(Photo Credit: Human rights are for Everyone)

By Nathaniel Leigh

Israel-Hamas War

Local organizers holding peaceful protest of Israel-Hamas war with documentary screening

Jul 25, 2024 | 8:00 AM

A local group will be screening a documentary at Safety City as part of a peace demonstration against the war in Gaza.

Attendees will be able to view the documentary Irealism as well as a recorded 30-minute interview with a former college student living in the Gaza Strip, while Israel continues their war against Hamas.

The documentary follows two Jewish-American youth as they make a pilgrimage to Israel and covers topics such as apartheid, racism, dispossession of land and home, and the occupation of Palestinian land by the Israeli government.

Organizer Barry Deford says the purpose of the viewing is to help engage and inform the public of the situation.

“There’s not a lot of coverage in our media, and social media as we all know, can be a bit of a hot mess,” Deford says. “The point would be to give people the ability to have a constructive and conscientious discussion on what genocide means and base our conversation off of the concept of empathy.”

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(Photo Credit: Human rights are for Everyone)

Co-organizer Kayla Young says she hopes the screening experience will demonstrate that long-term peace cannot exist without equality.

“Seeing the resilience of people learning about [the war in Gaza] and saying That’s not right and it shouldn’t be happening to anyone anywhere,” Young says. “I’m hoping that viewers that come will come with an open heart and an open mind. We’re a peaceful group, we believe in non-violence. We ask people to come in that spirit and come to hear some of these stories.”

Deford says the documentary and the screening event in general serves as somewhat of a counterbalance to arguments that anyone against the war in Gaza is demonstrating antisemitism.

“These are voices of Jewish people who are not convinced by the way in which the Israeli culture is moving,” he says. “And in fact, it is moving in a direction that is quite antithetical to the peace-loving precepts of the Jewish religion and Jewish faith in general.”

The viewing goes tonight at Safety City at 7:00 p.m., pre-registration is required.