by Muna Dajani, Alaa Iktaish, Bassel Rizqallah and Diaa Ali Hroub

Our project, Mapping Memories of Resistance in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights (1), is an ongoing collaborative effort between academic institutions, activists, artists, and students who are interested in narrating, documenting, and re-telling stories and experience of living with, resisting, and enduring forms of political, socio-economic and cultural domination. The project forms part of the Academic Collaboration between the Department of Geography and Environment at LSE, the Israeli Studies MA program at Birzeit University in Palestine, and Al Marsad Arab Human Rights Centre in the Golan Heights. The overarching theme of the project is examining transformational events in the lives of communities under settler-colonial rule in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights. We examine the trajectories upon which the Jawlanis have embarked on following the great strike (الاضراب الكبير); a six-month strike in the Jawlani villages in 1982 protesting the unilateral Israeli annexation of the region and the attempt to force Israeli citizenship on the remaining Jawlani community. Our project took us on a journey of learning, unlearning, active archiving, brainstorming, and sharing ideas and reflections on how this event continues to be a ‘live’ event. What has been brought to the forefront of those encounters was the centrality of the shared experiences of solidarity and support that Jawlanis and Palestinians engaged in on multiple fronts.

The 1948 Nakba and the Naksa of 1967 are dates in history that are etched in the memory of Palestinians and Jawlanis alike as a year of dispossession, uprooting, defeat, surrender, and betrayal. Nineteen years after the Nakba, the 1967 Naksa expanded the settler-colonial territorial expansion, colonization, and the ethnic cleansing of the rest of Palestine (namely East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip) and the Syrian Golan Heights. Our approach in this project has not been to extend our focus to the monumental years and events of the Nakba and Naksa, but to focus on what has been framed as the ‘Shadow Years’ (2). ‘Shadow Years’ refers to the time following the Nakba and Naksa for those Palestinian and Syrian communities who remained in their towns and villages. They had to make sense of the material uprooting they endured from their lands and the abrupt deformation to their societies and way of life, putting them at the forefront of an encounter with a settler-colonial state. During these shadow years and as the settler colonial systematic uprooting intensified, communities mobilized, resisted, and collaborated with each other to solidify relations and build collective resilience.

This photo essay and the mapping project aims to initiate a recollection of testimonies, memories, and strategies of collective struggle, resistance, and resilience (sumud) that Palestinians and Jawlanis engaged with in their collective struggle and encounter with Israeli settler-colonial rule. We shed light on how this solidarity has shaped the Palestinian and Jawlani struggles and how we see its pertinency to inspire and invigorate future generations to reimagine new pathways of action.

* Scroll to bottom for footnotes

Nazeeh Abu Jabal on early Palestinian-Jawlani solidarity: “protect your land!”

Nazeeh Abu Jabal is a walking encyclopedia and a great storyteller. His sharp memory and love for history, as well as his local knowledge of the land, takes one on a vivid journey of the past. The story of the Jawlan after 1967 is filled with contrasting feelings and experiences. The Jawlani community was uprooted from its Syrian roots and forced to accommodate a new regime of settler-colonial rule, a new language and lexicon, a new currency, and a military rule that aimed to expropriate and exclude them from the means of production and political identification and belonging.

The Jawlanis’ triumph against these impositions described above could not be illustrated more clearly than with how the remaining villages’ lands were reclaimed, parceled, and transformed, creating the iconic landscapes of apple orchards in Majdal shams, Masada, Buq’atha, and Ein Qinya. Nazeeh’s recollection of the monumental efforts of the Jawlanis to protect their remaining land from confiscation brings to the forefront the role of Palestinian counterparts who alerted the Jawlanis to the creeping threat of land confiscation, as Nazeeh shares (4):

“After the 1967 occupation, we were able to be in touch with our friends and extended families inside Israel in Rameh and other Druze villages. One of our main concerns and inquiries were about the Israelis and how to deal with them and we sought their advice. Their first advice was: take care and protect your land. Any land left barren and uncultivated is going to be confiscated by the state. Water, springs, wells are going to become state property. You have to be strong and protect your land and water to preserve your existence. They shared with us that the Israeli state left them with no land and water through laws they imposed during the military rule. In the following months, we continued receiving more knowledge and advice from them on how to tackle the Israeli policies aimed at controlling our land and water. My father sat down with his friends and I was there. One friend advised: any land that is designated as Syrian state land such as forests, if not utilized by you Jawlanis, will be turned into Jewish settlements. One of those areas is Al Balan – an area between Majdal Shams and Masada. You should bring bulldozers to take out the forest and plant apples, there will be a lawsuit filed against you but the law states if you plant it for two years then you will definitely win the case. Plant any uncultivated barren land.”

Samira Khoury: women solidarity for justice and peace

This summer, Samira will be 93 years old. She was born in Nazareth in the Galilee, situated in northern Palestine. She dreamt of becoming a teacher all her life and her path in teaching began when she enrolled in “Dar el-Muaalimat” college in Jerusalem. Samira studied in Jerusalem for five years (1942-1947), then she worked in Akka until 1948. During the Nakba, Samira returned to Nazareth and got married. Her marriage to Abu Jaber introduced her to the Communist party, where she became more assertive in advocating for the collective rights of her community. The Israeli authorities suspended Samira and her husband from teaching in the public schools because of their political activism but she found another avenue to continue to advocate for Arab women’s rights. Samira and around 80 other women members of the Communist party decided to organize their work activities under a formal body called al-Nahdah al-Nisayah, or the Democratic Arab Women Movement in Nazareth (5).

“The Golan Heights: the first moment of love with Syria and the Syrians":

Through her activism and mobilization, Samira met with fellow activist and Jawlani women rights advocate Amaly Qadamani, both forging a new path for women-led mobilization and political activism. As Samira shares (6):

“After the occupation of the Golan Heights in 1967, we organized regular visits to Majdal Shams to coordinate and meet with our colleagues like Emilie Kadamani and Amal Abu Jabal and others. We also invited them to come to Nazareth for regular meetings to cook and discuss together how to build our mobilization. We started to protest with them against the occupation in a partnership with our Jewish colleagues. Different charters of the Democratic Women Movements in Rameh, Akko, and the triangle also organized bus trips to Majdal Shams. During the early days of the siege, we used to organize daily visits to demonstrate against the unlawful situation there and we even set up a demonstration tent in Nazareth in Al Ain Square.”

Samira highlights that a turning point in the solidarity work to support Syrian Jawlanis steadfastness against the Israeli occupation was when support with marketing their apple products began taking shape in a more organized matter. In Nazareth as well as in Jenin, Nablus, and Gaza, Palestinian merchants and activists began promoting and marketing Jawlani agricultural crops, such as apples and peaches, to support them and their fight to remain on their land.

