Two Recent Film Controversies and the Denial of Palestine
In the world of pro-Israel discourse, both Jewish and Western, Gaza barely exists. On the face of it this is a ridiculous statement. Surely Gaza is frequently discussed, especially in relation to Hamas rule and the Israeli hostages who remain in captivity there? A closer examination, however, reveals that popular engagement with Gaza, and with Palestine more generally, is so skin-deep as to be practically irrelevant.
The story told in this discourse goes something like this. There was October 7th, a heinous terror attack that seemed to emerge out of nowhere, fuelled by global Islamist ideology and directed by Iran. This was a brutal and antisemitic attack, the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, in which around 1200 were killed and hundreds taken hostage. Israel tried to defend itself but has been unable to bring home all the hostages, many of whom are still in captivity after over 500 days. Meanwhile there has been a global surge of antisemitism as supposed progressives around the world celebrated the massacre and failed to show any sympathy with Jews. Jews around the world remain emotionally scarred by October 7th and by the continued captivity of the hostages and are deeply upset at the indifference of their non-Jewish friends and neighbours.
This story will be very familiar to many, I find it very easy to write as I have heard it so many times. One source can be found here, on the blog of a UK Liberal Rabbi, but there are many more on social media. Others to whom the story is less familiar will immediately notice the lacuna; it says nothing about Gaza, and its suffering. Many versions of the story do of course mention Gaza, as the place where the hostages are being held, as the base of the hated Hamas, and previously as the source of rocket attacks on Israel. This is Gaza as Satan, as hell, the dark place next to Israel where terrible people reside and where terrible things happen. This Gaza has a place in the historic Israeli imagination, as Ari Dubnow has argued, as implied by the popular adaptation of the phrase lech l’Azazel (which basically translates as go to hell) to lech l’Aza (go to Gaza).
There is no space in this narrative for the people of Gaza, their lives, their love, their works, their play, their food, their culture, their everyday, their civilisation. More specifically there is no space for the vast suffering the Palestinians people of Gaza have experienced. Vast areas of Gaza have been wiped out. Every university and hospital in Gaza has been destroyed or heavily damaged. Precious archives and ancient buildings are reduced to ruins. We don’t have a final casualties figure, but in January a peer reviewed study in the Lancet estimated a figure of 64,260, up until the end of June 2024. Given that this was seven months before the ceasefire agreement it is likely that many thousands more have been killed since then. Only once the war is definitively over, and reconstruction begun will a credible figure based on surplus deaths emerge. Surplus deaths is a concept we will remember from the pandemic era – it measures how many more have died that would usually be expected in a given time period. It seems plausible that the final tally will be in six figures. This of course does not include the numbers of people injured, with many of their injuries not adequately treated. There is a lot which needs to be said about Gaza.
Now some Israel advocates do say something about all this, especially those who get asked about it in media interviews. They might dispute the casualty figures, claiming that they are unreliable because they originate from the Hamas-run ministry of Health. They might argue that a high number of the dead are Hamas combatants, and thus legitimate targets. They might say that Israel makes every effort to warn civilians so they can flee, or that Hamas uses Gazans as human shields so the casualties are really their responsibility. (I am very familiar with and can easily regurgitate these arguments too). But most people don’t say these things. Most people realise that these arguments are not very convincing, and that the person making them is conceding too much terrain, is already losing the argument. Most people have a different approach; to ignore Gaza altogether. This fact will seem unbelievable to some – they will insist that supporters of Israel know what it is doing in Gaza and support it. Some do, for sure. But I really believe that a great many more are blocking it out, ignoring it, unwilling for it to form part of their narrative.
