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The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is easily one of the most contentious subjects out there for many. The questions of resistance and terrorism, the harm of noncombatants and the factors that led to the incessant fighting have always been deeply argued about. The 2005 film “Paradise Now” by Arab-Israeli director Hany Abu-Assad masterfully compresses many of the moral dilemmas and intense emotions into what is, essentially, two men walking around the West Bank for most of the film’s runtime.
The film revolves around two Palestinian men, Khaled (played by Ali Suliman) and Said (played by Kais Nashif). Both are close friends who live in Nablus, the West Bank. In the beginning, it seems they are part-time car mechanics who lounge about when no work is to be done. It’s soon revealed that both have agreed to sign their lives away with a Palestinian militant group and that the two are to soon blow themselves up somewhere in Israel. Both men are, ostensibly, committed. They do the usual recordings displaying rifles, declaring martyrdom and hope that they will reach Paradise after they die. They’re tasked by a rather professorly-looking handler to detonate at any location, timed sequentially to cause maximum casualties. When they try to cross the border, however, they are spotted, and the two men split up back into the West Bank, as Khaled relinks with the militants and Said goes off alone. A small manhunt ensues as Khaled tries to find his friend, and with it, the two condemned men’s beliefs and emotions diverge entirely.
Khaled comes off as the more willing of the two until this point, believing they will be heroes after their deaths. During his search, he meets Said’s girlfriend, Suha, who discovers their bomb belts and reacts in horror (naturally). The two have a heated debate in the car as they continue searching, both agreeing that the Israeli-imposed conditions are intolerable, but disagreeing over the very purpose and meaning of martyrdom. Khaled believes it is for the greater struggle, while Suha believes it is futile and that there are other ways of resistance besides bringing more grief on others and themselves.
Said is the more intense of the two, clearly deep in thought over his life even before strapping on the bomb belt. He wanders alone during the separation sequence, coming upon a nearby Israeli settlement bus stop. He almost chooses to blow it all up until he notices a nearby child. He decides to go back to Nablus, where he meets all the people he’s close to — his car mechanic boss, a video storeowner, Suha herself and his mother (for her, he stops by the door but does not choose to see her again, likely due to his intense emotional state). Said confesses to Suha that a lot of his own motivations against Israel are personal: his father had collaborated with them and was executed by Palestinian militants when he was 10. Said blames the Israelis for taking advantage of his father and believes that there is no other way to fight any of the injustices or deprivations he faces except through martyrdom. He even repeats to himself that what’s destined is destined and that there’s no way to change it. But it’s clear he’s not someone who lashes out blindly — he does not want Suha to know that he has a bomb belt on himself, and his reluctance to see his mother despite going back to his home shows that, while he loves her, he does not want her find out what he plans on doing.
Khaled and Suha eventually find Said trying to detonate over his father’s grave, stopping his attempt. Khaled brings him back to the militants for a retry of the bombing operation. They are sent again, with Suha just too late to stop the men on their one-way trip. Khaled this time, however, has thought over his own life and Suha’s words, and his doubts take over as he calls to cancel the operation entirely. Said agrees, but once the contact car pulls up, he has the driver take Khaled away so he can carry out the bombing himself. Khaled is obviously horrified, but there’s nothing he can do. The film ends with a slow zoom-in of Said in a bus amidst some Israeli troops before it cuts to white.
For a film about such a violent conflict, there is hardly any violence throughout. No one gets killed on-screen, but the pressing tension is always there: the two men’s thoughts and doubts about suicide-bombing to Paradise building up with their own personal beliefs and emotions. Kais Nashif’s Said, especially, depicts the strange dichotomy of feelings a man could have on his way to blowing himself up. A part of him wants to redeem the family name for his father’s decision, another part is motivated by a greater cause he believes in, but the last part is a painfully bleak helplessness he feels, the belief that nothing he will do aside from what he has signed up for will change anything. His doubts extend as far as to try to hide his destiny from his close ones and to even put his co-bomber Khaled out of harm’s way. He views himself as the one who must do it, and Nashif’s performance shows the innate psychological terror such things can do to a man and how it can produce physical terror outside.
Of course, that isn’t to say that the other characters don’t feel such things themselves — Khaled’s initial commitment fades into lingering doubt as he concludes that there are other ways of resistance. Suha finds the whole thing appalling and wants to find a solution without futile violence. Even the militants themselves are portrayed as more than just one-dimensional terrorists or heroes. They are deeply sympathetic with the psychological toll taken on their two new and one-off recruits, but their belief in their struggle overrides such personal pains.
The film naturally garnered controversy, especially in Israel, where many saw the more humanized portrayal of suicide bombers as problematic at best. This was after a series of bombings throughout the early 2000s, so understandably this would generate much enmity. Abu-Assad (the director) pushed back against this criticism in an interview with Ynetnews: yes, it is terrorism, he implies. But from the perspective of the other side, it is counter-terrorism to Israeli expansion, bombings and repressive measures on Palestinian land. When asked whether he would have chosen to become a suicide bomber had he grown up in Nablus, Abu-Assad replied, “Yes,” citing an incident with an Israeli soldier that made him realize the mindset that motivates some people to become bombers: “I realized that when a man systematically goes through such humiliation, he chooses to kill his own impotency by carrying out an act of ‘let me die with the philistines.’”
Of course, not all of Abu-Assad’s views nor his film can explain the entirety of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict yesterday, today or in the future, but it certainly is a deeply emotional and psychological study into plausibly real men from a very real director that has stuck in my mind, and I think it should be viewed by a lot more people.