On the Side of the Road

Lia Tarachansky grew up in a settlement. When the second Intifadah broke out in 2000 her family moved to Canada. There, for the first time she met Palestinians and “discovered” their history and learned why they were fighting Israel in the first place. When she became a journalist, she returned to Israel to become the local correspondent for The Real News network. Returning for the first time to her settlement, she “discovers” the Palestinians next door as she travels the West Bank covering the Israeli military occupation. In this film she meets with those who played a personal role in the events of 1948 and like her, “discovered” that which they had not only erased from their consciousness, but erased from the map. For years she tries to convince veterans of the 1948 that set off the conflict as we know it today to face the most difficult questions and dig deep into their memories. This is a film about the questions Israelis cannot ask, about memories that cannot be uncovered, and the history that’s fighting to come to light. It was then, in 1948, three years after the holocaust that the nascent Jewish state was created in a bloody war that led to two-thirds of the Palestinian people becoming refugees. Those who fled or were expelled to this day remain in camps throughout the Arab world, the West Bank and Gaza. In 2009 the Israeli government proposed a law that forbade mourning this history. A law that attempted to criminalize history itself.