This paper focuses on an outstanding scene in The Juggler, Hollywood`s first movie set and filmed in modern Israel. Produced by Stanley Kramer, written by Michael Blankfort, and directed by Edward Dmytryk – the film starred Kirk Douglas, who following his work on The Juggler became one of Israel`s biggest supporters in Hollywood. Douglas played in the movie a traumatized Holocaust survivor, a German-Jewish variety entertainer named Hans Muller, who lost his family in the death-camps. Muller arrives as an immigrant, shortly after Israel`s establishment. After bouts of psychotic violence and a flight across the Galilee, he eventually finds love and prospects of recovery on a northern border kibbutz. At one point, Muller and his love-interest Yael – a young kibbutz woman – go on a hike to the ruins of a deserted Arab village. After a panic attack provoked by the sudden appearance of a Syrian border patrol, Muller breaks down into a tormented monologue about homelessness and loss. The fact that all this was filmed among the demolished houses of the village of Iqrit – whose exiled inhabitants had already begun in Israeli courts their decades-long legal fight to return to their homes – charges the scene with a symbolic meaning that its Hollywood creators were not aware of.
Based on newly revealed archive sources, this paper demonstrates how The Juggler not only connected the holocaust with the birth of Israel – but also inadvertently `documented` a living symbol of the Nakba, the `disaster` of the Palestinian Arabs wrought by the 1948 war.