TV REVIEW : ‘Talking to the Enemy’--Raw Emotions, Essential Truths

Chaim Shur and Muna Hamzeh are far apart not only in age, but also in politics. He’s a Zionist. She’s an anti-Zionist.

He lost a son in a reprisal raid on the PLO after the Munich massacre. On her wall hangs a photograph of her with Yasser Arafat.

Shur is Israeli. Hamzeh is Palestinian. They share very little and they share everything.

What they share are pain and loss.

Shur, a 60ish magazine editor living on a kibbutz in the Negev, and Hamzeh, a young journalist in Washington, are the central protagonists of “Talking to the Enemy,” Mira Hamermesh’s moving documentary that humanizes the terrible conflict between Palestinians and Israelis.

Made in 1987 for Britain’s Channel Four, it premieres here at 10 tonight on PBS Channels 28, 15 and 24.

After meeting in Washington in 1985, Shur and Hamzeh corresponded, and he invited her to visit him and his family on their kibbutz. At first Hamzeh balked. During the course of this film, however, the Jewish, Polish-born Hamermesh shows how the kibbutz meeting ultimately does come about.

“Talking to the Enemy” is marred by occasional bad audio and is unfocused and disjointed in spots. Yet the emotions captured on the screen are so raw and genuine--and the ironies of this long-standing Israeli-Palestinian antagonism so sensitively shown--that the film’s inelegance is far overshadowed by its essential truths.

When revisiting her childhood home in Haifa that is now in Israeli hands, Hamzeh cannot contain her sobs or rage and admits that, at that moment, “there is a side of me that can fight and carry a gun.” Yet later on the kibbutz, she cries along with Shur’s wife as the Israeli woman mourns the loss of her son in combat against the PLO.

Familiar stereotypes--Zionism means racism and Palestinian nationalism is synonymous with terrorism--are attacked here. Hamermesh, however, is too honest a film maker to inject gratuitous optimism. Shur and Hamzeh agree that “more blood will be shed.” Made more than three years ago, their prediction proves them prophets as well as enemies.