Faculty of Humanities M.A. Media Studies: Television and Cross-Media Culture Master Thesis Redefining the Narrative: An Exploration of the Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Reconstruction of Identity through Filmmaking Dina Maria Farag Student Number: 12431168 Supervisor: Emiel Martens Second Reader: Reza Kartosen-Wong Date of Completion: 28.06.2019 Table of Contents 1. INTRODUCTION 3 1.1 Culture as a Matter of Media 3 1.2 Historical Context –The Nakba & the Palestinian citizens of Israel 6 2. THE PALESTINIAN MINORITY: OTHERING AND COLLECTIVE IDENTITY 10 2.1 Israel–A Contradictory State 10 2.2 The ‘Trapped Minority’ 13 2.3 Otherness of Palestinians: Orientalism 15 2.4 The Collective Memory of the Palestinian Minority 19 2.5 Israeli Media Strategies & Palestinian Identity Construction 23 3. PALESTINIAN FILMMAKING: TAKING CHARGE OF THE NARRATIVE 27 3.1 In Between – An Overview 28 3.1.1 Behind the Scenes: The Funding and Production 29 3.1.2 Three Palestinians in Tel Aviv 36 3.2 Junction 48 –– An Overview 44 3.2.1 Behind the Scenes: The Funding and Production 46 3.2.2 Palestinian Resistance: Separate but Equal 49 3.2.3 Reception in Israel and Palestine 54 4. CONCLUSION 56 1 Abstract The Palestinian citizens of Israel are an indigenous minority living within Israeli territory. Succeeding the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 and the resulting immigration of Jews, the Palestinians living within the newly set borders of Israel were reduced to a minority. While there are various fiction and documentary films produced on the general issue of the Israeli-Palestinian contention, the Palestinian minority and their ongoing struggles to coexist within a hegemonic host state are often neglected. As the hegemonic state, Israel developed systematic policies to discipline Arab society and indoctrinate the minority with a Jewish worldview. One of the policies includes the reconstruction of media into central socializing mechanisms seeking to control the Palestinian collective identity and memory. As the role of media is detrimental in shaping the ways in which people view their own social and political reality, this thesis examines the how the minority uses alternative media as their own tool to resist Israeli oppression. By analyzing the funding, production, content and reception of the films In Between and Junction 48, this research concludes that the minority uses alternative filmmaking to regain control of their narrative and redefine their collective identity. Keywords: geopolitics, ethnic minority media, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Nakba, Palestinian minority, Palestinian citizens of Israel, Israeli media, identity construction, collective Arab memory, Palestinian filmmaking, Junction 48, In Between 2 1.INTRODUCTION 1.1 Culture as a Matter of Media The decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the most widely discussed and emotionally charged political issues in the world. While there is a great deal of information on the overall Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Palestinians living in Israeli territory and their ongoing struggles to coexist as a minority are often neglected. These Palestinian citizens are a minority living amongst Jewish-Israelis in Israeli territory. As such, Israel has actively utilized ideological mechanisms to impose the hegemonic Jewish worldview amongst its citizens of Israel, including the Palestinian indigenous minority (Jamal 2009, 573). Since the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948 (also referred to as the ‘Nakba, or ‘catastrophe’ in Arabic), the Israeli state has succeeded in dominating the Palestinian political and economic ecosystem. Unwelcome within the newly established Israel, the state aimed at taking control of the collective identity and memory of the Palestinians that remained within its borders. As such, the Israeli state “attempted to discipline Arab society by colonizing the Arab mind” after it had successfully dominated the Arab economy and political system (Jamal 2009, 573). The state systematically attempted to indoctrinate a hegemonic Jewish worldview within the Arab indigenous community. One of the most impactful expressions of this attempt is through the takeover of the existing Palestinian media landscape. As such, the use of media became a prevalent tool in order to cultivate the “preferred image of the Israeli Arab" (Jamal 2009, 573). Similarly, since dominant media are used to cultivate the ‘Israeli Arab’, alternative media are also becoming increasingly important tools for the minority to reconstruct the Palestinian identity, culture, and sense of community. As such, “(...) media by and for ethnics in a host country with content in ethnic languages”, was coined the term ethnic minority media (Shi 2009, 