A Film by Fida Qishta

A young girl sits among the rubble of her family home. She talks of the many people she knows who have been killed. When asked if she lost many family members she says: “Not many. Just my mother, my father and my brother.” Mona is 10 years old. For the million and a half Palestinians trapped in Gaza, ducks in a shooting gallery for Israeli tanks, planes and artillery, where is the hope?

Fida Qishta, a young Palestinian filmmaker and journalist from Rafah in Gaza has documented the horrific Israeli invasion and bombardment of Gaza in December 2008 and January 2009. Working with her crew of young Gazans, they have kept the cameras rolling for months, recording the struggle of the people of Gaza to retrieve some sense of normalcy from the absolute abnormality of life in the world’s largest prison camp, sealed off on all sides by Israeli and Egyptian walls, barbed wire and military.

This story reveals the resilience of the human spirit, as the farmers, fishermen, merchants, school children, teachers and medical workers find ways to snatch a semblance of normality from this insanity. But what happens when the abnormal becomes normal? What happens when children grow up among the rubble of their homes and cities, when they face the future as orphans colored by the memory of their parents violent deaths?

Free to the Public. Sponsored by Working for A Just Peace in Palestine-Israel.

Excerpt from 11/17/2012  Syracuse Peace Council press release:

As the Israel-Palestine conflict escalates again this week and the world’s airwaves are flooded with images of grieving families holding their dead, we in the United States must once again ask ourselves: Are we a nation of peace or a nation for war?

The U.S. gives around $3 billion in military aid to Israel annually. We must ask ourselves why our government is supporting Israel’s attacks on the civilian population in Gaza. And we must ask whether we as Americans agree that this should be done in our name, with our money.

The U.S. needs to divest from Israel’s military campaign against the Palestinians – a campaign that includes moving Israeli settlers into Palestinian territory, ongoing military occupation, land and resource grabs, military checkpoints that keep Palestinians from attending work and school or visiting their families, detentions without due process and a litany of other human rights abuses.