From 29-31 October, the Frontline Club is hosting screenings as part of the Green Caravan Film Festival, a travelling festival of environmental and socially-conscious films. The full lineup can be found here.

The Wanted 18 recreates an astonishing true story: the Israeli army’s pursuit of 18 cows, whose independent milk production on a Palestinian collective farm was declared “a threat to the national security of the state of Israel.”

In response to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, a group of people from the town of Beit Sahour decide to buy 18 cows and produce their own milk as a co-operative. Their venture is so successful that the collective farm becomes a landmark, and the cows local celebrities – until the Israeli army takes note and declares that the farm is an illegal security threat. Consequently, the dairy is forced to go underground, and the cows continue to produce their “Intifada milk” with the Israeli army in relentless pursuit.

Directed by: Amer Shomali and Paul Cowan
Runtime: 75′
Country: Canada
Year: 2014

On Friday 19 September, the Frontline Club hosted a screening of The Process, followed by a lively Q&A with the director, Joshua Baker, moderated by Jonathan Miller, foreign correspondent for Channel 4 News.

The film follows three main characters in Israel and Palestine: a young Israeli woman who has moved from her settlement to Tel Aviv, a privileged young Palestinian man who lives with his wealthy family in Ramallah and a mother living in the West Bank who is determined to join the struggle against occupation.

Miller introduced the film by saying, for him, it was revelatory and enlightening, presenting the very depressing story of war without end, but also capturing something different in the stories it revealed.

Baker started by explaining that he filmed everything himself with one camera, which resulted in six car crashes, and often made it very difficult to capture scenes with many people. While the film is only one-hour long, Baker shot over 77 hours of footage.

In explaining his decision and motivation behind the film, he said:

“I’d been spending a lot of time in the region, I’d been going to the region for a couple of years before this . . . and I became fascinated with this conflict that had been going for so long, but seemed to be so mundane, almost, so normalised. I started travelling to the West Bank and kind of got a bit tired of the lack of attention to the story , and also how different I think it can be from how its reported to the reality on the ground. . . . So I wanted to take a new stab at covering it, and hopefully that’s what this does.”

The first question was from a Palestinian journalist in the audience who was disappointed with the lack of acknowledgement of Israeli government oppression. Several other members of the audience agreed with this criticism, while another member of the audience wondered why the film did not touch on the role of the US government in the peace process and as a provider of weapons to Israel.

Baker replied that he felt he had presented the level of suffering Palestinians face under occupation, but he acknowledged that he had made certain “editorial decisions to make it palatable to a mainstream audience”.

As the film was only finished in June, just before the summer of violence in Gaza, the three main characters had not yet seen the final film. One of the main characters is a wealthy Palestinian who makes favourable statements about Israel in the film and Baker was worried about his safety, in light of the current situation. In discussing why he chose to include this character, he said that he represents a “certain elite of Palestinian society and politics”, who have almost benefited from the Israeli occupation.

One audience member felt he could relate to much of the film as it presented how the Israeli and Palestinian communities live almost completely separately. As a North American, he compared it to the almost invisibility of the indigenous populations of Canada and the US. Would there be another film on the same issue, but perhaps more raw? Baker said that this had been an option for this film, due to the amount of footage he had collected. But:

“I was not interested in violence. . . . It detracted from the message.”

Much of the film discusses the status quo, which is the result of the lack of progress made by the peace process after 20 years of negotiations. Baker discussed with the audience the fact that “most Palestinians don’t believe in the process” and politicians from both sides benefit more by keeping the status quo, especially the Israeli government who would lose much more by making any meaningful changes.

The Q&A ended with Miller explaining that, as a news journalist, he is bound by the need to be impartial. He asked Baker whether he felt this was also the case for him as a documentary filmmaker, to which Baker replied:

“While I hope that I approached this with some journalistic integrity and gave voices to both sides . . . it is clear that the Palestinians suffer the most in this situation, and it is very clear how horrible that is, and how they are suffering with no end in sight from the international community. Ultimately, I think it also harms Israel a hell of a lot; the continued alienation and isolation that they will face in the coming years will affect their current standing in the international community.”

Information on further screenings of The Process can be found on the film’s Facebook page.

As part of this year’s Summer Season exploring walls, barriers and borders today, the Frontline Club hosted a preview screening of The Architecture of Violence on Wednesday 13 August. It was followed by a Q&A with director Ana Naomi de Sousa and protagonist, architect and activist Eyal Weizman, moderated by filmmaker Olly Lambert. The film is part of Rebel Architecture, a six-part Al Jazeera English documentary series profiling architects who are using design as a form of activism and resistance to tackle the world’s urban, environmental and social crises.

