[News] Nat Turner and the Palestinians

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://souciant.com/2016/07/nat-turner-and-the-palestinians/


  Nat Turner and the Palestinians

Joe Lockard - July 12, 2016

When 17-year-old Palestinian Muhammed Taraireh stabbed to death 
<http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.728224> 13-year-old Hallel Ariel, 
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict came to a child murdering a child.  
Outrage in Israel was widespread, even though kids have died by the 
hundreds – the majority Palestinian.But this one death fit Israel’s 
official narrative. After visiting Hallel’s bedroom where she died, 
Netanyahu made a video 
<http://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-you-dont-murder-a-sleeping-child-for-peace/> 
with this statement:

“You don’t murder a sleeping child for peace. You don’t slit a little 
girl’s throat to protest a policy you don’t like. You do this because 
you’ve been brainwashed. You’ve been brainwashed by a warped ideology 
that teaches you that this child isn’t human. We will not let barbarism 
defeat humanity.”

For Netanyahu, this event instanced Palestinian barbarism. It presented 
a rationale for the occupation: we are a liberal, pluralistic society 
fighting against the Arab darkness that surrounds us. This formulation 
attempts to hide the daily violence of Israel’s occupation and the means 
by which towns such as Kiryat Arba have been built. As Palestinians 
understood when they celebrated a /shahid,/ but Netanyahu cannot understand.

Muhammed Taraireh, who knew he would die in his desperate attack, 
murdered Hallel Ariel as an affirmation of his own right to an equal 
humanity. His family, and many more Palestinians, celebrated his death 
as self-sacrifice to demonstrate a collective right to human equality 
and self-determination. If a Palestinian could not live with these 
rights, neither could an Israeli live with superior rights. Human rage 
totalizes and Palestinian outrage is no different. Such rage does not 
differentiate between adult and child, between genders, or between 
political beliefs. From an enraged perspective, an entire class is 
guilty of denying human equality: to strike at any one of them is to 
strike at the class as a whole.

This is not unique to Palestinians. Child murder in the name of freedom 
is visible in US history too. When I teach about the 1831 Nat Turner 
slave revolt and its major account, The Confessions of Nat Turner 
<http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/turner/turner.html>, one of the most 
difficult issues concerns violence against children. Turner recounts how 
the rebellion began with axe killings of the Travises, an entire family 
of five. Walking away from the house with his companions, Turner recalls 
how they forgot an infant in its cradle so two of them return to kill 
the child too. As the rebels go from house to house they killed children 
alongside their parents. In one house they killed a mother and her ten 
children.

Students find this reading traumatic. The commonest response is “Why did 
they kill the children?” A few will point to Thomas Gray, the white 
attorney who interviewed Nat Turner and published this antagonistic 
account. Maybe he changed details so as to make Nat Turner into a 
monster? No, the historical facts are that children died alongside 
parents in this rebellion. Students have to confront the deliberateness: 
it was not sufficient for the rebels to kill nearly the whole Travis 
family, but they turned around and came back to kill an overlooked 
infant. While sympathetic with the justice of a slave revolt, students 
have a very difficult time discussing the butchering of children. Many 
simply leave a seeming contradiction unreconciled. A few may come to the 
conclusion that it is impossible as modern readers to put ourselves into 
the shoes of slaves who have been treated as less-than-human for 
generations.

Despite this mass slaughter of white children, Nat Turner is widely 
celebrated in American culture as a defiant hero. When the new Nat 
Turner film, The Birth of a Nation 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birth_of_a_Nation_%282016_film%29>, 
is released this fall the US will address this history once again. 
Palestinians who refuse to be subjugated and strike with violent outrage 
at an oppressor class might easily recognize such moments in US history. 
Killing the children of oppressors is a desperate response from an 
underclass whose own children have no future of freedom, equality, and 
opportunity.

Instead of recognizing Palestinian human equality, the response of 
settlers has been to excoriate Palestinians – echoing slaveholding white 
Americans speaking of blacks – as morally deficient beings. In her 
funeral elegy for her daughter, Rina Ariel said, according to media 
reports, “I am standing here with a heart filled with pain and I am 
turning to you, the Arab mother, the Muslim who sent your son out to 
stab. I raised my daughter with love, but you and the Arab Muslim 
educators, you taught him to hate. Go, put your house in order.”

Rina Ariel has matters precisely opposite. It is Israeli settlers and 
Israel that must put their house in order. No two-state peace plan 
advanced or contemplated allocates Kiryat Arba or Hebron to Israel, nor 
is the continued existence of these settlements tenable under any plan. 
The political vision common in Kiryat Arba, a bastion of settler 
ideologies, is quite opposite: clearance of Arabs and their replacement 
by Jews. Hallel’s father, Amichai, stated “We have a view here; I don’t 
want to see this view. There’s a new neighborhood planned… I don’t want 
to see the view, I want to see a neighborhood.” The unspecified “view” 
from their Givat Harsina neighborhood is the surrounding Palestinian 
environs. Arabs spoil his view. The new Jewish neighborhood is to be 
built on the displacement of Palestinians.

