They both lost a close family member during the first intifadah, and they both belong to the organization Combatants for Peace.
Elhanan lost his 14-year-old sister in a suicide bomb attack in Jerusalem. Aramin’s young daughter was killed by an Israeli soldier during an incursion in the West Bank.
Combatants for Peace consists of former IDF soldiers and Palestinian fighters who have put down their weapons and are using active, non-violent means to resolve the conflict.
The Billboard from Bethlehem is a 60-minute documentary about a Connecticut billboard company’s owner, Bruce Barrett, who proposes to Combatants for Peace that they build a giant peace mural.
The idea came about when Barrett, who directed this documentary, heard members of Combatants for Peace give a speech at a synagogue in Connecticut and was “wowed.”
He approached them to do this mural in his shop, but they convinced him it would work better if they got Jewish and Palestinian kids to paint it in Bethlehem.
Billboard from Bethlehem trailer
The completed mural later hung on a giant billboard in Connecticut, on Connecticut Interstate I-95 and Route 84.
The film is mostly a collection of interviews with members of Combatants for Peace, who talk about their fighting experience and why they decided to lay down their arms.
“Occupation leads to resistance, resistance leads to oppression, oppression leads to more resistance, which leads to more oppression and innocent people pay the price. People like my sister pay the price,” Elhanan says.
Although the film doesn’t take sides and goes through pains to show both Jews and Palestinians as victims in a political struggle, it does have an obvious left-wing bias. It refers to “Palestine,” “resistance fighters” and “the occupation” throughout the documentary.
The group Combatants for Peace has as its goal the establishment of a Palestinian state with its capital in east Jerusalem.
The Billboard for Bethlehem makes its Canadian première at the ReelHeaRT International Film Festival on June 27 at 1:45 p.m. at the Innis Theatre in Innis College, University of Toronto, 2 Sussex Ave.
It airs in a program with two unscreened films, The Sky Was Angry, about children and teens who took refuge in a theatre in Beirut during the recent war, and Marathon Beirut, an American film about 20,000 people who took part in a marathon for peace in Lebanon.
Elik Elhanan, a former Israel Defence Forces paratrooper, and Bassam Aramin, a former Palestinian “resistance fighter,” have two things in common.
