Children Bearing Rocks with stones in their hands, they defy the world and come to us like good tidings. They burst with anger and love, and they fall while we remain a herd of polar bears: a body armored against weather.
Like mussels we sit in cafes, one hunts for a business venture one for another billion and a fourth wife and breasts polished by civilization. One stalks London for a lofty mansion, one traffics in arms one seeks revenge in nightclubs one plots for a throne, a private army, and a princedom.
Ah, generation of betrayal, of surrogate and indecent men, generation of leftovers, we'll be swept away-- never mind the slow pace of history-- by children bearing rocks. ~ Nizar Qabbani
Father & Daughter . A father lifts up and plays with his daughter behind a makeshift mesh fence in the slum neighborhood of Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip.
A Song for Childhood
The moon rose over childhood And childhood was hills gathering sparrows and flowers in baskets under the moon I'll pursue it, weeping and falling on jagged stones.
It is a confiscated childhood. From books and oil lamps, sometimes, to prison and release, sometimes, sometimes my life is counterfeit Inside a city besieged by guards.
The moon rose over childhood And childhood was a pine tree leaning across the shore of a sea and twinkling above it, in dreams, a star with many a mystery I'll spend a sleepless night in that tree in the dew and light for it an oil lamp.
This is a confiscated childhood From books and oil lamps, sometimes, to prison and release, sometimes, sometimes my life is counterfeit Inside a city besieged... ~ Hussein Barghouti
X-ray Girl. A young Palestinian refugee girl stands on the streets of Beach Camp in Gaza City, clutching an x-ray photograph. Beach Camp is one of the world's longest-standing refugee camps. August, 2008.
A few years back, I wrote and presented a paper at a conference that discusses some of the meanings that can be read from Houria. I found Preure's Houria fascinating for the layers of meanings that can be decoded (remember, I teach Visual Culture), as did the audience, for there was much passionate discussion about the points of entry I introduced. But Houria also 'hailed me' [Althusser] because of what Preure said about the art/work that she produces: "For me, the most beautiful thing is hope, and light."
Striving for the universal call of hope and light in their own particular ways, The International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN) is a diaspora of Jews across the globe, who take up various strategies and activism to speak out against the Zionist policies that obliterate the human rights of Palestinians. Along with study, letter-writing, and other creative activist and solidarity strategies, they go out into the streets and put their bodies on the line to make visible their anti-Zionism (scroll down the page to see some of IJAN's recent actions)
LA Jews Shut Down Israeli Consulate to Protest Siege on Gaza: jan 14 2009. A short video produced by members of IJAN.
Please watch this excellent video. Then, ask yourself: would I put my body on the line for Palestine? And if not, then ask yourself why. Standing up for Palestine is the litmus test of how far your peace, your justice, your compassion, your Jesus, your Zen, your democracy actually go. The members of IJAN show that their dream of justice is all-embracing, not exclusive. If they can speak out, why not you? Even if it is just a squeak?
During the Israeli onslaught in Gaza, IJAN issed a statement saying "We stand with the majority. We will not be silent on Gaza." In that statement (well worth a read) they link the indifference of the world community during the 40s and the genocide of Jews with the silence of the world community today in the genocide of Palestinians:
"As Joseph Massad recently wrote, Gaza is in uprising against genocide, and is receiving today the same indifference from the capitals of the West that the rebels in the Warsaw Ghetto received in 1943."
A Canadian contingent of the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network has recently banded in Sept. 2008; they explain who they are and their mission:
We believe IJAN will be useful in addressing the isolation of anti-Zionist Jews in Canada by connecting our work internationally. As the politics of Canada have been moving right, adopting and implementing the neo-liberal political and economic policies of the US and the Bush Administration, it is critical to counter Jewish conservatism with clear Jewish anti-Zionist politics.
IJAN will support the Canadian Palestinian solidarity movement and specifically, the campaigns in support of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. With its clear articulation of the strategic role for Jews in the Palestine solidarity movement, the Network hopes to challenge Jewish privilege and exclusivity and promote anti-racist practice in the work.
The Canadian IJAN statement was written before O, yet it is important to stress that neo-liberal economic and political policies are integral to the Obama administration, too, just as they were to the Bush administration. There will be no change on that. As US political philosopher Sheldon S. Wolin explains in Chris Hedges' It's Not Going To Be OK :
“The basic systems are going to stay in place; they are too powerful to be challenged,” Wolin told [Hedges] when [he] asked him about the new Obama administration. “This is shown by the financial bailout. It does not bother with the structure at all. I don’t think Obama can take on the kind of military establishment we have developed. This is not to say that I do not admire him. He is probably the most intelligent president we have had in decades. I think he is well meaning, but he inherits a system of constraints that make it very difficult to take on these major power configurations. I do not think he has the appetite for it in any ideological sense. The corporate structure is not going to be challenged. There has not been a word from him that would suggest an attempt to rethink the American imperium.”
Last November, the Canadian arm of IJAN, sent a letter to Victor Rabinovitch, president and CEO of The Canadian Museum of Civilization. This is not the first time Rabinovitch has been criticized for his pro-Zionist bias; the canceling of The Lands Within Me, an exhibit of Canadian Arab artists, right after 9/11 caused a flurry of activist outrage resulting in his recanting of that proposed cancellation. I have lots to say about that as I have written and presented papers about the politics of The Lands Within Me exhibit, and the racialization practices and the demonizing of Canadian Arabs and Muslims that surfaced...later.
In the IJAN letter to Rabinovitch, the Canadian Jewish anti-Zionists express their concerns about the links between the Canadian Museum of Civilization, The Canadian branch of the Jewish National Fund, and Canadian funding of illegal Israeli projects such as Canada Park.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dear Mr. Rabinovitch,
The International Jewish anti-Zionist Network is writing to express how disturbed we are by the granting of permission to the Jewish National Fund to hold its annual Negev fundraising dinner at Canada’s Museum of Civilization.
It is our understanding that a founding principle of the Museum is to insure that activities which promote intolerance will not be supported. We are therefore confused that you would choose to support an event being organized by the Jewish National Fund (JNF). The JNF is a quasi-governmental organization whose historic and continued role has been to acquire land for Jewish-only settlements. It is one of the key mechanisms through which Israel’s agenda of ethnic segregation, transfer and expulsion of Palestinians is carried out. Two-thirds of JNF land was forcibly taken from Palestinian refugees.
One such example is “Canada Park,” maintained through JNF-Canada contributions, and built on the site of three Palestinian villages captured in 1967, whose 10,000 residents were expelled, and all their homes razed to the ground. The existence of Canada Park and the financial support it continues to receive from the Jewish National Fund of Canada breaches Canada’s charitable status laws, which prohibit charities from violating Canadian public policy. At the same time, Canada Park is only one part of the JNF’s practice of expropriation of Palestinian land in Israel and throughout the West Bank for exclusive use by Jews.
The JNF is a political organization, and as such should not hold charitable status in Canada. By allowing the JNF to hold this fund-raiser, you are supporting and therefore a party to Israel’s institutionalized racism and ethnic cleansing.
We believe that it is not in the interest of Canadians to allow for the use of the Museum of Civilization as a stomping ground for the JNF. Now that we have brought this to your attention we expect the Museum to live up to it's stated principles and cancel. Not to do so means that the Museum is in violation of its own founding principles, and is complicit in the continuing violations of the rights of Palestinians to their land and resources.
Respectfully yours,
Sue Goldstein and Naomi Binder Wall, Canadian members of the International Coordinating Committee, International Jewish anti-Zionist Network
~~~~~~
Did the fund-raising dinner happen? Yes, it did. 600 people attended this posh event in the Grand Hall. The dinner's Key Note speaker? Ambassador Dennis Ross, Special Adviser to President-elect Barack Obama.
Some of the guests or Canadian Zionist Jews and Zionist-Jews-by-choice who work to continue the theft of Palestine and its resources. This particular photo honors those working on ongoing water theft, especially Barbara Crooks, who is holding her award for the continuing dispossession of Palestinians.
The dinner was a fund-raiser held to honour of Canadians Dan Greenberg and his wife Barbara Crook, who for many years "have been quietly and generously supporting many worthy causes in the Jewish and general communities". Barbara is a self-defined "Jew by choice", and director and North American representative of the Zionist organization, Palestine Media Watch, an organization that furthers stereotypes, misrepresentations, lies, untruths, and other materials to promote the continued non-understanding of Palestinians and Palestine.
