“The Land Speaks Arabic” Film Review
“The Land Speaks Arabic”, a documentary film by Palestinian film maker Maryse Gargour was shown in Winnipeg on March 4 to mark Israeli Apartheid Week. This is the fifth annual observation of the campaign to organize opposition to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land and its discrimination against its Arab citizens. The showing was sponsored by the Canada Palestine Support Network.
“The Land Speaks
Arabic” provides a rarely heard perspective on the creation of the state of
Israel and the disaster that it represented for the Palestinians people. It also exposes many of the common myths and
fabrications that are so often used to justify and rationalize the brutal and
ongoing dispossession of Palestinian Arabs from their lands and livelihoods. Ms Gargour makes use of historical film footage
and photographs as well as interviews with historians and Palestinians who lived
through the Naqba (the Catastrophe) to chronicle the events that preceded the
declaration of the state of
In North America, the standard story of the founding of a Jewish state in the Middle East is almost always told by Israel’s supporters. This story sets the Jewish people in a hostile world, perennial victims who in the face of implacable anti-Semitism, pogroms and genocide finally return to their promised land. In the Zionist telling, the Jewish holocaust is presented as the justification for a Jewish state and the Zionist solution to age-old anti-Semitism. However as shown in Ms Gargour’s film, this is not the whole story of Zionism.
Well before the near
annihilation of European Jews by the German Nazi regime in the 1940s, the
Zionist movement had established its goal of creating a “home” for Jews and
only Jews in Palestine. Zionist leaders
pursued this aim by attempting to sell the idea to the imperial powers of the
time. After the concept was rejected by
the Ottoman Turks, the Zionist leadership went shopping the Jewish state
proposal to the western powers of
The Zionist
goals were received most favourably by the British and French who in the early
1900s were aspiring to replace the tottering Ottoman Turkish Empire in the
areas of Arabia east of the Suez Canal that it still controlled. Zionist connections and influence proved
useful to the British during the First World War as British armies were fighting
the Turks. In recognition of its
identity of interests with the Zionist plan for
The British and
French governments had made promises to the Arabs during the war. The Anglo-French covenants pledged that the
Arab populations could establish national governments of their own choosing in
keeping with the principles of self-determination. These undertakings applied to the larger area
the Arab Middle East that was under Ottoman control. There was no specific undertaking to Arab
residents of
Once Britain
became the mandated power in Palestine after the defeat the Turks it began to
allow large scale Jewish immigration to Palestine. Balfour explained after the war that Britain
had made no undertaking with respect to Palestine and saw no need to consult
with the 700,000 Arabs living there as to their wishes as to the future of
Palestine. The actions and statements of
British government officials in this period left the Zionist leaders with no
doubt that the British mandatory authorities wanted as many Jews as possible to
migrate to
The film chronicles the Palestinian struggle against the waves of Jewish immigration. Hostility between the Palestinian residents and Jewish colonialists soon led to violence between the communities. Murders and riots increased until 1936 when the Palestinians staged an uprising against the British authorities who were correctly seen as being responsible for Jewish immigration and the looming dispossession of Palestinian Arabs. The film contains interviews with Palestinians who took part in the uprising and witnessed the brutality with which the British army crushed the revolt. The British forces jailed or hanged any Palestinians caught with firearms. British actions in crushing the uprising left the Palestinians disarmed, disheartened and at the mercy of the Zionists.
As noted in “The
Land Speaks Arabic” the Zionist leaders were secular Jews. They did not use religion as a justification
for their intention to displace the Palestinians from their land. The Zionist project was colonial not messianic.
They saw it as analogous to the European
conquest of the new world. Their problem
however was that the Arabs living in
Ms Gargour’s film shows how the Jewish settlers in Palestine prepared for armed conflict from the very beginning. Jewish villages and kibbutzim were organized as paramilitary entities where residents, both male and female, were given arms and military training. As their numbers reached a critical mass in the late 1930s and early 1940s the Zionist enterprise became increasingly aggressive. Many Jewish terrorist groups arose that waged war against Palestinians and increasingly against the British administration.
With the end of
the Second World War, the Zionists decided that the British were of no further
use to them and in fact had become an impediment to the swift creation of the
Jewish state. Once the partition of
“The Land Speaks Arabic” graphically tells the story of how the Zionist forces went about expelling the Palestinian people from the land where they had lived for centuries. The film contains extended interview with Palestinians who were forced from their homes during the 1948 war.
The Palestinians were unarmed, unorganized and lacking any determined political leadership. The Zionists on the other hand were organized as an army and led by ruthless men who knew exactly what they wanted. That was to be rid of the Palestinians. Zionist leaders like David Ben-Gurion, Menachem Begin, and Yitzhak Shamir led a campaign of terror in the service of ethnic cleansing. The goal was simple – to remove as many as possible of the 700,000 Palestinian Arabs in the newly portioned Jewish state.
The method was
intimidation through murder. The Zionist
myth respecting the creation of the state of
The Palestinians interviewed by Maryse Gargour for her film were in Palestine in 1948. They experienced the Zionist threats, the terror, saw family members and neighbours murdered. Their accounts are compelling. Their memories of Zionists as merciless butchers are fresh and raw. They clearly understood that the Zionists in 1948 gave them only two options – flee or die. Their testimony has been confirmed by every serious historians of the Israeli – Palestinian conflict.
“The Land Speaks
Arabic” tells a dark tale but it throws a welcome light on the Middle East’s
enduring conflict. The film ends in 1948
but the Zionist enterprise in