Maryam Zohny on Palestine, Activism, and Solidarity

New Article Submission

Thank you for your interest in Jadaliyya. We welcome all submissions. The most significant requirement is for Jadaliyya submissions to be analytically compelling and offer a perspective or argument that has not been covered at length either on Jadaliyya or elsewhere. Because of the volume of submissions, well-written pieces are prioritized. Length is flexible, 1000 to 2500 words is the average range. However, we will accept longer pieces. Once submitted, several members of the editorial committee will review your piece and one of them will inform you of the decision.
Author Details
Article Details
Select Countries
Select Keywords
Select Topics
Only RTF, Word, and Pages documents accepted.

Recommended image size: 762x800 px

Location of each image should be indicated in the text of the article via a square bracket caption that includes: (1) a description of the image; (2) the photographer/designer and source of the image. Please note we only use images you as the author have the right to use, which usually means those of your own creation or those published under Creative Commons. Alternatively, you need specific permission from the copyright holder.
Please read the Release Form and provide an electronic signature [your full name] below to confirm that you accept its terms
Required
Hyperlink words in your article if they refer to links on the internet. We encourage more, rather than less, links (try to avoid footnotes—embed them as hyperlinks if possible)

Article added successfully.

Pages Menu BETA
Oct 11, 2013 Palestine
[Image of Maryam Zohny. Image provided by author. [Image of Maryam Zohny. Image provided by author.

Maryam Zohny on Palestine, Activism, and Solidarity

By : Maryam Zohny

[This post is part of an ongoing Profile of a Contemporary Conduit series on Jadaliyya that seeks to highlight distinct voices primarily in and from the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia.] 

Jadaliyya (J): Can you describe the aims, goals, and operations of the LEAP Program to us?

Maryam Zohny (MZ): Learning for the Empowerment and Advancement of Palestinians (LEAP) is a grassroots program that was established in 2010 with the aim of empowering Palestinian refugee youth in Lebanon through education. Education is a liberating tool. Through nurturing students’ intellectual and creative growth and providing them with a productive space to learn, we hope to re-inspire students’ thirst for knowledge and encourage them to continue their education, so they may become agents of change in their communities. LEAP is operated as a labor of love with a commitment to the right to education for all children and the recognition of refugee rights.  We are strictly a volunteer-run program with no paid staff or administrators.

We began as only a summer project in 2010 with seven volunteers in one camp and one hundred fifty students. Since then, we have grown exponentially due to the community’s request to increase and expand our projects. After only three years, LEAP has expanded to five refugee camps and worked with over one hundred fifty volunteers and one thousand eight hundred students. Furthermore, additional components have been added to our projects, such as teacher training and a community project.  Moreover, LEAP began with one project and is now operating three projects.

LEAP is centered on English proficiency because the national Brevet examination required for promotion to high school is administered in English. Unfortunately, due to lack of proficiency in English, the majority of Palestinian refugee students fail this exam, tragically and abruptly discontinuing their educational career. Failure to pass the national Brevet exam also prevents students from exploring vocational opportunities, as many vocational centers require a Brevet certificate. For Palestinians in Lebanon, this is crippling, considering that they are already prohibited from working in over seventy professions.  Vocational training has been proven to significantly increase their access to employment opportunities. LEAP hopes to improve students’ English proficiency so that they may continue their education and gain access to greater opportunities and resources. Moreover, LEAP offers students a space to engage in fun and cooperative learning exercises and activities, so as to re-inspire students to seek knowledge and creatively think their way through life in spite of the many limitations they are faced with in Lebanon.

J: You were also the program director of Columbia`s Center for Palestine Studies. What does the center do?

MZ: The Center for Palestine Studies (CPS) is the first and only such academic center of its kind at an American university. The Center promotes the academic study of Palestine by supporting research, teaching and intellectual collaboration among scholars within Columbia University and beyond. A principle mandate of the Center is to promote scholarship and facilitate exchanges with scholars, students, and academic institutions in the West Bank and Gaza, and among refugees and others in the Palestinian diaspora.

The creation of CPS honors the scholarly legacy of Professor Edward Said at the university, where he taught for forty years. Through his extensive writings, Said developed a critical dialogue about Palestine in the United States from his academic base at Columbia. This year marks the tenth anniversary of his passing, in which CPS and Columbia University are organizing a series of events to reflect on his legacy.

The Center organizes numerous programming activities on various topics. A few of our most central themes have been archives, Palestine and law, the Nakba, and refugees, with special attention paid to film and the arts.

