At the Heart of the Conflict: Youth in the West Bank Take Sides

The music is powerful, unfamiliar and beautiful. The camera pans across children laughing and playing, and then armed men in camouflage. There are rows of houses set back in the hills, dry countryside and high rise apartment buildings. There is a kosher Burger King and a Marlboro store, buses like you'd find in any other big city, but there is also an undercurrent of fear. Here people are divided by religion, ethnicity, and class. This is Jerusalem, home to both Israelis and Palestinians, who for years have been fighting for the right to the land they both claim as home.

Audiences around the US will have an opportunity to see this footage of Jerusalem in "Promises," a POV documentary, that will be running on PBS during the week of December 12th (check your local PBS station for exact dates and times). "Promises" shows a slice of this life in Jerusalem and shows viewers the Palestinian and Israeli conflict through the eyes of seven children.

All of the children's views are pivotal to understanding the situation in Jerusalem. There are the twins, Yarko and Daniel, secular Jews who are frightened yet fairly ambivalent; Mahmoud who is fiercely anti-Israeli; Schlomo who has been exposed to American culture and appears to have a strong sense of equality; Sanabel an outspoken and political Palestinian girl, who's father is a journalist imprisoned in Jerusalem; Faraj who lives in a Refugee camp and took part in the Intifada; and Moishe who's family are fundamentalist Zionists.

Although they live in the same city, only minutes away from one another, the children's lives are all very different. Some of the Israeli children appear sheltered and have a limited knowledge of what is going on around them, while the Palestinian children live in refugee camps, are directly involved in the political struggle and all have a very strong sense of patriotism. In fact, some of the Palestinian children's views were so politically charged that director and producer Justine Shapiro says she and her fellow filmmakers felt they had to be very careful about what they allowed into the final cut of the film, not wanting to compromise the safety of any their subjects.

	There is a kosher Burger King and a Marlboro store, buses like you'd find in any other big city, but there is also an undercurrent of fear. Here people are divided by religion, ethnicity, and class.

But "Promises" does not shy away from the anger, fear and frustration that is at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. At some moments the youth profiled are mirrors of the adults in their lives. Several of the Palestinian kids actually call for violent resolution, or eradication of the Jews. The Jewish children are equally stubborn at moments. They invoke God, point out scripture and advise the Arab's to give up their struggle.

Even the children who don't have black and white beliefs about the rightful ownership of Jerusalem live in constant turmoil. And this film is filled with the kind of strong images that place the viewer inside that turmoil. In one scene the twins are shown riding on a public bus, and talking about their fears of terrorism. "There were lots of terrorist attacks on the number 18 bus," says Yarko. "People avoid the number 18, which is dumb 'cause if I take the number 22 -- which is supposed to be the safe line -- I could still blow up. When I get on I'm anxious, so I look for suspicious people. If I see a really scary person, I watch him. I try to get off before he does. I keep waiting for the explosion."

The Palestinian children, on the other hand, have lived in the cramped refugee camps for three generations. They are kept from travelling freely around the West Bank by checkpoints set up between regions. When the Palestinian children do need to travel, like when Sanebel and her family visit her father in prison, they are met by guards who often don't speak the language, and demand government papers and cooperation.

In another scene, Faraj and his grandmother travel into the city illegally to visit the site of her family's home, now an empty, overgrown hillside. His grandmother, who still has the deed to the land and the key to what had been their house, passes these things on to Faraj, encourages him to stay true to a vision of returning.