I watched the Oscars Sunday night knowing The Voice of Hind Rajab was not going to win. The Academy has always ratified what’s already safe to feel. Sunday was no different. The film, for all its standing ovations and its Brad Pitts and its 95% on Rotten Tomatoes, was never Academy material — and the truth is it should not have been. Both of these things are true. Hold them and bear with me.
The responses since then have split into typical camps: those who believe the film was robbed, that an Oscar would have meant something, that the snub is proof of Hollywood’s complicity. There are also those who say the film already won with its record-breaking standing ovation at Venice. To both groups, with love and with the impatience of someone who has been watching us settle: You are both wrong. We cannot afford to keep being wrong in these ways.
The Voice of Hind Rajab is set entirely inside a Red Crescent dispatch room in Ramallah. The drama — and there is genuine drama — unfolds between the call center workers trying to figure out what the best protocol for the emergency is. They argue about routing procedures and chain of command, about who has authority to dispatch the ambulance. They also sweat as they determine which route is approved and whether it is safe and legal enough to send someone to a child bleeding alone in a car surrounded by her dead cousins. As the story builds, the paperwork grows and grows to gradually become the film’s antagonist.
The Israeli military fired 335 bullets into a car containing a six-year-old girl, Hind, four of her cousins, her aunt and her uncle, killing everyone. They then destroyed the ambulance that was trying to reach her, killing emergency responders Yusuf al-Zeino and Ahmed al-Madhoun. But the Israeli military gets less screen time, or moral reckoning, than the Red Crescent supervisor deciding whether his staff have followed proper dispatch protocol. That might appear restrained, but that misses the point of the political decision made to let the craft absorb the politics, and in doing so, avoid being held accountable for it. When we have a drama inside the institution that failed to save the little child, we produce — inadvertently, no doubt — a story about Palestinian civil society’s inadequacy, without laying bare the facts of the impossible killing machine that it faces, a machine that any civil society anywhere would be unable to prevent killing Hind and her family. We could even go so far as to say that the Palestinians become the agents of their own death.
The film spends more energy staging the argument between Mahdi and his staff than it ever spends accounting for the fact that Israeli forces had, by that point, destroyed eighty ambulances and routinely killed their crews in Gaza. In effect, the workers were being forced to make an impossible calculation — knowing sending more people would very likely only lead to their deaths. The film presents this as institutional failure, but overlooks the fact that the rescue workers themselves were operating inside the same conditions that killed Hind: A sustained assault that has dismantled Gaza’s medical and rescue infrastructure through targeted killings of medical personnel and the destruction of hospitals. The inability of the Red Crescent to reach Hind on time is not separate from the story of the killing itself and the prior destruction of every system that might have interrupted it.
The film does not fully register this pattern — and, structurally, it cannot, because it would require it to move beyond the confines of the dispatch room and the 89 minutes of thriller time, and into the decades that precede the moment Hind picks up the phone. That kind of story resists the boundaries of Western genre, which was not built to contain, much less resolve, the totality of occupation.
By packaging Hind’s death within this genre, the film quietly relocates moral responsibility into the room. The Red Crescent workers are procedural agents in a story whose central actor remains the Israeli military. The thriller engine personalizes and localizes what is, in fact, systematic and total. It allows viewers — if that’s the right word — to feel the grief while missing the crime. The genre itself depends on the premise that something could have gone differently: that someone might have acted faster, braver, or defied the protocol that ultimately cost the child her life. It requires the possibility of intervention, of an obstacle that could have been overcome. But stories like Hind’s do not offer that possibility. They do not belong to any existing genre — or perhaps they belong to one we have yet to build.
The word genocide appears once, in Arabic, and without subtitles. The film decided that word belongs to us only. It simply means that we can say it to each other in the dark of a cinema in our own language. The creators of the film, who knew exactly where the ceiling is, chose to stay beneath it and called it a work of confrontation. I still don’t know how we can confront the world with a word we are afraid to translate.
