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Wedding in Galilee is a film that allows the audience a view into the world of a Palestinian wedding in a rural village. Over the course of this film and the microcosm of the wedding the audience is afforded a valuable and unique view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The film repeatedly arguing that it is possible to combine the Israeli and Palestinian people.

Through Wedding in Galilee the complexity of the nationalistic and cultural conflagration of Israel and Palestinian conflict is shown to not be intractable. The film continually attempts to combine the Palestinian and Israeli people, the director Khleifi speaks on this himself, “People who live in a place are subordinate to an idea and experience it. I try to create synthesis” (Gertz 1). This synthesis is shown to the audience in a number of ways throughout the course of the film.

The film is primarily about a wedding of two individuals, at a larger scale however it seeks to address the issue of how Palestine and Israel are to be paired to one another, as one state or in the relationship of two separate nations. The use of the wedding within the movie is to address this complex issue of nation-hood is well suited, as the article The Palestinian Cinematic Wedding by Nadia Yaqub states, weddings are invaluable motifs, “They serve important roles in the construction of more abstract (e.g. national) identities of belonging by providing a means of fictionally extending familial and personal connections outward to ethnic groups and nations (Yaqub 3). However, the film does not linger long in strict differences between the Israelis and Palestinians, but continually calls them to collude and cooperate.

An example of this collusion lies in the scene of the fainted Israeli soldier. As the article Wedding in Galilee by Tim Kennedy points out, the film continually seeks to challenge a Western audience’s assumptions and homogenization of Palestinian National character, seeking to display the Palestinian people as a multifaceted and heterogeneous group (Kennedy 45). However this blindness to the multifaceted nature of the Palestinian society does not happen only in western society, in Gertz’s A Chronicle of Palestinian Cinema, he points out how contemporary critics miss the point, “Ignoring the complexity and the heterogeneous aspects of Khleifi’s films and praising them solely for their contribution to the Palestinian struggle” (Gertz 38).

One such case of this complexity lies in the scene of the fainted female Jewish soldier, taken a Palestinian home. The audience is shown a number of scenes, claustrophobic and hazy that blends the differences between the Israeli soldier and the Palestinian women. The director Khleifi provides a quote that further underlies this attempt at cultural collusion, “The Palestinians keep saying we want a democratic state where everyone can live together…a state that’s bi-national, or better, multinational” (Rosen 52). The films portray of a desire for nationalistic and cultural blending, a challenging view for a Western audience, accustomed to whitewashing a clear divide into the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

The ending scene of the film however casts the audience into doubt. The young boy Hassan, in a dream-like scene runs through a forest while the cracks of gunfire resound. The boy’s determined gait in the face of danger, as the director himself puts, “it is an image of weakness but it also testifies a terrible force” (Shafik 200). Kennedy provides important context for this terrible force in his article, Wedding in Galilee, pointing out that contrary to the cooperation subtext of the film, shortly after its release the first Intifada took place, a violent movement of Palestinian nationalism (Kennedy 45).

Wedding in Galilee stands as a complex reaction to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, an attempt by the director to drawn connections between the two, seemingly disparate peoples. The film leaves the audience with a feeling of yearning, having seen the potential communality, contrast with the bleakness of reality.