Films of Palestine: "Return to Haifa" (1982)
This is the first post in a new series focusing on the films of Palestine.
Introduction
Five months ago, in October 2023, I finally saw Shoah, Claude Lanzmann’s revered nine-hour documentary about the Holocaust. Eschewing filmed reenactments and the use of stock footage, Shoah consists mostly of interviews with those present during the Holocaust—survivors, perpetrators, and eyewitnesses—as well as contemporary footage shot at sites of major atrocities. The film leaves you with two primary takeaways: (1) the ease with which everyday people go along with unthinkable barbarism, finding ways to excuse their callousness as ignorance or self-preservation; and (2) the relatively recent timeline of these events, which in the case of Shoah would have taken place only a few decades before the film’s production.
Eleven years in the making and stretching across fourteen countries, there’s no question Shoah is a mammoth achievement. And yet, I found myself grappling with why I didn’t regard it as an all-time masterpiece, as so many others do. First, there’s the simple fact that Shoah is not a perfect film: the main flaw, I think, is Lanzmann’s decision to center himself visually and aurally, feeling the need to film himself conduct interviews that are then translated into the various languages of Lanzmann’s onscreen subjects. Though Shoah is certainly about the act of bearing witness, Lanzmann’s decision to foreground himself detracts from what should be the main focus of the film’s interrogation of the past. (Curiously, Lanzmann also had the tendency to downplay the contributions of others who played a decisive role in Shoah’s interlocutions.) Secondly, there’s the more philosophical question of whether the Holocaust can be adequately represented on film in the first place, though Shoah does grapple with that question by foregrounding verbal testimony over visual observation. (While I’ve been devastated and overwhelmed by literary encounters with the Holocaust, such as Elie Wiesel’s Night and Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, I honestly don’t think I’ve ever seen a film that conveys its full horror and incomprehensibility.) Whatever the case, I find myself somewhere between the film’s numerous supporters and the negative reaction of Pauline Kael, who famously criticized Shoah upon its release and was met with accusations of being a self-loathing Jew. “The film has fine, painful moments,” Kael wrote in 1985, “and it’s widely regarded as a masterpiece. But some may feel it lacks the moral complexity of a great work, and may also find it logy and diffuse, and exhausting right from the start.” As far as notorious Kael takedowns, there are many others I disagree with more vehemently than her (relatively mild) critique of Shoah.
Most of all, though, I need to admit to myself that maybe October 2023 was not a good time to finally watch Shoah. That was the month in which Hamas launched a surprise attack against Israel—according to Hamas’s military leader, Mohammed Deif, an assault stemming from Israel’s blockade of Gaza, its approximately 75-year-long occupation of Palestine, and its violence against Muslims and Islamic culture. In response, Israel launched a counteroffensive that quickly escalated into genocide and rapidly expanding occupation, killing over 10,000 people in Palestine (compared with more than 1,400 in Israel) and displacing almost a million and a half Palestinians in the ensuing month.
I won’t attempt to parse out the entire history of the Israel-Palestine conflict, which would require hundreds of pages and an understanding of world history that I don’t possess. But the uncanny timing of all this political violence and my viewing of Shoah left me overwhelmed with difficult questions I couldn’t answer. The first question: How could Israel and the descendants of Holocaust survivors use a horrific past to excuse the perpetration of another genocide? (It was this question that Jonathan Glazer so admirably asked on the Oscars red carpet this year, and the vitriol he’s faced since then—not to mention America’s cowardly vetoing of the proposed U.N. ceasefire—make it clear how the discourse in America still favors the side of economic and military might.) If anything, watching Shoah around this time only made the parallels more overt. The seemingly ordinary townspeople in Shoah who disguise their antisemitism by painting Jewish people as violent, untrustworthy animals have been echoed by countless Israelis since then, who make similarly vile accusations against the Palestinian people. (This culture of ingrained racism is expertly laid out by Sylvain Cypel’s Walled: Israeli Society at an Impasse.) Similarly, the scenes in Shoah that revisit sites of historical violence—which, in the film, are revealed to be leveled nowadays, concealed by tranquil fields and trees that bear mute witness—find their corollary in Israel’s attempts, since 1948, to raze Palestinian cities from the map. For example, there’s the case of Tantura, which was violently occupied by the Israeli army in May 1948—one of more than 400 Palestinian towns to meet this fate since the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” when Britain terminated its mandate over Palestine and Israel declared independence. (There’s even a linguistic overlap here: Shoah and Nakba both mean “catastrophe” in Hebrew and Arabic, respectively.)
