Lemon Tree (Etz Limon)
This is a very exciting time for Israeli cinema. Films such as Waltz With Bashir and The Band’s Visit, are among the best to have been released in Australia over the past year or so. They can now be joined by another excellent feature: Lemon Tree (Etz Limon).
Palestinian widow Salma (Hiam Abbass) lives by a lemon grove she inherited from her father, on the border between the West Bank and Israel. Salma’s children live far away. Her only companion is a loyal employee with no family of his own, who had worked for Salma’s father and who, along with Salma, tends the lemon grove. They are barely able to make ends meet.
When the Israeli Defense Minister moves into a house on the other side of the border, a watchtower is erected, and security measures rapidly put into place to protect the minister and his wife. The security personnel decide that the lemon grove poses a security threat, by providing potential cover for terrorists who may wish to assassinate the politician. They order that the grove be destroyed. This compels Salma to take legal action and she employs the services of a young divorced Palestinian lawyer, Ziad (Ali Suliman).
On the other side of the grove, the politician’s wife, Mira (Rona Lipaz-Michael) is going through her own struggles. She suspects that her husband is having an affair. Unlike her husband, Mira spends every day at their new house. She and Salma have been contemplating each other with wary but thoughtful regard, and although they have never spoken to each other, they seem to have formed a connection. Between them, an Israeli soldier guards the watchtower. He doesn’t perceive any threat from the Palestinian neighbours, and spends his time listening to audio lectures about syllogisms in preparation for an exam.
Riklis delivers a respectful and even-handed story in which the Israeli/Palestinian issue is humanised, and neither side is demonised. He has said that this is not a political film. Despite the political overtones in the plot, this is ostensibly a human story. Perhaps Riklis is suggesting that rather than protecting citizens, politics is merely placing obstacles between the inhabitants of the world who, at heart, are basically all the same.
Whether manning a watchtower, playing an ambassadorial role as the wife of an elected official or tending a lemon grove, each of the main cast members is preoccupied by his or her own concerns. In many respects, political issues are an impediment.
Lemon Tree is full of subtle but powerful metaphors. When Mira attempts to visit Salma, a soldier intervenes. The division between Mira and Salma, and the eventual construction of the wall between their homes is an allegory for the inability of many cultures to see the other’s point of view. Even the exercises that the soldier in the watchtower is working through, exemplify syllogisms that represent the logical errors people make in the construction of potentially destructive stereotypes that often unconsciously shape how they perceive each other. A crude example might be: terrorists who attack Israeli politicians are Palestinian; the woman living beside the lemon grove is a Palestinian; therefore, she is a terrorist.
Three of the best films to have been released in Australia recently have been from Israel. What they all have in common, is the desire to challenge the propensity we have in this increasingly hostile world, to focus on the differences between cultures, rather than what unites us as humans. Let’s hope it’s a sign of prevailing humanity.