Enduring Frames: Cinema, Solidarity, Palestinian Resistance

While writing these words, we are struck by the inadequacy of language in the face of annihilation. In spite of this, we approach this dossier as an attempt to respond to the urgency of our moment—a moment in which the past twenty months have unfolded not only as a moment of unprecedented violence, but as a systemic campaign of erasure. Words fail to convey the horrors endured daily by Palestinians in Gaza and the rest of Palestine. Yet, they remain indispensable weapons in the face of this erasure. As the late Gazan poet Refaat Alareer, murdered by an Israeli airstrike in December 2023, declares, “If I must die, let it bring hope—let it be a tale.”¹ Palestinians have not retreated in their resistance. In synchrony with allies worldwide, they have harnessed the “strength” of words, from survivor testimonies to the forensic indictments of the International Court of Justice, from protest chants echoing from Yemen to South Africa and the halls of American universities. These voices have forged a new vernacular of global solidarity that loudly opposes the destruction of people in the name of the settler colonial project. 

As Mohammed El-Kurd has poignantly made visible, the mainstream Western media has pressured Palestinians to adapt to roles of perfect victims, allowing for what he calls “the politics of appeal” as the dominant model for action. However, once we move away from the realm of Main Street in the US, the UK, Germany, and other genocide supporting countries, a quite different constellation of relations becomes legible. From Irish rappers Kneecap’s protest at Coachella, to Greek dock workers blocking arms shipments to Israel, from movements like Film Workers for Palestine to student encampments demanding divestment, all these actors openly reject the legitimacy of appeals to dominant powers. In demanding justice that interrupts atrocities and holds perpetrators accountable, they inevitably de-centre the West and its former colonial metropoles. These politically committed practices have been instantiated from numerous places across the globe. They chart complex geographies, bringing together diverse strategies of resistance that reshape consciousness and collective action. Reinvigorating old images, they are giving birth to new imaginaries of Palestinian liberation. This dossier highlights cinema and film culture’s contribution to this pivotal historical shift of our current global conjuncture.

Still, neither words nor images can stand against the onslaught of arms, drones, and bombs. Nor can they prevent the relentless loss of life. While the torture and horrors inflicted by the Zionist apartheid state, through the myriad mechanisms of its settler colonial project, have been taking place since at least the 1948 Nakba, the scale of violence unleashed in the past two years is unprecedented. Faced with these atrocities, the burning urgency to do something has moved countless people across the world. The question of agency and meaningfulness of actions that do not directly change the situation on the ground in Gaza, in Palestine, as well as in Lebanon, Yemen, and Syria now, looms large. As critical law and theory scholar Brenna Bhandar observed, “the idea that taking political (and legal) action should in some ways make one feel hopeful that a change in course is possible – particularly as it relates to intensive lethal violence – has been challenged by the brazen performance of impunity by Israeli politicians, soldiers and citizens.”² In editing this dossier, and as we write these words, we make no pretence of offering answers, nor do we harbour delusions about the impact of our act. What we can, though, is add our voices to the chorus that has created what writer and urbanist Mahdi Sabbagh calls “the flows of liberatory ideas that come from under and in spite of settler-colonial geographies”.³ Bringing together seven essays and two interviews, we foreground diverse ideas, practices, and – crucially –geographies that have underwritten solidarities shaped around Palestinian cinema. Ours is not necessarily a meaningful gesture, but one at our disposal: a rare act that is tangible and within our means.

The dossier before you offers accounts of how filmmakers and film cultural works devised, often new, forms of their practice through committed engagement with the Palestinian struggle for liberation. The centring of this committed practice amplifies and brings to light the significance that Palestinian and film cultural workers across the world have found in cinema. In an interview we conducted with Ola Salama, executive director of Ramallah-based Filmlab Palestine, she observed: “The genocide was broadcast live—it required no explanation. Yet cinema serves a distinct purpose. While news reports may fade from memory, films endure. This is why we approach cinema as both a weapon of resistance and an instrument for sustaining our narrative.”⁴ Echoing Salama, we recognise in the temporality of films—the ways they are made, the ways they travel across borders, the strength and duration of attachments they create with audiences, the forcefulness and ease with which they gather people—an opening to speak about the might and multivalences of resistance against horror.   

