Life, Death, and zionist Bureaucracy in The Voice of Hind Rajab
Reflections on the film and the many questions it raises about our strategies for protecting and caring for one another in a the face of bureaucracies governed by genc logics.
About a month ago, I went to Dar Al-Kalima, a university in Bethlehem, to watch The Voice of Hind Rajab (2025) with a good friend of mine.
Dar Al-Kalima showed the film as part of a larger series, one of many film screenings taking place in the city of Bethlehem itself and across Palestine. In the last year alone, several prominent films about Palestine have been released with the backing of internationally-recognized actors and producers, including Hind Rajab, Palestine 36, and a third film, All That’s Left of You. While I haven’t yet seen the other two, unlike many other films about Palestine that have enjoyed relative prominence, these films have not been produced with the same burden as some others whose stories are mediated by the colonizer’s gaze (Five Broken Cameras, No Other Land). This makes a difference: Palestinians are not shown as primarily victims, and their colonizers do not need to be portrayed as redeemable. In fact, they do not need to be portrayed at all, and in Hind Rajab, uniquely, they are not. Palestinians themselves — with a Tunisian director, in the case of Hind Rajab — are able to represent themselves, their lives, culture, and reality according to their own experiences and perspectives.
We streamed into the university’s movie theater, greeting friends as we settled in, tissues at the ready (literally). Certainly everyone in the audience already knew the story of Hind Rajab, a five year old Palestinian child, fleeing Tel al-Hawa in Gaza City with family members according to the orders of invading Israeli forces. She was left trapped in a car after these same forces killed the family members in the vehicle with her, and eventually was murdered by them herself alongside the emergency responders who came to rescue her. Anyone who was following the news at the time — late January 2024 — will remember seeing the Palestinian Red Crescent Society’s appeals online for international support and intervention, the subsequent release of some of the gut wrenching audio between Hind and the PCRS, and the news, twelve days later, that both Hind and her rescuers had been found dead, having been knowingly targeted and murdered.
