Krytyka Polityczna - Knows only pain and fear

I met Zakarias Zubaidi in 2005 and in February 2006 the Freedom Theatre^¹ was officially inaugurated. Soon afterwards I moved to the Jenin refugee camp.

Tell us a bit about yourself, about the theatre’s history and aims. What’s your function in it?

I’m the theatre’s manager, in charge of projects, finances, staff etc. My mother comes from Israel, and my father from Poland, from Cieplice near Jelenia Góra. I was born in Sweden. I’m a nurse by profession. For a couple of years I worked as a child carer. Israel’s political situation had always worried me and I wondered what I could do to change it. In the summer of 2005 I was in the West Bank and I met Zakarias Zubaidi^², one of the last surviving actors of the first theatre in Jenin^³. He inspired me to think about theatre as about a strategy of resistance. We talked about the goals and effects of theatre action. The old theatre in Jenin gave the local community a sense of power and created its leaders. Zakarias spoke also of his desire to rebuild the theatre. Those ideas grew in me until finally, with Juliano, the son of Arna Mer Khamis^⁴, and with Zakarias, we decided to rebuild the theatre. Starting from scratch, devoting our own time and money, encouraging others – people of Jenin and international volunteers – to join us, we started building our Freedom Theatre. The guiding idea was to continue Arna Mer Khamis’s work and to fight for the freedom of the Jenin refugees. How do you fight for freedom with art and culture? First you have to understand what factors have determining influence on your life. When you’ve learned that, you can transform life, create your own vision of a good society. And that’s how we arrive at the issue of the identity of the Palestinians, whose culture, its very core, has been hurt by the occupation. And it’s precisely culture that makes it possible to shape individual identities, that connects people and creates a close-knit society. From the very beginning of the occupation it was the Israelis’ goal to control not only the territory, but also people’s minds. They always wanted to manipulate them. And they’ve succeeded in that. They created physical barriers in the shape on checkpoints, walls and military zones in the whole of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, but also mental ones. People distrust and fight against each other. Brothers use weapons distributed by the occupier against brothers.

A frustrated society that has no say over its own situation, in which everyone is deeply concerned about their children’s security, about their family, finally directs the frustration inwards. A symptom of that is the return to clan feuds, clan fights with clan, family with family. The reason is frustration and an inability to control your own life. Tormented people abuse other people, you can see that in the Jenin camp. The traditional family hierarchy has collapsed, the father is unable to provide for the family and he feels humiliated. Men lose their self-confidence and their sons throw stones at the Israeli tanks, convinced they’re braver than their fathers. When the latter are unable to control their kids, they resort to violence, thus teaching it to their children. Women, the mothers, behave the same way. It’s a vicious circle, fuelled by the Israeli occupation. The international humanitarian aid breeds corruption, some people are forced to collaborate with Israel, become informers. You are never safe, people die in their own homes, because the snipers aim at the windows. Parents are unable to protect their own children. The children are exposed to traumatic experiences. This situation has continued for so long it has deeply corroded the very social tissue. And still there’s energy and strength in this society. But this energy needs a place where it could develop. It needs a stage on which it could perform, a material it could transform, and a shape that it could adopt. And I believe this is precisely what theatre gives you. It’s a form, a screen, a stage on which actors can share their stories and experiences. Some of our girls have been publishing a newspaper to learn journalism. One day they asked their teacher, ‘What are we supposed to write about? Nothing is happening at the camp’. ‘What do you mean, the army searches the camp every night’. ‘Yeah, but that’s normal!’. This example shows how the abnormal has become normal. Their own stories are too normal for them, too ordinary to be told. But it isn’t normal that the army penetrates the camp every night, that every family has lost someone, that every family has someone in prison. About eight in ten people in the camp have been arrested at least once. These people need to be given the capacity and means to talk about it. Girls need to understand that forcing them to marry, keeping them at home, the absence of any joy in their life aren’t normal.

