“I promise, I’m only staying for seven minutes, not 70 years,” Israeli comedian Noam Shuster Eliassi said at the 2019 Palestine Comedy Festival in East Jerusalem.

The Palestinian crowd exploded in laughter. Shuster Eliassi doubled down.

“By the way, this is Amer’s joke, I stole it.” She gestured to Amer Zahr, the festival’s founder. “It’s mine now, God promised it to me!”

For a Jewish Israeli (and the first Jewish performer to play the Palestine Comedy Festival) to tell this joke to an audience of Palestinians requires an extraordinary level of chutzpah. Fortunately, for all of us, Shuster Eliassi — subject of the new documentary Coexistence, My Ass, in which this scene appears — has that in spades.

Coexistence, My Ass, which follows Shuster Eliassi, a 38-year-old Israeli Jewish comedian and activist, over five tumultuous years — including the Oct. 7 attacks and ensuing war — opens in select theaters next week. The film, directed by Amber Fares, is ostensibly about the shaping of Shuster Eliassi’s one-woman stand-up show as she works to incorporate more of her politics into her comedy, which she performs in Hebrew, Arabic and English. She began performing standup after pivoting away from a United Nations job, newly skeptical of the peace movement in which she was raised.

Because Shuster Eliassi is a product of Wahat al Salaam/Neve Shalom — a name that means “Oasis of Peace,” and belongs to the only intentionally integrated Israeli-Palestinian community in the Middle East. World leaders and celebrities like Hillary Clinton and Jane Fonda have visited her village to witness the admittedly beautiful example of coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians it provides.

But as grateful as Shuster Eliassi is for her home, she’s furious at what she sees as the lack of political co-resistance from liberal Israeli Jews. “I’m mad and not in the mood for dialogue, and I don’t think there are two equal sides,” Ranin, Shuster Eliassi’s Palestinian best friend and fellow resident of Wahat al Salaam, vents at one point. “There’s one strong side that’s fucking over the other side.”

Coexistence, My Ass makes unbearably clear that merely coexisting is not enough. Yet I fear that instead of provoking a deeper self-reflection, the documentary will become a talking point for liberal Zionist Jews seeking to prove that Israel is worth loving and that true coexistence is possible. That takeaway is not inaccurate, but it is incomplete.

As Shuster Eliassi, the daughter of an Iranian Jewish mother and Ashkenazi father, describes it, Wahat al Salaam/Neve Shalom was an idyllic, if immensely unusual, place to grow up. Her parents are devout left-wingers; some of her earliest memories are of being home alone with her mother while her father was in prison for refusing to serve in the military in the occupied West Bank. Early in the film, she recalls him explaining to her as a child that they would not be barbequing on Israeli Independence Day out of respect for their Palestinian neighbors.

Shuster Eliassi’s bilingual education and her deep relationships with Palestinians in her hometown are an enviable sight for many who desire peace in the Holy Land. Wahat al Salaam/Neve Shalom is not perfect, but the documentary shows that there is a very real sense of idyllic optimism in its way of life. Shuster Eliassi’s humor is infectious, and it charms and connects her to people who are very different.

Yet the town — which as of 2023 had a population of 313 — and the children it produces are an extreme minority in Israel.

Despite the fact that 20% of Israel’s citizens are Palestinian — including one quarter of Israel’s doctors, and a whopping 49% of the pharmacists — most Israelis are not raised in a society that teaches them to be mindful that Israeli Independence Day is also Nakba Day. The documentary suggests that even among self-described liberal Israelis—the kinds of citizens who poured into the streets to protest against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s judicial reform bill, and later, for the return of the hostages — that the concerns of the Palestinians are an afterthought. People like Shuster Eliassi, who continue to consider the occupation as the root cause of Israel’s suffering, are deluded radicals.

Over and over in the film, she is told by fellow Israelis that she is a traitor to her people. Even those who do not outright denounce her tend to feel that her focus on Palestinian rights and self-determination is misguided.

“I agree with you about the occupation,” one woman tells her at a Tel Aviv protest against the judicial reform, “and still, first and foremost, we need to protect our home.” At another judicial reform protest, an older man is enraged by Shuster Eliassi’s speech telling demonstrators that “there’s no such thing as democracy with occupation.” “You’re an enemy of the state!” he screams.

One of the most telling moments of the film is when Shuster Eliassi’s friend Elad, a fellow comedian, tells a story about his childhood growing up in Pisgat Ze’ev, a settlement within East Jerusalem. He describes how on Yom Kippur, still clad in white from services, he and his friends would go stand on the highway overpass and drop stones onto Palestinian cars.

“That was our ‘hang,’” he says dryly.

Shuster Eliassi asks why he thinks they did that. “Because someone instructs them to,” he says. “A fifth grader doesn’t just wake up one morning and decide to go throw stones.”

The point of documentary filmmaking is to get a slice of reality on the record. Shuster Eliassi’s slice is captivating, and I sincerely hope that her story inspires people and gives them a deeper understanding of both the Israeli psyche, and what co-resisting with Palestinians looks like.

Because the whole point of Shuster Eliassi’s comedy and activism is that coexistence is a goal that can’t be achieved without action. Instead of wondering why there is only one Neve Shalom/Wahat as Salaam in all of Israel — “The State of Israel doesn’t support our project,” community spokeswoman Samah Salaime says at one point — I worry that most American Jewish viewers will walk from the film complacent that it exists at all.

After two utterly miserable years, the Jewish community is desperate for stories of hope, which Coexistence, My Ass provides. Yet especially in the aftermath of a fragile ceasefire, when Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank are confronting utter devastation and violence, the story of a dynamic comedian speaking truth to power is an opportunity to examine our own capacity for solidarity.

The emphasis on co-resistance, not simply coexistence, is laid bare late in the documentary, as Shuster Eliassi and her parents watch the news of violent riots in May 2021 in mixed Jewish and Arab cities. In Bat Yam, an Arab driver is pulled from his car and nearly beaten to death in front of a television camera crew.

“Aba,” Shuster Eliassi says to her father, “in this moment of truth, the Jews are nowhere to be found. They’re not in the struggle.”

Even the village WhatsApp feed, she remarks, during a moment of existential struggle for its Palestinian residents, is full of “love and light” activism from the Jews, versus an expression of true solidarity.

“They want to get back to the coexistence template,” she says, “and that’s not what’s needed now.”

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