Fragments of a stolen memory: Efforts to reclaim the Palestinian image
In March, Al Jazeera released Karnit Mandel’s 2021 documentary A Reel War on their YouTube channel. The film bears a striking resemblance to Rona Sela’s Looted (2019). The directors, both Israeli women, originally archivists, narrate and guide the audience through their research, dramatically recounting the rediscovery of the Palestinian archive. This archive had been stolen from Lebanon in 1982 and was later found in Israeli possession.
In a scene depicting VHS tapes piled up next to an old TV playing footage from the stolen archive, the narrator of A Reel War describes this footage as “bits of unidentified, ownerless archive material without any indication of their source or creator” – a statement that this article aims to contextualise and challenge.
A brief history of Palestinian cinema
Palestinian cinema is closely connected to the memory of pre-1948 Palestine and the Palestinians’ desire to return to their homeland. The complete history of this cinema is fragmented and incomplete, especially before Nakba (1948). While it was once thought to have begun with the founding of the Palestine Film Unit (PFU) in 1968, the first Palestinian documentary was actually shot in 1935, three decades earlier, by pioneer filmmaker Ibrahim Hassan Sarhan.
This history had to be recovered from the Shatila refugee camp in Beirut, where Sarhan was interviewed by Iraqi filmmaker Kassem Hawal. Sarhan is now recognized as one of the founders of pre-1948 Palestinian cinema, along with other Palestinian filmmakers believed to have made documentaries and features before the Nakba. Sarhan also founded Studio Palestine in 1945 and produced a few feature-length films, but all of them have been lost, as is the case with most Palestinian images from that period. Britain, and later Israel, severely and systematically restricted Palestinians’ ability to document or create images.
As a result, almost no documentation survives from the Palestinian side of the events of 1948, aside from oral histories and personal testimonies. Researchers also note a “period of silence” in Palestinian cinema from 1948 to 1967, during which virtually no Palestinian films were made.
In 1968, a group of exiled Palestinian filmmakers living in Amman, Jordan, began making films known as the Cinema of the Palestinian Revolution, founding the aforementioned Palestine Film Unit, which also became part of the global movement of militant cinema, commonly referred to as Third Cinema. At the same time, particularly in countries closer to the Eastern Bloc, and among filmmakers influenced by the internationalist movement or Third Cinema, a wave of alternative Arab cinema began to emerge.
What happened in 1982?
After moving to Beirut in 1970, Khadijeh Habashneh, alongside Mustafa Abu-Ali and other filmmakers, created the PFU Archive in hopes of establishing a history of Palestinian identity and countering the Israeli claim that “Palestinians don’t exist”. The archive included well over 100 films, from pre-1948 until the early 1980s. With the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the siege of Beirut in 1982, the archive was abandoned and then disappeared. Numerous assumptions and rumors began to circulate, speculating on exactly where the archive ended up: Was it buried in a graveyard, trapped beneath a collapsed building in Beirut, or secretly exchanged during the Oslo Accords? The last claim is firmly disputed in Mandel’s film. It was only recently discovered by some Israeli researchers that at least parts of the archive are in the possession of the Israeli army, stored as state and military secrets with extremely limited access.[1] The full extent of Palestinian materials held in the Israeli army archive remains unknown.
What we do know is that Israel recorded its own systemic looting, and footage of it has been featured in multiple films by both Palestinian and Israeli filmmakers. The Israeli army’s confiscation and subsequent classification of the PFU Archive as state and military secrets represents a blatant act of cultural aggression with far-reaching implications. These films captured the daily lives, struggles, and aspirations of Palestinians, serving as an invaluable repository of Palestinian heritage and offering a counter-narrative to the Israeli claim that “Palestinians don’t exist.” By seizing this archive and denying access to its contents, the Israeli army effectively sought to erase Palestinian identity and historical narrative and to perpetuate the Israeli occupation.
Furthermore, the classification of the archive as state and military secrets suggests that its contents may reveal uncomfortable truths about the Israeli occupation and its impact on Palestinian society. By keeping these films hidden from public view, Israeli authorities maintain control over the historical narrative and avoid scrutiny of their actions.
The seizure of the PFU Archive is part of a broader pattern of Israeli policies aimed at erasing Palestinian culture and history. This includes the destruction of Palestinian villages, the confiscation of Palestinian land, and the smothering of Palestinian cultural expression. These policies are designed to create a reality in which Palestinians are rendered invisible and, if portrayed at all, are seen only through a Zionist lens – so that their claims to land and statehood can continue to be delegitimized.
