A scene from Write Down, I Am an Arab. Mahmoud Darwish fell for Tamar Ben-Ami when he was 22

أنا عربي" بلسانٍ عبري مُبين

خلدون عبداللطيف

29 مايو 2014

ابتسام مراعنة وزوجها اليهودي

قبل أيام قليلة، خرجت ابتسام مراعنة منوحين، مخرجة فيلم "سجّل أنا عربي"، عن طورها لا صمتها، وكتبت في صفحتها على الفيسبوك ما يشبه البيان بلغة عربية موتورة وركيكة، كونها اعتادت على التواصل مع جمهورها "الإسرائيلي" بالعبرية، ثم أتبعت ذلك بنشر صورة لها في إستوديو إذاعة الجيش الإسرائيلي "جالي تساهل" للحديث عن الفيلم بلسانٍ "عبري" مبين.

كلام "منوحين" جاء، كما تدّعي، ردّاً على الانتقادات التي تعرّضت لها، فانطلقت لتؤكد أنّ أحداً من مُعارضيها لم يشاهد الفيلم أو حتى يطلب مشاهدته، وإنما اكتفوا بالـ"تريلر" الذي لا تتجاوز مدته دقيقتين ونصف، بينما مدة الفيلم تبلغ نحو 73 دقيقة. وقد عُرض العمل مؤخراً في مهرجان "تل أبيب" أو "دوكو أفيف" للأفلام الوثائقية، موحياً بفكّ اللغز الحقيقي لـ"ريتا"، حبيبة الشاعر الفلسطيني الراحل محمود درويش التي طالما طُرحت بمعزلٍ عن سياقها الشعري، ومن دون تأكيدات موثّقة حول حقيقة هويتها.

قيل سابقاً إن "ريتا" هي نفسها "تانيا رينهارت"، أستاذة علم اللسانيات ونظرية الأدب في جامعة تل أبيب، التي ولدت في حيفا عام 1943 وتوفيت في نيويورك عام 2007 جرّاء أزمة قلبية، مكرّسةً جزءاً من كتاباتها ونشاطها لفضح سياسات إسرائيل الصهيونية، ومفاوضات عملية السلام التي وصفتها "بمفاوضات المئة عام".

أما "منوحين"، فقد جاءت لتكشف في فيلمها عن "تمار بن عامي"، التي هي حتماً "ريتا" الحقيقية وغير المزيّفة؛ راقصة يهودية من أصل بولندي تعرّف إليها الشاعر يوم قامت بأداء رقصة في مقر الحزب الشيوعي الإسرائيلي وكان عمرها 16 عاماً. لكنّ العلاقة لم تستمر طويلاً بعد التحاق "تمار" بالخدمة العسكرية في سلاح البحرية التابع للجيش الإسرائيلي.

الـ"سيدة من تل أبيب" دافعت أيضاً بصفاقة في هذه "الهُلّيلة" عن تمويل فيلمها من مصادر إسرائيلية: "هل تجنيد أموال إسرائيلية (حيث 20% منها فلسطينية عربية) يعني أن الفيلم صهيوني؟ ولو قمت بتجنيد أموال أمريكية، هل هذا يعني أن فيلمي "طاهر" وفلسطيني بعيونكم؟".

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ثمة مَن يجدون متعةً في نبش خصوصيات الراحلين وكشف أسرارهم؛ ومُخرجة "سجّل أنا عربي" من طينة هؤلاء
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وذهبت "منوحين" إلى إجراء مقارنات فجّة، ضمن إطار قضية التمويل، بين فيلمها وفيلم "الجنة الآن" لهاني أبو أسعد، و"خمس كاميرات محطمة" لعماد برناط، و"عجمي" لإسكندر قبطي، قبل أن تختم كلامها الذي اختلطت فيه "سين" الوعيد بـ"سين" الاستمرار"، ويؤشر إلى حجم ما تعانيه من التباس أو ربما انفصام في مفهوم الهوية، قائلةً:

"سجّل. أنا ابتسام مراعنه متزوجة لبوعز منوحين يهودي وإسرائيلي الجنسية، وأسكن في أرضي وبلدي في مدينة تل أبيب ـ يافا، وأعمل مخرجة سينمائية منذ 10 سنوات، وأوثق تاريخ شعبي الفلسطيني، وسأكمل بتجنيد الأموال الإسرائيلية لأنها أموالي وأموال أهلي وشعبي، وسأبقى أؤمن بالسلام والمحبة بين الشعبين الفلسطيني واليهودي...واللي مش عاجبو يرقّص حواجبو".

