Hassan Mizer tells of going to high school like any student in the morning, only in a refugee camp. Israeli guns flash, a bullet punctures him, lodges in his spine. In dark-eyed, solemn straightforwardness, Mizer tells how 13 other students were shot in the legs “as a way to disable them.” This young man can no longer walk, as a final frame of him illustrates. He added, “as for justice, there is no justice, no way to stop these crimes and no one can help.”
That interview was two years ago in Palestine in the just-released documentary “Where Olive Trees Weep.” The film, an unflinching background and history lesson that led to the current genocide in Palestine, was shot in three weeks in 2022, in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and in the occupied territory of the West Bank.
Its title references Palestinian olive trees and groves torched by Israelis. Olive trees are central to Palestinians for their major economic benefits, cultural heritage, social significance, and political symbolism.
The film, directed and produced by California-based filmmakers Zaya and Maurizio Benazzo — a couple whose diverse Bulgarian and Italian backgrounds include award-winning documentaries as well as exploring and documenting spirituality and nonduality absent of religious doctrines.
In a promotional “Where Olive Trees Weep” Q&A, the Benazzos explain their missive, how they strove to honor “the trauma legacy that led many Jews to immigrate to the new state of Israel while unpacking the deeply dangerous and disingenuous notion that this was a “land without a people for a people without a land.”
Within a couple of days in Palestine, a bigger picture emerged. They found “a brutal settler colonial project imposing a very harsh form of apartheid and bent on ethnically cleansing an indigenous population by all available means.”
The directors succeeded in their mission, constructing a lovely, scene-burning stunner that brings the context of 75 years of Israeli occupation and dispossession in Palestine to an audience who may previously know nothing.
The Israel-Palestine conflict is a highly complex labyrinth of history, religion, politics and culture, bound by suffering and conflict. The creation of Israel in the heart of Palestine is a chronicle of conquest and dispossession, a story unfolding over centuries. The film lays out a blunt truth: Palestinians have faced relentless oppression, control, dispossession and murder for decades. One doesn’t need to be pro-Palestine, Muslim or belong to any particular faith or nationality to grasp the sheer brutality, the horror, the tragedy of this ongoing nightmare. One only needs to be human.
As writer and Jewish Currents editor Peter Beinart pointed out recently, Oct. 7 was an act of unethical resistance on the heels of more than seven decades of ethical and peaceful resistance that was met with violence or, perhaps, worse, apathy by Israel and the United States.
In the film, Neta Golan, an Israeli anti-apartheid activist and an active member of Israelis Against Apartheid, talks of Israeli snipers taking out protesters, medics, children, people in wheelchairs, in The Great March of Return. That was a peaceful series of protests in 2018-19 along the Gaza-Israel border, where Palestinian demonstrators symbolically returned to their ancestral homes by slowly approaching the Israeli blockade of Gaza on foot.
In response, Israeli military snipered and killed nearly 200 unarmed Palestinians, and maimed more than 6,000 by shooting at their kneecaps. She states, “The UN called it war crimes. The world saw it week after week, and no one did anything.”
Art is equal parts expression, beauty and truth; and this film, with Jewish and Palestinian narrators, mixes the art with heady doses of loss, trauma, and a pursuit for peace and justice. As ongoing Israeli massacres drag on in Gaza and the occupied West Bank in response to Hamas’ attack on Oct. 7, the film focuses on the lives of people — the unsung, the rudderless, the colonized, the ordinary, the lost, the hurting. The stories rise from deep sadnesses and losses born of Israeli occupation, the intergenerational pains, physical and emotional traumas, and unyielding Palestinian tenacity. It goes lengths to humanize Palestinians, with an arching, aching theme of trauma-healing.
Brutal, clear-eyed truths yank heartstrings, philosophical contexts lift, explained and shown in strangely beautiful and deceptively simple ways, along with the cycles of trauma that propagate it. As one 66-year-old Palestinian — Rafea Foukaha, whose ancestors worked and lived on the same Jordon Valley land since before Turkish rule — puts it, “we’re dead while we’re alive.”
Stunning, hopeful landscapes, ancient terraces, burnt orange skylines, camels silhouetted against unpeopled vistas, laughing children and Israeli-built fences and walls—one painted with the words “Walls Are Meant for Climbing”— double as visual metaphors of subsistence and persistence, of yearning and courage.
