“If I had known that speaking the whole truth about a struggle whose wounds and sensitivities are still fresh would be far from easy, if I’d known that discussing our struggle with Israel would lead to more despair about the disappearing chances for peace, day after day, If I’d known that beforehand, I certainly would have avoided getting involved in this project. Now that I’ve begun it, I find no better way to express the essence of Israel’s policy than what its army carried out in Quneitra in 1974, when they completely razed it.
And so we don’t forget cinema in this horrendous scene, only one civilian building survived all of this destruction, a few meters from the border: a cinema house.”
Omar Amiralay, “A Plate of Sardines” (1997)
There has been a sea change in the perception of the Palestinian cause across broad sectors of the American population. It has been spurred by the most dire of circumstances, but there has indeed been a change. Sympathy with the Palestinians has never been higher in the United States, and Israel has never been in a worse position vis-à-vis public sentiment. Nevertheless, the shipment of arms continue, the bombings continue, and state repression of those against the genocide continues to intensify as well. Perception, however, is not politics—or rather, perception has little sway in a country, indeed in the West at-large, increasingly bathed in a cavernous democratic deficit. But even on the level of simple representation, which both informs and is informed by public perception, Palestine continues to run up against certain limitations, particularly in film.
Palestinian representation in cinema remains weighted down by anchors chained to Palestinian representation off the screen. In the past, Palestinians were almost exclusively portrayed as “terrorists”, flat in their simple and irrational desire to cause widespread destruction, fated for anonymous death at the hands of the burly patriot (or patriots). Inroads by Palestinian cinema into the festival scene were still held back by the requirement that Palestinian characters, now allowed to speak, voice their skepticism about armed resistance alongside their desire for a nebulous peace—the specter of “terrorism” coloring their reception. Films depicting Palestinian armed resistance in any kind of positive light, previously relegated to left-wing screenings in basements, have only recently begun to receive screenings in arthouse theaters—larger independent or corporate theaters mostly continue their policy of blindness. Even victories like No Other Land’s Academy Award win are marred by a great big asterisk—the necessity of an Israeli co-director and an explicit condemnation in the victory speech of the actions of October 7th, despite the documentary having been filmed many months prior.
Buried beneath the already buried stories of Palestinians are the stories of the other Arabs who have also been the victims of Israel’s campaigns of brutality, displacement, and ethnic cleansing. Lebanon, Egypt, and Syria have suffered massive waves of expulsion throughout the 20th century, yet those stories of suffering and colonization remain untold outside their respective borders, and even there they are increasingly forgotten by the new generations despite Israel’s increasing aggression. As Abdul-Malik al-Houthi once remarked, “Whenever the Israeli enemy expands, where else can it expand? Except in Arab countries, Arab lands?”
Among the most potent of these stories of dispossession is the story of Quneitra, the now-abandoned Syrian town in the Golan Heights. Once a town of tens of thousands, Israel occupied in in the War of 1967 and held it for years. Settlers desired the land it sat upon, just as they did the rest of the newly-occupied Golan. When the IDF learned that it would have to relinquish control of Quneitra in order to achieve a ceasefire with Syria, it annihilated the city as an act of revenge. Graffiti from Israeli soldiers taunted the Syrians who sought to return: “You want Quneitra, you’ll have it destroyed.”
Quneitra was never reconstructed. A few families returned, but the city largely remains a ghost town, a monument to a total and all-encompassing act of cruelty against a civilian population, one that would be repeated against cities and villages in Gaza over and over and over again. Across the disengagement line, the Syrian Golan was subsumed into the Israeli fabric. It was officially annexed, its populations told to accept Israeli identity as swathes of Zionist settlers moved in to Judaize the area. It became a ski destination, a vacation hotspot, a safe alternative for those thinking of leaving the kibbutzim around Gaza but still wedded to the expansionist frontier. Alawites, once full citizens of a sovereign Arab state, were now touristic oddities for Israeli travel writers.
Quneitra may be a ghost, but its image lives on in the films of Mohammad Malas. Malas was born only a few years before the establishment of Israel and he left for the Soviet Union the year after Quneitra was taken by Israel. His return to Syria coincided with Israel’s withdrawal. Like almost everyone from Quneitra in that time, the major events of his life have been shaped by Israel: when its military moves, when its politicians are content that they’ve meted out sufficient suffering. In the course of Malas’s travels, he learned from Russian cinema and met Andrei Tarkovsky, and took those influences into the films he would come to make in the Arab world. At home in that Arab world, Malas’s films are well-awarded and his opinions still sought after, whether from the Saudi-leaning al-Majalla or the Hezbollah-leaning al-Mayadeen. His value as a trailblazing auteur is still well-recognized in film circles today, despite a tapering off of his artistic output in his advanced age.
