[News] Even with Palestinian children's art, Israel must make itself the victim

[Anti-Imperialist News]

middleeasteye.net
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/uk-palestinian-children-art-israel-victim-makes>
Even with Palestinian children's art, Israel must make itself the victim
Gwyn Daniel - March 3, 2023
------------------------------

[image: image.png] Here are two seemingly incompatible scenarios. The first
is the horrendous and unconstrained violence currently being unleashed on
Palestinian <https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/palestine> citizens,
their homes, towns and villages by Israeli settlers whose representatives
now occupy key positions in the Israeli
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/israel> government.

Israeli commentators
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-kristallnacht-relived-huwwara-press-review>
have used words such as "pogrom" and "Kristallnacht"
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-kristallnacht-relived-huwwara-press-review>
to describe the murder and destruction inflicted on unprotected civilians
and their property.

If the usual method of accusing individuals or institutions
of antisemitism does not fit, then the argument is used that British Jews
should not be troubled by discomfort when confronted by the consequences of
Israel’s actions

The second is an episode far away in a genteel part of London, where a
British pro-Israel charity has somehow managed
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/uk-gaza-children-artwork-london-hospital-removed-legal-action-threat>
to pressure the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital into removing from one of
its corridors
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/london-hospital-gaza-children-artwork-removed-utterly-bizarre>
an
exhibition of art by Palestinian children from the Gaza Strip.

The UK Lawyers for Israel group submitted a complaint to the hospital it
said "on behalf of some Jewish patients, who said that they felt vulnerable
and victimised by this display". A UKLFI director commented: "We are
pleased that the display has been removed and that the hospital has
responded positively to its patients’ complaints."

But what could possibly be a rationale for Palestinian children’s art, with
its expressions of hopes and dreams, of community, of love of the land, of
fear and suffering, to be perceived as such a threat to the equanimity of a
few Jewish supporters of Israel that it had to be removed?

In my view, one connecting thread is a familiar pattern: the more extreme
and violent Israel’s behaviour and the more human rights violations it
commits, the harder it has to work to portray itself to the outside world
as a victim (with "the right to defend itself") - and the more assiduously
do its defenders in the UK <https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/uk>and
elsewhere attempt to neutralise dissent by evoking victimhood or distress
among the wider Jewish population.

If the usual method of accusing individuals or institutions of antisemitism
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/topics/antisemitism>does not quite fit, then
the argument is used that British Jews should not be troubled by discomfort
when confronted by the consequences of Israel’s actions.
Representations of suffering

It is entirely understandable that many Jews who have strong attachments to
Israel experience distress and discomfort when faced with evidence of its
crimes. What is unacceptable is that pro-Israel bodies in the UK seize upon
these experiences in order to close down representations of suffering or
depictions of such crimes.

<https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-palestine-gaza-children-traumatised-year-after-bombardment>

Reading about Chelsea and Westminster Hospital’s decision to remove the art
display, I was reminded of presentations I have given to other therapists
about working with a team that treats traumatised children and families in
Gaza
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/video/silent-wounds-mental-toll-war-and-siege-gazas-youth#autoplay>.
On each occasion, concerns were voiced in advance that describing such work
could be "divisive", "inflammatory" or lead to some people feeling "very
uncomfortable" and "marginalised".

One such set of objections occurred in May 2021, less than a week after
bombs had been raining down
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/video/it-was-massacre-palestinian-mother-recounts-experience-during-gaza-bombing>
on the citizens of Gaza, resulting in the deaths of 66 children
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-gaza-attack-world-reactions> and
traumatising
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/video/silent-wounds-mental-toll-war-and-siege-gazas-youth#autoplay>
thousands of others.

Then, as now, elevating the hurt or distress of those who might be offended
by naming Israel’s crimes above the need to bear witness to the victims of
those very crimes - an assumption that is also offensive to Jews - is a
toxic distortion that can, in my view, only be understood as racism.

This is another connecting theme between the two disparate events described
earlier.

Racism is hard-wired into settler-colonial regimes because the drive to
evict the indigenous people from their lands inevitably involves
dehumanising those who are driven out. This "logic of elimination"
<https://globalsocialtheory.org/thinkers/patrick-wolfe-2/#:~:text=Most%20notably%2C%20Wolfe%20has%20continued,of%20indigenous%20peoples%20and%20polities.>,
as Australian historian Patrick Wolfe termed it, has much in common with
earlier practices in Australia, the USA, Canada and South Africa.

Israel, as a 20th- and 21st-century settler-colonial state, needs to draw
upon, in addition to violence, modern techniques of hyper-regulation,
surveillance, monitoring and hasbara (propaganda).

