Sleeping With the Enemy? Review of “”Would You Have Sex With an Arab?

By Clara Abdulaziz,http://ta3beer.blogspot.com, April, 19

“One in five Israelis is an Arab, but it is difficult to find places where they touch fingertips.”

In her latest feature-length documentary, French filmmaker Yolande Zauberman ventures out into the nightlife of Tel Aviv and asks the people she meets a deceptively simple question: “Would you have sex with an Arab?” It is clear that sex serves merely as a proxy to grapple with a much larger question: can individuals transcend identities rooted in long histories of conflict, or is identity so rigidly constructed that it in fact defines one’s humanity?

Zauberman has said that she produced the film to “give space for awareness.” It is meant to be “a little bit sexy, a little bit funny.”

It is also, quite frankly, pretty depressing.

Zauberman’s choice of Tel Aviv for her film was not arbitrary. It is famous for its non-stop club scene, and is one of the most LGBT and queer-friendly cities in the world. She shows that even here, where most young residents seem more concerned with partying than religion and politics, the boundaries of Jewish and Arab identity remain stubbornly situated within the larger Arab-Israeli conflict.

The Question proves to be an interesting icebreaker to get (often intoxicated) club-kids and bar flies to discuss Israel’s Big Issues. Most interviewed are caught off guard; many Israelis had never even considered romance with an Arab. A pretty blonde with a nose ring admits that most of her friends don’t even want to see Palestinian men in the clubs where they go dancing, and compares their exclusion to apartheid. She calls her fellow Israelis “hypocrites” for perpetuating systematic discrimination against Arabs, but acknowledges that her own parents would be horrified if she brought home a Palestinian man.

“I’ve never looked at them that way… [being Arab] is a turn off,” says a slim brunette in a dark nightclub. She then seems embarrassed and backtracks. “If I didn’t know that he was Palestinian, maybe I wouldn’t have a problem… What is wrong with me, I don’t know.”

It is impossible to not to recall the highly publicized case where an Arab man was convicted of “rape by deception” for lying to a Jewish Israeli woman about his ethnicity to get her into bed.

It was also shocking to hear a middle-aged Jewish man’s assertion that the Israeli occupation has had “no rapes” because the degree of “dehumanization is so deep that Israeli soldiers won’t touch a Palestinian woman — she’s hardly a human being.” Or to realize that because of Israel’s mandatory military conscription, most Arab women cannot divorce sexual encounter from the violence of the occupation.

Zauberman does discover those places where Jewish, Israeli, and Arab identity hybridize and become fluid. She finds Arab Jews, Hebrew-speaking Arabs, Jews who have loved Arabs, Arabs who have loved Jews, and children of intermarriage whose very existences challenge rigidly defined social categorizations. But almost all of them describe very painful and sad experiences. Their lives become “impossible” in the face of larger social and political structures.

Zauberman’s documentary is dedicated to her close friend Juliano Mer-Khamis, an Arab-Israeli actor, director and political activist featured in the film who was murdered in front of his ‘Theater of Freedom’ in the refugee camp of Jenin on April 4, 2011.

When asked to comment on this line of inquiry, Mer-Khamis retorts: “[You can’t] solve the Palestinian problem in bed… It’s not about misunderstandings… We understand very well the intentions of Israeli policy. The system is not dealing with the emotional side… It’s fascism… People, governments, economies, control… There’s no possibility of love… No love will overcome that.”

Mer-Khamis’s impassioned response to Zauberman’s question, taken alongside the film’s other interviews, does indeed reveal the nonsense of Israel’s identity politics. However, Zauberman’s choice to end the film by reflecting on her friend’s tragic and untimely death serves as a sad reminder of society’s impotence to transcend it.

Clara Abdulaziz is an Arab-American and is currently a graduate student at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS) at Georgetown University. Her partner is an Israeli-born American Jew. Their families probably don’t want to think about them having sex, but are generally supportive of the relationship.