I can’t speak for them, but let me give you an example. When children play Palestinians and Israelis, everyone wants to be an Israeli because they always win and have bigger guns. They perceive Hebrew as better than their own language and want to learn it. Jews are those who’ve achieved more. Palestinians are adopting some of the Israeli role models because they are losing their own culture. They adopt what they know from the Israeli media. These oppressed people want to play the role of the oppressor, because it’s him who is becoming the ideal.

They live completely in the present. Dreams are usually made on the basis of some more or less distant perspective, some future. But when you can’t change the present and therefore shape the future, why fight, why get up in the morning? This situation has continued for so long people have lost their goals, they don’t know what they’d like to achieve, don’t know where their lives are heading.

What is the sentiment among the people of Jenin today? What has been left of the Second Intifada? You said the occupation bred extremism.

The Second Intifada is perceived by the Palestinians as a failure, a military defeat. I think the Intifada was a kind of alternative, a way of acting in an impossible situation. Today there’s no viable option of armed struggle, nor is there any acceptable peace proposition. Israel’s goal is to maintain the status quo and keep things ‘hushed’ on the international forum. Israel has continued the policy of appropriating the Palestinian territory, and at the same time suppressed the debate about the creation of a Palestinian state. There’s a vacuum in the Palestinian society, people don’t know what will happen, they are waiting. I suspect there’ll be a Third Intifada, more bloody and difficult than the previous ones.

They’re not talking about it on the street, but I can’t imagine a different scenario. It’ll probably happen within the next five years. Between the intifadas there’s time for searching for peaceful solutions. But because none has been found so far, the Palestinians will be forced to resort to other means of resistance. This means an armed uprising. Unless the situation changes, the Third Intifada will break out, but this time the Palestinians will have to confront the wall surrounding and dividing their land. And the Israelis will face much better armed Palestinians.

Yes, almost every night. These are often special units. Their members wear civilian clothes. They infiltrate the community, look for certain people in the city. If they find them, they kill or arrest them.

Every year the Israelis arrest thousands of boys aged sixteen or so, whom they later interrogate and force to collaborate. They blackmail them, ‘Unless you become an informer for us, we’ll revoke your work permit, revoke your sister’s right to healthcare, prolong your brother’s sentence by another ten years, etc.’. And they agree to collaborate. I’m sure they’re informers also among the people we know.

Let’s return to the theatre. We saw the film Arna’s Children about the most tragic period in the theatre’s history, when most of the actors were killed or died as suicide bombers.

Arna was born in a Jewish, Zionist family in the north of Israel. As a young woman, she was a soldier of the Israeli special forces^⁵, but during the ethnic cleansing in Palestine after 1948 she joined the Palestinian resistance. She became a teacher and came to the Jenin refugee camp. She started working here, using drawing as a creative form of expression and therapy. She introduced new teaching methods to the schools here. Other than beating the student until he or she remembers the given piece of information. She opened four day-care centres for children, trained teachers. At the peak moment, over 1,500 children participated in her programme, called Protection and Education. In 1993, she received the Right Livelihood Award, called the alternative Nobel, and used the money to open a theatre in Jenin. That first theatre was located in the house of Zakarias Zubaidi’s mother. In 1993 Arna died of cancer. In 2002, the Israeli army invaded Jenin and destroyed part of the camp, including the theatre. The archive was destroyed, and most of the actors died. Zakarias Zubaidi’s brother and mother, some of Arna’s closest friends, were also killed. Zakarias’s mother was killed by a sniper in her own apartment.

Besides Arna’s Children I also saw a film here about the kids who are actors in the theatre. They said, ‘I’d like to be an actor in the future, be famous etc.’. It sounded very much like the beginning of Arna’s Children. And yet most of the actors of that theatre are dead. What is the future of the kids you work with now?

