<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
</head>
<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
<div id="container" class="container font-size5">
<div dir="ltr" style="display: block;" id="reader-header"
class="header"> <b><small><small><small><a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/24/yes-i-said-national-liberation/"
id="reader-domain" class="domain"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/24/yes-i-said-national-liberation/">http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/24/yes-i-said-national-liberation/</a></a></small></small></small></b>
<h1 id="reader-title">Yes, I Said “National Liberation”</h1>
<div id="reader-credits" class="credits">by <em><strong>Robin
D. G. Kelley </strong></em><br>
<span class="post_date" title="2016-02-24">February 24, 2016</span></div>
</div>
<div class="content">
<div style="display: block;" dir="ltr" id="moz-reader-content">
<div
xml:base="http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/24/yes-i-said-national-liberation/"
id="readability-page-1" class="page">
<div itemprop="articleBody" class="post_content">
<blockquote>
<p>“You can’t trust a big grip and a smile
And I slang
rocks Palestinian style”</p>
<p>– “The Shipment,” <em>Steal This Album</em> by The
Coup</p>
</blockquote>
<p>For the past thirty-five years, “Free Palestine” has
been etched into my political vocabulary. In the
movement circles that nurtured and trained me, “Free
Palestine” rolled off the tongue as easily as “Free
South Africa,” “Free the Land,” “A Luta Continua,”
“Power to the People,” and the ubiquitous “El Pueblo
Unido Jamás Será Vencido!” I was a sophomore in college
when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, in order to drive
out the exiled Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
Two years later, as a first-year graduate student and
chair of UCLA’s African Activists Association, I invited
representatives of the PLO to participate in our fifth
annual conference on imperialism. We received hate mail
and death threats from the Jewish Defense League, and
the university administration leaned on us to withdraw
the invitation. But we prevailed. I completed my
doctoral dissertation in 1987, the first year of the
First Intifada, and like most of my compatriots
attributed Israel’s willingness to participate in the
Oslo negotiations to Palestinian resistance. Although
Oslo proved to be a disaster and a betrayal of the PLO’s
founding principles, we saw the prospect of direct
negotiations as a small step toward an elusive national
liberation. more</p>
<p>Yes, I said “national liberation.” Liberals wished for
“Peace in the Middle East.” We radicals regarded the PLO
as a vanguard in a global Third World struggle for
self-determination traveling along a “non-capitalist
road” to development. Palestine stood on the frontlines
in a protracted battle against imperialism and “settler
capitalism.” Palestinians weren’t victims — at least not
in my political world. They were revolutionary
combatants and, thus, models for those of us dedicated
to Black liberation and socialism.</p>
<p>From our current neoliberal perch, this claim must seem
completely foreign, if not absurd. But in the early
1980s, we were influenced by a group of
activists/intellectuals who believed another world was
possible, but only through revolution. Walter Rodney,
Manning Marable, June Jordan, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Angela
Davis, Chinweizu, Cedric Robinson, Vincent Harding,
Cornel West, Barbara Smith, Stuart Hall, not to mention
Edward Said, Eqbal Ahmad, and Samir Amin, wrote about
the ravages of racial capitalism, the violence of
patriarchy, the futility of parochial politics in the
face of global imperialism, and the absolute necessity
to resist. We were living in the last decade of the Cold
War, the era that gave rise to Reaganism and
Thatcherism, new imperialist wars, and new revolutions
in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, from El Salvador,
Haiti, and Grenada to Nicaragua and South Africa. Here
in the belly of the beast, capital flight, the erosion
of the welfare state, neoliberal privatization schemes,
the weakening of antidiscrimination laws and policies,
and a wave of police and vigilante killings struck our
communities with the force of a cluster bomb. The
decade, in fact, opened with police killings and
non-lethal acts of police brutality emerging as a
central political issue, resulting in a massive urban
insurrection in Liberty City, Florida, in May of 1980.
