Movie review: Dancing Arabs an Israeli balancing act

By Jay Stone

The dancing Arab in Dancing Arabs is Eyad (Tawfeek Barhom), a brilliant young man — he can not only multiply large numbers in his head, but he can also mentally calculate how that the local grocer is making 73-per-cent profit — who nevertheless lives a life of economic isolation. He’s one of 1.6 million Arabs who live in Israel (they make up 20 per cent of the population), resenting their status, praying for Islamic conquest, plotting an impossible future.

He’s dancing, but not for joy. He’s trying to find his balance.

But there’s a dark humour in this telling of the story. Eyad’s father Salah (Ali Suliman), for instance, was once accused of a bomb plot. When the boy brags that his father is a terrorist, Salah denies the word even exists. “The Jews invented it to confuse everyone,” he says.

Eyad grows up and wins a scholarship to a Jewish school in Jerusalem, a development that thrills Selah, who thinks he’ll be “the first Palestinian to build an atomic bomb.” But Eyad finds himself dancing between two worlds, alternately welcomed and threatened by the Jewish population. Some kids make fun of his clothes and his accent; Palestinians, it turns out, have trouble pronouncing the letter “P.” Eyad finds a Jewish girlfriend named Naomi (Daniel Kitsis), but their love has to remain a secret, especially from her parents. He gets a job tutoring a disabled Jewish student named Jonathan (Michael Moshonov) but their friendship contains a rocky undercurrent of tension.

“Sometimes I forget you’re an Arab,” Jonathan says as he and his new friend relax in Jonathan’s house.

“Me too,” says Eyad.

“Don’t worry,” Jonathan adds. “Someone will always remind you.”

Dancing Arabs was directed by Israeli filmmaker Eran Riklis (The Syrian Bride, Lemon Tree), and written by Sayed Kashua, a Palestinian Israeli, based on his own semi-autobiographical novel. They can’t quite maintain a similar edge throughout an increasingly unlikely plot. It’s a family drama sharpened by its political subtext — most of the story is set during the Gulf War, when Palestinians were cheering for Saddam Hussein to defeat Israel somehow — and the occasional foray into cultural critique. One day in school Eyad deconstructs the role of Arab characters in Israeli literature, and it sounds much like the part that foreigners once played in American culture: the eroticized, slightly unhygienic outsider.

It’s meant to be an even-handed investigation of a family drama in a divided land, but Riklis’s sympathies are clearly with the Arab cause. In one scene, Eyad’s grandmother says she hopes he will become a doctor and return to cure her illnesses, a reminder that, despite the jokes, a career as a physician is not an exclusive dream in the Middle East.

Dancing Arabs ends with Eyad facing an uncertain future, shorn of his identity but fitting in at last. It says something about Israel that it is at once a happy ending and a tragedy.

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