Filmmaker Rushdi Sarraj.
Roughly 130 people from around the world tuned in to a virtual movie screening to get an on-the-ground view of the human suffering caused by bombs dropped on Gaza, past and present — and to vent their frustrations and fears of still more bloodshed to come amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas war.
That movie screening and Zoom-streamed public conversation took place Saturday afternoon, at an online event hosted by the Palestine Museum US, which is located at 1764 Litchfield Turnpike in Woodbridge.
The movie that was screened was Bank of Targets: A Glimpse Into the Devastation Unleashed by Israel Bombing of Gaza.
That’s journalist/director Rushdi Saraaj’s short but graphically devastating film, released two years ago, depicting the widespread and — from the film’s POV — indiscriminate devastation of residential areas in Gaza over the years of Israeli occupation and the resultant terrible human toll.
Although it was not discussed either in the film (Arabic, with English subtitles, but not all visible on the computer screen) or during the hour of impassioned discussion afterwards, “bank of targets” is a military term usually referring to a pre-set list of acceptable targets, often organized by order of priority.
Saraaj himself was killed on Oct. 22 in an Israeli bombing of his building in Gaza, part of the now intensifying Israeli response to the Hamas raid of Israeli settlements, and the massive indiscriminate killing and hostage taking that ensued on Oct. 7.
“It is a difficult day for all of us and in Gaza,” said Palestine Museum Director Faisal Saleh about the intensified Israeli airstrikes on Gaza, “may God be with them, and today we share a film of a filmmaker who lost his life last week, in honor of him.”
Thomas Breen photo
Faisal Saleh, at an Oct. 18 pro-Palestine rally downtown.
Saleh and author Christa Bruhn introduced the film with words of mourning and frustration and hope for peace, connecting the past bombings depicted in Saraaj’s movie to the ongoing airstrikes in Gaza in recent weeks.
They spoke about how it’s hard to believe we are three weeks in and with no end in sight for the bombing.
Some of the event’s attendees urged each other to be gentle and kind with yourself and with others, no one has all the answers. But with so much death and dying, if we could just pause, that’d be one step in the right direction.
Still another attendee, Jacqueline, said she was speechless, with a broken heart.
Someone else was weeping in South Carolina. “We need it to be Never Again for everyone,” wrote another in the Zoom chat. The word “heart broken” came up again and again.
About 130 people attended the Zoom screening, with 89 remaining for the discussion, and with Bruhn reading selections from the chat and citing participating voices from, among other locations, Switzerland, Germany, Ithaca, N.Y., Santa Fe, N.M., and New Haven.
The first five minutes of Saraaj’s 27-minute film features a sound track of pounding music, breathless running, and screams; quick cuts, urban vistas of rubble, wailing women, bloodied children, and lone young men sitting, in a place of desolation beyond grief, their heads in their hands atop a mountain of collapsed concrete and rebar.
There are, amid scenes of the bombings and clean-ups, interviews Saraaj has interspersed with fellow journalists (many others have been killed, and speakers in the film assert that to kill the story-tellers is among Israel’s bank of targets) and their commitment to keep covering, no matter the danger or depth of loss.
What’s unique, at least to this reporter, is the film’s ground-level view. The way the ground shakes with each explosion, how the camera is jostled, then returns to alignment and focus to capture a building as it explodes seemingly just a block from the camera’s lens.
That, and the unfolding human trauma, especially of the young people, always in the panicked frames, is very different from the traditional more aerial news coverage we see on CNN. Everything here is close up, cramped in the frame, as if there is nowhere else to go or to be, which I gather is the central visual point.
“I’m ashamed,” wrote one person in the chat, “of both my countries, Greece and Denmark, for not voting for a [U.N. resolution] ceasefire.”
The purpose of Saturday’s virtual gathering was very much like the Jewish community’s gathering around a screening of the new Golda Meir biopic, Golda, earlier in the week: Not so much about movie-love as to deploy film as a gathering place, for attendees to say hello across states and countries, and to offer each other comfort and support, and to vent frustrations, express fears, and assure each other that there is hope.
Here’s a sampling of highlights and exchanges from the discussion, by turns furious with frustration and anger but also tempered by hope and even humor, with the speakers, except for Saleh and Bruhn, identified by initials:
NS, a Lebanese-American from the Detroit area: I feel like I’m sleeping with the enemy. Online it is so frustrating, the insensitivity on TikTok and Instagram, the making fun of Palestinians is repulsive. The general public rushing to support Israel, as if we were only insects! We are always being put on the stand as guilty until proven guilty. No, I am not condemning Hamas. They are a resistance movement. It’s been torture since 1967.
Saleh: There’s nothing that Hamas did or does that Israel has not done a thousand times.
NS: Sure we feel bad for the hostages, but how about the [Palestinian] women giving birth in Israeli jails? Did you [Americans in general] just grow a conscience on Oct. 7! Why don’t you be up in arms [for Palestinians] as you did for civil rights [in America] and in South Africa? But, no. Palestinians don’t even count as animals, because if we were frickin’ animals, then there would be animal rights. I’m venting.
Anonymous voice in the chat: What will it take to get people to listen?
AH, originally from a village outside of Ramallah: Yes, [referring to the film] they target the journalists. I believe he was targeted to silence any voice coming out of there. But at the moment the world has awakened. And we can see this all around the world that Israel will become a pariah, the only good thing coming out of this. Even if they flatten the whole of Gaza, Gazans will stay, they will come back.
LC, an ethnic studies curriculum writer, Boston area: I’m eighty-eight and have done all kinds of work, and why has the needle moved only a little? Because we haven’t reached those in power. We protest, we write, we demonstrate, but the leaders are not hearing. My aunt is locked behind concrete walls in Bethlehem, and relatives can’t reach her. We have to confront those in authority [like President Biden]. And we need to continue to tell stories.
Bruhn: Her [LC’s] most important point is education, deepen our understanding, share the full [Palestinian] history with others, and many people will say, Oh, my God, we had no idea …
MY, from Palm Desert, California: I’ve been advocating [for Palestinian rights] for 50 years [ever since she spent college years in Lebanon]. And especially in my [Episcopal] church. [Describes bringing in an effective speaker from Jewish Voice for Peace]. People will listen to Jews, not Palestinians.
Saleh: They can’t be accused of anti-Semitism.
Bruhn: But then they’re accused of being self-hating Jews.
NS: We love Jews, we hate Zionism.
Bruhn: Thank you all for coming. Please tell us what else you need. This is a space to envision the future.
Saleh concluded the event with the announcement of the Palestine Museum’s next event on Sunday at noon, a presentation and discussion on the recent proposal from the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has issued a warning to President Biden that he may, through arming Israel, be complicit for war crimes, to be discussed at the museum’s next open house.
Click here for more information about the museum.
Click here to read an article about another recent local film screening, hosted by the Jewish Federation of Greater New Haven and the Hebrew Program of Yale’s Near Eastern Languages and Civilization Department, that offered an Israeli perspective on past and present violence in Israel and Gaza.