From Challenge No. 78
March-April 2003

alternative media

Two by Video '48

Video '48 has released its second major documentary:

SINCE 1995, 35,000 Israeli-Arab construction workers have lost their jobs. They are victims of two successive processes. The first is political: starting in 1992, the Rabin government slapped closure on the Occupied Territories. Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza could not get to work. For them and their families, the result has been catastrophic. For Israel, the initial result was a dearth of construction workers. Then began the second process: the government issued permits, allowing contractors to import foreign labor.

At first the foreign workers replaced the shut-out Palestinians. With the eating, however, came appetite. The foreigners pay thousands of dollars in advance, under the table, for the privilege of working here. They are cheap, unorganized and easy to exploit. Israeli Arabs, who had made up the main labor force in construction, have not been able to compete. The contractors have dumped them, importing even more from Rumania, Poland, China and elsewhere.

In a few years, the new work force has completely replaced the local one.

Today, amid a chaotic labor market, Video '48 reveals the factors at play in the construction industry. The camera follows the Minister of Labor, the President of the Contractors' Association, the manager of the Employment Service, managers at construction sites, and especially the jobless workers.

Another factor is the Workers Advice Center (WAC – or Ma'an in Arabic). The camera tracks WAC's first steps in a campaign called "A Job to Win." At the time of the filming, WAC had managed, against all odds, to return 400 Arab construction workers to their jobs. The number is now 550, and hundreds more are organized and waiting.

The press applauds Not in My Garden

Not in My Garden, a documentary by the alternative film-group Video '48, made its Israeli TV debut on January 6, 2003, more than two years after production. A cable company screened it on Channel 8, which is known for scientific and cultural content. The film left no one indifferent: not the TV critics, who heaped it with praise; not the mayor of Carmiel, Adi Eldar, whose words inspired the film's title; and not the Minister of Communication, Rubi Rivlin, who leveled threats at the Council on Cable and Satellite Media for permitting the broadcast.

Reviewing the film, Ra'anan Shaked, TV critic for Yediot Aharonot (the country's biggest daily) wrote as follows: "In 1991 the city of Carmiel sent the villagers of Ramya an eviction notice, telling them to take themselves, their children and herds and depart from their village at once, for the sake of Carmiel's expansion. Just that. Plain and simple. No apologies, no scandals, quietly: 'Arabs, out of the way.' The mayor of Carmiel, a petty colonialist named Adi Eldar, managed in the meantime to get control of some of the villagers' grazing land, and now he complains that the herds trespass on the city itself: 'and cause enormous damage to the public landscaping.' Mon Dieu! One cannot complain that the film does not present both sides, but even so, the Israeli version seems pale and insipid." (Yediot Aharonot January 7.)

Ruta Kupfer of Ha'aretz wrote, in a preview on January 6: "If there's one thing that won't be forgotten from the film, Not in My Garden, it's the scene that takes place between two women, Jewish and Bedouin, as they stuff grape leaves. The scene is demagogic: the Jewish woman is dominating and coarse, a real parody, while the Arab woman is delicate and pleasant. But the scene is absolutely authentic. No staging. It makes one blush with shame. … The climax comes when Abramovich (the Jewish woman) describes her disgust with the Bedouin's donkey: 'Wherever it goes it leaves its shit.' As she says this, her dog is sitting on the couch behind the two, close to the food they are preparing, as if in its natural place. When Ahlam (the Arab woman) says something in her own tongue, the dog owner snaps at her: "Ahlam, speak Hebrew… You could be selling me, for all I know."

In the Hebrew website Na'na, Yoana Gonen wrote the following preview, also on January 6: "Video '48 is a collective of artists who are attempting to change the Israeli reality by means of subversive cinema. Their work is political, and this is said absolutely in their favor. It is as their name implies: they deal with the problems of the Palestinian citizens of Israel, that is, those who live inside the Green Line. The group is funded by contributions; it refuses to accept funds allotted by the state. Financial dependence gets in the way of one's critical intuition, and criticism is the central motive of Video '48.

"It is astonishing to see precisely the Jewish participants in the film. Watch it and try not to be embarrassed. The Jewish residents of the Rabin neighborhood in Carmiel lord it over the Ramya villagers with humiliating remarks, and a dullness of sensibility, such as result when a sense of power breeds moral rot. Not in My Garden is the best thing that TV will offer you this month. It will enable you to hear something that you won't hear anywhere else. It will enable you to better understand yourselves. It will enable you to break this barrier of silence and silencing."

After the first screening on Channel 8, Eran Hadas wrote in Yediot Aharonot: "A storm has arisen in the Ministry of Communication over the broadcast of a report on the city of Carmiel on Channel 8. In the last few days, Minister of Communications Rubi Rivlin has turned to the Council for Cable and Satellite Media, requesting that it check why the mayor of Carmiel, Adi Eldar, was not given right of response in the report entitled Not in My Garden. The ministry claimed that behind the production of the report stands a group known as Video '48, which is identified with the radical Left. People in the Council for Cable claimed that this represents "gross and blatant interference by the minister in the contents of the broadcast." (Yediot Aharonot January 12.)

Channel 8 has continued to show Not in My Garden as scheduled.

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