Judea and Samaria in Israeli documentary cinema: displacement, oriental space and the cultural construction of colonized landscapes

This article argues that Israeli documentary cinema represents Judea and Samaria as an oriental space. An analysis of some prominent films reveals common conventions used by filmmakers in the cinematic representations of the region. These conventions establish a series of distinctions between ‘here’ and ‘there’, such as domestic versus foreigner, familiarity versus strangeness, safety versus danger, and belonging versus alienation. The orientalization of Judea and Samaria is considered here as a rhetorical strategy that enables filmmakers to perform a cultural construction of the region as a colonized landscape.