Of the ordeal inflicted in Yarmouk, the largest Palestinian refugee camp in the Middle East, located on the outskirts of Damascus, besieged and starved by the Assad regime between 2013 and 2018, Western public opinion has seen practically nothing. While most of the stages of Syria’s descent into hell have been amply documented, in collective memory, the ordeal of Yarmouk can be summed up in one appalling but unique scene, captured by the United Nations in January 2014: that of a tide of paupers come to beg for food in an apocalypse landscape.
The documentary by Palestinian Abdallah Al-Khatib, LittlePalestine, offers a masterful response to this iconographic deficit. Filmed on location between 2013 and 2015, before the camp fell under the control of the Islamic State (IS) organization, it is woven with sequences that take place upstream and downstream of the famous 2014 photo. is designed not as a journalistic investigation but as a diary, a meditation on the human experience of the siege. It reconstructs a memory in the process of being lost, most of the survivors of Yarmouk being dispersed today in the four corners of the world, and restores a narrative of resistance, long blurred by intra-Palestinian divisions on the subject and by the anti-terrorist propaganda of the Syrian regime. . In 2018, he completely razed the camp, in the name of the fight against the jihadists, while allowing them to flee into the desert.
“Act of Survival”
When Abdallah Al-Khatib, a young Fatah activist, the main Palestinian nationalist formation, began filming, in 2013, he was twenty-five years old, Yarmouk, an unofficial camp, created in 1957, south of Damascus, which had little little by little took the form of a commercial district perfectly integrated into the capital, was transformed into a trap. After its conquest by rebel groups, including elements of the Al-Nusra Front, the Syrian branch of Al-Qaeda, the regular army blocked all the exits. Tens of thousands of Palestinians are thus trapped and begin to wander the streets of the camp in search of food. One hundred and eighty of them succumbed to hunger in the months that followed, in addition to the hundreds of deaths caused by bombardments and sniper fire. The distress of the population is such that an imam proclaims in October 2013 that it is halal (lawful) to eat dogs.
“The act of filming, even before it became a way of documenting this story, was for me an act of survival, a way of preserving my psychological balance”, says Abdallah Al-Khatib, joined in Berlin, where he obtained political asylum. In the siege of Yarmouk, the young director discerns the echo of two other Palestinian tragedies: the siege of the Tel al-Zaatar camp in 1976, by the Maronite factions of Lebanon, and that of the Chatila camp, between 1985 and 1987, by the Shia Amal militia.
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