ETHICS OF LIBERATION

Palestine as a Mode of Existence

Randa Abdel-Fattah

OUR PALESTINIAN FAMILY of thirty, nineteen of them grandchildren, spill out of a Sydney suburban house onto the front lawn. A Palestinian flag and an Eid Mubarak banner are draped over the front porch. The smokers huddle on the driveway, sucking on their first morning cigarette since Ramadan. A few of the girls, dressed up for Eid, balance their phones on a windowsill and record a Tik Tok video. My mother-in-law sits on a rattan outdoor chair that is too big for her, gripping a cup of Arabic coffee. The younger children play soccer, using my father-in-law’s lemon trees as goalposts, ignoring the cries of the aunties to watch out for the branches. The rhythm of this 2021 Eid morning hums along to the invisible cadence of “We teach life, sir.”

We constantly encounter our life in exile through a lenticular lens. Viewed from one angle: joy, love, privilege. Viewed from the slightest tilt of an angle: injustice, oppression. We dismiss the self-indulgent temptation to feel despair in the safety of diaspora, and cajole the children to pose in family photos. The angle tilts. We scroll through social media, watch videos of Israeli mobs chanting “Death to Arabs,” hear Mona Al-Kurd’s anguished cry, “You are stealing my house”; recoil at attacks on worshippers in Al-Aqsa. The lens tilts again: we send Eid gifs in WhatsApp groups.

My mother-in-law’s phone rings. “They’re a few minutes away,” she cries, and tips her coffee onto the grass.

My phone rings. A journalist from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) who had no time for us yesterday, suddenly wants a story on a Palestinian family about “how Eid celebrations have been affected given the situation.”

The situation is this. Gaza is being bombed. And my husband and father-in-law are on the way back from the hospital with his cancer test results.

Israel pounds Gaza with airstrikes for eleven days. Within 26 days, my father-in-law is dead.

* * *

About a week after my father-in-law’s diagnosis, less than two weeks before his death, I sit beside him at his home, computer propped on my lap. I am in multi-tasking activist daughter-in-law mode. “How do you feel, Amo?” I ask, as I email colleagues about an open letter, Academics for Palestine.

Alhamdulilah,” he replies with stoic calmness.

Al-Jazeera news is on the television, reporting on Gaza. I can hear Disney’s Aladdin from my seven-year-old son Adam’s I-pad, with him beside me singing along, uninhibited, out of tune, mutilating the lyrics. I raise the volume on the television. Adam raises the volume on the I-pad, letting out a frustrated cry, “I can’t hear the song!”

“We’re watching the news,” I say.

Amo shoots me a look of disapproval and turns off the television.

Here, two competing claims to the family space offer an insight into how our Elders teach us life in the quotidian spaces of a Palestinian diasporic family. On the one hand, a claim by a Palestinian here to bear witness to what is happening in Palestine there. On the other, a claim by a Palestinian child here to control the here, to keep what is happening in Palestine there.

I think about my father-in-law’s gesture of solidarity with his grandson to allow him the space to be a child, to play and sing while I watch Palestinian children being murdered and terrorized in Gaza by the Israeli State. I think about when the right time for a child is to understand the connection between here and there. Not just in the migration sense proposed by Ambalavaner Sivanandan, but to understand, as Palestinians outside of Palestine, that we are not mere spectators to a geographical place. To understand Palestine as a mode of existence.

“Are you in pain?” I ask Amo. He smiles. “How can I complain? Look what’s happening in Gaza. Alhamdulilah.” I apologize for being on the laptop. For the past few days, I had neither called nor visited, consumed by what is happening. “No,” he says, cutting me off. “Keep doing it.” He takes out his phone and shows me WhatsApp videos from Palestine, shared with him by family and friends.

Crouched beside Amo’s grave days later, I remember this scene and sob. I sob for the missed moments in Amo’s last days, but not out of guilt. Amo, himself a tireless advocate for justice, understood that Palestine is a way of life, not just a cause.

I cry because I am haunted by the constant questioning of what commitment to a liberation struggle yield in families—in how we teach our children in the Diaspora that sumud is an embodied way of life. I say “in the Diaspora” because, first, that is where I write from and second, because the children in Palestine are the ones who teach me the meaning of sumud, not the other way around.

Working with children and young people as an author and academic, I am constantly exploring what political life means: how we make sense of our purpose and identities, how we relate to each other, what children learn about the world through their families and themselves, how we find balance, how we know when to resist by facing Israel and when to turn away. A life defined solely in resistance risks “becoming an end in itself and for itself,” as Ghassan Hage argues. Cultivating a “space or a dimension of life that is free from both Occupation and the resistance to Occupation” is to cultivate a space of “heroic normality.”

One, out of all the images that haunt and invigorate me, is that of a little Palestinian boy and girl standing in the most recent crime scene that is Gaza, smiling as they hold their pet fish amidst the rubble and debris.

To be clear, I am not fetishizing resilience. We must reject the pontificating of those who expect the occupied, bombed and traumatized to exercise “restraint” and demonstrate resilience.

The image affected me deeply for another reason. Here was what scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian describes as Israeli “kill-ability” facing off with Palestinians’ livability. Here were two children momentarily claiming a space of “heroic normality,” reminding us that in our struggle for liberation we must sometimes pause long enough to consider who we will be, what we will do, what we will mean, when Palestine is free.

When our intrinsic, non-negotiable rights and dignity as a people are honored, what will it mean to live fully human? If we suspend the human, postpone joy, creativity, play, stillness, laughter, frivolity until we are liberated, what will be left of us when liberation comes. These two children with their fish reminded me of this.

There is much to lose in the fight to achieve freedom and justice if, in thinking about what we are fighting against, we neglect to think about what we are fighting for. Children, precisely because they do not mean to, remind us of this. When Adam called out “I can’t hear the song!” he was reminding me that we are fighting not simply for the right for Palestinian children not to be killed, but for their right to live, and it is for this reason that my father-in-law, wiser than me in that moment, turned off the television to let Adam hear his song, and to let us hear Adam sing.

* * *

In our efforts to resist the political and media establishment’s denial of Palestinians’ “permission to narrate,” as aptly described by Edward Said, Palestinians have, by necessity, spent years demanding space, and labor mobilizing voices to speak against denial in its entirety: Nakba, Naksa, two-state/one-state, apartheid, blockade, borders, green line, ethnic cleansing and so on. Counter-narration has been central to our collective resistance, especially among diasporic, exilic populations in the West. At the rightful center of the Palestinian narrative of struggle and liberation are young people, not as supporting characters but as leading narrators whose occupied lives, blockaded dreams, checkpoint births and grievable deaths must remain the central story.

With 51% of Gaza’s population under the age of 15, a war on Gaza is a war on children. With 45% of the West Bank population under the age of 15, Israel’s military Occupation is waged against babies, toddlers and teenagers. With over 30% of the total Palestinian population aged between 15–29, young adults live in oppressive conditions, brutalized by Israel’s settler colonial apartheid regime.

Children and young people are fundamentally at the core of the Palestinian liberation movement. Israeli political elites know this.

We see this in how Israel has normalized the dehumanization of Palestinian children—what Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian calls “unchilding.”

During the 2018 Great March of Return, Israel’s then Defense Minister, Moldovan-born settler and ultra-right nationalist Avigdor Lieberman, declared “there are no innocent people in Gaza.” The IDF’s official Twitter feed posted a graphic listing, “Molotov cocktails,” “rocks,” “wire cutters,” “arson kites,” “children,” “disabled civilians” and “rope tied to fence” as “Hamas’ Tools for Infiltrating Israel.” In other words, Palestinian children are fair game, legitimate targets.

We see this when Israel purposely excludes eight-month-old baby Leila Ghandoor22 and all the other babies and children killed or permanently maimed from the political category of “innocent”—and Western politicians and journalists endorse this exclusion by asserting Israel’s “right to defend itself,” whilst meekly requesting that Israel use “proportionate violence.” Apportioning life and death is only possible in a world where Palestinian children count as a ratio of human: non-human, sub-human, less-human. With Israel as representative/embodiment of the West, there is no more powerful and mobilizing signifier for the non-human than the “terrorist.” A signifier moored in the global cartography of racialized power hierarchies in which Israel, as local defender of “Western” interests and settler colonial values, finds its legitimacy in the racist trope of fighting the “violent,” “extremist,” the “radical” East. In this representational prison, Leila Ghandoor can never be innocent. Her murder is justified by terms such as “Hamas human shield,” or blamed on Hamas’ supposed “dead baby strategy,” as a Zionist defender once put it to me during my appearance in May 2018 on Australia’s national Q&A television program.

