Out of Sight, Out of Mind

Yuli Gerstel sits across from the host, next to a couple who lost their daughter in a recent suicide bombing. She and her fellow guests are clearly uncomfortable, their anguish showing through the polished format of Israel’s most prominent political discussion program. The host starts to interrogate Yuli. How could she possibly forgive the terrorist who shot her? The man who tried to kill her, who succeeded in killing two of her fellow El Al crew members outside a London hotel in 1978? And how could she go even further, establishing contact with that man–Fahad Mihyi–and fighting for his release from prison? As he presses her, the parents of the bombing victim seem to grow even more uncomfortable. They appear to be horrified by Gerstel’s desire to make peace with her aggressor.

\tGerstel has broken ranks. She has claimed her grievance for herself and set out to forgive the terrorist she calls her own. As the director, producer, and protagonist of “My Terrorist,” she struggles not only with the disdain of other Israelis, but also with her own suffering and pain–obstacles to the resolution she so desperately seeks.

\tThe film opens with an account of the attack. A young El Al flight attendant at the time, Gerstel was sitting on an airport bus outside a hotel in Mayfair when she spotted a man who “looked suspicious” to her. A few minutes later, she glanced up to find the same man pointing a machine gun in her face. Fahad Mihyi was part of a cell of the People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Palestinian terrorist group. As grenades detonated around them, Mihyi opened fire, wounding Gerstel and killing two of her fellow stewardesses. A year later, Gerstel was a witness at Mihyi’s trial. He received four life sentences.

\tThough one might expect only a lifelong peacenik to forgive such a crime, we learn that the young Gerstel took great pride in her army service and in Israel’s military exploits. She reminisces about the glory days of ’67 and the commando raid to free hostages at Uganda’s Entebbe airport in 1976. The turning point comes during the Lebanon war in 1982, where Gerstel witnesses the IDF-sanctioned massacres of Palestinians at Lebanon’s Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Horrified, she quickly turns to peace activism and human rights photography, and ultimately resolves to reconcile with Mihyi after seeing Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat shake hands on the White House lawn in 1993.

\tBut though that emotional and ideological transition is intriguing, the film’s focus remains far too much on Gerstel herself. The titular terrorist becomes almost a forgotten figure, the story of her correspondence and relationship with him fading into the background. Mihyi does contribute to his own anonymity by refusing to be viewed on camera or to divulge his history. But one gets a sneaking suspicion that Gerstel took a wrong turn into angst-ridden self-exploration and never quite made it back.

\tWith the terrorist noticeably absent from what is meant to be a story about an Israeli peacenik and her terrorist, we get instead the story of an Israeli peacenik with some trauma thrown into the mix. Faced with the opportunity to advocate for Mihyi’s release, Gerstel agonizes over how far her compassion can go. But then the intifada breaks out, causing her to begin a series of painful ruminations on the Israeli/Palestinian cycle of violence.

\tThe harrowing events of September 11th prompt even more soul searching as Gerstel tries to overcome her anger and her loss of hope in a resolution to Middle East violence. In conversation with Gideon Levy, a well-known Israeli journalist who writes about the effects of the occupation on the Palestinians, Gerstel says that the World Trade Center attacks have changed her view of Mihyi from freedom fighter to a player in a larger terrorist culture. This radical shift in perspective calls the entire premise of the film into question and leaves the viewer wondering how truly committed Gerstel is to her professed goal of reconciliation.

\tWhat saves the documentary from sliding into angsty irrelevance is Gerstel’s powerful insight into the most recent hostilities between Israelis and Palestinians. “This is not my war,” she says, heaping criticism onto the Israeli right-wing’s justification for its aggressive security policy. “It is not a war of survival. It is a war for greater Israel.” Were it not for her own flipping back and forth between anger and forgiveness, her political assertions would have that much more force. And had Gerstel remained true to the original purpose of documenting her relationship with Mihyi, her film and her opinions would have come off as less unhinged.

\tThat storyline ultimately unravels, reaching no resolution whatsoever. The trauma of being victimized clearly remains a powerful force in Gerstel’s personality and her unresolved anguish seeps into her relations with her family. The film ends with Gerstel contemplating whether her children will be angry at her because she hardly ever lets them out of the house, for fear they might become the victims of a terrorist attack themselves. Having set out to make peace with her terrorist, this peacenik fails even to come to terms with the everyday dangers all Israelis face. As the film closes, we see Gerstel getting her kids ready for school. She sends them off with a neatly-packed juice drink and a kiss, a nervous parent hoping only for her children’s safe return.