From Ground Zero: Stories from Gaza

The uniqueness of the film, From Ground Zero: Stories from Gaza (2024), goes well beyond it being a documentary that includes an animated short made by children and a puppet show. Footage of a Palestinian being pulled from the rubble twice—one with the head of his dead friend very close to him and the other with his account that he could see body parts of his parents near him—is nothing short of chilling. Perhaps less so, yet equally stunning, are the close-ups of the legs and arms of children on which their respective parents had written the names so the bodies could be identified after a bombing. That the kids had dreams in which they erased the black ink from their skin because they refused to fathom the eventuality of having to be identified is chilling in a way that goes beyond that which film can show visually. Moving pictures can indeed go beyond the visual in what film is capable of representing and communicating to an audience. The same can be said regarding the potential of film to bring issues not only in ethics, but also in political theory and theology to a mass audience.

The movie is a collection of 22 short films made in Gaza by 22 filmmakers there who wanted to inform the world of the atrocities being committed there by the Israeli government. Interestingly, in none of the short stories is Israel mentioned by name. Only once is there a mention of “the occupier.” This may point to the depth of the hatred once the infliction of suffering and even death has reached a threshold of sorts. In the short story, “Out of Frame,” a woman says, “There is no longer a possibility of peace.” Not even a possibility. This may mean that a significant number of Gaza residents would rather die than make peace with Israel. This could also mean that in over-reacting in punishing a collective so much, rather than just the individuals who had taken hostages on October 7, 2023, the Israeli Netanyahu misjudged out of hatred and thus unwittingly triggered much more hatred against Israel. The prime minister obviously had not consulted with the European philosopher, John Locke, who had written that one rationale for government is that victims cannot be trusted to use fair judgment in acting as judge and jury in sentencing the victimizers.  Indeed, the descendants of victims of another century can themselves become victimizers, and the cycle can indeed intensify rather than dissipate, even for seven generations.

Two other ways in which ethics, political theory and theology can be discerned in the film also relate the two domains. In the short story, “No Signal”—this title itself resonating with the filmmakers’ intent to inform the world of what was really going on in Gaza—someone says that “martyrs” were being dug out of a collapsed building nearby. Throughout the 22 stories in the film, the dead are repeatedly referred to as martyrs. The sheer consistency may mean that the residents of Gaza were viewing the atrocity as being committed by Jews against Muslims, rather than as a secular political conflict between an occupier and the occupied. Mirroring the helplessness of a subjugated people not allowed to have weapons even to defend themselves from rogue (or organized) military commanders, the film reveals a sense of fatalism among all the fatalities. In the story, “Echo,” a woman on a phone says in the midst of bombing, “Get in a house; any house!” The other person replies, “God will protect us.” Well, obviously that was not true, considering the number of fatalities, so the insistence itself may reveal a sense of utter helplessness. Ironically, in his book on the human need for meaning, Victor Frankl provided as support the search for meaning by Jews in Nazi concentration camps in the mid-20^th century. So in the film’s short story, “24 Hours,” the man who had been dug out of debris three times, and had been stuck for hours near the dead bodies of a friend and his parents, could only say, as if in utter futility, “It’s God’s will.” The filmmaker could have gone further on that point—thus showing the potential of film to stimulate viewers to think theologically without being indoctrinated—by bringing in the obvious question of theodicy: how is it that a benevolent deity allows the innocent to suffer? A friend of the man could have said, “If it is Allah’s will, then how could it be said that Allah protects us from evil?” Contrary to the claim made by Israel’s president, I am assuming that not every resident of Gaza was culpable in the October incursion into Israel proper to kill Israelis and take hundreds of hostages. The intent of the filmmakers to show the world the physical and mental suffering being inflicted by the Israeli military for more than a year renders the theological question especially salient, especially as the recurrent use of the word “martyr” evinces a distinctly religious interpretation by a significant number of the residents of Gaza (though perhaps not all of them, as glossing over an entire collective is often contrived and thus artificial).

