University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Cinematic activism: film festivals and the exhibition of Palestinian cultural politics in the United States

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Cinematic activism: film festivals and the exhibition of Palestinian cultural politics in the United States

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Content Copyright 2016 Umayyah Cable

CINEMATIC ACTIVISM:

FILM FESTIVALS AND THE EXHIBITION OF
PALESTINIAN CULTURAL POLITICS IN THE UNITED STATES

by

UMAYYAH CABLE

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(AMERICAN STUDIES AND ETHNICITY)

August 2016

ii

DEDICATION

For my mother, Layla Hijab Cable,
and my sister, Thuraya Anastas Cable,
with all my love

In memory of David Koff
1939-2014

iii

Acknowledgments

The completion of this dissertation would not have been possible without the love and
support of my family; this project is dedicated to them. My mother, Layla Hijab Cable, who was
exiled from her homeland of Palestine in 1967, instilled a moral compass in me from early on
and has taught me the truest meaning of perseverance. From as early as I can remember, she
taught me (by example) how to deconstruct racial and gender stereotypes in film and media; no
images were safe from her analysis, and for that I am eternally thankful. I would be up a creek
without my sister, Thuraya Anastas Cable, who has always believed in my hair-brained schemes
and who has come to my rescue more times than I can count. She has taught me the meaning of
loyalty. Thank you to my father, Robert Norton Cable Jr., whose logophilia is certainly
hereditary. Much love to my maternal grandmother, Afifeh Anastas Hijab. A painter and a
pianist, she profoundly shaped the first seven years of my life by filling it with art and love. I
miss her every day.
I have immense gratitude for my dissertation committee. I thank Evelyn Alsultany, Jack
Halberstam, Olivia C. Harrison, Kara Keeling, and my chair, Sarah Gualtieri, for their belief in
my (oftentimes unwieldy) project, for their support and guidance over the years, and for always
raising the bar just as I was reaching it. They have taught me the meaning of rigor. The six years
I have spent talking with Sarah Gualtieri have been critical to helping me iron out the nuances of
this project. I thank her for always reminding me to think about the stakes of this project and for
encouraging me to trust my intellectual instincts. My gratitude to Evelyn Alsultany and Olivia
Harrison is immeasurable, especially for all the time I have spent—heart stopping and
heartwarming alike—reading their incredibly thorough and thoughtful written feedback. What a
iv
privilege it has been to be read so closely. I could not have asked for better teaching mentors
than Jack Halberstam and Kara Keeling. It has been a gift to watch and learn the pedagogical arts
from them both, and an honor to guest lecture in their classes. They made my teaching
apprenticeship fulfilling and fun.
I am also grateful for all the mentorship I have received at the University of Southern
California (USC) from Laura Pulido, Nayan Shah, Macarena Gomez-Barris, Sarah Banet-
Weiser, Richard Andalon, and Vanessa Schwartz, whose guidance has helped at pivotal
moments. Laura Pulido and Nayan Shah helped to shape this project early on at the prospectus
and first chapter stages; I am grateful for their careful readings and feedback. Special recognition
must be given to the administrative staff in the department of American Studies and Ethnicity
(ASE): Kitty Lai, Jujuana Preston, and Sonya Rodriguez, for putting out many fires, making
ASE run smoothly, and putting up with so very much graduate student neuroses. Much thanks
must also go to Mary Clark and her incredible staff at USC’s Von KleimSmid Center Library:
you guys rock. Thanks also to the members of the Visual Studies Graduate Certificate writing
group, especially Nadya Bair, Lara Bradshaw, Samantha Carrick, Nadine Chan, Feng-Mei
Herberer, Allison Kozberg, Luci Mazola, Joshua Mitchell, Kate Page-Lipschmeyer, Roxanne
Samer, and squad leader Laura Isabel Serna. I also thank Nadine Naber, Lara Deeb, Louise
Cainkar, Pauline Homsi Vinson, Elaine Hagopian, and Suad Joseph, who have engaged my
research and writing at various stages of un/development. I am also grateful for the mentorship I
received while an undergraduate at Smith College; thank you to Darcy Buerkle, Frazer Ward,
and especially my advisor, Kevin Rozario.
This project is indebted to the tremendous work of Palestinian cinema and the Palestine
Film Festivals that support it, especially the Boston Palestine Film Festival. I thank the
v
organizers and volunteers for their labor of love. I am also so very grateful for the people whom I
interviewed for this project and I thank them for their willingness to spend time and share their
experiences with me. Thank you to the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University’s Radcliffe
Institute of Advanced Study and the Academy Film Archive for indulging my whimsical forays
into their archives. Special thanks to my colleagues on the Arab American Studies Association
board of directors. My research has been financially supported by the University of Southern
California, namely the department of American Studies & Ethnicity, the Visual Studies Research
Institute, the Middle East Studies Program, the Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education
Program, and the Graduate School. I also thank the Center for Arab American Philanthropy for
the generous grant I received in my final year.
Big ups to my comrades in ASE: Deborah Al-Najjar, Sophia Azeb, Crystal Baik, Jolie
Chea, Jih-Fei Cheng, Amee Chew, Jennifer DeClue, Treva Ellison, Sarah Fong, Laura Fugikawa,
Kai M. Green, Christina Heatherton, Jenny Hoang, Sabrina Howard, Priscilla Leiva, Jessica
Lovaas, Celeste Menchaca, Joshua Mitchell, Anjali Nath, Jessi Quizar, Emily Raymundo, Sriya
Shrestha, Tasneem Siddiqui and David Stein. I am deeply grateful for my dear friends, Crystal
Baik, Lara Bitar, Laura Blosser, Jih-Fei Cheng, A.J., Anjali Nath, Emily “Beast” Raymundo,
Roxanne Samer, Alexis Waller, and Devon Wilson-Hill. We have laughed, cried, sweat, and
cursed our way through the years. You each have inspired me, challenged me, nurtured me, and
loved me in indelible ways and I cherish your presence in my life. Much love and thanks to old
friends Emily Winokur, Katherine Cummings, and Dawnielle Peck: your friendships have
shaped who I am today. I have much love and gratitude for Charlotte Karem Albrecht, Nada
Ayad, Neda Maghbouleh, and Mejdulene Shomali, to whom I have (often) turned to for
SWANA-American studies solidarity. Thanks to Jennifer Kelly and Marisol Lebron, who have
vi
proven to be excellent conference companions. High five to Jacqui Shine, PhD; we made it, yo.
Thanks to all the people who have shown me kindness and generosity in this final hectic year,
especially Natania Meeker, Dave Tomkins, Shelly Walther, Andy Leising, Rami and the crew at
Super Copy in Eagle Rock, and all the baristas at Cafe de Leche, Highland Cafe, and Copa Vida.
Shout out to everyone at Boot Camp Pasadena, with special thanks to coach Stephen Cooper for
all the burpees and for putting up with my constant stream of profanities.
Two weeks before I was to embark on my first fieldwork trip to the Boston Palestine
Film Festival, my lower back decided it was quitting time. Out of seemingly nowhere, I was
overcome by intense pain, stiffness, and immobility. I made what in hindsight was a rather
unfortunate decision to push through the pain and proceeded with my travel and research plans.
By the time I came back to Los Angeles, I could barely stand. An MRI revealed
Spondylolisthesis (say that three times fast). I spent ten months struggling through physical
therapy, which included dealing with the setbacks of two car accidents (one major, one minor). I
owe an unfathomable debt of gratitude to my team of medical practitioners and physical
therapists: Dr. Douglas Cheshire, Dr. Michael Sniderman, Wendy Lopata, Lori Levine, Jasmine
Singh, and especially Dr. Aaron McGuiness, who, in that extended moment of crisis, literally
helped me learn how to walk again. They taught me the meaning of patience.
Last but not least, I have so very much love and gratitude for Wendell James Bubba aka
Weirdo, whose companionship and daily walks kept me sane in the final stages of writing.

vii

Table of Contents

Dedication ii
Acknowledgments iii
List of Figures viii
Abstract ix

Introduction 1

Chapter 1:
An Uprising at The Perfect Moment:
Censorship and the Emergence of
Palestinian Cinematic Activism 1981-2006 29

Chapter 2:
Mainstreaming Palestine:
Film Festivals and the Politics of Visibility 75

Chapter 3: 115
“I’ve been here all my life:”
Palestinian Women’s Filmmaking
and the Representation of Diasporic Identity 115

Chapter 4:
Keffiyeh Cinema:
Negotiating Palestinian-American Identity
Through Film Festival Culture 153

Conclusion 185

Filmography 193
Bibliography 193

viii
List of Figures

Figure 1: Hanna, Children of Fire (1989). 50

Figure 2: Hanna's drawings, Children of Fire (1989). 51

Figure 3: Two stills from Intifada: Introduction to the End of an Argument (1990). 54

Figure 4: Political cartoon by Paul Szep, The Boston Globe, May 3, 1991. 58

Figure 5: Image by Instagram user "vee_and_jordan," October 17, 2015. 75

Figure 6: Original Out In Israel publicity poster (left) and Street Cred's culture jammed version
(right). 96

Figure 7: Original Frameline37 publicity poster (left) and Streed Cred's culture jammed version
(right). 97

Figure 8: Boston Palestine Film Festival Facebook post, October 9, 2015. 98

Figure 9: Deleted Boston Palestine Film Festival Facebook post and comments, October 17,
2014. 117

ix
Abstract

Cinematic Activism examines how marginalized or underrepresented identity-based and cause-
based groups leverage film culture in order to foment social, cultural, or political change. I
explore this in detail by analyzing how Palestine-themed film festival organizing in the United
States has emerged as a method for the open expression of Palestinian cultural politics within a
broader cultural context that is marked by hegemonic institutional and political support for the
state of Israel, or what I call “compulsory Zionism.” I draw on queer and feminist theory in order
to illustrate how the social power relations within the United States construct Palestinian cultural
identity and politics as the politically and culturally queer Other within the context of
compulsory Zionism.

This project is based on oral history interviews with participants of the Boston Palestine Film
Festival, film festival participant observation, visual analysis of films and festival materials, and
qualitative analysis of print news discourses on Palestinian cinema. I trace the emergence of
Palestinian cinematic activism to the 1980s and 1990s, wherein controversies over the exhibition
of Palestinian cinema in cities such as Boston and San Francisco made the institutional and
cultural censorship of Palestinian cultural politics highly visible while simultaneously identifying
film exhibition as a powerful tool by which to dismantle institutionalized compulsory Zionism.
At the same time, these controversies were frequently cast in relation to controversies over the
expression of LGBT/Q cultural politics through art and cinema. This project therefore also
historicizes the relationships between Palestinian cultural politics and LGBT/Q cultural politics,
which continue to interact today within the realm of film festivals, such as Outside the Frame:
Queers for Palestine Film Festival, Frameline: The San Francisco International LGBTQ Film
Festival, and the Out in Israel Film Festival. Cinematic Activism is ultimately a study of culture
and power that interrogates cinema’s role in the production of transnational solidarities and
political activism.

1
Introduction

“What we must again see is this issue involving representation, an issue always lurking
near the question of Palestine.”

-Edward Said, The Question of Palestine, 1979.

On October 21, 1981 David Koff’s documentary film, Occupied Palestine, premiered at
the Castro Theater as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival. The feature length
film had been shot on location in the Palestinian territory of the West Bank, which had been (and
as of the time of this writing, continues to be) illegally occupied by the Israeli military and
civilian settlers since 1967. Occupied Palestine was intended, in the words of filmmaker Koff, to
“break some of the ice of the monolithic slant” in American support of Israel as produced
through mainstream American entertainment and news media’s representations of the Israel-
Palestine conflict.
1
Through his film, Koff set out to give voice to the Palestinian people who
have been silenced and demonized by a regime of representation which has been strategically
deployed to justify American cultural and political support for the state of Israel and the
continued dispossession of Palestine.
2
Documentary filmmaking has long since been considered
the genre through which to creatively advocate for social and political causes, and what better
place than San Francisco to premiere a film with such a politically charged topic. At the time of
Occupied Palestine’s release, San Francisco had gained a reputation as a city where identity-

1
Herb, “Film Reviews: Reviewed At Frisco Fest - Occupied Palestine,” Variety (Archive: 1905-2000),
November 1981, 26.

2
Stuart Hall uses the phrase "racialized regime of representation" to describe the work that racial
stereotyping performs in the constructions of "otherness" and the hegemonic power such representations
wield for the purpose of social exclusion. Stuart Hall, Representation: Cultural Representations and
Signifying Practices (London: Sage, 1997), 269-270.
2
based and cause-based social and political justice movements, such as the lesbian, gay, bisexual,
and transgender (LGBT) rights movement, thrived within a broader culture populated by artists
and intellectuals who were invested in liberal activism. Earlier that same year, Frameline: The
San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival (simply Frameline from here onward)
had made the Castro Theater its permanent annual venue.
3
Established in 1977 amidst the gay
rights movement, Frameline is the longest running and largest lesbian, gay, bisexual,
transgender, and queer themed film festival in the world, and it promotes a mission to “change
the world through the power of queer cinema.”
4

One would think that such a city, home to vibrant countercultures and socially conscious
cultural productions, in a region with a relatively large Arab-American community, would be
hospitable to Koff’s film.
5
However, twenty-five minutes into Occupied Palestine’s fully packed
screening, the Castro Theater was evacuated due to an anonymous telephoned bomb threat. How
ironic for a film which sought to humanize a people long since dehumanized as terrorists, to be
the target of a domestic terror threat. The screening resumed that night after the San Francisco

3
Coincidentally, Castro Theater is also deeply linked to the history of San Francisco’s Arab American
community. The theater was founded in 1910 by William, Elias, and George Nasser, three brothers from a
Lebanese immigrant family. The Bay Area Reporter. “Castro Theater Timeline.” Accessed March 18,
2016. http://www.ebar.com/arts/art_article.php?sec=film&article=380; Therese Poletti and Tom Paiva,
Art Deco San Francisco: The Architecture of Timothy Pflueger (New York: Princeton Architectural Press,
2008.), 37. Accessed March 18, 2016,
https://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=http://site.ebrary.com/lib/uscisd/Doc?id=10469418.

4
"About Frameline." Accessed March 8, 2016. http://www.frameline.org/about.

5
According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2005-2009 American Community Survey, California has the
largest Arab American population in the United States. According to 2000 census data, the national
average percentage of people who self-identify as Arab was .4%,; in the San Francisco Bay Area the
percentage of self-identified Arab people ranged from .7% to 2.7%. California has the highest Palestinian-
identified population, however the Chicago area has the most concentrated community of Palestinian-
identified people. "Demographics: Arab American Institute." Accessed March 8, 2016.
http://www.aaiusa.org/demographics; U.S. Census Bureau, The Arab Population: 2000: Census Brief, by
G. Patricia de la Cruz and Angela Brittingham, accessed April 6, 2016,
https://www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/c2kbr-23.pdf
3
Police Department conducted a sweep of the theater, but the evening’s spectacle indicated that
Occupied Palestine had touched a nerve. That nerve was attached to a greater system of what I
theorize throughout this dissertation as “compulsory Zionism,” or the manners in which
hegemonic support for the state of Israel is enforced at numerous cultural, social, political, and
institutional levels within the United States. Koff’s film constituted a form of cultural resistance
to compulsory Zionism and its exhibition through the San Francisco International Film Festival,
therefore, exemplified a precursory form of what I theorize in this dissertation as cinematic
activism.
This project emerged from a sense of cognitive dissonance regarding the expression of
Palestinian cultural politics in the United States. “Cultural politics,” according to Stuart Hall, are
concerned with "the relationship between culture (meaning signifying practices) and power."
6

The study of “cultural politics,” broadly speaking, is defined as “an exploration of precisely
what is cultural about politics and what is political about culture."
7
The term “cultural politics”
also refers to the ways in which "identities become sites of contestation, politicization, and
struggle over national narratives, and in the context of transnational cultural flows."
8
Given these
various and loose definitions, I use the phrase “cultural politics” within this project to encompass
a broad field wherein contests over cultural identities and political ideologies are represented and
contested through creative practices and cultural productions. More specifically, Palestinian

6
Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies and the Politics of Internationalization, and Interview with Stuart Hall.”
By Kuan-Hsing Chen. Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogies in Cultural Studies, David Morley and Kuan-Hsing
Chen, eds., (Longon: Routledge, 1996), 395.

7
John Armitage, Ryan Bishop, and Douglas Kellner. “Introducing Cultural Politics.” Cultural Politics 1
(March 2005).

8
Evelyn Alsultany and Ella Shohat, “The Cultural Politics of ‘the Middle East’ in the Americas: An
Introduction,” Between the Middle East and the Americas: The Cultural Politics of Diaspora. Evelyn
Alsultany and Ella Shohat, eds. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 25.
4
cultural productions are characterized by the representation of Palestinian cultural identity,
which, especially within the context of the United States, “[has] always been shaped by the
politics of [the] homeland and its relationship with Israel and the United States.”
9
As such,
Palestinian cultural identity is informed by ones understanding of oneself as belonging to a
Palestinian ethnic collectivity and the struggles that group has faced with the ongoing conditions
of exile, occupation, and colonization in historic Palestine.
10
Some of the “politics” of Palestinian
culture, then, are concerned with the recognition of the Palestinian people as an indigenous
ethnic group; critiques of settler-colonialism, war, and occupation in Palestine and elsewhere;
and a rejection of Zionist ideology and its manifestation through the Israeli state. My use of the
phrase "Palestinian cultural politics" is therefore intended to invoke the politics of Palestinian
identity and culture (that which is contested) and the culture of Palestinian politics (the
representation of those contestations). The exhibition of Palestinian cultural politics, then, refers
to how contestations over the question of Palestine are put on display in the public sphere,
primarily through media and cultural productions.
Having been raised in a Palestinian-American household, having experienced anti-
Palestinian racism, and having studied the ways in which Zionism is engrained within American
media, governmental politics, and culture, I had come to understand the discussion and
representation of Palestinian cultural politics within the context of the United States as taboo at

9
Sunaina Maira, “ ‘A Strip, A Land, A Blaze,” Arab American Hip Hop and Transnational Politics.”
Between the Middle East and the Americas: The Cultural Politics of Diaspora. Evelyn Alsultany and Ella
Shohat, eds. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 200.

10
I define “historic Palestine” according to the 1920 borders of the British Mandate of Palestine, which
constituted a contiguous geographic unit that resembles the combination of the what today are four
compartmentalized territories: 1) the state of Israel and the occupied lands of 2) Jerusalem, 3) the West
Bank, and 4) the Gaza Strip. Ilan Pappe, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 71-72.

5
best, and at worst, dangerous. I saw this taboo reflected in the ways the American mass news
media and entertainment industry produce distorted representations of Palestine that reflect
favorably towards the state of Israel.
13
I saw it reflected in the history of domestic terrorism and
state repression perpetrated against Palestinian-American activists and civil rights
organizations.
14
And I saw it reflected in what Arab American and Middle East Studies scholars
have documented as a general culture of self-censorship that has existed around Palestine-related
studies in the US academy.
15
This is why it came as a surprise to me to find Palestine Film
Festivals not merely existing, but thriving in places, which, in many ways, could be considered
the cultural and institutional nerve centers of compulsory Zionism in the United States. Places
such as my hometown of Cambridge, MA and the greater Metro Boston area, which I had

13
Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation after 9/11 (New York:
New York University Press, 2012); Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters : Culture, Media, and U.S.
Interests in the Middle East Since 1945 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005); Luke
Matthew Peterson, Israel-Palestine in the News Media: Contending Discourses (New York: Routledge,
2015); Jack Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People (Northampton, MA: Olive
Branch Press, 2009).

14
A series of domestic terror attacks were perpetrated against Palestinian-American civil rights activists
and Arab-American civil rights organizations during the 1970s and 1980s. In 1972, Robert Steven
Manning, who was then a member of the Jewish Defense League, was convicted of bombing the Los
Angeles home of Palestinian-American activist. In 1985, the American Arab Anti-Discrimination
Committee (ADC) was the target of a several attacks: ADC’s west coast Director, Alex Odeh, was killed
by a bomb planted at the regional office in Santa Ana, CA; the national office in Washington, D.C. was
ransacked and set ablaze; and a bomb which had been planted at the New England regional office in
Boston, MA injured two police officers who attempted to diffuse it. Eric Malnic, “Ex-JDL Activist Found
Guilty in Bombing Death.” Los Angeles Times, October 15, 1993. Accessed March 18, 2016.
http://articles.latimes.com/1993-10-15/local/me-46008_1_bombing-death; John Ward Anderson, “FBI
Probes Attacks on Arab Group: FBI Probes for Rights Violations In Attacks Against Arab Group.” The
Washington Post. December 6, 1985, accessed March 8, 2016,
http://search.proquest.com/docview/138412894.

15
Many scholars have written on the challenges faced by Arab American studies and Middle East studies
scholars in the American academy. For details, see: Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar. Anthropology’s
Politics: Disciplining the Middle East (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015); Steven Salaita,
Uncivil Rights: Palestine and the Limits of Academic Freedom (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2015);
Therese Saliba, “Resisting Invisibility: Arab Americans in Academia and Activism,” Arabs in America:
Building a New Future. Michael Suleiman, ed. (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2000).

6
personally known to exemplify the adage “progressive except for Palestine,”
16
where the Arab
American Anti-Discrimination Committee’s New England regional office had been the target of
an attempted bombing in 1985, and which also played host to a history of institutional censorship
of Palestinian cinema in the 1990s (which is the topic of Chapter 1). Places such as Chicago, in
the state of Illinois, where Palestinian-American scholar Steven Salaita had been “un-hired” in
2014 by the University of Illinois for his Twitter comments condemning Israeli state violence
against Palestinian civilians, and where in that same year the US government tried and convicted
Palestinian activist Rasmea Odeh for immigration fraud, imprisoned her, stripped her of her
citizenship, and slated her for deportation after serving her sentence. And places such as
Washington D.C., the locus of American government and its political and financial support for
the state of Israel. Palestine Film Festivals, it seemed, were breaking the taboo. From this sense
of surprise arose the central research question of this project: how and why was the mobilization
of Palestinian cinema—broadly conceived of as films made by Palestinian filmmakers, films
focused on and sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, and Palestine themed film festivals—
emerging as a method for the open expression of Palestinian cultural politics in the United
States? These festivals and the films showcased therein were performing a certain kind of work,
and I was eager to understand the fruits of that labor. I wanted to know what, if any, cultural,
social, and institutional changes were taking place through the proliferation of these films and
festivals and how those changes were effecting not only the ways in which Palestine is
represented and discussed in the United States, but the quality of Palestinian-America’s social
and cultural life as well.

16
Steven Salaita defines “progressive except for Palestine” (PeP) as describing “people who profress to
oppose racism, sexism, imperialism, war, segregation, dogma, meanness, and incivility, but who suddenly
become quite less enlightened vis-à-vis Israel, or who torture their ethics in risible contortions in order to
render support for Israel compatible with their progressive self-image.” Salaita, Uncivil Rights, 93.
7
Palestine-themed film festivals exemplify a more pronounced, organized, and intentional
form of the cinematic activism identified in the opening of this introduction. If “film” is the noun
used to describe the material and representational multimedia object that we commonly refer to
as a “movie,” then “cinema” serves as a catchall for the sociality and culture that forms around
films. Activism, on the other hand, is the “practice of vigorous campaigning to bring about social
or political change.”
17
As such, cinematic activism refers to the ways in which film culture is
mobilized in the service of social or political change. Nowhere is this more evident than through
the proliferation of film festivals which take up underrepresented identities and causes as their
theme. Having emerged in the early 20
th
century in large part as incubators for nationalisms and
their accompanying ideologies, film festivals have historically served to promote particular—
sometimes sinister, sometimes recuperative—social and political agendas. Although film culture
thrived well before the advent of the festival, Cindy Wong identifies the emergence of the
festival in the form we recognize it today as starting in the 1930s with the founding of the Venice
Film Festival as a vehicle through which to promote Fascist and Nazi discourses. The now world
famous Cannes Film Festival, on the other hand, was founded in direct, anti-Fascist response to
the Venice Film Festival.
18
Today, Wong notes, film festivals play a major role in the creative
and political economies of global film culture, and they have rapidly grown in popularity, so
much so that one can easily find festivals, big and small, which reflect any number of
identitarian, ideological, or social interests.

17
"Activism, n.," OED Online. March 2016. Oxford University Press. Accessed April 06,
2016http://www.oed.com.libproxy2.usc.edu/view/Entry/1957?redirectedFrom=activism.

18
Wong notes that the Cannes festival premiered, coincidentally, on September 1, 1939, the same day that
Hitler invaded Poland. Cindy Hing-Yuk Wong, Film Festivals: Culture, People, and Power on the Global
Screen (New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 2011), Pg. 38-39.

8
Often organized around national, identity-based, or cause-based themes, film festivals are
dynamic events which accommodate cinema’s representational, social, and cultural elements. As
such, this dissertation takes the development of Palestine Film Festivals in the United States as a
starting point from which to understand the power of cinematic activism to foment political,
social, or cultural change, and I take the Boston Palestine Film Festival (BPFF) as a case study
through which to demonstrate how such a process works. Doing so illuminates the challenges
that Palestinians in the US face in articulating their identities, as well as the political imperatives
behind using cinematic activism as a social justice strategy and educational resource. Although
Palestine Film Festivals have been well established in cities like Chicago, Houston, Toronto, and
London,
19
and more recently in Kuala Lumpur, Santiago, Sydney, and elsewhere, Boston affords
a rich site for this study because of the convergent histories of censorship, transnational feminist
activism, and independent Palestine-focused media productions that preceded the mobilization of
a successful festival, making it a particularly fruitful example of how, when, and why cinematic
activism has developed as a political practice.
20
There has also been a history of controversy
around Palestinian film screenings in the Boston area since the 1980s, which is the topic of
Chapter 1. Boston has also been home to vibrant Arab-American organizing around the issue of
Palestine since the 1980s and is home to a large Arab-American community in the US that has
attracted the attention of Arab-American studies’ scholars—namely Elaine Hagopian and Evelyn

19
In 1998, London was the first city to launch a Palestine Film Festival. In 2004 the Palestine Film
Foundation was established to manage the festival. However, as of 2015, the festival's organizing has
been suspended indefinitely due to lack of sufficient financial support. The Palestine Film Foundation
remains intact. "Festivals: The Palestine Film Foundation." Accessed March 8, 2016.
http://palestinefilmfoundation.org/festivals.asp?s=next.

20
The Boston area has a history of Arab American independent media activism. For example, the political
and cultural commentary television show, Arabic Hour, has been broadcast on local community access
television stations since the 1980s.

9
Shakir—since the 1970s. Established in 2006 and co-sponsored by the Museum of Fine Arts, the
BPFF attracts roughly 2000 participants each year and is one of the largest and most successful
Palestine Film Festivals in the US.
In terms of the larger scope of the project, the concept of cinematic activism can be
applied to other identity-based and cause-based groups that leverage film and festivals in the
service of social or political change. For example, since the 1970s, Frameline: San Francisco
International LGBTQ Film Festival has helped to mobilize the LGBT community around film
and video as a way to disseminate information about the gay rights movement, and later the
AIDS crisis, and to celebrate LGBTQ identity and culture amidst a broader culture of silence and
discrimination. Another example is the Human Rights Watch Film Festival, which screens in
over twenty cities worldwide and showcases films about international social and political issues
which are largely under- or misrepresented in mainstream media.
21
While cinematic activism is
especially useful for understanding how underrepresented groups in the United States use film
and film culture to effect social and political change, this term can also be used to account for the
ways in which cinema, and film festivals in particular, have emerged as sites of political and
cultural contest. For example, in 2010 the Israeli Consular General of San Francisco collaborated
with the pro-Israeli public relations firm Blue Star to produce the Out in Israel Film Festival
which sought to “pinkwash” Israeli state violence against the Palestinians by promoting Israel as
an LGBT safe haven while condemning Palestine and Palestinians as essentially and inherently
homophobic. Out in Israel, along with the myriad other public relations advertisements produced
by Blue Star, was the target of a culture jamming campaign by Street Cred: Advertising for the
People (SCAP), a project by Bay Area Art Queers Unleashing Power (BAAQUP) an anonymous

21
“About: Human Rights Watch Film Festival.” Accessed March 15, 2016. https://ff.hrw.org/about

10
guerilla art collective,
22
and was protested by the Bay Area activist collective, Queers
Undermining Israeli Terrorism (QUIT). Similarly, the aforementioned Frameline Festival has
been the target of QUIT’s boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign objecting to the
festival’s acceptance of funding from the Israeli consulate and promotion of Israeli pinkwashing
films.
23
The term cinematic activism, therefore, can be used to more broadly describe various
types of political activism organized around film culture, particularly in holding filmmakers and
cause-based festivals accountable to their missions of social responsibility within a global film
festival political economy rife with ideological and financial agendas.
My discussion of LGBT and/or queer (LGBT/Q hereafter) cinematic activism in relation
to Palestinian cultural politics is not coincidental. While conducting my research, I found that
controversies over Palestinian cinema’s exhibition and recognition in the United States have
consistently occurred in relation to discourses on and controversies over LGBT/Q arts and
cinema. This project, therefore, also historicizes the relationship between Palestinian and
LGBTQ cultural politics, as manifest through cinematic activism and its accompanying visual
cultures. These repeated intersections of Palestinian cultural politics and LGBT/Q cultural
politics within the realm of cinematic activism suggests two things: first that Palestinian and
LGBT/Q identified people have shared social or political interests, and second, that the issue of
Palestine activism in the United States could potentially go the way of the LGBT rights
movement, that is to say, become mainstreamed. Mainstreaming is, according to my
interlocutors, one of the central aims of the BPFF, which will be discussed further in Chapter 2.

22
Bad News Bruce. “Street Cred: Advertising for the People.” Poor Magazine. Posted January 28, 2014.
Accessed March 15, 2016. http://www.poormagazine.org/node/5024

23
A number of prominent artists and activists signed an open letter to Frameline asking them to cut their
ties with the Israeli consulate. QUIT! “Prominent Queer Artists and Activists Tell Frameline to Dump
Israeli Consulate.” San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center. Accessed March 15, 2016.
https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2013/04/06/18734776.php.
11
Part of this investigation, then, also addresses the ways in which abject or underrepresented
groups leverage cinematic activism to make their identities or causes more socially acceptable,
normalized, and at times even popularized. What better way to measure a group or
phenomenon’s status in relation to the dominant cultural norms than through its presence (or
absence) in mainstream media? The evolution of the gay rights movement and its film culture
offers a telling example of cinematic activism’s power to mainstream underrepresented issues.
Over the course of four decades, LGBT/Q rights activists in the United States have used film and
film festival organizing to transform their social and cultural stature and mobilize grassroots
activism in order to gain legal protections and civil rights. Today, the white, socioeconomically
privileged subset of the LGBTQ community enjoy an increased level of visibility and inclusion,
which is reflected in American popular visual and media cultures, from television shows such as
The L Word, and Modern Family, to Oscar award winning films Brokeback Mountain and Milk.
In a word, expressions of homonormative LGBT/Q identity and cultural politics have entered the
mainstream.
However, LGBT cultural politics are not the same as queer cultural politics, and not all
cinematic activism endeavors are invested in a project of mainstreaming. I turn to film festivals
once again to help clarify these distinctions. The aforementioned Frameline: San Francisco
International LGBTQ Film Festival, while arguably a form of cinematic activism, exemplifies
what I mean by “mainstream,” as evidenced by the organization’s emphasis on visibility and
inclusion, which reflects the interests of the festival’s corporate sponsors. With sponsorship from
the Human Rights Campaign, not to mention private television networks such as HBO and
Showtime, as well as multinational corporations and financial institutions such as Wells Fargo,
AT&T, and United Airlines, it is no surprise then for the festival’s mission and content to reflect
12
the “societal interests which control and finance” it.
24
What is more, Frameline has also accepted
funds from the Israeli Consulate and featured Israeli pinkwashing films in its programming.
Frameline’s financial and representational relationship with the Israeli government and Israeli
pinkwashing films has made it the target of further cinematic activism. In June 2015 QUIT put
on a festival of their own: Outside the Frame: Queers for Palestine Film Festival. Organized by
the same activist collective which picketed the Out in Israel Film Festival in 2010, Outside the
Frame is in many ways an outgrowth of QUIT’s earlier protests against Out in Israel. With
sponsorship from independent media and community organizations such as KPFA Pacifica
Radio, Against Equality, Gay Shame, the prison abolition organization Critical Resistance, and
non-profits such as the Arab Resources Center, Arab Film Festival, and the Middle East
Children’s Alliance, Outside the Frame represents a radically different set of cultural politics
than those of Frameline. Where Frameline represents mainstream LGBT cultural politics,
including investments in homonationalist aims such as marriage equality, Outside the Frame
represents radical queer cultural politics and investments in racial, gender, and economic justice.
And yet, LGTB cultural politics and queer cultural politics are not so easily divided into
discrete and/or oppositional categories of “mainstream” and “radical,” respectively. The
exhibition of Dean Spade’s Pinkwashing Exposed film offers an example of where the
distinctions between radical and mainstream are beneficially blurry. For example, in 2015
Pinkwashing Exposed screened at Outside the Frame, as well as the Boston Palestine Film
Festival, a festival which, as will be explored in detail in Chapter 2, aims to “mainstream
Palestine.” I would not argue that the queer-identified Palestine solidarity activist depicted in
Dean Spade’s documentary film Pinkwashing Exposed are attempting to mainstream either queer

24
Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass
Media (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), xi.
13
or Palestinian cultural politics. Spade himself critiques the project of mainstreaming in his own
academic and legal scholarship on critical queer and trans politics, state violence, and the LGBT
rights movement. However, Pinkwashing Exposed and its circulation through a variety of
festivals does disseminate the information contained therein more widely, creating greater
visibility and awareness of a localized victory within the BDS movement, a movement which, in
order to succeed, requires a critical mass of support and grassroots micro-movements. The
radical queer activists who screen Pinkwashing Exposed at Outside the Frame in 2015 and who
lobby Frameline to sever its ties with the Israeli government and drop its pinkwashing films are
not necessarily attempting to mainstream Palestinian cultural politics so much as they are
advocating for the excision of Zionism from the mainstream LGBT film culture of the San
Francisco Bay Area. These relationships LGBT/Q cinematic activism and Palestinian cinematic
activism will be explored in greater detail in Chapter 1.

Literature Review
The timeliness of this project is evidenced through the convergence of several burgeoning
discourses across the fields of American studies, Arab American studies, queer studies, and film
and media studies. Whether in studies of immigration, racial formation, literature and cultural
productions, activism, or cultural politics, Palestine, to refashion the words of Edward Said, is an
issue always lurking near the field of Arab American studies. The question of Palestine has been
one of the central concerns of the Arab American community from as early as World War I, and
the development of Arab American studies as a field has reflected the importance of Palestinian
cultural politics in the formation of a pan-Arab American sense of identity and community.
25

25
Lawrence Davidson, "Debating Palestine: Arab-American Challenges to Zionism 1917-1932." Arabs in
America: Building a New Future. Michael Suleiman, ed. (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press,
14
Cinematic Activism continues in this Arab American studies vein, but with an attention to the
role of cinema in the mobilization of a broader, interethnic community of artists and activists
invested in Palestinian cultural politics, which includes the celebration of Arab-American
cultural identity.
Once considered “academic suicide,” Arab American studies has experienced a surge of
growth in the post 9/11 era, as the field’s longstanding critiques of forced migration,
racialization, settler-colonialism, war, and occupation became increasingly relevant to broader
scholarly critiques of the War on Terror and US imperialism.
26
In the post 9/11 context, the fields
of American studies and ethnic studies have been prompted to reconsider their relationships to
Arab American studies and in turn, the question of Palestine. At the same time, queer studies
scholars have also interrogated the ways in which homonationalist LGBT/Q identity and cultural
politics have been taken up by the Israeli state’s "Brand Israel" public relations campaigns in
order to “pinkwash” the occupation and apartheid regime.
27
American studies and queer studies
have thus each undergone a Palestine intervention, in both intellectual and political terms.
American studies has not only taken up the question of Palestine as on object of study, but has
mobilized its institutional power in support of Palestinian cultural politics by way of the

2000); Sarah Gualtieri, Between Arab and White: Race and Ethnicity in the Early Syrian American
Diaspora. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009),165-167.

26
Nadine Naber, "Introduction: Arab Americans and U.S. Racial Formation," Race and Arab Americans
Before and After 9/11: From Invisible Citizens to Visible Subjects. Amaney Jamal and Nadine Naber, eds.
(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008), 3-4.

27
Homonationalism is defined as: "national homosexuality…that corresponds with the coming out of
American empire. Further, this brand of homosexuality operates as a regulatory script not only of
normative gayness, queerness, or homosexuality, but also of the racial and national norms that reinforce
these sexual subjects." Jasbir Puar, “Israel’s Gay Propaganda War.” The Guardian, July 1, 2010,
Accessed March 18, 2016, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/jul/01/israels-gay-
propaganda-war; Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Chapel Hill, NC:
Duke University Press Books, 2007), 2.

15
American Studies Association’s resolution to endorse the academic and cultural boycott of
Israel.
28
The confluence of these interventions has made this study—which employs queer theory
to investigate the cultural politics of Palestine in an American context—possible in ways that
were unimaginable merely two decade before.
29
Cinematic Activism must therefore be situated
within what could arguably be called “the Palestine turn” that has been taking place in the US
academy over the last decade.
Palestine has not merely emerged as a topic of study or a cause to be rallied for, but has
come to represent a universal symbol of in/justice which scholars and activists have taken up to
explore the interrelationships between the racial and sexual politics of American imperialism and
European colonialism (Zionism included) through what Olivia C. Harrison calls "the prism of
Palestine."
30
In her analysis of Maghrebi literature, Harrison points to Palestine's role in the
deconstruction of colonial ethnic categories and the mobilization of anti-colonial activism
through a process of "transnational identification." It is through this process of transnational
identification that US racial politics and queer politics have become, and always have been,

28
American Studies Association National Council, "About: Resolutions and Actions, Council Resolution
on Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions." Accessed on March 8, 2016.
http://www.theasa.net/american_studies_association_resolution_on_academic_boycott_of_israel.

29
As an undergraduate at Smith College from 2001 to 2005, I majored in American studies primarily
because in the aftermath of the September 11
th
attacks, it was one of the few academic spaces—as a
person of Palestinian descent invested in Palestinian cultural politics— where I felt safe even mentioning
the word “Palestine,” and even then with caution. Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar’s ethnographic study on
the politics of Middle East anthropology from World War II to present documents the sustained and
pervasive suppression of and self-censorship by scholars whose research focuses on Palestine or
approaches the Palestine-Israel conflict in critical ways. Furthermore, the Center for Constitutional Rights
and Palestine Legal, two civil rights and legal advocacy non-profits, co-authored an extensive study on
the censorship of Palestine activism in numerous sectors of American society. Deeb and Winegar.
Anthropology’s Politics; Palestine Legal. “The Palestine Exception to Free Speech: A Movement Under
Attack in the US.” Accessed March 25, 2016. http://palestinelegal.org/the-palestine-exception/.

30
Olivia C. Harrison, “Rethinking ‘Jews’ and ‘Arabs’ through Palestine: Transcolonial Perspectives on
Maghrebi Literature.” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 17, (2013): 24.

16
imbricated with the question of Palestine, as discussed by scholars, artists, and activists alike,
such as Angela Y. Davis, Keith Feldman, Gil Hochberg, June Jordan, Robin D. G. Kelley, Alice
Walker, and Cornell West.
31
Cinematic Activism contributes to this growing body of literature
and is invested in understanding how and why Palestinian cultural politics have been taken up by
social justice movements in the United States, such as Black Lives Matter, Jewish Voice for
Peace, and Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism, as well as the possibilities and limitations of
these solidarities.
Just as the topic of Palestine holds new found significance within American and queer
studies, film festivals are finally getting their due within the field of cinema studies. The
festival's role in and relationship to activism has been a central discussion in this burgeoning
field and my understanding of cinematic activism is informed by several central academic
discussions of film festival that have emerged within the last decade.
32
Cindy Wong offers a
detailed analysis of the political and cultural economies of the global film festival circuit. I draw

31
Angela Davis and Frank Barat, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the
Foundations of a Movement (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2016); Keith P. Feldman, A Shadow over
Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press,
2015); Gil Hochberg, ed, Queer Politics and the Question of Palestine, a special issue of GLQ: A Journal
of Lesbian and Gay Studies. 16 (2010): 493-516; June Jordan, Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected
Essays (New York: Basic/Civitas Books, 2003); Robin D. G. Kelley “Another Freedom Summer.”
Journal of Palestine Studies 44 (November 1, 2014): 29–41; Alice Walker, The Cushion in the Road:
Meditation and Wandering as the Whole World Awakens to Being in Harm’s Way (New York: The New
Press, 2014).

32
Despite their popularity and significant role in film culture, film festivals have long been ignored as an
object of study, and the bulk of critical scholarship in film festival studies has only been published since
2000, in large part due to the creation of the Film Festival Yearbook series by St. Andrews University
Press. Still, major contributions to the field have consisted of edited volumes. Dina Iordanova, ed., Film
Festivals: History, Theory, Method, Practice. (New York, NY: Routledge, 2016); Dina Iordanova, ed.,
The Film Festival Reader. St Andrews Film Studies, 2015); Dina Iordanova and Ruby Cheung. Film
Festival Yearbook 2: Film Festivals and Imagined Communities (Wells, Scotland: St Andrews Film
Studies, 2010); Richard Porton ed., Dekalog 03: On Film Festivals (New York: Wallflower Press, 2009);
Jeffrey Ruoff, Coming Soon to a Festival Near You: Programming Film Festivals (Wells, Scotland: St
Andrews Film Studies, 2012); Kenneth Turan, Sundance to Sarajevo: Film Festivals and the World They
Made (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003).

