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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Even with Palestinian children's art, Israel must make itself the victim</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">Gwyn Daniel - March 3, 2023<br></div>
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<div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><div><p>
<img src="cid:ii_letmbt2w1" alt="image.png" width="392" height="221">
Here
are two seemingly incompatible scenarios. The first is the horrendous
and unconstrained violence currently being unleashed on <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/palestine" target="_blank">Palestinian</a> citizens, their homes, towns and villages by Israeli settlers whose representatives now occupy key positions in the <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/israel" target="_blank">Israeli</a> government.</p>
<p>Israeli<a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-kristallnacht-relived-huwwara-press-review" target="_blank"> commentators</a> have used words such as <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-kristallnacht-relived-huwwara-press-review" target="_blank">"pogrom" and "Kristallnacht"</a> to describe the murder and destruction inflicted on unprotected civilians and their property.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>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</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The second is an episode far away in a genteel part of London, where a British pro-Israel charity has somehow<a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/uk-gaza-children-artwork-london-hospital-removed-legal-action-threat" target="_blank"> managed</a> to pressure the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital into <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/london-hospital-gaza-children-artwork-removed-utterly-bizarre" target="_blank">removing from one of its corridors</a> an exhibition of art by Palestinian children from the Gaza Strip.</p>
<p>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."</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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 <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/uk" target="_blank">the UK </a>and elsewhere attempt to neutralise dissent by evoking victimhood or distress among the wider Jewish population.</p>
<p>If the usual method of accusing individuals or institutions of <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/topics/antisemitism" target="_blank">antisemitism </a>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.</p>
<h3>Representations of suffering</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<div>
<p><a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-palestine-gaza-children-traumatised-year-after-bombardment" target="_blank"><img src="https://www.middleeasteye.net/sites/default/files/styles/read_more/public/Nadine-Abdullatifa.JPG?itok=SmPtvv5X" alt="" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="392" height="245"></a></p></div>
<p>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 <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/video/silent-wounds-mental-toll-war-and-siege-gazas-youth#autoplay" target="_blank">traumatised children and families in Gaza</a>.
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". </p>
<p>One such set of objections occurred in May 2021, less than a week after bombs had been <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/video/it-was-massacre-palestinian-mother-recounts-experience-during-gaza-bombing" target="_blank">raining down</a> on the citizens of Gaza, resulting in the deaths of <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-gaza-attack-world-reactions" target="_blank">66 children</a> and<a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/video/silent-wounds-mental-toll-war-and-siege-gazas-youth#autoplay" target="_blank"> traumatising</a> thousands of others.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>This is another connecting theme between the two disparate events described earlier.</p>
<p>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 <a href="https://globalsocialtheory.org/thinkers/patrick-wolfe-2/#:~:text=Most%20notably%2C%20Wolfe%20has%20continued,of%20indigenous%20peoples%20and%20polities." target="_blank">"logic of elimination"</a>,
as Australian historian Patrick Wolfe termed it, has much in common
with earlier practices in Australia, the USA, Canada and South Africa.</p>
<p>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). </p>
<p>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.</p>
<h3>'Unchilding'</h3>
<p>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<a href="https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/1650366" target="_blank"> "unchilding"</a>
- 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". </p>
<p>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.</p>
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<p><span><img src="cid:ii_letma63s0" alt="image.gif" width="15" height="15"></span>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. </p>
<p>UKLFI <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/feb/27/artwork-gaza-schoolchildren-removed-chelsea-and-westminster-hospital" target="_blank">said</a> that they "asked for the artwork to be removed because of the propaganda, not because it was by children from Gaza".</p>
<p>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."</p>
<p>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".</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h3>Vision of the lost land</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Likewise, the 2018<a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/tags/great-march-return" target="_blank"> "Great March of Return"</a>
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<div>
<p><a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israel-settler-terrorism-law-land" target="_blank"><img src="https://www.middleeasteye.net/sites/default/files/styles/read_more/public/images-story/A%20member%20of%20Israeli%20security%20forces%20and%20one%20from%20settlement%20security%20walk%20past%20a%20car%20set%20on%20fire%20by%20settlers%20from%20the%20nearby%20Bracha%20settlement%2C%20in%20the%20Palestinian%20Burin%2C%20West%20Bank%20on%20February%2025%2C%202023_0.jpg?itok=I8TIR7eP" alt="" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="392" height="245"></a></p></div>
<p>It is essential to grasp what this deliberate inflicting of death and destruction does to the soul as well as the body. The <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2018/aug/22/our-memories-have-vanished-the-palestinian-theatre-destroyed-in-a-bomb-strike" target="_blank">bombing of the Said al-Mishal theatre</a>
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. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The head of the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital School understood how crucial these connections were when she <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/feb/27/artwork-gaza-schoolchildren-removed-chelsea-and-westminster-hospital" target="_blank">acknowledged</a> the impact of "bringing children together to share their experience of life".</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The pressure exerted on Chelsea and Westminster Hospital to remove the artwork by Gaza children, with its <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/uk-gaza-children-artwork-london-hospital-removed-legal-action-threat" target="_blank">threat of legal action</a>,
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.</p>
<p><em>The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.</em></p>
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