, said a key factor in her agreeing to come aboard the project was the way Youssef and co-writer Maytha Alhassen chose to show the everyday reality of Palestinians against the backdrop of the conflict.“We’ve never seen a mainstream American show that captures how brutal the Israeli army is, especially to kids; or Palestinians getting denied entry and interrogated, which happens all the time, simply for being Palestinians.
“It’s ultimately a story about a naïve Arab American character who thinks what he’s doing, that flying to Israel with Orthodox guys, is normal and to an American audience, it is normal. But once he’s on the ground here, it becomes very clear how completely abnormal the situation is,” she says. “The date in the episode is based on a personal event of his own when he did pass through checkpoints to meet a girl. We talked a lot about that scene. Rasha is a great character,” says Jacir, noting the role is played by rising local actress Yara Jarrar.
“This is a live military occupation. It’s not something of the past, it’s something of now and things are very tense here,” she continues. “To have a film set where you have crew members who are Israeli, and who are in the army or have just served in the army, on one side, and Palestinians, on the other, that’s not a normal way to work for me. Our house was ransacked by the Israeli army less than a year ago. I can’t work with a crew, where I think one of them could have been involved.
“I found that interesting. For me, the violence I experience here in its various degrees, from its very mundane forms to the really violent situations that I have been trapped in, I find it really important to make work about it and to talk about it,” she continues. In terms of the actual shoot, Jacir says the process was not radically different for the crew from working on a feature.