Letters to Palestine Read online

  What is Palestine to do? It fires rockets. These are miserable devices. They fly erratically and scare their adversaries, but kill very few, destroy very little. Why, ask the liberal detractors, do they bother with these rockets? After all, they do no damage and they allow Israel justification for its violence.

  What is Palestine to do? Not fire rockets? Conduct a mass civil disobedience campaign? Ah, yes. A good idea, drawing from Gandhi and Mandela—a massive march from Ramallah to Gaza that comes up against the Israeli separation walls and the Israeli forces—making their political leaders decide if they can simply fire on thousands of unarmed Palestinians who want to part the Israeli landscape to join their bifurcated lands.

  Sitting in the darkness of Israel’s Hadarim Prison is one of Palestine’s most important political figures, Marwan Barghouti. He has been a guest of Israeli incarceration since 2002—on charges, unproven, that he is a terrorist. For the past decade, Barghouti has called for a general political resistance to Israel, earning him—as he sits in solitary confinement—the title “Palestine’s Mandela.” Why does Israel hold people like Marwan Barghouti in its cells? Why does Israel arrest all those who want a serious political dialogue and who are able to carry mass support, including those who favor a civil disobedience strategy? Here is where Israel wants the conversation to disappear. It is enough to say, “but Hamas is firing rockets and so we have to retaliate.” It does not want to talk about other strategies. These would not allow it to perpetuate its policy of annexation through settlements (in the West Bank and East Jerusalem) and through the production of misery (in Gaza).

  Israel planned to build settlements on a pocket of land just east of Jerusalem called E1. For two nights in January 2013, 300 activists set up camp there. They called their village Bab al-Shams, the gate of the sun. The name comes from the novel by Elias Khoury, Bab al-Shams (1998), which tells the story of a Palestinian couple, Younis and Nahila, one a fighter in Lebanon and the other a defender of their home in the Galilee. The couple meets secretly in a cave called Bab al-Shams, their haven. The activists who created their village of Bab al-Shams called it their “gate to our freedom and steadfastness.” They had no rockets, no weapons. The young activists came out of the popular resistance committees. Their politics reflected their frustration with the strategy of negotiation and conciliation. “For decades,” said the organizers of the village, “Israel has established facts on the ground as the international community has remained silent in response to these violations. The time has come to change the rules of the game, for us to establish facts on the ground—our own land.”

  The day after their encampment was first put up, Elias Khoury sent the citizens of Bab al-Shams a letter. “I see in your village all the faces of the loved ones who departed on the way to the land of our Palestinian promise,” he wrote. “Palestine is the promise of the strangers who were expelled from their land and continue to be expelled every day from their homes. I see in your eyes a nation born from the rubble of the Nakba that has gone on for sixty-four years. I see you and in my heart the words grow. I see the words and you grow in my heart, rise high and burst into the sky.” Israel destroyed the camp three times, even though the activists had broken no Israeli law (they used tents, which did not require permits). The activists kept rebuilding their camp until Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered that the area be designated as a closed military zone. The pillow had to remain on the face of Palestine.

  Palestine, pillow on its face, has to defend the rockets that get fired out of its tattered body; Israel, pushing the pillow down, has never been called to account for its incarceration of Palestine’s most serious and popular political leaders.

  Sitting in his prison, during this Gaza war, Barghouti said, “Resistance as an option is and will remain a sufficient method for retaining freedom and independence.” If Palestine does not resist, it will be fully suffocated—no way to breathe, no dignity.

  Investigation

  Ceasefires have come and gone before. They promise little. The basic facts of the situation do not change. There is no move to lift the suffocation of Palestine—to end the embargo on Gaza, to allow the Palestinians to form their own state, to agree to borders (Israel does not have declared borders, and yet demands that it be recognized—how can Palestine formally recognize a country whose borders are not clear?). None of this has happened.

  Eternal return is the sensibility of these conflicts—no forward motion.

  The one proposal that affords some international consensus is for the United Nations to investigate the nature of the conflict, to ensure that that allegations of war crimes heard by the UN Human Rights Council should be fully looked into. The Council’s vote to set up a body for an investigation needs to be fully implemented. Israel has already closed the door to the investigators from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. In 2009, Israel prevented a previous UN panel from studying the nature of Operation Cast Lead—its investigation of people inside Israel had to be done over the telephone. A UN member state so cavalierly snubs a UN agency with an overwhelming mandate to do its job. Will the UN at least be able to undertake a proper investigation of the attacks on its institutions by Israel’s armed forces? Without being able to interview those troops and study their target information, any investigation would be incomplete. Israel will contend that the attacks were carried out in error, or else that the targets were not UN buildings at the time but launch pads for Hamas. Israel is going to block any serious investigation of war crimes.

