Blue Box (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by Andrew Montiveo

No ongoing conflict seems as long and stubborn as that between Israelis and Palestinians. Its genesis dates to the British Mandate of 1920 that granted Palestine to London, which opened it to mass Jewish immigration, settlement, and contentious statehood. Wars, accords, and international conferences have failed to bring harmony between the Jewish nation and the wider Arab world—least of all, the estimated six million Palestinian refugees.

These refugees descend from the 750,000 Palestinian Arabs whose lands the Israeli state transferred to its own citizens after the latter’s war of independence in 1948. The so-called “architect of transfer” was Yosef Weitz, one of Modern Israel’s founding fathers. The country’s national myth elevates Weitz as the man who planted Israel’s many beautiful forests. More cynical voices deride him as the man who bought, and later seized, Palestinian Arab lands in the 1930s and ’40s.

He is also the great-grandfather of Michal Weits, the director of Blue Box, a documentary that analyzes Yosef’s contentious life and legacy. The film’s title refers to the blue tin cans with which the Jewish National Fund collected donations from across the globe. These donations permitted the JNF to acquire and develop Palestinian Arab lands from the Mandatory Period in the ’30s to Israel’s early statehood in the ’50s. The money raised, to quote a popular slogan of the day, allowed long-persecuted Jews to claim “a land without a people for a people without a land.” Except that the land did have a people.

Besides that of Israeli and Palestinian, Blue Box presents a conflicted duality in parallel chronicles. The first belongs to Michal’s famous ancestor, narrated from three decades of personal diaries. The second belongs to Michal herself as she reconciles Yosef’s dual role as a patriarch to the Israeli aliyah and an agent of the Palestinian nakba. 

The parallel chronicles chart more than individual journeys; they articulate competing perspectives—one traditional, the other critical—that divide generations. The older generation, raised comfortably in Yosef’s positive light, defends the actions of “Grandpa Joseph” as essential to Israeli people’s survival. The younger generation, embodied by Michal and her cousins, seems ambivalent given Yosef’s notorious role in the expropriation of Arab lands.

Michal’s investigation finds a man whose complexity and nuance align with her generation’s conflicted attitudes more than the simplistic, idealized perspective of her elders. Yosef was born into hardship in 1890s Tsarist Russia, leaving a land of pogroms for an uncertain, laborious, and ultimately consequential life in Palestine. Yosef took advantage of a sympathetic British regime to champion the Zionist cause and bring hundreds of thousands of Jews to the Levant.

A formative scene emerges early in the film as Yosef tours Ramallah in 1933. Weitz envies the Arabs’ productive farms and cultivated lands surrounding the city. “Their conquest of the wilderness makes us sad and leaves us heavy-hearted,” he says through a voice-actor’s narration as a montage of black-and-white photos depict a rich and populated landscape. Weitz, a founding father of Israel, views Ramallah’s Arabs with admiration. It’s a powerful moment given Ramallah’s current place as the squalid and confined heart of a remnant de facto Palestine.

Witnessing long-established Arab development drives Yosef to raise money and acquire land frantically. He finds ample opportunity. Many parcels belonged to absentee landlords in faraway cities like Beirut, Cairo, and Damascus. These inherited lands yielded little personal value to their owners, who sold them as casual transactions. But they meant a livelihood to the anonymous tillers. Michal highlights Yosef’s inner torment as he uproots one community. “My stomach turned the entire time,” he recalls. “As they began leaving the land, a voice of conscience screamed inside me: Are you now forcefully expelling these people who have worked the land for years and years?” It’s a haunting question because we, the audience, have ninety years of hindsight to know the outcome of this story.

Weitz’s guilt subsides as the years pass and the JNF encounters determined resistance by the native Arabs. Mass riots break out across Palestine in 1936, targeting the occupying British troops, Jewish settlers, and any Arabs who cooperate with either. The revolt assumes spiritual zeal as Jerusalem’s senior mufti, Amin al-Husseini, deems it a sacred duty to liberate Palestine. Though the revolt fails, Weitz finds little respite as a World War erupts and, in time, the horrors of the Holocaust are revealed. The end of the war leaves him hardened: “Among ourselves, we must be clear: there’s no room for both people in this country...The only solution is a Land of Israel with no Arabs...Transfer them all.”

Like many Zionists, Weitz blames the whole of Europe for dooming its Jews because of ancient prejudice and indifference. His drive intensifies after his son, Yehaim, dies during an act of sabotage in 1946. “His beautiful face is covered by a question mark,” Yosef mourns. “For what? And for whom?”

