CRACK IN THE WALL

SYNOPSIS

Rami Elhanan is Israeli and Bassam Aramin is Palestinian.

While meeting her friends, Smadar, Rami’s daughter, dies in a suicide attack in the center of Jerusalem. Ten years later, Abir, Bassam’s daughter, is fatally shot by a young Israeli soldier during a break between classes. The tragic death of their daughters brings the fathers closer together and gives rise to a long-term friendship and a common mission.

Rami and Bassam travel together and tell their stories in various places in Israel, Palestine and around the world. This time they travel to Poland.

During their journey, we use fragments of memories to build a story about the lives of two families living on opposite sides of the wall, united by the pain of losing a beloved child.

The speeches of both fathers during the meeting, the many meetings they hold, in which they tell their story over and over again to different listeners in different places, are edited with scenes of their journeys to subsequent places, conversations between them and conversations with members of their families, as well as with photographs from private archives, archival materials from different periods of their lives, showing different periods in the history of Israel-Palestine.

PROTAGONISTS

Rami
My name is Rami Elhanan. I am Smadar’s father. I am a graphic designer, Israeli, Jewish, and Jerusalemite for seven generations. And you could say that also a Holocaust graduate. My mother was born into an ultra-Orthodox family in the Old City of Jerusalem. My father came here in ’46. He rarely mentioned what he saw in the camps, except when he talked to my daughter Smadar when she was ten or eleven.

The story I would like to tell begins and ends on a special day in the Jewish calendar, on Yom Kippur. For Jews, it is the holiest day of the year, the day of asking for forgiveness for sins.

On that day in ’97, three suicide bombers blew themselves up in the middle of Ben Yehuda Street in downtown Jerusalem, three bombs, one after the other. They killed eight people – themselves and five others, including three girls. One of them was our Smadari. It was Thursday, 3 p.m. She went to buy school books and then had a jazz dancing lesson. A pleasant, quiet day. She was walking with her friends, listening to music.

I’ve told this story so many times. But I always have something new to add. Memories come back to you endlessly. Just see the open book. Hear the door closing and the window opening. Whatever. Butterfly.

We buried her in Kibbutz Nachshon, on a green hill on the way to Jerusalem. Smadar was buried next to her grandfather, General Matti Peled, a true peace fighter, lecturer, and member of the Knesset. He was loved by people on both sides of the barricade, they came to his funeral from all corners of this mosaic country, Jews, Muslims, Christians, settler representatives, government representatives, Arafat representatives, people from abroad, everywhere. And then we buried her next to him.

When someone kills your daughter, you want to get even. Go out and kill any Arab, anyone, everyone. Revenge. This is the easiest way.

After some time, you start asking yourself questions. Will killing anyone bring my daughter back? You start to wonder what happened and why. Why was someone so angry, so desperate, so hopeless, that he decided to blow himself up next to a girl who wasn’t even fourteen? What shaped him? In what world was he born?

Then, about a year after Smadar’s murder, I met a man who changed my life. He told me about his son Arik, a soldier who was kidnapped and murdered by Hamas. And then he added that he founded such an organization – the Parents’ Association – for people from Palestine and Israel who have lost loved ones but still want peace. He invited me to a meeting.

They came in one by one, there were so many of them. Arabs? Really? At the same meeting as the Israelis? How is that possible? I saw a lady in a traditional black Palestinian dress, with a scarf on her head – I could assume she was the mother of one of the attackers who took my daughter. She walked slowly. Only after a while I saw that she was clutching a photo of her daughter to her chest. She passed me. I couldn’t move. This woman lost her child. My mourning was the same as this woman’s.

I was forty-eight years old then and it was the first time I saw Palestinians as human beings. Not just workers on the streets, cartoons in newspapers, terrorists, but real people who suffer exactly as I do. I saw the equality of pain.

This wound will never fully heal. I despair. Joining others saved my life. We may have built a wall for ourselves, but it is in our heads, and every day I try to break it down a little.

My name is Rami Elhanan, I am Smadar’s father. I say it every day, and every day becomes a new beginning because someone else hears it. I will repeat these words until my death, it will never change, but until the end of my days I will try to make a tiny crack in this wall.

Bassam
My name is Bassam Aramin, I am Abir’s father. I am Palestinian, Muslim, Arab. I am forty-eight years old. I lived in various places – in a cave near Hebron, for seven years in prison, then in an apartment in Anath, and now in a house with a garden in Jericho near the Dead Sea.

When I was a boy, my friends and I hung out the Palestinian flag in the school yard. We knew the Israeli soldiers would go crazy. We waited for them to come and started throwing stones at them. We were kids, we didn’t understand what was happening. To your village…

Some people come to your village, speaking an incomprehensible language. Who they are? Aliens. They arrive in armored vehicles, ask for identification, and say: Against the wall! Shut up! Turn around! On the ground! They break into your house in the hills, cut off the road, and destroy it. They arrest your father, brothers and uncles. They stop you on your way to school. Your teacher is arrested at the school gate. You too soon. I knew children who were beaten and killed.

