‘Why don’t you believe Palestinians?’: the Israeli comedian putting the conflict on stage

In the late 2010s, Noam Shuster Eliassi was working at the United Nations, the latest step in a lifelong effort to build peace between Israelis and Palestinians, when she had an epiphany. In Ukraine, a Jewish comedian named Volodymyr Zelenskyy had made the improbable leap from sitcom about accidentally becoming president to actually becoming president. Perhaps, if she were to take her political career seriously, she should start writing jokes. Related: ‘No one’s been willing to take a risk’: are Palestinian films still struggling to get seen? It worked. As an Israeli Jew fluent in Hebrew, Arabic and English, Shuster Eliassi could nimbly weave between different audiences, and what started as short comedic videos on social media soon became an invitation from Harvard to develop a full-on stand-up routine skewering the idea of coexistence as it’s often used in the Israeli-Palestinian context. The show would riff on her upbringing in one of the only joint Israeli-Palestinian communities in the country, threading a fine needle with self-deprecating humor and an activist’s edge. The aim, she told the Guardian, was to “unpack” the idea of coexistence, “and say, like, ‘this is how I grew up, there are so many funny kumbayah moments, and I propose something else.’” That was in 2019. By the time Shuster Eliassi took the stage in Montreal in September of last year, to perform the full routine before a documentary crew, the idea of coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians seemed even more vastly and horrifically remote. After an affable routine ranging from her asking Palestinian neighbors for kebabs on Israeli independence day (“no agenda, just tahini!”) to her Jewish mother meddling in her dating life, Shuster Eliassi addressed the elephant in the room. It used to be the occupation, she says. “Now, the elephant in the room is genocide.” That moral clarity – the insistence on calling out that elephant in the room, through disarming humor and radical frankness – forms the backbone of Coexistence, My Ass!, a magnetic new documentary, directed by Amber Fares, that takes its name from Shuster Eliassi’s trilingual one-woman show. The film, shot over five seismic years in the US and Israel, chronicles both the development of Shuster Eliassi’s singular comedy, rooted in a too-rare portrait of Arab-Israeli friendship, and the stunning collapse of any near-term hope for real coexistence in the wake of the 7 October 2023 Hamas-led attacks and Israel’s retaliatory destruction of Gaza, killing over 71,000 Palestinians. “I thought the film was going to be about [Noam] trying to be a comedian in the US, and probably going to university campuses in the year of an election,” said Fares. “And the film just took an entirely different turn.” First it was Covid, which forced Shuster Eliassi to leave Harvard for Israel, where she was quarantined with a mixed group of Arabs and Israelis that recalled her unusual upbringing in Neve Shalom / Wahat as-Salam (“Oasis of Peace”). The daughter of an Iranian-Jewish mother and a Romanian Ashkenazi Jewish father – “woke, progressive leftists” who “believed Israelis and Palestinians deserve the same equal human rights”, she says with faux disbelief in her routine – Shuster Eliassi grew up as a literal “poster child for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process”. She socialized with Palestinian neighbors, learned Arabic from Palestinian educators and represented the idea of peace to numerous celebrities who visited the village; the film includes a clip of Shuster Eliassi and her Palestinian best friend Ranin getting a shout out from Jane Fonda. “My parents saw moving here as a way to say ‘we’re not just joining a seminar or a dialogue group, we want to live in this alternative way.’ As a political statement, not just a kumbayah thing,” Shuster Eliassi said. “There was always a sense of doing – not just talking about the alternative, but with your individual choices, doing it.” The show’s mocking premise – Coexistence, My Ass! (“let’s start with my ass,” she jokes, lest you have your guard up) – drew from frustration with the sloganeering of peace: the celebrity visits, the lip service, the lack of real reckoning with how true coexistence cannot coexist with occupation. “It has been so frustrating to always see this notion of coexistence used repeatedly as a nice decoration,” she said. “It’s like how Trump can come here and say that he is making peace – these are words. Nobody is ‘against’ coexistence.” “But to me, it was so clear that we will only be able to taste [coexistence] after we talk about the root of the problem and we act on it, especially as Israeli