Kopkind Colony

One of the rich pleasures of going to the movies is the chance to talk about it after. Kopkind’s Movie Night on Saturday, July 27 – 7 pm at 118 Elliot in downtown Brattleboro – will feature the documentary Israelism, followed by comments from special guests from the Palestine solidarity movement of Western Massachusetts, who will then engage the audience in discussion. In the project’s tradition, this is an inter-generational group, with two people who have been doing organizing and activism together for more than twenty years, and two who have worked together on a number of actions over the past year, including the UMass Amherst encampment. The event is free and open to the public.

A bit more about our guests, in their own words:

Hind Mari was born and raised in Palestine. She was nearly 6 years old when the Six-Day War took place in June 1967, placing her city of Nablus under Israeli military rule. She has vivid memories of the bombings and the earliest days of Israeli military occupation. In early September of that year, her dad, who was a school superintendent, was jailed for six weeks for going on strike and refusing to start the new school year as a protest to a ban by Israel on 84 textbooks.

Hind likes to call herself (and her brother) the original BDS organizers for their refusal to buy Israeli candy in 1967, and for convincing the neighborhood kids to follow suit. She went to college in Nablus, Occupied Palestine, where her education was interrupted by school closures, roadblocks and jailings. She earned a Fulbright for her master’s in 1986 and came to UMass Amherst, where she earned her doctorate and continues to work.

Alisa Klein grew up an ardent Zionist in a Jewish American family, and lived as a teenager and young adult on a kibbutz in the north of Israel. She completed high school there, served two mandatory years in the Israeli army, and attended university in Tel Aviv. What she experienced in the army, and then studied at university, ultimately brought her to an understanding of the inherent inhumanity and genocidal nature of the settler colonial project that is Zionism and the State of Israel. After writing her master’s thesis in Amman, Jordan, and serving as the editor of a Bethlehem-based online journal of alternative analysis of Israel and Palestine, she returned to the US as an ardent Palestine liberation activist and annual visitor/activist to the West Bank. Since 2000, she has lived and conducted activism in Northampton in Western Mass. 

Molly Aronson grew up in an observant Jewish and politically minded household, and became skeptical of Israel and the Zionist project at an early age. In college at the University of Michigan, they were one of a few vocal Jews advocating for divestment, and later got involved in more radical Palestinian solidarity movements. While Zionism had made Jewish spaces unattractive for most of their life, learning about the history of anti-Zionist Jews and organizations such as Jewish Voice for Peace opened up a new road into organizing for Palestine and connecting with their own faith, history and lineage. Since October, Molly has been organizing for Palestine in Western Mass with Jewish Voice for Peace, Jewish Voice for Peace Action and the Western Mass Coalition for Palestine. They were a lead organizer of the 25 Mile March for Palestine – a march the length of Gaza that mobilized more than 600 people from Northampton to Springfield, MA. 

Louai Abu-Osba is a Palestinian American, born to parents from Salama, Palestine. Salama was the first village to be ethnically cleansed by Zionist militias from Europe during the Nakba. He grew up primarily in Saudi Arabia and Jordan, with a sprinkling of Connecticut, Maryland and Qatar. He graduated from Hampshire College in 2003, where he was elected student commencement speaker. During his commencement speech, Louai characterized Israel’s founding as genocide, its policies in occupied Palestine as apartheid, and strongly advocated for Hampshire College to divest its endowment from Israeli companies. Louai has worked as a content creator and software engineer in media and entertainment ever since, and recently founded The ArtStead, a permaculture and experiential media lab focused on social justice, climate change and community activism.

Israelism tells the story of two young Jewish Americans who were raised to love Israel unconditionally but whose perspectives take a sharp left turn when they witness the brute realities of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. They join a movement of young American Jews battling the old guard to redefine Judaism’s relationship with Israel, revealing a deepening generational divide over US policy in the Middle East and modern Jewish identity.

We decided to show this film now because despite the multicultural, multiracial, multigenerational masses demanding a ceasefire and opposing US complicity in genocide in Gaza – in other words, the evidence of one’s own eyes and reality – so much media and political bloviation has sought to downplay or even erase not only the participation of young Jewish Americans in the protests and campus encampments but the decades’ long movement for Palestinian liberation in this country.

Simultaneously, the vast majority of reportage on Israel and Palestine in most anyone’s memory – as well as on the genocide in Gaza – has invisibilized the Palestinian experience or rendered it narrowly, prejudicially, often stupidly or in a deliberately deceptive fashion. Our guests on the 27^th are all involved in the current movement. Hind and Louai’s life experiences as Palestinian, what they want audiences of the film to know and be thinking about beyond the confines of its story, are especially critical to any informed consideration of the solidarity movement and of this crisis for the people of Gaza, the Occupied Territories, the diaspora and the world. A genocidal war is everyone’s business. Given longstanding and current US foreign policy, every American has a responsibility to try to stop it.

The question of Palestine and a people’s right to self-determination have been part of Kopkind’s concerns from the start of this project. They were critical issues that Andrew Kopkind wrote about and analyzed in his journalism. Alisa Klein, who has been the central organizer of the panel for the upcoming post-screening discussion, was a ‘camper’ at the Kopkind/Eqbal Ahmad Initiative seminar/retreat on the Middle East in 2003. This free Movie Night culminates Kopkind’s first session this summer, with political journalists and organizers, who have been meeting and thinking for the past week on the theme ‘The Politics of Life vs. Death’.