Three years ago, on the eve of the Tisha B’Av fast, directors Joseph Cedar and Tawfik Abu Wael attended a traditional selihot service at a Jerusalem synagogue frequented by young members of the Lehava Jewish supremacist organization. The two were conducting research for their series “Our Boys,” which they created and directed with Hagai Levy, focusing on the two teenagers and young adult convicted of murdering Palestinian youth Mohammed Abu Khdeir in 2014.
Abu Wael was wearing a kippa “as camouflage.” Leaving the synagogue, the two directors fell into conversation with the Lehava youths, one of whom asked Abu Wael to roll him a cigarette. “And then one of them suddenly says to me, about Cedar: ‘What are you hanging out with this Tel Aviv Ashkenazi lefty for? You’re one of us,'” Wael recalls with a smile during a recent conversation.
“That was a moment which clarified that reality is so complicated,” he says. “When you grow up with a sense of discrimination, you come to the world with anger. I can really understand why people become racist: the social gaps create an energy of frustration and rage. And I think Mizrahi racism toward Arabs stems out of hatred for Ashkenazim. They hate the Ashkenazim more than they hate the Arabs, as seen in this case with Cedar.”
Abu Wael harnessed the feeling of rage he identified among the Lehava youth when writing and directing his new series. “Unknowns” (“Alumim,” in Hebrew), currently being aired on Kan public television, centers around teenagers with a criminal background whose school, which resembles a battlefield, offers them a final shot at rehabilitation.
The nine 50-minute episodes created by Abu Wael – in cooperation with Guy Sidis, Nirit Yaron and Shira Porat – is somewhat reminiscent of the Nordic Noir genre. Here, too, the background is the discovery of a girl in the forest in Beit Shemesh, outside Jerusalem, who had apparently been raped.
Tawfik Abu Wael.
David Bachar
But the gray Scandinavian landscapes and contemplative, suit-clad detectives are replaced here by a brilliant group (actors Ofek Pesach, Amir Tesler and Ben Sultan) who fire off racist slurs in juicy Hebrew at everyone who crosses their paths. The rest of the time they steal bicycles, abuse dogs and sell drugs to youths from more fortunate families.
The veteran wing of the “Unknowns” cast is represented by Yehuda Levi, playing a smarmy Tel Aviv businessman who is doing community service work at the youths’ school after being mixed up in financial fraud; Shani Cohen, as the benevolent, compassionate teacher; and Yaniv Biton as her husband – a worn-out Beit Shemesh cop who tries to solve the rape case.
Why you must watch HBO’s brilliant new Israeli drama ‘Our Boys’
Israeli star of HBO’s ‘Our Boys’ explains why you have to watch the show
‘I don’t represent anyone, but I bring a voice that isn’t heard enough,’ says artist Yasmine Bakria
As he did in “Our Boys,” the 45-year-old writer-director manages to look at his protagonists in the new series – violent and racist as they may be – with a highly compassionate eye. When I ask him where he’s mustered this affection for characters who spout a never-ending stream of virulent slurs, Abu Wael’s answer is unequivocal: “I grew up in this kind of reality in Umm al-Fahm [an Israeli Arab city in the north], in a poor neighborhood, in a family of 10 kids. I come from a fatherless home, with a mother who was illiterate but also a very strong woman who had to provide. That’s the environment I grew up in. I have friends who have been in prison. I have friends who were murdered. This was the reality. In each of the teenage characters in the show, there’s something that resembles me or the people I grew up with.
“Primitive racism like that of the boys in the series isn’t different from the kind that comes from an elitist place. I’ve lived in Tel Aviv for many years and still, for me to be able to rent an apartment in town is a nightmare. And these are people who will tell you they voted [for left-wing parties] Meretz or Hadash,” he adds. “There is a bourgeois racism that is violent and beneath the surface. By the way, Arabs are racist toward Jews too. Racism simmers everywhere and this fascinates me.”
This is the first time Jewish characters take center stage in one of Abu Wael’s productions. In the past he directed “Thirst,” a movie about a Palestinian family migrating to the desert, which won a critics’ award at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival. Following that he directed “Last Days in Jerusalem” (2011), about a couple from East Jerusalem whose marriage is collapsing. He then went on to work on “Our Boys,” which won over a dozen Israeli Academy Awards.
A scene from “Alumim.”
Curtesy of Kan
He created the Palestinian plotline of that show, which focused on the lives of the three Jews who murdered teenager Abu Khdeir. This time around, in “Unknowns,” there are no Palestinian characters on the small screen, let alone protagonists.
