Protesting Israel’s Dehumanization and Demonization of the Palestinians

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Jun 19, 2019 Palestine-Israel
Protesting Israel’s Dehumanization and Demonization of the Palestinians

Protesting Israel’s Dehumanization and Demonization of the Palestinians

By : Shahd Abusalama

Last month, I came under attack by Zionist groups and publications, including the Jewish Chronicle and UK Zionist Federation. Those attacks were routed through my university, Sheffield Hallam, as part of an organized attack on the Palestinian-led movement for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions of Israel, especially in England and Germany. Its purpose is to silence the rights-based movement that has succeeded in threatening Israel’s culture of impunity. It aims to undermine BDS activists’ credibility and in my case, smear my academic reputation.

These attacks came after starring in a couple of videos, Cultural Boycott and Madonna Don’t Go, which London Palestine Action made to advocate for the Palestinian call to boycott Eurovision on the basis of its “art-washing” of Israeli crimes against the Palestinian people.

Let us start with where Eurovision physically takes place: the ethnically cleansed village of al-Manshiya, one of 531 Palestinian villages and towns completely destroyed and depopulated of their native populations in 1948 to make way for Israeli apartheid.

At the time of Eurovision, Palestinians were commemorating their seventy-first anniversary of the Nakba, a week after another Israeli aggression against the Gaza Strip that claimed twenty-five lives, including two pregnant women, two toddlers, and a twelve-year-old child. Less than an hour’s drive from the Tel Aviv Convention Centre which hosted Eurovision, two million Palestinians remain caged in the Gaza Strip where minimal means of survival are denied.

I was born and raised in Jabalia refugee camp, one of the Gaza Strip’s eight camps which house its majority-refugee population (seventy percent) whose original lands reside so close yet so far thanks to Israel’s denial of their Right of Return. This denial is brutally evident in Israel’s use of lethal force against the ongoing Great March of Return protesters in wide daylight before the contestant countries in Eurovision who ignored the context of apartheid to enjoy its glitz and glamor. Outraged at their complicity, Dr. Haidar Eid questioned in his last cultural boycott appeal from Gaza: “Why are you pretending not to see the colonization of Palestine? How does it feel to sing so close to so much human misery and suffering?”

On a positive note, the Boycott Eurovision campaign has caused Israel major political and financial losses and massively distorted the “prettier face” it wished to disseminate through Eurovision. This was due to BDS’s revealing what Israel desperately wanted to veil. I am proud to have contributed to the BDS success, but this comes at a price. 

 

The videos that featured me went viral with hundreds of thousands of views on social media platforms. That made Israel's supporters angry enough to dig into my old tweets with the intention of pulling out something that could discredit the liberation causes I represent.

The Jewish Chronicle published two articles, one online, and a shorter print version two days later, accusing me of anti-Semitism over a tweet I made in 2012 when I was barely twenty years old. The irrational wave of hate and racism kept flooding my way, despite deleting the tweet, recognizing its unintended offensive content, and clarifying that in my whole life in Gaza's prison until September 2013, I had never interacted with any Israeli Jew outside the framework of the ongoing wars which cost us horrific human and material loss.

Nowadays, thanks to Israel's devotion to conflating anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism to quell any criticism and protect itself from accountability, false accusations of anti-Semitism can lead to devastating consequences, especially for Palestinians. My brother Majed, for example, is facing criminal charges in Germany over BDS activism. Ironically, he is being persecuted alongside two Israeli anti-Zionist activists, Stavit Sinai and Ronnie Barkan, for protesting the visit of Aliza Lavie (Yesh Atid), a war-criminal member of the Israeli Knesset, chair of the anti-BDS lobby, and head of the Israeli mission to the European Council, to the Humboldt University in Berlin in June 2017. However, unlike his Israeli comrades who are privileged with the position of being white Israeli Jews with dual citizenship, my brother is vulnerable.

His vulnerability has increased after the German parliament passed a non-binding anti-BDS resolution on 17 May, labelling BDS as anti-Semitic with the intention of criminalizing a human-rights-based movement rooted in international law and UN resolutions. Stavit and Ronnie recognised this difference and commented, “We do not come as equals before the law.” My brother belongs to a stateless community, comes from the world's largest open-air prison to which he cannot return due to Israeli sea, land, and air blockade, and resides in Berlin on a temporary visa. His offense is protesting Israel’s decades-long dehumanization which he grew up with since the day he was born Palestinian, enabled by the likes of Lavie who are busy fueling more aggression against us while claiming victimhood and escaping justice. This is brutality.

