The Kanafani Effect: Resistance and Counter-Narration in the Films of Michel Khleifi and Elia Suleiman

Middle East Journal of Culture and 

Communication 7 (2014) 190–206 

MEJCC 

brill.com/mjcc 

The Kanafani Effect 

Resistance and Counter-Narration 

in the Films of Michel Khleifi and Elia Suleiman 

Refqa Abu-Remaileh 

Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow, in affiliation with the 

Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin & Marburg University, Germany 

r.abu-remaileh@sjc.oxon.org 

Abstract 

Guided by Ghassan Kanafani’s seminal studies on ‘resistance literature’, this paper 

extends the concept to contemporary Palestinian fiction film to explore its permutations 

in the visual medium. The resistance label has had its repercussions on Palestinian 

cultural production; however, it continues to inspire an aesthetically-driven 

innovative defiance in the face of an ongoing Israeli occupation. Tracing the divorce 

of cultural production from political organizations, I focus on a Palestine configuring 

‘inside’, attending to the films of Michel Khleifi and Elia Suleiman, to explore therein a 

particular synthesis of counter-narratives of resistance. Embedded in the moving image 

medium itself, in its structures, techniques and narrative forms, the aesthetic resistance 

Kanafani had anticipated shines through these artists’ films to disclose new spaces of 

everyday resistance, in expressions of freedom, satire, self-criticism and humor. The 

spectator is called on to partake in creating these spaces, by reading silences and interpreting 

multilayered images so as to construct meanings that cannot be hijacked by 

language or confined by oppression. 

Keywords 

Palestinian cinema – Palestinian literature – Michel Khleifi – Elia Suleiman – Ghassan 

Kanafani – Edward Said – Mahmoud Darwish – resistance 

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi: 10.1163/18739865-00702006

the kanafani effect 191 

… 

One has to keep telling the story in as many ways as possible, as insistently 

as possible, and in as compelling a way as possible, to keep attention to it, 

because there is always a fear it might just disappear. 

edward said (in barsamian 2003: 187) 

∵ 

Introduction: The Kanafani Effect 

The telling of the Palestinian story through film has produced its own stories, 

struggles and tragedies, its own exiles and returns. It has, like literature, been 

driven, shaped and judged by an important element throughout: resistance. 

In literature, an early and influential treatment of this element was produced 

by the writer and journalist Ghassan Kanafani. Kanafani was born in Acre in 

1936 during the British Mandate. In 1948, he and his family were expelled and 

forced into exile, initially in Syria where Kanafani grew up. Later, he moved 

to Kuwait, and finally to Beirut, where he was assassinated in 1972 by Israeli 

Mossad agents. Kanafani was not only a prolific writer, journalist and editor, 

he was also a tireless political activist in the Palestine Liberation Organisation 

(plo) and a prominent spokesperson for the Popular Front for the Liberation 

of Palestine (pflp). 

Famous for his short stories and novellas Men in the Sun (1962) and Return 

to Haifa (1970) among others, Kanafani also wrote a number of non-fictional 

literary studies in the late 1960s, two of which were devoted to what he called 

adab al-muqawama (resistance literature). When Kanafani published his seminal 

study Adab al-muqawama fi filastin al-mutallah (Resistance literature in 

Occupied Palestine) in 1966, he introduced to the Arab world the works of a 

number of unknown young men he called the ‘poets of resistance’. These young 

poets were from the ‘inside’, from Occupied Palestine—part of a population 

that, after the Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948, had been for the most part forgotten. 

Having managed to escape expulsion in the war, the 150,000 Palestinians who 

remained in their towns, villages or surrounding areas were placed under strict 

Israeli military rule, separated from each other, and isolated from their exiled 

families and relatives scattered in numerous Arab countries and throughout 

the rest of the world. Kanafani’s ‘discovery’ and exposure of these voices from 

the heart of Palestine rallied Arab critics, who came to praise these newly vis- 

Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 7 (2014) 190–206

192 abu-remaileh 

ible poets as a shining example of commitment and a model for other Arab 

writers (Klemm 2000: 57). 

The mid-1960s was a time when pre-war revolutionary momentum was 

sweeping across the Arab world and the notion of iltizam—the need for a writer 

to be politically committed and socially responsible—was at its height. Faith 

in the role of the writer and the ideals of a committed literature, however, were 

shattered a year later with the shocking Arab defeat in the 1967 war. The Naksa, 

as it became known, was a devastating loss that led to disillusionment, followed 

by a period of skepticism that swept the Arab world. Jerusalem, the West Bank 

and Gaza, which had been under the control of Jordan and Egypt respectively, 

were now lost as Israel seized control over all historic Palestine. Undeterred, 

and perhaps even reinvigorated by the need for Palestinians to take matters into 

their own hands after the Arab defeat, Kanafani published a second volume 

of his study in 1968. Al-adab al-filastini al-muqawim taht al-ihtilal (Palestinian 

resistance literature under occupation) reaffirmed the important role that 

cultural resistance could play in the struggle for the liberation of Palestine. This 

marked a moment of divergence: while ideals of iltizam were withering away 

in the Arab world, Palestinian cultural production was rising under the spell of 

cultural resistance. 