17
from her discussion of film festivals as public spheres to account for the ways in which the
practice of cinematic activism makes the open discussion and representation of previously
suppressed issues possible.
33
Marieke de Valk has conceptualized the work of legitimization that
festivals performs through the cultivation of cultural capital in the festival's hierarchies of prizes
and competitions. Particularly with regard to documentary films, Valk notes that prestigious
festival competitions add value to a film—and its subject matter—thereby legitimizing the issues
represented therein and promoting them in the public sphere.
34
Although this project is primarily
concerned with less prestigious film festivals, I build on Valk’s conception of legitimization by
considering the placement of smaller festivals or films within larger cultural institutions, such as
museums and awards ceremonies, respectively.
When it comes to a film or festival's focus on humanitarian, social, or political issues, the
legitimacy acquired through the films distribution and consumption is largely produced by what
Sonia Tascón calls the "humanitarian gaze," or a way of looking that is "organized by a
relationship of unequal power premised on humanitarianism, a discourse that shows some to be
(persistent) victims, and others as aiding them.
35
This then predisposes the privileged that aid
them to seek “others” as figures of pity or, at best, as fighters to be 'more like us.'" Put another
way, the humanitarian gazer "will seek to find an effective self projected on screen." Human-
interest film festivals, therefore, not only produce value and legitimacy for underrepresented
issues, but also foment—at times problematically—the process of transnational identification
that is necessary for mobilizing disparate groups into solidarity and action. This project addresses

33
Wong, Film Festivals, 159.

34
Marijke de Valck, Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2007), 123-161.

35
Sonia M. Tascón, Human Rights Film Festivals: Activism in Context (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2015), 7.
18
this tension with particular regard to the slippages that exists between categorizing a film or
festival as “Palestine” or “Palestinian,” hierarchies of privilege, and the role of allies in the
promotion of Palestinian self-representation through cinematic activism.
Film festival studies have focused primarily on human rights themed film festivals, as
well as a substantial discussion on LGBT identity-based film festivals, and these texts have
focused on major festivals such as the Human Rights Watch Film Festival and Frameline.
Discussions of Palestinian cinema within the context of film festivals has been both sparse and
problematic, and Cinematic Activism addresses this dearth. While Cindy Wong references “the
Palestinian situation” in passing, Sonia Tascón’s discussion of Palestinian cinema’s function
within the context of New York City’s Human Rights Watch Film Festival (HRWFF) is couched
within a larger critique of the festival’s underrepresentation of Latin American films. In Human
Rights Film Festivals: Activism in Context, Tascón argues what she considers to be the
HRWFF’s overrepresentation of Palestine-related films in contrast to a “nonattention” to Latin
American related films in its programming as the result of the festival’s catering to New York
City’s liberal Jewish and Israeli communities. Tascón both collapses Judaism and Zionism and
reduces the utility of Palestinian cinema within the HRWFF to the purpose of mirror, suggesting
that its presence within the festival primarily serves liberal Jewish-American and Israeli
audiences, without any consideration for New York City’s vibrant Arab American community.
While Tascón’s criticism of the HRWFF’s lack of Latino representation within the festival
programming is valid, especially given the demographic shifts taking place within the United
States, her criticism implies that Latino and Palestinian cultural politics share no overlaps, which
ignores Arab American-Latino studies scholarship that addresses the political and cultural
19
relationships between the Middle East and Latin America.
36
Still, Tascón contends that
Palestinian cinema would not have such a prevalent presence at the HRWFF if it did not also
appeal “to a broader audience not of Jewish descent for whom the issue demonstrates something
about the way in which power is configured within the United States.”
37
That “something” that
Tascón vaguely alludes to is “compulsory Zionism,” which is one of the central concepts that I
put forward in this dissertation.
While these scholars are cognizant of the inequitable power relations that exist between
films, filmmakers, spectators, and festival organizers within the larger film festival political and
cultural economies, their focus on well established, well funded, "A" level festivals—such as
Cannes, Frameline, Sundance, and Toronto International—and their accompanying liberal,
socioeconomically privileged audiences—leaves much to be desired. Insignificant attention has
been given to low budget, volunteer-run festivals that lie outside of the, for lack of a better word,
mainstream festival industry. Smaller, less established festivals are where a practice of cinematic
activism becomes especially relevant, because the gains to be made in terms of visibility and
legitimacy are substantially greater. In Dreams of a Nation, a collection of essays based on a
briefly held New York City film festival of the same name, critically acclaimed Palestinian
filmmaker Annemarie Jacir discusses the political import of showing Palestinian film, both under
occupation in the West Bank and in the United States. Jacir points not only to the genocidal
targeting of Palestinian artists for assassination by the Israeli state, but also to the historic
criminalization and silencing of Palestinians and their cultural productions both in the occupied
territories and the United States. Jacir delineates the work of curating and producing Palestinian

36
Evelyn Azeeza Alsultany and Ella Habiba Shohat, eds., Between the Middle East and the Americas:
The Cultural Politics of Diaspora. (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2013).

37
Tascón, Human Rights Film Festivals, 170-200.

20
film festivals not only as acts of resistance and cultural survival, but also—particularly within the
context of the United States, where she and several other Palestinian filmmakers have worked in
exile—as a way to disrupt the hegemony of the Zionist discourse.
38

Like the study of film festivals, the study of Palestinian cinema is rapidly growing in
popularity, in large part due, I would argue, to its increased dissemination and availability
through film festival circuits. Scholarship in Palestinian cinema studies has been exponentially
emerging since the 1990s, with considerable attention being paid to cinema as a project of
national recuperation and cultural survival. Bringing Benedict Anderson's conception of
"imagined communities" to mind, Palestinian cinema “[serves] as a national unifying factor”
39

through which to cohere the Palestinian nation around shared cultural experiences and
consumptions. A burden of representation also befalls Palestinian cinema, as it has been charged
with the labor of counteracting stereotypical Hollywood and Israeli representations.
40
Said, in the
preface to Dreams of a Nation, states “Palestinian cinema provides a visual alternative, a visual
articulation, a visible incarnation of Palestinian existence in the years since 1948…and a way of
resisting an imposed identity on Palestinians as terrorists, as violent people, by trying to
articulate a counter-narrative and a counter-identity.”
41
Many scholars have noted that within the
context of occupation and apartheid, the production of culture is always already a form of

38
Annemarie, Jacir, “‘For Cultural Purposes Only.’ Curating a Palestinian Film Festival.” Dreams of a
Nation: On Palestinian Cinema. Hamid Dabashi, ed., (New York: Verso Press, 2006), 25.

39
Nurith Gertz and George Khleifi. Palestinian Cinema: Landscape, Trauma, and Memory.
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008), 4.

40
Ella Shohat and Robert Stam. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. (New York:
Routledge, 1994), 182.

41
Edward Said, “Preface.” Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema. Hamid Dabashi, ed. (New York:
Verso Press, 2006), 3.

21
political resistance in the face of continued dispossession, erasure, and silencing, and Joseph
Massad goes so far as to characterize Palestinian cinema as a "weapon of resistance."
42
The
production of Palestinian culture, writes Helga Tawil-Souri, "whether of the everyday, the
institutional, the mundane, or the monumental—is an act of resistance, because it de facto
attempts to reverse Golda Meir's fiat that Palestinians do not exist."
43
Tawil-Souri goes further to
argue that the production of academic scholarship on Palestinian culture in and of itself is an
extension of that political resistance by performing the work of documenting the existence of a
culture that is under continuous threat of erasure. This conception of Palestinian cinema as
always already political has also informed the way scholars conceptualize the aesthetic
components of Palestinian cinema, with Hamid Dabashi characterizing Palestinian as possessing
an aesthetic of traumatic realism.
44

However, the burden of representation is still quite the burden to bear. Scholars, have
began to interrogate Palestinian cinema's relationship to Politics with a capital "P” by asking
whether a film about Palestine or made by a Palestinian filmmaker must always explicitly
address "the political" in order to be considered a Palestinian film or Palestinian "enough."
45
I
witnessed this debate play itself out at the Boston Palestine Film Festival, both in the ways

42
Haim Bersheeth, "The Continuity of Trauma and Struggle: Recent Cinematic Representations of the
Nakba." Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory. Ahmad H. Sa’di and Lila Abu-Lughod, eds.
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Joseph Massad, "The Weapon of Culture: Cinema in the
Palestinian Liberation Struggle." Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema. Dabashi, Hamid, ed. (New
York: Verso, 2006); Edward Said, Culture and Resistance: Conversations with Edward W. Said. David
Barsamian, ed., (Cambridge, Mass: South End Press, 2008); Helga, Tawil-Souri, "The Necessary Politics
of Palestinian Cultural Studies." Arab Cultural Studies: Mapping the Field. Tarik Sabry, ed., (London;
New York: I. B. Tauris, 2012).

43
Tawil-Souri, "The Necessary Politics of Palestinian Cultural Studies,” 142.

44
Dabashi. Dreams of a Nation, 11.

45
Tawil-Souri, “The Necessary Politics of Palestinian Cultural Studies," 138.

22
spectators judged a film's level of Palestinianness or worthiness of placement within the festival
based on its representation of “the political,” as well as through my interlocutors stories of
having their own diasporic identities delegitimized over perceived failures to represent Palestine
in politically sufficient or culturally authentic enough ways. This tension will be explored in
greater detail in Chapters 3 and 4, wherein I discuss what I refer to as a kind of political and
cultural queerness of Palestinian-American subjectivity, and the ways in which diasporic and
exilic Palestinian cultural identity is negotiated through festival participation and reflected back
through diasporic Palestinian women’s filmmaking.
The relationship between queer cultural politics and Palestinian cultural politics once
again comes into play through the queer theoretical grounding of this project, especially in
Chapters 3 and 4 where I employ queer as a lens of analysis. In the introduction of Queer
Politics and the Question of Palestine, a special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay
Studies, Gil Hochberg defines queer politics as:

both a body of politics that centers on the experience, rights, bodies, languages, cultures,
exclusions, and inclusions of LGBTQ and other sexual minorities and a body of politics
dedicated to the queering of the political as such. Queer, in other words, stands as both
an adjective—marking bodies, issues, desires, and so forth as queer—and as a verb,
questioning normative articulations of the political and the very processes by which we
determine the scope of what counts as political.
46

As both a marker of subjectivity and praxis, I use the phrase "culturally queer" to describe the
subjectivity of Palestinians in diaspora, particularly those in the United States, in that they
embody what Gayatri Gopinath refers to as a position of "queer diaspora." Gopinath’s
theorization of the diasporic subject as the “queer” or odd “other” to the proper, “authentic”
national subject is useful for understanding the construction Palestinian-American subjectivity in

46
Gil Hochberg, “Introduction: Israelis, Palestinians, Queers: Points of Departure.” GLQ: A Journal of
Lesbian and Gay Studies 16 (2010): 497.

23
relation to Palestinians inside historic Palestine.
47
This is why in Chapter 3, I address the cultural
queerness of diasporic Palestinian women’s sexuality and romantic relationships as represented
in the films of Cherien Dabis and Annemarie Jacir. This tension is also addressed in detail in
Chapter 4, which explores the ways in which issues of cultural authenticity, self-determination,
and diasporic identity are projected onto and negotiated through my Palestinian-American
interlocutors participation at the BPFF.
From this understanding of Palestinian-American subjectivity as culturally queer, I draw
form Adrienne Rich's discussion of "compulsory heterosexuality" to describe the power relations
which inform a sense of Palestinian-American “political queerness.” I conceptualize Zionism as
“compulsory” and Palestinian-American subjectivity as politically and culturally queer in
relation to it in order to describe the position of Palestinian cultural identity and politics within
the context of the United States. Adrienne Rich characterized heterosexuality as compulsory in
that it constitutes an institution that has been “forcibly and subliminally imposed on women.”
48

Likewise, I consider Zionism compulsory within the context of a US-Israel sub-imperial
relationship in that support for the state of Israel is imposed on a number of American cultural,
institutional, and governmental levels. For example, US taxpayers are forced, often unwittingly,
to support the Israeli state by way of $130 billion (and counting) worth of US foreign and
military aid.
49
In such a context, Palestinian-Americans inhabit a position of political queerness

47
Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Chapel Hill,
NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 11-13.

48
Adrienne, Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Signs 5 (1980): 631-60.

49
Shirl McArthur, “A Conservative Estimate of Total U.S. Direct Aid to Israel: More Than $130 Billion.”
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. October 2015. Accessed April 6, 2016.
http://www.wrmea.org/2015-october/a-conservative-estimate-of-total-u.s.-direct-aid-to-israel-almost-
$138-billion.html.

24
in relation to the norms of compulsory Zionism. While my usage of the term “queer” may seem
unorthodox, I follow in the path of Cathy Cohen, who has argued that the term queer and the
politics that follow from it must not simply be limited to gender and sexual identity categories,
but instead must contend with a variety of non-normative, marginal, and intersectional subject
positions which must include a multiplicity of vectors, particularly race and class. Cohen
conceptualizes “queer” in intersectional terms in order to hail a new form of queer politics
designed as a leftist political framework that “makes central the interdependency among multiple
systems of domination.”
50
I take up Cohen’s theorization of queer, then, as a means to illustrate
the queerness of Palestinian-American subjectivity both politically vis-à-vis compulsory Zionism
and culturally vis-à-vis Palestinian ethnonational cultural authenticity. In sum, “queer” is not
intended to delineate Palestinian-American non-normative sexualities and/or genders, but rather
to signify, as Cohen calls for, a position or subjectivity of radical alterity and a politics of
resisting the dominant norms of compulsory Zionism.

Methods and Structure
This dissertation is a cultural studies project undertaken through an array of social
science and humanist methods to account for the interrelated representational, cultural, and
institutional work that is performed through a practice of cinematic activism. By combining
methods of participant observation, cultural and oral history, and qualitative media analysis, I
take what Julie Peteet refers to as a "microprocessual" approach to analyzing a diverse archive of
materials, in order “to describe and analyze events at the level of experience within a larger,

50
Cathy J. Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?”
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 3, no. 4 (May 1, 1997): 437–65.
25
regional political-economy and cultural framework.”
51
Between 2013 and 2015, I conducted
semi-structured qualitative interviews with 21 BPFF participants—organizers, volunteers,
audience members, and filmmakers—in order to understand what motivated people to attend the
festival and their thoughts about the role that Palestinian cinema and film festivals play in the
context of the United States. Open coding of these interviews helped to produce a grounded
theory of cinematic activism as a combination of social and representational practices intended to
change American cultural and institutional attitudes toward and treatment of Palestinian and
Palestinian-American identified people and their cultural productions. These qualitative
interviews are complimented with participant observation at festivals such as Outside the Frame
and the BPFF, discursive analysis of local and national print news media coverage of Palestinian
cinema, as well as visual analysis of films to produce an interdisciplinary study of film culture
and festival organizing as a practice of cinematic activism. To be sure, the visual and aesthetic
representations within the films in these festivals are worthy of their own dissertation. But this
project is primarily concerned with the manner in which politics are mobilized through film
culture and the accompanying social, cultural, and institutional practices that emerge from such
mobilization. While consideration for the way in which Palestine is aesthetically represented in
the United States is of great import, what I find more interesting are the social and cultural
mechanisms which revolve around such representations. To clarify, this project is less concerned
with Palestinian cinema as an aesthetic object and more concerned with Palestinian cinema’s
proliferation through film festivals as an example of the larger phenomenon of cinematic
activism.

51
Julie Marie Peteet, Gender in Crisis: Women and the Palestinian Resistance Movement (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1991), 2.
26
However, film festivals are just one point on the discursive horizon that is cinematic
activism. I theorize cinematic activism as a framework with four components: exhibition,
organization, representation, and spectatorship and the four chapters of this dissertation are
organized according to this framework. Chapter 1 (exhibition) undertakes a cultural history of
Palestinian cinema’s exhibition and reception in the United States between 1981 and 2006 by
analyzing a series of local and national controversies at film festivals, museums, and awards
shows. This chapter contextualizes how and why cinema emerged as a productive site for the
transnational expression of Palestinian cultural politics, but also historicizes the ways in which
discussions of LGBT/Q cultural politics have consistently accompanied controversies over the
exhibition of Palestinian cinema in the United States. In doing so, Chapter 1 demonstrates how
Palestinian cultural politics in the US context have historically been constructed as “queer,” in
that LGBT cultural politics (absented of Q) went mainstream while Palestinian cultural politics
remained taboo. Chapter 2 (organization) examines the mobilization of the Boston Palestine Film
Festival (BPFF) in the 2000s as a space where diverse groups of people in the Boston area with
shared and sometimes-conflicting investments in the issue of Palestine are united through their
interests in Palestinian cinema. This chapter outlines the cultural and social aims of the BPFF
according to its participants, while analyzing how the organization itself has served to challenge
compulsory Zionism on an institutional level.
In Chapters 3 and 4, I employ a queer theoretical lens through which to analyze
Palestinian-American subjectivity within Palestinian cinema and cinematic activism. Chapter 3
(representation) focuses on the work performed through the aesthetic representation of Palestine
and Palestinianness, with particular regard for the construction of Palestinian national identity
and diasporic identity politics within the greater Palestinian cinematic movement. This chapter
27
considers the role of diasporic subjectivity within Palestinian cinema through an analysis of
narrative films that represent Palestinian-American characters, such as Annemarie Jacir’s Salt of
This Sea and Cherien Dabis’ Amreeka. Where existing scholarship on Palestinian cinema has left
heterosexuality unquestioned, I center gender and sexuality to highlight how diasporic women’s
filmmaking “queers” the representation of and discourse on cultural authenticity by depicting
narratives about failed marriages, LGBT identity, and mixed race love affairs. Lastly, Chapter 4
(spectatorship) examines how concerns over Palestinian identity, cultural authenticity, and self-
determination are projected onto and expressed through film festival culture. Interviews
primarily with ethnically/racially mixed-identifying Palestinians illustrate how festival
participation helps my interlocutors negotiate feelings of cultural and political queerness in the
United States while cultivating a sense of Palestinianness in diaspora.
As Megan McLaran and Yates McKee note, it is a misnomer to suggest that “activism” is
always in opposition to the state or other forms of power and cinematic activism can just as
easily be used to reproduce inequitable social power relations as it can disrupt them. This is how
it is possible for festivals such as Frameline, which operates in the service of a homonormative,
rights-based conception of "equality," Outside the Frame, which seeks to disrupt Frameline's
homonormativity, and the Boston Palestine Film Festival which seeks to mainstream an
otherwise culturally and politically queer topic such as Palestine, all can inhabit the same
category of cinematic activism despite their competing or conflicting agendas.
Cinematic Activism is ultimately a study of culture and power which reaches well beyond
the confines of Palestine studies, LGBT studies, or film festival studies. This project is less a call
to arms and more an homage to the cultural labor that has already been undertaken and an
acknowledgment of the social and institutional changes produced by Palestinian cinematic
28
activism. For so long, as observed by Helga Tawil-Souri, the field of Palestine studies has been
preoccupied with the question of the political at the expense of the cultural. I join scholars
working in the emergent field of Palestinian cultural studies with the hopes of reanimating the
discourse on Palestine from the perspective of diaspora, through the lens of cinema, and within
the social dynamics of film festivals. It is my hope that through a greater understandings of the
workings of cinematic activism, community organizations and grassroots movements will be
able to hold films and festivals more accountable to their alleged missions of social responsibility
and political change, and as such redirect the power of cinematic activism more towards the
cultivation of justice and less towards corporate sponsorship and mainstream recognition.
29
Chapter 1:
An Uprising at The Perfect Moment:
Censorship and the Emergence of Palestinian Cinematic Activism 1981-2006

“Unspooling at Friscofest was interrupted by house clearing, telephoned bomb threat from
unidentified source. After cops found nothing, screening was resumed through completion. Pic
[sic] indeed is passion stirring: Palestinians in audience frequently fell into rhythmic clapping,
and one local critic later bombarded filmmaker Koff for ‘rabble-rousing.’ Both critic and Koff
are Jewish.”
-Opening lines of Variety film review from the
premier of David Koff’s Occupied Palestine at the
San Francisco International Film Festival on
October 21, 1981.
1

“Suicide bombers, Mossad agents, gay cowboys, country singers, literary lions, a bullheaded
CIA agent, and a transsexual on a road trip were among the cast of characters in films nominated
Tuesday for Academy Awards.”

-David Germain, The Jerusalem Post.
2

In 1991, the curators of Uprising: Film and Video on the Palestinian Resistance
withdrew their film series from its planned exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA)
in Boston, MA. Elia Suleiman, Palestinian filmmaker and curator of Uprising, cited censorship
as the reason for the series’ withdrawal. The Uprising series consisted of eight Palestinian film
and video art pieces, ranging in format from feature length films such as Mai Masri’s
documentary Children of Fire and Michel Khleifi’s autobiographical narrative, Canticles of the
Stone, to Elia Suleiman and Jayce Salloum’s collaborative experimental video remix Intifada:

1
Herb, “Film Reviews: Reviewed At Frisco Fest - Occupied Palestine.”

2
David Germain, “Oscar Says Yes to ‘Paradise Now’. Munich’ Nominated in Five Categories: Daily
Edition.” Jerusalem Post. February 1, 2006, accessed April 8, 2016,
http://search.proquest.com/docview/319509643.

30
Introduction to the End of an Argument, as well as a variety of short documentary and
experimental films by burgeoning Palestinian filmmakers. Just a year before the Uprising
censorship controversy, in 1990 the ICA had garnered a reputation as a champion of free speech
for its support of The Perfect Moment, a retrospective of gay artist Robert Mapplethorpe’s
photography.
3
Across the country, major art institutions across the country were thrust into the
media spotlight as The Perfect Moment show generated a national controversy for its inclusion of
sexually explicit images depicting homoeroticism, bondage, domination, and sadomasochism
amidst a raging culture war over freedom of expression, multiculturalism, and public decency.
As LGBT artists, curators, and AIDS activists turned to art to foster greater awareness of the
AIDS crisis and its effect on their communities, conservative legislators fought against this art-
activism movement by targeting the institutions that supported the exhibition of such work. The
radical right’s main target was the National Endowment for the Arts, which had provided
financial support to institutions which had curated or exhibited LGBT and AIDS themed shows,
such as the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, and Artists Space in
New York City, and the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center. The controversy over
Mapplethorpe’s work escalated rapidly. Fearing how the controversy would effect its financial
stability, the Corcoron Gallery in Washington DC cancelled its planned exhibition of The Perfect
Moment. The Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center (CAC), however, went forward with its
exhibition of The Perfect Moment, which resulted in the museum’s executive director Dennis
Barrie being put on trial for obscenity. Refusing to capitulate to conservative pressures, the ICA
stood by Mapplethorpe’s work and proceeded with The Perfect Moment show, insisting on art’s

3
Mapplethorpe died of AIDS-related causes on March 9, 1989. Richard Meyer, “Mapplethorpe, Robert.”
Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered History in America, Marc Stein, ed., (Detroit:
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2004), 2:221–22.

31
capability of speaking for itself and that any argument otherwise was an espousal of self-
censorship.
4

Yet, merely a year later in 1991 the ICA relegated Palestinian cinema to the realm of
indecency when, under pressure from ICA board member Steve Grossman and Leonard Zakim
of the Anti-Defamation League, the museum attempted to add a panel discussion to Uprising.
Citing a lack of “balance” and a need to “contextualize” the films, the ICA ventured to place
Suleiman and Harvard Law School Professor and staunch supporter of Israel, Alan Dershowitz,
in political debate over the Israel-Palestine conflict. Such a move suggested that when it came to
the question of Palestinian cultural productions, art could not in fact speak for itself. The ICA’s
treatment of Uprising exemplifies how support for the state of Israel permeates American society
and institutions in ways that mediate or proscribe Palestinian cultural productions in the United
States, or what I call compulsory Zionism, while the curator’s withdrawal of the series reflects
Palestinian resistance to liberal multicultural political correctness which has operated in the
service of institutionalized compulsory Zionism. The ICA incident marks a moment when
Palestinian cultural politics were constructed as a threat to American liberal multicultural values,
and cinema became a powerful site of struggle over Palestinian identity, representation, and self-
determination. The ICA incident also marks a moment of simultaneous convergence and
divergence, wherein Palestinian cultural politics and LGBT cultural politics meet within the
public sphere of cinematic activism. At this critical juncture, the LGBT cultural politics were
swept up into the mainstream, and Palestinian cultural politics became, in a sense, queerer than
queer.

4
Patti Hartigan, “Mapplethorpe Show To Open Amid Controversy ICA Founder Raps Selections.”
Boston Globe. August 1, 1990, accessed April 6, 2016,
http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com.libproxy1.usc.edu/docview/294566219?acco
untid=14749

32
In this chapter, I argue that the importance of Palestinian filmmaking, curation, and
exhibition as central components to the practice of cinematic activism emerges from a historical
context marked predominantly by attempts to censor and suppress Palestinian and Palestine-
focused film. This chapter historicizes how narrative and experimental film, exhibition
organizing, and later on, film festival organizing, developed as interdependent methods of
cinematic activism in the 2000s after attempts to censor documentary films in the 1980s and
1990s. Through an analysis of the print news coverage of controversies surrounding the
exhibitions of David Koff’s documentary film Occupied Palestine in 1981 and 1986 and Elia
Suleiman’s Uprising film series in 1991, this chapter situates the relatively successful reception
of Palestinian narrative film in the US and Palestine Film Festival organizing in cities such as
Boston, Chicago, and Houston in the 2000s within a context marked by censorship. The 1980s
and 1990s also constituted a time wherein the image of the Palestine-Israel conflict began to
change in the United States., beginning in 1982 when the Israeli military invaded Southern
Lebanon and facilitated the Sabra and Shatila massacre of Palestinian refugees. As editorial
footage of the atrocity circulated in mainstream US news media, Israel was, for the first time,
portrayed as the aggressor responsible for the deaths of Palestinian women and children.
5
By
1987, images of the first Palestinian Intifada became increasingly more visible to the US public
through national televisual and print news coverage, and once again, American perception of the

5
In a personal essay, Elaine Hagopian recounts her experiences of providing analysis and commentary for
the media during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, noting the massacre of Sabra and Shatila as a
turning point in the American public’s perception of Israel. Norman Finkelstein has also commented on
how the Sabra and Shatila massacre informed his turn away from Zionism. Elaine C. Hagopian,
“Reversing Injustice: On Utopian Activism.” Arab Studies Quarterly 29, no. 3/4 (Fall 2007): 57–73;
David Ridgen and Nicolas Rossier, American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein (United States:
Typecast Releasing, 2009).

33
conflict changed as viewers saw Palestinian youth clash with heavily armored Israeli soldiers.
6

Documentary films such as Occupied Palestine, and even more so Children of Fire from the
Uprising series, must be situated within the context of—and acknowledged as distinct from—
this more widely disseminated body of editorial imagery.
While the editorial images of the first intifada that circulated through mainstream press
and television did so under the auspice of objective journalism, Noam Chomsky and Edward S.
Herman have argued that mass media in the United States are concerned less with objectivity and
are intended more to “serve, and propagandize on behalf of, the powerful societal influences that
control and finance them.”
8
Luke Peterson has analyzed the ways in which US news reportage on
the Palestinian-Israeli conflict closely aligns with the interests of the Israeli state, and as such,
produces knowledge about Palestine that is biased in favor of support for Zionism.
9
As this
chapter demonstrates, although attempts in the 1980s and 1990s to screen independent films and
reportage that challenged the compulsory Zionism of mainstream media were met with strong
resistance from spectators, Zionist activists and NGOs, and media producers alike, such
controversies also pointed to the possibility for new forms of film, media, and visual culture
based activism. The controversies surrounding Occupied Palestine and the Uprising films
unfolded in the local and national press, such as the Boston Globe, New York Times, San
Francisco Chronicle, and Los Angeles Times, and opponents of these films publicly accused the

6
Intifada means “shaking off” in Arabic and refers to the Palestinian non-violent, youth-led, mass
demonstration movement against the Israeli military occupation.
8
Chomsky and Herman, Manufacturing Consent, xi.

9
Peterson, Israel-Palestine in the News Media,182.

34
filmmakers of producing “unbalanced,” anti-Semitic propaganda.
10
Yet the controversies over
these films, especially in the case of the Uprising series, marked a turning point in the discourse
on and representation of Palestine in the United States, in that the mix of film genres—
documentary, experimental video art, and autobiographical narrative fiction—situated the films
in the series within the realm of art and culture, instead of the realm of objective journalism.
In the wake of the Mapplethorpe victory, the ICA’s attempt to censor Uprising also
brought a new mix of participants to the conversation on Palestine in the US. Palestinian cultural
producers, free speech activists, LGBT artists, media scholars, film critics, and museum curators
found solidarity with one another in their shared interest in defending art as a site for cultural
critique and political expression. These high profile censorship attempts came at moment when
LGBT people, people of color, and other identity-based groups relied on their rights to freedom
of expression to leverage art as a form of political activism in the face of increased subjugation
and the ongoing culture wars over sexual decency and racial degeneracy. Within such a context,
art became a primary terrain of struggle wherein underrepresented cultural politics and radical
critiques of dominant cultures could be expressed under the purview of subjectivity, freedom of
expression, and self-representation.
11
Such a context also made certain kinds of social and
political solidarities possible where little had existed before. For example, when the Uprising

10
John Corry, “TV View; Balanced Journalism Needn’t Preclude A Point Of View: Review.” New York
Times, April 1986, accessed April 6, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/1986/04/20/movies/tv-view-
balanced-journalism-needn-t-preclude-a-point-of-view.html.
11
Stuart Hall has argued that popular culture is a primary site for struggles over cultural hegemony in the
US. In her examination of the US-Israel subimperial relationship, Melani McAlister further argues that
popular culture is a primary site for struggles over political hegemony in the Middle East. Lastly, within
the context of the post-9/11 War on Terror, Evelyn Alsultany has argued that government and media
discourses are inextricably interrelated, and together form a visually constructed “hegemonic field of
meaning.” Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 11; Stuart Hall, “What is this Black in Black
Popular Culture?” Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. Kuan-Hsing Chen and David
Morley, eds. (New York: Routledge, 1996), 468; McAlister, Epic Encounters.

35
series came under threat, free speech advocates who had defended the Mapplethorpe show were
quick to make the comparison between the subjugation of LGBT artists and the censorship of
Palestinian cinema. The historicization within this chapter serves two important purposes in
understanding the interconnectedness between Palestinian cultural politics and LGBT/Q cultural
politics. First, it contributes to the academic discourses on homonationalism, by questioning
whether mainstream LGBT culture has always enjoyed a hostile relationship to the question of
Palestine; and second, this knowledge further contextualizes why gender and sexual identity
became primary targets for conscription into compulsory Zionism through Israeli pinkwashing in
the late 1990s and early 2000s. Through this study, we can begin to see how pinkwashing
emerged, in part, as a technique for dismantling burgeoning solidarities between Palestinian
artists and activists and the LGBT/Q movements in the United States.
12
Charting how art and
cinema became central methods of Palestine activism in the United States has also entailed
tracking the points where Palestinian cultural politics and LGBT/Q politics have intersected in
US discourses, mainstream, radical, or otherwise. What this historicization points to, then, is the

12
Queer studies discourses on Israeli homonationalism and pinkwashing have largely focused on the post
9/11 period, which has given the impression that queer solidarities with Palestine emerged at the turn of
the millennium and merely in response to pinkwashing. However, in his doctoral dissertation, Jih-Fei
Cheng has analyzed how the presence of the Palestinian keffiyeh scarf adorned by activists in archival
video footage of ACT UP demonstrations in New York City in the early 1990s indicates a longer
genealogy of US queer social movements in solidarity with Palestine. Likewise, Nishant Shahini analyzes
the ways in which contemporary media representations of the 1990s AIDS activism movement
whitewashes the radical history of the movement and disregards how organizations such as ACT UP have
always taken an anti-war, anti-imperialism, and Palestine solidarity stance within the queer social
movements in the US. Additionally, since the 1990s, Arab American feminist studies scholars have
engaged with the work of radical black lesbian feminist June Jordan and her writings from the 1980s and
1990s in solidarity with Palestine and Lebanon. More recently, Keith Feldman has also taken up Jordan’s
writings as a means to historicize transnational identifications between racial justice movements in the
United States and the plight of the Palestinians. Jih-Fei Cheng (2015). "AIDS and its Afterlives: Race,
Gender, and the Queer Radical Imagination." (PhD diss, University of Southern California), 109-114;
Feldman, A Shadow over Palestine; Saliba, “Revisiting Invisibility: Arab Americans in Academia and
Activism,” 304-305; Nishant, Shahani, “How to Survive the Whitewashing of AIDS: Global Pasts,
Transnational Futures,” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 3.1 (2016): 1–33.

36
much larger social and political stakes of cinematic activism as a method of social justice
activism and coalition building, and provides a greater understanding of the construction of
antagonisms and the nature of solidarities between identity-based social justice movements in the
United States.

Occupied Palestine
Originally premiered in the United States in 1981, Occupied Palestine was—and
remains—a groundbreaking documentary film that, at the time of its release, depicted a radically
different representation of Palestine and Israel than what American audiences were accustomed
to through mainstream television news or Hollywood films.
13
Made by Jewish-American
filmmaker David Koff, Occupied Palestine stirred substantial controversy in the 1980s. The
film’s premiere at the 1981 San Francisco International Film Festival was interrupted by a bomb
threat ten minutes into its screening, and approximately one thousand audience members had to
be evacuated from the Castro Theater.
14
Although the screening eventually continued that
evening, the spectacle of the film’s premiere marked the film as not only controversial, but
dangerous, a sentiment that was reproduced discursively through film reviews, opinion editorials,
and press coverage, and which had lasting effects on the films availability and dissemination.
After having noted the screening’s interruption due to the anonymous bomb threat, a reviewer in

13
For studies on the televisual, editorial, and filmic representation of Palestine and Palestinians in the
United States, see McAlister, Epic Encounter; Peterson, Israel-Palestine in the News Media; Shaheen,
Reel Bad Arabs.

14
John Stanley, “‘Occupied Palestine’ - The Arab Point of View Of the Israeli Occupation,” The San
Francisco Chronicle, April 6, 1986, accessed April 6, 2016,
http://infoweb.newsbank.com/resources/doc/nb/news/0EB4EDE7F21112BF?p=AWNB; Duncan
Campbell, “Film-Maker David Koff on His Radical Documentary Occupied Palestine,” The Guardian,
May 1, 2013, accessed March 18, 2016, http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/may/01/david-koff-
documentary-occupied-palestine.

37
Variety described the Castro screening as “passion-stirring” for both Palestinian and Jewish
spectators, noting that “Palestinians in audience frequently fell into rhythmic clapping, and one
local critic bombarded filmmaker Koff for ‘rabble-rousing.’ Both critic and Koff are Jewish.”
15

Within the context of such a spectacular threat of violence, the reviewer’s choice to characterize
a Jewish critic of the film as “bombarding” the filmmaker suggests that Occupied Palestine’s
true danger lay in its ability to reveal the violent means necessary to the defense of an
ethnocentric ideology such as Zionism. Despite filmmaker Koff’s identification as Jewish-
American, the film was decried as antisemitic, with a “filmic air of Nazism” and “representing
propaganda more than objective documentation.”
16
Most theaters subsequently refused to show
Occupied Palestine, ostensibly blacklisting it and censoring the representational shift that Koff
had intended to produce through the film.
17

This was not, however, the end of Occupied Palestine’s controversy. The film would be
cast into the national spotlight once more, when in 1986 San Francisco’s KQED Public
Broadcasting Station (PBS) included the film in a new program, Flashpoint: Israel and the
Palestinians. Hosted by reporter Stephen Talbot, Flashpoint was designed as a nationally
broadcast opinion-editorial style show intended “to create a kind of ‘free speech television’” in
order to stir discourse around controversial contemporary issues by presenting partisan
perspectives accompanied by commentary.
18
For example, the topic of the first Flashpoint show

15
Herb. “Film Reviews: Reviewed At Frisco Fest - Occupied Palestine.”
16
Ibid.

17
Campbell, “Film-maker David Koff on His Radical Documentary Occupied Palestine.”

18
Jay Sharbutt, “Latest `Theme Night’ On PBS Anathema To Some: Home Edition.” Los Angeles Times
(pre-1997 Fulltext). April 14, 1986.

38
was on the issue of abortion: Flashpoint: The Abortion Battle.
19
For the second installment,
KQED paired two thirty-minute Israeli-made documentaries, Two Settlements and Peace
Conflict, with an hour long, edited-for-television version of Occupied Palestine. Flashpoint was
scheduled to air on the historically significant date of April 9, 1986, which was the 38
th

anniversary of the massacre at the Palestinian village of Dir Yassin, where in 1948 the Irgun and
Stern gangs—two Zionist paramilitary organizations that were widely considered terrorist
organization by the British and lead by future Israeli prime minister Meacham Begin—
massacred between 93 and 170 villagers.
20
The Dir Yassin massacre is one of the most well
known atrocities of the Nakba and its history has become symbolic of the ways in which the
establishment of the Israeli state is rooted in the violence of ethnic cleansing.
Occupied Palestine takes this symbolism one step further by making the argument—
visually—that ethnic cleansing is central tenant of political Zionism and that such a project
profoundly shapes both the social and geographic landscape of the Israeli state. One of the early
segments of the film focuses on the dedication ceremony of a new settlement sponsored by
Canadian funders on the outskirts of Jerusalem. The speaker at the dedication ceremony tells a
familiar story of triumphant pioneers settling land and beginning anew, a familiar narrative for
both US and Canadian audiences. The scene transitions to static shots of Canada Park, a natural
park in Jerusalem established by the Jewish National Fund in honor of Canadian funders. The
camera depicts Canada Park as a serene, even peaceful place with soft golden light filtering
through olive trees to illuminate empty and inviting picnic tables. The sound of birds softly
chirping amidst the olive branches is interrupted by a single gunshot. A caption then graces the

19
Corry, “Balanced Journalism Needn’t Preclude a Point of View: TV VIEW.”

20
The exact number remains contested. Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford:
Oneworld, 2006), 90-92.
39
bottom of the screen: “Amos Kenan, ‘Report on the Razing of Villages…’ 1967,” as a dramatic
voiceover—read by British actor Ian Holm—details the Israeli Army’s demolition and expulsion
of a Palestinian village in 1967. As the camera tracks through the park’s olive groves, showing
picnic tables, campsites, and a children’s swing set, Holm narrates Kenan’s testimony:
At noon the first bulldozer arrived and pulled down the first house. Within ten minutes, it
was turned into rubble, including its entire contents. The olive trees, cypress trees, all
were uprooted. We were ordered to block the entrances to the village and prevent the
inhabitants from returning. The order was to shoot over their heads. We asked the officers
why the refugees were sent from one place to another. They told us this was good for
them—they should go—moreover, why should we care about the Arabs, anyway? The
platoon commander said simply that they were to be driven out. We drove them out.