This parallel makes me sad, because a similar fate may be awaiting our children. We don’t teach them violence, but we don’t tell them they can’t use violence against their oppressors. We teach them how to speak when standing in front of a crowd, how to move, how to work in a group, how to be audible for others. In what context they use these skills later doesn’t depend on us. We teach the kids to be free individuals so that when the moment of choice comes, they are able to make it. If they have the strength to put up resistance, we believe it’s the normal course of things. A free, able-bodied person doesn’t keep quiet when someone violates their life. I’m a Jew, my family went through the Holocaust. The Jewish WWII heroes that we remember to this day were those who had the courage to resist the oppressors. It’s the same with the people here, the people of Jenin, they have to have the courage. You need it when you distribute information that opposes the dominant propaganda, and when you reach for a gun to offer resistance. We give the kids in the theatre the power to make a choice. Don’t misunderstand me, we’re firmly against the killing of civilians, suicide attacks, or attacks against the Israeli population.

We’re planning to open a larger, more modern one. Next year we want to open a three-year theatre school. We want our actors to be able to study in postgraduate courses in Sweden or Germany. We get in touch with other theatres in the world so that our students can present themselves on the international stage.

The number of people who can teach acting here is limited, we have little money, and it’s hard to get here. You can only get here from Jerusalem, but there are many Israeli checkpoints on the way. The people working for us now are international volunteers and teachers from Palestine and Israel. Many volunteers offer themselves, so we try to use the time when they’re with us as effectively as possible.

We’ve given seventy eight performances so far this year to a total of almost fifteen thousand viewers. This is something! Fifteen thousand people in a theatre at the Jenin refugee camp! These people saw everything, from London Circus to Francois Abu Salem’s 1982 monologues about Beirut^⁶. Freedom Theatre is the only theatre north of Ramallah. We’ve become the cultural centre of the north. It suddenly turned out that in the Jenin refugee camp, generally perceived as one of the most violence-affected places in the West Bank, people can enjoy culture.

There are Israelis among us, though it’s troublesome for them, they help us. Once we smuggled in seven Israelis for a performance. This is A zone, Israelis have no access here^⁷.

To help people survive, you give them food. But to survive means also to remain a creative person. So we help them to survive in spiritual terms. After all, culture responds to man’s basic needs.

Isn’t it so that in Europe culture decorates people’s lives, while in Jenin it simply helps to survive?

What you say about Europe isn’t true. We usually don’t realise that in order to be human beings, we need culture. Culture connects people, drives the society, serves as its driving engine. I see how the Freedom Theatre generates social energy, how it makes the community stronger. The only other option here is the gun. So you can’t compare this with the situation in Europe. There you don’t have soldiers who shoot when standing in the door of the house you live in.

Let’s return to what you said at the beginning. You said you had been inspired by Zakarias Zubaidi and his conception of theatre as a form of resistance.

He and I think along similar lines. Man is the body, the mind and the spirit. The spirit is the strongest of the three and gives us the energy to create, while the mind transforms ideas so that they become possible. And the body turns them into action. So it became clear to me that it was necessary to focus on the training of the spirit and the mind, and that is done precisely with culture.

Zakarias Zubaidi is a soldier. What did he mean by saying that theatre should be a form of resistance?

Theatre should help people develop their own version of themselves, instead of adopting outside forms and narratives as its own. Especially here, where people listen to the views promulgated by the radical Islamic movements and parties, which exploit this desperate environment to promote their programmes.

Look at how music and dance connect people, how tradition and history connect them. The guerrillas in Columbia were connected by common political goals and by the songs about their struggle. Theatre is a common goal for our actors. To create a strong political movement, a resistance movement, you need a strong identity. And culture is a means of consolidating people’s identity.

How is it done in practice? A sixteen-year-old turns up on your doorstep. What’s next?

You can say that the situation of everyday violence makes everyone here, both the kids and the grown-ups, feel like victims. Being a victim means among other things that you lose the ability to control your life. If we want to use theatre to create a new identity, different from their victim identity, we need to make these people more aware of what is happening around them, how to behave in a group to identify common goals.

