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NEW YORK POST
Tales of Terrifying Fear and Forgiveness
By V.A. Musetto
June 25, 2003 -- In August 1978, Yulie Cohen Gerstel, then a 22-year-old
stewardess for El Al, was slightly injured in a terrorist attack in
London by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. A co-worker
was killed and another seriously injured.
One of the terrorists, Fahad Mihyi, was captured and given four concurrent
life sentences in a British prison. The man who helped carry out the
attack died in the assault.
Now, 25 years after the attack - "The fear I felt at that moment never
left me," she says - Gerstel has visited Mihyi in prison and is waging
a campaign to have him freed.
The reasons behind her provocative decision (some Israelis have called
her a "traitor") are detailed in "My Terrorist," a gripping and thoughtful
documentary written and directed by Gerstel herself.
Gerstel, a handsome woman who lives in Tel Aviv with her two teenage
daughters, calls "My Terrorist" a "cinematic journey to convince those
around me and myself that it is time to forgive." "The Israeli occupation
for over 35 years plays a major factor in the fact that the Palestinian
terrorism still goes on," she continues, adding, "Reconciliation is
better than revenge."
"My Terrorist" opens today at the Film Forum with "Human Weapon," director
Ilan Ziv's examination of the origins and effects of suicide terrorism.
The film travels to Israel, Lebanon, Northern Ireland and Sri Lanka
in a chilling look at the death and destruction inflicted by zealots
who are willing to die and become "martyrs" for their causes. The origins
are traced to the Japanese suicide pilots of World War II.
In an attempt to understand this phenomenon, Ziv interviews leaders
of terrorist groups like Hamas, failed hit men now in jail and relatives
of those who died carrying out these attacks. The effect is frightening.
My Terrorist
Rating: 3 stars
Total running time: 112 minutes. Not rated (horrors of war). At the
Film Forum, Houston Street, west of Sixth Avenue. Through July 8.
Published: 06 - 25 - 2003, Online Edition
THE VILLAGE VOICE
A Pair of Documentaries Grapple With Fanaticism and Forgiveness Too
Fast, Too Furious
by C. Carr
June 25 - July 1, 2003
It set off a shock wave, this forgiveness. Near the beginning of My
Terrorist, filmmaker Yulie Cohen Gerstel appears on Israeli television
to talk about her decision to help facilitate a prison release for the
terrorist who nearly killed her in 1978. The host of Political, Israel's
most popular political talk show seems incredulous. "Explain to me why
you don't scare yourself," he demands. Across from Gerstel sits a woman,
Yaffa El-Harar, whose daughter died in a car bombing several years ago.
Radiating fury and pain, El-Harar declares that no one should even be
talking to terrorists, much less forgiving them: "They should be eliminated
without hesitation, without mercy."
My Terrorist opens this week at Film Forum along with Ilan Ziv's Human
Weapon, a new documentary on the history of suicide bombing, or what
Ziv calls the privatization of political violence. (It's no longer the
exclusive domain of nations.) Here is plenty of terrible evidence about
the path of no hesitation, no mercy-ground the terrorists own. As Robert
J. Lifton says in Human Weapon: "The apocalyptic violence and the suicide
bombing dimension create an aura of threat, death transcendence . .
. and it is tempting to plunge into that in the effort to destroy it
or combat it, in a way that resembles it. That's the real danger."
Gerstel tells her antagonists on Political that she simply wants to
find another way. What happens in My Terrorist might be called the privatization
of reconciliation (since that process no longer seems to interest certain
governments). On a recent visit to New York, she said that the film
had not been well received in Israel, where it was shown on cable TV.
Critics called it "boring" and "shallow." In fact, it's a unique work
of conscience, and since the outbreak of the second intifada, a subversive
one.
In August 1978, Gerstel was part of an El Al crew attack as they arrived
at a central London hotel. She'd been immediately suspicious of the
two Arab men near the door and had just pointed them out when Fahad
Mihyi opened fire with a machine gun. The other man pulled the pin on
a grenade as a panic-stricken stewardess ran straight into him; she
and he died instantly. Another stewardess standing right next to Gerstel
fell in the lobby with a bullet in her brain. Hit in the arm by shrapnel,
Gerstel later testified at Mihyi's trial. A member of the Popular Front
for the Liberation of Palestine, he got four concurrent life sentences.
Gerstel grew up in the Tel Aviv neighborhood that was home to Ariel
Sharon and Moshe Dayan, attracted to the military. By the time of the
terrorist attack in London, she had already served her mandatory two
and a half years in the air force and was a college student, working
summers as a stewardess. But after graduating, she rejoined the air
force as a captain.
Her disillusionment began with the massacre at the Sabra-Shatila refugee
camp in 1982. "Me being a victim maybe delayed my involvement in the
Palestinian cause," she speculates. She remembers a demonstration she
attended with her young daughter to demand withdrawal from Lebanon,
and her sensitivity to the violence as other Israelis threw things and
called them traitors. "I remember deciding not to go out anymore. I
think I was traumatized, but one day I grew up. It's a process."
Gerstel began to make films in 1993, all documentaries, none particularly
political-one on the Bedouins, another on a Kurdish village in Israel.
