I have just finished making the trailer for my film.
Very shortly after getting back from Israel and Palestine, I got pregnant, and had to decide whether or not I wanted to impose all of the stress and frustration I feel regarding this issue on the little person growing inside me. I don’t want to have an angry child. So I took a bit of time off, and while staying reasonably well-informed, I didn’t live inside the conflict day and night.
Deadlines as they are, I had to finish a demo, which will hopefully enable me to get the funding I will need to finish the film. And then, when I was home for the holidays, war broke out again. This time, it is all the same. The same rhetoric, the same flawed logic. Thankfully, this time the Western media is more critical of what is happening over there, although it seems that there are still a large number of people who can’t quite see beyond the Zionist propaganda they have been fed all their lives.
The other day, a young man from the group I toured around Israel with told me I needed my head checked when I changed my status on Facebook to “Israel is not a normal country, it is an occupying country, a colonial country and the people of Gaza are under siege.” The sad thing about his remark is that because he was only there for ten days, and during those ten days, he only saw the side of Israel that is glitsy and fun, a homeland for all Jews, he couldn’t possibly imagine that this place, this Palm Beach in the middle of the desert, is really a terrible place for those who are not Jewish.
Forget all of the other racism that exists within Israel — forget that the Russian Jews, the Ethiopians, the Arab Jews, are discriminated against by their Ashkenazim brethren. Forget that the government sends these people to the front lines, makes them hate and fear the Palestinian people even more. For those who have lived on this land for generations but are not Jewish, life is a terrible thing. Life is full of fear, fear that your home might be demolished. Fear that you could be harrassed by settlers who want nothing more than to see you leave. Fear that your child, your mother, your sister may be shot for no reason by the IDF, and then their existence wiped out, ignored, because while Israel repeatedly breaks international laws and commits war crimes, the laws of the rest of the world do not count in this place.
As long as the US stands behind Israel, this rogue state will be allowed to do whatever it likes. It will be allowed to continue treating Palestinian people as though they are animals, the way the Jews’ ancestors were treated by other ignorant, indoctrinated and hate-filled people around the world. And people like me, with Jewish blood, will cry out in protest in other parts of the world, devastated that the very same tactics used against my family are being used by people who told me that they are my brothers and sisters. And then, when I protest these actions, I am told that I am anti-semitic, because I cannot condone the ethnic cleansing of a people who simply don’t agree that their land should have even been taken away from them.
Why is it so hard to share?
