The Stones Cry Out: Film

Palestine is the cradle of Christianity, but “the living aspect of Christianity in Palestine is disappearing,” warns Palestinian politician Hanan Ashrawi in Yasmine Perni’s recent film The Stones Cry Out (2013).

Perni, a native of Italy, has lived in the Arab world since childhood. A journalist, photographer and researcher, this is her first documentary.

The film’s synopsis:

In 1948, tens of thousands of Palestinian villagers were driven from their homes in what was officially dubbed “Operation Broom,” intended to literally sweep tens of thousands of Palestinians from their homes in the fertile hills and valleys of the Galilee, and make way for settlers in the newly created state of Israel. 

Elias Chacour, now the Archbishop of Galilee, was just a little boy when Israeli troops ordered his family out of the Christian village of Kifr Bir’am. He left the vilage with a blanket on his shoulder, walking to his new home, a cave. 

Today Kifr Bir’am is an Israeli national park, the houses of the village are crumbling, the church is abandoned. 

After the Galilee came the expropriation of the West Bank in 1967, the settlements, the wall. Bethlehem, the birthplace of Christ, is now hemmed in by the wall, cut off from Jerusalem, and robbed of much of its agricultural land. 

All too often media coverage of the conflict in Palestine has framed it as a conflict between Muslims and Jews, largely ignoring the fact that Palestine was the birthplace of Christianity, that Palestinians are both Muslims and Christians, and that Palestinian Christians have played a critical role in their land’s history and the struggle to maintain its identity. 

From 1948 up to today, through wars and uprisings, leading Palestinian Christians, including the late president of Bir Zeit University, Gabi Baramki, Palestinian leader Hanan Ashrawi, civil society activist Ghassan Andoni, Patriarch Emeritus Michel Sabbah and others recount the unwavering and sometimes desperate struggle of all Palestinians to resist Israel’s occupation and stay on their land.

Read more on the return of Palestinian Christians, to resettle in their old villages, expropriated by the occupying power.