Sunday 26 Jan 2025, at 18:30h, we will watch the movie “Neighbours” by Mano Khalil in Even Space 2 of the AUC dorms.

From this website:

In a Syrian border village in the early 80’s, little Sero attends school for the first time. A new teacher has arrived with the goal of making strapping Panarabic comrades out of the Kurdish children. To enable paradise to come to earth, he uses the rod to forbid the Kurdish language, orders the veneration of Assad and preaches hate of the Zionist enemy- the Jews. The lessons upset and confuse Sero because his long-time neighbors are a lovable Jewish family. With a fine sense of humor and satire, the film depicts a childhood which manages to find light moments between dictatorship and dark drama. Little Sero gets involved in dangerous pranks with his friends, and dreams of having a television so he can finally watch cartoons. But he also experiences how the adults around him are increasingly crushed by the despotism, violence and nationalism which surround them.

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Monday 18 November 2024, at 18:00h, we watched and discussed the movie “Where Olive Trees Weep” by Maurizio Benazzo and Zaya Benazzo.

We streamed the movie from the official website (donations optional).

From the website:

Where Olive Trees Weep offers a searing window into the struggles and resilience of the Palestinian people under Israeli occupation. It explores themes of loss, trauma, and the quest for justice.

We follow, among others, Palestinian journalist and therapist Ashira Darwish, grassroots activist Ahed Tamimi, and Israeli journalist Amira Hass. We also witness Dr. Gabor Maté offer trauma-healing work to a group of women who were tortured in Israeli prisons.

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On Monday 11 Nov 2024, students and staff from SSP came together in the common room to talk about the violence in Amsterdam surrounding the football match between Ajax and Maccabi.

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On Thursday 7 Nov 2024, students and staff from SSP came together in the common room to talk about the outcome of the elections in the United States.

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Location:

• Online: https://meet.waag.org/ssp-reading-club
• Physically: AUC 3.01

Tuesday 12 November 2024 from 12:45h to 13:45h we will get together¹ to discuss the work of two authors:

• The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon: chapter 1 “Concerning violence” (± 72 pages) link
• Algerian Chronicles by Albert Camus, “Preface” (± 7 pages) and “The Nobel Prize Press Conference Incident” (± 2 pages) link

We believe that by reading and discussing these texts, we are simultaneously staying close to the original crisis that led to the formation of SSP, while at the same time recognizing that this crisis is happening in a larger historical and contemporary context of decolonization and armed struggle.²

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Wednesday 2 Oct 2024 at 16:00h we had our first SSP reading club sesion.

We read the article “Organizing for self‐determination, ethical de‐Zionization and resisting apartheid” (see e.g. https://sci-hub.se) by Omar Barghouti (who also participated in the “Boycott debate” link).

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Monday 23 September at 6pm we watched the documentary: “Beyond the frontlines”. Location: Common Room.

Embark on a journey across Palestine alongside Palestinian psychiatrist Dr. Samah Jabr and discover the resistance and resilience of a people affected by the invisible wounds of war and occupation.

Want to see this movie for yourself? We rented it for a few euros on Vimeo.com. (Country/region = the Netherlands)

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Tuesday 10 September at 6pm we wateched and discussed the movie “Innocence”.

Want to watcht the movie as well? You can rent it on Vimeo. Just make sure to have VPN on a non-Dutch location (e.g. Colombia) to have the option to rent the movie for 24 hours.

“Innocence” tackles the issue of militarization and its impact on the lives of young Israeli people who are forced to serve against their own identity and values. Through a narration based on the haunting diaries of soldiers who died in uniform and rare home video they left behind; the film depicts their inner turmoil…"

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Dear students, dear staff,

We hope you all feel rested and ready for the new academic year.

Last year was eventful, stressful and hurtful. The explosion of violence in Palestine, and the question of how to relate to it - as a society and as a university - highlighted differences in our community that sometimes appeared unbridgeable.

Staff Students Platform (SSP) emerged out of a shared desire to keep trying to bridge those differences: to reach out to each other and explore, and to some extent find, some common understanding.

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Wednesday the 19th from 17:00h to 19:00h SSP organized a debate between Omar Barghouti, Han van der Maas and Yolande Jansen.

Omar Barghouti is a founding committee member of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) and a co-founder of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. He received the Gandhi Peace Award in 2017.

Han van der Maas is Professor of Psychological Methods and Distinguished Research Professor of Complex Systems in the Social and Behavioural Sciences at the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences at the University of Amsterdam. He is the principal author of a recent petition that speaks out against the bloccades and occupations that have been part of the student protests.

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For Monday 17 June at 6pm we planned the movie “Fiddler on the Roof”.

From one of the SSP members:

Based on Sholem Aleichem’s writings about Jewish communities around 1900 in the area of what is now Ukraine. The movie explains a lot about rural Jewish communities, and the tensions between tradition and modernity. It ends with the forced migration of the Jewish community as the result of a progrom. It addresses many difficult topics but it’s a musical and has many fun parts.

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On Wednesday the 12th of June from 13 to 14, we gathered (on the couches on the first floor), to discuss what SSP has been so far, and what it can and should be in the future.

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On Monday the 10th of June we watched the movie Israelism.

From the movie’s official website:

Two young American Jews - Simone Zimmerman and Eitan - are raised to defend the state of Israel at all costs. Eitan joins the Israeli military. Simone supports Israel on ‘the other battlefield:’ America’s college campuses. When they witness Israel’s mistreatment of the Palestinian people with their own eyes, they are horrified and heartbroken.

They join the movement of young American Jews battling the old guard over Israel’s centrality in American Judaism, and demanding freedom for the Palestinian people. Their stories reveal a generational divide in the American Jewish community as more young Jews question the narratives their synagogues and Hebrew school teachers fed them as children.

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On Wednesday the 5th of June we invited everyone - staff and students - for a walk from 12:00h to 13:00h. The goal was to have open conversations about our thoughts and feeling about the difficult moment AUC is going through, and the values that we feel are at stake.

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Monday the 3rd of June at 19:00h we watched the movie Lemon Tree, which tells a tale of a friendship between a Palestinian and an Israeli woman.

Missed the movie: you can watch it here.

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On the 27st of May 2024, at 7pm we watched the movie “Little Palestine":

Missed the movie? We rented the movie on vimeo.com. (Available from IP addresses in (i.a.) the Netherlands).

From vimeo.com:

The district of Yarmouk (Damascus, Syria) sheltered the biggest Palestinian refugee camp in the world from 1957 to 2018. When the Syrian revolution broke out, the regime of Bashar Al-Assad saw Yarmouk as a refuge of rebels and resistance and set up a siege from 2013 on. Gradually deprived of food, medicine and electricity, Yarmouk was cut off from the rest of the world. Abdallah Al-Khatib was born in Yarmouk and lived there until his expulsion by Daesh in 2015. Between 2011 and 2015, he and his friends documented the daily life of the besieged inhabitants, who decided to face bombing, displacement and hunger with rallying, study, music, love and joy. Hundreds of lives were irredeemably transformed by war and siege – from Abdallah’s mother, who turned into a nurse taking care of the elderly at the camp, to the fiercest activists whose passion for Palestine got gradually undermined by hunger…

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On the 21st of May 2024, at 7pm we watched the movie “Farha”.

Missed the movie: we watched it on Netflix (from account based in Spain):

From Wiki:

Farha (Arabic: فرحة, romanized: Farḥa) is a 2021 internationally co-produced historical drama film about a Palestinian girl’s coming-of-age experience during the Nakba, the 1948 displacement of Palestinians from their homeland. The film is directed by Darin J. Sallam, who also wrote it based on a true story that she was told as a child about a girl named Radieh. It premiered at the Toronto Film Festival on 14 September 2021 and began streaming on Netflix on 1 December 2022.

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On the 13th of May 2024, at 7pm we watched the movie “Tantura”.

Missed the movie: you can rent it here:

From Tantura-film.com:

When Israeli graduate student Teddy Katz meticulously documented a massacre of Palestinian civilians surrounding Israel’s independence, he was initially celebrated for his groundbreaking work. But soon, he was stripped of his degrees and was publicly shamed as a fraudulent traitor. Decades later, incendiary new evidence emerges to corroborate Teddy’s initial findings, not just vindicating him, but raising profound questions about how Israelis — and we all — deal with the darker chapters of history.

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On April 26th 2024 a group of staff and students came together in the common room to come up with, and discuss ideas for events that SSP could organize/facilitate.

The talks were organized around three tables, each with their own theme:

1. Ideas for activities
2. Rebuilding trust
3. Topics and speakers

After about 30-40 minutes, we discussed the outcomes of each table in a plenary session.

The post-its were collected and turned into the visualization below:

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On 21th of April, at 7pm we watched the movie “Naila and the uprising”:

Missed the movie: watch it here:

From the website justvision.org:

When a nation-wide uprising breaks out in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, a young woman in Gaza must make a choice between love, family, and freedom. Undaunted, she embraces all three, joining a clandestine network of women in a movement that forces the world to recognize the Palestinian right to self-determination for the first time. Naila and the Uprising chronicles the remarkable journey of Naila Ayesh and a fierce community of women at the frontlines, whose stories weave through the most vibrant, nonviolent mobilization in Palestinian history - the First Intifada in the late 1980s.

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