The relationships that Samira and her colleagues have nurtured throughout the decades with Jawlani women and their families remain strong and warm. She proudly displays an appreciation plaque gifted to her by ‘The Women of the Golan’ for all her efforts and determination to create bridges of solidarity, mutual aid, and unconditional dedication to justice and peace.

Common struggle and solidarity budding inside prison walls

“The prison experience in the 1970s, in my opinion, was the most critical and central stage in Palestinian-Jawlani relations. That was a truly collective experience that transformed our political relations and struggles,” Salman Fakhreldin, a political figure in the Jawlan and human rights activist working for decades to raise awareness of Israeli human rights violations, exclaims (11). Jawlani and Palestinian prisoners were meeting, sometimes for the first time, inside prison walls and learning about each other’s struggles, mobilizing their communities when escalations and clashes arose and participated in acts of solidarity inside the prison commemorating important events. One example is narrated by Hayl Abu Jabal, a veteran political figure in the Jawlan, who reflects on the reciprocal nature of the Jawlani-Palestinian struggle and solidarity. In a post last year on Facebook, Hayl recalls the events of the 1976 Land Day while imprisoned in Ramleh for his role in a secret cell operating from the Jawlan and cooperating with the Syrian intelligence forces. After announcing a strike commemorating the first anniversary of Land Day, the bewildered prison authorities wondered why Syrians would do that? They are not Palestinians! Hayl recalls the reply of Shakib Abu Jabal, a renowned political figure and leader who said firmly: “It seems you don’t comprehend that Palestine is southern Syria!”

Solidarity with Birzeit University - an unlikely beginning:

“Relations with the university began through the shortest and the most unlikely way we can imagine,” is how Salman Fakhreldin started his conversation about the relationship between Birzeit University and the Jawlanis (13). This relationship started through the Jewish solidarity committee with Birzeit University in the 1970s, which was a committee including Jews and Arabs headed by the physics professor Danny Amit at Hebrew University. We started to get acquainted with them, especially the Jerusalem group. That is how I learned about Birzeit University and their role in leading a popular struggle against the occupation.” In the eighties, the Jawlan and Birzeit University shared common strategies of resistance. In the Jawlan, Salman was heading the media committee that played a critical role in raising awareness about the events of the strike, the siege in Palestine, and beyond.

During that time, Salman was invited to attend a meeting in Jerusalem with the Birzeit Solidarity Committee to share about strikes in the Golan Heights and their aims. While solidarity demonstrations, visits, and financial and political support were consolidated in the 1980s by Palestinians and centered around breaking the siege, voluntary work camps organized by Birzeit University were the highlight of that relationship. From 1985 to 1987, the student council and the voluntary work department organized visits to the Jawlan to support the farmers during apple, peach, and cherry harvesting seasons. Every season, between 150-250 students arrived at the Golan Heights to participate in volunteer work camps, that were in essence political and spaces to learn about each other’s struggle against the occupation. Ali shares how these camps were so influential for solidifying solidarity between Jawlanis and Palestinians: “It was an opportunity to get acquainted with that area, since the Jawlan is far away, and only those who go to visit that area go to Jabal el Sheikh as a touristic area and do not visit the Arab villages in the Jawlan. These visits allowed us to create a brotherhood between Palestinians and Syrians from the occupied Golan outside the prison walls.”

Salman Natour on intersectional struggle: “I’m not from the Jawlan but my heart is with the Jawlan”

Salman Natour was a Palestinian writer and freedom fighter from the village Daliyat al Karmel near Haifa (15). He was born a year after the Nakba and was active in the communist party, the only party where Palestinians inside Israel could become politically mobilized. Salman embodied the essence of Palestinian-Syrian Jawlani solidarity. As a journalist, he contributed to numerous articles about the Golan Heights, especially at the height of the 1982 general strike event and siege. He was also the secretary of the Committee for Solidarity with the Golan which he initiated with monumental figures such as Emile Touma (a Palestinian historian, journalist, and the co-founder of Al-Ittihad newspaper). The committee mobilized lawyers, physicians, and politicians across the Galilee, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip to support the Jawlanis through organizing demonstrations, solidarity visits, and medical and food support in an effort to break the unlawful siege they were undergoing by the Israeli military forces.

His articles were poignant and powerful documentation of events he witnessed when he was able to reach the Jawlan, combined with testimonies he collected from the Jawlanis themselves. These testimonies depicted critical moments in the strike, such as the collective act of throwing the Israeli identity cards authorities tried to impose on the Jawlanis and they vehemently refused.

Salman continued his mobilization efforts through his attempt to testify before the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva on the conditions of Arabs in occupied territories. However, the Israeli authorities issued a travel ban on Salman and confined him to his village for six months where he couldn’t even continue visiting the Jawlan (18).

Salman’s mobilization with the Jawlanis was not limited to the strike and he continued to document and commemorate the anniversary with his counterparts. During an event in Majdal Shams celebrating the 31st anniversary of the strike, he spoke of the strike as the most fascinating period of his life, when the collective struggle of Palestinians and Jawlanis solidified and transcended artificial borders created by settler colonialism (20).

Salman expresses the centrality of the strike in his life by reiterating, “As an author, politician, as an Arab and a Palestinian, I carry the Jawlan strike experience with me wherever I go.”

FOOTNOTES:

(1) For more information, check the project’s website here.

(2) New Directions in Palestinian Studies (NDPS) carried out its fifth annual workshop in March 2018 at Brown Univeristy and was entitled “The Shadow Years: Material Histories of Everyday Life,”. This workshop attends to Palestinian experiences overshadowed by the overwhelming focus on moments of rupture such as 1917, 1936–1939, 1948, and 1967.

(3) National Library of Israel. 1974. https://rosetta.nli.org.il/delivery/DeliveryManagerServlet?dps_pid=IE45740676

(4) Interview with Muna Dajani. Summer 2017.

(5) Eventually, The Movement of Democratic Women in Israel emerged as a collaboration and integration of two movements: The Democratic Arab Women Movement and The Progressive Jewish Women Movement. Rosa Luxemburg website. Tandi movement of democratic women in Israel. https://www.rosalux.org.il/en/partner/tandi-movement-of-democratic-women-in-israel-mdwii/

(6) Interview carried out by Alaa Iktaish on 13 March 2021 in Nazareth.

