In few places has cinema been so inseparable from history as in Israel and Palestine. Here, documentary filmmaking has long been a battlefield of meaning, a space where land, identity and memory are fought over with the same intensity as territory itself.
Since the dawn of Zionist settlement in the late nineteenth century, and through wars, occupations, and two Intifadas, the camera has been used both as a weapon and a mirror. It has served to affirm nationhood, to mourn loss, and, increasingly, to question moral responsibility.
The Second Intifada (2000 to 2005) marked a turning point, when traditional binaries such as terror versus war, civilian versus soldier, victim versus perpetrator, began to collapse. In this new reality, documentary filmmakers sought new languages: some turned inward, others bore witness from exile, and many tried to build fragile bridges of empathy.
Today, this evolution can be traced across both Israeli and Palestinian works, many of which are featured in the GuideDoc collection Palestine Stories From An Occupied Land.
For most of the twentieth century, Israeli documentaries upheld a collective narrative: the rebirth of a people, the heroism of the soldier, and the moral purity of "just wars." But the Intifadas and the ongoing occupation of the West Bank and Gaza shattered that certainty.
Filmmakers began to confront the psychological and ethical fractures within Israeli society. This shift gave rise to what scholars call “good Israeli films” — documentaries that attempt to do good, to show compassion — and “perpetrator trauma films”, in which soldiers and civilians face the haunting consequences of their actions.
In Of Land and Bread, the daily violence of checkpoints and home demolitions unfolds through a mosaic of small, unflinching scenes. The camera refuses catharsis, forcing the viewer to inhabit the monotony of control and humiliation. Similarly, Gaza Health Under Siege turns its lens on hospitals and clinics, revealing how political structures of power directly determine who receives care and who does not.
Another example, The International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People – Why Was It Established, traces how the recognition of Palestinian rights has been shaped by decades of occupation and resistance, reflecting on the uneasy moral positioning of Israelis who support that recognition.
These films mark a crucial rupture. The Israeli filmmaker, once a chronicler of national pride, becomes a conflicted witness, aware that the act of filming is itself entangled in systems of domination.
If Israeli cinema has moved from certainty to doubt, Palestinian documentary has followed the opposite path: from invisibility to the creation of a unified voice. With no state institutions or consistent funding, Palestinian filmmakers have turned the camera into a weapon of survival.
From the 1930s to the present, their mission has been to make existence visible, to reclaim a history that has been silenced or displaced. The Second Intifada revitalized this mission, giving rise to works centered on collective trauma, exile, and the transmission of memory.
The subgenre of children’s resistance films is particularly striking. Two Kids A Day follows the stories of minors arrested by the Israeli army, exposing the normalization of violence in Palestinian childhoods. Similarly, When the Boys Return observes a group of young men in Hebron who, after being released from prison, try to rebuild their lives, their laughter and fragility revealing both trauma and resilience.
Meanwhile, Arna’s Children goes deeper into the long-term effects of resistance and education. Through the story of his mother, activist and theatre teacher Arna Mer Khamis, director Juliano Mer Khamis revisits the children she once taught in the Jenin Refugee Camp, some of whom became fighters, others martyrs.
Palestinian cinema thus becomes both archive and act of resistance: a refusal to disappear, a space where grief transforms into political identity.
Across both Israeli and Palestinian film traditions, geography becomes a moral map. The checkpoint is no longer a mere setting; it is the architecture of occupation itself.
The "roadblock movie" subgenre that emerged during the Second Intifada treats space as a form of domination. In films like Ambulance, directed by Mohamed Jabaly, the claustrophobic streets of Gaza become a visual metaphor for suffocation. As the filmmaker rides with an ambulance crew during the 2014 war, the camera captures the collapse of distinction between front and home, combatant and civilian.
Likewise, Gaza’s Strawberry Fields turns the simple act of cultivating fruit into a quiet form of resistance, a field transformed into a frontline where survival itself becomes defiance.
The spatial metaphor extends to My Gaza Online, where a filmmaker living in Norway keeps in touch with his family in Gaza via webcam. The digital connection becomes a new kind of checkpoint, a border of pixels and longing.
Through these works, the map itself becomes a cinematic character: fragmented, controlled, and constantly rewritten.
Out of years of despair and polarization, a new kind of film has emerged, one that seeks not to document conflict but to imagine coexistence.
In this "blood relations" wave, the focus shifts from ideology to personal encounter. Gaza Sderot: Life in Spite of Everything juxtaposes the everyday lives of families on both sides of the border, capturing parallel routines that defy the logic of enmity.
This gesture of cinematic empathy continues in films like Gaza Health Under Siege and Ambulance, where care becomes a political act, and in The International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, which seeks shared ethical ground.
Together, these works suggest that reconciliation, however fragile, begins with seeing, with refusing to look away.
In the wake of the devastating genocide and violence witnessed in Gaza in recent years, a tragedy that has shaken global public opinion and redefined the very limits of representation, documentary filmmakers face an urgent ethical question: what does it mean to film after destruction?
For Palestinian cinema, this moment may become both a reckoning and a renewal. The systematic devastation of cities, archives, and lives has not silenced the creative impulse; rather, it has turned survival itself into a cinematic act. New generations of filmmakers are already emerging with cameras as their only remaining tools, determined to document the erasure and reclaim narrative sovereignty over their own history.
In this new phase, we can expect documentaries that confront the visual politics of absence, films made with fragments, testimonies, or found footage from mobile phones, where the very act of recording becomes resistance. Just as Ambulance captured the chaos of war from inside an emergency vehicle, future works will likely blend urgency and poetry, proximity and trauma, crafting a cinema that testifies not only to suffering but to endurance.
Israeli documentary, too, will be forced to look inward again. For those filmmakers who oppose the ongoing violence, the challenge will be to confront complicity, silence, and collective denial. The “good Israeli” and perpetrator trauma films of the 2000s may evolve into a new generation of works that question not only individual ethics but also national narratives built on perpetual conflict.
Meanwhile, international audiences, and platforms like GuideDoc, will play a crucial role. By preserving and amplifying these voices, they ensure that documentary cinema remains a living archive against oblivion.
The Israeli and Palestinian conflict has not only shaped geopolitics but also profoundly transformed the language of documentary cinema. From the Zionist propaganda of the early twentieth century to today’s fragmented and self-reflective works, filmmakers have used the camera to navigate trauma, power, and identity.
Whether in the confessional tone of perpetrator trauma films, the defiant realism of Palestinian resistance cinema, or the humanistic gesture of the blood relations films, this body of work embodies a shared desire: to turn witnessing into understanding.
The documentaries available in GuideDoc’s Palestine Stories From An Occupied Land — including Gaza Sderot, Two Kids A Day, My Gaza Online, Arna’s Children, Ambulance, Gaza’s Strawberry Fields, Gaza Health Under Siege, Of Land and Bread, The International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, and When the Boys Return — reveal how cinema can transform even the deepest wounds into acts of memory and connection.
In the face of destruction, cinema becomes both a witness and a survivor.
The story of Israeli and Palestinian documentary is, at its core, the story of how images resist disappearance, how memory insists on existing even when everything else collapses.
If the twentieth century’s documentaries sought to build nations, those of the coming decade may try to rebuild humanity itself: a cinema born from ruins, committed to empathy, justice, and the unyielding act of remembering.
From everyone at GuideDoc, we stand in solidarity with the filmmakers and people of Palestine. Through the power of documentary, we echo their call for justice, dignity, and the freedom to tell their own stories.
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