‘Yallah Gaza’: Roland Nurier Defends Film Banned in France as Gaza Faces Genocide

January 2, 2025 Articles, Features
Roland Nurier's documentary "Yallah Gaza" was banned in France. (Design: Palestine Chronicle)

By Bouna Mbaye

Roland Nurier’s documentary “Yallah Gaza,” which offers a poignant portrayal of the lives of Gazans before the October 7 genocide, continues to face opposition, prompting a powerful letter of defense to French officials.

“Yallah Gaza” is Roland Nurier’s second film about Palestine. His first, titled The Tank and the Olive Tree: Another History of Palestine (2019), explored the historical dimensions of the Palestinian struggle.

“Yallah Gaza,” released in early November 2023, offers a window into the (not-so) ordinary lives of Gazans before the genocide. The film aims to demystify the prejudices and clichés surrounding the people of the Gaza Strip, challenge preconceived notions about Gazan society, and show that Gaza was, in its context, a normal society living under totally abnormal conditions.

The film includes interviews with Palestinians from various walks of life—teachers, artists, farmers, historians, fishermen, local political leaders, and journalists—as well as with non-Palestinian activists, researchers, and specialists in international law who discuss the history of Palestine, Gaza, Zionism, religion, international law, resistance, and geopolitics.

In short, it is a film about the extraordinary resilience of the people of Gaza.

Most of the footage was shot in Gaza by Gazans themselves.

Released at a time when protests against the genocidal assault on Gaza were banned by the French government, “Yallah Gaza” was initially met with resistance. Activists and laypeople alike were accused of “apology for terrorism,” and the film was blocked in several venues, with some pro-Israel lobbyists urging French Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin to prevent screenings. An example of such pressure can be found here. 

Despite this, the film has since been screened widely across France, including at the French Senate a few weeks ago.

However, on December 5th, a screening scheduled in Mornant was banned. In response, Roland wrote a letter to Renaud Pfefer, the president of the Mornant City Council, addressing the false justifications for the ban. Below is the full translation of Roland’s letter:

Letter by Roland Nurier to Renaud Pfefer, President of Mornant City Council

To justify the deprogramming of my film by the Mornant association, you state, and I quote, “the film was shot before October 7th, and is therefore anachronistic with today’s reality. Showing it today was not appropriate.”

So if I follow your logic, we shouldn’t show westerns or films about Native Americans either, given that the theft of their land and the violation of treaties by the United States date back a few hundred years?

Then you say that my film presents “Hamas as a resistance movement.”

I have been interested in Palestine-Israel for over 40 years, and in depth for 25. I have visited the occupied territories twice. This is my second film, so yes, I assert and assume my understanding of the situation as a “citizen-observer.”

Hamas, like other Palestinian movements and political groups, resists the Israeli occupation, and this resistance, whatever form it takes, is a fundamental right recognized by the United Nations Charter, which Israel signed when it joined the UN.

Resistance fighters have always been described as terrorists, as was the case with Nelson Mandela and the members of the Manoukian group, to whom France owes so much and to whom it recently paid tribute.

Need I remind you of the excerpt from General De Gaulle’s press conference on November 27, 1967, when he declared: 

“… Israel, having attacked, seized, in six days of fighting, the objectives it wanted to achieve. Now, in the territories it has taken, it is organizing an occupation that cannot be achieved without oppression, repression, and expulsions, and a resistance to it that it in turn calls terrorism…”

That Hamas and other Palestinian militias committed war crimes under international law on October 7 is indisputable and reprehensible. But I refuse to let myself be trapped by the Israeli narrative, and I want to retain my free will.

Of course, in the West we prefer non-violent resistance—I’m one of them—and that’s why there is a sequence in “Yallah Gaza” that evokes Gazan citizen resistance during the “Return Marches.” This non-violent movement of 2018-2019 was harshly repressed by the Israeli occupation army, resulting in the deaths of dozens of Palestinian youth, including journalists and health workers.

In my film, I evoke, through the eyes of a jurist, the international law that our national political leaders put forward to condemn and take sanctions (rightly) against Putin following the invasion of Ukraine. I rely on facts—nothing but facts—when I note that this same international law has been violated by Israel for 50 years (and I’m not even talking about the ongoing genocide) without any sanctions being taken.

From my point of view, this is a very worrying moral and human failure. You have to admit that this double standard is pretty hard for the average person to accept.

My film “Yallah Gaza” effectively shows Gaza before (sequences shot in 2021). I evoke the schools, universities, hospitals, and associative structures that functioned despite the confinement—and yes, under the administration of Hamas. Hamas was democratically elected in 2006 and was then administering the Gaza Strip. I’m just stating this as an observer, without any particular sympathy for this religious political group.