Tarkovsky’s influence, for instance, courses through Malas’s magnum opus, “The Night” (1992). The film details the story of a son attempting to piece together his father’s fragmented memories of the 1936 Palestine Revolt and the major convulsing events of the next few decades. These memories end with his father’s death after the IDF occupation of Quneitra—his father cursing the Israelis to his last breath as he dies in the street. Malas’s love for Tarkovsky’s “Mirror” is all over the film, especially in its approach to poetic voiceover and its depiction of disjointed memories, but the disjointedness serves a political purpose as well as a narrative one.
The father is consumed by his desire to reverse his abandonment of the fight for Palestine one fateful day in the 1930s, a desire that keeps him from his son and alienates him from his neighbors. When the father is not mumbling to himself or standing barefoot in the street, he is mostly taciturn and difficult. The fragmented form means that what glimpses we do receive of the father’s humanity are incomplete, the circumscribed visions of a man in some kind of untouchable and inscrutable anguish, only communicated to the son through occasional reminders of the cause he once fought for. Our frustration at the father’s inscrutability is the son’s own. Israel and the reverberations of its creation across the Arab world continue to affect even the most personal details of a family’s life. In the end, the father’s attempts to finally secure a safe place for his family in the 1960s are futile: the Israelis take it anyway, and then leave it destroyed—physical ruins mirroring the memories of their absent and ruined patriarch.
While “The Night” is influenced by Tarkovsky’s “The Mirror”, it is not as wholly experimental as Tarkovsky’s work. Both “The Night” and Malas’s previous film, “Dreams of the City” (1984), act as relatively linear showcases of major events in Syrian history, as opposed to Tarkovsky’s famously non-linear approach to Soviet history. Military coups come and go, new fighting groups sprout up and sputter out, and conspiracy theories are traded amongst the populace about who precisely betrayed Palestine and if Hitler has converted to Islam. These moments would seem almost Forrest Gump-ian had their finales not been so dark and bitter, with the realization that none of these changes in Damascus, nor the changing currents of the populace, meant anything in the end. When the family in “The Night” looks upon the celebrations of Israel’s withdrawal from (most, but not all) territories occupied during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War in the film’s opening, they are unmoved by the fireworks overhead or the monument being unveiled. After the illumination leaves the sky, they must return to the debris that was their lives.
What differentiates Malas from his contemporaries is the function of memory in the Arab imagination, where all memories of what used to be are marred by the knowledge that they will inevitably end in failure, death, and the destruction of bright future longed for and now bitterly foreclosed. It is something more severe, more societal, than mere personal grief or parental grievance, even if those are the subjects into which Malas himself loves to delve. Malas’s stories are not grand epics or war documentaries, but stories about ordinary Arabs, living ordinary lives. The tragedy is not spectacular, but the day-to-day consequence of geopolitical struggle: their lives must be upended by the wants and desires of Israel, a faceless enemy to the resident of Damascus or Quneitra or Homs, that nevertheless overwhelms every decision their country could make.
85,000 Palestinians fled into Syria following the Nakba, never to return. The still-present refugee camps in arenas like Damascus became battlefields in a civil war that would take place over 60 years later, in a conflict still egged on by the occupying power that expelled them. Once a pillar for the growth of the pan-Arab United Arab Republic under Nasser, regionalist squabbling and demands for more Syrian representation would help precipitate the end of any united Arab front against the Israeli state; the Israelis would invade both Egypt and Syria in a few short years. A crude form of Ba’athism would soon overtake the Syrian politic, locking the country into a form of successive kingship. Just as Syria’s political horizons deteriorated, so to did the notion of resistance, until the very idea moving against Israel militarily, of joining the fronts that had been opened in Gaza and Lebanon and Yemen, would have no purchase with the Assad family. The occupation of a core piece of Syria’s southern land, the Golan, has been virtually forgotten by the world, its Israeli character now taken almost as a given in Western parlance. Israel has ultimately taken advantage of every change in government, every political project, every territorial shift, and has used such changes to take more and more Syrian land for itself and its settlers.
From Malas’s first film on, the the feeling of inevitability surrounding Israel’s conquests, and the inability to reconstruct what was taken, are confronted head-on. In the short film, “Quneitra ’74” (1974), a woman returns to her childhood hometown, only to find her home destroyed and the few residents still there unable to recognize her, having now grown into womanhood. She spends her time attempting to repair the parts of her house that remain, cleaning the few glass panes that remain unbroken, but the sounds of fighting insistently enter from outside. She sleeps on the tile floor of her home, moonlight entering through the holes in her roof, her future in this ghost town left beyond the frame.
