By Nate Feldman
I get emails from the American Friends of Neve Shalom/Wahat Al Salam, a village in Israel with Israeli Jewish and Palestinian residents. In their most recent newsletter, attached was a recent interview a resident, Noam Shuster Eliassi, did with the Reuters news agency.
Noam, from an Israeli Jewish family, has been performing comedy in many venues, discussing the situation in the Middle East. Having grown up in a joint Israeli-Palestinian town, she is able to connect with Arab audiences and is very sympathetic to their cause. The article discusses a documentary about her called Coexistence, my Ass!, which is the name of her comedy routine.
Reading her interview there are a couple of things that struck me. On the one hand, I admire that she is willing to connect to the other side of the conflict. For example she has performed at the Palestine Comedy Festival in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem. She has also been willing to perform her act in parts of Israel where views like her are very unfavorable. She mentioned the need of reaching out to ultra-nationalists, not just leftwing activists who already favor coexistence.
On the other hand, some of the views expressed in the article seem quite typical for most global leftwing activists, which pretty much present Israel as the big, dark villain of the story and the Palestinians as entirely innocent. While it focuses on the suffering of people in Gaza, it doesn't really bring up sensitive issues like Israeli prisoners being starved by the Hamas organization, the October 7 massacres, or the fact that entire communities in Northern Israel were endlessly shelled by Hezbollah rockets (or the attacks of Iran on Israeli civilian populations). This is not to say there is no suffering in Gaza, because there is. And, it is not to say that Israel never commits atrocities because it does.
That is not to take away from what Noam Shuster Eliassi does. I wish there were more people who did work like this. But, keeping oversimplistic narratives of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict don't help either.
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