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April 25, 2008
Who can rightfully claim Israel?
Ralph Benmergui's five-part series on Vision tackles some hard questions.
RON FRIEDMAN
Veteran Canadian journalist Ralph Benmergui was in Israel in December and January to produce a special program for the occasion of Israel's 60th anniversary. Before leaving for the trip, his mother gave him the following advise, "Use your judgment. And don't take sides." While in Israel, he met with a wide variety of people and tackled a broad range of issues. The result is a five-part documentary series, My Israel, which will air on Vision TV this May.
Benmergui created the movie to share with viewers what Israel meant to him, after what he described as an evolving, lifelong "relationship." In the five episodes, Benmergui deals with some of Israeli society's most controversial issues: "Jerusalem," "The Wall," "Race and Class in the Holy Land," "Who is a Jew?" and "The Future."
Right at the start, Benmergui addresses what is perhaps Israel's single most controversial issue – ownership. "You can't help but feel, when you're in Israel, or when I think of Israel, about whose place is this? Who has the rights to be here? And what happens when you say that you have propriety rights to be here?" said Benmergui in a phone interview with the Jewish Independent. "If you drill down 50 feet under a road in Jerusalem, you will find 15 civilizations who were convinced that this was their city."
In the first episode of the series, Benmergui addresses what he sees as a disconnect between the present attachment to land and Judaism's traditional detachment from material things. "As a people who haven't had one [a land] for so long, we've evolved in many ways, with the concept of holding your Judaism in your heart and in your home," he explained. "And now we have this real-estate issue. And it's a very thorny issue.
"Another big issue for me, as a Moroccan, as an Arab Jew, was 'What is this country for me?' We do a whole episode on Mizrachi Jews.... Ten per cent of judges are Sephardic, 10 per cent of professors are Sephardic – the positions of power are not held by the Sephardim, they are held by the Ashkenazim." Benmergui said the situation in Israel resonated with his own experience of feeling invisible as minority among Jews in Canada.
According to Benmergui, a lot of what he shows on the program will be new to most Canadians and even for many Jews. "When you tell people you're going to Israel, they think you literally get off the plane in Ben-Gurion and bullets fly over your head. I had to show that it's a country and it's also a country with real issues that any country has."
He continued, "I think it's really important that every Jew has to put to the test – about everything in their life – the ethics and values of a situation and the, so called, reality, so Israel is no different from that.
"When we talked to Israeli Jews, they said, 'Please, get involved in this conversation, stop sitting on the sidelines,' because the 21st-century identity of a Jew is Israeli, as much as it is Diaspora, for the first time ever."
For My Israel, Benmergui and his crew talked to people from a broad cross section of Israeli society and found a common theme: "Everyone told us that they were a victim of something when we were there," he said. "Until people can acknowledge the humanity in each other and accept the right of the other to be, without feeling that they're going to become invisible by giving them that right, this is going to go on forever."
Benmergui spoke of hesitancy among many Jews to speak openly about Israel. He told the Independent about a discussion that he organized in his synagogue, addressing the question, "Can you be a good Jew and criticize Israel?"
"We were all scared that someone was going to either say something we couldn't accept or someone was going to call somebody an anti-Semite." Benmergui, who said he himself has been called an anti-Semite in the past, explained that, "a lot of Jews in Canada have really been stifled.
"I think Jews now are afraid to have a conversation with each other that has any criticism, not of the idea of Israel, but of the regime and the way it behaves at certain times.... I think we've got to have a bigger conversation, because Israelis want us to have this conversation," he said. "I just wanted to do a series where I ask questions and I don't favor anyone. I give everybody a hard time. I don't care who they are."
Benmergui thinks that Zionism has replaced Judaism for many North Americans, that expressing unconditional support of Israel has become an alternative way of expressing Judaism. "Writing a cheque isn't living a Jewish life, it's just writing a cheque," he said.
The people that Benmergui interviews over the course of the series are those you'd call ordinary people; he chose not to speak to generals and politicians or people representing causes. "What I got from people is a feeling of being caught in a cycle, that you're either at the bottom or the top or the middle of a cycle, but it's always coming round again. There's no real forward movement."
After visiting in many different places around the country, Benmergui identified a "co-existence of [feeling that] 'everything is normal' and 'there's no future,' because people just don't know where the future is.
"I don't know what the world is going to bring," he continued. "But I do know that if you're a Jew, there's a responsibility to the country to say, 'If this is what we've been waiting for all this time, then let's try to bring to bear everything that we feel that we've evolved into as Jews into this place, which includes not just security, but it includes social justice and loving the stranger – I mean, it's right there in the Torah."
Benmergui also addressed issues in regard to Canadian Jewry. He sees a weakening of liberal ideas and a move to the politics of the establishment and the status quo of the dominant culture. "As Jews, we should be trying to protect the weakest people in this country because, 40 years ago, we were those people," he said.
Benmergui urged Canadians, and Canadian Jews in particular, to get involved in the debate on Israel: "Don't just write a blank cheque to some mass organization and then turn away.... Talk to each other. Try to bring to bear Jewish influence to the Jewish state."
My Israel airs Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, May 5-7, 6 p.m. and 9 p.m., on Vision TV.
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