J: What inspires you to continue engaging in activism when it is not always clear if change is being made, or when the end does not seem near?

MZ: Without labels, such as activist or activism, I consider the work I do to be guided by two factors: one being a strong conviction in social justice, and the second, in line with the first, is a responsibility (wajib) in ensuring I am doing what I can to achieve the former, whether it is related to domestic issues or international issues. I see the world as a collective community and believe we should each do our part to empower marginalized communities and work towards equality. Historical circumstances and occurrences led me to a place with greater opportunities, in which I have access to significantly more privileges than many of my brothers and sisters. There is no end to advocating for social justice, since unfortunately, a myriad of issues continue to exist all of which deserve our time and focus. But Palestine, for me, is central.

My inspiration is rooted in my childhood. Attending most of my adolescent schooling in Spanish Harlem, racial and social inequalities were evident to me at a young age. Walking between districts, it was apparent to me, even at the age of thirteen, that systemic and inherently racist structures kept certain populations oppressed, particularly Black and Latino communities in the US, with the targeting of the Arab and Muslim communities taking place more recently. Thus, my inspiration at an early age came from groups like the Young Lords and the Black Panthers who worked to serve, protect, and empower their communities.

I remember learning about Bobby Hutton at age sixteen. At the same age, Hutton had joined the Panther party as its youngest member. Shortly after, he was killed in an exchange with police officers, having been shot multiple times. Hutton’s story has stayed with me ever since. His commitment to improving his community at such a young age, based on the conviction that it is the only right thing to do, as opposed to what is popular, convenient, or self-serving, is admirable. He was a role model to me at that age.

Over the years, I continued to gain inspiration from those remaining steadfast to in spite of the most heinous conditions and treatment, such as Palestinian hunger strikers; our students/friends/colleagues in the refugee camps of Lebanon who continue to push forward for a better life despite the grim opportunities available to them; and mothers and fathers around the world who wake up every morning and work long hours in humiliating and degrading conditions to feed their children and provide shelter for their families. It is in these struggles that one also finds the beauty of the human spirit and strong character, which is inspirational.  

History reassures me that change is possible. We know from history that rights are never granted and reforms never made without pressure and advocacy. Therefore, action is our main hope for change; anything less will only guarantee the status quo.

J: What resources do activists in your community have that you believe are particularly valuable? What resources do they lack?

MZ: Now more than ever, activists in the United States have an array of resources that were unavailable even five years ago. For example, now there is a Palestine legal support initiative whereby lawyers offer free consultation and guidance. There is now also a national network of Palestine student groups working on a third national conference under the National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP) network. In addition, there is increased access to alternative news sources such as the Electronic Intifada, Jadaliyya, Mondoweiss, and the Palestine Chronicle, among many others, which offer the Palestine narrative and make on-the-ground news more accessible. Furthermore, digital networks have made it easier to form transnational advocacy networks and to connect with people around the world, which has been a crucial tool. These networks have allowed for Palestinians on the ground and in the diaspora to articulate and share their own stories directly, be it  via Facebook, Twitter, Youtube or other social media outlets.

J: To what extent do you think it is necessary to build solidarity outside of your country and the community of activists in your area of focus?

MZ: Building networks and connections with Palestinians on the ground is crucial for the Palestine solidarity movement. It is important for Palestinians to determine their own path and struggle to self determination. For activists to be in solidarity, they should help support the campaigns and strategies Palestinians are calling for and help amplify their efforts.

Palestinians are fragmented in their nationhood and collective identity and it has been difficult to reconvene a national dialogue due to a dispersed diaspora. Thus, transnational networks allow for Palestinians, and those in solidarity, to engage in such discussions to strengthen the movement.

J: How have political transformations happening in the region affected your work?

MZ: The political climate in the Middle East since the Arab revolts has greatly impacted our work on the ground in Lebanon. For example, since the uprising in Syria, we have been unable to expand our work to Northern Lebanon, despite the need and request, due to high security risk. Thus, we have remained concentrated in Beirut and Tyre. However, the security situation this summer escalated and clashes spilled to other parts of Lebanon, compelling LEAP to cancel its projects in three of the five camps we were expected to operate in. As a result, we were forced to cancel our projects for over six hundred of our students and one hundred fifty of our teachers.

Furthermore, due to the large influx of refugees from Syria, our student population has significantly changed over the past couple of years. Before, LEAP’s student demographic consisted of primarily Palestinian refugees from Lebanon. However, since the uprising in Syria, a larger number of our student population is now Syrian or Palestinian refugees from Syria. This necessitated that we rearrange our curriculum owing to different education levels and systems between Syria and Lebanon, and better train our volunteers on how to deal with students who have recently experienced trauma and devastating circumstances since their exile from Syria.

