So let it be with Palestine.
For the last seven decades, the history of the Palestinian people has been one of tireless abuse underscored by what the late Edward Said described as the politics of dispossession. Fast forward to the present, we witness a replay of this form of insidious politics in the impending Israeli plan to annex further land from the already illegally occupied West Bank.
The declaration, albeit delayed, to annex one-third of whatever that remains of the shrinking land of the Palestinians, including parts of the Jordan Valley, is nothing if not yet another blatant instance of utterly illegal land grabbing.
Nevertheless, it would appear that our anger over this injustice presents with an unfortunate numbness, consequent upon our collective fatigue over the historical drama dubbed euphemistically as the Palestinian question.
Whither Palestine? Popular culture has deemed the Israeli-Palestinian situation an impossible question and a conundrum. But how did we get to this point? There is no straight answer for the problem is complex and the situation wrapped in concentric narratives. It is akin to constructing a box for Schrödinger’s Cat. We lose sight of what the actual thing is, or whether or not it’s alive or dead, or both!
Yet, the narratives are often supremely effective and caustic. Stereotypes are an essential tool here. First, Israelis are made in one image, cast to one color and personality. Likewise, the Palestinians.
Despite the fact that both nations exist, often in greater abundance and affluence, beyond their homelands. Transplanted away from home, the diaspora feel the need to bleed the nationalistic blood for ideas that we take for granted.
The life force, vibrance, and internal struggles and debates of these two peoples are lost as this truly international issue loses sight of the people they argue over. We speak of simple solutions.
Two states or one, who gets self-determination, and what of human rights? These fixes attempt to patch a problem as though this was a simple domestic matter as some would have us believe.
The normal definition of domestic and foreign, state and nation, borders and sovereignty are all tossed out. And these unfair and demeaning narratives are shielded against being labeled anti-Semitism or Islamophobia.
Edward Said’s The Politics of Dispossession illustrates this dilemma. To consign the Palestinian people to the dustbin of history was easy. Just erase any sense that they had “a history, society, and, most important, a right to self-determination”. Colonization transcends land and borders and invades the hearts and minds as well.
The colonization done upon the Palestinians is three-fold. History and empire building, the State of Israel, and the Muslim community all have a hand in the dispossession of the Palestinian people.
The history of Palestine is long and storied, but unfortunately, large chunks of it have been given footnotes by the whims of Western powers.
Said pulls no punches in mentioning how Israel has not only used the sympathies garnered by being the survivors of the Holocaust, but abused them to the point of making the Palestinian people “the inheritors of the Hitlerian legacy”.
Said points to how the Arab states took up arms to defend Palestine, less for the desires of the Palestinian people and more for their own gains against Western interference in their affairs.
Even today, the Muslim call to defend Palestine is often misguided. We derive our pride and militancy from a toxic nationalism rooted in a romanticized ideal of Palestine and the Ummah.
The stark reality is that the Palestinians, a dwindling people, are dispossessed of their land and their right to self-determination.
The reason for the impending annexation is grounded in excavating for proofs so that a discovery justifies evicting Palestinians from their homes. This is tantamount to legitimizing repression and subjugation of a people in the name of archeology.
But there’s an equally insidious motive behind this land grab which includes the annexation of farm lands and water access points.
The annexation rides roughshod over international law which forbids annexation and territorial conquest but when has it been where the Israeli government pays any attention to it?
The reality is that the Palestinian people are being erased from history. Those who remain in ancient Palestine are kept as prisoners at home at the mercy of jailers who see them as sub-human.
Those who flee become members of the global refugee community where their identity becomes an ideal at the mercy of appropriation.
Still, we must guard against being overwhelmed by the politics of unilateral victimhood. In The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After, Said writes that “collective memory is a people’s heritage, but also its energy”.
True indeed but this argument has to work both ways. What is good for the goose is also good for the gander. If we attribute this truth to Palestinians, we must be prepared to accord it to Jews as well.
I do not draw your attention to the injustice in Palestine as a Muslim, nor as a diatribe against the state of Israel, or as a statement of anti-colonialism. I write this as one dedicated to justice and the upholding of human rights for all.
In as much as I would stand with all oppressed peoples, I stand with Palestine and against her further dispossession for the sake of humanity and our inalienable rights.
To remain detached in this blatant dispossession of the Palestinians is to be complicit with the perpetrator. Perhaps, we seek our own justification for this laxity in Covid-19 where criminal acts of land grab are to be regarded as part of normalcy, new or otherwise.
But can we search our conscience and still wish to “go gentle into that good night” of normalcy in the face of such naked usurpation of human rights?
Or rather as the opposite of love is not hate but indifference, shouldn’t we instead “rage against the dying of the light” of benevolence and humanity?
ANWAR IBRAHIM
July 5th, 2020 (Kuala Lumpur)