The Human Factor

For decades the world has looked at the tension in the Middle East between Israel and its neighbors and wished for a peaceful solution. In the new documentary featuring interviews from the American negotiators involved, The Human Factor takes us back to the 1990s and the closest America came to brokering peace between Israel and its neighbors Palestine and Syria.

With access to members of the team who dealt directly with Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin, Bill Clinton, Ehud Barak, and others, director Dror Moreh's film offers a behind-the-scenes look at obstacles, struggles, and small victories (such as the Oslo Accords) that offered the hope of lasting peace only to ultimately come up short. Although Syria feels a bit short-changed here given the strong focus on Israeli's relationship to Palestine, and the film could do better in expanding on the last 20 years of after the 90s peace proposals finally fizzled out at Camp David, The Human Factor is an informative and engaging documentary from the perspective of those who lived through events with the added benefit of decades of hindsight to look back on what went wrong.