Inas Halabi’s film We Have Always Known the Wind’s Direction (2019 and Dala Nasser’s film Red in Tooth (2021) are two films which explore erasure, (in)visibility and concealment  by using techniques to register the less visible or invisible - from making nuclear radiation ‘visible’ through the use of coloured filters over the camera by Halabi to using a wildlife trap camera to capture nocturnal wildlife that inhabits the area by Nasser. 

These two films use exploratory road trips to investigate the landscape. Inas Halabi’s film We Have Always Known the Wind’s Direction (2019) examines the potential burial of toxic nuclear waste by Israel in the south of the occupied West Bank, Palestine as she drives to Tarqoumia which is interspersed with fragments of conversations with Dr Khalil Thabayneh, a nuclear physicist at Hebron University. In Dala Nasser’s film Red in Tooth (2021), Nasser takes sporadic road trips to south Lebanon along the UN imposed border or ‘blue line’ to explore the environmental degradation in south Lebanon after the Israeli occupation (1983-2000) installed an illegal irrigation system that diverts water away from the Wazzani River (part of a tributary of the River Jordan that flows into Palestine), leading to over-extraction.

Together, these films are immersive explorations of the slow violence of environmental destruction by an occupying power. Slow violence addresses violence that takes place on a different temporal scale to direct, physical violence; it is structural and less immediately visible, such as environmental damage,  deaths caused by exposure to nuclear radiation, and the health impacts of drinking contaminated water. Halabi and Nasser’s films reveal the flux and material flows in a landscape (such as water flow and radioactivity), and their acts of exploration are a form of bearing ‘witness’, using the camera to document and compile evidence. They explore the different temporalities and (in)direct means of Israeli settler-colonial violence, which extends in all directions to surrounding countries and peoples— Palestine, Lebanon and Syria—and impacts the material environment on multiple scales and depths, from water extraction, to radiation from dumped nuclear waste. 

In the two films some aspects of Israeli settler-colonialism are hyper-visible and ever-present, such as the apartheid wall that cuts through the West Bank, militarised check-points and illegal settlements, while others are more concealed. Halabi’s film opens with shots at night of the Israeli apartheid wall that separates the West Bank and ’48 territories, and in Nasser’s film the UN border cuts through the landscape with visually similar vertical concrete slabs. In both films we see multiple methods of re-engineering the landscape in Israeli-occupied land in Palestine and Lebanon, from borders that slice through natural ecosystems, the infrastructures of militarisation and surveillance (helicopters and aircraft in the sky, UN vehicles), as well as its waste products.  

In We Have Always Known the Wind’s Direction views of seemingly banal landscapes are then combined with commentary about nuclear radiation that re-frames our understanding of them. Various acts of concealment or withholding information in the film mirror the purposeful negligence of the occupying power to inform people living in the area about the potential risk of nuclear radiation. Here, Palestinians living under occupation bear the consequences, and globally it’s the most marginalised communities who’re forced to bear the impacts of environmental hazards. Halabi uses coloured filters on the camera to create visual categorisations to indicate different types of nuclear radiation: ‘Red is caesium 137, orange is strontium 90’. The long-term impacts of radiation on the body are described by Dr Thabayneh: ‘caesium gathers in gonads and causes genetic mutations... strontium collects in the bone marrow and causes leukaemia’, and after this medical explanation a more sensory, embodied text describes an anxiety around the possibility of death ‘my organs feel heavy...’. 

A building with a Palestinian flag stands out defiantly in the landscape, but the red filter over the shot gives a warning that it’ll also be subject to violence by the occupation. The voice-over reads: ’these colors only confirm that we’re going to die’, speaking of a delimited future as Israeli occupation controls all aspects of Palestinian life, from birth to the various different modes of death it can inflict. In both films it is the lack of information that creates anxiety, through not being able to detect a threat in the invisibility of nuclear radiation or contaminated water; it disrupts our frames of understanding and engaging with the world where we’re no longer able to evaluate risk through bodily senses. 

Both films contain shots of mainly unpeopled landscapes, with signs or vestiges of human activity— broken barbed wire fences, a road sign in Arabic and French ‘Bienvenue Al-souwani’ referencing the French colonisation of Lebanon. These suggest acts of forced displacement that occurred in the past and forces that continue to make these areas uninhabitable, with both a grief and a foreboding in the face of continual Israeli destruction.

