ALBERTO GOMEZ: Works on Palestine
NAKBA: Reflexiones de jóvenes cineastas palestinos / Reflections of Young Palestinian Filmmakers
Article on the Palestinian filmmakers Wisam Al Jafari and Tamara Abu Laban from Dheisheh. Text written in solidarity with the Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research by Alberto Gomez and published in Ateneo liberación in February 2021. Translated into English by Dot Tuer on May 15 in commemoration of the Nakba and in solidarity with the Palestinian people.
Link to article in Spanish follows the English translation.
In the beginning …
First - they say – there were the Canaanites and then there were the Hebrews. One thousand years before Christ was born Saul founded his kingdom, which was later divided into two. Almost 2,700 years ago the Kingdom of Israel was struck down by the Assyrians. 2,560 years ago the Kingdom of Judah was annihilated by the Babylonians, and in the year 70 AC the Romans razed Jerusalem. These are the historical precedents of the State of Israel, its title deeds to Palestine.
-Rodolfo Walsh, Noticias, 1974.
Where are you from? – I'm from Jaffa. – And where do you live? – I live in a tent. And you? Where are you from? – I'm from Bulgaria. – And where you live? – I live in Jaffa.
-Arlette Tessier, Dialogue in Gaza, 1972.
It has been almost fifty years since the Argentine writer Rodolfo Walsh wrote about the Palestinian refugee camps in the Argentine newspaper Noticias, describing a panorama of tents and electrified wire. Not much has,changed since then. The wire fence that surrounded the refugee camp is no longer visible, but only because it has been replaced by a seven meter-high wall and sentry-box towers stationed every fifty meters where the Israeli army surveils and controls the Palestinian population, now locked up for three generations. As in the previous decades, overcrowding, a lack of water, and the power outages several times a day constitute the living conditions for the current refugees, and those who preceded them.
In a conversation via Zoom held in early February 2021 and organized by the Toronto-based artist collective ConverSalón, two young Palestinian filmmakers, Wisam Al Jafari and Tamara Abu Laban, spoke about living and filming in Dheisheh, where they were born and still reside, one of the first Palestinian refugee camps to be established after Arab villages were attacked by the pro-Israeli commando forces in 1948 and the villagers expelled. Their most recent films – Al Jafari's Ambience and Abu Laban’s Behind the Fence – both completed in 2019, record the rhythms of daily existence and the testimonies of three generations of refugees in Dheisheh to document the resistance of the Palestinian people to Israel oppression.
In actuality, a densely built-up encampment, 1.5 kilometers in size with a population of more than 9,000 people, Dheisheh occupies land that has been leased from Jordan through the auspices of the United Nations. The UNRAWA (United Nations Agency for Palestinian Refugees) is responsible for administering and guaranteeing food for the displaced population, and for the health and education of the children, including building schools, with minimal funding. The Israeli government exercises military and territorial control.
Inside the camp, there are no public squares or parks; the children play in the streets, narrow corridors of pavement similar to those of Latin American shanty towns, with precarious vertical constructions of rooms piled on top of each other reaching upwards towards the sky, “as if looking for air and freedom,” in the words of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008).
Link to article in Spanish follows the English translation.
In the beginning …
First - they say – there were the Canaanites and then there were the Hebrews. One thousand years before Christ was born Saul founded his kingdom, which was later divided into two. Almost 2,700 years ago the Kingdom of Israel was struck down by the Assyrians. 2,560 years ago the Kingdom of Judah was annihilated by the Babylonians, and in the year 70 AC the Romans razed Jerusalem. These are the historical precedents of the State of Israel, its title deeds to Palestine.
-Rodolfo Walsh, Noticias, 1974.
Where are you from? – I'm from Jaffa. – And where do you live? – I live in a tent. And you? Where are you from? – I'm from Bulgaria. – And where you live? – I live in Jaffa.
-Arlette Tessier, Dialogue in Gaza, 1972.
It has been almost fifty years since the Argentine writer Rodolfo Walsh wrote about the Palestinian refugee camps in the Argentine newspaper Noticias, describing a panorama of tents and electrified wire. Not much has,changed since then. The wire fence that surrounded the refugee camp is no longer visible, but only because it has been replaced by a seven meter-high wall and sentry-box towers stationed every fifty meters where the Israeli army surveils and controls the Palestinian population, now locked up for three generations. As in the previous decades, overcrowding, a lack of water, and the power outages several times a day constitute the living conditions for the current refugees, and those who preceded them.
