modern Syria, it is the abuse of Syria’s national achievements by a deadly security state apparatus to justify its hegemony that filmmakers and artists like Malas contest, as has been discussed by Cook and Wedeen, among others.3 This nationalist narrative began to unravel in the wake of the Arab Spring in 2011, which inspired and brought hope to the youth of Syria, however brutal the Syrian’s regime’s retaliation, and despite the evolution of the Syrian uprising into a civil war. True to form, Malas would address this unraveling in his 2013 film, “Ladder to Damascus.” Not enough can be said about the devastation of a people and a country that has spiraled into a drama of overlapping proxy wars and new enemies unimaginable fifteen years ago.
It is not truly comparable to the Lebanese civil war although the analogy is always close. It makes more sense to regard the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq as the root of the manufactured sectarian conflict that has overtaken Syria. However, there is still something instructive in reflecting on the Lebanese civil war, that other very complicated and bloody conflict that began in 1975 and ended in 1990 and resulted in hundreds of thousands dead and tens of thousands missing. It was a very confusing war, with many factions, parties, and shifting allegiances. It was not just a war between Muslims and Christians, between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Lebanese, or between leftists and right-wing parties. Aptly described by late Lebanese filmmaker Randa Chahal Sabbagh as a series of “heedless wars” in the title and subject of her 1995 documentary Nos Guerres Imprudentes (Our Heedless Wars), other major players included Syria, Israel, and to a less visible degree the United States and the Soviet Union, who all pursued their own political, national, and regional interests. The Palestinian refugee stood at the center of this conflict.
This particular text, The Dream: A Diary of the Film, reveals Malas’s private thoughts and observations as his film takes shape. In other words, through this text, we see the interior of a film project. This is both a film and a book, working in concert with each other—each in a sense incomplete without the other. It is written in poetic prose, often in note form, in a style which by its nature resists building a totalizing portrait or narrative. It is the chronicle of Malas’s experience of meeting and filming people living in the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon from 1980 to 1981—Shatila, Burj al-Burajneh, Qasmiyeh, Nahr al-Bared, and Ein al-Helweh, among others. This book and the subsequent film (although the film was actually released before the book was published) provide a snapshot of a collective body of refugees at a critical juncture during the Lebanese civil war, at the height of the PLO’s presence in Lebanon (on all registers: symbolic, social, cultural, economic, personal, historical), and before the devastating Israeli invasion of 1982. Malas’s initial idea of making a documentary about a Palestinian family quickly turned into an observational documentary composed of nocturnal dreams as narrated by Palestinians in the camps. As an observational documentary, every shot was carefully studied and composed before filming—this we learn from the book. This is the technical and artistic aspect that enhances the content; it is the dreams themselves that the film seeks to ‘observe.’ These dreams are woven together into an informative text on the statelessness of Palestinian refugees and their right to self-determination. Throughout the process of making this film, Malas sought to discover, without suggesting a monolithic vision, the ‘quintessence’ of the Palestinian. The dreams of the Palestinians in this work reveal the extent to which their plight recurs and resonates in the fabric of the Arab world.
Perhaps Malas’s own experiences of loss, as has frequently been mentioned by scholars and critics,4 compelled his interest in the subject of this diary and subsequent film. But there is also a commitment to memory as a necessary response to loss. Remembering the dead is necessary in order to grieve, and when we look at his different films and texts, we find that this is a common thread. Loss is part of the picture; it is the motive behind the act of filmmaking, and the act of remembrance. If his own father had fought and died for Palestine (as is suggested in his film “The Night”), was Malas perhaps investigating his own relationship to Palestine and the Palestinian struggle as another way of understanding his father? Perhaps he was trying to find the contours of this feeling in the diary and film, with the desire to heal both self and other. Who are people at their core if they are not their dreams, hopes, fears, memories, and affinities? Perhaps allowing his subjects to share their preoccupations through their dreams would illuminate the collective imagination of stateless Palestinians—who are so often used as pawns in the political games of the region, then and now. The result of this telling is to not only remind us of loss, but of the lives lived, the presences embodied, the experiences that occurred, the spaces that were inhabited, and the dreams that were dreamed. The most important message of this book is to be found in the margins: what came before and after it, what is alluded to in the shadows of someone’s eyes or in the narrowness of an alley. The places mentioned—Khalsa, Safad, Acre, and so forth—are real places that these people were expelled from and to which they and their descendants are not allowed to return. As for the other events referred to in the work, the women raped, the houses looted, the buildings demolished, the villages ruined—all of which have been partially documented in oral testimonies now available on certain websites such as www.palestineremembered.com—reality mixes with dream.
The book is framed by two major massacres of Palestinians during the war in Lebanon: Tel al-Zaatar in 1976 (following on the heels of the Karantina massacre) and Sabra and Shatila in 1982. Tel al-Zaatar was a densely populated refugee camp located on the Christian side of the Green Line in Beirut. In 1976, a unified group of Christian militias called the Lebanese Front, comprised of the ‘Tigers’ militia, the Phalange Party, the Guardians of the Cedars, and al-Tanzim, entered the camp and slaughtered between two and three thousand Palestinians in the span of fifty-two days. The PLO factions fighting back were Fatah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP). In two days in 1982, September 16–17, an estimated two thousand or more people were slaughtered by Christian Phalangist militias, with the knowledge and implicit consent of Israeli forces, in the massacre of Shatila and the neighboring slum, Sabra. The massacre was in retaliation for the killing of Bashir Gemayel, the then president-elect of Lebanon and senior leader of the Phalange Party, and was conducted under the supervision of Ariel Sharon, the then Israeli defense minister, who was also the architect of the Israeli invasion.
Some of the survivors of Tel al-Zaatar appear in “The Dream,” some of whom, as we are informed at the end of the film, would perish in the Sabra and Shatila massacres. What are we to make of this work that chronicles the dreams of survivors of one massacre who then face death in another? Is “the dream,” the parenthetical aside Malas refers to on the first page of his preface, inserted into a reality where nothing changes? Aside from the framing massacres of this text, references are made to many other events, places, and figures central to the post-1948 Palestinian narrative—Land Day, historic Palestine, Shimon Peres, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Yasser Arafat—which project, through the dreams narrated by the film’s subjects, an overarching narrative of the Palestinians in the post-1948 Arab world: their aspirations and hopes, but also their humanity and their right to exist, despite the indifference of Arab and other rulers.
For readers familiar with history, the Camp Wars of 1985–1987 also appear on the margins of this text. When the PLO leaders departed in 1982 it was largely a symbolic departure—many of the PLO fighters remained and were absorbed by different Palestinian factions. The Camp Wars were essentially a struggle between Palestinian factions and Syrian-backed forces in Lebanon, the aim of which was to put an end to the influence of the PLO and Yasser Arafat. It is considered the bloodiest period of the civil war, ending with massive casualties on all sides. The different Palestinian factions were united against Amal, the Shia militia headed by Nabih Berri, which was allied with Syria. Hezbollah, which at that time was just emerging and still a very minor player, received military training from leftist Palestinian factions. Walid Jumblatt, the Druze leader and head of the Progressive Socialist Party, refused to participate with the Syrians and Amal in besieging the Palestinian camps, and allowed the different leftist Palestinian factions to maneuver in his territory. The Lebanese Communist Party leader George Hawi
