Letters to Palestine Read online

  LETTERS TO PALESTINE

  LETTERS TO PALESTINE

  Writers Respond to War and Occupation

  Edited by Vijay Prashad

  Foreword by Junot Díaz

  First published by Verso Books 2015

  The collection © Verso 2015

  Contributions © Contributors 2015

  The foreword by Junot Díaz comes from off-the-cuff remarks he made at Clark University, Worcester, MA, on September 30, 2014.

  The introduction by Vijay Prashad is based on his report for Red Pepper, October/November 2014.

  An earlier version of Ben Ehrenreich’s essay was published in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

  Deema K. Shehabi’s “Gate of Freedom” first appeared on the Academy of American Poets website as the Poem of the Day on March 10, 2013.

  An earlier version of Colin Dayan’s essay was published in the Boston Review. Nora Barrows-Friedman’s essay is an edited excerpt from her new book, In Our Power: US Students Organize for Justice in Palestine (Just World Books, 2014).

  All rights reserved

  The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

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  ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-067-8 (PB)

  eISBN-13: 978-1-78478-259-7 (US)

  eISBN-13: 978-1-78478-294-8 (UK)

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

  Typeset in Electra by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh, Scotland

  Printed in the US by Maple Press

  CONTENTS

  Foreword: Americans Are So Deranged About Palestine Junot Díaz

  Introduction: A Country in Darkness Vijay Prashad

  Conditions

  What Is Palestine to the US? Mumia Abu-Jamal

  Bad Laws Teju Cole

  Travel Diary Noura Erakat

  Extract from A Concordance of Leaves Philip Metres

  Imagining Myself in Palestine Randa Jarrar

  Checkpoint Jasiri X

  Below Zero: In Gaza Before the Latest War Ben Ehrenreich

  Gate of Freedom Deema K. Shehabi

  Soundtracks of the Resistance Rumzi Araj

  Until It Isn’t Remi Kanazi

  War Reports

  Afterwords Sinan Antoon

  How Not to Talk About Gaza Colin Dayan

  Running Orders Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

  They Wake Up to a Truce a Fragment Fady Joudah

  Diary of a Gaza War, 2014 Najla Said

  Gaza Hayan Charara

  Gaza Renga Deema K. Shehabi

  A Gaza Breviary Corey Robin

  Please Look Closely Naomi Shihab Nye

  Politics

  Yes, I Said, “National Liberation” Robin D. G. Kelley

  This Is Not the University of Michigan Anymore, Huwaida Huwaida Arraf

  Samidoon: We Are Steadfast Nora Barrows-Friedman

  The US Boycott of Palestine Alex Lubin

  The Collapse of the Pro-Israel Consensus Alex Kane

  What Is Anti-Semitism Now? Sarah Schulman

  Reflections on the Israeli Army Shutting Down the Palestine Festival of Literature in the Month of May in 2009: Burning Books, a Bebelplatz in Jerusalem Kevin Coval

  Notes

  About the Authors

  Foreword:

  Americans Are So Deranged

  About Palestine

  Junot Díaz

  I grew up in the ’80s in Central New Jersey, and every single kind of colonial settler calamity was present in my community. I was friends with an Irish kid, the only white kid in our community, and a hard-core Irish Catholic republican. His family used to pass the hat around in church to raise money for the IRA. My other friend was an Egyptian kid whose family extended into Palestine, and throughout the ’80s, while everybody else was watching John Hughes movies, this kid had me on point on Palestine. And then of course this was at the height of the apartheid movement. So all of my African American friends, well, two of them, not all of them, had parents who were part of the leftwing, pro-ANC, anti-apartheid movement. I’m in this poor community and this is all just getting beamed into my head.

