Solidarity and the Palestinian Cause by Zahi Zalloua;

Author:Zahi Zalloua;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350290211
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2022-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

The two-state solution delivers Palestine more fully to the market; it offers Palestine either as a relic of the past, locked in an Orientalist framework, or as an ultra-modern, hyper-technological reality, a captive consumer population, a “standing reserve,”50 in Heideggerian parlance, whose (natural/human) resources are to be ordered, arranged, and developed according to neoliberal fancy.

Is this what Palestinians want? Is this what the protagonist aspires for? The ending of the film answers in the negative. As we follow the protagonist entering her apartment with a keycard in the form of a Palestinian flag (another superficial token of Palestinianness), we sense in her a desire for more. Upon entering the modern flat, she first waters a small olive tree contained to a small plot of earth embedded in the tiled floor, then selects a traditional Palestinian meal (including marmaon, tabbouleh, and kibbeh) from a row of shiny self-heating, prepackaged meal boxes, and serves it on keffiyeh-patterned dishes. She puts the food on the table but does not sit down and eat. Instead, she walks over to the nearest window, raises the high-tech frosted-glass blinds with the touch of a button, and stares intently out at the former Palestine, cradling her unborn child, her expression at once grim, determined, and tinged with disbelief. Focusing first on a close-up of her face, the camera zooms out dramatically to reveal the scale of the immense skyscraper, its isolated location, and its enclosure behind a massive security wall.

For queer theorist Lee Edelman, the figure of the Child—which does not refer to actual or historical children but rather to their symbolic function “as the emblem of futurity’s unquestioned value”51 —thematizes the ideological trappings of identity. The Child’s phantasmatic appeal is twofold: it points to a pure or innocent existence uncontaminated by the social order, and it also gestures to a more enviable futurity, a more authentic symbolic space, where society as such is reformed and redeemed, where the transcendent wholeness of the Child is recovered. Edelman opposes queer negativity to this figure of the Child. Queerness declines any integration in the order of beings, never ceding on its heterogeneity; indeed, it rejects all forms of identitarianism: “queerness can never define an identity; it can only ever disturb one.”52 Queer negativity jettisons the Child’s putative redemptive value, short-circuiting, in turn, liberal society’s heteronormativity and its prospects of “reproductive futurism.”53

We might be tempted to see Nation Estate’s unborn child as an “emblem of futurity,”54 functioning as fertile ground for nationalist investment. On this reading, the child would intimate a time before the settler, a time before sin, if you will. But this reading effectively ignores the colonial situation, and thus risks hermeneutic distortion. To give the Palestinian child to come an anti-colonial twist is to pay attention to the competing temporalities staged in Nation Estate. Within Sansour’s ironic and unsentimental universe, this child does not stand for a time of national plenitude, but signals an alternative temporality, a time out-of-joint with Zionist hegemony. The futurity announced by the

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