Tag Archives: Nakba

Theatre of the Oppressed

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IMG_0825In the end, no matter how it starts, the same pattern plays out over and over at demonstrations in Israel-Palestine; the same drama, unfolding in the same acts. It’s a call-and-response – a kind of perverse tango – that begins with a demand for basic human rights, and ends with (or is temporarily derailed by) a violent putting-down, by either state or individual actors, or sometimes both. In part one, the freedoms requested may differ – for homes not to be destroyed, for land not to be stolen, for lives not to be taken – but the expressions are the same: walk, chant, shout, hold signs, hold hands, hold on. In part two, whichever side of the Green Line you are on, the order of play is again the same, even if the props are different.

I have watched in Nabi Saleh as Israeli army snipers shot live ammunition at Palestinian teenagers and as Border Police fired tear gas canisters directly at unarmed demonstrators; as a group of Palestinians asking Israeli security forces for their land back received a response in the form of stun grenades hurled at them; as a teenaged girl sobbed while watching her (unarmed, peaceful) father being hauled away by members of the Border Police, his hand reaching back towards her in desperation. I have watched in Beitunia as snipers shot live bullets at more Palestinian teenagers who were protesting on the anniversary of Nakba Day, two of whom were later shot to death. (And yes, the violence at Nakba Day demonstrations is worse, because only one people is allowed to grieve over a defining national tragedy here, and it isn’t the Palestinians.) I have watched in central Tel Aviv as extreme right-wing nationalists came to break up protests against the slaughter in Gaza, wading into a crowd of demonstrators and hitting, shoving, throwing eggs and other objects, with minimal interference from the police. And today, I watched in East Jerusalem – during a demonstration against the Judaisation of Palestinian parts of the city – as the police and Border Police assaulted unarmed protesters for having the audacity to carry signs calling for an end to the Occupation; as elderly women were manhandled by big men with big guns and bigger frowns; as the façade of democracy that many still insist exists here was violently exposed for the fraud that it is.

Yes, we all know our lines here. Everyone is used to the ironic, inverted cycle of violence that is the hallmark of repressive regimes, in which non-violent calls to end violence are met with further violence. We seem doomed to repeat the same punishments, as if we were characters in Dante’s Inferno. And yet, there is a defiance to these protests which uses the logic of the Occupation against its enforcers. As one will often hear from ex-soldiers with Breaking the Silence, much of the mandate of Israeli security forces is aimed at ‘making our presence felt’ (this is particularly pronounced in Hebron, from where many of Breaking the Silence’s testimonies come): the raids, arrests, war games, intimidation and restrictions are there to remind Palestinians that they are a subjugated, captive population, always surrounded, always being watched. But in turn, so are the protests a demonstration of presence – the presence of those who are subjected to the Occupation, and those who are not but nonetheless oppose it. They are a reminder that in spite of the crushing brutality and scale of oppression here, those trapped within the apparatus of structural violence will not fade quietly into the night. When faced with a vast, state-administered machinery aimed precisely at attacking a society’s very presence in its own land, reasserting that presence becomes an extraordinary show of resilience.

The violence, however, is undeniably increasing. As the Occupation entrenches itself more and more; as the legacy of the Nakba grows ever longer with no acknowledgement of responsibility and therefore no possibility for its victims to truly grieve and thus heal; and as the infringements on human rights continue to mount up, so do the demonstrations multiply, along with the aggressive culling of the sentiments expressed within them. We are reciting the same lines, only louder and faster, and even as our voices get hoarse it seems we will never be allowed to run out of words. There are so many here crying out for the curtain to fall on this insane drama, even as those in power are determined that the show go on.

 

The 76-year weekend (Palestine to Vienna)

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In the early afternoon of 15th May 2014 I am in a car with two companions, driving through the West Bank, occupied Palestine. It is Nakba Day and we are on our way to Beituniya, a Palestinian town next to Ofer Prison, in order to attend one of several demonstrations being held in memory of the ethnic cleansing of 1948. As we drive through those hills and mounds that always remind me of piles of smashed terracotta, the occasional cloud of smoke can be seen rising up in the distance. Pink Floyd looms out of the car’s speakers. An army jeep drives past us; I turn round to watch it disappear, and I have a sense of driving through a tunnel that has no return route. I am acutely aware of my Israeli nationality, and I feel as if I’m trespassing.

