Philly Remembers Al-Nakba... 60 Days for 60 Years

Location: The Rotunda, 40th and Walnut, time TBA

Handala, a new film from Philadelphia-based creators Adam Beach, Peter Wiegner, and Meghan Taqhuette, features footage filmed last summer in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. The creators describe their film:

Handala is a film about the paradox of tremendous hope in various forms of localized Palestinian and Israeli nonviolence, and at the same time, the devastating hopelessness of over 40 years of evermore violent occupation and ethnic cleansing in Palestine. It draws from material filmed in the occupied Palestinian Gaza Strip and West Bank, and Israel in the summer of 2007. With the film we are, in a sense, placing two diametrically opposed realities next to each other, in tension with one another, in order to honestly represent just how horribly violent and repressive the occupation is, and yet, also attempting to convey the thick inspiration and hope represented in the nonviolent movement to end the occupation and achieve mutual recognition and reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians. We believe that it is necessary to place these two narratives, of hope and desolation—very different but intrinsically related narratives—beside each other without diminishing the compelling weight of either. It is hopeless; it is full of hope.

Handala is also a willful act of historical revision. Ilan Pappe, describing the purpose of his seminal book: The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, wrote: "It is the simple but horrific story of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine…a crime against humanity that Israel has wanted to deny and cause the world to forget. Retrieving it from oblivion is incumbent upon us." Retrieving the memory of al-Nakba—the Palestinian catastrophe—Pappe wrote is: "the very first step we must take if we ever want reconciliation to have a chance, and peace to take root, in the torn lands of Israel and Palestine." We agree. What was, the reality of history, must be brought into view in order to understand and approach what is the case today in Israel and Palestine.

In making Handala we have attempted to humbly follow in the footsteps of Jewish-Israeli, Palestinian, and international academics and activists alike in doing our small part to retrieve the narrative of catastrophe from the dark void of un-memory to which it was driven by the Zionist movement and the subsequent state of Israel. The film is named after the character created by the Palestinian refugee-artist Naji al-Ali. His name is "Handala," which means bitterness. We named our film Handala as if to say: We too turn our backs in bitterness on false peace that aims to separate Palestine into pieces and create a sham Palestinian state, sovereign in-name-only. Peace through separation has only compounded violence. Thus, we look toward creative forms of coexistence.