The difficulty of operating in a volatile and dynamic country like Lebanon is that we never know whether or not we will be able to implement our projects. We hope for the best and continue to plan, but it may all be in vain if the security situation forces us to suspend a project. Over the last four years we have had to carefully monitor the security situation and measure the risk of implementing our projects. However, this is a daily reality for the people of Lebanon. We have learned that the only way to move forward is to continue to build and attempt to make a varied future possible. 
Tags
Jun 7, 2013 Lebanon
Linah Alsaafin By :
Linah Alsaafin

Linah Alsaafin on Social Media and Palestine

[This post is part of an ongoing Profile of a Contemporary Conduit series on Jadaliyya that seeks to highlight distinct voices primarily in and from the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia.]

Jadaliyya (J): What do you think are the most gratifying aspects of Tweeting, and Twitter?

Linah Alsaafin (LAS): Twitter is a great aspect of citizen journalism. It brings worlds closer, in the sense that people living in different countries can easily interact with each other. One highlight is that mainstream media outlets now consider certain Twitter sources as reputable, such as Robert Mackey from the New York Times blog, The Lede, who uses Storify to recount events, including when Mustafa Tamimi from Nabi Saleh was killed on 9 December 2011. Twitter is also used to call out and express views against what is officially parroted out to media by the abysmal Palestinian and Israeli leadership. There’s little chance of being censored by Twitter in such cases.

J: What are some of the political/social/cultural limits you’ve encountered using platforms like Twitter, and blogs like Electronic Intifada? How would you compare it to your work for Al Jazeera and Al-Monitor?

LAS: I think Twitter was first used by Palestinians to inform the world of what was happening on the ground, about the Israeli occupation policies and how they affect Palestinian communities and individuals. That widened to include other Palestinians within the information sphere, where it created a loose band of mutual connections: a network. You have Palestinians communicating and relaying updates from protests, their thoughts, jokes, and articles to each other from Gaza, the West Bank, the ’48 territories, and those in exile. Twitter is a reflection of the occupation-imposed Palestinian geographical and cultural fragmentation, and an attempt to weld this division by closing the gap through cyberspace. When events take place in Jerusalem, we know who we can count on and to follow for updates, as in Gaza and the West Bank. 

Socially speaking, I’ve had the pleasure of encountering many of the Palestinian Tweeps face to face after getting to know them exclusively from Twitter, whether from protests, meetings, or a simple hang out. I’ve traveled to Gaza twice since November 2012 and was “reunited” for the first time with young women and men who I came to intimately know from their writings, blogs, and Twitter. Likewise, it is also gratifying meeting activists from Umm al-Fahem, Haifa, or Jerusalem. It’s a surreal feeling, and a minor victory that we owe to our utilization of social media to rebuild these splintered connections with each other. It opens up your mind to other realities as well, as you learn of the daily reality and experiences of your friends that carry different color-coded Israeli military-issued ID cards. 

Electronic Intifada is different from Al Jazeera, Al-Monitor, and Al Akhbar English in that in addition to writing articles and conducting interviews, I also blog for EI. With blogging, I can write pretty much whatever I want, such as my thoughts and feelings on a particular protest, describing firsthand my experiences with the Israeli occupation and the PA repression, etc. It’s more liberating in that sense, as readers get a good grasp of where my politics and thoughts very clearly lie. I incorporate my personal accounts and experiences into my blogs, and can comfortably rant against the PA and use “strong language,” such as describing them as collaborators led by a quisling without worrying about getting censored or for the post to be deemed “inappropriate.” With the other three outlets mentioned above, it’s strictly about the traditional journalistic writings, reports and such. 

J: In your experience and use of social media, do you feel it helps mobilize or disorganize? Focus or crowd? Is it manageable or noisy? Can it help persuade and mobilize or does it turn everyone into a voyeur and spectator?

LAS: There isn’t a correct answer for this; it can go both ways. It can organize as we’ve witnessed with the worldwide trending campaigns in support of the Palestinian hunger strikers, especially Samer Issawi, and it can disorganize due to a simple misunderstanding. We always have to be aware of verifying information before sharing it, because there are serious repercussions when it comes to sharing archived photos, false news, and rumors with your followers and the social media world – whether intentionally or not. One example is when UN employee Kholoud Badawi accidentally tweeted a photo of a Palestinian girl killed on the presumption that it was a picture from an Israeli air strike the same day. The Israeli officials hounded her online and pressured the UN to fire her. 