Israel's culture of impunity assumes they can continue committing a gradual genocide against our existence, without us fighting back to reclaim our humanity and hold them accountable. If we “dare to dream,” to use Eurovision’s slogan this year, we face Israel’s multi-faced violence, which chases us wherever we go, even when we physically break free of Israeli systems of oppression to Europe. And unfortunately, the Israeli narrative continues to enjoy Western bias despite growing resistance from believers in global justice across the world. As a result, our suffering and yearning for freedom and justice is left unheard and unseen in the mainstream. Meanwhile, Israel and Western governments are criminalizing the BDS movement, which has given us an empowering non-violent tool to tackle those intersecting international systems of oppression against us, and a solidarity tactic to break this chain of complicity.

In September 2018, following an article I published on Al-Jazeera protesting the IHRA's anti-Semitism definition which potentially makes calling Israel a racist endeavor a criminal offense, a person who identified himself as Vienna's “only Jewish criminal attorney at law” and  wrote to my university, accusing me of anti-Semitism. In his long email, he claims that I “do not understand” what apartheid and anti-Semitism is. He forgot that I know what these are not only from textbooks but from a first-hand experience of being born a Palestinian woman of colour, something that drives my passion and actions against injustice and all forms of racism. If anyone looks at the Palestinians' traumatic encounter with Zionism throughout the past century, they would come to the conclusion that United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379 reached in 1975, which equated Zionism with colonialism and South African apartheid, and determined Zionism as “a form of racism and racial discrimination.” He refused to see how Palestinians experience Zionism and ended his letter by advocating for Israel’s travel bans against BDS activists and human rights organizations, saying,

It might be acceptable to boycott just those activists who preach for the boycott of Israel. So please tell this student not to come to us, not to enter our community. She is not welcome here. We do not want to see her. We do not want to hear her. She can stay wherever they want to, but please let her stay away from us.

He used the word “her.” However, this student has a name and identity, and it is me he wants disciplined. Moreover, Israel’s travel bans do not apply to me. As a refugee, Israel already denies us our inalienable right to return as guaranteed by the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194 of 1949, its choking siege on Gaza which paralyzed movement and life there, has left us unable to even return to our refugee camps.

There was nothing in my article that supports this attorney's claim. In fact, the article was an optimistic reflection on Theresa May's visit to Robben Island, where a journalist embarrassed her by questioning what she did to end apartheid in South Africa, knowing that her party slammed Nelson Mandela, who was imprisoned there for decades, as a terrorist and called for his execution. My article simply promised the Palestinians the same destiny which South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement had sought–liberation. This attorney’s complaint ignored my history as a Palestinian refugee and survivor of Israel's ideologically-racist oppression, instead turning resistance to that oppression into a crime. Targeting me though my academic aspirations was his best tactic.

Those attacks against my brother Majed and me are not solitary, nor are we uniquely targeted. This Zionist-led witch-hunt has targeted many Palestinian and solidarity activists. Palestinians see this organized attack as another form of the dehumanization that we have experienced without interruption amidst the continuing denial of our legitimate struggle for freedom from Israeli apartheid and settler colonialism, which for many has not simply meant living a precarious life, but having one’s life at stake. We do not forget that Israel has a brutal history of detaining, torturing, deporting, and assassinating Palestinian activists.

The latest attack followed the footsteps of Vienna's attorney in targeting me as an academic and through academic institutions, challenging my right to speak rather than my ideas. The Jewish Chronicle identified me as a PhD student at Sheffield Hallam University. However, I have not mentioned my academic affiliation in any of the videos’ promotions, and simply identified as a Palestinian activist and artist.  A few twitter trolls engaged in the smears that JC launched by tagging Sheffield Hallam twitter account without involving me. I eventually found out after the UK Zionist Federation tagged me and Sheffield Hallam University in the same tweet that reduced me to an anti-Semite. Like that attorney, many overlooked my history as belonging to a people undergoing an anti-colonial struggle and whose right to resist is guaranteed by international law.

Several Saturdays ago, I stood before the Not Eurovision Party for Palestine audience ready to recite a poem by heart, entitled Palestine, before I joined my Dabke Dance Company Hawiyya to perform our folk dance Dabke. I was supposed to co-host the party but I stepped down at the last minute due to anxieties sustained after this smear campaign, and decided to limit my participation to Hawiyya’s performance. However, as I started to recite, I lost the words. However, the support I got from that crowd empowered me to continue–it was eventually a massive success. Yet I acknowledge my mental and physical exhaustion due to a combination of over-work, over-worry about my family’s precarity in Palestine and being dehumanized in exile by hostile media representations, UK-Israel arms trade and the persisting denial and demonization of our struggle.

