Film Series to Culminate with Address by Noted Professor
BY WILLIAM SCHUTT

Most people have difficulty fully understanding the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. To better inform the community, Oberlin students and faculty organized a film series running all this week and into the weekend. The series will also usher in keynote speaker Rashid Khalidi, professor of Middle East history at the University of Chicago. 
The project was conceived by juniors Louise McGauley, Juliana Keen and senior Debra Guckenheimer. The three were concerned that such a serious topic received insufficient attention at Oberlin. One of the problems they recognized was the length and subsequent complications of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The first time America bore witness to the Israeli-Palestinian discord was in 1948. 

Last semester, the students approached women’s studies Professor Frances Hasso, who became the project’s chief organizer. 
“The students wanted a way to get involved and I recommended focusing on something they had all participated in — films,” Hasso said. “They’ve done a wonderful job.” Hasso is also responsible for initially contacting Khalidi. 
“We didn’t want films of Israeli men with guns or Palestinian boys with rocks. Students here have a tendency to see things in black and white. We chose films that were more personal and revealed the complexities within the conflict,” said Guckenheimer, who at one time lived in Israeli for three and a half years.
The first film, Out for Love…be back Shortly shown Monday, was a former soldier’s documentary about his search for love amidst the tension surrounding the assassination of former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. In the film, the narrator’s personal tribulations — not being able to express his feelings to his girlfriend — become part of a larger, more tragic story involving the crisis plaguing his country.
“The conflict itself is so complex that one film can’t tackle the entire situation. The beauty of this film was that it came from one man’s perspective. It didn’t try to be more than it was,” sophomore Lindsey Dillon said after viewing Monday’s film.
Other films screened this week included Circus Palestina, a comedy about a Russian circus troupe visiting a Palestinian town and losing their main attraction — a lion — and You, Me, Jerusalem, a documentary of two EMTs, one Israeli, the other Palestinian, discussing politics. 
The series was planned as a way for students to become more aware of the conflict, especially at a level of relating personally to the tragedy through the medium of film. These resources were previously unavailable to students as Guckenheimer, Mcgauley and Keen discovered during planning.
When they first asked Mudd for films to screen, they were informed the library had no such documents. Consequently, the library decided to purchase all of the films being shown so students who could not attend this week’s series have the opportunity to watch them at their leisure. 
The film series will be followed by Khalidi’s talk, which is being sponsored by the office of the president the office of the dean of student affairs, the history, politics and women’s studies departments and the Mead-Swing Lecture Committee.
Khalidi will be focusing specifically on Jerusalem, the Middle Eastern subject he is currently focusing on. According to Hasso, Khalidi is the leading Middle Eastern Studies academic. He is author of three novels about the Middle East and over seventy scholarly articles on features of its history and politics. His talk is intended to give members of the campus a fuller understanding of the situation in response to a desire for a public forum to engage in a serious dialogue as Hasso and the student organizers have demonstrated.
“There seems to be a gap in the departments for this subject because the issue permeates many fields — history, politics, religion — so there’s no intellectual space to actually talk about it that’s charged,” Hasso said. 
For the students involved in the project, the series has thus far been a successful one. 

“It’s been very worthwhile. At every movie I have heard people crying. A few people have thanked us for getting people to think about what is happening in the Middle East and how the actions of the U.S. affect people abroad,” Keen said.
The series also offers pamphlets listing internet sources of information on the conflict and will be showing two PBS specials this Saturday and Sunday — Beginning with The Partition of Palestine at 5 p.m. in Mudd and The Fifty-Years War: Israel and the Arabs being shown at 4:30 p.m. Khalidi will also be taking the time to have an informal discussion with students after his speech.