Review of Borhan Alaouie's Film 'Kafr Kassem'

In the 1975 film 'Kafr Kassem,' the Lebanese director Borhan Alaouie exposes several contradictions of the Arab world while describing the actions of his brothers in other countries, thus providing viewers with a truly historical representation of his reality. Kafr Kassem is a small Palestinian village situated within 12 miles of Tel Aviv. The action of the film takes place between July 23rd and October 29th, 1956. The first date commemorates the nationalization of the Suez Canal, the second the night of the historic massacre when 49 people were killed by Israeli troops. That day the Israeli command had decreed a curfew for 4:30 p.m. knowing that it was physically impossible to warn the workers in the fields who, as usual, returned to the village around 6:30 p.m. From the discussion of the Israeli officers, viewers understand that the massacre was clearly premeditated, the orders clear and precise - shoot on sight all those discovered after the curfew.

Beyond the massacre, which is minutely reconstructed, without sentimentality or false humanism, Alaouie analyses the implacable genocidal mechanism of the Zionists against the Palestinians. Apart from a certain bitterness, the film is a coldly lucid analysis, materially and historically speaking, of the state of the Arab world at the time. 'In 1956,' explains Alaouie, 'Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal. Israel, France and England prepared the "tri-partite" intervention because they saw in the nationalisation of the Canal an attack against them. As Nasser explained it, the Egyptians had built the canal with their own sweat and blood and now were only taking back what rightfully belonged to them. Why, then, did Israel become involved in this intervention? This is what clearly demonstrates the neo-colonial nature of Israel. After three months of nationalisation, during which time each had its own tactics, Israel thought that it was necessary to prevent the Arabs in the occupied territories from reacting or acting. They wanted to make an example, a preventative example, and so a premeditated massacre was chosen as a form of intimidation.

Significantly, the film opens with Nasser's anti-colonialist speech announcing the nationalisation of the Canal, thereby providing a progressive introduction but also pointing out a tactical contradiction. Nasser proclaims that m 'Palestine is the heart of Arabia.' But at that historical moment it is already a divided Arabia, divided by an opponent who, fearing an uprising the Palestinians, forced them to become 'Israelians,' and then staked themselves on a historical situation which would take several years to level out. To the Nasserian communists who were jubilant because of Nasser's action, Alaouie contrasts a consideration of the course of history, which in 1967 will end up in the Six Day War.

Alaouie explains the situation in these terms: 'At that time [that of Israelisation] there was within the Israeli Communist Party, to which was attached the Arab Communist Party, a difference of analysis. Some (revisionists) pretended that what separated the Arab workers from the Israeli workers was Zionism. They believed that the problem of the Arab workers would be resolved once the class struggle began. The Arab workers would then have to be in solidarity with the Israeli workers. The others (Nasserians), on the contrary, refuted this analysis because the Palestinians were not in the same class struggle situation. These two theses were debated within the Communist Party. It has been proven that this was an historical debate and a little later those of the first tendency identified themselves with the national liberation struggle.'

'Kafr Kassem' also shows us the process of dispossession employed by the Zionists on the Palestinian frontiers. Alaouie speaks in his film of Palestinian land which fell under the 'fallow land' law. Land which belonged to peasants, often their only means of subsistence, was expropriated without compensation when it was judged essential to the security of the Zionist state because of its proximity to the border. The land was left uncultivated and so became fallow. After a year, the plots fell into the public domain and were recuperated in this way, serving as buffer zones, a sort of 'no man's land,' at the borders. In this way, one by one, several Palestinian villages were dispossessed, the land going to Israeli immigrants arriving from Europe to found the kibbutz. As Alaouie explains: 'The Arab political movement formed in 1960, appropriately called "El Ard" ( "The Earth"), was based on the need to recover the Palestinian land in occupied territory. The Zionists clearly knew that without land the Arabs were deprived of their roots. They tried to obtain this land through two laws - the first was the application of the "fallow land" law, which the film analyses. There was also the "absent" law, however, which was much more terrible - through this, the Arab peasant became unemployed or an employee assigned to work for the new colonialists." It was exactly those unemployed and employees who were living in Kafr Kassem and who were massacred by the Israeli troops in October, 1956.

[This essay was extracted and slightly edited from an article by Andre Paquet, 'Toward an Arab and African Cinema: The 1974 Carthage Film Festival,' which was originally published in Cineaste, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 19-20 (Fall 1975).]