Avi Mograbi’s The First 54 Years: An Abbreviated Manual for Military Occupation undertakes the difficult task of outlining the history of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land since the Six-Day War in 1967. Rather than positioning his film as an in-depth examination of a conflict too complicated to fully cover even in a Ken Burns-sized opus, the Israeli Mograbi wisely limits his scope to the methodologies employed by his country as occupiers who gradually and meticulously normalized their presence in Gaza and the West Bank to the point that they could claim an inalienable right to the land itself.
Using interviews with 38 Israeli soldiers who served throughout the past half-century, Mograbi guides us through one military-led atrocity after another—some large, some small, but all indicative of the sociological and psychological power moves Israel took to gain a stranglehold on these long-contested regions. Stories of Palestinians working in Jordan being denied the right to unite with their families in the West Bank or of Israeli soldiers routinely agitating innocent citizens are all weaved together into a larger portrait of the forced displacement, alienation, and widespread abuse of a people with to no means to defend themselves.
The First 54 Years is certainly a one-sided account of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and Palestinian voices are conspicuous by their absence. But the film is bolstered by its recounting of injustices orchestrated against the Palestinian people from men who actively took part in them, and who are now involved in the Breaking the Silence organization, created to expose the nefarious tactics used to appropriate Palestine’s land. Mograbi’s recounting of facts sometimes veers toward the dryly academic rather than raw and urgent. But this distancing strategy is part and parcel of the director’s approach, hinted at by the “Abbreviated Manual” in the title and exemplified by his direct-address introductions to each new segment, in which he speaks to the viewer as if he were an instructor coolly and impartially teaching the rules and strategies to follow were one to successfully occupy a country for many decades.
These more subjective forms of address are shrewdly countered by the film’s third formal strategy: documentary footage of events that mirror stories told by the soldiers or demonstrate the oppressive actions taken by the Israeli military to systematically destabilize the Palestinian people through physical and psychological means. Where the interviews and Mograbi’s “lessons” detail the myriad steps taken to limit, and often infringe upon, the freedoms of Palestinians, the additional on-the-ground footage serves as a primer on the knotty history of the entire conflict. And, as these sequences were often either filmed secretly or seemingly not meant to be seen outside of the Israeli military, they present damning evidence of abuses as widely varied as they are cruel and unusual.
The First 54 Years’s three stylistic approaches don’t always mesh together seamlessly, nor do they offer any room for a pro-Israeli counterpoint. But as a film explicitly interested in deconstructing the very calculated forms of escalation that one dominant nation—in both their military arsenal and political pull in the United Nations—has imposed on a far weaker one for decades, it’s a persuasive, economical dissection of events that sheds light on the grievances of the Palestinian people that have long fallen on deaf ears.
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