The last paragraph of the Jerusalem Post article is telling in hitting the nail on the head of one of Israel's key reasons to build the Apartheid Wall and refuse to settle peace with Palestinians or negotiate a Palestinian state: the demand for water.
"Israel has just about exploited all its renewable water sources and the future of its water supply depends on the country's ability to develop new sources of water, such as wastewater recycling."
Just as many Canadians have never met nor talked on a friendly or neighbourly level with a First Nations person, so too many Israelis have never met nor talked on a friendly or neighbourly level with a Palestinian. Many Canadians only know ABOUT First Nations peoples from newspapers, documentaries, classrooms, and occasionally, passing by someone on the street. I know many Finnish-Canadians in town who have never talked with an Anishnaabe person and who know nothing about Anishnaabe culture except for the most superficial, stereotypical things, but boy! do they have some mean things to say about the Anishnaabek.
In Israel, as Cynthia Enloe notes in The Space Between Us, in her chapter on working with Israeli and Palestinian women, many Israelis have never met nor talked with a Palestinian. Now, it's not easy for an Israeli to met a Palestinian because the state is apartheid: military checkpoints to keep Palestinians out, highways where only Israelis and tourists who do not have passports stamped with an Arab country can drive on; the Apartheid Wall, the wall/fence around Gaza, to name a few. So an Israeli person who truly seeks to understand Palestinians and their call for right-of-return, restitution and reparations, and land, needs to really work hard to move out of the straightjacket his/her state has created from him/her.
As others have written, and Enloe concurs, those who are the occupied, the colonized, the enslaved, the abused, or the policed know much more about the "Master" than he/she knows about the people they and their "lifestyles" subject. So, as Enloe explains, many Israelis know very little about Palestinians having never met one.
Indeed, Enloe states that for those few Israelis who have actually spoken to a Palestinian (we're not talking here about soldiers at the military checkpoints or the guards at the Israeli prisons and detention centres (where Palestinians are held without charge or trial) overwhelmingly populated with Palestinians, but average, everyday folks), it is the case that it is a male Palestinian who is doing some day labour or other low-level work in Israel. Israelis have even less direct contact with Palestinian women.
Like in Canada, it is the role of the colonizer and the privileged to move out of their comfortable spaces and step out, risk, and reach out to those who our state, with our compliant, sometimes silent--but not always so-- permission, has repressed and oppressed: the First Nations. It is not the job of the oppressed to reach out, to teach, or to assuage the feelings of those whose status is confirmed in everyday life, those whose lives are predominant in the media over and over again; those who "won" because of colonial power-over. It is not the job of First Nations peoples to convince Canadians that their (FN's) concerns are valid.
No, it is the job of those who reap the fruits of colonization to enter the decolonizing process and listen to what those who have been subjected have to say. It is their responsible to interrogate how history has been constructed to exclude and disparage FN peoples as well as create romantic fossilized notions of them. It is their responsibility to do the work to see how their benefits and progress in society is BECAUSE of continuing unequal relations and the continuing denial of the human rights of First Nations people in Canada.
Just as many Canadians only get their information about First Nations peoples from the mainstream media, government representatives, and from state-produced and education institutions and academic documents and narratives, so too the Israelis use similar channels to tell themselves about the Palestinians, to tell themselves their own made-up stories about the Palestinians.
It is no wonder many, many Israelis, like many, many Canadians, are confused and defend the dominant myths, stereotypes and lies, especially the ones that might ask them to look at their own lives, their own lifestyles, their own privileges, their own exclusions, their own practices.
One example of how distortions emerge that inhibit one's access to a more comprehensive knowledge of the ground beneath one's feet and the people who live on it, or who have been expelled from it--which happened in Canada (and is not over because of resource extraction, massive toxic dumping on FN lands and refusal to settle land claims, to name a few) and continues to happen in Israel--is history books.
And by history books, I mean websites and other media where dominant history is CONSTRUCTED, that is, made.