Despite the fact that the Palestinian armed struggle in the 1970s, of which 

cultural resistance was part and parcel, was brewing in the ‘outside’ of exile, 

Kanafani bestowed the label of ‘resistance literature’ on works emerging from 

what appeared to be the relative quiet of the inside. In practice, the severely 

restricted lives and movement of Palestinians under Israeli rule meant that an 

organized response to occupation was nearly impossible. However, by stressing 

an inside/outside dichotomy, Kanafani located the essence of the cause and 

hence the heart of the struggle inside. It is this essence, Kanafani argued, 

which gave literature under occupation an intrinsic quality that the manfa 

(exile) did not possess. As he saw it, for writers inside, resistance was not a 

choice but a necessity, arising as a daily struggle to combat forms of oppression 

that were more potent than arms and violence (Kanafani 1966: 54). In such 

a context, the ‘conscious commitment’ (al-iltizam al-waʿi) (Kanafani 1968: 65) 

that developed of its own accord under occupation was one that did not 

demean the value of the word, but recognized the importance of its role and 

saw it as indispensable. Kanafani recognized the gravity of the cultural battle 

being waged inside against Israeli policies directed at the erasure of a people 

and their history in the name of ‘security’ (Kanafani 1968: 38). For this reason, he 

endowed the literature emerging inside with crucial importance to the wider 

field of Palestinian cultural production. 

Kanafani defined resistance literature as fighting on two fronts: the front of 



raising awareness, and that of responding to Zionist myths, claims or accusations. 

No other people are simultaneously as well acquainted and at the 

same time so victimized by Zionist policies as the Palestinians inside Israel. 

The ‘Kanafani Effect’ which rapidly propelled young poets including Mahmoud 

Darwish, Samih al-Qasim and Tawfiq Zayyad to great renown also set Palestinian 

literature on a new path of self-awareness, planting the seeds for a (continuing) 

debate on the relationship between aesthetics, politics and resistance 

in the context of the Palestinian struggle. This paper explores the transposition 

of this ‘Kanafani Effect’ into the medium of film. 

The Kanafani Effect in Film? 

It was not long after the publication of Kanafani’s studies that Palestinian political 

organizations in exile recognized in film and photography a tool for advancing 

their cause, documenting and disseminating their struggle and instating 

a new Palestinian image of defiance to replace that of refugees and despair. 

Unlike literature in this period, the sole site of resistance for film was confined 

to the manfa, springing out from the refugee camps of Jordan and Lebanon. A 

good example was the plo’s Palestine Film Unit, established in 1968 as part of 

the cultural wing of the armed struggle, with cameramen often operating like 

fidaʾis (freedom fighters), living between the front lines and tents, recording 

battles and life in the refugee camps and contributing with their films, rather 

than with guns, to the Palestinian struggle. The period between 1968 and 1982 

became known as the period of militant cinema and revolutionary filmmaking. 

This period came to an abrupt and tragic end with the Israeli siege of Beirut 

in 1982, which led to the further exile of the plo leadership to Tunis, and the 

destruction of the plo’s cinema archives and infrastructures in Beirut. 

While documentary films in general, and those of the revolutionary filmmaking 

period in particular, made a clear and direct contribution to Palestinian cultural 

resistance, this paper focuses on contributions made by the fiction films 

that began to emerge from the inside during the 1980s. In their periodization 

of Palestinian cinema, Nurit Gertz and George Khleifi discern a mute Palestinian 

landscape inside Israel from 1948 through to the 1980s. Film production, 

which had existed prior to 1948, became an impossibility after the Nakba with 

the eradication of hundreds of Palestinian villages and urban neighborhoods, 

and with the imposition of military rule. It was thus not until the 1980s that a 

film scene began to revive itself inside. This revival can be traced to the point 

at which Michel Khleifi (1950–), a young man from Nazareth, returned home 

after studying and working in film and television in Belgium and became one 



of the first of a new generation of filmmakers to challenge the shroud of silence 

that had been cast over the inside. 

With this history in mind, the current paper examines Palestinian films 

emerging from the inside from the 1980s, and focuses on the work of Khleifi 

as well as the films of Elia Suleiman (1960–). Looking at these directors’ films 

through a Kanafani-esque lens, it discusses the nominal positional boundaries 

of an inside/outside dichotomy in relation to a changing Palestinian cultural 

and political landscape, and shows how a particular ‘essence’ of resistance 

continues to permeate these works. In a context marked by the failure of 

political processes and of linear chronological narratives to express or give 

shape to the Palestinian tragedy, the paper shows how new topographies of 

resistance began to develop in the narrative films of these two directors. 