Wissam Hamada, Hind’s mother, is a woman who has already been through more than most of us can hold in our imaginations. It must be heartbreaking every time she hears her daughter’s voice in the film (that’s the only format Hind is present in the film, as background voice). She has travelled with the filmmakers to places around the world and said that without the film her daughter’s story would have been “just another number.” I believe she believes that. Hamada was evacuated from Gaza through a network partly built by the film’s producers, which puts her in a complex position of gratitude and grief that no outside observer should try to simplify. She is a woman living inside an enormous grief, evacuated from her besieged home through channels facilitated by the people who made a film about her daughter shortly after she was killed, and this is the complicated position from which she speaks.
Hind, whose story the film is supposedly telling, is a waveform on a screen. The film knows her voice. It does not know her. That absence — of her identity, her humor, the texture of a child with a life ahead of her — is exactly what the thriller form requires. She must remain a sound; if she becomes a person, she takes up too much room for the genre to work. And it doesn’t end there. The six-year-old is offered to an audience primed to feel devastated, to leave with their conscience freshly scored. The film delivers that tension, and then a moment of silence that feels like authenticity. But somewhere in that process, we lose the difference between witnessing and consuming. The film, for all its virtues, does not always know which side of that line it’s on. It is engineered for that circuit — and it is very good at it. That is the problem.
The film was produced by Brad Pitt, Joaquin Phoenix, Rooney Mara, Alfonso Cuarón, Spike Lee, Jonathan Glazer, amongst others — the full choir of progressive Hollywood. It received a 23-minute standing ovation at Venice, breaking the record set by Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth at the Cannes Film Festival in 2006. I’ve been watching Western cultural institutions give Palestinian pain standing ovations for my entire life, and I’ve watched the same governments that fund those institutions continue to arm the occupation every single time. In Venice, the film won the Silver Lion Prize and it was nominated for a Golden Globe and an Oscar. Its lead actor, Motaz Malhees, was barred from attending the Oscars ceremony by a travel ban signed by the government of the country hosting the ceremony, and this was reported as ironic, as though this was not precisely the intended message.
I am not naïve about what it takes to get a film funded and distributed, to navigate Israeli lobbying pressure, to build the kind of coalition that puts Brad Pitt and Joaquin Phoenix’s names on a project about Palestinian death. I know a pro-Israel group in Hollywood ran a coordinated campaign to suppress the film’s chances at the Oscars. I know that getting any version of this story into mainstream cinemas is an act against the grain. I am not dismissing that. I am saying it is not enough. We cannot mistake “better than nothing” for “what art can do.”
I am uneasy with how quickly the film’s success was claimed as a victory for Palestine. As a Palestinian writer, I can’t shake the feeling that we are accepting a measuring stick that was never ours and never meant for us — one that rewards proximity to Western institutions more than accountability to the people whose lives are being depicted. And I wonder if, in our hunger for visibility and validation, we were willing to accept a film that names our pain but still falls short of what Palestinian cinema could—and should—be.
We have been telling this story since before the film industry paid attention to it. We have been telling it in Arabic and in exile and in the margins of languages that weren’t built for what we carry. We do not need to be grateful for the version that was made for the audience that produced the conditions we’re describing. That hunger for validation from institutions that were never meant to represent us holds us back from recognizing the projects that name our pain and offer accountability to the people whose lives are being depicted.
We have to ask ourselves: Do we know Hind? Of course we’ve heard her voice, or maybe have seen the building someone renamed after her at Columbia in her honor — which matters, and which she would have deserved, and which is still not the same as knowing her. But do we know her laughter, the way she moved through a room, what she was afraid of, what she loved, the world she was building inside herself at six years old? We learn none of it from the film. We learn it, if we learn it at all, from the interviews her mother gave on the side, on other people’s platforms. The film that claims her voice does not make space for her life. I find it hard to believe this absence was unintentional. In the meantime, until we build the cinema that holds all of that without asking anyone’s permission or worrying about the subtitles, we have not yet done the thing we came to do. Art, I promise you, was never meant to be negotiable.
There are people making films in Gaza right now on equipment that is constantly being destroyed, with no distributors, no Hollywood executive producers, and no red carpets — only a race against time to tell their story before the next airstrike. That is where the infrastructure belongs and that is where the money should be going, and where our attention should be directed — instead of counting ovation minutes.
