“A Catastrophic Success:” On Trump’s Board of Peace, Mohammad Bakri’s 'Jenin, Jenin,' and the Eternal Light of Resistance
During this time of monsters, I reflect on Gaza's future, Jenin's past, and the substance of memory.
The following are opening remarks for tonight’s screening of Mohammad Bakri’s Jenin, Jenin (2002) and Tierney Bonini’s My Life as a Palestinian Fighter (2023). The remarks (indicated by italics) are followed by a short essay on Donald Trump’s Board of Peace and its nightmarish vision for Gaza, the aforementioned films, and the eternal light of resistance. Any and all references to revolutionary violence are merely for intellectual musing. Thank you for reading.
Good afternoon, everyone. Before we watch tonight’s film, Jenin, Jenin, I want to thank all of you for braving the snow to be here, not just with me but, more importantly, to be here with one another. I also want to thank May Day for hosting this event, and for having hosted my screenings for over a year now. Please, if you’re able to, make a donation, as spaces like this are as crucial as ever, especially during these dark days in which we should be, as Muriel Rukeyser once urged us, reaching the “limits of ourselves.”
Now, I’ll try to be brief: For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Rosa, and this is yet another installment of my film series, Visualizations of Revolution. I’m going on two years of hosting film screenings now, many of them with my brilliant friend and fellow programmer, Yasmina. The impetus behind this series was 7 October and the subsequent rise in the interest of the history of Palestine, specifically a rise in the interest of the Palestinian people’s decades-long resistance to Zionism and imperialism. I figured that, if we collectively watched films by and about revolutionaries, we could build a constellation of movements and strategies. Once built, we’d closely examine this constellation, and we’d be able to map the historical intersections between movements in Palestine, Latin America, Africa, Europe, Asia, and elsewhere. In studying these intersections, we could see and discuss what has and has not worked, we could learn the names of organizations, individuals, and tactics, and we could see the strategies and sacrifices put forth by those who came before us. And, within that, we could decide for ourselves how to navigate this era defined by genocide and fascism. After which, we could move forward, arm in arm, underlined by strategy and sacrifice, for that is the purpose of political education, to arm oneself with the discipline to strategize and a desire to sacrifice. I’m not saying that watching movies is the skeleton key to revolution but, what I am saying is that I hope I can contribute, if even a tiny bit, to your political journeys.
On that note, I’ll end with this: Fascism doesn’t yield to marches or chants. It never has and it never will. However, I am convinced that fascism can yield to a synthesis of mass collective action and militancy. Last Friday, in Minnesota, the country witnessed the largest general strike in 80 years, and tens of thousands of us across the country rallied in the streets, declaring our solidarity with those strikers. That’s a start. The state responded by assassinating Alex Pretti, a VA nurse who was shot 10 times at point-blank range by Trump’s Blackshirts. We are long past the moment during which we must push the labor unions to act more militantly—the unions have to act now. If they do, there will be opportunities to act behind the speeches made by the union organizers and the faith leaders. We can, as George Jackson once wrote, make the enemy aware that “there must be funerals on both sides.” Given enough strategy and sacrifice, one act can heighten the contradictions of an era and become a contagion. A hundred of these acts can bend history towards the will of the people. A thousand of these acts, a flood of these acts, can usher in the hour of the furnaces, when, as Cuban poet José Martí once said, “only light should be seen.”
Thank you.
Rest in peace to Alex Pretti, rest in peace to Renee Good, and rest in peace to Michael Parenti, who passed away this last weekend at the age of 92.
Until victory, always.
“We’re gonna be very successful in Gaza.”
—Donald J. Trump, chairman of the Board of Peace
“May God turn your grave into a slice of heaven.”
—A Palestinian mother at the grave of her martyred son
“Is this not the perfect picture?”
—A resident of the Jenin refugee camp
Early on in Mohammad Bakri’s Jenin, Jenin (2002), a documentary shot in the aftermath of an Israeli incursion into the eponymous city’s refugee camp, a Palestinian man—who just days prior, held a young man in his arms as he died—lays bare the reality of the world, declaring, “Israel is not the terrorist—the whole world is the terrorist” (italics are mine). One need not look further than recent developments in and around Palestine to confirm this. Last week, at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s nefarious son-in-law and senior advisor, debuted his and Steve Witkoff’s “master plan” for “New Gaza.” New Gaza is the A.I.-generated fever dream of Trump and Kushner’s so-called Board of Peace, a private company, chaired by Trump, that aims to replace the long-futile United Nations as the world enters an era during which nation-states, devoid of all other utility, merely function as bludgeons. In New Gaza, which Kushner, in an absurd turn-of-phrase, has promised will be a “catastrophic success,” a concentration camp-cum-mass grave will be transmogrified into a “transportation hub,” replete with luxury hotels and “energy and digital infrastructure.” Of course, it logically follows that Palestinians (the plan says “Gazans,” not Palestinians) will be provided with “jobs, training, and services,” as “security, deradicalization, reconstruction, and a free market economy” finally make their debut in the beleaguered enclave. The magnanimity of Kushner will be embodied in a data center built upon the corpses of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. And, then, Kushner, “King of Kings,” will shout, “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
In the three-month period since a so-called ceasefire was agreed to, the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) have committed over 1000 violations, killing nearly 500 Palestinians. An estimated 10,000 bodies still remain under Gaza’s rubble. The amount of aid agreed upon under the conditions of the ceasefire have not been delivered and many residents of the Strip have had to endure extreme weather in makeshift tents and shacks, leading to numerous deaths caused by hypothermia, including those of several infants. This is Gaza, a place where genocide has not stopped its march. Instead, behind the thin veneer of Orwellian terms such as “ceasefire” and “Board of Peace,” the genocide quietly marches to its “completion.” This is not to mention that, as eyes remain on Gaza, Palestinians are being lynched in the West Bank every single day, as the threat of a total Israeli annexation of the territory is becoming increasingly likely. With this in mind, as nearly three dozen countries, including Israel and numerous comprador Arab states have signed onto the Board of Peace, greenlighting its nightmarish machinations, I return to Jenin: “Israel is not the terrorist—the whole world is the terrorist.”
