Six films on Gaza from the Media Education Foundation

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OCCUPATION 101

While polls show that Americans see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as exceedingly complicated, they also indicate that Americans are strikingly unfamiliar with one of the fundamental sources of the conflict: Israel's nearly five-decade military occupation of Palestinian land. In straightforward and accessible terms, Occupation 101 lays out the basic facts of the occupation, providing crucial context that too often goes missing in American media coverage of the conflict.

THE WAR AROUND US

The War Around Us tells the riveting true story of the only two international journalists on the ground during Israel's first major bombardment and invasion of Gaza in 2008-9. Award-winning filmmaker Abdallah Omeish chronicles the experiences of Al Jazeera's Arab-American Ayman Mohyeldin and Arab-British Sherine Tadros as they report from Gaza City throughout the devastating assault. Mohyeldin, who has been covering the current Gaza invasion for NBC news, made headlines last week when network executives took issue with his powerful reporting about Palestinian civilian casualties.

PEACE, PROPAGANDA & THE PROMISED LAND

This critically acclaimed documentary about American news coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict exposes how pro-Israel pressure groups, U.S. strategic interests, and a narrow set of deep-seated cultural myths have combined to dehumanize Palestinians and minimize the brutality of Israel’s illegal military occupation. Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land provides a stunning look at how ideological assumptions and political pressures distort U.S. media coverage of the conflict.


LIFE IN OCCUPIED PALESTINE

Anna Baltzer, a graduate of Columbia University and the Jewish-American granddaughter of Holocaust refugees, documents her experience as a volunteer with the International Women's Peace Service in the West Bank, offering a straightforward account of everyday Palestinian life under Israeli military occupation. Life in Occupied Palestine provides a powerful ground-level perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – one too often absent from mainstream American media coverage and American political discourse.

ARNA'S CHILDREN

Arna Mer Khamis was born into a Jewish family, married a Palestinian Arab, and emerged as a legendary activist against the Israeli Occupation. Arna's Children tells the alternately inspiring and tragic story of the theatre group she established in the Jenin refugee camp to help children channel their anger, bitterness, and fear into the arts. Filmmaker Juliano Mer Khamis, Arna’s son, takes us back to the camp years after his mother’s death to find out what happened to these children, telling a powerful and heartbreaking story that juxtaposes their lives at the theater with their lives as militants years later

LIVE: FROM BETHLEHEM

LIVE: From Bethlehem documents the struggles and successes of the Bethlehem-based Ma’an News Agency, the only independent news network in the Palestinian Territories and an increasingly prominent source of information in the wider Middle East. The result is a fascinating and nuanced look at how news gets produced — and how ordinary Palestinians live — under Israeli military occupation, seen through the eyes of reporters, producers, and photographers on the ground.