The victor, the colonizer, writes the history books that are told in school and the histories that we find on websites that purport to tell us the "history of this land." This is true in Canada, as it was true in Finland (only since about 20yrs ago did Finns start to bring in the red history to the "real" history of Finland, which was only version of the whites, with the reds as the add-on), and this is true in Israel.
In Canada you can still find people--I met someone just yesterday--who have never heard about Residential Schools until just last year or so when our Prime Minister had to make an official public apology about this abuse of First Nations human rights. How is it that many Canadians had their head in the snowbank about this?
Those who colonize write "the history" and conveniently leave out the ugly, brutal parts of their creating of that history, and when it is brought in, use euphemistic language to whitewash that violence (one ex. using "immigrant" instead of "settler", using "nation-building" instead of "colonization"). The ugly history of the Canadian government's and Canadian churches' residential school system, which was an institutionalized means of "killing the Indian" of each FN child they snatched into its system and attempting genocide through "education" (they did not succeed), was a hidden history for many, many years. It still is not resolved, and many people in Canada still live inside of its ugly legacy.
To speak of decolonization means that everyone in society, not just the First Nations, acknowledge the violence of colonization, the lies used to cover it up, and the continuing impact and effects of that distortion of history FOR ALL CANADIANS, First Nations and non-native. De-colonization is not just for the oppressed; it is also a requirement--an obligation--of each person from the dominant groups and those groups who benefit in society because of silencing, misrepresentations, and the unequal benefits some have received at the cost of the continuing oppression of peoples, in the case of Canada, First Nations.
The school where I am teaching in Fort Frances used to be one of those residential schools. One of those state institutions that cleansed the ugly work it was doing through the language and practices of everyday bureaucracy.
Testimony: Soldier beats Mahmoud 'Awwad, fracturing his skull, Jan. '09.
Read Mahmoud's brother's testimony of what happened at the West Bank Huwara checkpoint, one of many Israeli military gate-keeping practices, to keep Palestinians OUT of Israel. Mahmoud's brain had to be operated on because of the beating; he was put on a respirator and is in intensive care.
"A female soldier was at the checkpoint, and she saw what happened. She checked the ID cards of the young people crossing the checkpoint. Na’im heard soldiers call her Ayala. She is light-skinned, of moderate build, 1.65 meters tall, and has long, brown hair combed into little braids."
synopsis:
"I saw policemen talking with Fawzi. Fawzi took his ID card from one of the soldiers and asked him, “What about my brother? You detained him because of me, and I’m being released now.” The soldier said, “I detained him, and I’ll release him whenever I want.” I called to another soldier and said, “Let him take his things.” The soldier came over to me, took Fawzi’s things, and gave them to him. Fawzi left.
A tall soldier, about 1.8 meters high, light-skinned, with a thin face, came over to me and said, “Your nose is too much up in the air. You’ll lower your nose and bow now.” He grabbed my hand and pulled me out of the room. He called another soldier over and the two of them beat me. The other soldier was shorter, light-skinned, thin, and had a bit of a beard. They pushed me to the ground and hit me with the butts of their weapons on my shoulders and back. I tried not to fall. They wanted to humiliate me but I preferred to die than to be humiliated. I didn't do anything, my hands were cuffed. The soldiers beat me hard. They said, “You’ll go down on the ground, whether you want to or not.” I told them I wouldn’t. The soldier who had cuffed me said to me, “Now I’ll show you how you’ll go down.” Then he blindfolded me with a piece of cloth.
In the meantime, my brother Mahmoud, 29, arrived at the checkpoint. He was on his way to work in Israel and was waiting in line at the checkpoint. I heard him say to the soldiers, “Why are you beating him? What did he do?” The beating stopped and the soldiers shouted. Then I heard some commotion, but I couldn’t see what was happening. Somebody, I don’t know who, removed my blindfold. I saw my brother stretched out on the ground. His head was bleeding and he was unconscious. The soldiers shouted at people coming to the checkpoint to move back. Some people picked up Mahmoud and walked away. I ran after them. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Somebody told me that a soldier had hit Mahmoud in the head with his weapon, and that Mahmoud had immediately lost consciousness. We took Mahmoud by car to Rafidya Hospital."
