Closed airport cast as Palestinian metaphor

Omar Karmi, Foreign Correspondent

• Last Updated: June 01. 2008 12:09AM UAE / May 31. 2008 8:09PM GMT

The film shows that the airport was not only a hub for regional travel, running daily flights to Cairo, Beirut and Amman, but also consumed the lives of its employees and absorbed those living nearby. AP Photo/Cathay Pacific Airways, HO

QALANDIYA, WEST BANK // Few places are further removed from the glamour and razzmatazz of the Cannes Film Festival than the Qalandiya refugee camp near Ramallah in the West Bank.

Drive through the camp’s narrow alleys and the dirt road opens up to a paved one where the houses get a little bigger, some even boasting their own gardens.

But, just as it appears the decay of the camp is about to give way to the idyll of a rural village, a seven-metre- high concrete wall covered in graffiti brings the journey to an abrupt end.

The wall, part of Israel’s separation barrier, unceremoniously towers out of the ground and runs off into the distance; to the Qalandiya checkpoint that severs Ramallah from East Jerusalem one way, and, to the other, over the hills and out of sight.

Behind the wall lies the old runway and control tower of what was once the Jerusalem Airport where, in the 1960s, stars like Katharine Hepburn and Omar Sharif brought moments of glamour to employees and surrounding villagers.

It is Jerusalem Airport that brings these two disparate places together.

A thoughtful and quirky documentary about the airport, the people who worked there, as well as the occasional visits from celebrities, was shown out-of-competition at Cannes this year, and generated enough excitement that organisers of the Dubai International Film Festival want it to feature in their December festival.

In the documentary, 5 Minutes From Home, Nahed Awwad, a young Palestinian filmmaker, explores the history and significance of Jerusalem Airport, located not far from her home in Ramallah, a city surrounded by checkpoints and closed off from the rest of the world.

The film shows that the airport was not only a hub for regional travel, running daily flights to Cairo, Beirut and Amman, but also consumed the lives of its employees and absorbed those living nearby.

But the airport ceased to function as an international port when the West Bank came under Israeli occupation in 1967, and in this way the film uses the loss of air travel to symbolise the greater restrictions on Palestinian freedom of movement.

“For Palestinians in the West Bank to travel, we have to leave through the Jordan valley,” said Mrs Awwad, 36. “We have no access to the airport in Tel Aviv, and no other exit, so any flight we take we have to travel to Amman first.”

Indeed, for Palestinians the mere idea of travel has always been a complex one. Deprived of statehood and nationality, the mere possession of a passport, let alone easy access to an airport, is uncommon.

The advent of the Palestinian Authority complicated things further. Palestinians now go through three checks – PA, Israeli and Jordanian – before they can reach Amman. And while a Palestinian airport was built in Gaza and the PA boasts its own airline, both of these have lain dormant since the outbreak of the second intifada.

“I think it is very hard for people who do not live here to understand how we have to live,” Mrs Awwad said. “There are things that people everywhere take for granted that for us are only remote possibilities. Travel is one such thing.”

The lives of the locals feature extensively in Mrs Awwad’s documentary. There is Norma, the elderly lady whose house in the village near the airport now lies on the wrong side of Israel’s wall.

In between reminiscing about the stars that passed through her village as a result of the airport, Norma struggles to come to terms with the chaotic traffic at the Qalandiya checkpoint she now has to cross to visit her sister in Ramallah.

There is the indomitable enthusiasm of Abu Alex, the airport’s former traffic controller. An enthusiast of all things related to air travel, there is a boyish pathos to how he decorates the upstairs office of his Jerusalem travel agency with the many air travel knick-knacks he has collected throughout his life, and which he proudly shows off to Mrs Awwad.

Mrs Awwad also introduces us to Hania, a flamboyant former flight attendant now living in Amman, whose banter invokes the days when working as a stewardess was prestigious.

Throughout the film Mrs Awwad attempts to contact by telephone Captain Salem, a former pilot and a veteran of the Jerusalem-Beirut stretch, and wonders aloud how these two cities could once have been so closely connected.

The airport’s history is told through a series of interviews with passersby at the Qalandiya checkpoint, from where the overgrown runway can be seen. Many of those questioned among the younger generation were unaware that the airport was visible.

“People remember people,” Mrs Awwad said. “People’s stories, their personalities and their habits are what sticks in the mind. And I realised from getting to know these characters that there was a whole history there that I, as part of the generation that has grown up under occupation, knew nothing about.”

Ultimately, it is a political film and that was Mrs Awwad’s intention.

She regards her filmmaking, and Palestinian art in general, as “the last battle”.

“I think we have failed, politically militarily and diplomatically. I think film and art present us with our last battleground. And I think it is an effective battle to fight, even if it takes a long time.”

Read any country report about the West Bank and Gaza, whether from the World Bank, the CIA’s yearbook or Jane’s Information Group, and the occupied Palestinian areas will be described as having two airports, both dormant.

But Israel’s wall has been completed around Jerusalem airport and a project to build housing for Israelis near the northern end of the runway is in the pipeline though it has yet to receive government approval.

Another window of Palestinian history seems to be closing and Mrs Awwad’s sideways glance may be the last look through it.

okarmi@thenational.ae