[News] The Only Right That Palestinians Have Not Been Denied Is the Right to Dream
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Thu Feb 1 10:53:44 EST 2024
The Only Right That Palestinians Have Not Been Denied Is the Right to
Dream: The Fifth Newsletter (2024)
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*The Only Right That Palestinians Have Not Been Denied Is the Right to
Dream: The Fifth Newsletter (2024)*
Malak Mattar (Palestine), /Gaza/, 2024.
Dear friends,
Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
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On 26 January, the judges at the International Court of Justice (ICJ)
found
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that it is ‘plausible’ that Israel is committing a genocide against
Palestinians in Gaza. The ICJ called upon Israel to ‘take all measures
within its power to prevent the commission of all acts’ that violate the
UN Convention
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on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948).
Although the ICJ did not call explicitly for a ceasefire (as it did in
2022 when it ordered
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Russia to ‘suspend [its] military operation’ in Ukraine), even a casual
reading of this order shows that to comply with the court’s ruling,
Israel must end its assault on Gaza. As part of its ‘provisional
measures’, the ICJ called upon Israel to respond to the court within a
month and outline how it has implemented the order.
Though Israel has already rejected
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the ICJ’s findings, international pressure on Tel Aviv is mounting.
Algeria has asked
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the UN Security Council to enforce the ICJ’s order while Indonesia and
Slovenia have initiated separate proceedings
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at the ICJ that will begin on 19 February to seek an advisory opinion on
Israel’s control of and policies on occupied Palestinian territories,
pursuant to a UN General Assembly resolution adopted in December 2022.
In addition, Chile and Mexico have called
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upon the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate crimes
committed in Gaza.
Israel’s reaction to the ICJ’s order was characteristically dismissive.
The country’s national security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, called
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the ICJ an ‘antisemitic court’ and claimed that it ‘does not seek
justice, but rather the persecution of Jewish people’. Strangely, Ben
Gvir accused the ICJ of being ‘silent during the Holocaust’. The
Holocaust conducted by the Nazi German regime and its allies against
European Jews, the Romani, homosexuals, and communists took place
between late 1941 and May 1945, when the Soviet Red Army liberated
prisoners from Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen, and Stutthof. However, the
ICJ was established in June 1945, one month after the Holocaust ended,
and began its work in April 1946. Israel’s attempt to delegitimise the
ICJ by saying that it remained ‘silent during the Holocaust’ when it
was, in fact, not yet in existence, and then to use that false statement
to call the ICJ an ‘antisemitic court’ shows that Israel has no answer
to the merits of the ICJ order.
Malak Mattar, Gaza (detail), 2024.
Malak Mattar (Palestine), /Gaza/ (detail), 2024.
Meanwhile, the bombardment of Palestinians in Gaza continues. My friend
Na’eem Jeenah, director of the Afro-Middle East Centre in Johannesburg,
South Africa, has been reviewing the data from various government
ministries in Gaza as well as media reports to circulate a daily
information card on the situation. The card
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from 26 January, the date of the ICJ order and the 112th day of the
genocide, details that over 26,000 Palestinians, at least 11,000 of them
children, have been killed since 7 October; 8,000 are missing; close to
69,000 have been injured; and almost all of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents
have been displaced. The numbers are bewildering. During this period,
Israel has damaged 394 schools and colleges, destroying 99 of them as
well as 30 hospitals and killing at least 337 medical personnel. This is
the reality that occasioned the genocide case at the ICJ and the court’s
provisional measures, with one judge, Dalveer Bhandari of India, going
further to say
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plainly that ‘all fighting and hostilities [must] come to an immediate
halt’.
Amongst the dead are many
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of Palestine’s painters, poets, writers, and sculptors. One of the
striking features of Palestinian life over the past 76 years since the
Nakba (‘Catastrophe’) of 1948 has been the ongoing richness of
Palestinian cultural production. A brisk walk down any of the streets of
Jenin or Gaza City reveals the ubiquity of studios and galleries, places
where Palestinians insist upon their right to dream. In late 1974, the
South African militant and artist Barry Vincent Feinberg published an
article in the Afro-Asian journal /Lotus/ that opens with an interaction
in London between Feinberg and a ‘young Palestinian poet’. Feinberg was
curious why, in /Lotus/, ‘an unusually large number of poems stem from
Palestinian poets’. The young poet, amused by Feinberg’s observation,
replied: ‘The only thing my people have never been denied is the right
to dream’.
Malak Mattar (Palestine), /Gaza/ (detail), 2024.