(7) The Palestinian Museum Digital Archive. https://palarchive.org/item/133923/the-movement-of-democratic-women-stands-in-solidarity-with-the-women-of-the-golan-1976/

(8) The Palestinian Museum Digital Archive. https://palarchive.org/item/133916/the-8th-of-march-demonstration-1986/

(9) The Palestinian Museum Digital Archive. https://palarchive.org/item/128744/a-meeting-between-the-movement-of-democratic-women-and-women-from-the-golan/

(10) Photo taken by Alaa Iktaish. March 2021.

(11) Interview with Salman Fakhreldin conducted by Diaa Ali Hroub.

(12) Photo from Jawlan.org. Retrieved in 2017.

(13) Interviews conducted by Diaa Ali Hroub in 2020.

(14) Retrieved from arab48 website. 2017. https://www.arab48.com/فسحة/جدول/2017/07/15/في-ذكرى-ميلاده-أمسية-لسلمان-ناطور-في-الجولان-|-مجدل-شمس

(15) Research conducted by Bassel Rizqallah.

(16) Al-Ittihad newspaper. 12 March 1982. 13 thousand detainees appeal to the free of the world. P.7. Retrieved from National Library of Israel archive. https://jrayed.org/ar/newspapers/alittihad/1982/03/12/01/?&e=-------ar-20--1--img-txIN%7ctxTI--------------1

(17) National Library of Israel. 1982. https://rosetta.nli.org.il/delivery/DeliveryManagerServlet?dps_pid=IE45841858

(18) Jewish Telegraphic Agency. 1982. Jta daily news bulletin. May 13 1982. Vol. LX, No. 92, p. 3. Retrieved
http://pdfs.jta.org/1982/1982-05-13_092.pdf?_ga=2.177702061.948891012.1619832444-1786531834.1619832444

(19) ص2، لو اعتقلتمونا جميعا وسننتم الف قانون فلن تستطيعوا تغيير جنسيتنا السورية، سلمان ناطور https://jrayed.org/ar/newspapers/alittihad/1983/02/15/01/?&e=-------ar-20--1--img-txIN%7ctxTI--------------1

(20) Aiman Abu Jable YouTube Channel. 2013. مداخلة الكاتب سلمان ناطور في ذكرى انتفاضة الجولان، يوتيوب: قناة أيمن أبو جبل، تاريخ النشر: 15 فبراير 2013، تاريخ الوصول: 30 أبريل 2021، في:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYf7pkQyBls&t=1s

Learn more about ‘The Untold Story of the Occupation of the Golan Heights’ here!

'Palestine, IN-BETWEEN' is presented by CPS + LIFTA with Lena Mansour and Cher Asad with support from The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities, the Center for Archaeology at Columbia University and the Columbia Global Center | Amman.

Episode 3: The Black Goat Act

Within this bonus podcast episode, we explore the “Black Goat Act” with Rabea Eghbariah. The Black Goat Act, imposed by the Israeli government in 1950, criminalized the possession and herding of black goats, targeting the most abundant livestock animal in Palestine and centuries-old farming tradition. Enacted by colonial powers and without scientific rationale, we discuss the different ways Israel has used and enforced this legislation throughout history to further its agenda of Palestinian erasure and dispossession.

This podcast was created in collaboration with Columbia University's Center for Palestine Studies, Lifta Volumes (@liftavolumes), Lena Mansour (@lenamansour), and hosted by Cher Asad (@Cher.Asad) with support from Columbia University's SOF/Heyman, Columbia Global Centers Amman, and the Columbia University's Center for Archaeology.

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‘Palestinian Wild Food Plants’ is a book that documents and illustrates the range of wild edible plants of Palestine that can be foraged (collected). Wild food plants refer to what grows without help from humans, including both annuals and perennials. In recent history, the agricultural reliance on high-yielding varieties has led to a catastrophic decline in crop diversity. Rather than functioning as a comprehensive document, the content of this book focuses on the hilly regions of the West Bank and provides practical information about common wild food plants ‘in the face of coming environmental challenges.’ Information for this book was collected through field transects in Salfit and Wadi al-Dib, analyzing print and online data sets, and open community discussions. Here we highlight some of the wild edible plants that can be foraged in May, as well as an essay by ‘Palestinian Wild Food Plants’ editor Omar Ismeeh Tesdell. Omar is a professor teaching geography and environmental studies at Birzeit University in Palestine. You can access the full digital book here.

*Photos by Yara Dowani & illustrations by Elizabeth Tesdell.

Wild Food Plants, Anthropocene, Palestine

By Omar Imseeh Tesdell 

Wild food plants or wild edible plants have always been an important part of the human diet. They have provided the backbone of human survival for millennia before agricultural cultivation. They have continued to be important even with the advent of agricultural cultivation, when people began to train wild plants to produce food on a human schedule rather than a schedule bound to the microclimates of their locale.

Wild food plants grow without help from humans. Some are annuals, emerging in spring and summer to produce edible leaves, stems, owers, and then going to seed in order to grow again the next season. Some are perennials, and give useful leaves and fruits without the need to reemerge each year. They are foraged (collected) and either eaten raw or sautéed. Essentially every group of people around the world have relied, whether for sheer survival or culinary pleasure, on wild plants for food.

Moreover, foraging of wild food plants for most of these peoples is a deeply gendered enterprise with women functioning as the primary reservoir of knowledge and practice.

Wild food plants began to decline in importance as people trained grasses, legumes, and other wild plants to produce bigger seeds, ripen at the same time, and produce easily harvestable and storable grains. This process is ongoing and has taken thousands of years to transform a wild grass to produce the wheat plant as a viable agricultural grain. However, as recent work in paleoethnobotany has shown, reliance on wild plants ebbed and owed–it did not switch immediately–as part of the strategy for human survival in the case of periods of poor agricultural yields.

In the very recent history of the last two hundred years, the modern agricultural reliance on high-yielding crop varieties has resulted in a massive decline in the diversity in our crops as we depend now on only a few crops. For example, instead of every village in the Levant having its own heirloom varieties of wheat (as in Palestine with dibbiyyeh and heittiyyeh wheats), now we rely on a few varieties among many other wheats. Studies show that we have lost the vast majority, up to seventy-five percent, of these local varieties.

In Palestine, we have a particular relation to this question. It is in the general area of the Levant and Fertile Crescent that people transformed wild plants into some of the world’s most important grain crops, like Einkorn and Emmer wheats, barley, chickpea, flax, lentil, pea and bitter vetch. Here in the hills and open areas you can nd the wild relatives of these crops growing today without human interference. For more than 100 years, they have been explored, collected, and classified by scientists seeking to improve the domesticated crops with traits from their wild relatives. 

