Israeli cinema and its cultural significance

Walking on Water: Film Interpretation

The protagonist Eyal of the film Walking on Water (2004) is a member of Israel's secret service organization, the Mossad. This is communicated in the first scene of the film, which depicts an apparently ordinary family in a boat. Suddenly, Eyal kills the father of the family with a lethal injection. The audience is immediately predisposed not to like Eyal, until they discover that he is actually fighting for the forces of 'good.' Or, at least the forces deemed to be 'good' in Israeli society, given the profound ambiguity with which Eyal regards his role.

In the next scene, the viewer learns that Eyal is considering leaving the secret service. This is revealed when he is seen getting his next assignment: to kill an aged Nazi war criminal who is still on the loose. Eyal knows that many of his ancestors died in the Holocaust. However, he is uncomfortable with the idea of enforcing justice in such a manner, even when he learns that the Nazi's grandchildren are in Israel. However, after Eyal learns that his wife has committed suicide, he throws himself into his mission as a way of dealing with his personal demons. By juxtaposing the suicide with the new assignment to track the Nazi, director Eytan Fox suggests that there is a suicidal aspect to Eyal's enforced mission of revenge. It also suggests that motivations to dredge up the past are never pure, even when in pursuit of representatives of pure evil. But Meacham, Eyal's boss, stresses to the conflicted agent his responsibility on behalf of all Jews as well as the nation of Israel to conduct the execution.

The film further complicates the murky question of when murder is justified by making the grandchildren of the Nazi very sympathetic. One of them, Axel, is actually gay and thus would have been executed (ironically) under the standards of racial purity of his Nazi grandfather. Pia, the granddaughter, like Axel, completely repudiates the family's Nazi past. Still, in keeping with his mission, Eyal continues to maintain contact with the family, uncertain as to whether he will commit the murder of the Nazi until the bitter end.

The film is thus a moral drama as well as a cat-and-mouse suspense game. The tension grows as Eyal follows his new 'friends' Axel and Pia to Berlin to celebrate a family birthday party, where, much to the grandchildren's surprise, the Nazi is in attendance. The audience is never certain as to what Eyal is thinking, and perhaps Eyal himself is not certain. Part of a secret service agent's job is to pretend to 'make nice' with his victims. The audience knows that Eyal no longer relishes his role on one hand, but they also know that he has, in the past, committed murders even when he is not entirely joyous about his actions.

Within the persona of Eyal, the film questions both the morality and the justice of taking revenge. On one hand, without revenge, there is always the risk that the suffering of the past will be forgotten, a point-of-view articulated by Meacham, the head of the Mossad. On the other hand, focusing too much on revenge can result in more suffering and carnage in the present. Is it right that Axel and Pia should be judged by the actions of their grandfather, and by judging them, does that not simply alienate them from the cause of Israel, which was supposed to be founded as a moral state as well as a refuge for Jews?

Eyal cannot bring himself to kill the grandfather of Axel and Pia on sight because the man has become too humanized in his eyes, as a result of his interactions with the young Germans. This distancing of one's self from the humanity of others is, after all, the type of cognitive dissonance that allowed the Nazis to commit their own horrific actions. Within Israel, of course, these types of moral debates were front and center in the public consciousness during events such as the Eichmann trial, where formal Nazi war criminals were brought to justice. But this debate about the extent to which the past should be allowed to infect the morality of the present is also haunting Israeli politics today, in terms of the interactions between the Palestinians and the Israelis. Each side on this conflict uses old grievances to justify morally questionable actions. Survival is always the necessary goal, but survival and moving into the future is not supported by the black-and-white morality of secretive actions. This present-day conflict is obliquely referenced when Axel 'picks up' a Palestinian waiter, who is portrayed as serving in a subservient role in Israeli society.