As soon as you dress up as a queen, you become one. You can behave like a queen, the world starts to obey you. This is a world of imagination, one that you can control, change. We tell the kids the story of Siegfried and the dragon. Then they can choose whether they want to be Siegfried or the dragon. They play a scene enacting the role of a dangerous, powerful dragon. But then the actor cast as Siegfried comes and slays the dragon. This is perhaps the first time they experience something like that. It’s an incredible power, to be able to manipulate reality, to be a hero and slay the dragon. This experience is the beginning of a creative, adult life. They begin to notice the possibility of change, work in a group, learn the potential of cooperation. They realise that common goals and working together makes everyone feel better.

It does, but the main objective is to create a ‘collective mind’. We’re not interested in ‘individual self-fulfilment’ the way it’s construed in Europe or America. The Palestinians are a collective society. A community based on family and connection networks We don’t want to turn it into an individualistic society, based on a capitalistic vision of the world. We strive to help the community fulfil itself by strengthening the individuals.

Theatre touches man’s very essence, his desire to search for meanings. We use theatre as a therapy. Psychodrama is a means of healing by returning to the inner conflicts and anxieties. Enacting them makes it possible to finally react to them. We’ve also been inspired by Augusto Boal and his Theatre of the Oppressed^⁸. A group of young people can enact the following scene: a student asked by the teaches gives the wrong answer. The teacher hits him. But is a different ending possible? The instructor tells the actors to play the scene again, but this time, instead of hitting the student, the teacher discusses the problem with them. Then the kids choose the better solution.

You try to replace action whose effects are toxic with a different kind of action.

Creative theatre creates such alternatives for reality by resorting to imagination.

Theatre shows imaginary situations. How do your actors behave in the face of real events?

They live in a world where their mothers are humiliated, go to schools where they’re physically abused. And yet these young boys, who once roamed the streets, fought with knives, without the desire to learn anything, suddenly become involved in theatre. To work with text in theatre, they need to read and write. Suddenly these skills become important for them. They start to notice connections between things. The school-leaving exams become important for them, because they want to get into theatre college. They want to feel free, to have a choice. Also women gain a wider perspective than just moving from their father’s kitchen to their husband’s kitchen. I believe our work has long-term effect. To see progress, you need a lot of patience, persistence, otherwise the effect will be short-lived. Especially in this lonely society, fed with false promises, full of expectations and constant disappointments. So the task of the theatre is very important. We’ve shown there’s a way, a choice, and we’re helping them to take advantage of it. If we fail, it’ll be a proof that there’s no alternative. Then the only thing left to these people here will be religion in its most dangerous form, demanding obedience, not accepting individual desires and creative thinking.

It is. Theatre cannot be apolitical. Culture cannot be apolitical. The goal of our theatre is political. Especially here, in a place where even saying ‘hello’ is filled with political meaning.

In our official statements and everyday activity we oppose the Israeli occupation. We believe it to be the main obstacle to the self-fulfilment of the Palestinian people. Because of this occupation children are frightened and wake up in the middle of the night, parents have no work, businesspeople have to close their businesses. But fighting the occupation isn’t our direct objective. We break the barriers that the occupation creates between people. There’s been more and more people who act like us. Eventually there’ll be enough of us to create a social movement. Because fighting the occupation is a task for those are most affected by it. It’s these young people who’ll one day lead the Palestinians out of the occupation.

Our goal is distant. A child needs ten years to learn something, to enter the stage and start changing things. You reap the effects of such activity as ours years later. It’s like sitting in a prison cell with nothing but a teaspoon for digging a tunnel. There are no shortcuts on the road to freedom. A shortcut means fighting an armed struggle without strategy and support, without knowing what your goal is, without a vision of the future world. Here such a decision means that one day you’ll end up with a bullet in your head. To create a political awareness and define political goals you need to act in the long-term.

