Elementary, My Dear Schnabel 139

the West deal with posttraumatic stress disorder, asking for forgiveness and sympathy from the West (and receiving it), Palestinians are
not in a position to deal with posttraumatic symptoms, since they
are remain within the traumatic experience itself. Therefore your
talk of reconciliation is irrelevant at this point. Reconciliation can
only take place after the end of the Occupation, when both sides are
equal and free in the same point of time to look into their posttraumatic wounds and try to heal them slowly.
But you dont stop there. You let the national liberal narrative
speak out of your throat. You write that Israeli governments are
elected, and therefore the derogatory term regime does not apply to
them. Well, four million Palestinians are not allowed to vote in the
elections that decide who will seize their land, who will give them
(not enough) water, who will (or will not) let them get through the
checkpoint to their workplace or to the hospital, who will decide if
they can go abroad to meet their dying parent for the last time (or
not), and this is not the worst. For the elections also decide who will
start a full-scale war against them and bomb them with the most
lethal U.S.-Israeli weapons of shock and awe. So, when it comes to
the Occupation, the Israeli regime is a very precise term according to
your own definition of the word regime. You see, it is not just some
sterile dictionary semantics that assigns a truth value to ones statements. It is also a matter of ones point of view. And, from the Palestinian point of view, it is an apartheid regime par excellence.
It was nice of you to recognize Palestinian suffering caused by
lost empires such as Great Britain and the Soviet Union. But isnt it
strange that you fail to refer to Palestinian suffering caused by a living
empire, the alive and kicking United States of America? So was that a
display of patriotic American attitude? Or maybe it was a calculated
move, considering the future distribution of your new film Miral? It
looks like youve got yourself an alibi in Hollywood now... or (how
shall I put it?) Hollywood loves liberals as long they are romantically
human but not freedom fighters for Palestinians, for example.
Let me just state for the nth time that I object to any kind of boycott of movies and works of art! It should be stressed that even the
hardliners in the cultural boycott campaign are well aware of the fact
that there is no cinema without government support, and they state
very clearly that if the money is not given to an artist for propaganda
purposes the ensuing work of art should not be boycotted. Again,

alon15758_cl.indd 139

7/6/11 8:00 PM