He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Media Making as Peacemaking: Israel/Palestine, and shared the following:
Page 99 describes a scene from the Israeli television show Fauda, in which two Israeli commando soldiers talk about their decision to take an old Palestinian sheikh captive, as they try to use him as a bargaining chip to bring back their comrade who was taken hostage by Hamas. After witnessing the torture of the sheikh, one of the soldiers, Nurit, a woman who recently joined the unit, asks the veteran soldier, Avichai, a man and the unit's sniper, how they have become so cruel. He responds by explaining how the unit trains them to become mindless killing machines because if he were to hesitate to act on the battlefield, that would put him and all of his comrades at risk. Avichai concludes that if Nurit hesitates, she should never have joined the unit in the first place.Visit Yuval Katz's website.
Page 99 fits into one of the key discussions in the book; it demonstrates how war alienates people from themselves in the name of ideology or patriotism, undermining possibilities to generate real peace with themselves and with their supposed enemies. The broader discussion about Fauda demonstrates how serving in this undercover unit ironically brings Mizrahi Jews, that is, Jewish people in Israel whose families originate from the Middle East and North Africa, closer to their lost Arab identity, because knowing the language and the culture is an asset in a unit whose main weapon is disguising themselves as Arabs to infiltrate Palestinian territories. However, because Arab identity is so cynically weaponised in this context, it ultimately generates alienation rather than proximity.
--Marshal Zeringue
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