The Hamas videotape The Promise opens with four vignettes—barbed wire illuminated by blinding rays of light, a herd of goats with bells around their necks jingling like a bell choir, a flock of sheep flocking, a group of dogs savagely attacking one another.

The meaning of the scenes is unclear, and no interpretation offered. While the sun is commonly used in intifada media to represent the inescapability of truth, the herd of goats and the flock of sheep belong ostensibly to the realm of the pastoral, even if the affect of these particular shots is not especially in the bonny glenn. It is the dogs that are unforgettable—they resemble wolves, and bite each other viciously on the neck as they chase each other round and round, madness and fury with nowhere to go.

When they finally disappear, the viewer breathes a sigh of relief. A second later, the screen reads, “The International Company for Art Production presents The Promise” the characters of which are rendered in an elongated, swordlike script. A song follows, its words choreographed to iconic shots of the intifada—burning tires and billowing black smoke, masked shabab flinging stones with slingshots, a Palestinian flag waving in the wind, Islamist banners featuring crossed swords and the slogan, “And prepare for them.” The filmmaker has even thrown into the mix a waving Israeli flag and an ultra-Orthodox Jew in long black robe and forelocks swaying back and forth in prayer. There’s also a globe spinning round and round, bringing to mind the triumphalist phrase with which Hamas likes to end its documents—”Palestine…and all the world.”

The song is actually not a song, but an anthem with a beat hypnotic and rousing at once. There are no musical instruments involved, this being Hamas—only human voices. The men, what sounds like a small army of men, issue their call for martyrs as though they themselves already inhabited the next world. “Revolutionaries! Revolutionaries!” they sing in smooth masculine harmony, stretching out the last syllable of thiwar (“revolutionaries”) till it hums and vibrates as if on its own effortlessly, the last unit of sound warbling in perpetuity or as long as breath will last:

• O winds of Paradise, blow
• O river of martyrs, flow
• Islam is calling, who will answer?
• O righteous people, get up!

• (p. 104 ) Revolutionaries ! Revolutionaries !

• You can meet us on the roads of al-Aqsa
• The horses of pride are wandering with us
• The blood of martyrs makes henna on our hands
• Paradise needs men

• Revolutionaries ! Revolutionaries !

A picture of al-Aqsa Mosque then fills the screen, while the voice of Sheikh Hamid al-Beitawi, a preacher and one of the December 1992 Hamas deportees, can be heard in the background delivering the Friday sermon. His voice is overpowering, urgent and beseeching, and makes the hearer feel that something horrible is imminent. You can’t escape from such a voice. As the screen reads, “O al-Mu’tasim,” a reference to the ninth-century caliph, we hear the sheikh saying, his voice sharp and rising, “We implore all Muslims to rise up to help us. We are in trouble. O our brothers in the Islamic world. The usurpers, the tyrants, are tyrannizing us. They are violating the holy places, the holiness of the blessed al-Aqsa Mosque.” Thus begins a film whose unifying theme is violation and its avengement.

The video cuts to a recent Hamas martyr, whom we initially see in a hospital bed, shrouded in a banner inscribed with the shahadatain, the credo of Islam, “There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah.” Someone has placed a large Qur’an near his head. He appears to be alive but in a coma. A middle-aged woman sits beside his bed. She could be his mother, but as she speaks, it becomes clear that she is his grandmother. She describes how the youth had been shot in the eye while throwing stones and then beaten in the face with guns.

The video begins to skip about, one rapid-fire image succeeding the next, spliced between segments of interview with the grandmother. A scene entitled “Nablus during the Curfew” displays a completely empty city, which is followed by more footage of the grandmother pointing to the entrance wound of the bullet that felled her grandson. A little girl veiled in white sings about the son of al-Mu’tasim to scenes of an infant being rocked in a wooden cradle. The grandmother tells us that ever since her grandson was little, “he was always throwing stones at the Jews.” She was always reminding him “that his father had a big family and that he should help him, but he always said, Ί want martyrdom, I want martyrdom, I want to be in the life everlasting.’” The father appears at this point and says that he is proud of his son because he possessed a better degree than himself—a reference perhaps to the “degree” of martyrdom, then the video cuts again to a bearded young man appears suddenly onscreen and, speaking presumably of the Israelis, says, “At the beginning, they allowed everybody to work and to tell their opinion and allowed religious freedom, but when the street people began turning to Islam, and people began to (p. 105 ) understand Islam as a way of life, they began bothering people. They do more than destroy mosques.”

The scenes continue, almost without mercy—old men, schoolgirls, arrests, destroyed buildings, injured people, medical logs, Islamist leaders. A man in a white lab coat, presumably a doctor, leads the viewer to a wall covered with photographs of youth who’ve been injured in clashes and confrontations with soldiers and settlers, or who perhaps were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. “These shabab,” he says, gesturing toward the photos, “are around eighteen. This picture of a martyr—he was married, and his wife had twins after he was martyred.” He moves on to the next photo. “This youth,” he says, “was shot in the head, and this one, the Jews threw a hand grenade at his house, so he lost both his legs.” He moves on to the next. “This child,” he says, “is thirteen years old; he was admitted to the hospital three months ago. The students had left school. One of them threw stones at the car of a settler. Another settler began shouting and shot this child in the neck from the back. Now he is completely paralyzed. Also, he is living by a respiration machine.”