It seems to me that some of our political leaders have less regard for the Gulf petro-monarchies.

“Yallah Gaza” was about a people who “made society” with or in spite of Hamas—we could discuss this for hours, and I’m not an advocate of Hamas. In my film, I wanted to reveal this highly educated people, their creativity, their education, their youth, and their thirst for life—like all the peoples of the world.

Refusing to listen to the contextualization proposed by my film (by preventing its broadcast)—i.e., the confinement of over 2 million people, by land, sea, and air, the deprivation of their freedom, the confiscation of their water, the regular and indiscriminate bombardments—is a denial of history. (Reminder: before October 7, Gaza had suffered 5 wars with thousands of victims, the majority of them civilians, women, and children, and extensive destruction of infrastructure.) Refusing to screen my film on a spurious pretext means depriving the citizens of Mornant of the opportunity to acquire historical knowledge (the first 20 minutes of the film) and to form their own opinions.

You also mention the fact that you “don’t want to import the Middle East conflict here,” and I hear you. There’s a lot to be said for this statement, which is often repeated by our national and local politicians.

And that brings us back to current events and the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

Who is importing the conflict to France?

Is it “Yallah Gaza”, the little film that describes a pre-October 7 population and shows “a normal people living in an abnormal environment”?

Or the French politicians who, the day after October 7th, rush to Tel Aviv to support a colonizing country that has been violating UN resolutions and international law for 50 years, and are incapable of taking political sanctions against a genocidal state (see the latest Amnesty International report and the numerous reports from the ICC and ICJ)?

Or the repeated statements by part of the political class and our mainstream media that “the State of Israel has the right to defend itself,” which doesn’t hold water for a second from the point of view of international law, since Israel is considered an occupying power and the Palestinians are under occupation? These are factual and indisputable elements of international law.

Allow me the right to think differently.

So “I’ll sell my film like vegetables, you say”?

I don’t think that’s very nice, either for all the people involved in the film and the team who worked for 2 years to make it on a shoestring budget, or for our local market gardeners.

You can think what you like about Israel’s policy towards its neighbors, but in my films, I claim the right to have an opinion on Zionism, a colonial ideology from another era.

See my previous film LE CHAR ET L’OLIVIER: UNE AUTRE HISTOIRE DE LA PALESTINE (2019), a film judged by all the press to be educational in terms of historical understanding of this region of the world.

Refusing to screen my film, you must understand, could be interpreted as unconditional support for Israel, and today it’s quite inconceivable to openly support a genocidal state without abandoning the humanity of mankind.

I therefore believe that it is legitimate, and all the more so since October 7, to take a critical look at Israeli policy, which is just an opinion that can be debated.

I therefore invite you to let my film be shown, and to come and have a friendly chat afterward.

For the moment, your decision is seen by many of your fellow citizens as an attack on freedom of expression.

In fact, from my point of view, this refusal reveals the collapse of our republican ideals and the disappearance of Western values—values that are, incidentally, quick to lecture the entire world on democracy and human rights.

If it helps you understand what the Palestinians of Gaza (and the West Bank) have been enduring since October 7, I can provide you with dozens of videos showing Gazans filming their own genocide, bearing witness to their ordeal. These videos, which have kept me awake at night for the past 14 months, are not the fake news that some of our media have been repeating about decapitated babies and disemboweled women on October 7. I do not wish to minimize the acts committed by Palestinian armed groups, but these videos are cries for help that leave me powerless and terribly disarmed.

History will one day judge the abandonment of the Palestinian people and the intellectual (and geopolitical) swindle that is the colonization of the land of Palestine.

I sincerely don’t know how humanity will recover from the terrible times we are living through.

“Yallah Gaza” just wants to bear witness to the resilience of a people who are disappearing before our very eyes—with the complicity of the West and a large number of Arab countries.

A petition in support of the film has been launched.

(The Palestine Chronicle)

– Bouna Mbaye is a Pan-African activist, member of the Pan-African League Umoja and Pan-African Brigade for Palestine. He contributed this article to the Palestine Chronicle.

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1 Comment

  1. Sounds like the French, who were all over themselves in remembering the French Resistance of 1940-45 when two of their secret agents were arrested in New Zealand following the Rainbow Warrior bombing in 1985, are falling all over themselves in forgetting the French Resistance of 1940-45 and desecrating their memories in claiming the Palestinian Resistance is “Terrorism”.

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