Lemon Tree

Here is a parable about bad fences making bad neighbours.

The narrative of Lemon Tree is intercut with images of the massive wall that divides Palestinians and Jews along the West Bank.

Like many Jews, Israeli director Eran Riklis hates the wall, and in Lemon Tree, as well as his previous outing, 2004's The Syrian Bride, he treats its construction as an act of aggression undermining the possibility of peace.

But this time there's no way around Israel's military will and the relentless machinery of its unyielding government. From the get-go, the lonely widow, Salma Zidane (Hiam Abbass) seems to know her efforts to keep the lemon grove that has been in her family for 50 years and provides her meagre income, will come to nothing.

Surrounded by a wire fence and under constant surveillance by soldiers in watch towers, she is not even allowed to tend her trees, which begin to die before she's able to mount a proper appeal.

The zealous, self-possessed politician Israel Navon (Doron Tavory), values his — and, by extension, Israel's — security over Zidane's need to survive, and blocks and mocks her at every turn, even as his wife, Mira (Rona Lipaz-Michael), begins to feel compassion for their new neighbour, whom she can't avoid watching in grieving silence.

Zidane's efforts are also undermined by her Palestinian friends, men fearful of drawing attention to their own anti-Israel activities, and others who see her growing friendship with feisty Palestinian lawyer Ziad Daud (Ali Suliman) as an insult to her late husband and to Arab traditions. Her grown son, living in America, can only root from afar when her case makes international headlines.

To his credit, Riklis is fairly even-handed in his treatment of characters on both sides of the impenetrable divide. Though Zidane is his focus, he is careful to balance her imminent tragedy with the effects of the wall-defence policy on the lives of Israelis who believe in it.

The struggle between the neighbours may seem one-sided, but Navon's intransigence becomes a corrosive agent in his own marriage. He may win the battle and save his political skin, but in the eyes of his wife and daughter — a student in the U.S. — he's in danger of losing his humanity.

A carefully constructed essay on one of the fundamental issues of the Palestine-Israel conflict, Lemon Tree benefits from allowing the behaviour and emotions of its complex characters to make the important points, and steering clear of long-winded court sequences. and legal arguments.

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This struggle, after all, will be resolved, if at all, in people's hearts, not in the judicial system. And in its simplicity and understated humanism Lemon Tree says pretty well all there is to say.