This narration prompts the viewer to imagine the atrocities described and envision what is absent
from the landscape as depicted on screen. Visual studies scholars Susan Sontag and Roland
Barthes have debated the ways in which visual objects, such as war photography or images of
atrocities, illicit a viewer’s empathy, and as such have been deployed in the service of
humanitarian calls to action, at times in problematically objectifying ways. By strategically not
showing images the atrocity, Koff employs a modified version of this technique, in that there is a
distinct absence of empathetic imagery, yet the work of visualizing the atrocity is performed
through the viewer’s imaginative interpretation of the voiceover narration. Such a technique is
commendable in that it has the ability to conjure an empathetic response in a viewer without
objectifying Palestinian suffering.
This technique is continued throughout the scene, as the camera cuts to a medium shot of
a young Palestinian woman who narrates her experience of witnessing her own village being
demolished over the course of several days. She relayed her horror in hearing of the experience
of a disabled elderly man who could not flee his home and was thus buried alive as the Israeli
army razed his home. The camera cuts back to the scenery of Canada Park, this time showing
40
stone rubble of what could have been a property boundary wall or perhaps the foundation of
where a house once stood. As we see Canada park for the second time, what had first appeared
warm and appealing suddenly takes on a sinister sense of haunting as the viewer comes to
understand that the same emptiness that had made this scenery so inviting was in fact
necessitated through ethnic cleansing. The Palestinian woman goes on to describe all the
amenities that once exists in her village—a textile shop, a grocery, a pharmacy, two schools—as
the camera meditates on a series archival black and white photographs of the village’s white
stone houses cascading down a hillside, a family portrait showing three generations, and lastly,
two women in traditional Palestinian village dress standing amidst olive trees. “It was just like
any other Arab village, it had all the requirements of life.” The camera cuts again to Canada Park
with captions explaining the Jewish National Fund’s establishment of the park in 1976 on the
lands of Yalu, Beit Nuba, and Amwas, three villages razed in 1967 which had a total of 10,000
residents.
21
The interspersing of contemporary scenes of Canada Park with archival images and
voiceovers of firsthand accounts and oral history serves an important pedagogical purpose. This
segment of the film trains the audience to see that which is visual, but not visible throughout the
film: the absence of the indigenous Palestinian population and the violence of ethnic cleansing
that necessitated such an absence.
In another scene, the camera pans slowly through an abandoned village, partially
demolished and desolate, as Ian Holm provides a dramatized voiceover of Joseph Weitz’s
personal journal entry from December 19
th
, 1940. Weitz, who was director of the Jewish
National Fund, wrote: “It must be clear that there is no place for both peoples in this country. If
the Arabs leave the country, it will be broad and will be wide open for us….the only solution is
Eretz Israel, or at least the Western part of Eretz Israel, without Arabs. There is no room for

21
David Koff, Occupied Palestine, (1981; San Francisco, CA: Cinema Six Productions, 2013), DVD.
41
compromise on this point, and there is no other way than to transfer Arabs from here to the
neighboring countries, to transfer them all.” This assemblage of scenes and narration performs
pedagogical work of teaching the viewer to see Palestine beneath the screen of contemporary
Israel. By drawing upon the mythology of a “a people without land for a land without people” in
conjunction with visual evidence of Palestinian historical existence in the landscape through the
depiction of the village architecture and archival photographs, Occupied Palestine is
illustrating—and making visible— the Palestinian legal status of present-absentee and in doing
so produces an aesthetic of Palestine that is occupied by Zionism.
As the controversy over Flashpoint unfolded in the press in the weeks before and after
the broadcast, it became clear that much of the criticism levied at Flashpoint was aimed at
Occupied Palestine. Cited as “lacking sufficient context,” producers at 34 out of 308 PBS
stations, including those serving some of PBS’s largest audiences, such as New York City’s
WNET and Washington, DC’s WETA, refused to air the show.
22
In an opinion editorial in the
New York Times, journalist John Corry weighed in on the Flashpoint debate, calling Occupied
Palestine “anti-Israeli” and going so far as to accuse the film of being antisemitic propaganda
“not far removed here from the films produced under the Third Reich.”
23
Corry asserted that
images of razed Palestinian villages accompanied by a voiceover of an Israeli soldier’s diary
entry describing a massacre in 1948, or that footage from of an American Jewish fundraising
dinner interspersed with images of right wing religious settlers handling some of the $600
million worth of machine guns donated by American Jews “looked like old-fashioned anti-

22
Sharbutt, “Latest `Theme Night’ On Pbs Anathema To Some: Home Edition.”

23
Corry, “TV View; Balanced Journalism Needn’t Preclude A Point Of View: Review.”

42
Semitism dressed up in a new political nomenclature.”
24
Corry’s criticism of the film equated
criticism of Zionist political ideology (and the Israeli state upon which it was founded) with the
most extreme form of European anti-Semitism. Ironically, Occupied Palestine was produced by
a Jewish-American filmmaker, gives focuses predominantly on Israeli testimonies, quotations
from Zionist leaders such as Joseph Weitz and Vladimir Jabotinsky, first person accounts of the
expulsion of the Palestinian population, and the militarization of Israeli settler-colonization to
achieve such ends. Ultimately, the focus of Occupied Palestine is on Palestine by proxy; the
film’s primary focus is on political Zionism and it’s manifestation in the form of military
occupation and settler-colonization.
What is more interesting about Occupied Palestine’s reception and treatment in the press
is how it was referred to by some as a Palestinian film. Nearly a month before the intended
broadcast, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Washington Post each published articles which
described the program as consisting of two Israeli films and one Palestinian film.
25
Although still
referring to Occupied Palestine as “the Palestinian portion” of the broadcast, Stanley pointed out
that although the film is sympathetic to the Palestinian cause it is not in fact a Palestinian cultural
production or self-representation. The day after the broadcast, Steve Daley of the Chicago
Tribune characterized Flashpoint as a view of “the Middle East through the eyes of Israeli and
Palestinian filmmakers” as represented through “three ‘partisan’ films—two Israeli and one

24
Ibid.
25
John Carmody, “WNET Forgoes Mideast Program.” Newsday. March 14, 1986, accessed January 29,
2016, http://search.proquest.com/docview/285395829; Scott Blakey, “KQED Mideast Program Sets Off
Controversy.” San Francisco Chronicle. March 14, 1986, accessed January 29, 2016,
http://docs.newsbank.com.libproxy.usc.edu/s/InfoWeb/aggdocs/AWNB/0EB4EDD70A20AC94/0D0CB5
81732302F5?s_lang.

43
Palestinian.”
26
Three days prior to the scheduled broadcast, the San Francisco Chronicle’s John
Stanley provided an more nuanced assessment of Flashpoint: “one of the more startling things
about the Palestinian portion of the presentation is that it was produced by a Jewish American,
David Koff, who grew up in a middle class Los Angeles family.”
27

Although arguably an editorial oversight to characterize Occupied Palestine as a
Palestinian film, ergo Koff as a Palestinian filmmaker, to do so displaces the Palestinian cultural
producer from the larger field of Palestinian cultural production. The repeated categorization of
Occupied Palestine as Palestinian either in terms of authorship or content, raises an important
question regarding genre: is Occupied Palestine a Palestinian film or a Palestine film? To call
Koff a Palestinian filmmaker based on the content of his film supplants Palestinian subjectivity
with Jewish-American subjectivity, constituting a further occupation of Palestine in discursive
terms. This discursive displacement is reflected in the visuality of Occupied Palestine itself, as
the representation of Palestinian voices and experiences is always already framed through or
positioned in relation to Zionism and occupation. This is exemplified through the film’s primary
focus on Zionist ideology, settlements, and occupation, relegating Palestine and Palestinians as a
secondary focus, which is reflected aesthetically through the films visual representations.
28

Throughout Occupied Palestine, images of Palestinianness are literally framed through
the infrastructure of occupation. For example, in a single take, the camera is fixed on a close shot
of Palestinian homes amidst green trees. As the camera zooms out we see the structures grow

26
Steve Daley, “PBS Strikes Balance With 3 Unbalanced Films.” Chicago Tribune. April 10, 1986,
accessed January 29, 2016, http://search.proquest.com/docview/290928087.

27
Stanley, “‘Occupied Palestine’ - The Arab Point Of View Of The Israeli Occupation.”
28
When viewed in this way, Occupied Palestine unwittingly reifies the Zionist argument that Palestinian
demands for self-determination are based on a sense of national identity that only arises in relation to
Israel and is thus antisemitic and illegitimate. Rashid Khalidi refutes and debunks that argument. Rashid
Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1998).
44
smaller and smaller as the shot’s frame is overtaken by a settlement facade under construction.
The distant homes which the viewer had once been so close to become mere specks in a
landscape now framed by a settlement archway. Through these visual techniques, Occupied
Palestine establishes an occupied aesthetic—and the ethnic cleansing and settler-colonization
that it is compromised of—as a framework through which to understand the land, people, and
stories depicted in the film. The visual representation of Palestine, then, is aestheticized as
occupation, meaning that Palestinian cultural productions becomes primarily recognizable as
Palestinian only in relation or reference to the political circumstances of Israeli occupation. As
will be discussed later in Chapters 3 and 4 regarding Palestinian-American filmmaking and
festival organizing, such an aestheticization has larger implications for whether or not a film,
filmmaker, or festival organizer is legible as Palestinian or Palestinian “enough.” After
establishing ethnic cleansing and settler-colonization as frames through which to view the film,
midway through the film the camera focuses more acutely on the Palestinian experience of
occupation. The film shifts toward showing the material realities of life under occupation for
Palestinians who survived the expulsion and ethnic cleansing of 1948 and 1967 illustrates the
contemporary material realities that are the direct result of the historical atrocities described
earlier in the film. After remaining visibly absent from the landscape represented in the first half
of the film, Palestinians are visually placed back into the landscape of historic Palestine by way
of the film’s framing. The pastoral beauty of earlier shots is replaced by scenes of rubble from
demolished homes, fields of untilled farmland gone to seed, keffiyeh clad old men smoking in
front of storefronts, and stone-throwing Palestinian youth being chased by Israeli soldiers armed
with semi-automatic rifles.
45
Koff’s film is certainly occupied with the question of Palestine, albeit a particular view:
Palestine, as seen through the occupation. In this sense, the film functions much like a cinematic
rendering of Edward Said’s essay, “Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims,” which was
published in 1979, the same year that Koff filmed Occupied Palestine. In this way, the film
works to make Said’s argument visual by showing the expressly colonial aims of Zionist political
ideology and making visible the colonial power relations between occupier (Israel) and occupied
(Palestine).
29
What Occupied Palestine demonstrates is that part of the work of cinematic
activism is to make underrepresented cultural critiques and political arguments both visual and
visible.
Occupied Palestine is a path breaking film and it is important to interrogate its role in
both challenging and reproducing ideas about Palestine and Palestinians as self-fashioned
victims whose existence as “a people” formed in reaction to the Israeli state.
30
Films such as
Occupied Palestine have performed the work of making visible the subjugated experiences of
Palestinians, and in doing so have produced an aesthetic of occupation that has made Palestine
more recognizable to a US audience. However, it is this very aesthetic of occupation that has also
worked to marginalize Palestinian self-representations, such as the works of Elia Suleiman,
Cherien Dabis, and Annemarie Jacir, who provide more heterogeneous and polyvalent stories of
Palestine and Palestinians which do not necessarily take the occupation as their central focus. For
films that focus on Palestine and which are sympathetic to the Palestinian perspective—whether
or not the filmmaker identifies as Palestinian—to be labeled and perceived as Palestinian films,
is to further dispossess Palestinians from the right to tell and represent their own stories. The

29
Edward Said, The Question of Palestine. (New York: Vintage Books, 1992).
30
Joan Peters famously argued this in From Time Immemorial, which has since been refuted by scholars
such as Rashid Khalidi. Joan Peters, From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict
over Palestine (New York: Harper & Row, 1984); Khalidi, Palestinian Identity.

46
reception of Occupied Palestine in the mainstream US press as a Palestinian film indicates the
extent to which Zionism occupies the question of Palestine, so much so that Palestinians are
displaced from the field of their own cultural productions.
Over thirty years after Occupied Palestine first premiered in the United States, the film
has enjoyed a renewed attention and appreciation, in part due to its re-circulation through
Palestine Film Festival circuits in 2013.
31
The controversy over Occupied Palestine exemplifies
how Zionist discourse in the United States has operated to continually occupy the question of
Palestine, to such an extreme that a film primarily about Zionism—and Palestinian experience in
relation to it—becomes a Palestinian film. While Occupied Palestine has itself has served an
important role in shaping sympathetic images of Palestine and Palestinians by teaching US
viewers to see Palestine where it has previously been erased, it’s US reception as a Palestinian
film has had larger implications in terms of who is legible as a Palestinian filmmaker or what
constitutes a Palestinian film in the US context. This point is addressed in greater detail in
Chapter 3 in my discussion of Cherien Dabis’ filmmaking and its relationship to the category of
Palestinian cinema, as well as in Chapter 2 in my discussion of the role of Palestinian identity
politics vis-à-vis Jewish anti-Zionist cultural politics within the Boston Palestine Film Festival
organizing culture.

31
I met David Koff briefly in October 2013 while at a Boston Palestine Film Festival screening of
Occupied Palestine at Harvard Law School. The film screened at the London Palestine Film Festival that
same year. Koff was enthusiastic about my project and that same October we engaged in a brief email
exchange with the intention to conduct a Skype interview. However, due to his travel plans and my own
medical emergency, we postponed our interview plans for the spring. It was with great sadness that I
learned he had committed suicide on March 9, 2014 at the age of 74. Howard Blume,“David Koff Dies at
74; Filmmaker and Activist Took on L.A.’s Belmont Learning Complex.” Los Angeles Times, March 28,
2014, accessed March 18, 2016, http://articles.latimes.com/2014/mar/28/local/la-me-david-koff-
20140329.

47
Uprising: Children of Fire and Introduction to the End of an Argument
I turn now to films in the Uprising series, namely Children of Fire and Intifada:
Introduction to the End of an Argument, in order to highlight the role of self-representation
within a practice of cinematic activism. While Occupied Palestine and Children of Fire share the
same genre of documentary, there are fundamental differences between these films in terms of
content, authorship, and style which influence their respective reception in the United States.
Filmed in the cinéma vérité style, Children of Fire was directed by exilic Palestinian filmmaker
Mai Masri, whose participatory approach to the film’s making sets it apart from Occupied
Palestine as a self-representation. Shot in the West Bank city of Nablus over the course of a
month in September 1989, Children of Fire offers a subjectively Palestinian point of view of the
occupation, both in form and content. With a three-person crew consisting of director Masri,
Lebanese executive producer and husband Jean Khalil Chamoun, and British cameraman Andy
Jillings, from the beginning the film and its production is perceived as a threat to the precarious
control enforced by the Israeli occupation. The film opens with Masri’s 5
th
unsuccessful attempt
to enter Nablus as she is denied entry by the Israel military at the city’s main entrance, a
checkpoint controlled by the occupying army. We encounter Masri as she and her crew—
frustrated by the repeated denial of entry—hire a cab driver to take them into the city through the
winding mountain back roads instead.
Where Occupied Palestine focused predominantly on Zionist ideology and its material
effects of ethnic cleansing and occupation, through Masri’s dual subjectivity as filmmaker and
Palestinian exile, we see the occupation in far more intimate terms. Masri and her crew base
themselves out of her uncle’s apartment in Nablus and the film’s narrative unfolds from this
domestic space. Upon the crew’s arrival at her uncle’s home, the camera is trained on Masri and
48
Chamoun as they anxiously observe out a window, a large boom microphone extended outward
to record the sound of conflict from the street below. The camera cuts to a long shot from the
perspective of the apartment window to show a group of Israeli soldiers aggressively breaking
through doors, entering homes with semiautomatic rifles drawn, hunting for someone.
It is from this perspective of the Palestinian home under siege that Children of Fire shatters
the dominant perception of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. And we see this quite literally in
visual terms as the camera is trained on a bullet hole in one of the apartment’s windows. This is
not the vision of Palestine that American audiences would have been familiar with: there are no
burning tires, no stone-throwing youth in keffiyeh, no tanks or army jeeps are in this frame.
Instead, we see an unremarkable view of a quiet side street, a relatively mundane scene that is
rendered spectacular and foreboding through the shards of the bullet riddled glass. Here, the
visuality of Children of Fire is representative of what Hamid Dabashi has referred to as the
Palestinian aesthetic of “traumatic realism,” and it is through this aesthetic under duress that
Children of Fire poses an intervention to the existing regime of representation. From this space
of the Palestinian home under siege, we see women and children’s experiences of the occupation
and its social and emotional effects. Masri explains that her uncle’s neighbor’s son, Ayman, had
just been shot and killed by the Israeli military. A handheld camera follows Masri into the
apartment as she makes her way through the crowd of mourners to give her condolences to
Ayman’s mother, while Masri narrates through voiceover: “I come to mourn as a neighbor, and
yet I brought a camera with me. I feel that the camera is violating their grief, but I know they'd
all want Ayman’s story to be told.” Conscious of her outsider positionality as filmmaker and
wary of objectifying Palestinian grief, Masri’s film subsequently shifts its focus to the voices and
experiences of Palestinian children as told by children themselves. The film is largely framed
49
through an extended interview with Ayman’s ten-year-old neighbor, Hannah, who provides a
firsthand account of a childhood under occupation. Shots of the army’s brutality against
children—beatings, arrests, the deployment of rubber bullets and live ammunition against
unarmed civilians, teargas assaults—are interspersed with Hannah’s drawings depicting these
same images, as well as live scenes of young boys engaged in an imaginative play game of
“soldiers and fighters,” complete with the reenactment of dragging a wounded friend through the
street. The camera’s still shots of Hannah’s drawings of children throwing stones are juxtaposed
with a scene of a teenage girl as she is handcuffed and dragged—screaming—into a military
jeep. The girl is driven away as her mother chases after the jeep with arms wide open, wailing in
vain, her daughter’s fate unknown. The camera returns to Hannah’s illustrations of dead bodies
being carried through the street before cutting again to a shot of children marching at the head of
a funeral procession.
Here I would like to take the opportunity to analyze the use of Hanna’s drawings as a
framing device for the film in order to illustrate how cinematic activism operates on a
representational level. This sequence begins with a close up shot of Hanna. The camera is
positioned exactly at the level of Hanna’s face before cutting to an over-the-shoulder shot,
indicating that we are not only viewing Hanna as a peer, but we are quite literally watching from
her perspective. And what we see from Hanna’s perspective is her own visual representation of
the Palestinian Intifada as live action shots are interspersed with stills of Hanna’s illustrations.
While an American audience may have seen such live action shots as part of televisual news
coverage of the Intifada, what is unique about this sequence is that it literally re-frames the
Israeli occupation from the perspective of the Palestinian child.

50

Figure 1: Hanna, Children of Fire (1989)

I focus on four of Hanna’s drawings in particular because they are quite astute in
representing not only the brutality of the Occupation, but also in their ability to show how
resistance to the occupation through the street skirmishes of the Intifada operates on a visual
level. A recurring motif in Hanna’s drawings is the image of burning tires. By depicting keffiyeh
clad Palestinian youth waving the Palestinian flag and slinging rocks at Israeli soldiers through a
screen of red flames and the thick black smoke of burning tires, Hanna is showing us how
Palestinian youth resist the occupation in distinctly visual ways. With the field of vision
obstructed by the smoke of burning tires, Palestinian youth are protected from the lethal sight
lines of Israeli rifles. Yet, the bright red and green of the Palestinian national colors remain
defiantly visible as the Palestinian flag waves through the smoke, fanning the flames further.
51

Figure 2: Hanna's drawings, Children of Fire (1989)

Through Hanna’s self-representations, we learn that the Intifada is a visually oriented form of
resistance, and it is through Masri’s cinematic representation of Palestinian childhood under
occupation that the work of cinematic activism is played out not merely within the film’s
narrative, but on the level of the visual as well. So this begs the question: what sort of work is
being performed through such a personalized visuality.
Here it is worth examining Children of Fire within the context of the Uprising
programming at large. Whether the Uprising co-curators Elia Suleiman and Dan Walworth
included Children of Fire within the Uprising series for strategic purposes or not, it is worth
examining the work that this film performed not only within the context of Palestinian cinema,
but specifically within the Uprising series and the controversy around it. At the time of its
52
release, Children of Fire posed an important intervention to the body of documentary and
editorial coverage of the first Palestinian intifada. During the 1980s and 1990s, representations of
Palestine—and the Arab world more broadly—that circulated in the United States were largely
mediated through either mainstream news media and Hollywood,
32
or as I argue was the case
with Occupied Palestine—through a Jewish anti-Zionist lens. As a self-representation, Children
of Fire broke away from these dominant modes of documentary and editorial coverage of
Palestine and showed the occupation from the radically different point of view of the Palestinian
child. Masri takes this radicalism one step further by amplifying the subjective nature of her
representational practice. Although Masri is a native speaker of Arabic, she narrates the film in
English, signaling the West as her intended audience. Two minutes into the film, Masri explains
her motivations for returning to her familial home of Nablus in the role of filmmaking: “Nablus
has been on the news a lot, For most people it's more trouble in a far away place. But to me, this
is happening to the people I know.”
33
Masri’s narration over stock news footage of the intifada—
children throwing stones and waving the Palestinian flag, youth clashing with the Israeli military,
all see through the thick black smoke of burning rubber tires—functions to personalize the
Palestinian experience for American viewers. This personalization serves to ground the viewer in
the realm of subjectivity in order to preemptively diffuse accusations of bias that may be levied
by American viewers who have been trained to expect an objective premise.
Establishing the personal premise of the film serves two important purposes. First, such a
framing speaks to the feminist sensibility that “the personal is political,” marking Children of
Fire both in content and in style as a feminist text. Second, grounding in the realm of the

32
McAlister, Epic Encounters.

33
Mai Masri, Children of Fire. Arab Film Distribution. 1990.

53
personal provides the opportunity for the viewer to relate to the experiences of the filmmaker and
her subjects. By framing the occupation through the lens of childhood and narrating in English,
Masri’s film is playing to two very particular American audiences, both of which are entrenched
in a culture war wherein—as was demonstrated during the Mapplethorpe controversy a year
prior—concerns over children’s emotional, intellectual, and physical safety had been a major
point of contention. For example, during the Mapplethorpe controversy the First Amendment
Common Sense Alliance—which consisted of a coalition of conservative groups such as such as
Citizens for the Family First, Morality in the Media, and the Catholic League for Religious and
Civil Rights—opposed The Perfect Moment show on the grounds that it juxtaposed “five graphic
homoerotic images and two photographs of nude or partially nude children.”
34
The Mapplethorpe
show ultimately went on, albeit with the ICA’s imposition of a one-time age restrictive
admission policy that limited admission to no one under the age of 18 without the
accompaniment of an adult.
35

The ICA’s decision to limit children’s access to The Perfect Moment indicated a certain
belief in—or at least respect for those who believed in—the sanctity of childhood innocence.
And yet, it was Children of Fire’s depiction of Palestinian children’s loss of innocence due to
their experiences of the occupation that drew the most criticism from the press. In his review of
Uprising in the Boston Globe, staff writer Matthew Gilbert decried Children of Fire as
“manipulative and vindictive,” and suggested that the film suffered from “overkill.”
36
Here

34
Patti Hartigan, “Mapplethorpe Show To Open Amid Controversy ICA Founder Raps Selections.”

35
Patti Hartigan, “Artists Criticize ICA Restriction: Third Edition.” Boston Globe. July 11, 1990,
accessed December 7, 2015, http://search.proquest.com/docview/294555179.

36
Matthew, Gilbert, “Poignant Views at the ICA.” Boston Globe, May 1991, accessed December 7, 2015,
http://search.proquest.com/docview/403395995.

54
again, programming plays a role within a practice of cinematic activism. These films work
synergistically together to present an argument which commands a re-calibration of a viewer’s
moral compass, in this case for the humanization of Palestinians. Suleiman’s own film in the
series, Intifada: Introduction to the End of an Argument (simply Introduction from here on),
conveniently contained a rebuttal to Gilbert’s critique from none other than children’s television
icon Fred Rogers, from the Emmy Award winning PBS television show, Mister Roger’s
Neighborhood. Midway through Introduction, amidst a montage of US television news clips of
scenes from the occupation, including images of Palestinian children running away from an
Israeli tank, as news anchors pontificate about “terrorism” via voiceover, the screen cuts to black
for a moment of silence before cutting to a clip from Mister Roger’s Neighborhood, wherein Mr.
Rogers states in his gentle and measured way: “I’ve been terribly concerned about the graphic
display of violence which the mass media has been showing recently, and I plead for your
protection and support of your young children.”
37

Figure 3: Two stills from a sequence in Intifada: Introduction to the End of an Argument (1990).

37
Fred Rogers quoted in Jayce Salloum and Elia Suleiman. Intifada: Introduction to the End of an
Argument. 1990.
55
Part of the Mapplethorpe controversy had revolved around paternalistic concerns over
children’s exposure to or protection from images that objectified children. Coming on the heels
of this debate and presenting the subjective voices of children lamenting their lack of emotional
and physical protection and visual documentation of the violence these children experience under
occupation, the pairing of Intifada along with Children of Fire, as well as the Mr. Rogers clip
within Intifada, in the Uprising series served to make the issue of Palestine relevant and relatable
to a US audience steeped in a culture over children’s safety. It must be understood, then, that the
curatorial decision making behind Uprising is what made the show so provocative, in that it
played to liberal argumentation and feminist logic of the personal as political in defense of
freedom of expression while simultaneously challenging conservatives and progressives alike to
follow through in their crusade to defend children from harm.
At the time, Children of Fire furnished a different perspective than Occupied Palestine in
that it provided American audiences with a Palestinian self-representation amidst the plethora of
documentary and editorial representations that mealy treated Palestine as an object of report. It
was this premise of self-representation that cohered all the films in Uprising despite their
disparate genres, lengths, and subject matter. And it was from this self-representational premise
that Elia Suleiman and Lebanese-American filmmaker Jayce Salloum included their
collaborative piece, Intifada: Introduction to the End of an Argument, within the Uprising series.
The filmmakers combined their own video footage with edited sequences of mainstream news
footage of Palestine, alongside American film, television, and cartoon stereotypes of Arabs and
Muslims. The product was a work of experimental video art that provides a scathing critique of
56
the role of visual culture in supporting Western political duplicity in the Middle East.
38
Of all the
Uprising films, Suleiman and Salloum’s Intifada: Introduction to the End of an Argument
(simply Introduction from here on) was reviewed by Matthew Gilbert as “the best” within the
whole series and it offered a radically different visual representations of Palestine and Israel.
While Intifada fits best into the category of video art, such a genre does not preclude the
making of an argument, something that Gilbert noted in his Boston Globe review: “The movie
allows a clear view of Hollywood stereotyping, and hints at the insidious ways the entertainment
media filters into news coverage… ‘Intifada’ also questions the notion of propaganda itself.”
39

Introduction consists predominantly of footage taken from broadcast television news shows,
Hollywood and Israeli films, and archival footage, yet there are large portions of the film that
consist of the filmmaker’s own footage: scenes of driving around Palestine and Israel,
interviewing family members, and mundane street scenes. It is through these mundane scenes
that Intifada provides a transformative the self-representative in the service of the series’
argument to humanize the Palestinian people. After a 10 second clip of archival footage of a
newsreel countdown, Intifada opens with a still shot of the tops of trees and the corner of a
residential building, as seen from a second or third story window. A woman’s voice softly sings
in Arabic as we watch the tree leaves rustling in a slight breeze. We hear the woman stumble
over the lyrics before giving a slight grunt of an embarrassed laugh, then states in English, still in
a sing-songy voice: “I don’t know the tune to this.” She continues singing awkwardly in Arabic,
then switches again to English: “I don’t know this song, I lied to you and I can’t sing it, sorry,”
before breaking out into a cheerful laugh. The woman’s soundtrack fades out as a muffled

38
For studies addressing the role of visual culture in producing anti-Arab racism an support for US
occupation and imperialism in the Middle East, see: McAlister, Epic Encounters; Shaheen, Reel Bad
Arabs.

39
Gilbert, “Poignant Views at the ICA.”
57
recording of the song she had been singing fades in, along with the sound of crickets, and the
woman’s voice returns to sing along, skipping some of the lyrics that she doesn’t know. This
opening scene introduces an American viewer to an unfamiliar, domestic version of Palestine, as
we are introduced to an unseen woman and an unremarkable view out of a Palestinian window.
She is a person: awkward, genuine, light-hearted, even romantic. The mundane nature of this
opening then stands in sharp contrast to the view of Palestinians depicted in the montage of
mainstream media montage to follow. In this way, Introduction broke from the norms of
Palestine-related visual culture—which, at the time, had been dominated by documentary and
editorial imager—by representing Palestine in a way that is at once at a distance from the politics
of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, yet still politicized.. The film comes across as quirky, artsy,
and even a little weird in relation to Children of Fire, Michel Khleifi’s autobiographical narrative
Canticles of the Stone, or the remainder of the documentary films that Uprising consisted of.
Furthermore, the film’s relatively positive reception in the press and the discourse surrounding
the Uprising controversy indicated a potential for Palestinian artists and filmmakers to leverage
non-documentary filmmaking, such as video art and narrative film, along with film curation and
exhibition, as tools of resistance and methods of cinematic activism in the face of attempted
censorship.
58

Figure 4: Political cartoon by Paul Szep, The Boston Globe, May 3, 1991.

Debating Uprising
In May of 1991, the Boston Globe ran a political cartoon by Paul Szep which summarized
the absurdity of the conflict over the Uprising series. Szep’s cartoon, captioned “Another great
show at the ICA,” features two semitically stylized men amidst a destroyed painting canvas.
40

Having fallen from the wall and onto the two men as they brawl—oblivious to the destruction
around them—the caption on the wall where the canvas once hung reads: “Palestinian film
series.” In the background of the upper right hand corner, another artwork hangs on the wall, its

40
I credit Olivia C. Harrison with pointing this out.
59
caption reads one single word: Mapplethorpe. In this single image, Szep’s political cartoon
encapsulates the argument of this chapter: in controversies over Palestinian cinema in the United
States, the debates over LGBT/Q cultural politics have always been close at hand, and
Palestinian cultural politics and LGBT/Q cultural politics have been positioned in relation to one
another through their shared expression within the realm of cinematic activism.
Although Uprising had originally been scheduled for the spring of 1990, the series had
been delayed a year as a political power struggle unfolded at the ICA, which culminated publicly
as the media coverage of the controversy began in the spring of 1991. According to Suleiman,
the ICA had originally attempted to delay the series in 1990 due to the “general mood of the
country” after the United States invaded Iraq during the first Gulf War, and Uprising was then
thrust into the media spotlight in 1991 when Steve Grossman, vice chairman of the ICA board of
directors, resigned from his role in protest of the Uprising films alleged lack of “educational
context.”
41
Grossman was a major figure on the ICA board and within Boston's greater political
culture, and his resignation had potentially significant financial and political ramifications. At the
time of his resignation, Grossman served as a vice-president of the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and chairman of the Massachusetts Democratic Party, two powerful
roles which positioned him as both a well-connected fund-raiser and a political advocate for the
embattled institution.
42
Grossman decried the Uprising series as “political propaganda,”
43
and his

41
Patti Hartigan, “Grossman Quits ICA Board over Palestinian Films.” Boston Globe. April 24, 1991,
accessed December 7, 2015, http://search.proquest.com/docview/294584021; “Museum Accused of
Censorship: ALL Edition.” Telegram & Gazette. May 3, 1991, accessed December 7, 2015,
http://search.proquest.com/docview/268447582.

42
Catherine Willford, “After Boston Censorship Attempts, Palestinian Film Series Rescheduled.” The
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs X, no. 4 (October 1991): 72, accessed January 28, 2015,
http://search.proquest.com/docview/218813319

43
“Museum Accused of Censorship.” Telegram & Gazette. May 3, 1991.
60
resignation left the ICA financially and politically vulnerable at a time of increased attacks
against and attempts to defund art institutions over the nature and meaning of freedom of
expression. Which is why even after Grossman's resignation, the ICA continued in its attempt to
diffuse such a threat by imposing the panel on the series, unbeknownst to the curators..
44
Leonard
Zakim, who was then director of the New England branch of the Anti-Defamation League and
one of Boston’s most prominent Zionist activists, also played a major role in publicly pressuring
the ICA. When quoted in a Boston Globe article, Zakim critiqued the series and demanded that
Suleiman engage in a political debate with Alan Dershowitz, in order to “balance” the opinions
and representations presented in the series with an Israeli perspective.
45

In contrast, during the Mapplethorpe controversy, arguments to omit the homoerotic
themed images from an intended retrospective show were readily shut down by free speech
advocates. Local city councilman and visual artist, George Pappas, was quoted in the Boston
Globe in reference to the ICA’s age restrictive admission policy for The Perfect Moment show,
stating: “by putting a restriction on it, you’re implying that there is something offensive about
it.” What free speech advocates such as Pappas made clear during the Mapplethorpe controversy
was that the attempted restriction of LGBT art and artists within a dominant heteronormative
culture was problematic because it reified the inequitable social power relations that the ethos of
liberal multiculturalism of the 90s sought to overturn. Yet it was this same inclusionist, political

44
Willford, “After Boston Censorship Attempts, Palestinian Film Series Rescheduled.”

45
Both when quoting Steve Grossman and Leonard Zakim and in staff writer Patti Hartigan’s summaries
of the controversy, the words “balance” and “counterbalance” were used repeatedly throughout the
coverage of the Uprising controversy. Hartigan, “Grossman quits ICA board over Palestinian films;” Patti
Hartigan, “Palestinian film series withdrawn from ICA.” Boston Globe. May 2, 1991, accessed December
7, 2015, http://search.proquest.com/docview/294596829; Patti Hartigan, “Remaining film pulled from
ICA series.” Boston Globe. May 3, 1991, accessed December 7, 2015,
http://search.proquest.com/docview/403400461.
61
correctness narrative that dogged Uprising, as those opposed to the Palestinian film series
demanded that the perspectives presented in films like Children of Fire, Canticles of the Stone,
and Introduction to the End of an Argument be contextualized and counterbalanced by an Israeli
perspective. Leonard Zakim stated in the Boston Globe that the ADL was “concerned about the
seemingly one-sided nature of it….it makes sense to have a responsible educational context.”
46

To justify demands for counterbalance, Zakim suggested that it would be irresponsible to
expose the Boston public to the implied biased content of the Palestinian films. Grossman further
turned the issue into a question of knowledge and education: “The mission of the ICA is heavily
educational in nature, and these films require an educational context. With something as complex
as the Palestinian question, understanding only comes from discussion and debate.”
47
Elizabeth
Sussman, who served as the ICA’s acting director at the time, supported Grossman and Zakim’s
point of view and justified the imposition of the panel under the pretense “that since the issue is
more complex than we had planned, we want to honor the complexity by having a discussion.”
48

The ADL not only pressured the ICA to place Alan Dershowitz on a panel with Suleiman
to politically debate the Palestinian-Israel conflict, but also demanded that a concurrent Israeli
film series accompany Uprising. Suleiman responded to these attempts to censor the series by
rejecting the ADL’s efforts to politicize Palestinian cultural productions. Suleiman defended
Uprising’s autonomy, stating in a Boston Globe article: “When you talk about censorship, this is
censorship. They don’t want Palestinians to stand on their own and present themselves
culturally…the idea was to start for once to get a look at how Palestinians are trying to tell their

46
Leanord Zakim quoted in Hartigan, “Grossman Quits ICA Board over Palestinian Films.”

47
Steve Grossman quoted in Hartigan, “Grossman Quits ICA Board over Palestinian Films.”

48
Elizabeth Sussman quoted in Hartigan, “Panel to Join Palestinian Series at ICA.” Boston Globe. April
25, 1991, accessed December 7, 2015, http://search.proquest.com/docview/294592125.
62
story. If you’re going to look at my work it should be about aesthetics.”
49
He continued in a
follow up article: “One tactic of oppression is to deny a voice, to wipe out a culture. If you’re
beautiful, if you have paintings and films and art, it is hard to legitimize your murder.”
50

Suleiman's assertion of the artistic value of Palestinian cultural productions placed the Uprising
controversy—not unlike the Mapplethorpe controversy before it—at the intersection of two of
prevalent discourses within US culture at the time: art censorship and genocide. In direct
response to the Mapplethorpe controversy, conservative Republican legislators were attempting
to limit the financial support of art institutions that received federal funding through the National
Endowment for the Arts if those funds were used to support artists whose work addressed issues
such as the AIDS epidemic or LGBT identity. The right wing attempts to censor LGBT arts
activism also came at a time when the AIDS activism movement—which included arts
activism—began using the word “genocide” to describe the US government’s negligence
towards the AIDS epidemic and the communities it was predominantly effecting.
51
In a
subsequent article in the Boston Globe, Suleiman made his argument even clearer: “a place that
protected against censorship when it came to Robert Mapplethorpe is practicing censorship on
us.”
52
While Grossman and the ADL attempted to code their attack against Uprising as an

49
Elia Suleiman quoted in Hartigan, “Grossman Quits ICA Board over Palestinian Films.”

50
Ibid.

51
Steven Epstein, “AIDS Activism and the Retreat from the `genocide’ Frame.” Social Identities 3, no. 3
(October 1997): 415.

52
Hartigan, “Palestinian Film Series Is Withdrawn from ICA.”

63
egalitarian call for "balance," Suleiman reframed the debate into a question not just of self-
representation, but also of cultural self-determination.
53

In this moment, Palestinian cinema gained critical support from the LGBT arts activist
community. Artists Space, the nationally renown New York gallery where Uprising had shown
in 1990, stood by the film series and publicly condemned the ICA, stating: “we deplore the use
of the Palestinian or any other culture to create a false controversy for opportunistic ends.”
54

Artists Space was no stranger to controversy and opportunism. Amidst the culture war over
things such as Mapplethorpe's The Perfect Moment, Andres Serrano,'s Piss Christ, and Artists
Space own exhibition of an AIDS themed collective show, Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing,
Republican Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina proposed legislation stipulating that federal
funds could not be used to support "obscene or indecent materials, including ... depictions of
sadomasochism, homo-eroticism, the exploitation of children, or individuals engaged in sex acts
. . . [or] denigrat[ing] a particular religion." The artworks in question represented the expression
of LGBT identity and sexuality and cultural critique relevant to the AIDS epidemic. After
passage of the Helms amendment in 1989, Artists Space had its $10,000 National Endowment
for the Arts (NEA) grant revoked for its exhibition of Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing, a
collective show focused on the AIDS epidemic and organized by prominent photographer Nan
Goldin.
55
The rhetoric surrounding the attacks on the NEA and the works of Mapplethorpe,

53
Mishuana Goeman has used the phrase “visual sovereignty” to conceptualize of the political import of
indigenous cultural productions within a settler-colonial context. Mishuana Goeman, “Introduction to
Indigenous Performances: Upsetting the Terrains of Settler Colonialism.” American Indian Culture and
Research Journal 35, no. 4 (January 2011): 1 – 18.

54
Hartigan, “Palestinian Film Series Is Withdrawn from ICA.”

55
Allan Parachini, “NEA Faces New Controversy in New York Show Art: National Endowment Seeks
Voluntary Return of $10,000 to Quiet Criticism,” Los Angeles Times, November 6, 1989, accessed
December 8, 2015, http://search.proquest.com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/280943811/.
64
Serrano, and the Witnesses artist focused on questions of sexual decency and obscenity, while the
controversy over Uprising revolved around the questions of balance and educational context, but
the central issue shared between these two controversies remained the same: the right to freedom
of expression for underrepresented artists and their social issues. Artists Space executive director
Susan Wyatt defended the exhibition of Palestinian cinema, stating ‘It is important for art to
speak for itself. [Suleiman’s] culture should be seen as a culture with its own identity. It doesn’t
need to be apologized for or linked to another program.”
56

Suleiman was not alone in drawing the parallel between LGBT artists and Palestinian
filmmakers struggles for self-representation, freedom of expression, and cultural survival. In a
letter to the editor titled “Off balance at the ICA,” Suffolk University communications professor
Gerald Peary criticized the ICA for capitulating to Grossman and the ADL’s demands for what
Peary understood as the transparent double standard inherent in the demand for “a balancing
panel—including, presumably, someone espousing an anti-Palestinian point of view.”
57
Peary
not only pointed out that the ICA’s decision to impose a panel discussion on the Uprising series
was problematic, but did so by drawing a parallel between the Palestinian self-representation and
LGBT freedom of expression, when, in closing his letter he asked: “the ICA has announced a
gay and lesbian film festival for August. Will there be those who demand a balancing panel of
respected heterosexuals?”
58
By placing Palestinian cinema and LGBT art in allied relation to
one another Peary essentially called into question the very necessity of an Israeli perspective

56
Patti Hartigan, “Censorship’ Is Again the Cry in ICA Flap.” Boston Globe. April 26, 1991, accessed
December 7, 2015, http://search.proquest.com/docview/294581002.

57
Gerald Peary, letter to the editor, Boston Globe, May 3, 1991.

58
Ibid.

65
through which to filter Palestinian voices. The revelation of this double standard demonstrates
how when it came to the question of freedom of expression, Palestinian voices and self-
representations were considered even “queerer than queer.” In this moment, Zionism and
heteronormativity became legible as related ideological mechanisms with shared investments in
domination, power, and control over minority subjects. Sulieman’s non-compliance with the
ICA’s attempts to censor Uprising demonstrated the cultural and political queerness of Palestine
within a culture of compulsory Zionism.
Free speech advocates also came to the defense of Palestinian cinema. James
D’Entremont of the Boston Coalition for Freedom of Expression characterized the ICA as
“inconstant and disturbing” in it’s treatment of Uprising in the wake of the Mapplethorpe
show.
59
John Reinstein of the American Civil Liberties Union also validated Suleiman and
Walworth's accusation of censorship. In a Boston Globe article on the series' withdrawal from the
ICA, Reinstein agreed that the ICA’s actions constituted a subtle form of censorship: "If the
panel was standing by itself, that would be different. But the problem is the cause and effect. The
artist has a legitimate claim because of the linkage of the panel to the film series.”
60

Without the consent of Suleiman or Walworth, the ICA proceeded with its plan to
schedule a panel to accompany the Uprising films. As the distributors of most of the films in the
series, the curators subsequently pulled all their films from the ICA in protest.
61
Canticle of the
Stone, however, had been distributed by the Seattle-based Arab Film Distribution, and its
screening was slated to continue, along with a panel, which was intended to, in the words of

59
Hartigan, “Remaining Film Pulled from ICA Series.”

60
Ibid.

61
Hartigan, “Palestinian Film Series Is Withdrawn from ICA;” Hartigan, “Remaining Film Pulled from
ICA Series.”

66
Elizabeth Sussman, “focus on the question of how artistic programs should or should not be
contextualized in a public setting.”
62
Sussman went on to suggest that such panels were a
“common component of our exhibition and film presentations,” although other, unnamed ICA
board and staff members refuted such a claim.
63
However, once Rita Zaweideh of Arab Film
Distribution was informed of the circumstances under which Canticles of the Stone was to be
screened, she pulled the remaining film from the ICA scheduled screening.
64

With the cancellation of Uprising at the ICA, also came the cancellation of the panel
discussion. Although Uprising ultimately did not screen at the ICA, the curators successfully
exercised their resistance to compulsory Zionism. The controversy did not end there, however, as
the ICA further capitulated to the ADL’s demands and scheduled an Israeli film series for after
the Uprising series would have taken place. Images of Palestinians in Israeli Cinema and Video
contained a mix of both documentary and fictional films made by Jewish Israelis that took
Palestine, Palestinians, and the occupation as their focus. Curated by renowned film scholar Ella
Shohat, Images was slated to screen in June 1991. Matthew Gilbert, who had previously
lambasted the Palestinian filmmakers in his review of the Uprising series, lavishly praised
Images in his Boston Globe review, calling the films “subtle and rational,” “effective,” “clever,”
“morally intricate,” and overall absent of what he characterized as “the flagrant heartstring
manipulations that marred Uprising.”
65
However, when Shohat learned of the ICA’s treatment of

62
Sussman quoted in Patti Hartigan, “Palestinian Film Series Is Withdrawn from ICA;” Hartigan,
“Remaining Film Pulled from ICA Series.”

