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If You're Pro-Israel, Skip 7 Days in Entebbe

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Pro-Israel movies don't get made anymore.

There are just two categories of movies about Israel. The overtly anti-Israel stuff and the covertly anti-Israel stuff. The covert part usually isn't too covert. But covert enough that they get played at Jewish and Israeli film festivals, that people who don't hate Israel go to see them.

That's the case with 7 Days in Entebbe according to some of the reviews. Like Munich, the movie is not overtly anti-Israel, it's just hostile to the idea of fighting terrorists. The stars are the terrorists. They have a more meaningful inner life. While the Jews are riven by conflict over fighting them.

Here's Liel Leibovitz at The Tablet.

Sternly, one character tells another that the fight must go on, for the sake of the hostages. Just as sternly, the other character replies that if the fight must go on, then we are all hostages. The latter is being metaphorical, maybe even metaphysical, musing about a future marred by perpetual hostilities. The former is being a bit more literal: There are 246 men, women, and children held at gunpoint in Uganda who need saving...

In 7 Days, however, the bad guys aren’t that bad—they’re German intellectuals, which means that, periodically, they must put aside their AK-47s and debate the dialectical nature of history....

It interacts with the world as you’d do in a Georgetown dinner party or in the opinion pages of The New York Times, making broad and bloodless statements while glancing sideways for the approval of your peers. The movie opens with a title card that explains that while some see the hijackers as terrorists, others view them as freedom fighters. It ends with more title cards, informing us that the nice soul-searching prime minister we’ve come to admire, Rabin, was assassinated by a religious Jewish zealot who did not share his enlightened views about the futility of the fight. These bookends are not incidental; they are the film, and everything else that happens in between is just there to serve the vapid and vacuous statement that the film chooses to make.

The heroes are the terrorists.

Padilha and screenwriter Gregory Burke have played down Israeli heroism in favor of telling the story from several points of view, with a particular focus on the two German hijackers, Brigitte Kuhlmann (Rosamund Pike) and Wilfried Bose (Daniel Bruhl).

We get their backstories: She feels her mistakes led to the arrest of her mentor, Ulrike Meinhof, and she is driven by guilt and anger, while he is a weak bookseller and publisher of revolutionary books who feels nobody takes him seriously.

They are by far the most fully realized characters in the film, and are portrayed in much greater depth than the hostages, soldiers, Palestinian terrorists and Israeli government officials.

Oh, and about that stupid dance number...

he movie opens with and keeps cutting back to a performance of Echad Mi Yodea by the Batsheva Dance Company. That athletic, high-energy dance features dancers dressed as Haredim (ultra-Orthodox) who sing, dance and eventually strip down to leotards...

Padilha said he used the dance to make a comment “in a cinematic and visual way” about the need to break free of the preconceptions that stopped the Israelis from negotiating with the terrorists.

There are just no words.

Said Padilha, who directed the 2014 Robocop remake: “In this recurrent conflict, it’s very easy for politicians to present themselves as protecting people against the enemy. But once you frame the relationship as enemies, it becomes hard to negotiate, and that’s still true today. There is a constant state of fear in both Israeli and Palestinian populations because of the conflict, and this fear is preyed upon by right-wing politicians — kind of like Trump who is going to build a wall to defend American from whomever, I don’t know.”

The guy involved in Narcos doesn't know. Really.

But if you're pro-Israel give this garbage a pass. Unless you really want to see Entebbe from the point of view of the bad guys.


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