As Israeli bombardments continue in Gaza in order to destroy, once more, to cause as much human and material damage as possible to the Palestinian enclave that suffers an unbearable blockade since 2006, I want to get back to Jerusalem to get some issues straight.
There are two separate Sheikh Jarrah stories – one read and watched in the news and another that receives little media coverage or due analysis.
The obvious story is that of the nightly raids and violence
meted out by Israeli police and Jewish extremists against Palestinians in the
devastated East Jerusalem neighborhood.
For weeks, thousands of Jewish extremists have targeted
Palestinian communities in Jerusalem’s Old City. Their objective is the removal
of Palestinian families from their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood.
They are not acting alone. Their riots and rampages are directed by a
well-coordinated leadership composed of extremist Zionist and Jewish groups,
such as the Otzma Yehudit party and the Lehava Movement. Their unfounded
claims, violent actions and abhorrent chant “Death to the Arabs” are validated
by Israeli politicians, such as Knesset member Itamar Ben-Gvir and the Deputy
Mayor of Jerusalem, Arieh King.
Here is a little introduction to the political discourse of
Ben-Gvir and King, who were caught on video shouting and insulting a wounded
Palestinian protester. The video starts with MK Ben-Gvir disparagingly yelling
at a Palestinian who was apparently wounded by Israeli police, yet returned to
protest against the evictions planned for Sheikh Jarrah.
Ben-Gvir is heard shouting, “Abu Hummus, how is your ass?”
“The bullet is still there, that’s why he is limping,” responds
the Deputy Mayor, King, to Ben-Gvir. King continues, “Did they take the
bullet out of your ass? Did they take it out already? It is a pity it did not
go in here,” King continues, pointing to his head.
Delighted with what they perceive to be a whimsical commentary
on the wounding of the Palestinian, Ben-Gvir and King’s entourage of Jewish
extremists laugh.
While “Abu Hummus”, wounded yet still protesting, is a testament
to the tenacity of the Palestinian people, King, Ben-Gvir, the settlers and the
police are a representation of the united Israeli front aimed at ethnically
cleansing Palestinians and ensuring Jewish majority in Jerusalem.
Another important participant in the ongoing Israeli ethnic
cleansing campaign in Jerusalem is Israel’s court system which has provided a
legal cover for the targeting of Palestinian inhabitants of Jerusalem.
The legal foundation of the Jewish settlers’ constant attempts
at acquiring more Palestinian properties can be traced back to a specific 1970
law, known as the Legal and Administrative Matters Law, which allowed Jews to
sue Palestinians for properties they claim to have owned prior to the
establishment of Israel on the ruins of historic Palestine in 1948. While
Palestinians are excluded from making similar claims, Israeli courts have
generously handed Palestinian homes, lands and other assets to Jewish
claimants. In turn, these homes, as in the case of Sheikh Jarrah and other
Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, are often sold to Jewish settler
organizations to build yet more colonies on occupied Palestinian land.
Last February, the Israeli Supreme Court awarded Jewish settlers
the right to many Palestinian homes in Sheikh Jarrah. Following a Palestinian
and international backlash, it offered Palestinians a ‘compromise’, whereby
Palestinian families relinquished ownership rights to their homes and agreed to
continue to live there as tenants, paying rents to the very illegal Jewish
settlers who have stolen their homes in the first place, but who are now armed
with a court decision.
However, the ‘logic’ through which Jews claim Palestinian
properties as their own should not be associated with a few extremist
organizations. After all, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 was not the
work of a few extreme Zionists. Similarly, the illegal occupation of East
Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967 and the massive settlement
enterprise that followed was not the brainchild of a few extreme individuals.
Colonialism in Israel was, and remains, a state-run project, which ultimately
aims at achieving the same objective that is being carried out in Sheikh Jarrah
– the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians to ensure Jewish demographic majority.
This is the untold story of Sheikh Jarrah, one that cannot be
expressed by a few news bytes or social media posts. However, this most
relevant narrative is largely hidden. It is easier to blame a few Jewish
extremists than to hold the entire Israeli government accountable. Israeli
Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is constantly manipulating the subject of
demographics to advance the interests of his Jewish constituency. He is a
strong believer in an exclusive Jewish state and also fully aware of the
political influence of Jewish settlers. For example, shortly before the March
23 elections, Netanyahu made a decision to greenlight the construction of 540
illegal settlement units in the so-called Har-Homa E Area (Abu Ghneim Mountain)
in the occupied West Bank, in the hope of acquiring as many votes as possible.
