Abstract
The filmstrip Palestine is the Issue begins with a set of images that would have been
familiar to US viewers of the 1970s: commercial airline passenger planes standing out
of place in the vast expanse of a landing strip in the Jordanian desert. Small figures
stand in the shadow of a plane’s wings. A Palestinian flag flies just below the plane’s
tail. A psychedelic symphony of string and horn instruments plays over the still images.
The music is simultaneously familiar yet not immediately recognizable: it is a thirteen-
second sample of “A Day in the Life,” the final track on The Beatle’s Sergeant Pepper’s
Lonely Hearts Club Band album. The lo-fi recording gives the music a degraded sound
quality, and when paired with the images on screen, this sampled cacophony gives the
impression of a jet engine accelerating for takeoff. The narrator begins: “In September
1970, four luxury passenger jets made emergency landings in the Jordanian desert. For
the first time, the world at large paid heed to the Palestinians.” By the time this filmstrip
began circulating in the US in 1975, the stereotype of the Palestinian as terrorist-
hijacker had become hegemonic in US culture through the contextless repetition of this
kind of imagery on the news and in entertainment media. Palestine is the Issue utilizes
this ripped-from-the-headlines sensationalism as a dramatic hook to draw viewers into
the narrative before flipping the script: “Let us now look at the root causes of Palestinian
anger.”
Based on archival research using the Association of Arab American University
Graduates (AAUG) special collection at the Eastern Michigan University Archive, this
paper examines the AAUG’s production and distribution of educational filmstrips in the
1970s and 1980s. Through the formation of a mail-order media rental program, the
AAUG conceived of and utilized filmstrip production, exhibition, circulation, and
spectatorship as a strategy through which to disseminate the organization’s academic
discourses on Palestine and Zionism to wider audience outside of higher education,
including churches and public schools. In addition to filmstrip production, the AAUG
served as an alternative media distributor in the 1980s and 1990s for a number of
independent documentary films, including David Koff’s famously censored Occupied
Palestine. The AAUG’s methods and goals with regard to media are exemplary of early
Arab American activist attempts to leverage media for the purpose of mobilizing
Palestine solidarity activism.
Discipline
Geographic Area
North America
Palestine
West Bank
Sub Area
None