I did a double-take with the name of Palestine Museum’s most recent film on Saturday morning. At first I thought it was a typo, as the film was by Mohammed Bakri, filmmaker famous for his 2003 film Jenin Jenin, about the Israeli rampage & destruction of Jenin Refugee Camp the year previous. But actually the Arabic word “Janin” means a fetus in the womb, a being that will be born, and Jenin 2024 was born of the incursion in 2002. Bakri is a deep thinker who doesn’t necessarily spell things out for his audiences. His title could mean Israel’s 2002 invasion – devastating but unsuccessful – gave birth to the Israeli military’s need to physically remove all the Camp’s residents. Or might it mean that the resistance spawned by 2002 gave birth to an even fiercer mindset on the part of Palestinians? They are down (and “out” – the Refugee Camp’s population has just been expelled) but by no means are they defeated.
In his original film, which has long been banned by Israel because it is too disturbing for Israelis to actually see what their military does, Bakri uses a handheld camera and shoots for 5 days in the midst of the invasion. He films several residents, including a young girl whose clarity and resolve are imprinted in my brain. In his new film, he revisits that young girl, now a mother of 4. She said in 2002 that the resistance would never die, that they would never stop in their determination to live in their homes, to have equality, to be free. That they would go on to have children of their own who would carry it forward, and that is exactly what she has done.
She now lives in the UAE, but her sumud – her steadfastness – remains as strong as ever. And now she has 4 offspring whom she is raising to resist the occupation.
Somehow Zionist apologists soothe themselves with the notion that Palestinians are “Arabs” who don’t really mind where they live, any Arab country will do. As Bakri said in the interview post film-showing, “the occupier will never understand the meaning of home”. (Palestine Museum, 15 March, 2025) When he revisits the Jenin Camp this time, he hears from many that they don’t want to repeat the “mistakes” of their ancestors, ie: they don’t want to become refugees in another place yet again. They are seasoned by their oppression and they know that if they leave they will not be allowed by the occupier to return. This is why we see so many thousands of Gazans returning north on foot to the rubble that once was their home. They are saying they would rather die in the place where their home was than be dispossessed again, like the 750,000 in 1948, and the 200,000 in 1967. And this, despite the fact that for 2 weeks now, not a single aid or food truck has been allowed into Gaza by Israel. UN-OCHA, which has tracked aid trucks to Gaza on a daily basis for years, now reports none. (Helena Cobban, Just World Ed, 15 March, 2025.) And Trump’s recent transfer to Israel of another $4 Billion worth of arms, without consulting Congress, seems to indicate that he is fine with this. After all, he has plans for Gaza.
The purpose of the intentional starvation of 2 million plus Palestinians is to pressure Hamas into returning the remainder of the hostages (or their bodies) to Israel. Hamas knows that once this happens, the bombing will start again, and will continue indefinitely, according to Netanyahu. It will continue until the ethnic cleansing is complete.
My question to the Israeli strategists behind this great travesty is: what about the rest of the Palestinians, of whom there are about 7 million? Will you have to dispossess/jail/torture/starve them as well? Can you not see that this staggering violence will only create a more determined resistance? As Nobel Peace Prize nominee, American-Israeli anthropologist Jeff Halper noted in a recent webinar, the Zionist project in Israel-Palestine is like all settler-colonial operations in that it has 3 stages:
- Dispossession of the people from their lands.
- Pacification of the people.
- Normalization, meaning the world accepts that the colonizers have “won”.
The dispossession occurred in 1948, in 1967, and is underway yet again. Attempts at pacification have been occurring ever since and have not succeeded. Trump (Round 1) aimed for normalization with the shameful Abraham Accords, but once Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza began in 2023, that plan faltered. Saudi Arabia said they would not go along with it without a state for the Palestinian people. And now the Arab states apparently have the support of the EU for a rebuild of Gaza involving Palestinian control, a distant cry from the obscene “Trump Gaza” so grotesquely captured in the 2 minute video Trump himself re-posted in early March. It went viral and has to be seen to be believed. Despite the vitriolic bombast on the part of Israeli & US leaders, it seems safe to say that Israel’s “colonizing” project (Theodore Hertzl, 1897, founder of modern political Zionism) will fail.
Despite decades of lawsuits, harrassment, exorbitant fines, and the banning of Jenin Jenin, Bakri made clear his sense of purpose in the interview: “I will continue making films. I will never be silent. I will never give up” (Palestine Museum, 15 March, 2025). He is working on his next film: Gaza, Gaza, Gaza. And like his other films, Palestinians’ determined cry for freedom will no doubt be loud and clear. This is sumud.