63
Ibid; Ibid.

64
Hartigan, “Remaining Film Pulled from ICA Series.”

65
Matthew Gilbert, “Israeli Filmmakers View Palestinians with Sympathetic Eye.” Boston Globe. June
13, 1991, accessed December 7, 2015, http://search.proquest.com/docview/294609260.

67
the Uprising series, she promptly withdrew her association with the Images show, telling the
Boston Globe: “I want the public to know where I stand in relation to this controversy…I
unequivocally support the curators of Uprising.”
66
In a letter to the ICA, Shohat further
challenged the institution to uphold its proclaimed commitment to discourse. She called on the
ICA to organize a “courageous public discussion on the myriad forms of subtle and not so subtle
modes of censorship operating whenever critical Israeli or Palestinian cultural events are
proposed or presented.” Despite Shohat’s withdrawal, she agreed to allow the ICA to screen
Images as planned, which included attendance by three of the featured filmmakers.
67

Meanwhile, Uprising found new and more supportive exhibition spaces in the Boston
area. The Space gallery in Boston agreed to screen the series in its entirety that June, and
additional screenings were scheduled for September at the Harvard Film Archive in Cambridge .
The Space gallery’s curator, Kay Matthews, was quoted in the Globe as saying “we will let the
films stand on their own,” and Artist Space curator Micki McGee praised the alternate
exhibition: “The Boston public deserve to see these important works.”
68
When all was said and
done, the panel discussion was thwart and Uprising ultimately did successfully screen in Boston.

Oslo’s Ashes and the Phoenix of Palestinian Cinema
The political backdrop for these controversies is a different drama all its own. The 1990s
also played host to the Oslo peace accords, a project that was largely concerned with political

66
Patti Hartigan, “Curator Withdraws from ICA Series.” Boston Globe. June 12, 1991, accessed
December 7, 2015, http://search.proquest.com/docview/294607645.

67
Patti Hartigan, “ICA Announces That Film Series Will Go On.” Boston Globe. June 13, 1991, accessed
December 7, 2015, http://search.proquest.com/docview/403406733.

68
Patti Hartigan, “The Space to Show Palestinian Series.” Boston Globe (pre-1997 Fulltext). May 16,
1991, accessed December 7, 2015, http://search.proquest.com/docview/294588811.

68
representation, in the broadest sense of the phrase. Oslo had been championed as the harbinger of
Palestinian self-determination, when in reality it signaled a concretization of Israel’s burgeoning
apartheid regime. In exchange for recognizing the state of Israel, which in itself implied a
relinquishment of Palestinian refugee’s right of return to pre-1948 Palestine, the Palestinian
Authority—the governing party charged with representing and acting on behalf of the Palestinian
people—was granted administrative control over compartmentalized sections of the occupied
territories. Such a transaction prompted a cascade of conflicts over Palestinian political
representation, rights, and identity. As Ali Abunimah describes, “the grim reality was that Oslo
transformed the crude occupation into something more insidious…Israel had transferred
responsibility [to the Palestinian Authority] but without power or independence and Palestinians
came increasingly to see the P. A. not as a vehicle for liberation but as a proxy force designed to
relieve Israel of various costs of enforcing the occupation itself.”
69
In the celebratory bonfire that
was Oslo, many Palestinians watched from a distance as their rights went up in smoke. Since the
discourse on Palestine in the 1990s was largely concerned with the question of political
representation (or lack thereof), it is fitting, then, that the 1990s and 2000s were marked by
concern for representation of a different kind: the aesthetic, the visual, and the cinematic. During
the post-Oslo slump in political organizing,
70
Palestinian cinema was making the Palestinian
struggle for self-determination visible on a global level, mainstream US film culture included.

69
Ali Abunimah, One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse (New York:
Picador, 2007), 63-66.

70
Nadine Naber, Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism. NYU Press, 2012. 53.

69
In 2003, Elia Suleiman once again found himself at the center of controversy in the United
States when the Palestinian-Israeli conflict went to the Oscars.
71
Suleiman’s award winning
feature length narrative film, Divine Intervention, made national headlines when the American
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences declared the film ineligible to even be considered
for nomination within the category of Best Foreign Language Film much to the chagrin of the
film’s produces, Arab-American civil rights organizers, and Palestinian political actors alike.
72

Feda Abdellhadi Nasser, a counselor for the Permanent Observer Mission of Palestine to the
United Nations, criticized the Academy’s dismissal of Divine Intervention, stating in a Los
Angeles Times article: “what it comes down to is that the Palestinian people, in addition to the
denial of their rights…are now being denied the ability to compete in a competition that judges
artistic and cultural expression.”
73
Filmmaker Suleiman also critiqued the Academy’s attitude
towards his film, and was quoted in the New York Times and USA Today, as saying, “Cinema is
the negation of the notion of nationalism…of course, if there’s a denial of Palestinianism as a
cultural or national entity, then you fight for it. But, in fact, cinema is yearning to cross those

71
This was also not the first time the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was brought to the Academy’s attention.
In 1978, Vanessa Redgrave won an Oscar for her role as supporting actress in the Holocaust film, Julia.
Redgrave had been a vocal supporter of Palestinian rights and during the same year that she filmed Julia,
she funded and narrated a documentary on the Palestinian Liberation Organization, called The
Palestinian. She drew the ire of the Jewish Defense League, whose members picketed the Academy
Awards ceremony and asked that the Academy deny her an award. During her acceptance speech,
Redgrave condemned “Zionist hoodlums,” which drew audible gasps of shock, as well as booing and
hissing from the Academy audience. Corey Robin, “Vanessa Redgrave at the Oscars | Jacobin,” accessed
March 16, 2016, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/03/vanessa-redgrave-at-the-oscars/.

72
Lorenza Muñoz, “Palestinian Film Is Ineligible for Oscar Consideration.” Los Angeles Times,
December 14, 2002, accessed March 16, 2016, http://articles.latimes.com/2002/dec/14/entertainment/et-
munoz14.

73
Feda Abdelhadi Nasser quoted in Muñoz, ““Palestinian Film Is Ineligible for Oscar Consideration.”

70
boundaries all the time.”
74
Suleiman defended the value of his film as not merely evidence of
Palestine’s existence, but perhaps more importantly, as an art form through which to transcend
geopolitical and material reality and indulge in the universal pleasure of cinema.
The Academy’s communications director, John Pavlik, defended the organization’s
position, citing the fact that the film did not met three of the basic requirements for
consideration. First, since “Palestine” was not listed as one of the United Nations’ member
nations, the Academy did not recognize it as a country, this despite the fact that Palestine has
held UN observer status since 1974 and that the Academy had previously bent its own rules to
include submissions from similarly contested territories, such as Puerto Rico, Taiwan, and Hong
Kong.
75
Second, the film must have been put forward by said country’s designated film selection
committee, of which Palestine had none. Lastly, the film must have screened in a theater in said
country for a minimum of on week, a feat that would have been especially difficult to
accomplish considering the fact that, at the time, the only operating theaters in the Palestinian
territories had been destroyed by shelling, closed due to the second Intifada, or as was the case in
Gaza, set ablaze by religious fundamentalists.
76
Still, the mere thought of a Palestinian film
being recognized by the Academy as Palestinian stoked the worries of American Zionists. "I
think it would be deeply disappointing if [the academy] would recognize a film from an area that
is not a U.N.- sanctioned country," stated then president of the Zionist Organization of America
Morton A. Klein in an article in The Jewish Exponent. He went on to say that for the Academy to

74
Elia Suleiman quoted in Sherri Muzher. “Academy Snubs Fine Palestinian Movie: FINAL Edition.”
USA TODAY. January 24, 2003, accessed March 16, 2016,
http://search.proquest.com/docview/408944720.

75
Muñoz, “Palestinian Film Is Ineligible for Oscar Consideration.”

76
Nurith Gertz, and George Khleifi. Palestinian Cinema: Landscape, Trauma, and Memory
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008), 36.

71
even consider Divine Intervention for nomination would "give legitimacy” and “a stamp of
approval, or any kind of credibility” to the Palestinian people.
77

Faced with certain rejection, the producer’s ultimately did not submit Divine Intervention
for consideration for the 2003 awards, making this a non-controversy of sorts. However, their
non-submission of the film in 2002 proved to be a strategic move, buying the producers time to
lobby the organization in anticipation of the 2004 awards season. Their efforts paid off when in
December 2003 the Academy included Divine Intervention on its list of 55 films eligible for
nomination to the category of Best Foreign Language Film.
78
In the face of continued criticism,
this time from the pro-Israel side of the Palestine-Israel conflict dyad, Pavlik publically made
clear that the Academy was not attempting to make a political statement: “We’re not trying to be
the UN and say that Palestine is a country. We’re saying that there’s a film industry that
considers itself Palestinian, and it has come up with a film worthy of submission.”
79
However,
eligibility did by no means guarantee nomination, and the film was ultimately not selected for
nomination.
This would not be the Academy’s last Palestinian headache. With the Divine Intervention
incident fresh in the American public’s mind, in 2006 Hany Abu Assad’s Paradise Now set out
to accomplish what Divine Intervention could not. The film not only attained an Oscar
nominated for Best Foreign Language Film, but was also nominated for and subsequently won
the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s (HFPA) Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Film.

77
Geoffrey W. Melada, “The Politics of Art,” Jewish Exponent, January 9, 2003, accessed March 16,
2016, http://search.proquest.com/docview/227276980.

78
Chris Nashawaty, “Hollywood & ‘Divine’.” Entertainment Weekly, December 2003, accessed March
16, 2016, http://search.proquest.com/docview/219035211.

79
John Pavlik quoted in, “Palestinian Film, Denied Last Year, Among Movies up for Foreign Film Oscar:
Final Edition.” Daily News. October 23, 2003, accessed March 16, 2016,
http://search.proquest.com/docview/358052494.
72
Paradise Now’s accolades spawned a heated debate over the film—and filmmaker’s—national
identity. While the HFPA listed Paradise Now as hailing from Palestine, the Academy attempted
to take a more politically correct approach to the film by listing it as from the “Palestinian
Authority.”
80
In addition to the numerous institutional firsts accomplished by Paradise Now, the
2006 awards season shaped up to be the year of the underrepresented in more ways than one.
Ang Lee’s gay cowboy love story Brokeback Mountain and Paul Haggis’ racial tension drama
Crash won the bulk of the seasons coveted awards, while Duncan Tucker’s transgender themed
road trip dramatic-comedy, Transamerica, also garnered nominations and critical acclaim. The
question of Palestine found itself amidst a motley crew of politicized cinematic representations,
all of which attempted to breach some of Hollywood’s longest standing taboos around gender,
sexuality, race, and ethnicity, and Palestinian cultural politics were once again cast in relation to
LGBT cultural politics within the theater of cinematic activism.
81

Conclusion
The controversies over Palestinian cinema in the 1980s through the early 2000s revealed
a chink in the institutional facade of compulsory Zionism. At the root of this conflict lay the

80
Ken Ellingwood, “Now Playing in Israel.” Los Angeles Times, March 1, 2006, accessed March 16,
2016, http://articles.latimes.com/2006/mar/01/entertainment/et-paradise1.

81
The 2006 Academy Awards remains a hotly contested topic. Paul Haggis’ ensemble drama Crash won
over Ang Lee’s popularly favored Brokeback Mountain in the category of Best Picture, which stirred
accusations of homophobia and counter-accusations of racism. Although Lee won for Best Director,
Crash was considered a surprise win, and the press rumored that Brokeback Mountain had been snubbed
due to Hollywood’s taboo around male homosexuality. Almost ten years after 2006 Oscar upset, in 2015
The Hollywood Reporter conducted a poll among Academy members to assess how they would vote if
they were to vote again in the present; Brokeback Mountain prevailed. However, whatever multicultural
panacea the Academy attempted to serve through Crash’s win was not enough to solve Hollywood’s
problems with racism and sexism. While the Academy may, in hindsight at least, look fondly on
Hollywood’s first (white) gay men’s love story, the 2015 and 2016 all-white and predominantly male
nominations have stirred controversy over the industry’s continued sexism and racism in the much-
celebrated post-feminism and post-racial era. “Recount! Oscar Voters Today Would Make ‘Brokeback
Mountain’ Best Picture Over ‘Crash’.” The Hollywood Reporter, February 18, 2015, accessed February
24, 2016. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/recount-oscar-voters-today-would-773522.

73
question of representation, which Edward Said has described as the “issue always lurking near
the question of Palestine.”
82
In the context of compulsory Zionism, wherein “Zionism always
undertakes to speak for Palestine and the Palestinians,” the question of who controls and how to
control the representation of Palestine became a main site of power struggle.
83
This chapter has
shown the ways in which comparisons to LGBT/Q cultural politics and visual representations
have consistently undergirded debates over the exhibition of Palestinian cinema in the United
States. As such, this chapter has contextualized how and why cinema emerged as a productive
site for the transnational expression of Palestinian cultural politics, but also historicizes the ways
in which questions of LGBTQ cultural politics have consistently accompanied controversies over
the exhibition of Palestinian cinema in the United States. In doing so, Chapter 1 demonstrates
how Palestinian cinema in the US context has historically been constructed as “queerer than
queer,” and the shared interests between LGBT/Q and Palestinian cultural politics.
Although the attempts to control the exhibition of Palestinian cinema—and documentary
films in particular—constituted a form of censorship, the controversies that erupted around these
events made it clear that narrative film and film exhibition practices were potentially vital tools
with which to resist compulsory Zionism. It was through these struggles over the visual and
cinematic representation of Palestine in the 1980s and 1990s that filmmaking and film exhibition
emerged as methods of cinematic activism and the successful development of Palestine Film
Festivals in the 2000s in cities such as Boston, Chicago, Houston, and Washington DC was made
possible. With cinematic activism identified as a method through which to successfully
circumnavigate the everyday and institutional censorship imposed by the culture of compulsory
Zionism, Palestine activists and Palestinian filmmakers have leveraged the power of visual

82
Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage, 1992), 39.

83
Ibid.
74
representation to, as one Boston Palestine Film Festival organizer put it, “do politics through
art.”
84

84
Ruba (Boston Palestine Film Festival organizer). Interview with author. October 26, 2013.
75
Chapter 2:
Mainstreaming Palestine:
Film Festivals and the Politics of Visibility

Figure 5: Image by Instagram user “vee_and_jordan,” October 17, 2015.

The nervous excitement within me rises with each step I take up the stairs of Boston’s
Museum of Fine Arts (MFA). Situated on Huntington Ave across the way from Northeastern
University and the Wentworth Institute of Technology, the museum’s Greek Revivalism façade
is illuminated dramatically, commanding attention in the early darkness of the October evening.
Upon entry, I make my way through several galleries, breezing through the Art of Asia, Oceania,
76
and Africa; Works on Paper; and Photography. I make a mental note about the colonial legacy of
museum curatorial practices as I pass the folk arts and antiquities encased in glass, I barely
glance at the collection of photographic prints from the Pictorialism movement, and in my hurry,
I cannot distinguish whether the drawings I pass are by Klimt or Schiele. I rush through the
painstakingly displayed works of art until finally arriving at my destination of choice: a large
atrium which houses contemporary art installations, a café and wine bar, the museum’s main
bookshop, and most importantly, the Remis Auditorium, a screening room with a seating
capacity of almost four hundred. The open space of the atrium is quickly filling with people,
many of whom don keffiyeh, the traditional Palestinian scarf. While many of the keffiyeh I see are
the traditional black and white or red and white variety, most people—young and old alike—are
rocking the new, hip version of the scarf, made with non-traditional colors: pink, purple, gold,
maroon, green, orange, turquoise. The whole rainbow is represented and no two are alike.
Manufactured in the Palestinian owned and operated Herbawi textile factory in the occupied city
of Hebron in the West Bank, these scarves are available for purchase at a small table set up in
front of the auditorium’s entrance. Next to the keffiyeh table, a large vertical banner reads:
“Boston Palestine Film Festival.” It is opening night of the 9
th
annual festival and this space
inside the heart of one of the United States' premiere cultural institutions is brimming with
excitement and urgency.
It has been over twenty years since the censorship controversy over Palestinian cinema at
Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art as discussed in the previous chapter. Given that history,
the Boston Palestine Film Festival’s (BPFF) exhibition within the MFA is quite a sight to
behold; everything about this micro-journey into the BPFF tells a visitor that they are about to
experience something of great cultural import. Inside the MFA, Palestinian films (and the
77
cultural politics therein) comingle with works by renowned contemporary artists, such as Jeppe
Hein, Jenny Holzer, Maurizio Nannucci, and Kara Walker, artist who are known for their
deployment of cultural commentary through their work. The BPFF’s placement at the MFA , in
the words of one festival organizer, “mainstreams Palestine and makes this an art festival in a
powerful way."
1
After years of controversy over its inclusion within American cultural
institutions, Palestinian cinema, it would seem, has arrived. As such, this chapter takes the BPFF
as an example of how a practice of cinematic activism foments cultural and institutional changes
for the benefit of underrepresented groups.
This chapter explores the BPFF’s aims, goals, and effects according to twenty-one
festival participants and organized around dominant themes that emerged in semi-structured
interviews. Interview data is analyzed in conjunction with the festival’s own publicity materials
along with print news coverage of the festival in the local press, including The Boston Globe,
The Boston Phoenix, and The Jewish Advocate. Between October 2013 and October 2015, I
interviewed twenty-one participants, nine of whom have worked for the festival in the capacity
as organizer (five) or volunteer (four) at some point since the festival’s start. Fourteen
participants self-identified as Palestinian or Palestinian-American, three participants self-
identified as Jewish or Jewish-American, and the remaining four participants respectively self-
identified as Irish-American, Indian, Iranian-American, and Syrian-American. Eight of the
people I interviewed were invested in their own visual or performing arts practice, which
included documentary filmmaking. Three participants were undergraduate or graduate students
at the time of our interview and six were current or former K-12 or postsecondary educators. All
interviewee names are pseudonyms. A microprocessual analysis of these diverse materials
reveals the ways in which the festival constitutes a central method of cinematic activism, one

1
Eileen, Boston Palestine Film Festival organizer. Telephone interview with the author. July 29, 2014.
78
that, in the case of Palestinians living in the United States, is used to resist compulsory Zionism
and promote the open expression of Palestinian cultural politics from the Palestinian perspective.
Approaching its ten year anniversary, the BPFF runs for ten days in October wherein a diverse
group of people come together around Palestinian cinema through their shared investment in
educating the American public—as well as themselves—about Palestine, humanizing the
Palestinian people, and bringing representations and discussions of Palestine to a wider audience.
According to nineteen out of the twenty-one participants, education and cultural
connectivity were the two main goals and effects of the festival. At its most basic level, the
education imparted through these films was one of “humanization,” that is, making the issue of
Palestine more readily understandable, personalized, and relatable for the American public. Such
a process at once teaches American viewers that Palestinian people are human while fostering
connectivity to other groups, namely Jewish-Americans. The intended educational and cultural
connectivity benefits of the festival were not limited to those unfamiliar with the issue of
Palestine. Although there was some hesitancy around the festival “preaching to the choir,” in
general, people agreed that the pedagogical and social components of the festival were just as
important for themselves as they were for those unfamiliar with Palestine. As will be discussed
in detail in Chapter 4, the festival is an important site for Palestinian-American cultural
connectivity, as issues over cultural identity and authenticity are projected onto and negotiated
through the festival and the films therein.
Within this discussion on education and connectivity, half of my interlocutors mentioned
the role that films and festivals plays in terms of a desire to “mainstream” Palestine and how the
festival works to “legitimize” support for the Palestinian cause. Among more than half of my
interlocutors there was a particular hope for Palestinian cinema and its dissemination through
79
film festivals to perform the work of educating the broader American public by undoing or
counteracting mainstream media stereotypes. What is more, most people believed that the
BPFF’s placement within such a prestigious institution such as the MFA lends legitimacy to the
films and Palestinian cultural politics, which serves to bring Palestine to a more mainstream
audience.
Arab American Activism, Zionism, and the Massachusetts Connection
Before delving into the details of the BPFF’s organizing, I will first contextualize the
festival’s genesis within a longer history of Arab American political activism while situating
such activism within Boston’s particular cultural context of compulsory Zionism. Joanna Kadi
has described Arab Americans as “the most invisible of the invisibles,” meaning that in the US,
Arab American racial and ethnic subjectivity has been “simultaneously emphasized and
ignored.”
2
Although anti-Arab racism existed long before September 11
th
, in the aftermath of the
terror attacks in 2001, such racism turned into “America’s elephant in the living room.”
3
Racially
classified as “white” in the eyes of the US government yet simultaneously racialized as the
terrorist Other, Arab American subjectivity has frequently vacillated between invisibility and
hyper-visibility, depending on social and political context. Palestinian-American experiences of
this dichotomy are often amplified, as the public expression of Palestinian self-identification
elicits responses ranging from the mundanely ignorant—“Where/what is Palestine?”—to the
more spectacularly hostile—“Palestine does not exist!” or “you must be a terrorist!” Palestinians

2
Joanna Kadi (now Joe Kadi), “Introduction,” Food For Our Grandmothers: Writings by Arab-American
and Arab-Canadian Feminists (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1994), xvi-xix.

3
Steven Salaita, Anti-Arab Racism in the USA: Where it Comes from and What it Means for Politics
Today (Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto, 2006), 7.

80
in the US, and Arab-Americans who publically engage in discourses on Palestinian cultural
politics, therefore, must constantly negotiate this line between invisibility and hyper-visibility.
At the same time, Zionism has historically been aligned with liberal and progressive
politics, which Nadine Naber, Eman Desouky, and Lina Baroudi argue has worked to silence and
marginalize open discussions of Palestinian cultural politics within progressive social justice
movements. Naber, Baroudi, and Desouky conceptualize Zionism as “the forgotten -ism,” to
describe how Zionism has been promoted as an anti-racist and feminist social justice ideology,
which has resulted in Palestinians—and Arab Americans more broadly—having been historically
elided from racial and gender justice movement organizing in the United Sates.
4

The formal political organizing of the Arab-American community is predominantly traced
to the founding of the Association of Arab-American University Graduates (AAUG). Founded
by a group of US based Middle East studies and postcolonial studies scholars in the aftermath of
Israel’s 1967 invasion and occupation of Palestine, the AAUG was conceived as a pedagogical
social movement that would work to correct racist stereotypes and misconceptions about Arabs
and the Arab world which saturated US political rhetoric and popular culture at the time.
5
The
AAUG centralized the issue of Palestine in its organizing efforts and stressed teaching, public
intellectualism, and academic scholarship as the preferred methods for conducting activism;
however, the organization’s academic focus drew critiques of elitism and its emphasis on

4
Nadine Naber, Eman Desouky, and Lina Baroudi. “The Forgotten -‘ism:’ An Arab American Women’s
Perspective on Zionism, Racism, and Sexism.” Color of Violence: The Incite! Anthology, (Cambridge,
MA: South End Press, 2006).

5
Rashid Bashshur, “Unfulfilled Expectations the Genesis and Demise of the AAUG.” Arab Studies
Quarterly 29, no. 3/4 (Fall 2007): 7–13.

81
Palestine did not always account for other concerns within the Arab American community.
6
Still,
the AAUG’s activism lead the way for the formation of several national organizations, namely
the National Association of Arab Americans (NAAA) in 1972, the American-Arab Anti-
Discrimination Committee (ADC) in 1980, and the Arab American Institute (AAI) in 1985, the
aims of which were mainly lobbying for Arab American interests in Washington, civil rights
advocacy, and the mobilization of the Arab American community around electoral politics.
7

Many of the scholar-activists involved in the AAUG held academic positions at colleges
and university throughout Massachusetts, which, in conjunction with the region’s large Arab-
American population, made the state a central site for activism around the issue of Palestine. For
example, in the years leading up to the AAUG’s founding, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Nasser Aruri,
and Elaine Hagopian cultivated personal and professional relationships while working at various
colleges throughout Massachusetts.
8
During the 1970s and 1980s, the Arab-American activist
community in Massachusetts, particularly in the Metro Boston area, became increasingly
organized. By the early 1980s, the AAUG had moved its main office to the Boston suburb of
Belmont, ADC had a regional office downtown, and there were active local chapters of Women

6
Elaine Hagopian, “Reversing Injustice: On Utopian Activism,” Arab Studies Quarterly 29 (3/4) 57-73;
Janice Terry, “Community and Political Activism Among Arab-Americans in Detroit.” Arabs in America,
246-247.

7
Terry, “Community and Political Activism Among Arab-Americans in Detroit,” 246-247.

8
From 1962-1967, Aruri was completing his doctorate at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst while
Abu-Lughod and Hagopian held teaching positions at nearby Smith College. The same year that the
AAUG was founded, Hagopian and Aruri each took up new positions at Simmons College in Boston and
the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth (then Southeastern Massachusetts University), respectively,
while Abu-Lughod moved to Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Naseer Aruri, “AAUG: A
Memoir,” Arab Studies Quarterly 29 (3/4), 33-46; Elaine Hagopian, “Reversing Injustice: On Utopian
Activism.”

82
for Women in Lebanon and the Palestine Aid Society.
9
As the Arab-American community grew
stronger and more organized, it became a priority to mobilize this strength toward making
Palestinian cultural politics from the Arab-American perspective more vocal and visible within
the broader field of Boston’s cultural politics. In 1981, Hagopian joined Mikhail Haidar, Linda
Simon, and others in the Metro Boston area to produce Arabic Hour, a current affairs talk show
which focused on cultural and political issues relevant to the Arab-American community.
10
The
show was broadcast on community access television stations throughout New England and
quickly gained a national following with broadcasting on community access television stations in
places with large Arab American communities, such as New York City, as well as Dallas and
Houston, Texas.
11
However, after gaining such significant visibility, the show and its producers
were targeted by yet another anonymous—albeit vague—threat of domestic terrorism. In January
of 1988, the Arabic Hour production office in Boston was burglarized and the show’s two
professional video cameras were stolen. Linda Simon, who was the Associate Producer of Arabic
Hour at the time, was alerted to the theft by an anonymous message left on her home telephone

9
The exact dates of when AAUG and ADC established offices in Metro Boston are unknown. My
knowledge of Women for Women in Lebanon and Palestine Aid Society’s Boston area activities is based
on my own childhood experiences of accompanying my mother, Layla Hijab Cable, to meetings and
events. This knowledge is also based on documentation of these activities as archived within my mother’s
personal papers and the papers of Nora Lester Murad (who, upon my suggestion, has since sent them to
the Arab American National Museum’s archive where they await processing). Elaine Hagopian,
“Reversing Injustice: On Utopian Activism;” Ann Thomas, letter to the editor, Washington Report on
Middle East Affairs, March 1988.

10
Elizabeth Boosahda, Arab-American Faces and Voices (Austin, US: University of Texas Press, 2003)
262-263.

11
Ethan Bronner, “Arabic TV Program Burglarized; 2 Cameras Taken,” The Boston Globe, January 26,
1988, accessed May 8, 2016,
http://search.proquest.com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/294451833/abstract/E370F6D4DC2246C4PQ/1;
Ann Hodge, “Year-old Access Houston Broadens Diversity of Programming,” Houston Chronicle, June
22, 1988, accessed February 17, 2015,
http://infoweb.newsbank.com/resources/doc/nb/news/0ED7AE3512F5EDDD?p=AWNB
83
answering machine, which stated: “We’re holding the video cameras hostage.”
12
Two weeks
prior to the burglary, the office door of the Boston Rainbow Coalition—where Simon worked for
the Reverend Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign—was defaced with racist graffiti, which
read: “Arabs Out, Death to the PLO.” Although it was unclear whether the two incidents were
related, local Arab-American lawyer and community activist George Najemy spoke out in the
Boston Globe, stating that regardless of the perpetrator’s motivations, such actions have “the
effect of dampening the Arab voice in the community, [and] of creating fear among activists.
There is a sense that it is dangerous to speak out on behalf of Arabs.” These incidences came just
three years after the 1985 bombing of ADC’s New England regional office in Boston, which was
one of a series of bombings during the 1980s—many of which it was widely believed had been
perpetrated by the Jewish Defense League—that targeted Arab-American civil rights
organizations and activists. The Boston bombing severely injured two Police officers and
resulted in the indefinite closure of ADC’s New England office.
13
These are just some examples
of how the 1980s marked a time when Arab American activists in the Boston area leveraged
independent media production as a means to make the self-representation of Palestinian cultural
politics more visible, despite the especially violent and threatening manifestations of compulsory
Zionism.
The academic roots of Arab-American activism on Palestine and the subsequent outgrowth
of Arab-American media activism are of particular import to the formation of cinematic activism
because such a history points to the ways in which, in the United States, academic knowledge
production colludes with media representations to delimit the hegemonic field of meaning about

12
Bronner, “Arabic TV Program Burglarized; 2 Cameras Taken.”

13
Thomas, letter to the editor.

84
Palestine and Israel.
14
In Metro Boston specifically, Zionism’s place within the liberal and
progressive political culture that is frequently associated with the region has been inscribed
through cultural institutions, as exemplified in the previous chapter, as well as through
educational institutions, namely colleges, universities, and public schools. For example, as a hub
for some of the nation’s most prestigious higher educational institutions and boasting one of the
highest number of colleges per capita, the American academy profoundly informs the culture of
Metro Boston. When prestigious local universities, or their faculty and administrators take
political positions, those positions have broad cultural influence. For example, in 1984 Jehuda
Reinharz—who was then professor of Jewish history at Brandies University in Waltham, MA (he
would later become President of Brandeis)—wrote an uncritically positive, widely circulated
review of Joan Peter’s New York Times bestseller From Time Immemorial, a profoundly anti-
Palestinian book that was critiqued as dangerous and fraudulent by scholars such as Edward
Said, Noam Chomsky, and Norman Finkelstein.
15
While it may be unsurprising for an
historically Jewish university to support Zionism, I point to the Brandies example to explain how
influential academe has been in muddying the distinctions between Judaism and Zionism.
Conflating the two enables a kind of logic that equates critiques of the Israeli state with
antisemitism, the accusation of which has been used to censor Palestine scholarship and
activism. For example in 2002, nearly two decades after From Time Immemorial was published,
in response to Palestine-focused student activism on campus that called for Harvard University’s

14
Evelyn Alsultany uses the term “field of meaning” to describe how government discourses collude with
televisual representations of Arabs and Muslims to delimit a “range of acceptable ideas about the War on
Terror,” as well as Arabs and Muslim American subjectivity more broadly. Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims
in the Media, 14.

15
Edward Said, “The Joan Peters Case,” Journal of Palestine Studies 15, (1986), 144-150, accessed April
8, 2016, http://www.jstor.org.libproxy1.usc.edu/stable/2536835.

85
financial divestment from companies that conduct business in illegal Israel settlements in the
West Bank, then president of Harvard Lawrence Summers publicly equated criticism of Israel
with antisemitism in an attempt to discredit the student’s voices.
16
More recently, in 2014
numerous university presidents throughout the US, including several in the Boston area such as
Harvard University, Boston University, Brandies University, and the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, publicly denounced the American Studies Association after the organization’s
membership had overwhelmingly passed a resolution to support the Academic and Cultural
Boycott of Israel.
17

Institutionalized support for Zionism is not limited to higher education; examples can
also be found in the area’s regional public school curriculum. For example, middle and high
schools in the Boston Public Schools regularly use the Facing History and Ourselves (FHAO)
curriculum as a component of their 8
th
grade and 10
th
grade civics courses.
18
Founded in the
Boston suburb of Brookline, MA in 1976, FHAO is an anti-racist and conflict-resolution themed
youth curriculum that takes the Holocaust as the basis for teaching social justice. That same year,
Elaine Hagopian served as president of the AAUG and she has recalled how FHAO emphasis on
the Holocaust “was too often used to justify Israel, a colonial settler state,” and how such
curriculum greatly informed the politics of Metro Boston’s liberal culture.
19
Holocaust studies

16
David H. Gellis, “Summers Says Anti-Semitism Lurks Locally,” The Harvard Crimson, September 19,
2002, accessed on February 24, 2015, http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2002/9/19/summers-says-anti-
semitism-lurks-locally-university/

17
Matt Rocheleau, “MIT’s President Opposes Boycott,” Boston Globe, December 31, 2013, access
February 25, 2015, http://search.proquest.com.libproxy.usc.edu/docview/1471949687?pq-
origsite=summon.

18
Facing History and Ourselves, “District Partnerships,” accessed March 23, 2014.
https://www.facinghistory.org/for-educators/school-and-district/district-partnerships.

19
Hagopian, “Reversing Injustice: On Utopian Activism.”
86
scholar Michael Rothberg has also critiqued the ways in which the Holocaust has been
constructed as a Eurocentric narrative of exceptionalism. Rothberg notes that in achieving a
culturally hegemonic status, such exceptionalist conceptualizations of the Holocaust serve to
reinforce a competitive model of collective memory by establishing a hierarchy of oppression
and suffering. This hierarchy "obeys a logic of scarcity” to simultaneously create impermeable
borders and divisions between struggles that could be allied together while overshadowing and
silencing other forms of state violence, trauma, and genocide and that such a model fails to
interrogate the intimate relationship between European colonialism, the Holocaust, and present
day political crises in the Middle East.
20
While the FHAO program attempts to resist this kind of
competitive model of racialized oppression by incorporating issues such as Jim Crow, the Civil
Rights struggle, Darfur, and the Armenian genocide, the curriculum avoids an explicit discussion
of the relationships between the Holocaust, the state of Israel, and the question of Palestine. In
doing so, the program tacitly supports compulsory Zionism. This kind of silence around the
question of Palestine exemplifies how compulsory Zionism operates in passive and quotidian
ways.
Compulsory Zionism not only permeates Boston’s cultural and educational institution, it
is quite literally manifest in the city’s built environment. The Leonard Zakim Bunker Hill
Memorial Bridge, named in memory of the Anti-Defamation League’s most prominent Boston
area Zionist activist, is of Boston’s most visible and prestigious landmarks. This world famous
cable-stayed bridge spans over 1400 feet to carry 10 lanes of the concurrent traffic of Interstate
93 and US Route 1 across the Charles River, making it the world’s widest cable-stayed bridge.
Referred to in the Boston Herald as a “civil rights crusader,” Zakim spent decades organizing

20
Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).

87
Boston’s black and Jewish communities around social justice issues, and the bridge’s dedication
ceremony focused heavily on his role in the cultivation of Metro Boston’s liberal and progressive
political cultures.
21
During the ceremony, then Mayor of Boston Thomas Menino praised the
naming of the bridge for it’s ability to “showcase the diversity and the unity of race, religion, and
personal background that exists in Boston today because of the work of community leaders like
Lenny Zakim and because patriots fought long ago in Charlestown to make our country
independent.”
22
The imperialist rhetoric that animated the dedication ceremony highlights the
irony inherent in the promotion of a colonial and xenophobic ideology such as Zionism as a form
of social justice activism. In such a celebration of liberal multiculturalism, the history of
indigenous peoples and European conquest—both in the Americas and the Levant—become
obscured, even erased.
Although it is a relatively small festival, the Boston Palestine Film Festival’s success
comes into sharp relief when viewed within the context of compulsory Zionism and Arab-
American activism in the Boston area in the decades that preceded its founding. Established in
2006, with the first festival in 2007, the BPFF is an all-volunteer non-profit organization with
three major aims: first, “to celebrate Palestinian cinema as a cultural and artistic production of a
people in exile and under occupation and siege,” second, “to reduce prejudice and discrimination
against Middle Eastern people generally and Palestinians in particular” in the post-9/11 United

21
Doug Hanchett and Cara Nissman, “The Boss May Honor Zakim at Dedication of Bridge,” The Boston
Herald, October 4, 2002, accessed April 8, 2016,
http://ic.galegroup.com/ic/bic1/NewsDetailsPage/NewsDetailsWindow?failOverType=&query=&prodId=
&windowstate=normal&contentModules=&display-
query=&mode=view&dviSelectedPage=&displayGroupName=News&limiter=&currPage=&disableHighl
ighting=&displayGroups=&sortBy=&search_within_results=&p=BIC1&action=e&catId=&activityType
=&scanId=&documentId=GALE%7CA92453248&source=Bookmark&u=usocal_main&jsid=d8b5ea3f6
22f0a81e6041cf87f2b5502

22
www.leonardpzakimbunkerhillbridge.org, accessed June 29, 2015.

88
States, and third, “to instill pride in our Arab-American community” and “provide a link” to
Arab heritage, culture, and history for those living in diaspora.
23
As discussed in Chapter 1,
controversies surrounding the exhibition of Palestinian cinema from the 1980s and through the
first decade of the 2000s served to identify film as a critical "terrain of struggle"
24
over the
question of Palestine, and the Boston area proved to be a locus for such controversies. From
those controversies arose an awareness of the power of filmmaking, curatorial practices, and film
exhibition as methods of resistance to the Israeli occupation of Palestine and offer a politically
and culturally queer alternative to the compulsory Zionism of US culture. Despite these moments
of Palestinian cinema’s increased visibility, the post-Oslo period was also characterized by a
decline in US-based political and social activism around the issue of Palestine.
25
Palestinian
cinema may have been garnering media attention in the United States, but there remained a
qualitative dearth of US news coverage on the political and material realities of what was
actually happening in Palestine. While Palestinian cinema became more widely visible through
Academy and Golden Globe Award nominations, 2006 proved to be a pivotal moment for the
Palestinian-American community as well.
BPFF co-founder Mary, who identifies as Palestinian-American, recalled how the festival’s
organizing was inspired by a sense of cognitive dissonance regarding how Palestine was being
represented and discussed in relation to the realities of the occupation, and the efficacy of
Palestinian-American organizing. The daughter of Palestinian immigrants, Mary was born and

23
Maryssa Cook-Obregon and Katherine Hanna. “6
th
Annual Boston Palestine Film Festival Set for
October 5-13, 2012.” Boston Palestine Film Festival Press Release, (October, 2012).

24
Stuart Hall, “What is this Black in Black Popular Culture?” Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural
Studies. Kuan-Hsing Chen and David Morley, eds., (New York: Routledge, 1996), 468.

25
Naber, Arab America, 53.

89
raised in the United States and has been a festival organizer since its inception in 2006. She had
been politically active with several Palestine related grassroots organizations in the 1980s, but
described to me how Oslo had revealed deep fissures within the Palestine activism circles she
had been a part of. The Palestine activism community she had been involved with predominantly
included exilic Palestinian and other Arab professionals—teachers, engineers, doctors, and the
like—who were working or studying in the United Sates, as well as those like herself who had
been born and raised in diaspora. She recalled how the Palestine activism she had been working
with in the 1980s devolved into factions and “fell apart” with the signing of the Oslo accords in
1993, and the organizing that she had been a part of in the Boston area largely went dormant for
the latter half of the decade.
26
During this same period, even national Arab American
organizations such as the AAUG began to whither and disband under the pressure of Oslo’s
factionalism.
27

However, with the turn of the millennium also came the start of the second Intifada in the
fall of 2000. Palestinians in the occupied territories once again rose up in protest against the
Israeli occupation, and once again, they were met with violent repression by the Israeli military.
In addition to the second Intifada, the September 11
th
, 2001 terror attacks and the subsequent US
military invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 established the Middle East as the
theater within which numerous states and private corporations would play out their attempts to
assert political hegemony and control over the region’s natural resources, such as oil and natural
gas. In the summer of 2006, Israel waged a war in Lebanon, which included an aggressive
bombing campaign and ground invasion of Southern Lebanon—a region heavily populated with

26
Mary, Boston Palestine Film Festival organizer. Telephone interview with the author. November 23,
2013.

27
Hagopian, ““Reversing Injustice: On Utopian Activism.”
90
Palestinian refugees. As the United States and Israel levied threats and waged wars against
countries such as Iraq and Lebanon—both of which play host to large numbers of Palestinian
refugees—the desire and need to reconvene the Palestine activism scene grew urgent: “We felt
the blackout on what was happening in Palestine…The media was against us—the control of the
Zionist lobby, all of that stuff—just made us invisible. We felt like there are these films coming
out [of Palestine] and these are Palestinians telling their own story.”
28
However, Mary pointed to
a particular frustration she had around what she calls the “react and demonstrate” model of
political activism, wherein, in the face of Israel’s atrocities against the Palestinians, the first—
and sometimes only—method of activism consisted of protesting in front of the Israeli consulate.
She desired a more “proactive” approach and envisioned “a radical departure from 'let's go stand
in front of the consulate and have our signs.' I felt like that line of activism was dead. It was
going nowhere and we could keep doing it until we're 100 years old and its not going to have any
impact.”
29
This frustration, coupled with excitement around the burgeoning Palestinian cinematic
movement, is what inspired the festival’s organizing.
In January 2006, Paradise Now won the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Film. This
cultural “victory” was short lived, as a mere six months later Israel would wage a war against
Southern Lebanon, an event that stirred transnational public memories of Israel’s role in the
Sabra and Shatila massacre in the exact same region almost twenty-five years previously.
30
The

28
Mary, Boston Palestine Film Festival organizer. Telephone interview with the author. November 23,
2013.

29
Ibid.

30
Buzzy Gordon, “The Lost Lesson of Sabra and Shatilla.” Forward. October 5, 2007, accessed March 1,
2016, http://search.proquest.com/docview/367711784; Joshua Mitnick, “In Lebanon Strife, Memories of
Past War for Israel: ALL Edition.” The Christian Science Monitor. July 25, 2006, accessed March 1,
2016, http://search.proquest.com/docview/405546822; John Walcot and David C. Martin McClatchy,
“This Summer’s Mideast Crisis Feels Like An Echo of History.” The Sacramento Bee. August 6, 2006,
91
time was ripe for a cultural intervention, and in 2006 several of my interlocutors become
involved with Tawwasul, an organization designed to bring Palestinian art and culture to the
Boston area with the intention of making the issue of Palestine visible, and in doing so, educate
US viewers not only about what was happening in Palestine, and the Middle East more broadly,
but the United States’ government and media’s s role therein. Mary recalled:
The guiding principle was: this is not like business-as-usual in terms of political
work, this is going to be different, we thought, a better way to reach a mainstream
audience to hear what's happening.
31

The stark contrast that existed between the mainstream US news media’s biased coverage
of what was happening in the Middle East,
32
combined with the kinds of media attention
Palestinian cinema was receiving in the United States proved to be a starting point for a new kind
of political activism. It was from this context that Tawassul’s members undertook the project of
organizing a film festival in order to, in the words of Palestinian co-founder Ruba, “do politics
through film.”
33

Visibility Politics and the Festival as Visual Pedagogy
As Mary’s recollection of the festival’s prehistory attests, a greater emphasis on the politics
of visibility was necessary before any other goals—such as educating the US public about

accessed March 1, 2016, http://search.proquest.com/; Scott Wilson, “Calls Mount for Olmert to Step
Down; Blistering Critique of Israel’s Role in Lebanon War Shakes His Governing Coalition: FINAL
Edition.” The Washington Post. May 2, 2007, accessed March 1, 2016,
http://search.proquest.com/docview/410118424docview/246684378.

