Freedom Socialist Bulletin • Number 37 • Winter/Spring 2007

Review

Palestine Uncut
Horror, Defiance and Tenacity — resistance in a land under siege

On 2 July 2006 an emergency rally was held in Sydney to protest the Israeli assault on Gaza and the West Bank. Photo courtesy of Possum News Network, www.brushtail.com.au

For well over a century, Palestine has been an unfolding history of dispossession and displacement, brokered and bankrolled by world powers in pursuit of their interests in this rich and strategic region. To the people who lived in Palestine for thousands of years, the cost has been horrific.

Knowing this history, I knew I had to see the Palestinian film festival, Palestine Uncut. Held in Melbourne in mid June, the event combined 12 films and an exhibition which made for a powerful learning experience about the horrors of Israel's 40-year occupation.

In 1947, the United Nations (UN) arbitrarily partitioned Palestine, reducing it to Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Fifty-five percent of Palestinian land went to European Jewish immigrants who, in 1948, founded Israel as an exclusively Jewish State.

In the 1967 Six Day War, Israel occupied and colonised Gaza and the West Bank. Thirty-five years later, with the active complicity of the UN and United States, much more land has been stolen. Palestine Uncut exposed not only the extent with maps and data but also the human, economic and cultural consequences for the Palestinians, who now occupy just 22% of the former territory, surrounded by what is aptly called "the Apartheid Wall."

Scottish Palestinian journalist, Maher Mughabi, launched Palestine Uncut and introduced two works by women filmmakers, Annemarie Jacir and Dahna Abourahme. Like Twenty Impossibles, directed by Jacir, dramatises the occupier's total power at the checkpoint, in all its arrogance. Produced by Jacir and directed by Abourahme, Until when… focuses on households in the Dheisheh Refugee Camp near Bethlehem. The camp, home to 12,000 people, is less than one square kilometre and enclosed by chain fences with razor wire several metres high.

We are introduced to the Hammash family. The grandparents were among the Palestinians who fled the 45 surrounding villages in 1949. Sana works at the Women's Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling. Emad and Hanan are raising their four-year-old daughter, and Fadi, 13, looks after his four younger brothers while their mother cleans houses.

Sana was a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). She explains that Palestinian women "were born to be political." She tells of her involvement in the recent intifada ("uprising") and describes how girls collected stones and fought on the front lines. Throughout the film, Abourahme intersperses photos among the interviews, and we see one of women, including elders, throwing rocks. Says Sana, if the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) had taken the intifada seriously, they would not have accepted the 1993 Oslo Accord. This "fake peace" particularly affected women because, she explains, it dispersed the intifada, and women left the struggle.

Grandfather Ahmed Hammash's son is a mason, who sometimes has to work for Israelis at gunpoint. He talks about the importance of providing an education for his daughters, so that they can make choices about their own lives. For him, "There's been no nation to educate me. I was educated by the intifada." Like Sana, he is scathing of the Oslo agreement.

Fadi says, "The intifada should be something inside of you." He wants to be a journalist for al-Jazeera. He grew up with the intifada and has turned his room into a shrine to the struggle and the fighters, yet he hopes for real peace between Palestinians and Jews. Emad, who retells his role in the resistance and experience in an Israeli prison, echoes Fadi's vision of the future he wants for his daughter: "I wish her a future of democracy, freedom and equality."

Other films featured the Palestinian Women Prisoners Movement, showing the involvement of women in the political struggle. At least 10,000 have been detained, the majority between 1967 and 1976 and more in the intifadas that followed. Following the Oslo Accord, they refused to be released in small groups. Their slogan was, "No peace without the release of all women and men detainees." In 1997, only women were released, and the failure of the accord left many behind Israeli bars.

Children Nevertheless is about the children of Tel el Zaatar refugee camp, outside Beirut, who were orphaned by Israeli bombardments. The 1974 film, They Do Not Exist, addresses the denials of early Israeli leaders, Moshe Dayan and Golda Meir. Another work that pays tribute to Rachel Corrie, a human rights activist crushed by an Israeli bulldozer, indicts the U.S. and Israeli governments, the U.S. media and the military occupation. This film and Ripples Cross both give a picture of international solidarity that is organising inside the Occupied Territories. These are just samplings of the impressive collection of screenings that covered many layers of the struggle since 1967.
The accompanying exhibition featured equally moving displays. The powerful artistry of Melbourne's Dora McPhee came across in her two displays. Disappearing Palestine is a series of six maps, each showing an historical stage with a commentary, from the partition of 1948 to the completion of the wall today. The maps alone convey the atrocity, but the background images bring out the human side. Dispossession – Parts of a Whole consists of seven large panels that depict the realities of being stateless. The homes, the rubble, and the faces of the homeless still holding their door keys in the hope that they'll return. Photos of special personal moments, all shattered. The series ends with a Palestinian keffiyah and stones, representing the intifada, with a collage in the background of massive protests from around the world.

The display of Palestinian embroidery was stunning. This ancient art is now a necessity for women needing to eke out a living. The work of Northern Irish photographer, Rusty Stewart, put into brilliant still life the sadness, horror, defiance and resistance that defined the whole festival.

Palestine Uncut made me think of the women of Nazareth, who are fighting Israel's pilot welfare-to-work scheme for Arab Israelis, which they believe will be extended beyond Nazareth. They say that the plan is really about imposing forced, unpaid labour which Israel can use to avoid funding employment programs. Radical Women is an endorser of an international campaign to stop the plan. I saw this fight resonating in the festival. Most striking for me was the resilience of the struggle and the optimism that comes from its defiance and tenacity. A person could not walk away feeling anything but inspired and, as Maher Mughabi challenged, moved to action.

Something missing, however, was the recognition of resistance among Israelis against their government. Soldiers refusing to serve are imprisoned. Feminists and queers have led huge demonstrations against the occupation. They are making the link between Israel's war on Palestinians with the cutback on jobs and services to Israeli citizens. Mohammed Alatar, whose film, The Iron Wall, was part of the festival, comes closest to addressing this. He's been criticised by Palestinians for including an Israeli woman settler in his film. But, he explains, she represents 65% of the settlers who are there only for economic reasons. "If they had reasonable alternative housing at the same price inside Israel, most of them would be happy to leave the settlements. I want people to know that." This is a crucial point. The problem shared by working class Israelis and Palestinians is the Israeli State, and many Israelis understand this.

In Australia, the most powerful move to action right now is to link the Iraqi resistance to the Palestinian struggle and make this connection with our own. Successive Coalition and Labor governments have tied Canberra to the coat tails of Washington and Tel Aviv. The cost to our sisters and brothers of Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine has been devastating. The cost to us is the unrelenting destruction of our education, health and living standards to pay for these wars. This is the strongest message I took away from Palestine Uncut.

Debbie Brennan