Return
to Haifa (1982) is a film in which the political element of
international relations is translated into personal terms on the levels of
family and individual people. The establishment of Israel by the UN is depicted
in the film as being accomplished not only incompetently, but in negligence of
likely human suffering. In fact, the suffering of the indigenous population may
have been intended, given the operative attitude towards those people as animals.
That the human being can be so dehumanizing in action as well as belief ultimately
makes victims of all of us, even across artificial divides. This is precisely
what the film depicts, with the victims being the active characters while the real
culprits remain for the most part off-camera. The viewer is left with a sense
of futility that can be undone by widening one’s view to include the antagonists,
who are not passive. It is not as if fate inexorably brought about the Nakba
(or even the scale of the atrocities in Gaza in the next century, which, as the
film was made in 1982, cannot be said to be anticipated by the filmmaker—though
perhaps it could have been).
In the film, Saeed and
Safiyya, a Palestianian couple expelled from Haifa in the Nakba that took place
in 1948, return in 1967 to what had been their house in Haifa. Recognizing that
furniture does not make a home, Saeed and Safiyya are particularly interested
in whether their now-grown son, Khaldun, whom they abandoned when they fled
from their house in the Nakba, would now want to live with them in the occupied
territory or remain with Miriam, the Israeli who lives in the house and adopted
Khaldun. To the twenty-year-old Khadun, whom Miriam had named Dov, Saeed and
Safiyya are strangers. All of them are victims.
That Miriam had survived the
Holocaust and is empathetic to the Palestinian couple having lost their house
keeps her from being the film’s antagonist. That, in a flashback, she criticizes
the Israeli soldiers for throwing a dead Palestinian boy like a piece of wood into
a truck during the Nakba also goes to her character, especially given that, in
a flashback further back, she witnesses Nazi troops shooting her own son. Moreover,
not only is it inappropriate to blame her for leaving Europe to live in the
Jewish state after the Holocaust and even for moving into the empty house in 1948,
she is worthy of praise for adopting an infant and raising him. To be sure, she
is blameworthy for having lied for years to Dov about the circumstances of his
infancy, and Saeed rightly makes this point. Even so, Saeed, Safiyya, and
Miriam, and even Khadun/Dov, share the experience of victimhood even if the son
is not aware of his own and he lacks empathy for his birth parents, who had
lost not only their house, but their son too. In fact, he blames them for
having abandoned him in the house when they (and everyone else in the town) was
fleeing gun-fire without notice. Lest it be thought that he, or even Nazi
Germany is the prime antagonist, I submit that squalid role goes to the nascent
state of Israel, with the UN as the negligent accomplice.
With home, belong,
and return arguably being the three concepts that underlie the film’s
narrative, the thesis can be described in the following terms: Macro-political decisions
and resulting societal-level events have social and psychological impacts that
are destructive and even ruinous to individuals and families. The film’s thesis
resonates with Israel’s disproportionate reprisals against Palestinians in Gaza—rendering
over a million homeless and short of food for months on end as of early 2025,
when I saw the film. It is one thing to read that 55,000 Gaza residents were dead
or missing and to look at photographs of the demolition of cities in the occupied
enclave, and quite another to be there and see the horrendous impact on individuals
there. Put another way, it is one thing to read of Israel’s president claiming
that every resident of Gaza was guilty (and thus deserved to suffer) after
Hamas’ foray into Israel proper in October of 2023, and quite another to comprehend
the scale of the subsequent devastation in Gaza. Upon assuming office in 2025,
U.S. President Trump characterized Gaza as a demolition zone. Relative to that,
the Nakba that is portrayed in the film can be regarded as tame.
In the film, Saeed and Safiyya
arrive by ship with other European Jews in 1948. In spite of having suffered
atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis, the human beings arriving in the new state
of Israel felt empathy for strangers. “All we know,” one migrant says, “is that
we are going to homes owned by others.” Not even having suffered in Nazi Germany
gives those new arrivals any presumption. I submit that this attitude is in
start contrast to Israel in how it needlessly aggressively managed the Nakba in
1948. Even the UN, which left it to the Israelis to uproot the indigenous residents,
can be blamed, especially considering the reference in the film to the Israeli
attitude in which Palestinians are regarded as though animals to serve the
Jews. From such an utterly dehumanizing attitude, not only the Nakba, but also
the huge atrocities in Nazi Germany, almost a century later, in Gaza, are all
to easy for the aggressors to justify to themselves. Furthermore, if indeed the
attitude was held by the new government of Israel in 1948 and its military, the
UN can be reasonably judged as woefully negligent in failing to supervise on
the ground the transfer of land in the process of the creation of the state.
Such a momentous political decision as creating a state in a territory which is already populated and the indigenous population has not consented has the potential for abuse against families and individuals, as the results of the Milgram and Stanford psychological experiments confirm; humans given power have an excessive inclination to harm others. This fact is hardly limited to the Nazi and Israeli governments, and international governmental infrastructure should be up to the task of being able to safeguard our questionable species from its own nature. Return to Haifa can be viewed as making the point through narrative that people across divides can all be regarded as victims from political decisions being taken without considering the possibility (or probability) that one group might view another as consisting of service animals rather than as other human beings, who having a rational nature (Kant) and sentiments (Shaftsbury), are worthy of being treated as not merely means, but also ends in themselves.