That same year witnessed the founding of the National
Black United Front (NBUF) and the National Black
Independent Political Party (NBIPP). Black radicals took
factory jobs to reach the working classes, demanded
freedom for political prisoners, threw their energies
behind building a socialist Africa, continued the long
tradition of community-based organizing, and
participated in acts of solidarity occasionally chanting
“Free Palestine.”</p>
<p>Three decades later, in the wake of the incalculable
devastation caused by Israel’s latest assault on Gaza,
solidarity with Palestine appears stronger than ever. In
every corner of the United States, people took to the
streets and to social media to condemn so-called
“Operation Protective Edge,” Israel’s latest genocidal
assault on Gaza. Palestine solidarity activists built
bridges with prison abolitionists, immigrant rights
activists (under the banner “Stop the War on Children
From Gaza to the US/Mexico Border”), labor (in the Block
the Boat demonstrations), and most spectacularly with
the struggle against racist police violence in
Ferguson/St. Louis, Missouri. What drives most of these
acts of solidarity, however, is empathy for Palestinian
suffering and/or recognition of common experiences of
oppression. Spectacular violence is guaranteed to
generate condemnation, which explains why outrage tends
to ebb and flow with Israeli military incursions, rising
precipitously during Operation Cast Lead in 2009, and
again when Israeli airstrikes resumed under “Operation
Returning Echo” in 2012. The 2014 criminal war on Gaza
has thus far produced the most casualties, the most
material damage, and the greatest moral outrage. Images
of infant corpses and entire families buried beneath
concrete rubble generated feelings of anger and
sympathy, while propaganda efforts to portray Israelis
as vulnerable, terrified victims of Hamas rockets
largely backfired.</p>
<p>Thanks to fearless journalism and relentless activism,
spectacular violence in Gaza and the West Bank has
swelled the ranks of the Boycott, Divestment and
Sanctions (BDS) movement, largely because it offers a
tangible, ethical, nonviolent strategy to challenge
occupation, the slaughter of civilians, and Israel’s
egregious violations of international law. Even when the
movement’s financial impact is minimal, the educational
effect has been enormous. Thanks to years of sustained,
protracted debate, the public knows a lot more about the
occupation, who profits from it, and the historical
roots of dispossession going back to 1948. During the
bloody summer of 2014, I encountered more and more
people in the United States openly describing Gaza as
the largest open-air prison in the world, citing the
fact that our taxes subsidize Israel’s garrison state to
the tune of 6 million dollars a day, criticizing the US
for consistently vetoing UN resolutions condemning
Israel’s human rights abuses while violating our own
Arms Export Control Act prohibiting the use of US
weapons and military aid against civilians in the
occupied territories. Even a few American liberals no
longer see the question of Palestine as an Arab-Israeli
“conflict” rooted in some ancient, irreconcilable
hostility, but rather as a colonial occupation and
violation of international law and human rights,
subsidized by the United States.</p>
<p>Then in August, as the war on Gaza rose to the top of
the news cycle, so did the escalation of racist police
violence in the US. The killings of Eric Garner, Ezell
Ford, Kajieme Powell, John Crawford III, and most
significantly, Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri — all
unarmed, all in the space of a couple of months — were
immediately linked to events in Gaza. The people of
Ferguson who took to the streets to decry Brown’s
unwarranted murder (he was on his knees with his hands
up when Officer Darren Wilson fatally shot him) faced
down riot police, rubber bullets, armored personnel
carriers, semiautomatic weapons, and a dehumanizing
policy designed to contain and silence. Activists
readily drew connections between Israeli racialized
state violence in the name of security and the US — from
drone strikes abroad and the killing of Black men at the
hands of police—and the role Israeli companies and
security forces have played in arming and training US
police departments. Palestinian solidarity activists
issued statements about the Ferguson protests and the
NYPD killing of Eric Garner, and Palestinian activists
in the West Bank have put out their own solidarity
statements along with advice on how best to deal with
tear gas.</p>
<p>The Gaza to Ferguson link has been revelatory in other
ways. In our lexicon — especially post 9/11 — cops and
soldiers are heroes, and what they do is always framed
as life-saving, defensive action in the name of public
safety. Police occupy the streets to protect and serve
the citizenry from (Black and Brown) criminals who are
seen to be out of control. This is why, in every
instance, there is an effort to depict the victim as
