[News] Your Enemies Destroyed One Palestine; My Wounds Populated Many Palestines

[Anti-Imperialist News]

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*Your Enemies Destroyed One Palestine; My Wounds Populated Many 
Palestines: The Forty-Ninth Newsletter (2023)*


Malak Mattar (Palestine), A Life Stolen Before It Had Begun, 2023.

Malak Mattar 
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(Palestine), /A Life Stolen Before It Had Begun/, 2023.

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=4473d3ec79&e=d206d0a40d>.

The indecency of the phrase ‘humanitarian pause’ is obvious. There is 
nothing humanitarian about a brief interlude between bouts of horrendous 
violence. There is no true ‘pause’, merely the calm before the storm 
continues. We are witnessing the bureaucratisation of immorality, the 
use of old words with great meaning (‘humanitarian’) and their reduction 
to new, empty phrases that betray their original meanings. Before the 
debris from the first rounds of Israeli bombs could be cleared, the 
bombing resumed just as viciously as before.

The word ‘humanitarian’ has been severely bruised by the West. You might 
remember another phrase, ‘humanitarian intervention’, that was used as 
cover for the destruction of Libya in 2011 after the legitimacy of 
Western military intervention had been eviscerated by the illegal US 
invasion of Iraq in 2003. To rehabilitate this legitimacy, the West 
pushed the United Nations to hold a conference that resulted in a new 
doctrine, Responsibility to Protect (R2P), which, while purporting 
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to ‘ensure that the international community never again fails to halt 
the mass atrocity crimes of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and 
crimes against humanity’, instead provided the West with a UN Security 
Council mandate (under Chapter VII of the UN Charter) for the use of 
force. The attack on Libya in 2011 took place under this doctrine. The 
guise of humanitarianism was used to destroy the Libyan state and throw 
the country into what appears to be a permanent civil war. There has 
never been even a whiff of R2P when it comes to the Israeli bombardment 
of Gaza (not in 2008–09, not in 2014, and not now).

It does not seem to matter that more Palestinians have been displaced 
and killed by Israel since 7 October than were displaced and killed in 
the Nakba (‘Catastrophe’) of 1948. If the word ‘humanitarian’ meant 
something in 1948, it certainly does not mean much now.

Hanaa Malallah (Iraq), The Looting of the Museum of Art, 2003.

Hanaa Malallah 
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(Iraq), /The Looting of the Museum of Art/, 2003.

As the numbers of the dead and displaced increase, a sense of numbness 
grows. It began with a hundred dead, then a hundred more, and is rapidly 
escalating into the tens of thousands. In Iraq, approximately a million 
people were killed by the US onslaught, the sheer scale of death and the 
anonymity surrounding it forcing a sense distance from the rest of the 
world. It is difficult to wrap one’s head around these numbers unless 
there are stories attached to each of the dead and displaced.

Part of the problem here is that the international division of humanity 
makes for unjust accounting of human life: were the Palestinians killed 
in Gaza treated with as much dignity as the Israelis killed on 7 
October? Are their lives, and deaths, assigned equal worth? The uneven 
response to these deaths, alongside the uncritical acceptance of this 
unevenness, suggests that this international division of humanity 
remains in place and is not only accepted, but also perpetuated, by 
Western leaders, who make allowances for the killing of more brown 
bodies than white ones, the latter seen as precious, the former seen as 
disposable.

Abdel Rahman al-Muzayen (Palestine), Untitled, 2000.

Abdel Rahman al-Muzayen (Palestine), /Untitled/, 2000.

During the ‘humanitarian pause’, a hostage transfer took place through 
which Hamas and the Palestinian factions released 110 Israelis while 
Israel released 
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240 Palestinian women and children. The stories of the Israeli 
casualties, many of them residents of settlements near the Gaza 
perimeter fence, and other hostages such as the Thai and Nepalese 
fieldworkers are now well-known. Less frequently discussed and much less 
understood are the stories of the Palestinian casualties. Equally 
disregarded is the fact that after 7 October, Israel launched a mass 
campaign to detain over 3,000 Palestinians, including nearly 200 
children. There are more Palestinians in Israeli prisons now 
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than before 7 October. During the first four days of the truce alone, 
Israel arrested almost as many Palestinians as it released through the 
hostage transfer.