There has been considerable work on the modern documentation of wild food plants and foraging in Palestine and the Levant. Much of this work emerged in the tradition of European and American ethnographers and scientists of the early twentieth century including George E. Post, Gustav Dalman, Grace Crowfoot, Louise Baldensperger, and Hilma Grandqvist. Palestinians, some of whom retained a professional relationship with international researchers, including Tawfik Canaan, Hanna Stephan Hanna, Omar Saleh al-Barghouthi, and others, contributed many works on the agriculture and peasant life of Palestine in this early period. Researchers coming from the Zionist movement also produced a massive amount of work on this topic to help drive the colonization project with special reference to Aaron Aaronsohn, Michael Zohary, Naomi Feinbrun, and Avinoam Danin. In response, a new generation of Palestinian researchers Shukri Arraf and Sharif Kanaaneh, among others, worked from the 1970’s through the 1990’s to document both plant and peasant life in Palestine. In addition, Mohammed Ali-Shtayeh and Rana Jamous have also extensively published on wild edible foods in Palestine.

In contrast to the above work, we do not aim to give an encyclopedic or comprehensive list of wild food plants. Moreover, we do not seek to make claims about the health or nutritional benefits of these plants.

Rather we offer a select list of common wild food plants in the hill region of the West Bank that are particularly useful and helpful in the face of coming environmental challenges. Building upon the Palestinian folkloric and scientific traditions noted above we provide a select list of wild edible food plants that may offer new avenues of exploration of alternative food crops in Palestine.

In early 2018 we used four interconnected research methods to produce the information you see here. First, we conducted two field transects with Amna Othman in Dayr Ballut (elevation 250m) a local wild plant expert in the Salfit district, cataloguing and photographing the plants. Second, we conducted two field transects to identify and photograph plants in Wadi al-Dilb near Ramallah (elevation 600m). Third, we cross-checked our taxonomic nomenclature with reliable print and online datasets to tie local names to the accepted scientific names. Fourth, we conducted an open community discussion at the Khalil al- Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah in April 2018 with more than fifty interested participants to document local plant names. This work was largely conducted by a core team of Omar Imseeh Tesdell, Yara Dowani, Yusra Othman, Saher Khoury, Renad Shqeirat, Yara Bamieh and Elizabeth Tesdell. We are especially grateful to Morgan Cooper and Saleh Totah of Mashjar Juthour, Ramallah, for their friendship and assistance in plant identification.

Plant classification and nomenclature is a delicate art. With regard to local Arabic names we decided to put as many names as possible, even in the case of overlap between plants, in order to document the diversity of local names. In the case of scientific names, we adhered strictly to the ‘accepted’ binomial nomenclature of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) http://www.gbif.org, which draws its datasets from other major world collections.

The centrality of Palestine

We are not alone in our renewed interest in foraging of wild food plants. In many parts of the world, but especially Europe and North America, researchers and small groups of people have been quietly working to rediscover and make available information about wild food plants.

Information on wild food plants is particularly important in the age of the proposed Anthropocene, or the first geologic epoch where humans have become a geologic force. Our total dependence in modern life on fossil fuels has led us to find ourselves asking probing questions about modern human modes of life. Problems of the Anthropocene such as carbon emissions, consumerism, lack of green space, and climate change are easily crowded out in Palestine by overriding concerns related to the Israeli occupation.

However, I would like to suggest that traditions of wild food plant foraging and the history of plant domestication in Palestine compel us to consider the Anthropocene from within the context of Palestine. If Palestine is implicated in the rise of agriculture, and agriculture is implicated in the coming of the carbon age, then Palestinians must participate in the discussion of the Anthropocene from within our context.

It is worth considering whether the Anthropocene formation may or may not be useful for us Palestinians. I recently led a workshop session to discuss the subject with high school science teachers and students at a science festival in Ramallah. We discussed the question of geologic time scale and the minuscule role of humans in shaping the history of the earth. At the same time, we discussed the surrounding rural areas where ancient peoples domesticated wild grasses and legumes, found in their landscape, to produce the first crops.

Most of the students and teachers came from villages to the west of Ramallah which now find themselves enmeshed in the Israeli frontier warren of separation barriers and checkpoints. They are also working with a local foundation to break away from the mostly retrograde Palestinian educational experience, which has more to do with producing docile students than free thinkers. However, the same wadis and hillsides have a pertinent history to the Anthropocene were one to look more deeply.

The Natuf valley, which winds from the highlands north of Jerusalem westward toward the Mediterranean Sea, is one of the first places early cultivators began to experiment in collecting, processing, and planting seeds from wild plants. The famed Natufian culture, a central player in the Neolithic plant experiments, stretched from modern-day Egypt to Turkey. It was named for the Natuf valley in Palestine by British archeologist Dorothy Garrod who excavated a major Natuan cave site, near the Palestinian village of Shuqba in the 1930s. Fascinatingly, this site is also the same area where the teachers and students participating in the Anthropocene discussion come from.

I briefly sketched the outlines of the sharp debate in the “advanced countries” (duwwal mutaqaddamah as our students here call them) on the subject of anthropogenic forces on the climate coming either from agricultural expansion or the dependence on fossil fuels. The Palestinian teachers and students come from village schools nestled amongst the hills that brought forth the so-called Neolithic revolution and are themselves a mere one or two generations now away from subsistence cultivation. Here in the Third World, a long way from idealized peasant worlds, it is difficult to deny that most people want to reap the comforts of modern life. The young people had a few things to say about the Anthropocene. In one particularly insightful moment, a young man and high school student, asked, “what use is the Anthropocene for us?”

I had a difficult time answering such a bold question, so I did what most college faculty do when they find themselves in such a situation, they pitch it back to the class so they can consider an answer. I looked around the room at the students and teachers and marveled at our collective transition from subsistence agriculture to a room showing all the signs of kitschy décor all too common in Palestine. Given a chance to gather my thoughts for a preliminary response, I understood the contours of the discussion better.

We Palestinians are a formerly agrarian society living amidst, some might say, the ruins of the agricultural revolution in its own origin place. So I said, “We were always part of the Anthropocene, so shouldn’t we also help to write its story now?” The young man nodded with the familiar zeal of a Palestinian student when challenged to be just as good as the rest of the world. He said, “Maybe it is a useful idea after all.”

View the complete digital publication, ‘Palestinian Wild Food Plants,’ here!

As an extension of Haitham Ennasr's project with Bilna'es, Nothing Old, Nothing New, he will be in conversation with Freya Dutta, Elias Wakeem, and moderator Ruanne Abou-Rahme, discussing how their practices correlate and intersect revolutionary cultural practices at large. The panelists will discuss the relationship between class, gender, race, capital, the colonial, and the use of art as a tool to illustrate systems of oppression and imagine a future where they aren't tolerated as a natural fact of life.

