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Health & Fitness

'The Attack' Wages War On Common Sense


A movie that chooses to be about the political situation in Israel, rather than an apolitical story about family and/or love, such as “Fill The Void” and “Footnote” has its work cut out for it. While people of many persuasions routinely attempt to portray the conflict as black and white, the truth is that it remains defined by its shades of gray, not by easy solutions.

I will confess I have a bias, having traveled throughout the country and met people there of several different identities. There was the story of a dual American-Israeli (Jewish) citizen who partied with gay Palestinians on Ramadan. The protest march for a two-state solution that was mostly made up of Israelis. The Israeli Jew of German descent who worked at the Holocaust museum. The Palestinian worker in the hostel who had been deported several times, but just kept coming back over the border into Israel. The Palestinian taxi driver in the West Bank who showed me around, shared details about his life, and stated that “it would be safer for me to go to Afghanistan than to go to Gaza.”

So I suppose this partly explains why I not only disliked “The Attack,” but almost felt personally insulted by it.

“The Attack” focuses on assimilated Arab surgeon Amin Jaafari (Ali Suliman) in Tel Aviv whose world is torn apart after his wife Siham (Remond Amsalem) dies in a suicide attack that killed many people, including several children, and she is alleged to have been the suicide bomber. Amin at first steadfastly denies this, but mounting evidence soon convinces him that Siham was indeed the cause.

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Seeking to understand his wife's actions, Amin journeys back to his poverty-stricken childhood home to find answers. At this point, the movie begins to fall apart, and never truly comes back together. Before this, “The Attack” manages to sensitively portray the world Amin has built for himself and the people, Jewish and Arab alike who populate it. It even refused to completely villainize his interrogators.

However, once Amin leaves Tel Aviv, “The Attack” travels to truly dangerous territory. It comes very close to condemning Amin as a complacent traitor, with his wife portrayed as a rebel driven by compassion for those less fortunate than herself (she's actually a Christian, not a Muslim). One of his Jewish friends even states that he should be more grateful to Israel for “allowing” him to become successful.

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And while a nonending does not always mean cowardice, it certainly feels like it here. Spoiler: what Amin does with the knowledge he gains is never answered, nor does it state what he does with his life. In another movie, the last few minutes would be food for thought. Here it feels like a cowardly refusal to take a stand and show how Siham's actions will affect Amin's for the remainder of his life.

It also refused to answer the most persistent question on my mind (and that “The Attack," to its credit, actually asks too). Even if one could accept that Siham chose to become a suicide bomber to protest the plight of the Palestinians, a very real problem, why, why, why, did she have to pick a place that was populated by so many innocents, particularly children?

Grade: C-


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