The Ariels have plans for larger expulsions too. Seizing on the murder, 
Rina Ariel wrote a public letter to prime minister Netanyahu demanding 
that she and 250 mourners be permitted to conduct prayer ceremonies on 
the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Her husband announced the renaming of the 
compound’s Moghrabi Gate after their daughter, now to be called Hallel 
Gate 
<https://www.facebook.com/22738684968/photos/a.86889944968.20323.22738684968/10150678011559969/?type=3&theater>. 
Rina and Amichai Ariel are long-time supporters of the Temple Mount 
Faithful movement to build a Third Temple to replace the Dome of the 
Rock and al-Aqsa mosques, undoubtedly the surest means of turning a 
national conflict into an enduring and catastrophic religious 
war-to-the-finish.

The Ariel family, kin to ultra-right settler minister Uri Ariel who has 
pressed for the establishment of Israeli sovereignty on the Temple 
Mount, has lived in Hebron for over 40 years, almost as long as the 
occupation. Thirty years ago I was with a delegation that visited with a 
Palestinian family living immediately adjacent to Kiryat Arba. A couple 
times a week at night-time someone was throwing hand grenades at their 
home and taking occasional potshots. Fortunately their stone walls were 
thick and there were solid metal shutters. No one had been hurt yet, 
just children frightened. We planted a couple olive trees on the 
property while settlers gathered on the high ground above and screamed 
at us. One woman hanging onto the security fence screamed hoarsely in 
Brooklyn-accented English “Go back to Tel Aviv! You are traitors, scum!” 
I don’t know what happened to the Palestinian family, but it is most 
likely that the Kiryat Arba settlers managed to dislodge them and take 
their land for expansion.

This is the violence by which Palestinians have been displaced 
throughout Hebron. It is the Ariels, their neighbors, and their 
political supporters who bear responsibility for putting Hallel and 
other children on the front lines of a colonial project that can 
engender only hatred, resistance, and counter-violence. By charging 
Palestinians to change and cease resisting occupation, Rina Ariel avoids 
her own responsibility as an adult participant in an ugly project based 
on superior means of violence. The colonizer who demands that an 
occupied and colonized people accept their condition lives in a delusion 
of circular self-fulfillment where a dominant population dreams of 
others accepting their own subordination.

So theo-colonialist West Bank settlers and their advocates propose to 
educate Palestinians on their duties as moral subjects. Caroline Glick, 
The Jerusalem Post <http://www.jpost.com/Author/Caroline-B-Glick>’s star 
ultra-nationalist columnist, voices such a demand that Palestinians 
cease resistance and condemns them as morally deficient for refusing to 
capitulate to Israel’s settlement project. Glick writes 
<http://www.truthrevolt.org/commentary/glick-moral-equivalence-has-become-moral-atrocity> 
“The smart set in the West has insisted for over a generation that 
Israel and the Palestinians are morally equal” and that the term “cycle 
of violence” only makes excuses for Palestinian depravity.

In this argument, one that joins the Ariel family in effacing Israeli 
violence and domination, Palestinian society is no more than the world’s 
leading manufacturer of anti-Semitism. Any recognition of Palestinian 
equality – not to mention Israeli responsibility – constitutes evidence 
that Western political morality has been overcome by “the hate-filled, 
murder applauding mob” that is Palestine. In Glick’s colonial and racist 
argument, equality itself is the enemy of humanity. Nat Turner would 
recognize this type of argument predicated on the naturalization of an 
alleged inferior morality.

Little separates Glick’s reactionary defenses from the 19th-century 
pro-slavery apologist George Fitzhugh’s 
<http://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/fitzhughsoc/fitzhugh.html> 
fulminations against equality as a watchword for moral collapse often 
accompanied by mass murder. This well-known species of pseudo-historical 
argument posits a complacent, weak, and luxury-loving society that falls 
prey to an evil under-class willing to murder the innocent. A settlement 
advocate such as Emily Amrousi 
<http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=16565>, for 
example, asks rhetorically whether the Ariel murder will shake “the 
foundations on which the complacent West builds its cafes? Wake up, 
world! Hallel was sleeping, and she died.” The killing of a Jewish child 
becomes a sign of moral somnambulism, rather than accurately as the 
product of an ethno-national conflict and its desperate moments.

For its part, the Netanyahu government only knows how to plunge deeper 
into the settlement project. It perpetuates a political morass through 
attempts to normalize an ever-vigilant security regime that governs 
Palestinians. A Jewish girl’s death means another harsh security 
crackdown, not likely to be effective where a majority of Palestinian 
men in the West Bank have been arrested and held at some point in their 
lives. Too, after Nat Turner’s rebellion the southern states instituted 
new legal restrictions and repressive disciplinary measures. These 
allowed slaveholders to succeed in the short term, not in the long term. 
Similarly, Palestinians count on a lengthy process of eroding the 
occupation through individual and collective acts of anti-colonial 
revolt. One rebellion never suffices.

Nat Turner is alive and lives in Palestine today.

/
/

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