Nothing Old, Nothing New (Project of Bilna'es) 

Nothing Old, Nothing New is a collection of experimental videogames, drawings, text, and objects developed over the course of six years. The project plays on the relationship between capitalism, colonialism, depictions of landscapes, real estate development, and folklore. In this play Nothing Old, Nothing New reappropriates aspects of these practices to envision a revolutionary utopia. Inspiration for the project came from a tour of downtown Beirut in late 2014 when Haitham Ennasr was given an annual report titled City in Scenes by Solidere, the company responsible for the renovation of downtown Beirut. City in Scenes was illustrated with talismanic drawings of stars that inspired three video games, City, New City, and Tabula Rasa, along with a multitude of drawings, writings, and objects. 

Haitham Ennasr

Haitham Ennasr is an artist and interactive designer who refers to himself as "radically soft." Haitham graduated from and taught for the Design and Technology MFA program at Parsons School of Design in New York. He was a fellow at the Home Workspace Program at Ashkal Alwan in Beirut and a founding member of "Taawoneeyi," a cooperative of artists dedicated to supporting each other materially and immaterially. Haitham's work is created through a vernacular sci-fi, folkloric, and intersectional revolutionary utopic lens. His mediums of expression include drawing, painting, sculpture, videogames, text, and performance.  

 Elias Wakeem

Elias Wakeem is a genderqueer artist and activist who makes art that bends and plays with language, character, and identity, often using grotesque body forms to create performances that challenge boundaries in their society. They use installation and performance to develop and create various characters and personas. Elias holds a bachelor of arts from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design and is currently pursuing a master's degree in art studies at the University of Haifa. Elias has given lectures and performed at academic institutions and festivals worldwide on drag culture and queer identity in Palestine.  

 Freya Dutta

Freya Dutta is an artist, designer, and educator based in New York City. She uses art to build a dialogue around inequity in her communities and questions systems of power with playful interactive storytelling. Her career began as a filmmaker in Mumbai. In 2013 she co-founded the studio Antidote, where she works as the creative director for immersive experience design. Freya also teaches at the Parsons Design and Technology program and speaks at conferences and gatherings worldwide. Her work was exhibited most recently at the V&A Dundee. She is currently coordinating activist art for various labor organizations in New York, weaving, and pulling weeds in her local community garden. 

Ruanne Abou-Rahme (Moderator)

Ruanne Abou-Rahme works across a range of sound, image, text, installation, and performance practices. Her practice is engaged in the intersections between performativity, political imaginaries, the body, and virtuality. Her approach has primarily involved sampling materials, both existing and self-authored, in the form of sound, image, text, and objects, recasting them all together into new "scripts." The result is a practice that investigates the political, visceral, and material possibilities of sound, image, text, and site, taking on the form of multimedia installations and live audio-visual performances.   

'Palestine, IN-BETWEEN' is presented by CPS + LIFTA with Lena Mansour and Cher Asad with support from The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities, the Center for Archaeology at Columbia University and the Columbia Global Center | Amman.

Love & Intimacy

Video Series

As part of 'Palestine, IN-BETWEEN', we present the LOVE & INTIMACY video series. Over the course of the next several weeks, we’ll be releasing short films that center intergenerational outlooks on love and intimacy in Palestine and the diaspora, with discussions highlighting—but not limited to— disconnects, desires, relationships, trauma, teaching, learning, and beyond. This series includes intimate interviews and conversations held between Palestinians who share a close relationship, including old friends, parents and children, grandparents and grandchildren, lovers, cousins, and more. 

Conversations explore what has been inherited and what is being shed, as well as the ways in which taking care of ourselves and each other is to care for the collective—now and into the future. Dialogue moves beyond topics of love in the human-to-human sense, extending to the deep connections one shares with an object, time, smell, memory, land, and ritual. 

This week we share conversations held between Layla Kanaan and Laith Zuaiter, Jenan Ismail and Lana Albeik, and Lara Khouri and Mais Amad. We’d like to thank all who participated in this series for your time, energy, and openness. You can watch the videos and follow the series on palestineinbetween.com, a blog and accompanying website to this program where we will be sharing original content and reposting content by Palestinians all over the world. The videos can also be viewed by scrolling below or by heading to YouTube.

Intro graphic by Ashay Bhave.

WEEK 5:

MARAH & HAFSA

In this episode, we meet Marah, 21, and Hafsa, 93. In this video, Marah interviews her grandmother Hafsa, who she grew up living with in the United States. They discuss Hafsa’s beliefs around love being present in the connection between land and happiness, love in the routines of caring for and tending to fig and olive trees, the wealth of simplicity, and her favorite memories of Palestine. Together, they share how love is taught and passed down and the ways Marah has learned Palestine, and love as an extension, through her grandmother. This interview took place in El Paso, Texas.

SHARON & LILLY

In this episode, we meet sisters Lilly, 23, and Sharon, 25. Lilly and Sharon are Palestinian-Americans who are based in Haifa. In this video, they interview each other and discuss how experiencing racism as Palestinians in ’48 has inspired their need to love themselves, discovering yourself within your identity, the diversity of Palestinianness and the importance of individuality, learning better communication through quarantine, listening as a form of love, and deconstructing the taboo that love is reserved for marriage. 

TAMARA & FAIZA

In this episode, we meet Tamara, 26, and her mother, Faiza, 64. Tamara grew up between the US and Palestine, while her mother has lived most of her life in Palestine. They are both based in Chicago, where this interview takes place. They discuss Tamara’s learned confidence from Faiza, sincerity in expression, Tamara finding love in someone who doesn’t tick all the boxes, maintaining independence when in love, hybrid identity, processing 9/11 as a Palestinian, and Palestinian identity relating more to living with principles than living in the past. 

NAYROUZ & SERENE

In this episode, we meet Serene, 41, and Nayrouz, 39. Serene and Nayrouz met eight years ago through a mutual friend at Beit Zatoun in Toronto, a Palestinian cultural center that’s since shut down. Nayrouz grew up in Jerusalem and Serene grew up in Kuwait and Jordan, but the two share a historical connection to Marj Ibn Amer. In this interview, they discuss nostalgia as a curse, nostalgia as a result of love, solidarity between Palestinians and indigenous communities in Canada, finding fulfillment in one another, learning the diversity of love through the global pandemic, differences and similarities in their Palestinianness, and the ways that carrying an Israeli passport isolates you from connecting with people in countries across the Middle East. 