بين ظهرانينا مَن يجد متعةً في نبش خصوصيات الراحلين وكشف أسرارهم التي آثروا الاحتفاظ بها في صناديق سوداء حتى آخر شهقة؛ ومُخرجة "سجل أنا عربي" من طينة هؤلاء "النبّاشين". لماذا إذن تبدو هوية "ريتا" الحقيقية مصدر جذبٍ وإثارةٍ إلى هذه الدرجة في ضوء تجربة درويش الشعرية؟ وما الذي ستضيفه الآن إلى إرثه الأدبي والشعري، بل حتى صورته المنطبعة لدى جمهور الشعر؟ ولماذا تريد فئةٌ معيّنة أن تنسب براءة اكتشاف "ريتا" لنفسها عوضَ أن تظلّ "مجازاً" آسراً في غير قصيدة من قصائد درويش؟

مؤخراً، تنامت بشكل ملحوظ لدى بعض الأشخاص ظاهرة التجرّؤ على كشف ما لديه ولدى غيره من أسرار حقيقية أو مدّعاة حول أيقونات رحلت عن عالمنا، مطالباً بتناول أسرارها خارج سياقاتها الوطنية، أي لجهة كونها وثائق تاريخية واجتماعية تضيف إلى أرشيف أصحابها، ومشفوعةً بالاعتقاد أنّ الأيقونات غير منزّهة عن "التعرية" ومن الواجب إتاحة أرشيفها الخاص والحميم للجميع.

وفي ما يخصّ فيلم "سجّل أنا عربي"، ثمة موقفٌ أكثر مغالاة ـ وربما غرابة ـ حياله، يرى في النّبش الحاصل بين حين وآخر في إرث درويش الشخصي مؤشّر كراهية لا محبة، وساتراً يتمّ إطلاق النار من خلفه على الشاعر الراحل نتيجة مواقف سابقة وثارات لا بدّ من تصفيتها.

في أيّ حال، وطالما اعتبرت "مناحين" حياة درويش الشخصية متاحةً للجميع في فيلمها، إلى جانب تعاملها مع مسألة الخصوصية وكأنها "وكالة بدون بوّاب"، ومع الهوية باعتبارها مجرّد بطاقة ممغنطة، فلا ضمانة بعد الآن لعدم اكتشاف "ريتا" ثالثة أو رابعة، وربما خامسة في الأمد القريب، بينما تظلّ قصائد درويش وسط كل ذلك هي التي تشير إليه فحسب.

When the Palestinian national poet fell in love with a Jew

Tayseer Nazmi

about a minute ago

When the Palestinian national poet fell in love with a Jew
The love letters between Mahmoud Darwish and 'Rita' intrigued Israeli-Arab filmmaker Ibtisam Mara’ana Menuhin for her own, very personal reasons.
By Alona Ferber
When Ibtisam Mara’ana Menuhin decided to make a film about Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish, it wasn’t because she had developed a new love for his poetry – it was because he had been in love with a Jew.

“Write Down, I Am an Arab,” which premiered at Tel Aviv’s DocAviv film festival last month, where it won the Audience Award, features the never-seen-before Hebrew love letters Darwish penned to Tamar Ben-Ami, the young Jewish woman he fell for when he was 22. Their relationship is a major focus of the film.

For the 38-year-old filmmaker, who grew up as Ibtisam Mara’ana in a religious Muslim family in Israel, exploring the relationship between Darwish, who died in 2008, and his Jewish love was a new way of telling her own story. After moving to Tel Aviv from the northern Arab town of Fureidis in 2005, Mara’ana fell in love with her neighbor, a Jew from Canada. Yonatan had immigrated to Israel; his grandfather was a Zionist pioneer, the founder of a kibbutz who fought in the 1948 War of Independence. (Mara’ana Menuhin is her married name.)

Click here for more on mixed marriages in Israel: A special project by Haaretz for Shavuot 2014.

It was difficult “to hide all the time,” she tells Haaretz today. “It was hard not to be able to talk about your love and share it because of this national difference.”

Their three-year relationship, which took place mostly without the knowledge of their families, was the subject of Mara’ana Menuhin’s 2010 film “77 Steps.” With six documentaries and a number of awards already under her belt, this film was different. “I wanted to come out of the closet,” she says of the movie. “I wanted to explode onto the screen.”

“77 Steps” (the name comes from the number of steps up to the filmmaker’s mother’s house) tackled questions of identity and relationships between Arabs and Jews. Prof. Elie Rekhess of Northwestern University, Illinois, a scholar of political history of the Arabs in Israel, says such relationships were more common during the Mandate period, and also among communists – like Darwish himself – who were united by class struggle in the 1960s. Still, Rekhess says this trend wasn’t encouraged by the mainstream, and it was overwhelmingly a question of Arab men with Jewish women.

The last estimate he is aware of, now around 15-20 years-old, put the number of mixed Jewish-Arab couples in Israel – married or unmarried – at around 1,500. “As far as I know, it hasn’t become more accepted, and it is hard for me to find a reason for it to be more acceptable,” Rekhess says.