  Even with an investigation, nothing will come of it. The Goldstone Report on the 2009 war had sufficient information to indict many Israeli leaders for war crimes, and yet no process was taken forward. On behalf of Israel, the US lobbied hard to prevent any discussion of the Goldstone Report in the appropriate UN forums. In 2009, then US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice told UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon several times to stop the progress of an inquiry. She told International Criminal Court President Sang-Hyun Song to block any move to consider Israeli actions against Palestine. “How the ICC handles issues concerning the Goldstone Report will be perceived by many in the US as a test for the ICC, as this is a very sensitive matter.” In other words, if the ICC went ahead with the Report the US would consider freezing out the institution. It was a direct threat.

  During the current ceasefire talks in Cairo, Israel insisted that the Palestinians concede that they should demand no investigation of the nature of the war and no accountability. It was a remarkable negotiating point. One thought was that Hamas would also be pulled up for war crimes, and so would be uneasy with a UN investigation. Izzat al-Rishq, a Hamas politburo member, said he was not bothered about this aspect. He said that the Palestinians should “act as soon as possible.” Israel has already begun to discredit the UN Human Rights Council’s investigation committee, calling its members “anti-Israel,” while its UN Ambassador Ron Prosor tried to deflect attention by calling for an investigation of Hamas’ rockets. Netanyahu defined the Israeli response to an investigation: “The report of this committee has already been written. The committee chairman has already decided that Hamas is not a terrorist organization. Therefore, they have nothing to look for here. They should visit Damascus, Baghdad and Tripoli. They should go see ISIS, the Syrian army and Hamas. There they will find war crimes, not here.” On November 12, 2014, the Israeli Foreign Ministry informed the United Nations that it would not cooperate with the UN investigation. Palestine, meanwhile, joined the ICC in early 2015. Israel threatened to retaliate with a more aggressive settlement policy. The United States threatened to cut its modest humanitarian aid to Ramallah.

  Solidarity

  No country is as complicit in Israel’s occupation and wars as the United States. It provides the diplomatic and military support that Israel needs to continue to garrison the Palestinians, make their lives more difficult and migration more appealing. The general tenor of US political fealty to Israeli policy was laid out by US President Gerald For
d to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1975: “Should the US desire in the future to put forward proposals of its own, it will make every effort to coordinate with Israel its proposals with a view to refraining from putting forth proposals that Israel would consider unsatisfactory.” The US government recognizes that while it will plead the Israeli case, it cannot be seen as doing nothing for the Palestinians. Richard Nixon told his consigliere Henry Kissinger in 1973, “You’ve got to give [the Palestinians] hope. It’s really a—frankly, let’s face it; you’ve got to make them think that there’s some motion; that something is going on; that we’re really doing our best with the Israelis.” This dance has been going on from Nixon and Golda Meir to Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu, and will likely continue. The fraudulent “peace process,” maintained with complete cynicism by the United States, has smothered Palestinian dreams.

  Slowly, cautiously, sections of the US population have broken with the pro-Israel consensus. Solidarity with Palestine has been a consistent feature of the US left. The brave young activists who founded the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) in 2001 brought their bodies to bear against the Israeli military’s expansionist policies. Israeli bulldozers and bullets took the lives of young ISM volunteers Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall. This was courageous work, the province of a small number of hardened activists. Four years later, in 2005, activists from Palestine’s growing civil society organizations formed the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. BDS called upon people of good conscience to abjure any cooperation—both direct and indirect—with institutions and firms that participate in the occupation of Palestine. BDS asks less in terms of solidarity—one does not have to risk one’s own body before a bulldozer or bullet; nonetheless, the backlash against the movement has been fierce. BDS provided an avenue for mass political participation, drawing large numbers of people into concrete action to put pressure on Israel. The BDS movement has grown exponentially across the world, including in the United States. It is a movement designed for international solidarity.

  Not far from the offices of Palestine civil society organizations are the prisons that house some of Palestine’s most distinguished political figures. The year after the BDS call was published, prisoners from different factions (the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) produced a National Reconciliation Document. This “Prisoners’ Document” called for unity among all organized political forces to rekindle a national liberation movement for Palestine. If BDS invited the world to stand against Israel, the Prisoners’ Document called upon Palestine to stand up for itself. These are the two sides of solidarity. BDS and the Prisoners’ Document are the two inextricable pillars for solidarity with Palestine.

  Documents

  This is a book of documents. They are whispers from corners of the United States of America, whose government has been Israel’s great enabler. The authors of these documents are committed to the people of Palestine as much as to humanity. These are writers who have taken positions, who have traveled to the occupied zones and written diaries, who have modulated their screams into poems and who have conjured up strategies for the streets, the boardrooms, and across the centers of political life. These writers are people that I greatly admire. That they would take the time to so hastily produce such beautiful work to fight against the amnesia over Gaza and the disavowal of Palestinian politics is itself an indication of the worlds that we are prepared to fight against and the worlds we would like to create. These cultural offerings are bundled into this book for Palestine. These are our letters. Please deliver them to the present so that we can make a better future.

  CONDITIONS

  What Is Palestine to the US?

  Mumia Abu-Jamal

  For some, this may come as a surprise, for it seems illogical, but the US doesn’t hate Palestine.

  It arms and finances its nemesis, Israel—yes.

  It votes consistently with Israel in the United Nations—even against the majority of the world’s nations—yes.