In our approach, we found no alternative but to remain grounded in staying as close as possible to the realities where these cinematic practices unfold, and to honour the labour of film cultural workers. For those of us who lose capacities for conceptual and abstract thinking in the moments of escalating ethnic cleansing, it is the tangible activity of filmmakers, film programmers, and organisers that presents the thread to follow. A thread that offers invaluable insights about the political capacities and poignancy of cultural work. We, thus, constructed this dossier as a platform to amplify the voices and work of those who relentlessly oppose, disrupt, and intervene in the operations of imperial and settler colonial projects. 

The two interviews we conducted–one with Ola Salama from Filmlab Palestine, the other with filmmakers Mohamed Jabaly, Saeed Taji Farouky, and Mohanad Yaqubi of the Palestine Film Institute (PFI)—centre on these organisations’ mechanisms of resistance, as well as their evolving strategies during these past two years. Complementing these conversations, Iskandar Abdalla, artistic director of The Arab Film Festival Berlin, reflects on the festival’s 2024 edition, which dedicated its Spotlight section to Palestine. These accounts demonstrate how the three institutions have not only sustained Palestinian cinema under siege but actively reshaped it into a dynamic force of cultural resistance and transnational solidarity.

 If these three pieces constitute the “present” section of the issue, three essays by Fadi Abu Nemeh, Rana Anani, and Nadine Fattaleh explore the relationship between the past and present and how the former bears upon the latter. Fattaleh reflects on translating Khadijah Habashneh’s book, “Knights of Cinema: The Story of the Palestine Film Unit,” into English and ponders the significance of the militant impulse.⁵ Once at the heart of the images produced by the PFU, it is now evident in the image-making of journalists, which renders visible the destruction in Palestine. Anani examines how the historical formations of global solidarity play a pivotal role in preserving Palestinian revolutionary cinema, enabling contemporary filmmakers, artists, and researchers to carry on with artistic traditions central to writing Palestinian history. Further extending such inquiries, in a way, AbuNe’meh presents the “inside” perspective from one of these research projects. Focusing on the collective Subversive Film’s project “Tokyo Reels,” he recounts his involvement in it, demonstrating how these projects broaden the horizons of younger generations of Palestinians, propelling them towards a new grasp of history and cinema.

The third section of the issue is dedicated to the essays that focus on the past as both a site of revolutionary possibility and an archive of radical futurity. AK Latif’s study of Palestina, Otro Vietnam (1972) excavates the film’s tricontinental networks to reveal how Third Worldist solidarity was forged through cinematic production, distribution, and aesthetic experimentation—legacy now reclaimed through digital preservation. Claire Begbie’s article pays tribute to Iraqi filmmaker Qais al-Zubaidi (1939–2024), highlighting his lifelong commitment to Palestinian cinema and demonstrating how his innovative works documented Palestinian exile while resisting Zionist erasure through transnational collaborations. Finally, Suja Sawafta and Emma Ben Ayoun’s analysis of Ici et Ailleurs (1976) addresses cinema’s fraught relationship with historical representation, arguing that Godard and Miéville’s “meta-dialectical” approach exposes cinema’s failures while insisting on its political potential to bridge temporal and geographic divides. Together, these articles underscore how the past’s fragmented traces continue to shape and be shaped by Palestine’s ongoing struggle against imperialism and cultural annihilation.

We find a historical perspective essential for thinking about Zionist settler-colonial violence across its long durée and grasping different valences of resistance to it. We align with Nasser Aburahme’s framing—shared by many scholars and activists—that “the headfirst charge into a frenzied genocidal campaign in Gaza can only be understood if parsed in the full historical arc of struggle over Palestine that reaches this current inflection point.”⁶ This extended historical view reveals not only the brutal continuity of colonial erasure and Zionism’s “utter dependence on imperial patronage.”⁷ It also foregrounds the unbroken thread of Palestinian steadfastness that persisted across generations. While bearing witness to this history, we nevertheless share Aburahme’s optimism, if we can use that term, in his conviction that Zionism’s foundational impasse has met its dead end. The essays in this section demonstrate how Palestinian cinema has and still does document this historical struggle and actively contests its erasure, transforming archival fragments into tools for liberation.

