The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Through Cinema

3 units

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often considered the longest-running national conflict in the world. The dispute, which started in the early 20th century, attracts much attention more than a hundred year later, stirring intense passions and generating controversial headlines. This course explores the Israeli-Palestinian conflict though Palestinian and Israeli cinema. We examine the ways in which cinema depicts the conflict in the Middle East, starting from the British Mandate to the present day. Adopting a relational history reading, the course examines the treatment, the influences, and the representation of major historical and political events in the region - Israeli independence/Palestinian Nakba (1948), the Six-Day War/Arab Naksa (1967), the Yum Kippur war (1973), the Lebanon War I (1982), the Palestinian uprising Intifada I (1987), the Oslo accords (1993), Intifada II (2000) - in both Israeli and Palestinian films. The course examines the social and historical processes which shape Palestinian and Israeli cinematic narratives, self-representation, the representation of the Other, the relationship to the land, diaspora, national narratives, collective memory, and trauma. This course offers a dialectical cinematic and historic journey from national films to transnational modernist and experimental films, from the collective to the individual, and from hope to despair. Required Screenings: