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Friday October 26, 2007

Suicide bomber, victim linked in artless documentary

by michael fox
correspondent

In March 2002, a teenager and a security guard were killed in a suicide bombing in a Jerusalem supermarket. It was a typically gruesome attack, but it had an atypical — and chilling — symmetry.

The teenager, Rachel Levy, was a smart, vivacious high school student with a shining future. The bomber, Ayat Al-Akhras, was also a top female high school student who showed great promise.

They were born just months apart and lived only a few miles from each other. And together they made the cover of Newsweek, symbols of the horrific cost of the ongoing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

Editors and pundits love symbols, but real life is infinitely rawer and messier. As Hilla Medalia’s awkward, inelegant documentary, “To Die in Jerusalem,” attests, parallels can only be extended so far, and understanding is often an ephemeral concept.

The 75-minute film, which premieres Nov. 1 on HBO, screened earlier this month at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco with the director present.

The filmmaker collects interviews with family members and friends on both sides, along with a forensic pathologist who recounts the difficulty of differentiating Rachel and Ayat’s body parts. The girls bore a strong resemblance, apparently, a fact that’s underscored by Ayat’s father holding up the Newsweek cover and misidentifying his daughter by pointing to Rachel.

The movie’s motor is Rachel’s mother, Avigail, a brassy, outspoken woman struggling to come to terms with her loss and grief. As the film begins, she makes an effort to contact Ayat’s mother, Um Samir, partly to offer and receive some comfort and partly in hopes of comprehending something that defies logic or explanation.

Um Samir, for her part, tells the filmmaker that she’s agreeable. “Why wouldn’t I meet with her? We are both victims of the state of Israel.”

Avigail’s tortured healing process propels her to visit a prison and meet with a couple of young Palestinian women serving long sentences for their roles in attacks on Israeli civilians. Although there are fleeting moments of connection woman to woman, each is too enmeshed in her own point of view for anything to transpire but unsatisfying political debate.

There is real communication, however, when Avigail expresses her desire — at a gathering of Israelis who’ve lost loved ones in suicide attacks — to meet Um Samir.

The responses range from mystification to empathy, but it marks the only time in the film that somebody truly gets Avigail. It’s the most effective sequence in the documentary, even if it’s edited (like the rest of the film) with a meat cleaver.

Finally, after a handful of frustrated attempts and years after the deaths of their daughters, Avigail and Um Samir convene for an extended showdown. They are not in the same room, but are connected via satellite and TV monitors. It’s an artificial environment that works against candidness and confidences, and pretty much dooms any chance for a breakthrough.

Um Samir is rigid and largely unmoved, a side effect, perhaps, of her husband sitting next to her. She didn’t know what Ayat was planning, she insists, but her responses are political instead of personal.

“Should I resist occupation with a bouquet of roses?” she asks Avigail.

Some viewers might conceivably be more sympathetic to Um Samir’s point of view if it weren’t for a previous sequence of her husband cleaning his big Audi that calls into question the degree of their suffering in Dehaisheh.

Ultimately, the two women are unable to overcome the hurdle of conversation-via-television, the language barrier and their beliefs. This profound failure to find common ground is dispiriting, but not overly so, because the film did not encourage the viewer’s expectations.

Such is the frustration of real life. To Medalia’s credit, she recognizes that there is little sense, and no moral, to the wasteful and tragic deaths of two vibrant teenagers.

“To Die in Jerusalem” airs Thursday, Nov. 1 on HBO. The film will be rebroadcast Nov. 4 at 2 p.m., Nov. 6 at 8:30 a.m., Nov. 10 at 9:45 a.m., Nov. 14 at 12:15 p.m. and 8:30 p.m., and Nov. 26 at 7:30 p.m.

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