When we arrive in Beituniya, we – three Israelis – dislocate ourselves, shrugging off our nationality and slipping on another citizenship (real or imagined). We speak English, and let our outsiderness bring us inside. The scene is familiar: tear gas, smoke, flames, cracks and small explosions, running youths, running soldiers, kneeling soldiers, heard-but-not-seen soldiers, jeeps, cat-and-mouse, stones and bullets. Flags and helmets. Keffiyehs and guns. Palestine and Israel. And something less familiar, at least for me – a different-sounding crack, more of a pop. People scatter, and then gravitate back towards the soldiers. More popping, and scattering; demonstrators near the front of the protest beckon at something unseen, and an ambulance that has been idling behind me flies towards them. People continue walking back from the front line. The ambulance hurtles back past us, and people’s heads turn to follow it before looking again in the opposite direction. A young man, gas mask perched on the top of his head, and his t-shirt, hands and arms covered in blood, is walking in the middle of the road away from the soldiers. He is screaming and shouting, turning round every now and again and gesturing, before eventually collapsing against a wall in tears. A friend who was walking with him crouches alongside. People gather, paramedics run over. He is in shock; the blood is someone else’s. Out of the impenetrable wall of discussions in Arabic happening all around, I hear someone say in English that the Israeli army had shot live bullets, as a wound from a rubber bullet wouldn’t bleed so profusely. We drift back in the direction of the shooting, amid talk that the person who has been shot is young, and now in a very grave condition. Standing by, watching and listening, my blue ID card burning a hole in my bag, I suddenly understand Israel rather better than before: the extent of its hysterical paranoia, its red lines, its constant reliance on hatred for strength. This demonstration and the army’s response cry out that the fundamental founding reality of this country is one that Israelis are distantly aware of but cannot bear to face, like someone who has stepped on broken glass and dares not lift their foot to inspect the damage.

But there is no time to reflect on this in Beituniya, because we are back in the car on the way to Jerusalem. We do not know at that time that by the end of the afternoon, two Palestinian teenagers will have been shot dead. Our identity carousel spins again as we drive away: Muslim prayer beads swing from the rear-view mirror and Arabic music plays on the stereo. Eventually, after a traffic jam caused by road closures in Ramallah, we approach the entry back into Israel. The checkpoint is the site of another demonstration. We drive through the flames of burning tires and our adopted identities melt away too; the music is switched off, the beads tucked into a compartment under the stereo. We are Israelis again, with an appropriate story prepared for the soldiers at the checkpoint – we were visiting friends in a settlement. If you can’t beat them, join them (temporarily). In the shared taxi on the way back to Tel Aviv from Jerusalem, I read on my phone that a Palestinian teenager shot during the demonstration in Beituniya has died. I cannot stop my brain from drawing a line between what I saw and what I have just read. For the rest of the day, I’m not sure what I am, and not because I shuffled the deck so many times.

Eighteen hours later I am in the air, flying to Vienna for a memorial honouring members of my family who were killed in the Holocaust. I feel Jewish again, in a way that I don’t (or can’t) when I’m in Israel. I think to myself that identity is merely sleight of hand, or perhaps drag. Two days after, surrounded by my family from around the world, and other people’s families from around the world, I listen to the daughter of my great-grandmother’s brother describe to us all the last time she saw her father, before he was taken to a concentration camp in 1938. A survivor herself, she pays tribute to all those who were lost during the Holocaust, and tells us: “I want to say that their lives weren’t taken in vain, but they were. And today, the atrocities continue in other countries.”

We walk through Vienna’s streets under a grey sky, going from one house to another in the old Jewish district of Leopoldstadt in order to memorialise former residents who were taken and killed by the Nazis. It is raining, and we are on the other side of the solar system from Beituniya and its burning roads. The volume on the Nakba Day reel in my head dials down, and the cracks and explosions and tear gas fade away. Then a woman, speaking about a member of her family being remembered that day, ends her speech with “Am Yisrael Chai” (the people of Israel live), and a young man with a blood-stained shirt and a tear-stained face escapes from my memory and slips into my mind’s eye. Banquo in Leopoldstadt.

The carousel revolves again. In this seventy-six year weekend, I am standing in the street where a teenager is shot dead for remembering, killed in my name, and standing in the street where my family were rounded up and eventually killed for their name. A strange wind blows from one memory to another, one people to another, one history to another. They are two tragedies that dare not speak each other’s name, and they will forever be our shadows.

Their lives were taken in vain.

DYKE, GO LIVE IN GAZA

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This directive was sent to me yesterday afternoon through Facebook, from a complete stranger. A little while later another message arrived, with an attached picture of the body of a murdered child, still lying on the floor of his bedroom –  the crime scene – with blood all around. A mezuzah is fixed to the doorframe in the foreground of the photo. The picture was accompanied by the sender’s suggestion that I am in favour of the killing of Jews.

I assume the two messages were sent by the same person, as although they had different names their profile pictures (of two men standing side by side, grinning) were exactly the same. I cannot say with absolute certainty what provoked these messages, as I immediately reported and blocked the sender(s). I am confident it is not connected to the articles I write, as I go by a different name on Facebook (for precisely the reason of trying to limit where and how much hatemail can come my way). Based on past experience, and the timing of the messages, I am fairly positive they arrived in response to my posting in public forums (regarding open positions at the company I work for) while having a profile picture which states ‘Not in My Name’ in English, Hebrew and Arabic. Given the current assault on Gaza, it is fairly obvious to what this slogan relates.