31
Mary, Boston Palestine Film Festival organizer. Telephone interview with the author. November 23,
2013.

32
Peterson, Israel-Palestine in the News Media.

33
Ruba, Boston Palestine Film Festival former organizer. Personal interview with the author. October 25,
2013.

92
Palestine—could be addressed. The early festival organizers recognized that American cultural
complicity with the US government’s support for the state of Israel stemmed from a lack of
awareness of what was actually taking place in Palestine and Israel. This lack of awareness has
been manufactured through the representational regime of compulsory Zionism. It was not so
much that there was a dearth of visual evidence of Palestine’s suffering, or that Palestinian visual
culture did not exist, but that the compulsory Zionism of US culture has served to censor such
representations through an enforcement of “balance” and “objectivity.” Palestinian co-founder
Ruba emphasized the intention of making the festival visible through print materials: "The plan
was actually to do politics through film. The plan was: we’re going to show Palestinian films,
we’re going to put ads in the subway, we’re going put ads in the Boston Globe, we’re going get
reviews in papers so that people would come and watch the films and know that they’re there.”
34

From the beginning, the festival has run print advertising campaigns on Boston’s public transit
system, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA), or, “the T” for short. Several
of my interlocutors recalled vivid memories of their encounters with the festival’s advertising
campaigns while riding the T, which is how Palestinian-American audience member Anton first
heard about the festival: “I remember the first time I saw the advertisements on the subway, I
was like, wow! Boston Palestine Film Festival. What is that? I was really excited that there was
something going on about this.”
35
While the primary purpose of the festival’s advertising may
have been merely in the service of publicizing the event, the BPFF print advertisements quickly
took on a much greater significance for both the festival itself and the greater Palestine activism
community.

34
Ibid.

35
Anton, Boston Palestine Film Festival audience member. Personal interview with the author. October
24, 2013.

93
The inaugural festival in 2007 coincided with the 59
th
anniversary of the Nakba and the
40
th
anniversary of the beginning of the occupation. For the BPFF’s second year, the organizers
took up the Nakba for the festival’s main theme, which was reflected in the advertising
campaigns. Co-founder Suhail recalled how the advertising campaign in and of itself felt like a
victory in the struggle to make Palestine visible in the United States:
We had the word Nakba plastered all over the city [which had] never been done in
the mainstream like that. Longtime activists said [they’d] never put the word
Nakba in any advertising campaign in the city….The city had never seen anything
like it. We hit the city hard. Every major newspaper did an article on us.
36

This emphasis on visibility and visual culture was intended to represent “social justice
[but] from a different way,”
37
and the subway advertisements proved to be a powerful tool for
attracting participants and audience members. For example, Mary proudly relayed a story to me
from one of the festivals first few years, wherein a man and woman dressed in Boston Red Sox
apparel, who, on their way home from a game at nearby Fenway Park, excitedly arrived at a
screening at the MFA after seeing the ads on the subway.
38
With a weekly ridership of 1.2
million passengers, MBTA advertising is one of the most visible and efficient promotional
methods for cultural events in the Metro Boston area.
39
Additionally, the BPFF venues are all
accessible via the T’s widespread public transportation system. The MFA has its own stop along
the Green Line light rail "E" train route, which provides service along Huntington Avenue from

36
Suhail, Boston Palestine Film Festival former festival organizer. Personal interview with the author.
October 25, 2013.

37
Ibid.

38
Mary, Boston Palestine Film Festival organizer. Telephone interview with the author. November 23,
2013.

39
Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority. “Chapter 1: Introduction.” Ridership and Service
Statistics. Fourteenth edition. July 2014.

94
the heart of downtown Boston to Northeastern University, the Wentworth Institute of
Technology, Massachusetts College of Art, and the Longwood Medical Center complex, which
includes Harvard University's Medical School campus.
Audience member Alma commented on how pleased she was to see that the issue of
Palestine, as she put it, “infiltrates” American civil society through more quotidian forms of
visual culture such as the subway advertisements. She explained:
“The T is a working class public sphere and that brings a film festival outside of
just the league of [the] elite or educated. Is a poster on the T really drawing the
attention of everybody? Probably not…But it feels like a presence in a public
sphere that’s positive. The norm is to see things about Israel everywhere. So I feel
the BPFF infiltrates in the sense that it seems everywhere at the time that the
festival’s happening when otherwise theirs nothing.”
40

Alma’s comment about the BPFF’s print materials infiltrating the public sphere is evocative of
Jurgen Habermas’ conception of the public sphere “as a space for the emergence of an inclusive
civil society” wherein pressing political, social, and cultural issues are debated.
41
Cindy Hing-
Yuk Wong has drawn upon Habermas’s conception of the public sphere, as well as Nancy
Fraser, Oscar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Miriam Hansen, and Michael Warner’s theoretical
reinterpretations, to investigate the wider social and cultural work of festivals. Wong has
contended that the sociality and spatiality of festivals as sites for open discussion of contested
and underrepresented issues—“has opened up international organization for the promulgation of
liberal human issues like human rights, ecological consciousness, immigration, globalization,
and gay identities.”
42
With regard to the question of Palestine, substantive discussion of the issue

40
Alma, Boston Palestine Film Festival audience member. Personal interview with the author. October
26, 2013.

41
Wong, Film Festivals, 163.

42
Ibid. 188.
95
from the Palestinian point of view has historically been restrained in the United States under the
very purview of “debate,” and the open discussion of Palestine within the greater American
public sphere has been tellingly absent. The organization of a Palestine specific film festival,
then, has greater social and political implications which reach far beyond the purview of merely
“art” or “culture,” and gesture to transformation of the American cultural climate with regards to
the issue of Palestine.
Boston has not been the only city wherein the Palestine-Israel conflict played itself out
through public transportation advertising. While discussing the significance of the BPFF’s
advertisements on the T, Alma related what was taking place in Boston to what had also been
taking place in San Francisco during this same period. Since the early 2000s, the San Francisco
Bay Area has played host to a visual culture-based tête-à-tête between the Israeli public relations
firm Blue Star and the anonymous guerrilla art collective Street Cred. In April 2010 a collective
of organizations—including Blur Star, the Consulate General of Israel to the Pacific Northwest,
the Israel Education Initiative, the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, and the LGBT Alliance of
the Jewish Community Federation—co-sponsored Out in Israel, a month-long film festival
designed to showcase “LGBT culture in Israel and Zionist perspectives."
43
The festival was an
example of Israeli pinkwashing, and the Out in Israel advertisements which graced San
Francisco’s public transit systems quickly became the target of Street Cred’s culture jamming
counter-campaigns, while the Out in Israel festival itself was picketed by members of Queers
Undermining Israeli Terrorism (QUIT).

43
The website for Out in Israel was taken offline shortly after the festival ended. However, the site is
preserved through the Internet Archive. "Welcome to Out in Israel."
http://web.archive.org/web/20100401044850/http://www.outinisraelsf.org/, accessed March 16, 2016.
96

Figure 6: Original Out In Israel publicity poster on the left and Street Cred's culture jammed version on the right.

Although Out in Israel was a one-off festival, Israeli pinkwashing has permeated other
realms of San Francisco’s LGBTQ film culture. Over the course of six years, what began as a
visual debate between Blue Star and Street Cred has developed into a coordinated cinematic
activism campaign. After Out in Israel, operating according to the boycott, divestment, and
sanctions (BDS) principles as outlined by the US Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel
(USACBI), QUIT began to lobby Frameline, the organization which produces the San
Francisco’s International LGBTQ Film Festival, asking the organization to decline financial
contributions from the Israeli consulate and to boycott the inclusion of pinkwashing films in its
programming. In the face of Frameline’s continued complicity with pinkwashing, including the
continued acceptance of funding from the Israeli government, in the summer of 2015 QUIT
97
premiered Outside the Frame: Queers for Palestine Film Festival, a free, three-day festival
running at the same time as Frameline 39 ’s (39
th
annual San Francisco International LGBTQ
Film Festival) opening weekend. Hosted at San Francisco’s Brava Theater. With 800 people in
attendance, myself included, Outside the Frame served as an alternative to Frameline39 and
showcased not only films focused on Palestine, but a variety of films by filmmakers who refused
to submit their films to Frameline in accordance with the boycott call. In the meanwhile, Street
Cred has continued its guerrilla art movement, with Frameline as one of many targets of the
collective’s culture jamming efforts.

Figure 7: Original Frameline37 publicity poster on the left and Street Cred's culture jammed version on the right.

Returning to the BPFF, the festival’s print advertisements have become a regular part of
Metro Boston’s seasonal advertising campaigns and are a point of pride for both the organization
and festival participants alike. In recent years, the festival has worked to maximize the benefits
of its advertisement’s popularity by taking participatory a approach to its publicity campaigns. In
the weeks ahead of opening night, the festival holds a competition through social media, wherein
potential festival participants are challenged to post pictures to Twitter and Facebook
documenting their encounters with the festival’s advertisements for a chance to win a pair of
98
tickets to the screening of their choice. As a form of participatory culture,
44
the BPFF’s social
media competition helps to further publicize the festival through social media while rewarding
participants for their interactive engagement with the festival beyond the time and space of the
festival itself.

Figure 8: Boston Palestine Film Festival Facebook post, October 9, 2015.

Just as the public transit advertisements draw audience members who otherwise may not
have been aware of the festival, or Palestine in general, the festival’s overall emphasis on visual
culture and performing arts draws people to participate in the festival’s production itself:

44
Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture (New York: Routledge,
1992).

99
Many of them [volunteers] came from non-activist backgrounds. They were just
interested in film and cinema and cared about Palestine enough to do it…many of
them were drawn to this because this was the least political—at least on the
surface—initiative. It was something that was cultural and engaging and exciting.
But it clearly had a political undertone.
45

Many of the present-day festival participants who were interviewed for this project reiterated the
importance of film’s visual elements in making the topic of Palestine more accessible to US
viewers and bringing people into awareness about Zionism and Israeli apartheid. Since the
1990s, a great body of scholarship has emerged dealing with the primacy of visuality, visibility,
and visual representations in the formation of culture, knowledge, and power relations. Scholars
such as WJT Mitchell, Nicholas Mierzoff, Susan Sontag, Ella Shohat, Robert Stam, Martin Jay,
and others have debated virtues of “the visual turn,” including visual culture’s capacity to stir
empathy, mobilize people to action, and as a tool for both democratization and domination. The
concept of “visual literacy” has also served as a useful means through which scholars have
explored the primacy of the visual, from understanding the import of painting in 15
th
century
Italy as a means of documenting social history, to the emphasis on visual pedagogy in
progressive education.
46
While certainly not unique to the contemporary moment nor the
American context, visual literacy in the United States has taken on new meaning in the new
millennium as screen culture has dominated many aspects of people’s social lives. In a moment
marked by the primacy of the visual, Palestinian visual culture has also served to lend legitimacy
to the issue of Palestine, as Suhail commented: "Palestinian cinema on any mainstream venue is

45
Suhail, Boston Palestine Film Festival former festival organizer. Personal interview with the author.
October 25, 2013.

46
Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: a Primer in the Social History
of Pictorial Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972); James Elkins, Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction
(New York: Routledge, 2003); Susan Shifin, “Visual Literacy in North American Secondary Schools:
Arts Centered Learning, the Classroom, and Visual Literacy.” Visual Literacy. James Elkins, ed., (New
York: Routledge, 2007).

100
nearly impossible. But now it’s considered a very current and important vehicle for
expression…People have begun to accept cinema as a genuine vehicle for speaking about these
issues. People are becoming more sophisticated in terms of watching documentaries."
47

Audience member Alma reiterated this point, stating: “I’ve noticed that people give legitimacy to
film in ways that they wouldn’t necessarily always give it to a personal narrative as told by a
person.”
48
In her efforts to form closer social bonds with new friends and coworkers, Alma
attempts to educate her peers about Palestine by sharing her own personal experiences of the life
under Israeli occupation. However, in the face of her American peers’ microaggressive disbelief
of her accounts and their denials of the validity of her experiences, Alma turned to film to
corroborate her experience and do that pedagogical work on her behalf. Palestinian cinema
became, in her words, “a way for me to tell my story without me telling it.” Alma made
particular note of the psychological dimensions of visual culture and its capacity to evoke
empathy within an otherwise uninformed or even contrary viewer:

“whatever images have been in their brain from their childhood or adulthood,
that’s what they connect it [Palestine] to…Maybe it’s cliché, maybe it’s sad that
I’m hoping that people will identify it [Palestine] with some other image of horror
that they’ve seen, but I find that those are the moments where people are like: oh
my god, this is horrible."
49

The process of identification which Alma describes enables a spectator to affectively
learn about the Palestinian people and by recalling their own experiences with or knowledge of

47
Suhail, Boston Palestine Film Festival former festival organizer. Personal interview with the author.
October 25, 2013.

48
Alma, Boston Palestine Film Festival audience member. Personal interview with the author. October
26, 2013.

49
Ibid.

101
trauma or state violence. In her discussion of Alexander Kluge and Oscar Negt’s theorization of
the public sphere as a “social horizon of experience,” Mariam Hansen writes of experience as
“that which mediates individual perceptions with social meaning; conscious with unconscious
processes, loss of self with self-reflexivity; experience as the capacity to see connections and
relations.”
50
This process of identification is reproduced through the spatial and social dynamics
of the festival, and is the thrust behind the festival’s goal of producing cultural connectivity.
Georgina described the tenor of the festival:
There’s a tremendous amount of excitement. There are people who haven’t seen one
another, old friends reconnecting at this event. People who come back every year....So
there’s this very strong sense of identification, of energy around being together. There’s
this real sense of community in the foyer of the MFA where people are milling around.
There’s almost an electric energy in the air as people come together before the film.
51

The importance of the social connectivity produced through the festival’s culture is not to be
discounted, especially in the wake of Oslo’s divisiveness and the post September 11
th
political
climate of the United States: Ruba also stated: “The festival was creating that community where
we who share the same politics can just be together, celebrating, and feeling like, you know,
we’re not isolated, we’re not freaks for what we think.”
52

While cultural connectivity works to build a sense of community around Palestinian
cultural politics, it is the coherence of this connectivity through visual and artistic means which
serves the festival’s other major goal: education. Seven of my interlocutors were active visual or
performing arts practitioners, several of whom have in one way or another contributed their

50
Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1991), 12-13.

51
Georgina, Boston Palestine Film Festival volunteer. Personal interview with the author. October 21,
2013.

52
Ruba, Boston Palestine Film Festival former organizer. Personal interview with the author. October 25,
2013.

102
creative skills or products towards the festival’s production. In the words of Jewish-American
filmmaker Rachel, “I really see myself as using storytelling as a way to humanize people that are
demonized. Also I find so much commonality between Jewish and Palestinian culture that I feel
like if people only opened their eyes, they would actually see it.”
53
Rachel’s documentary
screened during the 2013 festival, and she ascribed the compulsory Zionism she experienced
within her family and extended community as a symptom of what she referred to as “cultural
PTSD [Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder]” regarding the Holocaust.
Rachel had a specific audience in mind and made it a point to use her own family’s
experiences with the Holocaust as the framing device for her film: “I don't want to make a film
for people who already agree with me. I want to make a film for people who don't know anything
or who disagree with me. So they need a familiar face to invite them in.”
54
By drawing on her
own personal experience and juxtaposing her own family photos of her European Jewish
relatives who relocated to the United States with those of displaced Palestinians living in the
United States whom she interviewed for the film, Rachel leveraged the process of identification
to foment a from of what she called “visual learning,” for her viewers.
The humanization of the Palestinian people through this visual process of identification is
at the crux of the festival’s pedagogical aims. Lamia, another Palestinian audience member,
reiterated the importance of "the visual" in affecting a viewer and conjuring in them a conscious
comparison between a more familiar historical tragedy and the contemporary reality in

53
Rachel, Boston Palestine Film Festival audience member and filmmaker. Personal interview with the
author. October 23, 2013.

54
Ibid.

103
Palestine.
55
As an early childhood educator who values progressive education, Lamia believes in
a universal human desire to produce and consume art and culture as a way to make sense of the
human condition. Lamia referenced the short film Ismail, which screened at the 2013 BPFF, as
an example of how a film does not necessarily have to refer directly to politics in order to
represent the political plight of the Palestinian people. Ismail is a short fiction film based on the
experiences of Palestinian painter Ismail Shammout. Lamia commented on the role such a film
plays in humanizing the Palestinian people: “it's import to bring the awareness that the
Palestinians are humans, the Palestinians are artists, they're musicians and producers, they're
singers, they're actors, [and] they're politically in a place [situation] where they shouldn't be.”
56

The majority (fourteen) of my interlocutors referenced Palestinian cinema’s capacity to
humanize, personalize, or otherwise make the plight of the Palestinian people relatable to
American audiences. However, one of my interlocutors offered a critique of this humanizing
discourse. Former festival organizer Ruba expressed the sense of discomfort she feels in needing
to prove Palestinian humanhood: “in order for you to actually make a difference, you have to
touch these people in a place where they can relate to you as a human being. I mean, it’s very
demeaning for me to actually think in those terms. That I have to, you know, do this in order for
them to see me as an equal human being and to see Palestinians as worthy of their attention.
There’s a little bit of resentment there.” While she acknowledged the importance of
humanization and relatibility in the process of changing people’s attitudes towards and opinions
about Palestine, Ruba’s discomfort speaks to the extent to which compulsory Zionism in the US
has contributed to an unequal premise from which Palestinians and Palestine activists must make

55
Lamia, Boston Palestine Film Festival audience member. Personal interview with the author. October
20, 2013.

56
Ibid.
104
their case. Palestine activists must expend significant energy just to prove Palestinian
humanhood, something that should be taken as a given, before there can even be any substantive
consideration for the nuances of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Under such conditions, Palestine
activism becomes suspended in a regressive state, limiting the possibility for more progressive or
radical interventions. Understanding the hindrances imposed by compulsory Zionism is
important for understanding why the BPFF would take up the more characteristically liberal
multiculturalist aims of legitimizing and mainstreaming Palestine.
While most of my interlocutors agreed that the festival and the films showcased therein
serve an educational purpose, some of the festival organizers whom I interviewed were resistant
to the use of the word “political” in describing the festival. Many were wary of the relationships
between film as an educational tool and the festival as a political entity. Eileen, a festival
organizer, stated that she thinks the work done through arts organizing such as is done through
the festival, lies “somewhere between educational and political activism. It’s more than
educational. I think educational is too soft [of a word] and political activism is too strong [of a
word]…I think it’s somewhere in between the two.”
57
However, Eileen clarified that the work
performed through the films and the film festival constituted a form of “cultural resistance,”
which she defined as “opposing oppression through culture. Fighting back against oppression
through art, through poetry and film and literature and the power of the pen…I think it’s very
powerful and it’s just less direct, but it’s no less effective.” Festival organizer John further
distinguished between the role of the festival and the kinds of political or representational work
performed through the films: “As a festival entity, we definitely don’t take any political stances.
We basically say, ‘These films speak for themselves.’ We serve as a vehicle to enable their

57
Eileen, Boston Palestine Film Festival organizer. Telephone interview with the author. July 29, 2014.

105
showing and viewing, but the festival itself doesn’t make any political statements. The films
do."
58
The perception of a film as “political,” therefore, rests in the eye of the beholder. The
BPFF does not itself endorse any specific political parties or platforms, such as Fatah, Hamas, or
the BDS movement, but many of the films showcased in the festival represent a multitude of
implicit and explicit political stances and audience members are therefore left of their own
accord to infer political messages from the films they see. For example, during the festival’s 9
th

annual run in October 2015, the BPFF screened a set of films at the Cambridge Public Library
under the thematic heading of “Palestine Through an LGBT Lens.” The evening’s screening
consisted of Mondial, a short dramatic film about two gay Lebanese men on a road trip to
Ramallah, followed by Pinkwashing Exposed: Seattle Fights Back! A feature length
documentary by legal scholar and transgender activist Dean Spade, Pinkwashing Exposed
chronicled the story of how a local Palestine solidarity activist group in Seattle, WA, Queers
Against Israeli Apartheid (QuAIA), successfully lobbied the City of Seattle’s LGBT
Commission to cancel an Israeli-government sponsored pinkwashing event. In addition to
explaining what pinkwashing is, the film expressly advocates support for the BDS movement
while modeling how to execute a successful boycott on a local level. By drawing on interviews
with local LGBTQ activists, Palestinian-identified and otherwise, the film also illustrates why
queer cultural politics are indelibly linked to Palestinian cultural politics, once again
exemplifying why the process of identification is so important to the educational mission of the
festival’s practice of cinematic activism. While the BPFF abstains from taking a stance on BDS,
the screening of Pinkwashing Exposed clarifies the relationship between the festival and the

58
John, Boston Palestine Film Festival organizer. Personal interview with the author. December 14, 2013.
106
films, as described by Palestinian-American volunteer Suha: “Being involved in the festival is a
form of community, whereas the actual films themselves are a form of activism."
59

There is an overall understanding of the role of festival organizing as a softer method of
or vehicle for political activism, one that performs the work of representation, education, and
humanization. In fact, festival was recognized early on as an important venue for Arab American
activism, when in 2008 the Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC)
Massachusetts Chapter honored the BPFF with the Dedication to Activism Through Arts
Award.
60
But the festival also performs a different kind of work, that of legitimization through
institutionalization, or, in the words of Suhail, “the delicate approach of institutional [sic]
building and working behind the scenes” to dismantle the compulsory Zionism within American
culture and cultural institutions.
61

As discussed in Chapter 1, Boston is a city where compulsory Zionism had demonstrated
its institutional power through previous attempts to censor Palestinian cinema. One of the points
of contention during the Uprising controversy in 1991 revolved around the question of the ICA’s
abuse of its institutional power in defining the legitimacy and limits of freedom of expression of
artists hailing from underrepresented groups. In the case of the Boston Palestine Film Festival,
the venues which host and co-sponsor the festival—namely the Museum of Fine Arts, (MFA)
Harvard Law School, the Harvard Film Archive, and the Cambridge Public Library—provide the
institutional protection and power that is necessary to undertake the work of cinematic activism.

59
Suha, Boston Palestine Film Festival volunteer. Personal interview with author. October 20, 2013.

60
Boston Palestine Film Festival. “About: History,” accessed May 23, 2014,
http://www.bostonpalestinefilmfest.org/about/history/

61
Suhail, Boston Palestine Film Festival former festival organizer. Personal interview with the author.
October 25, 2013.

107
Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) serves as the BPFF’s co-presenter, meaning that it is the
festival’s largest sponsor and venue and BPFF organizers, volunteers, and audience members
alike remarked on the importance of MFA’s institutional status in making the festival’s success
possible. As Suha remarked, the MFA’s support of the festival is critical in “Giving it
[Palestine] a platform, creating a space where these things can be said.”
62
Just as Alma felt that
rendering the Palestinian experience cinematically lends legitimacy to the Palestinian cause, so
too do participants feel that the festival’s placement at the MFA lends legitimacy to the festival
and its overarching educational and representational goals:
"showing our films in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston lends a certain level of
legitimacy to what we’re doing…We hear from our community that the
legitimacy of being in the MFA is something they are very proud of.
63

One of the ways in which the MFA lends this legitimacy is through visual means. The MFA’s
signature logo figures prominently on all of the BPFF’s print materials—programs, posters,
banners—as well as online through the festival’s website and social media accounts, serving as,
in the words of Eileen, the "stamp of legitimacy" necessary for the festival’s success.
64
In
addition, the MFA’s film department publishes its own monthly film program, which is
distributed by mail to the institution’s members, and gives the BPFF a major publicity boost by
featuring the festival in its print program in the lead up to the festival.
The placement of the festival within the MFA not only lends institutional credibility to
Palestinian cinema and its cultural politics, in doing so Palestinian cinema is—once again—

62
Suha, Boston Palestine Film Festival volunteer. Personal interview with author. October 20, 2013.

63
Mary, Boston Palestine Film Festival organizer. Telephone interview with the author. November 23,
2013.

64
Eileen, Boston Palestine Film Festival organizer. Telephone interview with the author. July 29, 2014.

108
elevated to the level of “art.”
65
Suha comments: “In the MFA you have some of the greatest
pieces of art and history. So putting something like the Boston Palestine Film Festival right next
to these things kind of equalizes the importance and shows how important it is.”
66
BPFF’s
presence at the MFA also raises the festival and all that it represents to a comparable level with
other, more established festivals: “all of a sudden, you have a Palestine Film Festival that is on
the same footing as a Turkish Film Festival or a Jewish Film Festival or a French Film Festival.
It’s such a reaffirmation of its presence, the Palestinian presence."
67
Part of the work performed
through institutionalization concerns the representation and validation of Palestinian identity,
culture, and experience. In the words of Georgina, the MFA
is a cultural icon within the City of Boston, so it gives a kind of legitimacy and a kind of
recognition of the importance of Palestinian film and the Palestinian experience and
Palestinian identity, that couldn’t be had elsewhere. There is no other institution that
could house this festival that would give this community the same level of cultural
recognition and affirmation of their existence. This is so important in light of the fact that
so many Americans don’t even know where Palestine is.
68

The tensions around cultural validation and institutional legitimacy go beyond the local
social or cultural realm of the festival and its immediate participants and has a larger effect in
shaping the burgeoning Palestinian cinematic movement and its reception in the global film
market. Suhail, who has worked with several Palestine Film Festivals in the United States and
Canada, notes that these festivals have also raised the aesthetic bar for Palestinian cinema:

65
See previous chapter's discussion of Palestinian cinema and the Academy and Golden Globe Awards.

66
Suha, Boston Palestine Film Festival volunteer. Personal interview with author. October 20, 2013.

67
John, Boston Palestine Film Festival organizer. Personal interview with the author. December 14, 2013.

68
Georgina, Boston Palestine Film Festival volunteer. Personal interview with the author. October 21,
2013.

109
“One thing that Palestinian festivals have also done, is given filmmakers an
important venue to show their films, and put a thrust behind them to make more
cinema—not just make films, but make cinema. Many filmmakers were making
films, but they were not very cinematic. We’re saying, “Look, we’re doing this in
mainstream venues, in museums. Please make films of that caliber because we’re
tired of seeing the same old cinema verite dark shot of Bil’in.”
69

The festival program is composed of films selected through a competitive process. As a
competitive festival showcased within one of the nation’s premier art institutions, the festival
lends legitimacy to emerging Palestinian filmmakers who struggle to place their films in other
competitive festivals.
70
One organizer commented: “I think the film makers are also very proud
of the fact that they get a theatrical venue from there, rather than having it just at a university or
in some smaller screen somewhere."
71
And while the festival’s placement at the MFA benefits
burgeoning filmmakers who seek legitimacy within global cinema’s creative economy by
offering a prestigious venue to list on their curricula vitae, filmmakers must also grapple with the
ways in which the proliferation of Palestine Film Festivals has also contributed to a
“ghettoization” of Palestinian cinema. Mary pointed out: “The rise of Palestinian film festivals is
a good thing, because otherwise their films wouldn’t be shown in a mainstream venue in
America. But on the flip side, we’ve also become a sort of ghetto for Palestinian films. So I see it

69
Suhail, Boston Palestine Film Festival former festival organizer. Personal interview with the author.
October 25, 2013.

70
Marijke de Valck has discussed the process of festival competition and prize granting as a process of
legitimization, particularly for documentary films, as well as the content of those films. Valck, “Venice
and the Value-Adding Process.” Film Festivals.

71
Mary, Boston Palestine Film Festival organizer. Telephone interview with the author. November 23,
2013.

110
at a crux at this particular moment of our development as a festival…There is this dichotomy
here.”
72

The interrelated intentions to mainstream representations of Palestine and gain legitimacy
in order to educate a wider American audience fall under the rubric of “visibility politics.”
Visibility itself “is a power-laden project that has the effect of silencing critiques of state
violence and the structural inequalities that produce hatred and racism,” wherein objectification
is mistaken for inclusion.
73
An intellectual tension exists between the need and desire to make
Palestine and her people visible in light of her geographic and cultural erasure, and the effects
that such a visibility project entails. While scholars and activists alike may bristle at the word
“mainstream,” it would be difficult to argue against Palestine’s visibility without crossing into
the realm of compulsory Zionism. Although the intention to mainstream Palestine is laden with
problematic notions of inclusion and is suggestive of aspirations to normativity in very racialized
ways, I want to stress the fact that these words come directly from my interlocutors, festival
organizers, volunteers, and audience members alike. As problematic as a mainstreaming
discourse may be, we as scholars are obligated to sincerely listen to our archives and represent
our findings in transparent ways. A critique of the BPFF’s mainstreaming discourse must also be
reconciled with the relative success of PFF’s across the country, as measured by the
proliferation, longevity, and placement of festivals within powerful cultural institutions, such as
the MFA, the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago, and the Houston Museum of Art, at a time
when scholars and think tanks alike are publishing study after study which document the
suppression and censorship of Palestine activism throughout the United States. While a critique

72
Ibid.

73
Nadine Naber, “Introduction: Arab Americans and U. S. Racial Formation.” Race and Arab Americans
Before and After 9/11: From Invisible Citizens to Visible Subjects. Amaney Jamal and Nadine Naber,
eds., (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008), 3.
111
of the mainstreaming discourse can certainly coexist with support for the project of visibility, it
is important to recognize that by their very nature, “film festivals incorporate contradictory
impulses in their texts, audiences, and discussions.”
74
A practice of cinematic activism, not
unlike most other social movements, must always negotiate a number of intellectual, political,
and even ethical tensions.
For example, “legitimacy” and “mainstream” are themselves racialized categories, and
the BPFF exists within Metro Boston’s already racialized social and cultural landscape, which
begs the questions: what characterizes “the mainstream” and “legitimacy” for and in the eyes of
whom? Mary acknowledged the tension inherent in the festival’s aspirations for legitimacy
through its placement at the MFA: “[It] excludes, in some ways, communities that we want to
reach out to because the Museum is not a place where all communities actually feel welcome.
We try to address that in different ways—by having our free screenings, by having [them at]
libraries, acting with other festivals in Roxbury and different communities. Boston itself is
segregated in a lot of ways, too.”
75
In referencing “Roxbury” and “segregation,” Mary alludes to
Boston’s history of strained race relations, particularly between the city’s minority black
population and the white majority, which, to this day, remain largely segregated with regards to
neighborhoods.
76
While the MFA constitutes a mainstream venue and its institutional power
within the larger American arts and culture industry certainly lends Palestinian cinema a
semblance of artistic and cultural legitimacy, the BPFF’s placement therein precludes the

74
Wong, Film Festivals, 164.

75
Mary, Boston Palestine Film Festival organizer. Telephone interview with the author. November 23,
2013.

76
“Mapping Segregation.” The New York Times, July 8, 2015, accessed March 16, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/07/08/us/census-race-map.html.

112
participation of certain raced and classed groups, namely members of the black community and
poor people. As an organizer, Mary was cognizant of how the festival’s placement at the MFA
could potentially discourage participation by more socio-economically and racially diverse
audience, thus hindering the festival’s goal of disseminating Palestinian cinema to a truly
wider—and not simply whiter—audience. And of course, if the goal is for Palestinian cinema to
reach a wider audience, that too is in tension with the intention to gain broader cultural
connectivity, wherein “mainstream” means being taken up with dominant norms of whiteness,
masculinity, and heterosexuality.
If the festival’s aim is to disseminate Palestine to a mainstream, that is to say, white,
masculine, heterosexual, or otherwise dominantly normative audience, it also means coming to
terms with the dissemination of representations of Palestine which may reinforce existing
commonly held stereotypes about Palestinians that may or may not be simpatico with the project
of legitimacy. For example, both John and Alma expressed concern over the depiction of
“negative” representations of Palestinians, such as the case with films like Paradise Now or
Inheritance, which address themes such as suicide bombing, and sexism and patriarchy within
Palestinian society. Interlocutors were concerned with how such representations could
potentially be received by audience members who may already hold preconceived essentialized
notions of Palestinians as terrorists and misogynists.

Conclusion
What does it mean to mainstream Palestine? And is such an aim even possible? While
this dissertation does not argue that Palestinian cinematic activism has brought the issue of
Palestine to the American mainstream, nor have Palestinian-Americans received the kind of
113
representational privilege as those afforded to homonormative LGBT identified people.
However, this dissertation does provide some evidence of how representations and discussions of
Palestine have entered more mainstream arenas in ways that were previously sanctioned. For
example, as evidenced from Chapter 1, something as ambitious as a Palestine themed film
festival would not have been possible in the Boston area a mere decade before the BPFF was
launched given the cultural and institutional climates of compulsory Zionism which actively
barred Palestinian cinema from representing itself. And while the BPFF’s co-sponsorship with
the MFA is an indicator of the cultural shifts that have taken place since the 1990s, a question
remains over what is at stake in the attempt to mainstream of Palestine activism in the United
States. Put another way, what is gained and what is lost? For the Boston area in particular, the
BPFF’s increased visibility and sense of legitimacy are certainly victories in and of themselves
given the history of censorship which preceded the festival’s founding. Yet, the accomplishment
of those aims has also meant the potential foreclosure of relationships with other social justice
formations in the Boston area, such as the black and Latino communities or radical queer
activism. In this sense, this particular strain of Palestinian cinematic activism behind the BPFF is
following in much the same path as the San Francisco gay rights movement of the 1970s, the
birth of Frameline, and the subsequent advancement of a mainstream, homonormative LGBT
rights movement.
Meanwhile, the issue of Palestine is in fact being taken up within a variety of social
justice movements across the United States. For example, members of Black Lives Matter, a
movement which has gained momentum in its aims to bring awareness to and work to prevent
the widespread and lethal police brutality against black men and women in the United States,
have publically expressed solidarity with the Palestinian people and their shared struggles against
114
state violence and genocide. While the inclusion of this broader, and specifically inter-racial,
social justice coalition is not represented through, nor necessarily made welcome within, the
BPFF, there exists a greater recognition of the import of such solidarities as depicted through
diasporic Palestinian women’s filmmaking. The representation of ethnicity, race, and gender in
the construction of transnational Palestinian cultural politics, will be addressed, in part, in the
following chapter.
115
Chapter 3:
“I’ve been here all my life:”
Palestinian Women’s Filmmaking and the Representation of Diasporic Identity

In October 2014, I attended the sold out opening night screening of the 8
th
annual Boston
Palestine Film Festival at the Remis Auditorium in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The
headline film that evening was May in the Summer, the second feature length narrative film by
Palestinian-American director Cherien Dabis. Set in Amman, Jordan, the film tells the story of
May, a Palestinian-American writer living in New York City and preparing for her upcoming
wedding in Jordan to her Palestinian fiancé, Ziad, who is a leading academic in Islamic studies at
a US university. Throughout the film, we learn a series of facts about May’s existence: her
mother is Palestinian and her father is white and American; her mother is devoutly Christian and
although both May and Ziad are secular, Ziad comes from a Muslim family; born and raised
outside of Palestine and growing up in both Jordan and the United States, May has lived a
diasporic and transnational life. These circumstances combine to establish May’s subjectivity as
bifurcated and her social circumstances rife with cultural tension. A concern over cultural
authenticity is an undercurrent throughout the film and tensions around this issue are played up
throughout the film for comedic effect, especially as depicted through May’s relationships with
her two younger sisters, Yasmine and Dahlia. The opening night’s audience responded with
enthusiastic laughter to the almost-farcical portrayal of May, Yasmine and Dahlia, as they
negotiate their differences which have been thrown into sharp relief as they prepare for May’s
wedding.
Dabis participated—by way of a video conference call—in a post-screening question and
116
answer period that was largely dominated by women’s voices, many of whom conveyed heartfelt
gratitude to the director for bringing Palestinian women’s stories to the screen and making
diasporic experiences seen and heard. This feedback continued virtually on the BPFF Facebook
page the day after the screening, as Facebook user Gina Caliguri Kurban posted a comment in
reply to a promotional post about the film, writing: “May in the Summer was fabulous! The lead
actress who also wrote and directed the film is Palestinian-American—something to be truly
celebrated! Bravo and thank you BPFF!!” The comment that followed this enthusiastic reception,
however, represented a very different attitude toward the film, wherein Facebook user Sami Jitan
wrote: “May in the Summer was an OK film—not much to do with Palestine.” Jitan’s comment
suggests that perhaps Dabis’ film—which was not set in Palestine, nor did it explicitly depict or
address “politics”—was unworthy of headlining the Palestine Film Festival.
1
While this
comment can be viewed as an isolated opinion of a single audience member, another film in the
BPFF’s 2014 lineup, Tim Schwab’s Cinema Palestine (2013) also seemingly reflected Jitan’s
opinion. A documentary focusing on the rise of the Palestinian cinematic movement, Cinema
Palestine features clips from films by and interviews with burgeoning and well-established
Palestinian filmmakers and actors alike. Cherien Dabis—herself a diasporic subject—and her
films, however, are strangely absent from Schwab’s catalogue of Palestinian cinema. Dabis was
not the only diasporic filmmaker left out of Schwab’s homage; Zeina Durra, who identifies as
Bosnian-Jordanian-Lebanese-Palestinian and whose film The Imperialists Are Still Alive! was
nominated for the 2010 Sundance Grand Jury Prize,, was also absent from Cinema Palestine.

1
At some point after this virtual exchange took place, this entire Facebook post—along with the
comments—was deleted by the BPFF Facebook administrator. I had taken a screenshot of the original
post before it was deleted.
117

Figure 9: Deleted Boston Palestine Film Festival Facebook post and comments, October 17, 2014.

This chapter considers the ways in which struggles over diasporic Palestinian identity,
cultural authenticity, and self-determination play themselves out across the field of Palestinian
cinema through the interplay between filmic representations of Palestinian subjectivity and
concerns about genre and categorization. I argue that representations of Palestinian women’s
subjectivity in Palestinian women’s filmmaking critiques and “queers” the construction of
Palestinian cultural authenticity as predominantly represented in what Nurith Gertz and George
Khleifi have delineated as the fourth period of Palestinian cinema, namely films from 1980 to
present.
2
Films such as Salt of This Sea (2008) by Annemarie Jacir, Amreeka (2009) and May in
the Summer (2013) by Cherien Dabis, The Imperialists are Still Alive! (2010) by Zeina Durra,

2
Gertz and Khleifi, Palestinian Cinema, 30.
118
Inheritance (2012) by Hiam Abbas, and Villa Touma (2014) by Suha Arraf, pose a series
questions around the nature and meaning of “Palestine” and “Palestinian” as both identity and
genre categories, and the cultural, gender, and sexual politics that inform a person or film’s
relationship to it. Four out of these six films explicitly address diasporic subjectivity, and all
share one or more of the following themes in common: mixed race, interethnic, or interfaith love
affairs; transnational relationships; failed or broken marriages, courtships, and engagements; or
otherwise transgressive sexuality or relationships. While the relationships depicted in these films
may be heterosexual in nature, and May in the Summer is the only film to expressly reference
lesbian or gay sexuality, these representations offer politically and culturally queer twists on the
prevalent tropes of marriage and courtship that exist throughout the fourth period films, the most
famous examples of which are Wedding in Galilee (1987) by George Khleifi, Rana’s Wedding
by Hany Abu Assad, and Divine Intervention (2002) by Elia Suleiman. The analysis within this
chapter focuses primarily on three films—Salt of This Sea, Amreeka, and May in the Summer,
3
—
which I argue re-imagine Palestinian identity and cultural politics in ways that resist masculine
nationalism, promote transnational feminism, and put forth an alternative, even if impossible,
vision of Palestine’s future that resists a nation-state based solution and gestures towards a
horizon of queer cultural politics.
At the conclusion of Annemarie Jacir’s 2008 feature film Salt of This Sea, the film’s
protagonist, Soraya, is deported from Israel due to an expired visa. Asked by an Israeli security
officer, “Where are you from?” she replies, defiantly, “I’m from here.” He then asks, “How long

3
While I have screened all of these films at least once within the context of film festivals, most of these
films have limited or no distribution in the United States and are therefore difficult, if not impossible, to
access. Dabis and Jacir’s films have distribution—such as through popular streaming services Netflix—in
the United States and are thus accessible. My analysis of The Imperialists are Still Alive!, Inheritance,
and Villa Touma is based on my field notes while attending screenings at film festivals, or, as is the case
with Imperialists, when it was briefly available on Netflix from 2012 to 2013.
119
have you been here?” and she replies, “I’ve been here all my life.” This scene functions as a
retelling of the film’s opening scene, wherein upon arriving at the Tel Aviv airport, Soraya is
questioned and searched by Israeli security officials. In the opening scene, the viewer learns that
Soraya—played by Palestinian-American poet Suheir Hammad—is the US-born child of
Palestinian refugees. Soraya’s parents were born in a refugee camp in Lebanon but her family
originated in the Palestinian coastal city of Jaffa before they were forcibly expelled to Lebanon
in 1948 during the Nakba. These opening and closing scenes establish Soraya’s subjectivity as
quintessentially Palestinian in that her very presence at the airport—a borderland-space where
identities are surveilled, managed, and transported according to state classification—provokes a
profound sense of geopolitical anxiety for both the Palestinian subject and the Israeli state’s
security apparatus through which she must pass.
4
This particular form of political anxiety—and
the insecurity it stems from—unites Palestinians through their shared experiences of
dispossession, dispersion, and disenfranchisement. And yet, despite meeting this aforementioned
criteria which produce a sense of Palestinianness, Soraya is told repeatedly throughout the film
that her knowledge of and claims to Palestine as homeland are invalid, that she may feel
Palestinian but that is where her Palestinianness ends. This depiction of a Palestinian-American
woman’s attempt to return to and recuperate her family’s home illustrates how the conditions of
exile and return are informed by intersections of gender, sexuality, class, and race. The character
of Soraya and the myriad social conflicts she has throughout the film signifies the senses of
political and cultural queerness of Palestinian-American subjectivity in relation to
representations of Palestinian national identity as constructed in the four period of Palestinian
cinema.

