Syriana directed by Steven Gaghan, 2005, English, Arabic , Farsi, Urdu, and French  with subtitles, color,  2 hours 8 minutes.

By Donald H. Harrison

SAN DIEGO, Calif.—Here's a movie about intrigue, politics, big money and religion in the Middle East.   Another film about the Israelis and the Palestinians?  Absolutely not!  In fact, the most intriguing Jewish angle about this Middle Eastern movie is that there is no Israeli angle—and,  more than anything else, that should get viewers thinking. 

At least so far as this movie is concerned, much of the violence in the Middle East has nothing to to with either Israelis or the Palestinians, instead it has to do with the sometimes complementary, sometimes adversarial relationships among the U.S. government, Big Oil, Arab Nationalism, Islamic Fundamentalism, and Wall Street.

The three stars of this film—George Clooney, Matt Damon and Jeffrey Wright—portray respectively a CIA killer, an independent energy analyst, and an oil company merger attorney.  The plotting is slow, glacially slow at times, and I don't advise watching this movie in a reclining chair.  You might just fall asleep, perhaps because director Gaghan is too true to his premise.

The premise is that seemingly unrelated events, in places all over the globe, are manifestations of the titanic power struggle for control of the world's energy resources.  The constantly shifting action is bewildering; for a good portion of the time as you watch this video, you ask yourself  "What the hell is going on?  What's the plot?"  The next phase either is to say, "Oh to hell with it" and switch your home entertainment system back to television, or to settle in and let the movie play itself out.  Eventually, if you don't fall asleep in the meantime you begin to understand how the conflicting entities interrelate.  

All this, one supposes, is a metaphor for what happens to us in real life as we consider the Middle East.  1) We are confused by seemingly unrelated events.  2) Often we become so bored by what's really going on that we switch our attention back to the easy-to-understand drama of Israel vs. the Palestinians, ignoring the larger story.  3) Some people, however, with high patience quotients are able to fathom the bigger picture.

All this reminds me of my student days at UCLA in the early 1960s, when I would wander from Kerkhoff Hall, where the Daily Bruin had its offices (and I had my campus "home") to the Terrace Room of the Student Union, where one could normally find any number of small, informal discussion groups ready to ponder almost any subject.  

There was one Israeli who used to tell us, "Forget about the Israelis and the Arabs ("Palestinians" wasn't a term used  then), that's just the surface!  Look deeper.  It's Shell vs. Standard!)  Few of us took him seriously and, regrettably, I can't recall his name.  But, whoever he was, today, some 40 years later, he'd probably hold up the Syriana video and say something like, "Middle Eastern studies?  Here, here's Middle Eastern studies!"

That's not to say that the struggle between Israel and the Palestinians doesn't have its own logic, and its own importance. What we are declaring here is that just because it is the easiest story in the Middle East  for the news media to cover—Israel, after all is an open society—that does not mean that it is the only story, nor necessarily the most important. Furthermore, it is not the causal story that some people think it is; it is not  the genesis for all other Middle Eastern-related events whether those be 9/11, the attack on the USS Cole, The War in Iraq, or Iran's attempts at nuclear buildup.  

Remove the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the Middle East and you still would have one of the most roiled regions in the world, where the wraiths of greed, power and corruption hover over the oil fields.

Which brings us to the only specifically Jewish angle in the movie that I could discern.  This was a reference to economist Milton Friedman made by Danny Dalton, a minor character. Contemptuous of a proposed government investigation into oil company practices, he essays on the true nature of things: "Corruption is government intrusion into market efficiencies in the form of regulations. That's Milton Friedman. He got a goddamn Nobel Prize. We have laws against it precisely so we can get away with it. Corruption is our protection. Corruption keeps us safe and warm. Corruption is why you and I are prancing around in here instead of fighting over scraps of meat out in the streets. Corruption is why we win."