Translating Knights of Cinema

John Berger once wrote, “If we can see the present clearly enough, we shall ask the right questions of the past.” Surely, many people who have awoken to the Palestinian predicament in the past two years can now more clearly acknowledge Zionism’s historic investment in the elimination of the indigenous population of historic Palestine. In conversation with Berger, I explore what the past—and particularly Palestinian images of the past—can tell us about the present.

I spend a lot of time deliberating what a truly militant practice of image-making in support of Palestinian liberation looks like at this moment. On the eve of Dreams of a Nation, a film festival in the United States, Edward Said observed that “the whole history of the Palestinian struggle has to do with the desire to be visible.” Israel’s repeated attempts at disappearing the Palestinians and effacing their historic relationship to the land are certainly what grounds the enduring investment in Palestinian assertions of presence in pictures. Yet there is a cruel optimism in the aspiration for visibility as such, without a clearly defined political ground. While being “seen” is highly coveted by oppressed groups, the recognition it promises never quite delivers.

I know with certainty what the militant image of the past looked like. In Fursan al-sinima: sirat wihdat aflam filastin (Knights of Cinema: The Story of the Palestine Film Unit), a book I translated into English, Khadijah Habashneh offers a first-person account of the program of a militant cinema that closely adhered to the politics of the Palestinian national movement during the height of its revolutionary mobilisation between 1968-1982. After a series of reversals and recapitulations in the revolution’s trajectory – a history too complex to recount here – Al-Aqsa Flood came and caught us all in its storm. It renewed the possibility of anti-colonial action from the most impoverished and besieged corner of historic Palestine, and among its effects has been to resuscitate the question of Palestine, thrusting the image back at the centre of the global agenda. Still, it remains unclear how the solidarity practice of looking can translate into politically meaningful action in the face of genocidal violence that is itself waged through visualisation. I think there’s a way to pose this question historically by engaging with Knights of Cinema, to examine how Palestinians across generations have been able to delimit a frame of visibility and to define a politics of the image in tune with the shifting of times. 

The Palestine Film Unit was established in Amman in 1968 by Sulafa Jadallah, Mustafa Abu Ali, and Hani Jawhariyeh. The camera went hand-in-hand with the Kalashnikov, and the Palestinian Revolution became, as Cuban director Santiago Álvarez notes, the first national liberation movement to be accompanied by a cinema dedicated to making visible its cause (62). From the early days of borrowed equipment and makeshift technologies in Amman, to more advanced infrastructures for developing and circulating films in Beirut, Knights of Cinema narrates numerous moments in which the relationship between cinema and militant action was debated and contested. Abu Jihad, a key PLO military leader, underscores this symbiosis, stating that “photography is as important to us as fighting, because it disseminates our image to the world.” (21) This visual strategy operated through a particular mode of representation. It sought to recast the Palestinians from docile objects of abjection to agentive subjects of movement. In that sense, photography worked not only to counteract Israel’s colonial myth of “a land without a people” but also to mirror the revolutionary project of transforming passive refugees into militant fida’iyin, or freedom fighters. 

One of the PFU’s most widely circulated films, Lays lahum wujud (They Do Not Exist, 1974), thematises the Israeli project of occulting Palestinians. Its title plays on Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir’s pithy negation of Palestinian existence. The short film is an epistolary exchange between young Palestinian refugees, encamped and bombarded in Lebanon, and guerrilla fighters stationed on the frontier with Israel. Its narrative asserts that the intractable conditions of dispossession and confinement can only be overcome through armed resistance against Zionist aggression. The important point to acknowledge is that revolution and movement precede the image, and delimit the space of appearance of the fida’yin. On an aesthetic level, the appropriation of colonial discourse, the agitational arrangement of sequences, and the film’s documentary mode all place the PFU’s output in conversation with the project of Third Cinema.

The success of They Do Not Exist in negating the negation of Palestinians was due in large part to the political conditions of its time. Emerging at the height of Third World liberation struggles waged in the name of national self-determination, the film, along with the broader works of the PFU – was able to draw resonances between the Palestinian Revolution and past and ongoing anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles in Algeria, Vietnam, Cuba, Nicaragua, Mozambique, and Angola. The role of cinema in revolution was a frequent topic of conversation at festivals attended by members of the PFU and in numerous manifestos issued by the group. In this sense, the PFU was internationalist in both outlook and practice. It hosted many global filmmakers aligned with the Palestinian cause, of whom Jean-Luc Godard has received most attention, but Knights of Cinema also describes other encounters with French, Argentinian, Japanese, and German directors, alongside a network of aligned Arab filmmakers. 

Freed Palestinian Prisoners in the Occupied West Bank, January 2025. Afif Amireh for The New York Times.

