Bye Bye Tiberias: Fighting Palestinian Erasure Through an Act of Remembrance

Goodbye, Tiberias begins with a grainy VHS recording of a woman and her child swimming in the waters of Lake Tiberias on the western shore of the Sea of ​​Galilee.

The Ex–Palestinian–Algerian director Lina Swalem says: “As a child, my mother took me to bathe in this lake, as if bathing me in her story.”

This cinematic memoir attempts to tell that story by collecting and piecing together the memories of her family, scattered Israeli profession.

The story is set near the lake where they lived before Nakba in 1948, when 700,000 Palestinians were displaced by Israel.

Nowadays, Hiam Abbas (widely known in the West for her role as Marcia Roy in Succession) visits the lake again with his mother Nemet. They see that its banks are surrounded by barriers and along the shops decorated with neon signs in Hebrew. They try to think in silence, but are interrupted by the blare of pop music and the approach of Israeli soldiers.

The film follows Abbass, who left the village of Deir Hanna at the age of 23 to pursue an acting career in France, as she returns to her home to care for the ill Nemeth.

Sualem describes the story of Palestinian displacement through the stories of four generations of women in her family, of which she is the fourth.

Among them are her great-grandmother Um Ali, who fled Tiberias in 1948 with her husband and eight children; her great-aunt Hosnia, who took refuge in Syria after being exiled; and her mother, Hiam, who left Palestine for Europe in her 20s.

A thousand yard view

Goodbye, Tiberias attempts to weave their stories together through ’90s home video, archival footage, family photos, poetry and contemporary interviews with Abbass and her sisters.

A recurring motif throughout the film, Sualem and her mother arrange photographs on the wall of her grandmother’s apartment, forming a jagged map of their family’s history.

The video camera of Sowalem’s annual visit to Deir Hanna as a child often captures the four women together, but constantly switches focus from one woman to another, from the young Sowalem engrossed in the game to Um Ali, meditatively plaiting her white hair.

In a selection of home movies, photos and interviews with her daughter, Abbass seems withdrawn. She often looks away from the camera, her eyes twinkling inward.

In a teenage photo, she wears that same thousand-yard stare. A video of her second wedding shows Abbas staring off into space amid beaming guests.

Abbas’s desire to escape from home, expressed in the poems she wrote at night as a teenager and recites to the camera, is accompanied by a strong desire to return there.

Aware of her mother’s discomfort, Sualem presented alternative ways of depicting the past, having Abbas reenact conversations with her father, her sister, and a former colleague at the Palestinian National Theatre.

As Sualem urges his mother to return to the cell, Abbas snaps: “What do you want, Lina?”

Abbas’s desire to escape from home, expressed in the poems she wrote at night as a teenager and recites to the camera, is accompanied by a strong desire to return there.

The paradox is movingly embodied in her description of the reunion with Aunt Hosnie. Abbas’s French passport allowed her to cross the border that split the family in 1948, barring Hosnia from returning. Abbas describes how they were drawn together “like magnets”.

“don’t leave me”

In one scene, she stands on a balcony, spins in place and points to the sea, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan.

“And here we are in the middle,” she concludes.

Her sense of being “in the middle” reflects the state of Palestine itself.

During a WhatsApp conversation with Abbas, her mother Nemet pleads, “Don’t leave me.”

We see her for the last time before she dies.

Although the Israeli occupation does not occupy a prominent place in the film’s frames, it creates a constant noisy background. The roar of a jet plane flying overhead or khaki-clad soldiers marching past Abbas on the shores of Lake Tiberias interrupts their efforts to preserve the material trace of their memories.

His brutality is felt in the fragmented stories of four generations of women, which Sualem lovingly tries to piece together.

Sualem notes that even her knowledge of Arabic is a “fragment” of her mother’s language.

The film is an attempt to confront this violence and counter the extermination of the Palestinian people by preserving and transmitting memory.

“What if the remnants of this place disappeared?” Sualem ponders as the film closes.

As we observe attrition Gazawhere Israeli forces have killed more than 40,000 people and razed more than half of the buildings to the ground, this issue has become even more urgent, and the act of remembrance a more relevant form of resistance.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.