
The Tinderbox: Understanding The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
A personal reckoning with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, tracing its history from ancient claims to the present day through the eyes of one filmmaker forced to question what they were taught. The film gathers a wide range of voices, including an Israeli settler and a political figure from Hamas, to lay out competing versions of how the conflict started and why it persists. It moves between geopolitics (border disputes, immigration, inequality) and the psychology of entrenched belief, showing how propaganda and selective history on both sides keep the conflict alive. Archival material and on-the-ground interviews sit alongside discussion of an American-brokered Middle East peace plan and the rise of antisemitism and Islamophobia worldwide. Rather than assign blame to one side, the film treats the conflict as a structural problem, a tinderbox built from decades of grievance, and asks what would actually have to change for it to stop. It closes without a tidy resolution, leaving the audience with the same open question the filmmaker started with.