It is of note that most (more than two-thirds 
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of the Palestinians released from Israeli prisons are never charged with 
any crime and have been held in ‘administrative detention 
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in the military’s legal system, meaning that they are held without a 
time limit, ‘without trial [and] without having committed an offence, on 
the grounds that he or she plans to break the law in the future’, as 
defined by the human rights organisation B’tselem. Some of them have 
been lost in the maze of the Israeli incarceration system indefinitely, 
unable to exercise even the most basic right of habeas corpus, with no 
court appearance, no access to a lawyer, and no access to the evidence 
against them. Israel currently holds 
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more than 7,000 Palestinian political prisoners, many of them associated 
with left-wing factions (such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of 
Palestine and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine). 
More than 2,000 of these prisoners are being held in administrative 
detention.

Many of these Palestinian prisoners are children. Many of them spend 
years in the Israeli system, often under administrative detention, 
unable to make a case for their release. The Defence for Children 
International (Palestine) reports 
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that 500–700 children are detained each year, and a chilling report 
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from the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in 2015 showed that 
Israel is in full violation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the 
Child 
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(1990). Article 37 of the convention says that the ‘arrest, detention, 
or imprisonment of a child shall be in conformity with the law and shall 
be used only as a measure of last resort and for the shortest 
appropriate period of time’. As multiple cases show, Israel uses arrests 
as a measure of /first/ resort and holds children for long periods of time.

Defence for Children International studied 
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sworn affidavits from 766 child detainees from the occupied West Bank 
arrested between 1 January 2016 and 31 December 2022. The following data 
emerged from their analysis:

75% were subjected to physical violence.
80% were strip-searched.
97% were interrogated without a family member present.
66% were not properly informed of their rights.
55% were shown or made to sign a paper in Hebrew, a language most 
Palestinian children do not understand.
59% were arrested at night.
86% were not informed of the reason for their arrest.
58% were subjected to verbal abuse, humiliation, or intimidation during 
or after their arrest.
23% were detained in solitary confinement for interrogation purposes for 
a period of two or more days.

Sliman Mansour (Palestine), Prison, 1982.

Sliman Mansour 
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(Palestine), /Prison/, 1982.

There are thousands of untold stories of the brutality inflicted upon 
Palestinian children. One of them, Ahmad Manasra 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=1a0c6305ba&e=d206d0a40d>, 
was arrested on 12 October 2015 at the age of thirteen in occupied East 
Jerusalem on the charge that he stabbed two Israelis: Yosef Ben-Shalom, 
a twenty-year-old security guard, and Naor Shalev Ben-Ezra, a 
thirteen-year-old boy, who survived the attack. The Israeli courts 
initially found Ahmad guilty of the stabbing but then changed their 
opinion to say that his fifteen-year-old cousin Hassan Khalid Manasra, 
who was shot dead at the scene, had stabbed the two Israelis. There was 
no evidence of Ahmad’s complicity, yet he was sentenced to 
nine-and-a-half years in prison.

Still in prison, Ahmad Manasra (now 21) has been held in solitary 
confinement for months on end. Khulood Badawi of Amnesty International 
said 
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in late September that Ahmad ‘was taken to the mental health unit at 
Ayalon prison after spending the better part of two years in solitary 
confinement. The Israeli Prison Service has requested an extension of 
Ahmad’s isolation for another six months in brazen violation of 
international law. Prolonged solitary confinement lasting more than 15 
days violates the absolute prohibition of torture and other cruel, 
inhuman, or degrading treatment’.

Ahmad’s case took place during a wave of what were called ‘knife 
attacks’, when young Palestinians were accused of rushing at Israeli 
military posts with knives and were then shot dead. At that time, I 
investigated several of these attacks and found them to be based on 
little more than the word of Israeli soldiers. For instance, on 17 
December 2015, Israeli soldiers at the Huwwara checkpoint shot 
fifteen-year-old Abdullah Hussein Ahmad Nasasra to death. Eyewitnesses 
told me that the boy had his hands in the air when he was fatally shot. 
One of them, Nasser, told me that there was no knife, and that he ‘saw 
them kill the boy’. Kamal Badran Qabalan, an ambulance driver, was not 
allowed to retrieve the body. The Israelis wanted control over the body 
and the story they would tell about it.

