As for Obama, Yedioth ran a comparison between his State Department address on the Middle East and the clarifications he made to AIPAC on Sunday—such as what he meant by “mutually agreed swaps”—under the headline “Dispelled the Fog” (Pizer et Ha’arafel). And in a front-page headline on Obama’s comments in London after Netanyahu’s Congress speech, Israel Hayom went for rhyming Hebrew acronyms: “Obama to the Palestinians: Lo Ba’um, Rak Bamum,” which translates to “Not at the U.N., Only in Negotiations.” The same edition of the paper, which is owned by U.S. billionaire casino mogul and Netanyahu backer Sheldon Adelson, noted that its poll found 61 percent of Israelis to be in favor of the “Netanyahu principles” (ekronot Netanyahu). Earlier in the week, Maariv put its own poll results on the front page: 57 percent say Netanyahu should have said yes to Obama’s proposals for peace. In the same poll, though, the prime minister was judged the person most suited to lead the country; Kadima leader Tzipi Livni came in a distant second.

The Ofer Brothers Group, owned by Israel’s richest family, this week denied selling an oil tanker worth about $8.65 million to Iran’s national shipping company and objected to sanctions the White House said it would impose on both the Israeli conglomerate and its Singapore-based Tanker Pacific Management subsidiary. Ofer Brothers says the tanker was sold to a Dubai-registered company that is not on a U.S. blacklist, but the State Department said the group “did not heed publicly available and easily obtainable information” that could have indicated who would really be getting the tanker. Haaretz intelligence reporter (and Tablet Magazine contributor) Yossi Melman wrote that in 2008 Israel passed a law prohibiting Israeli firms from investing in international companies that operate in Israel and maintain extensive trade ties with Iran—he says there are at least 200 of them—but that the government has not enforced the law. Netanyahu “is not lifting a finger” to stop indirect trade with Iran, even though he “endlessly preaches the need for firm action,” Melman wrote.

Hundreds of Israeli soldiers will be issued a new uniform in July that boasts a cell phone pocket and improved armpit ventilation, the army announced this week. But around the same time, the army’s ombudsman sent the message that soldiers shouldn’t be using those cell phones quite so much. Maj. Gen. Yitzhak Brik told a Knesset committee this week that officers are increasingly issuing commands via text messaging or email, and warned that 40 percent of those commands are not being carried out. “There are some commands that you need to give while looking the soldier in the eyes, otherwise the soldiers won’t follow the commanders into battle,” Israel Hayom quoted him saying.

Israeli filmmaker Joseph Cedar won the best screenplay award at the Cannes Film Festival this week for his fourth movie, Footnote, or He’arat Shulayim, which tells the story of the decades-long rivalry between two Talmudic scholars, a father and son. The relatively staid setting marks a major change from Cedar’s 2007 film, the Oscar-nominated Beaufort, about the Israel Defense Forces’ withdrawal from southern Lebanon, for which Cedar won the best director prize at the Berlin International Film Festival. The latest win was seen in Israel as a victory for the country’s film industry, not just for Cedar. The prize is a “huge and unprecedented achievement for Israeli cinema,” wrote Yedioth. Before the winners were announced, Maariv took a more flippant tone, involving a play on the homonyms Cannes and the Hebrew word “kahn,” meaning “here.” The paper asked in a headline: “Mi Cannes Hamenatze’ah?” (Who’s the Winner Cannes/Here?).

Because of Shavuot, Israel Week in Review will return June 17.

The film, co-directed and –written by an Israeli and a Palestinian, was submitted after winning Israel’s Ophir Award for best picture. It is set in Ajami, the largest Arab neighborhood in Jaffa, and begins with a 13-year-old Arab boy witnessing a revenge murder.

The Israeli nominee in 2007 was Beaufort, and in 2008 it was Waltz With Bashir. Senior Writer Allison Hoffman wrote about both last October. And Sara Ivry interviewed Bashir director Ari Folman for the Vox Tablet podcast.