So you are preparing these young people, your actors, for becoming involved in political activity in the future?

I’ve never really lived in Israel. Besides my family, nothing connects me with this place. Geographically or historically Israel is a beautiful and interesting place, but in terms of religion and politics the Israeli society has nothing to offer me. I think it’s lost its identity. Jewishness was lost when the state of Israel was created. Judaism, weakened by the Holocaust, flickers somewhere in Europe. What dominates here is Israelishness. Militaristic, individualistic, capitalistic, short-sighted.

I have some other questions, but you don’t have to answer them. Isn’t it so that we, Europeans, have such an immense debt towards Jews for the Holocaust that we must keep justifying the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza? And the consecutive wars against Lebanon… Is being Jewish today not a kind of shelter where people hide from responsibility for Israel’s militaristic policy? Israel is now forced to face the effects of its thinking about the state in ethnic terms, with the effects of transforming a whole nation into soldiers, with the fact of the common acceptance of violence, with its militarised democracy, a martial-law democracy. What do you think about it?

What is the Jewish state? What happens when the idea evolves and is realised by a community that has always been oppressed? The only way this state can define itself is through constant external threat. It’s like a long-abused child who reaches adulthood and is forced to assume responsibility for others, for his own children. Such an adult knows only pain and fear, knows only violence, it’s his only language. Such is the Israel of today – someone who was abused as a child and now abuses others. Israeli schools make their students believe that the world is against them and wants to destroy them. In Sweden they sell a bubblegum with a small comic strip. In Israel too, but here the gum is called Bazooka^⁹. In one of the Israeli strips there’s a scene where a mother says to a kid listening to music from a walkman, ‘Don’t listen to music too loud or you’ll lose your hearing, lose points at the conscription board and they won’t accept you for a staff unit’. A child should care for its hearing not because of school or being able to play guitar, but to be able to become an officer in the future. According to the logic of an Israeli ad, mobile telephony exists so that a soldier can call her girlfriend. It’s a society of soldiers, I have no doubt about that. I sometimes wonder who rules Israel – the civilian government or the army?

1 The Freedom Theatre, the official name of a theatre at the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank.

2 Zakarias Zubaidi, as a teenager an actor of the Jenin theatre, then member of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, the armed wing of the Fatah, responsible for, among other things, suicide attacks in Israel. Until today an informal, charismatic leader of the Jenin community.

3 Most of the actors of the first Jenin theatre died during the Second Intifada and afterwards. The actors died as soldiers and suicide bombers. In 2002, during the battle of Jenin, the theatre building itself was destroyed as well.

4 Arna Mer Khamis, Israeli activist, founded a children’s theatre at the Jenin camp. Its story is told in the documentary Arna’s Children, dir. Danniel Danniel and Juliano Mer Khamis. See also http://www.arna.info/Arna.

5 Arna was a member of the Palmach (see http://www.arna.info/Arna/herstory.php), a Jewish military organisation founded by the British mandatory government and the Jewish Haganah in Palestine in 1941. Palmach units fought in the 1948 war.

6 In 1982, Lebanese Christian militias massacred the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut, at the silent consent of the Israeli army, which for a couple of days refused to acknowledge what was going on in the camps.

7 A zone, areas under Palestinian control: the Gaza Strip and several larger cities in the West Bank. B zone – areas under mixed control: the Palestinians exercise civilian control, but the Israeli army exercises military control. C zone – areas under Israeli control: Jewish settlements, access roads and strategic points (hills, water wells etc.) (after www.wikipedia.org). The division is not respected by the Israeli army, which carries out operations in some A-zone cities and in fact controls them.