Why did you decide to go for Jewish protagonists this time?
“I’ve been wanting to shed this cape [of Arab protagonists] for some years now. I like to tell a story and I don’t have to do it only in Arabic. When you’re a minority and you make a movie, people look at you through a microscope. It’s a sort of burden. They’ll always try to figure out if you’re for the Palestinians or against Israel; who you’re representing. You automatically become an ambassador. You can’t just make a film or show. On the other hand, in Europe, when you go looking for funding, they look at you through the Palestinian prism and if you’re not dealing with the occupation, it’s like, what do we need you for anyway?”
Like as a Palestinian you only have one story to tell.
From “Our Boys.”
“There’s a flattening of the discourse and perspective. If you make a film about love or relationships and there’s nothing directly touching on the occupation, there’s no way to sell it. In addition, in Israel there’s always the issue of who will want to watch content in Arabic. You ask yourself these questions too and begin to deal with things that are not related to the work itself. But I’m here to tell a story. I live in this place: a Palestinian who lives in Israel and speaks Hebrew. I’ve lived in Tel Aviv for longer than I’ve lived in Umm al-Fahm. So I felt that I’m a local and I experience this place’s problems and I swim in this place’s currents – so I can tell the story of this place, even if it’s not a Palestinian story. It has been a very refreshing experience to be free of that cloud. Palestinian actors are often wary of cooperating with Israeli productions, so there’s been something very liberating about working on this series.”
Tahini stain
Abu Wael found another liberating aspect working on the new series in terms of his emotional connection to the protagonists he created, with youths an Israeli rarely encounters: “Since I also came from a very poor family, I’ve gone through what these boys do, being marginalized. Your only options growing up in Umm al-Fahm are to be a criminal, or just a construction worker, or be six feet under.”
Luckily for him, he chose a different path, and although he dropped out of high school in 10th grade, he managed to graduate and enroll in Tel Aviv University’s Steve Tisch School of Film and Television.
From “Our Boys.”
Ran Mendelson / YES
He came to “Unknowns” at the 11th hour, after some of the episodes had already been written, but insisted on rewriting them to make them match the reality he grew up in and knew so intimately.
“I asked myself why I wanted to make this show,” he says. “I realized that these are precisely the boys who deserve compassion and grace. The character of Menachem, who is portrayed as the worst of the gang, deserves that gaze. These teenagers – marginalized, criminals and racists, Arab-haters and Ashkenazi-haters – are supposedly as far from me as they can be. The challenge was to find the place where they become complex characters. I do know them, after all. These are youths who need a father to guide them and a mother to hug them. When you grow up in material poverty, you feel like the world screwed you over and you think about how to screw it back. And I knew I could do this. These are scary characters, but your heart goes out to them. That was the goal here.”
You weren’t put off by the fact that every other epithet they hurl is about “f****** Arabs” and “homos”?
“I have the privilege, as a Palestinian living in Tel Aviv, to accept all kinds of perspectives relating to complex identities. So I like to deal with political, sexual, psychological identity. In a movie I was working on that got sidelined because of COVID-19, there was an affair between a straight guy and a transgender woman. Racism fascinates me too. We live in a world full of racism.”
Do you think a show like “Unknowns” would have aired if the protagonists were Arabs?
“I seriously doubt it. Any Arab content has question marks attached. I’ve discovered that Arabs and Ethiopians, for example, do not sell on TV. They try to avoid putting them on the screen. Put it this way: they talk about the ‘first Israel’ and ‘second Israel’ [i.e., the privileged vs. the underprivileged, outlying parts of Israeli society] all the time here, but nobody talks about the ‘third Israel.’ There’s the country’s 20 percent Arabs who are completely screwed, stuck in ghettoes, disadvantaged.
“I’m not surprised that they’re not represented on TV because they’re completely invisible. Nobody wants to see them. At most you’ll see an easy-to-stomach Arab, secular Arabs or ones living in Tel Aviv, or an Arab laughing at himself like [journalist and author] Sayed Kashua. On the other hand, what he did is genius because he managed to plant subversive messages about the Nakba and social gaps within the context of comedy.”
Is that why Palestinian creators seek funds abroad and also work less and less in Israel?
“On the one hand, they’re not really wanted so they turn to the Arab world – but in my view that’s a catastrophe. You have to rise above. Being an artist means rising above everyday politics. To not work with the establishment in Israel or the local foundations – that’s sad. An Arab creator has no chance to make a comedy or a show for young adults. On the other hand, there’s stupidity among the Arabs too. The idea that if I disassociate from the Israeli establishment then I’ll have the Arab playground – that’s foolishness, because at the end of the day you live here, your fate is here, the Israelis are your partners. An Israeli I live with and love is worth a million times more than an Arab I don’t know. I’m here and I’m not leaving. What the others are doing is to emigrate from their own place. It’s sort of a defeat. After all, I’m here and living in Tel Aviv, and even if they don’t want to rent an apartment to me – I’m here till they kick me out.”
