Can one die equally? Do all bodies experience an equal gaze under power? In what manner does the hegemony of power manifest and diffuse within the corporeal realm? According to French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault, the primary mechanism of power revolves around the control over life and death, which is exercised through biopolitics. Elucidating upon this notion, Cameroonian political theorist Achille Mbembe introduces the concept of ‘Necropolitics,’ which is an extended, drawn-out state of dying where numerous disenfranchised individuals are condemned from birth.
Using these conceptualizations on bodies, how it is regulated and degraded, I analyze a Palestinian film, Farha (2021) which demonstrates the repercussions of ethnic cleansing on a single village through its protagonist Farha. The movie is precisely significant as it shows the condition of the village before the Nakba of 1948, as well as its aftereffects, thereby drawing the audience to witness the extent of displacement and dehumanization of the Palestinians.
The film Farha is set during the Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”) of 1948 – the year that marked the onset of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, leading to nearly six million refugees across multiple generations.
When the writer and director of the film, Darin J. Sallam was asked her thoughts on the film. She underscored that the story is based on a real life girl named Radieh, who managed to survive at the time and walked to Syria where she shared her story with another girl. Later, that other girl grew up, had a daughter of her own, and shared Radieh’s story with her own daughter—which was Darim J. Sallam herself.
This article demonstrates the repercussions of Israeli colonial policies over the lives of Palestinians, through the character of Farha. Thus, reducing their existence to what Agamben, in his work Homo Sacer, identifies as “Bare Life,” thereby interrogating the mechanisms through which power insidiously infiltrates and regulates the domains of life and death. This is carried out both by the preservation of those deemed conducive to body politics as well as by organizing the demise of those perceived as threats to it.
The Plot
The narrative opens by introducing Farha as a spirited, unconventional girl who, instead of conforming to marriage, demands to enroll in a school in the city. However, her dreams are shattered when the Israeli Defense Forces attack her village only a day after she receives permission to pursue her aspirations. While the film is centered upon one woman, it echoes the thwarted aspirations of numerous Palestinian girls who have been forced to live a life of continuous displacement and humiliation.
During the attack, Farha’s father, Abu Farha, in an effort to protect her, locks her in a pantry while he goes out to seek help. Tragically, he never returns, leaving Farha entrapped in the pantry for days alone without food or water while listening to the constant scream of the villagers being shot from the walls of the pantry.
The pantry which is devoid of food, water, and light illustrates the corporeal degradation of Farha. Her persona reflects the inflictions and impact of violence leading to her eventual dehumanization. Thereby, the film moves away from the conventional understanding of character development and traces the character or corporeal degradation of such bodies thus, situating itself within the broader framework of necropolitics where the status of living is relegated to the “living dead.”
Mbembe in his work, Necropolitics expounds on the existence of “death worlds,” that is, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the “living dead.” Moreover, the pantry also serves as a metaphor for her country which is forced into a “death world.” A world where the natives experience forced starvation, destruction and displacement. This theme is further emphasized in the film’s concluding scenes, where Farha is shown aimlessly walking towards a desolate road, embodying the conceptualization of the “living dead” entrapped in a “death world.” These death worlds can be sites of obvious war, terror, and genocide, where the foremost objective is extensive destruction, often rationalized by a perceived state of emergency. In such instances, entire populations are relegated to being mere “collateral damage,” if not viewed as adversaries to be eradicated.
Furthermore, Farha’s discovery of a gun in the sack of grain in the pantry symbolizes Farha’s agency as it helped her escape from the entrapment, however, in a limited way. As the gun only facilitated Farha’s exit from the smaller entrapment of the pantry to enter the larger entrapment of her country or the “death world” created by the settler colonization of Israel.
As Farha walks out of the pantry, she encounters her once bustling village completely desolate. She walks to the same place where the film began, once filled with laughter and camaraderie, with her friends enjoying themselves is now silent and still. Following this scene, she is shown in a close-up shot, sitting alone on a swing where she once sat with her friend Farida. However, the swing of Farida was broken, signifying the devastation and loneliness of the place. She then discovers a forgotten note from her friend and sets off to walk towards an empty road with no destination in mind, embodying a social existence where she is stripped of her daily existence and is relegated to what Agamben calls a “Bare Life.”
The Bare Life
In his work Homo Sacer, Agamben elaborates on “Bare life” as a living condition where merely the biological fact of life is given priority over the way life is lived, by which Agamben means its possibilities and potentialities. It is a kind of social existence where humans are stripped of their political existence. Agamben delineates further, “In the ‘politicization’ of bare life – the metaphysical task par excellence the humanity of living man is decided.”
Such forms of existence are often not typical of a sovereign state but rather what Agamben calls a “state of exception” which he recognizes in Nazi concentration camps. He writes, “precisely because they were lacking almost all the rights and expectations that we customarily attribute to human existence, and yet were still biologically alive, they came to be situated in a limit zone between life and death, inside and outside, in which they were no longer anything but bare life.”