During this time of monsters, I must remind myself that resistance is eternal. The history of Palestinian resistance is a long and winding one—from the Arab Revolt of 1936-39 (of which Ghassan Kanafani wrote an excellent analysis), the Popular Front of the Liberation of Palestine’s (PFLP) plane hijackings in the 60s and 70s, the First and Second Intifadas, to the Great March of Return, right down to the heroism displayed during Operation Al Aqsa Flood—Palestinians have always proven that, to the last pulse in their veins, they shall resist. However, within these grander epics of steadfastness, there are smaller chapters that are seemingly forgotten to the wider world. Yet, these smaller chapters allow us to form a fuller historical picture which, in turn, makes the present that much clearer. And it is one of these smaller chapters, referenced above, that I wish to shine a light on: the Battle of Jenin and Mohammad Bakri’s subsequent film, Jenin, Jenin.
The Battle of Jenin saw the invasion and flattening of the eponymous refugee camp during a two-week period in 2002, amidst the Second Intifada. While there are certainly more exhaustive histories out there, it is perhaps worth mentioning the roots of the Second Intifada. With the Oslo Accords having proved to be, as Edward Said wrote, a “Palestinian Versailles,” and with the collapse of the Camp David Summit, Palestinian society in 2000 was on edge. Then, an inflammatory visit by then-Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon, who is mentioned quite a bit in Jenin, Jenin, to the Al Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site in Islam, set all of Palestine ablaze. Sharon stormed the compound, located in Occupied Jerusalem, flanked by hundreds of police officers and soldiers, in what was no more than a smug act of utter disrespect. For the next four years, the Second Intifada, or the “Al Aqsa Intifada,” would see ferocious acts of resistance across all of Palestine, leading to over 1000 Israeli deaths. In March 2002, a suicide bombing in Netanya killed 30 Israelis and injured over a hundred more. The bombing, which Hamas claimed responsibility for, and the Israelis refer to as the “Passover Massacre,” was only the latest in a string of deadly suicide bombings. Shortly thereafter, in an act of collective punishment par excellence, the IOF launched Operation Defensive Shield, of which the incursion into Jenin was but one part.
At the time, Operation Defensive Edge, which also saw incursions into Ramallah, Tulkarem, Qalqiya, Nablus, and Bethlehem was the largest IOF operation in the West Bank since 1967, when Israel took control of the territory after the Six-Day War. However, it was only Jenin that was flattened. It was Jenin that, according to human rights activist Jennifer Loewenstein, had become a “landscape of ruin.” And it was Jenin where Mohammad Bakri, the famed Palestinian actor and director, who passed away in December at the age of 72, traveled to in the immediate aftermath of the invasion, to put on display, as he referred to it, “the Palestinian Truth.” In capturing and putting on display the Palestinian Truth, heard from the mouths of various people, most notably the very old and the very young, Bakri’s film is crucial as an artifact of memory-making. And, as sociologist Ron Eyerman writes in “The Past in the Present: Culture and the Transmission of Memory,” “...memory provides individuals and collectives with a cognitive map, helping orient who they are, why they are here, and where they are going. Memory, in other words, is central to individual and collective identity…”1 Without Bakri’s assertion in the form of this film, which, in its urgency helped to define the resulting historical narrative about the Battle of Jenin, the narrative would’ve been one exclusively crafted within a Zionist framework. I need not remind you that this is how the Western media functions: They are the stenographers of the empire, cowards who hold pens filled with ink made from the blood of the dead. This media project is succinctly summed up by one of the interviewees in the film, Nabil, a former prisoner who spent 15 years, six months, and 15 days in an Israeli prison. As he pushes a stroller through a row of tents, ad hoc housing in the wake of the camp’s destruction, he says, “They say that we are non-democratic, reactionaries, under-developed, and inferior people.” Nabil is right, for, in the aftermath of the Netanya bombing, Jenin was accused of being a “hotbed of terrorism.” And, of course, Western logic dictates that anyone and everyone can be a terrorist. One need not be brandishing a Kalashnikov or throwing stones, for doctors, children, the elderly, and the disabled are welcome to take up the mantle of “terrorist.” With Nabil, Bakri allows for a prisoner—one of the more ubiquitous and consequential figures in Palestinian society, yet one that confronts abuse, both sexual and psychological, and erasure at the hands of their Israeli jailers—to speak, an act that we would never see in any Western media outlet.2 Once again, the visual helps us to recuperate that which is at risk of becoming lost, in this case a Palestinian Truth that contains both collective and individual narratives.
