Disturbing the Peace

 Disturbing the Peace (2016) is an award-winning film about Israeli and Palestinian combatants who took part in the generations of armed struggle in the region until something happened to each one of them that allowed them to see the conflict from the others’ point of view.

Through the use of interviews, archival footage and dramatic recreations, each person's story is told.  They relate their first experiences of violence created by the “other side”, the part they played in the armed conflict and the event that changed them forever.  And then the story of how they began to work together for peace unfolds.

Chen Alon is the grandson of a Polish immigrant to Palestine.  The rest of his family were all killed by the Nazis.  “Zionism saved his life,” says Alon who learned to feel that Israel was the only place where Jews can be safe. He remembers being bombed when he was four and joining the Israeli army at age eighteen.  At one point he was confronted by the father of sick Palestinian children at the border were he was on guard while he talked to his wife about his sick daughter on his cell phone.  He suddenly felt a split between himself as a father and as a soldier and realized that there were fathers on both sides of the conflict.

Jamil Oassas talks about the Palestinian people’s journey. “Israel’s creation was our catastrophe,” he says as he tells the story of how the Israeli army invaded his family’s village and took them all away except for his grandfather who refused to leave and was therefore killed.  His family was moved to a refugee camp where they have lived ever since  He remembers the Israeli soldiers in the camp shooting his fourteen year old brother for breaking curfew to visit his uncle next door.  And so Oassas took part in “resisting the occupation.”  Later when many Israeli children were killed by a suicide bomber, his mother was crying because the mothers of those children would go through the same pain as she did.  “Blood is blood.  It doesn’t have two colours,” she said.  This shook him to the core when he realized that mothers were suffering on both sides.

Israeli, Assaf Yacobovitz  worked as a controller of missions that included the dropping of bombs.  He never connected the work he did on his radar screen with the actual reality of who the bombs were being dropped on until one day he saw on TV the destruction caused by the mission he had just been a part of.  He suddenly felt compassion for the people he had killed by being a part of the mission and something changed inside of him.

Shifa al-Qudsi remembers a childhood of seeing the Israeli army killing Palestinians.  She remembers seeing a student killed in front of her house when she was a child.  One day when she was an adult, her daughter came home after seeing a girl killed in front of her.  She describes how she wanted to do something to protect the Palestinian children.  Since there was no Palestinian army, she decided to carry out a suicide attack.  “Our world was a cemetery of the living,” she said.    Before she could carry it out, she was arrested and taken to prison.  She always thought that Israelis were evil but one day a guard’s sibling was killed in a suicide attack and Shifa could see that people were dying on both sides and feel compassion for her captor.

The stories go on an on.  Stories of people who have only seen one side of an armed conflict but then suddenly can see it from the point of view of their previous enemy.  A group of Israeli soldiers including those interviewed in the film, wrote to the Prime Minister of Israel saying that they would protect Israel but they would not patrol the occupied areas or do anything that degraded other human beings.  This became a big story in Israel and there were many people who called them traitors.

At the same time a group of Palestinians who had studied non-violence while being held in prison had been released and were looking for ways to put these new strategies into action.  They invited the Israeli soldiers to come for a meeting.  Although it felt extremely dangerous to these soldiers, they came for the meeting and eventually Combatants for Peace was born.

The first step to build trust for healing was to confess.  Each told their story while sitting in a circle.  They found out that they had something in common:  the willingess to kill people they didn’t know.  But now they all wanted peace.  They started to see things from the other side and in 2006 Combatants for Peace was created.  

Combatants for Peace have worked since then to create alternatives to armed conflict in order to create peace in the Middle East.  They studied non-violence and were inspired by Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela to hold rallies, ceremonies and other public events to present an alternative to their fellow citizens.   “Each time we are creating this alternative of this reality of Israelis and Palestinians communicating with each other, it is a revolution,” one of them says. 

Protest at the wall that divides Israelis and Palestinians included giant puppets.  The two sides met at the wall and ironically, it was the soldiers that were symbolically trapped between the two groups of peaceful protesters.

The approach that each side is the victim and the other side is the perpetrator has to be rethought.  “We are all victims of the conflict and also its creators,” says one member at a rally.  If they are creators of the conflict then they can be creators of peace, is how they now understand the story of the conflict.  On Memorial Day in Israel CFP holds a ceremony to remember the lost lives on both sides of the conflict.

Image from Disturbing the Peace

What keeps them going in the face of ongoing conflict?  They know that if they could change their minds about the conflict then it is possible for others to do so.  They have empathy and compassion for those suffering on both sides and when they feel discouraged, they support each other to keep on going. 

  Although Disturbing the Peace is about what seems to be an intractable conflict, the principles that stand out have a universal truth.  The knowledge that we are connected to one another, compassion, empathy and the strength of community are the arms of these combatants.  The DVD case reads, “DISTURBING THE PEACE is a story of the human potential unleashed when we stop participating in a story that no longer serves us and, with the power of our convictions, take action to create new possibilities.” 

Disturbing the Peace is an example of a new story that is being told and lived and one which can inspire all of us to rethink the stories we tell about conflict.  You can hear some of their members in this youtube video.

Members of Combatants for Peace