By Manny Frishberg, JTNews Correspondent
In 1978, El Al flight attendant Yulie Cohen Gerstel was nearly killed in a terrorist attack on the jet she had just flown into London.
More than two decades later, as a wife and mother, she became involved in an effort to gain parole for Fahad Miyhyi, the Iraqi member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine who shot up her plane with a machine gun. This is not a simple story. In fact, as presented in the hour-long documentary, it is not really a story at all. Rather, it is a complex meditation on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the causes of terrorism and the sources of retribution and forgiveness. It is also a tremendously honest look at how one Israeli woman’s view of the world during a horrendous and terrifying period of history. The Six-Day War, the 35-year occupation of the West Bank and even the collapse of the World Trade Center towers are not merely backdrops, but integral players in Yulie’s personal drama.
Gerstel’s Israeli credentials are impeccable: a sixth-generation Israeli whose great-great grandfather emigrated to Palestine in the 19th century; she grew up in a neighborhood with some of Israel’s most famous leaders ; her best childhood friend was Ariel Sharon’s eldest son, who was killed when he was 12 years old.
As a peace activist, she is motivated by a desire to see her homeland become a place free of the fear that permeates her daily life. At one point in the intermittent internal monologue that serves as a narration for the film, she says the idea of working toward reconciliation with the man who wounded her and killed her coworker nearly a quarter of a century ago is to overcome the fear. We never meet Miyhyi, except in the excerpts of letters which Yulie she reads on-screen.
My Terrorist pulls no punches. When Gerstel speaks about what she learned in 2000 guiding European photographers in the West Bank, and when she describes Sharon’s trip to the Temple Mount as the start of the second intifada, she says things that are all but taboo for American Jews. Gerstel appears on an Israeli TV talk show alongside a woman who has lost a daughter in a suicide bombing, and later meets and talks with the same woman privately (along with her own documentary camera). The two women manage not to judge one another, but they also come no closer to an agreement in their approaches to the terrorists who have changed their lives. Her own ambivalence shows up in the way she quizzes her teenage daughter about what to do if she sees a suspicious person on the bus before allowing her to go out with friends.
In the aftermath of 9/11, Yulie loses heart, and decides for a time not to go forward in her plan to help Fahad. She ultimately sends a letter on his behalf to the British parole board and predicts he will eventually win release. Yet My Terrorist has no winners and no names have been changed — there are no innocent.