Spartacus in Palestine

There is a scene in Elia Suleiman’s 2009 film The Time That Remains that has stuck with me for the past few days. Students at a Nazareth school, including a young Elia himself, are shown Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 film Spartacus.

In this scene, the year is 1970, three years into the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem that continues to this day. Nazareth, however, has been part of Israel since the 1948 Nakba when its defenders, including Elia’s father Fuad, surrendered to the invading army and the town was forcibly integrated into the new state. 

In more ways than one, The Time That Remains is the story of the slow, repetitive temporality that followed that initial loss. For the Nazarene Palestinians, the days merge into one another and into weeks and months and years. Life becomes monotonous, almost banal, interspersed with bouts of violence inflicted by an army that never misses an opportunity to remind these Israeli citizens that they are lesser than. In the film, as in the lived experiences of Palestinians today, Israeli encroachment on all aspects of Palestinian life continues unabated as if the occupation was a natural force like gravity, or time itself.

Throughout the film we are shown scenes that are sometimes comical, sometimes distressing, sometimes both, but always absurd. An alcoholic man repeatedly douses himself with petroleum but never figures out how to light the match. That same man and his son, also an alcoholic, spend the rest of their lives coming up with conspiracy theories and grand plans to defeat Israel. 

Israeli soldiers follow an injured protester into the hospital and wrestle with hospital staff who are trying to keep the injured man in while the Israelis are trying to take him away. The school teacher proudly performs her role as a subservient second-class citizen and yet somehow never has anything interesting to say. A young Elia is berated by his teacher for calling Western countries colonialist and imperialist, but the teacher doesn’t seem to know what to do with the rebellious child other than to repeat his objections.

Condemned today, praised tomorrow

The film gives us a feeling of how cruelly absurd the Nakba was. It makes no sense. People like my grandfather were simply living their lives as they had for generations and then, virtually overnight, were forced to pack their bags and leave. The victors were handed a social license by the world to act in ways that were supposed to have been rendered obsolete with the Nuremberg trials. 

Palestine became one of the exceptions in this world, and the Israelis understood over a period of decades that they do not need to abide by any international norms if they do not want to. As for the Palestinians, they got to be deprived of everything, and sometimes even their name. Unlike in Spartacus, no Palestinian is allowed to stand up to their oppressor and declare themselves the leader of the revolt. At the very least, if they do, they receive no praise for it from the same people who’d praise the Thracian gladiator and his accomplices standing up to the mighty Romans.

This is because the story of Spartacus has been appropriated by the West and is a good example of the contradictions within Western liberalism, that same liberalism being currently challenged by fascism. 

As Omar El Akkad argues in One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, “one of the hallmarks of Western liberalism is an assumption, in hindsight [my emphasis], of virtuous resistance as the only polite expectation of people on the receiving end of colonialism” but “while the terrible thing is happening – while the land is still being stolen and the natives still being killed – any form of opposition is terroristic and must be crushed for the sake of civilization.” 

In other words, because they are sufficiently removed from our time, some struggles, like that of the Spartacus uprising, are praised for their bravery and perseverance. At the same time, similar struggles, like the Palestinian one today, are condemned.

The story of Spartacus

Think of the Indigenous peoples of the so-called Americas. The past struggles of Native Americans are often romanticised within Western liberalism because they are assumed to be dead (they are not). 

For that reason, it is easy to praise Sitting Bull (Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake), Tecumseh, Geronimo (Goyaałé) or indeed Crazy Horse (ȟašúŋke Witkó) or at the very least lament their tragic defeats at the hands of the White supremacist American state. It is difficult today to argue that the American state were the good guys in that story. Only once the cause is perceived to be dead and buried could it be resurrected through books and movies to tell a good story of the underdog taking on the evil behemoth.

Palestinians do not get to be the underdog in this story, even though their opponent, Israel, is backed by the most powerful behemoth the world has ever seen, the USA. They don’t get to be that because they still insist on being alive. Perhaps if they allow themselves to be crushed they may one day be romanticised. Once their homes are all demolished, their people exiled and their culture extinguished beyond the four walls of a bookshop, movie theater or museum, their names may finally be spoken out loud.

In the decades since Spartacus came out the original rebellion that inspired the film became the quintessential story of a just uprising. It should be noted though that the film came out in the middle of the US civil rights movement, a movement led by and composed of the grandchildren of enslaved Black people. A movie like Spartacus, played by a white cast, couldn’t be played by Black actors as that would make it too prescient. 

But even with a white cast it was considered too controversial at the time. Howard Fast, the communist author of the book it is based on, wrote it in jail for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). The book itself was banned for ‘promoting communism’, which is how the US government interpreted a revolt by enslaved people against their masters. This didn’t stop Dalton Trumbo, also a communist, from adapting it into a screenplay, which is how we get Kubrick’s film.

Spartacus, in other words, occupied this middle ground. The timing of its release made it dangerous because the US civil rights movement was underway. This makes it closer to the Palestinian cause. At the same time, the story itself was old enough to be told to a mainstream audience. 

There are no Palestinian Spartacus films that are able to get the kind of reception that it did. Even a documentary like No Other Land on the realities of Israeli Apartheid in the West Bank remains to this day unable to find US distribution despite its recent Oscar victory.

Where is the Palestinian Spartacus?

Palestinians are cursed for not being all long dead and buried. Their existence is a thorn on the side of those who wish to erase their very name. I’m reminded of a scene in Jean-Luc Goddard’s Notre Musique (2014) which I’ve referenced many times in recent years. In it, the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish is speaking with the Israeli-French Jewish actor Sarah Adler. He explains (in Arabic) that we know of Trojan victims through the words of the Greek tragedian Euripides. Instead, Darwish says, he was “looking for the poet of Troy because Troy didn’t tell its story.” These are the stories that are missing. Troy, Palestine.

Fast, Trumbo and Kubrick got to tell the story of the Spartacus rebellion, further challenging the hegemonic hold that the Roman empire has had on Western history. It is interesting that the culture was only barely ready to accept a film like Spartacus. Moviegoers had to be transported two millennia into the past to find a slave rebellion they could stomach despite more recent and ongoing (at the time) rebellions all over the world. 

In the end, Spartacus was the closest thing to a story with, to use El Akkad’s phrasing: “no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it is too late to hold anyone accountable.” It was relatively safe to talk of the Thracian slave who led a rebellion against the mighty Romans as there are no Thracians left to defend today, and no ancient Romans to defeat. 

This is something that Palestinians – or indeed Haitians (Toussaint Louverture was described by Marx as ‘Black Spartacus’), South Africans, Algerians, Sudanese, Syrians, Kurds, Armenians, Tigrayans, Tibetans, Uighurs and others – do not have. They are cursed with the fact that their struggles are still very much of the present, as persistent hauntings in our world.

The challenge today is how to achieve the cultural resonance that Spartacus did while accepting the risks that come with seeking accountability in the present. We don’t want to wait centuries before the Palestinian cause is as uncontroversial as the Spartacus uprising is because by then it may be dead and buried. We want Palestine freed in the here and now, and for a world that accepts the Palestinian struggle just as it has accepted the Spartacus uprising.

Perhaps one day, watching that scene in The Time That Remains will feel different. It would no longer be this powerful commentary on the hypocrisy of the so-called free world that supports an entire people’s lack of freedom. There wouldn’t be this tension that exists today between two, because Palestine would have been freed.