Honored to be a 'Freedom Rider'

[Image by Marc Israel Sellem.] [Image by Marc Israel Sellem.]

Honored to be a "Freedom Rider"

By : Mazin Qumsiyeh

I was honored to be a freedom rider and it was a team effort at its best (those who rode and the many who worked behind the scenes). Two other Palestinians were also arrested with us. They were there as a reporters/observers, not participants. All eight of us were eventually released pending potential trials. Fajr kindly gave us a ride to the edge of Beit Sahour from Ramallah (we were released at Qalandia checkpoint), where my wife met us with my car. She and I then gave Nadim and Badi` a ride to Hebron. I thus arrived home at 1:30 AM and the phones started ringing again at 7 AM.  I am extremely tired and with a headache, but wanted to send you a brief report and links to stories about this amazing and inspiring experience. While released, we are still charged with "illegal entry to Jerusalem" and with "obstructing police business" pending potential trial.  

This was one of the most heavily covered media events I have ever participated in. It was also streamed live on the internet and nearly 100,000 people signed a petition in support for us freedom riders. Thus, I do not need to write to you in detail about how three buses refused to let us board and then one driver (who later told journalists he did not know what was going on otherwise he would have also refused) allowed us on the bus and what happened on and off the bus.  Below are some links to published stories that give you a taste of all of this. Note especially the signs that we carried and showed before we rode the bus and from the windows of the bus (I am the one with the "DIGNITY" sign).  Perhaps I will write more, personally, when my mind is clearer and I have had some sleep. But there are two anecdotes that happened that are kind of unusual and funny and in some way worth telling while they are fresh in my mind:

  • They took me to the Shabak ("Israeli intelligence") guy before they took me to the investigator for the bus issue.  The Shabak guy did not ask me about the bus at all.  He introduced himself as head of the Shabak area of Ramallah (and previously of Nablus and Jenin).  He asked me if I was abroad recently.  I said yes.  He said what happened when you came back.  I said I was interrogated at the bridge.  He said "come-on interrogating is a big word". I said I do not know what else to call an 8 hour delay including 2 hours of actual questioning.  He said what else they told you.  I said that the interrogation would continue and that there is a captain "Suhail" or "Suhaib" or something like that who will call me later.  He said that that it is him and his name is "Shihab"!  I said "well then maybe we will save another visit"! He told me that is not likely as I seem to continue to "cause problems and violate laws". I said there is something called international laws and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  Denial of freedom of movement and entry to Jerusalem while allowing colonial settlers to live on our land and have freedom to travel in and out of Jerusalem on segregated buses is a violation of the International Convention Against the Crime of Apartheid. We also engaged in a political discussion and I explained about why Israel now has no incentive for peace (the three main sources of income for it would all dry up if there is peace) and my views of a democratic, pluralistic country for its entire people.

 

  • One young Ashkenazi soldier was very arrogant and even called me "Professor Teez" (Teez is Arabic for "ass").  We all (freedom riders) laughed it off and I told him that I did not insult him and that when someone insults me they demean themselves first.   When he repeated it after my interrogation by the Shabak, I stood up and confronted him and the Druz officer intervened and the soldier moved away. There were other incidents with other people similar showing that our collective attitude was strong, defiant, and resilient.  We all had Palestinian Kuffiyyas and kept wearing them.  Fadi even wrapped himself in the Palestinian flag the whole time except when they did the full body search.  We have some video from inside the compound which I will share later.


I came out to find the news that the Zionist mayor of New York Mike Bloomberg ordered the clearing out of the "Occupy Wall Street" protesters for now; a very important protest.* But my reading of history and trends tell me that the global intifada will only accelerate as a result of repression by the powers to be.
 

Freedom Riders Odyssey:

*Arundhati Roy: Occupy Wall Street is "So Important Because It is in the Heart of Empire"


[This article was originally published on Popular Resistance.]

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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