Crossing red lines through red fields

In an article she wrote two weeks ago in the Israeli blog "The Sting," producer Osnat Trabelsi called for "a battle that does not divide political and social issues." In the critical social blog, published by Itzik Saporta and Yossi Dahan, Trabelsi wrote that she did not attend demonstrations against the war in Lebanon.

"I prefer not to go for the same reasons that I am invited," she wrote, referring to her North African ethnicity. "We know who stays in the shelters and the identity of most of those killed by Katyusha rockets ... my essence lies within the tension between Beit Hanun and Sderot, and therefore I express solidarity with both sides."

Trabelsi, 40, lives and works in a Tel Aviv apartment. The sticker on her front door bears the message: "Free Tali Fahima." "It is important to talk about her," Trabelsi says, "and the fact that the individual who actually chose to cross red lines and act is a young Mizrahi woman from Kiryat Gat."

Trabelsi's film, "Bhirot," directed by Ronen Amar, portrays the Negev town of Netivot and was screened at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque in early August. "Red Fields," directed by Ayelet Heller, will premiere today at the same Cinematheque.

Trabelsi was born in Ashdod and studied film and television at Tel Aviv University with Ari Pullman, Hagai Levi, Eytan Fox and others. She says it was symbolic that the first feature film she worked on in a production role included Arab actors - "Gmar Gavia" (Cup Final); and that in her last non-documentary film, "Zohar," a biographical film about Mizrahi singer Zohar Argov, Trabelsi met the famous Arab actor, Juliano Mer-Khamis.

Ariel Zilber in Arabic

The fateful meeting with Mer-Khamis brought Trabelsi to visit unfamiliar territory - the city of Jenin. This was quite a leap for Trabelsi who, at the age of 15, demonstrated against the evacuation of the Sinai settlement of Yamit, and whose mother mainly voted for the Likud party because, "Mizrahim do not vote for Labor." In Jenin, she met Mer-Khamis' Jewish mother, Arna Mer.

"It was 1992," she recalls, "and I was very impressed by her. I immediately understood that someone should make a film about her. I considered her a rarity: A woman who acts rather than speaks. That was during a period in which my political perspective was still in flux - I was still at the end of my Zionist phase."

It took time to persuade Arna Mer to agree to a film in which she and the theater project she founded in Jenin would play a central role, but she finally agreed. "Arna's Children," directed by her son and produced by Trabelsi, one of the finest documentaries produced in the last decade, won a slew of international prizes. The film immediately granted Trabelsi, who previously supported herself by producing commercials, the status of a major producer.

But it was not her first documentary film. The first, "Smoke Screen: Three Days with Ariel Zilber," directed by Yigal Burshtein in 1999, followed singer Ariel Zilber as he produced a Hebrew-Arabic CD. "During that film, Zilber did not support the extreme right-wing position that he does today," Trabelsi says. "Just the opposite - I was attracted to producing the film because of Zilber's belief that Arabic music and its connection with Israeli music represented truth. I even recently considered releasing the film in DVD to highlight the irony," she smirks.

She is the eldest child in a family of two girls and two boys. Her parents immigrated as children: Her mother, at age nine, from Iraq, and her father, at age 11, from Tunisia. "They were very detached," she says. "They came at an age, which was too young to bring tradition from 'there' but too old to adopt tradition from 'here.'"

As a young woman, she says that she angrily turned off the radio whenever her mother listened to Arabic music. "Seven years ago, while she was riding in my car, I played an Umm Khulthum CD and she nearly fainted," Trabelsi says. "She told me, 'you all forbade me from hearing Arabic music for so many years that I'm not accustomed to it anymore.'"

"I was brainwashed by the Zionist education I received in Israel," Trabelsi explains. "On one hand, the culture was present at home: the hospitality, the customs of celebration, and other things were Arabic - not even Mizrahi. But on the other hand, I received a 'white' education at school. We celebrated the Passover Seder at my Tunisian grandfather's house. There were about 50 people sitting together on the floor. Doors were removed from hinges and propped on orange crates to serve as tables. In contrast, we were given Haggadot [Seder prayer books] at school that portrayed a couple of parents sitting at a table covered with a white cloth and flanked by two children. For years, that made me ashamed of our 'primitive' customs. In addition, at our home, to this day, we read every passage of the Haggada twice: Once in Hebrew and once in Arabic, and all that created dissonance which was hard to live with."

