Matene Toure in The Baffler:
AFTER THE NAKBA OF 1948 and the violent implementation of an Israeli state in historic Palestine, the revolution looked to cinema. The portrayal of Palestine in cinema goes back to the creation of cinema itself, in 1896; the creation of sound cinema posed a grave threat to burgeoning Zionist activities. Organizations like the Jewish National Fund and Histadrut (General Federation of Laborers) rounded up major financial and political support to back film productions that expanded the propaganda apparatus locally and abroad. As a consequence, as Ella Shohat notes in Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation, “very few narrative features were produced until the early sixties, while documentary practice in Palestine became virtually a synonym for Zionist propaganda films.” Dominant visual regimes were oriented toward legitimizing modern Zionism in the eyes of the West and socializing new settlers internally, often using cinematic devices such as Americans playing Israeli soldiers (Paul Newman in Exodus) or the exotic Arab women-victim trope (Dina Doron in Clouds Over Israel) making these movies little more than vessels for paternalist, revisionist narratives and the advancement of Israeli nation-building.
In 1968, Palestinian cinema reemerged as part of the liberation movement, which believed in the power of film to cultivate solidarity in the Arab region and internationally. Recently restored by the Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, The Dupes (1972), directed by the Egyptian filmmaker Tewfik Saleh, resurfaces in the aftermath of the Hamas attacks of October 7 and Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. At the time of its release, the film was one of the first narrative Arab films to confront the Zionist cinematic propaganda machine by centering the tragic history of the Nakba, or or “catastrophe,” which had been purposely omitted from Israeli cinema. As Edward Said writes, “The whole history of the Palestinian struggle has to do with the desire to be visible.”
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