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PARTISAN REVIEW
In a review of the play , Tom Segev - himself on the left - wrote
that he had "not learned anything that I didn't already know about
Sharon , the Israeli army or my Israel. .. . I am still waiting for a
smart playwright, Sobol, for example, who will examine the self–
enclosed elitism, the sexism, the racism .. . to be found also among
journalists of the dovish left. "
Sobol's plays weren't out of step with the trend among serious
cultural productions . The great majority of Israeli films, plays, and
sociology over the past four years has centered on the dark side of
Jewish - Arab relations: on the economic, power, and sexual relations
between the colonialist and the colonized . The films have dealt with
the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, with an Israeli army officer
falling in love with a Palestinian woman; or the death of an Arab vil–
lage youth at the hands of an Israeli farmer who found him sleeping
with his sister; or an Israeli leftist caught in a tragic triangle between
Palestinian guerillas and nonviolent PLO supporters and vicious
Israeli security agents .
The most successful of these films,
Behind the Bars,
was directed
and written by the Barabash brothers, reserve army officers who have
a dovish left politics. (One of them addressed the famous rally of
four hundred thousand following Sabra and Shatilla .)
Behind the Bars
takes place inside a prison where officials keep Jewish underclass
prisoners and Arab politicals apart through the skillful manipulation
of heroin sales and nationalist demagogy. Finally , the Jewish hero, a
streetsmart but basically decent hoodlum, and the leader of the Pal–
estinian politicals, band together and lead a successful hunger strike
against the authorities .
If
the underlying message, that nothing separates Jews and
Arabs except the false consciousness of nationalism and drugs, is a
crude Marxist theme, the film is slick and well-made.
Hagai Eshed, a journalist closely associated with Shimon Peres,
launched an attack on the film, and on the tendency to disparage
Israel , in a column in the Labor newspaper
Davar.
The cultural world
is "destroying Israeli myths and building up Palestinian myths," he
wrote, and cited an article by an intellectual called in to help the
Education Ministry "teach democracy" in the schools and combat
right-wing extremism. And he denounced "land and power" as "na–
tionalist-fundamentalist" factors distorting Israeli democracy .
" 'Land and power' is the translation into the fashionable jargon
[of the left
1
of the Hebrew Zionist words 'settlement and defense',"
wrote Eshed. Part of the left, according to Eshed , is using the iin-