Pro-Israel accounts have an origin story for the current conflict: October 7th, and an account of present suffering: the suffering of the hostages and of Jews around the world, depicted as experiencing a wave of antisemitism and lack of sympathy for Jewish suffering. Theses accounts simply skip over Gaza, as if it doesn’t exist, as if it cannot be imagined, as if to think about it would be to support terrorism. As if the war is being fought entirely again Hamas militants with civilians being kept safe and protected. As well as the moral problems in this absence, it also leads to major misinterpretations of the behaviour of others. Because the war against Gaza is not considered, the huge protests against it around the world do not make sense. The only possible explanation is that the protests are motivated by antisemitism, made up of people who support Hamas’ actions on October 7 and don’t believe Israel has the right to defend itself against them. The idea that the protestors’ main motivation is the death of tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza is not seriously considered because those deaths are not being considered. Many supporters of Israel are infuriated by claims that Israel is perpetrating genocide in Gaza, or apartheid in the West Bank, but they do not usually rebut them through a detailed argument of why the legal threshold for genocide has not been met or why there is in fact equality for all in the West Bank. To do so would be to engage in the detail of Palestinian life and existence, something many simply cannot bring themselves to do. Instead, they simply deny the allegation without argument. There is no genocide. Jews are a group that experiences genocide not one that perpetrates it.
This lacuna has implications for the response to two recent films about Palestine. The first was Gaza; How to Survive a War Zone, made by two British directors and broadcast by the BBC two weeks ago but subsequently removed from iPlayer after complaints (It can be seen here). The complaints originated from the anti-Palestinian obsessive David Collier, laughably described by the Jewish Chronicle as a ‘researcher’, who wrote that he stayed up all night following the broadcast researching and writing up his supposedly scandalous findings. The central revelation is that the main child narrator of the film, thirteen-year-old Abdullah Al-Yazouri, is the son of Gaza’s deputy agriculture minister and the documentary does not mention this fact. The related claim is that any money paid to the child’s family for his performance might have gone to Hamas. Sure, it would have been wise to have added this information, and for the BBC to be aware of it, but it is hardly the bombshell that Collier and his unhinged supporters claim. Firstly, the father, Ayman Al-Yazouri, is a civilian politician, not part of Hamas’ military wing; they are distinct. This is important; there is no indication that Hamas politicians knew what its military wing was planning on October 7th. Secondly, deputy agricultural minister is a very junior post; this is hardly high leadership, let alone Yahya Sinwar territory. And as for some money going to Hamas – perhaps, but so what? Hamas is still, despite everything, the effective government in the strip. I highly doubt you can make a film in Gaza without some money finding its way to Hamas, just as it would be almost impossible to make a film in Israel without some money finding its way to the Israeli state or army. I’m sure that preventing any film being made in Gaza is precisely what some Israel advocates want. Lastly, Abdullah is far from the only person featured in the film, we meet many Gazans; other children, doctors, people fleeing bombing raids. Are they all necessarily Hamas? Are we erasing the concept of the Palestinian civilian?
The controversy demonstrates a common misunderstanding of Hamas as a Nazi-like movement that seeks to kill all Jews and must be utterly destroyed. In reality it is a Palestinian political movement, with an Islamist character that both governs part of Palestine and dreams of restoring Palestine to an (imagined) glorious past. It engages in brutal and unethical acts of resistance against Israel that fail to adequately distinguish between military and civilian targets. Hamas has done terrible things and should be held accountable for them just as Israel should be held accountable for its crimes. But to claim that Hamas must be destroyed while depicting all or most of Gaza as Hamas is a recipe for genocide. A recent Guardian letter, from a former Save the Children aid worker made a more substantive criticism of the film; that by following two children from better off families it presents the situation of children in Gaza as better than it actually is. I don’t think this is the issue the documentary’s complainants were concerned with.