WEEK 4:

AYA & NADA

In this episode, we meet Aya, 22, and Nada, 22. Aya is a Palestinian-American who grew up in the US and Jordan, and Nada is Palestinian-Emirati and grew up in the UAE. The duo met at NYU Abu Dhabi, where this interview takes place. Interviewing each other, they discuss how you know you're Palestinian if you've never been, the decision and narrative around removing the hijab, reputation as a limitation of love, how community love and independence complement each other, prioritizing mental health, chosen family, and pleasure beyond sexual satisfaction.

NADA & HANA

In this episode, we meet Nada, 24, and Hana, 24. Nada and Hana grew up in Amman together and share a 16-year friendship. Interviewing each other, they discuss being Palestinian and never having visited Palestine, claiming their Palestinianness in diaspora, the challenges of finding community outside of Jordan, the hardest part of themselves to love, confronting pain and discomfort to heal generational trauma, and how their families view love and intimacy across generations.

WEEK 3:

ELIE & JUSTIN

In this episode, we meet Justin, 33, and Elie, 71. Born in Palestine, Elie is the father of Justin and a Zen Buddhist priest and clinical psychologist. Justin is a filmmaker currently living in Los Angeles, where this interview took place. They discuss listening as the vessel of love, trauma and moving toward Buddhism as a Palestinian, how to better reciprocate love, where Elie's love and tenderness come from, being raised fatherless and becoming a father, and maintenance of the mind and relationships for a more healthy and full life.

LEENA & NOUR

In this episode, we meet Leena, 24, and Nour, 26. Leena is an Egyptian-Palestinian who grew up in Kuwait and Baltimore and lives in Amman. Nour is a Palestinian-American raised in Michigan who now splits her time between Chicago and Detroit. The two met in Washington D.C. through a mutual friend. They discuss grief as a collective and individual experience, building a relationship through sharing their visions, reimagined memory, the value of mercy, taking life in increments, and the connection between landscape and navigating selfhood.

CONSTANTINO & MARCELO

In this episode, we meet Constantino, 36, and Marcelo, 31. Constantino and Marcelo are cousins and first-generation Palestinians in Santiago, Chile. They discuss their position as Palestinians in Chile, why their diaspora community differs from others, maintaining their identity and culture, the pigeonholing of Palestinian-ness, nuclear family, visiting Palestine for the first time, and inherited traits from their parents. This video was translated from Spanish to English by Karime Sierra.

WEEK 2:

YASMIN & ALA’EDDIN

In this episode, we meet Yasmin, 23, and her father, Ala'eddin, 53. Yasmin is Palestinian-Lebanese and grew up in Lebanon, Switzerland, and the US. Ala'eddin lives in Shanghai and Yasmin is based in New York City. In this conversation, they discuss the lessons they've learned from each other, poetry as a higher form of human expression, wholeness as an impossible utopia, the struggle to release, and humor and its cultural significance.

HASHEEMAH & LINA

In this episode, we meet Lina, 25, and Hasheemah, 27. Lina is based in Surda, Palestine and Hasheemah is living in New Orleans, Louisiana. They met in a calculus class more than ten years ago and have remained friends since. In this episode, they discuss the concept of romance and multiple soulmates, falling in love with and finding a home in friends, learning boundaries through each other, the importance of showing up, being a good friend despite geographical distance, seeing love in a collective form, and giving as a love language.

WEEK 1:

MAIS & LARA

In this episode, we meet Mais, 33, and Lara, 41. Mais and Lara share a five-year friendship and live in Dubai. Championing the power of self-love, together, they reflect on personal milestones when considering their evolving relationship with their heritage and the process of discovering one’s self through being Palestinian. They discuss Palestine as a forbidden love, and how social media has given the Palestinian cause more visibility and created a stronger sense of identity in younger generations.

LANA + JENAN

In this episode, we meet Lana, 25, and Jenan, 25. Lana and Jenan are based in the UAE and met as teenagers during their ‘Tumblr days’ and share a nine-year friendship. Interviewing each other, they discuss the ways in which their beliefs feel close to or far from their elders and the unique ways that their parents show love. Jenan and Lana speak on how their Palestinianness is similar and different, Palestinian identity in the US versus the UAE, growing into adulthood together, love languages at home, freeing themselves from guilt, and how they build each other. 

LAITH + LAYLA

In this episode, we meet Laith, 23, and Layla, 24. Layla is based in Portland, Oregon, and Laith is based in Los Angeles, California. The pair met a year ago through the internet, making contact with the desire to connect with a fellow Palestinian-American. Though they’ve never met in person, they share a bond that is deep and familiar. In this conversation, they discuss assimilation as a survival tactic, racism in US mainstream media and how it discourages a proud Arab identity, and the path to defining themselves as Palestinians. 

Palestine, IN-BETWEEN Podcast

Episode 2: Criminal Foods

In this episode, we explore the criminalization of three popular edible plants within Palestine with our guest Rabea Eghbariah. Zaatar, akkoub, and miramiya are staples in Palestinian cuisine, and yet there is currently a legal ban on their picking, possession, and trade. We discuss these plants' cultural and economic history within Palestine and the history and significance of their prohibition by the Israel Nature and Parks Authority.

This podcast is made in collaboration with Columbia University's Center for Palestine Studies, Lifta Volumes, Lena Mansour, and Cher Asad.

Spotify / Apple Podcast / Anchor FM / Breaker / Radio Public / Google Podcasts / Pocket Casts

Photos in graphic taken by Matt Milstein

Al-Ameen Archive is an archive project of Raya Manaa’s father’s career in photography that extended more than 40 years. Between the 1950s and 1990s, Mahmoud Manaa worked as an event photographer, focusing on weddings and engagement parties in the Galilee in northern Palestine. He documented more than 2,500 weddings, and many indigenous and religious ceremonies that took place in the marginalized and peripheral areas of the Galilee, an area known for its pluralism and rich religious and ethnic diversity.

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How did you start the Al-Ameen Archive project?

My father, Mahmoud Manaa, was a photographer and used to have a photo studio called Studio Al-Ameen. He ran the business and was mainly a wedding photographer but also took family portraits on the side. I found his work in our basement at home––first just a small box with a few negatives and prints. I kept searching and found around 10,000 negatives and prints, which was huge! It's an enormous archive. I assume it'll take me at least three years to scan and organize it.︎

Would you consider Studio Al-Ameen a physical or mobile studio?

