Over the past weeks, the plight of Palestine has gripped the news. The time is right to revisit the 2020 documentary film Mayor for an intimate look at the fundamental issues at play in the latest surge of occupational violence. The film raises an oft-invoked question: what is to be done?
Mayor follows Musa Hadid, the mayor of Palestinian capital city Ramallah and his attempts to exert local city governance while under Israeli occupation. One moment, Mayor Hadid puts out a flaming dumpster in the streets, and days later he ushers Prince William around the city. No matter how mundane or extraordinary the task, Mayor Hadid’s duties always collide with the limitations imposed by settler colonialism. His job, like Occupied Palestine more broadly, is characterized by a crisis of governance in which he and the rest of the Palestinian people are stripped of self-determination.
Though Palestinians have nominal authority over local matters, the occupation ensures that Mayor Hadid is not free to pursue what in many other cities would be routine governmental activity. In one scene, a Ramallah city hall deputy laments how it took fifteen years for Palestinians to get Israeli authorization for a cemetery. Time and again Mayor Hadid is frustrated in his attempts to address basic infrastructural issues, such as sewage spilling over into the streets, which often cannot be fixed because Israel controls building permits.
By situating the film on questions of governance, with a Christian mayor as its protagonist, Mayor neutralizes the tendency to rely on religious stereotypes to explain the crisis of Palestine. The film makes clear that at its essence, the occupation of Palestine cannot be reduced to a Jewish/Muslim divide. Most of the narrative is spent following Mayor Hadid as he and his deputies plan the city’s Christmas events. A three-story Christmas tree is hardly the image globally associated with Palestine, and though Ramallah is historically a Christian city, Israeli raids threaten the event all the same.
The movie’s stakes sharply rise when the Trump administration calls for Jerusalem to be named the capital of Israel. Mayor Hadid drives through Ramallah. Black smoke fills the sky, and flames are scattered across the horizon. As Mayor Hadid’s car rounds a curve, Israeli soldiers are seen walking down a parallel road, shooting at a group of children who are throwing rocks. The Israeli soldiers shoot a child in the leg. By the end of the protests against Trump’s announcement, dozens of Palestinians are dead and hundreds are wounded.
Vice President Pence declares that he wants to protect Christians in Palestine. In response, Mayor Hadid states “We do not seek protection from anyone as Christians, we seek protection of the entire world from the pressures of the occupation.” Mayor Hadid is clear, the Palestinian struggle is one of national oppression. As the violence in Palestine dominated the global news cycle, the same old tropes and platitudes made the rounds. Biden and others continued to repeat the tired call for a “two-state solution,” yet arbitrarily carving new borders into the land does not address the fundamental contradiction of a citizenship predicated on subjugation. Enough.
Despite Israel being held up as a beacon of so-called democracy, Israel is an exclusivist ethnic state. The maintenance of Israel as a Jewish state necessitates the exclusion of non-Jewish people in order to preserve its purity. In June 2018 the Israeli parliament removed all doubt as to the reactionary nature of the Israeli state, passing the Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People. Under this law “national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people,” meaning true citizenship is exclusively Jewish. This law also affirms the necessity of expanding Jewish settlements, declaring, “[t]he State views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value, and shall act to encourage and promote its establishment and strengthening.” The Israeli Supreme Court upheld this law, demonstrating its apartheid character.
In order to maintain a Jewish state on Palestinian land, the Israelis must dominate all attempts at local governance as a means through which to oppress the national self-determination of the Palestinian people. It is the day-to-day reality of national oppression and its suffocating impact on governance that is viscerally portrayed in Mayor.
The critical contradiction of Israel is in the imposition of a statehood where sovereignty is not embodied by all the people who live there. Today in Israel, Jewish identity is the key to citizenship, a cruel irony for a people who themselves spent centuries living under states in which they were denied emancipation. Hermann Ahlwardt, a rabidly anti-semitic German statesman remarked in 1895, “A horse that is born in a cowshed is far from being a cow. A Jew who was born in Germany does not thereby become a German; he is still a Jew.” A similar reactionary logic is now deployed against Palestinians: being born on the land does not make them part of the society.
The exclusion of people living within state borders is a dynamic that exists far beyond the boundaries of Israel. States such as the gulf monarchies disenfranchise and exclude millions of laborers toiling within their borders. There are over 10 million migrants working in Saudi Arabia, and they too have no rights and are denied citizenship in the very society they build. The same dynamic exists within the United States, where millions of migrant workers live in the shadows and unarmed Black people are shot by the police. As such, it is no surprise that Israel, the U.S., and Saudi Arabia maintain such a tight alliance, as they all attempt to manage the contradiction of governing externalized peoples who are denied full citizenship.
In 2021, when asked about ongoing violence in Israel and Palestine, President Biden replied, “My expectation and hope is that this will be closing down sooner than later.” But, as the events of recent weeks prove, there is no “closing down, no “coming to conclusion,” no return to peace and calm while the Israeli occupation continues to exist and proliferate. A so-called return to normal would be, as shown so viscerally in Mayor, a return to violence, degradation, and humiliation carried out by the occupying Israeli state.
While visiting a school playground, a small child asks Mayor Hadid his party affiliation, fundamentally questioning what the political basis is for liberating Palestine. Mayor Hadid identifies himself with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. “They don’t exist anymore,” the child laughs. Mayor Hadid admits, “That’s right! There’s no one left to liberate us.” Mayor Hadid’s response identifies a core truth; that there is a lack of a clear political direction to resolve the Occupation, both in the region and around the world. Forward progress for Palestine requires international solidarity unified behind a clear political vision.
Though the occupation of Palestine is a complex situation, we must nonetheless begin by clarifying a simple political principle: we will not tolerate a world in which people live in a society but are forced beneath full citizenship, whether in Palestine, Paris, Riyadh, Belfast, or Minneapolis. A constitution which does not incorporate its living constituents is merely a monarchy without a crown.
Mayor persuasively demonstrates the need for the liberation of Palestine as a nation. The question is, to what governing and administrative arrangement should the nation of Palestine be fully emancipated? The proposition of a two-state solution is unacceptable because it preserves the reactionary logic of restricted citizenship within an exclusivist ethnonationalist Israeli state formation. We all must be free, and the existence of such a state makes this impossible to ever realize. A liberated society where no private entitlement or religious claim can circumvent popular sovereignty, where the exercise of power is of the people rather than over the people, is the only path, from Ramallah to Tel Aviv to Derry to San Juan.
At the end of Mayor, Mayor Hadid is seen traveling the world seeking out potential sister cities for Ramallah. Liberation, much like sovereignty, requires recognition. In the wake of the current wave of violence in Palestine, all cities of conscience should take this as their charge, to declare Ramallah and Gaza City as their sister cities.
We live in one world.
After Empire is a partisan think tank and cultural institute dedicated to resolving the big contradictions of our shared world and advancing social life beyond the exploitation, degradation, and exclusion fostered by imperialism. After Empire seeks to unite with all people who desire a liberated society.