Veiling and Unveiling the Israeli Mediterranean: Yulie Cohen-Gerstel’s My Terrorist and My Land Zion

Abstract

Although the Mediterranean, as a geopolitical entity and as an ideological concept, has rested on a historical process of absorbing, hybridizing, and assimilating different people from diverse ethnic, religious, and national groups, its hegemonic culture imagines, views, and represents itself as the origin and cradle of “Western Civilization” at the expense of excluding its rich and diverse Arab, Muslim, Jewish, Levantine, African, and Semitic cultures.¹ This article explores and reassesses how a particular example of women’s cinema produced in Israel, one of the so called Mediterranean countries, both veils and unveils the exclusionist practices of “Europeanization” and “Judaization” by struggling to give a voice and an image to repressed nationalities and cultures. In this article, I argue that Israel’s struggle to construct a “Mediterranean identity” epitomizes the contradictions endemic to the country’s formation of a national identity and is intimately linked to its continuing conflict with the Arab world in general and the Palestinians in particular. I analyze these contradictions by closely studying two documentary films, My Terrorist (Yulie Cohen-Gerstel, Israel, 2002) and My Land Zion (Yulie Cohen-Gerstel, Israel, 2004), both made by a politically engaged female Israeli director. Using the device of a personal/subjective journey, these films articulate the process of forming an identity by reflecting, projecting, and constructing debates around Israeli national identity. In particular the films focus around three major foundational sites of struggle over Israeli identity: the Holocaust versus the Nakba,² the Orient, and the so-called (in an ironic historical twist of the “Jewish Question”) Palestinian Question.