Name: Aqabat-Jaber, Peace with No Return?
Director: Eyal Sivan
Released: 1995

Aqabat-Jaber, Peace with No Return?

1995 — 61 min — Colour, 16mm — Eyal Sivan

Can Israeli-Palestinian peace be envisioned without the return of Palestinian refugees to their native land, now Israel? Is this a physical return or a symbolic one, founded on the recognition of the injustice inflicted on the people of Palestine in 1948, at the creation of the State of Israel?

Having filmed Aqabat-Jaber, Passing Through on the eve of the first Intifada, Eyal Sivan returns to this refugee camp in 1994, in the wake of the Israeli army's withdrawal from the region. A few kilometres from Jericho, Aqabat-Jaber, built 70 years ago, is a refugee camp now under Palestinian self-rule. Yet its 3,000 inhabitants have not changed status. After the peace accords, they remain refugees and cannot return to the villages their parents were driven from. At the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the question of the refugees' return will determine the future of the Middle East.

This film, conceived as an analogy, tells the story of Palestinian refugees as the story of all refugees, deported populations, displaced people, who stand at the centre of the great conflicts of our time.

Photo gallery

Photo Aqabat-Jaber, Peace with No Return? 1

Photo Aqabat-Jaber, Peace with No Return? 2

Photo Aqabat-Jaber, Peace with No Return? 3

Photo Aqabat-Jaber, Peace with No Return? 4

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Credits

A film by: Eyal Sivan
Producer: Armelle Laborie
Camera: Nurith Aviv
Sound: Rémy Attal
Editing: Sylvie Pontoizeau

Press (excerpts)

“A very powerful testimony on the uprooted of every origin. With a fine restraint and without the usual moralizing, it bears witness to the almost irreducible fractures of memory and to this tragic clash between the "Palestinian right of return" and the Israeli law of return.” — Libération
“Eyal Sivan continues his relentless and unsettling investigative work on the true nature of his native country. This reflection on memory, history, values, the myths of Israel confronted with reality, passes, of course — and perhaps above all — through knowledge of the other. That is, of the enemy-partner of the past half-century: the Palestinian.” — Le Nouvel Observateur
“From this honest and rigorous film, carrying the poetry of the depths of despair, it emerges that the Prophet stopped at Aqabat-Jaber, this metaphorical site of the Palestinian impasse.” — Télérama