Wendy
Brown’s discussion of the Israeli wall brings up some useful and
interesting points. Essentially, she describes it (along with other
postmodern walls, such as the US border wall) as being an assertion of
state sovereignty that no longer exists. This assertion of sovereignty
then has different effects on the people of Israel and Palestine.
Specifically, she discusses the ways in which the Wall projects negative
associations onto the people of Palestine. This aligns closely with
Sarah Ahmed’s discussion of how hate is organized.
What
Ahmed says is that hate depends on associating the hated group with
negative stereotypes and traits. The Palestinians are thus associated
with violence and terrorism (the stated reasons for erecting the Wall in
the first place) and the Israelis with peacefulness and restraint.
Some anti-Wall activists, as Brown states, go so far as to say that the
ugliness of the Wall is a deliberate attempt to associate Palestinians
with this ugliness and claim that they are the cause of many if not all
negative effects on Israel. Ahmed goes on to state, however, that it is
not just the hated group as a whole that is negatively affected by hate
but also the bodies of the people belonging to the hated group. This
effect is shown quite thoroughly in the Israeli movie “The Bubble”
(הבועה).
The
opening scene of this movie, which follows a group of young people
living in Israel and Palestine, features strongly emotional negative
effects of hate on the body of one Palestinian woman, and continues from
there. During the opening scene, one Palestinian woman ends up giving
birth at one of the checkpoints to cross over into Israel. The negative
associations the Palestinians have actually force her to give birth in
the road with any number of bystanders, mostly Israeli soldiers and
other Palestinians attempting to enter Israel, looking on.
Later
on one of those bystanders, Ashraf, enters into a romantic relationship
with one of the soldiers who was at the checkpoint, returning to
Palestine when a friend’s ex-boyfriend threatens to reveal that he was
in Israel illegally. Ashraf’s Israeli boyfriend and one of his friends
then pretend to be French journalists to cross over to Palestine and
talk to him. When Ashraf’s sister’s fiance catches the two men kissing,
he blackmails Ashraf to try and convince him to marry his cousin.
Ashraf later finds out that his sister’s fiance is part of a terrorist
organization setting up bombings in Tel Aviv. On the day after her
wedding, his sister is fatally shot by Israeli soldiers looking for
those behind the bombings. Out of grief and a sense of helplessness,
Ashraf decides to take his brother-in-law’s place as a suicide bomber,
eventually killing himself and his boyfriend but limiting other
casualties.
As
can be understood from this brief plot summary, in this movie the
Israeli wall and more generally Israeli attitudes toward Palestinians
cause significant bodily harm to two Palestinian women and one gay
Palestinian man. The way in which these negative associations are
attached to specific bodies causes harm to those bodies.
How
is it that specific bodies come to more harm than others in this movie
through these negative associations? Why might the filmmaker be
portraying the situation this way, rather than as causing harm to
different Palestinian bodies? How do ideas of violence as a
self-perpetuating cycle influence the production and interpretation of
this movie? Who does the filmmaker set up as being responsible for
these negative effects, and why might he have chosen them as opposed to
others?
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