We Jews know well the faces of hate. We saw it on the faces of the nazis of Europe. We saw it again on the faces of white segregationists when we marched alongside African-Americans during the Civil Rights Movement.

Where we never expected to see it was in the mirror.

Yet, that is the looking glass held up to us in two provocative documentaries, Between the Lines and The Settlers, which were selected for viewing by a committee of the San Diego Jewish Film Festival. Our newspaper agreed to sponsor a discussion during the Feb. 13 program not because we agree with the points of view of these two documentaries, but because we believe both films raise serious issues that should be examined by our community.

You get the feeling that The Settlers is a "hit piece" almost from the moment it begins, when a narrator describes as "fanatics" the Jews who decided to make their homes in the overwhelmingly Arab city of Hebron.

Having thus prepared the audience to come to a similar judgment, the documentary then examines the insular lives of these settlers, juxtaposed against the larger Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The most telling scenes are when an interviewer tries to engage the Jewish settlers in a discussion about the Arabs. Repeatedly, the subject is either evaded or dismissed as unworthy of serious discussion.

What do the settlers see when they look out the window at the Arab city? They see what they want to see.

A more complex piece of work, and one that as a journalist I found quite
interesting, is Between the Lines, a documentary on Amira Hass, a Jewish Israeli journalist who lives in and reports from Ramallah for the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz.

There is a saying attributed to Joseph Pulitzer that the job of a newspaper is to "comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comforted." Hass is an adversarial journalist of that school, seemingly ever ready to confront Israelis about how they treat the Palestinians and just as willing to
confront Palestinian officials about the corruption of their government.

At one point in an interview, Hass admits that annoying officials is fun, something she has enjoyed ever since she grew up as an outsider in Israeli society as the daughter of Communist Party members.

But before you write Hass off as simply a malcontent, you need to hear the story she tells about her mother, a Holocaust survivor, remembering being on a train to a concentration camp and being able to look out and see the faces of Germans carrying bundles of food. These German bystanders looked on without any concern as the Jews were being transported to the camps.
That story burned into her conscience. Hass decided that she could not be a
bystander. Unlike the German passersby, she needs to cry out, to remonstrate, to protest in the face of perceived injustices.

To many readers of Ha'aretz, she is the worst kind of Jew. A traitor. A kapo. But she believes she is following in the paths of Righteous Gentiles.

Who is she? Ultimately, Between the Lines lets us decide for ourselves about Hass— making this documentary, in my opinion, quite superior to The Settlers. But in this film, too, we see the face of Jewish hate, as when Hass and an Arab assistant are turned away nastily from a Jewish settlement, hate and contempt for the Arab boiling out of the throat of the young Jewish
guard.

Disrespect for the Arabs, denial of their humanity, contempt for their
customs, for their problems, for their complaints— these are the elements that distort the Jewish face that we see in the mirrors of these documentaries.

Our first reaction, of course, is a defensive one. What about all the outrages perpetrated against us by the Arabs? How respectful are people who target our children with suicide bombings? Why should we care about people who purposefully kill civilians? Why don¹t the documentaries go into that?

Why don¹t they show the horrible sermons about Jews delivered on almost any Friday in the mosques? What about the Palestinian textbooks that picture us as devils? The maps that leave out the name Israel? Why are only the Jews held up to such withering scrutiny?

Why indeed?

I always have had the belief that when we want to change a bad relationship with another person, we cannot only look at the other person's perceived faults. We must be willing to look at our own, to see if there is anything in our character that requires changing, and then make that change, regardless of what that other person does. If the other person doesn't follow suit, well, we at least have changed ourselves in a positive direction. If, on the other hand, the other person does follow our lead — then all the better.

I think that Israelis, who sometimes take pride in the stereotype that they are blunt, need to learn that simple courtesies, good manners and respect must become the derech eretz, the way of the land, not only toward fellow Jews (and there is far too little of that, as it is), but also to the Arabs
and to other peoples in Israel's midst. We must honor the Jewish belief that every human being is created in the image of God.

As long as we treat other people as things, rather than as fellow human beings, we cannot claim to be a "light unto the nations," for we act as the very reverse.

Israel needs to project itself to the rest of the world as we understand Israel to be, as a country with a good neshumah, as a country that treasures rather than scorns relationships with its neighbors.

I remember Israelis watching with lumps in their throats as Egypt's President Anwar Sadat first came to Jerusalem to offer peace. I remember the appreciation Israelis felt when King Hussein came to the home of youngsters killed by a Jordanian sniper to comfort the grieving family. These were special moments to us because old adversaries paid us respect.

Israelis and other Jews must pay respect to the Arab people. Such overtures may or may not make a difference to the Arabs. But it will make a difference to us — to the kind of people we are.

If such documentaries as Between the Lines and The Settlers, even while provoking our anger, move us along that road, then they have performed very worthwhile service for  the Jewish people.