Help us to help you get home. When the terrible recollections of what happened in Europe have ceased to humiliate us, I expect them to serve instead as a political stimulus, sparking the upheavals that so frequently occur in the cycles of peoplehood. Cycles, indeed. Red-roofed, alley-lined, gallery-filled, and located across the street from the beach, Neve Tzedek is also adjacent to the site of the former Palestinian neighborhood al-Manshiyya. Within the vast scope of The Brutalist , it is difficult to locate the meaning of Zionism, Israel, and the decision of characters to trade in the depicted cruelties of immigration in the United States for the off-screen barbarism of the new Israeli state.
In April , at the time Ben Gurion declared Israeli independence at a building in downtown Tel Aviv, Manshiyya resembled other Palestinian communities in the city of Jaffaβthe then-Arab metropolis just meters away from Neve Tzedek. Manshiyya had an estimated 13, residents, who, within days of the Israeli declaration, were uprooted by Israeli forces who expropriated their land.
This organized destruction of Palestinian land, which was then resettled in Manshiyya and elsewhere with Jews, was not the byproduct of a few rowdy Israelis during wartime. It was organized by Ben Gurion himselfβamong many othersβ but remains denied as a matter of Israeli state policy.
This occurred throughout the entire country. No Palestinian, of the hundreds of thousands displaced in , has since been allowed home. It is not difficult to imagine that someone, perhaps from Manshiyya and pushed to Gaza in , has since been killed by the ongoing Israeli slaughter of the largest remaining concentration of Palestinians in the world.
Perhaps in their memories of their homes, they remember when Zionist settlers built some of those Bauhaus structures. Come home with me. The works on display at the Biennale are constructed entirely in America. They are sexually preyed upon, exploited for artistic talent their sponsors do not possess, and casually dispossessed all over again, when fate frowns, a shipment of concrete is derailed, and capital dries up. As represented in the film, Israel is a home to which these Jews return after suffering both the Holocaust and the false salvation of America.