That’s it. No overt side-taking, no public declaration that I consider the Israeli army’s operation in Gaza to be a massacre, and my government to be in the process of committing war crimes (of a far more egregious nature than those of Hamas and Islamic Jihad), although I am taking the opportunity to state these opinions now. Simply a timid, almost platitudinous phrase. ‘Not in my name’ is the epitome of pulling punches; it is my feeble, small attempt to try and create some distance between myself and the thick smog of nationalism and uncontrollable racism blanketing this country. It is a hint at the fact that even as I am woken up in the morning by explosions in the sky above my home, and I check my phone with a pounding heart and a foggy head to confirm the rockets were intercepted, the muted flicker of relief is stamped out by shame and confused despair at the accompanying headlines of the latest heavy artillery rampage in Gaza. It is my subtle way of telling the world that living under regular rocket fire for two weeks has given me the fraction of comprehension needed in order to weep in vicarious terror while watching shelling in Shuja’iyah, and that this video scares me far more than sirens in my own city. ‘Not in my name’ is an acknowledgement that while I deplore what is taking place, I am nonetheless part of a society which is staggering around in a bloodshot-eyed war frenzy, screaming for death and revenge – and that I therefore bear some responsibility. It is an admission that as much as I wish it weren’t, this bloodshed is very much happening in my name.

In the Israel of today, such thoughts and stances are sedition, treason, heresy. To the rightwing here (very much in the majority) I am betraying my (read: our) country, people, history, heritage, religion, land. I am betraying the concept on which this country was founded, and on which it is gradually being torn apart: the united Jewish people, in their united homeland, forever and ever, amen. In this nation which eats, sleeps and breathes its past sufferings, it is our patriotic duty to place every new conflict in the continuous narrative of attempts to extinguish the Jewish people; it is the ethos of the State of Israel that those who live must re-live, mourn and struggle, memorialise and fight. In this mindset, any aggression is merited under the banner of self-defence and survival; to believe otherwise is to forget, and to forget is a crime (unless you are Palestinian, in which case to remember is a crime). We are prisoners to our past, and we have made an entire other nation prisoner to our past, too.

What holds true for the rest of the world holds true for Israel and Palestine: when people attack others for their beliefs or identity, they are not attacking individuals – they are attacking ideas. In any episode of political or ethnic violence, categorisation is a key component; the label replaces the individual’s name. It is an effective tactic. To define is to reduce, for what potential is left in the categorised? A name is more human, more familiar and more expansive than any label can ever be. It is something that everyone in the world has in common. We all have a name, and it is the beginning and end of ourselves, even as we too often forget that the same is true for every other human being. It is what makes naming the dead on ‘the other side’ in wartime such a powerful, transgressive act; it undermines our narrative and the fragile fortress of self-belief and moral righteousness we construct during times of conflict in order to justify the lives we take away and the sacrifices we make. It is why the Israel Broadcasting Authority banned an Israeli NGO’s radio advert listing the names of the children killed by the Israeli army in Gaza.

Our names, I believe, are our greatest hope. As Salman Rushdie has suggested, true freedom is the freedom to reject, and he is right: only with complete independence and security is it possible to cast off the definitions that form the boundaries we use to prop ourselves up. It is my profound hope that there will come a day in Israel and Palestine when enough mutual security will be felt in order to unshackle ourselves from our competing categorisations, because the labels that surround and define us – that everyone here is tripping over, choking on, blinded by – have become too burdensome to keep carrying around. For my part, I don’t really belong in Israel/Palestine; I’m not from here and will never understand what it is like to have been born and brought up here. But it is my home and where my heart and mind thrive, and that ambiguity is the source of my privilege here: being on the margins of society offers an easy escape from labels and boxes. All I really brought with me from the UK was my name, and it is therefore in that name that I refuse to step in line behind a massacre masquerading as an existential and moral crusade. It is in that name that I stand against the occupation of 1967, and the ethnic cleansing of 1948. And if in response to these statements one will call me a traitor, an extremist, a leftist, a dyke, a kappo, an anti-Semite, a self-hater – I will respond with my name. If I am called a Jew, a goy, a half-caste, a foreigner, an immigrant, an outsider – I will respond with my name. I have no need to be free of my name, for it is my whole person, and it encompasses all of what I am, of who I am, who I have been, and who I ever will be. And it is for that reason I say, again: not in my name. It may be a small, cowardly stand in the face of such violence, extremism and injustice, but it is a stand that no one else in the world can take.

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“He who believes his birthplace to be his homeland suffers. He who believes all places could be his homeland suffers less. And he who knows that no place can be his homeland is invincible.”

– Chrétien de Troyes