Principled Solidarity? Humanitarianism and Post-Intifada Documentary Cinema

Abstract

After the Second Intifada, documentaries made in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle saw an unprecedented proliferation. Scholars have attributed this to the humanitarian ideologies and practices that have coloured the Palestine solidarity landscape since the Oslo Accords. While these hegemonic codes of humanitarian representation have rightly been critiqued for their depoliticization of the Palestinian struggle, there is still yet to be a more comprehensive conceptualisation of how and why this impulse emerges in Palestine solidarity documentaries. This thesis addresses this gap by identifying and exploring three humanitarian approaches that pervade this corpus of post-Intifada solidarity documentaries. In Chapter 1, I conduct a comparative case study of the video advocacy initiatives, The Greenhouse Program and the Camera Project. I argue that, despite the initiatives’ self-presentation as vehicles of empowerment and independence for their Palestinian participants, both engage in paternalistic institutional practices that resemble those of humanitarian agencies. In Chapter 2, I argue that, in humanitarian documentaries, Palestinian children are subject to a Eurocentric valuation of innocence that ultimately depends on their simultaneous depoliticization and pathologization. In Chapter 3, I conduct a comparative case study of Waltz with Bashir (2008) and Advocate (2019), and explore how the (de)humanization of the films' Palestinian subjects is dependent upon their proximity to the humanity of the Jewish-Israeli protagonists. Ultimately, I argue that the critical paradigms I identify, informed by the humanitarian principles, allow us to better apprehend and contextualise the pitfalls of humanitarian representations in Palestine solidarity documentaries. They bolster our interrogation of exactly how and why this humanitarian impulse fails to support the struggle for a free Palestine.