'Bethlehem': Cops and bombers match wits

In his first feature film, director Yuval Adler creates a wrenching tale of compromised lives in Israeli-Palestinian conflict zone

Reviewed by MORDECAI SPECKTOR
Bethlehem, a few minutes by car from west Jerusalem, is a popular stop for Holy Land tourists. The big draw, especially for Christian pilgrims, is the Church of the Nativity, where you can descend to a grotto and the spot where purportedly Jesus was born.
In the film Bethlehem, however, the city is a center of intrigue in the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As an epigraph at the film’s opening notes, Bethlehem is under the control of the Palestinian Authority (P.A.), but “groups such as Hamas and the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades have their own agendas. Seeking to infiltrate the various factions, the Israeli secret service maintains a covert network of Palestinian informants.”
The story in Bethlehem is remarkably similar to the tale spun in Omar (2-14-14 AJW), which opened Feb. 21 at the Edina Cinema. Both films focus on the relationship between Israel’s Shin Bet domestic security service (known to Israelis as “Shabak”) and its informants in the Palestinian territories. Omar, directed by Hany Abu-Assad, is this year’s Oscar nominee from Palestine for best foreign language film.

: Sanfur (Shadi Mar’i), a young Palestinian informant for Israeli intelligence, gets a new cell phone from Razi (Tsahi Halevy), his Shin Bet handler, in a scene from “Bethlehem.” (Photo: Courtesy of Adopt Films)

Bethlehem is the first feature film from director Yuval Adler, who co-wrote the script with Ali Waked, a Palestinian journalist. Adler draws strong, naturalistic performances from his three main actors, who were not professionals prior to the shooting of Bethlehem.
For example, Tsahi Halevy, who plays Razi, the Shin Bet handler of Sanfur (Shadi Mar’i), the teenage Palestinian informant, was a soldier in an elite IDF unit that operated in the West Bank, according to the director’s statement in the film’s production notes. Perhaps Halevy lent his expertise to one of the film’s exciting sequences, when Shin Bet agents and Israeli troops try to ambush a Palestinian arch-terrorist in the Bethlehem shuk. As the Israelis try to kill or capture the wanted terrorist, who has holed up in a house, a full-blown riot rages in the street outside.
The main plot of Bethlehem concerns the Shin Bet’s pursuit of Sanfur’s older brother, Ibrahim (Hisham Suliman), a Brigades mastermind. After a terrorist bombing on King George Street in Jerusalem, for which Ibrahim publicly takes credit, pressure ratchets up on Razi to importune his young informant for Ibrahim’s location. Scenes shift between the Shin Bet headquarters in Jerusalem, and the narrow streets of P.A.-controlled Bethlehem.
Razi has come to regard Sanfur — in a marvelous performance by Mar’i, in his first feature film role — as a surrogate son. He has hopes that his young informant will rise in the Palestinian revolutionary ranks and become an even more valuable source of intelligence; but Razi’s superiors disagree with his assessment, after the bomb explodes in Jerusalem.
Soon young Sanfur finds himself jammed by all sides, amid rumors of Hamas funding Brigades fighters in order to monkeywrench peace talks between Israel and the P.A.
In an incredible scene at a hospital morgue, heavily armed Hamas fighters arrive to claim the body of a shahid (martyred partisan). As the Hamas group takes the body out of the hospital, an Aqsa Brigades contingent arrives and demands that they put down the shahid’s body. A tense armed stand-off escalates in the hallway.
Bethlehem’s strength is in its exploration of the nuances of Israeli anti-terrorist operations and, on the Palestinian side, the schisms and intrigues within the movement. Ordinary Palestinians in Bethlehem deride a P.A. security official — a “big shot” living in a fancy house, traveling with a phalanx of bodyguards— in the crudest terms. The local Brigades faction, which is led by the charismatic Badawi (Hitham Omari), openly asserts its muscle, as it tries to extract 17,000 shekels in back pay owed to them by the P.A. bureaucrat.
Director Adler comments that the characters in Bethlehem are “compromised, extreme, and not always easy to like”; but he “tried to bring their contradicting viewpoints into a single whole without taking sides, and without judging them.”
Bethlehem, an exemplary political thriller, takes viewers on an exciting ride through Jerusalem and its environs. And like Omar, the film’s final shocking climax flows from Sanfur’s predicament. After all, he’s only a pawn in a larger game.