Now, Trabelsi says that the Palestinians are responsible for her return to her roots. "My Israeli identity distanced me from them and Palestinian identity brought me closer." she says. "That is exactly what I am trying to do now - make the connection between being Mizrahi and being Palestinian. Who now lives alongside Palestinians? Only Mizrahi Jews. Who works with Palestinians on a daily basis? Only Mizrahi Jews - they share the same status and can also find closer social connections than with someone who lives in Ramat Aviv."

But despite the natural connection that she describes, reality is far more complex. Despite the pride that her mother expresses in her achievements, she still tells her, "You know how difficult it is for me that my daughter vilifies my nation."

Once, Trabelsi says, she brought a Palestinian friend to her mother's home in Ashdod and the conversation between them moved her to tears. "The conversation was conducted in Arabic, of course," she says. "That made our story here a tragedy because the only foreign language that my mother knows is Arabic. They spoke to each other with proper respect: My mother called her, 'Habibti' [my darling] and she responded with, 'Halti' [my aunt]. My mother told her that the Arabs want to slaughter us and my friend answered, 'Auntie, I am sitting in your home and you tell me that my people are murderers?' My friend told her that there is nowhere in the world where her entire family may reunite and my mother told her, 'I have nowhere else to go.' That is sad. Why does one have to come at the expense of the other?

"They have put the idea in people's heads here that if the Palestinians come, we have to go, and that is a lie. The liberal Ashkenazi Left wants this division: 'Us here, them there.' And I wonder: Now they don't want the Palestinians. Maybe, tomorrow, they won't want me because I am an Arab-Jew."

'My best friends are Ashkenazi'

After "Arna's Children," Trabelsi produced "Badal," a documentary directed by Ibtisam Mara'ana, and "Nivdal," a short documentary about a Palestinian whose home was surrounded by the separation fence. She is now working on other films, including, "Ashkenazim," directed by Rahel Leah Jones, which is currently being edited.

"Some of my best friends are Ashkenazim," Trabelsi says with a smile. "The film gave me the opportunity to learn about them - mainly about how the people who were 'the blacks' in Europe became the white, gold standard here in Israel. The more I learn about the extent to which these people were oppressed, the less I understand how they became such oppressors."

"Red Fields," produced by Trabelsi and directed by Ayelet Heller, also provides viewers with a glimpse of reality unknown to most. The film portrays Palestinian strawberry growers whose lives are inevitably attached to Agrexco, Israel's national produce exporter. They struggle to produce a crop for an Israeli national company that markets their product around the world, while simultaneously coming under attack from the Israel Defense Forces. In addition to the socioeconomic-nationalist story it tells, the film also portrays the daily routine of occupation, and, as in the case of Palestinians and Mizrahi Jews, how common laborers pay the ultimate price.

In the film, Heller proves she has mastered the art of understatement. The film leaves its characteristic stillness aside in only one scene in which the entire film crew, except the director, appears in a strawberry field as IDF helicopters bomb the region. The startled film crew asks the director to notify the IDF of their presence and request that they stop firing in their direction.

"The fact that she, as a Jewish-Israeli, can call and ask that they stop firing at her and an innocent Palestinian cannot is the entire story," Trabelsi says. "We decided to include the scene in the film because it tells the whole story and also because it portrays a moment of joint destiny."

Partnership is a recurring motif for Trabelsi that occasionally gives rise to surprising pronouncements, like her declared sympathy for Gush Katif evacuees. "Did anyone in the radical Left, who demonstrated against the war in Lebanon, think about the people sitting in bomb shelters in the North?" she asks. "That same Left does not think about people evacuated from homes who are now living in trailers and God-knows-when, if at all, they will get a house. What's the story? Are we punishing them? We have to relate to these people. If we want to talk about refugees in 1948, we have to talk about settlers."

At the beginning of the war in Lebanon, Trabelsi signed a document declaring her identification with Lebanese civilians. The document was drafted by filmmakers, including Avi Moughrabi with whom she collaborated in the establishment of the "Occupation Club" to screen Palestinian films, during the second intifada. "It is significant that the names of the founders of the Occupation Club are Trabelsi and Moughrabi [North African names]," she says.

She confesses that she now regrets the document did not include some mention of the suffering of residents in northern Israel. "It was a mistake not to mention Haifa," she says. "I agree that a way should have been found to talk about them. However, when expressing solidarity, you can't say, 'I've also got it bad.'"