After the Tuesday screening of Rabin, the Last Day by Israeli director Amos Gitai the cinema-goers were invited to the talk with the legendary journalist and one of the greatest Slovenian authorities on the Middle East situation, Ervin Hladnik Milharčič, which took place in the cosy atmosphere of the Kinodvor Café. Hladnik Milharčičcomplimented the incisive filmmaker by saying that he masterfully drew from a range of emotions, lining them up and then developing them gradually without neglecting any. He especially commended the director’s decision to feature solely Israeli characters; Yithzak Rabin’s fruitless endeavour to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and establish peace with Palestine met with strenuous opposition from the ultranationalists and resulted in assassination of the fifth Israeli Prime Minister. Gitai chose to represent Rabin’s futile peace initiative as an entirely Israeli story, and refused to attach the blame to the Palestinians. The journalist went on to say that he did not particularly appreciate it when “documentary material was exploited in the name of fiction”, but that such treatment was justifiable in this case in view of the fact that the lines between Israeli reality and fiction often tend to get blurred.

Apart from giving a detailed account of Rabin’s chequered political career that did not steer away from classical Israeli expansionism until the beginning of the 1990s, Hladnik Milharčič also related some amusing anecdotes about his years as a news reporter. Following a long stint in Cairo and after having reported from various countries in the region (“the film doesn’t feature a single Palestinian, and no Israeli entered my life in the Middle East”) he finally relocated to Israel and was astounded to see razor wire at the border. The first article that he sent to Ljubljana from Jerusalem was the report about Rabin’s funeral on 6 November. The next day he interviewed Yasser Arafat (who signed the Oslo I Accord, the first face-to-face agreement between the government of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation) who confided in the Slovenian journalist, “I lost a partner – and I lost a friend.”

Written by Andraž Jež

Photo Iztok Dimc

{rss uri=http://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/base/user/109749061448260716122/albumid/6218419964524490193?alt=rss&kind=photo&hl=sl&imgmax=d}