The Reports on Sarah and Saleem

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a difficult topic. It's a mess on which my position has fluctuated a bit over the years, but in a greater or lesser degree I've always been quite supportive of normal Israli people that just want to have a state (of course I profoundly distaste orthodox jews and new settlers) and though I have never cared too much about Palestinians (because of Hamas and even worse groups, because of how Palestinian groups were crucial to unleash the bloody Lebanese civil war). That said, I think for sure that Palestinians deserve to have their own state, particularly the ones living in Cisjordania, and I think Israel, as a wealthy country would have to help a normal Palestinian state (one state that should annihilate the Islamist groups) to develop (a way of paying for the land they've taken from them).

Quite often one can find some form of beauty in pain and madness, and we could say that's the case here. All the suffering caused by this conflict has given us some of the best films ever produced: Le fils de l'autre, Capharnaum and Incendies (as I've said, without the Palestinian conflict probably we would have never witnessed the Lebanese Civil war), and now The Reports on Sarah and Saleem.

I've recently watched this excellent film on TVE2. If you watch it you'll probably wonder how could someone come up with such a crazy story, and well, reallity did, as the film seems to be based on real facts.

We have a married Israeli woman (married to an army high rank) and a married Palestinian guy that are having an affair. When you add to this unfrequent (I guess) situation something that could seem harmless, taking a drink together in Bethlehem (Belén), where nobody knows her, you're setting the ground for some crazy developments. In the end the guy ends up accused of seducing her (the wife of a soldier) to gain knowldge about Israeli military actions. The adulterous man becomes an imprisoned hero for Palestinians, and she becomes a traitor, not just to her husband, but to her nation.

It's really good for me to watch films like this, not just because of how instructive and entertaining they are, but because they remind me that not all Palestinians are crazy Hamas islamists. Many of them are normal guys that undergoing a brutally unfair and harsh existence, try to get by, and try to enjoy life, taking a drink, a dance and flirting with girls (event with Israeli ones).

One of the sequences in this film that I think I'll particularly remember in the future is this dialog between the desperate Israli woman and her work colleague, another young, normal, Israeli woman (I mean that she does not look like a religious or nationalist fanatic). I'm not reproducing the original dialog, just the main sense of what they say:

• It's horrible, I've cheated on my husband
• Oh, pour girl. Well, it's not that bad, these things sometimes happen
• But furthermore he (my lover) is a Palestinian
• What!!?? You are crazy. There are millions of Jewish men in this world and you have an affair with an Arab! How desperate you are!!!

Probably I would have said those same "racists" (yes, "Arabs" are not a race, but you understand) words. I admit that because of the conflict betwen our civilization and that other civilization, sometimes I tend to generalize and consider almost all Arabs, all Maghrebians and all Turks as our enemies. I know this is unfair, I know not all of them are crazy Islamists, crazy nationalists or crazy criminals, but it's easy to generalize, and when I do so, I'm ashamed about it.