audiences by way of association with similar localities in variable social contexts. One of the prominent themes to surface from this emergece narrates the stories of women and their oppression. The Israeli film Kadosh (Amos Gitai, Israel, 1999) which tells the story of a childless married woman at the heart of a Jerusalem ultra-orthodox enclave, is analyzed in relation to this category, and in relation to the stories of women in the films Atash (Tawfik Abu Wael, Israel/ Palestine, 2004), and Water (Deepa Mehta, Canada / India, 2005).