Another story we made for VJ Movement. Israeli and Palestinian software developers work together on an online operating system, but it’s almost impossible for them to have real world meetings because of the political situation (so they usually skype). The Palestinian crew is VERY happy their digital product can’t be controlled by Israeli checkpoints, and they get shares in the company besides.

Here’s a vid of a very unusual, provocative museum in Jerusalem – situated in a bullet-scarred building that before 1967 was on the border between Israel and Jordan. (Khaled and I did a lecture/screening there a few months ago – will post some clips from that soon). Check out the museum website.

This is another video we recently made for VJM, a cool Dutch indie news website. Check it out, especially for the commercials from Ale Yarok, the “Green Leaf” marijuana political party, and also for the way Israel plays the terrorist card against drug use, by connecting the dots to Hizbollah.

Another short vid we made for VJMovement in Holland. Uri Avnery is the brightest light on the Israeli left, and he speaks from a lot of experience. He came to Israel in 1933, a 10-yr old fleeing Nazi Germany. He has endured not only endless criticism, but beatings and assassination attempts, to get his message out that peace with the Palestinians is the only way. Read Avnery’s weekly column (in English) here.

Almost all of Khaled’s work is controversial to someone. When I first tell Jewish friends about “the Arab man who opened a Holocaust museum,” they say something like “amazing”, and basically think he’s a saint.

Yes, part of what Khaled is doing is courageously confronting Arab/Moslem denial about the Holocaust (he was after all, on the way to the December, 2006, Holocaust Conference in Tehran, when the Iranians denied his visa at the last moment.)

But then later, when they (again the Jewish friends) learn that he sometimes puts photos of the Nakba next to Holocaust photos in his tiny museum, or worse, confronts Israelis (even Israeli soldiers) with Holocaust photos, my Jewish friends change their tune.

I’m re-posting the video clip above (won’t do this often, promise) that some of you may not have seen. One acquantance emailed me when I first put it up, saying Khaled is “simply using the Jewish martyrs of the Holocaust to make a case for himself. There is no connection or even slight similarity between the atrocities carried out by the Nazis and the Arab-Israeli conflict.”

She asked what I thought, so I answered her – yes, the Separation Fence (which cuts through the village in the video, separating them from many dunams of olive trees and thus income) has cut down drastically on suicide bombings. But why is the Fence not built on the Green Line? And why not even near the settlements in the West Bank, but many hundreds of meters east of them, apparently to allow future growth for the settlements?

The woman never wrote back. So yes — Khaled is indeed not a total saint, he wants to help his fellow Palestinians achieve (what he thinks is) justice. I tell friends (the ones still listening) about one of Khaled’s operating principals, Gandhi’s satyagraha, “to convert, not to coerce, the wrong-doer.” 

Displaying Holocaust photos is definitely less harmful than throwing stones (as some young Palestinians do at the weekly demos against the Fence). Would the photos shame an Israeli into trying to change its government’s policies? Or would they just offend?

What do you think?

[And by the way, a young Palestinian was killed several weeks ago at the exact spot where we shot this video, when he was hit in the chest with a tear gas cannister, and bled to death.]

Here’s our new trailer – anyway, how can you sum up in a few minutes a complex story coming from a completely conflicted complex part of the world anyway?? Comments always welcome…

Today Khaled, Radi, and I drive to Bilin, a village in the West Bank about 20 km northwest of Jerusalem. The town is cut in two by the Separation Fence (which is a 30 foot high concrete wall in other places). Palestinian farmers can no longer get to their fields, their land is suddenly no longer theirs, but Israel claims it prevents potential terrorists from slipping into Israel.

We join the weekly march/demonstration, which ends up at the Fence – Khaled and Radi holding high large b&w photos of the Holocaust. Finally, we’re 100 feet from the soldiers, several layers of fence and barbed wire between us. Khaled and Radi are armed with the photos, held up against the fence like protective crosses. (Khaled convinced a young Palestinian guy, who usually throws stones at the soldiers, to hold a photo too.)

A few moments of silence. The soldiers seem confused, one looks away, maybe in response to the photos. Then – a shot, followed by the characteristic hiss coming at us across the No Man’s Land – a tear gas grenade spirals across the ground near us. My first experience of this wonderful “crowd dispersal” invention, my eyes immediately burn, tears fall, and I can’t stop coughing.