"The Attack" opens with Amin Jaafari (Ali Suliman) accepting a prestigious career achievement award. As he says in his gracious speech, he's the first Arab to be so recognized in 41 years (a date which happens to coincide with the beginning of terrorist activities against Israel). Having reached the top of his field, with the respect and admiration of his mainly Israeli peers and friends, he seems to perfectly represent, and speaks of, the possibilities of a peaceful co-existence.
But the very next day a suicide bombing rocks Tel Aviv and the body of Amin's wife, Siham (Reymonde Amsellem) is brought into Amin's hospital, her corpse mangled in a way that indicates she was the bomber. After a period of denial, and brutal interrogation by the Israeli police, Amin travels to Nablus, the Palestinian territory in the West Bank, where Siham was headed, to trace her steps and figure out her motivations. We are as mystified and horrified as the hero, and learn her reasons, bit by bit, through Amin's eyes.
Flashbacks, in just the right amount, fill in the story of their love, and romance, a somewhat unexpected aspect in a thriller about terrorism. A stand-out image shows the couple on a motorcycle, with Siham in her wedding whites whipping along against the starkly beautiful Middle Eastern terrain.
Yet the Palestinian-Israeli conflict—or as it's called by those who are living with it, "the conflict"—lurks at the edge of everyone's lives. The two terrific documentaries on this topic which were nominated for an Academy Award last year—"The Gatekeepers," the retrospective thoughts of members of the Shin Bet or Israeli Secret Police; and "5 Broken Cameras," about a Palestinian photographer trying to capture the territorial struggles for land—come to mind. Yet this fiction film makes deeper emotional dents: the politics are very personal if we like the film's main characters. We do. Siham is especially intriguing, a sultry yet idealistic woman. That's a hard combo to enact.
Amin's own Palestinian relatives offer some reasons for Siham's chosen martyrdom; Karim Saleh is especially poignant as his nephew Adel, saying "Something snapped in her head," an ironic echo of the earlier analysis of terrorists by the savvy Israeli police. Another explanation comes from a young Muslim priest: "We are a ravaged people people fighting for our dignity with whatever we have." Amin has tracked him down to find someone, something, to blame. But as in the rest of "The Attack," there are no easy answers. "I never met your wife," the priest declares, "I wish I had."
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