If the PFU once operated within a unified national movement, rendering Palestine perceptible through the lens of the Third World, both the movement and its frame have since been fractured. Yet the project of the pioneers of Palestinian revolutionary cinema is being reanimated by today’s resurgence of anti-colonial action, producing images born of a breach in the established order of the visible. There are, most immediately, traces of the PFU’s ethos in the work of courageous journalists, from those in formal news outlets to independent content creators on Instagram like Bissan, Aboud, and Saleh, who bear witness so that the world may see Israel’s obliteration of Gaza—its land and people. Echoes of the PFU’s support for armed struggle resurface in videos released by the resistance and broadcast on Al-Jazeera Arabic, with limited circulation amongst non-Arabic speakers through Telegram channels. There are resonances of the PFU in celebratory footage of freed Palestinian political prisoners and other moments of victory—however partial—that make apparent the renewal of struggle across the geographies of Palestine made possible by Al-Aqsa Flood. There are also similarities in internationalist connections activated during the Palestinian Revolution, and the outpouring of solidarity from the global film and media community today—from boycotts of film festivals complicit in the genocide, to imperfect screenings organised at university encampments, and everything in between. 

The experiences of many members of the Palestine Film Unit testify to the sacrifices involved in the making of revolutionary images, foreshadowing the grave price that Gaza’s journalists—abandoned by the entire Western journalistic profession—must pay to broadcast the truth of genocide. Whereas members of the unit, including Hani Jawhariyeh, Ibrahim Nasser and Abdelhafeth Al-Asmar, were martyred on the battlefield in Lebanon, Palestinian journalists in Gaza are now intentionally targeted and murdered in a war against the witnessing of war. During the Israeli siege in Beirut in 1982, the archive of the PFU, along with that of the Palestine Research Center (which produced a narrative of the Palestinian People), was looted. Knights of Cinema is in part a labour of documenting what was stolen, written to accompany Khadijah Habashneh’s twenty-year journey to recover the stolen archive. Israel’s current “culturalicide” and “epistemicide” in Gaza, involving the wholesale destruction of cultural heritage, universities, and sites for the production and preservation of knowledge, is entirely unprecedented in scale and scope. But as the story of the PFU proves, what is remembered never dies.

To translate Knights of Cinema is to attempt to render the Palestine Film Unit’s past experiences useful to our political present. More important than the specific content or plots of individual films of Palestinian revolutionary cinema is the need to engage with the institutions and infrastructures that define the framework through which the Palestinians become visible. The PFU produced agentive images of people fighting for self-determination, a struggle that claimed the very form of recognition required for modern political representation—namely, the nation-state. Today, the project of the Third World has been relegated to the margins, and the possibility of freedom for the colonised is no longer the galvanising slogan of the global majorities. From the high-altitude vantage point of power politics, Western governments that provide material support for genocide have become mouthpieces for Zionist and US imperialism’s “forever war.” Foreign governments, legacy media, and the United Nations work in concert to criminalise the resistance by recasting it as terrorism, to disappear the victims of genocide by blaming them for their own annihilation, and to silence the solidarity movement through invoking the spectre of anti-semitism. While images of Palestinians have always faced censorship in one way or another, they have become so thoroughly occulted in hegemonic Western media by the far more dominant discourses of securitisation and global counterinsurgency. 

In staying true to the grassroots vantage point of Knights of Cinema, let us turn our attention to consider the work of activists bridging the divide between the global North and the global South. Allies of the Palestinian cause—sympathetic audiences who have been actively witnessing Israel’s gruesome genocide of Gaza as mediated on their screens—recognise in these images of the burning, the massacres, the corpses that “Palestine is the World.” Framing Palestine as the convergence point of destructive forms of settler-colonialism, militarism, and racial capitalism compels us to rethink how solidarity coheres between those who produce images amidst a genocide and allies whose labour of witness and action is necessarily limited. The challenge today is to remain steadfast in our attention to the Gaza’s journalists, who risk their lives to film as they exclaim, “look at what is happening to us.” And in looking, the optic of solidarity demands that we see—within terabytes of pixels mediating mounds of rubble Gaza—glimpses of the inexhaustible generativity of Palestinian land and the people who inhabit it. 

The journalists of Gaza, like the knights of the Palestine Film Unit before them, activate different constellations of images in the long Palestinian struggle over the shifting regimes of visibility. This struggle is in part about cameras, aesthetics, and audiences—but first and foremost, it is a political struggle over how the frame is cast, and what can be recognised within and beyond its contours. In the time of the Palestinian Revolution, the shared horizon of liberation from colonial domination gave the image its positive content. In the wake of the Al-Aqsa flood, the globally interconnected structures of dispossession are themselves evinced in the image, refracting forms of violence and subjugation that implicate many allies of the Palestinian cause, primarily as perpetrators, though occasionally victims as well.