Unruly Daughters to Mother Nation: Palestinian and Israeli First-person Films DORIT NAAMAN This artick examines the Zsraeli documentary My Land Zion and the Palestinian documentary Paradise Lost. Both films are critical autobiogruphical zyx texts and in both, the woman filmmaker negotiates her emotional and ideological ties with her culture, history, and nation. Naaman proposes that by using the autobiographical genre and by engaging emotionally as well as rationally, zyxwv the women filmmakers discussed offer a particular gendered position rebelliously outside nationalism and the place of women within it. My mother got a desperate phone call from Abed. His four-year-old son was alone in an East Jerusalem hospital-alone because neither Abed nor his wife had permits to enter Jerusalem. The poor boy was awaiting an emergency operation without his parents. The thought hammered, ricocheting through my brain. I held tight to my sixteenth-month-old baby and cried. As my mother relayed the content of the call and the hours that followed, I could not imagine any parent tom apart from his or her child at a time of need. This cognitive process quickly led to a familiar anger at the sins of the occupation and its violent machinations against civilians. I hear those kinds of stories all the time, and since I became a mother, I find them even more intolerable, especially when children are involved. But this time it happened to someone I know, and it happened to him supposedly for my own benefit, as if to “secure” me. And so the immorality of the actions taken in my name is a personal as well as a political matter to me. When I was growing up in Jerusalem most of the house cleaners, gardeners, and handymen were Palestinian. At the time, even if I was somewhat aware of the politics of the conflict, I was not aware at all of its economic ramifications, Hypatia vol. zyxwvutsr 23, no. zyxwvuts 2 (April-June 2008) zyxwvu 0 by Dorit Naaman