Social media can mobilize people, but in my opinion it should be backed with on-the-ground experience. There’s no problem in being a Twitter activist and an activist on the ground, but the two tend to collide. In larger demonstrations, it is preferable to have organized previously with a communications team whose role is to provide live updates, live streaming, photos, etc. If everyone wants to protest then we will end up relying on reporters and not from those on the ground, and if everyone at the protest is tweeting then there will be redundant and an overload of information echoed out. The key is to find the balance, to organize and to coordinate with one another.

J: In one of your recent articles, you describe the havoc that Israeli settlers and soldiers have wreaked upon the family and property of Khaled Daraghmeh, a Palestinian farmer in the West Bank. Do you think the increasing international attention to settler crimes and to the illegality of Israeli settlements will spur better protections for Palestinians under occupation? Why or why not?

LAS: The international community is characterized by one word, and that is complicity. They can write up hundreds of human rights reports, issue a million condemnations and express as many regrets over the Israeli occupation’s policy. But unless they take up serious measures to bring Israel to accountability – such as sanctions against the occupying entity and divestment from companies that profit from the occupation, in addition to somehow finding a way to debase the US veto against any punitive action against Israel – they will remain complicit in the occupation and international law will further be cemented as a farce for the Palestinians.

J: A number of your pieces have detailed the complicity of the Palestinian Authority in the occupation, including their inaction regarding settler violence, their welcoming of Obama despite his continued military and economic support for Israel, and the PA`s repression of Palestinian demonstrators. In your opinion, is the PA reformable? And if not, what steps must be taken to challenge the PA effectively?

LAS: The PA is absolutely not reformable. There is no middle ground on this. Its sole existence was to maintain the security interests of Israel while pacifying Palestinians under limited self-rule. It is increasingly clear that in order for another uprising to happen, the collaborative PA must be dealt with an existential blow. I believe we are still years away from this point, as the current general disgruntlement and fear of repression from the PA must be channeled into awareness for its abortive role in Palestinian liberation and self-determination, which will naturally lead to action-oriented measures. However, as more than 750,000 Palestinians are dependent on the PA for their livelihoods (and that number is obviously higher when you include their families), this will take some time to undertake and initiate alternatives. People will ask, “What happens after you dissolve the PA? Will we be left in a political vacuum?” But getting rid of the PA is a revolution in itself, and in revolutions, alternatives are never previously and calculatingly planned out. The whole point of raising awareness on a collective front is to ensure that we won’t become victims of another native subcontractor for the Israeli occupation. By targeting the PA, we would have targeted a significant extension of the occupation itself. Getting rid of one autocratic system is never achieved by peaceful measures alone. This is the same PA that has recognized Israel’s right to exist, transformed the national narrative into a meaningless Bantustan and largely symbolic state on 16 percent of the West Bank, and works effusively with the Israeli army to crush dissent and maintain the status quo. So calling for burning the PA ministries, for example, is not a hedonistic and uncivilized or exaggerated act, precisely because they symbolize the subjugation of Palestinians from resisting actively against the occupation. 

J: One of your most recent articles on Electronic Intifada detailed the comments of a Palestinian heckler living inside Israel/the `48 Palestinian Territories. What role, if any, do you see for Palestinian citizens of Israel in the movement for liberating Palestine? What separates them from Palestinians in the OPT, and what separates them from Israeli Jews? 

LAS: As a person living in the West Bank, I cannot dictate what the role for Palestinian citizens of Israel should be. Their reality is much different from mine, and more complicated. What is classified as “normalization” for me doesn’t necessarily apply to them, as they live as a minority, the fifth column within Israeli society, and are forced to rely on the Israeli government for services in their day-to-day lives. What is crucially important, however, is the knowledge and awareness of where they stand in Israel, and that is as second or third class citizens with over 50 Israeli government laws that discriminate against them, purely for being Palestinian Arabs. Living within this institutionalized racist society should be highlighted by civil disobedience, and overt normalization projects such as a joint Israeli-Palestinian art exhibition for example should be battled. A special shout out goes to the youth of the third generation refugees of the village of Iqrith who have admirably taken matters into their own hands and physically returned to set up and maintain life there. It is highly important for Palestinians outside the ’48 territories to coordinate with them in various ways in order to maintain the connection and unity of the Palestinian people as one, all oppressed by the same military occupation regime.

[Linah Alsaafin tweets at @LinahAlsaafin and blogs at the Electronic Intifiada.]