Mahdi Amel in Gaza: On the Colonial Mode of Production

Yaser Murtaja and Roshdi Sarraj are filming themselves swimming in the Mediterranean: “Good morning, Sea, morning of love, good morning, dear Gaza,” gurgles Murtaja—a photojournalist—joyfully. He is treading water. “Good morning, with the crabs under our feet,” adds his colleague and best friend, Sarraj. The two laugh, then dive beneath the surface. This footage, from 2016, is part of Mahdi Amel in Gaza: On the Colonial Mode of Production, a new short film by radical geographer Mary Jirmanus Saba and militant musician Tareq Rantisi. (The title references the Lebanese communist and theorist of “the colonial mode of production” Mahdi Amel, assassinated in 1987.) Thirty years after Amel’s assassination, the two young swimmers set up a media organization (Ain Media) dedicated to documenting Gazan life. However, Yaser died at the hands of an Israeli sniper as he filmed the Great March of Return in 2018, and Roshdi succumbed to bombardment in his home in 2023, shortly after Operation Al-Aqsa Flood—Hamas’s name for the October 7 attacks—and the subsequent genocidal action against the Strip. The large text on Rantisi and Saba’s screen is forthright with its challenge to the audience regarding these murders: “What is our responsibility to Motaz, to Bisan, to Roshdi, to Yaser? To Gaza?” Conversely, the voice-over addresses the dead eponymous Marxist directly: “My dear Mahdi, what if the path of production, subject as it is to capital’s logic of endless accumulation, has taken us on the road to extinction? In this moment of ecological disarray, the ties between the forces of reaction and resource extraction have never been more clear.”

Sophie Lewis (Eflux.com)