Can Tel Aviv on Fire bring hope to Israeli-Palestinian conflict when all else has failed?

The multiple-award-winning film Tel Aviv on Fire may show a comedic path to understanding and eventually peace between Israelis and Palestinians where all else has failed. Or, at least the film allows the answer to the title question to be “maybe” without that itself being a joke.

Trying to make jokes about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would certainly offend many people, especially many who would identify with one of those sides. Even attempting to do so involves navigating a minefield of pain and grievances, death and destruction that can easily blow up in one’s face (pun not intended), a minefield that would turn most away from the task and doom most of the rest to failure and public attack, up to and including the lethal kind.

That Tel Aviv on Fire succeeds brilliantly beyond any reasonable expectation in making us laugh about subjects that are generally drowning in misery and sorrow and often devolve into a partisan, tribal victimhood olympics is nothing short of remarkable. Aside from being one of the most unique films in recent memory, it may even one day be viewed as a textbook vehicle for achieving understanding when all else is seems lost.

If this sounds ridiculous to you, it should, but to that I say, see the film.

A funny thing happened on the way through the military checkpoint

Tel Aviv on Fire, winner of seven film festival awards so far (Best Film [three times!], Best Screenplay, Best Narrative, Best in World Cinema, Best Actor) and six other nominations in 2018-2019, comes to us from director and writer Sameh Zoabi and is due out Aug. 2 in select U.S. theaters.

Simply put, this is one of the funniest movies I have ever seen, and the funniest I have seen in years. The main character is a struggling Palestinian writer, working as something of a linguistic specialist for a Palestinian TV show: he is fluent in Hebrew, and the main writer, another Palestinian, keeps getting the Hebrew for the series wrong.

The TV series itself is set just before the 1967 Six-Day War, in which Israel took the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, Gaza, and Sinai from Egypt, and the Golan Heights from Syria (it still holds all of these except for Sinai); when the UN and other major international bodies speak today of an “occupation” by Israel of Palestinian and Arab land, this is when that started and what they are talking about (many Israeli Jews feel different, although many Palestinians, Arabs, and others see the establishment of Israel itself in 1948 as an occupation, with most Israeli Jews disputing this idea). The series focuses on a beautiful Palestinian spy, in love with her intelligence handler and actively spying on an Israeli general.

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In an irony not lost on many viewers, the main character of the movie itself is living with the consequences of the conflict of the fictional TV series for which he works. He lives in Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem, for all practical purposes part of Israel today, but commutes to work across what is now known as “the wall,” manned by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), crossing into Palestinian territory, the city of Ramallah in the West Bank, for most intents and purposes controlled in actuality by the Israeli military occupation, with some authority doled out to a weak Palestinian Authority (this is all very complicated, and for more information see my deep-dive here).

Every day, he crosses the same Israeli military checkpoint twice just to get to his work and back home. Unluckily for him, the checkpoint’s Jewish Israeli commander’s wife—and, it seems, just about every other Israeli and Palestinian woman—loves the show on which our protagonist is working. Trying to make himself seem important to the commander after he is being detained and interrogated, he exaggerates his role in the series, hoping to be released faster.

But the commander has different ideas: he doesn’t like the way Israelis are portrayed on the Palestinian TV show and uses his power over the protagonist to try to force changes more favorable to the Israeli perspective into the show. When the main Palestinian guy is back with the TV show’s team, they accuse him of being too sympathetic to the Israeli side.

This goes back and forth for the rest of the movie, highlighting the reality of abuse that can happen with Israeli soldiers having so much leverage over Palestinians but also the desire of everyone to be represented and thought of positively and humanely and how friendship and understanding can be forged even in the unlikeliest of scenarios (something which, I have argued, is what makes even Game of Thrones transcendental).

I watched the Israeli premiere of this film in Haifa at the Haifa International Film Festival thanks to the kindness of one of the supporting actresses, the singular Laëtitia Eïdo, most recognized for her role as the Palestinian doctor at the center of the hit Israeli (now global) series Fauda and commonly playing roles that are bridges to understanding.

What I saw at the premiere was almost a miracle: a robustly mixed Arab and Jewish, Israeli and Palestinian audience, laughing hysterically throughout the movie at the same times at the same things; the mixed audience truly reacted as one, with sympathy (or at least empathy) and understanding for both the Arab and Jewish characters. At its end, the film was met with a standing ovation and all smiles from the audience members, and, not long after, won Best Film at the festival (one of three such awards the film has won).

One example early in the film highlights the way humor transcends tense divides: our Palestinian protagonist calls out his writer boss for having the Jewish Israeli general in the TV series call the spy “explosive” as a romantic compliment, a word that fits poorly. Wrestling with the word choice in his mind while he is passing through the Israeli military checkpoint, he asks a female Jewish Israeli soldier asking him for his ID if calling a woman “explosive” is okay or rude.

The Israeli Jewish side appreciates the humor as a Jew being approached by an Arab throwing around the word “explosive,” the Palestinian Arab side know how tense it is going through an Israeli checkpoint as an Arab, so both can anticipate the problems that will arise from his asking that question. As a result, both sides can feel for the poor character just asking an innocent question but getting told after by the Israeli female soldier to get out of his car for an interrogation.

The film is skillfully woven with threads of similar humor throughout, where an awkward situation can be understood from both sides for different reasons and the humor unites around one or more actual, humanely represented people with whom the audience can identify in spite of the divides.

At the same time, these moments teach the other side about the opposite perspective in societies and cultures that rarely consider the perspective of the “enemies” with which they have been locked in conflict for so long: it is a shared humor that allows understanding to pass through, even in moments of duress and discomfort.

As I have noted before, such small, rare moments of shared humanity in the setting of a conflict rampant with dehumanization are not going to mean a peace treaty tomorrow, but they are precious and necessary building blocks for any such eventual breakthrough to occur. And there were enough building blocks in the theater that night for a massive Lego set.

A micro-peace process: laugh, understand, empathize, sympathize

In being what it is, Tel Aviv on Fire transcends being just a comedic film and actually promotes understanding through humor when pretty much everything involved in these conflicts is designed to do the opposite. For this, apart from being an excellent film, it must be commended. Yes, alone it will not end hate and conflict, but films like this one, and the understanding through humor they produce, are absolutely necessary, if not sufficient, for any real peace to ever be achieved. And in this, Tel Aviv on Fire can certainly be considered breakthrough.

Tel Aviv on Fire’s limited theatrical release in the U.S. begins this Aug. 2.