The studio was running out of my family's living room––it was completely occupied, they didn't even have a place to host people. There was lighting, chemicals for film development, and camera equipment everywhere. Everything was developed in the house. I think 90 percent of what I've seen in the archive was shot in the Galilee, mainly weddings. The Galilee area contains around seven villages, but he'd also visit Jerusalem, Nablus, the Naqab, and Druze areas. My parents are from Majd Al-Kurum in the Galilee, about a 10-minute drive from the Akka seashore.

What years was Studio Al-Ameen operating?

He started doing freelance wedding shoots in the 1950s and opened the studio in '61 or '62. He was self-taught, no courses. I remember him telling me he burned a lot of films in the learning process, a lot of overexposure and underexposure. The studio shut in the mid-90s, according to the dates that I've found on negatives. My dad doesn't remember well anymore. He's suffering from Alzheimer's and it's hard to get accurate information from him.

Was there a photo you found in the archive that made you certain it was important and needed to be safe kept?

The key picture was one from a hammam el arees* of the three guys taking a shower together. When I saw the photo I was like, there's something queer under this archive's surface, and I need to look through it and do more research. There were a lot of things that amazed me about this archiving project––all the cliche poses, photographs of a groom holding a bride in his hand. We refer to this photography style as nouf, which is couples photography. The aesthetic aspect of these pictures is something that I think is worth researching, archiving, and preserving. We have a gap in Palestinian archiving practices in general. You either get the Nakba photographs or pre-Nakba photographs, as if these are of only importance to the Palestinian story. As if what happened after that wasn't important. We don't have enough pictures and enough archive materials to show us what happened during the 60s, 70s, and 80s. We don't have enough representation in Palestinian storytelling in general, especially in the '48 areas. Some people don't even know that two million Palestinians live within Israel. We have something to represent, and I think it's important to share through these images, these weddings, and this archive.

*Hammam el arees translates to groom's shower, a pre-wedding tradition held across Palestine.

In terms of Palestinian queerness, what have you learned through this archive so far?

I can say that in all the hammam el arees photos that I've found, the queer elements are there and obvious; images of three guys taking a shower together completely naked, many pictures of men holding hands. I've only scanned three or four packs of negatives of different hammam el arees so far, but I'm sure I'm going to find the same gestures and poses as I move forward. Hammam el arees is all about the groom's friends helping him shower and get groomed. You don't see gestures like this today. I think because Palestinian society is more aware of the different sexual identities, they've become more sensitive to what different gestures may suggest, and they try to avoid it.

Your collection is refreshing and exciting.

It's a lot. There are also amazing collections I've found of family portraits. People couldn't afford to buy cameras and film, so they used to call a photographer to come to their house and shoot one film roll, 36 pictures, for the family. There's one family's home that stuck with me. The interior design, the amazing wallpapers––wallpaper of Canada and stuff that has nothing to do with Palestine––inserted inside the house. Snow wallpapers.

How has wedding photography changed or stayed the same since Studio Al-Ameen was active?

That's an interesting question, actually. People are still taking nouf photos, and it's still one of the most important stages of the wedding. It's the only couple of hours that the bride and groom have the opportunity to take pictures alone, without the whole family and mess around them. We do have a lot of the same cliche poses in nouf photos, but maybe they're conducted in a different and more modern way. I follow local photographers and know that there are specific types and styles of wedding photography that people want in Palestinian society. There are still some cliche poses and a lot of similar styles across the wedding photography couple shoots. It's different, they aren't going to put the bride on the groom's palm as a miniature, but they do other cliche stuff.

Do wedding ceremonies and the traditions involved still carry the same value and importance for new generations of women in Palestinian society?

I've been thinking about this and trying to investigate more through this archive. Something that's touched me the most is talaat al aroos pictures, the tradition of when a bride leaves her parent's house to the groom's home. This used to be one of the most emotional stages of Palestinian weddings––you'd see everyone hysterically crying with these big red eyes, as if the bride is moving to Canada. Even the father is crying. It seems like this ceremony represents the bride leaving one chapter of her life, leaving her parents, and moving to another house where she's someone else's responsibility. She's not her father's daughter anymore. A lot has changed in the past 20 to 30 years, and it's amazing to see how women are treated so differently after such a short period of time. Talaat al aroos is not that emotional today, especially for the brothers and fathers. Even though the event holds less weight, brides are still taking medication to calm themselves down for the talaat al aroos––I've heard that from relatives and friends who got married. It still symbolizes something very emotional and hard. There's been a shift in mentality for the bride and her family, though. Talaat al aroos is now something that is anticipated, something that should happen––that the woman must leave the house eventually. As a single, 30-year-old Palestinian woman, I hear talk of this all the time. That I'm not supposed to be at my parent's home or be attached to them at this age, that this is the path all Palestinian women take. They should get married in their early or mid-20s. There used to be this strong bond between the bride and the father, and this has changed. The normalized, relaxed intimacy between men––without all these reflections about the queer and sexual identity––has also changed. A lot of stuff has changed.

Please continue.

Almost all weddings were held in the center of the village 20 or 30 years ago. They used to block streets––of course, you're going to block the street when the whole village is busy with a wedding. This doesn't happen anymore. We've become a more separate and individualistic society. Now a family will leave their village for a wedding because we don't have this same community, or real connection between people, anymore. Weddings used to be way more fun. You would see the whole village participating and taking part. Some cleaning, some cooking. I think we have lost that too.

You can feel joy through the photographs.

Yes, totally. From the photos I've seen from between the 1960s and 1990s, there also used to be alcohol at every single wedding. I noticed these changes just by looking at my mom's older photos before investigating my father's archive. She used to wear clothes at my age that I wouldn't dare to wear today, extra small mini skirts and see-through tops. It was cool back then though, it was fine. Majd Al-Kurum, where my family is from, is a 100 percent Muslim village, but you'd still find alcohol at almost all weddings. People are still drinking in Majd Al-Kurum, for example, but you won't see alcohol at 80 percent of the weddings there. I find this really interesting. You expect that people become more open about these things with time, but what's happening with Palestinian society is exactly the opposite. Maybe for '48 Palestinians, it has something to do with being part of the Israeli society because I do feel like people want to protect themselves more. I hear elders talking about how in mixed cities like Haifa and Akka it's harder for people to preserve their heritage and protect their community, the Muslim community, from what’s happening around them and the Israeli society's effect on them.

Mahmoud Manaa used to photograph events and families across Palestine, from Jerusalem to the Naqab. From your observations of the archive, do wedding customs and decor change across the different regions of Palestine?

