Lawfare and alternative facts are used to change the landscape. A Palestinian special effects man worked on his own family’s land, expropriated by the Israeli military and then rented to Hollywood film producers. Boycotts of Israeli companies need to make careful choices to avoid furthering the aims of their opponents.
Graham Douglas
The film “Rambo III” was a fiction set during the soviet invasion of Afghanistan, featuring a people’s hero Rambo, fighting to expel them.
In 1988 it was the most expensive film ever made, and it was actually filmed in Israel’s Negev desert, through a happy and profitable collaboration between the Israeli military and the Hollywood film industry. Daniel Mann is an Israeli academic and filmmaker who has lived in London for 12 years. He brings an interest in ecology to bear on the issue of filmmaking.
What emerged from collaboration with his Palestinian friend was the film “Under a blue sun”, named in contrast to the way the sunsets in “Rambo III” were intensified with red filters.
Film festivals in some countries are intimidated into not showing films critical of the Israeli apartheid state and its abuse of Palestinians. He has been the target of right-wing trolls from Israel.
The ancient legal tradition that unworked land belongs to no-one is used in Brazil by the MST (Movimento Sem Terras) to occupy empty land owned by large companies. In Israel, land occupied or not, can be declared as required by the army, with no legal process, houses demolished and families living there expelled at gunpoint.
Mann discusses the issue of Israeli funding for cinema and argues that the BDS movement (Boycot Divestment Sanctions) needs to recognise the complexities.
His film received the main award at Documenta Madrid, and he used it to support Palestinian Bedouins communities.
The Israelis often portray the Bedouin as having neglected a once fertile land and allowed it to decay into desert.
This pristine and allegedly empty desert is the landscape of ethnic cleansing. Imagining the land as empty and infertile is an age-old tool of European colonial struggles, by the French in Algeria and the British in Palestine before 1948. Early in the twentieth century the Desiccation Narrative claimed that the colonisers were here to save the land from mismanagement or abandonment by its Indigenous people.
Tying property rights to working the land made it easier for Jewish settlers in the Naqab desert, and later the state, to seize land from Palestinian Bedouins. The film shows how reimagining the landscape is a crucial part of the Zionist relation to the environment. One way of forcing fiction into the desert was through afforestation, introducing the pine tree, an invasive species which is incredibly harmful to the land itself – helped the young Israeli state to take over land and declare it state property.
The colonisers used the Roman concept of Terra Nullius – no man’s land – which they took from Ottoman Law.
It was imported into the Israeli context as the “Dead land doctrine”, whereby uncultivated land is deemed dead and therefore up for grabs. That doctrine allowed Israel, through organisations such as the Jewish National Fund, to declare most land in the Naqab desert as dead and therefore available.
But this ignores the pastoral nomadic lifeworld of the Palestinian Bedouins.
As happened to the Gypsies in Europe?
In Australia and in North America where those indigenous people who were not slaughtered were pushed into reservations. Ethnic cleansing – you read the land as being empty, so you can expel anyone who is there. The Jahalin tribe, to whom the locations used for the making of Rambo III likely belongs, were pushed into camps and villages such as Khan al-Ahmar in the West Bank.
You say in your article that the desert is perceived as an alien land. It seems that the desert – unless the coloniser wants it – can only be populated by political aliens in the same way as the EU is conniving in forcing migrants there in Libya and Tunisia.
The desert has often been rendered by colonizer nations as an opaque ‘experimental place’ beyond the reach of law, where the indigenous population can be stripped of any rights they had as civilians or even citizens. I call it a ‘sacrifice zone’ where military technologies are tested against unwanted life forms: such as migrants in the Sonoran Desert in Mexico, by the US Border Patrol. An immensely biodiverse ecology is weaponised and used by the state beyond the public gaze.
For cinema’s Western vision, the desert has a chameleon quality, which allowed it to appear as somewhere outside the known inhabited world. In Israel it’s a testing ground both for weapons and for technologies of population control.
How did you meet Bashir and how did he manage to keep all these props from “Rambo III”?
I began looking into the relationship between Hollywood film producers and the Israeli military while working on my first book “Occupying habits”, based partly on declassified Israeli military documents. I found a few papers with “Rambo” as a letterhead, pertaining to collaborations between private Hollywood companies and the Israeli military on the use of desert land, held by the Israeli State, as lucrative locations for cinema.
In “Rambo III” there is a Palestinian Bedouin Bashir Abu Abia, who worked on the making of this film: an artist and special effects man working on location on his own extended family’s land that had been seized by the army. We established a trust between us, and he told me that he had never re-watched the film.
He saw it as a documentary on his own life, not a film about Rambo. He was bitter, because it stood for imperialism and military occupation. We developed this film together. Our friendship is the most important thing I took from making the film. He has an enormous collection of objects from various films. They include weapons, which for me hover in the duality between an artificial prop and a real gun, always both, something that moves between image-making and the violent politics of land.
He still lives in the village, but the rest of his family are in the West Bank.
There are about 40 villages in that area, which were declared illegal by Israel so that the population could be expelled. His family were there, long before 1948, and at his age he will not leave. He wants to continue with his art, especially because he is slowly losing his eyesight.
The Bedouins in the film are Israeli citizens under the Israeli legal system, unlike the Palestinians in the West Bank, who are facing military and administrative legal systems, or Gaza which for many years faced a military siege and blockade and is now facing genocidal brutality from Israel and renewed ethnic cleansing.
The Rabinovich Foundation partly financed your film, and some organisations are saying that filmmakers should not accept money from them.
This film was made with the aid of Israeli institutions before Oct 2023. I am an Israeli citizen, and the film was made with other Israelis, both Palestinians and Jews. I firmly believe that working within Israel\Palestine to resist the current far-right ethno-nationalist state is our duty. If Palestine is not free, Israel will never be free, and vice versa. We must use the means we have to change reality on the ground, and not delude ourselves that leaving Israel\Palestine or working to save it from without will lead to significant change: the struggle is much harder.
The BDS movement today is essential. Sanctions and Divestments are crucial to the attempt to stop a racist and messianic government in Israel. But asking Israeli citizens to boycott Israel is suffocating the few voices that are left within it, who sometimes have the cultural power to demand change. If they are silenced, Palestinians will pay the price. In a successful struggle to bring equality and freedom, we must recognise our different positions. Solidarity is about the recognition of similarly and difference. An indiscriminate cultural boycott of Israeli artists and filmmakers is a gift to the ethno-nationalists and fascists. A right-wing NGO tries to dox and shame anti-Zionist academics and filmmakers: preventing me from using public Israeli funds prevents me from making films.
From inside you understand that complicity isn’t tied to nationality or ethnicity (whereby every Israeli is complicit) but to action and inaction, ideology and an ethical compass.
The question is not simply one of purified politics, where you imagine that some funds are clean and others contaminated, but about what you do with the money.
(Photos supplied by the interviewee to The Prisma and authorised for publication)
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