The Coming Home of Michel Khleifi 

The period Bashar Ibrahim calls the ‘New Palestinian Cinema’ (2005: 13) and 

that Gertz and Khleifi call ‘The Return Home’ (2008: 32) coincides with the 

emergence of a new generation of Palestinian filmmakers from within Israel. 

Ibrahim, Gertz and Khleifi all trace the inklings of these new beginnings to 

Michel Khleifi’s return and the making of his first full-length documentary Fertile 

Memory in 1980. That film tells the stories of two women: Khleifi’s widowed 

maternal aunt in Nazareth, a factory worker who struggles against the Israeli 

confiscation of her family land, and a young divorced novelist, Sahar Khalifa, 

and her daily struggles under occupation in the West Bank. Fertile Memory 

blurs inside/outside dichotomies, revealing a geography of occupation that, 

after 1967, extends far beyond the inside Kanafani originally referred to. What 

had changed by the late 1960s was the creation of not one but two insides (and 

two occupations), each united under the pressures of what Elias Khoury termed 

the ‘ongoing Nakba’ (Khoury 2012), and each giving rise to a new landscape of 

resistance. 

While Fertile Memory produced different cinematic effects through its narrative 

techniques and aesthetics, as well as in its access to better quality film and 

equipment, it shared the urgency with which the documentary genre had been 

approached during the revolutionary filmmaking period. The ongoing nature 

of the conflict made persistent the preoccupation with recording, documenting, 

and explaining the story of Palestine and the Palestinians. The newly Occupied 

Territories became the locus of filmmaking, replacing scenes of civil war 

and life in exile with accounts of life under occupation, and the documentary 

format became the staple of independent low-budget Palestinian filmmaking. 



As well as pioneering new aesthetic techniques, Khleifi ushered in the rise of 

independent auteur cinema. Having links to European production companies, 

he began by securing external funding for his films. This represented a shift 

from earlier patterns of patronage, whereby Palestinian political organizations 

in exile had funded their own film units; and it opened a path leading toward 

an international arena of independent cinema co-production, distribution and 

film festival recognition. In the absence of a Palestinian national film industry, 

this co-production model became one of the few avenues for independent 

Palestinian filmmakers to pursue.1 It also enabled Khleifi to make the first 

full-length fiction film set inside. Wedding in Galilee (1987) provided many 

Palestinians, after almost 40 years of dispossession, the first glimpse of the land 

they had lost in 1948. It lifted the veil, also for the first time, from the lives 

of those ‘Forgotten Palestinians’ (Pappe 2011) who had become (second-class) 

citizens of Israel. 

Wedding in Galilee is a film homage and a visual longing for an idyllic homeland 

of beautiful olive groves and traditional Palestinian village life. It tells the 

story of a village in the Galilee preparing for the wedding of its mayor’s son. 

To secure permission for this event to take place in spite of the existence of a 

military curfew, the mayor is obliged to ingratiate himself with the military governor 

by inviting him to attend the celebrations. The presence of the military 

governor and his staff amidst the folkloric and traditional festivities brings out 

underlying tensions and competing reactions among the villagers themselves, 

and frequently revolves around diverging generational and gender positions. 

The groom’s uncle absents himself in protest at the indignity and humiliation 

of the situation. We then see the young men of the village conspiring to attack 

the governor in defiance of the mayor’s authority, as he comes to symbolize an 

older and passive generation that has seemingly failed to uphold the will of the 

people. A strong motif of male humiliation further manifests in the groom’s 

inability to consummate the marriage and an Oedipal attempt to kill his father. 

The film contrasts these passive, anti-heroic, or violent male reactions with a 

series of creative and subversive female interventions. 

Although Wedding in Galilee is set in the present of the late 1980s (Shohat 

1998), it shows the village under Israeli military occupation, thereby conflating 

this present with a past of living under direct martial law (in place from 1948 to 

1966). The film in this way links the ‘old’ with the ‘new’ occupation of the West 

1 More recently, the Arab Gulf countries, in their bid to be more internationally competitive 

in the cultural sphere, established their own film festivals (Dubai International Film Festival, 

Abu Dhabi Film Festival) and with it alternative financing possibilities for Arab filmmakers. 



Bank and Gaza Strip (begun in 1967). Defying their multilayered subjugation, 

whether to Israelis, to state authority, or to patriarchy, the film’s female characters 

find creative modes of resistance. It is the mayor’s daughter, Sumayya, who, 

despite initially dissuading one of the younger men from attacking the governor, 

is later seen provocatively telling an Israeli soldier that he will have to take 

off his uniform if he wants to dance with her. This rejection of the uniform and, 

by extension of the authority of armed masculinity, is similarly performed by 

other women of the village when they revive an Israeli female soldier who has 

fainted by dressing her in Palestinian clothes. 

