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In the spring of 2007, Rula Jebreal, a prominent political journalist and TV anchorwoman in Rome, was lunching with her friend Walter Veltroni, the city’s mayor. He told her that a man wearing pajamas had come to his office that morning and asked him to turn off the lights—to improve the view of the Roman ruins outside the window. “Who was that nut?” she inquired. “He’s an artist, an interesting guy,” Veltroni said. “His name is Julian Schnabel, and he’s having a show at the Palazzo Venezia tonight—you should go.”
Rula did go to the Schnabel opening and stayed for the festive dinner afterward. Toward the end of it, the artist made his way down the long table, exchanging pleasantries with some of the 300 guests. He stopped when he got to Rula and introduced himself.
“Are you Indian?” he asked.
“No, I’m Israeli.”
“So you’re Jewish?”
“No. I am Palestinian.” (Pause.) “What’s wrong? Are you scared?”
“Should I be?” Schnabel wasn’t scared. He was dazzled—by her dark-skinned beauty, her intelligence, and her reputation as a writer, which he had already heard about. “He had a charming smile,” she remembers. “Very innocent, like a child.” He asked if he could see something she had written.
She sent him her first book, Miral, in a rough English translation. Published in Italy in 2003, it is an autobiographical novel about three generations of Palestinian women, told through the eyes of a girl growing up in Jerusalem during the first intifada—the Palestinian uprising that began in 1987 against the Israeli occupation. The book, surprisingly, is not anti-Israel; it recognizes the conflict as an ongoing tragedy for both sides. “I found the story was very important, heartbreaking,” Julian tells me. “It was a learning experience for me, as a Jewish person, like taking a walk in somebody else’s shoes. I also thought, This is a movie—it’s actually written like a movie.”
Having just won the Palme d’Or in Cannes for his third film, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Schnabel wasted no time. By the end of 2007, the Jewish artist and the Palestinian journalist were collaborating on a screenplay for Miral, which opens in theaters on December 3. Penguin has just published an English edition of the book. And Julian and Rula, who fell in love while making the film, now live in Palazzo Chupi, Julian’s pink, twelve-story town house in New York City.
Rula Jebreal was born in Haifa in 1973 and grew up in the Old City of Jerusalem. Most of the wrenching stories in her book and the film are true. Her mother, Nadia, was raped repeatedly by her stepfather from the age of thirteen until she ran away from home four years later; she became a belly dancer, drank heavily, went to jail for slapping a woman who had insulted her, had two daughters with different partners, and married a saintly man named Othman Jebreal, who vowed to save her but couldn’t. When Rula, the older child, was five, her mother committed suicide by walking into the sea.
Determined to provide a safer, more peaceful environment for Rula and her younger sister, Rania, Jebreal, the man they knew as their father, placed them in the care of a remarkable Palestinian woman named Hind Husseini. From a prominent Jerusalem family, Husseini had founded an orphanage in 1948 for Palestinian children uprooted during the creation of the state of Israel. “Hind was my teacher, my mother; she saved my life,” Rula says when I visit her at Palazzo Chupi. Husseini donated everything she had, including her extensive library, to the orphanage—thousands of books in English and in Arabic—and it was here that Rula’s education and imagination took wing. She read Anna Karenina, The Count of Monte Cristo, and, of course, Oliver Twist—“all orphans read Oliver Twist,” she tells me. “When I read One Thousand and One Nights, it opened my mind to the role of female sexuality in Arab literature. And then Naguib Mahfouz’s Palace Walk, about society, politics, and artists living in Egypt in the thirties. These two books show women as protagonists.”
Rula and her sister went home to their father’s house every other weekend. A gentle, loving man, Jebreal was a gardener at the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the most sacred Arab shrine in Jerusalem. “Taking care of the gardens was a form of meditation for him,” she says. “He spent his life there.” Jebreal became a minor imam at Al-Aqsa in his later years, but “he never made us pray or wear a veil or fast for Ramadan. Once I asked him, ‘Where does all this violence around us come from?’ And he said, ‘The danger is not in the sacred books. It’s in the minds of those who interpret them.’ I never thought of my father as an intellectual, but in that moment I realized how deep his thinking was, and how very peaceful his sense of religion was.”
Like the book, the movie Miral ends on a cautiously hopeful note, with the Oslo Accords promising an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict and Miral leaving Jerusalem in 1993 to study in Italy. The Accords soon broke down, as we know, but a new life began for Rula. (Her sister, who had recently married, stayed on.) “I needed to be free to create my own destiny,” she says. “I wanted to love my country. I also needed distance so I could be objective.” She had won a scholarship to the University of Bologna, where she studied medicine, and lived with an intellectual Italian family. Dinners in the household were a forum for lively political discussions and debates. The mother taught languages at the university, and she introduced Rula to Nietzsche, Rilke, Dante, Primo Levi, the Old Testament, Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, Isabel Allende’s novels, and the Egyptian novelist Amin Maalouf. “She didn’t press me on the traumas of my past,” Rula says, “but she told me that you can heal yourself through reading. I felt abandoned as a child, and sometimes very angry, but I was able to judge my mother’s story in a more forgiving way with the help of books.”
She met a young Italian art student in Bologna, and they had a child together. Rula named her Miral, after the red-and-yellow wildflower that grows in the desert in her homeland. After college, Rula worked as a physiotherapist, specializing in young people with brain damage. The work was extremely depressing. She went back to college to study journalism in 1997, and immediately began publishing articles in Il Messaggero and other papers.
