Eliyahu Ungar-Sargon launched a kickstarter campaign a day or so back to fund a film he is doing on the one state solution, called A People Without a Land. The solution is not about the land, it’s about the people, the excellent trailer explains, in evident reference to false beliefs. And it appears the film will examine the Palestinian experience so as to convey why the conflict persists despite “decades of a a failed peace process.”
Below is Ungar-Sargon’s description of his project:
My interest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict began when I was 13 years old and my parents decided to move our family from the leafy Boston suburb of Brookline, to the Jerusalem settlement of Ramot. It was the early 90‘s and the heady optimism of the Oslo Accords would soon be shattered by the Goldstein massacre, the assassination of Yitzchak Rabin, and a wave of deadly suicide attacks inside Israel. As a teenager, I rebelled against the religious zionism of my parents by joining the secular, left-wing Meretz youth group and speaking out against the occupation. It seemed obvious to me at the time that the only solution to the conflict was for Israel to withdraw to the 1967 borders.
When I graduated from high school, I decided against serving with my friends in the Israel Defense Forces. I left Israel and enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where I studied Film, Video, and New Media for four years. It was at SAIC that I had the great fortune of encountering a number of people who would challenge some of my basic assumptions about Israel/Palestine and further raise my political awareness. Omar Karmi, a journalist and teacher of political philosophy, introduced me to the centrality of the refugee question in the history of the conflict. Raja Halwani, an analytic philosopher, exposed me to the ethical problems inherent in ethno-nationalism. And Ali Abunimah, author and co-founder of the Electronic Intifada, sparked my imagination with his proposal for a one-state solution.
A few years after I graduated, I began work on my second feature-length documentary film, “A People Without a Land.” The project started with a short exploratory trip that my wife/producer Pennie and I took to Israel and the West Bank in the winter of 2008-2009. What we discovered during that trip was that most of the people we were talking to had given up on the two-state solution. Armed with this insight, we decided that our film should be about the moral and practical failure of the two-state solution. The idea was to describe and indeed facilitate a paradigm shift away from partition solutions and towards integration solutions. By exposing the exclusionary nature of political Zionism and imagining a shared future based on justice, equality, and human rights, we hope to ease the transition towards the inevitable integration of Israelis and Palestinians into a single political entity.
Since that first trip, we have collected some 360 hours of footage including 500 street interviews, along with interviews of historians, philosophers, politicians, and activists. “A People Without a Land” in currently in post-production and we are in the process of raising money to finish the film. To learn more about our project, please click on the link below.
Peace process? Hardly. More like piss process or peace charade. One of my favorite takes on this joke was done by CodePink with a very accurate depiction of the reality of the land-grab game hiding behind the charade. And although this was done in 2010, the same applies to every year during the decades long charade:
If you say to your shrink “If I do this I am damned and also so if I do that” he would answer: why not consider a third option. Which is in this case: the 2.5SS – 2.5 state solution. Obama went from Israel to Jordan, which is no coincidence, they are third leg here. They once owned the Wes-bank and should re/co-own it with Israel – Jews there voting in Israel and Arabs in Jordan under some “confederation” form between Israel and Jordan and the West-Bank (Gaza reverts to Egypt, to which it once belonged). The Jordanian king is under pressure, from inside and outside (Syria upheaval) and needs both the US and Israel to survive and that could be an incentive for him. Think “out of the box”, as they say.
There never was a peace process to “fail”. And a 1SS is hardly inevitable.
More likely a 1.5S non-solution, possibly leading to confederations in the longer run.