8 Theatre of the Oppressed is based on the idea that interpersonal relations are a dialogue: between men and women, between families, between ethnic groups and the nation. In our realities, this dialogue has a tendency of degenerating into monologue, which results in oppressor-oppressed relations. The main goal of the Theatre of the Oppressed is to return to dialogue between people (after http://www.peacexchange.eu/pl/teatr/W_innych_krajach.html).

9 Bazooka, man-portable anti-armour rocket launcher, introduced during WWII by the US Armed Forces (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bazooka).

Yoav Gross and Oren Yakobovich in conversation with Roni Lahav and Artur Żmijewski

My name is Yoav Gross, I’m a filmmaker, working in the video department of B’Tselem on a project called Shooting Back. We document the everyday life of people under Israeli occupation from the perspective of humans rights violations. We collaborate with the mass media, presenting our footage to Israeli and foreign journalists.

My name is Oren Yakobovich, I’m the head of the video department. I’m a filmmaker by profession, I used to make my own documentaries in the past. I joined B’Tselem three years ago, when it was decided to create a film archive there. I founded the video department then.

We record and collect short video reports from the Occupied Territories. We have a huge archive of documentary recordings showing human rights violations. We are developing a project called Shooting Back, under which we distribute cameras among Palestinians living in high-risk areas.

High-risk areas in the Territories are those near Israeli military bases, observations points, checkpoints, and settlements.

The organisation was founded in 1989. The First Intifada, the first Palestinian uprising, was under way. There was only one channel on Israeli TV, the Internet barely existed. The public knew virtually nothing about what was going on in the Territories and in Gaza. B’Tselem was founded precisely to provide such information.

The media didn’t report about the Intifada? It was an armed uprising after all!

It was an awkward subject, an unpleasant public issue, so the flow of information was being suppressed. Issues such as human rights or morality weren’t discussed. B’Tselem was founded to illuminate those dark spots, to provide the public and decision-makers with information about events in the Occupied Territories. The First Intifada started in 1987, and for the first time the Israeli society felt the need to think about respect for human rights.

The Israeli army had been trained to fight regular troops. It didn’t know how to deal with urban guerrillas. It was very difficult for it to change its tactics. The soldiers were used to fighting tanks, not people armed with stones and slingshots. By the time they understood the difference, many Palestinians had died. Reports about it started getting through to the public. People were moved, there was a craving for information.

Did the Intifada divide the Israeli public? Or was the narrative about it dominated by a single viewpoint?

The Intifada exacerbated existing divisions, the public dividing even more sharply into the opponents of the occupation and those in favour of incorporating the Territories. That was the main line of division at the time between the left and the right. And it remains so to this day. Asked whether they support the right or the left, an Israeli understands the question to mean whether he is in favour of keeping the Territories or getting rid of them. Most people in Israel are right-wingers, even if they define themselves as sympathising with the left.

I’ve heard every leftwing discourse here is infected with rightwing nationalism. The litmus paper is precisely the position on the Territories and on the treatment of the Palestinians.

The problem is that the tragic Jewish history made most people supporters of the right. People don’t want to cede the West Bank, because for them it’s part of Israel. The majority would probably put it like this: ‘This is not a good moment for ceding the West Bank, because there’s no one to cede it to, there’s no partner on the other side’.

Why is it so important to say that B’Tselem is not a political organisation?

B’Tselem is an organisation monitoring the observance of human rights using international humanitarian law. Human rights are universal, they are owned neither by the left nor the right. B’Tselem has no mandate to participate in the political debate.

Human rights are political, because politics deals with human needs, such as the need of decent life, without violence and humiliation. In Israel, human rights violations are usually explained with one universal formula: ‘security reasons’. The formula has justified many a violation.

B’Tselem is an information centre, documenting cases of human rights violations in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. When we say this, of course, most Israelis will accuse us of being radical leftists. We have to keep explaining that we’re involved in collecting and distributing information and will provide it to anyone, whether from the left or the right. The access to the information and video recordings obtained by B’Tselem is free.

How do you obtain and distribute information? How did you come up with the idea of distributing video cameras among the Palestinians?