The second question I grappled with: How does one react to a tidal wave of violence and injustice that the average person feels powerless to confront? A question a lot of people have been asking themselves recently. Peaceful protests and calling one’s representatives are crucial and admirable acts, even if they sometimes seem to carry only the illusion of meaningful change. I was immediately skeptical of social media activism, which had people leaping to performative, over-generalized conclusions that barely made an attempt to understand the situation. In the immediate wake of October 2023, I tried to read up on a situation that is at once not complicated (Israel is committing overt acts of genocide) and incredibly complicated (over a century of sectarian violence, broken U.N. treaties, political duplicity, and unsuccessful mediation attempts). The aforementioned Walled; Israelis and Palestinians: Conflict and Resolution by Moshé Machover; and Palestinian Walks by Raja Shehadeh were incredibly valuable readings in this regard.
But still, the question remained of how to meaningfully react to atrocities happening a world away. In other words, how to express my support for Palestine in ways that feel genuine, at least to me. Rightly or not, I’ve always felt that art (the creation of it and the conversation around it) is the most impactful way to change the world—it turns theory into human stories, abstraction into lived reality. In the end, the simplest response was the one that appealed to me most: immerse myself in the films and literature of Palestine. This rich culture is often reduced to one of suffering and misery in mainstream media conversations, but I’d rather try to uplift the artistic voices that don’t receive enough attention. And so, I finally arrive at the intention of this new series of posts: to experience the cinema of Palestine in all its political complexity and cultural vibrancy.
Return to Haifa
Return to Haifa (1982) is, in fact, a Lebanese film made by an Iraqi director, Kassem Hawal. Even so, it seems like an ideal starting point for this series on Palestinian cinema. For one thing, the movie is based on the novel by the Palestinian writer and journalist Ghassan Kanafani, which focuses on two significant events in recent Palestinian history: the Nakba of 1948, when over 700,000 refugees were forced to leave their homes during the Arab-Israeli War; and the Six-Day War of 1967, after which a victorious Israel far expanded its reach beyond the territories laid out in the U.N. mandate of 1947. Secondly, Return to Haifa was made at a time when the PLO was funding the production of Palestinian films in other Arab countries—especially in Lebanon, where the Palestinian Cinema Association was based (in Beirut).
The story of the film follows Said (Paul Mattar) and Safia (Hanan Al Haj Ali), who were two of the nearly one million Palestinians forced out of their homes in 1948. In the chaos that ensues when the Israeli army bombards the city of Haifa, Said and Safia are forced to evacuate and must leave their infant baby, Khaldun, behind. Flash-forward to the summer of 1967, a time at which the Israeli government reopens some parts of the Occupied Territories to Palestinian refugees. Said and Safia, now living in Ramallah, make the difficult decision to return to Haifa and search for information about the son they abandoned. Meanwhile, their other son, Khaled, decides to take up arms as a fedayeen, or freedom fighter (though most Israelis would label them as terrorists).
Upon returning to their old home in Haifa, Said and Safia discover that it’s occupied by Miriam (Christine Schorn), a Holocaust survivor from Poland who’s now an Israeli citizen. Complicating matters is the fact that Miriam adopted an infant Khaldun when she was relocated to Haifa, renaming him Dov and raising him in the Jewish faith. Dov/Khaldun is thus torn between his love for his adoptive mother (not to mention for the state of Israel, for which he now serves in the army) and his allegiance to his Palestinian parents, whom he’s never known.