Intersectionality of resistance then and now
While there are systemic attempts at erasure, resistance persists. One of the famous instances of films surviving the siege of the PFU Archive was made possible by the efforts of a solidarity group based in Japan, which safeguarded 20 reels of film. The collection they preserved is now known as the Tokyo Reels. As art historian Wendy M.K. Shaw put it in her reflection on these reels: “For what makes the Tokyo–Palestine reels special is not their capacity to induce militancy in contemporary viewers, so much of their reflection of the global solidarity network that enabled the films to survive to the present, in the absence of government institutions as well as input from Western forces.”[2]
One of the reels is the music video produced for the song The Urgent Call of Palestine, sung by Zeinab Sha’ath and directed by Ismail Shammout. What is perhaps most striking about this reel is the immense geographical journey its production took. It started in India with Lalita Panjabi, who, having written the poem and the lyrics of the song, then sent it to Mysoon Sha’ath, who was working in Radio Cairo. Mysoon then passed it on to her sister Zeinab, who would immediately set about composing music for the work. Later on, Zeinab started debuting and singing the song as she toured around the Arab world, and in Lebanon, she eventually met Palestinian painter Ismail Shammout, who agreed to direct the music video for the song. This film was considered lost until it was retrieved as part of the Tokyo Reels. Decades later, US-based record labels Discostan and Majazz re-released Zeinab Sha’ath’s album.
The very fact that this song is accessible on our music streaming platforms today is a testament to its arduous journey, a path paved by countless collaborations and unwavering determination. The intersectionality of the resistance defied and continues to defy geographical borders and time.
In March of this year, Lebanese singer Yasmine Hamdan released a music video for her rendition of Shmaali, a song deeply embedded in Palestinian history. It has been adapted multiple times over the years by various Palestinian and Arab singers. The lyrics of Shmaali carry coded messages that mothers once used to discreetly inform their sons of their impending release from prison. The music video, conceived by Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari and edited by Yannig Willmann, artfully combines archival footage – primarily home movies showing weddings and traditional dances – alongside amateur films. This creative endeavor exemplifies the multifaceted nature of Palestinian resistance, which repurposes and reimagines archival material.
The use of archival footage in the video adds another layer of depth and meaning to Hamdan’s version of Shmaali. The juxtaposition of joyous celebrations with the harsh realities of political imprisonment creates a poignant contrast that highlights the enduring spirit of the Palestinian people. The inclusion of amateur films further emphasizes the importance of preserving and sharing personal narratives as a form of cultural resistance.
The video’s focus on traditional dance and music underscores the role of artistic and cultural expression in Palestinian resistance. By reclaiming and celebrating their cultural heritage, Palestinians today actively challenge attempts to erase their identity and history. Dance and music serve as powerful tools for preserving collective memory and fostering a sense of community and belonging.
Both examples, though decades apart, shed light on the power of collaboration and the intersectionality of resistance through music. Such works clearly have makers and collaborators; they are not merely individual endeavors, but rather the patchwork of many lives, relationships, geographies, and personal histories.
Echoes from Gaza
The kernel of A Reel War is the newsreel footage from Gaza dating from 1956. This footage, depicting the everyday lives of fishermen and workers at the beach, stands in stark contrast to the images that emerge from Gaza today. This difference between the images of the past and present both estranges and provokes the viewer, highlighting the devastating impact of the ongoing genocide.
Another poignant scene, captured in an uncredited film shot by the PLO, features a child’s voice exclaiming, “Film me, film me!” This resonates as a chilling echo of the current situation in Gaza, where children are tragically exposed to conflict and violence, even as its direct victims, and ask to be filmed and be seen by the world. The parallel between the footage shot by the PLO and the footage we see on a daily basis on our phones underscores the continuity of the suffering and injustice that Palestinians have endured and continue to endure.
The situation in Gaza today also highlights the crucial role that intersectionality and international solidarity play in safeguarding Palestinian archives. Just as the Tokyo Reels were preserved through internationalist solidarity with the Palestinian cause, much of today’s audiovisual archive of the war in Gaza is being kept abroad, as Israeli forces systematically destroy Gaza’s cultural heritage and archives throughout the strip – whether personal collections or state records, art institutions such as museums and galleries, all are reduced to rubble or burned. Initiatives such as the UK-based research group Forensic Architecture, play a crucial role, archiving audiovisual materials coming out of Gaza and using them to visualize and investigate events often suppressed or denied by their perpetrators. Such efforts keep an archive alive when, as in 1982 and again today, Palestinians are denied their right to memory and documentation.