4
Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, 1.
120
Until the emergence of filmmakers such as Jacir and Dabis, Palestinian cinema has
largely elided diasporic voices and has privileged spatial, social, and temporal proximity to the
materiality, experiences, and geography of historic Palestine in ways that shore up
heteronormativity and masculine ethnonationalism. In Salt of This Sea, Soraya’s character
represents the condition of diaspora Palestinians whose social, material, and geographic ties to
historic Palestine have been severed along lines of gender, sexuality, class, and culture. The rise
of Palestinian-American representations in film indicates a shift toward transnational queer
cultural politics within Palestinian women’s filmmaking that complicate and challenge the
discourse on national identity, its representation in film, and the role of cinema in the struggle for
Palestinian social justice. Here, “queer” does not signify LGBTQ sexuality or identity, but rather,
as serves as an analytical lens through which to understand non-normative “bodies, issues,
desires,” and the work they performing in “questioning normative articulations of the political
and the very process by which we determine as what counts as political.”
5
My use of “queer” is
also informed by Gayatri Gopinath’s theorization of the diasporic subject as the “queer” or odd
“other” to the proper, “authentic” national subject to illustrate the relationship between
Palestinians residing inside the boundaries of historic Palestine and those who live in exile.
6
I
frame these cultural politics as transnational in order to signify feminist solidarity, social
movement organizing, and politics among diasporic, Third World, and women of color that
recognizes and accommodates cultural and national difference.
7

5
Hochberg, “Introduction: Israelis, Palestinians, Queers: Points of Departure,” 497.

6
Gopinath, Impossible Desires, 11-13.

7
Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan. “Global Identities: Theorizing Transnational Studies of Sexuality.”
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 7, no. 4 (2001): 663–79.
121
Since 2008, a shift has been taking place within the Palestinian cinematic movement, one
that reinvents the existing tropes of marriage and social reproduction and exemplifies this sense
of transnational queer cultural politics. By introducing a new representation of the Palestinian
subject—namely that of diasporic Palestinian women living in the United States and Palestinian-
American identified women—the works of filmmakers Annemarie Jacir and Cherien Dabis
exemplify what I consider to be the emergence of a feminist genre in the Palestinian cinematic
movement. Such characters exist within narratives of tension over the place and meaning of
“home,” and call attention to competing ideas about national identity, belonging, access,
knowledge, and privilege within the transnational Palestinian community. Through a close
reading of Cherien Dabis’ Amreeka (2009) and Annemarie Jacir’s Salt of This Sea (2008), this
chapter examines how Palestinian-American women have been cinematically constructed as
socially, culturally, and politically queer, and how representations of home in contemporary
Palestinian cinema exemplify a larger tension between masculine nationalist identity politics and
transnational queer cultural politics that inform the experiences of diaspora Palestinians in
general, and Palestinian-American women in particular.
The idea of home within the Palestinian-American context is constructed through an
understanding of oneself as belonging to a diasporic Palestinian ethnic collectivity combined
with an imaginative process of identification with Palestine through transnational feminist
cultural politics. Unlike previous Palestinian films that have represented Palestinian national
identity either from within or directly adjacent to the geopolitical events and territory of historic
Palestine, Amreeka and Salt of This Sea draw on the “transnational condition”
8
of diasporic
Palestinians’ lives by narrating the story of Palestinian dispossession and national identification

8
Helena Lindholm Schulz and Juliane Hammer, The Palestinian Diaspora: Formation of Identities and
Politics of Homeland (New York: Routledge, 2003), 10.

122
from outside of the normative spatial, temporal, and social boundaries of historic Palestine. I
consider these films “queer” in both form and content in that to represent Palestine from the
point of view of diasporic women not only breaks away from the previously established norms in
Palestinian cinema, but in doing so puts forth a different set of cultural politics that also troubles
the norms of Palestinian national identity at large.
Although Palestinian identity is largely understood as always exilic,
9
it is not always
diasporic. For example, Palestinians living within the state of Israel and in the occupied
territories are exilic in that most are internally displaced yet remain within the territorial borders
of historic Palestine, while Palestinians in refugee camps in neighboring states or who have
resettled elsewhere throughout the world can be considered both exilic and diasporic. Palestinian
narrative films have historically emphasized the exilic nature of Palestinian subjectivity, but have
not always explicitly represented the diasporic or transnational subject. Furthermore, I suggest
that even those Palestinian films seeking to challenge certain real and imagined political and
cultural boundaries simultaneously reinscribe other boundaries along lines of race, class, gender,
and sexuality. In what follows, I contrast, for example, depictions of familial and romantic
relationships in films from the fourth period of Palestinian cinema, also called the “counter-
narrative” movement and those from the feminist intervention that is the focus of this chapter.
Edward Said described Palestinian narrative film as a counter-narrative in terms of its
“[resistance to] an imposed identity of terrorists [and] violent people]” and that it “provides a
visual alternative” that “stands against invisibility.”
10
What Said was referring to is the rise of
Palestinian narrative filmmaking from the 1980s to present, which has also been characterized as

9
Said, The Question of Palestine, xxviii.

10
Edward Said, “Preface.” Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema. Hamid Dabashi, ed. (New York:
Verso, 2006), 3.

123
the Fourth Period of Palestinian cinema.
11
The counter-narrative has consistently privileged
representations of heteronormativity as the path to justice, through plotlines that revolve around
weddings and courtships. In contrast, in the works of Palestinian women filmmakers such as
Dabis and Jacir, divorces, illicit love affairs, and broken off engagements abound, and these
representations indicate how Palestinian women filmmakers re-articulate the cultural politics of
Palestine in queer and feminist ways. Such films prompt the Palestinian cinematic movement to
revisit the question of what it means to represent Palestine and how those representations inform
and enforce powerful ideas about who belongs in the social and territorial categories of
“Palestinian.”
From Counter-Narrative to Queer Diaspora
In order to understand how Salt of This Sea and Amreeka represent queer cultural politics,
it is necessary to understand what exactly these films are shifting away from—in other words,
how do they challenge the assumptions of a genre that has, itself, historically pushed for critical,
emancipatory representations? I will first explain the ways in which Palestinian national identity
has been historicized, then move into a discussion of how the counter-narrative movement has at
times subscribed to and contraindicated that construction. It is widely understood within
Palestine studies that for Palestinians, the founding of the state of Israel in 1948 produced shared
experiences of dispossession, geopolitical insecurity, exile, and collective trauma that now serve
as the contemporary foundations from which Palestinian national consciousness constitute an
imagined community.
12
However, Rashid Khalidi historicized the development of Palestinian
national consciousness in terms of “overlapping senses of identity” that predated 1948 and his

11
Gertz and Khleifi. Palestinian Cinema.

12
Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, 1.

124
work has been integral to discrediting the notion that Palestinian national consciousness is
simply form of counter-nationalism in reaction to the founding of the Israeli state. Khalidi
illuminated how Palestinian national consciousness and identity has primarily been rooted in an
historical and material relationship to the land of Palestine, and that Palestinian national
consciousness should be viewed no differently than other indigenous national movements that
developed simultaneously in Asia and Africa during the post World War 2 decolonial era. While
the very facts of dispossession and dispersion emphasize how the exilic condition are integral to
the development of Palestinian national identity, Palestinian national consciousness has thus
been primarily theorized through the Palestinian subjects’ historic relationships with
territorialized geopolitical spaces, centering the space of historic Palestine as the anchor point
from which Palestinian national identity unfolds.
13

Since the 1980s, a great body of Palestinian narrative film has steadily been growing,
one that reflects these scholarly articulations of Palestinian national identity. Scholars such as
Edward Said, Hamid Naficy, and Hamid Dabashi have hailed films by Elia Suleiman, Hany Abu
Assad, and Michel Khleifi as producers of a counter-narrative cinema that combat the negative
representations of Palestinians in Hollywood and Israeli films, and put forth self-representations
of Palestinian “collective identity.”
14
The counter-narrative movement has largely reproduced
representations that cohere to the geopolitical and territorially based construction of Palestinian
identity, exemplified by the works of Michel Khleifi, Elia Suleiman, Rashid Masharawi, Ali
Nasser, and Hany Abu Assad, to name a few. Up until recently, the fourth period of Palestinian
cinema has largely been dominated by men. While some of the earliest films in the counter-

13
Ibid.

14
Said, “Preface.” Dreams of a Nation.

125
narrative movement centered their stories around women, such as Khleifi’s Wedding in Galilee,
Suleiman’s Divine Intervention, and Abu Assad’s Rana’s Wedding, even those films that feature
women’s stories are limited to the trope of heterosexual marriage and courtship. Still, many of
these films have served to recuperate the Palestinian cinematic image by challenging the racist
constructions of Palestinians in mainstream Hollywood and Israeli cinema. While it would be
easy for a counter-narrative movement to solely rely on “positive” portrayals of Palestinians,
these films depict more complicated representations of Palestinian subjectivity that fall outside of
a positive/negative binary by simultaneously resisting, correcting, and incorporating Palestinian
stereotypes. For example, in Hany Abu Assad’s Academy Award nominated Paradise Now, the
stereotype of the Palestinian suicide bomber is not rejected, but rather is embraced and recast in a
more complex, multidimensional light in order to contextualize and humanize Palestinian men
and their emotional and moral struggles over their circumstances.
By contrast, the films such as Jacir’s Salt of This Sea, Cherien Dabis’ Amreeka, and Zeina
Durra’s The Imperialists Are Still Alive! are rife with representations of what Gayatri Gopinath
has theorized as the “queer diaspora,” or what she defines in part as “ a mode of resistant
feminist cultural practices that prevents the reconstitution of patriarchal…masculinity and
disturbs the space of the heternormative home.”
15
Scholars such as Helga Tawil-Souri and Carol
Fadda-Conrey have taken up Palestinian women’s filmmaking and the representation of
women’s experiences to interrogate the gendered dimension—and limitations—of Palestinian
cultural politics, particularly around issues of belonging, the homeland, and the right of return.
While important and necessary work has been done through the counter-narrative movement in
terms of complicating the image of Palestinians in cinema, little critique exists with regard to the
movement’s gendered and spatialized representations of Palestinian identity nor the ways in

15
Gopinath, Impossible Desires, 10.
126
which the very construction of “counter-narrative” produces a set of problematic binaries. The
first binary of stereotypical Israeli and Hollywood representations versus the more “authentic”
Palestinian counter-narrative is problematic in its temporal construction. The very construction
of “counter” denotes something as corrective and revelatory, which entrenches one category in a
temporally specific and progressive relationship to the other: hegemonic stereotype first and
counter-narrative second. Just as Khalidi historicized Palestinian national identity as independent
of Israeli, I want to think about Palestinian cinema on its own terms as well; that is, as a form of
cultural production that is not merely a reaction to “bad” representations in Israeli or Hollywood
cinema. The counter-narrative construct, combined with the ways in which postcolonial and
Third World cinemas have been especially vulnerable to the “burden of representation,” wherein
a representation of one is taken as an allegorical representation for all, ultimately undermines the
emancipatory ethos of the Palestinian cinematic movement.
16

This binary has also reified the space of historic Palestine as sole container within which
Palestinian national identity originates, ultimately privileging a spatial and temporal proximity to
historic Palestine as the basis for the construction of a revelatory, corrective, and “authentic”
Palestinian subject. With the exception of Georg Khleifi’s Wedding in Galilee—which depicts
women’s homoeroticism—the counter-narrative cinema has largely represented Palestinian
national subjectivity as unquestioningly heterosexual, often masculine, and always already inside
the geopolitical boundaries of historic Palestine and temporality proximate to the Nakba. For
example, critically acclaimed Palestinian films such as Elia Sulieman’s Divine Intervention and
Paradise Now by Hany Abu Assad have visualized Palestinian national consciousness by
emphasizing Palestinian character’s confrontations with the territorialized geopolitical spaces of

16
Ella Shohat and Robert Stam. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. (New York:
Routledge, 1994), 182.
127
the occupied West Bank and the state of Israel. In this way, the counter-narrative construction
homogenizes Palestinian identity by producing a static image of the Palestinian who is always
already inside Palestine, a representation that fails to account for the reality that most
Palestinians are exiled from the geopolitical space of historic Palestine. Such singular
representation enacts an epistemic violence against the heterogeneous diasporic population in
that it serves to further exile diasporic Palestinians who exist far outside of the space of historic
Palestine and the immediate temporality of its dispossession. The counter-narrative therefore
produces a second binary: the “authentic” counter-narrative Palestinian subject versus the
multiplicity of geographically dispersed and socially fragmented Palestinians who do not meet
the spatio-temporal standards represented by the counter-narrative subject.
Spatio-temporal boundaries are not the only parameters being patrolled in these
representations. Elia Suleiman’s films are widely recognized as integral to the development of
the counter-narrative movement, in large part due to how Suleiman utilizes deadpan humor and
slapstick as a way to challenge Hollywood and Israeli cinematic stereotypes of Palestinians as
violent terrorists. In Divine Intervention (2002), Suleiman’s satirical depictions of romantic
encounters at, through, and prevented by Israeli military checkpoints draw on particularly
heteronormative anxieties about the viability of a Palestinian nation. With the nuclear family
serving as a metonym for the nation, it is no coincidence that marriage is a major trope in
Palestinian cinema. Stories about marriage arose at the advent of the Palestinian cinematic
movement with Michel Khleifi’s Wedding in Galilee (1987) and have since become a central
trope for Palestinian narrative films such as Hany Abu Assad’s Rana’s Wedding (2002),
Inheritance (2012) by Hiam Abbasa, and Cherien Dabis’ May in the Summer (2013). Suleiman’s
128
Divine Intervention plays with this trope by showing the preamble to the Palestinian marriage:
the occupied courtship.
Divine Intervention illustrates the exilic status of even those Palestinians living within
occupied Palestine by depicting a love story unbounded by modern geopolitics, colonialism, or
military occupation, a love story that trespassed the constructed geopolitical boundaries that have
interrupted the once contiguous historic Palestine. The film centers on a love affair between a
Palestinian man and woman who must traverse through an Israeli checkpoint in order to spend a
few precious minutes together. Although the action of the film trespasses the territorial
boundaries of the occupied territories, the general space is imagined as contiguous based on its
previous history as Palestine. As such, the lover's romantic trespass in fact comes to represent a
form of resistance to occupation and colonialism and a recuperation of historic Palestine through
an investment in social reproduction. While Divine Intervention has been read as a radical film
for the use of humor and magical realism to disrupt Palestinian stereotypes, the film’s emphasis
on star-crossed love re-inscribes heteronormativity and social reproduction as the path to
Palestinian justice. The checkpoint represents the obstacle to Palestinian romantic love and its
terminus: marriage and family. Divine Intervention speaks to how the occupation not only
interrupts the territorial continuity of a would-be nation-state, but interferes with the continuity
of Palestinian social reproduction, which is ultimately an anxiety about the failure to reproduce a
sovereign nation-state. Within the context of genocidal state violence and settler-colonialism,
Palestinian reproduction can be seen as a method of resistance: to reproduce is to survive.
However, the anxiety undergirding the love stories of these films operates from a specifically
129
heteronormative premise, where heterosexuality is both assumed and compulsory for the
liberation and self-determination of Palestine.
17

In contrast, where the counter-narrative movement is largely characterized by the trope of
marriage, the feminist cinema offers a queer twist on this same theme. Characterized by the
failure of heterosexual and ethnonational romantic relationships, Palestinian feminist filmmakers
reinvent the trope of marriage through new stories about divorce (Amreeka), quarrels and break
ups (Salt of This Sea), failed engagements May in the Summer), LGBT identity (May in the
Summer), and mixed race, inter-ethnic, or interfaith love affairs (Amreeka, May in the Summer,
The Imperialists are Still Alive!, Inheritance), and these films often conclude with the figure of
the unmarried diasporic Palestinian woman. For example, although Salt of this Sea also revolves
around a heteronormative love story between Soraya and Emad, the romance ultimately fails due
to the couple’s fundamental disagreements over not only the meaning of Palestine but the
methods of resisting occupation and apartheid. The gendered representations exemplified by the
works of Dabis and Jacir do not simply reflect shifting representations and conceptualizations of
Palestinian identity, but indicate how Palestinian-Americans re-articulate the cultural politics of
Palestine through queer and feminist attitudes and practices. These films interrogate what it
means to represent Palestine and how ask us to consider how those representations inform and
enforce ideas about who belongs in the category of “Palestinian” and how to attain Palestinian
justice.
As the sections that follow will elaborate, representations like those found in Salt of This
Sea and Amreeka fall outside of the gender, spatial, and temporal norms set by the counter-
narrative cinema while also disrupting additional social norms such as compulsory

17
Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Feminist Theory: A Reader. 3rd
ed. Wendy Kolmar and Frances Bartkowski, eds., (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2009), 290-293.
130
heterosexuality and ethnocentrism. When examined through a queer theoretical lens, counter-
narrative cinema can largely be understood as a nationalist cinema, whereas cinematic
representations that stray from the spatio-temporal confines of historic Palestine not only
represent the diaspora, but constitute a form of cultural queerness in relation to that nationalist
cinema. It is through an interrogation of this latter binary that I examine what I consider a
feminist turn within Palestinian filmmaking.
Queering Palestinian Identity Politics: A Framework for Cultural Politics
In the last decade, several Palestinian women have introduced a distinctly diasporic
identity discourse to the rapidly growing body of Palestinian narrative film. Films such as Salt of
this Sea (2008) by Annemarie Jacir and Amreeka (2009) by Cherien Dabis feature characters
who were born and raised outside of spatio-temporal boundaries of historic Palestine and whose
identification as Palestinian originate from a sense of belonging to a diasporic ethnic collectivity
and an intellectualized and imaginative identification with Palestine and her cultural politics,
instead of a material or geographic experience of historic Palestine and its dispossession. Both
films were independently produced by female filmmakers and center their stories on the lives of
diasporic Palestinian women and the challenges those women face in articulating, claiming, and
reconceptualizing their identification with Palestine. These films represent a departure from the
counter-narrative’s privileging of a heteronormative and masculine-centered national identity
and a shift toward a centering of queer diasporic and transnational feminist cultural politics that
account for the ways in which intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality inform the
diaspora’s relationship to historic Palestine.
“Queer” becomes a useful analytic for deconstructing the norms within the discourse on
Palestinian identity politics, understanding the shifting representations in these diasporic films,
131
and for exploring the social power relations across the transnational Palestinian diaspora that are
reflected in the differences between the counter-narrative movement and the feminist turn. The
counter-narrative cinema is distinguished in that it supplants the hegemonic Western stereotypes
with a set of self-representations of Palestinian subjectivity, yet representations that still adhere
to other hegemonic social norms such as compulsory heterosexuality, gendered divisions of
labor, and social reproduction as a metonym for nationalism. The characters in Salt of this Sea
and Amreeka represent the “queer diaspora”—by which I mean how the diasporic subject has
been elided as the “queer other” to the proper, “authentic” national subject.
18
The conception of
queer diaspora is useful for making sense of intra-Palestinian tensions over the legitimacy and
primacy of certain forms of Palestinian representation over others, as well as the diasporic
feminist filmic movements’ refusal to adhere to a heteronormative and masculine nationalist
telos of liberation.
Utilizing “queer” as a method of analysis serves two purposes: to identify that which
subverts, resists, or fails to uphold hegemonic norms in terms of race, nation, gender, sexuality,
and class, while also signifying the radical and imaginative potentialities that are foreclosed
within the normative social and cultural realms. I draw upon queer theoretical critiques of the
ways in which “liberation” is objectified as a finite material object in favor of understanding
liberation as an ongoing set of social processes and practices towards a social justice horizon.
19

This notion of queer not as object but as objective emphasizes the role of the imagination in
conceptualizing the future of Palestinian justice. The imagination itself, in turn, must be

18
Gopinath, Impossible Desires, 10.

19
Jose Esteban Munoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York
University Press, 2009). Spade, Dean, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and
the Limits of Law (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2011).

132
understood as a “social practice” and thus becomes a useful analytic through which to understand
the psychic linkages between ideology and identity formation, or the site where a “rich, complex,
agent-driven and ongoing working-out of affinity”
20
takes place. I am not trying to discount the
very real and necessary attachment to the geographic and territorial recuperation of historic
Palestine, in the denial of territorialized home or absence of material place. Rather, I emphasize
the imagination as “place” where diasporic Palestinians can maintain and affirm their Palestinian
identification despite potentially being elided from future state-based and material forms of self-
determination and reparation, as evidence by Soraya’s statement, “I’ve been here all my life,” at
the conclusion of Salt of This Sea. This understanding is not intended to discount the effects of
colonialism and apartheid on the material circumstance and social relations of Palestine and
Palestinians, but rather seeks to emphasize how diasporic constructions of Palestinian identity
are not always automatically tethered to the territorialized space of historic Palestine and
illuminate the processes that diaspora Palestinians undergo to maintain, affirm, and articulate
their Palestinianness.
Amreeka and Salt of This Sea demonstrate a queer diasporic consciousness that ultimately
complicates Palestinian conceptions of home and belonging, resists the heteronormative
nationalist privileging of spatio-temporal proximity to historic Palestine, in a sense advancing a
set of queer and feminist cultural politics that emphasize “differentiation, relationality, and
linkage”
21
as a way to critique heterosexist and ethnocentric genealogies and the hierarchical
privileging of a singular representation over a multiplicity of others. An emphasis on cultural
politics over hierarchical identity politics serves to critique the prevailing social understanding of

20
Max Haiven and Alex Khasnabish, “What Is the Radical Imagination? A Special Issue,” Affinities: A
Journal of Radical Theory, Culture, and Action 4, no. 2 (2010): iii,
http://affinitiesjournal.org/index.php/affinities/article/view/70.

21
Shohat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism, 48.
133
Palestinian national consciousness and the ways in which it reifies conceptions of who is an
authentic Palestinian subject, and ultimately who is entitled to material benefits of any future
Palestinian justice. If the identity politics of the counter-narrative cinematic movement reifies
historic Palestine as the center from which Palestinian identity unfolds, the queer-feminist
movement imagines Palestinian nationhood—through diasporic subjects—as a polycentric
constellation structured by shared cultural politics.
Relational Home-making in Amreeka
Directed by Palestinian-American filmmaker Cherien Dabis, Amreeka (2009) is the story
of Mona and her son Fadi who emigrate to the United States from the West Bank, Palestine. The
two arrive in suburban Illinois at the home of Mona’s sister, Raghda. Set in 2003 at the start of
the Iraq War, the story revolves around Mona and Fadi’s difficulty assimilating to the cultures of
both middle America and Arab America, and follows the two as they negotiate their differences
and adapt to their new hybridized lives as Palestinian-Americans. Although as unassimilated
immigrants Mona and Fadi can arguably be considered culturally queer in relation to both
mainstream US and Arab-American cultures, the character of Salma—Fadi’s cousin, played by
Alia Shawkat—exemplifies how Palestinian-American identity is not only constructed around a
sense of Palestinianness that is politically, culturally, and racially queer within the context of the
United States. Salma’s character is positioned as the point of contention between the regulating
agent of Arab-American cultural authenticity on the one hand, and performing the cultural
politics of Palestine on the other, resulting in two competing conceptions of the location and
meaning of home in the Palestinian-American context. Salma’s gendered relationship to her
family members is important to understanding her dual role as keeper of and threat to Palestinian
cultural authenticity in diaspora: she is simultaneously a social chaperone to her newly emigrated
134
cousin, Fadi, yet also a threat to her parent’s “articulation of Arabness” in diaspora.
22
Dabis’s
representation of Salma can be seen as a representation of a double bind for young Palestinian-
American, as Salma is simultaneously obligatory for and a threat to Fadi’s integration into the
Palestinian-American social landscape. She must reconcile the expectations of her immigrant
family in relation to her position as a Palestinian-identified American in US society, and the
conflicts she engages in speak to the processes through which Palestinian-American identity is
constructed relationally.
The conception of home as an imaginative process of identification is especially relevant
to Palestinian-Americans for whom the concept of home must be negotiated between their
racialized positionality inside the US and nationalist Palestinian identity politics that reify
geographic and political territory as a basis for identity. Amreeka affords a more sustained
example of how the meaning of home is especially complicated within the Palestinian-American
context. For Palestinian-Americans, claiming home is not only complicated by the exilic
subjectivity shared by all Palestinians, but also requires a confrontation with the politics of
claiming home from inside the heart of US empire. Several factors complicate Palestinian-
American senses of home. First, although Palestinian American subjectivity is arguably the result
of forced migration, as victims of Israel’s (US-subsidized) settler-colonial project, Palestinian
Americans must reconcile the ways in which their resettlement in the Americas is enabled by
European and American settler-colonialisms, or how their own transnational subjectivity
functions as a form of neocolonialism.
23
Second, although Palestinian-Americans are politically

22
Nadine Naber defines “articulations of Arabness” as being “grounded in Arab histories and sensibilities
about family, selfhood, and ways of being in the world” that take shape as reverse Orientalism, wherein a
rigid binary exists between “good Arab” culture and “bad American” culture. Naber. Arab America, 6-8.

23
Grewal and Kaplan, “Global Identities: Theorizing Transnational Studies of Sexuality,” 663–79.

135
privileged in terms of their status as US residents and citizens, an exclusive focus on that
privilege whitewashes Palestinian-American experiences without taking into account the
processes and consequences of Arab racialization within the US racial stratification.
If the mainstream social conception of home in the United States is delineated as a
geopolitical signifier of “citizenship,” then “home” is closely linked to a sense of belonging to
the dominant national culture. Although the history of Arab racial formation in the US has
administratively relegated Arabs to the racial category of “white,” Arabs in the United States
have simultaneously been racialized as enemies of the United States.
24
Arab racial formation in
the US is important to understanding how a sense of ambivalence and un-belonging in the face of
American racism has contributed to the construction of “Arab American” identity as inherently
transnational,
25
contributing to a shared political consciousness regarding the circumstances of
colonialism and imperialism that informs the bifurcated condition of Arab-American lives, and
ultimately producing a sense of pan-Arab-Americanness.
26
In Amreeka, the identity politics
represented through the character of Salma are exemplary of how processes of racialization
produce a profound sense of Arab unbelonging in America. Yet Arab racialization also forges an
Arab-American identification with people of color despite their juridical racial formation as
“white” in the eyes of the US state. Films such as Amreeka then serve as a powerful medium
through which a particular set of Arab-American social justice solidarities—namely what Nadine

24
Sarah Gualtieri historicized Arab racial formation throughout the 20
th
century and Evelyn Alsultany
addresses how Arabs and Muslims are represented in the media as racialized enemies of the US nation
who cannot be considered at "home" in the US. Gualtieri, Between Arab and White; Alsultany, Arabs and
Muslims in the Media.

25
Gualtieri, Between Arab and White, 14–16, 163, 194n44.

26
Ibid., 167.

136
Naber has theorized as a "diasporic Arab feminist anti-Imperialism”—are

performed and
circulated.
27

The dramatic conflict in Amreeka revolves around Salma’s negotiations between her
adherence to and performance of Palestinian cultural politics, indicating a competition between
differing conceptions of home. Salma’s conflict with her mother revolves around what Nadine
Naber has characterized as an Arab-American “politics of cultural authenticity,” or, the
“narrative of Arabness that prescribes what is respectable and what is stigmatized, what is
normal and what is deviant.”
28
Put another way, Salma’s behaviors are closely surveilled and
regulated within the Palestinian-American home-space according to what is constructed as
culturally authentic behavior. This ultimately manifests as Ragdha’s assertion of the space of the
Palestinian-American home as an extension of the Palestinian national territory.
Salma and Raghda’s differing conceptions of home and conflict over the social norms of
that concept come to a dramatic head in their confrontation around Salma’s behavior outside of
the home space. In one scene, after Salma and Fadi spend a typical suburban evening smoking
marijuana with Salma’s African-American boyfriend, James, the two sneak back into their
suburban home only to be accosted by their mothers. Although Salma lies to hide the fact that
she and Fadi had both been smoking and socializing with a young man of color, Raghda grounds
her nonetheless, judging Salma’s perceived Americanization as justification for the punishment.
Salma, outraged by her mother’s refusal to comprehend and respect the different contexts of their
experiences, proclaims: “Here’s a shocker, mom, we live in America, we’re American!” To
which Raghda replies: “Listen, habibti [my love], as long as you live in this house you live in
Palestine!” This conflict is indicative of Ragdha’s spatial reconceptualization of Palestine in

27
Naber, Arab America.

28
Ibid. 13.
137
diaspora. Through Raghda, Palestine is constituted as spatially relational, not territorially
rooted.
29
For Raghda, the space of Palestine consists not just a singular, territorially bounded
place, but rather as diasporic clusters that are made material through the imaginative construction
of the home as the protective housing for the family—and by extension the nation in diaspora.
Put another way, the Palestinian-American house acts as diasporic satellite to the hub of historic
Palestine while the parental unit serves as proxy governors in charge of managing the subjects of
the Palestinian nation in diaspora. Such a conception still relies on the territory of historical
Palestine as referent, yet invokes a radical re-imagining of Palestinian territoriality not as
singular and fixed but as multiple and mobile. Raghda’s Palestine is, in a word, constellational.
Raghda and Salma’s intergenerational conflict over both the meaning and the place of Palestine
revolves around the structure of the house and the family's movements and behaviors within and
outside of it. Unlike Raghda, who understands herself as Palestinian and expresses that
identification by extending the territorialized realm of Palestine to the constellational space of
the home, Salma’s understanding of herself as Palestinian-American is expressed in terms of her
social and cultural context.
While Amreeka’s constellational representation of Palestinian identification is still
different from the spatially and temporally bounded counter-narrative representations, Raghda’s
outrage over Salma’s behavior echoes the anxieties about social reproduction that are present in
the counter-narrative cinematic movement. Within Raghda’s satellite Palestine, Salma’s
identification as Palestinian through cultural politics position her as politically queer in relation
to her territorially disciplined mother. Raghda is invested in reproducing Palestine in diaspora by
regulating her daughter’s social interactions and the enforcement of cultural authenticity that

29
I am borrowing the language of “relation” and “root” from Edouard Glissant. Edouard Glissant, Poetics
of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing, (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 142-142.
138
serves greater ethnonationalist aims. In contrast, Salma rejects ethnonationalism and instead
asserts her Palestinian-American identity by cultivating a shared set of cultural politics that are
invested in inter-ethnic, anti-racist consciousness and political pedagogy.
Salma’s resistance to the politics of cultural authenticity does not come in the form of a
rejection of her Palestinianness, but in fact manifests as an increased performance of Palestinian
cultural politics outside the home. Salma’s performance of Palestinian cultural politics comes out
especially forcefully as she challenges the racial, political, and gender norms of her high school
classroom in Middle America. In a scene in Salma and Fadi’s classroom, Salma defends her
cousin against racist remarks while also challenging her white male classmate’s assumptions
about the Middle East, ultimately drawing attention to herself from not only her peers, but her
teacher as well. Salma’s performance of Palestinian cultural politics, marked by her willingness
to challenge and reeducate her peers, makes Salma susceptible to what Naber has theorized as
“internment of the psyche,” or “a sense that one might be under scrutiny…[by] invisible arbiters
of the legality and normality of behavior, rendering [one] vulnerable to the ‘truths’ contrived by
the state.”
30
Employing Naber’s theory here is especially useful for understanding how the
histories of US subsidized settler-colonialism in Palestine and Arab racial formation in the US
converge to produce Palestinian-American identity that is largely constructed through political
consciousness, wherein the “space” of the psyche for Palestinian-American youth is actually a
space of internment as they attempt to negotiate the racial, gender, and class norms of US society
and the regulating forces of Arab-American politics of cultural authenticity.
In Amreeka, the cultural and political queerness of Palestinian-American subjectivity is
made clear as Salma struggles between her immigrant mother’s articulations of cultural
authenticity and the performance of cultural politics necessary to simultaneously fulfill that

30
Ibid., 40.
139
cultural authenticity. Through her outspoken political debates in her high school classroom,
Salma upholds the Arab-American project of political pedagogy while negotiating surveillance
not only by the US state—as represented by her public school teacher who is in charge of her
scholastic evaluation—but also by her immediate family. Surveilled on all fronts, Salma’s
“home” then is actually confined to the psychic space of her imaginative and intellectualized
sense of belonging that she claims in the United States. Salma and Raghda’s conflict over the
meaning of home is indicative of their competing identity politics, and furthermore, the
legitimacy—and in fact primacy—of those politics. Home then comes to represent a site of
intellectual struggle between diasporic Palestinian cultural politics and the imaginative
reterritorialization of the Palestinian homeland in diaspora.
One of the facets that signifies Palestinian-American cultural politics is the way in which
that political consciousness is utilized to cultivate inter-ethnic solidarity with people of color.
Salma’s contested sense of home functions as an inroad to socio-political solidarity with people
of color in the United States, a relationship that has at times been contested due to Arab-
American racial formation as “white.” In a scene that takes place after a tense political moment
in their classroom, amid the geographic homogeneity of the suburban Midwestern landscape,
Salma and Fadi clarify their cultural politics as anti-racist and invested in solidarity with people
of color. Salma, Fadi, and James, free of parental, peer, and scholastic surveillance, traverse the
flat and empty Midwestern landscape while sorting out the politics of their lives. The trio stand
on the side of the highway next to wide-open farmland discussing the classroom conflict and the
ignorance of their white male classmates. Salma and James, chiding Fadi for what Salma’s
younger sister has characterized as his “fresh off the boat” style and demeanor, teach Fadi how to
perform a racialized Americanness by sagging his pants and mimicking a hip-hop inspired strut,
140
all the while chanting “Go Fadi! Go Fadi!” This scene is reflective of the ways in which Arab
American youth, and especially Palestinian American youth, have identified with the subversive
ethos of hip-hop culture and produced their own brand of “political pedagogy” through youth
culture. In this moment, Salma, Fadi, and James signal their allegiance to inter-ethnic coalition
building by simultaneously performing multi-ethnic hip-hop culture alongside their shared
critique of the white hegemony that informs their social experiences.
Reclaiming Home in Salt of This Sea
Salt of This Sea (2008), the first feature film by Palestinian director Annemarie Jacir,
portrays the gender and class complexities of the diasporic Palestinian’s right of return. As a
return narrative, Salt of This Sea follows Soraya, a working-class Palestinian-American woman
born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, as she travels back to her familial homeland of Palestine
to reclaim not only her family’s property, but also her own identity. The opening and closing
scenes of Salt of This Sea establish specific characteristics of Soraya’s Palestinian subjectivity.
She is both exilic and diasporic: exilic in that she has been transgenerationally banished from her
family’s home, and diasporic in that even though she herself does not have first-hand
experiential knowledge of Palestine, she nonetheless understands herself as part of a distinct and
dispersed ethnic collectivity.
31

By centering the narrative on a diasporic woman, the very premise of Salt of This Sea
disrupts the previously established character models of the counter-narrative cinema. Soraya is
someone who has been socially and politically estranged from historic Palestine. In representing
a Palestinian character who upholds neither the Western hegemonic idea of the Palestinian
terrorist nor the counter-narrative model of the “authentic” Palestinian within historic Palestine,

31
Articulations of “exilic” and “diasporic” are borrowed from Hamid Naficy. Hamid Naficy, An Accented
Cinema : Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 11-14.
141
Jacir’s representation of Soraya brings voice to the millions of diasporic Palestinians who cannot
locate themselves within the previously established hegemonic/counter-narrative binary. In this
sense, Salt of This Sea, particularly the character of Soraya, represents a shift towards a not only
more polyvalent representations with Palestinian cinema, but one that advocates a politics of
transnational feminist solidarity and queer diasporic empowerment.
Throughout the film, Soraya’s claims to Palestine are challenged on both juridical and
social levels and the conflicts she engages in demonstrate how her gendered and classed
positionality in diaspora prevent her from recuperating the Palestine that was lost to her. Within
the context of the film, Soraya’s system of meaning is derived from her diasporic positionality:
Palestinian is how she understands herself in terms of ethnicity and her imaginative knowledge
of Palestine is what gives her life meaning. Yet her very identification as an American, her
Palestinian identification is challenged not only by the Israeli government’s systems of control,
but in how the West Bank Palestinians she encounters throughout the film minimize her desire to
recuperate Palestine. For example, in a scene early in the film where Soraya is having lunch in an
upscale restaurant in Ramallah with some businessmen she has been introduced to through a
friend, she is met with cynicism and condescension as one man states: “Return. That’ll be the
day. Who wants to return here anyway?” Shocked by the man’s cavalier attitude to the right of
return, Soraya retorts: “A lot of people!” While Soraya is constantly reminded by West Bank
Palestinians that she has the privilege of American citizenship—a fact that is repeatedly invoked
by others as a way to minimize her desires to reclaim Palestine—this scene draws attention to a
different type of privilege that remain unspoken throughout the film, namely that of spatial
proximity, material access to, and experience of historic Palestine. As an employed man with
administratively legal residency in the West Bank, the cavalier businessman has intersecting
142
privileges not only of gender and socioeconomic class working in his favor, but has the juridical
privilege of Palestinian administrative identification and residency, something that is not easily
attained by those in diaspora.
For Palestinian-American Soraya, the basis for knowing herself as Palestinian is largely
based on her imaginative identification not with the territory of historic Palestine, but its
sensorial landscape. Soraya returns to Palestine to reclaim her identity through first-hand
experiences of Palestine’s materiality and geography: the hillsides, fruit trees in a garden, the sea
where her grandfather swam daily. Yet Soraya’s nationality as a citizen of the United States
positions her in contrast to Palestinians within Palestine. Although she has the privilege of
American citizenship, such status does not insulate her from harassment by the state of Israel's
security apparatus, as demonstrated in the film's opening scene. Furthermore, that same privilege
of American citizenship disenfranchises Soraya, when upon arrival she is classified as a
"tourist," which restricts her access to Palestine to the temporal limits of an Israeli visa. Soraya's
imaginative identification with Palestine is challenged to varying degrees by the West Bank
Palestinians she encounters throughout the film, who, although are oppressed by the Israeli
apartheid regime, possess a different kind of privilege: that of material access to—and
experiential knowledge of—Palestine. These competing sets of privileges are central to the film's
conflict as Soraya’s imaginative—and at times romanticized—conception of Palestine that had
been developed entirely in diaspora is repeatedly challenged.
It is not simply Soraya’s diasporic subjectivity that prevents her social and administrative
inclusion within Palestine, for her experiences of exclusion and inclusion, rejection and
acceptance are informed by the intersections of her gender and socioeconomic class. This
intersectionality ultimately prevents both the material reclamation of her family’s property, and
143
more importantly, the social integration and incorporation into Palestinian society that she so
deeply craves. In many ways, Soraya’s story about her attempts to reclaim Palestine while
negotiating her simultaneous privilege and disenfranchisement, reflects what Palestinian-
American writer Lisa Suhair Majaj has described as the “on-going negotiation of difference”
undertaken by Arab-American women.
32
The language of reclamation has been integral to Arab-
American feminist identity politics, especially within the context of how diasporic
disenfranchisement often falls along lines of gender, sexuality, and class. Majaj uses the word
“claim” to express the “identity ‘Arab-American’ not as a heritage passed from generation to
generation, but rather as an on-going negotiation of difference.”
33

Through this critique of “heritage,” Majaj invokes a critique of the ethnocentrism,
heteronormativity, and patriarchy that disenfranchise diasporic subjects, especially women and
those who fail to uphold the norms of cultural authenticity. As an unmarried, working-class,
diasporic woman, Soraya does not posses the social power or economic resources necessary to
reclaim her family's property. What's more is that Soraya not only represents the queer diaspora,
but her character also exemplifies how the “American” part of “Palestinian-American”
subjectivity serves to elide Palestinian-Americans from the larger project of Palestinian
nationhood and thus minimizes Palestinian-American claims to historic Palestine. Although this
is not unlike many postcolonial struggles over the representation and primacy of the nation over
the diaspora, the stakes for Palestine are different. As a people who are subjected to illegal
occupation, forced exile, Apartheid, and aggressive settler-colonial practices by state of Israel,
intra-Palestinian conflicts over diasporic Palestinian’s identification with Palestine must be

32
Emphasis mine. Lisa Suhair Majaj, “Boundaries: Arab/American.” Joanna Kadi, ed., Food for Our
Grandmothers: Writings by Arab-American and Arab-Canadian Feminists (Cambridge, MA: South End
Press, 1999), 69.

