A guest post from Hillel Stavis:

November 13th
Newton Country Day School
Newton, Ma
7:00 pm

Screening and Discussion of the Film, Encounter Point
A presentation of the Newton Human Rights Commission

The film’s production company describes itself this way:

"Just Vision is a nonprofit organization that informs local and international audiences about under-documented Palestinian and Israeli joint civilian efforts to resolve the conflict nonviolently. Using media and educational tools, we raise awareness in order to encourage civic participation in grassroots peace building."

Encounter Point was produced and directed by Ronit Avni, an American-Israeli with the following cv:

Ronit was assisted on the film by Julia Bacha, writer for The Control Room, the apologetic documentary on Al Jazeera.

Encounter Point attempts to "share pain and hope" through interviews with a number of Israelis and Palestinians, ostensibly advocating the "linear equation" model of pain and suffering: equal portions of pain on both sides of the conflict. Given the filmmakers’ backgrounds and the subtle, manipulative techniques employed, however, the film’s objectivity and purported absence of political message remains highly questionable.

Playing out against the general backdrop of "equal" tragedies, the film reveals its true colors at the very outset. Selection becomes advocacy when you encounter whom Avni has chosen to speak on camera:

"A former Israeli settler, a Palestinian ex-prisoner, a bereaved Israeli mother and a wounded Palestinian bereaved brother."

All of a sudden, the equation is no longer an equation. One side has clearly become the villain in the piece.

This carefully culled collection of the "bereaved" and "victimized" yields a not-so-hidden political agenda in almost every frame of the film. The only Jewish victim is a soldier (a representative of the "occupation.") Ms. Avni could have chosen the mother of an elementary school child deliberately murdered on his way home from school on the number 18 Jaffa St. bus in 1998. But she wanted a particular mother and a particular political viewpoint. And she found her in Robi, an immigrant from South Africa and an anti-apartheid activist. Three quarters of the way into the film, the apartheid disease gets fullblown, with validation from someone who knows apartheid first hand. Visiting a settlement in Gaza, Robi castigates her fellow Jews as perpetrators of a new "apartheid." The constant terrorist attacks against them are never mentioned, nor is the Palestinian demand that not a single Jew be permitted to live among them.

Robi’s appearances in the film oscillate from holding up signs at Meretz peace rallies to writing letters to the mother of her son’s murderer, hoping to reach some sort of reconciliation with the family (a la the South African model). Alas, her pleas go unanswered.

She also bonds with a group called Machsom Watch, a group of Israeli women who show up at Israeli checkpoints to protest the humiliating treatment of Palestinians (the outrageous practice of checking them for bombs that will kill men, women and children). For some inexplicable reason, in 2005 at the Erez checkpoint in Gaza, this group failed to show up when Wafa al-Biss tried to cross into Israel with 20lbs of high explosives hidden in her trousers. Ms. Al-Biss intended to kill as many Jews as possible at a Jewish hospital. She was familiar with the Israeli medical system because she had received free treatment for serious burns she suffered in a fire that started in her kitchen.

Without coercion, Al-Biss then declared,

"Today I wanted to blow myself up in a hospital, maybe even in the one in which I was treated. But since lots of Arabs come to be treated there, I decided I would go to another, maybe the Tel Hashomer, near Tel Aviv. I wanted to kill 20, 50 Jews …"

The "former Israeli settler," Shlomo, now a proud, secular member of the Israeli left, says that his new life has taken the weight of the responsibility for the Jewish people "off his back." He views his former, unenlightened life and brothers and sisters with scorn.

The Palestinians are portrayed as working tirelessly for peace (except that, unlike their Israeli counterparts, they are working alone, because, try as they might, they cannot find any Palestinian-bred peace organizations to support them.) At least the film implies that working for peace within Palestinian society can be a very risky business. They end up, instead, working with the many, well-funded Israeli peace organizations like Seeds of Peace, whose green flag is shown proudly flying over Jerusalem.

The film constantly targets its political enemies within Israel: The "Right Wing," political parties like Moledet and "The Settlers." The standard tropes are also here:

"The occupation created terrorism," Israel as an "apartheid" state, the "apartheid wall" and Arab violence as "resistance."

On the other side, there is no depiction – or even mention of – Hamas, Islamic Jihad, or Fatah’s Al Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade. The camera meanders through Arab villages but, inexplicably, can’t find a single poster extolling suicide killers or the ubiquitous anti-Semitic slogans painted on walls. An uninformed viewer of this film would be convinced that the vast majority of Palestinians spend their days picking olives, dancing the Dabka and working with international peace organizations.

Nor is there any mention of the daily rocket attacks against Sderot and other towns in Israel.

Encounter Point is a cleverly constructed, nasty piece of work, ostensibly promoting peace and reconciliation but cloaking a completely one-sided political agenda.

***

The discussion after the film was entirely predictable: Parroting the film’s captions of "Occupation" etc., most of the audience gave it high marks for neutrality. Father Walter Cuenin, the Catholic chaplain of Brandeis ran the show. Better than most MC’s at such events, he nevertheless reinforced the blandishments in the film while ignoring its deceptive techniques and messages.

A Palestinian woman decried the absence of a "fair" depiction of Palestinians in the media and the West, praising the film’s "objectivity." QED.

Notably, vilification of Israel during the Q & A was not so prominent as it might have been absent the glaring, murderous, recent news stories of Palestinians gunning down each other. That doesn’t play very well to the balcony in the local Unitarian church. Instead, the audience, true to the Massachusetts' uni-party’s penchant for America slamming and Bush-bashing, reserved its condemnations for the United States and its "interference" in other cultures (odd, considering the left’s universal condemnation of the Bush administration for NOT playing an active part in Middle East diplomacy). Oh well, it’s on to the next Sundance award.