The uniqueness of the film, From Ground Zero: Stories from
Gaza (2024), goes well beyond it being a documentary that includes an
animated short made by children and a puppet show. Footage of a Palestinian
being pulled from the rubble twice—one with the head of his dead friend very
close to him and the other with his account that he could see body parts of his
parents near him—is nothing short of chilling. Perhaps less so, yet equally
stunning, are the close-ups of the legs and arms of children on which their
respective parents had written the names so the bodies could be identified after
a bombing. That the kids had dreams in which they erased the black ink from
their skin because they refused to fathom the eventuality of having to be
identified is chilling in a way that goes beyond that which film can show
visually. Moving pictures can indeed go beyond the visual in what film is
capable of representing and communicating to an audience. The same can be said
regarding the potential of film to bring issues not only in ethics, but also in political theory and theology to a
mass audience.
The movie is a collection of
22 short films made in Gaza by 22 filmmakers there who wanted to inform the
world of the atrocities being committed there by the Israeli government.
Interestingly, in none of the short stories is Israel mentioned by name. Only
once is there a mention of “the occupier.” This may point to the depth of the
hatred once the infliction of suffering and even death has reached a threshold
of sorts. In the short story, “Out of Frame,” a woman says, “There is no longer
a possibility of peace.” Not even a possibility. This may mean that a significant
number of Gaza residents would rather die than make peace with Israel. This could
also mean that in over-reacting in punishing a collective so much, rather than
just the individuals who had taken hostages on October 7, 2023, the Israeli
Netanyahu misjudged out of hatred and thus unwittingly triggered much more
hatred against Israel. The prime minister obviously had not consulted with the
European philosopher, John Locke, who had written that one rationale for government
is that victims cannot be trusted to use fair judgment in acting as judge and
jury in sentencing the victimizers.
Indeed, the descendants of victims of another century can themselves
become victimizers, and the cycle can indeed intensify rather than dissipate,
even for seven generations.
Two other ways in which ethics, political theory and theology can be discerned in the film also relate the two
domains. In the short story, “No Signal”—this title itself resonating with the
filmmakers’ intent to inform the world of what was really going on in Gaza—someone
says that “martyrs” were being dug out of a collapsed building nearby. Throughout
the 22 stories in the film, the dead are repeatedly referred to as martyrs. The
sheer consistency may mean that the residents of Gaza were viewing the atrocity
as being committed by Jews against Muslims, rather than as a secular political
conflict between an occupier and the occupied. Mirroring the helplessness of a
subjugated people not allowed to have weapons even to defend themselves from
rogue (or organized) military commanders, the film reveals a sense of fatalism
among all the fatalities. In the story, “Echo,” a woman on a phone says in the
midst of bombing, “Get in a house; any house!” The other person replies, “God
will protect us.” Well, obviously that was not true, considering the number of fatalities,
so the insistence itself may reveal a sense of utter helplessness. Ironically,
in his book on the human need for meaning, Victor Frankl provided as support
the search for meaning by Jews in Nazi concentration camps in the mid-20th
century. So in the film’s short story, “24 Hours,” the man who had been dug out
of debris three times, and had been stuck for hours near the dead bodies
of a friend and his parents, could only say, as if in utter futility, “It’s God’s
will.” The filmmaker could have gone further on that point—thus showing the
potential of film to stimulate viewers to think theologically without being
indoctrinated—by bringing in the obvious question of theodicy: how is it
that a benevolent deity allows the innocent to suffer? A friend of the man could
have said, “If it is Allah’s will, then how could it be said that Allah
protects us from evil?” Contrary to the claim made by Israel’s president, I am
assuming that not every resident of Gaza was culpable in the October incursion
into Israel proper to kill Israelis and take hundreds of hostages. The intent
of the filmmakers to show the world the physical and mental suffering being
inflicted by the Israeli military for more than a year renders the theological
question especially salient, especially as the recurrent use of the word “martyr”
evinces a distinctly religious interpretation by a significant number of
the residents of Gaza (though perhaps not all of them, as glossing over an
entire collective is often contrived and thus artificial).
The psychological toll itself
begs the theological question. In the first short story, a Gazan refugee in a
camp near Egypt has a sense that her life is over. Her father had been killed by
the Israelis in 2014, and more recently her sister’s entire family was killed
in a bombing. In the short story, “Sorry, Cinema,” a filmmaker who was barred
from leaving Gaza to receive a film award at a festival says, “Time has become
my enemy.” In “Flashback,” a young woman says she keeps a bag packed because
she might have to leave her house at a moment’s notice. “My mind stops because
of the drones,” she says. In “The Teacher,” a man waits for his phone to be recharged
but there are no unused sockets, water has just run out when he is next in line
for it, and the same occurs when he is in line to get food. In “Overburdened,”
a woman admits, “I am very surprised that we survived” walking north to get out
of Gaza. In “Hell’s Heaven,” a man sleeps in a body bag that he took from a
morgue because he has no blanket and it is cold in his tent at night. “Nothing
remains of this city except the sea,” he laments. In “Offerings,” a writer says
of infliction of suffering and death, there is “no recognition of human beings.”
This resonates with statements in the media by Israelis referring to the
Palestinians as dogs. Such dehumanizing sentiment had ironically been inflicted
on the Jews in Nazi Germany. In fact, in the short story, “Fragments,” one of
the charcoal drawings could be assumed to be of Nazi concentration-camp
survivors being liberated. The psychological toll and the natural reaction of
intense hatred may go beyond the comprehension even of psychologists.
The physical, psychological
and even spiritual toll being inflicted by human beings on other human beings
could bring victims to question whether God exists as a personal being rather
than there being what in Hinduism is called brahman, which is impersonal
ultimacy as conscious infinite being. In terms of political theory, both the
human toll and the extent of bombed, collapsed buildings shown throughout the
film may mean that the residents of Gaza were living in something akin to
Hobbes’ state of nature, in which life is short and brutish. This state,
however, pertains to the relation between Israel and Gaza, rather than between
the residents of Gaza, as a sense of solidarity among them is evinced throughout
the film. For example, the bread-lines filmed were orderly; people were not
fighting each other for food.
In spite of Jeremy Bentham
having written that the notion of natural rights (i.e., in a state of nature) is
ridiculous, and Hobbes’ social-contract theory being short an explanation for
why people in a state of nature would feel obliged to enter into a social
contract instituting a government before it is up and running, the scenes of
order documented by the film even though the people in line may be close to
starvation may point to the natural fellow-feeling of which humans are capable
even when a police presence is lacking, though the threat of an onslaught of
Israeli troops may be a sufficient motivator to keep the peace while standing
in line for food, water, and medical care. The filmmakers could have explored
the peaceful atmosphere in the cities in Gaza—whether it was due to a shared
sense of camaraderie from having lost martyrs, and thus a shared “brotherhood”
as Muslims, a psychological or religious sense of futility and even numbness,
or a fear that disorder would incite even more ruthlessness from interlarding
Israeli soldiers. The question of whether Gaza resembled the Hobbesian state of
nature could also have been explicitly asked and explained without viewers
being lost in the midst of philosophical jargon and a de facto mini-lecture.
