“I met Zehava at a shelter for sex workers in Tel Aviv,” narrates filmmaker Tamar Baruch as she introduces the protagonist of her documentary film, “Her Name Was Zehava.” Later, we learn that Zehava’s birth name was Abed El Rahman Jumaa and that she was born in the Palestinian West Bank village of Beit Lid. In Palestine, she was hunted and abused because she was trans, while in Tel Aviv she was hunted and abused because she was Palestinian. The remarkable achievement of this film is that, while it presents Zehava not as a political symbol but as a vibrant, complex, charismatic, three-dimensional individual, it is also absolutely about the occupation. The nuance and humanity that radiate from every frame of the 22-minute documentary are entirely due to Baruch’s light touch, wisdom and humanity.
Zehava — the name means Goldie in Hebrew — had already lived several lives by the time Baruch began filming her in 2020. Palestinian Authority police had beaten and arrested her several times for expressing her LGBTQ+ identity, so she sought safety by smuggling herself through Israel’s purportedly impregnable security barrier and made her way to Tel Aviv. Penniless, she went hungry and slept on park benches near Jaffa Port. Police arrested and imprisoned her 12 times in two years for the dubious crime of being a Palestinian in Israel without a permit. In one scene, she ticks off the names of all the prisons she’s been detained in and then describes the experience of being gang-raped in a cell.
And yet, for all the ongoing hardship, Zehava radiates a remarkable warmth and love of life. She slides joyfully into the Mediterranean Sea and describes the pleasure of being in the water. She vibrates with emotion as she sings the lyrics of Israeli balladeer Avi Biter’s mournful songs, which make her feel seen (“I didn’t know myself/A person without a name/I was left alone with my fate/God what is this I’m going through/The pain is tearing me apart/Pour me another glass, my friend. Maybe it’ll help.”) When Biter, who is a huge star in Israel, heard about the Palestinian trans woman who loved his songs, he told Baruch that he was deeply touched and offered her the right to use his songs in her film at no cost.
A key event occurs about seven minutes into the film. Zehava wants to visit her 91-year-old grandmother at home one last time, before the hormones she is taking to transition cause her physical appearance to change. She and Baruch drive to Beit Lid, but someone — possibly one of the uncles who threatened several times to kill her — has alerted Palestinian Authority police and they are waiting for her. Zehava, who is driving, panics. The ensuing car chase, with Baruch screaming at Zehava to stop and Zehava calling the Israeli police to ask for help in her fractured, heavily accented Hebrew, is terrifying. At the checkpoint, the security guards allow Baruch through but Zehava, the person who was in danger, is turned back — because she is a Palestinian without a permit to be in Israel. Later, Baruch helps smuggle her back through an opening in the permeable security barrier. “I can never go home again. It’s too dangerous,” Zehava tells her once she is back in Tel Aviv.
“It was important for me to avoid pinkwashing,” said Baruch. The point of the film was not, she said emphatically, to present Israel as a place where Palestinian LGBTQ+ people were welcome and found safe harbor. Israel, she noted, “causes enormous suffering” to LGBTQ+ people from the West Bank. She added that she didn’t feel it was her place to criticize the Palestinian Authority; the film shows what LGBTQ+ people in the West Bank have to deal with, without comment. She did, however, feel comfortable criticizing Israel, which is her home.
Baruch told me, during a phone interview, that she took Zehava home to meet her Tunisian-born mother. The filmmaker described the experience of watching the two of them speak to one another in Arabic as formative. “Zehava helped me understand my mother and to come to terms with my own Arab identity,” she said. “Most Israelis are Mizrahim but they [the Ashkenazi establishment] taught us that Arab culture was second class, not worth knowing. Zehava helped me to accept myself.” Seeing Palestine through Zehava’s eyes also helped her understand the occupation, she said.
There are details in the film that highlight the complexity of Israel-Palestinian society. When Zehava asked her help in finding a natural-looking wig to replace the garish blond wig that inspired her choice of name, Baruch posted a notice on the Facebook group “Ru Paul’s Drag Race.” An ultra-Orthodox woman from Jerusalem responded by donating one of the wigs she wore for reasons of religious modesty. “She did not care that the recipient was a trans person and a Palestinian,” narrates Baruch, adding, “To thank her, I took a photo of Zehava wearing her wig.”
In another scene near Beit Lid, before the aborted visit to her grandmother, Zehava points to a man in the distance who is climbing toward Israel’s barrier, about to cross at one of its unguarded openings to look for work on the other side. “People just want to work, to live,” she says. Thousands of West Bank Palestinians without permits smuggle themselves into Israel every day, desperate for work; this is still the case in post-Oct. 7 Israel-Palestine.
Is there room in our grievance-driven, rage-filled discourse for a small film that tells the story of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank through the lens of one person’s experience, while tens of thousands have been slaughtered in Gaza’s ongoing war? Baruch said that presenting nuance in the current context felt “subversive,” but hoped that the film, though not optimistic, would contribute something to a conversation that was less coarse, less brutal. “I’m very depressed about the situation,” she said. “The discrimination and extreme inequality against Palestinians must end. The dialogue between me and Zehava in the making of this film suggests that things can be different.”
On Dec. 5, “Her Name Was Zehava” won the David L. Wolper Student Documentary Award at the International Documentary Association’s prestigious annual awards ceremony in Los Angeles. (Basel Arda and Yuval Abraham won best feature documentary and best director for their acclaimed film “No Other Land,” about the ethnic cleansing of Masafer Yatta in the West Bank.)
Zehava died at the age of 22 in Haifa, under murky circumstances that the Israeli police did not investigate. In the film, Baruch returns to Beit Lid to see Zehava’s gravestone and visit her grandmother. “I felt it was important,” she said. “I felt it was the respectful thing to do.”
“Her Name is Zehava” will be screened in New York on Dec. 7 at 2:30 p.m., at the JCC in Manhattan. There will be a panel discussion after the screening, with Tamar Baruch, Saed Atshan (author of “ Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique”) and Abby Stein, a transgender rabbi who was raised in a Hasidic community.
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