Nonetheless, the support I received after I denounced this cyber-attack in a statement was overwhelming. I may be vulnerable due to my Palestinian identity, my history of trauma, my UK refugee residency, and being far from my family who are locked in Gaza. I belong, however, to a much bigger family of solidarity, for whose dedication to our struggle for justice I am forever grateful. My statement concluded with a promise:

As a Palestinian woman resisting Israel’s occupation, racial supremacy and apartheid, I shall continue to reject Zionism as a racist ideology while firmly condemning anti-Jewish bigotry. Our struggle is against all forms of oppression and racism. We target complicity, not identity.

Until justice prevails.
Jul 9, 2013 Lebanon
Zeynep Gambetti By :
Zeynep Gambetti

Occupy Gezi as Politics of the Body

Since the Gezi resistance started with bloodshed on 31 May, it has had an “anti-depressant” effect, as a friend of mine puts it, as much as it has been nerve-racking. During this period where each day has been prone to new crises and normalcy was completely disrupted, we simultaneously experienced the peaks of ecstasy and the depths of sorrow.

Analyzing such an intense event naturally requires taking some distance. Pending systematization, however, the vivid memory of each day impels one to put on paper multifarious ideas that resonate well with the resistance. Each morning, many bodies with sleep deprived eyes wake up in Istanbul, Ankara, Antakya, Urfa, and Denizli to take to the streets once again, after having quickly checked the latest news in the social media. They are astonished and impressed that they can still walk, run, stand up, and carry provisions for those in the parks. Exhausted bodies rejuvenate with every new threat that the government utters, and with thousands, tens of thousands of others they begin flowing to Taksim, Kızılay, Kuğulu Park, Gündoğdu, Abbasoğlu, and Yeniköy Park carrying home-made gas masks, swimmer goggles, anti-acid solutions, and whistles.

No one does or can govern these bodies. The masses that gather in public spaces are not formed by virtue of transferring tax money into the wallets of partisans. No one provides shuttle buses for them; no one gives them flags, or feeds them with sandwiches. No one assigns them the slogans they shout out during the demonstrations. Bodies that take heart from knowing that they are not alone do not count, or count on, numbers to meet with others in communal or virtual spaces. One standing man suffices for thousands of others to take to the streets. After all, “one” is also a number…

The government, whose tactlessness prompts these resisting and standing bodies to convene again and again every single day, could not have missed the significance of this body politics. These bodies naturally do have a language, even a few languages that are at times congruent and at others incongruent; however, as a whole, they constitute a politics of the body. The rage and dreams that have been embodied in tweets and graffiti since 31 May turn into material realities through the physical existence, visibility, and endurance of the bodies. If history is being rewritten, then its subject is the body.

Four of these bodies lost their lives during this war that the government has waged on society. Thousands of bodies have been beaten up: some lost their eyes, some received irretrievable injuries. Skins were burnt under the water from the cannons, “laced” with chemicals for maximum harm; lungs were choked with tear gas. Pounded arms, legs, and heads got crushed and broken. The long-term effects of the tons of chemicals dumped on bodies are still unknown. What is known, however, is that these chemicals killed hundreds of cats, dogs, and birds, and that they did harm to countless insects, butterflies, and other smaller organisms.

The apparatuses of the state, and the vehicles of death that responded to Gezi’s politics of the body, attempted to imitate the life force that they failed to extort. In response to the huge numbers that filled the parks and squares and astonished everyone without exception, they hoped to gather partisans together in scripted rallies. They began comparing head counts; they calculated representative percentages. When the calculations did not match, they increased the number of police in body armor and helmets and moved them from protest to protest. They built walls of flesh and steel against the wave of resisting flesh. When that did not work, they offered these bodies—which have been in contact with each other physically and virtually through meetings, banners, and tweets—a mise en scène of dialogue, the conditions of which were more or less already determined. They could not even wait for this attempt to yield fruit; two warnings and a command were enough to launch an assault to remove the bodies that produced an alternative sociability from the park, from the space in which physical resistance could be transformed into a life style. They freed the public space of the public. They collected all the banners, pictures, and colors one by one to erase them from social memory. They stripped all the trees, each dedicated to victims of state violence; they appropriated the barricades that were named after tens of people who had undergone physical and psychological torture, and they tore them to tatters. They destroyed the efforts to keep alive the memories of Fikret Encü, who was a victim of Roboski; Metin Göktepe, who was tortured and killed in detention; Dicle Koğacoğlu, who could not take all the sorrow inherent in this society any more; and the Surp Hagop Armenian Cemetery, which was destroyed by Turkish racism.

