Bisan Owda rose to prominence for her videos on social media detailing life in Gaza since the beginning of Israel’s war on the Palestinian enclave (Screengrab/AJ+)
he UN recently published a report unequivocally documenting the fact that Israel is committing genocide in Palestine. It concluded last month: “Israeli authorities and Israeli security forces have committed and are continuing to commit genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”
The UN is not the first, nor will it be the last, institution to empower the world to hold the murderous settler colony accountable for its crimes against humanity. Every Israeli official during this genocide, like every German Nazi during the Holocaust, must be held accountable for their actions – and punished to the fullest extent of international law.
A forum like the Nuremberg Trials (1945-46) must be convened to hold Israeli authorities to account for their deadly deeds. At the same time, all decent Israelis who oppose this carnage must begin to imagine themselves in a world beyond the vicious calamities of Zionism.
Countless Jews around the globe, including in Israel, are at the forefront of opposing the Gaza genocide. Jews are not committing this genocide; Zionists are. Not all Zionists are Jews, and not all Jews are Zionists.
The psychopathic US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, is not Jewish. The career opportunist charlatan, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, is not Jewish. The American, British, German, French and other western politicians sending unrelenting streams of weaponry to Israel to aid its genocide – most of them not Jewish – must also be held accountable.
The Palestinian genocide, vastly documented, is today at the epicentre of the world. No stone must be left unturned in politics, culture, sport, film, media or any other discipline to show how the unrelenting Israeli savageries in Gaza and the rest of Palestine are radically altering our conception of the world, and thereby our worldviews.
Any field with the word “world” in it – world literature, world philosophy, world cinema, world music – must not be allowed to have any claim on our critical intelligence without first addressing the ground zero of Gaza.
Spotlighting atrocities
We must all mobilise to counteract the prevarications of corporate media, led by the New York Times and the BBC, as they work to normalise and camouflage the truth of the Palestinian genocide. The minute US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared “the war” to be over, these media outlets swiftly changed the subject, burying the horrors of Gaza with “other news”.
A glance at the front pages of corporate media across the US and Europe shows how they are already abandoning the Gaza slaughterhouse, as genocidal Zionism becomes the new normal. The rest of us, humanity at large, must do precisely the opposite. Gaza today is the heart and the heartbeat of the world.
The problem is not only with corporate and state media. Starting with the US government, and extending to ruling regimes across Europe, Canada and Australia, the entire ecosystem of militant hegemony that calls itself “the West” is empowering the Israeli murder machine to commit this colossal act of genocide in plain view of the world.
Every institution of civil society must therefore be mobilised to defend Palestinians, and to make Palestine the cornerstone of our moral convictions.
A case in point: three significant cinematic events – in Venice, Toronto and Hollywood – recently cast a spotlight on these atrocities.
At the epicentre of that humanity is the art, culture, literature, cinema and poetry of Palestine – and the defiant soul that informs them all
During the Venice Film Festival, one of the most significant European events in world cinema, headlines noted: “‘The Voice of Hind Rajab’ Stuns Venice With Its Longest Standing Ovation of 22 Minutes Amid Tears and ‘Free Palestine’ Chants”.
Meanwhile, in Toronto, Palestinian filmmaker Annemarie Jacir premiered Palestine 36, which explores the fateful year of 1936, when Jews fleeing European antisemitism found refuge in a land from which they would soon drive the native inhabitants out at gunpoint.
At the same time, top Hollywood actors – including Emma Stone, Joaquin Phoenix, Rooney Mara, Nicola Coughlan and Andrew Garfield, among others – publicly pledged not to work with Israeli film institutions implicated in genocide and apartheid against Palestinians.
These are exceptionally important events in world cinema, highlighting one of the gravest acts of moral depravity in the modern era: Israel’s targeting of Palestinians for extermination in the Gaza concentration camp, as indeed in the rest of their homeland.
The world will not stand by and watch. Israel has engaged in this act of savagery on behalf of the entire western machinery of death, destruction and conquest. Israel is the poisoned tip of the western arrow that targets the world. Palestinians today stand for the world; Israel for the West.
Restoring humanity
The ongoing slaughter of Palestinians, which has taken place day in and day out for more than two years – on top of their past century of suffering at the hands of murderous Zionists – must remain at the epicentre of the global conscience.
Scholars in global cinema have long struggled to define their field between, as they put it, “what is unknowable and as yet unknown about World Cinema”. The point has always been to de-centre world cinema, making Hollywood just one of many other possible and evident cinemas.
What could this notion mean today, at this hour of global horror? As key scholars have convincingly argued, world cinema “testifies to the unequal distribution of economic and cultural power. World Cinema refers to cinemas of peripheries, cinematic production of ‘developing’ or Third World countries or non-Hollywood.”
They correctly note: “It does not encompass everything which is produced in the peripheries, but only that part, which lends itself to the gaze of (broadly understood) western scholars.” We need to reverse that gaze. Palestinian, Arab, Iranian, Indian, African and Latin American filmmakers now do the looking.
Venice, Berlin, Cannes, Toronto and Hollywood are all fine places to raise awareness about Palestine. But they are not where the real truth – and the cinema that is committed to it – takes place. The real centre of world cinema today is Bisan Owda in Gaza, the young Palestinian woman with an iPhone documenting the holocaust of her people.
In a series of videos Owda recorded and released under the general title of “It’s Bisan from Gaza and I’m Still Alive”, she singlehandedly revolutionised the very idea of world cinema, and recentred it in Gaza. She has received much attention and admiration for her videos, among them a 2024 Peabody Award, an Edward R Murrow Award, and an Emmy. Such accolades do not add credit to Owda; her work accredits those who bestow the awards.
By virtue of eyewitness accounts, for which scores of Palestinian journalists have given their lives, an entire generation of Palestinian filmmakers like Owda have recentred world cinema, moving it away from Europe and the US, and towards the rubble of Gaza, where a new digital age has changed our conception of the world.
The ruling regimes in Israel and the US have lost the plot. They have nothing to offer the world as they preside over the deadliest killing machine on earth. They think that because they have amassed weapons of mass destruction, they have won the game. They are delusional. This genocide will bring them down.
The world is now standing face-to-face with the chimeric creature that is Israel and the West. Fighting it restores a triumphant humanity. At the epicentre of that humanity is the art, culture, literature, cinema and poetry of Palestine – and the defiant soul that informs them all.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