The film focusses on the architectural infrastructure of the West Bank, and the idea that architecture can be used as a form of violence, which at first, may not be obvious, as Weizman said:

“If you think about human rights violations, you think about soldiers, you think about politicians. You don’t really think about architects. If you want to make architects liable to violations of interntional law, the proof is in the drawing. . . . You see a settlements like Ariel . . . and you see it built as a wedge and you start understanding that the way it was designed was to cut a whole kind of north–south axis along the West Bank. The design, [the] line that was drawn on the plan of the architect, is where the crime is . . . because there is a conscious attempt or intent to produce material damage through architectural form.”

The film also explores Weizman‘s latest project, Forensic Architecture, which aims to use architectural knowledge as evidence in the investigation of war crimes and human rights violations.

“It is essential now to use architecture as a form of evidence [in court], at a time when most wars are happening in cities, where in fact not only most wars are happening in cities, [but] most people that die are dying inside buildings.”

Responding to a question about whether there are Palestinian attempts to counter the invasive effects of settlements, de Sousa replied:

“There are interesting stories and very interesting Palestinian architects like Naseer Arafat [featured in the film]. . . . Sandy Halal . . . also has [done] some very interesting work in the refugee camps all across the West Bank, which is about involving people who live in the camps in thinking about and imagining and acting out urbanisation of the camps, which is very interesting because the refugee camps are perceived to be temporary spaces and that temporariness is linked to the claim to the right to return. And so there is a sort of cultural resistance to the urbanisation of camps.”

However, as Weizman explains in the film, the undercurrent of architectural violence has often gone unnoticed:

“When you are travelling through the West Bank everything looks very banal and mundane and that’s its power. . . . [The wall] draws like a moth towards a flame all the photographers to work with that because it’s so visually obvious. But when you see a settlement, it looks like a suburb; the road, it looks like any road. When you see infrastructure systems – the same. This is where decoding is important, this is where you have to denaturalise processes that seem very natural.”

Talking about the wider implications of these ideas, de Sousa added:

“This idea that the built environment is a slow kind of violence, I think, is something that you see everywhere.”

Premiering on Monday 18 August 2014, Rebel Architecture features inspiring architects that are using design to tackle the world’s urban, environmental and social crises.

For further reading on the subject, see:

Carranza, L E. 2010. Architecture as Revolution: Episodes in the History of Modern Mexico.

Forensic Architecture, ed. 2014. Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth.

Segal R, Tartakover D and Weizman, E, eds. 2003. A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture.

Weizman, E. 2007. Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation.

Weizman, E. 2011. The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza.

Weizman, E. 2012. Forensic Architecture: Notes from Fields and Forums.

"a new path, a new emotional path […] even for much of the so-called left wing in Israel, they’ve never experienced this.  They’ve never experienced this emotional journey."

"If you’re a victim, you have a responsibility to heal yourself, to find a way out."

"Healing is a challenge in life.  It’s the victim’s sole obligation […] forgotten wounds can’t be healed, so I film […] it helps me confront life, and begin to heal."

Put another way, each has its own version of the events that have locked them together for so long, and as every journalist who has covered this story knows only too well, if one side applauds you for telling the truth, the other will accuse you of lying.

Pratt cites his conviction that the Palestinian people have been and are still victims of “a great injustice”, and that responsibility for the extreme suffering they endure lies unequivocally with the state of Israel, as grounds for abandoning the reporter’s tradition of impartiality.

His view, like mine, is that nobody who has spent time on the ground in the West Bank and Gaza could fail to conclude that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians is anything less than barbaric. What better reflection of this is there than the stream of young men, and some young women, whose rage and despair drives them to become suicide bombers?

Intifada covers the eventful, many would say fateful, years that saw the Palestinian resistance develop from children armed only with stones confronting the might of the Israeli army troops to the uprising provoked by Ariel Sharon’s inflammatory visit to the al-Aqsa mosque and the subsequent emergence of Hamas and Islamic Jihad as fully-fledged guerrilla organisations.

Part reportage, part analysis, it draws heavily on Pratt’s extensive time in the field, constantly ducking and diving in riot-torn Palestinian towns and counting the bodies after bomb attacks on “soft” targets in Israel. He’s very good at conveying the adrenaline fuelled and addictive business of covering the front line, though perhaps rather too fond of mentioning how dangerous this was – you chose to be there, David.

The shocking conduct of Israeli troops towards ordinary Palestinians is vividly portrayed: pregnant women aborting because roadblocks prevent them from reaching hospital, babies suffocating after tear gas is fired into houses, savage beatings in full view of the media. Pratt wonders aloud how the average Israeli can live with this and concludes that it is a case of wilful self-deception: the worst abuses occur in the occupied territories where relatively few have ever set foot.

Of course, there are those who refuse to turn a blind eye to the repression and injustice done in their name: the middle class Jewish women who monitor checkpoints, human rights groups like B’Tselem, the courageous newspaper Ha’aretz. Pratt might usefully have included something about the Israeli soldiers, many of them combat veterans, who found duty in the territories so abhorrent to their personal morality that they preferred to go to jail rather than serve there ever again.