Following this horrifying sequence of the injured and dead, Sheikh Hamid al-Beitawi appears again. This time he speaks as though addressing Israelis directly. “Your criminal bullets,” he says, “will only increase our insistence and steadiness. The Muslims say and sing,”

• Kill me, rend me
• drown me in my blood

• You will never live in my land
• You will never fly in my sky

• Kill me, rend me,
• drown me in my blood

• You will never live in my land
• You will never fly in my sky

• O swords of Allah, rise up from sleepiness to light
• Teach the usurpers a lesson and send them to their destruction

• O swords of Allah, rise up from sleepiness to light
• Teach the usurpers a lesson and send them to their destruction

The song is remarkable, masochistic one minute, the next calling for the divine destruction of the enemy, sheep and wolf virtually in the same breath. It is followed by a former prisoner’s description of his interrogation in an Israeli prison:

I entered Corridor Seven after half an hour, and prayed to Allah. Praise the Lord, I called Allah, and then they called me to be interrogated. I said, (p. 106 ) O Allah Who changes hearts and sight, let our heart be steadied by our religion. O Allah, I want that you should shut their throats and save me from their evil. I was reading verses of the Qur’an. I was sure that Allah would be with me, no matter what the result. Thank Allah, the interrogation of the first day was for nothing. On the second day, they took me to be interrogated and put me under the sun for a long time. The interrogation on the second day was harder—there was a lot of beating.

The prisoner’s testimony is followed by interviews with a number of Hamas leaders, including Sheikh Mahmud az-Zahar. He no longer wears Western attire, as he did when we met with him in his office at the beginning of the intifada, but rather an Islamic robe. Sitting in front of a depiction of the Dome of the Rock, he takes note of some of the many “positive effects of the intifada,” which, he says, include more women wearing Islamic dress and fewer “shameless weddings,” by which he means weddings featuring music and dance. The camera cuts again to Sheikh al-Beitawi, who is delivering a sermon in an unnamed mosque, or perhaps continuing the one shown at the video’s beginning, for the topic, again, is the caliph al-Mu’tasim:

O people and leaders of the Islamic world, did you not hear, did you not read in history, of one of the Romans who tried to attack the honor of a Muslim woman, and she shouted for help from Caliph al-Mu’tasim? Our mothers, wives, and daughters are shouting, O Islam! Palestine is Islamic, and the duty of all Muslims is to rise up to rescue Palestine. O people and leaders of the Islamic world who stand looking, the day will come when you will say, Ί wish I had been killed the day when the white bull was killed.’

The reference is to the well-known fable of the hungry lion and the three bulls, according to which a hungry lion spies in the distance three bulls—one black, one red, one white. He welcomes the bulls into his presence, allowing them to graze before him. Time passes, and becoming hungry, the lion takes the red bull and the black bull aside and tells them that the white bull, being white, might attract dangerous predators and that he will have to go. And so the hungry lion eats the white bull, and the red bull and the black bull do nothing. Time passes, and the lion’s hunger once again grows too strong to ignore. This time, he takes the black bull aside, and informs him that the red bull, being red, might attract dangerous predators. Thus it is that the red bull is eaten as well, and the black bull does nothing. A few days later, the lion is hungry again. As his teeth sink into the black bull’s neck, the black bull cries out, “Truly, I was eaten the day the white bull was eaten.”

The fable, a warning against Arab complacency and plea for action, is followed by a song that promises the return of Khaibar, often used in intifada media as a call for slaughter:

• (p. 107 ) Khaibar, Khaibar, O Jews, the Army of Muhammad will return
• Khaibar, Khaibar, O Jews, the Army of Muhammad will return

• By the intifada, by the intifada
• By the intifada, by the intifada

• The intifada will continue until the land returns free
• The intifada will continue until the land returns free

• Intifada, intifada
• Intifada, intifada

• O son of high-minded Jerusalem, its flame is Islamic
• O son of high-minded Jerusalem, its flame is Islamic
• O son of high-minded Jerusalem, its flame is Islamic
• O son of high-minded Jerusalem, its flame is Islamic
• O son of high-minded Jerusalem, its flame is Islamic

• Set it on fire with the light of the Qur’an and march forward in all countries
• Set it on fire with the light of the Qur’an and march forward in all countries

• By the intifada

In light of the initial spectacle of the dogs, it might seem that what is being represented in the rest of the video is not only violation and vengeance but also the wrenching of speech from speechlessness, the deliverance of men from “pure instinct”—the gift of religion—but the rhetoric and reality are so blood-soaked that the process seems aborted or incomplete. Perhaps, the mad dogs represent not instinct but rather “infidel wolves,” meant to remind the viewer of the dangers of defilement. Or perhaps, unbeknownst to them, they serve as the “natural” analogues of a language and reality so violent that they bite their own tails as they go round and round in infinite repetition. For sure, by the end of the first part of The Promise, one hardly knows what to make of the disconcerting mixture of pity and rage, victimage and triumphalism. One sits there, speechless and resourceless, before this extended discourse of the weak and the wounded.