


































The sunset of human rights and working with emotions

Review by Francisco M. Argueros

Of Land and Bread. 2019. Produced by B’Tselem and Ehab Tarabieh. The Video 
Project. 

“When everyone on earth dies, the last person should play this while walking into the 
sunset” writes a Youtuber, in a very dramatic tone, about Handel’s Sarabanda,1 which 
constitutes the sole soundtrack of the documentary Of Land and Bread, repeated over 
and over. I watched it in two evenings while on a solitary retreat and it put me on the 
verge of tears. Of Land and Bread can be emotionally experienced as walking into the 
last sunset of humanitarianism with a feeling of impotence and sadness that in my case 
didn’t turn into outrage. If compassion is one of the emotions aroused by the 
documentary, then it can develop into empathy and taking action to stop the naked 
oppression portrayed by the documentary of Palestinians in the occupied territories and 
West Bank. Perhaps that is the purpose of documenting the everyday experience of 
Israeli occupation through the “naked eye” of the video camera. The documentary does 
not provide any background, contextualization, or explanation. We only learn that 
B’Tselem (an Israeli human rights organization) began its Camera Project in 2006 by 
distributing cameras to Palestinian volunteers (the video makers) and that the Project 
lasted 10 years.

The documentary is neither neutral, objective as far as objectivity can go, nor inclusive. 
It consists of video fragments (stories, or pieces of visual story telling) pinned together 
and showing a Palestinian perspective on the occupation and the Israelis. These are 
represented by soldiers and the (illegal) settlers. What the documentary depicts is 
oppression seen by the oppressed in a land that is supposed to be or have been the 
land of the people today known as Palestinians, which is what the Israeli settlers, 
backed by the army, deny. The opening scene (without title) shows an Israeli settler 
approaching a group of Palestinians planting a field. He asks them to share their piece 
of land with him: 

—I’ll plant half and you [will plant] the other half … we need to eat. 

1

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klPZIGQcrHA 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klPZIGQcrHA


—Why? —they ask —This land is ours.

—This land is part of Israel … it belongs to the Jews … God gave it to us [Leviticus].

—But this is my father’s land. 

—When the Messiah arrives, you will be our slaves … we’ll treat you well if you 
behave… You have Syria, Arabia ... you have land … —

The settler knows he’s being filmed but keeps going until Israeli soldiers appear, 
though not to stop him. Their role is shown in the following stories. 

A similar argument informs the story called “The Flag.” There seems to be a gathering 
of settlers, a celebration filmed from a Palestinian house. The settlers see a Palestinian 
flag on the roof of that house and one of them climbs to the roof but gets stuck in 
barbed wires. 

A dialogue follows between the Palestinian, owner of the house, and the settler, who 
wants to take down what he calls a “Jordanian flag”: 

—Take down the Jordanian flag … this land is all mine … God gave [it] to the Jews … 
It’s only the Jewish people who lived in this land from the very beginning.

The house is private property. Israeli soldiers arrive to the roof entering through the 
door, not to arrest the intruder but the owner of the house: “take the flag down, or we’re 
going to arrest you.” In the end, they just leave the house.

The harassment and discrimination that Palestinians suffer in the street is part of 
everyday life. A soldier, captured by the lens, shouts (in the story called “Carnival”), 
“you can’t stay here … this place is for Jews! In “Taking the High Road” a soldier warns 
a Palestinian: “you can’t go this way; this is only for Jews.” Palestinians must walk 
along a different section of the street, one designated only for them. “These are our 
orders,” says the soldier. The “we just follow orders” rings a bell, and not a nice one.

STONES AS GUNS

Most of the stories are about children and stones. A soldier grabs a child who 
seemingly has thrown a stone at an army car. The child cries hard thinking he is going 
to be arrested. His father arrives and is detained and blindfolded. In the end both are 
released. Then there are the night home visits. Soldiers enter in the middle of the night, 
waking up the whole family and children who are sleeping, asking for identification, 
taking pictures, asking children if they throw stones, and then leaving. A father asks, 
“why don’t you come during daytime?” (“A Bedtime Story”). 

