Cinema’s special screening shines a light on Palestinian-Israeli relations

When the film was submitted to the Berlinale Film Festival this year, tickets for all four screenings sold out on the first day.  

“The film is testimony to a truth that never seems to be told in the mainstream media or by politicians of any flavour: Palestinians and Israelis are not mutually exclusive,” said Sharyn. 

“It serves many dubious agendas to dismiss the 75-year-old conflict with a glib, ‘well, they’re never going to be able to live together peacefully’, not least that of the UK companies selling arms to Israel. 

“But in fact, for a great deal of history prior to the setting up of modern day Israel on a part of the map that had said ‘Palestine’ for a very long time, Muslims, Jews and Christians had lived as neighbours. 

“I once asked an elderly Palestinian if she knew how far Christianity dated back in her family. ‘My great-great-great-great-great-many-greats-grandmother,’ she replied, with a twinkle in her eye, ‘used to babysit Jesus.’

“And for decades, a long list of organisations and individuals from both Palestine and Israel have been working co-operatively for a shared, peaceful future beyond the colonial occupation of one by the other. 

“Now, under more difficult circumstances than ever before, Israeli organisations such as Israeli Committee Against Housing Demolition and Combatants for Peace continue to demand that their government cease constant breaches of international law and implement an immediate ceasefire in Palestine and Lebanon for the sake of all, not least any surviving Israeli hostages.

“Physicians for Human Rights Israel and B’Tselem have been particularly vocal in calling also for the release of the thousands of Palestinians held without charge in Israeli detention, including many healthcare workers taken from Gaza hospitals.”

Sharyn, who has volunteered many times in Palestine, including being part of the Free Gaza Flotilla that broke the Israeli sea blockade in 2008 to get to Gaza and volunteering in ambulances and Gaza hospitals, travelled to Cairo this year to support Palestinian refugees seeking refuge in the Egyptian capital. 

She said: “In the past, I have regularly volunteered to accompany unarmed West Bank Palestinians going out to harvest crops or hold peaceful demonstrations, where this resulted in the immediate arrival of armed Israeli soldiers. 

“To support the human right of these farming families to be on their community land, we internationals stood in front of them. But often, in front of us, shielding us all as best they could, facing the guns of their conscripted fellows, stood Israelis. 

“At the end of a sometimes terrifying day, we would drink black sweet tea together in Biddu, or Buddrus, or wherever we were, and I would watch Palestinians and Israelis laughing together with relief that no-one was injured. And when there were injuries and deaths, they would carry each other.”

Sharyn will return to Edinburgh’s Parliament House next week to hold a second ceasefire vigil, one year on from her first, as the World Health Organisation confirms that 10,000 Gazans are missing, more than 102,000 have suffered injuries including head and spinal cord injuries, major burns, and injuries requiring amputation, and 43,000 Gazans are dead. 

The dead include Shirin, her daughter Saja, and Saja’s baby, about whom Sharyn wrote in the Campbeltown Courier in 2023.