Tom Segev is the columnist of Ha’aretz, a left-wing Israeli newspaper, and a historian who chronicles the lives of Israelis in 1967.

Many of books have analyzed the roots of the Six-Day War and its significance to the history of the Middle East. Segev illustrates how the fear of another Holocaust drove Israel to launch wars against Egypt, Syria and Jordan, grabbing land and starting a tradition of excess.

If you believe in the mainstream discourse regarding the Six-Day War and in the image of an infallible Israel, you may not like this book. It is a book full of controversial ideas, and it makes harsh statements about the Jewish state.

Taking references from thousands of interviews, official and unofficial materials, Segev’s book distinguishes itself because of its reliance on materials both from archives and diaries of regular people. For example, the third section of the book was fully based on the diary of Private Yehoshua Bar-Dayan, who leaves his wife and son to join the army to prepare for war. The diary challenges the myth of heroism of normal Israelis and Kibbutz members. Many pretended to be courageous in order to avoid losing face in front of relatives and friends.

Segev paints a detailed picture of the Israeli society before the war. It also illustrates Israeli social problems that still exist today. Discrimination against Mizrahim Jews and Arab Israelis, whom some Israeli politicians repeatedly called to expel, is one of the problems. The biggest issue, however, is the struggle between the religious and secular. It is harder to solve the Palestinian conflict when religious settlers and rabbis, who believe themselves to be more righteous, have wielded more influence in the Knesset (the Israeli parliament).

This book will bring discomfort to those who do not wish to challenge established narratives. The popular argument supporting the Israeli decision to go to the war goes as follows: “ Nasser ordered Egyptian troops to be stationed in Sinai Desert and to launch blockades in Red Sea and Suez Canal. Syrian Troops also mobilized themselves in Golan Heights. So were Jordanian soldiers, who were deployed in West Bank… Israel was forced to attack and occupied Gaza, West Bank and East Jerusalem to protect itself from another war.”

This book challenges this argument by describing the political struggle between the “old” and “new” Israeli politicians. The strike against Egyptian troops was finalized when “Old” elites such as Levi Eshkol and Abba Eban gave in to the military generals such as Ariel Sharon and Yitzhak Rabin. Plus, criticism of the 1948 leaders for not taking all of the Biblical land added to the cultural and social turmoil which in turn resulted in the decision to enter the war.

The most shocking fact is the Israeli attempt to transfer 100,000 Palestinian refugees to Iraq. The cause behind the collapse of the plan is unknown. Neither was the number of refugees leaving their homes published by Israel. Though, the refusal to accept an offer from America, which, under the Senator Edward Kennedy, proposed a 200,000 quota for Palestinian refugees, forces people to question whether or not remaining behind was a bad idea as far as the Palestinians are concerned.

This is a wonderful book which documents the lives of both the Israeli people and the increasing influence of military in their politics. Its first-hand account vividly depicts how the ecstasy from victory has turned out to be the biggest curse for the Jewish state, Palestinians, and the possibility of peace in the Middle East. Its focus is narrow, but its lessons are immense.

In her bio, Ms. Mahdi lists her mother as her source of support in pursuing her goals. She also lists her background in graphic design and advertising. She has done freelance work for a variety of Egyptian publications, so, if you’re in Egypt, she might already be familiar.

Mahdi looks like she is no friend of the George W. Bush administration, though she takes on other subjects just as freely (Osama Bin Laden, Brad Pitt, and Tony Blair among them – personally, I’m a big fan of the Brad Pitt caricature; considering the fact that this man’s perfectly chiseled face has been staring at me from every newsstand).

Mahdi is working in a male-dominated field, in a country where bloggers and other outspoken individuals can wind up in jail. For this alone, she ought to be admired, methinks.

Her commentary on the Shia-Sunni rift and the political exploitation thereof caught my eye, and will stay with me for a long time. By contrast, the depictions of George W. Bush as Satan/monster lack bite (notwithstanding such depictions’ popularity in Egypt, and beyond).

I think if Mahdi were to focus more on specific aspects of current U.S. foreign policy, her work would become more pointed – and accessible not only to the Arab world, but to those beyond it.

