Five Broken Cameras

Films showcase how Israel is not only destroying Gaza, but also its own soul

- Sudhanva Deshpande

THE ongoing genocide in Gaza has destroyed cities and villages, killed tens of thousands, wiped out entire families and displaced millions. It has also obliterated history.

The Palestinian struggle for freedom has been not only about land, about asserting selfhood and belonging, but also about claiming history. One of the founding myths of Israel is that it is 'a land without people for a people without land'. It was on the basis of this fiction that Zionist forces expelled over 700,000 Arabs from their land in 1948, an event the Palestinians refer to as Nakba ('catastrophe').

Just as the Nakba was an attempt to create a fake history, the current genocide in Gaza has also generated its own fictions. The current Israeli and western narrative would have us believe that the events of October 7, 2023 were sui generis, that they came out of nowhere, that nothing preceded them. This narrative attempts to wipe clean the slate of history.

This revisionist narrative will not succeed in the end, just as previous attempts at justifying ethnic cleansing and genocide by colonial powers in other places-such as the United States or Australia-have not succeeded in erasing indigenous histories. Among the most powerful records of life in Palestine under Israel's occupation before October 7, 2023, are films.

Long before I visited the country, I encountered Palestine viscerally through cinema. I had read books about Palestine and Israel, and I followed news from the region as best I could. But what gave me a sense of the lived life in Palestine were films. Over the years, I've seen scores of long and short, fiction and documentary films about Palestine and Israel. Here are the five that moved me the most.