UNSETTLED

The Palestinian Gaza Strip has scarcely been out of the news over the last several years, especially since the radical organization Hamas ousted the Fatah-dominated Palestinian government from this territory last summer.

Adam Hootnick’s Unsettled follows and records crucial events from 2005 when Israel withdrew both its armed forces and thousands of Jewish settlers, some of whom had been there for decades, from Gaza, making possible both formal Palestinian control and last summer’s internecine strife.

Hootnick, a former MTV News producer, and resident of Israel in 1997-98, felt drawn back to Israel in order to capture in a documentary movie both the preparation for the Israeli pullback and its execution.

Unsettled

This decision by the rightist government under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon split his Likud party and enraged many Israelis. Hootnick’s impressionistic, montage-infused documentary isn’t intended to be political, but it refers in passing to the political and military calculation the nationalistic Sharon had made: 8,500 Jews lived in antagonistic isolation amid 1.3 million Palestinians. And protecting them were thousands of Israeli soldiers, some of whom, inevitably, were injured and, less frequently, killed.

“How come a full brigade of soldiers is guarding one settlement?” is the rhetorical question posed by a 21-year-old draftee named Yuval, referring to the military presence at only one Jewish village.

Hootnick’s movie focuses on Yuval and five other young Jews of various backgrounds and political tendencies, three of them Gaza residents, who are impacted by the settlers’ eviction. The heart of the movie is the difficult, sometimes anguishing mission of tens of thousands of soldiers to persuade their countrymen and women to leave peacefully.

Unsettled has an involving, sometimes engrossing and almost tragic human interest appeal (made possible, in part, by Hootnick’s remarkable coverage from the very center of the confrontation between soldiers and settlers) but the movie is, perhaps unavoidably, skewed. No Palestinian appears. And looming just over the historical horizon is the monster problem no Israeli government has had the will or desire to address: the quarter-million Jewish settlers in the contested West Bank.

—george sax