NEW YORK, March 28: One cannot comprehend why such strong denunciations were made by the Jewish organisations on the screening of ‘Miral’ an understated moving film about travails of a Palestinian schoolgirl during first Palestinian Intifada, directed by Julian Schnabel, a Jewish film-maker at the United Nations. The Israeli delegation to the United Nations and the American Jewish Committee (AJC), the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), and other Jewish organisations dubbed it an effort to portray Israel as the villain in its dealings with the Arab world.

This at a time when the world body has not only lent itself to many a screenings of Holocaust related films and many exhibits to mark the tragedy of the second world war.

Filmmaker Julian Schnabel says he understands why Jews have condemned the movie which opened in New York on Friday, as an anti-Israel narrative: “It comes out of fear”.

“The fear that the Holocaust occurred, that ‘We have been [decimated] and we don’t want it to happen again’; that ‘these people, the Palestinians, are against us having a state of Israel, and we must fight for that no matter what happens’. But I don’t believe that’s true. I believe a Jewish homeland in Israel is super important, and a great thing, but we must have empathy, we have to be sensitive. I don’t think it’s a very encouraging way to look at people, as ‘us and them’. It isn’t us and them. We are all human beings. And what is good for the Palestinians is also good for the Israelis.”

Miral — which is based on an autobiographical novel by the journalist Rula Jebreal , who is also Schnabel’s fiancé — portrays a Palestinian girl, orphaned after her mother commits suicide, who becomes radicalised while teaching in a refugee camp during the first Intifada in 1987. In one scene, Miral is arrested in the middle of the night for her association with Palestinians activists, then brutally beaten during her interrogation in an Israeli prison. In another, a female terrorist attempts to place a bomb in an Israeli cinema, while the rape scene from Roman Polanski’s “Repulsion” plays on the screen. The sequence is a metaphor not only for the rape of Miral’s mother – which propels the woman’s suicide — but also for the protagonists’ perception of the rape of the Palestinian people, Schnabel said in a interview.

“It’s not from my omniscient point of view of a 59-year-old Jewish guy who’s got all these different facts where I have to explain who attacked whom in the Six Days War. It’s Miral’s family history as it was told to her, and as it was lived by her.

And that’s the power of the story. I can’t do this inexhaustible summation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There are just too many stories.

“When I shot the movie and lived and worked in Israel and in Palestine, I was pretty ashamed of certain situations that I witnessed,” Schnabel said. “I felt it was like apartheid over there, and that’s very disappointing. There’s democracy for Jewish people in Israel but I don’t think there’s democracy for Palestinian people….When I see a kid with a yarmulke throwing a rock into a Palestinian home and screaming at them, that doesn’t seem to be the Jewish way to me.”

‘Miral’ means ‘stand-up straight’ in Arabic, but in an anecdote in the film Miral tells Israelis it means red flower which blooms in the desert.

Schnabel knew almost nothing about Middle East politics until he met Rula Jebreal in 2007 at an opening of his exhibition at the Palazzo Venezia in Rome.