Some of the only people we see in Nasser’s film are portraits of Hezbollah leaders on billboards, including Hassan Nasrallah (who has since been killed by Israel), a UNIFIL ( United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon) soldier cutting grass while hazard tape blows in the breeze, and the shadows of two figures overlooking the corpse of a dead dog strewn in the grass. The absence of people draws our focus instead to animals and vegetation that also inhabit the landscape including dogs, jackals and herds of goats and sheep. But this also brings discomfort and unease; the feeling of threat is uncontainable as it not only affects the human realm but also the animal– at the same time it also suggests a futurity of life outside of man-made destruction. 

The title of Nasser’s film relates to the phrase ‘red in tooth and claw’ meaning to behave ‘competitively’ and ‘ruthlessly’; the immediate physical violence of the animal realm, where we see a jackal tearing meat off a carcass, is an analogy to the slow violence enacted by Israel that is equally as ruthless and predatory. It also refers to and subverts the metaphors based on nature used by settler-colonial ethnosupremacism to justify ‘domination’, such as referring to indigenous people as ‘animals’ or sub-human. Here we see it is the slow violence of man-made environmental destruction that is the most violent. Settler-colonialism also uses metaphors of nature of ‘purity’ versus ‘contamination’ or ‘toxicity’, yet it’s the settler-colony of Israel that is itself contaminating the land that it's occupying. The control of water resources from the West Bank, Gaza and South Lebanon towards the occupied ’48 territories has led to desertification. Israeli settler-colonial narratives claims that Palestine was a ‘desert’ and only through occupation did the landscape ‘bloom’; the unsustainable water extraction that led to desertification then becomes a form of ‘retroactive proof’ to manifest these claims. 

The toxicity in Nasser’s film isn't immediately detectable, but through the film score it’s made clear that something is disharmonious and out-of-balance. It hums and reverberates with discordant sounds and white noise, distorted vocals and then silence accompanies a shot of a flowing river. We see pipes, water towers and plastic water bottles scattered in the landscape, which show different stages of water extraction, transport and processing that reveal the illegal irrigation system implemented by Israeli occupation forces that led to river pollution. An animated blue line slowly branches its way across the screen through a landscape shot; its similarity to the UN-imposed blue line that partitioned south Lebanon after the end of Israeli occupation in 2000 indicates both natural and artificial separations of land. Through fragments of conversations with farmers living in south Lebanon who ‘live off of their livestock’, we hear how they’re under attack and how the livestock itself is used as a colonial weapon: ’Today we learned they got hold of the cows. They broke the line and pulled them out of the river and into the occupied territories’.

In the face of direct, ongoing IOF military violence against Gaza, the West Bank and south Lebanon, these two films by Halabi and Nasser reveal the longer-term structures and processes of occupation, displacement and destruction that may be otherwise concealed, and how these led up to this current moment which continues to accelerate. They are especially pertinent given the escalation in settler attacks on Palestinian farmland in the West Bank,  IOF attacks on south Lebanon that include the cutting down of olive trees and the killing of cattle, and the genocide on Gaza which targets agricultural land whilst simultaneously restricting aid. The settler-colony will attack any means to sustain indigenous life in order to establish its domination. 

The planting of non-indigenous trees in the West Bank, combined with rising global temperatures, has led to an increase in wildfires that both erases and exposes its colonial history. The burial of nuclear waste has risks including thermal pollution contributing to climate change; Israel’s use of White Phosphorous bombs in south Lebanon and Gaza contaminates the water supply impacting agriculture and livestock there but also impacts the regional water supply.  Carbon emissions from IOF bombing of Gaza has contributed significantly to global warming which will worsen drought in the whole SWANA region. The depth and detail into which Israeli settler-colonialism seeps into the everyday life of Palestinians is impossible to summarise here— psychologically and politically, impacting families, communities, livelihoods and environments. But a specific power dynamic lies at its core: that it is an intentional and conscious form of destruction rather than a byproduct. For the settler-colonial project the immediate goal of domination is more important, no matter if it leads to its own destruction.