Constructive Resistance opens with the camera sweeping through an eerily quiet village on the slope of a grassy hill. No one is around. On the soundtrack the dull, repetitive thud of heavy artillery shells and the odd crack of gunfire is heard. Where are we? Is this a rural ghost-town caught up in Syria’s civil war? As the camera tracks along the streets, we see that some of the houses have no roofs, and as we move inside the stone walls we realize a strange fact: they appear never to have been lived in. They are merely empty shells. ​

We are in a mock “Arab village”, one the Israeli army uses to train its soldiers in how to invade and take over Palestinian communities. This is where the army brings its soldiers when it wants to ready them for an “arrest” operation, or to enter a village to demolish homes there. We are in Area C, a place supposed be the bulk of a future Palestinian state.

This training ghost-village is one of three active military bases surrounding the tiny but very real village of al-Aqaba. The village should be an idyllic spot. Here time seems almost frozen, a life maintained in these hills in the fertile northern West Bank almost as it was in Palestine before the creation of Israel. The villagers still farm their sheep on the verdant hills, and grow subsistence crops But the very isolation and quietness is what also draws the Israeli army to the area. Here they can act out of view of the world.

Constructive Resistance will answer a series of questions through interviews with the local villagers and Palestinian experts: What is Israel’s objective in Area C? Why is it demolishing these peaceful villagers’ homes? What threat is al-Aqaba to the might of the Israeli army? Where does Israel expect the villagers to live? Is the Palestinian Authority offering these threatened villages in Area C a path to effective resistance, or assisting them, either overtly or covertly?  Can the villagers themselves take control over their own destiny?

And most important of all, can the tiny village of al-Aqaba provide a model and inspiration that might help other villages under threat to resist Israel’s ethnic cleaning programme through its policy to rebuild?