TV Review: To Die in Jerusalem
To Die in Jerusalem (2007)–***
To Die in Jerusalem, a documentary account of two mothers in mourning after an 18-year-old Palestinian girl’s martyrdom operation kills a 17-year-old Israeli girl, leaves the viewer with two questions in the end: who will lay down their arms first and who should lay them down?
It’s not surprising, the questions we are asking, because they are the same questions we were asking before the documentary. To Die in Jerusalem doesn’t claim to answer either question, but rather shows the audience the ideological stalemate through the eyes of mothers who lost their daughters.
The daughters are Rachel and Ayat, the former being an Israeli teen who went to the supermarket for her mother and the latter being a suicide bomber. Both girls look eerily similar with long dark hair, dark eyes, and dark complexions. Their deaths were not lost on the world, so much so that the director even includes a sound byte from George W. Bush that is surprising in its eloquence. Bush mentions the dying of youths as the death of the future, and for the mothers, their ideas of what the future should be are representative of the broader conflict.
Though the film has about 40 minutes of poignant exposition, To Die in Jerusalem is mainly focused on getting to the last 30. In that half hour, the mother of the Israeli girl, Abigail, confronts the mother of the Palestinian girl, Um Samir, via satellite. The meeting comes four years after the bombing, and whatever answers Abigail was still looking for aren’t found.
The mothers tend to talk around each other, Abigail from the perspective of the free Israeli who has time to ponder the seemingly illogical attack and Um Samir from the perspective of the oppressed Palestinian who mourns her daughter but not the reasoning behind the attack. Um Samir, in fact, has one of the single most passionate moments when she argues that only through resistance have the shackles of oppression been historically removed.
Um Samir doesn’t have the ability to see the event from Abigail’s perspective. Likewise Abigail, who could barely stand to be in Palestinian Authority-controlled territory long enough to experience its horrors, cannot empathize with Um Samir’s life. Even the mutual prayer for peace and their hatred of the political systems that perpetuate the violence come from their differing points of view.
To Die in Jerusalem ends with the pictures of the girls juxtaposed once again on screen, a sobering reminder of the tragic consequences of the continuing struggle to find peace. There are no solutions proposed, but the delicacy of the subjects allows an audience well aware of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to consider it again in a way they haven’t before.
To Die in Jerusalem, directed by Hilla Medalia, airs Nov. 1 at 9 p.m. on HBO.
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