Nine Foreign Language Films Advance in Oscar Race [Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences]

Related: War Movies [Tablet Magazine]
Soldier’s Story [Tablet Magazine]
Sources of Hope, Amid A Divide [NYT]

Earlier: Israel Submits Arabic-Language Film for Oscars

“Everything can burst here tomorrow morning, and you just never know,” said Katriel Schory, executive director of the Israel Film Fund, a government-backed nonprofit that provided financing to both Folman and Maoz. “You cannot say the Second Lebanon War triggered these projects—it was a sheer coincidence.” And, he insisted, there was no master plan, just a desire to let a generation of filmmakers who had all served in the first, controversial Lebanon war—what Maoz calls the “Lebanon generation”—explore the lasting effects of combat on Israel’s young.

“What isn’t a coincidence is that we are all obsessed with this war,” said Amy Kronish, the former curator of Jewish and Israeli film at the Jerusalem Cinematheque. “But the film fund’s policy is to fund every feature film, if possible, that’s worth funding—they won’t say to a director, we had a film about this already, we won’t fund you.”

Theoretically, all three films could have come out at the same time. Cedar, a former paratrooper, and won financing in early 2006 from the Rabinovich Foundation for the Arts, another government-sponsored film fund, and wrapped in June of that year, weeks before the start of the 34-day second invasion. The film, which Cedar began writing while sitting in a military jail after refusing to do reserve duty, captures the final days of the occupation of an ancient fortress in southern Lebanon, just before IDF troops pulled out in 2000. Folman, a writer for the Israeli version of In Treatment, began his script for Bashir around the time of the pullout, after he requested early release from his reserve duty as a writer for IDF safety-instruction movies on the grounds that he needed therapy for PTSD stemming from his experience at the front in 1982. In the spring of 2006, he presented Schory with a 10-minute pilot for an animated film exploring his struggle to remember what exactly he did during the massacre at Sabra and Shatila, and released his film last year, just ahead of the Gaza invasion, triggering a heated national debate about the nature of responsibility and memory.

Maoz, a production designer and cinematographer who made his living for years shooting music videos and commercials, wrote his screenplay in a four-week burst in 2006. “I said to myself, you are over 40 and you need to do something with yourself—you are not a young director, and it’s now or never,” Maoz said in an interview last week. He began shooting in 2007, but completion of the film was delayed after the death of one of his producers. Chronologically, his movie belongs at the beginning: it describes the experience of four soldiers manning a tank on June 6, 1982, the first day of the first Lebanon invasion. Set entirely inside the claustrophobic metal walls of the machine, it captures the narrow experience of soldiers whose only view on the carnage is through the sight of a scope—cracked by a missile, for good measure—and who wind up having to bear the brunt of making life-or-death decisions while their feckless commanders sit considering abstractions in safe war rooms, far away.

Now, Maoz—who once told Variety that he watched the news coverage of the second Lebanon War with the uneasy sense that they were filming his script—bears the burden of being in the shadow of his compatriots. Both Beaufort and Waltz with Bashir were huge successes both domestically and abroad, garnering laurels at international film festivals along with consecutive nominations for the best foreign-language Oscars, Israel’s first since the early 1980s. (Folman, who lost the Academy Award race to a Japanese film, won Israel’s first Golden Globe.) “If they’d come out in the same year, maybe one would have succeeded at the expense of the others,” Cedar said.

Lebanon, which is set for theatrical release in America early next year, won the top prize last month at the Venice film festival, but was edged out for best picture at Israel’s Ophir awards, which means Maoz won’t have a shot at a foreign-language Oscar statuette. “In the beginning I thought it was bad luck to be number three,” said Maoz. “But I know that millions of people will see it, and I don’t have reasons to complain.”

Related:

Time of Favor [Tablet]

Fortress of Solitude [Tablet]

Soldier’s Story [Tablet]

Few Israelis seemed willing even to talk about the eighteen-year occupation, in which the ancient Beaufort fortress,

Beaufort Castle, 1982

eight miles north of the Israeli border, was strategically vital. Yet the book took off. “It first became popular among Israeli soldiers,” Leshem says. “Whenever I gave lectures, the people in the audience were predominantly soldiers who were just out of the army and young guys before their induction because the book was relevant to them.”

