Will An Israeli Win By Getting Beaten?

Leafing through Haaretz from a week ago, I spotted an interesting story of Israeli cinema (at the JPost, they have the wrong trailer up, for some reason, but no real story of the film).

According to Haaretz's report, an Israeli film won a Golden Bear award as the best short film in Berlin. Based on this, that makes the film an automatic candidate for next year's Oscars.

The festival site included this description of her film, "The Men Behind the Wall":

Woman seeks men. Man seeks women. Everything could be so simple if she weren’t in Israel and the guys nearby that the app suggests in search mode weren’t in the West Bank. Israeli filmmaker Ines Moldavsky makes herself the subject of her investigation...time and again the talk comes back to their needs, their lust, the possibility of sharing that lust. The filmmaker’s aesthetic strategy is that of a double exposure in her search – she experiences the personally unfamiliar physical space in Palestine as well. The conversations oscillate between virtual phone calls and concrete encounters. The artist stands provocatively at an intersection in downtown Ramallah, dressed in a red spaghetti strap dress, outstretched arms balancing a microphone boom in the air.                                                                                                                 

                                                                                                           Violence resonates – in the search for a violation of boundaries.

Haaretz was a bit more, er, explicit:

The idea for the short seems simple, but her highly experimental documentary actually touches on a multitude of complex themes.

“Every morning, I woke up in my Jerusalem apartment and thought about what it would be like to target Palestinian men that live behind the wall for dates on my dating app,” Moldavsky explains, referring to the West Bank separation barrier.

The 28-minute short shows the filmmaker soliciting Palestinian men in Gaza and the West Bank for BDSM sex via the dating apps Tinder and OkCupid, and then getting in touch with them on the phone and via Skype. It also documents their candid, explicit conversations about lust, hard-core sexual practices and the desire for casual dating.

This reminded me, in a backwards fashion, of a something written in 1977 about Zionism, which I blogged in 2007,  That since the word zayin in Hebrew is the male penis, Zionism is actually the Jews screwing the Arabs.

The filmmaker, Ines Moldavsky, 

said she

wanted to show young Palestinians simply as men; as gentle, sexy, handsome, nice guys who think about the mundane things in life like sex and dating.

She is a graduate of Bezalel. On its site the film's description reads:

זהו מסע פטישיסטי של אישה, ספק מרגלת, ספק אומנית, ספק נימפומנית בשטחים הכבושים. 

which translates as

This is a woman's trip of fetishism - perhaps a spy, perhaps an artist, perhaps a nymphomaniac - into the occupied territories.

As I do not know if actual sex was engaged in, what I do know is that this is at her Facebook page:

and she's been thinking about "occupation" since at least October 2012.

Going back to Hazelton, after reading her, Henry Makow understood her so:

According to Hazleton -- whose analysis overlaps significantly with that of Jay Gonen, the Israeli-born author of A Psychohistory of Zionism -- Zionism's predominant impulse is an acting out of son-mother incest. 

While I am willing to yield that once the area of psychology becomes a dominant element of analysis, there really are no borders.  What was an Arab woman doing exploding herself on a Jerusalem street?  Participating in an orgy? Is that Arab sexual activity?  When an Arab stabbed a Jew near the Ariel junction was he exhibiting homosexual aggressiveness?

These theories are not only outrageous, but, in my opinion, reveal more about the perversions of those who suggest them.

Again, I do not know from the film's descriptions whether or not Ines actually did get physical, whether her sex was violent against her or against the males or whether she was just a talker, and that is none of my business.

What I do think is that she should keep any perverse thoughts about the conflict Arabs have with Israel to herself and what she does with the award is for her private pleasure.

But next year's Oscars will be Israel-centered again.

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Cross-post version here. ^