The gendered representations of resistance in Wedding in Galilee point to a 

disintegration of the figure of the male hero—whether the mayor, the father, 

the soldier, or the husband—and the rise of an actively subversive female figure. 

Tracing the commitment to social progress in his analysis of resistance 

poetry, Kanafani had earlier identified a focus on content that exposes a ‘surprising 

weakness in aesthetic structure’ (Kanafani 1968: 56). He drew on the 

example of early works by Mahmoud Darwish and Rashid Hussein that were 

preoccupied with rejecting the shackles of tradition imposed by rural societies 

on relations between men/women, fathers/sons and so on. While Kanafani 

regarded these efforts as ‘romantic’ and of ‘limited horizons’ (Kanafani 1968: 

57), at the same time he considered them a possible launching pad for transcending 

traditional themes and ultimately allowing these poets to take intellectual 

leaps to higher poetic forms. 

Kanafani’s criticism of over-reliance on traditional themes can to some 

extent be applied to Wedding in Galilee. The film’s strategy of accessing ‘Palestinianness’ 

through female spaces, wedding rituals, and shots of an idyllic rural 

Galilean landscape is imbued with nostalgic folkloric hues. This return to folklore 

is a trend that developed more broadly in Palestinian narratives during 

the 1980s. In his periodization of Palestinian literature inside Israel, Manar 

Makhoul suggests that a type of ‘Nostalgic-Folkloric’ (2012: 164) novel developed 

in the period from 1987 to 2010. His description of these works helps 

place Wedding in Galilee within a wider Palestinian cultural context inside 

Israel. Nostalgic-folkloric novels, according to Makhoul, attempt to depict and 

recapture Palestinian life before and up to 1948, so as to ‘recollect their fragmented 

identities, aiming to reconstruct and revive an authentic Palestinian 

self’ (Makhoul 2012: 170). Such narratives rely on and include elements of Palestinian 

folklore such as folk tales, myths, songs, proverbs, poetry, traditional 

medicine, food, clothing, animals, birds, wild plants, and so on—all motifs that 

Khleifi draws heavily upon in Wedding in Galilee. 

Echoing the literary lament for a lost past, Khleifi uses folklore to experiment 

with a sense of timelessness in Wedding in Galilee. The village is a place 



where multiple temporalities coexist: elements of a distant past (the characters 

of the grandparents hail back to an Ottoman era, idealized village life and 

its rituals), the more recent past (of the 1948–1966 Israeli military regime), the 

immediate present (of the 1980s and the ‘new’ occupation in the West Bank and 

Gaza Strip), and even a notional future (the prospect of a more egalitarian form 

of Palestinian-Israeli cohabitation). Folklore is meanwhile not just a means to 

evoke a specifically Palestinian way of life, but to enact the presence of that way 

of life on the land. Presence is what Kanafani valued most about the inside and 

what Edward Said, many years later, saw as the essence of the struggle between 

Palestinians and Zionism—‘a struggle between a presence and an interpretation’ 

(Said 1979: 8–9). Kanafani, like Said, believed in the power to be derived, 

as Abdul-Rahim al-Shaikh puts it, from synthesizing ‘a counter-narrative stemming 

from the Palestinian presence on the land’ (al-Shaikh 2010: 483). 

Kanafani, however, saw in al-adab al-shaʿbi (folk literature) an important 

role in resistance and counter-narration not in terms of its evoking nostalgia 

but in its providing access to folk wisdom and offering a path toward storytelling 

and satire (Kanafani 1966: 45). While Khleifi himself used folklore to 

testify to existences and presences on the land in a way that might counter 

Zionist myths, as by suggesting ‘a land without a people for a people without 

a land,’ he also opened new horizons for a subsequent generation of filmmakers 

who would go on to map a terrain of resistance reaching beyond nostalgia, 

idyllic landscapes or folkloric symbolism. It is Elia Suleiman, who most concertedly 

pursued this counter-narrative tendency—one in which storytelling 

foregrounds the subversive powers of irony and satire. 

The Second (Home) Coming of Elia Suleiman 

After many years in self-imposed exile, Suleiman returned to Palestine and 

settled in Jerusalem following the signing of the Oslo agreement in 1993. While 

in exile, Suleiman had begun to experiment with filmmaking, creating what 

he would later ironically call a ‘complicatedly simple’ (Butler 2003: 67) style 

involving multilayered static frames, choreographed action, sparse dialogue 

and non-linear narratives. His early New York experiments, Introduction to 

the End of an Argument (1990, co-directed with Jayce Salloum) and Homage 

by Assassination (1991), paved the way for his three full-length fiction films: 

Chronicle of a Disappearance (1997), Divine Intervention (2002) and The Time 

That Remains (2009). 