Her rise was meteoric. She became the first foreign-born female journalist to read the evening news on Italian TV, and by 2003 she had her own political talk show, conducting tough, searching interviews with Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and other high-level pols and personalities in Europe and the Middle East. She covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where her knowledge of Arabic gave her extra leverage. After the terrorist attacks in Madrid and London, she advised Berlusconi to prevent a similar attack in Rome by coming out against the Iraq war; he did so, on her show, and the publicity was enormous. (Rome was not attacked, but Berlusconi’s impending meeting in Washington with President George W. Bush was canceled.) That year, 2005, she received Italy’s prestigious Ischia Prize in international journalism.
In August, Rula and Julian invite me to Montauk, where Julian owns a handsome property—house by Stanford White; indoor and outdoor studio, swimming pool, and assorted outbuildings by Schnabel. Rula’s fourteen-year-old daughter, Miral, is traveling with her father, who is having a show of his sculpture and paintings in Japan. Julian, the only American male besides Hugh Hefner known for wearing pajamas in the daytime, is in shorts today. Rula, waving from the wraparound porch, looks cool and lovely in a vintage cornflower-blue dress she bought in a thrift shop and shortened. Julian’s larger-than-life-size portrait of her greets you as you walk in the front door. (An even larger one is in their bedroom in New York, and he’s at work on a third.) “I never felt like I had a home,” she tells me later that day. “When Julian and I decided that we wanted to be together, it wasn’t about passion or fire. I loved his intellectual depth and honesty, and even his roughness. I loved his weak points and his strong points, and felt that they were completing each other.”
Julian takes me on a tour. Two of his huge white-bronze sculptures command the front lawn; three new red-and-white object paintings, shaped like surfboards, hang on the outside walls of the house; and his studio is full of paintings he’s done in the last couple of weeks. On the subject of Rula and Miral, he says, “If this movie is authentic, it’s because of her. She opened doors nobody else could. We were able to shoot in the orphanage and in the house where her mother had been raped, both of which had been denied to the production company. We shot in the Al-Aqsa Mosque. I needed an assistant director to communicate with a mob of people, and she could speak Arabic and Hebrew. If something was on the wall of a teenage Muslim girl’s room that shouldn’t be there, she’d know that. I could never have made this film without Rula.”
Rula arrives with glasses of fresh, unsweetened lemonade, and Julian goes off to make lunch. (She’s put them both on a low-carb diet; Julian has lost eighteen pounds in the last month.) We sit on the studio porch and talk about the movie. When Julian asked her to work with him on it full-time, she had just been offered a new prime-time show on Italian TV, with an even bigger audience than her last one. “It was a hard decision,” she says. “It took about three hours to make. I thought, How hard did I work on the book, and how important was it to me? I wrote it for my daughter and for all the girls left behind. Hind told me never to forget them. Miral is me, and at the same time it is the collective memory of the generation of the first intifada. I witnessed their lives, and I wrote it.”
Miral is a painter’s film. The complex, three-generation story—with a strong international cast that features Freida Pinto as Miral—evolves in scenes whose power and beauty are sometimes at odds with the brutality of the action. Hardliners on both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict will no doubt be offended, but Miral is a serious effort to depict the plight of noncombatants in a permanent war zone, surrounded by hatred and violence but yearning for peace. When it was shown at the Venice Film Festival on September 2, Repubblica gave it five stars and called it “a masterpiece. . . . The most important movie shown at the festival in the last ten years.” No one can say the film is not timely. The day it premiered in Venice, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas met with President Obama at the White House to inaugurate a new process of peace talks. Rula firmly believes that diplomacy, and only diplomacy, will someday end “the violence you breathe in the air every day” in that region. “I’m not denouncing one side or the other,” she says. “I’m denouncing a situation that became intolerable for people on both sides.”
She also believes that education is the key. “This is a movie about women,” she says, “but it’s also about human rights, about saving children in all countries where there are conflicts. Children are not children in the Middle East. They are adults at the age of five. And little girls are the main victims of any conflict. Education can set them free, help them become independent economically, so that they’re not sold or married off or turned into suicide bombers. If a society wants to become modern and democratic, doing it through women is a good idea. This is the way to dismantle religious fanaticism.”
Julian appears briefly to say lunch will be ready in ten minutes. “He finds women more interesting than men,” Rula tells me. “Our strength is that we’re so different, and we come from different worlds. I’ve always dealt with brutality—war zones, crises, natural disasters. Now I’m more relaxed because he’s shown me another side of life, the artistic side. He’s made me see life through his eyes, and it’s very colorful—he wears yellow-tinted glasses, you know.” She reads the newspapers to him at breakfast—before, he never read them—and he has strong opinions about her clothes. (Azzedine Alaïa is now her favorite designer.) “Julian makes me feel so light. I used to take myself very seriously, but with Julian, I laugh so much.”
Rula, who has written three books in all, is working on her fourth, which will be a sequel to Miral. As soon as the movie is launched, she hopes to reignite her TV career and eventually have a show of her own in New York, doing political and cultural interviews.
If she were interviewing herself about Miral, I ask, what would she most want to know? “Was I honest intellectually?” she replies. “Did I bring truth to every detail of this movie? My answer is yes. The movie is dedicated to everyone who still believes peace is possible.”