It is important to note how the forgetting of the historical perspective is more than detrimental, and it has been present in many different forms. Within Palestine specifically. This has certainly been a deliberate strategy of settler colonialism. Education in the occupied Palestinian territories since 1994 stands as proof. The politics of school textbooks as devised by the first curriculum centre established by the Palestinian Authority (PA) upon signing the Oslo Accords with Israel have generated considerable controversy.⁸ Given the gravity of Israeli colonialism and its penetration of all aspects of Palestinian life, it comes as no surprise that the education of Palestinians was bound to become a hotbed for ideological contestation because of this limited autonomy. However, while an examination of school textbooks’ construction of self, history, and the nation often provides a source for articulating different struggles, scholars of Palestinian education warn that curricula also run the danger of “possibly enacting a ‘colonial present’ that could empty de-colonisation from within.”⁹ For example, a quick look at the history textbooks assigned for primary and secondary education reveals that the narrative of the Palestinian national movement between the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 and the eruption of the First Palestinian Intifada of 1987 has been entirely omitted. This, of course, runs in tandem with the overall policies implemented by the PA in shifting its conception of the struggle from a national liberation movement to a state-building project, in hopes of succeeding in its negotiations with Israel. This approach predetermines the silencing of the militant nature of the struggle at this time, and it disregards the influences of transnational networks of solidarity, as well as the armed resistance carried out by state and non-state actors. Turning to cinema helps counter this process.¹⁰

From the early efforts of Palestinians taking control over their political and cultural autonomy, cinema has served as a witness and a weapon. This tradition traces back to the 1970s, where transnational solidarity cinema served to embed Palestinian narratives with global anti-imperialist struggles. As Nadia Yaqub elucidates in Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution, the Palestinian films of the 1970s were “part of the creation of a Palestinian visibility that has been sustained to the present day,” serving not merely as artistic endeavours but as “representations of the Palestinian experience [that] contributed to the fabrication of the Palestinian revolution by rendering it visible to its participants and allies as a revolution.”¹¹ These works, often produced under conditions of “extraordinary precarity,” sought to forge a collective identity, document displacement and resistance, and project Palestinian narratives onto global screens, countering a “curse of visibility.”¹² Cinema from this period and the thinking that accompanied it, fuelled by beliefs at the heart of the revolutionary political praxis, as Kay Dickinson notes, still “carry vital lessons in how a cinema of liberation might function.”¹³ This volume underscores cinema’s enduring power as a site of political imagination and cultural resilience by engaging these historical and contemporary trajectories.

Similarly to Aburahme, Adam Hanieh makes a point about the necessity for a geopolitical perspective that situates Israel and the Zionist project not as isolated or exceptional phenomena, but as an extension of broader Western colonial projects.¹⁴ He argues that the dominant discourse of developmentalism on Palestine “obfuscates, and thereby strengthens, the reality of Israeli settler colonialism” by divorcing economic and social interventions from the structures of power that sustain it.¹⁵ This obfuscation mirrors historical patterns of colonial rule, where technocratic governance and neoliberal policies have long served to “disappear” power relations while reinforcing dependency.¹⁶ 

This same logic of obfuscation operates in the cultural sphere, where visibility does not equate to liberation. Helga Tawil-Souri extends this critique to the realm of media.¹⁷ While the globalisation of the Palestinian cause amplifies its visibility, she argues that it has also “rendered the issues distant and mediated spectacles,” abstracting its anticolonial essence into depoliticised frameworks of human rights or symbolic solidarity. As she observes, this process “hollows the cause itself,” reducing Palestinians to “bystanders” as competing ideological agendas co-opt their struggle.¹⁸ We find this perspective relevant as it reveals how both economic and discursive structures work to undermine Palestinian agency, whether through neoliberal development frameworks or through the commodification of solidarity. In our times of horror, with this issue, we chose to centre those for whom solidarity is not a symbolic gesture, and those who refuse erasures of settler colonial frameworks. 

As we stand appalled that the world fails to halt the slaughter—denying Palestinians even the basic dignity of armed intervention—we refuse to relinquish the power of images and film culture as tools of resistance. A power, many have sought to harness through harsh times in history, certainly Palestinians themselves.

Endnotes