Malak Mattar, born in December 1999, is a young Palestinian artist who
refuses to stop dreaming. Malak was fourteen when Israel conducted its
Operation Protective Edge (2014) in Gaza, killing over two thousand
Palestinian civilians in just over one month – a ghastly toll that built
upon the bombardment of the Occupied Palestinian Territory that has been
ongoing for more than a generation. Malak’s mother urged
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her to paint as an antidote to the trauma of the occupation. Malak’s
parents are both refugees: her father is from al-Jorah (now called
Ashkelon) and her mother is from al-Batani al-Sharqi, one of the
Palestinian villages along the edge of what is now called the Gaza
Strip. On 25 November 1948, the newly formed Israeli government passed
Order Number 40, which authorised Israeli troops to expel Palestinians
from villages such as al-Batani al-Sharqi. ‘Your role is to expel the
Arab refugees from these villages and prevent their return by destroying
the villages… Burn the villages and demolish the stone houses’, wrote
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the Israeli commanders.
Malak’s parents carry these memories, but despite the ongoing occupation
and war, they try to endow their children with dreams and hope. Malak
picked up a paint brush and began to envision a luminous world of bright
colours and Palestinian imagery, including the symbol of /sumud/
(‘steadfastness’): the olive tree. Since she was a teenager, Malak has
painted young girls and women, often with babies and doves, though, as
she told
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the writer Indlieb Farazi Saber, the women’s heads are often titled to
the side. That is because, she said, ‘If you stand straight, upright, it
shows you are stable, but with a head tilted to one side, it evokes a
feeling of being broken, a weakness. We are humans, living through wars,
through brutal moments… the endurance sometimes slips’.
Malak Mattar (Palestine), /Two Gazan Girls Dreaming of Peace/, 2020.
Malak and I have corresponded throughout this violence, her fears
manifest, her strength remarkable. In January, she wrote, ‘I’m working
on a massive painting depicting many aspects of the genocide’. On a
five-metre canvas, Malak created a work of art that began to resemble
Pablo Picasso’s celebrated /Guernica/ (1937), which he painted to
commemorate a massacre by fascist Spain against a town in the Basque
region. In 2022, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for
Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) published a profile
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on Malak, calling her ‘Palestine’s Picasso’. In the article, Malak said,
‘I was so inspired by Picasso that, in the beginning of my art journey,
I tried to paint like him’. This new painting by Malak reflects the
heartbreak and steadfastness of the Palestinian people. It is an
indictment of Israel’s genocide and an affirmation of Palestinians’
right to dream. If you look at it closely, you will see the victims of
the genocide: the medical workers, the journalists, and the poets; the
mosques and the churches; the unburied bodies, the naked prisoners, and
the corpses of small children; the bombed cars and the fleeing refugees.
There is a kite flying in the sky, a symbol from Refaat Alareer’s poem
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‘If I Must Die’ (‘you must live to tell my story… so that a child,
somewhere in Gaza while looking heaven in the eye… sees the kite, my
kite you made, flying up above and thinks there is an angel there
bringing back love’).
Zulfa al-Sa’di (Palestine), /King Faysal I of Iraq/, 1931.
Malak’s work is rooted in Palestinian traditions of painting, inspired
by a history that dates back to Arab Christian iconography (a tradition
that was developed by Yusuf al-Halabi of Aleppo in the seventeenth
century). That ‘Aleppo Style’, as the art critic Kamal Boullata wrote in
/Istihdar al-Makan/, developed into the ‘Jerusalem Style’, which
brightened the iconography by introducing flora and fauna from Islamic
miniatures and embroidery. When I first saw Malak’s work, I thought of
how fitting it was that she had redeemed the life of Zulfa al-Sa’di
(1905–1988), one of the most important painters of her time, who painted
Palestinian political and cultural heroes. Al-Sa’di stopped painting
after she was forced to flee Jerusalem during the 1948 Nakba; her only
paintings that remain are those that she carried with her on horseback.
Sa’di spent the rest of her life teaching art to Palestinian children at
an UNRWA school in Damascus. It was in one such UNRWA school that Malak
learned to paint. Malak seemed to pick up al-Sa’di’s brushes and paint
for her.
It is no surprise that Israel has targeted UNRWA, successfully
encouraging several key Global North governments to stop funding
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the agency, which was established
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by United Nations General Assembly Resolution 302 in 1949 to ‘carry out
direct relief and works programmes for Palestine refugees’. In any given
year, half a million Palestinian children like Malak study
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at UNRWA schools. Raja Khalidi, director-general of the Palestine
Economic Policy Research Institute (MAS), says
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of this funding suspension: ‘Given the long-standing precarious nature
of UNRWA’s finances… and in light of its essential role in providing
vital services to Palestine refugees and some 1.8 million displaced
persons in Gaza, cutting its funding at such a moment heightens the
threat to life against Palestinians already at risk of genocide’.
I encourage you to circulate Malak’s mural, to recreate it on walls and
public spaces across the world. Let it penetrate into the souls of those
who refuse to see the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people.
Warmly,
Vijay
Website <www.eltricontinental.org>
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