The celebrated signing of the Oslo Peace Agreement in 1993, symbolized by the handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, signaled to people throughout the world a long-awaited resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Recent events, however, have cast a shadow over the original optimism for regional peace and revealed the fundamental shortcomings of the agreement. Tom Wright and Therese Saliba lived in the West Bank from 1995 to 1996 and chronicled these events as they unfolded. Checkpoint, their new video-documentary, portrays a side of the story little known to American audiences: the devastating effects of the agreement on Palestinian lives. With an engaging style and offbeat humor, the documentary exposes shallow mass-media interpretations of the conflict and reveals the immense imbalance of power between the two sides.
Palestinian and Israeli human rights activists, as well as political figures like Hanan Ashrawi, give their views of the major events of the period: Rabin's assassination, the Palestinian Authority takeover of West Bank towns, the first Palestinian elections, the suicide bus bombings, Arafat's abuse of power, Netanyahu's election, and the September 1996 uprising.
Checkpoint takes its title from the innumerable Israeli roadblocks, which ironically have become a permanent feature in the new era of Palestinian "autonomy." In the post-Oslo era, the checkpoint becomes the symbol of Israeli control and domination. In the face of these obstacles, Israelis and Palestinians seek to grapple with these grave injustices and to set forth an alternative vision for a just peace.
