History's Broken Wings: "Narrative Paralysis" as Resistance to History in Amos Gitai's Film "Kedma"

In the course of this voyage, the refugees, as film characters, are expected to participate in the cinematic plot that epitomizes the Zionist narrative: they must forget their erstwhile traumas, overcome the memories of the Diaspora, jettison the Jewish characteristics of their identity, fight the Arabs, and thus be transformed from passive Jews to warring Hebrews who fight for their lives and their fate. The way to deal with such a block, Freud claims, is to reinsert the occurrence in the chain of causal events from which it slipped away, i.e., to integrate it into a narrative, since post-traumatic stress disorder is actually the deconstruction of a mental narrative that is based on cause and effect.