The Palestinian village of Khan al-Ahmar sits off dust-blown Highway-1, between Jerusalem and Jericho in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. At the village centre is the \u201cschool of tires\u201d, a fragile construction of rubber, wood and adobe which is attended by around 300 Bedouin boys and girls. The Israeli authorities denied the villagers an official building permit and ruled that the entire settlement is illegal. For the past eight years the school has been operating under threat of imminent demolition, a symbol of resistance to widespread settler violence.<\/p>\n
Amos Gitai arriving at the Venice film festival, 3 September 2026. Photograph: Laurent Vu\/Sipa\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n
It is only international pressure, says the veteran Israeli writer-director Amos Gitai, that has kept the place upright and still open. \u201cThe school has become a litmus paper. It is a test of how far the international community will go [to protect the rights of the people of Khan al-Ahmar]. For once, on this issue, Europe stood up and said no.\u201d As for the future, who can tell?<\/p>\n
Khan al-Ahmar\u2019s \u201cschool of tires\u201d provides an anchor of sorts for Gitai\u2019s The Road to Jericho, a fluid, haunting documentary that elects to frame fraught recent history as a great tidal churn. In tackling the issue of the occupied West Bank, 75-year-old Gitai is also exploring his own role as a ringside observer and frequent commentator, delving back through the bulging back catalogue of a director who the critic Michael Atkinson dubbed \u201cIsrael\u2019s one-man New Wave.\u201d His film stirs a documentary portrait of the school with ghostly footage from the past 40 years. So we see a clip of the playwright Arthur Miller from Gitai\u2019s 2001 drama Eden, plus archive interviews with Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin during the golden false dawn of the mid-90s Oslo accords.<\/p>\n
The future, Gitai admits, looked altogether brighter back then. The wise heads, by and large, have since left the building. \u201cThe killing of Rabin [in 1995 by a far-right Israeli law student] decapitated the efforts to create a dialogue,\u201d he explains. \u201cRabin was very simple, very sober. He wanted an agreement and was prepared to put all the questions on the table and discuss them [because he knew that] you cannot force an agreement. An agreement has to be agreed upon.\u201d<\/p>\n
And now? \u201cThat\u2019s all gone,\u201d he says flatly. \u201cEverything has been destabilised and we are now in the hands of people who don\u2019t want peace, whether it\u2019s extreme-right settlers or Hamas. So this is, absolutely, the worst time I\u2019ve known in my life. Many of us in Israel have been living these last three years in a state of shock at the levels of violence and savagery we are seeing.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2018I consider my work as a civic gesture\u2019 \u2026 Gitai in 2005. Photograph: Martin Argles\/The Guardian<\/p>\n