Malas extended the themes of his fictional dramas into his documentary work. In “The Memory” (1975), Malas’s follow-up to “Quneitra ’74″, Israel’s unquenchable expansionism is represented as a violent, careening camera, forcing itself down hallways as clanging music plays in the background. Interspersed are interviews with a displaced woman who details the ways in which the Israeli military has sent her further and further away from her former home, now leaving her in the ruins of Quneitra.
In The Dream (1987), Malas interviews families in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, including Sabra and Shatila, whose dreams reveal what they remember and value most. Some women remember the exact streets of their former homes in places like Akka, others visualize Arab leaders like Nasser. All are still in some way still guided by what Israel has done to them, and whether their visions bring them images of their former lives or the victory still to come, they still go to sleep in the tents and squalor of the refugee camps all the same.
In both Palestinian and Syrian cinema, the foregrounding of memory and the desire to recapture what was lost continues to appear and reappear. With Palestine, there is sadness in what has been irreparably lost, but there is also a hope, born out of struggle, that what remains might one day be recovered; that a new chapter of freedom, without Israeli domination, may yet begin. Syria’s cinema, on the other hand, is tinged with a bitter sense of finality.
Quneitra did not remain across the disengagement line, it was returned to Syrian hands after seven years, but it was returned a caustic shell. The city, and the memories of the exiles, constitute what Malas refers to as an “open wound”—unable to heal, unable to return to what existed before. It is that bitterness, that anger, that frustration at being unable to bring back the past that drives his filmmaking. In Malas’s vision of Syria, memory’s pathways always wind through rubble.
“Of course, sometimes reality doesn’t solve things,” he remarked from among Quneitra’s ruins 23 years after the war, “but cinema protects them. In any case, had we known that Quneitra would be destroyed, perhaps one could have hoped to live there and die there, instead of turning it into a memory in his head, or pictures in a film.”
“Sometimes I have the impression that humans only capture a singular memory from their lives and continue to relive it in their imaginations repeatedly, as if the world stands still at that moment in time, and wipes all others out of remembrance.”
Malas’s mission is to preserve Quneitra as he knew it in the only way left, through cinema, through the construction of images. While it is an admission that what has been lost can never be recreated, it is not an admission of defeat. “It’s true that I’m always making films about Quneitra,” Malas has remarked, “and Quneitra is very much linked to the struggle.” In the book “Camera Lucida”, French literary theorist Roland Barthes calls photography an “asymbolic death, outside of religion, outside of ritual” where the paradigm between life and death is “reduced to a simple click, the one separating the initial pose from the final print.” In a sense, this is the way in which Malas views Quneitra: a preservation that marks its object’s end as soon as the film passes through the camera. As Barthes writes, “photography is a kind of primitive theater…a figuration of the motionless and made-up faces beneath which we see the dead.” Even in the moving image, what was lost bears heavily upon, overwhelms that which we see. As French film critic and theorist Serge Daney once wrote, sounding in echo with Barthes, “the filmmaker becomes someone who renders the weight of life through the certainty of death.” Malas’s filmography acts as a monument to all that Israel has taken, and as a reminder that this could happen to any Arab city, to any Arab country, to any Arab people, should circumstances shift. It is both a personal attempt to freeze time and mourn what’s been lost, as well as a warning to those who come after.
As of this writing, Quneitra is no longer in Syrian hands. After the fall of Bashar al-Assad, Israeli forces moved quickly into what Syria still held of Quneitra province, and it continues to push further into Dara’a, all while threatening military intervention as far east as Suwayda and as close to the seat of power as the suburbs of Damascus. It was not provoked, it was not threatened, but it acted in paranoid fashion against a potential threat, the idea that one day Syria might have a military that could threaten Israel, maybe. Again, we are witnessing what Arabs in the 1940s and the 1960s witnessed: unchecked Israeli expansionism, and its unspeakable colonial desires made manifest. Those who watch the films of Malas will undoubtedly be reminded of the scenes of Palestinians in Gaza returning to their destroyed homes in the north.
Those in Syria’s south continue to demand action from the new Syrian government, action that has so far been vague and non-committal, if taken at all. The fledgling Syrian government (such as it is) asserts that any provocation of Israel will only lead to further capitulation. Still, the Israeli tanks march on, displacing more civilians, destroying more land, ripping apart more communities. What, if anything, will eventually put a stop to this horrific cycle of violence against Quneitra remains to be seen, but the suffering caused by Israel will remain long after its soldiers depart, regardless of the manner of their departure. Those whose towns are being turned into IDF bases may one day speak of their villages as Malas spoke of his own city to his protégé Omar Amiralay in 1997:
“Omar, I wish you’d known the city, not just through cinema, but by actually being there.”♦