Israel’s most recent bombardment of Gaza killed 256 Palestinians, including 66 children. According to the Israeli Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Centre, at least 48% of Palestinians killed were “associated with terrorist groups” with “many” of the children characterized as “family members of terrorists”—in other words, justifiably exterminable.

Ahed Tamimi, the Palestinian teenager who slapped a soldier a few hours after an Israeli soldier shot her 15-year-old cousin in the head at close range was, according to Israel’s then Culture Minister, Miri Regev, “not a little girl,” but “a terrorist.”

There is no end to Israeli’s instrumental invocation of the language of the so-called “war on terror” to legitimize its criminalization of Palestinian children’s existence and resistance. Israel has invested heavily in a sustained discursive regime which seeks to normalize the meaning of “Palestinian resistance” as “terrorism” and transform “Palestinian child” to “terrorist.” In the last twenty years, in particular, the narrative of Palestinian youth as terrorists, as “national security threats,” has been calculated to plug neatly into the fundamental, organizing grammar and imperial logics of the “war on terror.” Israeli strategists know only too well how the imperative of messaging the Palestinian child as culpable terrorist serves the purpose not only of fighting the war on terror as an agent of the West, but also of escaping international scrutiny. After all, the spectacle of dead innocent children puts a lucrative multi-billion-dollar military, surveillance technology and armaments industry at risk, with Gaza being the ideal “weapon-testing laboratory.” Framing Israeli military campaigns as counterterrorism serves a political economy in which Western governments are heavily invested. The racial scripts, securitized imagination and pre-emptive logics of the war on terror have always operated against young Muslim, black and brown people who have been constructed as a central category of the terrorist figure.

How, then, does all this bode for Palestinian youths’ imaginings of liberatory futures?

National liberation must start with self-liberation and self-liberation first demands self-knowledge of one’s positionality.

In my most recent project, I have been interrogating the violence exercised against young Muslims by the State, and so-called neutral policies and political practices in a war on terror context and how this leaves its traces on youth born into a post 9/11 world. I have sought to mine deep into how this violence is experienced and resisted by young people in the micro-context of their lives, in particular their schools, and how years of “countering violent extremism” policies and political and media rhetoric have normalized a hyper-sensitivity to and policing of Muslim/Arab (because they are treated as synonymous) youths’ bodies, speech and the spaces they move in. Living in what academic Sunaina Marr Maira describes as “the everyday of surveillance,” young people shared with me how they engage in both adaptive and maladaptive coping strategies in response to attempts to contain and manage their political expression and dissent: from a young Palestinian girl who was forbidden to wear a “Free Palestine” t-shirt at school because it was “political,” to a young Muslim boy who was interviewed by ASIO for writing an essay on terrorism and Western interference in Muslim countries, to students who confessed to pursuing strategies of self-censorship in order to demonstrate their “safeness,” or pushing back and claiming the right to speak on their own terms. I also encountered students who pursued assimilation, sought to perform as “good”/”moderate”/”apolitical” Muslim/Arabs. They were, to borrow from Bhabha, miming whiteness and, in the process, reduced to ambivalence, finding themselves always “almost the same, but not quite.” On the other hand, there were Palestinian students who, faced with their dehumanization in the syllabus taught to them in school—which almost always insisted on “two-sides”/ Israel has a right to self-defense/BDS is anti-Semitic/Hamas this and Hamas that”—refused to “prove” their humanity.

One of the ways to mute young people’s voices is to devalue their emotions, dismiss their political passion and anger as subjective and irrational. There are the explicit attempts to censor young people who support Palestine—cases such as that of Rahmaan Mohammadi who wore a “Free Palestine” badge to school and was referred to the police by his teachers under the UK’s counter-radicalization Prevent program. There is also the epistemic racism that young people face, which denies them their anger, emotion, resistance and political voice in the name of the myth of “neutrality.”

Ramon Grosfugel argues that Western hegemonic identity politics and epistemic privilege is sustained by certain myths, one of which is what Colombian philosopher, Santiago Castro-Gomez, called the “point zero” perspective. Grosfugel explains: “The ‘point zero’ perspective is the Western myth of a point of view that assumes itself to be beyond a point of view.”

