Recounting Memories of Resistance in 33 Days

Introduction: Wars on the Ground and on the ScreenNew Arab Cinema has been successful in portraying Arab anti-colonial struggles for national self-determination, with numerous films making lasting contributions to visual historical discourse about the Arab region (Khoury, 2005; Shafik, 2007). With respect to the struggle against Israeli military and political hegemony, many films have documented Palestinian history and culture, depicting the plight of Palestinians both in and outside of Israel and/or the Occupied Territories, including refugee camps in neighboring Arab countries. Some documentaries have also investigated the connections between imperialism and Zionism, demanding international recognition for Palestinian statehood (Valassopoulos, 2014).1Lebanon has suffered at least five major offensives by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF); nonetheless, Lebanese filmmakers have been generally unable to "approach history directly" (Marks, 2008: 92). Although most Lebanese films deal with the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) and its aftereffects (Khatib, 2008), all "condemning it in different ways" (Khatib, 2011: 134), their rendering of resistance against Israeli forces is by far less pronounced. In filmmaking, there is a "strong separation of the civil war from the resistance against Israel" (Richard, 2014: 505). While the civil war is widely (and rightly) deemed absurd, the struggle against Israeli occupation, when depicted, is "positive" in both its tonality and memory, for example, in the Al-Manar-produced TV series Al-Ghaliboun (Richard, 2014: 506). Resistance on the screen has revolved around the figure of Souha Bechara- who attempted to assassinate General Antoine Lahad, commander of what was then Israel's proxy South Lebanon Army-and the notorious detention center at Khiam in South Lebanon, for example, in the film Incendies (2010) by Denis Villeneuve, based on Wajdi Mouawad's 2003 play (Launchbury, 2014). A new film, however, has emerged recently. Al Sir el-Madfoun (The Buried Secret; 2015) by Ali Ghafari is a Lebanese-Iranian film about Islamic resistance against Israeli occupation, inspired by the true story of Lebanese Amer Kalakesh, who carried out a suicide mission in Jerusalem in the mid-1980s. It seems surprising that, although numerous documentaries have been made in response to the July-August 2006 Israeli war on Lebanon,2 only two motion pictures have come out about this brutal 34-day episode, namely, the docudrama Taht el-Qasf (Under the Bombs), by Philippe Aractingi, in 2007 and 33 Days, a relatively big-budget LebaneseIranian production3 by Jamal Shoorje, in 2012.Lina Khatib contends that while their civil strife drove the Lebanese apart both literally and politically, its memory-made visible by "a mixture of reality and fantasy" in cinematic productions which together constitute "a memory project giving a voice to a silenced past"-has succeeded in "bringing them together" (2008: 178, 179). The 2006 war, I believe, reveals an opposite pattern. While it is true that "[w]hatever the private feelings about Hizbullah's behaviour, Israel's response created an overwhelming sense of solidarity-a feeling that the Lebanese people, regardless of sect or political persuasion, were in it together" (Whitaker, 2006: 136), once the dust had settled, the sharp divide between Lebanon's two main political imaginaries was resumed and even sharpened.4 Individual memories of the 2006 war vary widely, so there is little to share publicly and therefore perhaps even less to remember evenly.The Lebanese South has been largely neglected by the Lebanese state and artists alike. Despite having resisted Israeli occupation for 21 years (1978-2000),5 it had remained ironically absent from literary and cultural productions. Back in 1985, novelist Elias Khoury stated that South Lebanon had remained solitary and estranged, "hurtl[ing] forward, as if it has already accepted for itself a separate fate" (quoted in Khayyat, 2014: 171). …