The burden of sacrifice spans generations. An uncle of Michal, one of several relatives to bear the name Yehaim, notes how many of the Weitz family are named after Israel’s fallen. “We carry a tombstone on our backs from the day we’re born,” he remarks. The appellation casts those named with a specter, one reminding each of a lifelong duty to defend the memory, cause, and vision of the fallen. 

“Do you know what happened on November 29, 1947?” the younger Yehaim asks Michal defensively in one scene. “They had a chance: half for us, and half for them.” By they, Michal’s uncle means the Arabs. Following the Israeli declaration of independence on May 14, 1948, soldiers from a half-dozen Arab nations joined Palestinian militias to try and reclaim the whole of the disputed territory. The effort ended in failure: Israeli troops won far more territory than the United Nations had proposed. Yehaim’s argument to Michal reflects a “tough luck” perspective often pointed at Palestinians and neighboring Arab states since. By that logic, the Arabs should’ve accepted the partition plan of 1939, which was better than that of 1947, which was better than that of 1949, and on and on. It’s a voice of indignation, the voice of that tombstone he bears.

Yosef celebrates Israel’s conquests in 1949 by touring abandoned Arab towns and villages. There is a chilliness in his assessments as he hurries to document and map out the vacated communities. He sends engineers to plunder useful materials, demolish buildings, and flatten the surrounding lands. “I visited the village of Mi’ar,” he reflects. “I was surprised that I didn’t flinch at the sight of the ruins. No remorse or regret...” It is a dramatic reversal from the torn man who was distressed a decade earlier by every displacement. 

Rather than consider moral quandaries, Yosef sets about consolidating the war’s spoils. Highways, plazas, and—most of all—trees cover the remnants of old villages. Weitz led young Israel’s afforestation campaign, planting the seeds for millions of arbors to decorate the newly conquered land—and bury its Arab past. In the film’s most indelible scene, Michal drives through a forest-lined highway. An eerie score accompanies the sight of collapsed stone walls, a decayed mosque, and the remnant of a tower. One could easily mistake them for Byzantine, Ummayyad, or Crusader ruins. Each shot of the present site transitions to a photograph of the same place a century earlier. Each shows a once-bustling Arab community, now no more than a graveyard to a vanquished era. 

“The tree,” Michal says, “the evergreen symbol of life itself, now stands guard like a soldier.” Yosef had once praised the Arabs of Ramallah for their power over nature. Fifty years after his death, the same man’s most vivid reminder is having the natural world swallow up the Arab epoch.

The film illustrates the shifting paradigm using maps that lay out Jewish and Arab communities from 1910 Palestine to 1966 Israel. It’s a stark contrast: Ottoman Palestine counts 730,000 inhabitants, the overwhelming majority shown in swaths of orange that mark long-established Arab cities and villages. A few specks of blue mark the province’s Jewish communities, home to a modest 80,000. By the eve of the Six-Day War, most of the orange segments have been crumpled together along the frontiers of an Israel now shaded almost entirely blue with a far heftier 2.4 million Jews.

It’s with the Six-Day War that Yosef leaves his most prescient fears. While Israelis stand jubilant over a swift victory on June 10, Weitz frets over the long-term consequence of what his countrymen have gained. Told along black-and-white newsreel scenes of Israeli celebration and Palestinian despair, the viewer hears his strain: “Shall we hold on to the West Bank and Gaza Strip? The Arab residents did not flee this time.” Scenes progress through the decade to show later footage Palestinians riots, funerals for fallen soldiers, and civilians grieving over yet another bout of violence. “How can we absorb this huge mass, estimated at a million people or more? I’m worried about the results of this war...”

Israelis and Palestinians have experienced many pains since then. As of this writing, Israeli soldiers have encircled and bombared the Palestinian enclave of Gaza. The impending operation is yet another act of retaliation for yet another act of terrorism to upset a miserable status quo.

If Michal Weits has achieved anything with Blue Box, it has been to reveal her great-grandfather as not a man devoid of compassion but one at conflict with himself, his cause, and the greater events around him. “Joseph Weitz endowed us with the Blue Box,” she concludes. “He also left us keys to a black box. As if you knew, Grandpa, that one day someone would come asking questions.”

For more information on Blue Box, click here.

Andrew Montiveo is a writer and filmmaker in Los Angeles. A graduate of film at UC Irvine, he has written on media criticism and history for The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Worcester Journal, and Bright Lights.

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Cineaste, Vol. XLIX, No. 1