The only thing that remains is a politics of the body—but the bodies that produce this politics differ from what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life.” They are not “mere” bodies that the arbitrary will of a sovereign can isolate from society, oppress unceremoniously, or push to the margins of the symbolic world. Rather, they evoke what Ernst Bloch calls “the upright man,” the collective Prometheus. Bloch writes:

Nothing is more fortifying than the call to begin from the beginning. It is youthful as long as it is; to it there belongs a young and aspiring class. It is innocent of the bad things that have happened, for it has never had a real opportunity to be guilty. When this happens, justice has the effect of a morning; it opposes itself to that eternal sickness which was handed down before it. Beginning anew is freshness through and through; it is a first if it appears completely ahistorical, and if it seems to lead back to the beginning of history….It carries the image of the pastoral mood, of the shepherd, of the simple and upright man; one can play with it even in the dark.[1]

Gezi is the struggle of disorderly bodies, those who do not have any dispositif other than their own bodies, against the death machines. If the machines are regulatory instances that follow commands and extort public spaces of mobility with force and violence, then the force they face is the resistance of life itself. Life flourishes at the most unexpected moments and places, just like weeds that crack the concrete and spring out of it. No apparatus of the state can succeed in dominating life absolutely.

The state seeks order; it can control only those whom it orders. It cannot cope with the demand of "freedom"; it has to ask questions such as “freedom for whom,” “freedom for what,” or “freedom under what circumstances” in order to tuck freedom into neat boxes. Order draws borders, fixes identities, and defines. It attempts to establish a hierarchy. By telling parents to take their daughters and sons home from the park, it both brands the resisting bodies as "children" and tries to trigger into action the nucleus of society: family. Through its rhetoric of security, it attributes the risks of its own making to the resisting bodies. It hangs its own flag or banner on the bodies that it prefers knocking down rather than protecting. It punishes those who do not obey; it uses punishment as retaliation. It operates through censorship, threats, and propaganda.

Life, on the other hand, is a constant flux. It challenges borders and moves beyond them. It opens up to circulation those spaces that are closed off due to construction; it paints such destructive vehicles as bulldozers pink; it transforms steps into tribunes, pieces of iron into wish trees, and trees destined to be cut down into monuments. It walks on highways and bridges that are closed to pedestrians. It does not like the empty and the sterile; it covers them up with banners, slogans, tents. It leaves its mark on every surface. It disrupts silence at times with pots and pans, and at other times with a tune from a piano. It plays with identities and definitions; it makes them fluid; it renders them indistinguishable. It can make fun of both itself and the established order thanks to its humor. By changing one single letter in a word, it can ridicule the heaviest of symbolisms. When the state apparatus sends a riot-intervention vehicle to pour tear gas on it, life stops to catch its breath for a while and goes right back to resisting. When a body grows tired, it gets replaced by a reinvigorated one. Life turns into thousands of fingers that tweet and take photographs when the state apparatus sends down vehicles of propaganda. It stops its wheelchair to grab the flag that fell on the ground while escaping from tear gas. It apologizes when it steps on someone`s foot while running; it calms down those who panic.

It is obvious that these bodies that fascism wants to militarize will not assume any ideological identity. When they do not drink alcohol, they ridicule conservatism; when they lie under a TOMA, they make fun of liberalism, which claims that life is the most valuable good. Orthodox Marxism cannot decide under which class struggle these "çapulcu" bodies are to be subsumed. As long as they stay in physical contact, as long as they remain as collective Prometheuses, as long as they—have to—continue the resistance, they grow accustomed to each other`s colors, languages, and genders. They disrupt the behavioral rules that ideologies and institutions expect from them. The natural or moral instinct of protection that has been attributed to mothers loses ground when female bodies participate in the resistance alongside their children. The nationalist and the Kurd exchange anti-acid solutions in gas-filled hotel lobbies. The upper-class college kid drinks the water handed over by the kid with an Anonymous mask without needing to ask what neighborhood he’s from. Soccer fans save their curses for the police rather than for their rivals.

What comes out of all this is trust, not chaos. That`s why the bodies multiply with every gush of tear gas, spaces expand with every police attack, and the quality of contact among the bodies increases with every propaganda speech. The life woven together by bodies born in Gezi is so tenacious that the government is right in fearing it. The power of these bodies stems from their capacity to mutualize endurance, rather than vulnerability (as Judith Butler envisioned they would). One would need to look into the extensive interstices of this politics of the body, rather than into macro-level discourses, to begin deciphering it.

NOTES

[1] Ernst Bloch, Natural Right and Human Dignity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 61.

[An earlier version of this article was published on 26 June 2013 on BIA ("Independent Communication Network"). The link to that version can be found here. This article was translated from Turkish by Gülfer Göze.]