February 23, 2013 | 11:28 am

Academy’s doc night focuses on Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Posted by Danielle Berrin

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The documentary filmmaker Michael Moore

When did Michael Moore anoint himself the broker of Middle East peace?

I wondered this as I sat in the audience during the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ “Oscar Celebrates Docs” night on Feb. 20, as an evening that began with laudatory reverence for “nonfiction cinema” devolved into Israel-Palestine couples therapy with Moore as shrink.

It would not surprise anyone that knows of Mr. Moore to learn that he was hardly impartial. A real couple would have divorced.

Among the five documentaries nominated -- including “The Invisible War” about rape in the military, “How To Survive a Plague” about the AIDS crisis and “Searching for Sugarman” about a musician resurrected from obscurity -- Moore mostly wanted to talk about the two indictments of Israel.

“The Gatekeepers” which features a compilation of interviews with former heads of Israel’s Shin Bet security agency has been called “a damning censure of Israel's occupation of the West Bank,” as my former colleague Amy Klein described it in the liberal Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz. Maybe so, but it is nonetheless eye-opening and brutally honest and does not deserve censure for being censorious.

“5 Broken Cameras” is one Palestinian man’s account of life in the West Bank village Bil’in where he has both witnessed and experienced horrors at the hands of Israeli soldiers. Emad Burnat, who is both the subject and the chronicler of this film would pass his footage “over the wall” to his Israeli collaborator, Guy Davidi, for editing.

Neither paints a pretty portrait of Israel, because, like every other country or nation-state in the history of the world, it is flawed. But collapsed into the space of one evening with only these two films as reference points, any talk of the Israeli Palestinian conflict becomes sorely misguided. And disturbingly lacking in context.

But for Mr. Moore it was an opportunity to congratulate the Israeli filmmakers for being so very, very “brave” in daring to portray their country in its realness, and accept complicity in its crimes. “This has been a painful process,” Davidi, the co-director of “Cameras” said of receiving the nomination. “The image you get of having an [Oscar] nomination, you think it will be a moment of joy, but moments of joy and moments of destruction are all tied up.”

Moore was also inclined to grant “Cameras’” Emad Burnat, who was unceremoniously detained at Los Angeles International Airport the evening prior, a soapbox with which to vent his prolix grievances about Israeli occupation: “For me to go through this,” he began about his LAX ordeal, “they stop me for questions [and] this moment reminds me of where I live, where I come from. I live under occupation. I live under Israeli control. For me it’s become a normal life.”

Moore referred to a scene in the film where an “Israeli soldier purposely shoots a Palestinian civilian.” “What makes this film so powerful,” he added, “is that it shows non-violent resistance is the way to do this. And I think that’s what [the Israeli government] is so scared of -- because non-violence will work.” He suggested that “the day 5,000 or 10,000 Palestinians sit in the road and don’t get up” might just do the trick.

Moore’s strutting, stunning lack of sense about the depth and scope of this conflict was discomfiting to watch. If one didn’t know better, it was as if the troubles between a powerful Israel and a powerless Palestine began with the 2010 Gaza Flotilla raid. “I think if every American watched these two movies, there’d be a sea change,” Moore naively suggested. “That’s what makes [these films] so dangerous.”

That’s it! If only Americans would watch two documentaries, the ancient conflict over the Holy Land would be resolved. Moore’s calls for peace now were absurdly oblivious to the travails of history -- God forbid he ask Burnat what he felt when PLO President Yasser Arafat rejected Israel’s offer of 95% of the West Bank and the entire Gaza Strip during the Camp David Summit in 2000, for instance, or of any of the other numerous occasions when Israel was indeed ready to End The Occupation but came up against Palestinian intransigence.

Moore would do well to learn more about that for which he so vociferously advocates. But the sort of nuances that history requires would hardly serve the Hollywood penchant for clear-cut villains and vagabonds.