assailant – Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Darrien Hunt
– the sidewalk is a weapon, their big bodies are
weapons, they lunge, glare, flail their arms as evidence
of threat. In Israel/Palestine, wars of pacification and
annihilation are branded as efforts to neutralize the
threat of terrorism. The blockade of Gaza is presented
as necessary for Israel’s security. People who live
under occupation experience the world as victims of
perpetual war. Indeed, the police department’s decision
to leave Mike Brown’s bullet-riddled, lifeless body on
the street for four and a half hours, bleeding, cold,
stiff from rigor mortis, was clearly an act of
collective punishment. This is the point of lynching
— the public display of the tortured corpse was intended
to terrorize the entire community, to punish everyone
into submission, to remind others of their fate if they
step out of line. Collective punishment violates the
laws of war, though in this case the Geneva Conventions
do not apply. Collective punishment takes other forms as
well: routine stops, fines for noise ordinance
violations (e.g., playing loud music), fare-hopping on
St. Louis’s light rail system, uncut grass or unkempt
property, trespassing, wearing “saggy pants,” expired
driver’s license or registration, “disturbing the
peace,” among other things. If these fines or tickets
are not paid, they turn into possible jail time, making
bail, losing one’s car or other property, or losing
one’s children to social services. The criminal justice
system is used to exact punishment and tribute, a kind
of racial tax, on poor/working-class black people. In
2013, Ferguson’s municipal court issued nearly 33,000
arrest warrants to a population of just over 21,000,
generating about $2.6 million dollars in income for the
municipality. That same year, 92 percent of searches and
86 percent of traffic stops in Ferguson involved black
people, this despite the fact that one in three whites
was found carrying illegal weapons or drugs, while only
one in five blacks had contraband.</p>
<p>How do the police and the courts get away with this? By
criminalizing Blackness, much the same way the Israeli
state criminalizes Arab-ness. (Of course, Blackness is
also criminalized in Israel, as evidenced in the
treatment of African asylum-seekers in Tel Aviv, just as
Arab-ness is criminalized in the US post-9/11). In the
US, decriminalized Blackness exists as a state of
exception — i.e., by portraying the Mike Browns and
Trayvon Martins of the world as the undeserving dead, by
rendering them good kids, college-bound, honor students,
sweet, as if their character is the only evidence they
have of their innocence. If we really enjoyed
color-blind justice, then even someone with a dozen
felony convictions has a right to due process and a
presumption of innocence until proven otherwise in a
court of law.</p>
<p>We see these same principles at work in Palestine.
Focusing on the killing of innocents – children, women,
elderly – to the exclusion of able-bodied men (except
for journalists and the like) plays into the
deserving/undeserving dead binary and assumes that all
men are combatants (i.e., justifiable targets) unless
proven otherwise. At its core, this framing
automatically excludes those defending their territory,
in accordance with international law, from any claims to
“human rights,” foreclosing any serious conversation
about the<br>
justifiable right to self-defense — whether in Gaza or
Ferguson. Those deserving of human rights protections,
political scientist Sedef Arat-Koç wryly observes, must
“present themselves in, and effectively accept, a state
of pitiful, naked humanity, a child-like innocence and
helplessness, a non-politico-human status, and complete
dependence on the pity and charitable recognition of
outsiders.” She goes on to ask: “Does it mean that
resistance, struggle for dignity and justice, and an
aspiration for self-determination are inherently
illegitimate and suspect . . . if they are exercised by
Palestinians who disagree with the Western mainstream
solutions to the Palestinian question?”</p>
<p>Of course, Arat-Koç is absolutely right. Western
liberals are not pacifists: They are quick to arm
“rebels,” so long as they are the right rebels. The
innocent child, the grandmother, the widow, are the only
Palestinians deserving of liberal sympathies, for they
are ostensibly unburdened by political motives, even
though they dream dreams of taking back their native
land, recovering stolen property, enjoying the rights of
citizenship and nationality, and bringing down Israel’s
apartheid state once and for all. But what about those
dreams? Palestinian dreams? Black liberation dreams? How
did we move from a solidarity firmly rooted in the
commonalities of resistance to one based almost entirely
on the commonalities of oppression? From a radical
vision of national liberation, a dream of building a
post-Zionist, post-racist world, to a solidarity rooted
in shared victimization? How did we come to pitch human
