A Faith that Burns, or the Sermon at Ground Zero
Saul here. I’m writing this the day after the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) took Palestinian filmmaker (and Oscar-winner) Hamdan Ballal into custody, after a mob of Jewish settlers beat him bloody.
The IDF initially said that Ballal is undergoing medical treatment, but his Israeli lawyer told the Associated Press she was unable to reach him for more than a day. One of his co-directors told the AP that several people in the mob that attacked Ballal were in uniform, and that he was led away in handcuffs.
“I realized they were attacking me specifically,” Ballal said in an interview from a West Bank hospital after his release on Tuesday. While he doesn’t speak Hebrew, “when they say ‘Oscar’, you understand. When they say your name, you understand.”
From a certain perspective, the incident is a perverse endorsement of the thesis of their film, No Other Land, an Israeli-Palestinian co-production that depicts the destruction of a Palestinian community in the West Bank by Jewish settlers.
“We came back from the Oscars and every day since there is an attack on us,” Adra told the AP. “This might be their revenge on us for making the movie. It feels like a punishment.”
To be sure, a lot of people on the right have called No Other Land things like “a carefully crafted piece of demagoguery” or “an Oscar win for HAMAS” or (per the Israeli government) an act of “sabotage against the state of Israel,” and one which justifies Israeli public funding of only pro-Israel content, as determined by the Netanyahu administration.
After No Other Land won the Oscar for Best Documentary, Steven Meiner, the mayor of Miami Beach, called it "a one-sided propaganda attack on the Jewish people," and tried to strip the independent theater that showed it of its lease on city-owned property.
I can’t evaluate these discursive claims, because I haven’t seen the film, which has no U.S. distributor. (The theater in Miami Beach, like every theater that shows it, has had to make its own arrangements to procure a copy.)
But what I can say is this: like Meiner, the Miami Beach mayor, I grew up a member of the Orthodox Jewish community, and was trained to view the political decisions of specific Israeli governments as coequal with the fate and interests of the Jewish people writ large.
I no longer feel that way: I believe, ever more, that our great strength is that we are a diasporic people. But I once believed deeply, and maybe foolishly, in the dream of liberal Zionism, which has been an increasingly wrenching legacy to reckon with —- over the past two decades, of course, but particularly so over the last two years of the disturbing reports of, say, doctors tortured to death in Israeli custody; or book burnings by Israeli soldiers; or the allegations from the Committee to Protect Journalists that the IDF is deliberately targeting reporters.
And so, mea culpa: that’s a big part, I think, of why our cadence at Heat Death has dropped so drastically this last year. True, there has been other stuff going on: I have been raising a small child — perhaps the most engrossing and time-consuming creative endeavor there is — and Asher has been working furiously on an Anna O’Brien novel which, I have to say as a first reader, absolutely slaps, and which we’ll look forward to sharing with you soon.
But also it’s this: until the October 7 attacks, a big part of our interest at Heat Death has been Jewish culture. As I watched what happened in Gaza, and thought back to my own experience reporting in Israel, and covering the aftermaths of forced disappearances in Latin America, or the murders of journalists in Cambodia, or the detritus of urban warfare in the Philippines, I think — and I’m not particularly proud to say this — that I was heartbroken over each nail in the coffin of what I had once believed, and that heartbreak manifested itself as a profound writer’s block.
Yesterday, with the Ballal news, however, something broke free. It brought me back to my own time, as a baby journalist, spending Shabbats with the right-wing settlers in the West Bank. I went back to an essay I wrote in November 2023, about my own flirtation with the seductive, destructive faith they carry. A faith that warms, and then burns.
At the time, that felt too hot to publish. It no longer does.
As always, this is Heat Death. More after the break.