Gaza – I just got back from a screening in Gaza of Budrus, Julia Bacha’s film about grassroots resistance against the Israeli separation wall in the West Bank village of the same name. Some 100 people, Palestinians and a few foreigners, came to the screening in the courtyard of the French Cultural Center.
Having been to many of unarmed demonstrations in the West Bank, just like those depicted in the film, and watching the movie alongside Palestinians in Gaza, it was a genuinely moving experience.
For me, watching the film reminded me, yet again, about how the real story of Israel and Palestine today is not a diplomatic story about the negotiations between Abbas and Netanyahu, the melodrama about the settlement freeze, and so on. Rather it is a political struggle, and Palestinians are fighting against a brutal system of segregation that has been thrust upon them. There is no way for me to see scenes from Budrus—of club-wielding Israeli border police beating peaceful Palestinian demonstrators—without recalling, to cite just one example, the African American freedom struggle in the US.
I also chatted with two Palestinians who attended the screening, one young man and one young woman. The first thing both of them remarked on to me was the presence of Jewish-Israeli activists in the demonstrations in Budrus. For them, this was something authentically new. This struck me as an important observation. You have to imagine, Palestinians living in Gaza, 20 or 21 years old, who have trapped here their entire lives. The only Israelis they know of are peering from distant watchtowers.
Muhammad, with whom I attended the film, is active in some of the nonviolent demonstrations taking place here in Gaza. He remarked as we walked home on how in the West Bank there is face-to-face contact between Palestinians and Israeli soldiers. In Gaza, anyone who even approaches the militarized border will be “killed,” he said. “Shot,” I corrected him. “No,” he said, “killed.”
We walked further and pondered this point a moment, and then we both came to the same observation, that the live-fire buffer zone around Gaza, and Israel’s military actions against Gaza, is a military response to a political problem. The only reason Israel withdrew soldiers and settlers from the interior of Gaza, Muhammad argued, was because of resistance on the ground here, except here the opposition to occupation historically has taken on a violent form.
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Cross posted from Jared’s blog, with author’s permission. Budrus opened in theaters in the US and Israel last weekend. More details here.