I think as Mahdi continues to hone her craft, more good stuff will happen.

As the festival wound down, I found myself needing an injection of Hollywood, and Susanne Bier’s “Things We Lost in the Fire” was the ticket. Well, maybe. Susanne Bier is actually Danish, and this movie is somewhat unconventional. I’m not sure if it’s going to get a wide release in the Middle East, but I’m not holding my breath.

The one consistently terrific thing about this film is Benicio Del Toro and his brand of awesome. I’m not exactly sure how he manages to take the familiar role of a recovering heroin addict and transform it into something this charming and unpretentious, but I like to think it has something to do with being charming and unpretentious in real life. Either way, this is one performance any self-respecting Del Toro fangirl or fanboy cannot possibly miss out on, no matter where you are.

The rest of the movie oscillates between genuinely grounded, thoughtful material and occasionally coma-inducing melodrama. Halle Berry’s turn as shell-shocked widow Audrey is solid, but her obligatory moment of meltdown and surrender felt as thought it could have come off a check-list. While Del Toro’s heroin withdrawal scene has similar overtones, his inventive facial contortions alone create something original to watch.

David Duchovny, the dead husband who is the link between Berry and Del Toro’s characters, has some potential, but he disappears halfway into the film. The story is fragmented (much like a grieving person’s mind – which I thought to be a nice touch overall), and Duchovny’s character is seen in flashbacks. But the flashbacks just stop all of a sudden, and the film is the poorer for it. We understand that Brian was a righteous dude unjustly taken from his family in the prime of his life, but aside from the great dynamic he has with his drug addict friend, we don’t really get to know him as a human being.

The deadpan John Carroll Lynch is a source of comic relief as a weird but good-natured neighbor, but it’s a bad sign when you realize his character is actually more likeable than Brian’s.

Bier is drawing a fascinating parallel between addiction and grief however, and she does succeed in raising serious questions about the way human beings deal with both phenomena. Grief is seen as more “respectable,” but in modern-day life there also seems to be very little in the way of social tradition in regards to dealing with it (Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking has made the claim that today’s Americans see grief almost solely in terms of “moving on,” rarely addressing its actual dark nature). Audrey understands that Brian’s hapless friend Jerry needs rehab, for example, but Jerry in turn sees that Audrey is in a similar position. The old saying – “it takes one to know one” – certainly applies here.

Bier and the screenwriter, Allan Loeb, also have a handle on life’s cruel little sense of irony: Audrey worries that her husband might get shot while visiting his junkie pal in a neighbourhood that seems composed solely of other junkies, but tragedy comes at her sideways. Brian is killed, but not while slumming it with various “unfortunates,” far from it, in fact.

I do take issue with the fact that too many films that closely explore human emotion take place in opulent households. I understand that a bleak storyline can be offset by a gorgeous background to startling effect, but come on, poor people grieve too – and their lives are not devoid of beauty either. Beauty, after all, is more than a stately home full of expensive doodads.

Well, the time has come to separate the best from the rest. For me, the festival peaked with the world premiere of “Captain Abu Raed” – the first Jordanian feature film in a rather long number of years.

Let me tell you, all those decades upon decades were certainly worth the wait.

Director, writer, and producer Amin Matalqa described this film as a “fable,” which is probably as close as one can get to its essence without giving too much away. The hero of the story, portrayed by veteran Nadim Sawalha (you’ve seen him everywhere from “Syriana” to “The Nativity Story” as of late), is a janitor who gets mistaken for an airline pilot on account of a hat fished out of the trash in Amman’s Queen Alia International Airport.

Abu Raed is an older man who leads a quiet life, having conversations with his dead wife’s portrait and spending his evenings with only a cup of tea for company. This is a man who had dreams once; you can still see something of them in his kind, keen gaze, alongside past calamities and defeats, all equally ground down by the thievish passage of time.

It is the exicted attention of his humble neighborhood’s children that inspires Abu Raed to assume the role of storyteller and sage; as he recounts tales of the fictional adventures of the man he might have been, we discover that the man he is is not a whole lot different. Abu Raed can still be a hero, janitor’s uniform and all.