Jews that have privilege and the responsibility to do this.” The film follows Shuster Eliassi as she attempts to keep her increasing media presence – post-Covid, she secures a regular gig on a TV show; a music video mocking Arab countries selling out Palestine, called “Dubai Dubai”, goes viral – in line with her principles, particularly as the Israeli comedy scene turns away from discussion of the occupation. Some attempts to thread the needle fall flat; others soar (“Don’t worry, I’m only going to be here for seven minutes, not 70 years,” she tells a Palestinian audience to uproarious laughs). “Some comedians in Israel are like, ‘oh here’s Noam, she’s the one who talks about the occupation – why can’t you do, like, Tinder jokes and stuff?’” she said. At a pro-democracy protest against corruption in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, Shuster Eliassi repeatedly asks liberal Israelis whether they see the protests as at all connected to Palestine. Most say no. “Because Israelis were never confronted with decades of illegal occupation and actually controlling Palestinian people – Israelis were never confronted with what it’s actually doing to the moral fabric of our society, and what it means that our society is so hyper-militarized,” said Shuster Eliassi of that common response. “Everyone takes a role in the escalation of the dehumanization of Palestinians.” As she tells it, on 6 October 2023, Shuster Eliassi finally achieved her mother’s dream of bringing home a new boyfriend. The next day, nothing was ever the same. The documentary shies away from showing footage of the slaughter on 7 October, or the mass killings in Gaza – a “very conscious decision”, said Fares. “We felt that by the time this film came out, that footage would been seen and seen and overseen.” Instead, it cuts to Shuster Eliassi at the funeral of longtime peace activist Vivian Silver, who was killed in the attacks, then her despair at the carnage in Gaza, the escalation of her protests and the feverish pitch of social media commentary across languages. In the intervening two years, Shuster Eliassi has performed less in her home country, owing in part to lack of audience, in part to dwindling venues willing to book her, and in part because she’s now expecting her first child. “A lot of comedians who’ve continued doing comedy during this time – I don’t want to demonize all of them, but I’ve had a huge heartbreak,” she said. “It’s like American comedians who contributed to the re-election of Trump. You’re like, ‘Oh my god, this is how you’re using this tool that was designed to fight against fascism?’ It’s the same thing, when I see comedians making fun of starving Gazans on stage or using comedy to do Israeli propaganda.” She has fared better outside the country, where Coexistence, My Ass! has mirrored her routine’s ability to invite in and challenge diverse audiences without alienating them. An independent release without major backers, the film premiered at Sundance and opened the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, in a co-presentation with the Arab Film & Media Institute, offering a different but still sharp angle on the conflict. Still, Shuster Eliassi notes, “a lot of what we’re saying in this film, Palestinians have been saying for a really long time. And I say to the audiences, that if they feel relieved or reassured because they hear it from an Israeli Jew – why don’t you believe Palestinians? Why do you need an Israeli Jewish character to [believe]?” Shuster Eliassi and I spoke days after a ceasefire was announced, which still has not stopped the killing in Gaza. The film, like her routine, like so many invested in true coexistence, are left bereft – imagine, she says on stage, if we had addressed the elephant in the room in time? “I often think about how I just got lucky, to have this opportunity to exist with Palestinians and have Palestinian neighbors and friends and educators, to have Palestinian life and existence become part of my DNA,” she told me. “It’s extraordinary to me how ordinary it could be. And it really makes me sad, to think how easily things could have been much, much different.” Hope, she noted, is a strange thing to consider in the midst of atrocities, but it persists. “I don’t know what it is about the human spirit, like how Palestinians are surviving this, how my grandmother moved on after a Nazi camp. How people are constantly rebuilding homes, how I’m now carrying a child into this impossible reality,” she said. “There is something irrational about hope. And it’s very similar to coexistence – these are what our human tendencies can lead to, if we are dedicated to humanity.” Coexistence, My Ass! is now showing in select US cinemas with a UK date to be announced