Even during a period like the Israeli-Hamas war in May, with everything on fire, you didn’t think about leaving?
“I’ve already emigrated once. From Umm al-Fahm to Tel Aviv. I came from one of the poorest neighborhoods in the country and now I live near the Habima theater – that’s a crazy migration to me. I have no motivation to do it again. The time of the military operation this past spring was disgusting, but it also brought out a lot of humanity in people. It was the first time I felt scared walking down the street, but I also had good Jewish friends willing to protect me with their lives. This shows there’s compassion everywhere. I’d walk around a lot listening to Arabic music at full volume just to check the boundaries, or I’d walk along the beach where you’d see that there are no more Arabs. They were completely gone from the landscape. I asked myself if people can tell who I am. Once, I left home and had a tahini stain on my pants and I was afraid they’d identify me because of it.”
Listen, Jews eat tahini too.
He laughs. “True. You might think it would have been best to be born Jewish, but the Jew probably thinks they’d have been better off being born elsewhere, somewhere quieter. You need to embrace your fate. We live in a world full of hate, but there’s good in people too, even if there are not so many of them. When you see images of hate and blood, you can see the compassion too.”
Tawfik Abu Wael.
David Bachar
‘Prehistoric society’
Abu Wael learned one of his lessons in compassion through a framework called Looking Forward, sponsored by the Keshet broadcasting company, where he met at-risk teenagers from Israel’s periphery, to whom he tried to impart some cinematic skills. He volunteered at the project for five years.
“The hardest for me was meeting youth from [the Israeli-Arab village of] Jisr al-Zarqa. You realize you have no tools to deal with a gay boy or a girl who’s suffered domestic violence. It’s too hard.”
One of the most powerful lines in the first episode of “Unknowns,” which also echoes those encounters, is “Always throw the first punch.”
Abu Wael: “Where I grew up, if you don’t know who’s taking the first punch, you might get stabbed. It’s a struggle for survival. You don’t know what and when someone’s gonna pull something out. It’s like two cowboys. You have to take the lead. I’ve been in situations like that too. I’ve been in fights and you have to know when lines have been crossed. If you don’t throw the first punch, you’ll lose. By the way, the State of Israel is the classic example for that. That’s why it’s the strongest and most dominant.”
So maybe that line is an all-Israeli allegory.
“Totally. Israel embodies this line to perfection. When I directed one of the young actors, I explained to him that he has to think of himself like this: Anyone who doesn’t love you should fear you. That’s Israel’s motto. Ask any Shin Bet [security service] agent and they’ll tell you it’s great to have the Arab fear you. Those are the materials of the place we live in.”
A scene from “Alumim.”
Curtesy of Kan
Lately, the media and politicians are addressing violence in the Arab community. In your view, how willing is the Israeli to look at the community without that sort of mediation?
“I think the mainstream in Israel is sick and tired of Arabs, and as far as it’s concerned they can disappear, leaving only their tasty food and maybe their houses. Somehow. the regime has managed to ghettoize the Arabs. After all, when do they talk about violence in Arab society? When it spills over into Israeli society.
“I myself can be the biggest critic of the Arabs: It’s a prehistoric society that has a lot of room for growth and development. It has been living under oppression and decay for a long time, but the truth is that I have no expectations from Arabs because they live in shit. They don’t really have anything to aspire to. The State of Israel, which holds the power, needs to take care of them.
“By the way, when I was shooting in Beit Shemesh, I felt the closest to a situation of meeting Arabs. Not just Arabs, the ones from the refugee camps [created after 1948]. The heaviness of hopelessness, the fact that you can’t even dream. You’re 17 and you already feel like an old man of 70. It hit me. It reminded me of the people who grew up in the refugee camps. I really connected with the place.”
In 2004, you were asked what would have happened if you weren’t a director, and you answered that you would have been a hitman. I assume that was said in jest, but maybe it’s not that far-fetched.
“When I did interviews back then, I really had a lot of anger at the world. But when I look at the place I came from, I could easily have wound up there. I wouldn’t have gone on to be a construction worker because it would have bored me. My soul has something extroverted in it, so I would’ve gone for broke. Something dangerous. Kill or be killed.”
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Italian
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish