Jerusalem’s High Cost of Living

By Hazim Bitar, ALIF Productions, 2001, video. List: $29.95; AET: $25.

Reviewed by Hugh S. Galford

Given the current state of affairs in Palestine, it is easy to forget how the situation began. In “Jerusalem’s High Cost of Living,” Hazim Bitar presents us with a damning, horrifying, often gut-wrenching reminder.

Bitar, who produced the video “Uncivil Liberties,” flew to Jerusalem in September 2000. While the primary purpose of his visit was to meet and dialogue with young Israelis from West Jerusalem about the peace process, his trip was also a homecoming. His family, Jerusalemite publishers, was forced to flee the city in 1948 and 1967. The film opens with a discussion of the upheavals created by these two wars and the exile experienced by his grandparents’ generation.

Despite the changes promised by Oslo, Bitar’s Jerusalem roots didn’t mean much to the Israelis. After a security check, he was issued a three-month visa. At the same time, he notes, any Jew from abroad instantly would be given the right to live in Jerusalem. The city’s spiritual importance for its exiled inhabitants is immediately clear in Bitar’s loving and eloquent depiction. Jerusalem, he says, is “the city where, in the name of God, ungodly deeds have been committed. Title deeds are claimed to have been written by Prophets—and signed in blood.” This is, he notes, the city of Jacob, of Jesus, and of Muhammad; the monuments constructed by their followers provide a breathtaking panorama of the Holy City.

They also serve as a visual foil to the soul-less, white concrete monstrosities called settlements that surround Jerusalem, covering and obliterating the city’s topographical self. Anyone who envisions Israeli settlements as lone huts on an open prairie will be in for the shock of their lives to see instead these sprawling, mountain-sized mini-cities.

Beyond the stone and concrete of the physical city, Bitar also focuses on the city’s living stones, its inhabitants. Despite its spiritual importance, Bitar shows Jerusalem to be a real city as well—its streets crowded with shoppers, its stores selling an abundance of goods, and its faithful performing their duties.

The Arab-Israeli conflict is a purely 20th-century creation; the European persecution of Jews has no counterpart in the Arab or Muslim world. Despite the difficulties facing peace, Bitar insists “where there is a will, there should be a way—but only if there is a will.”

The existence of such a will is brought into serious doubt by his interviews with young Israeli Jews. All in their late teens to mid-twenties, these young people are the individuals on whom any peace agreement will depend.

Bitar interviews five young Israelis, three men and two women. Their parents (and possibly they themselves, judging by their accents) were born abroad: two are American, one Russian, one Polish and one South African. None of these young people sees any chance for peace; only the Pole actually says that he is for peace. The Muscovite says, “Let them live in the Gaza Strip, in Jericho, but I don’t want them,” pointing to his skull, “here on my mind.”

When Bitar asks the South African if she is for peace, she replies, “No, not with Arabs.” When pressed why, her friend—an American talking into a cell phone—replies, “Because they’re animals. Forget it.” Without missing a beat, she turns back to her phone conversation.

According to the Muscovite, the Arabs are “primitive people—Bedouin in the desert who don’t know shit about nothing”—as opposed to people in Europe who “deal with high-tech stuff.” Bitar asks the three men if they think that’s cultural or genetic; the Muscovite answers, “A bit of both.” The American man, however, says, “Genetic.” Arabs, according to these young Israelis, “have some brains, but sometimes the brain doesn’t develop.”

“If you have happiness, you have everything,” says the South African. When asked how one gets happiness, her simple reply is, “Without Arabs.” When Bitar asks the three men what they would do to fix the situation, the American—brandishing a handgun that he admits would get him arrested if officials saw him with it—answers, smiling, “Shoot the bastards.”

The hostility, ignorance and blatant racism of these young Israelis’ views are the film’s most chilling point. They show no knowledge of history, no sense of empathy, no personal contact with Palestinians. These Israelis’ answers are delivered in a gleeful, almost light-hearted way—they’re superior and they know it. Why change?

Change, however, occurred faster than anyone could imagine. The film’s subtitle is “The story of the first days of the Palestinian Jerusalem Uprising of September 2000.” Bitar shows news footage of MK Ariel Sharon’s Sept. 28, 2000 visit to al-Haram al-Sharif. In the aftermath of Sharon’s visit, Bitar tells us, no one is allowed in or out of Jerusalem. As Bitar wanders the Old City, he sees soldiers everywhere, but no signs of the reported clashes. His sense of relief is betrayed, though, by people on cell phones talking about shooting at the Makassed Hospital.

Makassad is located in a residential area. From a distance, Bitar films the Israeli troops, behind barricades, firing into the crowd. Looking for victims, he says, he finds them—often just yards away. A Palestinian ambulance driver offers to take Bitar closer to the lines, but even before he gets in, an Israeli bullet shatters the ambulance’s rear window. Nearer the front, he has to proceed on foot. Wondering what could have brought out such a massive Israeli response, he finds a couple of Palestinian teenagers throwing rocks from behind a dumpster.

