“The Dreamers of Lost Dreams”
The Oslo Accords and the Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin on Screen (1994–2015)
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Abstract
In this article, I discuss how several documentaries and films by Amos Gitai provide primary oral and written sources to write a history from below of the Oslo Accords and of their demise. In the first part of the article, I discuss sources from a set of interconnected documentaries (Give Peace a Chance and Arena of Murder) filmed between 1994 and 1996; in the second, I focus on the movie Rabin, The Last Day (2015), and I explore sources from the so-called Gitai-Rabin archive deposited at the Bibliothèque National de France. Overall, this material brings us the voices of various groups within Israeli society and among Palestinians, revealing the complexity of the issues on the negotiating table, and the cultural, social, and political questions that the peace process unleashed.
Contributor Notes
MARCELLA SIMONI (Ph.D., University College London, 2004) is Associate Professor of History and Institutions of Asia at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, where she teaches History of Israel and Palestine and History of the Jews in Asia. She is the author of two volumes on welfare during the British Mandate in Palestine (A Healthy Nation and At the Margins of Conflict, 2010), has co-edited various volumes on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and on the history of racism in Italy (The Languages of Discrimination and Racism in Twentieth Century Italy, 2022). She is a founding board member of the journal Quest: Issues in Contemporary Jewish History and a board member of the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies. E-mail: msimoni@unive.it