on Palestine

In our lifetime

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 Palestinian demonstration for Peace. Ramallah, West Bank 1991

(tw: war, violence)

I was raised pro-Palestinian.

To me, all that ever meant was that I stood for the liberation of Palestinian peoples. To me, recognizing their plight was/is/always has been the bare minimum.

I was also raised with a general consideration of peoples of all faiths, and have deep esteem and love for Judaism. It’s sad that I have to position this, but sometimes I have felt (from others) that siding with Palestinians was akin to siding with criminality. Last night, I watched a documentary on Edward Said, the great Palestinian writer, and was absolutely horrified by a segment on the Phil Donohue show, and the general ways it seemed he would constantly have to defend his humanity, and position, while others questioned his authority and morality, as well as his legitimacy as a thinker, simply because of what we believe a Palestinian to be.

Of course, it’s dangerous when Israel is conflated with Jewishness and vice versa—perpetuating anti-Semitism instead of focusing on the important critiques necessary of the Israeli state and Zionism. Yet, I am also hyper-aware of how quick Israel is to conflate the two, accusing even the U.N of anti-Semitism. And, though it’s important to understand the validity of why those who were/are historically persecuted would want a homeland—the most important question when it comes to Israel, to me, is: Who is in control? And—who has to be dominated, silenced and sequestered to sustain the empire, the mythology—through the creation of a homeland for some via the displacement of others?

In 2021, we are looking more intimately at subjugation in all forms. The subjugation of people on the peripheries: queer people, trans people, Black people, Indigenous peoples. Dalits and anti-caste allies are fighting fascism in India (and casteism abroad) while anti-Blackness is being articulated across the globe, as well. These are liberatory times. I smell revolution in the air. But we’ve been here before. We’ve been here when the radical left united throughout the 60/the 70s; when Eldridge Cleaver was in Algeria and liberation fronts mirrored each other’s verve, using the image of each other as global compatriots in the fight against domination. I think of the powerful film “The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived” by Heiny Srour about the Dhofar rebellion in Oman. All the times we were pulling ourselves from the aggressor’s reach.

Yet, I also think of my father’s eldest brother who was a mukti juddo (freedom fighter) in the Liberation War of Bangladesh. Now that same uncle works in finance. They figured out formulas to silence us—kill us, imprison us or buy even the most radical of us out. That’s a thing I always ask my dad, where did the spirit of revolution go? Capitalism and power are always the seducers. I guess that’s what happens when a movement is taken over by masculinity when greed enters the room. If history will tell you anything it’s that men are pretty terrible leaders. They too easily succumb to Earthly pleasures, losing the sense of holiticism you need to create advanced societies. Greed, ego, the fanfare of an audience always pulls us back to lust and the instability of the feckless power of masculinity.

I keep watching these videos about Israel, about foreign policy, of America. I’m listening to Noam Chomsky re-iterate that the ANC was deemed a terrorist organization for decades in the US and that Nelson Mandela was on the terrorist watch list until 2008. THIS IS 14 YEARS AFTER THE MAN WAS ELECTED AS THE PRESIDENT OF SOUTH AFRICA!!! After he was a renowned International leader and humanitarian!!! The gall. The fucking hubris of white people sometimes.

What makes a freedom fighter? Now, what makes a terrorist? I’ve been asking myself this question since I was 13 or 14, being Muslim after 9/11 will do that to you. You start existentially trying to conceptualize who you are because all your brain tells you is that you’re a terrorist which doesn’t make any sense because you know yourself to be so much more than that. So I would always come back to the same question, what makes a freedom fighter? Now, what makes a terrorist?

There’s this brilliant Israeli film called The Gatekeeper (that’s a link to the film) by Dror Moreh that I watched at NYFF six years ago. The chilling lucidity of these six ex-Shin Bin head officers talking so openly about genocide and military occupation should be cause for alarm to anyone who questions the morality of “Israel must protect its borders,” when it’s ethnically cleansing from the inside out. There’s an ex-head that even asks, “What constitutes a freedom fighter?”

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Question: Is Captain America or the Avengers freedom fighters……….. or are they, terrorists?

Just kidding. They’re terrorists, lol.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that the mythology of America and its liaisons (or who Noam Chomsky calls “the big boys”) often feels as ludicrous as the film Team America, and yet it feels so accurate? (M a t t D a m o n) I mean what is America but a country that parades around in its pompous (self-designated) position of world power (enter national anthem here) while it drones people to the dirt, criminalizing them, silencing them, killing them, raping them, doing that all over the world, just murdering all kinds of democratic leaders that could have been true powers of good in this world and yet what happens? Oh the C.I.A just intervenes every single time and just shoots them in the head then instates cronies who wanna play war with the big boys and when they don’t wanna play war like the Americans anymore, or when they’re deemed unworthy or even unnecessary, these big boy wannabes are imprisoned or killed or put on a terrorist watch list for years&years, kept on the leash that is what America says goes (!!!!!) and the cycle just goes on and on. This is the be-all end of American diplomacy, of American foreign policy. It is war. It’s is terror. It is bravado and masquerading who has a bigger dick than you. Because God forbid any nation really be able to contend with the hegemony of the American empire. God forbid anyone actually elects democracy anywhere else.

