Documentary Israel/Palestine

A documentary about people in Israel and Palestine who refuse the friend-enemy framework. Who say: We have only one land – and we have to find a way to live in it together. Almost everyone in Germany has an idea of how the conflict could be solved.
Perhaps we should ask the people who have to live it? Do you know the Pro-People approach?

For instance, Palestinian politician and chair of the Jerusalem Development Fund, Samer Sinijlawi.

Why is he largely unknown in Germany? Because he doesn't serve the classic narrative of the conflict?

He is the only senior Palestinian to have travelled to the border of Gaza and publicly condemned October 7th. While he spoke, he could hear the bombs falling on Gaza in the background. He knew: innocent people are dying there right now. And he thought: October 7th is the responsibility of the Palestinians. What is happening in Gaza is the responsibility of the Israelis.

How did I come to meet such people?

A private trip to visit my daughter, who had an artist's residency in Tel Aviv in 2023, brought me to Israel for the first time. What I experienced there shaped my understanding of the conflict: Israelis of deep humanism, yet militarily formed and deeply convinced of the necessity of self-defence. I lived through a Hamas rocket attack under the protection of the Iron Dome, took tours into the West Bank and witnessed the human rights violations there. None of it left me afterwards. October 7th reached me personally: I knew people who had become important to me. Since then I have been trying to understand. And to film.

My Israeli Airbnb host had already drawn me deeper into the conflict in 2023. He opened up questions I hadn't had before. He has remained an important person in my life ever since. Because I don't work about people – I work with them, in the spirit of cinéma vérité. I don't arrive, film and leave. This approach has led me to people I would never otherwise have met.

The initiative Roots was founded by settlers and Palestinians. Its Palestinian co-director Khaled Abu Awwad describes it in an interview with me as "an initiative of Palestinians and far-right settlers." That is where I began filming. People who say: We have to end the ranking of suffering. The spiral of "we suffer more than you."

I accompanied Rav Hanan Schlesinger, one of the co-founders of Roots, at his former home in the settlement – as he said goodbye to 45 years of life there, which he gave up because, as he puts it, he no longer wants to "be part of this injustice." He now lives in Jerusalem. He still has access to his old home because his books are there. The results of Roots are visible. Even if, as Khaled says, it will be a long time yet before Israelis and Palestinians reach even a zero level of trust again after October 7th.

People who can hold two truths in one heart without abandoning their own identity – they are almost entirely unknown in Germany. In German documentaries about Israel/Palestine, we mostly encounter two figures: the extreme settler and the good leftist. This film shows a third space: people who take unusual paths. Not out of pure idealism, but because they have to live together. While others wage the Pro-Palestine vs. Pro-Israel debate as an intellectual exercise, these people have no time for it – they are too busy trying to find a way to survive it.