The Agency of the Jewess and Her Palestinian Counterpart: Destabilizing Gender and Vulnerability as Resistance in Paradise Now and For My Father

Abstract

ABSTRACT:In this article I compare two twenty-first-century films that foreground the subversive agency of Israeli and Palestinian women within the military context of the Middle East conflict. Paradise Now (Abu-Assad, 2005) and For My Father (Zahavi, 2008) convey the subject of powerless women living on the fringes of normative society, whose agency averts the maximal effects of a Palestinian suicide bombing. Coming from seemingly opposing perspectives—Palestinian and Israeli—these films' aesthetics nonetheless converge in both a redefinition of their genre and the place of gender and resistance within it. Not only do they collapse the spectacle of terrorism and humanize their bombers, they also destabilize the masculinity of men who self-sacrifice on the altar of the fatherland. In the process, they shift the expected locus of vulnerability as resistance—from men who implode the vulnerable body to women who risk everything to preserve it. The parallel roles of the Jewess and her Palestinian counterpart in these films implies the provocative idea that feminine intervention in the Middle East is not only admirable or "natural," but necessary, if there is to be any hope of lasting resolution. Viewing the two films in tandem on the backdrop of contemporaneous literature and film, points to the potential for a shared, feminist zeitgeist in the cultural production of the two nations at this crucial juncture in history.