Farha, alongside millions of Palestinians, inhabits such a “state of exception” where the structures of power subtly permeate and regulate the domains of life and death. This is manifested both by the preservation of those deemed conducive to the exigencies of the body politics and by organizing the death of those perceived as threats to it. In this state, the human body is severed from its normal political status and is abandoned to the extreme form of existence.
The colonial occupation of Palestine since 1948, particularly the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, demonstrates such a “state of exception.” Gaza Strip is the largest open-air prison in the world where two million Palestinians are locked in a sixteen-year-long blockade imposed by the Israeli and Egyptian regimes. Gazans suffer from food, water, medicine, and a shortage of other necessities. Mbembe in his work Necropolitics argues that Gaza and the West Bank present three major characteristics concerning the working of the specific structure of terror which he calls necropower. The first involves the dynamics of territorial fragmentation – the sealing off and expansion of settlements.
This process has a two-fold objective: to render all movements impossible and to implement forms of separation on the model of an apartheid state. This spatial organization of the colonized territories echoes Frantz Fanon’s depiction of the colonized towns. In his work, Wretched of the Earth, Fanon writes, “The town belonging to the colonized people . . . is a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute. They are born there, it matters little where or how; they die there, it matters not where, nor how. It is a world without spaciousness; men live there on top of each other.”
Such specialization is what this film tries to foresee through the eyes of a 14-year-old girl. However, the story of Farha is not unique; rather she embodies the suffering of every Palestinian who has been unjustly and forcefully displaced and dispossessed by the Zionist militias.
Zionist Project and Orientalism
One of the scenes in the film that explicitly illustrates the repercussions of Israeli colonial policies on the lives of Palestinians is when Farha peeps through the hole of the pantry wall to see an entire Palestinian family being shot before her eyes by the Zionist militias. Their newborn baby is left in the open to die. This scene particularly demonstrates the brutality of the Zionist militias in the film. Moreover, this scene also stands in stark contrast with the mainstream films where the protagonists usually achieve a character development at the end, Farha instead, experiences a character or corporeal degradation at the end as a result of such violent incursions.
In the words of Mbembe, this level of dehumanization in the late modern occupations is a result of disciplinary actions, biopolitics, and necropolitics that combine to impose domination over the inhabitants of the occupied territory, however, it is also closely associated with the political extremist ideology of Zionism and orientalism.
The Britisher’s facilitation of the mass migration of Jews was driven by both the Christian Zionist ideology, which advocated for the return of Jewish people to their homeland, Palestine, for the second coming of Jesus, and their colonial mindset, where they were unwilling to address the issue of Jewish homeland they had created. Like any hegemonic Western political ideology, Zionism is a deeply violent and orientalist discourse that has resulted in the murder of thousands of Palestinians.
For many Zionists, Palestine was not even an ‘occupied’ land when they first arrived there in 1882, but rather an ‘empty’ one: the native Palestinians who lived there were largely invisible to them or, if not, were part of nature’s hardship and as such were to be conquered and removed (Ilan Pappe). This orientalist and colonial mindset of the Britishers compelled them to impose the Western-created issue of Jewish homeland onto the native land of Palestinians, resulting in widespread killings and numerous other atrocities.
There is an important scene in the film that accurately highlights the British role in the entire colonial project of Israel. The scene begins with a pastoral shot in a lush orchard where Farha shouts at the departing British soldiers, exclaiming, “Look what you have done, even though you are leaving.” While her remark was directed at the smoke from the vehicle, it can be symbolically extended to the residue of the colonial mindset perpetuated by another settler colony of Israel. Like the smoke of the vehicle, the British left behind their colonial residues, from which the Palestinians still have not been able to come out to this day.
The ongoing ethnic cleansing and genocide that began on 7 October 2023, bears witness to the impact of such brutalization and dehumanization inflicted by the settler colonization of Israel that has resulted in the killing, raping, and starving of more than nine thousand women like Farha.
The movie is situated within the broader framework of various critical theories that ground themselves in the conceptualizations of bodies, along with an analysis of the protagonist whose village was subjected to ethnic cleansing. Moreover, I want to emphasize the courage demonstrated by the Palestinians to resist the colonization of Israel time and again claiming their right over their homeland. Despite the years-long struggle and the brutality of ongoing genocide, which has killed more than 39,000 Gazans mostly children, Palestinians continue to resist in the most empowering and inspiring way, placing their faith in the future of a liberated Palestine.
Work Cited
Agamben, Giorgio. “Homo Sacer.” Stanford University Press eBooks, 2020
Fanón, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. 1963.
Mbembé, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Duke University Press eBooks, 2019.
Pappé, Ilan. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. 2006, www.schou.de/terrorwar/Ethnic Cleansing-Palestine.pdf.
“On Palestine / Noam Chomsky, Ilan Pappé.” Journal of Palestinian Refugee Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, Jan. 2015, pp. 83–85.
Excellent analysis of necropolitics in ‘Farha.’ The article offers a deep and thought-provoking examination of how power dynamics are portrayed in the film. It’s an engaging read for anyone interested in understanding the complex interplay between politics and cinema.