One of the best sources for understanding the specific characteristics of Palestinian trauma is its cinema, which from its inception has provided authentic – if not necessarily realist – portrayals of the Palestinian historical and contemporary experience.⁵ ‘In its attempt to articulate a national narrative’, writes Edward Said, ‘Palestinian cinema discovers a world that has been frequently hidden’, and makes it visible.⁶ Nurith Gertz and George Khleifi flag up the contrapuntal agenda at stake when they point out that ‘the history of the Palestinian film […] is the history of the endeavor to recount the Palestinian story, against the setting of the Israeli account that had previously silenced it’.⁷

The representational context is not limited to Palestinians: others have produced visual media pointing to the potential for, and limits of, consciousness-raising and empathic identification with Palestinian trauma.⁸ British-born, Egyptian-based Omar Robert Hamilton is one of them. His oblique short film Though I Know the River is Dry (Ma‘a Anni A‘rif Anna al-Nahr Qad Jaf, 2013) illustrates that trauma is a continuous reality of Palestinian life.⁹ The film connects the Nakba and other catalytic events in the modern history of Palestine, notably al-naksa (the ‘setback’) of 1967 and the First (1987–91) and Second (2000–6) Intifadas.¹⁰ These connections indicate that trauma persists in the consciousness of the Palestinian people and will have no resolution without an almost unimaginably ambitious political solution; they also underline the close fit between the private/individual and the public/collective in this context. Hamilton’s film thus problematises trauma theory in particular ways, but it also transposes the fundamental insight of trauma studies: that there is a compulsion to find a way to tell the story of traumatic experience.¹¹ In the Palestinian case (not exclusively), the imperative is moral and political as well as psychological. Palestinian cinema challenges what, from the Palestinian point of view, is a persistently colonial situation.¹²

Palestinian feature and documentary films of the last decade such as Hany Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now (Al-Janna al-Alān, 2005) and Omar (2013), Vibeke Lokkeberg’s Tears of Gaza (2010), Fida Qishta’s Where Should the Birds Fly? (2012) and Emad Burnat’s and Guy Davidi’s Five Broken Cameras (Khamas Kamīrāt Mu

a

amah, 2012) present trauma as intrinsic to Palestinian history and identity, rendering precarious any individual or collective achievement. Recent events – the building of the Separation Wall (al-Jidār al-Fā

il, which features prominently in both Five Broken Cameras and Omar), the continuous ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Jerusalem and other parts of the West Bank, and the Israeli attacks on Gaza in 2006, 2008–9 (the focus of both Tears of Gaza and Where Should the Birds Fly?), 2012 and 2014 – have influenced the emergence of a new cinematic protagonist such as the one we see in Though I Know the River is Dry, who manifests profound pessimism, even despair.

We thus partly challenge, by updating, Gertz’s and Khleifi’s argument that Palestinian cinema has moved towards the presentation of characters who dramatise ‘a post-traumatic reflection’.¹³ Though I Know the River is Dry is fairly typical of films produced in the last decade in that it stresses massive continued injustice and the dynamic worsening of the Palestinian situation. Many of these films emphasise the present impossibility of working through trauma and anticipate a still darker future. Their directors realistically portray a tragic status quo and a lack of initiatives for resolution to the Palestinian tragedy.¹⁴

This is not to say that contemporary cinema negates the stubborn struggle of Palestinians to survive and to cultivate a human existence. In fact, it has been said that hope – ‘materially grounded, progressively functioning, future-forming hope’ – is the only really incurable Palestinian syndrome.¹⁵ We end our chapter with an example of a film that explicitly links the witnessing of trauma to potential healing, at least to the extent where witnessing can continue. In the main analysis, we offer Hamilton’s short, sombre film as an example of the fact that art is, more generally, an other-oriented reconstruction of reality which, in Said’s words, ‘exists intensely in a state of unreconciled opposition to the depredations of daily life’.¹⁶

About half the international Palestinian population are refugees, both within and without historic Palestine. The total number of Palestinians living ‘outside’ (whether as refugees or in diaspora) is approaching five and a half million.²⁰ Even Palestinians resident in their historic land tend to be distanced from their pre-1948 dwelling places and separated – by borders, the Separation Wall and checkpoints – from other parts of the community, including family members. Palestinians still lack a nation-state and are regionally marginalised, to put it mildly, in political, economic and cultural terms. The landscape has become increasingly unrecognisable to its original inhabitants.²¹ To the ‘memoricide’ that Pappé condemns, Nur Masalha adds ‘toponymicide’; ‘the de-Arabisation of the land […] the erasure of ancient Palestinian place names and their replacement by newly coined Zionist Hebrew toponymy’.²² This emphatically colonial strategy progressively limits the possibility of a political resolution. Judith Butler has recently e...