In a conversation via Zoom held in early February 2021 and organized by the Toronto-based artist collective ConverSalón, two young Palestinian filmmakers, Wisam Al Jafari and Tamara Abu Laban, spoke about living and filming in Dheisheh, where they were born and still reside, one of the first Palestinian refugee camps to be established after Arab villages were attacked by the pro-Israeli commando forces in 1948 and the villagers expelled. Their most recent films – Al Jafari's Ambience and Abu Laban’s Behind the Fence – both completed in 2019, record the rhythms of daily existence and the testimonies of three generations of refugees in Dheisheh to document the resistance of the Palestinian people to Israel oppression.
In actuality, a densely built-up encampment, 1.5 kilometers in size with a population of more than 9,000 people, Dheisheh occupies land that has been leased from Jordan through the auspices of the United Nations. The UNRAWA (United Nations Agency for Palestinian Refugees) is responsible for administering and guaranteeing food for the displaced population, and for the health and education of the children, including building schools, with minimal funding. The Israeli government exercises military and territorial control.
Inside the camp, there are no public squares or parks; the children play in the streets, narrow corridors of pavement similar to those of Latin American shanty towns, with precarious vertical constructions of rooms piled on top of each other reaching upwards towards the sky, “as if looking for air and freedom,” in the words of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008).
The filmmakers describe a pervasive lack of freedom. They can only film on location surreptitiously and cannot leave the camp without permission.
Tamara Abu Laban’s Behind the Fence is a testimonial documentary that narrates the history of the exodus to Dheisheh through first-person witnesses, who describe their experiences of tents and barbed wire, cold, snow, and hunger, and how without blankets or mattresses they had to survive in the open.
The revelations of the inhuman conditions endured by women and men a generation older than Tamara, some of whom are family members and who have suffered jail and persecution, does not negate their hope of returning one day to their lands, to their fields, their vineyards, their olive groves, which for centuries have belonged to their relatives. The film conveys the dignity and admirable strength of the Palestinian people to believe and to create even in the worst of circumstances.
When asked about how she approached filming her subjects, Tamara explains that while she began with a script, “the narration developed through the process of filming,” that by recording testimonies she was constructing historical memory at the same time.
The director of Ambience, Wisam Al Jafari, similarly notes that his film evolved through the process of filming. While he had a script to work from, every time his crew tried to shoot a scene it was made impossible by the lack of privacy, silence, and space. “So,” he explains, “we decided instead to go out with a camera, day and night, to record movements and sounds of camp, to use our daily environment to create the music for the film that we couldn't do in a room covered in egg boxes that was our improvised studio.”
In the end, the quotidian sounds of people and movements in a confined space succeed in capturing the powerful energy of everyday life in the camp. The result is neither more nor less than a conjunction of sounds, of incredible noises that build upon each other to become a poetic manifesto of denunciation and resistance.
When asked about avenues for showing their work, the filmmakers – two young survivors of three generations of a displaced peoples – tell us that “film festivals in general do not accept our work; because we seek to show the reality of the Palestinian camps, they reject us.”
When asked about how the pandemic has affected their lives, they respond that they have experienced the pandemic in the same way as when the Israeli army decrees a curfew in the camp: “we must stay in our house for days, with the consequences that this brings, of many people losing their jobs by not being able to go to work; living with the pandemic is the same as living with the usual curfew, except with less fear, since if you go out in the pandemic you do not run the same risk that the army will repress you.”
Cold, hunger, snow, tents, barbed wire, corridors, exile, jail, wall, wars, curfews, fear: these are words of oppression that accompany the Palestinian people living under occupation and in exiled from their lands. In these pandemic times, the Palestinians, like many others, are day by day more deterritorialized, their plight as a displaced peoples disregarded and forgotten. Al Jafari's Ambience and Abu Laban’s Behind the Fence stand firm against this oblivion.
Alberto Gomez, Ateneo liberación in February 2021.
English translation by Dot Tuer
