This presentation describes Gazan cinema as what I call an “infrastructure of care” in order to critically assess the entanglement of filmmaking and humanitarianism in the Strip. Since the beginning of Israel’s siege of Gaza in 2007, both cinema and various forms of medical care are largely framed by coordinated, overlapping, and/or competing economies of colonization, development, human rights, and humanitarianism, as well as Islamic and secular politics of resistance. In a context in which infrastructures of humanitarian care provide the conditions of possibility for cinema in Gaza, I argue that Palestinian filmmakers in turn dispense their own form of care by producing negotiated forms of self-representation. Gazan cinema functions as an infrastructure of care because its diverse modes of address inscribe it within multiple economies of obligations, solidarities, and forms of social reproduction. Following Aboumaliq Simone’s definition of “people as infrastructure” (2004), this presentation shows that cinema contributes to revitalizing social bonds and materializes the desire for social exchange and cooperation by offering modes of self-representation in negotiation with a variety of demands. Care unfolds in different directions (one cares for, about, and even, with) and at varied distances, whether it be oriented towards the self, the community, the “refugee” as a category, or the political international scene, or even emanating from the far-away spectator. I elaborate the concept of “infrastructure of care” based on a deep historicization of filmmaking practices in Gaza and a film and discursive analysis of Mohamad Jabaly’s personal documentary Ambulance/Isa’af (2015). Here I read images against the grain, by examining how Jabaly’s modalities of filmmaking retrace the competing economies of care within which Gazan images are situated. The framework of infrastructure of care thus proposes an analytical tool: tracing those personal and economic attachments’ trajectories – the circulation of care from one subject to another within film representations, filmmaking, and film funding – maps out a geopolitical and emotional cartography of Gazan cinema which may expand, parallel, or divert the financial flows distributed and channeled by humanitarian agencies and news outlets that structure a specific global economy of care. To sum up, this presentation demonstrates that Palestinian affective labor of self-representation constitutes a form of care which requires a reckoning of the global visual and humanitarian economies.

How do we hear Gaza under siege? What do embodied and land-based claims to return, such as those that were enunciated during Gaza’s Great March of Return render audible? As theorists of colonialism in the anti-colonial and decolonial tradition have argued, the ‘sense-experience’ gives evidence to the colonial wound (Fanon 1961; Mignolo 2009). The sensory encounter indexes where and how race lives, thereby revealing the body and its ways of knowing as an epistemic site. Departing from Western knowledge structures that privilege the mind over the body and its registers (i.e. the senses, affect, intuition, dreams, desires etc.), scholars of decolonial thought urge us to pay close attention to the ‘body-politics of knowledge’ (Grosfoguel 2011; Mignolo 2009) as an instinctive and visceral epistemic site to understand colonial formations and decolonial projects through. This paper reflects on what can be known epistemically and otherwise through paying attention to the politics of the senses in Gaza.  Methodologically, it brings together scholarship in Palestine Studies, Sound Studies and decolonial thought. It draws on a range of sound recordings taken from the eighteen-month popular protest including documentary footage and soundbites published by protestors and local TV and international press to explore what can be heard through and across the Great March of Return.

For decades, and clearly with the emergence of what Ella Shohat (1989/2010) termed “the Palestinian Wave” in Israeli Cinema, the Israeli film milieu—directors, producers, film critics and, to an extent, even fans of Israeli films—have taken a dovish stand vis-à-vis the Palestinian issue; often the Palestinian Wave films of the 1980s and 1990s amount to a strong damnation of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The vast majority of members of the film milieu reside in Gush Dan with Tel Aviv as its demographic and cultural epicenter. Although the area surrounding the Gaza Strip, known in Hebrew as ʿOtef ʿAza is about an hour away from Tel Aviv, it has often been thought by Israel’s media and cultural center as a (non)place “at the end of the word.” This study of Israeli films on Gaza situates its investigation precisely in this otherwise marginalized border area. More specifically, “So Close, So Far” seeks to identify the unique thematics and modes of expression Israeli filmmakers who reside in ʿOtef ʿAza/the Western Negev employ in their cinematic explorations of the Israeli-Gazan warfare, co-existence across from the separating fences and walls, and the strained people’s collaborations. This paper pursues the following research questions: How can we situate the positions and subjectivities of those filmmakers who reside in ʿOtef ʿAza and have become directly impacted by the military-political situation across both sides of the border (e.g., being subjected to occasional rocket attacks and forced to spend time in shelters)? Likewise, what role do these filmmakers take as they live amidst communities in Israel’s periphery known for their hawkish views towards Arabs in general and Gazans (who lie under the rule of Hamas) in particular? And finally, in exploring the various documentaries, feature films, and shorts of this essay, can we discern a unique cinematic grammar that emerges out of the particular realities the filmmakers encounter in this border zone?