The Illusion of the One-way Mirror: Filming the Checkpoint in Divine Intervention

Moving from documentary to fiction film, this chapter centres on Elia Suleiman’s film Divine Intervention (2002), which juxtaposes silent, repetitive scenes of mundane daily life with moments of absurd fantasy, in a disorienting fashion. Suleiman’s film, which features little dialogue or plot, repeatedly stages scenes at a checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah. I conceptualize the checkpoint’s power as emerging from its establishment of control over vision and sight, drawing on studies by Weizman and David Fieni, among others, and I argue that Suleiman uses the cinematic camera to look back and to contest the contingent power of the checkpoint. Moreover, by calling attention to its own status as film through techniques of framing and staging, Divine Intervention reveals the fragile, performative, even theatrical nature of the checkpoint’s projection of power, and it stages fantasies of its destruction. Modes of contesting and circumventing the border emerge from an intensive and persistent focus on the border itself, and fantasy becomes a means of articulating new paradigms of political resistance.

Border Crossings and Stray Narratives of Return

This chapter examines a literary depiction of the repeated borders encountered on the Palestinian journey of return from exile in Raba‘i al-Madhoun’s Lady from Tel Aviv (2009). While many earlier examples of the common Palestinian literary trope of return, such as Jabra Ibrahim Jabra’s In Search of Walid Masoud (1978), either ignore the border or go silent altogether at the crossing back towards Palestine, al-Madhoun’s novel metafictionally reimagines the narrative of the protagonist’s return from London to the Gaza Strip by way of Tel Aviv as a series of encounters with borders that progressively blur distinctions of past/present and real/imaginary. At each crossing, new narrative voices appear, and gradually the lines between characters, narrators, and authors disintegrate, producing a cacophony of voices and an uncontrollable narrative of return. The novel performs and thereby exposes the disorienting effect of the border and its production of an unpredictable, “stray” life in blockaded Gaza. The Lady from Tel Aviv reveals that an unruly multitude of voices can offer a response to the silencing effect of the border.

Sayed Kashua, the Palestinian Hebrew Novel and the Failure of Coexistence

This chapter expands upon the notion of proliferating borders as sites of the failure of coexistence. It centres on two novels by Sayed Kashua, a prominent Palestinian journalist and writer who publishes primarily in Hebrew. Building on meditations on the relationship between language, silence, and estrangement by Julia Kristeva and Jacques Derrida, I trace Kashua’s journey into disillusion and despair, expressed through the silence and alienation imposed by a set of increasingly constricting borders. The novels Second Person Singular (2010)and Let It Be Morning (2004) reveal the failure of coexistence through the persistent re-emergence of the very borders that coexistence seeks to break down or render irrelevant, and the hollowness of strategies of linguistic and cultural assimilation. In Kashua’s novels, these attempts constantly fail at the border, a space that produces myriad forms of alienation and eventually exile. The analysis focuses on the locales of a suddenly blockaded Palestinian village and the divided city of Jerusalem as the twin sites of this paradigm’s failure. Kashua’s engagement with borders reveals what he eventually calls the “lie” of coexistence.

Return to the Border: Commitment, Utopia and the Inescapable Green Line

This chapter examines the tension between utopian literary visions of a borderless Israel-Palestine and the increasing proliferation of borders in the region in two novels, Ghassan Kanafani’s seminal 1969 novella Returning to Haifa, and Sami Michael’s follow up to Kanafani’s work, Doves in Trafalgar (2005). Beginning with the notion of utopia as an antithesis to borders, this chapter traces a shift from Kanafani’s earlier work, which uses the Palestinian protagonist’s border crossing and return to his lost home as a galvanizing moment of renewed commitment to the utopian vision of Palestinian resistance, to Michael’s later novel, in which the border’s persistence and expansion produces the failure of a utopian vision of Israeli-Palestinian coexistence. In this reading, borders function as post-utopian spaces that signify the decline of certain political ideologies and commitments in both Palestinian and Israeli literature.

Conclusion: Physical and Fictional Borders

The concluding chapter begins with a discussion of some of the anxieties around aestheticizing the grotesque border spaces of Palestine, which are sites both of real physical violence and of representation, imagination, and fantasy. It shows how the analyses in previous chapters seek to balance these concerns, and suggests that many of the works I examine refigure abstractions such as national symbols as tangible objects used to contest the power of the border, suggesting that the border produces a kind of de-metaphorization. Finally, this chapter considers the extent to which this focus on the tangible and the literal exposes the border’s deception and calls into question its rhetorical power.

Introduction: Excess, Illusion and the Border

The introduction provides historical, theoretical, and cultural context for analysing the relationship between border spaces and literature and film. Beginning with a historical overview of borders in Israel and Palestine, with an emphasis on the recent proliferation of checkpoints and walls, it links spatial transformations to cultural shifts. Specifically, while borders have always featured in Palestinian and Israeli cultural production, their expansion in the 21st century has increased their prominence as crucial literary and filmic spaces. This chapter draws on contributions from the “spatial turn” in critical theory, in order to situate this study within larger transnational trends and phenomena. It argues that in the contemporary era, borders in Israel/Palestine are ubiquitous, excessive, and deceptive, leading to the question that guides much this book: How do these borders shape literature and film, and how do authors and filmmakers respond to, critique, and, in some cases, contest their presence?

Does the Camera Lie? Or, How to Document the Wall

This chapter considers the problem of depicting the border on screen, and in particular the limits of the ability of an emerging genre of wall documentaries to expose the “reality” of borders in the region. In light of cinema studies scholarship on how documentaries construct truth claims, and studies of filmic and literary representations of the wall, Chapter 5 focuses on two films that examine critically the Israeli-built wall in the West Bank. The first, Mur (2004), directed by Simone Bitton, juxtaposes rhetoric and image to interrogate official narratives of the wall. It shows the border to be a deceptive space and reveals the danger of letting the border speak for itself. The second, Five Broken Cameras (2011) by Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi, questions the truth claims of documentaries, particularly the notion that the camera can produce a cohesive depiction of the border. Instead, filming the border is a process of constant interruption.