In new film, Tel Aviv leftist picks up and moves to a West Bank settlement
While her cameras and political views initially spook Tekoa residents, in ‘Unsettling,’ Iris Zaki manages to get locals talking about their lives beyond the Green Line
Jacob Magid is The Times of Israel's US bureau chief
In one of the first scenes in Iris Zaki’s new documentary, “Unsettling,” the Tel Aviv film director taps into a unique dissonance being lived out by residents of the West Bank settlement of Tekoa.
Sitting at a small circular table she sets up outside the town’s minimarket, Zaki explains to her new friend Matanya that the reluctance of many locals to engage with her stems from their discomfort with addressing the political reality in which they are living.
However, she immediately follows that observation with the acknowledgment that people in Tekoa are remarkably content with their lives.
“It’s something I’ve never come across before. Where I come from, people are cynical, self-critical, and sarcastic. It’s something I don’t see here. I don’t sense a discomfort [with the political reality],” she posits.
Finding nothing to object to, the Tekoa resident shrugs and says, “Yes.”
Matanya is one of six residents featured in the documentary, for which Zaki picked up and moved to the Etzion Bloc settlement south of Jerusalem for two months in the summer of 2016.
During that time, Zaki strove to test her doctoral dissertation, which asked whether it is possible to conduct a filmed conversation without it feeling like an interview.
To do this, she draped the table facing the minimarket with a welcoming white doily cloth, surrounded it with three movie cameras and waited for locals to come and talk to her.
“It took a long time for people to calm down and feel comfortable with my presence,” Zaki recalled in a conversation with The Times of Israel after the premiere of her film at the Tel Aviv International Documentary Film Festival last week.
She admitted that the combination of the cameras and her political views, which she was very upfront about, initially scared many locals who are used to being portrayed unfavorably in the media.
The opening scene highlights one such resident, an American immigrant who can be heard in the background shouting at Zaki as she is lugging her camera equipment into the settlement.
“We’re living in a town where people have been murdered, okay? Murdered, okay? Blood all over the sidewalk and… typically left-wing people are anti-Israel and anti-settler and that bothers me,” the man can be heard saying in English.
But Zaki said that once residents understood that she was there to listen rather than interrogate, they were more willing to sit down across from her and open up.
She made no claims that the individuals she spoke with were representative of the broader settlement movement, or even of Tekoa itself, but she did manage to depict the stories of a diverse group of locals, providing a window into the phenomenon that has been developing over the Green Line for the past 50 years.
There’s Asaf, for example, who moved to the settlement with his family because of its mixed secular-religious school, but accepts that his presence “helps contribute to the [Palestinian-Israeli] conflict,” and Moriya, who states plainly that she has “no empathy for the other side” and insinuates that Israel should expel all Palestinians in the next war.
Even two former “hilltop youth” activists — Navah and Akiva — sit down across from Zaki and share their pasts establishing outposts throughout the West Bank with authorities “on their tail.”
And a documentary on Tekoa would not be complete without reference to the late Menachem Froman, who as the settlement’s chief rabbi was a tireless advocate of interfaith dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians.
Zaki sits down with his daughter-in-law Michal Froman, who shares her wish to have every settlement hold exchanges with neighboring Palestinian villages. This conversation just six months after she was seriously injured by a Palestinian teenager in a stabbing attack while shopping in Tekoa.
Overall, the voices featured represent a younger generation of settlers who, at least according to Zaki, recognize that something is wrong with the status quo in the West Bank.
“They don’t pretend that the Palestinians don’t exist like the older generation,” she said.
As Matanya puts it, “You need to have minimal intelligence to be able to notice that something isn’t right here.”
But for the most part, Zaki’s new friends don’t view themselves as the negative components in the equation, with each highlighting a Palestinian “other” that is prone to violence.
Zaki said she was struck by the “normalcy” of the lifestyle despite the difficult circumstances.
She pointed to her conversation with Akiva, who acknowledged that every child from his generation in the settlements grew up with post-traumatic stress, only to later explain that the reason he chose to remain in the settlement after undergoing an ideological about-face was because of his children.
Zaki does not shy away from addressing apparent hypocrisies within her own camp. She asks Moriya if she was afraid growing up in Hebron, the flashpoint city often characterized as an epicenter of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Not missing a beat, Moriya recalls what she used to tell her left-wing cousins who would ask her the same question growing up: “I don’t understand. You love Arabs. What are you afraid of?”
Zaki does not respond.
Later in the conversation, the Tekoa local recalls becoming enamored of the settlements as a child through the stories of Israel’s pioneering kibbutzniks.
“The grandchildren of those kibbutzniks disowned us and somehow said that whatever was captured in ’48 was okay and whatever was captured in ’67 was not. Even though in ’48, they drove out entire villages and settled on top of them,” Moriya says.
Zaki appeared to be stepping into a minefield of cliches by choosing to film a documentary centered around a leftist that goes to to meet “the settlers.” However, she manages to avoid the pitfalls thanks largely to her ability to engage locals from their own vantage point and through their personal stories.