599). Therefore, alternative media by and for minorities help stabilize the minority’s original identity and its affiliation with the former homeland (...)” (Caspi & Elias 2011, 63). In addition to serving as a foundation for maintaining the minorities’ cultural and collective identity, ethnic minority media also serve as an alternative to dominant mainstream media. It challenges the minority’s stereotyped representation commonly found in dominant 3 media and provides viewers with a more layered depiction of them as a people (Caspi & Elias 2011, 63). In this thesis, I will analyze how the Palestinian minority in Israel uses alternative filmmaking as a tool to regain control of their narrative and redefine their collective identity as a way to resist Israel’s attempt to cultivate the submissive ‘Israeli Arab’. By taking charge of their own narrative, I argue that Palestinian citizens of Israel are utilizing alternative filmmaking to combat the perpetual and oppressive attempts of the Israeli state to control the collective memory and identity of an entire minority. I will do so, by analysing the two films In Between ​ ​ and Junction 48 and argue that these productions provide the minority with the opportunity to ​ take charge of their own identity construction. I will also argue that the funding structures, productions, storylines and reception of the films portray symbolic meaning relating to the struggle of the Palestinian minority living in Israel. Within my analysis, I also examine the intentions and perspectives of those involved in the films (mainly directors, producers and leading actors), and explore how they regard their own identity as a part of a minority that uses filmmaking as a tool to reconstruct their collective identity. As such, a part of my analysis will include commentary I personally obtained in interviews with Maysaloun Hamoud, the director of In Between, as well as Samar Qupty, the leading actress in Junction ​ ​ 48. Both Hamoud and Qupty are members of the Palestinian minority in Israel, and can, ​ therefore, contribute firsthand to certain details of each film, as well as examine how the films function in regards to their own identities as Palestinian citizens of Israel. Additionally, while the number of films revolving around the Palestinian people in the West Bank is growing, films produced by and starring Palestinian citizens of Israel are scarce. In Between and Junction 48 are amongst the most prominent films that earned international ​ acclaim while also being produced by the minority. Tackling themes unique to them, both films employ Arab actors and actresses, producers and directors who are active members of the Palestinian minority. Addionally, the films are significant to this research due to their credible representations of the Palestinian minority and their interactions with Jewish-Israeli characters. Naturally films amplify and exaggerate certain depictions, however, the two films selected (as was stated numerous times in interviews with the directors and cast members and will be addressed in the analysis), aimed at portraying realistic representations of the Palestinian minority for the screen. In order to analyze the symbolic meaning of the films, 4 relating to the real struggle of the Palestinian minority living in Israel, a degree of authenticity must be met. Considering land and geography are at the heart of the Israel-Palestine contention, this thesis research falls under the scope of geopolitics. As the name suggests, the term geopolitics refers to the relationship between geographic discourses and the ‘political’ (Toal 2005, 65). Toal (2005) specifies that geopolitics can be regarded as the dynamic between geographic entities (such as rivers, mountains, locations or climate), and political and societal structures of states and communities (65). In other words, identifying and attributing meaning to geography is in itself already a political process (Toal 2005, 65). Dittmer (2010) argues that today, geography refers to the different ways meaning is inscribed into places and as such “dividing the world up into spaces with which we associate value” (11). As such, classic geopolitics is rooted in the analysis of ‘how the world is’ (Dittmer 2010, 11). In terms of perceiving ‘how the world is’, media are one of the greatest influences. In that sense, “television, newspapers, books, the Internet and cinema act as mediators of people’s experience of places” (Zimmermann 2007, 59). In terms of Israel and Palestine as well as the Palestinian minority in Israel, the issue of geography, space and location are extremely complex and emotionally charged. Since land and geography (or the loss) of it are at the heart of the Israel-Palestine conflict, the specifics are rarely fully understood by the international community.