By Farid Farid

Mahmoud DarwishOne of Mahmoud Darwish's most memorable lines is "there is on this earth, what makes life worth living." The illocutionary profundity and sentimental beatitude captured in this line by the national poet of Palestine rings truer today more than ever in a world afflicted with moral bankruptcy and ethical corruption. The now finite fragrant poetry and prose of Darwish, who sadly passed away two years ago on 9th August, was one of the epicurean pleasures to be savoured as a reader. The carefully constructed stanzas and meandering rhythms were at once intellectually gratifying and spiritually nourishing. In his posthumous collection, The Butterfly's Burden, Darwish's elegant poems are prophetic as ever but also heart wrenching in their evocative descriptions of his beloved occupied homeland of Palestine.

[Note from the Editor: We re-publish this opinion from the August 1st issue of the New York Times to stimulate debate. Efraim Karsh is professor and head of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King's College London. He is regarded as perhaps the most vocal critic of the New Historians, a group of Israeli scholars who have questioned the conventional history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. According to Howard Sachar, he is "the preeminent scholar-spokesman of the Revisionist (politically-rightist) Movement in Zionism." Daniel Pipes described him as "the preeminent historian of the modern Middle East writing today." His views would counter those of many who describe what happened to the Palestinians in 1948 as the Nakba, or "catastrophe". We will review Karsh's book Palestine Betrayed in a forthcoming issue of the Levantine Review.]

In his latest outing, Etgar Keret demonstrates how the short story is his playground—a platform of the anthropology of the absurd, the dream and the passion that he portrays. Keret was just awarded the Chevalier (Knight) medallion of France's Order of Arts and Letters in July 2010.

Etgar Keret
By Omri Herzog

(Suddenly, a Knock on the Door, by Etgar Keret; Kinneret Zemora-Bitan [Hebrew], 179 pages, NIS 84)

With his new short-story collection, Suddenly, a Knock on the Door, Etgar Keret is once again the talk of the town. I have been witness to several conversations about him. They included admiration of his talent, of course; a Keret-style remark about the public relations assault that has accompanied the book's publication; and several complaints too. Two in particular: Why doesn't Keret write a novel rather than keeping on with the short stories—after all, it could be great if he would take the plunge; and another comment about the fact that the new book is meant from the outset for translation into foreign languages: It contains almost no "Israeliness," whatever that means (Humus? Military service? A comment on "the situation"?); Keret is no longer one of us, and we feel somewhat betrayed—now he belongs to the world.

The Goldstone Report, on the Gaza war, has been one of the most polemic documents of the last decade. Certainly there are a plethora of opinions about its accuracy or even validity. This is just one of many.

By Yaniv Reich

Judge Richard Goldstone at the UNDefense Minister Ehud Barak described it as "false, distorted, and irresponsible". Information Minister Yuli Edelstein called it "anti-Semitic". Israeli Ambassador to the US Michael Oren said it "insidiously... portrayed the Jews as the deliberate murderers of innocents". Foreign Minister Lieberman argued that its true purpose "was to destroy Israel's image, in service of countries where the terms ‘human rights' and ‘combat ethics' do not even appear in their dictionaries". And the US House of Representatives banded together in bipartisan harmony to pass a resolution (344-36) that called "on the President and the Secretary of State to oppose unequivocally any endorsement or further consideration" of it.

Samuel Maoz Samuel Maoz, who trained as a cameraman and worked in art direction for both film and television in Israel, was wounded as a 20-year-old soldier during the 1982 Summer War with Lebanon. 25 years later he began a process of confronting his personal feelings and experiences for his first feature film, Lebanon. His colleagues Joseph Cedar and Ari Folman were already on their way to making their own war films, Beaufort and Waltz With Bashir respectively. Lebanon describes the traumatic experiences of a four-man Israeli tank crew in a Lebanese village early in the war.

After Lebanon had been rejected by both the Berlin and Cannes film festivals, Maoz picked up a Golden Lion at last year's Venice Film Festival. The film was nominated in ten categories for the Ophir, Israel's national film awards.

Lebanon is the first feature for Maoz, who carved out a reputation as a documentarian in Israel. Here Maoz is interviewed by Carlos Valdivia, a media assistant at the Levantine Cultural Center in Los Angeles.

Two soldiers in a tank: (outtake from "Lebanon" dir. Samuel Maoz)
Lebanon, the first feature from Israeli filmmaker Samuel Maoz, takes us in with a platoon of Israeli soldiers at the beginning of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. The story is drawn from the personal recollections of writer-director Maoz, who was an actual participant in that attack. As events play out, the camera stays entirely within a tank to which four of the soldiers are assigned, so we are always either looking at them or through their eyes out of the tank's gunsight. Over the span of their brief first mission, the soldiers' mental state devolves from apprehension to delirium as their simple directive to search an already-airstruck Lebanese town leads them into a nightmarish trap.

Reviewed by David Shasha

My Father's Paradise: your purchase in part benefits Levantine Cultural CenterTowards the end of Ariel Sabar's extraordinarily compelling retelling of his family's history in Iraqi Kurdistan, he makes a brilliant observation that encapsulates his tale and is emblematic of the broken stories of so many Middle Eastern Jews. Recalling his father's feverish memories of his fractured past-a past of rich traditions that were destroyed over the course of successive exiles-he states:

Dreams, I recalled now, had long been a refuge from his life's incongruities. During his first year in the United States, he once told me, he dreamed he was in New York, all alone in Grand Central Station. All at once, the train doors swept open and all of Zakho's Kurds poured out onto the platform. Dreams were a place where fragments could be made whole. (pp. 278-279)

By Carlos Valdivia

an outtake from "Azi Ayima"

Israel 2009, 77 mins. Hebrew, Arabic and French w/ English subtitles.

The filmmaker embarks on a journey with his mother in search of classmates from her elementary school, the Alliance, which she attended 60 years ago in the little village of Gurama in the Tafilalt region of Morocco. Through their stories of past and present, Morocco is reconstructed and comes to life through vivid memories. It is a story of transition, cultural crisis, social survival and also lots of faith, optimism, joy and dignity, told for the first time by Moroccan women of the first generation to immigrate to Israel.