Media Backspin writes of the documentary To die in Jerusalem, which somehow balances the death of Rachel Levy with the death of the girl who killed her. (My guess is that the movie ignores the hero, Haim Smadar, who died that day.)
Backspin notes that the source material, the article in Newsweek was just as wretched as the portrayal of the two girls in the NY Times. Someone else noticed this at the time, Bret Stephens, then editor of the Jerusalem Post.
There’s a hero to this story. She’s a quiet, studious, beautiful Palestinian girl, with a rich and mysterious inner life, who one day bids a nonchalant farewell to her classmates, leaves a “grim warren of alleys and tightly packed dwellings,” and commits something perfectly abrupt and terrible, in the stylized manner of ritual Japanese suicide or a French art-house film. The Rachel Levy of Greenberg’s telling is, by contrast, just another transplanted JAP. More problematic is that Greenberg’s evident concern for balance is such that he tells us nothing about Akhras save the details of her life that mirror Levy’s. Which is to say, everything about her that’s banal. But it is not a banal girl who walks into a supermarket with explosives wrapped to her waist to detonate herself and every other living thing within a 20 meter radius. To limit the profile of Akhras to the fact that she went to school and did the laundry is a little like telling us that Charles Manson likes mustard on his burgers and is a huge fan of the LA Lakers.
Absent from Greenberg’s account is some idea of how a young woman can be raised, educated and eventually recruited to become a suicide bomber. What were her family’s politics? On what diet of literature was she schooled? How did the suicide squad find her? What sort of training did she get? What kind of society makes murderesses out of its future mothers?
But we get none of it, except that Akhras “was quite normal.” Within that artless remark there’s a story worth telling about this killer and the world that made her. Too bad Greenberg misses it.
…
Yet for all this, Hammer’s story disappoints. “There was something about staring into the almost-twin faces of the bomber and her victim last week,” he writes, “that moved the seemingly unending tale of strife in the region to a deeper and even more unsettling place… Martyrdom – or, depending on your point of view, murder – is becoming mainstream.”
Depending on your point of view?
“To die in Jerusalem” is not the first dramatization of this terror attack. A few years ago, there was a play “Paradise” that was being produced in Cincinatti and upset the Muslim population there. I found out about this in an obscure blog, David’s Israel Blog.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
