A Bottle in the Sea of Gaza. Advertised as a pacifist message of hope and reconciliation is based on the two solitudes premise, ostensibly in the film that posits the secular perspective of bridging societies uniting them in the process by common humanitarian, political, social and economic concerns. The sub-text of the film however is the real two solitudes is between the Israel founded by Herzl based on the secular homeland concept or a homeland based on Jewish law and following an orthodox view of faith in all its equally fragmented and intense passions and rivalries.
The film is another shot across the bow; another vision of the one state solution of everyone living in an ideal socialist utopia on the thirty-third parallel. As opposed to a one state Biblical invocation of Land of Israel for the Jewish people and the variant form of “end of days” and strains of messianism leading to a new golden age. Add to that groups of the “awakening of the lost ten tribes” and other profound stirrings, and one can see the battle of hearts and minds is in full press mode….
( see link) ….Tal Levine is 17, a young Jew who lives in Jerusalem with her parents and older brother. Naïm Al-Farjouk is 20, a Palestinian youth who dreams of a better life outside Gaza, where he was born. As the dove flies, only about 100 kilometres separate the two. But more than distance keeps them apart. Jew and Arab, rich and poor, Tal and Naïm are from two different worlds, never to speak.
---MK Zahava Galon, Meretz Party:Organized groups will come from Brooklyn and get the right to vote. All the decisions about life and death here, whether to evacuate the territories, whether to authorize outposts, those sitting in New York or Brooklyn will decide for us? “Groups of Jew-boys… Jews, organized in the Diaspora, will decide how we live here?” Galon continued, quickly correcting her mistake. “That’s what our government wants to do,” she concluded. “No more human rights, no more democracy, no more court system to protect us.” Galon told Arutz Sheva that the word had been “a slip of the tongue, I don’t know how it happened, and I corrected myself immediately. Read More:http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/154881#.T5aBJdXT3PQ
But what if they tried?
That was the premise behind French author Valérie Zenatti’s young-adult novel Une bouteille dans la mer de Gaza, published in 2005 and translated into English as Message In A Bottle. In the book, the two protagonists engage in a spirited series of email exchanges, which begin after Tal naively sends a message in a bottle to the people of Gaza, down the Mediterranean coast. Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/entertainment/movie-guide/Review+Bottle+Gaza/6343261/story.html#ixzz1sx3pLinE
“If, like me, you think we should learn to know each other, for all sorts of reasons but mainly because we want to get on with living our lives in peace because we’re young, then send me a reply,” Tal writes….
---MK Zahava Galon, head of Meretz, made a serious slip of the tongue Wednesday while speaking to Army Radio's Razi Barkai. While discussing the influence Diaspora Jews exert in Israel, Galon expressed frustration at the possibility of “Jew-boys” (the derogatory word is Yehudonim in Hebrew) deciding Israel’s fate. Before her slip, Galon made reference to Nazi Germany when discussing Israeli politics and attempts to limit the Supreme Court’s power. “This is a matter of principle, are we an enlightened country that builds a wall to protect ourselves from a fired-up mob or oppressive majority… That is why they allowed judicial overseeing from the Supreme Court… It is the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day, we’ve seen the power of an oppressive majority…” Barkai responded by joking, “I’ll erase that from the protocol.” Galon continued, “If 10 mandates...
She leaves an email address where she can be reached: bakbouk@hotmail.com – ‘babouk’ meaning ‘bottle’ in Hebrew – then puts the letter in a bottle and gives it to her brother, Eytan. He’s a soldier in the Israeli Defense Forces, and has access to a stretch of beach along the border with Gaza. Secretly, Eytan throws the bottle into the sea, and it drifts south. Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/entertainment/movie-guide/Review+Bottle+Gaza/6343261/story.html#ixzz1sx5RUgyx
---Chabad Rabbi Shalom Dov Wolpo, an ardent messianist is perhaps the most visibly political Chabad Rabbi involved in a number of controversial campaigns, and has called for people not to celebrate Israeli Independence Day in response to Ariel Sharon's disengagement plan. He told a conference in Jerusalem that "the remedy for the disengagement is to understand that the State of Israel is a terrible thing. We should not bless or praise the state that was founded by criminals and heretics like Herzl."---Read More:http://www.chabad-mafia.com/israel.php
The premise of the film is based on pacifism as an abstraction of middle-class values, one concerned with the fear
the individual’s contamination of the soul while advocating a spiritual laissez-faire attitude which itself tends to generate the insecurity, anxiousness and trauma of violence and war it seeks to remedy. The ideology of the film is Zionism; the line of the anthem, Hatikva, “to be free” , the absence of the past, the absence of social constraints, even a repressing of revolutionary change.
That the pacifist is not launching the rockets or killing the Palestinians might even be more revolting than those on the front lines of the conflict: a fence is probably more disgusting than a thief, and a pimp worse than a hooker. Let someone else do the heavy lifting and harvest the benefit for the sanctity of their own soul. There is a slimy moral aspect to this, “values” which are actually hyper individualism and the self-serving; like the anarchist “peace activists” in Israel who play the “game” of empathy without authentic engagement. An intra bourgeois fratricide and shindig. Even if the utopian aspect of this film were realized, a John Lennon “Imagine” scenario, the violence would still go on; it would just be channeled to a coercive state structure….
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