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Water

Unfinished peace overtures

By Khaled Diab

When an Egyptian police orchestra got hopelessly lost in Israel, they struck a personal chord with the locals, despite the political discord.

 

June 2008

The Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra is on a diplomatic mission: to go to Israel and play at the inauguration of an Arab cultural centre. Dressed in their full regalia, they wait in vain for their welcoming party at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion airport.

 

Stranded, they decide to make their own way. A linguistic cock-up, due to the fact that Egyptians have trouble producing the ‘p’ and ‘v’ sounds, conspires to land them in the remote, desolate and windswept desert town of Beit Hatikva, instead of Petah Tiqva.

 

Beit Hatikva (Hebrew for House of Hope) is so off the beaten track that you are unlikely to find it on any map – that’s also because it exists in the imagination of Israeli director Eran Kolirin.

 

Ever since I first read about The Band’s Visit (Bikur Ha-Tizmoret), I have been eager to see it, but it has only just been released here in Belgium. But the wait was well worth it.

 

Kolirin wanted to make a film that looked beyond the politics of Arab-Israeli relations and to delve into the human aspect. “Everyone is a little bit lonely,” he said in an interview. “Everyone is a little bit lost.”

 

And the Band’s Visit is all about loneliness and loss, delivered as a deadpan and rather dark comedy, with much of the humour deriving from awkward silences (only about 40 minutes of the film's running time of 84 minutes is dialogue) and the mismatching of the film's dysfunctional characters. Although their Egyptian accents were not convincing and the solemnity and silence of the characters was uncharacteristic of the vast majority of Egyptians, I managed to suspend my disbelief and get into the story.

 

The first encounter between the inhabitants of the dozy town and the band of not-so-merry musicians is memorable. Hopelessly lost, the orchestra approach a sleepy local café. The handful of bored punters regard the stiff and proper arrivals, dressed in their smurf-coloured uniforms, with the kind of miffed looks reserved for an alien landing – and this is probably the nearest to an intergalactic visit Beit Hatikva is ever likely to experience.

 

Tewfiq, played by the veteran Israeli actor Sasson Gabai (who impressively delivers most of his lines in Arabic), asks the owner, Dina (Ronit Elkabetz, one of Israel’s leading actresses), if she would be so kind as to provide them with directions to the Arab cultural centre. The beautiful, wild and hard-as-nails proprietor jokes that, in their desperate town, there is no culture, neither Israeli nor Arab.

 

Dina exhibits the Israeli version of Middle Eastern hospitality (which I had the good fortune of experiencing first hand) and offers to put the men up – as there is no hotel in the forsaken town – and persuades and bullies two of the customers to share the load with her.

 

During the night the band spends in Beit Hatikva, its members and the townsfolk touch one another’s lives in unexpected ways. For instance, Simon, played by the upcoming Israeli-Palestinian stage actor Khalifa Natour, provides comfort to his out-of-work host whose marriage is falling apart, and his host spurs him to finish the concerto of which he has only ever written the overture.

 

Dina takes in the unsmiling bandleader and the ladies man Khaled (the young Israeli-Palestinian actor Saleh Bakri). An unusual love affair develops between the feisty and fiery Dina and the reserved and regimented Tewfiq, as they tour the town by night.

 

A romantic at heart, Dina tells Tewfiq of the Egyptian films everyone in Israel used to watch when she was younger, and their stories of passion, sacrifice, betrayal and blazing love. Perhaps hoping that this mysterious stranger would be her very own Omar Sharif, Abdel-Halim Hafez or Rushdi Abaza, and dispel her all-embracing loneliness, she opens her heart to him and tells him of all her disastrous relationships.

 

Dina's disarming frankness leads him, despite his reticence, to open up and articulate, albeit haltingly and in few words, the sadness and loneliness he has felt ever since his wife died out of grief for their son, who committed suicide, apparently because his father was too demanding. Uncomfortable with the unexpected intimacy, he withdraws back into his shell and Dina winds up sleeping with Khaled to try to bury her disappointment.

 

The funniest scenes in the film occur at the town’s ‘hottest’ nightspot. Khaled, who had joined a group of young people in the vague hope of finding some action, winds up at an almost-deserted roller disco. With no available woman in sight, Khaled grudgingly helps one of the café’s punters, who is painfully shy and socially clumsy, to connect with his designated date by sitting next to the couple and whispering and miming a step-by-step guide to ‘seduction’.

 

Describing the story as that of “a lost band in a lost town”, the film's opening sequence tells us that “not many people remember this. It’s not that important.” And in the context of the conflict, such personal, human interactions are largely ignored because they complicate simplistic stereotypes.

 

Another largely forgotten visit, which was both real and important, was that of Sana Hassan. Everyone recalls Anwar Sadat’s famous visit to Jerusalem, but three years earlier, while Egyptian and Israeli forces were still deadlocked in the desert, Hassan caused a sensation and a scandal in Egypt by abandoning her diplomat husband and post-graduate studies at Harvard and moving to Israel.

 

Driven by fascination, her desire to embark on a personal quest for peace and understand the dynamics of the society behind the conflict, she wound up spending three years in Israel, where she met people of all political hues and from all strata of society – from Golda Meir and Menachem Begin to Kibbutzim workers and street prostitutes. She wrote a book about her experiences which, perhaps due to its ambiguities and fiercely independent refusal to tow the party line of either camp, has fallen into obscurity. I have managed to locate a used copy of it and await its delivery with baited breath.

 

Unfortunately, Arab audiences have been deprived of the opportunity to see the Band’s Visit. Kolirin’s dream was to have the film screened at the Cairo Film Festival. However, Egyptian artists and intellectuals generally maintain an unofficial cultural boycott of Israel.

 

While I appreciate that Arabs should not normalise economic ties with Israel until there is peace with the Palestinians, there is a need on both sides to humanise the other – and cultural exchange is essential in this regard.

 

My own personal peace mission to Israel and Palestine last year provided me with a whole new depth of understanding. It enabled me to see the human face of Israel, which resembles their Arab neighbours in so many way, to understand better why they think in particular ways and the complexity and ambiguity that political reductionism overlooks.

 

Unlike the Egyptian band and their Israeli hosts, there was no shortage of words during my visit – and the endless conversations and debates I had with the family I stayed with for part of my visit and other Israelis I encountered did us all good. If more Arabs and Israelis met face to face, then this conflict could be resolved faster.

 

 

This column appeared in The Guardian Unlimited’s Comment is Free section on 27 May 2008. Read the related discussion.

 

 

 

ã2008 K. Diab. Unless otherwise stated, all the content on this website is the copyright of Khaled Diab.

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