Heatopher's Motivational Post, AKA The Prologue

Heatopher of late 2023 has bequeathed himself a daunting task in 2024. With no less lofty an ambition than resolving the Arab/Israeli conflict, if not for the world as a whole, but in my own head at least, I took it upon myself to watch a very strictly equal number of films from the two sides of that monstrous separation wall. These were to be watched in very rigid alternation, one Arab (mainly Palestinian, of course, but not exclusively), followed by an Israeli (or possibly Diaspora Jewish) movie. I’ve done my best to stick faithfully to the task, but of course there have been a few breeches of protocol, firstly due to the fact that I had already watched slightly more films from the Israeli side than from the Arab side, so there was the need for a little rebalancing.

There was a period in my life when I studied the Arab/Israeli troubles in quite a lot of detail. It’s really too bad that I wasn’t in the end able to produce the key document, aka a PhD, attesting to all that study, but I speak to people who did finally manage to squirt out that thesis, and their stories confirm to me that missing out on a university career in the twenty first century doesn’t necessarily warrant too much hand-wringing. I can write another time about why I didn’t make it. Of course some of that is painful to talk about (and I won’t talk about all of it); but once I realised the extent to which British universities were turning into corporations in the early years of this century, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to survive inside that system. Even more so in the second and third decades of the century, when the Culture Wars have taken hold of the neoliberal marketplace of ideas, just as much now in the UK as it so notoriously has in the USA. Had I indeed pursued the academic career that I once thought life had destined me for, I know that I would have been an early casualty of the Culture Wars, more than likely to offend both sides. In lieu of having had the pleasure of that experience, let’s see how many people I can offend on here. You don’t need to try too hard these days 😏

And what more perfect project could be designed to offend everyone at some point than a survey of films and documentaries from the Middle East? My only intention is to view and compare films from both sides of the conflict to get the most balanced possible perspective, and if I offend the many extremists on both sides, I will have done my job. Seriously, though, I hope not to offend any reasonable person, whichever side of the wall your gut sympathies lie, and more importantly I hope that I will provide useful resources to anyone who wants to understand what’s going on.

In my next post, I’ll talk about how the idea for this project came about, where I looked for the films which I’m going to talk about, and how it quickly snowballed into the mammoth effort that it will turn out to be.