The establishment of the state
of Israel in 1948, being in the wake of the Nazi atrocities, was arguably viewed
generally then as something that the world owed to the Jewish people. Perhaps
for this reason, the UN did not take adequate measures on the ground to
safeguard the Palestinian residents. In retrospect, the possibility, even likelihood,
that people who group-identify with (or even as) victims consciously decide
to become victimizers should have been better considered. The film, Farha,
made in 2021, illustrates the sheer indeterminacy, and thus arbitrariness, of
human volition when it issues orders to the body to be violent against other
rational beings. Channeling Kant, it can be argued that the decision to shoot a
family that poses absolutely no threat impurely out of hatred based on group-identity
fails even to treat other rational beings as means—to say nothing of as ends
in themselves. The unadulterated deplorability in being unwilling even to
use another person as a means to some selfish goal, preferring instead to kill rather
than respect the otherness of another person, grounds the verdict of the culprit
being less than nothing. In another film, The Brutalist (2024), Laszio, the
Jewish protagonist, erroneously concludes that Jews must surely be less than
nothing, given how they were treated not only in Nazi Germany, but also in
Pennsylvania even after the news of the Holocaust had reached the other shore. Whether
brutality or passive-aggressive prejudice is suffered, however, turning one’s
victimhood into victimizing is ethically invalid, for such a callous
reaction fails to treat other rational beings as ends in themselves, and may
even be so severe as to fail to treat them even as means.
Near the beginning of Farha,
an Islamic teacher of girls looks on approvingly as one of the girls reads that
the words of an unbeliever are the lowest. I submit that this line sets the
tone for the film, and underlies how the Israelis and Palestinians have treated
each other as groups historically, and most egregiously in how the
Israeli government killed and decimated in Gaza in 2023-2024, interestingly
just after Farha had been made. The unprovoked willfulness, or volition,
that the film depicts of an Israeli commander deciding to have two of his
subordinates shoot an unarmed Palestinian family and leave the just-born infant
to die because a Palestinian baby is not “worth a bullet,” can be interpreted
as the prima causa that, aggregated, lead to Hamas’ attack on October 7,
2023, which in turn led to the disproportionate Israeli decimation of
Gaza, with as many as 55,000 killed and over a million residents rendered homeless
and suffering a famine. In other words, the pivotal incident of the film can be
heard has the proverbial first shot. As it was not heard around the world, the
filmmaker of Farha performed that service for the world.
Myopia circling self-identification
based on groups perpetuates cycles of hatred and violence. In Farha, the
Islamic teacher objects to Farha’s father, who decides to allow his daughter to
attend school in the city. She already knows the Koran, the teacher says. “What
else is there to learn?” Closing the loop, as it were, can lock in antagonism
based on group-identity, for the Koran not only states that the words of the
unbeliever are lowest, but also that if a nonbeliever living in the same
village refuses thrice to convert, it is better that that person be killed than
risk that one’s false beliefs pollute the believers. I read this line while I
was spending a Spring Break at Yale reading the Koran for a term paper. In
Christianity, the Apostle Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 6:14-18 that Christians
should avoid close contact with people who do not believe that Jesus Christ is
the Son of God. To be sure, merely avoiding contact is ethically superior to
killing, but an Islamicist could point ironically to the story of Abraham as
teaching that divine commands (and thus revelation) trump even
universally-accessible moral principles.[1]
In Farha, the Israeli
group-commander is not following a divine command when he uses his free will to
give the order to shoot the Palestinian family; he is thus culpable. He even knowingly
breaks the promise he made to Farha’s uncle, who was anonymously helping the
Israeli commander, that women and children would not be harmed. Even though the
commander’s group-identification-saturated paradigm backs up his volition, he is
blameworthy as an individual, for his volition is his alone and so, as
the Americans say of the U.S. President, the buck stops with him.
Coming away from the film, a
viewer might wonder why it is that the village had to be evacuated immediately.
The loud-speakers repeatedly threaten that any (Palestinian) villagers who do
not leave the village immediately will be shot. Why such a hurry? Ironically, the Israeli military could cite
Paul’s no-contact dictum; the possibility of sharing the village is
never brought up in the film. The dire urgency is undercut visually in the last
scene, as Farha sits on a swing next to that which her friend had sat—that other
swing is now broken. The village is deserted—no Israelis have moved in. Flies
swarm the dead baby in the courtyard—the corps not having been worth even a
bullet.
Is it such an Augustinian, Hobbesian, Pascalian, and Machiavellian world that peace is only possible once all humans have been removed from the equation? For only finally, at the end of the film, is the village at peace; Farha walks away in silence and no one is left. She leaves the village in desolate peace. If the Age of Reason did indeed fall to the Holocaust and Gott ist tot as Nietzsche claimed, such that all we have left is human subjectivity, as the decimated philosophical phenomenologists of the decadent twentieth-century erroneously concluded, how will humanity pull itself together, especially if group-identification is permitted to continue to have such staying power in human consciousness? Until her world was needlessly turned upside down, Farha just wanted to be a teacher; she wanted to break through constrained knowledge and help others to do so too. She ends up just trying to survive long enough in a small pantry-room to escape the arbitrariness of an antagonistic human will. Perhaps a little Buddhism might be helpful in dissolving the grip of group-identification; a group’s name can be understood as just a label, rather than as corresponding to an actual group-self, which does not really exist. In other words, “Israeli” and “Palestinian” may be interpreted as labels in a nominal rather than a realist way in terms of whether anything existent corresponds.
1. See Soren Kierkegaard’s book, Fear and Trembling, on this point: namely, the divine command to sacrifice Isaac trumps the ethical charge of murder even though only Abraham knows of the command whereas the ethical principle not to murder is accessible to anyone.