B’Tselem employs field representatives collecting reports in every larger city in the West Bank, in Jenin, Hebron, in East Jerusalem, in Bethlehem, Ramallah, Tulkarem, as well as some villages, for instance in South Hebron. We also employ Palestinians living in Gaza. On the basis of their reports, we evaluate the scale of humanitarian rights violations, the scale of violence.

With the Palestinians victims of violence, their testimonies don’t matter. The military and the police don’t take them seriously. But a video is hard evidence. The court has to take it into consideration. That was the first reason for equipping Palestinians with the cameras. For a long time written testimonies were the only thing we had. Today our activists have digital cameras and have recorded many cruel events. We have all this in our archives, we make it available, publish it. Film has become a weapon in the fight for human rights.

During the bomb attacks in the London underground, people filmed the events using their mobile phones, and those amateur recordings were then shown on the main news. It’s a standard today. Such a situation is good for us because our field representatives are not professional filmmakers.

So you decided to work with B’Tselem’s video programme in order to exploit the power of the film image?

I saw that nothing was changing in terms of the occupation. That was frustrating. I joined B’Tselem because I’m a filmmaker, a documentalist. I wanted to work using film as an instrument of changing reality.

Everything started in Hebron, it’s the heart of the conflict. It’s the only Palestinian city where Jewish settlers live in its very centre. The Palestinians living in the immediate vicinity of the Jewish settlers have it worst. They’re constantly assaulted, conflicts are an everyday occurrence. I came up with the idea of equipping those Palestinians in Hebron with video cameras. That’s how it started. When we got the first recording from them, we immediately realised how powerful it was. With a single scene you can achieve an effect that would otherwise be impossible to achieve, it’s a very powerful instrument.

In that first clip there’s a scene where a settler woman shouts at a Palestinian girl, pushing her, offending her, calling her a slut. The soldiers standing around them don’t react. We posted the recording on ynet, the Israeli news website. Three hours later over four hundred comments had been added. The same Friday the TV broadcast a popular entertainment show called The Great Country, and among other things it showed a parody of our clip. From that moment on everyone knew it. The mainstream media subsequently showed it. The case became high-profile. The debate about Jewish settlement in the West Bank returned. The prime minister had to comment. The situation in Hebron found itself in the centre of attention. For the first time the Palestinian point of view was present in a news report. After all, the event had been filmed by a Palestinian woman. The recording shows she was in a dangerous situation. It was an impartial media report, provoking feelings of compassion or mercy. The camera’s extremely subjective point of view made it possible for the viewer to identify with that Palestinian woman.

Can you describe the strategy of how the Palestinians are supposed to use the cameras?

In Hebron, we surrounded with cameras each of the six Jewish settlements in the city. The main Israeli checkpoint can also be filmed. The situation in the city is difficult. Palestinians are forbidden from entering certain streets. Film recordings show settlers throwing stones at people, beating them up, or trying to force their way into their homes. This is part of a tactic of winning ground. That’s in the city of Hebron. Southern Hebron, the second place where we distributed the cameras, is inhabited by Palestinian shepherds and farmers. The settlers living there simply want to claim their land. It looks like the Wild West, an open space, the settlers with guns, on horseback. Every piece of land there is a battleground. When the settlers come, the activists turn on their cameras. We have a horrifying recording from there, showing white-clad settlers, their faces covered, walking towards the camera.

Some cameras are also in Gaza. This is a new situation for us. It will be difficult to extract the recordings from there, because the area is basically closed. We can’t get there, so it’s hard to work with people, to explain that we want them to record acts of violence. In Gaza soldiers really shoot at people, and it’s extremely difficult to record something like that. You could film at night, using cameras with infrared capability. But in Gaza that’s dangerous too.

