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<h1 id="reader-title">Nat Turner and the Palestinians</h1>
<div id="reader-credits" class="credits">Joe Lockard - July 12,
2016<br>
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<p>When 17-year-old Palestinian Muhammed Taraireh <a
href="http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.728224">stabbed
to death</a> 13-year-old Hallel Ariel, the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict came to a child murdering a
child. Outrage in Israel was widespread, even though
kids have died by the hundreds – the majority
Palestinian.<span id="more-27235"></span> But this one
death fit Israel’s official narrative. After visiting
Hallel’s bedroom where she died, Netanyahu made a <a
href="http://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-you-dont-murder-a-sleeping-child-for-peace/">video</a>
with this statement:</p>
<p>“You don’t murder a sleeping child for peace. You don’t
slit a little girl’s throat to protest a policy you
don’t like. You do this because you’ve been brainwashed.
You’ve been brainwashed by a warped ideology that
teaches you that this child isn’t human. We will not let
barbarism defeat humanity.”</p>
<p>For Netanyahu, this event instanced Palestinian
barbarism. It presented a rationale for the occupation:
we are a liberal, pluralistic society fighting against
the Arab darkness that surrounds us. This formulation
attempts to hide the daily violence of Israel’s
occupation and the means by which towns such as Kiryat
Arba have been built. As Palestinians understood when
they celebrated a <em>shahid,</em> but Netanyahu cannot
understand.</p>
<p>Muhammed Taraireh, who knew he would die in his
desperate attack, murdered Hallel Ariel as an
affirmation of his own right to an equal humanity. His
family, and many more Palestinians, celebrated his death
as self-sacrifice to demonstrate a collective right to
human equality and self-determination. If a Palestinian
could not live with these rights, neither could an
Israeli live with superior rights. Human rage totalizes
and Palestinian outrage is no different. Such rage does
not differentiate between adult and child, between
genders, or between political beliefs. From an enraged
perspective, an entire class is guilty of denying human
equality: to strike at any one of them is to strike at
the class as a whole.</p>
<p>This is not unique to Palestinians. Child murder in the
name of freedom is visible in US history too. When I
teach about the 1831 Nat Turner slave revolt and its
major account, <a
href="http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/turner/turner.html">The
Confessions of Nat Turner</a>, one of the most
difficult issues concerns violence against children.
Turner recounts how the rebellion began with axe
killings of the Travises, an entire family of five.
Walking away from the house with his companions, Turner
recalls how they forgot an infant in its cradle so two
of them return to kill the child too. As the rebels go
from house to house they killed children alongside their
parents. In one house they killed a mother and her ten
children.</p>
<p>Students find this reading traumatic. The commonest
response is “Why did they kill the children?” A few will
point to Thomas Gray, the white attorney who interviewed
Nat Turner and published this antagonistic account.
Maybe he changed details so as to make Nat Turner into a
monster? No, the historical facts are that children died
alongside parents in this rebellion. Students have to
confront the deliberateness: it was not sufficient for
the rebels to kill nearly the whole Travis family, but
they turned around and came back to kill an overlooked
infant. While sympathetic with the justice of a slave
revolt, students have a very difficult time discussing
the butchering of children. Many simply leave a seeming
contradiction unreconciled. A few may come to the
conclusion that it is impossible as modern readers to
put ourselves into the shoes of slaves who have been
treated as less-than-human for generations.</p>
<p>Despite this mass slaughter of white children, Nat
Turner is widely celebrated in American culture as a
defiant hero. When the new Nat Turner film, <a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birth_of_a_Nation_%282016_film%29">The
Birth of a Nation</a>, is released this fall the US
will address this history once again. Palestinians who
refuse to be subjugated and strike with violent outrage
at an oppressor class might easily recognize such
moments in US history. Killing the children of
oppressors is a desperate response from an underclass
whose own children have no future of freedom, equality,
and opportunity.</p>
<p>Instead of recognizing Palestinian human equality, the
response of settlers has been to excoriate Palestinians
– echoing slaveholding white Americans speaking of
blacks – as morally deficient beings. In her funeral
elegy for her daughter, Rina Ariel said, according to
media reports, “I am standing here with a heart filled
with pain and I am turning to you, the Arab mother, the
Muslim who sent your son out to stab. I raised my
daughter with love, but you and the Arab Muslim
educators, you taught him to hate. Go, put your house in
order.”</p>
<p>Rina Ariel has matters precisely opposite. It is
Israeli settlers and Israel that must put their house in
order. No two-state peace plan advanced or contemplated
allocates Kiryat Arba or Hebron to Israel, nor is the
continued existence of these settlements tenable under
any plan. The political vision common in Kiryat Arba, a
bastion of settler ideologies, is quite opposite:
clearance of Arabs and their replacement by Jews.
Hallel’s father, Amichai, stated “We have a view here; I
don’t want to see this view. There’s a new neighborhood
planned… I don’t want to see the view, I want to see a
neighborhood.” The unspecified “view” from their Givat
Harsina neighborhood is the surrounding Palestinian
environs. Arabs spoil his view. The new Jewish
neighborhood is to be built on the displacement of
Palestinians.</p>
<p>The Ariels have plans for larger expulsions too.
Seizing on the murder, Rina Ariel wrote a public letter
to prime minister Netanyahu demanding that she and 250
mourners be permitted to conduct prayer ceremonies on
the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Her husband announced the
renaming of the compound’s Moghrabi Gate after their
daughter, now to be called <a
href="https://www.facebook.com/22738684968/photos/a.86889944968.20323.22738684968/10150678011559969/?type=3&theater">Hallel
Gate</a>. Rina and Amichai Ariel are long-time
supporters of the Temple Mount Faithful movement to
build a Third Temple to replace the Dome of the Rock and
al-Aqsa mosques, undoubtedly the surest means of turning
a national conflict into an enduring and catastrophic
religious war-to-the-finish.</p>
<p>The Ariel family, kin to ultra-right settler minister
Uri Ariel who has pressed for the establishment of
Israeli sovereignty on the Temple Mount, has lived in
Hebron for over 40 years, almost as long as the
occupation. Thirty years ago I was with a delegation
that visited with a Palestinian family living
immediately adjacent to Kiryat Arba. A couple times a
week at night-time someone was throwing hand grenades at
their home and taking occasional potshots. Fortunately
their stone walls were thick and there were solid metal
shutters. No one had been hurt yet, just children
frightened. We planted a couple olive trees on the
property while settlers gathered on the high ground
above and screamed at us. One woman hanging onto the
security fence screamed hoarsely in Brooklyn-accented
English “Go back to Tel Aviv! You are traitors, scum!” I
don’t know what happened to the Palestinian family, but
it is most likely that the Kiryat Arba settlers managed
to dislodge them and take their land for expansion.</p>
<p>This is the violence by which Palestinians have been
displaced throughout Hebron. It is the Ariels, their
neighbors, and their political supporters who bear
responsibility for putting Hallel and other children on
the front lines of a colonial project that can engender
only hatred, resistance, and counter-violence. By
charging Palestinians to change and cease resisting
occupation, Rina Ariel avoids her own responsibility as
an adult participant in an ugly project based on
superior means of violence. The colonizer who demands
that an occupied and colonized people accept their
condition lives in a delusion of circular
self-fulfillment where a dominant population dreams of
others accepting their own subordination.</p>
<p>So theo-colonialist West Bank settlers and their
advocates propose to educate Palestinians on their
duties as moral subjects. Caroline Glick, <a
href="http://www.jpost.com/Author/Caroline-B-Glick">The
Jerusalem Post</a>’s star ultra-nationalist columnist,
voices such a demand that Palestinians cease resistance
and condemns them as morally deficient for refusing to
capitulate to Israel’s settlement project. Glick <a
href="http://www.truthrevolt.org/commentary/glick-moral-equivalence-has-become-moral-atrocity">writes</a>
“The smart set in the West has insisted for over a
generation that Israel and the Palestinians are morally
equal” and that the term “cycle of violence” only makes
excuses for Palestinian depravity.</p>
<p>In this argument, one that joins the Ariel family in
effacing Israeli violence and domination, Palestinian
society is no more than the world’s leading manufacturer
of anti-Semitism. Any recognition of Palestinian
equality – not to mention Israeli responsibility –
constitutes evidence that Western political morality has
been overcome by “the hate-filled, murder applauding
mob” that is Palestine. In Glick’s colonial and racist
argument, equality itself is the enemy of humanity.
Nat Turner would recognize this type of argument
predicated on the naturalization of an alleged inferior
morality.</p>
<p>Little separates Glick’s reactionary defenses from the
19th-century pro-slavery apologist <a
href="http://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/fitzhughsoc/fitzhugh.html">George
Fitzhugh’s</a> fulminations against equality as a
watchword for moral collapse often accompanied by mass
murder. This well-known species of pseudo-historical
argument posits a complacent, weak, and luxury-loving
society that falls prey to an evil under-class willing
to murder the innocent. A settlement advocate such as <a
href="http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=16565">Emily
Amrousi</a>, for example, asks rhetorically whether
the Ariel murder will shake “the foundations on which
the complacent West builds its cafes? Wake up, world!
Hallel was sleeping, and she died.” The killing of a
Jewish child becomes a sign of moral somnambulism,
rather than accurately as the product of an
ethno-national conflict and its desperate moments.</p>
<p>For its part, the Netanyahu government only knows how
to plunge deeper into the settlement project. It
perpetuates a political morass through attempts to
normalize an ever-vigilant security regime that governs
Palestinians. A Jewish girl’s death means another harsh
security crackdown, not likely to be effective where a
majority of Palestinian men in the West Bank have been
arrested and held at some point in their lives. Too,
after Nat Turner’s rebellion the southern states
instituted new legal restrictions and repressive
disciplinary measures. These allowed slaveholders to
succeed in the short term, not in the long term.
Similarly, Palestinians count on a lengthy process of
eroding the occupation through individual and collective
acts of anti-colonial revolt. One rebellion never
suffices.</p>
<p>Nat Turner is alive and lives in Palestine today.</p>
<p><em><br>
</em></p>
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