There’s a powerful scene in Moroccan-French-Israeli filmmaker Simone Bitton’s 2004 documentary “Wall,” which tells the story of the construction of the West Bank barrier, a 448-mile – or 721-kilometer – network of walls and fences dividing large parts of the West Bank from Israel.
A concrete slab is slowly lowered into place in order to complete a section of the wall. Inch by inch, the vibrant, hilly Palestinian community on the other side gets smaller and smaller.
And then – just like that – a world that’s a stone’s throw away is gone.
As someone who studies the restrictions placed on Palestinians, I often think about this scene as a microcosm of Israel’s decades-long use of walls, checkpoints and surveillance technologies to seal off Palestinians from the rest of society.
Nowhere is this dynamic more evident than the Gaza Strip, which Israel fenced in during the 1990s and has blockaded since 2007, citing security concerns and the threat of militant attacks.
Thanks to these barriers, the immense suffering of Palestinians in Gaza – more than 70,000 of whom have been killed as a result of the Israel-Hamas war since 2023 – has been difficult to document. The Israeli government largely bars international journalists from entering the Gaza Strip independently, while Palestinians in Gaza are generally not allowed to leave the Gaza Strip.
But the Sept. 10, 2026, premiere of Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s film “NAZA” at the Venice International Film Festival...
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