33
Ibid.
144
viewed not simply as a matter of preserving ethnonational authenticity, but must also be
understood as a byproduct of Zionist efforts to undermine Palestinian claims to land and
sovereignty. The intra-Palestinian policing of diasporic Palestinian claims to Palestinian identity
and rights has the unfortunate effect of shoring up the very Zionist ideology that denies the
Palestinian right of return and that has historically attempted to deny the very existence of the
Palestinians as a people. This ambiguous relationship between notions of Palestinian cultural
authenticity and compulsory Zionism will be explored further in the following chapter.
Soraya’s sense of belonging to Palestine is affirmed through her imaginative processes of
identification with Palestine as homeland, yet challenged when trying to reclaim materiality and
geography through that identification. In Salt of This Sea, Soraya’s identification with Palestine
and her attempts to reclaim the material inheritance of the Palestinian homeland, namely her
family’s finances and property, are denied throughout the film, leaving her bitter in the face of
deportation from her family’s historic homeland. It is through a “negotiation of difference” that a
sense of belonging is either affirmed or denied, and as a single, working-class, diasporic
Palestinian woman, the intersectionality of Soraya’s differences drives her sense of
unbelonging—and social conflicts—throughout the film. What is symbolic in Soraya’s reply to
the security officer in the final scene of Salt of This Sea, her claim that she is “from here” and
that she has been there “all [her] life” is that it represents both the diasporic imagination’s
attempt to cultivate a sense of belonging through an assertion of the right of return to an ancestral
home in the face of diasporic disenfranchisement.
This disenfranchisement is further highlighted through Soraya’s interactions with
Palestinians of higher socio-economic class, such as the scene with the lawyer evaluating
Soraya’s request to acquire Palestinian administrative identification. When Soraya encounters
145
the lawyer, her social classification as diasporic and her gender are pointed out as obstacles to
the attainment of her claims: she is not Palestinian enough based on the very conditions of her
family’s dispossession. Here, Soraya’s national consciousness—her shared experience of
dispossession—fails to validate her relationship to Palestine and is instead a direct hindrance to
her attempts to reclaim her material and geographic homeland. Soraya is thus representative of
the melancholic condition of the Palestinian diaspora: her failure acts as a foil for the general
failure of Palestinian political representation.
Palestine’s Queer Horizon
Where in Amreeka suburban Illinois is the foil for historic Palestine, in Annemarie Jacir’s
Salt of This Sea, the landscape of the West Bank serves as the backdrop for diasporic Palestinian
struggles to reclaim identity, culture, and geography. The geography in both films is significant
to the construction of a Palestinian-American cultural politics and the visual representation of
these landscapes serve as important metaphors for the forging of alternative relationships that
both affirm and deny diasporic claims to historic Palestine. Jacir’s representation of the
Palestinian landscape simultaneously adheres to and transforms the previously established
aesthetic tropes within Palestinian cinema. Since the early years of the Palestinian narrative film
movement in the 1980s and 1990s, the landscape of Palestine has constituted a symbol of
identity and nationalism.
34
Within Salt of This Sea, the landscape of Palestine is presented not
only as the scene within which the film’s action takes place, but is in many ways representative
of a silent character with whom the protagonists are in constant interaction. In Salt of This Sea,
the landscape is the entity that the protagonists simultaneously yearn for yet struggle with.
The West Bank is both the mise en scene and metaphor for Palestinian struggles to
reclaim identity and culture. In one of many poignant scenes in Salt of This Sea, Soraya argues

34
Gertz and Khleifi, Palestinian Cinema, 4.
146
with her love interest—Emad, played by Saleh Bakri—over their divergent understandings of
Palestine. Emad is a Palestinian resident of the West Bank, but he is originally from a village that
is now inside the state of Israel. As the scene begins, Jacir entices the audience into the
Palestinian landscape through slow sweeping pans over what is left of the West Bank’s rolling
hills while a gentle, contemporary Arabic folk song establishes a beautifully melancholic tempo.
As the couple sits atop a golden, sun drenched hill, Emad points out a detail to Soraya’s naked
eye: the distant coastline far in the hazy summer horizon. Soraya and Emad’s fight takes place
amidst a sweeping hillside that has been divided by stone walls: it is open, yet
compartmentalized. The open horizon is tempered by the small wall adjacent to where their fight
takes place. This wall, although small and relatively unobtrusive, similarly serves to hem Emad
in, who in a moment of frustration tosses a rock into the valley below, indicating a desire to
transcend the infrastructural and identitarian barriers that not only cause the social, political, and
material compartmentalization of Palestine and Palestinians, but are also stoking the conflict
between him and Soraya. The scene unfolds into a gendered conflict over their different
conceptions of what Palestine “means” to each of them, as illustrated through their disagreement
over Jaffa oranges.
During the fight, Emad accuses Soraya of having a fantastical notion of Palestine, and
Soraya defends her identitarian positionality by invoking the language of “knowledge.” Emad
challenges what he views as Soraya’s naive understanding of Palestine by stating: “You think
Palestine is just oranges? What a fantasy!” Soraya retorts by asserting her imaginative
knowledge of Palestine as legitimate despite her legal disenfranchisement from Palestinian
materiality. She states: “[in Arabic] I’m not some foreign chick who’ll kiss your ass and say
you’re special because you’re Palestinian. [in English]! You don’t know me! [Back to Arabic] I
147
don’t need a lecture on Palestine. Don’t tell me what Palestine is. I know what it is.” The
exchange—like the majority of the film—takes place in Arabic, save for one distinct line in
English wherein Soraya, exasperated, asserts her difference: “You don’t know me!” Soraya
challenges Emad on his chauvinism, distrust of, and ignorance towards Soraya’s diasporic
identification with Palestine. Soraya is, in effect, challenging Emad for his privileged position
within Palestine by asking him to recognize that his knowledge of Palestine—and the geography
of Palestine itself—is spatially and temporally limited not only by the occupation, but by the
walls of his own nationalist sensibility, a limitation that negates the diasporic Palestinian body
politic, Soraya included. In this moment, Soraya embraces her difference as a point of strength: it
is the thing that empowers her mobility, her knowledge, and her desire, despite it also
disempowering her access to and recuperation of her family’s property. Palestine becomes a
psychic prison for Emad because of the discursive and identitarian borders imposed on national
identity. What the depiction of this conflict lays bare is how queer diasporic and transnational
feminist imaginings are in ideological conflict with a masculinist ethnonational identity politics
that are informed by the very conditions of Zionist occupation which serve to divide and conquer
Palestine.
A closer look at the casting of this film reveals that this scene is not simply a diasporic
critique of Israeli occupation or exclusionist ethnonationalism, but is also Jacir’s own critique of
the gendered politics within the Palestinian cinematic movement. Soraya is played by Brooklyn
born Palestinian-American slam poet, Suheir Hammad, while Emad is played by Saleh Bakri, a
Palestinian from northern Israel who although a successful actor in his own right, is the son of
Mohammad Bakri, widely considered among the founding patriarchy of contemporary
Palestinian narrative film. I read this scene as Jacir literally speaking back to the spatio-
148
temporally limited conceptions and gendered representations of Palestinian national identity that
exist within the male dominated Palestinian narrative film movement. In her debut feature film
Jacir makes a bold move to simultaneously break the identitarian tropes within Palestinian
cinema and call out Palestinian national cinema for its complicity in the elision of diasporic
women’s identities, experiences, and cultural productions. One of the arguments in this
dissertation, then is that the rise of Palestinian women filmmakers (such as Jacir and Dabis)
constitutes a component of cinematic activism, by contributing to a feminist genre within the
Palestinian cinematic movement. When Annemarie Jacir makes a film asserting diasporic
woman’s knowledge of Palestine as equally legitimate as those spatio-temporally proximate
Palestinian’s, she is leveraging cinematic activism by both amplifying diasporic women’s voices
in the discourse on Palestinian justice and drawing attention to the ways in which gendered
conflicts over who is Palestinian enough are conditioned by the culture of scarcity and
disenfranchisement produced in the aftermath of the Oslo Accords.
Although in this hillside scene Soraya and Emad's bodies are cloistered in the
compartmentalized landscape, their gaze is transnational, transgressing borders, checkpoints,
ideological limits, and their own spatio-temporal positionality in Palestinian territory. Their
transnational gaze is trained on a horizon—the “then and there”
35
of historic Palestine— beyond
the present materiality of occupation. This transnational envisioning of a futurity beyond the
“here and now” of occupied Palestine is exemplary of Jose Esteban Muñoz ’s conception of
queer futurity, where the theoretical conception of “queer” is a utopic ideal that is “always on the

35
I borrow this phrase from Jose Munoz’s Cruising Utopia and use it to refer simultaneously to
Palestine’s historic geography as well as the as-yet time and space of Palestine’s future. Munoz, Cruising
Utopia, 12.

149
horizon…[and] profoundly resistant to the stultifying temporal logic of the broken-down
present.”
36

Through Soraya and Emad’s social conflict within this landscape, we see Palestine as
both the diaspora’s romanticized and unrequited love interest and the cloistering burden of
standing by that romantic ideal. Conflict arises between the two protagonists as it becomes
evident that they have contrasting conceptions of the meaning of Palestine as homeland. Soraya
imagines Palestine as a utopic elsewhere to the reality of her diasporic life in the United States;
Palestine serves as an intellectual and material place for the recuperation of her imagined identity
and the property that has been denied of her. Although Soraya has the privilege of American
citizenship, such status does not insulate her from harassment by Israel's security apparatus. That
same privilege of American citizenship disenfranchises Soraya, when upon arrival she is
classified as a "tourist," which restricts her access to Palestine to the temporal limits of an Israeli
visa. While the spiteful sting of Israeli’s temporal management of the diaspora’s access to
Palestine is a form of public disenfranchisement inflicted on diasporic Palestinian subjectivity,
what Salt also painfully represents is the private dispossession of diasporic identity, a hurt
inflicted upon the diaspora along gendered lines from within the broader Palestinian community
itself. She wants to shed her diasporic positionality in an attempt to commune with her deceased
parents and grandparents. Emad, on the other hand, wants to live abroad, away from the
humiliation and restrictions of life and death under occupation; he wants his identity to consist of
more than just a geographic entrapment within occupied Palestine, which includes biopolitical
management and surveillance under the Israeli Apartheid regime. Soraya’s investment in
Palestine as home is highly intellectualized and imaginative through her positionality as

36
Munoz, Cruising Utopia, 12.
150
diasporic subject, whereas Emad’s understanding of Palestine as home is directly tethered to the
material circumstances of his life.
I understand the work of Cinematic activism here as performing two interrelated tasks:
first, it Decolonizes Palestinian national identity politics by asserting transnational feminist and
queer diasporic ways of being and knowing. Second, it equips the Diaspora with tools to both
resist patriarchal nationalism and methods to cope with their often difficult social experiences in
the US. However, these feminist genre films are not just about critique. Soraya’s repeated
conflicts with men throughout the film are thrown into sharp relief next to her interactions with
Palestinian women. As illustrated through their fight over Jaffa oranges, Emad represents the
ways in which Palestinian identity politics privilege material experientially over imaginative
identification and in doing so reinforces a hierarchized structure of Palestinian identity wherein
the geopolitical nation is privileged over the diaspora. The hierarchy of these identity politics is
greatly informed by gender, as indicated by Soraya's repeated conflicts with Palestinian men
throughout the film. However, Soraya experiences unwavering affirmation in her interaction
with Palestinian women throughout the film. For example, upon meeting Soraya for the first
time, Emad’s mother greets Soraya with an unqualified affirmation: "Welcome to your country.”
Within this scene, Soraya is warmly ushered into Emad's home by his mother wherein she
experiences unquestioned acceptance by this matriarchal figure. This exchange highlights how
Soraya and Emad’s conflict over the meaning of Palestine reflects the ways in which Palestinian
cultural politics diverge along gendered lines. Throughout the film, Soraya repeatedly comes into
conflict with men who dismiss and challenge both her understanding of Palestine and her desire
to reclaim it. Yet, this exhibition of unquestioned acceptance by an older Palestinian woman
151
speaks to an underlying politics of transnational female solidarity, particularly regarding the
diaspora's right of return.
Once again, the home becomes a space where Palestinian American subjects are folded
into the project of Palestinian national identity. In Amreeka, the matriarchal home space became
the constellational territory of Palestine, which served to anchor its Palestinian American
inhabitants to Palestinian national consciousness in diaspora. In Salt of This Sea, the matriarchal
home space represents how a politics of transnational female solidarity operates as social
practice to resist both masculinist ethnonational and Israeli occupation by affirming Palestinian
national consciousness and welcoming the diaspora's return.

Conclusion
When Soraya states “I’ve been here all my life,” she is speaking to how—for diaspora
Palestinians—Palestine cannot be understood solely in terms of material place or territorially
bounded space, but must be understood as socio-political processes of home-making and
practices of belonging. Annemarie Jacir and Cherien Dabis, as emerging Palestinian women
filmmakers, are not only disrupting the norms established in the Palestinian counter-narrative
movement, they are also re-articulating diasporic Palestinian identity in politically and culturally
queer and feminist terms. Amreeka and Salt of This Sea not only show how Palestinian American
subjectivity is constructed as culturally, socially, and politically queer in both the Palestinian and
American contexts but in doing so interrogate the worth of heterosexual norms and their ability
to secure justice for Palestine and ultimately envision the future of Palestinian justice in terms of
transnational feminist praxis.

152
As these conflicts over diasporic Palestinian identity and culture are represented on
screen, to exhibit Palestinian women’s films at Palestine-themed film festivals constitutes a meta
form of cinematic activism, in that such exhibition highlights the underrepresented experiences
of diasporic women within the context of a festival already devoted to making the
underrepresented issue of Palestine more visible within the United States. All of Dabis’ and
Jacir’s films have been featured for the Boston Palestine Film Festival’s most prominent events,
such as opening and closing nights. The following chapter will address how Palestinian-
Americans living in the Boston area turn to the BPFF for representations that reflect their
experiences and how they conceive of the festival as a space to claim their sense of
Palestinianness through the act of spectatorship.
153
Chapter 4:
Keffiyeh Cinema: Negotiating Palestinian-American Identity Through Film Festival
Culture

The Remis Theater in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts reverberates with chuckles as
Cherien Dabis’ narrative film May in the Summer screens for a full audience on opening night of
the 9
th
annual Boston Palestine Film Festival (BPFF) in October 2014. On screen three
Palestinian-American sisters—May, Yasmine, and Dalia— sit poolside at a Dead Sea resort in
Jordan for May’s bachelorette weekend. Dalia and Yasmine bicker over each other’s Arabic
language skills, arguing about whose relationship to cultural authenticity is more precarious.
Eldest sister May—played by filmmaker Dabis—interjects to settle the argument, glaring with
frustration over the tops of her dark, oversized sunglasses. With a mix of annoyed paternalism
and knowing irony, May interrupts her younger sisters: “Guys, you speak equally shitty Arabic!”
Dabis’ films provide a compelling example of how Arabic language knowledge has long
played a key role in producing a sense of cultural identity amongst Palestinians in diaspora.
2
May
in the Summer, however, also demonstrates how the diasporic feminist turn in Palestinian
filmmaking unsettles essentialized notions of Palestinian identity and cultural authenticity. Films
like Dabis’ May in the Summer and Amreeka, as well as Zeina Durra’s The Imperialists are Still
Alive!, and Annemarie Jacir’s Salt of This Sea do the work of queering Palestinian filmmaking
by representing the voices and experiences of Palestinians that have largely been marginalized
within Palestinian cinema including those of diasporic and transnational women, divorcés,

2
Juliane Hammer, Palestinians Born in Exile: Diaspora and the Search for a Homeland (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2005) 172-177.
154
multi-ethnic and mixed race Palestinians, as well as LGBT identities. This cultural queerness
challenges what constitutes cultural authenticity as it has been constructed in popular and
academic discourses on Palestinian national identity and the representation of those discourses in
Palestinian cinema.
3
The wry humor of this scene illustrates the insecurity around identity and
culture experienced—to varying degrees—by many of the BPFF’s Palestinian-American
spectators, volunteers, and organizers who I have interviewed for my ongoing project
documenting the festival and the work it does to represent Palestinian cultural and identity
politics in diaspora, educate the American public, and challenge the US discourse on Palestine
and Israel.
This chapter is based on oral history interviews with fourteen Palestinian identified
participants of the BPFF. I draw in depth on the voices of nine of my interviewees. Of those nine
participants, one identified as Palestinian, five identify as Palestinian-American, one identified as
“pure Palestinian,” one identified as Palestinian-Palestinian, and one identified as half-
Palestinian. At the time of the interviews, all had been living in the Boston area for an extended
period or were residing in the Boston area temporarily as they pursued higher education.
Throughout the chapter I refer to my interlocutors as Palestinian-Americans, not to minimize
important differences among them, but rather to point to a shared exilic subjectivity given that
they were all geographically and socially situated in the US at the time of the interviews. All
names are pseudonyms.
In analyzing these interviews, I argue that struggles over Palestinian identity, cultural
authenticity, and self-determination motivate Palestinian-Americans to participate in Palestine

3
Gertz and Khleifi. Palestinian Cinema; Dabashi, Hamid, ed. Dreams of a Nation.

155
Film Festivals (PFFs).
6
As concerns over these issues are projected onto and expressed through
Palestinian cinema and festival culture, participation in PFFs constitutes a practice of cinematic
activism that resolutely rejects compulsory Zionism as well as essentializing ideas about Arab
ethnonationalism and cultural authenticity that work to silence and erase Palestinian-American
voices and experiences.
9
In this chapter I will elaborate my conception of compulsory Zionism in
order to account for the ways in which support for an essentialist and separatist Jewish state in
the land of historic Palestine is always already assumed and upheld as politically correct. This
theorization of Zionism as compulsory not only accounts for social and institutional support for
Zionism within the culture of the US, and the Boston area in particular, but also specifically
highlights the social power relations that exist within such a cultural dynamic.
This chapter investigates the conditions that produce a sense of Palestinian-American
political and cultural queerness. I take the BPFF as a particularly compelling example of how
PFFs constitute safe spaces where diasporic Palestinians in the US negotiate a sense of cultural
and political queerness while nourishing their sense of Palestinianness. More broadly, by
recognizing and accommodating Palestinian-American subjectivity, participation in the
cinematic activism of the festival creates a space in which diasporic Palestinian identity can be
asserted and reclaimed through an engagement with films that represent Palestinian-American
characters, such as May in the Summer and Amreeka. These cultural representations also assuage
my interlocutors’ feelings of marginalization and isolation, which are produced by a US’
dominant culture of compulsory Zionism wherein steadfast support for the state of Israel

6
Palestine Film Festivals exist in several North American cities, including: Ann Arbor, Chicago,
Houston, Toronto, and Washington DC.

9
Naber, Arab America, 63-64; Andrew Shryock, “The Moral Analogies of Race: Arab American Identity,
Color Politics, and the Limits of Racialized Citizenship.” Race and Arab Americans Before and After
9/11: From Invisible Citizens to Visible Subjects. Amaney Jamal and Nadine Naber, eds., (Syracuse, NY:
Syracuse University Press, 2008).
156
manifests, in part, as anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia. Meanwhile, the cultural work
performed through the festival’s social components—such as volunteering, organizing, post-
screening question and answer sessions, and opening and closing receptions—produces a sense
of community and cultural connection by gathering Palestinian-Americans together and
providing access to Palestinian culture—namely Arabic language, music, and visual culture—
that is normally absent in their daily lives. For a population that must contend with the genocidal
state violence of Israel’s settler-colonialism and Apartheid regime that seeks to continually exile
and dispossess diasporic Palestinians of their right to return to and reclaim Palestine, the
cinematic activism of the festival provides an important form of cultural maintenance.
The festival constitutes a space where the political and cultural queerness of Palestinian-
American subjectivity can be negotiated, asserted, and reclaimed despite the culture of
compulsory Zionism on the one hand and ethno-national
18
discourses on cultural authenticity on
the other hand. As evidenced through my interlocutor’s experiences, these seemingly polar
ideologies at times overlap and compete to define the expression or even suppression of
Palestinian identity and cultural politics in the US.

Cultural Authenticity, In/Visibility, and Justice
Throughout my interviews with Palestinian identified participants at the BPFF, I found
that my Palestinian-American and mixed-race
19
Palestinian-identified interlocutors struggled
with a sense of cultural dispossession produced at the intersection of the ideologies of cultural
authenticity and compulsory Zionism. The question of Palestinian-American in/visibility is

18
I define “ethno-national” as a form of racialized nationalism which privileges ethnic genealogy and
homogeneity as a means to cohere an imagined nation.

19
For details on Arab racial formation in the US, see Gualtieri, Between Arab and White, 156-157.

157
central to understanding the role that ethno-national identity politics play within the broader
discourse on cultural authenticity—and ultimately justice—as it is represented in film and film
culture. Concerns around in/visibility run through the entirety of the Palestinian struggle. When
PFFs in diaspora feature films with Palestinian-American characters—such as May in the
Summer, Amreeka, and Salt of This Sea—they are queering prevailing notions of culturally
authentic Palestinian subjectivity by making the diaspora visible in ways that are elided in both
Hollywood and Palestinian cinema. Edward Said relates Palestine’s “deeply problematic”
relationship to visibility to the post-Holocaust invocation of “a people without land for a land
without people,”
20
a political slogan which was leveraged to popularize Zionist political ideology
immediately after WW2. By conjuring an image of geographic emptiness, the phrase enacts
epistemic violence by discursively erasing Palestinian existence from the Palestinian landscape.
Yet, this invisibility has also been tempered by its extreme opposite—spectacular
hypervisibility—in the form of racial stereotypes constructed and circulated by Israel and
Hollywood, both of which assign Palestinians what Said calls a “visual identity associated with
terrorism and violence.”
21
The growth of a Palestinian cinematic movement must be situated in
the context of these extreme forms of invisibility and hypervisibility. The emergence of
Palestinian filmmaking provided what Said has characterized as “a visual alternative, a visual
articulation, a visible incarnation of Palestinian existence,” and the cinematic representation of “a
collective identity.”
22
As an extension of Palestinian cinema, cinematic activism, in the form of
film festivals, diversifies both the idea of who or what is constituted through that collective

20
Edward Said, “Preface.” Hamid Dabashi, ed. Dreams of a Nation, 2.

21
Ibid, 3.

22
Ibid, 3.

158
identity—in other words, who is culturally authentic—and how that representation takes place.
As such, the BPFF serves as a venue where the visual manifestation of Palestinian existence
confronts the concept of collective identity and is taken to task by the multiplicity and
heterogeneity of the diaspora.
While there are certainly moments of spectacular social conflict that erupt around the
expression of Palestinian cultural and identity politics in the US, the majority of my interlocutors'
conflicts with both compulsory Zionist culture and discourses on cultural authenticity emerge in
racialized social interactions that are focused on one’s in/visibility as Palestinian. My
interlocutor’s often simultaneously experience racialization and deracination,
23
experiences that
have been integral to the formation of their political consciousness and subsequent motivation
for participating in the politicized activities of the film festival. The discourse on cultural
authenticity colludes in uneasy ways with compulsory Zionism to produce a sense of social
isolation marked by the feeling of being simultaneously invisible and hypervisible as Palestinian-
American, and the sense of isolation produced through this convergence manifests itself in
microagressive social interactions, or “subtle and commonplace exchanges or indignities (both
conscious and unconscious) that somehow convey demeaning messages to people of color.”
24

Many of my interlocutor’s have experienced microaggressions that certainly fit
Constantine and Dorazio’s unidirectional model of a Zionist microaggressor conveying

23
Nada Elia, “The ‘White’ Sheep of the Family: But Bleaching is Like Starvation.” This Bridge We Call
Home: Radical Visions of Transformation. Edited by Gloria Anzaldua and Anlouse Keating (New York:
Routledge. 2002), 223-231; Saliba, “Resisting Invisibility: Arab Americans in Academia and Activism.”
Arabs in America.

24
“These racial slights can be verbal, behavioral, or even environmental…. [and] racial microaggressions
can be a cause of psychological distress and drain spiritual energy for people of color who experience
them.” Madonna G. Constantine and Cristina Dorazio. "Racial Microaggressions." In Encyclopedia of
Counseling, edited by Frederick T. L. Leong, vol. 3 (2008), 1291-92.

159
demeaning messages to Palestinians, but microaggressions concerning cultural authenticity also
exist within the Palestinian community. For example, festival organizer John explained how self-
conscious he feels about his facial hair because of the way in which his phenotypical appearance
comes under scrutiny in a deeply racialized way: “Any time I grow a beard, I get accused of
looking like a terrorist. Even by my parents, who tell me, ‘Why are you growing a beard? You’d
better shave that because you don’t want to be discriminated against.’”
25
John was laughing
when he relayed this anecdote to me, in part because it exemplifies the optical dilemma of
performing Palestinian-Americanness. A visual marker of Palestinianness not only makes one
susceptible to Zionist microagressions but can also make one vulnerable to a racialized state
surveillance that can have potentially drastic consequences in terms of one’s civil liberties. John
noted that most people who make this remark to him do so in jest, and in a way, such a
comment—by relying on a visual stereotype—could be construed as an acknowledgement of his
identity as a Palestinian. Yet, he expressed his discomfort with being the target of a racial slur
regardless of who it comes from: “People take it very lightly. They don’t think about the impact
of what they’re saying. It’s very stereotypical; it bothers me a lot.”
26
John’s experience
demonstrates how these kinds of microaggressions—coming from two seemingly opposed
ideological positions—compound to simultaneously other and deny Palestinian-American
identity and experience.
Examining Palestinian-American subjectivity through the lens of queer theory more
explicitly accounts for the power differentials within this intra-Palestinian discourse on cultural
authenticity, especially with regards to ethnic essentialism. For example, my interlocutor’s

25
John (Boston Palestine Film Festival organizer). Interview with the author. December 14, 2013.

26
Ibid.

160
named their identities in a variety of ways—“Palestinian-Palestinian,”
27
“Palestinian-
American,”
28
“pure Palestinian,”
29
and “half-Palestinian,”
30
just to name a few. These monikers
reflect the various positions that can be staked out within the intra-Palestinian discourse on
cultural authenticity. For example, while the identifications of “pure Palestinian” or “half-
Palestinian” attempt to biologically quantify identity by relying on a heteronormative logic of
genealogical reproduction, the phrases “Palestinian-Palestinian” or “Palestinian-American”
qualify identity in terms of geographic and social proximity to or distance from historic
Palestine. Scholars working in queer and feminist studies, such as David Eng and Lisa Lowe,
have critiqued the ways in which the very notion of diaspora has been used to shore up ideas
about “racial descent, filiation, and biological traceability.”
31
As Eng remarks, “configuring
diaspora as displacement from a lost homeland or exile from an exalted origin can thus
underwrite regnant ideologies of nationalism, while upholding virulent notions of racial purity
and its structuring heteronomrative logics.”
32
The biological and geo-social distinctions made by
my interlocutors reflect what Gopinath calls a subjectivity of “queer diaspora,” in that diasporic
Palestinians, especially those who identify as ethnically mixed, are implicitly coded as
ethnonationally inauthentic, or, in a geo-social sense, not “of Palestine” due to their estrangement

27
Alma (Boston Palestine Film Festival spectator). Interview with author. October 26, 2013.

28
John (Boston Palestine Film Festival organizer). Interview with the author. December 14, 2013; Lamia
(Boston Palestine Film Festival audience member). Interview with author. October 20, 2013; Mary
(Boston Palestine Film Festival organizer). Interview with author. November 23, 2013; 2013; Samira
(Boston Palestine Film Festival spectator). Interview with author. October 24, 2013.

29
Nourit (Boston Palestine Film Festival spectator). Interview with author. October 19, 2014.

30
Suha (Boston Palestine Film Festival volunteer). Interview with author. October 20, 2013.

31
David Eng, The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2010), 13.

32
Eng, The Feeling of Kinship, 13.

161
from the land and the society that inhabits it. As such, in this chapter I take “queer diaspora” as a
methodological approach toward the study of Palestinian-American subjectivity, because doing
so allows for “a different story about the contemporary politics of nation-building and race under
globalization, along with its accompanying material and psychic processes of social belonging
and exclusion.”
33

For my interlocutors, a sense of insecurity around one's inclusion or exclusion from the
category “Palestinian” became apparent when I asked how they identified in terms of ethnicity.
For example, Alma, a festival spectator, was born and raised in Palestine to an American mother
and a Palestinian father; she came to the US for college and medical school and feelings of
homesickness and disconnection from her family are what drive her to attend the festival. When I
asked Alma how she identified in terms of ethnicity, she described herself as "Palestinian-
Palestinian" as a way to specify her relationship to Palestine. When I asked Alma to elaborate on
why she chose a repetitive and hyphenated construction, she suggested that such a distinction not
only stemmed from concerns around her cultural authenticity as Palestinian within Palestine but
was also related to the politics of representation in diaspora: “Being half-American has a lot to
do with how I feel about my identity. But since I’ve come here [to the US] I’ve almost never
divulged that my mom’s American unless people really probe.”
34
Alma’s identification as
“Palestinian-Palestinian” speaks to an underlying insecurity around her social status within her
Palestinian community, her cultural relationship to Palestine, and how she is perceived by both
Palestinians and Americans alike. Alma's reluctance to divulge her mixed background is

33
Eng, The Feeling of Kinship, 14.

34
Alma (Boston Palestine Film Festival spectator). Interview with author. October 26, 2013.

162
indicative of her need to negotiate her own positionality within her Palestinian community in
Palestine and the society in which she is currently living and working.
While she strongly identifies herself as culturally and nationally Palestinian, she is
acutely aware of the complexity of her subjectivity and modulates how she represents herself
depending on social context. Here, Arabic—and English—language knowledge becomes a point
of identitarian contestation. For example, Alma relayed to me that although she grew up
speaking both English and Arabic at home, while speaking with her Palestinian classmates in
English at school she would perform an Arabic inflected accent in English as a way to diminish
her sense of difference as a mixed-race Palestinian. It is useful to consider Alma’s identification
as “Palestinian-Palestinian” via Lisa Lowe’s discussion of cultural identity not as something
transmitted vertically from parent to child, but as something transmitted horizontally based on
social relations, especially between nation and diaspora.
35
In this way, Alma’s identification as
“Palestinian-Palestinian” articulates what it means to be culturally authentic in that she accounts
for both ethnic genealogy and geo-social proximity to Palestine in the construction of her
identity.
Alma asserts her Palestinian identification in horizontal terms by privileging her social
and geographic relationship to Palestine in order to protect herself against both Palestinian
accusations of cultural inauthenticity and American dismissals of her Palestinian identity that
may arise from her mother’s status as an American. For Alma, to claim an American
identification would not only falsely positioning herself as culturally, geographically, and
socially American, but she also notes that, while in the US, when she does divulge that her
mother is American, doing so problematically absolves her interlocutors from taking

35
Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Chapel Hill, NC: Duke University
Press Books, 1996), 63.

163
responsibility for their racism towards Palestinians: “I find sometimes it gives people a sense of
relief. It’s like giving them an out into their own stereotypes about me. So I want to hold onto the
Palestinian-Palestinian because I want to present as not what people here imagine a Palestinian
is.”
36
In this way, the very act of asserting one’s Palestinian identity in the US serves to confront
a whole set of racial assumptions about who is Palestinian. To out oneself as Palestinian in the
context of compulsory Zionism, then, is to make a political statement on an interpersonal level.
Thus, Alma’s Palestinian identification becomes not only a performance of political and cultural
queerness but also serves as a pedagogical tool to challenge racial stereotypes about who looks
or does not look Palestinian.
Palestinian-American subjects face the dilemma of being perceived as different in
Palestine while also potentially being cast as similar in the US. Just as to be mixed-race
Palestinian-American in the Palestinian context is to be, as Alma put it, not “as Palestinian as”
one’s peers, likewise, to be mixed-race Palestinian-American in the context of the US is to be
just American enough to assuage any cultural or political anxiety around one’s Palestinian
identity. In both cases, the ethnic Palestinian side of the Palestinian-American construction is
trumped by the American side.
37
Yet, it is important to interrogate the political stakes of
claiming, disassociating from, or being identified by others as “American.” Furthermore, within
the Palestinian context, for Alma to downplay her American heritage serves to both distance

36
Alma (Boston Palestine Film Festival spectator). Interview with author. October 26, 2013.

37
In his ethnographic study of Arab-American youth culture in Detroit, Andrew Shryock noted that the
terms “halfies” is a common putdown for mixed Palestinian-American youth. Shryock, Andrew. “The
Moral Analogies of Race: Arab American Identity, Color Politics, and the Limits of Racialized
Citizenship.” Race and Arab Americans Before and After 9/11: From Invisible Citizens to Visible
Subjects. Amaney Jamal and Nadine Naber, eds., (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008), 91.

164
herself from US Imperialism and its financial and military support of the very same Israeli
occupation under which she grew up, while also shoring up her authenticity as a Palestinian.
Many festival attendees struggle with the ways in which the categories of “Palestinian”
and “America” are constructed as discrete and even incompatible. For example, Anton, a
spectator, is a second generation Palestinian-American of mixed Palestinian, Italian, and British
heritage who utilizes the festival as a resource that helps him reconcile his sense of racialization
and reclaim a sense of the Palestinian identity that has been denied him. Although Anton’s father
is Palestinian, he grew up only with his white American mother in predominantly white, rural
New Hampshire; racialized as other, yet disconnected from Palestinian culture. Anton’s
childhood experiences of racial othering left him aware of his ethnic marginalization, yet
growing up without an immediately present Palestinian family network or community left him
without a way to reconcile his sense of difference. He characterized the BPFF as a resource for
the reclamation and representation of his marginalized identity.
“It’s really the only place that I have access to. It [the festival] has
made it easier for me to talk about being Palestinian and identifying
as a Palestinian. I’ve always felt that it was something that I had to
diminish because it was so diminished in the world and in America
and even in my family.”
38

This erasure of Palestinian identity in the US comes into conflict with the inflation of American
difference in Palestine, speaking to larger concerns about the hierarchization of ethnonational
purity and the ways in which diasporic subjectivity in general—and “Americanness”
39
in
particular—is perceived in both contexts as the thing which trumps Palestinian identity. This

38
Anton (Boston Palestine Film Festival spectator). Interview with author. October 24, 2013.

39
See Nadine Naber’s discussion of “reverse Orientalism,” wherein she argues that within Arab America,
a cultural binary is constructed: good Arab on the one hand, bad American on the other. Naber, Arab
America, 6.

165
type of logic informs the power struggles over who can how to represent Palestine in diaspora.
Ruba, a former festival organizer, spoke at length about her experiences in organizing the BPFF
and the social conflicts that ensued between diasporic Palestinian festival organizers based in the
Metro Boston area and Palestinian filmmakers based in Palestine. In what she described as a
politics of “more Palestinian than thou,” Ruba talked about the way in which her female
diasporic subjectivity rendered her opinion less legitimate than that of male Palestinian
filmmakers who live in the West Bank: “There was always this issue of ‘I’m more Palestinian
than thou.’ This asshole basically tried to discredit me. I don’t need anybody to tell me whether
I’m Palestinian or not, or whether I’m Palestinian enough or not.”
40
In Ruba’s experience, a
creative disagreement within the festival organizing circle over which films to show resulted in
an interrogation of her cultural authenticity and an attack against her Palestinian identity in order
to discredit and disempower her in the curatorial process.
Ruba’s experience in the early years of organizing the BPFF exemplifies how gender also
informs diasporic women's relationship to cultural authenticity, disenfranchisement, and their
investment in cinematic activism in the US. The failure to be recognized as Palestinian enough in
order to make decisions about how to represent Palestine through film festival programming is
reminiscent of how the Oslo Peace process of the 1990s produced a logic of scarcity that
specifically disenfranchised Palestinian refugees through a bureaucratization of Palestinian
administrative identification.
41
That disenfranchisement has gendered dimensions as refugee
status is passed down patrilineally
42
and the gendering of Palestinian administrative

40
Ruba (Boston Palestine Film Festival organizer). Interview with author. October 26, 2013.

41
Schulz and Hammer. The Palestinian Diaspora, 140-167.

42
Christine M. Cervenak, “Promoting Inequality: Gender-Based Discrimination in UNRWA’s Approach
to Palestine Refugee Status.” Human Rights Quarterly 16, no. 2. Pg. 301. (May 1, 1994): 300–374.
166
identification concretizes the kind of social dispossession and legal disenfranchisement
experienced by women like Ruba. What Ruba’s experience highlights is that struggles over
claims to a legal stake in Palestinian identity manifest in diaspora as a struggle over the politics
of representation. The struggle Ruba faces—as a Palestinian woman born and raised in
diaspora—to have her voice heard and counted in decisions about how to represent Palestine in
the context of the cinematic activism of the festival is mirrored in the works of Palestinian
women filmmakers such as Annemarie Jacir and Cherien Dabis whose narrative films focus on
diasporic female characters and their experiences.
Claims to Palestinian identity are not solely limited merely to questions of ethnic or
cultural authenticity, but must also be understood in terms of claiming a stake within the ongoing
struggle for Palestinian justice, wherein “justice” functions as shorthand for the recuperation of
the finite materiality and territoriality of historic Palestine. In general, Palestinians are widely
understood as always already exilic. For example, even Palestinians who fled their homes in
1948 during the Nakba, (“the catastrophe” in Arabic), yet remained within the territorial
boundaries of what is now the state of Israel are considered exilic due to their experiences of
internal displacement and legal classification by the state of Israel as “present absentees.”
43
For
diasporic Palestinians, concerns over cultural in/authenticity are compounded by their
experiences of geographic dispossession and legal disenfranchisement. Thus the sense of
insecurity that permeates diasporic Palestinian subjectivity is generated by a logic of scarcity

regarding the material manifestation and distribution of that justice, resulting in socially
constructed gradations of “Palestinianness” by which to measure one’s worthiness or
unworthiness as a Palestinian subject. While these gradations carry larger implications in regards

43
Labeeb Ahmed Bsoul, “The Status of Palestinians in Israel: 1948-Oslo.” Arab Studies Quarterly 28, no.
2 (April 1, 2006): 31.
167
to the right of return, legal representation and enfranchisement, and reparations in the form of
property or money, the struggle over claims to a full stake in Palestinian identity manifests in
diaspora as a struggle over who can and cannot represent Palestine socially and culturally.
In Ruba’s case, identity operates in the service of exclusion in that it is quantified in
terms of geopolitical and social proximity to historic Palestine and then upheld or discredited in
order to qualify particular representational and political agendas. Although Ruba was born in
Jordan—and thus geographically closer to Palestine than perhaps someone born in the US—her
diasporic positionality made her susceptible to critiques around her cultural authenticity. In fact,
what Ruba described is how in a moment of social conflict her Palestinianness was quantified
based on the intersectionality of her gender, her diasporic subjectivity, and her radical politics. In
that moment her Palestinianness was diminished for the sake of upholding a politics of
representational authenticity, or, put another way, the privileging of a singular, nationalist
Palestinian image over a multiplicity of diasporic voices.
Here it is useful to conceptualize Palestinian-American subjectivity as culturally and
politically queer in terms of the diaspora’s relationship to historic Palestine. Gayatri Gopinath’s
framework of “queer diaspora” is especially relevant: “within heteronormative logic the queer is
seen as the debased and inadequate copy of the heterosexual, so too is diaspora within nationalist
logic positioned as the queer Other of the nation, its inauthentic imitation.”
44
In a similar vein,
Lisa Suhair Majaj critiques the imbedded heteronormativity of ethnonationalism, stating that
“claiming” Arab-American identity “not as a heritage passed from generation to generation, but
rather as an on-going negotiation of difference,” serves as a way to signal how Arab-
Americans—women in particular—attempt to reconcile feelings of bifurcation and perceived
cultural incompatibility. A queer diasporic framing illuminates the ways in which my

44
Gopinath, Impossible Desires, 11.
168
interlocutors' feelings of insecurity are a byproduct of both the discourse on Palestinian cultural
identity that reifies heteronormative genealogy and social and geographic proximity to historic
Palestine as the basis for national identification and the biopolitical administration of Palestinian
identity by governing bodies such as the Palestinian Authority, the Israeli state, and the United
Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA), all of which classify, compartmentalize, and at times
delegitimize Palestinian identity.
These questions around being Palestinian “enough” influence feelings of insecurity
amongst Palestinian-Americans and drive their involvement with the mode of activism
represented by the BPFF. The feelings of insecurity that Alma expressed in relationship to
cultural authenticity become more powerful for Palestinians born and raised in diaspora, as
exemplified through Ruba, Anton, and Suha’s narratives. Regardless of whether they identify as
"full" or "half," diaspora Palestinians negotiate their differences

in relation to Palestinians who
are constructed as somehow “more Palestinian” due to their social, genealogical, or geographic
proximity to historic Palestine.

