Abstract

Produced on the eve of the Soviet Union’s collapse, the film Rambo III (MacDonald, 1988) delivered an action-packed Cold War story about the CIA providing aid to the Afghan mujahideen. Israel-Palestine was perceived as a suitable stand-in for Afghanistan, where John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) fought alongside local guerrillas against Soviet troops. ‘Israel’, Stallone explained to a local reporter, ‘is a perfect replacement for Afghanistan. Not only is it bone-dry, but it’s also in war.’ With a third of its territory consisting of arid land, Israel-Palestine’s climate could conveniently simulate the orientalised war zone. Yet the country held another advantage that made it a ‘natural’ substitute. Dozens of declassified documents in the Israeli Military Archive reveal lengthy bureaucratic exchanges between Hollywood executives and military officers, containing lists of guns, tanks, jeeps, and above all, swathes of desert land confiscated from the Palestinian population and regularly deployed by the IDF for training purposes. Punching holes in the two-dimensional representation of landscapes and engaging with the materiality of geographies, the talk aims to unravel the visual estrangement of desert lands and to pull cinematic worlds ‘down to earth’. By displacing attention from the plots of blockbuster films to the soil that supports their production and to the people the land belongs to, the talk offers an urgent reminder that images of desert frontiers are neither universally distributed nor novel and have been predicated on conceptions of resource extraction, land grabs, and neo-colonial economies.