“Relevant” is understating the case. If Heaven Exists speaks directly to soldiers’ experience, using the blunt and gritty language of the front lines. Not only has the book garnered positive reviews from critics and respected Israeli writers like David Grossman and Meir Shalev, but it has also sold more than 130,000 copies, making it a hit of titanic proportions in Israel. During its eighteen-month stint on the best seller lists of the newspapers Haaretz and Yediot Ahronot, it held the number-one slot for nine months. You couldn’t sit on a train crowded with IDF soldiers traveling home and not find one or two of them reading it. Slowly, mothers of soldiers began reading the book to understand their sons’ army experiences. (I was one of those mothers.) In 2006, it won the Sapir Prize for Literature, the Israeli equivalent of the Booker Prize. “The reason that caused Leshem’s book to have such an impact is not the literary value of the novel,” says Maya Feldman, a book critic for Yediot Ahronot’s web site. “Its realistic content presents a chain of events that is expressed through soldiers’ words, people who were there, and not through the words of an author. Meaning, almost unprocessed. This authenticity, in my eyes, is strongly appealing.”

In March, a movie adaptation co-written by Leshem, titled Beaufort, opened in Israel to outstanding reviews. It broke box-office records in its first month of release (despite criticism from families of slain soldiers and war veterans that three of the leading actors had never served in the army), and became the nation’s submission to the Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film. Its director, Joseph Cedar, won the Best Director award at the Berlin International Film Festival. The novel will be published in the United States this month, also under the title Beaufort, and the film will open in New York City in January.

“The book provided soldiers with an outlet, a way to legitimize what they were feeling,” says Leshem over coffee at a café near his apartment in Givatayim, a Tel Aviv suburb. Slender and pale, with pensive dark eyes and a self-effacing demeanor, Leshem is thirty-one and works as Deputy Director of Programming at Israel’s Channel Two, lining up what he calls “escapist” shows like A Star Is Born. He says he did his own military service as a “pencil-pusher” in the Israeli Defense Ministry, working on behind-the-scenes preparations for the 1998 Wye peace negotiations. When he was released, he got a job reporting for Yediot Ahronot. He was sent to cover the Palestinians’ Second Intifada in the Gaza Strip in the fall of 2000, where he met the IDF soldier Rotem Yair, a commander in the Givati Brigade. “Rotem told me right out that he hated me,” says Leshem. “He said that when he was hiding in the bushes of Lebanon, I was, in his words, ‘drinking lemonade in a Tel Aviv café.’ He said I wouldn’t have even turned on the radio to see if he was okay and ‘you wouldn’t have even known if I was killed.’ Rotem hated me for not knowing.”

Leshem’s “guilt of not knowing” propelled him to persuade Rotem, who had always refused to speak to journalists, to recount his experiences. In If Heaven Exists Leshem has fictionalized him, turning him into Liraz Liberti, a dark-skinned Sephardic high school dropout, now the dispassionate but determined young commander of a team of thirteen Israel Defense Forces soldiers. The novel is written as his diary, detailing a condensed version of the actual events of the last winter of the occupation. “It’s really a book about withdrawal, not combat,” Leshem says.

At the start of the 1982 Lebanese War, a small Golani reconnaissance unit stormed and captured Beaufort Castle.

Israeli army troops at Beaufort Castle on June 7, 1982, the day after Israel Defense Forces invaded southern Lebanon

The Southern Lebanon security zone, controlled by the Israeli Army allied with the predominantly Christian South Lebanese Army, was established to prevent further rocket attacks on Israel by Hezbollah fighters who had moved into Lebanon. Soldiers at Beaufort knew the castle could become another Masada; they were sitting ducks for Hezbollah raids and mortar attacks. Alone in a medieval fortress on a lonely, vulnerable peak, cut off from their superiors at Army headquarters, they created their own culture, language, and rules. A wounded soldier is a flower; a dead soldier is a poppy. Eaten is afraid, and it is the worst thing for the unit, because it is contagious. The novel’s title comes from a saying that was written by a soldier over the doorway leading into Beaufort’s bunkers: “If heaven exists, this is what it looks like. If there’s a hell, this is what it feels like.”