rights against self-determination, as if it is an
either/or proposition? Are we merely struggling for a
long-term ceasefire and the withdrawal of settlements in
the West Bank? Are we really fighting for a détente with
an apartheid, Bantustan-style “state” ruled by the
Palestinian Authority? Are we really fighting for more
federal oversight of police, the “demilitarization” of
local law enforcement, and a return to the myriad
“standard” weapons cops used to kill us in the past? Is
our political imagination limited now because the
Palestinian Authority is the arm of Israeli state
repression rather than the governing structure of a new
society? Or is it because Black political power, from
the White House to the courthouse, has become the arm of
US state repression rather than the leader of an
authentic post-racist society?</p>
<p>Whatever the reasons, our solidarity ought to be based
on building a new world together. I am not suggesting
that we abandon the struggle to hold Israel accountable
for its continued crimes against humanity and violations
of international law, or that we stop mourning and
honoring the dead, or that we cease any of the immediate
actions designed to sustain life and bring a modicum of
peace. But peace is impossible without justice. The
brilliant Egyptian writer Ahdaf Soueif put it best: “The
world treated Gaza as a humanitarian case, as if what
the Palestinians needed was aid. What Gaza needs is
freedom.” And what is freedom for Palestine? “Free
Palestine” means, at a minimum, completely ending the
occupation; dismantling all vestiges of apartheid and
eradicating racism; holding Israel accountable for war
crimes; suspending the use of administrative detention,
jailing of minors, and political repression; freeing all
political prisoners; recognizing the fundamental rights
of all Palestinian and Bedouin citizens of Israel for
full equality and nationality; ensuring all Palestinians
a right to return and to receive just compensation for
property and lives stolen, destroyed, and damaged in one
of the greatest colonial crimes of the twentieth
century.</p>
<p>Ironically, as AIPAC-backed, right-wing Christian
Zionist organizations, such as the Vanguard Leadership
Group (VLG) and Christians United for Israel (CUFI),
work furiously to recruit Black students, elected
officials, and religious leaders to serve as moral
shields for Israel’s policies of subjugation,
settlement, segregation, and dispossession, it was
precisely the Zionist promise of a new society based on
the principles of justice, liberation, and self-determination
that attracted such overwhelming Black support for the
founding of Israel. This is a complicated story. Black
identification with Zionism predates the formation of
Israel as a modern state. For over two centuries, the
biblical book of “Exodus,” the story of the flight of
the Jews out of Egypt and the establishment of Israel,
emerged as the principal political and moral compass for
African Americans. “Exodus” provided Black people not
only with a narrative of slavery, emancipation, and
renewal, but with a language to critique America’s
racist state since the biblical Israel represented a new
beginning.</p>
<p>When Israel was founded in 1948, Black leaders and the
Black press, for the most part, were jubilant. Few Black
writers mentioned Arab dispossession, the Nakba, or the
terror tactics of the Haganah. Instead, Black leaders
and the Black press embraced the founding of Israel
because they recognized European Jewry as an oppressed
and homeless people determined to build a nation of
their own. In a speech backing the partition plan,
socialist labor leader A. Philip Randolph said that he
could not conceive of a more “heroic and challenging
struggle for human rights, justice, and freedom” than
the creation of a Jewish homeland. “Because Negroes are
themselves a victim of hate and persecution, oppression
and outrage,” he argued, “they should be the first to be
willing to stand up and be counted on . . . in this
fight for the right of the Jews to set up a commonwealth
in Palestine.” And yet, in defending a Jewish homeland,
Black leaders and the press often succumbed to anti-Arab
racism, depicting Arabs as the brutal, bloodthirsty
aggressors and the Jews as the heroic defenders of the
nation and purveyors of civilization. In March 1948, the
<em>Atlanta Daily World</em> ran a photo of Arab
“snipers” juxtaposed to another photo of Jewish men
standing guard under the caption, “Violence in the Holy
Land.”</p>
<p>There were exceptions. The iconoclastic writer George
Schuyler used his column in the <em>Pittsburgh Courier</em>
to criticize the expulsion of the Arabs. “The same
people who properly condemned and fought against German,
Italian and Japanese imperialism . . . now rise to
the vociferous defense of Zionist imperialism which
makes the same excuse of the need for ‘living space’ and
tries to secure it at the expense of the Arabs with
military force financed and recruited from abroad.”