Elsewhere, Bakri further allows for those who aren’t normally afforded platforms to speak, namely children and the disabled. In fact, two of the most ubiquitous individuals in the film are a mute man and a young girl, the latter of whom has become quite popular on the internet in subsequent years for her steadfastness in the face of the camp’s destruction. Bakri’s mute friend opens the film by re-enacting scenes from the Israeli invasion of the camp. Though he cannot speak, at least not in a way most of us are accustomed to, he is able to tell his story. His half-dozen appearances in the film see further re-enactments, a tour of his damaged home, and his showing us an old family photo album. Though re-enactment can never convey the true horrors of the Israeli invasion to an audience, especially to a Western audience, his re-enactment, a way of speaking with his body, turns his private memories into public ones. In viewing this re-enactment, the onus is on the viewer as to what to do with this newly gained knowledge. Of course, to even consider that re-enactment or that images of pain and trauma will have a mobilizing impact on the viewer is, at best, somewhat naive. I say that as someone who has spent most of their adult life studying the intersection of historical memory and film. The way we collectively remember eras of political tumult, from kidnappings, bombings, and assassinations to ethnic cleansing, war, and genocide is crucial, and film should play a role in crafting these collective memories. However, as an old man, angrily staring into Bakri’s camera, asks, “What good is your filming when no Arab has been able to do anything?” His condemnation, of course, can spread beyond the Arab world to encompass all of us, as, once again, “...the whole world is the terrorist.” Not much has changed since the Battle of Jenin, for in this time of genocide, the whole world consists of either terrorists or spectators. Yet, as I wrote above, I must remind myself that resistance is eternal. In the latter moments of Jenin, Jenin, Bakri’s young friend, who can’t be older than 11 or 12, says, with a determined ease, “I defend my motherland, I defend my camp…we are defending our land.” This is defiance in the face of not having water, electricity, or food. A defiance in the face of dozens of corpses, thousands of injuries, and mass displacement. A defiance that will only harden with age. This is an image we cannot, and will not, turn away from. And we are acquainted with this young girl because of the existence of this film. And it is because of this acquaintance, between the young girl and the viewer, that I will continue to champion films like Jenin, Jenin. Cultural scholar Macarena Gómez-Barris argues that documentary films “can disrupt silence, bounded experience, and isolation while moving individual traumatic experiences into the realm of collective acknowledgement.”3 Bakri’s film was so effective in disrupting the silence surrounding the invasion of Jenin’s camp that, after years of legal battles, the Israeli state ultimately banned the film in 2020, while also fining Bakri a large sum of money.
In watching Bakri’s film, in listening to a litany of Palestinian voices in the immediate aftermath of a tragedy, I am again reminded of Gómez-Barris, when she asks, “...if management and concealment are primary modes of hegemonic historical transitions, where indeed can memory be found?”4 Where Gómez-Barris’ inquiry was directed at post-Pinochet Chile, here, memory dwells in Jenin’s “landscape of ruins,” in its alleys and fields, its destroyed homes, and makeshift cemeteries. It is in these locations, underlined by these voices, that Palestinians, devoid of a state, further cement a truth of an Israeli state that knows nothing beyond death and theft. Memory is also embodied in those young men who, as members of the Jenin Battalion, went from being children of the first invasion of Jenin to fiercely resisting yet another Israeli invasion into the camp in 2023. Though our era seems cyclical and cynical, we must remind ourselves that resistance exists. And because resistance exists, skyscrapers won’t line the shores of Gaza, Trump will fail to make himself king of the world, and the world will meet the sacrifices of those in Palestine. And, dear reader, remember, resistance exists, not to be subservient to memory, but to mold it, to shape it, to give it new meaning. Resistance ruptures time, simultaneously fanning the flames of hope in the past, present, and future.
Ron Eyerman, “The Past in the Present: Culture and the Transmission of Memory,” in The Collective Memory Reader, ed. by Jeffrey K. Olick, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Daniel Levy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 305.
At the time of writing, there are believed to be over 9,000 Palestinians, including women and children, being held in inhumane conditions in Israeli prisons. For comparison, the resistance in Gaza, for the first time since 2014, is not holding any Israelis captive.
Macarena Gómez-Barris, Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 130.
Macarena Gómez-Barris, Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 21.