United in grief Israelis and Palestinians find power in empathy

“I’d heard about it, but that was the first time I went. I was just blown away – it is such a powerful ceremony,” she recalls. “These people were sharing their pain with this kind of fierce resolve that other people must not feel this terrible grief and a determination that the conflict must end. And I really felt the possibility of how a future could be different.”

Takac says she could almost see her husband roll his eyes on the other end of the phone line as she told him about the film she decided needed to be made in the moments after the ceremony.

So, with $20,000 of her own money, Takac set to work researching and speaking with individuals who have devoted their lives to building respect and understanding between Israel and Palestine.

Events since October 7 have not changed Takac’s resolve to keep using her skills to bring better understanding between sides that she acknowledges have become more polarised than ever.

“There is so much trauma in Israel, in the Palestinian territories and in Gaza, and it’s scary to think how that’s going to affect people going forward,” she says.

As the Gaza Strip is razed by repeated Israeli shelling, the amplification of stories from real people with lived experience is even more important, she says.

An abridged version of The Narrow Bridge will air on ABC on Sunday night. It documents the lives of two fathers, Israeli Rami Elhanan and Palestinian Bassam Aramin, who each lost a young daughter in the violence. The duo visited Australia in May last year to help spread their message of peace.

After spending seven years in an Israeli jail for his role in an attempted bombing, Aramin describes how he studied Hitler and the holocaust to better understand his enemy in the hope of being able to exact revenge.

But Aramin says instead he learned Israelis and Palestinians were in “radical disagreement about everything, but we are very similar. We want to kill each other to achieve peace and security”.

Before joining activist group Combatants for Peace, Aramin says his only experience of Israelis had been soldiers and settlers. He and Elhanan now visit schools in Israel and the Palestinian territories to convince children that, as Aramin says at one point in the film, no matter how many states it is divided into, the only choice is to share the holy land.

“Otherwise we will share the same land as our kids – two big graves,” Aramin says.

The full feature – which is being updated again to capture Elhanan and Aramin’s views since October 7 – also includes stories from Palestinian mother Bushra Awad, whose son Mahmoud was shot dead by Israeli soldiers, and Israeli woman Meytal Ofer, whose father was hacked to death by Hamas militants.

All have since joined a grassroots movement Israeli Palestinian Bereaved Families, which now finds itself under heavy attack from critics who say the group is trying to normalise the other side.

Takac says she has been fascinated by the psychology behind each individual’s experience moving through the stages of trauma to “post-traumatic growth”, where they discover a renewed sense of personal strength and renewed sense of purpose and appreciation for life.

“As a psychologist I was really fascinated to see how these people articulated the theory – we see Bushra describing her body and her spirit after the death of her son – her body fell apart, she lost interest in everything even her other children,” says Takac.

“And then Meytal makes this amazing comment about how after her father’s funeral she felt this screen go down, and she couldn’t feel anything, which is a visceral description of disassociation.”

Elhanan describes the natural response when someone hits you in the face being to hit them back. But he says it was a gradual process, coming to the other side to then understand what he says is the most important question of them all: “What can you do personally to prevent this unbearable pain for other people?”

“I was so blown away by the courage of these people. People whose hearts had been broken, yet they were so open-hearted, that I felt, more people needed to know these stories,” Takac says.

There is a vignette in the documentary where Leonard Cohen, on stage in Tel Aviv, shares with the audience the work Israeli Palestinian Bereaved Families is doing as an introduction to his masterpiece Anthem.

“In the film, Leonard Cohen talks about cracks being where the light comes in. I think that experience working with people in the hospital was one of those cracks,” Takac says.

It was only toward the end of shooting the documentary that Takac learned it was the same hospital where Elhanan’s daughter had been born and Aramin’s daughter died, a fact she still finds remarkable.

“Meeting people united through loss and grief is another crack. When we get past the walls of fear and the negative stereotypes – a lot of it is fear that leads to anger – you get a crack that allows you to see the other person as a human being,” she says.

The Narrow Bridge airs on ABC at 6.30pm Sunday AEDT.