Acts of erasure and their resistance
In the film A Reel War, a notable sequence unveils the censorship practices of Israeli media. This is vividly illustrated by displaying the media’s focus on staged scenes showcasing an Israeli soldier’s act of goodwill towards a Palestinian, such as offering a cigarette. Simultaneously, the very same media relegates footage depicting the harsh reality of an Israeli soldier assaulting a bound prisoner to the depths of their archives. While this sequence within the film aims to be revelatory and shocking, the harsh reality that Palestinians have to endure on a daily basis surpasses the film’s portrayal.
The film’s sequence serves as an investigative and demystifying tool, prompting viewers to question the media’s portrayal of events. However, filmmaker Kamal Aljafari adopts a different approach in his A Fidai Film (2024). Opting instead to creatively subvert the materials of the existing, dominant narrative, Aljafari manipulates archival footage. The archive he uses in A Fidai Film includes not only PFU films of the 1970s and 1980s seized by Israel, but also excerpts of Israeli fiction films juxtaposed with Israeli news and propaganda reels, stating, “It is a project of sabotaging their archive. It has many aspects. Sometimes I re-edit and completely change the meaning, and other times I focus on the margins, where the Palestinians are, through their clothing and appearance. It immediately becomes clear that the Palestinians are the natives, and the photographer himself is the outsider who has come from afar.”
This approach goes beyond investigation and revelation; it actively challenges and redefines the narrative by manipulating the very footage used to construct it. Through re-editing and focusing on marginalized elements within the footage, Aljafari reclaims the narrative and centers the Palestinian experience. He visually reinforces the Palestinians’ status as the indigenous people of the land and exposes the photographer as an outsider.
As we can see, the strategies employed in these two films are diverse, ranging from investigation and revelation to the strategic subversion of the existing narrative. They highlight the power of film to not only expose hidden truths but also to actively challenge and reshape prevailing discourse.
Reclaiming the narrative
The Palestinian archive has become a focal point for many Palestinian historians and filmmakers. As seen in the works mentioned earlier, it represents a quest to reclaim the narrative and reconstruct a national identity that Palestinians have long been denied. This appears either through efforts to recover and repurpose the archive, or through virtual reconstructions and retellings of events and histories, ensuring they are remembered in the future. Historically, Palestinians shifted from a society rooted in oral narration to one that relentlessly documents its existence – first through photographs and paintings, and today through films, phone footage, and even 3D reconstructions of places that no longer exist or are no longer accessible.
The battle to reclaim the narrative, once looted from Palestinians, holds particular significance today, especially in the global context – notably in Europe and the United States – where Palestinians face systemic censorship and are stripped of their agency to tell their own stories. Instead, the right to narrate is often reserved for European or Israeli figures, who are sometimes deemed more trustworthy by European institutions, film festivals, and media. For example, in the Czech Republic, a 2024 report by Masaryk University found that during Czech Television’s coverage of the war in Gaza in October 2023, Palestinians were given less than 1% of the total speaking time over the course of the sampled month, while the narrative was overwhelmingly dominated by Czech and Israeli officials.
The delegitimization of Palestinian voices is part of a broader process of dehumanization – the same process that normalizes the mass killing of Palestinians. This raises urgent questions: How can we liberate the Palestinian archive from Israeli and colonial domination, and return to Palestinians the agency to narrate their own histories without relying on Israeli (or American and European) mediators, including those who claim to be pro-Palestinian? Can it truly be considered Palestinian cultural preservation, if archives like those of the Palestinian Film Unit remain largely in the possession of Israeli institutions or researchers such as Rona Sela and Karnit Mandel, requiring Palestinians to go through intermediaries to access their own cultural materials? And how can we use these films today – while some of their original creators are still alive and without any clear copyright claims to their own works?
This so-called ownerless archive does, in fact, have owners and creators – individuals who once sought to safeguard a national film heritage that proved too threatening to the Israeli narrative. Its erasure was not accidental, but deliberate: an attempt to sever a people from their memory, their images, and the means to tell their own story. Yet, despite the theft and suppression, the archive continues to speak through fragments, through solidarity, and through the relentless efforts to reclaim what was taken.