The hubris of “point zero” is what epistemologically animates the narrative of “both sides,” “balance,” “neutrality,” “conflict,” “negotiations.” Students told me about teachers telling them not to “bring politics into the classroom,” or cautioning them to be “factual, less angry.” One student’s essay was marked down for being “too personal and emotional” and not “academic enough.” Students spoke to me about learning to “tone down” their anger because, as one student said, “I get told to sort of not be too, how should I say it, angry in my voice…anything I say sort of comes out as, not aggressive, but almost I guess being seen as an attack. I can’t tone down my emotions. They don’t want to hear my anger.”

The Orientalist trope of the angry, irrational Muslim/Arab is pernicious. The resistance to self-censoring and the pressure to do so in classroom contexts is a common theme among many students I encounter. Anticipating how one’s tone, words, emotional register will be interpreted through racial and Islamophobic tropes bears down on students’ self-presentation and contribution to classroom discussions because of how effectively a deep-rooted collective image of the “angry Arab” works to curtail political speech.

One university student told me: “I always feel like I have emotion and others don’t care. Then it hits me at the end of class, oh shit, I’m embarrassed. You’re the only one so passionate about it. It’s annoying because I think: why don’t they care? Like when it came to Palestine, the Middle East and brown and black lives, Syria, drones, Yemen and stuff, why don’t they get passionate? I’m sitting there and saying this is so wrong and they say I shouldn’t be so emotional, shouldn’t bring what’s happening overseas here, that I should leave it at home.”

To not care, not be affected, is emblematic of privilege—distinguishing what counts as “publicly grievable lives,” on the one hand, from “unremarkable” lives on the other, as Judith Butler theorizes. This enforced privatization of grief over “what’s happening overseas” is also about neutralizing school and university spaces, creating a binary between the “rational,” “apolitical” classroom space and the “emotional,” “irrational” private space.

The “point zero” epistemic racism that drives narratives of “balance,” “dispassion” and “neutrality” obscures the fact that Palestine is engaged in a liberation struggle where, to claim to be “beyond a point of view,” is in and of itself a point of view. The claim that one is not taking sides is taking sides. A posture of actual neutrality is not just impossible but indefensible when the fact of Israeli hegemony, belligerence and defiance of international laws is so clear.

In my work with young people, both Palestinian and non-Palestinian, I am unequivocal: Palestine is a site of knowledge which teaches us to repudiate the Western myth of a neutral, apolitical, ahistorical subject and rather to proudly announce ourselves as people who self-reflexively claim a political, social and emotional orientation and intellectual posture rooted in seeking justice and thereby, necessarily “taking sides.”

It is only conceivable to imagine future possibilities if this posture is nurtured from the moment children can understand the concept of justice and accountability, pursuing what Paula Abood describes as “models of selfhood that don’t privilege the cult of the individual, but rather are multifaceted and relationally kinetic.” To be Palestinian must be about embodying an ethics of practice, a way of navigating the world, constantly assessing the balance of privileges and denials, the weight of our words, the impact of our actions on others. We can only reject the epistemological and ontological presumptions and conceits of the so-called “point zero” perspective if children understand that there is no such thing as a point zero perspective and that we are all located on an axis of power relations based on historical forces.

To come to identity as a young Palestinian is about adopting an ongoing ethical, intellectual and political praxis of locating oneself beyond the local: searching for self-knowledge, reckoning and understanding in the silenced, erased, redacted spaces of histories taught. Unlearning and then relearning what it means to be Palestinian. I share with students my own genealogy of self-knowledge. To engage in “decolonial thinking” is to trace what Mignolo characterizes as the “imperial wound” of identity: the British imperial project that supported and enabled the creation of the State of Israel and dispossessed my father from his homeland, brought my father to another British imperial project—Australia. A settler colony that can, therefore, never claim a “point zero” perspective of “neutrality.” Understanding my positionality as the daughter of a dispossessed Palestinian born and living in Australia on stolen land, empowers me to embrace alternative epistemologies of identity, agitate for epistemic disobedience against the structures, laws, discourses and forces that seek our obedience, conformity, silence, erasure, dehumanization and containment.

