Seeing Through the Wall: Meeting Ourselves in Palestine and Israel, a documentary about a group of Americans who, in the winter of 2016, took a 12-day trip to Israel and the occupied West Bank, is not a documentary in a conventional journalistic sense.
There are no talking heads, no overarching lesson in history or politics, no maps, and no point-counterpoint arguments between Israelis and Palestinians about a conflict that often elicits heated, emotional discussion, no matter what the perspective.
Instead, the hour-long documentary, which was directed by Woodstock filmmaker Anne Macksoud and will be screened in Woodstock’s Town Hall Theatre on April 9, tells a smaller, more intimate story about human connection.
It is told from the point of view of the American visitors, their Israeli and Palestinian tour guides, and Israelis and Palestinians they meet along the way. Although the documentary questions the Israeli government’s policies toward the Palestinians, it does not look at the violence inflicted on Israel by “lone wolf” terrorists, or by such terrorist organizations as Hamas.
That was the intention, said Macksoud and Rabbi Dov Taylor, who led the trip. There are already numerous documentaries that look at the decades of conflict and violence experienced on both sides, Macksoud said.
“We didn’t go to create a history of the conflict. We’re not playing the game of who suffers the most, who’s the biggest victim,” said Rabbi Taylor, who was a rabbi in suburban Chicago and Boston before moving to Woodstock, where from 2009 to 2012 he was the rabbi of Congregation Shir Shalom. He is now the rabbi of Chavurat Ki-tov: A Gathering for Jewish Life and Learning, also in Woodstock.
The trip was advertised as open to people of all faiths, but in the end the group of 19 consisted largely of American Jews, and Macksoud and a small crew.
Some tourists in the group had been to Israel before but never to the West Bank, while there were others who had never visited Israel. The group was shepherded through Israel and the West Bank by MEJDI Tours, an organization that leads faith-based and student tours through Israel and Palestine, Egypt, Ireland, Jordan and Turkey, among other destinations.
Over the course of the trip, there was conversation and discussion with both Israelis and Palestinians.
Once the American travelers had seen for themselves some of the realities of life for Palestinians behind the wall that the Israelis erected as a result of the Second Intifada in 2000, they questioned the assumptions they’d brought with them about the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, and the proliferation of Israeli settlements.
The idea for a documentary came at the end of 2015 when a Woodstock filmmaker asked Taylor whether he was going to film the journey. Taylor hadn’t considered it but after mulling it over he then approached Macksoud.
Taylor said he wanted “to enable American and American Jews to meet a group of Palestinians as humans. I wanted the participants to see what occupation looks like on the ground.”
The reality of the divisions between the Israelis and Palestinians is such that “just as Palestinians don’t really know Israelis, Israelis don’t really know Palestinians,” Taylor said.
The trip was an attempt to introduce Americans to some of the complexities of living with the continuous threat of violence, and to redress some of the stereotypes that people have about the Mideast.
A mistake that both Jews and non-Jews make, Taylor said, is to “confuse Israel with Judaism. Israel is a nation state. There are Israelis who are Jews, Christians, Palestinians.”
Taylor has visited Israel many times and lived in Jerusalem twice: in 1966-67, when he was there on a Smithsonian Institution Fellowship in Biblical Archaeology; and in 1970-71, when he was working on a doctorate in modern Hebrew literature at Brandeis University.
He decided to stay in Israel in the spring of 1967 during the build-up to, and outbreak of, the Six Day War, when Israel, in response to hostilities from its Arab neighbors, launched a pre-emptive and devastating strike against the Egyptian Air Force and then seized from Egypt the Gaza Strip and the Sinai peninsula, from Syria the Golan Heights, and from Jordan, Jerusalem.
“I didn’t consider myself a hero but I didn’t want to be a coward,” said Taylor, who gave blood, and also worked with other students to put sandbags up against the glass walls of his university. “I learned that I’m a proud member of the Jewish people and I want to contribute what I can to Jewish survival. But over the years I have become more and more disenchanted with the policies of the Israeli government.”
While Taylor said that “there’s plenty of blame to go around” for the situation of stalemate and hostility that exists between the Israeli government under Prime Minister Benjamin Nehtanyahu and the Palestinian Authority, he is nonetheless an outspoken critic of Israeli governmental policies toward the Palestinians.
To be an American Jew criticizing the Israeli government is to invite sharp and often virulent criticism.
“Americans who say anything critical of Israel are accused of being anti-Semitic, which hurts. It’s not anti-Semitic to be opposed to some of Israel’s actions,” Taylor said.
For Macksoud, who is not Jewish, stepping into such a contentious territory was a delicate balancing act. She had not really intended to make a film about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; her previous films have explored climate change, the politics of food, AIDS in East Africa, the life and work of the late William Sloane Coffin and Christianity in Africa, among others.
But when Taylor asked her to direct and edit the film, she seized the opportunity, although not without some concerns.
“I don’t want to underestimate the fear of anti-Semitism,” said Macksoud. “Before I went on this trip and saw the difference between the government policies and Jews, I didn’t want to say anything. I felt I couldn’t speak out about it. I felt I didn’t know the ground.”
The point of the film and the discussion between the American travelers and their Israeli and Palestinian interlocutors was to broaden American views of a very complex situation, and “not to condone violence but to understand it,” Macksoud said.
Rabbi Lev Ba’esh, who is Rabbi Taylor’s nephew and who lives in Austin, Texas, was on the trip. He has been to Israel many times and has seen the documentary. “It was very on point, it was a clear representation of what happened. It didn’t feel like it was biased,” Ba’esh said.
It’s a tall order to ask any film to explicate one of the world’s most intractable conflicts. But that wasn’t really the point, said Macksoud and Taylor.
“I hope it opens a way to understanding and compassion,” Macksoud said. Anything that could lead to candid and civil discussion would be beneficial, she said.
“We do what we can,” Taylor said. “We do what we can.”
There will be a post-film Q&A with Rabbi Dov Taylor and the film crew: Anne Macksoud, Michael Sacca and Jesse Taylor.
Mohsen Mehdawi, a 26-year-old Palestinian man living in Vermont, will also be part of the panel.
Mehdawi speaks this evening about his experiences growing up in the Occupied Territories at the Bugbee Senior Center in White River Junction from 7 to 9 p.m.
For more information about the documentary go to olddogdocumentaries.org.
Nicola Smith can be reached at nsmith@vnews.com.
Correction
Rabbi Lev Ba’esh lives in Austin, Texas, and Rabbi Dov Taylor was working on a doctorate in modern Hebrew literature at Brandeis University when he was in Israel in 1970 and 1971. Ba’esh’s place of residence, and the school where Taylor was studying, were incorrect in an earlier version of this story.