The inexorable rise of Hamas as the most potent Palestinian force is examined in depth, and Pratt enjoys reminding us that Israeli military intelligence chiefs once backed Sheikh Ahmed Yassin’s Islamic fundamentalists as – to quote one general – “a healthy phenomenon that could counter the PLO” (not long before he was assassinated, Yassin joked to me that he was “Made in Israel”).

As Pratt notes, while the electoral triumph of Hamas last year hardly surprised seasoned observers of the intifada, the margin of its victory did: it is a gauge of the panic this created within the Israeli government that within a few months it discreetly approved a shipment of arms to the beleaguered Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas. The potential for a disastrous civil war is reflected in the repeated clashes between opposing factions in Gaza, raising the nightmare possibility of sectarian violence spreading throughout the West Bank.

In an afterword that will chime with all Middle East correspondents, past and present, Pratt observes that war in this afflicted region “is like a malevolent wind that blows, disappears, then returns.” It is hard to believe that this will change until the Palestinians have a homeland of their own in which to dream of peace.

Intifada: The Long Day of Rage by David Pratt

Sunday Herald Books £7.99

I was crouched by a cinder block wall around five feet high, surrounded by Palestinian youths making petrol bombs. Behind the wall was a warehouse and then a half constructed five story block, once intended to be apartments or offices. In front of the wall, about 50 metres away, was a crossroads guarded by an Israeli army bunker surrounded by a high, wire fence and dirt ramparts. The road to the right led down to the Israeli settlement of Netzarim. The road behind me led between olive groves, scruffy fields and small villages to the famous Erez checkpoint and ‘Israel proper’.

The road on the other side of the crossroads led further into the Gaza strip. All afternoon I had watched the same thing happening. The cycle was simple. It took half an hour for the youths around me to work themselves up to charge. Then half would run out into the road hurling stones and petrol bombs at the bunker. A single shot would ring out, dropping one of the demonstrators, a shout of ‘allahu akbar’ would go up from the others and the wounded youth would be carried by his peers back to the Red Crescent first aid teams and taken to hospital.

It was October 2000 and for the next two weeks and on through the next months I watched the same scene, almost a ritual, repeated again and again as the ‘al-Aqsa’ Intifada continued. The word intifada, as David Pratt, another witness to these same events, explains in his comprehensive and highly readable book, derives from the Arabic word nefada and means ‘shaking off’ as a verb and a ‘shudder, awakening, uprising’ as a noun. Few who witnessed the events of 2000 can have failed to grasp why.

In the opening chapter of ‘A Long Day of Rage’ Pratt vividly describes the scene at the West bank town of Ramallah, the seat of Yasser Arafat’s incompetent and corrupt Palestinian Authority where the demonstrations on the same stretch of road on the outskirts of town always followed an identical course. Pratt describes Israeli soldiers or border police watching them firing tear gas and ‘rubber bullets’, steel balls wrapped in a thin layer of rubber at the stone throwing demonstrators. The bullets were not unlike, as Pratt points out in a perceptive aside, musket balls of the 18th century. They were also, in a tragic ironic twist typical of the region, similar to the over-sized ball bearings that some of those behind the suicide bombers who attacked Israeli teenagers in nightclubs and bars at the time used to boost the destructive power of their blasts.

The violence at the checkpoints or in Ramallah had a bizarrely formulaic, demonstrative quality. If you did not have a profound understanding of local cultures and politics, it was difficult to comprehend what was happening or understand the complex messages that the two sides were sending to each other and to the international community. Luckily for the reader, Pratt has both the knowledge and the perception to understand and describe what was happening in 2000 and 2001, what happens today and what is likely to happen in the future. And though his writing occasionally slips into the classic ‘war correspondent’ narrative, Pratt is too much of a journalist to forget that it is the people who live the story every day, not the foreigners who chose to cover their plight, who are important and the book is crammed with revealing vignettes and well-observed dialogue.

Pratt is also honest enough to admit that he has a view and that ‘impartiality’, though often claimed, is far from common among reporters working in the region or commentators on the issue. ‘The state of Israel has a case to answer for in its appalling treatment of the Palestinian people’, Pratt says in his introduction. This is true as is the fact that both sides consider themselves victims and, in a sense, are write to do so. However I would contest the existence of a ‘Jewish lobby’ in America, arguing that there is a powerful ‘Zionist lobby’ instead. Such distinctions are important. The market is crammed with books on Israel, Palestine and the continuing and tragic conflict. However there is always room for another one by a conscientious journalist who takes time to get things right. This is an accessible, colourful and informed addition to the literature.

Jason Burke is the chief reporter of the Observer and author of Al’Qaeda:the True Story of Radical Islam and The Road to Kandahar (both published by Penguin)