The facts make you crazy because you realize how this bullshit, how these lies of freedom, of democracy, are tools to silence others while the big chief in office gets to call all the shots. The irony is, nobody said Israel doesn’t have the right to defend itself. It’s just that not only is Israel the aggressor, meaning it reacts first, meaning it’s not called defense when you’re the one attacking. But Said writes about this in The Question of Palestine in 1979, “Could anything be less honest than the rhetoric of outrage used in reporting “Arab” terror against “Israeli civilians” or “towns” and “villages” or “schoolchildren,” and the rhetoric of neutrality employed to describe “Israeli” attacks against “Palestinian positions,” by which no one could know what Palestinian refugee camps in South Lebanon are being named?”

Again, what constitutes a freedom fighter? What, then, makes a terrorist?

As Chomsky says in this interview, in a response to a question about achieving peace in the Middle East, “Let’s try the experiment of minimal honesty.”

Chomsky with the D R O P ‼️

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I’ve been pro-Palestinian for so long that I have beef with Natalie Portman, youknowhatimsaying? I could never understand how someone who vehemently fought for human rights was pro-Israeli. That’s been a questionable paradox for so long, the complete dismissal of the question of Palestine by some members of the left. I’ve been pro-Palestinian for so long I know every celebrity that’s said some whack shit about Palestinians, or those of whom have given hefty sums to the Israeli state. I know how imagined this settler nation is, how much, ironically, it relies on the function of white supremacy to gear the oils of its settler nation. Israel is one of the most unique cases in history, where, in less than a century, the persecuted became the persecutor.

Think about that.

Fear will do that to you. If history has taught us one thing it is that whiteness proliferates fear. Why else do you take land from other people? Why else would you build one of the strongest armies in the world—if not for fear? That sounds familiar, doesn’t it? To create a nation out of fear is to fear that what you’ve done will happen to you; or, in Israel’s case, what has been done to you will happen again. So you protect by becoming the aggressor.

America is well versed in this, in fact, pre-emptive strikes are another American specialty. What Chomsky says in the video above is what both he and Said have been saying for decades: there is no comparison between the Zionists or the Israeli Defence Forces and even Hamas or Hezbollah. Just like you can’t compare the Black Panthers to the US government—a bunch of guns does not make a terrorist—because I’m looking at you Ku Klux Klan—but it’s ironic that terrorist governments get to claim what is fighting for the people and what is being an incendiary. But, this is the thing, you simply, morally, cannot compare a military stronghold that is the IDF with fire-rockets that don’t even penetrate Israeli airspace (John Oliver explains this week) launched by stranded and blockaded Palestinians who are losing their homes, their lives, their crops, their blood, their sanity to Israel.

According to Newsweek, “Total American assistance to Israel, from its establishment in 1949 up to 2016, amounts to approximately $125 billion, a whopping sum, making Israel the largest beneficiary of American aid in the post-Second World War era. By the end of the ten-year military-aid package recently agreed for 2019–28, the total figure will be nearly $170bn.”

Also adding:

“In recent years, US aid has constituted approximately 20 percent of Israel's total defence budget (which includes pensions, and care and compensation for wounded veterans and widows), or 40 percent of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) budget, and almost the entire procurement budget. Termination would thus have a devastating impact on Israel's defence posture, unless a major reordering of national priorities took place, with profound economic and societal ramifications.”

Read the rest of the piece here.

Similarly, you cannot separate the creation of Israel from the sanctity, morality and myth-of-a-nation-building from the U.S. Both of the constructed imaginations of these settler-colonial nations is that of both of them exist on the erasure of the people they are trying to hide through chronic genocide. As if big pharma isn’t trying to kill off the average American, as if the lack of access to healthcare, civil liberties, general care for the average American isn’t a way to slowly make them go insane, or die. As if guns, jails and the police aren’t always to kill, silence and shut us the fuck up. Instead, the U.S has given almost 170 billion dollars to a nation far far away. So that they can also kill, cajole and silence all the people they no longer want.

Unrelated/related, writer Emily Wilder was fired from her job at the Associated Press due to her anti-Zionism stance. Wilder, herself, is Jewish.

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In Trauma and Recovery, Judith Heman writes, speaking to childhood abuse, “It fosters the development of abnormal states of consciousness in which the ordinary relations of body and mind, reality and imagination, knowledge and memory, no longer holds.”

