The Tinderbox
Film | Cert: 12 | ★★✩✩✩

Born and brought up in a traditional Jewish, Zionist household, British-American filmmaker Gillian Mosely started to question everything she had ever been told about Israel after a chance encounter in her teens with Tamir, a young Muslim Palestinian gay man. Through her new friend, Mosely learned of the plight of the countless Arab families who had lost their homes when Israel became a state.

Mosely later found herself questioning the very idea of whether Jews really had the primary rights to claim the holy land as their home.

Tinderbox 7

A scene from The Tinderbox

In The Tinderbox, her award winning documentary feature, Mosely delivers a detailed and thought-provoking — some might say controversial — look at the Israeli-
Palestinian conflict. In it, she talks to a wide variety of contemporary voices, ranging from Jewish settlers to political members of Hamas, about where they stand and how things can be resolved.

There is very little doubt that through her own painstaking work, Mosely has found herself siding with the Palestinian cause and finds it hard to reconcile her Zionist past with who she is today.

Although she says she set out to talk to all parties, Mosely has sadly failed to interview any members of her own family, something which I found rather intriguing and more than a little puzzling considering how personal her film purports to be. While clearly motivated by her, some might say, naïve quest for peace, one feels like Mosely had already made up her mind about who’s in the wrong.

Still, she does manage to make some pertinent points about Britain’s involvement in the current crisis through the British Mandate for Palestine.

While not likely to bring about peace or even a reconciliation between all parties who lay claim to the holy land, The Tinderbox does a great job of laying out some important moments in Israel’s history and the importance of continuing that ever so elusive peace process.