Review “The cousins “ولاد العم.”: the conflict between cousins, Arab and Jewish”

BY: MUHASSAD ALJUMAILI

“The cousins” is an Egyptian movie that greatly reflects the Arab-Israel conflict about Palestine. The movie was produced in 2009, directed by Sharif Arafa and the main actors were Karim Abdul Aziz, Muna Zaki, and Sharif Muneer. The movie narrates the story of an Egyptian woman “Muna Zaki” who lives in Egypt but got abducted with her children by her husband “Sharif Muneer” who turned to be an Israeli spy. He had to escape Egypt, so he kidnapped his wife and his children and took them to Tel Aviv. The Egyptian center of intelligence sent their spy “Karim Abdul Aziz” to save the Egyptian women and assassinate her husband.

I enjoyed watching this movie because of its scenario, dialogue, genre, direction, acting and its way of reflecting a story. This movie has stimulated my thinking in a lot of different aspects like the ideology of religions, causes of cultural hate, the relationship of political diplomats to the conflict itself. Then, I came up with the following question: how can a political peace treaty resolve a specific conflict and what is the possibility of creating new dispute???

I chose this movie for a review because it shows the conflict in multiple perspectives, the stereotype of Arab’s and Jewish ideologies and the cultural dispute between them. For example, the movie shows Israel as a developed country, but at the same time, it shows that Israel was destroying Arabs home. Another interesting example is when the woman, who was Muslim, was comfortable seeing her husband does not pray but accused him of being disbeliever when she realized he was Jewish. This movie is perfectly fit in our class discussion early this semester about Arab nationalism because I see that the nationalism is responsible for creating the stereotypes. A lot of Arab, based on my experience being Arab, were raised to see Jewish as evil in Arab communities while Islam religion taught Muslims that Jewish are the people of the book, in another word, Jewish are believers.

There is a lot of action in the movies along with some good drama. The answer to the question above needs the view of this movie and the analysis of its events. I don’t think that politics could resolve this type of conflict because it is complicated and has a lot of elements like religions, history, culture and land control. Even with the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, the movie tells us that there is an inner conflict between both sides, this is significantly represented when the characters, Egyptian woman, and the spy, were trying to flee Tel Aviv. The woman asked the Egyptian spy why didn’t they escape from the Egyptian embassy, and he answered her that the diplomatic relations were something and their situation was something else.

The different Arab countries’ policies toward the Palestinian case would help us to answer the second part of the question which is the possibility of creating new conflict. There is a scene in the movie shows how divided Arab are when a Palestinian engaged in a fight with the Egyptian spy because the spy was merely Egyptian. I noticed that the Palestinian person was verbally attacking Egypt in particular because of Egyptian politician. The Palestinian attack is also an example of stereotypes because if the Egyptian Politicians had terrible policies toward Palestinian, it doesn’t mean that Egypt is terrible nor Egyptians.