I don’t believe that Abdullah’s family connection is the real reason for the attacks on the film and its’ removal from the BBC website. I suspect the underlying, perhaps even subconscious issue is that the film shows in a real, viscous way what it is like to live in Gaza during the war, told from the perspective of children, the people with whom we naturally are most inclined to empathise. You can only communicate so much with the written word, and grainy phone-based citizen journalism is only one step better. There is nothing like high quality film, with people talking direct to camera (even better if they speak fluent english as Abdullah does) and showing the audience their reality, to bring home emotionally the horrendous situation in Gaza. There are moments when we see scenes of relative normality, such as a market, and start to believe things in Gaza are not as bad as we had supposed, only to be shown scenes of utter destruction and devastation. International media has effectively been banned or driven out since the start of the war; this is the first opportunity to show, in full colour and high-quality audio, the situation on the ground including people fleeing attacks from the air. For people who have been in denial about Gaza, this portrayal is deeply unsettling, disturbing, and dangerous. They thus seek to find a way to discredit it, to prove that it is a facade, to restore the reality that they believe in. In this age it almost seems quaint to demand removal of a programme from the website of the state broadcaster when it can easily be viewed in many corners of the internet. But the hasbarists know that many viewers are conservative in their viewing habits and will not seek these out. Its removal from iPlayer means a lot less people will see the film. The pro-Israel discourse’s narrative has teetered but not fallen.
The same issue is at work with the documentary No Other Land, which stunningly won the Best Documentary Oscar this week. It features the Palestinian residents of Masafer Yatta, in Area C of the West Bank. The film depicts how Israel has decided that the land on which these families have lived for generations should become a military training zone, and thus the families have no right to live there. We see the IDF demolish their homes, the Palestinians rebuild them, and they get demolished again. There is no Hamas element here – clearly the residents of Masafer Yatta pose no security threat to Israelis, they are simply an undesired presence on land that Israel wants. But nonetheless the filmmakers (Palestinian and Israeli) have faced enormous difficulties getting the film shown and still do not have a distributor. (It can currently be viewed on 4oD in the UK and now on YouTube). In the wake of the Oscar win, a range of Israeli politicians condemned the film as anti-Israel, or false, and called the film’s Israeli co-director Yuval Abraham an antisemite. Most revealing was that claim that if people want to see a real documentary about Palestinians, they should watch the footage taken by Hamas militants on October 7th. That is the only appropriate depiction of Palestinians, as terrorists and murderers. The appropriate depiction of Israelis is as victims, not as perpetrators. I found the following comment on social media, by a person who appears to be British:
the Palestinians lost their right to a voice on October 7th. Not because there aren’t Palestinian individuals who are undoubtedly suffering, but because the collective supports something so incredibly evil that it doesn’t deserve a story. It is utterly absurd for a one sided story to take center stage. Perhaps a documentary about the Nova, deserved this big audience.
Lost their right to a voice. Doesn’t deserve a story. Should be a documentary about the Nova massacre instead. Edward Said famously requested ‘permission to narrate’ the Palestinian story in The Question of Palestine in 1979, 45 years later that permission is still routinely denied.
The real lives of ordinary Palestinians, in all their complexity, is something most Israeli politicians and Israeli advocates don’t want to engage with, and don’t want others to see either. So we see attempts to control the means of distribution and broadcast, to prevent such depictions being shown.
I understand that there is the opposite phenomenon on the pro-Palestinian side; that the genocide in Gaza is the only issue, and October 7 or the Israeli hostages are not worth mentioning. And just today PACBI, the cultural boycott, campaign, issued a ridiculous statement condemning No Other Land as breaching BDS anti-normalisation guidelines. I reject this discourse just as much as the pro-Israel one. But let’s be honest – this approach does not hold much power in either the political or cultural spheres. Western governments have almost entirely adopted the Israeli viewpoint, which means extensive and constant discussion of October 7th and the hostages, where the most that can be expressed about Gaza is a vague wish for its suffering be ameliorated. In this climate, film is incredibly important. It produces empathy for those we are discouraged from empathising with and connection as individuals with people usually depicted as an undifferentiated mass of extremism and suffering. From Exodus to Waltz with Bashir to Golda, the Israeli experience has been frequently and empathetically depicted on screen. It’s long past time to do the same for Palestinian experience and life. When too many try to overlook Palestine altogether, watching and engaging with it visually offers the best possible corrective.