Ashira Darwish, a Palestinian journalist and trauma healer was nearly crippled after an Israeli beating, and is shown dancing and singing, an illuminating form of healing. She recalls, as a 16-year-old girl, soldiers storming a peaceful Palestinian-rights protest in Jerusalem. She was beaten and handcuffed, along with other kids. “That’s when the shock went and the anger rose. … I just froze.”
She talks of torture dungeons, which Israel has set up all over Palestine. Burning hot water in tight grave-like showers. She never believed the torture was happening until she experienced it.
Hungarian-born Dr. Gabor Maté, a renowned author and psychological-trauma specialist, whose maternal grandparents were killed in Auschwitz, is shown doing trauma-healing work, supporting women once tortured in Israeli prisons. But this is not PTSD, he explained, it is ongoing trauma.
Elsewhere, first-person stories of interrogation and torture, teen imprisonment, family fathers more worried about the family outside than themselves. A mother murdered, beaten by a group of settlers in front of her 12-year-old daughter. The mother’s brother explains, “this is part of our suffering. We don’t like to appear, to show ourselves as victims, to victimize our issue. Because we believe it’s a part of our duty and responsibility to resist.”
Phone footage stitches together adults and children passed from civilian hands to civilian hands after a bombing, settlers waiving Israeli flags, yelling, “We’ll kill you all (expletive)!” … the omnipresence of armed Israeli military soldiers, men and women, treating Palestinians like rodents. The severe strife and brutality are bookended with hushed moments of absolute beauty and tenderness; a stride into a mosque, a shepherd and his sheep, a large group coming together in joyful celebration, clapping in a synchronized traditional dance called a Dahiya.
Every minute of the film carries weight and meaning, in a graceful rhythm, juxtaposing Palestine’s old-world traditionalism against a cold, mechanized world of Israel’s high-tech weaponry and surveillance, at times subtly highlighted by composer’s Armand Amar pensive soundtrack, or joyful folk songs upholding oral histories. The cinematography is as lyrical, as sensitive, as the film’s subjects, who are mostly women.
Israeli journalist and author Amira Hass explained how a settler-colonial project, by definition, is meant to take the land and create a political system that excludes the indigenous people. “Two-hundred years ago in the States or New Zealand or Brazil, this was not considered violation; it was the norm. Now, because Zionism is an anachronistic settler-colonial movement, the world understands it’s not according to the norm, but the world accepts it.” Zionism allowed Jewish people to arrive because of the Holocaust. The brutality is seen as somehow justified by the Western world because it offsets the injustice of one people’s genocide, but does not acknowledge the resulting injustice against another.
There are references to peace talks: People expected Israel to stop their colonialist drive after the Oslo Accords (agreements between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization in the ’90s, which created a framework for Palestinian self-governance, and a peace treaty, in exchange for Palestinians giving up a hefty portion of their land). But Israel took that conceded land and kept going.
And what if you are too small to fight back? You can’t run, there is nowhere to go, and you can’t fight. You freeze, as Darwish says, children born in Gaza are born into prison, they are the most creative children, just based on how they find ways to survive.
Darwish pleads with the viewer who can do something, stop giving money for bullets that “shoot our children.” Stop supporting the war machine. “We need you.”
As Mizer said in the film from his wheelchair, “in the end, everyone will die, but what matters to us is the purpose for our death or the way in which we die. Essential to the people and the land is freedom. … The freedom to move as you like, to feel the coolness of ground. … It was robbed but it will be regained.”
If you see one doc a year, see this one.
This film screens for free in Tucson, outside, alongside olive trees in beautiful Himmel Park. The screening is tellingly co-sponsored by Jewish and Palestinian-led groups.
I phone a local booster of the film, Ori Tsameret, an articulate 24-year-old who grew up in Israel until his family moved to the states when he was 14.
He comes from a left-leaning Zionist household; his grandfather is a Holocaust survivor. He has relatives living in settlements and his best friend from childhood was an IDF soldier recently killed in Gaza.
Several years ago, he had epiphany about how Zionism wasn’t protecting mutual self-determination and is doing more harm than good. Tsameret watched the film and found it “powerful, and wide-ranging,” yet, he adds softly, “it mostly just made me sad.”
“Where Olive Trees Weep” screens outside at the amphitheater at Himmel Park, 1000 N. Tucson Boulevard, Tucson. All ages are welcome; parental guidance is suggested. It is free, with suggested donations toward replanting olive groves. Showtime is 7 p.m. For more info, go to whereolivetreesweep.com.