Invited to establish a media department at Birzeit University in Ramallah, 

Suleiman settled in Jerusalem in 1994. He took this opportunity to re-work 



a script he had begun while in New York, and which eventually became his 

first feature film, Chronicle of a Disappearance. The result was a minimalist 

diary-like narrative wherein scenes of an episodic nature offered an unconventional 

treatment of the Palestinian ideal of return. Indeed, Suleiman himself 

had returned to a situation that had changed remarkably since Khleifi’s Wedding 

in Galilee. The integral relationship Kanafani had seen existing between 

culture and armed resistance had subsided significantly since the Palestinian 

leadership had been forced into a further exile in North Africa in 1982. Thereafter, 

the locus of political activity had gradually shifted to the West Bank and 

Gaza Strip, where grassroots resistance gathered momentum throughout the 

1980s before culminating in the mass uprisings that became known as the First 

Intifada, erupting in 1987—not long after the release of Wedding in Galilee. 

The Intifada catapulted the Palestinian struggle under occupation into public 

consciousness, and eventually forced the international community to intervene 

in a bid to lessen the violence. The results of these interventions became 

known as the ‘Oslo peace process’, taking their name from the interim agreement 

signed in 1993 by plo Chairman Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister 

Yitzhak Rabin; this established direct negotiations between the two parties and 

proposed lending a form of limited self-government to a transitional body, the 

so-called Palestinian Authority (pa). The pa essentially assumed joint responsibility 

with Israel for policing its own people, in exchange for questionable 

promises of partial Israeli withdrawals from limited areas of the West Bank 

and Gaza Strip. Oslo thus signaled a counter-revolutionary turn, marked by 

a bureaucratization of the national movement. It became intensely divisive 

among Palestinians, with many notable public figures outspokenly criticizing 

the shift, including Mahmoud Darwish and Edward Said. More militant critical 

opponents later launched a new phase of armed struggle, some of them 

embarking on a campaign of suicide bombings. 

This was the fraught and divisive scene that Suleiman entered when he 

returned to the homeland. Being critical of the new political project himself, 

he quickly realized that the vacuum created by the demise of all-encompassing 

political ideologies had inadvertently opened up new spaces for cultural and 

creative dissent. In an understated but critical manner, Suleiman’s Chronicle of 

a Disappearance records the disillusionment that followed the Oslo agreement, 

making a series of satirical image-comments on the alleged hollowness of its 

new bureaucratic façade. Addressing the reduction and fragmentation of Palestinian 

lands as a result of the Oslo process, and highlighting the many unfulfilled 

promises that process involved, Chronicle of a Disappearance introduces 

a powerful element of Palestinian self-critique with its sardonic depiction of 

the results of the interim agreement. At one point we encounter es, Sueliman’s 



regular on-screen persona, walking onto a darkened empty stage. There, he 

finds an office chair draped in the Palestinian national flag, and decides to sit 

and spin around a few times before getting up again. Later, es journeys to the 

West Bank’s new ‘autonomous areas’. Marking the beginning of this journey, 

the words ard al-miʿad (the Promised Land) appear as a title card on the screen 

before being replaced by a shot of empty desert. A desert road leads to a fork 

marked by a sign indicating Jericho to the right and Gaza to the left. These were 

the first areas to fall under Palestinian Authority administration under the socalled 

Gaza-Jericho Agreement of 1994. After taking the road to Jericho, es then 

finds himself sitting on an empty hotel terrace, kept company by a lone swimmer, 

a wall-mural of Yasser Arafat and a flickering light overhead. 

This was the changed context that Suleiman estimated was ripe for satire 

and humor. His work brought two important ingredients to the recipe of aesthetic 

resistance and counter-narration: the element of self-critique combined 

with Suleiman’s eye for the absurd and surreal aspects of the Israeli occupation 

provided the ‘spice’ needed to create a novel narrative texture laden with 

irony and subversion. While Kanafani had not fully anticipated the subversive 

potential of humor, he accounted for what he termed ‘al-sukhriyya al-marira’ 

(bitter irony) (Kanafani 1966: 45) in his analysis of resistance literature, and 

drew on examples illustrating folk poetry’s potential to combine wit and wisdom. 

Kanafani remarked that poetry under occupation, unlike in the manfa 

(exile), was neither sad nor defeatist. On the contrary, he deemed that it was 

possessed of ‘an on-going revolutionary momentum with a hopefulness that 

provokes admiration’ (Kanafani 1966: 58). Believing that part of this momentum 

derived from the recourse to irony and the tragi-comic, Kanafani wrote 

that ‘the writer finds nothing more serious, in such a context, than satire’ (1966: 

67). 