To keep politics “out of classrooms,” treat “what’s happening overseas” as irrelevant, is to also elude the fact that Palestine is an international struggle. One of the most effective ways to promote despair is to make Palestinians feel isolated, to treat their cause as “just another Middle Eastern conflict,” “complicated,” “obscure,” “intractable.” This masks the intersections of state-sanctioned violence. The racial violence against indigenous, Black, racialized minorities and Palestinians is enacted through ongoing structures of race and settler colonialism which are based on a historical matrix of power. As we enter the twentieth anniversary of the war on terror, young Palestinians need the intellectual tools to grasp the imperial logic of the war on terror and connect the dots between what is happening in Gaza, or Sheikh Jarrah or the censored social media accounts of Palestinians in Israel, with their own experiences in Western contexts, such as in their classrooms. They need to understand the wider context of attempts to contain their dissent and deny them their resistance; understand what and who is served by the weaponization of the war on terror’s language of “radical,” “extreme,” “national security,” “terrorist” against particular social justice movements (Black-Palestinian solidarity activists, BDS activists, Black Lives Matters protestors, anti-racism activists, decolonial environmental advocates, youth campaigners). When young people insist on these connections, they herald ongoing and historic affinities and convergences between different movements against systemic and institutionalized state violence, systemic oppression and brutality.

Ultimately, to be Palestinian is about creating an ethics of liberation that is rooted in fighting for justice, not as a transactional gesture, a kind of “I scratch your decolonization back so you can scratch mine,” but because Palestinian liberation embodies what it means to be unapologetically committed to justice, truth-telling, dignity and freedom, no matter which part of the world you are in. This is liberating. This is empowering. Which is why shared global struggles are a threat, not only to white supremacy and Zionism, but also to neo-liberal multiculturalism which limits anti-racism to diversity politics or interpersonal nondiscrimination, never decolonization, never dismantling global power structures.

* * *

My father-in-law was born in Jaffa and is buried in the unceded sovereign land of the Gadigal people. In June 1967, he walked from Palestine to Jordan. He lay down beside corpses and “played dead” to avoid capture. Uprooted from Palestine, he ended up in Australia, where he spent his life devoted to helping refugees, migrants and marginalized communities. He also spent his life laughing and making people laugh. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian and Sarah Ihmoud write: “The significance of the past and its ruins starts from our responsibility to build a home for our humanity, our psyches and our communities.” Amo embodied this responsibility. As Israel bombed Gaza and his cancer spread, we spoke more about Palestine than we did about his health. He carried Palestine in him to the very end.

In I Saw Ramallah, Mourid Barghouti writes: “The Palestinian has his joys, too. He has his pleasures alongside his sorrows. He has the amazing contradictions of life, because he is a living creature before being the son of the eight o’clock news.”

What kind of “living creature” are we fighting for? Our political imagination and political labor are only as good as our insistence that to be Palestinian is to fight, even as we make music and dream without reference to Israel. Basma Ghalayani, in her introduction to “Palestine + 100: Stories from a Century After the Nakba,” contemplates the relevance of science/speculative fiction to Palestinians: “The cruel present (and the traumatic past) has too firm a grip on Palestinian writers’ imaginations for fanciful ventures into possible futures.” Yet, these fanciful ventures are critical. They allow us to “practice” our “humanity,” as Palestinian writer, Adania Shibli, puts it when she speaks of why words offer her a “rescue,” a way to “create parallel possibilities where dehumanization thrives.” There is a time for practices of aesthetic and embodied resistance and resilience—such as baking Eid cakes during war or setting up a barber”s mirror and chair in the rubble. However, there is also, crucially, a need for there to be a parallel, autonomous space to experience joy, not simply carve it out. To stop, as poet Sara Saleh writes, “writing about borders and bloodshed and war and death and home…” To dream without borders, walls, checkpoints or cages; laugh because it feels good, not because it is a defense mechanism; sing loudly to the lyrics of Aladdin with Al-Jazeera in the background. Affirm our humanity not as a reply, but because to be Palestinian is a life worthy of being celebrated and a death worthy of being grieved.

Allah yerhamak, Amo. We will instill in our children that their right to resist is just as important as their right to play.

22 Al Jazeera English, “Laila Anwar al-Ghandour becomes the face of Gaza carnage,” May 15, 2018, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/5/15/laila-anwar-al-ghandour-becomes-the-face-of-gaza-carnage last accessed November 5, 2021