After Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the most significant Palestinian film archive—containing dozens of documentaries made under the aegis of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO)—was lost, either to bombing or seizure by Israeli forces. While some of these films have since been found in Israeli archives (Sela 2017), reconstructed from copies (by Kamran Rastegar, Emily Jacir, Annemarie Jacir and others), and written about by scholars and filmmakers (Denes 2014, Gertz and Khleifi 2008, Jacir 2007, Yaqub 2018), most remain inaccessible. The significance of this archival absence resides both in the loss of a critical visual history, as these were among the first Palestinian self-representations in film, and in constituting yet another material limit to constructing a Palestinian narrative rooted in sources considered to be documentary evidence (as opposed to e.g. oral testimonies, often disparaged). In his essay “Permission to Narrate,” Edward Said argues that factual reports of Israel’s war crimes in 1982 did not ultimately determine attitudes toward Israeli conduct as much as the interpretive frameworks adhering to Palestinians and to Israel. I extend Said’s argument by surveying Palestinian cinematic history, in which the genre of documentary predominates (especially prior to the emergence of auteurs like Michel Khleifi and Elia Suleiman), and by highlighting recent Palestinian documentaries that redress archival loss not by finding traces of factual evidence but by narrating and imagining from their absence. I focus on Azza El-Hassan’s 2004 documentary Kings and Extras: Digging for a Palestinian Image, which follows the filmmaker through Amman, Beirut, Damascus, and Ramallah as she speaks with people connected to the PLO film archive. More than a search for the archive, El-Hassan’s film becomes a quest for images and stories that will reanimate Palestinian freedom dreams, across the borders and less visible chasms that keep Palestinians fragmented. She infuses her journey with folkloric and fabulous qualities, so that the aim of retrieving what has been lost is overtaken by the reconstruction of “potential histories” (Azoulay 2019), political possibilities that were suppressed before they could be realized, but which endure in social practices and in the imagination. I propose “reparative fabulation” as a mode of narration attuned to potentialities, and not only facts, as I engage with Said’s above essay, and decolonial feminist critiques of historiography that include Saidiya Hartman’s model of “critical fabulation,” Rosemary Sayigh’s ethnographies of Palestinian refugee women storytellers, and Omnia el-Shakry’s notion of “history without documents.”

The Nakba as historic moment and enduring condition unites a forcibly fragmented Palestinian body politic and mnemonically marks the original violence of the Nakba as an ongoing event that has deeply shifted the natural, cultural, and political terrain of Palestinian existence. The notion of an environmental Nakba as such emerged recently but phenomenologically must be understood as a crucial component of Israel’s enduring ethnic cleansing project in Palestine, as a concomitant form of violence waged simultaneously on diverse Palestinian bodies and the waters and landscapes that connect them materially, historically, and imaginatively. When attending to the overlapping and sometimes contradictory layers of ancient, contemporary, fabricated, and concealed histories of Palestine, Edward Said proposes that in many cases, “one has to rely on landscape readings, because little else remains.” Taking Said’s proposition seriously, in this paper I attempt to read the Jordan River and the Dead Sea as Palestinian “bodies of water” – a term borrowed from Astrida Neimanas – that are in various ways staging ecopolitical refusal. The former feeds the latter, and in the past century, but especially in the past 35 years, both interconnected bodies of water have been subjected to severe depletion, settler colonial occupation, overdevelopment by Jordan and Israel, and asymmetric diversion resulting in the unsustainable and critical condition we find them in today. Reading the ecological phenomena of the depleted Jordan River and ever-emerging sinkholes that have swallowed parts of the disappearing coast of the Dead Sea as ecopolitical refusal reveals the constitutive relationship between forms of ecocidal and genocidal violence committed in the last century by the imperial regimes that have targeted the waters and landscape of Palestine and attempted to erase Indigenous Palestinian presence from them. In order to further unpack the modalities of destruction waged concomitantly by the environmental Nakba on the land and the ongoing Nakba on the Palestinians who live from it and dream of it in the diaspora I will consider the prominence of these interpermeable Palestinian ‘bodies of water’ to the Palestinian social and political imaginary in photographic, documentary, geological and literary accounts that point to the urgent need to reclaim these bodies of water as a hydrocommons.

My contribution to this panel considers Avi Moghrabi’s 2012 film Once I Entered a Garden to reflect on the entanglements of migration, affects, and life histories in the Levant. This example of contemporary cinema verité follows Moghrabi, the descent of Syrian-Lebanese Jews, and Mograhbi’s former Arabic teacher and longtime friend Ali Al-Azhari, a Palestinian with Israeli citizenship who, displaced from his hometown of Sufariyya in 1948, has spent much of his life living in Tel Aviv. Inspired by a pan-Levantine phonebook whose listings span geographic distances now sequestered by borders, the two document their search for locations that speak to histories made impossible by competing imperial projects and nationalisms. Utilizing ethnographic and archival research conducted in Lebanon, I pair an analysis of Moghrabi’s film with an exploration of the ways in which Lebanon’s Jewish past is critically dependent on interregional networks and histories. I first analyze how Moghrabi’s filmic exploration of the two’s everyday practices, interwoven with Super-8 letters sent between imagined Jewish Lebanese lovers separated by the Israeli-Lebanese border, shows how quotidian life can challenge the separability of peoples in the region. I then turn to my research in Bhamdoun, a Lebanese town that was formerly the refuge place of upper-class Jews from around the Levant who gathered to escape the heat of summer. Positioned in proximity to nearby hotels, villages, and a casino, the synagogue’s ruins—unkempt but structurally sound—offer a glimpse of an often-idealized past, where Jews from across the region and beyond could join the company of an intersectarian Haute Bourgeoisie by simply boarding a train. By assessing the pitfalls of a romanticized pre-imperial Levantine past, I suggest that the material traces of Bhamdoun’s yesteryears offer possibilities—and warnings—for imagining an alternative to the present geopolitical status quo of the region.

The Syrian Archive is an activist-run organisation run from a nondescript apartment in a suburb of Berlin. It gleans video clips from social media sites through a purpose-built web crawler, archiving the images on its own private server. The archive regularly negotiates with social media giants to restore and archive footage removed during periodic takedowns, following, for example, fears in the wake of terrorist attacks, and moral panics that the footage contains terrorist material or might cause ‘radicalisation’. But the archive also uses the material in order to build war crimes investigations. During my fieldwork there, the Syrian Archive were gathering together footage related to hospital bombings in order to use in a potential future war crimes tribunal. Open-source content used in a war crimes tribunal had often been described to me as the “last hope” by many media activists. And yet, I was told by a young lawyer volunteering at the archive that of the over 300 incidents of hospital bombings, often documented by multiple witnesses, only two or three were an “open and shut case” of a war crime. Across those 300 incidents, only visual elements reached the bar of evidence. My role, however, was to translate the speech of people who appear in the footage for the sake of background information. Their speech, even when it claims to know who the perpetrators were, cannot achieve the status of testimony. What are the implications of this evidentiary silencing, and how is this archive made to speak?