In Suleiman’s films, satire and humor do not appear to emerge out of a 

deliberate narrative strategy or design, so much as from the episodic moment, 

the idiosyncratic characters, the background, and the streets themselves. In this 

sense, there is an instinctive folk element to the comedy of Suleiman’s films. 

His starting point is not the story of Palestine, but rather a search for a ‘poetic 

choreography’ where film sequences follow a certain tempo toward a punch 

line, a gag or a repetition, and this musicality in turn gives shape to the poetic 

or the comic. Humor in ‘the ghetto’, as Suleiman has described life in Nazareth, 

comes out of a necessity to extend and gain time: ‘If you know you only have a 

certain amount of time you can sustain yourself in despair [… But] one way to 

expand your life at this moment would be to poeticise’ (Suleiman 2009b). 

In his description of the tragi-comic element of resistance literature—what 

he called ‘al-balliyya al-latti tadhak’ (Kanafani 1966: 70), Kanafani touched on 



an intrinsic faith that the situation of duress, and by extension the nightmare 

of occupation, will one day pass: ‘the confrontation is a condition that can 

only be considered temporary’ he wrote (1966: 67). Suleiman takes this sense of 

temporariness to another level, to a poetic sphere that can enhance moments 

of humor and release those moments from the shackles of occupied time. 

These poetic spaces in Suleiman’s films disclose a resistance in the unexpected—in 

the margins, the cracks, the mundane and even the slapstick. Whether 

it is a blindfolded Palestinian prisoner giving directions to a tourist, or two 

lovers holding hands at the edge of a checkpoint, resistance is not that of 

heroic characters confronting extraordinary situations, but rather the heroism 

of the everyday act. In his later years in exile, Mahmoud Darwish was preoccupied 

with the possibility of dismantling the Palestinian hero and with asking 

whether Palestinians might instead produce normal writing about a normal 

life (al-Shaikh 2010: 488–489). However, rather than dismantling heroism per 

se, Suleiman re-directs the concept so that it is instead found in the capturing 

and recording of moments of pleasure, tenderness, childhood, neighborhood, 

nostalgia or melancholy; it is in these small acts of defiance against a psychological 

and physical occupation that aspires to break all forms of intimacy and 

de-humanize Palestinians. 

Experiencing these small joys of life becomes itself a form of resistance, 

perhaps especially when these experiences enact an indifference toward the 

occupation itself. A wonderful example appears in Suleiman’s most recent 

film, The Time That Remains (2009). Here resistance takes the form of the 

unstoppable human desire we observe in a young man, who despite the siege 

of Ramallah and an enormous tank turret rotating to track his every move, 

remains utterly oblivious, absorbed in speaking to a friend on the phone about 

his new music collection. He even arranges to go a party later that night. 

Undeterred by the occupation forces, the subsequent disco scene also asserts 

a thirst for life resilient even under curfew, and to which the soldiers observing 

from their military jeep themselves eventually submit, nodding to the beat of 

the music. 

The Time That Remains, unlike Suleiman’s earlier films, directly engages 

with, and depicts, the events of 1948. A film set was especially constructed for 

the shoot so as to recreate a 1940s Nazareth complete with period interiors 

(other elements of the film are set in modern-day Nazareth, Jerusalem and 

the West Bank). The 1948 passages of the film are loosely based on Suleiman’s 

father’s diaries from this period, along with his mother’s letters to her family 

in Jordan. Suleiman’s father was a young blacksmith turned resistance fighter 

who was captured by the Haganah (Zionist) armed forces, imprisoned and 

tortured. Although the first part of the film overtly deals with the events of 



the Nakba in Nazareth, the film does not yield to proffering history lessons but 

is instead dedicated to showing the continuity of family life—couples getting 

married, having children—and hence to showing how the family in the film 

not only struggled to defend their home, but also to stay and exist on their 

land. ‘Their resistance’, Suleiman says, ‘is just to every day laugh and listen to 

music’.2 Suleiman’s vision of resistance here appears to correspond with what 

Mahmoud Abu Hashhash has termed ‘butulat al-ashyaʾ al-ʾadiyya’ (the heroism 

of the everyday),3 whereby simply asserting a ‘living presence’ is in and of itself 

a form of heroic defiance. 

In Suleiman’s films, what is dismantled is the male hero from the inside, 

and Kanafani’s dichotomy is reversed to show ‘active’ resistance emanating 

from under another unforgiving occupation, this time from the West Bank and 

Gaza. Wedding in Galilee had hinted at a shift toward a more subversive female 

role. Suleiman’s Chronicle of a Disappearance and Divine Intervention represent 

this remapping of gendered defiance in even clearer terms. es (Suleiman’s 

on-screen persona) is depicted as a passive observer, an anti-hero from the 

inside, while his female alter-ego from Jerusalem (ChronicleofaDisappearance) 

and his West Bank girlfriend (in Divine Intervention) represent the agents of 

resistance. ʿAdan, the female heroine in Chronicle of a Disappearance defies 

and taunts the Israeli police, controlling their movements and confusing them 

via a misplaced radio transmitter, cunningly disappearing before they can 

capture her. The female character’s actions in Divine Intervention are less of 

the verbal/intellectual prank type found in the earlier film and suggest more 

of a physical fantasy, wherein a kuffiya-clad ninja-fighter-woman defies Israeli 

special forces by using a metallic map of historic Palestine and Christ-like 

powers to arrest and transform their bullets into a crown (of thorns). 