It is a different story when settlers throw stones. We see a whole crowd of settlers 
harassing a Palestinian house (or maybe an apartment), hurling stones and insults of a 
religious, sexual and gendered nature using loudspeakers and playing loud music all 
night long (included in the 90 minutes version of the film). Soldiers stand nearby but 
don’t move a finger. “They are our soldiers!” a settler says.

When soldiers don’t know that they are filmed they perform nastier actions. In one of 
the stories, a soldier kicks a child who is on the ground pinned down by another soldier. 



In another story, a young Palestinian hides in a store room, unarmed. Soldiers find him 
and beat him senseless for around five minutes, real time. One of the soldiers nails him 
repeatedly on the side with the barrel of his gun, as if it was a spear.

NOT EVEN IN DEATH IS THERE A BREAK

Heartbreaking is “The Old Man Funeral”: A water cannon pushes back a small funeral 
procession of a handful of men escorting a coffin. There’s not even noticeable rage as 
they turn back, heads down.

The stories document, one after another, oppression and powerlessness without 
comments, without context. They are not the “whole truth,” not the “whole story,” but 
what we see, as if we were eyewitnesses, is something that has happened, and  keeps 
happening in the West Bank and occupied territories. But the documentary has been 
produced by the Israeli NGO B’Tselem, which is concerned with human rights 
violations. In the Israeli society, there are people who are aware of what is going on in 
the West Bank and are working, as the objective statement of B’Tselem states, “to end 
this regime, as that is the only way forward to a future in which human rights, 
democracy, liberty and equality are ensured to all people, both Palestinian and Israeli, 
living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.”2 It seems then that one 
goal of the documentary is to make the world aware of what is happening, to move 
people and organizations to say something, to do something. Publicity of oppression is 
one way to fight against it. 

The social world, however, is presented in a messy way, as it is. It must be organized 
through contextualization and analysis. This is not what textbooks do: they give 
students an ordered world, neatly structured with typologies and summaries, and 
without emotions involved. Nothing should be taken at face value. The fact that there is 
no contextualization can be used as an advantage: students can make sense of what 
they see in an active and participatory way by working with resources provided by 
teachers or professors.

The contextualization involves dramatic and conflictive emotions as it includes the 
history of the arrival of the first Jewish settlers at the end of the 1800 and the reasons 
why Jews wanted to leave Eastern Europe, because of pogroms and later the 
Holocaust, and find a haven: their own national Jewish state. But the land was 
populated by others, as it was in biblical times, and making room for the newcomers in 
the end meant the displacement of those living on the land: Palestinians. The national 
identity of the latter is linked to the conflict over the land and the stubborn refusal of 
Israel to share it (one multiethnic state), precisely what B’Tselem aims at.

It is, therefore, a video that can be used in history, sociology, or anthropology courses 
dealing with the conflict over the territory in Palestine-Israel, or just conflict, oppression, 
or powerlessness. On the other hand, the focus can be on the anthropology or 
sociology of emotions, or even the use of sources. On the emotional side, the most 
relevant skill to develop, particularly for students of anthropology but also for history 

2

 https://www.btselem.org 

https://www.btselem.org/


students, is empathy: to try and see and feel from the point of view of others, even 
settlers and soldiers, with the aim of learning to know oneself by learning to know the 
other, and the other way around. Other emotions to deal with, and be aware of, could 
be impotence, rage, sadness, outrage, compassion.

The video comes in three formats: 30, 60 and 90 minutes. I prefer the longer version as 
it contains stories that I find very relevant but were cut in the shorter versions. 
However, the longer version might be too repetitive and heavy to watch considering 
that is difficult to keep the interest of students, when there is not a clear story line. I 
showed the 60 minutes version in a two-hour anthropology class (first year humanities) 
and after 30 minutes students started to go missing. Depending on the type of group 
(secondary or third level education; younger or older), it might be better to use only a 
few of the stories and then work with them. However, if the audience targeted is a 
group of activists, the 60 minutes version can go very well. Potentially there are two 
different types of uses: for activism and for learning to work with 
anthropological/historical thinking concepts and with emotions associated to these 
concepts. How both types are linked, however, is a different question.

Francisco M. Arqueros is an anthropologist working out of the Department of 
Geography, History, and Humanities at the University of Almeria, Spain. 

© 2021 Francisco M. Arqueros 


