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They Do Not Exist
ليس لهم وجود
Southern Lebanon, 1974. Mustafa Abu Ali, co-founder of the Palestine Film Unit (PFU), opens with life as it is in the Nabatiah camp. Refugees go about their day through small brick streets. Shoppers buy vegetables at the local grocery. A young boy holding a toy gun rides a tricycle while his mother hangs clothes to dry. Men drink tea in a café with Fatah party signage on the wall. A girl writes a letter to a freedom fighter.
One chapter in the edit later, Israeli fighter jets fly over the camp and bomb it to the ground—accompanied by classical music. Their excessive bombing is a retaliation for the Ma’alot massacre, a terrorist attack by the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP). After the bombs, Abu Ali returns to show how nothing remains, filming houses turned to rubble without sentiment or sound.
Survivors tell of destroyed homes and finding their murdered children, but remain militant in the fight for their existence. A quote by former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir, who declared that the Palestinian people did not exist, is used as a title to criticise the deliberate erasure of the Palestinian people. “Buildings crumble, but they can’t take away the dignity of the people. They’re grounded in knowing that their fight is just, that their stolen homeland is theirs.”