Divine Intervention is in some respects a slicker version of Chronicle of a 

Disappearance, using special effects and cinematic flourishes to create bombastic 

scenes of defiance that can be read as examples of a more overt form 

of resistance. Spectators watching the more recent film in Ramallah clapped 

and cheered as the lone female fighter defeated Israeli special forces. But this 

highly choreographed sequence can also be read as an experiment in creating 

the fantastical as a space of (mental) liberation. A closer unpacking of the scene 

reveals a clever collage overflowing with witty clichés, national symbols, Pales- 

2 Refqa Abu-Remaileh, unpublished interview with Elia Suleiman (London, bfi Film Festival, 

16 October 2009). 

3 Refqa Abu-Remaileh, unpublished phone interview with Mahmoud Abu Hashhash (al- 

Qattan Foundation, Ramallah, 17 May 2009). 



tinian paraphernalia, visual slogans and references to other films as well as to 

biblical imagery. Enacting this scene of an impossible (and gimmicky) divine 

intervention is not in fact a call to violence or a reifying of armed resistance, nor 

does it send any clear messages as to what should be done about the Palestinian 

situation. Even if it risks being mistaken for an escapist or even fatalistic vision, 

creating such spaces of fantasy when living under occupation represents a 

special exercise in subversive imagination and resistant counter-narration. 

The silence that pervades Suleiman’s films is transformed into a source of 

power. A passivity and acquiescence previously associated with Palestinian 

silence is turned on its head so as to become, according to Suleiman, ‘destabilising 

to power structures’ (James 2010) and especially those that want ‘as much 

noise as possible so they can capitalize on it, so they can contain and control’ 

(Handal 2011). Silence can be provocative, intimidating, and ‘sometimes a form 

of resistance because it dislocates’ Suleiman adds (Handal 2011). A scene in The 

Time That Remains showing es’s mother drinking a cup of coffee on a balcony 

while looking at a photo of her late husband is one of the most powerful and 

tender moments in all of Suleiman’s films. With nothing said and little action 

taking place, the scene maximizes the potential of the moving image to convey 

deep emotions: ‘You are witnessing an interior emotion that you can only 

feel’, Suleiman explains.4 Instead of reverting to a linear horizontal history, a 

layered history of accumulated emotions is created, one that has the potential 

to reveal the timeless repercussions and cumulative scars of conflict in one single 

moment. 

The mother-on-the-balcony and similar scenes allow the spectator to feel 

the moment and weight of history rather than acquire it through the provision 

of information and explicit images. As the Arabic subtitle of Chronicle of a 

Disappearance, ‘yawmiyyat al-hubb wa-l-alam’ (chronicle of love and pain) suggests, 

these scenes comprise a daily record of tragedy, and a micro-history of 

lives trapped in a vicious present. By creating these layered images, Suleiman 

places an onus and responsibility on the viewer to partake in the film’s process. 

‘I don’t want to feed the spectator’, Suleiman explains, ‘I want to make 

my films as embedded and layered as possible for the spectator to have the 

democracy of viewing the image aesthetically and not linearly’.5 In this way, 

the viewer is invited to fill in the gaps and participate in the creation of the 

image and its meaning. Kanafani had earlier alluded to this sort of aesthetic 

quality in a poetry that was pregnant with potentiality and meanings for a 

4 Abu-Remaileh, interview (16 October 2009). 

5 Ibid. 



reader to decipher; wherein: ‘People understood that they have to decode the 

meaning themselves’ (Kanafani 1968: 30). Referring to the symbolism he saw 

in such poetry, he linked this need for agentic reading in constructing meanings 

to a means of overcoming or defying Israeli censorship and repression. 

While this kind of deductive process may have come naturally to readers at 

the time, Suleiman’s more contemporary ‘poetic resistance’ brings us full circle 

by offering up cinematic texts that transcend the confines of a people under 

occupation, creating aesthetic spaces of freedom that viewers can participate 

in constructing and begin to look through. 

The Path of (No) Return? 

Kanafani’s 1960s studies, having firmly imprinted the concept of ‘resistance’ on 

the Palestinian cultural map, remain a surprisingly contemporary, stimulating 

and even avant garde source. Long after the notion of iltizam was pronounced 

dead in the Arab world, the idea of cultural resistance persisted in the Palestinian 

context. Many of the issues Kanafani addressed in relation to film’s literary 

predecessors have become (and remain) pertinent to the moving image 

form. Filmmakers, without abandoning the notion of resistance, have worked 

to transcend conventional conceptions of it, and to explore these through the 

new aesthetic horizons offered by the film medium. 

