Review of Shoshana

 

This is a film about Shoshana Borochov, a real person who was the daughter of Dov Ber Borochov, a "Marxist Zionist". There's lots to say about his ideas and his politics, which were in my lifetime influential in a retro sort of way about young Jews with contradictory ideas about Zionism and revolutionary socialism - but the film doesn't say much about his, though it alludes to the way he would have liked Zionism to have turned out nice. 

The film is about Shoshana's relationship with a British policeman, who is part of the Mandate authority trying to fight against the Irgun and its breakaway faction Lehi. This troubled love story is the centre of the film

The Irgun suspended hostilities against the British for the duration of WW2, Lehi didn't, and famously tried to develop a relationship with the Nazis on the basis of common hostility to the British Empire.

The film does make some efforts to show the different currents within the Palestinian-Jewish community in Palestine, but it's pretty cartoon-ish. We see that the mainstream Zionists (Labour Zionists, though it doesn't really say so) don't like the Revisionist Zionists (Irgun, and then Lehi) much, but there's not all that much substance to the disagreement - though the mainstream Zionists do call the Irgun fascists, which is justified. There are occasional Palestinian-Arab victims depicted (an Irgun attack on a bus, and then bombs in marketplaces) but there are no voices from the Arab community, no Arab characters...apart from one scene where the Mandatory Police carry out frightening round-ups in a village.

The Revisionist Zionists want to proclaim a Jewish (or rather a Hebrew) state right now, even though there's nothing like a Jewish majority. The mainstream Zionists are gradualists, and believe that continued Jewish immigration will eventually produce a Jewish majority, at which point the locals will accept a Jewish state. I can't help wondering when they thought this was going to be - the 1950s? The 1960s? With the British providing the umbrella under which this demographic and political shift would take place?

The film ends with the very beginning of what Israelis call the War of Independence and Palestinian Arabs the Nakhba...but all that's shown is a group of disorganised Arab fighters running to attack a group of Haganah fighters, lying in wait with machine guns. There's no refugees, no displacement...nothing of the civil war between the Haganah and the Irgun either. 

A few details are worth noting. We see the Irgunists flyposting their posters, with the emblem of a fist holding a rifle over a map including both Palestine and Transjordan, and the slogan (in Ivrit) "Rak Kach" - that is, "Only Thus". Until this point I hadn't really appreciated the continuity between the Irgun and the Kahanist party, which was of course called "Kach".

Also, Shoshana and her mother seem to be speaking to each other in Russian - presumably this was much more common in the Yishuv than we are given to understand, though Dov Ber Borochov was a Yiddishist as well as a Zionist, and the party he founded (Left Poalei Zion) was also pro-Yiddish. 

At one point in the film some bright-eyed young Zionists say that they have recently arrived from Kiev - was this ever possible in the 1930s?

Watched via informal distribution.