While the Sheikh Jarrah story is garnering some attention even
in mainstream US media, there is a near-complete absence of any depth to that coverage,
namely the fact that Sheikh Jarrah is not the exception but the norm. Sadly, as
Palestinians and their supporters try to circumvent widespread media censorship
by reaching out directly to civil societies across the world using social media
platforms, they are often censored there, as well.
One of the videos initially censored by Instagram is that of
Muna al-Kurd, a Palestinian woman who had lost her home in Sheikh Jarrah to a
Jewish settler by the name of Yakub.
“Yakub, you know this is not your house,” Muna is seen outside
her home, speaking to Yakub.
Yakub answers, “Yes, but if I go, you don’t go back. So what’s
the problem? Why are you yelling at me? I didn’t do this. I didn’t do this. It’s easy to yell at me, but I didn’t do this.
Muna: “You are stealing my house.”
Yakub: “And if I don’t steal it, someone
else is going to steal it.”
Muna: “No. No one is allowed to steal
it.”
The untold story of Sheikh Jarrah, of Jerusalem – in fact, of all of Palestine – is that of Muna and Yakub, the former representing Palestine, the latter, Israel. For justice to ever be attained, Muna must be allowed to reclaim her stolen home and Yakub must be held accountable for his crime.
"Scholars of social movements, civil disobedience, liberation struggles, and revolutions have long known that fear is one of the greatest barriers to overcome. For the oppressed to move from inaction to action, they must break this fear barrier.
In extreme cases, such as Palestinians living under Israeli settler
colonialism, the fear is based on lived experiences of torture, imprisonment,
maiming and killing, daily humiliations and dehumanisation, loss of income,
livelihoods, homes, dignity, freedom, and rights.
These last few days, the Palestinian people across colonised Palestine have
shown the world, not for the first time and not for the last, their deep and
awe-inspiring courage in the face of this fear.
For decades, the Israeli garrison state, as Hamid Dabashi accurately
describes it, with its massive apparatus of settler-colonial violence as well
as its armed civilians have been creating and building this state of fear in
the everyday lives of Palestinians.
I had a relatively privileged childhood in Palestine, but still, I am
acquainted with this fear, which you learn, not just by witnessing or
experiencing violence, but in the course of seemingly non-eventful and ordinary
days.
As a child in the early 1990s, I attended the Freres School within the old
city of al-Quds (Jerusalem). During recess, we would see armed soldiers patrol
the top of the city walls, looking down on us the way that self-perceived
superior beings look down upon a caged animal. And when we would leave school
and walk down the roads of el-Balad el-Qadeemeh (the old city), we would
regularly be confronted with armed Israeli civilians walking around with their
guns out in the open, asserting their supremacy, reminding us that we ought not
to look at them the wrong way or else.
On many of these walks, conversations between us children would turn to
stories we heard about torture methods that the Israelis use, the beating a
friend or relative took at the hands of Israeli soldiers, an armed Israeli
civilian cursing and spitting on a Palestinian, the long imprisonment and
suffering of relatives and friends. This is merely the background picture – and
a relatively benign one at that, relative to Palestinian standards, and
certainly things seem worse today than they were in those days.
Nevertheless, those days and stories pile up one on top of the other, along
with experiences of violent acts and events, building and instilling in
Palestinians a state of fear that we carry with us everywhere we go and move.
That fear barrier was instilled inside me from the moment I became
conscious of the world as a child. And despite overcoming it now and again, it
never disappears. Even after immigrating to Canada, after tasting some freedom,
holding citizenship for the first time in my life, feeling somewhat protected
by a state structure (very much a false sense of protection), that fear never
leaves you. It did not take long for me to realise that in these Euro-American
spaces, I had to be afraid of even speaking about Palestine.
The fear in Euro-America has a different basis though.
Fear in those spaces is based on lived experiences of being censored,
fired, disciplined, not hired or promoted, dragged through frivolous legal
cases, defunded, harassed, intimidated, and silenced.
This fear has become so naturalised, so ubiquitous, that some people in
Euro-American spaces seem to genuinely think now that they do not actually fear
this fear!
