Unsettled
Review by Peter T. Chattaway | posted 5/09/2008
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We often hear about the conflicts and tensions between Israelis and Palestinians, but how often do we hear about the conflicts and tensions within the Israeli community itself? Adam Hootnick's documentary Unsettled is a remarkably focused, yet diverse, look at several young Israelis who find themselves on different sides of a recent and very controversial issue: Israel's unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and the evacuation of the Jews there, accompanied by the demolition of their homes.
The withdrawal took place in 2005, five years after the Second Intifada began sending a steady stream of suicide bombers into Israeli communities, and there are occasional nods within the film to the violence that has become part-and-parcel of Israeli life. Lior, a lifeguard on the Gaza Strip's "Palm Beach," is happy to point out that life in the Gaza Strip is not just about people shooting each other: look at all the hot young Israelis who go surfing, sit around campfires and play Beach Boys songs on their guitars. But in the middle of one interview, a loud noise is heard in the distance, and the filmmakers asks if that was an attack. Yeah, shrugs Lior, that was a mortar shell. "It's normal," he says. "It's the reality, we surf in the morning and eat bombs in the night."
Lior
Lior's breezy beach-bum attitude is nicely offset by his friend Meir, who has a more religious sort of attachment to the land. While Lior and his parents, who have lived in the area for 20 years, have pretty much resigned themselves to the fact that the government is compelling them to leave their home and move somewhere else, Meir points to passages in the Bible where God promised the land to the Israelites and instructed them not to give the land away to their neighbors. "We can make peace with [the Palestinians]," he says, "but not on the borders of Israel." However, while Meir might seem more serious than Lior, his thinking about these issues does not run much deeper; asked how disagreements between the Jewish and Muslim scriptures ought to be handled, Meir simply replies that he does not believe in the Koran—or the Muslims' "Torah," as he puts it—because the rabbis told him it is not true. And that's that.
A more earnest sort of fight against the withdrawal is put up by Neta, a 20-year-old protestor who makes short films in an effort to convince her fellow Israelis that the withdrawal is not only a bad idea politically but disobedience against God. She complains that the people who made the decision to evacuate the Gaza Strip—a decision that was supported by a majority of the Israeli population—simply don't know what it's like to live there, so how can they presume to know what's best for that community?
Neta
Then there is Ye'ela, a 21-year-old activist on the other side of the fence, who lost a sister to a suicide bomber some years ago and now complains that people living in the Gaza Strip—a territory the Israelis have occupied since the Six-Day War in 1967—have no right to ask the armed forces to protect them when they arguably shouldn't be living there in the first place. The problem, says Ye'ela, is the religious people who think only of themselves, and not about the soldiers who die for them.
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