Returning to the Border: Preparing for June 5th on the Lebanese Border

[Bullet that was inside Miled Majthoub. Image from Nour Samaha.] [Bullet that was inside Miled Majthoub. Image from Nour Samaha.]

Returning to the Border: Preparing for June 5th on the Lebanese Border

By : Nour Samaha

[Editors` Note: Since the writing of this report, the Lebanese Army declared the border area a closed military zone. Several Palestinian groups have cancelled their plans to organize and participate in the event and instead have chosen to hold protests in their respective refugee camps. Several of those injured on May 15, as well as their relatives and friends, have decided to reach whatever check-point is closest to the border and hold a sit-in there.]

“I’m going to attend on Sunday, of course I am,” said Um Mohamed, with a smile. “I have already given one martyr for this, I don’t mind dying for Palestine.”

Um Mohamed, sitting in her cramped living room surrounded by a flock of women in Burj al-Shmali, one of the refugee camps in the south of Lebanon, spoke in detail about the moment her son, seventeen-year-old Mohamed Samir Saleh, was killed by the Israelis on the border on May 15, 2011. Recounting the events of that fateful day, she explained how he was breaking rocks into smaller stones when the bullet hit him in his back and travelled through his heart, killing him.

“He had told me the night before that he was going to be a martyr and wasn’t coming home the next evening,” she said. With a look of determination, she was adamant about the fact that they, as Palestinians, as refugees, as women, will go back to the border on the June 5, Naksa Day (the anniversary of the 1967 war), to continue what was started three weeks prior.

“I want to do what they did on Nakba Day, if not more. We are doing this for our land, and our nation,” she said, “I have no fear of bullets.”

Um Mohamed is not alone in her quest to continue the unarmed marches to the border. Many of the Palestinians who were shot and injured by Israeli soldiers on the May 15th have sworn they will return on Sunday, keen to show everyone that Israeli bullets cannot prevent them from demanding their right to return.

This Sunday, June 5th, the Day of Naksa, has been selected as the second march to the Lebanese-Israeli border to protest for the Palestinian right of return. While there has been a flurry of diplomatic and military manoeuvres on both sides of the border in an attempt to stifle the march, many expect it to not only proceed, but to numerically exceed the thousands who attended three weeks ago.

Miled Majthoub, from Ain al-Hilweh camp, was shot twice while at the border on the May 15th; once in the stomach with live ammunition and once in the chest with a rubber bullet, both coming from the Israeli side of the fence.  He had managed to get to the fence and grab the Israeli flag that was hanging there, which he threw back to his friends. “We tore the flag up, tied the pieces around stones, and threw them back at the Israelis,” he said, laughing. “It was when I went back a second time that I was shot.” Those around him were so convinced he was on his death-bed, a nearby shaykh asked him to recite the declaration of faith, usually done prior to death.

“Do I want to go back? Of course I want to go back!” he declared. His father tried to explain the feeling they all felt when they saw their land for the first time. “You can’t describe it, there’s something that pulls you towards it.” he said. For many, this was the first time they had ever laid eyes on their land. “My younger son was also there on Nakba Day, and he refused to leave. He told me, ‘as long as there are rocks, I’m not leaving.’ I understand this feeling.”

While not discouraging people from returning on the June 5th, he urged people to do so with caution, as a number of those going are doing so as a reaction to what happened on the May 15th. “As this is the case, the Israelis are prepared, so this time approaching the fence in the same manner as last time entitles you to a bullet.”

Miled’s neighbour, Mohamed Sleiman, twenty-seven years old, was one of the few who arrived at Maroun al-Ras early in the morning of the May 15th. He descended the hillside with one of the martyrs, Imad Abu Shakra, and together they reached the fence. Through the fences, the Israeli soldier on the other side spoke to him in Arabic, “Go away!” before laughing at him. When Mohamed refused to move, the soldier shot him. The bullet hit him sideways in his right leg. “I didn’t fall right away,” he said, describing how it took him about fifteen minutes before he fell, not being able to withstand the pain. Today he is still on crutches, but this will not prevent his determination to take part, once again, this Sunday.

“Nothing but God will stop me from going down on Sunday,” he said, with fierce resolve. “My goal is to return back all of Palestine, and I won’t stop until this happens.”

Israel, having voiced its fears over the return of the protestors to the Lebanese side of the border on Sunday, has doubled its efforts in protecting the border by adding more barbed wire to the already existing fence. Furthermore, it has stated in no uncertain terms that it will hold both the Lebanese and Syrian governments responsible for any infringement and will  "use all means necessary to prevent any attack on its sovereignty."

But these threats have not dampened the spirits of those who were injured by the Israelis the last time. Bilal al-Ali, twenty-one years old and from Burj al-Shmali camp, was hit by shrapnel in his thigh while at Maroun al-Ras. He had run down the hillside, blood boiling, after having seen dead and injured bodies being carried up. “Nothing could stop me,” he said. He began throwing stones at the fence when a bullet exploded past him, shrapnel getting lodged in his leg. “I didn’t feel it at all. People started to notice the blood and pointed it out to me,” he described, explaining that he refused to be loaded into an ambulance as there were other people more seriously injured than him.

“I’m going back on the 5th [of June] no matter what the price is,” he stated matter-of-factly. “Last time I got shot there, next time who knows, but whatever the result, I will take it. I am going for myself, and I am going for Palestine, nothing will stop me.” 

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412