Coexistence, My Ass!

Headnote

Abstract

This is a film review of Coexistence, My Ass! (2025), directed by Amber Fares.

Keywords

Peace Activism, Gaza, Occupation, Palestine, Human Rights

Noam Shuster Eliassi is the child of an Iranian Jew and a Romanian Jew who raised her in a unique community in Israel in which Palestinians and Israeli Jews intentionally live together-the "Oasis of Peace," or Neve Shalom/Wahat al Salam. The children attend the same school, and all are taught Arabic as well as Hebrew, so that Noam is fluent in both languages. Their community represented an effort to achieve coexistence and equality with justice for the two communities, and received international praise for their efforts. Noam has worked for the United Nations as a peace activist, but as she became frustrated with her ability to make a change in that realm, she moved to comedy as a more effective means of communication for her message. She has created satirical videos, performed stand-up comedy, and used social media as well as broadcast television to reach an international audience and to garner support for the cause of understanding and peaceful coexistence. Yet she has now come to feel that her efforts may be futile, as violence against the Palestinians has reached an unprecedented level.

The documentary follows her over the last five years-through the pandemic, in which she was quarantined with a religiously diverse group, into the years in which she has toured and broadcast her message. She is genuinely hilarious, and is able to disarm her audiences with her humor which satirizes the idiocy of religiously and ethnically motivated hatred. But as the years passed, she also found herself protesting the violence of Jews against Palestinians which went unchallenged and was fueled by Prime Minister Netanyahu's policies which empowered Jewish settlers. In 2021, when Hamas sent missiles into Israel, people responded with violence against the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, even though they had nothing to do with the attacks. Over and over, Noam is shown protesting these events and the Prime Minister's policies, even as he remains in office. The protests in 2023 targeted Netanyahu on corruption charges, but when her group sought to call attention to his discriminatory policies, other protestors tried to silence them as they told her that was not the issue. She insisted that was exactly the issue, and her argument made sense, as Netanyahu's ability to evade corruption charges was made possible by the support he receives from those who like his policies. We have seen the same drama played out recently in the United States, as insurrection charges against Donald Trump failed to make headway due to the tremendous support he enjoys for his own anti-democratic policies.

After the October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel by Hamas, like so many others, Noam is traumatized by the deaths she sees on both sides. Many of her friends and family believe that the attacks on Gaza are legitimate as a response to the murder of 1200 Israelis and the hostage taking of hundreds-but as of now 46,000 Palestinians have also died, many of those children. Like so many peace activists, she does not believe that more violence will help as it only fuels the endless cycle. She now feels that resistance and protest must be prioritized, as coexistence is impossible without equal rights for all-she has always known this, but now feels a new urgency and fear, as well as a sense of frustration and failure. Politics and comedy have not been enough, but neither will violence solve anything. Peace activists are often accused of being too idealistic, but they view themselves as the true realists, as they can see not only the unethical nature of war as it kills the innocent along with the guilty, but also the fact that it will not bring peace but only more discrimination and violence. Too few people in her own country or elsewhere in the world agree with her, so that this film ends more tragically than was originally intended. At the same time, she can continue to say that while others say it is "too complicated" a problem to solve, she insists that it is actually so simple: just grant equal rights to all. This film shows all the beauty and tragedy of peace activism in regards to one of the most pressing issues of our time. I hope that Noam and others will find the optimism to go on with their important work, that it might bear fruit in time.

Sidebar

Recommended Citation

Lyden, John C. (2025) "Coexistence, My Ass!" Journal of Religion & Film: Vol. 29: Iss. 1, Article 19.

Available at: https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol29/iss1/19

Author Notes

John Lyden is the Department Chair and Blizek Professor of Religious Studies at University of Nebraska Omaha. He has been the Editor of the Journal of Religion & Film since 2011. He is the author of Film as Religion: Myths, Morals, and Rituals (NYU Press), and the editor of the Routledge Companion to Religion and Film and co-editor (with Eric Michael Mazur) of the Routledge Companion to Religion and Popular Culture. He also co-edited, with Ken Derry, The Myth Awakens: Canon Conservativism, and Fan Reception of Star Wars (Wipf and Stock 2018).