Settlers or Squatters?

Who has a right to the land? What really counts here? The Tora’s promise of a “promised land”? Owning property or working the land for generation after generation? Four films about ideology, archaeological artefacts, wishes and realities, and a talk with Amira Hass, correspondent with the left-wing-liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz in Ramallah, and Galit Eilat, director of the Israeli Center for Digital Art

19h

The Inner Tour

Documentary by Ra’anan Alexandrowicz , Israel, Palestine 2001, 94 min, English subtitles

A group of Palestinians from West Jordan and the Gaza Strip travel by coach through Israel: a country which, to them, is their lost home and now stands for an occupying power. The only way they can see their places of birth is as “tourists”. This word becomes a metaphor for the stateless foreigners and emigrants who hold up a mirror to the people they are visiting. Looking through the coach window, the viewer also catches glimpses of Palestinian society, which is more complex than the familiar pictures of stone-throwing youths suggest.

21h

Oh, Fortress of Mine

Video by Alona Friedberg & Limor Orenstein , Israel 2002, 5.40 min, English subtitles

In a mixture of fairy-tale imagery, archetypal symbolism and video games, the two female filmmakers, amidst their families, sing a classic from the time when the state of Israel was founded: ‘Oh, Fortress of Mine’. The house becomes a fortress - with the kitchen as the bulwark.

The Settlers

Documentary by Ruth Walk , Israel 2002, 60 min, English subtitles

‘Each building erected here is an additional light in the temple of God. How can anyone forbid us to build?’ The camera accompanies people of Tel Rumeidah, a settlement in the middle of the Palestinian autonomous territory, through their daily lives: seven families with a total of forty-three children. The unshakable conviction of the settlers that they belong here, right alongside a people whose existence they ignore, has an almost surreal quality.