Schuyler dismissed characterizations of Arabs as
“‘backward,’ ignorant, illiterate and incapable of
properly developing the land” as thinly veiled
justifications for a Jewish state, reminding his readers
that this was the same argument used by the Nazis to
invade Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Russia, and to
justify European colonialism. Schuyler was not only
deluged with letters accusing him of anti-Semitism and
downright lunacy, but his own paper rebuked him in an
unsigned editorial.</p>
<p>These postwar Black intellectuals and activists who
viewed Israel as a model of national liberation were not
dupes, nor were they acting out of some obligatory
commitment to a Black-Jewish alliance. Rather, with the
exception of figures such as George S. Schuyler, they
failed to see Israel as a colonial project founded on
the subjugation of indigenous people. Why? First,
Zionism was seen in 1948 as a nationalist movement
forged in the cauldron of racist/ethnic/religious
oppression, resisting the post-Ottoman colonial
domination of the region by Britain and France, and
poised to bring modernization to a so-called backward
Arab world. The nationalist and anti-colonial character
of Israel’s war of independence camouflaged its own
colonial designs. Second, the Holocaust was critical,
not just for the obvious reasons that the genocide
generated global indignation and sympathy for the plight
of Jews and justified Zionist arguments for a homeland,
but because, as Aimé Césaire argued in <em>Discourse on
Colonialism</em> (1950), the Holocaust itself was a
manifestation of colonial violence. Israel comes into
being as a nation identified as victims of
colonial/racist violence, through armed insurrection
against British imperialism. It is a narrative that
renders invisible the Nakba – the core violence of
ethnic cleansing. The myth of Israel’s heroic war of
liberation against the British convinced even the most
anticolonial intellectuals to link Israel’s independence
with African independence and Third World liberation.
Israel’s ruling Labor Party pursued alliances with
African nations under the guise that they, too, were
part of the Non-Aligned Movement, and Israeli leaders
publicly condemned racism and presented Israel as a
model democracy. In 1961, when South Africa’s Prime
Minister Hendrik Verwoerd tried to deflect international
criticism of his country by describing Israel as “an
apartheid state” (“The Jews took Israel from the Arabs
after the Arabs had lived there for a thousand years.”),
Israeli leaders promptly denounced him. Indeed, in 1963,
then Foreign Minister Golda Meir told the UN General
Assembly that Israelis “naturally oppose policies of
apartheid, colonialism and racial or religious
discrimination wherever they exist.”</p>
<p>Meir wasn’t the first foreign minister to lie to the
General Assembly, nor would she be the last. The
Non-Aligned Movement never embraced Israel, which it had
come to see as a colonial power. In 1956, Israel joined
Britain and France in a joint military invasion of Egypt
after President Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser decided to
nationalize the Suez Canal Company. As part of the war
on Egypt, Israel occupied southern Gaza and slaughtered
Palestinian refugees and other civilians in Khan Yunis,
Rafah, and the nearby village of Kafr Qasim. Eight years
later, Malcolm X visited the refugee camp at Khan Yunis
during his two-month stay in Egypt and learned of the
massacres, inspiring his oft-quoted essay, “Zionist
Logic” which appeared in the Egyptian Gazette, September
17, 1964. Malcolm concluded that Zionism represented a
“new form of colonialism,” disguised behind biblical
claims and philanthropic rhetoric, but still based on
the subjugation and dispossession of indigenous people
and backed by US “dollarism.”</p>
<p>The 1967 Arab-Israeli War brought many more African
Americans around to Malcolm’s position. The Black Caucus
of Chicago’s New Politics Convention of 1967
unsuccessfully proposed a resolution condemning the
“imperialist Zionist war,” and the Black Panther Party
followed suit, not only denouncing Israel’s land grab,
but pledging its support for the PLO. The event that
drew the most ire from liberal Zionists, many of whom
had been veteran supporters of the civil rights
movement, was the publication of “Third World Round-up:
The Palestine Problem: Test Your Knowledge,” in the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
newsletter. It described Israel as a colonial state
backed by US imperialism and Palestinians as victims of
racial subjugation. In short, Black identification with
Zionism as a striving for land and self-determination
gave way to a radical critique of Zionism as a form of
settler colonialism akin to American racism and South
African apartheid.</p>
<p>As a result of SNCC’s article, “responsible” Black
leaders were called on to denounce the statement as
anti-Semitic and to pledge their fealty to Israel. It
was in this atmosphere that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,
made his oft-quoted statement: “We must stand with all
of our might to protect [Israel’s] right to exist, its
territorial integrity. I see Israel, and never mind
saying it, as one of the great outposts of democracy in
the world.” Pick up most literature from AIPAC or Stand
With Us or CUFI and you will likely see this quote
emblazoned in bold letters but bereft of any context.