University of Haifa sociologist Sammy Smooha concurs. “There are the same conditions today as there were 20 years ago,” he says. Smooha has conducted polls on Jewish-Arab relations since 1976, and has found that Jews and Arabs had become increasingly alienated from one another following the signing of the Oslo Accords in the early 1990s, through 2012.

Prof. Dorit Roer-Strier, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s social work school, agrees, noting it is hard to gauge whether the numbers have increased in recent years. “There are little data” on the extent of Jewish-Arab intermarriage, she says. Marriages between Muslim men and Jewish women in the country are considered Muslim marriages by the state, while other cases of interfaith marriage are subsumed in the total of all marriages.

“Either couples don’t marry at all, or they marry abroad in a civil ceremony, or they marry religiously," she explains.

According to the most recent figures, from the Central Bureau of Statistics, of the 8,995 reported marriages that took place abroad in 2011, only 19 were Jewish-Arab. People are reluctant to share their stories for the purposes of research, Roer-Strier adds, “but they will continue falling in love.”

The issue is still socially and politically taboo in Israel, says Mara’ana Menuhin, adding that attitudes toward mixed relationships here are “very primitive. We are in this world where we talk about development, we chase technological progress, but racially we are completely divided – it’s bizarre.”

In one scene from “77 Steps,” Yonatan tells the filmmaker, “I understand where you come from” as he heads out to a celebratory barbecue for Israel’s Independence Day and she is marking the Palestinian Nakba (“the catastrophe” – the Palestinians’ term for the establishment of the Israeli state). “I understand the limits of our relationship,” he says.

‘Difficult, but possible’

After the film was released, Mara’ana Menuhin started receiving private messages on Facebook from Palestinian women and Jewish men, asking her for advice and sharing their stories. “I tell them, ‘Of course it’s difficult, but it’s possible,’” she says.

Mara’ana Menuhin’s openness in “77 Steps” also provoked strong negative reactions. At a screening in a school in the northern Arab town of Arara a few years ago, the 200-strong audience of parents, teachers and students demanded the film be stopped after 15 minutes. The principal had intended to screen it to provoke discussion on the issues it raises, but in retrospect Mara’ana Menuhin admits that she and the principal were probably naïve to think it would be so simple.

“I don’t know how I got out of there alive,” she says now, recalling that she stood in front of the audience and confronted them, asking: “How many men do you know who marry non-Muslims?”

Mara’ana Menuhin also remembers telling the audience: “Mahmoud Darwish fell in love with a Jew, and he dedicated the poem ‘Rita and the Gun’ to her.” The men fell silent, but the women continued voicing their opposition to such relationships. They were “holding onto their repression,” the filmmaker says: She was no Darwish, they insisted. For women, things are different.

“There is an accepted stereotype of an Arab man in love with a Jewish woman – it works,” says Mara’ana Menuhin, who believes Arab women are judged more harshly for entering into mixed relationships than men. In fact, she notes, the very idea of a Palestinian woman talking openly on film about intimate relationships is taboo. By doing so herself, she believes she is challenging the stereotype of the Arab woman who is silenced, boycotted or even murdered for besmirching her family’s honor. When it comes to mixed relationship, says Mara’ana Menuhin, “a man can do it; he entitled to it.”

For the filmmaker herself, the whole issue is a feminist one – much like the subjects of the rest of her documentaries. “If a woman can’t say who she loves, it is one of the basic things in her status in society,” she says. “Standing in front of your father, your mother or your family, and saying ‘This is who I want to marry’ takes a lot of strength.”

The incident at the Arara screening pushed Mara’ana Menuhin to make the Darwish documentary. “I thought, what would happen if a man told this love story?” she explains.

“Write Down, I Am an Arab” hasn’t elicited the same angry responses as “77 Steps” so far. Reactions to the film in the Arab world, where Mara’ana Menuhin says the trailer is now starting to receive attention, range from praise for Darwish for loving someone “across the boundaries,” to charges that she invented the story about him and his Jewish girlfriend. This is the first time many have learned the true identity of “Rita,” she says, and the first time evidence of the relationship, such as Darwish’s love letters in Hebrew, has been made public.

Today, Ibtisam Mara’ana is married to a Jewish man named Boaz Menuhin, and is six months pregnant with their first child. They married in Tel Aviv in a nonreligious, alternative ceremony that is not formally recognized by the state, and now live in the apartment in that city that made an appearance in “77 Steps.”

It hasn’t all been smooth sailing, but she and her husband have gained their families’ approval. Mara’ana Menuhin says dating a Jewish man was easier the second time around: Not because her mother had gotten used to the idea exactly, but because she was glad her daughter was finally talking about marriage.

As for the wedding itself, last year, the whole experience was surreal, Mara’ana Menuhin recalls: “I was asking myself: What are they – our families, our friends – all doing here together? How did we manage to beat the system, and the hate, and the stereotypes?”