Let me, first, be very clear: this fear is not the main barrier standing in
the way of states like Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany,
France, etc, placing pressure on Israel. These states and their political,
academic, economic, and media institutions are on the whole strategically
aligned with the Israeli state. These states and their institutions are
actively participating in and driving the colonisation, exploitation, oppression,
and settler colonisation of much of the world, as they have been for centuries.
But I want to speak here to people working within these institutions who
genuinely want to transform them, to decolonise them, but yet are always quick
to evade the question of Palestine and true decolonial liberation. From
privileged politicians to academics to journalists to civil society organisers
to artists, a litany of excuses other than fear is often proclaimed as to why
they will not touch Palestine. A main feature of these excuses is the claim
that the issue is “complex and controversial”.
Of course, it is perfectly normal to not know enough about a particular
topic, issue, or question. There is nothing wrong with wanting to learn more
before commenting or taking a position. Asking questions is a healthy exercise
when you do not know.
But every topic is complex and controversial. How your food ends up on your
dinner table is complex. But that does not stop the majority of people from
talking about food production, distribution, how they want to shop ethically,
and so on. The economics of sports is also controversial. But that does not
stop millions of people from spending countless hours talking about player
salaries, advertisement money, revenue sharing among the clubs, and so on.
Palestine-Israel is not unique in its complexity or controversy. And while
most topics and issues are framed as complex and controversial for the sake of
commencing a deepened entry into the topic, exploring its many dimensions, the
statement that the issue of Palestine and Israel “is complex and controversial”
serves instead as an end to the conversation. When it comes to Palestine, this
statement is almost never the beginning of a quest for more knowledge and
better learning. Rather, this statement is the extent of the learning process.
It puts a stop to it. It ends the conversation by declaring a non-position on
the matter.
When politicians, executives, journalists, academics, etc, proclaim this
statement, their intended goal is for the question of Palestine to go away, to
be removed off their desk. Why? In many cases, because they are afraid of the
consequences that I have outlined above. This is what everyone admits and knows
in private conversations, but almost never openly acknowledges. Therefore, what
actually drives this non-positionality is the very fear that most people deny
having.
The non-positionality of the statement, “it is complex and controversial”,
is far from neutral. This statement indeed maintains the status quo by ensuring
the continued toxification of Palestine and Palestinians in Euro-American
public discourse.
Israeli propagandists are the only beneficiaries of a statement that posits
for itself a non-position. Because non-positions are always ultimately
concealment of reality. When you declare that you will not take a position,
when you end the conversation because something is controversial and complex,
you are declaring that the reality of the situation is hopelessly and
infinitely indecipherable. You are declaring that you do not know what position
to take because nobody knows the reality of the situation.
This statement thus declares that the reality of Palestine-Israel is
unknowable, which is precisely the conclusion that Israeli propaganda is
entirely comfortable with. Only the oppressed and colonised Palestinians and
their supporters are attempting to communicate the reality of settler
colonialism and apartheid to the world. Only they are making it knowable.
Israeli and Zionist propaganda in Euro-America and elsewhere is designed to
conceal and hide that reality because it does not serve the Zionist political
project. Therefore, a declared non-position that clouds reality and conceals it
is in fact a statement of support for Israeli propaganda.
This does not mean that Zionism does not understand its own reality. In
fact, within some Zionist discursive spaces, a space where, for example,
Zionist settlers speak freely, as we saw in the most recent viral video, you
will find a basic description of the brutality of that settler colonial and
apartheid reality: “If I don’t steal your home, someone else will steal it.”
They know that they are stealing, that they are there to eliminate and replace
the native Palestinians.
Palestinians have broken a fear barrier the likes of which the privileged
in Euro-America will never know or experience. The lived experiences of fear in
Palestine are far more violent and coercive than the lived experiences of fear
in Euro-America. I am not discounting the burden of the Euro-American based
experiences of job precarity, defunding, harassment and so on. These are real
fears, and they are deeply consequential for their victims, especially for
Palestinians and other racialised people, who face the most severe
consequences.
But those consequences are already a reality for those who speak up for
Palestinian rights. And for change to happen, there must be a collective will
and action to break the fear barrier and to face the consequences for it
together. And here is the good news: as we have seen in many other cases, when
action is collectively undertaken, those consequences are neither strong nor do
they last.
It is time to say, enough: enough of this imprisonment, occupation, colonisation; enough of evading the issue; enough of this fear. Palestinians continue to break their fear barrier. If you have not yet done so, then, my dear reader, if you genuinely want to transform the world, then you will have to." A Palestinian testimony
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