On Oct. 25, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met in Oman with Sultan Qaboos Bin Said. Three days later, Israeli Culture Minister Miri Regev and Israel’s national judo team were moved to tears when judoka Sagi Muki won a gold medal at the Abu Dhabi Grand Slam, and Israel’s anthem, “Hatikva,” was played for the first time in the United Arab Emirates. That same week, an Israeli film, “The Dive” was screened at the Duhok International Film Festival, in northern Iraq. These events do not attest to a new Middle East. None of the three Arab states has diplomatic relations with Israel.
“The Dive,” directed by Yona Rozenkier, won four prizes in August at the 35th Jerusalem Film Festival, among them Best Israeli Feature Film. Rozenkier was surprised to learn that “The Dive” would be screened in late October at the Duhok International Film Festival, in Iraqi Kurdistan. He and the film's producers, Efrat Cohen and Kobi Mizrahi, immediately grasped the political sensitivity of such a decision and the pressure that would likely be exerted on the festival's organizers. They therefore decided to keep the news to themselves, at least until the festival concluded.
The news, however, leaked, and on Oct. 25, the SHAFAQ News website reported that “an Israeli film would be screened for the first time at an Iraqi film festival.” Rozenkier shared the news with his friends on Facebook, in the process taking a dig at Regev, who has been pushing controversial legislation referred to as the “culture loyalty law,” which would deny state funding to cultural institutions that she does not consider loyal to Israel. “We were screened in Iraq,” Rozenkier wrote, “a country full of leftists that surely has a culture loyalty clause.”
“The Dive” is about three brothers who during the Second Lebanon War (2006) meet at their kibbutz, which is adjacent to the border with Lebanon, to bury their father. The funeral takes place a year after the father’s death, because he had donated some of his organs to science. The youngest brother is about to be deployed to Lebanon and is scared to death at the prospect. His militant older brother puts him through a series of drills and tests of courage in the spirit of their dead father, much to the chagrin of the third brother, a shell-shocked army officer trying to come to grips with the trauma of the war he had experienced.
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