Photo: Getty Images Photo: Getty Images The ongoing genocide in Gaza has destroyed cities and villages, killed tens of thousands, wiped out entire families and displaced millions. It has also obliterated history.
The Palestinian struggle for freedom has been not only about land, about asserting selfhood and belonging, but also about claiming history. One of the founding myths of Israel is that it is ‘a land without people for a people without land’. It was on the basis of this fiction that Zionist forces expelled over 700,000 Arabs from their land in 1948, an event the Palestinians refer to as Nakba (‘catastrophe’).
Just as the Nakba was an attempt to create a fake history, the current genocide in Gaza has also generated its own fictions. The current Israeli and western narrative would have us believe that the events of October 7, 2023 were sui generis, that they came out of nowhere, that nothing preceded them. This narrative attempts to wipe clean the slate of history.
Long before I visited the country, I encountered Palestine viscerally through cinema. I had read books about Palestine and Israel, and I followed news from the region as best I could. But what gave me a sense of the lived life in Palestine were films. Over the years, I’ve seen scores of long and short, fiction and documentary films about Palestine and Israel. Here are the five that moved me the most.
Snapshots: Filmsthat are powerful records of life in Palestine under Israel’s occupation Snapshots: Filmsthat are powerful records of life in Palestine under Israel’s occupationSometime in 2004, a friend gave me a CD of a pirated copy of Arna’s Children (2003), directed by Juliano Mer-Khamis and Danniel Danniel. This documentary is about Juliano’s mother, Arna, and the children of a theatre she established in Jenin, a town in the north of the West Bank. As the film opens, we learn that Arna Mer-Khamis has cancer, and about halfway through the film, she dies. The Stone Theatre established by Arna Mer-Khamis is also destroyed by Israeli tanks and bulldozers.
What gives the film its special charge is the children of the theatre. We see them deal with their trauma and loss through theatre during the First Intifada (‘uprising’; 1987-1993), and we are abruptly pitchforked about eight years ahead, to the Second Intifada (2000-2005), when many of them have become fighters. One of them, Zakaria Zubeidi, is today considered a legend in Palestine for having led the resistance during the Battle of Jenin in 2002. He also engineered possibly the most spectacular jailbreak in Israeli history, in 2021. Two children in the film, Ala and Ashraf, died as young men fighting in Jenin in 2002, and two others, Yussef and Nidal, died in a suicide attack in Israel in 2001.
Eventually, after the Second Intifada, Zakaria and Juliano teamed up with two others to establish The Freedom Theatre, one of Palestine’s most innovative cultural centres, in Jenin in 2005. Juliano was shot dead by an unknown assailant outside the theatre in 2011.
Farha (2021), directed by Darin J. Sallam, gives a sense of what the Nakba meant for the Palestinians who experienced it. The eponymous protagonist of the film is 14 years old and has dreams of pursuing an education in the city. Her father, the village headman, is already planning to get her married off. The year is 1948, and when Farha’s village is attacked by Israeli forces, her father hides her in the cellar and goes to defend the village. We see and experience the terror visited upon hundreds of Palestinian villages through the cracks of the door of the cellar where Farha is hiding. When, at the end of the film, Farha is forced to flee from the village, it is not the escape to a bright future that she had dreamed of. It is the shattering of a dream, a devastation of all that is familiar and comforting. It is a flight into hell.
The film Divine Intervention (2002) is a series of fictional and increasingly absurd sketches that explore everyday life in Palestine.Then there’s 5 Broken Cameras (2011), directed by Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi, which is a documentary record of life in the West Bank village of Bil’in. One of the film’s directors, Burnat, was not a filmmaker. He had bought a video camera when his son was born—to capture the child’s growing up. But the village of Bil’in, like many others in Palestine, was the target of Israeli violence. The dreaded ‘separation barrier’—also referred to as the ‘apartheid wall’—skirting the village, was being built by Israel, leading to a long and sustained protest by the people. The protest was led by two of Burnat’s best friends, and he found himself filming the protest marches and other actions alongside his son growing up.
After their tie against New Zealand on July 27, the Indian team then take on Argentina (July 29), Ireland (July 30), Belgium (August 1), and Australia (August 2) in its other Pool-B ties.
million88As the film progresses, we see Burnat getting more and more obsessed with filming, which starts to affect his family life as well. Many people are shot or arrested, including his brothers, friends and he as well. And, over time, one camera after another is destroyed by Israeli violence. By the time the film concludes, Burnat has five of them. In a poignant shot, we see them all laid out, like five dead bodies.
Palestinian cinema is not without humour. For example, Divine Intervention (2002), directed by Elia Suleiman, is a series of fictional and increasingly absurd sketches that explore everyday life in Palestine through the story of a man and his father who lives in another city. The problem is that the cities are Nazareth, in northern Israel, and Ramallah, in the West Bank. Even during the most ‘peaceful’ of times, a multitude of checkpoints separate the two, and a journey that should take an hour or two could end up taking the whole day, or sometimes not be possible.
In the first half of the film, we see the father’s neighbourhood in Ramallah, and the small daily squabbles that characterise relations between neighbours. All this would be ‘normal’, had it not been for the fact that they are living on occupied land, and Israeli raids punctuate their life. In the second half, the father falls ill and now the protagonist must travel from Nazareth to Ramallah to see him. While doing so, he encounters a woman, whom he continues to meet clandestinely as the film progresses. In a memorable sequence, he inflates a balloon with the face of Yasser Arafat on it to distract the soldiers at the checkpoint, allowing the lovers to sneak past.
The film ends with a surreal choreographed sequence where the woman catches bullets and destroys a helicopter with an object shaped like Palestine. Referencing silent movies of the past, as well as the work of auteurs such as Jacques Tati, the film uses minimal dialogue and repetitive actions to underline the absurdity of life under occupation.
The last film I want to talk about is not about Palestine, but about life in Israel. Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem (2014), directed by Ronit Elkabetz and Shlomi Elkabetz, is the story of a woman trying to get a divorce. (It is the final film in a trilogy—after To Take a Wife and Shiva—that explores the unhappy marriage of the protagonist). But to get a divorce in a religious court is not easy if you are a woman and the man is not willing. To make matters worse for her, he has not been cruel to her in any obvious way—there is no history of domestic violence; he provides for her material needs; and, he is not in another relationship. So why, then, does she want a divorce? Viviane struggles to explain to the rabbis why she is just not happy with him.
The film creates an atmosphere of intense claustrophobia, and the misogyny of the rabbis, the husband, and his lawyer (who is also his brother), is palpable. The trial drags on for years as the husband digs his heels in and simply refuses to grant the divorce. Even at the end, when he finally does agree, he struggles with the idea that she might get into a relationship with another man and refuses to sign the papers.
Israel is projected as a democracy. If you think of democracy as a political system based on elections, then it is. But if you think of democracy as a society where citizens have equal rights enshrined in law, then Israel is decidedly not a democracy. For one thing, it is an apartheid state—it has a whole set of laws that discriminate against non-Jews, Arabs in particular. But what this film reminds us is that any country created and run on identitarian lines also discriminates against half of its own citizens—women.
What Israel is destroying today is not only an entire territory, Gaza, the lives of its people, the Palestinians, but also its own soul. Films show us how.
(Views expressed are personal)
Sudhanva Deshpande is an actor and director with Jana Natya Manch and editor with leftword books. He is the author of Halla Bol: The Death And Life Of Safdar Hashmipesowin