Thanks to the editing of obscenely young Laith Majali (who is also one of the producers) and the brilliant cinematography of Reinhart Peschke, the movie has a lush, gorgeous look: the light alternates between laving like honey and casting inky shadows on faces and streets. The city of Amman exists as a separate character here, a living landscape transversed with human lives.

This is a family-friendly (I hate that horrible adjective, but there it is) film that nevertheless deals with the darker side of life. Domestic abuse, classism, societal pressure, and senseless tragedy figure heavily in the plot. Not all characters are redeemed, and not all loose ends are tied up with pretty bows. While neither edgy nor gritty (more adjectives I despise), this movie lingers with you like a beloved childhood story whose undertones continue to unfold in one’s mind long after the original encounter.

If great books cannot be read, only re-read (this is according to Vladimir Nabokov, a good authority on the subject), then great movies ought to be re-watched, and “Captain Abu Raed” is no exception. This movie will open in Jordan in February of 2008, and it will make its way to Sundance earlier next year as well. I’d love to chase it all over the globe, but will have to sustain myself with memories in the meantime.

If you need a point of reference, I would say this movie is a bit like “Monsieur Ibrahim” – only more engrossing. It’s an urban romance both humourous and melancholic, and a great antidote to pretentious art-films and sickly-sweet family dramas combined.

It is also hopefully the start to a new era of Jordanian filmmaking. Enough of Jordan being solely the backdrop to foreign-made films, I say. While “Captain Abu Raed” is a standalone achievement of tremendous magnitude, it could also be the start of something equally terrific.

It’s good news all around, at last.

Nick Broomfield’s “The Battle for Haditha” has not yet gotten enough press. In some ways, this is understandable. Despite the explosive subject matter, this is a low-key film. There are no big-name actors, no enormous budget, and, most importantly, the picture’s stylistic elements tend toward a stark, bare-boned simplicity. Nevertheless, this is a film to see.

Broomfield cast many amateurs for key roles, among them some ex-Marines and Iraqi refugees, and this is both good and bad. There is a definite air of authenticity surrounding the film, yet the acting occasionally appears forced. Some of the dialogue struck me as contrived- although this may have something to do with the subtitles. I do not speak Arabic, but having been accompanied by an Arabic speaker at the screening, I discovered that the subtitles are not as good as they could have been.

This movie is earnest, but, in some scenes, it also comes across as didactic. Do we really need to see the chief insurgent character, a disgruntled former member of the Iraqi army, spelling out the message with lines such as: “The Americans created the insurgency by dis-banding the army”? Does the chief insurgent furthermore have to opine stiffly on the future of Iraq, noting (in a manner that suggests that he is channeling Fukuyama) the bleak possibility of the country inheriting a new leader, someone who will be a helluva lot worse than Saddam?

Yet in spite of a few missteps, this is a haunting picture. I can’t get it out of my head, and I probably won’t for a long time. Broomfield captures the comings and goings of the residents of Haditha, people whose lives are about to be shattered, with intimacy and grace. I was floored by the character of Rashied (Duraid A. Ghaieb), a young man besotted with his pregnant wife (Yasmine Hanani – who attended the screening alongside the director, and ex-Marine actors Elliot Ruiz and Eric Mehalacopoulos), keenly aware of the growing danger of staying with his family in Haditha, and yet unable to do much about it.

Alongside U.S. Marines and Iraqi civilians, Broomfield dares to portray the members of the Iraqi insurgency as human beings. These people are not just fundamentalist foreigners, they are also ordinary locals who are infuriated with what has happened to their country. This simple truth is about as inconvenient as anything Al Gore can come up with, and is bound to make American audiences squirm in their seats.

At the Q & A afterwards, Broomfield pointed out that the massacre at Haditha has been extensively researched, and the script was an attempt to stick as faithfully as one could to real-life events. The movie was shot on location in Jordan, and grim anecdotes were related: apparently, one of the Iraqi families featured in the film wanted to pack up and leave in the middle of the shoot, highlighting the adversity of refugee life for the crew and the rest of the cast.

The audience, meanwhile, was happily irreverent. People expressed their anger with the U.S. occupation of Iraq with ease, blunt questions were asked, awkward pauses were observed, and the entire occasion had a fresh, unscripted feel one so rarely gets in similar settings in the States. Kudos to the festival organizers for this, honestly.

