VIDEO: How To Fight Voyeurism in Gaza
When some of us hear “Gaza,” we picture bombs or rockets or rubble.
What if, instead, we pictured an adorable little girl in a pink hat? Or a grandfather playing with his grandchild? Or young men handing out ice cream cones?
A new short film by Palestinian filmmaker Hadeel Assali is an ingenious exercise in juxtaposition. The audio: a journalist’s call for help in the embattled Gaza neighborhood of Shejaia last weekend. The visuals: footage of smiling and laughing Palestinians in Gaza last summer.
Instead of stirring us to voyeurism by showing dead brown bodies in the streets, this video stirs us to empathy by showing us the bodies of people who live and laugh and love. It’s a refreshing departure from the ceaseless televised carnage — which, by the way, has a disturbing race element to it: Can you imagine how people would react if dozens of dead white kids were shown on screen that way? And if those dead white kids were then used as the punchline for, say, an Onion article?
Rather than dehumanizing Palestinian bodies, this video shows their basic humanity, reminding us what’s at stake in Gaza.
Shuja’iyah: Land of the Brave from Hadeel Assali on Vimeo.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO