A documentary film about Home Evictions in East Jerusalem opens at the Jerusalem Film Festival

The Jerusalem Fim Festival opened a few days ago, and I am watching films galore!

A new film about the cruelty of the Occupation is Bissan Tibi’s documentary, One Street in Silwan.

Batn Al-Hawa is a normal street in Silwan, which is a Palestinian village in East Jerusalem outside the Old City Walls, where the government of Israel is harassing and displacing local residents on a regular basis. According to Israeli law, Jews may apply to reclaim property lost during the 1948 war.  (Palestinians are not permitted the same rights.) Thus, settler groups are using this to obtain properties all over East Jerusalem, moving into Arab neighborhoods, taking over homes that Palestinian families have occupied for more than 75 years. And the courts are supporting this.

There are two heroes in the film.  One is Dareen, an adolescent girl, whose family is fighting the possible eviction from their home. She doesn’t talk much, but we watch as she plays with her cousin and her friends in the street, her relations with her brothers unfold, and we go on tour of the street with her father, who provides visitors with a rudimentary tour and a meal in his home. 

The other main character is the street itself – the security cameras, colorful street art, children’s games - some which are extremely violent, soldiers patrolling, settlers passing by.  In the midst of this Arab neighborhood, there is one site that houses a group of settlers and another that has become a synagogue.  There is graffiti that has been blackened out, some violence, and plenty of bad feeling. 

Although focusing your camera on a child makes for a film lacking in depth, it also provides a lot of pathos and insight into the tensions and fears of the Palestinian citizens who are suffering the dispossession that is being meted out by the occupying forces.

One Street in Silwan (documentary, 53 minutes) is a debut film for Bissan Tibi. Watch the trailer here.

The film is available from Anna Somershaf at supershaf@gmail.com

 

 

Our Boys

Currently streaming on HBO in the USA is Our Boys, a series of 10 episodes, created by three filmmakers, Hagai Levi, Joseph Cedar and Tawfik Abu-Wael (two Jewish Israeli filmmakers and one Palestinian).  The series is an enormously impressive and hard-hitting historical re-enactment of terrible murders that took place in Israel-Palestine during the summer of 2014.

The TV series begins with the abduction and murder of three Jewish Israeli teenagers from the Gush Etzion junction, south of Jerusalem, during that summer. This incident brought deep sorrow and mourning to Israeli society.  But this is not the focus of the series. Rather, the filmmakers decided to examine the ethical and strategic issues involved in the senseless revenge murder of an innocent Palestinian teenager.

Seeking revenge for the murder of the three Israeli teens, Israeli right-wing ultra-orthodox extremists kidnapped, and while still alive, set fire to a Palestinian youth named Mohammed Abu Khdeir from Shuafat (a Palestinian neighborhood north of Jerusalem).  Following this heinous murder, extensive rioting broke out in the Palestinian community in Jerusalem and all over the West Bank, and missiles were shot from Palestinian militants in Gaza.  The film series reveals how much damage the murder of this Palestinian boy caused in Israel that summer.

All of this eventually led to the beginning of Operation Protective Edge, a military operation, that lasted for 50 days, against the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.

After the murder of Abu Khdeir, my husband, Ron, and my daughter Dahlia, went to pay their respects to the Abu Khdeir family at the tent of mourning in Shuafat, along with hundreds of other concerned Jews from all over Israel, on a solidarity visit organized by the Tag Meir Forum (see below).

Filmed on location in Jerusalem and surroundings, the TV series sets out to document how the Israeli police and Shabak (Shin Bet—Israeli internal security services) investigate the heinous murder of this Palestinian Arab teenager.  At first, the police were misled because they were so sure that such an atrocious murder of a Palestinian youth could not have been committed by Jews.  This sounds like a ridiculous assumption these days, but many people in Israel still believe that Palestinians are capable of terrible atrocities but that Jews would never do such things.  Even years after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, Israelis still refuse to believe that there is a violent right-wing extremist movement capable of such terrible deeds.