The level of hyper-vigilance displayed by some pro-Israel groups in the
UK is the counterpart of the hyper-surveillance inflicted on Palestinians
in the occupied territories. Through hasbara, Palestinians, including
children, are constructed by Israel and its apologists as either terrorists
themselves or - in the case of younger children - as indoctrinated into
violence by their elders.
'Unchilding'

The refusal to see Palestinian children as human beings possessed of their
own subjectivities, hopes, fears and desires for life is aptly captured in
Palestinian academic Nadera Shalhoub Kevorkian’s concept of "unchilding"
<https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/1650366> - the process whereby
the Israeli state perpetrates violence at many different levels against
Palestinian childhood, confining children to "non-living spaces, produced
by rendering lands, bodies, and lives exterminable and disposable".

The complaint about the exhibition of children’s art is a perfect
illustration of "unchilding", containing as it does the insinuation that
this art is both a threat in its own right to Jewish citizens’ peace of
mind and also serves as the pawn of adults with nefarious intentions.

[image: image.gif]In other words, this approach - in my view - exactly
mirrors the Israeli view that Palestinian children have to be responded to
as if they are not really children at all and thus merit no empathy, and
that sympathy should be reserved for those who feel threatened by them.

UKLFI said
<https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/feb/27/artwork-gaza-schoolchildren-removed-chelsea-and-westminster-hospital>
that
they "asked for the artwork to be removed because of the propaganda, not
because it was by children from Gaza".

They complained specifically about two notes. First one read: "Fishing with
nets is one of the oldest industries in Palestine. The shoreline stretches
for 224km from Rafah in the south to Ra’as al Naqoura in the north."
"Thus," UKLFI wrote, "the existence of Israel is totally denied and
'Palestine' is regarded as covering the entirety of Israel."

The second note was the picture on the plate accompanying the text shows
the Dome of the Rock with a large Palestinian flag, "implying that
Jerusalem and in particular the site of what had been the Jewish Temple,
would be part of a Palestinian state".

This complaint-in my view- callously disregards the inevitable desire of
Palestinian youth, especially in the besieged and blockaded open-air prison
that is Gaza, witnessing the day-to-day shrinkage of their land, to revive
collective memories of the beloved landscape of historic Palestine and to
insist on their continuing presence in Jerusalem.
Vision of the lost land

Despite the expectation of early Zionist state-builders that Palestinians
would forget their dispossession, this vision of the lost land has remained
strong over the generations. It involves a reclaiming of territory that is
both material and spiritual. It does not relate to any particular political
blueprint but is an inevitable response to settler colonialism.

Likewise, the 2018 "Great March of Return"
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/tags/great-march-return> was both a physical
attempt to break out of the illegal blockade imposed on Gaza by Israel
since 2007, and a powerful symbolic representation of the right of return
of Palestinian refugees, a right enshrined in UN resolution 194.

Palestinian children in Gaza, aged 16, will have experienced six major
attacks on their overcrowded, vulnerable environment, resulting in horrific
loss of life and the destruction of houses, schools, hospitals, mosques,
factories and power stations.

<https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israel-settler-terrorism-law-land>

It is essential to grasp what this deliberate inflicting of death and
destruction does to the soul as well as the body. The bombing of the Said
al-Mishal theatre
<https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2018/aug/22/our-memories-have-vanished-the-palestinian-theatre-destroyed-in-a-bomb-strike>
in 2018 was another cruel act, an assault on the culture that brings
nurture to a people under siege. The theatre was a precious resource for
Gaza children. The attack was not just on a building but on the space for
aesthetic appreciation, for fun, and for the joyful release that the
performance arts bring.

The artworks in Chelsea, with their moving evocations of Palestinian life,
likewise demonstrated a yearning for beauty. The ugliness of the physical
destruction of the homes and public spaces of Gaza is now paralleled by the
ugliness of these bullying attempts to destroy yet another part of the soul.

Finally, we need to consider the health, mental and physical, of the
children of Gaza and what can be done to sustain it. It is a profound irony
that the artwork removed was in a hospital's children’s department,
providing the excellent healthcare that Gaza children have no hope of
accessing.

Around 90 percent of Gaza’s children are considered to be showing symptoms
of trauma, a trauma which is never "post" but relentlessly ongoing and
reactivated.

Among the factors that support resilience in children is the sense of being
connected to an outside world, of not being forgotten, and that there are
people who witness and care about your suffering. This is why an exhibition
celebrating Gaza's children’s creativity is so important.

The head of the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital School understood how
crucial these connections were when she acknowledged
<https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/feb/27/artwork-gaza-schoolchildren-removed-chelsea-and-westminster-hospital>
the impact of "bringing children together to share their experience of
life".

These vital connections and the evidence they bring of the vibrant culture
and values of Palestinian life, preserved and nurtured over the
generations, serve as a constant challenge to Israeli domination and, just
as within Palestine itself, their manifestations outside are vulnerable to
attack and attempts at erasure.

The pressure exerted on Chelsea and Westminster Hospital to remove the
artwork by Gaza children, with its threat of legal action
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/uk-gaza-children-artwork-london-hospital-removed-legal-action-threat>,
maybe a small event compared with what is happening in Palestine, but, it
illustrates, in my view, the length to which Israel's friends in this
country will go to whitewash its abuses and demonise its victims.

*The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not
necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.*
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