Discordia

Watch Discordia

September 9, 2002, jewish student group Hillel has invited former Israeli Prime Minister Ben Netanyahu (former at the time, now he's PM again) to give a lecture at Concordia University in Montreal.

Concordia had/has a lot of students sympathetic to the cause of Palestinians and some consider Netanyahu a war criminal. They decided to protest his visit. The protest turned into cops beating a couple dudes, and a broken window.

The film, made by a jew and an arab, captures the following year the from the perspective of 3 students:

Samir Elatrash - Canadian of Palestinian decent. Vice-President of Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights. This guys a good speaker and seems to know whats going on.

Aaron Maté - One of the student council executives. Jewish guy, son of Canadian doctor/writer/activist/baller Gabor Maté. This guy is pro-peace, pro-palestinian, but thinks that Netanyahu should have been able to speak. Samir and Aaron were both beaten by the Po in the protest. This guys probably the smartest of the three.

Noah Sarna - Head of Hillel, and probably the most interesting of the three. For most of the film he seems oblivious to the perspective of the other two guys. He's from an all jewish school and had never really come into contact with people who see the conflict differently than the way he did. He seems like a nice, open-minded guy. Near the end he says something i wish more people would say when dealing with issues they don't understand, whether its true or not:

"...the scary thing is, no matter how open minded you think you are, no matter how objective or how knowledgeable you think you are, you can never know if you're just always deluding yourself. You can never know for sure if you're just close-minded still."

8/10