Quaker Service Jerusalem Hosts Weekly Film Series
By Promise Partner
Over the last several months, Quaker Service Jerusalem has been holding a weekly film series to promote education and discussion. Every Thursday night since early March, we have screened a film about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. These have ranged in style from documentary to feature films and in content from extremist settlers to the right of return. Our audience is mainly drawn from the local NGO community, peace teams, internationals, and occasional students and travelers.
Our first film was The Iron Wall, which discusses the history and impact of Israeli settlements. Later that month we showed Arna’s Children; its director returns to Jenin after the Israeli Defense Force’s invasion in 2002 to find the men who as boys had participated in his mother’s youth theater program.
We have shown two Mennonite Central Committee films, which are a great opening to the issues and highly recommended for groups in the United States: Children of the Nakba, which address the refugee crisis, and The Dividing Wall, which explores the humanitarian, social, and political impact of the Israeli-built “security fence.”
Our feature films have been Paradise Now, the controversial Oscar-nominated film that follows two childhood friends recruited for a suicide bombing, and Private, an intimate drama based on a true story of the Israeli Army’s takeover of a family’s home.
The three-part BBC series Elusive Peace is an account of the peace process through the eyes of major political figures. It examines the last six years through interviews with individuals like Clinton, Arafat, Sharon, Barak, Albright, and their negotiators, revealing what happened behind closed doors as the peace process failed and the Intifada exploded.
Our screening of Breaking the Silence was our most popular night by far. Twenty-five people crowded into the Quaker Service office/apartment to learn about this organization, a group of Israelis who are speaking out about what they have witnessed and experienced as soldiers in occupied Palestine. We were joined by Breaking the Silence member Yehuda Shaul who led a discussion following the film of testimonies.
Another Israeli organization offered us their film, Zochrot, which is the feminine Hebrew word for remembering. Zochrot works to raise Israeli awareness of the Nakba, the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948. In May Israeli director Eran Torbiner was with us for the screening of his film Matzpen, about the Israeli socialist organization of the 1960s and ‘70s that opposed Zionism and Occupation.
Most recently we have shown two films about extremist settlers: Inside God’s Bunker, which includes candid interviews with Hebron’s militant settlers and was filmed during the months leading up to the Goldstein massacre in 1994, and the PBS documentary Israel’s Next War.
The film series has been a positive outreach program of Quaker Service in Jerusalem. It has enabled people working on local peace and justice projects to gather in community and discuss topics relevant to work in the region. Films are an excellent medium to provoke questions and conversation and there are a plethora of films on issues of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Quaker Service encourages supporters in the United States to organize similar film series.
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