Watch Profound and Haunting Short Film “Death to the Arabs”

Web developer and The Electronic Intifada contributor Benjamin Doherty has released this profound and horrifying new short film on YouTube titled Death to the Arabs.

In it Doherty juxtaposes footage of Israeli missile strikes and sniper attacks against Palestinians in May through July of this year with Israeli demonstrations from the same time period calling for Palestinian extermination.

He organizes the footage around calls for “maavet la’aravim” (Hebrew for “Death to the Arabs”), though other less frequent chants, including “maavet la’smolanim” (“Death to the leftists” — referring to Israelis who oppose occupation and the current military attack to those who support Palestinian liberation), are also heard.

While two killings — the sniper shootings of two Palestinian teenagers in May — are shown in the film, there is no fetishization of mangled bodies nor lingering gaze upon bodily trauma.

To me the film is all the more powerful for it is this distance between the fact of the missile strike and the expectation of death that creates a haunting sensibility of doom when framed with the audio of “maavet la’aravim.”

While the demonstrators in the footage do not guide the missiles that actually bring maavet la’aravim — death to the Arabs — they narrate perfectly the footage of the assault undertaken by the Israeli government.

Further, Death to the Arabs brilliantly illuminates an ideological and practical connection — normally unorganized and very often thought not always unspoken (look up Israeli lawmaker Ayelet Shaked for an example to the contrary) — between the grassroots Israeli extreme right-wing and the more “respectable” establishment parties like Likud, Yisrael Beitanu and Yesh Atid.

Alternately put, the Israeli government is doing what the right-wing mobs are demanding and Death to the Arabs illustrates it in the most haunting fashion.

Courtesy: electronicintifada.net

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