King’s words come from a long, public interview
conducted by Rabbi Everett Gendler at the 68th annual
convention of the Rabbinical Society on March 25, 1968 —
ten days before his assassination and ten months after
the War. Revisiting it is highly instructive. First,
Gendler tried to cajole him into denouncing
“anti-Semitic and anti-Israel Negroes.” But King pushed
back. Dismissing the claim that anti-Semitism was
rampant in the Black movement, he argued instead that
Black-Jewish tensions stem primarily from economic
inequality and exploitation. He implored the audience
“to condemn injustice wherever it exists. We found
injustices in the black community . . . And we condemn
them. I think when we find examples of exploitation, it
must be admitted. That must be done in the Jewish
community too.” In other words, King not only insisted
on condemning all forms of injustice but he refused to
allow the charge of anti-Semitism to silence legitimate
criticism — of Jews or of Israel.</p>
<p>His remarks about Israel and the Middle East are even
more striking. Short of condemning war altogether, he
called for “peace” above all else. For Israel “peace . .
. means security,” though he never specified what
security meant in this context. He also addressed what
he thought peace meant for the Arabs. “Peace for the
Arabs means the kind of economic security that they so
desperately need. These nations, as you know, are part
of that third world of hunger, of disease, of
illiteracy. I think that as long as these conditions
exist there will be tensions, there will be the endless
quest to find scapegoats.” On the one hand, the
statement belies a surprising ignorance of the history
as well as the consequences of the 1967 war. King
repeats the mantra that Palestinians suffer from hunger,
disease, and illiteracy because they are poor, not
because they were dispossessed of their land and
property and subjected to a security state that limits
their mobility, employment, housing, and general
welfare. King’s solution?: “a Marshall Plan for the
Middle East.” On the other hand, by situating Palestine
in the “Third World,” he placed it squarely within what
he identified as the whirlwind of global revolution
sweeping aside the old economic structures based on
capitalism and colonial domination. “These are
revolutionary times,” he announced in his legendary
speech on Vietnam a year earlier. “All over the globe
men are revolting against old systems of exploitation
and oppression, and out of the wounds of a frail world,
new systems of justice and equality are being born . . .
We in the West must support these revolutions.”</p>
<p>We can only speculate on how King’s position may have
changed had he lived, but given the opportunity to study
the situation in the same way he had studied Vietnam, he
would have been less sanguine about Israel’s democratic
promise or the prospect of international aid as a
strategy to dislodge a colonial relationship. To be
sure, his unequivocal opposition to violence,
colonialism, racism, and militarism would have made him
an incisive critic of Israel’s current policies. He
certainly would have stood in opposition to the VLG,
CUFI, and the litany of lobbyists who invoke King as
they do Israel’s bidding. And let’s be clear: King
preached revolution. Distributing humanitarian aid and
ending hostilities were never the endgame. The point of
civil disobedience was not to keep the status quo
intact, to make the regime slightly more just or fairer.
The point was to overturn it. More than a regime change,
King called for a revolution in values, a rejection of
militarism, racism, and materialism, and the making of a
new society based on community, mutuality, and love.</p>
<p>Not surprisingly, I found this revolutionary commitment
to build a new society in Palestine. Yes, I confronted
the apartheid Wall, witnessed the harassment of
Palestinians passing through checkpoints, wept over
piles of rubble where Palestinian homes had been
demolished and their olive trees uprooted by the IDF,
walked through the souk in Hebron littered with bricks
and garbage and human feces dumped on Palestinian
merchants by settlers, negotiated the narrow, muddy
pathways separating overcrowded multistoried shacks in
the refugee camps erected in the shadows of
fortress-like West Bank settlements, and was overwhelmed
by the level of violence, repression, and dehumanization
Palestinians had to endure. But what impressed me most
were the activists, the intellectuals, the youth, who
spoke confidently about a liberated country, who saw the
old guard leadership and the Palestinian Authority as
impediments, who envisioned and debated a dozen
different paths to a democratic and decolonized future.
They gathered at Muwatin: the Palestinian Institute for
the Study of Democracy in Ramallah; at Mada al-Carmel:
the Arab Center for Applied Social Research in Haifa;
and in the refugee camps in Balata, Jenin, and
Bethlehem.</p>
<p>Bethlehem’s Aida Refugee Camp is home to the Alrowwad
Cultural and Theatre Society, a genuine community center
and youth theater founded by director, poet, playwright,
and educator Dr. Abdelfattah Abusrour, who believes
theater is a “nonviolent way of saying we are human
beings, we are not born with genes of hatred and
violence.” Having grown up in the camp, Abusrour gave up
a promising career in science to devote his life to
creating a “beautiful theater of resistance” aimed at
releasing the creative capacity of young people to turn
their stories into transformative experiences.
Abusrour’s play, <em>We Are Children of the Camp</em>,
is something of a collaborative venture, incorporating
the kids’ own stories into a sweeping narrative about
Palestine since 1948. The children speak from personal
experience about Israeli soldiers invading the camps,
shooting their parents, and then denying them access to
hospitals on the other side of the wall. They long for
human rights, a clean environment, freedom, a right to
return to their land, and the right to know and own
their history. Condensing nearly seventy years of
history in the play’s title song, they sing of being
made refugees in their own land, of colonies built, and
villages demolished. “They put us in labyrinths,” they
sing, “They planted hatred in us / They considered us as
insects.” And yet, the children onstage, like their
brothers and sisters and friends whom I met laughing,
riding their battered bikes along the narrow camp
streets, kicking around a scraped-up soccer ball, or
peppering me with questions about America, refused to
become insects to be stamped out, or cauldrons of
hatred. “We may have a spring,” the song continues,</p>
<p>Sun may rise again in our sky</p>
<p>We look to Jerusalem</p>
<p>Singing for freedom in our hearts.</p>
<p>Palestinian lives matter. Black lives matter. All lives
matter. This should be self-evident. The children at the
Aida Camp remind us that what matters most is struggle.
Here I am not speaking only about self-defense. To
struggle is to overturn the logics of a racial regime
that uses security to justify dispossession, military
rule, and the denial of the most basic rights. To
struggle is to begin building the future in the present,
to prefigure a post-apartheid/post-Zionist society. As
one song from Children of the Camp put it: “Occupation
never lasts . . . The government of injustice, vanishes
with revolution.”</p>
<p>The same vision of revolution is evident among the
young activists in Ferguson, Missouri. They, too, remind
us that Black struggle matters. It matters because we
are still grappling with the consequences of settler
colonialism, racial capitalism, and patriarchy in the
US. It mattered in post-Katrina New Orleans, a key
battleground in neoliberalism’s unrelenting war on
mostly Black, Latino, Vietnamese, and Indigenous working
people, where Black organizers lead multiracial
coalitions to resist the privatization of schools,
hospitals, public transit, public housing, and the
dismantling of public sector unions. The young people of
Ferguson struggle relentlessly, not just to win justice
for Mike Brown or to end police misconduct but to
dismantle racism once and for all, to bring down the
Empire, and to ultimately end War. As they reach out to
Palestine, and Palestine reaches back to Ferguson, the
potential for a new basis for solidarity is being born
— one rooted in revolution.</p>
<p><em>This essay is excerpted from <a
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1784780677/counterpunchmaga">Letters
to Palestine: Writers Respond to War and Occupation</a>.</em></p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div> </div>
</div>
<div class="moz-signature">-- <br>
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863.9977
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.freedomarchives.org">www.freedomarchives.org</a>
</div>
</body>
</html>