Reclaiming the Politics of the Future

 by Paola Rivetti

On September 8, 2022, the Irish Network for MENA Studies, the Early Childhood Research Centre (ECRC) at Dublin City University, and Academics for Palestine co-hosted the screening of the award-winning documentary Not Just Your Picture: the Story of the Kilani Family, by Anne Paq and Dror Dayan, with the participation of the director Anne Paq.

I was surprised at my own feelings while watching Not Just Your Picture: the Story of the Kilani Family. I felt a piercing frustration at one specific point of the documentary. Layla Kilani, one of the protagonists, walks in the streets of al-Khalil/Hebron with her friends, classmates and a guide, when an Israeli settler passes by - insulting them and inciting the Israeli soldiers to remove them from ‘his streets’. This scene is familiar to anyone who has visited al-Khalil/Hebron: the visitors on a political tour, the violent settlers, the soldiers escorting the settlers to guarantee their safety and security – and, it goes without saying, not moving when the settlers express their violence not only through words but deeds too, such as throwing objects or stones at unarmed visitors and/or Palestinians. To me it all seemed strangely staged and I felt frustrated at watching something I had conflicting feelings about – anger, but also shame, because I was finding the scene somehow boring rather than an irresistible call to revolt against settler colonialism.

As I was mulling over these feelings, however, I realised that the documentary was telling a different story than one of stagnation and never-ending injustice. While watching the sibling protagonists, Layla and Ramsis Kilani, go through a personal journey of growing awareness and politicisation, I realised that the movie was about a story in movement, about Layla and Ramsis’s growth and understanding of being part of a longer and inter-generational story of resistance. This is a movie about the politics of remembering the past as well as the politics of imagining the future, which Layla, Ramsis and many others are building.

Source: www.notjustyourpicture.com

Not Just Your Picture is the story of Layla and Ramsis, as much as it is the story of the larger Kilani family from Beit Lahiya, Gaza. Layla and Ramsis are the daughter and son of Ibrahim Kilani, who had left Gaza to study in Siegen, Germany, where he met his wife, fathered the two protagonists of the documentary and from where, after divorcing their mother, returned to Gaza. Here, Ibrahim Kilani married again and had five children. The whole family was killed by the Israeli army which, during the 2014 attack called ‘Protective Edge’, the most violent military attack ever conducted before and one of the deadliest, bombarded Gaza city centre killing the Kilanis and four other civilians.

The devastating news was broken to Layla and Ramsis by other family members and through a condolences letter from the German Diplomatic Mission in Ramallah.It was signed by a single worker of the Mission, who expressed personal sympathy to the Kilanis. No official communication from any German institution has reached Layla and Ramsis – both German citizens themselves – following the deaths of their German citizen father, Ibrahim, and his whole family.

The emotional reaction of Layla and Ramsis– disbelief, anger, disappointment, desperation – built momentum for their political action: not only have the two become more and more involved in the German political and activist environment, but they have also become more aware of their Palestinian heritage.

As we follow Layla and Ramsis on their personal and political journey of coming to terms with the tragedy they have lived through, the documentary does not yield to a normalised account of violence in Palestine. We see no footage of bombings, we see no image of buildings torn apart or post-military attack destruction. During the Q&A session, the director Anne Paq explained that this was an intentional choice, made in order to avoid the risk that the military attacks on Gaza were mistaken for a ‘conflict’ between two equal parties. In reality, she underlined, what we saw in 2014 was an attack on civilian targets, of which we also see evidence in the documentary. Several experts, when interviewed, have in fact reiterated that the military technology in the hands of the Israeli military forces is simply too advanced to believe that they did not know that in the building they bombed, there were civilians hiding. The skyrocketing number of civilian deaths, the repetitiveness of the military attacks, the normalisation of legal and political violence, the military occupation, Paq argues, show that what Palestinians live is not a ‘conflict’ but rather a regime of apartheid, as a growing number of international human rights organisations have acknowledged.

Violence is however present in the movie, and it is narrated through objects. The pictures of Ibrahim and his children killed during the bombing are omnipresent in the movie, along with a drawing of the Kilani family tree, maps of Palestine, old pictures, food and olives, and the laptops used by the family in Gaza to communicate with each other. All these objects tell stories of violence and dispossession through the eyes of those who have survived. For this reason, what we end up watching is a story of resistance.

The centrality of those who survived and their point of view was also brought up by DCU professor Mathias Urban who, when introducing the documentary, talked about the lasting wounds of the perpetual and repeated violence that Gazans experience, including mental distress and trauma.

Anne Paq during the screening (the author).

Ramsis tried to pursue justice through international law and the means this provides, and in particular, through the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights. After seven years since the submission of a criminal complaint in Germany on behalf of Ramsis, including photos, videos and witness statements against the Israeli army, in 2021 the two organisations were notified about the decision of the German Federal Public Prosecutor not to initiate proceedings. Undoubtedly, this leaves us with little trust in institutions and little hope for justice.

The documentary, however, has another message: Layla and Ramsis represent a generation of Palestinian activists for whom institutions matter just as much as individual attempts at seeking justice, and they know that it might not bring a tangible result. It is just one attempt though, one among the many other activities they commit to while building a genuine desire for, and roads to, justice from below. Borders do not matter: Layla and Ramsis embody the spirit of the Intifada of Unity and its political commitment to bringing together the voice and the actions of Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, Israel, and the diaspora, to fight against colonialism and apartheid in Israel/Palestine and everywhere else. In this sense, the documentary shows the work of two activists whose political understanding and theorising goes beyond the paradigms of the past – nationalism, resilience – to open up the horizon of the politics of the future.