The clashes continue throughout the afternoon. In the evening, the hospital quickly fills with families looking for loved ones. The casualty list—which, when Bitar arrived, ran to a hand-written, double-columned, double-sided sheet of A4 paper—quickly becomes known as “Sharon’s List.” Every hour, hospital officials update the list. By early evening, 150 are injured, five are dead.

Bitar focuses his time in the hospital on three or four individual cases. His footage is not for the squeamish. Azzam Abdeen was shot in the face with a rubber-coated steel bullet—which penetrated to a depth of four centimeters—and in the groin with a live bullet. Haitham Oweidah, who was praying in the Haram, was shot in the head. The rubber bullet passed through his skull and brain. He is officially brain-dead, but his heart is still beating. Leaving the hospital, Oweidah’s sister calls out, “God save us from America! God save us from Israel!”

The case which receives the most attention is that of Osama Jaddah, 23, an African-Palestinian who had gone to Makassed mid-afternoon to donate blood. On the way, he was shot in the chest, and became a victim himself. His family and friends have gathered at the hospital, waiting for news of the operation to remove the bullet. Bitar remains with the growing crowd as the hours slowly pass. The tension is unbearable, even for viewers, and the outflow of grief is overwhelming when someone—long after the fact—tells Osama’s mother that her son is dead.

Many Palestinians, Bitar says, feel that their suffering is due to U.S. opposition to providing an international protection force to the Palestinians, as it had in Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor. The Palestinians also know that Israeli soldiers use U.S.-made weapons. The footage from the hospital shows, leaving no room for doubt, that the Israelis were aiming for the head and upper body: to kill, not to incapacitate. It also presents brutally vivid evidence against the lie that “rubber bullets” are somehow less deadly than live ammunition.

In the aftermath of the first day’s violence, funerals, further clashes and the beginnings of a siege occurred. The Palestinian Jerusalemite community also showed its intense solidarity. Bitar films a press conference given by Fr. Attallah Hanna, of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, who says, “We declare: if Sharon attempts to visit the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, we will slam the gates before him, because an attack on a Muslim holy site is an attack on all of us. In Jerusalem, we are one family and one people. We must defend our holy sites as one Arab Palestinian family, Muslim and Christian, in Jerusalem.”

In the days after Sharon’s visit, the normally bustling streets of the Old City were deserted. Stores were closed, their metal gates shut and locked. A week later, Bitar traveled those still streets to visit the Jaddah family home to talk with Osama’s mother. Within the quiet house, Bitar finds her in the reception room, stoic and lost.

It is here that the horrible price paid by tens of thousands of Palestinian families in the last 50 years is displayed. Osama isn’t some statistic; he was a mother’s son. Asked to describe him, his mother, Wafa, replies, “My son was so compassionate—I could write pages about my son.”

Wafa tells us her son was energetic and helpful, always aiding his friends or anyone in need. We are told that he loved children, and that the night before he died he had had a dream about taking his own children on picnics.

Asked what she would like to say to Jewish mothers, Wafa is silent for a moment and then says, “What can I say…? They should look…at this waste of young lives and at the tormented mothers….They should stand by us. They should stop the massacres, stop this hurt. Haven’t they ever known a mother who lost a child? Can’t they feel for us?”

Her message to all other mothers is simple: “To stand by us. To speak out. To ask their indifferent governments to help us. What can I do?…Pray that no mother ever suffers this agony.” The interview ends as Wafa sinks back into silence.

Bitar tells us that he had tried to set realistic goals for the film before setting out. By his own admission, he seriously underestimated how bad things could get, and how quickly the situation could deteriorate. It was not, he says, the Jerusalem to which he had hoped to return. Following Sharon’s incursion, hopes for peace grew dimmer by the day; Bitar says he had expected the violence to diminish within a couple of days.

We now know how ill-founded this expectation was. Five dead has grown to 1,371; 150 injured to 18,790. Sharon’s visit to al-Aqsa has brought the Basilica of the Nativity under fire. The pace of events since March 31 focused our attention on the present. Bitar’s video reminds us of the political background to the 2000 intifada (Sharon’s Barak-blessed trip to al-Aqsa), Israel’s social context (young men and women as self-absorbed as any Gen-Xer), and of the dashed hopes for peace within the Palestinian community. It also serves to remind us that the conflict is not Arab vs. Jew, or East vs. West, but Israeli vs. Palestinian—be they Palestinian Muslims or Christians.

If you know what’s going on in Palestine, buy this video to add to your collection—and to share with friends. If you want to know why today’s violence is occurring, buy this video to learn. “Jerusalem’s High Cost of Living” is one of the few—if only—first-hand accounts available of those initial days, and the context it provides is invaluable.

There are some questions, however, it cannot answer. Walking Jerusalem’s streets, Bitar tells us, “I often pass Israeli soldiers. I hope to see in their eyes the reason for the killings. What goes through the minds of these Israelis? Are they simply willing executioners?”

Hugh S. Galford is the director of the AET Book Club. [In the interest of full disclosure: Galford’s name is listed among the film’s credits as a result of a small financial contribution he made to help pay for some of the file footage. He played no role in the film’s production, and receives nothing from its sales.]