Since Hezbollah soldiers often tried to storm the castle and there were constant rocket attacks, the soldiers always had to be ready for battle in less than thirty seconds—which meant sleeping in their uniforms and their boots. They couldn’t take showers or change their underwear; they took anti-diarrhea pills to avoid being caught by mortar attack while their pants were down. And every soldier knew how it felt to hold a dead man in his arms. The book captures both the intense devotion that develops among them and the propaganda that Hezbollah uses to try to break them. In one wrenching moment, the soldiers watch a Hezbollah broadcast on television that shows real footage from Israeli military cemeteries and pictures of Israeli soldiers weeping at a soldier’s funeral. “They love life, those Jews,” an announcer says in Hebrew with a Shiite accent. “We, on the other hand, love death.”

“I wanted to write an anti-war story,” Leshem says, “but it became a way for families of soldiers killed in the Second Lebanese War to cope with their grief.” The novel describes a game, What He Can’t Do Anymore, that Israeli soldiers played, a game of stories about their fallen comrades. In the first pages, the game is played about a soldier named Yonatan. “Yonatan can’t take his little brother to a movie any more. . . . He won’t be at his grandfather’s funeral, he won’t know if his sister gets married, he won’t take a piss with us from the highest peak in South America.”

Six soldiers named Yonatan were killed in the Second Lebanese War. At the war’s start, when Yonatan Hadasi, the first soldier named Yonatan, was killed, Israeli Army radio reported that the text of the What He Can’t Do Anymore passage of the book was read at Hadasi’s funeral. “Several parents of other fallen soldiers called me during the war,” Leshem says. “They told me that their son was in the middle of reading If Heaven Exists or had just finished reading it when he was killed and invited me to come to their house to meet their family.” Leshem went to pay shiva calls to these families. It was almost as if, because these soldiers were reading If Heaven Exists, they knew Leshem. And somehow, the families felt that Leshem knew their fallen sons and could bring some consolation. “Some of the families did a ‘take-off’ of my text,” Leshem says. “They rewrote a personalized version for the fallen soldier that was read during the eulogies.”

Dozens of American novels have been written by and about soldiers who served in Vietnam, but until If Heaven Exists no Israeli novel had ever been published about what happened to Israeli soldiers in Lebanon. “The Israeli Army pulled out on May 24, 2000, a Wednesday,” Leshem says. “By Friday, the word Lebanon was erased. Nobody talked about it.” His book, according to Maya Feldman, was the “first to break the silence surrounding that period.”

The book also serves as a painful reminder of how Israel has come full circle. “I thought that the withdrawal from Southern Lebanon was the right thing to do,” Leshem says. “It was an amazing chapter in Israeli history that what began as a movement of civilians, primarily mothers of soldiers, pushed the government to decide to pull out.” Yet the novel’s chillingly accurate prophecies, voiced by Liberti, about what would happen after Israel’s withdrawal seem to provide a way of understanding the growing consensus in Israel that the country is doomed to endless wars, even though it withdrew from Southern Lebanon and the Gaza Strip—and will most likely withdraw from the Palestinian Territories. “You don’t think Kiryat Shmona will be bombarded again?” Liberti asks on the last page of the book. “They’ll take a soldier hostage . . . bombard some northern settlement with mortar shells. . . . And when it comes, anyone who thinks a flock of IAF fighter jets is capable of taking care of the job from the air is going to learn there’s no replacing foot soldiers. We’ll march in there.”

In July 2006, ten months after If Heaven Exists was published, Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers along the Israeli-Lebanese border. Then the Second Lebanese War broke out. Hezbollah shelled Kiryat Shmona and the entire north of Israel (including the village where my family and I live). Israel’s Air Force bombed Hezbollah targets, and soon foot soldiers returned to South Lebanon to engage in house-to-house fighting. Israelis have a reputation for being resilient—hard, even—and rightly so. Sometimes it feels as if the country chokes its sorrow in a numbing silence. But as Liberti says in the book, “I’m sane, don’t worry. I’m not shell-shocked. In our country I’m certainly not the only twenty-one-year-old who’s held a body of a friend missing a head. You could almost say it’s normal around here.”