Between Future and Fiction
In August 2017, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu posted on Facebook—and then quickly deleted—a photograph of a coin found by an eight-year-old girl in the West Bank settlement of Halamish. The coin, he wrote, dated back 2,000 years and was proof of the “deep connection between the people of Israel and its land,” specifically Jerusalem. Within days, it was revealed that the object was in fact a souvenir produced by the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and was no more than 15 years old.
The story illustrates that the political past, present and future of the Middle East are perpetually to play for—and historical narrative, as filmmaker and artist Larissa Sansour well