The cameras many times physically protected the Palestinians. The settlers often withdraw when they see them. The cameras boost people’s confidence, encourage them, give them a way to influence the situation. Documenting the behaviour of soldiers or settlers is a way of participating in non-violent resistance. That has helped us to mobilise local communities in Hebron. Moreover, as Palestinians and Israelis, we found a common cause, created a kind of alliance.

The accounts we obtain are not objective media reports, they’re part of someone’s life. The Palestinian point of view. They’re not filmed in accordance with the principles of good filmmaking, but their value is exceptional. They’re not only documents, we also use them as evidence in courts. Our goals are not artistic. Thinking in artistic terms is limiting. We try to change reality in a different way than art does, more directly.

Direct action. What do you think about Arna’s Children? Does the film have the potential of realising political change? It’s about the community of Jenin, devastated and radicalised as a result of the Israeli invasion in 2002.

Arna’s Children is a great film, but did it change reality? We think about the purpose of our filming in very practical terms. We have a very clear goal: to change the government’s policy. Thanks to those recordings, the Israeli public learns that people suffer, the army learns about the effects of its violence. It’s our way of using images. The main purpose is to see how film can be used to bring about a change in the real situation. That’s where Shooting Back comes from and that’s what its goal is. We focus on the effect, on predicting what can cause violence to recede.

That’s exactly what I admire, because your work has visible effects. People in the Territories feel that the cameras protect them, that the democratic eye controls the soldiers’ behaviour, and that their recordings can make their way to the mainstream media.

A week ago, Channel 10 of the Israeli TV aired, at prime time, a show based on the recordings made by six Palestinian families from Hebron. These people never thought their voice could be heard. Now their recordings have been shown by one of the main channels of Israeli TV. Think what psychological effect it has on these people.

Another effect is that these people gain the sense of being able to do something in a seemingly hopeless situation.

Yes, but remember that the West Bank has been under occupation for 45 years now. These people have no illusions that a single video recording can change this. We don’t want to deceive people, to make them believe they can change something already today. It’s nice talking about it, but when you suffer from violence, you don’t want delusive hopes that a camera will change all that.

Very many people believe we act against Israeli interests. They believe we’ve lost our Jewishness, we receive a lot of hate mail. B’Tselem isn’t popular with the Israelis. Even the Israeli left thinks we collaborate with the enemy. Why do we collaborate with the international media? That’s treason. If a crime has been committed, why should it interest anyone from the outside? Why wash our dirty linen in public? It’s our business and we should deal with it on our home turf.

People of the Israeli left don’t know what it means to go to the West Bank, how it affects you. When you’re there and see with your own eyes what’s going on there, you can’t remain indifferent.

There’s an awful lot of suffering, trauma, panic in the Israeli society. Willing or not, with our work we touch these feelings.

Interestingly, I was also asked what I thought about outsiders’ views about Israeli and Palestinian problems. That this the business of the people living there and no one else. Why should outsiders interfere with other people’s problems? We’ll clean our house ourselves. During the Holocaust, Jews demanded an intervention from the US and Britain, but both these countries thought precisely it wasn’t their business. The League of Nations, then the UN, and now the best proof that ‘someone else’s business’ no longer exits is the EU.

Do you think the Israeli people are going mad, succumbing to a spiral of fear?

Of course. The foundation of this society is trauma, shock. We know that Jews, Israelis still happen to be victims of violence and persecution. But there’s no proportional relationship between the scale of this persecution and a sense of being a victim. In reality, it’s the Israelis who are persecuting another nation. The Israelis bear emotional consequences when meeting with the international perception of the fact. Social tension is immense. Violence hangs in the air. From this perspective, what we do at B’Tselem is unique.

In this whole situation the Israelis are becoming a harsh, non-emphatic society. People are getting harsher and harsher because they’re hard-hearted towards the Palestinians’ plight.

I’d like them all to go to Berlin, to Europe, and live them for a couple of years. So that they left how it was to live without borders, without walls, how it is to be a citizen of the world.