On a quest to discover how long I can survive on only soup, I run into some hard truths about eating.
1948 veteran Amnon Noiman speaks at a Zochrot Testimony Evening in Tel Aviv, Israel in 2010, as part of Lia Tarachansky’s upcoming documentary, Seven Deadly Myths. Amnon Noiman was born in Mandate Palestine. He’s a veteran of the 1948 war. He served in the PALMACH, in the seventh and ninth brigade. He was responsible for the expulsion of Palestinians from the Negev desert, where he fought against the Egyptian army. He delivered the above testimony at the request of Ameer Hallel and Zochrot to a Tel Aviv audience on July 19th, 2010. He later gave me another interview in his home in Haifa. Synopsis SEVEN DEADLY MYTHS, (Israel/Palestine, 2013, 55 min) Three years after the holocaust the Middle East was changed forever when Israel fought and won its independence. In that war, two-thirds of the Palestinians became refugees. In the years following, their properties and history were confiscated and destroyed, while to this day they remain in camps all over the Arab world. They never stopped fighting for their right to return to their homes, many of which were demolished. But it was not the houses; it was the very memory of this national trauma that was itself erased. In a new documentary, Seven Deadly Myths(working title), former Israeli settler and journalist Lia Tarachansky sheds light on the collective amnesia of Israelis when it comes to the fateful events of those years. She follows the transformation of four 1948 veterans as they uncover and challenge decades of denied memories. She then returns to her own settlement, in the heart of the occupied West Bank, to uncover a landscape of denial and a history of erasure.
During the weeks of January 23 and February 6, Salaam Shalom: Report on Palestine/Israel will explore the crime and consequences of ethnic cleansing in Palestine, from 1948 to the present day. We will feature, first, the videotaped testimonies of Palestinian refugees who were driven from their homes, villages and urban neighborhoods in 1948-49, in what Palestinians call the “Nakba,” the “Catastrophe,” in part 1 of a film titled, “The Nakba Dailies.” This will be followed by a report from the Alternative Information Center (AIC) in Jerusalem, a joint Israeli-Palestinian project, documenting the ongoing destruction of Bedouin villages and the confiscation of their lands inside Israel in the Negev desert. The Prawer Report, released last September by the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, calls for the relocation of 30,000 of Israel’s Bedouin citizens from their ancestral lands to special “townships” in the Negev, to more easily facilitate the immoral redistribution of their lands to Jewish settlers and communities. Finally, in a film called “Portrait of a Grape Farmer,” also produced by AIC, we will travel to the West Bank to hear the story of Ali Suleiman Daoud, a school teacher turned farmer, who describes the daily struggle to survive under military occupation as a Palestinian and farmer, as his livelihood and his lands come under attack from soldiers and settlers. Our show ends with an update on the recent destruction by Israeli soldiers with a bulldozer of the Palestinian Bedouin village of Beit Arabiya, in the West Bank, on the night of January 23, 2012. 100 men, women and children were left homeless.