One woman asked if “The Battle for Haditha” would get past “censorship” in the States, a question which reminded me of misconceptions people hold about the U.S. film industry. In the U.S., the real censorship lies in trying to find a distributor for a potentially controversial film. The MPAA can cripple a movie’s chance at being distributed by issuing an NC-17 rating, but such ratings are usually tied to graphic representations of sex. “Battle for Haditha” has secured a U.S. distributor and will, hopefully, be seen by at least a fraction of the people who need to see it most: those among us who continue to defend the ongoing, blood-spattered mess that has been made of Iraq.

The best moments of the film have to do with the peculiar duality of wartime violence: how it is both personal and mediated, vicious and strangely, grotesquely casual. It is the antithesis to all life, and yet it can make its perpetrators feel alive. No amount of theorizing can ultimately reveal its true nature, and Broomfield understands this. Sometimes, all you need to do is watch.

“The Fourth Hand” is one of those novels that started life as an excellent idea and yet, upon elaboration, the author found it impossible to make the novel as intriguing and engaging as the clever premise on which it was based. Patrick Wallingford, the protagonist, is a television journalist whose life is changed forever when he loses his left hand to a lion whilst reporting on a story in India. The story then follows Wallingford’s life as he opts for a landmark hand transplant surgery and ends up falling in love with the deceased donor’s wife, one of fiction’s most hollow characters – Doris. Admittedly, the possibilities for drama and subtle exposition of the human condition seem unlimited. The novel starts well and the reader can only be intrigued by this extraordinary context for a love story. It smacks of the honesty and beautiful absurdity of Irving’s “The World According to Garp,” an outstanding book by any standard.

But then “The Fourth Hand” loses itself in banality. The quality of the writing deteriorates to such an extent that one is tempted to think that Irving must have been temporarily possessed by the spirit of a second-rate writer. The reader finds himself almost cringing at times. This state of embarrassed reading is exacerbated by the fact that it’s IRVING for god’s sake. What happened? Some characters are developed for no apparent reason before they are lost never to be seen again. Events from the news rear their heads into the narrative every now and again. The plane crash that tragically ended the life of John F. Kennedy Jr. in July 1999 is used as a pretext to comment on the moral bankruptcy of the news media; but some of Irving’s comments here are as lacking in depth as some of the shallow news reporting he is berating. Wallingford, whose charms no woman on earth could ever resist, finds himself effortlessly bedding the entire female population of the novel – repeatedly. This doesn’t stop him from pursuing the love of his life – Doris of Wisconsin!

And it is in that highly uninspiring love story that the novel finds its only salvation and the reason why I shall be forever grateful for exerting so much effort (and it hurt) forcing myself to finish it. Doris doesn’t return Wallingford’s affections and so, to weave his way into her life, he starts looking for any common denominator. He starts reading “The English Patient”. “The English Patient” was apparently the last film Doris saw with her husband Otto before his tragic death. She had liked the film so much she decided to read the book. Doris opines that the book is “too well written.” “I’m reading it very slowly because I like it too much,” she adds.

Thank you Doris, Wallingford, Irving and Wisconsin!! For Doris’s only believable line in the novel led me to read “The English Patient” by Michael Ondaatje. Like Doris and Otto, I thought that Anthony Minghella’s 1996 film starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche was a masterpiece. But, unlike Doris, I didn’t feel compelled to read the book after watching the film. I thought that the film was so exceptionally good that there’s not much that the book could add to it. It took 6 years, and “The Fourth Hand,” to change my mind.

The main purpose for writing this article is to make you read “The English Patient,” if you are lucky enough not to have read it yet. “Lucky” because there’s a world of wonder waiting for you in Ondaatje’s 300 pages of breathtaking prose. It is simply a book like no other. It reads like a magical web of phrases that are at once gloriously poetic and achingly beautiful in their simplicity.