Reading Kanafani’s texts many decades later, there is a sense of openness 

and flexibility to his notion of resistance. One must remain alert to this flexibility. 

Should we not, the ‘Kanafani Effect’ might risk setting Palestinian culture 

on a path of no return, wherein a superficial understanding of cultural resistance 

can bring abut a shallow standard against which works of art are measured. 

Examples of this reductive understanding of cultural resistance are to 

be found in some of the criticism Michel Khleifi and Elia Suleiman have each 

been subjected to in the Arab world. Judged according to its putative ‘contributions 

to the Palestinian struggle’, Khleifi’s Wedding in Galilee, for instance, was 

heavily criticized for not expressly demanding the destruction of Israel, while 

Suleiman’s Chronicle of a Disappearance was initially boycotted by many, with 

Suleiman accused of treason, Zionism, and cooperation with the enemy as a 

result of the film’s being partially financed by the Israeli Fund for Quality Film. 

It was Mahmoud Darwish, in his obituary of Kanafani, who rang alarm bells 

at this narrow idea of ‘serving the cause’ and made a plea to release writers from 

the shackles of ‘exemplary nationalism, steely subservience and the demands 

for being nothing other than soldiers or priests’ (Darwish 1977: 16). Darwish 

at the same time warned against uncritically lionizing everything that comes 



out of the occupied lands, and stressed that artistic merit cannot be deemed a 

virtue of ‘geography as a non-negotiable gift’ (Darwish 1977: 21): ‘Writing can’t 

achieve its resistance function unless it is good writing. Bad writing which 

incites, under any slogan, is no worse than the worst weapon’ (Darwish 1977: 

13). 

The positionality of inside/out which was more clear-cut during Kanafani’s 

time, became more complex as time passed, with the ‘ongoing Nakba’, the 

extended occupations of Palestinian lands, and with processes of self-imposed 

exile from the inside to the manfa, and with returns from the manfa to the 

inside or even to Jerusalem and the West Bank (as in the case of Suleiman). 

But although Kanafani’s original categories may no longer be easily applicable, 

a link continues to exist between the enacting of a presence on the land and 

resistance. After the revolutionary period in the 1960s and 1970s, the manfa 

retreated into a period of relative silence (except in the realm of academia 

and among those who straddled both the inside and the outside, such as 

Darwish) and the locus of Palestinian cultural production gradually shifted to 

the inside—whether this be inside Israel or the West Bank and Gaza Strip. 

Each period of filmmaking has had its fate intertwined with the shifting 

notion of resistance. From an idea that sprang out of the deep social and political 

commitments of a Palestinian exile, Kanafani looked to the inside in search 

of a true understanding of what resistance might mean. Becoming a crucial 

part of the armed struggle, cultural resistance manifested as a form of militant 

revolutionary practice. Beyond revolutionary politics and practice, Kanafani 

also discerned a larger aesthetic potential for resistance, anticipating many of 

its later post-revolutionary elements and tactics. Fiction films inside later led 

the way, transforming Palestinian cinema by giving rise to the possibility of 

the independent auteur, operating beyond the aesthetic and political confines 

of formal institutions, while also blurring previously dominant inside/outside 

dichotomies. Overtly politically affiliated artists and filmmakers were no longer 

the sole standard; Khleifi and Suleiman did not align their works with any 

political parties or ideologies. And in their work they would gradually transfer 

responsibility for decoding and creating meanings to a spectator, inviting 

them to participate in the construction of cinematic meaning, and hence, in 

composing a cultural counter-narrative. 

Just as resistance poets recognized the value of words, Palestinian filmmakers 

inside Israel after the 1980s began to realize the potential of the moving 

image, not simply to raise awareness, to inform or educate, but also to subvert, 

challenge and even laugh. In Suleiman’s films, resistance is embedded 

in counter-narrative strategies that mobilize the satirical, self-critical, humorous 

and tragi-comic. Both Khleifi and Suleiman eschew the heroic male figure 



while revealing alternative spaces of female subversion. They have tried in their 

own distinctive ways to capture the tenderness of human emotions, peeking 

through the cracks at the marginal and the unexpected so as to tell the stories 

of accumulated tragedies but also those of the continuities of life in Palestine. 

In the tension between aesthetics and politics, resistance indicates a call for 

creativity and for discovering new aesthetic terrains, just as Kanafani intended 

it, and as Said put it—to tell the story in as many compelling ways as possible. 

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The Kanafani Effect: Resistance and Counter-Narration in the Films of Michel Khleifi and Elia Suleiman

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