Breaking the Silence
A Film by Toshikuni Doi

The Oslo Accords were signed between Israel and Palestinian representatives in September 1993. Will this accord bring true peace to the Palestinian people, living under occupation? In pursuit of an answer, director Doi Toshikuni began living with a family in Jabalya, the largest refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. It is a poor household, where one of the sons works across the border in Israel to provide support for the other 15 members of the family. But they are sustained by deep family love and by the dense collective consciousness of their fellow Palestinians. The films follows the changes the family undergoes over the course of six years, to depict the lives and sentiments of the Palestinian people as they are rocked by dramatic changes in political conditions and sway between two poles: hope for liberation from long years of occupation and fulfillment of the dream of an independent state, and despair, as reality intercedes to dash these dreams.

Even after the peace accord, Israel continues to exercise the power of life or death over Palestinian lives, by imposing border blockades and increasing economic dependency. The reality and structure of the resulting impoverishment of Gaza is established through the testimony of people in range of situations. It also becomes clear that the assistance provided by Islamist organizations to increasingly desperate Gazans serves to broaden the influence of these organizations.

Israel was not alone in causing the collapse of the peace accord. When Yasser Arafat’s PLO enters Gaza and set up the Palestinian National Authority, it is greeted enthusiastically by residents as a force of liberation from the occupation. But this government too, through the corruption of its leaders and its exercise of authoritarian, antidemocratic state power, soon engenders popular despair and opposition. The local leader Hayder Abdel Shafi, who enjoys widespread support and deep trust among Gazans, becomes the voice of this despair and criticism. Aiming for the democratization of Palestinian society, he runs in the first election for the Legislative Council, but he soon loses faith in the autocratic government and chooses to resign.

This film, from the micro perspective of one family’s life and the macro perspective of the economic structure and political developments, sheds light on the context in which the peace accord collapsed.

The homes of Palestinian residents in East Jerusalem are demolished one after another. A family whose newly built home was bulldozed by city authorities and is now forced to live in a tent is followed over the course of four years. While anti-Israeli feelings deepen among residents whose houses are unjustly demolished, they remain dependent on the Israeli economy for their livelihood. The film portrays Palestinians in East Jerusalem agonizing over this dilemma.

It becomes clear through interviews with government officials and experts that the demolition of Palestinian homes is part of a consistent policy to limit the Palestinian population and maintain a Jewish majority in the capital city of Jerusalem.

Meanwhile, Israel is building the «separation wall» in the West Bank, in the name of protecting its citizens from suicide bombers. In the Palestinian village of Jayyous, near the border with Israel (the Green Line established at the end of the 1967 War), 87% of the residents' farmland has been severed from the village by the wall. The farmers need permits from Israeli authorities to get to their own land, and they cannot farm without passing through an Israeli checkpoint every morning and evening. With the separation wall, Israel has seized additional land and water resources. Palestinians claim this encroachment on the basis of their livelihood is part of a conscious policy to pressure the residents to move away.

The commercial city of Qalqilyah, which faces the border, has been surrounded by the wall on three sides, closing it off from the outside world. As a result, it has lost its customer base of Israeli Arabs and people from nearby villages, and it is facing economic suffocation. The residents have lost their means of livelihood and have been indirectly forced to move.

Interviews with Israeli scholars confirm that the wall is not simply intended to protect Israel’s security, but is also a means of eroding the foundation for building a Palestinian state.

After the Second Intifada began in 2000, many houses were demolished in the city of Rafah, on the border between Gaza and Egypt. Following the life of one of these families, the film depicts the agony of residents who have lost their homes.

The Jewish residents of a settlement in the Gaza live in fear of Palestinian attacks. Meanwhile, homes of the residents of the neighboring refugee camp are demolished in succession, in the name of protecting the settlers. One of those residents, an honor student at a Gaza university, kills himself in a bomb attack. Interviews with his family and friends, along with his will, establish that he was driven by a desire for revenge on Israel. It becomes clear from their testimony that he had witnessed the pent-up anger and despair of people who are subjected to daily attacks by the Israeli army, whose homes are demolished and whose lives are threatened.

In Israel, Palestinian suicide bombings continue. In March 1996, a female border police officer was severely injured in a bus attack. The film follows her lengthy recuperation in a hospital, supported by her family, and depicts the victims' festering distrust and anger toward Palestinians.

Meanwhile, the parents of a 15-year old girl killed around the same time in a suicide attack in downtown Tel Aviv, read the poetry she has left behind and learn of her dreams: coexistence with Palestinians and a plea for peace. The parents shoulder their daughter’s vision and become involved in a peace movement, seeking coexistence with Palestinians.

As one of their activities, they participate in a dialogue with Palestinian families who have lost children to Israeli attacks. The Palestinians have traveled from the Gaza to Tel Aviv to meet bereaved Israeli families. The two sides came together with the shared goal of going beyond the enmity of losing their children to seek peace, but there is a gaping chasm between their views of the situation. The Israelis want an end to the fighting with Palestinians and to live calm, secure lives. The Palestinians want a life without occupation, where they are free to move about at will, where they can find work, and where they can raise their children in safety. They all hope for peace, but the gap between the two groups' visions of «peace» proves difficult to bridge.

In the spring of 2002, after a suicide bombing attack on a city in Israel, the Israeli army reoccupied major cities in the West Bank. During the course of this campaign, they surrounded and attacked the Balata refugee camp (near Nablus) and invaded the Jenin refugee camp. Doi entered the Balata camp alone just before the Israeli army sealed it off, and thoroughly documented the residents' lives and reactions over the following two weeks.

He then entered the Jenin camp, ravaged by a fierce Israeli attack, immediately after the Israeli siege was lifted, and vividly recorded the aftermath of carnage and destruction. In particular, he documented the physical and psychological suffering inflicted on two men and their families who survived the attack, then returned five years later for a follow-up report. Using the experiences of the Balata and Jenin refugee camps as examples, the film depicts the reality that the occupation has brought to the Palestinian people, as well as their tough determination to survive in the midst of these desperate conditions.

Meanwhile, in Israel a year after the reoccupation of the West Bank, a group of Israeli soldiers who served in the occupied territories held a photo exhibition that detailed their own acts of aggression, causing a major stir in Israeli society. That group of soldiers is called Breaking the Silence. Four of the group’s principal members describe how, in exercising absolute authority over Palestinians in the occupied territories, they had become aggressors, losing their sense of humanity, morality, and ethics, and turning into «monsters». This tendency has spread throughout Israeli society, they argue, increasing violence and eroding morality. Fully aware that some will accuse them of stabbing their country in the back, they have taken a stand in order to restore their own humanity and in the hopes that it will help revive Israel from the distress the occupation has caused Israel itself. Their voices transcend the framework of the Israel-Palestine problem and confront us with a message of universal significance.