Return to Haifa is admirably complex and non-judgmental toward the characters of Miriam and Dov. Miriam is sympathetically portrayed as a survivor of genocide and persecution, forced into difficult decisions and predicaments solely by virtue of her religion and her nationality. As she and her husband, Efram, wait to be relocated in a flashback set in an Israeli government building, Efram says, “Perhaps they [the Israeli government] are not telling us everything. All we know is that we are going into homes that belonged to others.” There’s a remarkable moment in which Miriam is harshly introduced to the violence that Israel is capable of when she sees a dead Palestinian child lying in the back of a truck; this flashback then cuts to newsreel footage of Hitler spewing one of his hateful speeches and the Third Reich saluting their führer in unison! It’s a baffling montage that, in the nature of dialectical materialism, suggests how the Holocaust set in motion the global calamities of the twentieth century (and beyond)—as if Hitler’s barbarism directly led to the atrocities that the Israeli state has committed.
Return to Haifa has some of the flaws you might expect from a production with limited resources: stilted performances from a non-professional cast; awkward, didactic dialogue that states the movie’s themes outright; a messy aesthetic that makes it hard to be immersed in the film’s world. The clear influence here is the landmark Battle of Algiers (1966), which also blends a fictional narrative with historical non-fiction footage to tell the story of a people’s resistance against their neo-colonial oppressors. Even Return to Haifa’s music, by Ziad Rahbani, echoes Ennio Morricone’s percussive score for Battle of Algiers. But Return to Haifa isn’t quite as successful in creating a sense of on-the-ground realism and impending action.
These weaknesses, though, are more than made up for by Return to Haifa’s sense of outrage and its expression of an ardent Palestinian voice (albeit made in Lebanon by an Iraqi filmmaker). Despite the film’s sensitivity toward Miriam, Return to Haifa explicitly condemns the Zionist state of Israel, as one of the characters alludes to “this world that crushes justice every day.” The movie is especially remarkable in commenting on Israel’s decision to reopen parts of the Occupied Territories to Palestinians in 1967, which might be construed as a sign of diplomacy, though Said sees the real reason behind the action: “When they [Israel] finished their occupation, they opened the borders in order to tell us, ‘Come and see, we are better than you, we are civilized.’ This is the war. This is the real war.” Through such stretches of dialogue, Return to Haifa makes it clear that, beyond the overt military actions, there’s a more nefarious war being fought: one of ideas, one that vilifies entire cultures, allowing Israel’s occupation to persist unabated.
As such, there is a propagandistic element to Return to Haifa, which isn’t necessarily a criticism. To dismiss all cinematic propaganda would be to ignore masterpieces like Battleship Potemkin (1925) and I Am Cuba (1964). After tying up its narrative, Return to Haifa ends with a scene that radically shifts location, as Said and Safia’s son Khaled trains as a fedayeen in Palestine and salutes the flag. This, the movie suggests, is the most patriotic act a Palestinian can commit: take up arms against the Zionist state. Mobilizing viewers into armed resistance might be a questionable form of propaganda, but when most modern media consists of propaganda in the opposite direction—valorizing Israel and its right to defend itself (just watch CNN or read The New York Times to witness ample evidence of this)—the more silenced perspective of Return to Haifa feels like a radical and liberatory reversal.
The film is also able to manage some evocative and stylish moments, with some inspired choices by director Kassem Hawal. Repeatedly, a shot of Israeli soldiers marching down stone streets, guns raised, footsteps reverberating, acts as a visual motif—a haunting symbol for the constant state of trauma and the threat of violence that occupation entails. Return to Haifa also makes expressive use of close-ups (particularly of hands fumbling as characters attempt to express the inexpressible) and shots in which the actors look directly into the camera. With unexpected flourishes like these and a more direct confrontation with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than most films attempt to achieve, Return to Haifa manages to be more than just a historical curiosity—it’s a tense, forlorn attempt to distill vast political machinations into sincere human drama.
Next Up: Wedding in Galilee (1987)