When I was seventeen, the prison bars closed on me for seven years.

I got out of prison in ’92. I got married right away. In ’94, we had a son, Araab, and then a daughter, Amir. I tried to do everything in my power to ensure that my son would never end up in an Israeli prison, so that he would not throw stones. I was one of four Palestinians who initiated talks with Israeli soldiers. We founded organizations of peace fighters. Rami’s son, Elik, was also there. This is how our families met.

On January sixteenth, two thousand and seven – two years after the founding of the Peace Fighters – my ten-year-old daughter Abir left school for break. Near the entrance to the school, Abir was shot by an Israeli Border Police officer. An American-made rubber bullet. In the back of the head. She went to the store to buy sweets.

She did not regain consciousness. The ambulance could not reach the hospital for several hours because the army claimed that there was a riot at the border point.

No investigation was carried out. It is never carried out when one of our men is shot. Typically, nothing is said or done when a Palestinian child is killed.

I joined the Parents Association just a few days after Abir passed away. I started traveling with Rami, we went everywhere around Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Bayt Jali and told our stories over and over again. We had a mission. Mourning gave us strength. We didn’t want revenge. Abir was born the same year Smadar was murdered. In the same hospital.

I don’t have time for hate anymore. Let’s invest in peace, not blood.

She did not regain consciousness. The ambulance could not reach the hospital for several hours because the army claimed that there was a riot at the border point.

In Palestine we say that ignorance is a terrible companion. We don’t talk to Israelis. We are not allowed to talk to them – neither Palestine nor Israel wants this. We have no idea who the others are. Build a wall and a checkpoint, erase the Nakba from textbooks, do whatever you like. We must learn how to share this country, or we will share it in our graves.

You can hate me. Build as many walls as you want. If you think a wall will keep you safe, run it through your garden, not mine.

DIRECTOR’S VISION

We live in a world of intensified war conflicts, which, more or less distant from each of us, are present in our homes through incoming messages, photographs, films, also posted on social media.

We all remember increasingly horrific images of death and injury to people, including children and infants, victims of shelling and bombing.

In this world of an escalating war industry, how can we hope to stop the escalating hatred, bloodshed and path to peace?

Two protagonists – an Israeli, Rami, and a Palestinian, Bassam, set off on a journey together. Both of them were touched by the tragedy of losing their beloved child, both of them face unimaginable pain. They know it is a pain that cannot be cured. You can turn it into hatred, the desire for revenge, or try to understand what led to these tragedies and constant bloodshed. Invest in peace, not blood.

They are active in the Association of Parents of Victims – both Palestinian and Israeli. They travel all over the world and tell their stories to different people, in different countries, not only in Israel and Palestine.

Rami’s father was in Auschwitz as a teenager, Rami calls himself a Holocaust graduate. The only person Rami’s father told about his camp experiences was his granddaughter Smadar, who died in a suicide attack in Jerusalem. The trauma affects the next generation.

Rami wonders what led young Palestinians to blow themselves up next to teenage girls, what kind of world they grew up in, how desperate and manipulated they were.

During the journeys in which we accompany Rami and Bassam, we learn the stories of both families – Israeli and Palestinian, through memories, archival materials and photographs. We observe a unique relationship between both fathers, connected by the pain of losing their daughters, but also by a strong peace mission and the need to build mutual respect instead of oppression and occupation.

This is their mission, how to turn pain, hatred, ignorance into an attempt at understanding. In their opinion, this is the only way to learn to live side by side without aggression and violence.

Their testimony, deeply human, from the abyss of suffering that never ends, after the loss of beloved children, shows the way to understanding without violence, without further victims, destroys the separation wall behind which occupation and oppression persists.

These are two monologues, people from both sides of the wall calling each other “brother”.

Even though they come from different worlds and everything divides them, they are united by friendship and even brotherhood.

The film begins in the morning and ends at night, but this symbolic day includes not one but many journeys, as Rami and Bassam repeatedly tell their stories to different groups of listeners in different places. Their monologues turn into a dialogue between them and with the listeners. It’s not always an easy conversation, sometimes they have to deal with attack or aggression.

An important part of the film is showing different groups of listeners and their reactions – different depending on the place and age. The tragic stories told by the characters, although they happened many years ago, remain in the modern world and are recalled again and again in the story. They evoke different reactions, sometimes unpredictable ones. They are also portraits of people trapped in different thinking patterns.

War conflict is present all over the world again and again. We participate through the media and images in various wars around the world, although most often we know little about the history and essence of the conflict. We know what the media tells us.

The relationship of our heroes is personal, intimate and allows us to understand both sides of the conflict in a deep, human dimension, without ideology or politics, from the perspective of an ordinary person, which could potentially be each of us. Geography matters.

The film is told as if from two sides of the wall: Israel and the West Bank.