Then, in 1999, she did a short film on Imad F. Sabi, who'd been deported
from Israel as a suspected recruiter for the PFLP. "It was him that
threw me back to my trauma, because I got to like him very much." She
took an evening course in Palestinian history, and began to meet people
in Gaza and the West Bank. "One day I was sitting in Nablus with my
Palestinian friends, in a café, and I was thinking-this Fahad could
be sitting here." She decided to look for him. After finding him in
an English prison, she wrote a letter asking about his background, his
motives: "I've been trying to figure out what happened to you personally
and to Palestinians in general that turned us to be enemies." His reply
was an apology. Eventually, he would ask for her help in leaving jail.
And she would ask him for permission to film. He refused. So My Terrorist
became her journey, "and he made me do this journey by not cooperating.
Because I didn't think about filming myself at all. It was supposed
to be about him."
Along the way, Gerstel had questions and doubts and discouragements.
After September 11, she nearly decided to break things off with him.
Now, she thinks he may be out of jail, but "on purpose," she doesn't
know. She spent all of one hour with him in prison, and was as certain
then that he'd changed, as she was certain in 1978 that he was dangerous.
THE NJ STAR LEDGER
Two Perspectives on Suicide Bombers
By Bob Campell
June 25, 2003
Some films come wrapped in dynamite. Case in point: The documentary
double bills "My Terrorist" and "Human Weapon." Disturbing to approach,
dangerous to touch.
Both hour-long nonfiction works examine the mystery of the focused,
fanatical terrorist willing -- even eager -- to die while killing for
a cause. They appall and fascinate. They question again the distinctions
between murderer and martyr, terrorist and warrior.
Both are Israeli in origin but hardly nationalist in tone. "Human Weapon"
is powerfully analytical. "My Terrorist" is even more powerfully, and
more challengingly, personal.
"My Terrorist" is at once more intimate, immediate -- and ideological.
In 1978 London, El Al flight attendant Yulie Cohen Gerstel and her crew
were machine-gunned by Fahad Mihyi and his partner, who were members
of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Gerstel's seatmate
was killed. Testimony by a wounded Gerstel helped earn the captured
Mihyi four life terms in U.K. prisons.
Astonishingly, her film "My Terrorist" is "my testimonial evidence to
Mihyi's parole hearing." The moviemaker, a sixth-generation Israeli,
believes that only forgiveness and understanding can cement peace. She
depicts a deepening acquaintance with the jailed terrorist. Twenty-some
years later, Mihyi expresses bewildered remorse and views himself as
a "manipulated" nobody.
Gerstel frankly concedes being partly spurred by the recent, continuing
Intifada. She believes that a "war for Israeli survival" has become
a "war for greater Israel." It isn't necessary to accept her arguable,
principled position to grasp the human stakes.
A determined Gerstel records all counter-arguments and answers as best
she can. Some will take a position on her effort without bothering to
see her film. But even a full viewing should only serve as an overture
to a profound debate. This singular testament was shown on Israeli TV
and awarded a Special Prize at the Jerusalem Film Festival.
NEW YORK TIMES
ARTS & IDEAS/CULTURAL DESK
FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW; The Sinister Evolution of the Most Intimate Form
of Political Violence
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Sharing the bill with ''Human Weapon'' is ''My Terrorist,'' Yulie Cohen
Gerstel's deeply personal reflection on the cycle of violence in the Middle
East. Ms. Gerstel, a sixth generation Israeli who was injured during a
1978 attack on an El Al flight, seeks out Fahad Mihyi, one of the attackers,
who had spent the last 22 years in an English prison. She initiates a
correspondence in which he expresses contrition for his youthful deeds,
and she considers supporting his release from prison.
Her impulse for reconciliation is contrasted with the unforgiving rage
of the parents of a flight attendant (and colleague of Ms. Gerstel) who
was killed in the same raid. But then the World Trade Center is attacked,
and the tumultuous emotions it re-awakens in Ms. Gerstel prompt her to
reconsider her offer. The movie's disparate voices coalesce here as an
emotionally charged microcosm of the conflict and suggest how difficult
it would be to sustain any peace, when all it takes is one vengeful dissenter
to undermine the noblest of intentions.
THE DAILY NEWS
Murder Weapon, Their Bodies
By Jack Mathews
By pairing separate documentaries with very different points of view about
Middle Eat terrorism, Film Forum has mounted a program that is both historically
educational and personally intimate. Ilan Ziv's "Human Weapon," the far
more ambitious of the two films, explores the modern evolution of suicide
bombers, from he 1983 attack on the American Embassy in Beirut to the
current epidemic in Israel, with stops in Sri Lanka, Europe and the United
States in between.
Julie Gerstel Cohen's "My Terrorist" stands in stark contrast to the polarized
mood of the Middle East. A flight attendant wounded in a terrorist attack
on El Al airlines in 1978, Gerstel decides 23 years later to contact "her"
terrorist in a London prison in an attempt to understand his motives and
build a small bridge between their defiant cultures.
Gerstel ends up testifying in favor of Fahad Mihyi's release, which puts
her at odds with families of Israelis killed by Muslim terrorists. Her
efforts are a testament to her own humanity and a ray of inspiration for
some ultimate peace. But it also speaks to the near futility of individual
forgiveness in a continuing tinderbox of hatred. |