The psychological toll itself begs the theological question. In the first short story, a Gazan refugee in a camp near Egypt has a sense that her life is over. Her father had been killed by the Israelis in 2014, and more recently her sister’s entire family was killed in a bombing. In the short story, “Sorry, Cinema,” a filmmaker who was barred from leaving Gaza to receive a film award at a festival says, “Time has become my enemy.” In “Flashback,” a young woman says she keeps a bag packed because she might have to leave her house at a moment’s notice. “My mind stops because of the drones,” she says. In “The Teacher,” a man waits for his phone to be recharged but there are no unused sockets, water has just run out when he is next in line for it, and the same occurs when he is in line to get food. In “Overburdened,” a woman admits, “I am very surprised that we survived” walking north to get out of Gaza. In “Hell’s Heaven,” a man sleeps in a body bag that he took from a morgue because he has no blanket and it is cold in his tent at night. “Nothing remains of this city except the sea,” he laments. In “Offerings,” a writer says of infliction of suffering and death, there is “no recognition of human beings.” This resonates with statements in the media by Israelis referring to the Palestinians as dogs. Such dehumanizing sentiment had ironically been inflicted on the Jews in Nazi Germany. In fact, in the short story, “Fragments,” one of the charcoal drawings could be assumed to be of Nazi concentration-camp survivors being liberated. The psychological toll and the natural reaction of intense hatred may go beyond the comprehension even of psychologists.

The physical, psychological and even spiritual toll being inflicted by human beings on other human beings could bring victims to question whether God exists as a personal being rather than there being what in Hinduism is called brahman, which is impersonal ultimacy as conscious infinite being. In terms of political theory, both the human toll and the extent of bombed, collapsed buildings shown throughout the film may mean that the residents of Gaza were living in something akin to Hobbes’ state of nature, in which life is short and brutish. This state, however, pertains to the relation between Israel and Gaza, rather than between the residents of Gaza, as a sense of solidarity among them is evinced throughout the film. For example, the bread-lines filmed were orderly; people were not fighting each other for food.

In spite of Jeremy Bentham having written that the notion of natural rights (i.e., in a state of nature) is ridiculous, and Hobbes’ social-contract theory being short an explanation for why people in a state of nature would feel obliged to enter into a social contract instituting a government before it is up and running, the scenes of order documented by the film even though the people in line may be close to starvation may point to the natural fellow-feeling of which humans are capable even when a police presence is lacking, though the threat of an onslaught of Israeli troops may be a sufficient motivator to keep the peace while standing in line for food, water, and medical care. The filmmakers could have explored the peaceful atmosphere in the cities in Gaza—whether it was due to a shared sense of camaraderie from having lost martyrs, and thus a shared “brotherhood” as Muslims, a psychological or religious sense of futility and even numbness, or a fear that disorder would incite even more ruthlessness from interlarding Israeli soldiers. The question of whether Gaza resembled the Hobbesian state of nature could also have been explicitly asked and explained without viewers being lost in the midst of philosophical jargon and a de facto mini-lecture.

 

Conscience

Volodymyr Denyssenko’s film, Conscience (1968), is set in a small Ukrainian village under Nazi occupation during World War II. Vasyl, a Ukrainian man, kills a German soldier, and the chief German stationed there gives the villagers an ultimatum: Turn in the culprit or the entire village will be liquidated; all of the villagers will be executed. The film is all about this ethical dilemma. According to Jeremy Bentham’s ethic of utilitarianism, the greatest good for the greatest number should prevail; any villager would be ethically justified in bringing Vasyl to the Germans to be executed so that the villagers can be spared. The ongoing pleasure of 100 people outweighs the ongoing pleasure of one person. But the film doesn’t follow this logic, and can thus be looked at as a critique of Bentham’s ethical theory. This is not to say that deontology, operating as an ethical constraint on utilitarianism, is entirely without risk. If I have just lost you, my dear liebe reader, consider this: Going beyond ethical constraints on an otherwise ethical theory, what if, as in the film, a political (or religious) cause is allowed to upend ethical considerations altogether, or at least to eclipse them?  I contend that the villagers do this in the film, for they sacrifice themselves as a matter of conscience to protect a murderer because they value his political cause, which is resistance to the Nazi occupation. At what cost? If in relegating the ethical level our species opens the floodgates to committing atrocities by good intentions, what might people like the Nazi occupiers in the film do without a conscience and external ethical constraints?

In the film, the villagers maintain their silence, but it is clear that they do not view Vasyl as a culprit, and thus as a murderer whom should be turned in. As a partisan fighting the Nazis, the violence that he commits is justified because the totalitarian control by the Nazi chief is so oppressive in the daily lives of the villagers. In a similar film, The Bride and the Curfew (1978), which is an Albanian film about a partisan woman whom the Nazis attempt to find because she has killed an Albanian collaborator and drawn chalk figures of resistance on buildings, the villagers do not view the protagonist as a murderer, for she has dedicated her life to a higher cause. At one point, she says that her life no longer belongs to her, for it serves the ideal of freedom, as in freeing Albania from the Nazi occupation. Several Albanians help her to escape, which she does. Unsatisfied with the original ending of the woman in a horse carriage being chased by a Nazi in a car, an Albanian Communist Party official had the ending changed so the Albanians in the carriage gun down the Nazis in the car, mob-style. It is not enough that the woman is being chased because she committed a murder; we the audience must see her as victorious. Beyond the need for closure, the Albanian official at least needed to see the immediate victory of the political cause.

In Conscience, Vasyl is not so lucky, though the villagers do more than the Albanian villagers do in The Bride and the Curfew for the Ukrainian villagers know that their own lives are on the line. Although there’s no reason to suppose that they have studied the 18^th century Bentham or his theory, the notion of the benefit of the villagers as a whole surviving outweighs that of one of them is clear to them. At one point, a woman tells Vasyl that a hundred souls will be lost because of his refusal to turn himself in, but she will not turn him in even though she is saying that a hundred lives are worth more than one. She, and the rest of the villagers, support the partisan cause against the Germans.

Finally, Vasyl does turn himself in, but the Nazi commander thinks Vasyl is lying and repeatedly slaps him. The commander has the villagers rounded up and shot and then he himself shoots Vasyl and the compliant Ukrainian woman who has been acting as his translator. So Vasyl can be read as finally concurring with Bentham’s ethical theory in being willing to sacrifice his life to save those of so many more. Is it the case, however, that Bentham’s calculus should have the final say when heroism is entered into the equation? The villagers are willing to keep silent. They go to their mass grave without having turned in the partisan murderer, but like Abraham in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, where a divine decree to sacrifice Isaac trumps the immorality of murder, the villagers put the partisan (i.e., resistance) cause above Vasyl being a murderer and thus a criminal to be legitimately turned in. The villagers feel an ethical duty to protect him even if doing so costs them their own lives.

In terms of philosophy, the villagers are deontologists because they recognize a constraint on Bentham’s “greatest pleasure for the greatest number” ethic. In terms of Kierkegaard, the villagers recognize a value about the ethic against murder. Whereas for Abraham, God trumps the realm of morality, the villagers recognize a political cause as suspending the ethical realm such that it is ethical to let a murderer get away with his crime, and, moreover, to violate Bentham’s ethical theory of utilitarianism. A political cause and a religious cause can each, if valued sufficiently, relativize or even vacate the ethical level. Such a cause can be valued so much that a man in one story is willing to sacrifice (murder) his son and an entire village in another story is willing to be sacrificed. Sacrifice, after all, is a noble virtue, but it should not be lost on us mere mortals that there are dangers to allowing the ethical dimension to be eclipsed.

If we are angels, then we must surely be killer angels even with good intentions. Doesn’t relativizing or even violating ethical strictures open the spigot to all kinds of ways to justify unethical conduct? Can our species afford even those lofty causes that we can value so much that the ethical domain takes a back seat or is lost altogether? One need only consider how sociopathic the Nazi commander is, utterly without a conscience in Conscience as he himself shoots his translator in the back of her head. Is not the hegemony of ethics, including Bentham’s insistence that maintaining or providing for the pleasure of the greatest number of people, something we should maintain, given our species’ horrific aggressive instinct? Our biological nature, hardly refined through Darwin’s natural selection, ought not be forgotten as we reach for the sky toward our great religious and political ideals.

The Nazi commander takes advantage of the villagers’ suspension of the ethical for a political cause by committing genocide rather than honoring such a people for acting on principle even at great personal sacrifice, and therefore ironically shows how dangerous it is not only for the villagers, but also then for people like the Nazis to suspend the ethical. The villagers are sufficiently civilized that they can afford to suspend the ethical for a cause without thereby opening the floodgates to all sorts of unethical behavior by them, but the atrocious and heinous conduct of the Nazis that results demonstrates just how much our species needs the ethical constraint. In other words, even though the villagers can bypass the ethical for a higher cause without then acting unethically in general because the ethical dimension no longer matters (even though they are acting unethically in letting the murderer escape), the Nazis’ resulting unethical conduct (without any superlative political cause) demonstrates the need our species has of ethical constraints that cannot be suspended or upended. Notice that having a good religious or political cause does not really make the ethical go away. Abraham is still guilty of attempted murder and the villagers refuse to turn in a man who has murdered another person. Even so, I submit that this is not enough, given our species’ aggressive nature. In the end, the entire village, except for one boy, is wiped out by men of entirely no conscience whatsoever.  