  So by the time I was in college, I could give you chapter and verse on anti-Zionist projects. And look, for many people it’s a really tough issue. It’s like we’ve kind of gotten deranged, so that there are certain areas we can’t discuss. And of course the situation in Palestine is an utter taboo in this country. Our ideas of terrorism, our ideas of Arabs, are over saturated with the most negative, weirdly perverse racist ideologies. I can’t even turn on the news for five seconds without hearing the most racist shit about Arabs or Muslims. And so in that kind of atmosphere, it’s just a shouting match. If you say, I think the occupation of Palestine is fucked up on forty different levels, people are like, you’re the devil, we’re going to get your tenure taken away, we’re going to destroy you. You can say almost anything else. You could be like, “I eat humans,” and they’ll be like bien, bien.

  On the basic, basic level: If you are occupying other people’s shit, guess what—you are fucked up. That’s that. And that’s a tough thing for people to stomach. Because we live in a country that’s currently occupying people’s fucking land. Perhaps Americans are so deranged about Palestine because Americans are thinking, if we give up here, these fucking Indians are going to want their shit back. Well, maybe they should get their shit back. Since 90 percent of us don’t own anything, I don’t know how much it would hurt us.

  Introduction:

  A Country in Darkness

  Vijay Prashad

  Forget Palestine

  Palestine is easily forgotten. There is war. There is suffering. The war ends. The suffering vanishes. Silence.

  Was there even a “war”? Palestine is under occupation, and has been since 1967, since 1948. An occupied land is not at war, can never be at war. It is occupied. Occupation is a state of war. The occupied space retaliates. It seeks its freedom. It is punished. Was Operation Protective Edge a war or a punishment? Operation Grapes of Wrath, Operation Cast Lead, Operation Pillar of Cloud—names less of defense and more of vengeful retribution.

  On the night of Tuesday, July 29, 2014, three shells hit the Jabalia Elementary Girls School in Gaza—a UN-designated emergency shelter for 3,300 Palestinians. Those who had taken refuge there came because the Israelis had warned them to leave their homes. The UN had given the Israelis the coordinates of this school seventeen times. Their warnings made no impact. The shells killed at least sixteen people and wounded hundreds. The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) chief, Pierre Krähenbühl, said in a powerful statement, “Children killed in their sleep; this is an affront to all of us, a source of universal shame. Today, the world stands disgraced.”

  Israel destroyed Gaza’s only power plant, which impacted the already fragile sewage and water purification system as well as food storage. Electricity was mostly off, which meant that the Palestinians were cut off from the world. As it is, when Israel conducts its “operations” inside Gaza, it seals the area, preventing media from entrance. The aftermath of these operations has been devastating, whether in Gaza City’s neighborhood of Shuja’iyya or the town of Khuza’a. Forty-four percent of Gaza’s 140 square miles (360 square km) was designated a “buffer zone” by the Israelis. By the end of this pummeling Gaza’s Mi
nistry of Health puts the figure for the dead at over 2,000 and the wounded over 11,000. Seven of ten Palestinians killed in this war were children.

  The UN Human Rights Council voted for an investigation of alleged war crimes by Israel against the Palestinians. The call for accountability came from most of the world’s states. But accountability there will not be. Indeed, there is barely memory. Palestine is forgotten.

  As I write these lines, Jerusalem is in torment. Tensions are about as high as they were in 2000—when Ariel Sharon went to the Al-Aqsa Mosque. I watch a video taken by B’Tselem of a disabled twelve-year-old boy, a-Rajbi, being detained by two strapping Israeli soldiers; they handcuff him brutally as he stands there and screams near his village of Jabel Johar, Hebron, near the settlement of Kiryat Arba. The settlers stand and cheer, one throwing out a clichéd racist slur. I watch another video of an Israeli officer accusing Israeli activists of treason for trying to prevent the removal of Palestinian farmers from their land. There are fast-moving tragedies. Already the 2014 Gaza War seems dwarfed by the escalation in Jerusalem.

  One day Palestine will become what it wants. But that day is not now. Now Palestine is a shadow.

