Grieving mothers on 2 sides of a suicide bombing

NEW YORK - The cover of

Newsweek

framed the story starkly: side-by-side pictures of Ayat al-Akhras, an 18-year-old Palestinian suicide bomber, and 17-year-old Rachel Levy, killed by the bomb that al-Akhras detonated March 29, 2002, at a Jerusalem supermarket. The two looked as if they could have been sisters and should have been living the lives of carefree teenagers, instead of becoming tragic symbols of the intractable Middle East conflict.

HBO's documentary president, Sheila Nevins, haunted by the cover, dispatched two American producers - she declined to name them in an interview - to begin work on a film. They weren't able to make inroads with al-Akhras' family, and the project was dropped.

But HBO got its film anyway, from a first-time Israeli feature-filmmaker, Hilla Medalia, who saw the same magazine cover, had the same idea and succeeded where the others had failed. Her film, "To Die in Jerusalem," will be shown on HBO beginning Nov. 1.

The film traces the efforts to bring the two mothers of the dead girls, who live less than four miles apart, face to face for a meeting that Levy's mother, Avigail Levy, said she believed would be cathartic as well as a symbol of hope, a chance to transcend entrenched hatreds.

Ultimately, stymied by fears of venturing into enemy territory, cultural differences and the bureaucracies of war, the two meet only by satellite, unable to bridge the physical chasm. The emotional gulf proves equally unfathomable.

At the time of the bombing, Medalia, now 30 and living in New York, was looking for a topic for a film she needed to make to complete her master's degree at Southern Illinois University. The story of the girls struck her as a way to show the conflict in a manner that even those who didn't follow the situation closely could comprehend.

"This is a very humanistic, personal story of mothers and daughters that can be told," she said.

With a call to directory assistance, she found Avigail Levy. It was harder to track down al-Akhras' parents in the Dheisheh refugee camp outside Bethlehem, but soon she was talking, separately, to Abu and Um Samir al-Akhras. The resulting film, "Daughters of Abraham," won an award at the Angelus Student Film Festival in Los Angeles and drew the attention of the brothers John and Ed Priddy, entrepreneurs in Boise, Idaho, who were beginning to finance films.

"Here you had two dead daughters, two grieving mothers and a woman who had the tremendous courage to go in and examine what was going on," said John Priddy, one of the executive producers. Nevins of HBO learned about the project, and jumped at the chance to get the film she had wanted.

Medalia, who had initially been afraid as an Israeli to venture into the Palestinian territory for the filming, returned to Jerusalem, confident that she could arrange a meeting of the mothers. It was obvious to anyone who saw the student film, Priddy said, "that these two women have to meet, which was the naivete of the whole thing."

Among other challenges, al-Akhras' mother would not or could not travel without her husband, and he, the father of a suicide bomber, was not eligible for a visa to visit Jerusalem, Medalia said. At one point the filmmakers reached out to the Rev. Mitri Raheb, pastor of Bethlehem's Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church, to be a neutral mediator, and in April 2006 he escorted Avigail Levy into the West Bank.

But the accompanying members of the film crew were detained for several hours by Palestinian authorities, and by the time they were released, night was falling. A scared Avigail Levy asked to return to Jerusalem, the plan for a meeting abandoned.

And there it stood, some 300 hours of footage shot, and still an unfinished film, until Nevins ran into the Priddys in August 2006 at the Sundance Institute. Over lunch the idea was floated that the mothers could meet by satellite. As disappointed as Medalia was that she couldn't physically unite the women, she said, "the satellite to me really represented the reality."

For four hours the mothers talked, which Medalia found hopeful. But many viewers will not get the ending they want. The renunciation of violence that Avigail Levy seeks never comes, supplanted by the rhetoric of grievances, as Avigail Levy talks about hate that goes back decades, and al-Akhras' mother details the hardships of Palestinian life.

At one point, when Avigail Levy says resistance is not worth loss of life, her Palestinian counterpart asks: "Should I resist occupation with a bouquet of roses? On a tray of gold?" *