Proofreading: Zuzana Hrivňáková
Notes:
[1] SELA, Rona. Palestinian Materials, Images And Archives Held by Israel. swisspeace, 2018.
[2] SHAW, Wendy M. K. One Person’s Terrorist Is Another Person’s Freedom Fighter, One Person’s Jihad Is Another’s Crusade: Reflections on the Tokyo Reels Film Festival by Subversive Film at the Documenta 15, 2022. In: ed. PFEIFER, Simone. GÜNTHER, Christoph. DÖRRE, Robert. Disentangling Jihad, Political Violence and Media. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023.
Pictures:
[1, 4, 5] A Fidai Film (dir. Kamal Aljafari)
[2 – 3] Tokyo Reels
In March, Al Jazeera released Karnit Mandel’s 2021 documentary A Reel War on their YouTube channel. The film bears a striking resemblance to Rona Sela’s Looted (2019). The directors, both Israeli women, originally archivists, narrate and guide the audience through their research, dramatically recounting the rediscovery of the Palestinian archive. This archive had been stolen from Lebanon in 1982 and was later found in Israeli possession.
In a scene depicting VHS tapes piled up next to an old TV playing footage from the stolen archive, the narrator of A Reel War describes this footage as “bits of unidentified, ownerless archive material without any indication of their source or creator” – a statement that this article aims to contextualise and challenge.
A brief history of Palestinian cinema
Palestinian cinema is closely connected to the memory of pre-1948 Palestine and the Palestinians’ desire to return to their homeland. The complete history of this cinema is fragmented and incomplete, especially before Nakba (1948). While it was once thought to have begun with the founding of the Palestine Film Unit (PFU) in 1968, the first Palestinian documentary was actually shot in 1935, three decades earlier, by pioneer filmmaker Ibrahim Hassan Sarhan.
This history had to be recovered from the Shatila refugee camp in Beirut, where Sarhan was interviewed by Iraqi filmmaker Kassem Hawal. Sarhan is now recognized as one of the founders of pre-1948 Palestinian cinema, along with other Palestinian filmmakers believed to have made documentaries and features before the Nakba. Sarhan also founded Studio Palestine in 1945 and produced a few feature-length films, but all of them have been lost, as is the case with most Palestinian images from that period. Britain, and later Israel, severely and systematically restricted Palestinians’ ability to document or create images.
As a result, almost no documentation survives from the Palestinian side of the events of 1948, aside from oral histories and personal testimonies. Researchers also note a “period of silence” in Palestinian cinema from 1948 to 1967, during which virtually no Palestinian films were made.
In 1968, a group of exiled Palestinian filmmakers living in Amman, Jordan, began making films known as the Cinema of the Palestinian Revolution, founding the aforementioned Palestine Film Unit, which also became part of the global movement of militant cinema, commonly referred to as Third Cinema. At the same time, particularly in countries closer to the Eastern Bloc, and among filmmakers influenced by the internationalist movement or Third Cinema, a wave of alternative Arab cinema began to emerge.
What happened in 1982?
After moving to Beirut in 1970, Khadijeh Habashneh, alongside Mustafa Abu-Ali and other filmmakers, created the PFU Archive in hopes of establishing a history of Palestinian identity and countering the Israeli claim that “Palestinians don’t exist”. The archive included well over 100 films, from pre-1948 until the early 1980s. With the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the siege of Beirut in 1982, the archive was abandoned and then disappeared. Numerous assumptions and rumors began to circulate, speculating on exactly where the archive ended up: Was it buried in a graveyard, trapped beneath a collapsed building in Beirut, or secretly exchanged during the Oslo Accords? The last claim is firmly disputed in Mandel’s film. It was only recently discovered by some Israeli researchers that at least parts of the archive are in the possession of the Israeli army, stored as state and military secrets with extremely limited access.[1] The full extent of Palestinian materials held in the Israeli army archive remains unknown.
What we do know is that Israel recorded its own systemic looting, and footage of it has been featured in multiple films by both Palestinian and Israeli filmmakers. The Israeli army’s confiscation and subsequent classification of the PFU Archive as state and military secrets represents a blatant act of cultural aggression with far-reaching implications. These films captured the daily lives, struggles, and aspirations of Palestinians, serving as an invaluable repository of Palestinian heritage and offering a counter-narrative to the Israeli claim that “Palestinians don’t exist.” By seizing this archive and denying access to its contents, the Israeli army effectively sought to erase Palestinian identity and historical narrative and to perpetuate the Israeli occupation.
