Field Diary

Amos Gitai’s film from 1983 – the third part of a trilogy including Bayit (1980) and Wadi (1981) – documents the IDF’s military operations in the Occupied Territories before and during the invasion of Lebanon, including interviews with soldiers, settlers, and Palestinian residents. Gitai’s camera is not an objective eye, but rather, a subversive means of expression on the Occupation. The result is a defiant critique of the normative discourse on the conflict conducted in the media. Gitai has described the film as documenting “the way people justify their motivation to occupy. It is about the occupier’s inability to face up to his own actions, taking refuge in abstractions (God, nationalism, security), and turning that into a mechanism for the legitimization of his actions.”