  It quietly and surreptitiously allowed Israel to become a nuclear power—yes.

  All this is true; but the US doesn’t hate Palestine. The truth is something far worse, for dismissal is more damning than hatred.

  Palestine, its people, its history, its culture, its art, its poetry, its very land, is dismissed as a mere trifle by the US Empire, not dissimilar to the response of the old British Empire, which dispatched the lands, hopes and dreams of the Palestinians, with cold, imperial aplomb.

  For empire is ever an exercise of global violence, for domination is but utter violation: the very root of violence.

  It violates the human soul, which yearns for freedom.

  Palestine was relegated to the misery of a warren of Middle Eastern ghettos for one reason—and one reason only.

  To allow the erection of a colonial outpost from which Britain (and later the US) could exercise power in a region that held the greatest prize in world history: petroleum.

  That outpost? Fortress Israel.

  Petroleum lit the lampposts of London, and fueled the factories of America, leading to its Industrial Age.

  It needed a sentry to protect this precious resource.

  It needed a watchdog in this neighborhood.

  Enter Fortress Israel.

  Palestine is a minor afterthought to the US Empire and its imperialist apologists. Its pain, its sufferings, its gross humiliations don’t bother the empire one whit.

  Yet, to millions of people, throughout Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas, their unjust and cruel treatment at the hands of the Zionists finds purchase in hearts worldwide.

  From their epic losses spring the fruits of a solidarity that binds us, human to human, oppressed to oppressed.

  As the cruelties of imperialism mount, giving rise to anger and distaste, the forces of solidarity grow too, encapsulating the majority of the people of the Earth.

  Bad Laws

  Teju Cole

  Not all violence is hot. There’s cold violence too, which takes its time and finally gets its way. Children going to school and coming home are exposed to it. Fathers and mothers listen to politicians on television calling for their extermination. Grandmothers have no expectation that even their aged bodies are safe: Any young man may lay a hand on them with no consequence. The police could arrive at night and drag the family out into the street. Putting a people into deep uncertainty about the fundamentals of life, over years and decades, is a form of cold violence. Through an accumulation of laws rather than by military means, a particular misery is intensified and entrenched. This slow violence, this cold violence, no less than the other kind, ought to be looked at and understood.

  Near the slopes of Mount Scopus in East Jerusalem is the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. Most of the people who live here are Palestinian Arabs, and the area itself has an ancient history that features both Jews and Arabs.

  The Palestinians of East Jerusalem are in a special legal category under modern Israeli law. Most of them are not Israeli citizens, nor are they classified the same way as people in Gaza or the West Bank. They are permanent residents. There are old Palestinian families here, but in a neighborhood like Sheikh Jarrah, many of the people are refugees who were settled here after the Catastrophe of 1948. They left their original homes behind, fleeing places like Haifa and Sarafand al-Amar, and they came to Sheikh Jarrah, which then became their home. Many of them were given houses constructed on a previously uninhabited parcel of land by the Jordanian government and by the UN Relief and Works Agency. East Jerusalem came under Israeli control in 1967, and since then, but with a greater tempo in recent years, these families are being rendered homeless a second or third time.

  There are many things about Palestine that are not easily seen from a distance. The beauty of the land, for instance, is not at all obvious. Scripture and travelers’ reports describe a harsh terrain of stone and rocks, a place in whic
h it is difficult to find water or shelter from the sun. Why would anyone want this land? But then you visit and you understand the attenuated intensity of what you see. You get the sense that there are no wasted gestures, that this is an economical landscape, and that there is great beauty in this economy. The sky is full of clouds that are like flecks of white paint. The olive trees, the leaves of which have silvered undersides, are like an apparition. And even the stones and rocks speak of history, of deep time, and of the consolation that comes with all old places. This is a land of tombs, mountains, and mysterious valleys. All this one can only really see at close range.

  Another thing one sees, obscured by distance but vivid up close, is that the Israeli oppression of Palestinian people is not as crude as Western media can make it seem. It is in fact an extremely refined process, one that involves a dizzying assemblage of laws and bylaws, contracts, ancient documents, force, amendments, customs, religion, conventions, and sudden irrational moves, all of this mixed together and imposed with the greatest care.

  The impression this insistence on legality confers, from the Israeli side, is of an infinitely patient due process that will eventually pacify the enemy and guarantee security. The reality, from the Palestinian side, is of a suffocating viciousness. The fate of Palestinian Arabs since the Catastrophe has been to be scattered and oppressed by different means: in the West Bank, in Gaza, inside the 1948 borders, in Jerusalem, in refugee camps abroad, in Jordan, in the distant diaspora. In all these places, Palestinians experience restrictions on their freedom and on their movement. To be Palestinian is to be hemmed in. Much of this is done by brute military force from the IDF—mass killing for which no later accounting is possible—or on an individual basis in the secret chambers of the Shin Bet; but a lot of it is done according to Israeli law, argued in and approved by Israeli courts, and technically legal, even when the laws in question are bad laws and in clear contravention of international standards and conventions.