It is interesting to also note that the series deals frankly with this issue of “who is the victim?"  Both sides, Israelis and Palestinians, claim victimhood in this decades long conflict.  Palestinians feel that they are the underdog, treated very poorly as part of the occupation, and therefore they see themselves as the only victims.  On the other hand, Jewish Israelis feel that they have been the victim ever since the Holocaust, and that they are still victims of Palestinian terror all the time, and therefore they must never let down their guard.  These are two conflicting narratives – both of which are articulated in the TV series-- which attempts to follow the actual events and at the same time, to evoke empathy and understanding on both sides.

The series has two heroes – one is the father of Mohammed and the other is the Shabak investigator.  The father of Mohammed Abu Khdeir is seen as a rational and cool-headed figure who is able to resist the demands of the Palestinian Arab extremists who want to turn his son’s murder into a cause for rioting and revenge.  The credits at the end of each episode show that the real-life parents of Mohammed cooperated in the making of this series, which is quite amazing.

Our other hero, Simon, the Shabak investigator, is given the difficult job of finding Abu Khdeir’s murderers.  He begins by tracking some of the young men of the Hilltop Youth, a group of young Jewish anarchists and extremists, who remind me sometimes of white supremacists in the USA.   These youngsters operate freely throughout the West Bank and inside Israel, even though the Shabak is aware of them and constantly watching them on their security cameras.  They indulge in terrible acts of destruction of property and even sometimes in murder, in what they call Tag Mechir, price-tag revenge attacks.  They represent a horrible stain on Jewish society in Israel. In recent years, they have been opposed by the Tag Meir (Light Tag) Forum, which engages in solidarity visits and educational programs to combat Jewish racism.

This is a very courageous and compelling television series, produced by HBO and Keshet. I am still in the middle of viewing it together with my husband. One of the reasons we chose to see it is that Bibi denounced it calling it anti-Semitic and anti-Israel. The opposite is the case. It is a gripping portrayal of an issue at the heart of Jewish morality within Israel, and I applaud the directors for having taken such a bold step in forcing us to grapple with these issues.

We have more episodes to watch, and we plan to go to hear the directors of the film speak at the JCC on the Upper West Side in New York in a few weeks, at the preview screening of the tenth and final episode. After that, I will update you on the conclusion of this important series. Stay tuned.

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Since shortly after the Six-Day War of 1967, when Israel annexed East Jerusalem, the residents of East Jerusalem have been residents of Israel, but not citizens. As residents, all of their personal status matters must be registered via the Israeli Ministry of the Interior in East Jerusalem.

An award-winning and compelling documentary film by Amir Har-Gil (an Israeli - Jew) and Isfahan Bahaloul (an Israeli - Muslim), Jerusalem in Line, tackles the difficult subject of how these residents have been humiliated and mistreated by this ministry, and how their basic human rights have been denied.    

People go to the Ministry of Interior offices to register births and marriages, and to apply for passports -- in this case actually laissez-passez documents since the Palestinians of East Jerusalem are not able to receive passports since they are not considered citizens of Israel. The applicants were forced to wait on long lines in the hot sun, were treated poorly when they got inside, and their requests were often denied without serious investigation into the complications and implications of each case.

The film, which is premiering this month at the Cinema Village in New York City, as part of the Socially Relevant Film Festival, follows three stories of people who have been forced to fight on-going battles with the Ministry of Interior due to serious infringements of their rights.  One story is about a 12-year-old girl who loses her health insurance since her resident status had been revoked for no apparent reason.  Another is the story of a Palestinian man whose residence in an East Jerusalem neighborhood was misconstrued to be across the border in the West Bank, and as a result, he lost his resident status meaning no social security, no disability benefits, and no health coverage.  The fact that he paid his annual municipal taxes (even though they claimed he didn’t live in Jerusalem) and the fact that he had had medical coverage all his life didn’t change matters.  Indeed, his need for dialysis three times a week only made his case more severe.  A third story was about a man whose house was demolished by bulldozers sent by the city, but he was continuously being billed for city taxes on this same house! 

Using the technique of a story-teller who sits outside the Ministry of the Interior in East Jerusalem, the filmmakers are able to relate these stories, and more, with charm, compassion and humanity – virtues that should be requirements to become bureaucrats of the government of Israel! 

Jerusalem in Line is a documentary film (63 minutes), available directly from Amir Har-Gil.  Check out his website.