There’s an added poignancy to reading “The English Patient” in these troubled times. The horrific attacks of September 11, the sad events in Israel/Palestine, the jingoism of reaction and counter-reaction, the “axis of evil” that sprung out of the pen of a tired spin doctor, the incredulous masses all over the world … etc. “The English Patient” deals with another time and another war. But the message is the same: Underneath all that, there lies a beautiful yet complex individual humanity that is more enduring than war, fiery rhetoric, and all attempts to paint the world with the brush of temporary boundaries, civilizations and nationalities.

The four unlikely characters who find themselves in the Villa San Girolamo in the dying days of World War II – the fatally wounded desert explorer, a former thief-turned-spy, a Sikh sapper working for the British army, a Canadian nurse – belong to the world. War and history always seem like unwelcome visitors to the reader whenever they force their tensions on the unfolding events in the decrepit Tuscan villa. The English patient, though burnt beyond recognition and drained of life, seems the wisest. His tales of exploration in the Libyan desert reveal a more genuine and humbled view of the world: “There was a time when mapmakers named the places they travelled through with the names of lovers rather than their own. Someone seen bathing in a desert caravan, holding up muslin with one arm in front of her. Some old Arab poet’s woman, whose white-dove shoulders make him describe an oasis with her name.”

The English patient fails to save Katherine, the love of his life who lay dying in a desert cave, because of doubts about his nationality. The soldiers who arrested him instead of helping him to save her thought he was just another “second-rate spy. Just another international bastard.” Hana, the nurse, also refers to herself and the sapper using the exact same term and provides a definition: “Born in one place and choosing to live elsewhere. Fighting to get back to or get away from our homelands all our lives.”
The English patient sums it up best, after recounting his heart wrenching tale, in an outstanding piece of descriptive prose:

“We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography – to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience. All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.”
“The English Patient” is, above all, a novel about love. Not “love” in the hackneyed faultless sense. But “love” as an inescapable truth, a fact. The relationship between the patient and Katherine defies both social and moral ethics. It leads us reluctantly to a difficult yet inevitable conclusion. Love as a bare emotion is stronger than our natural or socially imposed notions of propriety, and it is impervious to the demands of logic. The English patient notes:

“There are betrayals in war that are childlike compared with our human betrayals during peace … A love story is not about those who lose their heart but about those who find that sullen inhabitant who, when it is stumbled upon, means the body can fool no one, can fool nothing – not the wisdom of sleep or the habit of social graces. It is a consuming of oneself and the past.”

In contrast, the budding relationship between Hana and Kip, the Sikh sapper, seems free of complications. Two characters who find complete solace in each other after having suffered a series of losses during the war. As a nurse, Hana had to witness patients withering away on a daily basis, not to mention the death of her father. Kip’s bomb-disposal work was in essence a daily brush with mortality. His mentor in England, several of his friends, pulled the wrong piece of metal, made one small wrong move, and they were lost forever. The Villa San Girolamo and the quiet grace of Hana provided a sanctuary that he was at first reluctant to get into. But with time, Hana and Kip flow effortlessly into each other. Until the tensions of the world set in. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki weigh heavily on the four citizens of the world in the Tuscan hills, especially Kip. “From now on I believe the personal will forever be at war with the public. If we can rationalize this we can rationalize anything,” Hana notes in a letter to her mother in which she tries to make sense of how the war affected her, Kip and those around her.

“The English Patient” is a novel that makes you re-examine so many of the givens that seem to run our lives and the world. It challenges the reader to delve into the essence of humanity and revel in its beauty and challenges. But most important of all, there is a distinctive pleasure to reading Ondaatje’s narrative and his wonderful use of language. At times, you just find yourself sighing with disbelief at the mastery with which Ondaatje phrases his thoughts and the subtlety of his delivery. In recommending this book to you, I would like to leave you with what the English patient says when describing how he fell in love with Katherine. It was right after she stopped reading aloud a story of passion from “The Histories” by Herodotus. “With the help of an anecdote,” he fell in love. “Words …they have a power,” he concludes.

-”The Fourth Hand” was published in 2001 by Random House. Copyright © John Irving 2001
-”The English Patient,” was first published 1992 by Bloomsbury Publishing Limited. The edition I used for this review was published 1993 by Picador. Copyright © Michael Ondaatje 1992