How do filmmakers use intertextual and intermedial devices to engender political laughter? This paper will explore the nexus of intertextuality, laughter, and political turmoil through an analysis of intertextual blending in Palestinian movies from the Second Intifada period. Specifically, it will elaborate an extended dynamic analysis of filmic intertextuality in Divine Intervention (Elia Suleiman, 2002) through the juxtaposition of moving images from that film and from Le Ballon Rouge (Albert Lamorisse, 1956) and other intermedia. Literature scholars have traced how Palestinian filmic stories are in intertextual dialog with Palestinian writings, mostlythe stories of Ghassan Kanafani, but also Habibi’s Pessoptimist (Abu-Remaileh 2014; Yaqub 2012; Habibi 1974). Suleiman’s absurdist film humor is casually compared to the silent comedies of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin and the mutist films of Jacques Tati (Chion 2019; Chamarette 2014). But, sustained intertextual analysis has not been completed. This paper starts to fill this gap in intertextual criticism. The paper reintroduces three concepts from neoformalist and cognitive studies for intertextual analysis: transtextual motivation, allusion, and conceptual blending (Thompson 1988; Carroll 1982; Fauconnier and Turner 2002; Bateman 2016). It offers a short analysis of the Da Vinci image quote in Paradise Now (Hany Abu-Assad, 2005) and a longer blending analysis comparing Divine Intervention and Le Ballon Rouge. Hany Abu-Assad quotes visually and humorously from Da Vinci’s Last Supper (1498) with his protagonists beginning a final meal with the bombmakers. Intertextual blending analysis can trace whether the shot is just a sight gag, or the blend has a dynamic effect on the rest of the movie. Specifically, are both or one of the protagonists is Christ-like, and do Da Vinci and the Bible story cue further elements of the movie? In Divine Intervention, commentators notice the connections between the Ninja and The Matrix (1999) and the Old and New Testaments, but not the intertextual dynamics of the Arafat balloon scene. I offer a careful blending analysis tracing the comparisons Suleiman makes between Paris and Jerusalem, E.S. and a French schoolboy (and Manal Khader and a jeune fille), Arafat and the incarcerated schoolboy, Parisian child bullies and Israeli border guards; etc. Making intertextual jokes by blending a comic scene with a classical children’s movie, supports Suleiman’s satirizing of the casual, even childish, callousness of Israel’s occupation.