The Rutgers Graduate Lounge was packed Wednesday evening for a screening of alumnus David Aslan’s documentary film, Beyond Inspiration .
Initially created as Aslan’s Henry Rutgers Senior thesis, Beyond Inspiration takes a critical look at the events which took place leading up to and including the Israel Inspires and Palestine Solidarity Movement conferences in 2003. The movie’s main focus was showing the raw tensions that were exposed on campus that year. In addition to showing parts of the conferences and demonstrations, the movie also contains interviews with some of the leaders on both sides.
From the pro-Israel perspective, interviewees discussed questions of how to support Israel — with unquestioning love or informed love with criticism. Hillel staff members, students, and other Jewish communal leaders were interviewed.
On the pro-Palestinian side, Charlotte Kates, author of articles such as Israel has no “right to exist”, was a prominent figure, amongs other leaders.
The movie also documented a split that occurred within the NJ Solidarity group prior to its conference, with many of the Muslim and Arab students leaving the group in response to NJ Solidarity’s statement that it supported all actions of resistance from Palestinians, including the killing of Israeli civilians. In the end, the PSM broke ties with NJ Solidarity and held their conference in Ohio, while Charlotte Kates and NJ Solidarity ran its own conference at the same time as Israel Inspires here in New Jersey.
In a question-and-answer session, many students said they were impressed with the film and felt that it represented a fairly decent picture of Rutgers during that time. However, a number of students questioned the filmmaker’s decision to focus on certain leaders on the pro-Palestinian side. Bethany Shondark Murphy, a Rutgers College Junior, felt that although the movie was good, it “portrayed NJ Solidarity as the major Palestinian viewpoint, though it changed a bit in the end.” Karim El-Badrawy, a Rutgers Sophomore echoed that sentiment, saying he felt that “the Palestinian view was simplified, [because] Charlotte Kates does not represent the entirety of the Palestinian viewpoint; There are a lot of different Palestinian viewpoints.”
Aslan explained that finding a balanced viewpoint in the film was a very difficult task, that he had revised the film many times, and showed it to multiple people for their input during that process. In the end, he said he needed to “eyeball it.” Aslan said the movie’s goal was not to present a balanced viewpoint of the Israel/Palestinian conflict but to capture a moment in time at Rutgers with all the rancor and extremism that it included. For Aslan, this explains the preponderance of appearances of Charlotte Kates in the movie, since she was one of the loudest voices, who literally locked barred all the internal critics from NJ Solidarity.
A preview of the film can be seen here.
Those interested in hosting a screening can contact the film crew at info -at- aslander.com.