Performing Palestinianness: Language, Aesthetics, and Racialization
While essentializing ideas about cultural authenticity serve to delimit who can lay claim
to and represent Palestinian identity in diaspora, compulsory Zionism works to suppress
expressions of Palestinian identity that would normally be employed to affirm one’s sense of
Palestinianness. Examining these two ideologies together highlights the cynical relationship that
exists between compulsory Zionism and cultural authenticity, particularly regarding the ways in
which the quantification of Palestinianness—for example, identifying as “pure Palestinian” or
judged as “not Palestinian enough”—is taken up to delimit diasporic and mixed-race
169
Palestinian’s claims to identity, culture, and even the right of return. It is this tension that
produces a sense of social and cultural isolation for Palestinians living in the US, and it is
through PFF culture that my interlocutor’s attempt to mitigate that tension. In the following
section, I will explore how the issues of (1) language, (2) sartorial ethnic performance, and (3)
microagressions, are central factors contributing to the social tensions experienced by my
interlocutors.
The argument scene in May in the Summer that opened this chapter highlights the role
that Arabic language knowledge plays in constructing or obfuscating a sense of Palestinian
identity for diasporic and mixed-race Palestinians living in the US.
45
Specifically, this scene
illustrates how—from the perspective of Palestinian-American subjectivity—a sense of precarity
around ones relationship to cultural authenticity produces interpersonal conflicts, in this case the
argument amongst the three sisters, which mirror a larger discourse among Palestinians more
broadly on what constitutes Palestinian-American identity, particularly within the diasporic
context of the US.
46
For example, John, a BPFF organizer, was born and raised in Metro Boston
after his parents emigrated from Bethlehem, Palestine in the 1970s. He described the
development of his sense of Palestinian identity as incidental, something “learned by osmosis”
by way of growing up with two Palestinian parents. Although he grew up speaking what he calls
“kitchen Arabic,” John expressed that he felt his lack of sufficient Arabic language knowledge

45
In her ethnography of diasporic Palestinian returnees, Juliane Hammer notes that her interlocutors felt
that their “lack of [Arabic] fluency was an obstacle to feeling Palestinian.” Hammer, Palestinians Born in
Exile, 201; For more on the role of Arabic language in producing Arab American identity and cultural
politics, see Gualtieri, Between Arab and White, 167.

46
Louise Cainkar, “Palestinian Muslim Women in the US: Coping with Tradition, Change, and
Alienation,” (Ph.D. diss, Northwestern University, 1988); See also Shryock, “The Moral Analogies of
Race: Arab American Identity, Color Politics, and the Limits of Racialized Citizenship.” Race and Arab
Americans Before and After 9/11.

170
posed a “huge barrier” to reconciling his experience of privilege as an American citizen and his
racialized experience—and knowledge of himself—as Palestinian.
47
When I asked John to tell
me what made him feel affirmed in his identification as Palestinian-American, he noted the
importance of the BPFF in bringing the Palestinian community, and the Arab American
community more broadly, together:
“The festival is huge for me with that. Bringing together a large
group of people with similar passion and interest. To me, being
Palestinian is something to be prideful about, but there’s also this
big burden that comes with it. I guess it’s [affirmed by] being
around a community that’s carrying that burden.”
48

A large part of that burden relates to the pressure of representing Palestine and Palestinianness in
interpersonal interactions within a culture of compulsory Zionism. A feeling of precarity
regarding cultural authenticity only compounds the burden of representation.
Arabic language knowledge—or lack thereof—constitutes a major point of conflict for
my Palestinian-American interlocutors, serving to simultaneously challenge and affirm a sense of
Palestinian identity in diaspora. For people like John who were born and raised in diaspora, a
lack of Arabic language knowledge produces a sense of dissonance between his sense of
responsibility for representing Palestinian cultural politics within the context of compulsory
Zionism and the expectations around what it means to uphold cultural authenticity, who performs
that representation, and how. Yet, for others, Arabic language serves as a point of re-connection
to a Palestinian identity silenced within Metro Boston’s culture of compulsory Zionism. For
example, Lamia was born and raised in the West Bank but had been studying abroad when the
Israeli occupation began in 1967 and was thus unable to return home after college. She has lived

47
John (Boston Palestine Film Festival organizer). Interview with the author. December 14, 2013.

48
Ibid.

171
in the Boston area and been active in the Palestinian community there since 1979 and has
attended the festival as a spectator since it began in 2007. She pointed to the importance of
Arabic language in drawing her to attend the festival and in turn bolstering her identification as
Palestinian, which she describes as having been “disconnected from forcibly by not being
allowed to go home” after 1967.
49
Lamia emphasized the importance of language in producing
her sense of cultural connectivity, specifically in the form of what she considers to be a distinctly
Palestinian sense of linguistic humor that mocks the occupation and Apartheid state through
sardonic word play in Arabic. For Lamia, attending the festival and seeing Palestinian films—
and the humor that resides in Arabic dialogue—is about being able to reconnect to a sense of
Palestinian identity that she has been forcibly disconnected from.
Concerns around cultural identity manifest in a variety of ways in the Palestinian
diaspora, and film festivals are not exempt from the tensions the discourse around authenticity
generates. For example, festival organizer Suha described how she feels a “weird tension” as she
tries to reconcile her experiences of exclusion and invisibility alongside the hypervisibility that
comes with her Arabic name and her vocal participation in the cinematic activism of the BPFF.
50

Born and raised in the US to a Palestinian mother and a white American father, Suha grew up
speaking Arabic and strongly identifies as “nuss falastiniyya, nuss amerkiyya, bess [half
Palestinian, half American, but] 100% Muslim,” wherein her mixed-race background is made
whole through her faith and cultural identification as Muslim.
51
Yet, Suha explained to me the
conflicted relationship she has with other Arab Americans, especially other Palestinians,

49
Lamia (Boston Palestine Film Festival audience member). Interview with author. October 20, 2013.

50
Suha (Boston Palestine Film Festival volunteer). Interview with author. October 20, 2013.

51
Ibid.

172
including other cultural activists involved with the festival, as well as with her extended family
members—namely her cousins—who live in Jordan. She expressed frustration about her
relationship with her cousins in particular, stating that when she visits them in Jordan she feels
that she often “could never be Arab. I was always trying to prove that I am.”
52
Although Suha
feels angered by the combination of her cousin’s blasé attitude toward Palestinian liberation
alongside their exclusionary attitude towards Palestinian identity, she laments the fact that her
mixed-race and geo-cultural positionality in the US has led her to, in her own words,
“overcompensate” in her identification as Palestinian.
53
Suha’s dedicated involvement with the
organizing committee of the BPFF is one of the ways in which this overcompensation is made
manifest; her participation as a spectator and labor as an organizer of the festival has proved
important to affirming her sense of Palestinian identity. Still, the politics of cultural authenticity,
which trouble Suha’s familial relationships, remain present within the social space of the festival.
She explained to me the sense of insecurity she sometimes feels at festival events, such as the
opening night part for the 8
th
Annual BPFF : “I felt this weird tension, that I can’t—or they wont
accept me. Or I’m not Arab enough or don’t look Arab enough. Clearly I have to wear this
keffiyeh!”
54
Suha’s experience suggests that one’s precarious relationship to cultural authenticity
is not secured merely through Arabic language knowledge, but that exclusionary Palestinian
ethno-national identity politics are concerned with a performance of identity that can take the
form of dress. As someone who passes as white, Suha attempts to forestall the erasure of her
Palestinianness by wearing the keffiyeh, the traditional black and white Palestinian scarf, which

52
Suha (Boston Palestine Film Festival volunteer). Interview with author. October 20, 2013.

53
Ibid.

54
Ibid.
173
serves as a visual marker of her identity in the absence of a stereotypical Palestinian
phenotypical appearance.
Suha’s lamentation over her inability to just “be” is telling of a particular mixed-race
Palestinian-American way of being and knowing oneself that is greatly informed by a social and
psychic struggle to negotiate two sides of a bifurcated identity. I understand this struggle as
exemplary of what Majaj has described as a process of “self-creation” through an “on-going
negotiation of difference.”
55
As a mixed-race Palestinian-American, Majaj writes of the
importance of “claiming” her Palestinian identity largely to counteract the ways in which
“passing…wreaks implicit violence upon the lived reality of our experiences.”
56
“Claiming” in
this sense serves as a way to simultaneously acknowledge and resist the cultural, political,
material, and geographic dispossession that characterizes the Palestinian diaspora. However, as
Suha explained her feelings of isolation and exclusion the tears she shed during our interview
were important reminders that analyzing her experience in these intellectualized terms elides the
raw emotion of her experience. Here, the concept of political and cultural queerness accounts for
the affective dimension of Palestinian-American subjectivity as Suha’s experience exemplifies
how—despite the BPFF’s aims of fostering social and cultural connectivity—the festival cannot
always reconcile the Palestinian diaspora’s sense of identitarian insecurity.
Suha’s story represents the ways in which the dispossession of Palestine is not solely
about land or geography, but has broad social and psychic effects on Palestinians living in
diaspora. My interlocutor’s confrontations with compulsory Zionism in their daily lives weighs
heavily on their minds and contributes greatly to their feelings of political and cultural queerness.
Samira, an audience member and graduate student, explained to me how her expressions of

55
Majaj, “Boundaries: Arab/American.” Food for Our Grandmothers, 84.

56
Ibid, 80.
174
Palestinian culture—particularly through language—have exposed her to compulsory Zionism in
the form of microagressions in her professional and personal social interactions.
A PhD candidate at the time of our interview, Samira relayed a story to me about a time
she was attending an academic conference with several of her academic mentors. At the
conference, Samira was socializing in a small group with two faculty mentors who serve on her
dissertation committee, as well as an Iranian woman who she had just become acquainted with
and who also happened to speak Arabic. As Samira and the Iranian woman began to converse in
Arabic, one of Samira’s dissertation committee members interrupted by asking “What are you?
You’re speaking Arabic.”
57
In that moment, Samira—who had previously never mentioned her
ethnic heritage or Palestinian identification with any of her academic mentors out of fear of this
very sort of interaction—was pressed to come out as Palestinian. When Samira stated, “I’m
Palestinian,” she described the faculty member as having a strongly negative reaction by giving
her a hostile look before abruptly walking away from the conversation. Samira began to worry:
“I have to have a decent relationship with this woman. But at that moment I felt like maybe I just
hurt something by disclosing who I was. Maybe I just made her feel uncomfortable about
supporting my research or supporting me.”
58
Within a faculty-student dynamic already fraught
with power differentials, Samira worried her disclosure would affect her working relationship
with her mentor, especially as she approached the final stages of her dissertation. What was at
stake for Samira was not merely confined to the realm of identity politics, but had the potential
for substantial professional consequences that she believed could make or break her career
trajectory. This incident and Samira’s strong memory of it illuminates the way in which

57
Samira (Boston Palestine Film Festival spectator). Interview with author. October 24, 2013.

58
Ibid.
175
compulsory Zionism exacerbates already existing social power differentials that inform
Palestinian-American experiences of intersectionality as racialized subjects.
This type of hostile response to the expression of Palestinian identity indicates the way in
which Palestinian culture is perceived as an affront to dominant social and political norms, in this
case in the U.S. academy, shaped by compulsory Zionism. Suha identified this dynamic as well,
saying, “The personal is political, always. Anything Palestine is political. There’s no going
around it. To say ‘I am Palestinian’ is a political statement.”
59
If to assert oneself as Palestinian
is in fact to make a political statement, then to do so places the burden of representation on
individuals in the role of native informant. Gayatri Spivak theorizes the native informant as “an
impossible perspective” from the position of radical alterity, which Amit Rai takes as “less
subject-position than a particular strategic perspective, a kind of deconstructive lever through
which questions of radical alterity, responsibility, and [through which] persistent critique can be
constantly re-posed.”
60
Although postcolonial theorists have critiqued the power dynamics that
produce such a subjectivity, for my interlocutors to reclaim the role of native informant imparts a
sense of identitarian possibility where it has been foreclosed in different contexts. For example,
Suha—who has struggled with feelings of marginalization and the denial of her
Palestinianness—utilizes the feminist adage “the personal is political” as a way to take
ownership over the politicization of her identity, as well as to acknowledge the way that she
actively reclaims—and deploys—her Palestinian identity through a performance of cultural
politics.

Palestine Politics are Queer Politics

59
Suha (Boston Palestine Film Festival volunteer). Interview with author. October 20, 2013.

60
Amit S Rai, “Review.” Criticism 42, no. 1 (January 1, 2000): 119–23.
176
Understanding why my interlocutors attend the festival requires understanding how the
culture of compulsory Zionism affects Palestinian-American social life. Former festival
organizer Ruba stressed the importance of the festival as a safe space for the expression not just
of her Palestinian identity, but of the cultural politics that accompany that identity:
“The festival was creating that community where we who share the
same politics can just be together, celebrating, and feeling like
we’re not isolated, we’re not freaks for what we think.”
61

Ruba’s statement highlights how politically active Palestinian-Americans experience a
strong sense of non-normativity and marginality, a feeling of being out of place. Likewise,
Samira’s experience of being pressured to come out as Palestinian is telling of the way in which
Palestinian-Americans are situated as the politically queer Other to compulsory Zionism. I draw
on my interlocutor’s experiences to conceptualize Zionism as “compulsory”—and Palestinian-
American subjectivity as “queer” in relation to it—not only to indicate how Zionism functions as
a hegemonic or common sensical ideology within US culture, but to signify the power relations
within that cultural hegemony. Such an understanding also draws attention to the social justice
solidarities that become visible through a queer political optic. In terms of the BPFF, the political
and cultural queerness of Palestinian-American subjectivity emerges in my interlocutors’
experiences of racial passing, as well as in the practices of outing or closeting oneself as
Palestinian.
This sense of political or cultural queerness influences my interlocutors’ decisions to
divulge or withhold identitarian information about themselves in their everyday social
interactions. Ruba described the dilemma she faces regarding how and when to express her
Palestinian identity when meeting new people. She explained to me the way that she

61
Ruba (Boston Palestine Film Festival organizer). Interview with author. October 26, 2013.

177
“modulates” her identity through a process of strategic outing and closeting, in large part as a
way to cope with the sense of anxiety she feels as a Palestinian in the US.

For example, on the
first day of a foreign language class that she had enrolled in, Ruba worried about how to
represent herself because the instructor repeatedly referred to Israel:
“I’ve felt out of place and anxious in the US many times. I sometimes need to
assess the situation to know who I’m dealing with before I put out my identity in
full bloom. It’s not comfortable being Palestinian here because you don’t know
who you’re dealing with, you don’t know how they’re going to react to you. I think
about it all the time and I wonder: how am I going to modulate my identity?”
65

For Ruba, consciously choosing how and when to “modulate” her identity or when to “out”
herself as Palestinian is about exercising agency and shifting the power relations that inform her
experiences of identitarian affirmation and denial. I borrow the metaphor of the closet not to
connote a sense of shame around Palestinian identity, but rather as a way to describe the ways in
which Palestinian-Americans claim social power as minority subjects in sometimes hostile
environments and the way in which the practice of strategic outing functions to make oneself
visible through a performance of Palestinian cultural politics.
What my interlocutors' experiences indicate is that to represent and express Palestinian-
American identity in the US is to be politically queer within a culture of compulsory Zionism
and culturally queer in relation to Palestinian ethnonationalism. For some, these senses of
political and cultural queerness are closely reminiscent of their experiences as LGBT identified
and/or gender nonconforming people within a culture of compulsory heterosexuality. Spectator
Alma likens her experiences of strategically closeting herself as Palestinian as similar to the
kinds of social modulation she performs around her queer sexual identity within both the US and
Palestinian contexts. She explicitly connects her experiences as both a Palestinian and a queer-

65
Ruba (Boston Palestine Film Festival organizer). Interview with author. October 26, 2013.

178
identified woman, explaining to me the frustration she feels when her Palestinian identity is
actively erased in social situations where it is expected that she passively endure racist
microagressions: “It reminds me of a lot of queer/straight spaces where you’re like ‘I’m going to
hold back so that I don’t make you feel uncomfortable.’”
66
For Alma, her experience as a
Palestinian in the US closely mirrors her experience as a queer-identified woman within
heteronormative society. Alma's characterization of her strategic disclosure or omission of her
Palestinianness as analogous to her experience as a queer-identified woman brings new meaning
to my interlocutors' conscious acts of "modulating" their identities and their experiences with
passing. What is more, this kind of experience clarifies that Palestinian cultural politics and
queer politics share similar subjectivities in relation to systems of power and domination.
Examining Palestinian-American experience through a queer analytic illustrates the
structure of feeling Palestinian in the US. I borrow Raymond William’s concept of “structure of
feeling” for its emphasis on how “meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt, and the
relations between these and formal or systemic beliefs” operate to produce “a social experience
which is still in process, often indeed not yet recognized as social but taken to be private,
idiosyncratic, and even isolating.”
67
Jasbir Puar’s theorization of queerness “as a process of
racialization,”
68
is also helpful for understanding how the process of coming out as Palestinian
prompts microaggressive experiences of racial othering, wherein Arab Americans are not only

66
Alma (Boston Palestine Film Festival spectator). Interview with author. October 26, 2013.

67
Emphasis mine. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press,
1978), 132.

68
Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, xi.

179
considered as Helen Hatab Samhan has described as “not quite white”
69
and are simultaneously
grouped into the monolithic category of “terrorist” and thus racialized as enemies of the US
nation.
70
The visual construction of a Palestinian “look” through the trope of the Arab terrorist is
complicated by Hollywood’s practice of casting South Asians and Latinos in the role of the
terrorist. Evelyn Alsultany has argued that such casting practices work to conflate “brown” with
“terrorist,” working to racialize people of color as homogenized political enemies of the United
State,
71
while simultaneously erasing mixed-race and light skinned Palestinians from popular
notions of Arabness.
Such visual constructions of Arabness in general and Palestinianness in particular also
work to alienate mixed-race and light skinned Palestinians from their own sense of ethnic and
racial identification. While it is easy to reject Hollywood racial stereotyping, it is important to
interrogate the relationship between colonial racial formation and post-colonial nationalism,
especially regarding the kinds of value judgments made regarding the correlation between
phenotype, identity, and national belonging. For example, as a mixed-race Palestinian with light
features, Suha conveyed to me the pressure she feels about needing to perform her
Palestinianness:
“I’m literally constantly thinking about it, performing my identity—
who I am in all sorts of different spaces that I have to occupy. I pass
in all sorts of ways. I pass being straight (whatever the hell that

69
Helen Hatab Samhan, “Not Quite White: Racial Classification and the Arab American Experience.”
Arabs in America: Building a New Future. Michael Suleiman, ed., (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University
Press, 2000).

70
Amaney Jamal and Nadine Naber, eds. Race and Arab Americans Before and After 9/11: From
Invisible Citizens to Visible Subjects (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008).

71
Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 10.

180
means), I pass being a white chick, so people say a lot of things in
front of me and they don’t realize how much it is a part of me.”
72

Suha consciously feels a pressure to perform her identity, in part as a way to stake her
claim to Palestinianness within a diasporic context vexed by both Hollywood’s racialization and
Palestinian ethno-nationalism. She also performs her identity in part as a way to assert her
difference in the face of passing in the US. Suha's desire to gain acceptance from her extended
family and the larger diasporic Palestinian community also stems from her discomfort around
passing as white and straight. For Suha, passing as white and straight is not only an affront to her
queer sexuality, Palestinian-Americanness, and Muslim feminism, but also prompts fears around
how that passing disregards the multiplicities of her subjectivity, rendering her simultaneously
invisible and hypervisible. It is not simply a matter of being able to identify as Palestinian and be
seen as such. Rather, what is at stake here is a further dispossession of Palestine through a
genocidal project of subsuming mixed-race Palestinians into whiteness.
Yet, this sense of cultural dispossession cannot be overcome simply by performing
Palestinianness or adopting a racialized aesthetic. My interlocutor’s expressed to me the ways in
which they must calculate how and when to modulate their identity, and this calculation is
largely based on the quality of one’s interpersonal relationships and the level of comfort one
experiences in daily life. For example, both Ruba and Alma invoke the notion of “comfort” as a
way to index their modulation process.
73
The closer a relationship, the less modulation of
identity; the less familiar someone is, the less my interlocutor’s risk willing to be the target of
conflict or be thrust into the role of native informant. My interlocutor’s modulation is not

72
Suha (Boston Palestine Film Festival volunteer). Interview with author. October 20, 2013.

73
Alma (Boston Palestine Film Festival spectator). Interview with author. October 26, 2013; Ruba
(Boston Palestine Film Festival organizer). Interview with author. October 26, 2013.

181
exemplary of a politics of denial or shame, but rather stems from concerns around self-
protection. As people who are publicly politically active around Palestine, exemplified by their
involvement with or attendance at the festival, my interlocutors do not shy away from the task of
political performance. Rather, these processes of modulation are about negotiating social power
relations and gauging the professional and emotional “worth” of expressing their Palestinian
identities.
74
Since the revelation of identity potentially exposes Palestinian-Americans to the
violence of having their subjectivity minimized, denied, or defamed, modulation then functions
as a form of self-protection.
In this context, the festival functions as a safe space where an engagement with
Palestinian cinema becomes a radical act of self-care and community building. Self-care, in the
words of Audre Lorde, “is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of
political warfare.”
75
I draw on Lorde to assert the relationship between Cohen’s conception of
queer politics and my exposition of Palestinian cultural politics. By thinking of Palestinian
cultural politics as queer politics, and vice versa, new social solidarities and new forms of
political organizing become possible. For example, Mary, a festival organizer, cynically
described to me the method of activism around Palestine that took place in the 1990s as “let’s go
stand in front of the consulate and have our signs.”
76
Mary also related to me how important it
was to radically reimagining the social aspects of Palestine activism in the festival’s early
planning stages. Emphasizing the entirely voluntary nature of the festival organizing committee,
Mary and the other organizers noted how important the festival’s non-hierarchal organizing

74
Ruba (Boston Palestine Film Festival organizer). Interview with author. October 26, 2013.

75
Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light: Essays (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1988), 131.

76
Mary (Boston Palestine Film Festival organizer). Interview with author. November 23, 2013.
182
structure has been in fostering the BPFF’s mission to do “politics through art.”
77
She attributes
the vast psychic and social burnout that occurred within the Palestinian-American community
during the Oslo Peace accords in the 1990s to those more traditional, direct action forms of
activism. The Oslo Peace process— fraught with competing interests—prompted major
breakdowns in activist circles on a much broader level. A culture of scarcity and insecurity
permeated Palestinian-American activist groups as Palestinians in diaspora watched while the
Palestinian leadership adopted a nation-state based solution to the question of Palestinian
dispossession. While an independent Palestinian nation-state was considered a politically
palatable solution to assuage the concerns of those Palestinians who remained in the occupied
territories, such plans failed to account for the refugee right of return and the diaspora’s claim to
the entirety of historic Palestine. Along with this nation-state based solution came the necessity
of managing who could or could not lay claim to belonging in such a state; the administrative
quantification of claims to Palestinian identity became a paramount concern for the future
liberation of Palestine. Under such conditions, the already fragmented Palestinian diaspora
experienced radical breakdowns in identity based unity and solidarity. As Palestinian-Americans
grappled with the wake of the failed Oslo process, the events of September 11
th
and subsequent
Second Iraq War further complicated Palestinian-American cultural politics, as Arab- and
Muslim-Americans more broadly were thrust directly into the US surveillance spotlight,
hampering Palestinian-American civic and political participation in the older, hypervisible forms
of organizing and activism. And yet, as Israel carried out further and further atrocities against
unarmed civilians, namely the brutal military crackdown at the start of the Second Intifada in
2000 and the bombing of Gaza and Lebanon in 2006, the need for activism around Palestine
grew ever stronger.

77
Ibid.
183
Although the necessity for Palestine activism grew from a place of concern and
mourning, festival organizer Mary described to me the optimism she felt when the festival
organizing first began: “I felt like that [older, direct action] line of activism was dead; it was
going nowhere and we could keep doing it until we’re 100 years old and it’s not going to have
any impact.”
78
When the BPFF held it’s first fundraiser in 2006 at Algiers, a popular Arabic
coffee house in Cambridge’s Harvard Square, Mary immediately saw the festival’s potential as
both a new form of political activism and a community building agent, one that could “pull the
community together again because [we] had been so torn apart by Oslo...It was a chance to
reclaim ourselves as a community."
79
Participation at the festival then becomes more than simply
a method for the dissemination of Palestinian-American cultural politics; it becomes a holistic
practice of Palestinian-American community building and psychic survival. Faced with post-
Oslo social fragmentation and post-9/11 racialization, the Palestinian-American community was
in fact poised to reinvent its political praxis in a way that could recognize and respect Palestinian
heterogeneity while insulating participants from the increased racism and state surveillance that
existed during the Second Iraq War.
In this context, ripe with tension and urgency, that the BPFF launched in 2007 as an
alternative mode of Palestinian-American political praxis and the festival’s continued success
today is a testament to the strength of cinematic activism as a mode of political activism.
Through the BPFF and other similar organizations, cinema plays a key role in reaffirming
Palestinian-American identity and reunifying the Palestinian-American community in particular,
and the Arab-American community more broadly. For a community that has been forcibly
fragmented and dispossessed, the self-care component of this type of activism must not be

78
Ibid.

79
Ibid.
184
overlooked. When considered within the context of the Israel’s US-funded apartheid project that
seeks to not only diminish but destroy Palestinian art, culture, and life itself, the social and
psychic nourishment produced through cinematic activism becomes tangible not only in terms of
affirming individual and collective senses of identity, but ultimately in resisting genocide and
erasure.
Conclusion
My interlocutor’s invest in cinematic activism serves the dual purpose of queering both
the culture of compulsory Zionism in the US and the intra-Palestinian discourse on cultural
authenticity. As a diasporic site, the festival provides a productive space where these
subjectivities congregate around and connect through their shared cultural politics. Their
engagement with Palestinian cinema and festival culture from the political and cultural queerness
of their subject positions functions as a way to rebuild cultural and political strength and imagine
a fuller sense of what justice for Palestine might mean for the diaspora.
185
Conclusion

“Turning to the aesthetic in the case of queerness is nothing like an escape from the social
realm, insofar as queer aesthetics map future social relations. Queerness is also performative
because it is not simply a being but a doing for and toward the future. Queerness is essentially
about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for
another world.”

-Jose Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia.

In episode seven of Jill Soloway’s Emmy Award winning Amazon television show,
Transparent, transgender protagonist Maura Pfefferman nervously awaits her family’s arrival at
a fictionalized LGBT Center in West Hollywood, California for the “Trans Got Talent” show. As
the talent show’s dress rehearsal is underway, Maura putters through the rows of metal folding
chairs to reserve seats while a transmasculine hipster on the stage runs through what could best
be described as an angsty, lesbian-feminist style slam poem. The performer emphatically
enunciates each word: “What on earth is left to rape? What flowers? What two lips? What...”
The camera cuts to Maura, who in her earlier life had been a prominent political science
professor at an unnamed university in Los Angeles, as she pauses in her diligent task to look up
at the poetic spectacle just as the seemingly unimpressed artistic director interrupts: “Great, uhh,
cut to the end.” The performer obliges the direction, holds the microphone close, and flatly states
“Free Palestine” before exiting the stage. This scene begs the question: how did Palestine
become such a prevalent, dare I say “hip,” issue within the greater field of queer cultural politics
that it can now be the butt of a joke about the aesthetics of political radicalism?
Over the last three decades, Palestinian cultural politics and queer cultural politics have
intersected multiple times within the realm of film, media, and film festivals. It is from these
186
recurring intersections that this project examines film festivals as venues for cinematic activism,
meaning that they constitute multifaceted terrains of struggle through which “the dispositions
and configurations of cultural power” are shifted to incorporate and represent otherwise
marginalized identities and issues.
1
In this sense, identity- and cause-based festivals typify—for
better or worse—a project of visibility. More specifically, this dissertation has demonstrated the
role that film culture has played in enabling the open expression of Palestinian cultural politics
through Palestinian-self representation while resisting the social and institutional enforcement of
compulsory Zionism in the United States. While the practice of cinematic activism has helped
the Palestinian cause gain more visibility in the US context, it has also made intersections
between Palestinian cultural politics and queer cultural politics more visible. However, as Stuart
Hall has noted, “there is always a price of incorporation to be paid when the cutting edge of
difference and transgression is blunted into spectacularization…what replaces invisibility is a
kind of regulated, segregated visibility.”
2

The “Free Palestine” scene in Transparent, not unlike the placement of the Boston
Palestine Film Festival within the Museum of Fine Arts or the heteronormative trope within the
fourth period of Palestinian cinema, illustrates the problematic duality of visibility that has been
debated throughout this dissertation: what is being promoted, regulated, or elided when the issue
of Palestine is made visible in the US context? The problem of this duality is precisely why this
project demanded an interdisciplinary methodology. To examine the work of Palestine themed or
LGBT/Q themed festivals solely in terms of their representational objects (films), would be to
neglect the equally important social and institutional circuits through which these films traffic.
The study of film festivals therefore requires an interdisciplinary methodology that reaches well

1
Hall, “What is the ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?” 468.

2
Ibid.
187
beyond the typical domains of cultural studies (aesthetic or textual analysis of a cultural object)
and which incorporates sociological and anthropological techniques (participant observation,
interviews). Doing so helps to better clarify the interrelatedness between film as a
representational medium, festivals as catalysts for social or political consciousness, and the
creative processes of political activism. Such a methodology also helps to make sense of how
and why certain social and political solidarities are made possible though film culture, while
others remain foreclosed.
Chapter 1 demonstrated how early controversies over the exhibition of Palestine-related
films in the United States had frequently entailed comparisons between Palestinian cultural
productions and LGBT/Q cultural productions. Through an analysis of the print news discourses
over these controversies, this chapter laid the groundwork for understanding how Palestinian
cinema was constructed as “queerer than queer” in the US context. Chapter 2 provided an
analysis of how the Boston Palestine Film Festival (BPFF) attempts to “mainstream” the issue of
Palestine and resists compulsory Zionism by bringing Palestinian cinema and visual culture to
the public sphere. Chapter 3 addressed the representational work of Palestinian cinema itself by
interrogating the “queer diasporic” construction of Palestinian-American subjectivity in the films
of Annemarie Jacir and Cherien Dabis. Finally, Chapter 4 demonstrates how and why
Palestinian-American festival participants negotiate their sense of Palestinianness between
restrictive notions about Palestinian cultural authenticity on the one hand and compulsory Zionist
microaggressions on the other hand.
Although the study of cinematic activism provides an example of how, where, and why
LGBT/Q and Palestinian identitarian and cultural spheres intersect, what I have hinted at
throughout this project is the need for a greater interrogation of the relationships between the
188
question of Palestine and the construction of queerness—political, cultural, gender, sexual, or
otherwise. Over the past decade, a dynamic discourse has emerged from scholars working in the
fields of queer studies, ethnic studies, and American studies who have taken up the question of
Palestine. There now exists a rich body of literature wherein scholars have taken Palestine as an
object of study, especially within queer studies, to theorize the gender and sexual dimensions of
war, imperialism, settler-colonialism and the cultural support for these phenomena that exists
within US and Israeli societies. Here I am thinking of the works of Jasbir Puar, Gil Hochberg,
Rebecca Stein, Dean Spade, and others who have posed what is fair to say is a Palestine
intervention within queer studies. We have seen this manifest through cinematic activism as
well, as best exemplified by the Outside the Frame film festival and SF Street Cred’s culture
jamming campaigns as discussed in Chapter 2.
Alternately, the fields of Arab American and Middle East studies have consistently
engaged the question of Palestine since the 1960s and 1970s, and feminist scholars within both
fields have centralized gender and sexuality in their analyses of transnational and diasporic
cultural and identity politics. Within Arab American studies, scholars such as Jo Kadi, Louise
Cainkar, Lisa Suhair Majaj, Suad Joseph, Therese Saliba, Elaine Hagopian, Nadine Naber, and
many others working in American, European, and Middle Eastern academic spaces, have
produced a substantial body of Arab feminist studies scholarship which have long since engaged
the question of Palestine and the gender, racial, and sexual politics therein. The analysis within
Chapter 4 is inspired by the intersections of this previous scholarship in Arab feminist studies,
American and ethnic studies, and queer theory. Although primarily an Arab American studies
project, Cinematic Activism must also be considered in relation to the field of Palestine studies, a
field which has, as argued by Helga Tawil-Souri, consistently privileged “the political” at the
189
expense of “the cultural,” and primarily been marked by studies in history, literature, and
political science.
Within the field of Palestine studies there has also been a profound silence when it comes
to LGBT/Q sexuality, sexual politics, or an acknowledgment of “queer” as a category of
politically radical alterity. Work on Palestinian identity, politics, and nationalism has largely left
heterosexuality uninterrogated, which has worked to reify heteronormativity within the study of
Palestine. As scholars in Arab and Arab American feminist studies have noted, the reasons for
this failure to engage queer issues within Arab and Arab American studies more broadly is
twofold. First, it is assumed that social issues such as sexism and homophobia must be
deprioritized in order to focus on the greater struggle for liberation; second, there is a reluctance
to even address such social issues because it is perceived as “airing dirty laundry,” which
threatens to reinforce racist stereotypes of Arabs as intolerant and socially regressive.
3
These
concerns are amplified with respect to Palestine, in no small part due to the demonization of
Palestine and Palestinians through compulsory Zionism. Meanwhile, scholarship which does
address queer cultural politics (this dissertation included) has most often originated from outside
of Palestine studies and has frequently been framed in relation to pinkwashing and/or Israeli
LGBT/Q studies.
4
While I would venture to count this dissertation among that literature, such
approaches unfortunately have the effect of placing the study of Palestine in an epistemically
codependent relationship with Israel. Such a construction both robs Palestine studies of
epistemological sovereignty, while reinforcing the idea that LGBT/Q sexualities and identities

3
Nadine Naber, “Decolonizing Culture: Beyond Orientalist and Anti-Orientalist Feminisms,” Arab and
Arab American Feminisms (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2011), 87.
4
Hochberg, Queer Politics and the Question of Palestine; Colleen Jankovic, “Queer/Palestinian Cinema:
A Conversation on Palestinian Queer and Women’s Filmmaking,” Camera Obscura 27, no. 2, 2012, 134-
143; Puar, Terrorist Assemblages; Sarah Schulman, Israel/Palestine and the Queer International
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).

190
are not native to indigenous societies, are endemic to European culture, and are therefore
colonial and imperial in nature.
5
As such, this project asks not how queer studies can further take
up the question of Palestine, but how and why it is both necessary and important for Palestine
studies to take up queer theory in a serious, sustained, and sovereign way. What then does it
mean for Palestine studies to take up queer theory? Such an undertaking would reanimate the
study of Palestine through an underutilized theoretical lens of analysis, thereby provoking a
greater consideration for issues of gender and sexual identity and difference, as well as within the
calculus of liberation itself. Doing so has the potential to re-illuminate the discursive horizon that
is the question of Palestine, which, like queerness itself, to borrow from the late Jose Esteban
Muñoz, is something untouchable, futuristic, an ideal that exists as “the warm illumination of a
horizon imbued with potentiality.”
6

To return to Transparent, the subtext of the “Free Palestine” scene is saturated with a
mockery of hipster aestheticism. I would argue that Palestine is not merely an aesthetic trend
among young, hip LGBT and queer cultures. As Muñoz emphasizes, “queer aesthetics map
future social relations,” in that an investigation of queer aesthetics is about more than the look,
sound, or otherwise representation of things, but rather, provides an avenue for social and
political solidarities in the struggle for justice. Queerness is “not simply a being but a doing for
and toward the future. Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an

5
One of the ways in which anti-colonial scholar Franz Fanon critiques European colonialism is through a
critique of homosexuality. Regarding the Middle East, Joseph Massad argues that the production of a
discourse on gay rights in the Middle East, specifically through the work of non-governmental
organizations, constitutes an imperial project that “produces homosexuals, as well as gays and lesbians,
where they do not exist.” In turn, Massad arguers, such discourses legitimize American and Israeli
imperial and colonial oppression of the Arab and Muslim world as operating in the service of gay
liberation. Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 2008); Joseph Massad,
Desiring Arabs (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

6
Munoz, Cruising Utopia, 1.

191
insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.”
7
I call for Palestine studies
to “do” queer theory for this very purpose, to broaden the discursive horizon in the hope of
making solidarity, potentiality, and justice more visible.
In the meantime, the importance of Palestinian cultural politics in the United States has
reached far beyond the realms of cinema and academe, and has, in fact, entered the mainstream.
As I write this conclusion, the issue of Palestine has become a major point of contention for both
Democratic and Republican candidates in the US presidential primary elections. Not because
Palestine has not been discussed during US elections before (it has), but because, for the first
time, a US presidential candidate has publically vocalized an outwardly sympathetic position
toward the Palestinian people.
8
In a nationally broadcast foreign policy debate with Democratic
frontrunner and establishment favorite Hillary Clinton, US Senator Bernie Sanders stepped out
of Democratic party line when he stated “if we are ever going to bring peace to that region —
which has seen so much hatred and so much war — we are going to have to treat the Palestinian
people with respect and dignity.”
9
Sanders drew heat for his statements during the debate, as well
as for his decision to decline the invitation to speak at the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee (AIPAC) convention, a customary event wherein presidential candidates reassure the
Zionist establishment that they, once in office, will continue the US government’s “special

7
Ibid.

8
Samantha Lachman, “Why Sanders’ Comments On Israel-Palestine Are Historic.” The Huffington Post,
April 15, 2016, Accessed May 17, 2016, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bernie-sanders-hillary-
clinton-israel_us_57114f60e4b0060ccda353ab.

9
Natasha Noman, “Bernie Sanders Just Said the One Thing All U.S. Politicians Are Terrified to Say.”
Mic, April 15, 2016, accessed May 17, 2016, https://mic.com/articles/140993/bernie-sanders-is-the-first-
presidential-candidate-to-show-sympathy-for-palestinians.

192
relationship” with Israel.
10
Sanders, who also happens to be the first Jewish candidate to win a
primary election, essentially rejected compulsory Zionism and instead opened up the field of
Palestinian cultural politics, quite literally, for national debate.
I am not suggesting that cinematic activism has contributed to the prevalence of
Palestinian cultural politics within US electoral politics. I am, however, arguing that political
organizing through film and media has made it possible for the question of Palestine to become
visible within the greater landscape of US cultural politics in ways that were previously
unimaginable. What this dissertation has argued, then, is that cinematic activism has made
resistance to compulsory Zionism not only visible, but possible and viable as well. For that, I
argue, we have filmmakers, festival organizers, graphic designers, culture jammers, and guerrilla
artists to thank for the cultural work they have performed in making Palestine visible to an
audience whose vision had been obscured by compulsory Zionism. The growth of cinematic
activism and its accompanying visual cultures has shown us that another vantage point—and
with it another way—is possible.

10
Tal Kopan, “Bernie Sanders Will Not Attend AIPAC Conference.” CNN. Accessed May 9, 2016.
http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/18/politics/bernie-sanders-aipac-speaking/index.html.

193

Filmography

Amreeka. Directed by Cherien Dabis, 2009.
Brokeback Mountain. Directed by Ang Lee, 2005.
Children of Fire. Mai Masri, 1991.
Crash. Directed by Paul Haggis, 2004.
Divine Intervention. Directed by Elia Suleiman, 2002.
The Imperialists Are Still Alive! Directed by Zeina Durra, 2010.
Inheritance. Directed by Hiam Abbas, 2012.
Intifada: Introduction to the End of an Argument. Directed by Jayce Salloum and Elia Suleiman,
1990.
Julia. Directed by Fred Zinnerman, 1977.
May in the Summer. Directed by Cherien Dabis, 2013.
Occupied Palestine. Directed by David Koff, 1981.
The Palestinian. Directed by Roy Battersby, 1977.
Paradise Now. Directed by Hany Abu Assad, 2005.
Rana’s Wedding. Directed by Hany Abu Assad, 2002.
Salt Of This Sea. Directed by Annemarie Jacir, 2008.
The Time That Remains. Directed by Elia Suleiman, 2009.
Transamerica. Directed by Duncan Tucker, 2005.
Villa Touma. Directed by Suha Arraf, 2014.
Wedding in Galilee. Directed by Michel Khleifi, 1987.
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract Cinematic Activism examines how marginalized or underrepresented identity-based and cause-based groups leverage film culture in order to foment social, cultural, or political change. I explore this in detail by analyzing how Palestine-themed film festival organizing in the United States has emerged as a method for the open expression of Palestinian cultural politics within a broader cultural context that is marked by hegemonic institutional and political support for the state of Israel, or what I call “compulsory Zionism.” I draw on queer and feminist theory in order to illustrate how the social power relations within the United States construct Palestinian cultural identity and politics as the politically and culturally queer Other within the context of compulsory Zionism. ❧ This project is based on oral history interviews with participants of the Boston Palestine Film Festival, film festival participant observation, visual analysis of films and festival materials, and qualitative analysis of print news discourses on Palestinian cinema. I trace the emergence of Palestinian cinematic activism to the 1980s and 1990s, wherein controversies over the exhibition of Palestinian cinema in cities such as Boston and San Francisco made the institutional and cultural censorship of Palestinian cultural politics highly visible while simultaneously identifying film exhibition as a powerful tool by which to dismantle institutionalized compulsory Zionism. At the same time, these controversies were frequently cast in relation to controversies over the expression of LGBT/Q cultural politics through art and cinema. This project therefore also historicizes the relationships between Palestinian cultural politics and LGBT/Q cultural politics, which continue to interact today within the realm of film festivals, such as Outside the Frame: Queers for Palestine Film Festival, Frameline: The San Francisco International LGBTQ Film Festival, and the Out in Israel Film Festival. Cinematic Activism is ultimately a study of culture and power that interrogates cinema’s role in the production of transnational solidarities and political activism.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Cable, Umayyah (author)

Core Title Cinematic activism: film festivals and the exhibition of Palestinian cultural politics in the United States

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program American Studies and Ethnicity

Publication Date 06/07/2018

Defense Date 04/19/2016

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag activism,Arab Americans,cultural politics,film,film festivals,media,OAI-PMH Harvest,Palestinian cinema,queer theory,Racism,zionism

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Gualtieri, Sarah (committee chair), Alsultany, Evelyn (committee member), Halberstam, Jack (committee member), Harrison, Olivia C. (committee member), Keeling, Kara (committee member)

Creator Email cable@usc.edu,umayyah.cable@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-250470

Unique identifier UC11281118

Identifier etd-CableUmayy-4424.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-250470 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-CableUmayy-4424.pdf

Dmrecord 250470

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Cable, Umayyah

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA