[News] The Palestinian Youth Movement in a Time of War: An Interview with Kaleem Hawa

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/10/29/the-palestinian-youth-movement-in-a-time-of-war/

*/October 29, 2023/*

*/The Palestinian Youth Movement in a Time of War: An Interview with 
Kaleem Hawa/*

by Susie Day <https://www.counterpunch.org/author/bra3hevuna/>


      *“If this isn’t enough for you to adopt solidarity with Palestine,
      nothing ever was going to be”: Kaleem Hawa and the Palestinian
      Youth Movement*

Kaleem Hawa is a young Palestinian writer who has contributed eloquent 
pieces on art and film to such publications as /The New York Review of 
Books/ and /Artforum. /But he has no time for this now. He and his 
comrades in the Palestinian Youth Movement [PYM] are, to put it bluntly, 
in a war – war that might seem to have begun recently, but has actually 
been waged for decades against Palestinians.

The Palestinian Youth Movement, Kaleem tells me, “is an organization 
committed to the total liberation of Palestine and the return of the 
Palestinian people, which means confronting Zionism, imperialism, and 
Arab reaction; to raise consciousness for Arabs in the diaspora. I 
believe deeply in the work PYM is doing.” He shows me “The Second Week,” 
an article written by PYM 
<http://mail01.tinyletterapp.com/Snidelines/the-palestinian-youth-movement-in-a-time-of-war-an-interview-with-kaleem-hawa/22824193-thenewinquiry.com/the-second-week/?c=8620623b-65a0-7fdd-c7da-e0a5d6d3d088>, 
describing Gaza as the Israeli bombing continues:

    /If anything captures the work of the second week, it is this. More
    than a quarter of the homes in Gaza have been leveled by the
    genocidal Zionist regime and its imperial backers. Schools and
    mosques, hospitals and bakeries – all have been targeted …. Gaza’s
    entire health system has collapsed. Their intention is to break a
    spirit of resistance that cannot be broken; six wars have not been
    object lesson enough for them. At the time of writing, the Zionists
    have murdered 2,055 Palestinian children … /

  I need to ask Kaleem more…

*sd: */On a panel last week, you said, “Palestinians are not victims; 
they are agents of revolutionary history. There’s a great need to 
understand armed resistance.” Do you stand by that now?/

*Kaleem Hawa: *Certainly. That’s not to efface the immense suffering and 
grief of the Palestinian people, who’ve lived under genocidal violence 
for the last 75 years. But I do think that an overemphasis on that 
“victim” framework leads to a contingent solidarity – because 
ultimately, Palestinian people are not asking for Western recognition. 
They’re demanding a liberation of their lands and their homes from a 
settler-colonial project backed by the West. That liberation necessarily 
engenders resistance in all forms.

I think some in the solidarity movement have had to confront the 
practical realities of what Palestinian liberation means, and what the 
Palestinian people believe, vis-à-vis resistance. Ultimately, it’s been 
healthy for a lot of people in solidarity with us to be confronted with 
this.

*sd:* /What’s the “/this/” that we’re confronted with?/

*Kaleem Hawa: *That an oppressed people, thinking through strategies to 
achieve freedom and liberation amid world-destroying conditions of 
settler colonialism and military occupation, must contend with an array 
of strategies – and some of these will include armed resistance. The 
American public’s thoughts on the propriety of armed resistance are 
nowhere near as relevant or important as the actions they take to end 
that settler-colonial project.

*sd: */What do you think of the global reaction to the October 7 attack, 
and to Palestine, itself?/

*Kaleem Hawa: *The response by Western governments, the military 
contractors, intelligence services, business communities, the media that 
serve as propaganda arms for these governments is totally expected – a 
rational calculus to preserve Western imperial interests at all costs. 
This strategy includes a total dehumanization of Palestinian and Arab 
life, to manufacture consent for the violence waged against the 
Palestinian people now.

That being said, it’s been really encouraging to see, in the last two 
weeks, a surge of people taking to the streets, demanding an end to the 
seizure of Gaza and the attempts at genocide. We’ve seen student 
mobilizations on campuses; walkouts; calls for solidarity; work stoppage 
from labor unions; people leading direct actions and getting arrested. 
Across the world, including in the Arab world, in the Global South, 
we’ve seen an upswelling of popular support for Palestine, with hundreds 
of thousands in the streets. I think we’re realizing very quickly that 
the Palestinian struggle is emblematic of a larger struggle against 
dispossession and imperial capitalism.

*sd: */Usually, news media frame this as “Israel versus Hamas,” not 
“Israel versus Palestine.” What do you think of this?/

*Kaleem Hawa: *I think that this strategy uses an incredible amount of 
media propaganda and misinformation to vilify and use [Hamas as] as a 
political cudgel against the broader Palestinian liberation movement. 
Palestinian liberation is not the project of any one institution. 
Setting aside that Hamas itself is a complex institution that includes 
political and military and social formations, it’s important to 
understand that the broad Palestinian and Arab resistance is comprised 
of people of various ideologies and tactics – armed resistance is one of 
those. So we’re seeing the Western playbook enshrining an enemy that can 
be portrayed as evil, then used to manufacture support for total 
violence against an entire people. I think that’s what’s at play here 
with the emphasis on Hamas.

*sd: */It also creates a scenario of the “bad Palestinians,” who are 
making the good ones suffer./

*Kaleem Hawa: *Right. The double standard is unsurprising, but it’s 
incredibly offensive, as well, to consider that the Israeli Defense 
Force [IDF], which is one of the world’s most genocidal institutions, 
basically whitewashes the nature of its violence against Palestinians. 
The IDF created this language of the “most moral fighting force in the 
world,” to create a discursive frame in the West of good-versus-evil, 
which helps to flatten any understanding of the collective punishment 
being waged against the Palestinian people – and to undermine their 
right, morally and legally, to resist that violence as an occupied people.

*sd: */I heard on NPR this morning 
<http://mail01.tinyletterapp.com/Snidelines/the-palestinian-youth-movement-in-a-time-of-war-an-interview-with-kaleem-hawa/22824197-www.npr.org/2023/10/23/1207933378/palestinian-deaths-in-the-occupied-west-bank-are-escalating?c=8620623b-65a0-7fdd-c7da-e0a5d6d3d088> 
an interview with a woman in the West Bank, where killings of 
Palestinians are escalating. She was totally disgusted with Fatah and 
the Palestinian Authority; I got the impression that there are, or will 
be, other Palestinian groups at play./

*Kaleem Hawa: *It’s important to understand that every major political 
formation in Palestine is engaged in an armed resistance project. This 
aspect is not the entirety of Palestinian resistance, but it’s something 
that Palestinians and Arabs fundamentally agree on. It’s also important 
to understand our analysis of the Palestinian Authority [PA], which is 
an administrator on behalf of Zionism, to tamp down Palestinian 
resistance. I think the current resistance we’re seeing in Palestine has 
struck a blow against the PA, because people understand it doesn’t 
represent the Palestinian people in any meaningful sense.

*sd: */How important is it for us in the West to know who’s fighting for 
Palestine, besides Hamas?/

*Kaleem Hawa: *It’s always good to be informed. But I think the 
important thing, for people in the Western imperial core who want to be 
in in solidarity with Palestinian liberation, is two key demands. The 
first is a total anti-normalization of Zionism. That means Zionism /out/ 
of all the political, cultural, and civic institutions of life; an end 
to arms transfers and intelligence-sharing. It means recognizing what 
Zionism is, an ethnonationalist program predicated on the elimination of 
Palestinian life and Palestinians’ dispossession from the land. The 
second is understanding Palestinian resistance as something that’s 
fundamentally just. That’s what principled solidarity can look like 
right now.

*sd: */How important are a ceasefire and humanitarian aid to Gaza? Could 
these campaigns not, in some way, promote the image of Palestinians as 
victims?
/
*Kaleem Hawa: *The violence being waged right now against Gaza is 
world-destroying. People are rightfully calling for a ceasefire and an 
end to the siege, so that they can bury their dead. So they can help the 
more than one million Palestinians displaced all across Gaza; so they 
can mourn and honor our more than 5,000 martyrs, and the hundreds of 
children murdered in this violence. I don’t think anyone should make the 
mistake of feeling that calls for a ceasefire mean in any way that 
Palestinians are relinquishing their commitment to resistance and to the 
liberation struggle for Palestine.

*sd: */How important is it to determine who bombed the Al-Ahli Hospital 
in Gaza City?
/
*Kaleem Hawa: *I think part of a longstanding Zionist strategy is to 
reify a debate about the debate, so to speak; to conceal the Zionist 
project’s fundamental inhumanity. The mass media’s first line about the 
al-Ahli Hospital was to say, essentially: “It’s really confusing. We 
don’t know what to believe about this event.” Others, like Michelle 
Goldberg or Thomas Friedman in the /New York Times/, have gone further, 
as mouthpieces for the violence, to cite American and Zionist 
intelligence as saying, fairly decisively, that what happened was the 
result of misfired rockets by the Palestinian resistance.

Both cases are a form of genocide denialism. When you – in the context 
of the incredible, repeated crimes by Zionism against the people of Gaza 
– focus your platforms on a debate about one particular war crime, it’s 
ultimately an attempt to deny the structure of violence that’s operating 
from the river to the sea.

Understand. This is not the first time that Zionists have bombed a 
hospital; it will not be the last. Let’s center our analyses on a set of 
clear facts – which is that the majority of hospitals in Gaza have now 
been rendered inoperable by airstrikes and siege; that Zionism has 
targeted tens of hospitals and health centers and schools and places of 
worship and food delivery and water infrastructures; they’ve meted out 
total collective punishment of a refugee population of millions of 
people. Those are the fundamental facts, and we should not be distracted 
by attempts to undermine this reality with a media debate about the debate.

*sd: */People here are talking about censorship, like Viet Thanh 
Nguyen’s book event being canceled at 92NY in Manhattan because he 
signed a letter criticizing Israel 
<http://mail01.tinyletterapp.com/Snidelines/the-palestinian-youth-movement-in-a-time-of-war-an-interview-with-kaleem-hawa/22824201-www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2023/october/an-open-letter-on-the-situation-in-palestine?c=8620623b-65a0-7fdd-c7da-e0a5d6d3d088>, 
or NYU Student Body President Ryna Workman losing her presidency and a 
job offer for her newsletter expressing “absolutely solidarity 
<http://mail01.tinyletterapp.com/Snidelines/the-palestinian-youth-movement-in-a-time-of-war-an-interview-with-kaleem-hawa/22824205-theintercept.com/2023/10/16/pro-palestine-students-campus-gaza-war/?c=8620623b-65a0-7fdd-c7da-e0a5d6d3d088>” 
with Palestinians. I’ll also add that CounterPunch has gotten hit; the 
site’s been under bot attack for several days./

*Kaleem Hawa: *It probably means you’re doing good work. Pushback like 
this is a sign that you’re threatening the system.

*sd:* /Do you see this “pushback” as part of the struggle?/

*Kaleem Hawa: *The first thing to understand is that it’s an apparatus 
for surveillance, imprisonment, recrimination that’s part of the 
rollback of protections for people across the West. The decimation of 
unions, the expansion of the surveillance state – many of the repressive 
tactics we’re seeing brought against Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims 
are systems that were developed to repress Black people and the Black 
liberation struggle.

I personally believe that we need to watch developments in repression 
and surveillance – not because they’re unexpected, but because they 
represent an overall preparation for responding to dissent by liberation 
struggles, by everyone fighting for a more just world. There’s a 
dialectical relationship between what we’re seeing here, and Palestine. 
Palestine is being used as the spear tip, but the fundamental base 
doesn’t strategically discriminate.

We’re seeing this, for example, with Stop Cop City in in Atlanta*.* We 
know police officers are training with the Zionist entity. Just last 
week, police in Atlanta performed a training operation where they tried 
to “rescue hostages from Hamas 
<http://mail01.tinyletterapp.com/Snidelines/the-palestinian-youth-movement-in-a-time-of-war-an-interview-with-kaleem-hawa/22824209-x.com/micahinatl/status/1715053508033163623?c=8620623b-65a0-7fdd-c7da-e0a5d6d3d088>” 
– in Atlanta. These systems are mutually reinforcing. What we’re seeing 
done to Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims has been and will be done again 
to everyone in the West.

The repression we’re seeing now is incredibly significant, but people 
should not be afraid. Now is the time for courage; to fight back. This 
moment is clarifying, because it’s shown the Arab popular masses that 
Zionism is, in effect, a threat to all Arab peoples; that it’s able, for 
example, to launch airstrikes against three neighboring countries in the 
last two weeks. And that reactionary Arab governments empowered by 
Western monetary institutions and a global weapons trade do not 
fundamentally represent their people.

*sd: */What is PYM doing in all this?/

*Kaleem Hawa: *There’s our Popular University, which helps to 
disseminate educational resources, to coordinate the translation of 
revolutionary texts. PYM recently put out a toolkit on what is happening 
in Palestine; a list of resources 
<http://mail01.tinyletterapp.com/Snidelines/the-palestinian-youth-movement-in-a-time-of-war-an-interview-with-kaleem-hawa/22824213-docs.google.com/document/d/1ol9gjnwto99mpzxnrgl0zlvs-fw0vc6mepbjhujhtbo/edit?c=8620623b-65a0-7fdd-c7da-e0a5d6d3d088> 
and readings in Arabic and English that includes subjects of national 
liberation, settler colonialism, armed resistance, Palestinian history.

More broadly, PYM is leading a national March on Washington on November 
4 
<http://mail01.tinyletterapp.com/Snidelines/the-palestinian-youth-movement-in-a-time-of-war-an-interview-with-kaleem-hawa/22824217-www.instagram.com/p/cyooydda5h1/?c=8620623b-65a0-7fdd-c7da-e0a5d6d3d088>. 
We encourage everyone to come, to organize buses from their community, 
get their institutions and organizations involved, to endorse and support.

*sd: */Can I ask how you personally are handling this right now? Most of 
us are deeply upset – don’t you think acknowledging real emotion 
ultimately brings more intelligence to a movement?/

*Kaleem Hawa: *One hundred percent. Here, in New York, we held a vigil 
the night of the Al-Ahli Hospital massacre, in Washington Square Park. 
Hundreds and hundreds of people came. So we have this vigil; we want to 
read the names of our martyrs; and we can’t do it. Because, at this 
point, a list doesn’t exist, due to the sheer scale and immensity of the 
violence.^*

Yet we have a moment where the crowd sings together and mourns together 
and is furious together and joyful, and this is interwoven with 
political education about settler colonialism in Palestine – and with 
demands for action, concrete things people can do. This vigil was an 
encapsulation for me of just how important organizing, connected to 
people, is. It’s not dismissive of people’s emotions; it channels them 
to continue our work. Yeah, it was a really beautiful moment for us.

*sd: */I feel like this time is a social, political tipping point, where 
people who used to be friends may never speak to each other again. So 
much is at stake, not just in terms of individual personal 
relationships, but in how those relationships then move out into society 
and explode./

*Kaleem Hawa: *Yes. Our conversation has been about organizing and 
history and strategy, these types of things. But it must be emphasized 
that what’s being done to Gaza by the U.S. and Israel, is total horror. 
It’s incredibly difficult to see the destruction of civilian 
infrastructure, all of our martyrs, the thousands of children martyred. 
I don’t have any other word for it: it’s just horror. For me, 
personally, there are moments where I’ve let myself feel immense grief 
for my people. But there’s also rage, rage and anger at this system.

Being part of a movement like PYM has been life-saving. To be able to 
focus on doing what we can –I’d encourage anyone reading this, who’s 
feeling similarly, to join an organization. To organize their 
communities and families and workplaces around this topic. But I’m not 
gonna lie. It makes you really angry to see the masks that have come off 
in the last two weeks – and clarifying to understand who was not ever in 
solidarity with Palestinian people in the first place…

How do I put this? There are people who have made a career off 
Palestine, off of essentially metabolizing our pain and our resistance, 
appointing themselves as pseudo-spokespeople or intellectual historians 
of this moment, who have been shown to be fundamentally unqualified to 
do so, essentially that they’re cowards. To avoid giving specific 
examples, I’ll say that I’ve found refuge in my comrades in PYM, and in 
those who’ve shown principled, unwavering solidarity with the 
Palestinian people. This is a clarifying moment, because, if this has 
not been enough for you to adopt solidarity with Palestinians, nothing 
ever was going to be.

# # #


            —susie day, 2023


            _____
            ^* A list of “Palestinian Martyrs Since October 7, 2023” is
            given in “The Second Week,” by the Palestinian Youth
            Movement in /The New Inquiry/
            <http://mail01.tinyletterapp.com/Snidelines/the-palestinian-youth-movement-in-a-time-of-war-an-interview-with-kaleem-hawa/22824193-thenewinquiry.com/the-second-week/?c=8620623b-65a0-7fdd-c7da-e0a5d6d3d088>

            photo 1 credit: Kaleem Hawa
            photo 2 credit: Reuters



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