Lost in Translation: Film Misapplies MLK to Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

on July 15, 2014

Palestinians have a “modern-day civil rights movement” with a “very, very clear” relationship to America’s past civil rights struggle, African-American singers declare in the documentary Al Helm: Martin Luther King in Palestine. Yet critical examination of this film reveals how little applicability King and his righteous nonviolent struggle have to Israel’s ongoing conflict with its Arab neighbors.

The leftwing Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) screened Al Helm on June 29 at Washington, DC’s downtown Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library before an audience of about 30. The film documents an African-American and Palestinian coproduction of Stanford University Professor Clayborne Carson’s play Passages of Martin Luther King. Supported by the Department of State, the play toured Judea-Samaria/West Bank stages from March 22-April 5, 2011, for the purpose of furthering “dialogue and mutual understanding.”

In the coproduction, the African-American singers provide a Greek chorus with memorable civil rights melodies like Keep Your Eyes on the Prize. Palestinian actors present in Arabic scenes from King’s life such as his “I Have a Dream” speech. One portrayed police officer emphasized the play’s moral divide between civil rights defenders and repressive authorities with a military hat featuring a Nazi death’s head symbol. The play’s connotation that the Jewish state of Israel is oppressing Palestinians makes this anachronism extremely provocative.

Moral evaluations of the play’s participants become explicit offstage in the film. The Palestinian territories “evoked apartheid South Africa and Jim Crow America” for the singers, a reporter traveling with the group later wrote. Various Palestinians in the film seek to evoke American protests, such as the Stanford-educated Fadi Quran and five other “West Bank Freedom Riders” riding a Jerusalem-bound bus in violation of Israeli border security controls on November 15, 2011. By contrast, one of the American singers appears suggestive of Replacement Theology and its minimization of Jewish connections to Israel. Christians like her “have the New Testament as well” as the Old, and thus Jew and Gentiles “are all children of God” with no particular claim to Israel.

Play production, though, revealed differences between American and Palestinian outlooks, as both film and reporting revealed. The Palestinian cast under Palestinian National Theatre director Kamel Elbasha modified Carson’s play into a play about Americans and Palestinians rehearsing for Passages of Martin Luther King. Carson and the “American singers were fuming,” the reporter noted, that the “Palestinians had hijacked the play into a political statement about their own suffering and trivialized…the civil rights movement.”

The American Consul’s “face turned red,” Elbasha meanwhile reported to Palestinian media, during his scene of Palestinians refusing to have the American flag on stage. “I inserted a political statement against America with American money,” Elbasha boasted. The play’s “too Christian” character for majority-Muslim Palestinian audiences also prompted changes. “Muslims…were under-represented,” Carson’s likewise reported from his previous February 2010 visit with predominately Christian Palestinian proponents of nonviolence.

No such confessional problems faced Elbasha’s 2010 play Half a Bag of Bullets about Al-Qastal village near Jerusalem. Here “Zionist paramilitary forces defeated the mujaheddin” under the command of Abdel Qadir Al-Husayni in Israel’s 1948 independence war, noted a review. The nephew of Nazi-sympathizing Jerusalem Grand Mufti of Amin al-Husayni, Abdel Qadir led the Army of the Holy War (Jaysh al-Jihad al-Muqaddas) during the 1936–39 Arab revolt and in 1948. The review praises Elbasha’s “heart wrenching rendition of Al-Husayni’s” defeat and April 8, 1948, death along with the “gradual dispossession of Palestine.”

Elbasha’s dramatic shift from Al-Husayni to King reflects Carson’s own vacillating commitment to Palestinian nonviolence. “Every mass struggle yields elements of violence and elements of nonviolence,” Carson stated to an Al-Quds University audience in Jerusalem. “Nelson Mandela himself moved from one position to another.”

The Israeli radical Juliano Mer-Khamis of mixed Arab-Jewish, anti-Zionist Communist parentage also exemplifies in the film the interaction of violent and nonviolent elements among Palestinians. Mer-Khamis founded in 2006 Jenin’s Freedom Theatre, where Carson’s group performed, as a form of Palestinian “cultural resistance.” Mer-Khamis elaborated in an April 4, 2006, interview that his theater “is not…a replacement or an alternative to the resistance of the Palestinians…occupied by the Zionist movement” whether “in Jenin, or in Haifa.”

For Mer-Khamis, “joining the Palestinian intifada” means that the “strongest struggle today should be cultural, moral.” “We are not teaching the boys and the girls how to use arms or how to create explosives, but we expose them to discourse of liberation.” “We’re not good Christians. We are freedom fighters.”

Mer-Khamis simultaneously condemned the Palestinian Authority (PA) as the “second-head constructor of Israel.” This “middle class, bourgeois, corrupted authority,” controlled Palestinians “with the help of the CIA and Israeli intelligence.” Palestinians, though, “took back their own popular struggle for liberation” with Hamas’ January 2006 electoral victory, a “third Intifada.” “There’s not going to be a PA in two years. Hamas will take over.” Yet Hamas knows that the “vote of the Palestinian people was not to have more mosques…more hijab fabric” but a “political statement,” contrary to “American-Israeli propaganda.”

Mer-Khamis lived his words, accompanying his Freedom Theater cofounder Zacharia Zubeidi on patrols of the terrorist Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. Zubeidi went on to head Al Aqsa and kill at least six Israelis before accepting an Israeli amnesty. Two of Mer-Khamis’ former students also stole a jeep and killed four women at a bus station before being killed themselves as Palestine Islamic Jihad terrorists.

The 2004 film Arna’s Children about the educational work in Jenin of Mer-Khamis’ mother, meanwhile, expressed Arna Mer-Khamis’ “belief that music and theatre can show her students a way out of the occupation,” according to a Juliano biography. “In fact,” Arna was “raising the next intifada’s martyrs.” “Every time one of the shaheeds—the martyrs—appeared” during a Jenin football stadium screening of Arna’s Children before more than 3,000, “the audience roared, and members of the Al-Aqsa Brigades fired their guns into the air.”

Mer-Khamis and the Freedom Theatre formed a “bohemian oasis” in Jenin as he struggled against a “cultural-religious occupation” of Jenin’s conservative Islamic society as well as Israel with the backing of many New York radicals, including Jews. Freedom Theatre productions challenged Islamic taboos such as pigs, arranged marriages, homosexuality, and gender mixing with unveiled females while children at the theater learned about the Holocaust. Mer-Khamis also introduced theater workers to alcohol, hash, and radical foreigners behind closed doors.

In light of various threats, Mer-Khamis thus joked in a 2008 Israeli television interview available online and in Al Helm that a “f—-ed-up Palestinian’ would kill him for “corrupting the youth of Islam.” As depicted in Al Helm, a Palestinian man did indeed kill Mer-Khamis with five bullets fired as he sat in his car with his baby son on the lap on April 4, 2011, the anniversary of both his 2006 interview and King’s 1968 assassination. Few people in Jenin mourned the radical half-Jew Mer-Khamis and no one came forward to identify his killer, leaving open Muslim mores or Palestinian factional fighting and corruption as murder motives.

Such facts invalidate any specious application of King’s legacy to Palestinian conflict with Israel. The assertion that the “vast, vast majority of Palestinians are not involved in violence” by Washington, DC, JVP leader Shelley Cohen Fudge at the screening, for example, is highly suspect. King’s Christian message of loving enemies while nonviolently seeking reconciliation and justice, meanwhile, does not necessarily appeal to Muslim-majority Palestinians.

What goal, moreover, supplies Palestinians with a natural law justification for peacefully violating positive laws as demanded by King, a supporter of Israel’s security, in his 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail? Israel’s “occupation” decried by Cohen and others, after all, came into existence following the 1967 war as a response to all-too violent ongoing Arab aggression against Israel’s very existence. Under a “reversal of causality” the “results of Arab aggression are turned into the cause of Arab aggression,” Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer noted at a July 9 event. A scene in Al Helm also indicates that towns like Hebron, rather than being “occupied” by Jews today, had Jewish communities long before twentieth-century Arabs forced their expulsion. Israelis and Palestinians “need to work…out themselves” such complex conflict issues, Felicia Eaves from the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation cavalierly stated at the screening.

Yet church and synagogue audiences had been “extremely responsive” to films like Al Helm, a screening viewer enthusiastically reported to a pleased Eaves. The film’s singers were “staunchly in the Christian church” while the “African-American community is key” in maintaining American support for Israel, the African-American Eaves argued. Al Helm could thus play an important in promoting the anti-Israeli Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) advocated by the U.S. Campaign (JVP, Fudge distinguished, “only” supports BDS for the territories). “Great victories” had taken place recently in this respect at the Presbyterian Church, Eaves noted. Israel’s supporters should take note, for Al Helm’s not-so-peaceful message might be coming to their community soon.

  1. Comment by dromedician on August 1, 2014 at 4:03 am

    What are you doing for a just peace, Mr. Harrod? “If we are to have peace on earth, our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective.” So why are you just an Israel supporter? Why do you believe that such a nation should exist as an ethnic supremacy? All you do here is condemn the Palestinians while denying their experience of injustice. Compared to their vicious persecution in christian countries, jews were flourishing in arab lands before the arrival of European-style ethnic nationalism.

    You mention Hebron’s history. Have you been there recently, to see how settlers, protected by soldiers, spit and dump their trash on the streets where Palestinians walk in between?
    Commit yourself to both sides and all peoples and don’t try to wash over your people’s history of white supremacism by asserting some judeo-christian “civilized” consensus vs. muslim “barbarism.” That is merely the latest transformation of white chauvinism, with Israel as its extension.

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