Another story 
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is that of twenty-three-year-old Anas al-Atrash in Hebron. Anas and his 
brother Ismail returned home from a week of work in Jericho, their car 
filled with fruits and vegetables. At a checkpoint, Anas got out of the 
car when instructed to do so and an Israeli soldier shot him dead. The 
next morning, Israeli media reported that Anas tried to kill the Israeli 
soldiers. The journalist Ben Ehrenreich, who reported the story with a 
fierce determination for the truth, sought out the family’s version. 
Anas had no interest in politics, they told him. He was studying 
accounting and hoped to get married soon. The Israeli soldiers and 
intelligence officials kept asking Ismail if his brother had a knife. 
There was simply no knife. Anas had been killed in cold blood. ‘This is 
a savage country’, an eyewitness told 
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Ehrenreich. ‘They have no shame’. He meant the Israeli soldiers.

Hakim Alakel (Yemen), from the series The Eye of the Bird, 2013.

Hakim Alakel 
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(Yemen), from the series /The Eye of the Bird/, 2013.

The grammar of the Israeli occupation is to put pressure on Palestinians 
until an act of violence takes place – a knife attack, say, or even a 
fabricated knife attack – and then use that event as an excuse to deepen 
the displacement of Palestinians with more illegal settlements. The 
events that have followed 7 October maintain this logic. Israel has used 
people like Anas, Abdullah, and Ahmad, and the fabricated narratives 
surrounding their alleged crimes, as the raison d’etre to increase the 
demolition of Palestinian homes and expand illegal Israeli settlements, 
accelerating the Permanent Nakba.

Ten years ago, I met with Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who 
teaches at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Shaloub-Kevorkian studies how 
the occupation produces an everyday form of victimhood that stretches 
from the streets to Palestinians’ most intimate of spaces. Her book 
/Security Theology, Surveillance, and the Politics of Fear/ 
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provides a glimpse into the industry of fear that is produced and 
reproduced in the everyday violence inflicted upon Palestinians by 
settlers and the military, including the difficulties that Palestinians 
face in giving birth and burying their dead. The depth of the violence 
and uncertainty, Shalhoub-Kevorkian writes, moves Palestinian women to 
speak of ‘being choked, suffocated, or gagged’ and has led many of their 
children to lose 
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their will to live. There is widespread social trauma in Palestine or 
what Shalhoub-Kevorkian calls ‘sociocide’: the death of society.

More than fifty years of an occupation and war have created a strange 
dynamic. Both Ehrenreich and Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s work offer windows 
into this madness. Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who lives in Jerusalem, told me 
that she is part of a group of women who walk Palestinian children to 
school each day, since it is too dangerous for them to confront the 
police and the settlers on their own, or even in the company of their 
Palestinian family and friends. ‘/Bikhawfuni/!’ (‘They scare me!’), one 
girl, Marah (age 8), told her.

The children draw pictures at school. One of them drew a clown, a 
Palestinian clown. When Shalhoub-Kevorkian asked the child (age 9) what 
a Palestinian clown is, he explained, ‘This is a Palestinian clown. 
Clowns in Palestine cry’.

Abdul Rahim Nagori (Pakistan), Sabra and Shatila, 1982.

Abdul Rahim Nagori 
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(Pakistan), /Sabra and Shatila/, 1982.

The poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, who moved to Beirut to edit the magazine 
/Lotus/ in the aftermath of the 1977 military coup in Pakistan, wrote 
with horror about the plight and struggles of the Palestinians:

Tere aaqa ne kiya ek Filistin barbaad
Mere zakhmon ne kiye kitne Filistin aabaad.

Your enemies destroyed one Palestine.
My wounds populated many Palestines.

Faiz’s poem ‘A Lullaby for a Palestinian Child’, written during the 
Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, reflects the reality facing 
Palestinian children today:

Don’t cry children.
Your mother has just cried herself to sleep.

Don’t cry children.
Your father has just left this world of sorrow.

Don’t cry children,
Your brother is in an alien land.
Your sister too has gone there.

Don’t cry children.
The dead sun has just been bathed and the moon is buried in the courtyard.

Don’t cry children.
For if you cry,
Your mother, father, brother, and sister
And the sun, and the moon
Will make you cry ever more.

Maybe if you smile,
They’ll one day return, disguised
to play with you.

Warmly,

Vijay

Website <www.eltricontinental.org>

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