  I drew her bleeding

  One more war, one more exhausting period for the Palestinians filled with death and destruction, terror and its traumas. Wars come in a sequence: 2014, 2012, 2009, 2006 … This chain of numbers says nothing of the everyday war that eclipses the smiles of ordinary people who have to make bare lives in extraordinary times. Every document of the Israeli occupation and suffocation of Gaza resembles every other one. There are the forensic texts of human rights groups and the UN commissions—actuaries of the occupation, the authors of these documents give us the scaffolding of devastation. Poets and filmmakers, storytellers and pamphleteers fill their artifacts with sentiment. How many times can a human being hear that in seven weeks the Israelis killed over 2,000 people, injured tens of thousands, demolished the lives of hundreds of thousands, wiped out buildings that heal, teach and shelter?

  Fida Qishta, born and raised in Rafah (Palestine), took her video camera around to document life in her Gaza. She put her story together in a painful meditation of a film, Where Should the Birds Fly (2012). Scenes of ordinary farmers and fisherfolk trying to ply their trade, while Israeli snipers and gunboats shoot at them, get straight to the point. All those who talk of Hamas rockets being fired into Israel should take a look at this section of Qishta’s film, where there is a banal, even tendentious use of the gun to degrade and frighten unarmed Palestinians as they try to make a living. Bulldozers and border crossings make it impossible to lead lives. Then comes Cast Lead (2009). It is a good thing that Qishta has her camera and that she is so brave. The scenes are disturbing and honest—there is nothing manufactured about her film. We are there on the day (January 18) an Israeli attack killed forty-eight members of the family of Helmi and Maha Samouni, whose house in Zeitoun, in the suburbs of Gaza City, was bombed and then occupied. The departing Israeli soldiers left behind love notes to Palestine, graffiti in Hebrew and English: Arabs need 2 die, Make War Not Peace, 1 is down, 999,999 to go, Arabs 1948–2009. Qishta went to see fifteen-year-old Ayman al-Najar, victim of an Israeli bomb which killed his sister, in Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis. He shows Qishta his wounds, his body wracked by white phosphorus burns (the graphic image sears). Qishta takes refuge at a UN compound, a shelter to fleeing Palestinian families. Israeli F-16s release their bombs; some land on the UN buildings, the night resplendent with the white phosphorus traces, beautiful in the sky, barbaric on the skin.

  Then we meet Mona. She is the highlight of this disturbingly accurate film. At age ten, she is Qishta’s guide into the suffering and resilience of Gaza. Her farming family were herded into a neighbors’ home by Israeli troops who accuse her brother of being with Hamas; the home is then bombed from the sky. Qishta asks Mona how many people in her family died that day. “In my immediate family?” asks Mona, innocent to the gravity of her own question. So much death, but she appears resigned and wise. “If we die,” she says gravely, “we die. If we survive, we survive.” She shows Qishta a drawing she did of the massacre. “It was a sea of blood and body parts,” she says. “They took the most precious beloved of my heart,” meaning her parents. She points to a person in her drawing, “This is Palestine. I drew her bleeding.”

  Watching Qishta’s film once more during this current war brings out all the clichés of Israeli violence—the same excuses, the same brutal attack on civilians, the same paralysis on the ground. What was 2009 could have been 2014. It is all one period, punctuated by moments of anticipation.

  Hamas

  From its emergence in May 1964 to its exile from Beirut in August 1982, the Palestinian Liberation Organization was the main—and in many ways only—resistance organization of the Palestinian people. The PLO and its leader Yasser Arafat picked up the mantle of anticolonialism and national liberation movements in the 1960s to good effect. Algeria, Vietnam, Palestine—to have linked the Palestinian struggle to the Algerian and the Vietnamese wars of liberation was a major accomplishment of Yasser Arafat’s PLO. But the Israeli and Jordanian assault on it in Jordan in 1970 and then the Israeli invasion of Beirut in 1982 crushed its capacity to act in the area close to Israel. Even in Tunisia, the PLO was not safe. Israel’s fighter jets bombed the PLO headquarters in Tunis during Operation Wooden Leg in 1985, killing over eighty people. When the First Intifada broke out in the Occupied Territories in 1989, the PLO’s links to the Palestinians in the camps and in the Occupied Territories had been weak. Others had grown to replace them.