This last week, as the onslaught continues in the occupied territories, with Israel doing what the Americans clearly taught it to, my heart goes out to the members of the Sheikh Jarrah community and the important and groundbreaking work they’re doing to fight oppression. God speed. But it’s painful to watch. I have been feeling it in my bones, in my blood, in my body, in my soul.

I’ve been thinking about the wellness of Palestinians, of these families fighting war decade after decade. Babies born and dead through war. Weddings, work, life, prayer, it goes on as you hear fire rockets and screams while the blood on the pavement becomes habitual. I think of this, of my people, Muslims, strewn across the globe, absolutely obliterated by the West’s perpetual terror, destroying our lands for oil and resources to stop us from sanity and happiness. How do a people, generation after generation, survive war? I mean this psychologically.

“Palestine has some of the highest rates of mental illness in the world. A quarter of Palestinian adolescents have made suicide attempts; about 23.2% have post-traumatic stress disorder (according to a survey of 1,369 over three years) compared to around 6-9% in the US; and the Palestinian territories have by far the highest levels of depression in the Eastern Mediterranean region,” reports Olivia Goldhill for QZ.

In a chapter entitled, “Child Abuse” in Trauma and Recovery, Herman writes: “The abused child’s existential task is equally formidable. Though she perceives herself as abandoned to a power without mercy, she must find a way to preserve hope and meaning. The alternative is utter despair.” The abused child as a metaphor for the Palestinian.

What is it like to live in fear of your home being taken away from you every single day? What is it like to feel, and be abandoned, and used as a pawn? What must it be like for people to think you are forever a terrorist, and for your life to not even be protected even by international bodies who are apparently there to safeguard you?

The Palestinian is alone. Much like the abused child. This, from Goldill’s reporting, broke me:

“PTSD better describes the experiences of an American soldier who goes to Iraq to bomb and go back to the safety of the United States. He’s having nightmares and fears related to the battlefield and his fears are imaginary. Whereas for a Palestinian in Gaza whose home was bombarded, the threat of having another bombardment is a very real one. It’s not imaginary,” says Samah Jabr, chair of the mental health unit at the Palestinian Ministry of Health and one of just 32 psychiatrists in the Palestinian territories. “There is no ‘post’ because the trauma is repetitive and ongoing and continuous. I think we need to be authentic about our experiences and not to try to impose on ourselves experiences that are not ours.”

Jabr, author of the book Derrière les fronts (“Behind the Frontlines”) on mental health in Palestine, talks about PTSD in international forums, so as to communicate the suffering of those in her country in terms that can be easily interpreted around the world. But, she says, the condition does not fully capture the traumatic reactions of Palestinians.

“We describe our psychological experience in terms that we hope to be understood in the West, so we talk a lot about PTSD,” she says. “But I see patients with PTSD after a car accident. Not after imprisonment, not after bombardment or being labeled as a person against the law and having a relationship with prison like revolving door. The effect is more profound. It changes the personality, it changes the belief system, and it doesn’t look like PTSD.”

Jabr says people in Palestine who face continual trauma are more susceptible to shifts in personality, and express a variety of symptoms where their emotions stress is manifest in physical reactions. For example, she had a patient who suffered from breathlessness and who was sent to a psychiatrist after physical examinations could not find a cause. “A few months after he developed enough trust, he told me that he developed these symptoms after he was attacked by soldiers who forced him to use filthy words against his wife [and] his mother,” she says. “He was so ashamed of the event, that he had to comply with the instructions or soldiers…and his body expressed the suffering. We see that very often.”

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I have felt for a very a long time that the grievances of the Arab World, of the Middle East, of Muslims, one day they will need to be heard, and like the Nuremberg trials, America and its liaisons will have to answer questions of morality. Terrorism is not borne out of happiness, out of healthy regions. And, then, again, what makes a freedom fighter? What makes a terrorist? We cannot abandon the Palestinians and do nothing to understand them. It is our moral responsibility as peoples of this global world to protect those who are being mistreated—everywhere—and to root out justice and racism in all its forms, everywhere. But more than that, we have to fight. We have to fight our governments. Biden’s showing that he also lacks a backbone in this regard, snooze. I’m not here for this lip service anymore. Apparently, Obama gave 221 mill to the Palestinian Authority on his last days in office. (I mean the Obama administration’s legacy in the Middle East is … abhorrent but I always found his interest to speak to Palestinian liberation interesting. I mean this video says a lot.) But we need more. We need action. From our officials, from us, from each other. And we need to demand it now. And fight.

These are revolutionary times. But we can’t get lost. We can’t get bought. And we can’t tell lies anymore. Minimal honesty, what if we started there? We have to remember the final picture. In our lifetime. That’s what I pray for.

Viva Palestine.

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