He used to take general street shots and landscapes in the Naqab area, but he wasn't a famous wedding photographer there. Even in Nablus and Jerusalem it was just street shots and landscapes, I haven't found and wedding photography by him in these areas. In the Galilee, though, if you look through the photos and compare a Muslim wedding to a Christian wedding it was the same (put the wedding ceremony at the church aside, everything was the same). The party at the house, the clothes, the drinking, talaat al aroos, hammam el arees. They all have the same ceremonies, and it all looks exactly the same.

How do you see this archival project developing?

There are two main aspects I'm thinking about. One is more research-focused, the other artistic. Since I'm a visual researcher and not an anthropologist, I'd be glad to find a researcher who would write about the archive and weddings in the Galilee from the 60s to 90s. There is a lot to tell through this archive. I'd also love to see this archive projected in a gallery or museum. Think about this collection as a printed photo album, chapters dedicated to hammamat el arees and talaat al aroos.

Visit Al-Ameen Archive Website / Follow Al-Ameen Archive on Instagram / View the conversation at palestineinbetween.com

January 22-26

FILM SCREENING: MUSSOLINI'S SISTER BY JUNA SULEIMAN + TROUBLE IN PARADISE AND MOONSCAPE BY MONA BENYAMIN

January 26

LIVE PANEL WITH FILMMAKERS JUNA SULEIMAN AND MONA BENYAMIN, MODERATED BY DR. NADIA YAQUB

Please view the special live conversation at this link.

From January 22 to 26, join us for a five-day screening of films by Palestinian directors Juna Suleiman and Mona Benyamin. In collaboration with LIFTA Volumes, we will kick off the semester-long program ‘Palestine, IN-BETWEEN’ with Suleiman’s feature-length documentary Mussolini’s Sister and Benyamin’s short films Trouble in Paradise and Moonscape. On January 26, the screening period will round out with a live panel and Q&A held between the directors and moderator Dr. Nadia Yaqub, author of Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution. Topics in the panel will be guided by themes present in both of their works: interpersonal relationships and generational differences within Palestinian society. Through their films, Mona and Juna—who themselves belong to two different generations of Palestinian filmmakers—examine their relationships with the older Palestinian generation who happen to be those closest to them. Benyamin’s films’ main characters are her parents, while Juna brings her grandmother to the big screen. A step away from the scripts and storylines commonly associated with mainstream Palestinian cinema, they mock and analyze the perspectives and mentalities of the leading characters in their films through a distinct lens. Mussolini’s Sister gives entrance to the everyday life of Suleiman’s grandmother, Hiam, a cynical and strong-willed survivor of the Nakbeh who cannot seem to let go of control even in her late age. Benyamin’s shorts experiment with her amusing parents as she places them in a sci-fi world full of distortion and dark humor.

About Juna Suleiman

Juna Suleiman (b. 1981, Nazareth) is a Palestinian filmmaker. She graduated from the Tel Aviv University School of Film and Television in 2006. Suleiman directed, filmed, produced, and co-edited her first feature-documentary, Mussolini’s Sister; its world premiere was at the IDFA Competition for First Appearance 2018. The film has won Best Debut Film and Best Cinematography at Docaviv International Film Festival 2019 in Israel. It continues to screen and compete in festivals across Europe and worldwide. Suleiman was also the casting director of notable feature films, including The Time that Remains and It Must be Heaven by Elia Suleiman, Omar by Hany Abu-Assad, and Let It Be Morning by Eran Kolirin—where she also appeared as an actress in a supporting role. Suleiman is a former fellow of Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany.

About Mona Benyamin  

Mona Benyamin (b.1997, Haifa) is a Palestinian visual artist and filmmaker. Benyamin obtained her BFA from Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem in 2020. Her work explores intergenerational outlooks on hope and trauma, simultaneously questioning identity by using humor and irony as political tools of resistance and reflection. Her practice consists of time-based media, in addition to painting and drawing. She typically works with her immediate surroundings, often casting her family as the main protagonists in her films and using their home as the only setting.

About Nadia Yaqub

Nadia Yaqub is a professor of Arab cultures in the Department of Asian studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution (University of Texas Press, 2018) and Pens, Swords and the Springs of Art: The Oral Poetry Dueling of Palestinian Weddings in the Galilee (Brill, 2006), co-editor with Rula Quawas of Bad Girls of the Arab World (University of Texas Press, 2017) as well as numerous articles and book chapters about Arab and Palestinian film and literature. She curated Gaza on Screen, a three-day film festival that showcased films and filmmakers from Gaza, presented by the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University in April 2019.

Moonscape

17 min / Palestine / Arabic with English subtitles

Moonscape is a short film which takes the form of a music video for a ballad/middle of the road song, performed as a duet between a male and female singer, in Arabic. The song traces the story of a man called Dennis M. Hope, who claimed ownership of the Moon in 1980 and thus founded the Lunar Embassy – a company that sells land on a variety of planets and Moons, and makes a connection between his story and that of the director's – a young Palestinian woman living under the Israeli occupation, longing to end the misery of her people in any way possible. The visuals of the film are a hybrid of surrealist scenes from the Arab music industry, reenacted by the artist’s parents who also play the roles of the singers in the film, and film noir; in addition to found footage from the NASA archives, references from canonic films that influenced the art world and show representations of the Moon, and screenshots of Email correspondences with staff members of the Lunar Embassy. All in order to explore the relationship between hope, nostalgia and despair.

*A moonscape is an area or vista of the lunar landscape (generally of the Earth's moon), or a visual representation of this, such as in a painting. The term "moonscape" is also sometimes used metaphorically for an area devastated or flattened by war, often by shelling.

Trouble in Paradise

8:30 minutes / Palestine / English with Arabic subtitles 

Trouble in Paradise is a dysfunctional sitcom set out to explore humor as a mechanism of coping with trauma, pain, and taboos in relation to the Nakba and the Israeli occupation; by posing three sets of jokes ranging from the classical misogynistic genre to anti-humor and culturally specific humor; In order to examine why Nakba jokes never fully evolved as a genre and entered the Palestinian mainstream. 

*The main protagonists of the film are the director’s parents who do not speak English and have gone through the Nakba and the Naksa and never shared their memories from these major events.

Mussolini’s Sister

70 Min / Israel, Palestine / Arabic with English subtitles 

Despite the everyday banality of growing old, Hiam Jarjoura (85), an amusingly cynical lady from Nazareth- who has every reason to despise the world as experienced today- manages to rule over her entire world from a single old phonebook, a cctv and a daily meal she cooks for her beloved son, Mubada (55).  Gradually and painfully, Hiam finds herself with more time to kill and a lot more to recall. The film offers a retreat into Hiam's discerning memory, as she consciously finds herself more and more alone, at the presence of strangers, and final reflections on love, politics and contempt.