  In Gaza, the most important movement that supplanted the PLO was Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian organization. Gaza was under Israeli occupation and yet the Israelis allowed this movement—formed in 1988—to thrive. In 2009, an Israeli official told Andrew Higgins of the Wall Street Journal,

  Israel’s military-led administration in Gaza looked favorably on the paraplegic cleric [Sheikh Yassin], who set up a wide network of schools, clinics, a library and kindergartens. Sheikh Yassin formed the Islamist group Mujama al-Islamiya, which was officially recognized by Israel as a charity and then, in 1979, as an association. Israel also endorsed the establishment of the Islamic University of Gaza, which it now regards as a hotbed of militancy. The university was one of the first targets hit by Israeli warplanes in the [2008–09 Operation Cast Lead].

  Israel saw Mujama al-Islamiya, which would become Ḥarakat al-Muqāwamah al-ʾIslāmiyyah (Hamas: Islamic Resistance Movement), as the lesser of two evils. The real problem for Israel was the secular PLO. It had to be crushed. But the PLO, in exile and cut off from the Palestinian people, hastened to make any kind of deal to allow its leadership access to its land. The Oslo accords of 1994 must be seen in that context. But even Oslo, the surrender of the Palestinian leadership, was not enough for Israel. During the Second Intifada, the Israelis decided to destroy Arafat. In fact, on December 3, 2001, at a cabinet meeting, Ariel Sharon said, “Arafat is no longer relevant.” What was relevant was not Arafat himself but the image of Palestinian resistance. A desperate Arafat said on December 16 that attacks on Israelis must end, and so his PLO fighters clashed with Hamas to stop them from their attacks. But this was not enough for the Israelis. The Israeli army’s Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz said that the PLO crackdown on Hamas was insufficient. The Palestinian Authority, he said, “is infected by terror from head to toe and does everything to disrupt our lives and to bring terrorism to our doorstep.” The hammer came down heavily on the PLO. The life of resistance was to be knocked out of it.

  At this time, the Israelis also turned their gunsights on Hamas. In January 2004, Sheikh Yassin said he was willing to end armed resistance against Israel if a Palestinian state was created in the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem. Hamas’s political leader Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi also concurred, saying that the Palestinians would declare a decade long hudna in exchange for independence. On March 22, Israel assassinated Sh
eikh Yassin. Two hundred thousand people attended his funeral. On April 17, they killed al-Rantissi. Any talk by Hamas of peace was met with assassination.

  Hamas is one of the vehicles for Palestinian national aspirations. It is not necessarily the vehicle preferred by many Palestinians. There are many Palestinian Christians and nationalists, non–Muslim Brothers and communists who would like to have a different vehicle for their ambitions. But the Israelis have tethered the PLO through the Oslo process, destroyed the left outfits through assassination and incarceration. Israel asks, where is the secular and nonviolent Palestinian movement? It is sitting in Israel’s prisons. What it allows to live is Hamas, and then it says that the Palestinians choose Hamas, and then Israel says that the Palestinians force Israel to violence …

  Resistance

  Palestine lies on its rickety bed. Israel stands above, pillow in hand. It places it on the face of Palestine. Palestine struggles. It pushes back. In the next bed sits Egypt. It is silent. Its pockets are filled with US dollars, handed over in exchange for a signature at Camp David. Jordan is on the floor. It looks sad, shaken. It does nothing. Nearby the King of Saudi Arabia seems to be speaking about war crimes, sucking his oxygen container in jerks, wondering why it is taking so long for Israel to vanquish his enemies inside Palestine—Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian wing. No one comes to Palestine’s aid. The UN is in the corner. It has been banished by the United States, who stands close by, with its two mouths saying two different things. Palestine struggles alone.

  Israel turns, hand on the pillow, pushing down, and says, look—look, Palestine is threatening us, endangering our lives. Others look away, giving Israel license to push harder.

  The doctrine of self-defense does not apply to Palestine. It must take the pillow on its face willingly and allow itself to be asphyxiated. Resistance is a doctrine afforded to all, but denied to Palestine.