Aimee & Jaguar

Aimee & Jaguar (1999) is a film based on a true story centering on Felice, a Jewish woman who lived in Berlin until 1944 and belonged to an underground lesbian, anti-Nazi (spying) organization. To be a Jewish lesbian in Nazi Germany cannot have been an easy life, with possible catastrophe just around the corner on any given day.  In the film, Felice becomes romantically involved with Lilly, a mother of four and wife to a Nazi solder who is fighting at the eastern front. The film is essentially a love story between the two women. I want to draw out some of the ethical issues raised in the film—with the love story serving as my critique of two ethical theories—utilitarianism and duty-based ethics—that are implied in the film.  

Bentham’s ethical theory of utilitarianism has for its goal the greatest good, which is maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain, for the greatest number of people. In terms of distribution, the principle can justify allocating a lot of money to some groups—whose individuals can be expected to get a lot of pleasure out of the funds—while depriving other groups of any money because they would not get a lot of pleasure out of even the limited funds. Invest in pleasure where most of it is likely to result. It is the consequence, rather than the means, that is important.

Under such a lopsided distribution as making what money there is available to non-Jewish Germans, the notion of declining marginal utility means that a lot more money would have to be added to the rich Germans to give pleasure equal to that which would come from giving the impoverished groups even just a little money. The utility of 1 DM, for instance, after getting 99 DM is less than the utility after getting 2 DM. This point is illustrated in the film.

In one scene, a fur-wearing, wealthy German woman, sensing that Felice and her three friends, Ilse, Lotte, and Klara, in the bathroom are hungry, and Jewish, sells them food-stamps for nothing less than 200 marks—an extravagant sum judging from the reaction of the three Jews. Based on declining marginal utility, it would take such a sum of money for the pleasure obtained by the rich woman to equal the pleasure from the mere food-stamps accruing to the four Jews. Hence, the exploitation.

The utilitarian distribution cutting off some people or entire groups from funds needed for daily sustenance can be extended to include outright extermination. In Nazi Germany, exterminated groups included the Communists, homosexuals, and Jews. Felice and her three friends were on the losing end in at least two of the three. It is ethically problematic that Bentham’s theory could be used in such a way to justify investing only in people who are most able to be happy (feel pleasure), whether from inner constitution or by external circumstance. Maximizing the pleasure in a society overall is an aim that can justify means that can easily be viewed as unethical. In fact, the resulting pleasure overall, as it is distributed in society (i.e., unequally) can be viewed as unethical. Fortunately, we can turn to Kant to make up for Bentham’s lapses.  

In contrast to Bentham’s theory, Immanuel Kant held that people have a duty to treat other rational beings not merely as means, but also as ends in themselves. Reason, by which we assign value to things (and people) is itself of absolute value, and so rational beings should not be treated merely as means, but are worthy by virtue of having reasoning capability of being treated as ends in themselves. This version of Kant’s Categorical Imperative is similar to the Golden Rule in Christianity (Kant was Christian). For the Nazi leaders to treat groups of people as means only to a Nazi vision of society and race would be for Kant, unethical.

Yet is it reasoning that gives humanity its absolute value? In the film, Felice refuses to go with her friends on a train to safety in Switzerland because she loves Aimee and thus wants to stay with her; the decision taken is not rational, for Felice must know that she could have gone and returned after the fall of the Third Reich; she must also have known that she would probably not survive for long, even if the days of Nazi Germany were obviously limited. “A catastrophe,” Aimee’s mother says when she learns, after Felice has returned from the train station, that she is not only her daughter’s girlfriend, but also Jewish. In such a context, how much value can we put on Felice’s love for Aimee? It seems to me that reason cannot assign value to such an object of such power, so such value must be undefined, and thus absolute. Means and even lofty ends that slight the human natural ability to love face an uphill fight in claims to being ethical rather than unethical.