Noam Shuster Eliassi has a waggish and deft way with a joke. On stage doing standup, she promises her show will be short, then quips, “I’m only staying for seven minutes, not 70 years,” an allusion to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory. “Should I be boycotting this show?” she asks about her own act.

Shuster is the feisty star of Canadian filmmaker Amber Fares’s Coexistence, My Ass!, a portrait that dramatically changes shape as it goes along. The documentary starts out as a story of the young woman’s attempt to make sense of the charged Israel-Palestine conflict via comedy, accruing a degree of fame along the way. When a violent attack on Israel from Hamas takes place on October 7, 2023, and triggers a savage aftermath, the focus widens out into tragedy. Comedy can’t begin to touch the conflict’s devastation, the death toll, and the guilt.

Shuster’s background has long steeped her in the language and mission of the now-moribund Israel-Palestine peace process. An Arabic-speaking Jewish woman of European and Iranian ancestry, she and her family were part of Neve Shalom, a historic Israeli village cooperative devoted to Arab-Israeli harmony. In her standup act and in voice-over, Shuster pokes fun at lefty performative worship of high ideals: “We gave flowers to Hillary Clinton!”—shorthand for dashed liberal hopes worldwide if there ever was one. Shuster has Arab friends, shows up for peace marches, and starts to hone her comedy skills onstage in a stab at defusing the increasingly bitter atmosphere around the conflict. She’s a staunch defender of Palestinian rights, while semi-corny jokes about her hairy arms and husband-hunting bring a down-to-earth sisterly quality to her political humor.

Coexistence provides an episodic fly-on-the-wall view of Shuster’s life and progress over several years. She attends Harvard University on a fellowship, works on her act with other comedians, and lives within an Arab-Israeli quarantine during Covid. She also becomes a regular on an Israeli television show and records a satirical song that goes viral. The film explores her family and friendship dynamics, buoyed by fierce allegiance. The rapport Shuster has with director Fares is apparent as she opens up her thoughts and feelings. When right-wing forces gain more control in Israeli politics, it reveals the despair over divided loyalty that sometimes creeps into her life: “It’s incredible the love and support I get from Palestinians, but I’m not Palestinian.” Shuster insists that her compatriots acknowledge the humanity of the other side; she will get into arguments with her TV co-host and take online abuse defending Palestinians’ bottom-line human rights.

Any laughter stops after the October 7 attacks and the massive Israeli counterassault they unleash. Shuster has to accept the end of any dreams of peace for what looks like a long time and looks back on her peacemaking efforts for an honest assessment. “Peace in Palestine-Israel was at best like a feel-good industry and not a reality.” She condemns Israel’s lack of decency toward Palestinians as an original sin, then moves on to the sorry state of today: “Now the elephant in the room is genocide.” No matter how you take sides in the ongoing conflict, it’s hard not to mourn efforts squandered and opportunities lost—and to feel sorrow at the sight of Noam so distressed. Yet one feels that this formidable character will one day regain her pluck and optimism. Hell, if enough people joined her, maybe we could give peace a chance.