Rula Jebreal
Italo-Palestinian journalist, novelist, and screenwriter with both Israeli and Italian citizenship.
She is a commentator on MSNBC.
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Julian Schnabel’s latest film, Miral, is a coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle in the decades following the Arab-Israeli war of 1948 and the establishment of Israel as an independent state. Based on the semiautobiographical novel by Palestinian journalist Rula Jebreal, the film explores the human side of the conflict through a narrative that spans both decades and generations: The first half of the film, set during the postwar period of the 1950s and 1960s, chronicles the real-life efforts of Hind Husseini (Hiam Abbass), a member of a wealthy Palestinian family, to establish an orphanage in East Jerusalem to house and educate children left abandoned by the fighting; the second half, which is set between 1973 and 1994, delves into the life of Miral (Freida Pinto), the young daughter of a local imam (Alexander Siddig), who is sent by her father to live at Husseini’s school following her mother’s suicide. Like the book before it, the film artfully sketches Miral’s political awakening as a teenager coming to terms with both her identity and her independence as she struggles to reconcile the more benevolently intellectual influences of her father and Husseini with the more revolutionary ones that have come to surround her—including her boyfriend, Hani (Omar Metwally), whose involvement with an insurgent group responsible for a series of car bombings draws Miral, both physically and psychologically, onto the frontlines of the conflict.
Though Miral, the book, is technically a novel, many of the details of Miral’s upbringing are Jebreal’s as well. Born in Haifa, Jebreal was raised in East Jerusalem. At the age of 5, she and her younger sister were brought to Dar El-Tifel by their father, an imam at the nearby Al Aqsa mosque, following their mother’s death. Schnabel’s film, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival last September and hits theaters this month, both dramatizes Jebreal’s book and elaborates upon it, knitting together the narratives of Miral and a number of other women in her sphere—Husseini; Miral’s troubled mother, Nadia (Yasmine Al Massri); her friend Fatima (Ruba Blal), who is imprisoned after participating in a terrorist attack; her cousin Samir’s Jewish girlfriend, Lisa (played by Schnabel’s own daughter, Stella)—as they wrestle with both the burdens of history that have been thrust upon them and the increasingly complicated and violent world around them.
Though many of the early reviews of Schnabel’s Miralfocused on its reflection of the still fraught geopolitics of the region, the film, like the book before it, is more personal than polemical—a feeling intensified by the relationship between Schnabel and Jebreal, who in the course of bringing the book to the screen, saw their creative bond become a romantic one as well. The 37-year-old Jebreal has since relocated to New York City and is currently at work on a new book—her fourth—on the power dynamic that exists between politicians and the media. Interview’s chairman Peter M. Brant recently spoke to Jebreal about transforming Miral into a film and her own coming of age—as a Palestinian, as a woman, as a journalist, and as a newly transplanted New Yorker.
PETER M. BRANT: I wanted to start by talking about your background. What was it like for you as a young Palestinian woman born in Israel? I know that your father worked in the Al-Aqsa mosque, which is one of the greatest mosques in Islam and one of the oldest in the world.
RULA JEBREAL: My first memory as a child growing up is of playing in the gardens, the mosque is really a gigantic garden, probably the biggest in all of East Jerusalem. Our house was about 100 meters from the mosque. When the big doors opened in the morning all the children from the neighborhood would play there. The garden lead up to huge stairs, we would run back and forth while the guards chased us—sometimes, we would pick flowers or climb a tree, they didn’t like that, because it was a holy place. Aside from the fact that he was one of the imams who guided the morning prayers, my father was also the gardener, that was his meditation. We used to go there and help him bring the plants from one place to another. He took us to the markets to select seeds. My whole childhood was about being in that place. It wasn’t really a religious place to me. The love I felt there . . . was in contradiction with what I saw in the streets. It was a different world.
BRANT: As a young woman, what were your own feelings toward the Israeli authorities?
JEBREAL: I didn’t really have any when I was very young because I was protected behind the walls of my house, the walls of the mosque and later, walls of my school. I didn’t know that I was Palestinian. I knew that I was a girl, but the identity issues came later when I was 12 or 13—then, they came in a very strong way. You start questioning yourself: Who am I? Where do I belong? Where am I going? Why is my city divided? Why are we not allowed to enter in certain areas? We used to ask my father why the Christians lived in another neighborhood and didn’t come to our neighborhood. I think my father was trying to avoid having us think about these issues. I think the first time I really felt that I was Palestinian was a time when I was trying to go back to school with my father at night and there was a curfew for Palestinians. My father said, “I will walk first, but you have to understand, the police will not let me go. They will not let a man go, but they will probably let a young girl go, so keep moving and don’t look at me and don’t look back.” When I asked him, “Why won’t they let you go?” he said, “Well, there’s a curfew today for Palestinians.” I asked, “What’s a curfew?”
BRANT: You were 5 years old when your father sent you to Dar El-Tifel, which you describe in your book and which we see in the film as not only a home for all of these displaced children, but also as a great educational institution. How much contact did you actually have with Hind Husseini? She’s one of the strongest characters in the book.
JEBREAL: When I was a little girl, I didn’t have much contact with her—not until I was 10 or 11. But we knew she was there. She used to come to our rooms, to our classes. But I didn’t have a personal relationship with her until later on.
BRANT: She was from a very wealthy family.
JEBREAL: She was from one of the wealthiest families in Jerusalem. . . . The beauty of this woman . . . When Hind asked people to help her with the school, she would always say, “What kind of country do we want in the future? The best resistance is these children. Investing in their future is investing in your own future. If we have our own country one day, then we will have educated people to run it and not ignorant fanatics.” Hind was terrified of the idea of that.
BRANT: As you described in the book—and Julian shows in the film—she started the school during the conflict in the ’40s after finding this group of 55 children in the streets of the Old City who she took in.
JEBREAL: When you go to the school today, there’s a stone where she wrote, “In 1948, I found 55 children in the street. The smallest one was 2 and the biggest one was 12. I decided that day I would take care of them, that my house would become their home, and either I will live with them or I will die with them.”
BRANT: Your father actually knew her?
JEBREAL: Very well. They were friends. He used to bring her children from the city and the other villages. Because he was an imam, people viewed him as a kind of authority—a religious advisor—and they would come to him with their problems. So when they’d find kids who were displaced, they’d come to him. My father would take them to Hind, they would drink tea together and talk. He respected and admired her.
BRANT: He must have if he eventually turned you over to her.
JEBREAL: Well, even though my mother had died and he knew he would be lonely without us, in his heart he felt we’d be better off in a different environment.
BRANT: You lived there basically throughout the late-’70s and the ’80s, right?
JEBREAL: I stayed there until ’93. I was 16 when my father died, and I had a choice to come back and live in his house—my sister was living at my father’s house and my aunt would take care of us—or I’d stay at the school. But I felt if my father wanted me to go to that school when I was 5, there must have been a reason—and I understood that reason when I was a teenager, because that school became the only place where I was safe. As a woman, you don’t have really much freedom of choice in the Middle East—very often, by the time they are 13 or 14, girls get married. What Husseini did with that school is gave women freedom of choice. She gave us another option.
Photo: Rula Jebreal in New York, September 2010. Dress: Azzedine Alaïa.Cosmetics: Aveda, Including Petal Essence Eye Definer In Black Orchid. Hair Products: Aveda, Including Smooth Infusion Glossing Straightener.. Hair: Didier Malige/Bryan Bantry. Makeup: Virginia Young/Streeters. Manicure: Megumi Yamamoto For Rossano Ferretti Ny/Susan Price, Inc.
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