A short essay on Palestine and Israel

[This essay was written on Oct 11, 2023, a few days after the initial Hamas attack on Israel. In just the last couple of days, the humanitarian and political catastrophe has considerably worsened. As I add this short prelude, Israel is dropping thousands of bombs on Gaza in retaliation for the Hamas attack. Thousands of Palestinians have died. An evacuation order has been placed on the residents of Gaza. Many predict this order will amount to ethnic cleansing and genocide. In the US, sadly, we are seeing further entrenchment of antisemitism as well as anti-Muslim racism. In Chicago, a 71-year-old landlord stabbed a 6-year-old Palestinian boy to death. My God. At this very moment, there is little reason for optimism. And yet, as I write in this essay, the commitment I am making is to hold on to my humanity.]

I've started and stopped this short essay dozens of times just in the past 48 hours. It has been hard if not impossible to process the scale of suffering and violence going on right now in Israel and Palestine. In the political climate of academia where I reside, just uttering the words "Israel" or "Palestine" seems polarizing, dangerous, and downright foolish. Thinking, let alone saying, let alone writing anything at all is a guarantee to piss people off. Most of us will watch...well we're in America, so more accurately a few of us will watch from the comfort of our homes and offices, and then decide to keep quiet. We will continue to hug and kiss our kids without considering the mothers and fathers in that part of the world who will never be able to hug and kiss their kids again. I won't belabor this here in the prelude, but it bears mentioning that there are many reasons to say nothing. To remain silent. That’s certainly my own instinct, and the one I'm actively working against in this post.

Since there is nowhere to start, I'll start here. I stand with Palestine. And I stand with the right of the Palestinian people to resist their oppressors. To some, that immediately translates to support for the vicious terrorist attacks Hamas has waged in recent days. It doesn't. Hamas does not have a blank check. I'm sickened by the images and stories of Israeli civilians who have died in recent days. And I can't even begin to imagine the pain those families are experiencing. And of course, there is pain on both sides. And while we don't want to reduce this to a matter of numbers and stats, we all know what the math would say about which side has experienced more loss of life and which side has been responsible for loss of life. I don't mean any of this in a crude way, and yet I know that it does sound crude and even cruel to people with family in and ties to Israel given the specific sequence of events that have unfolded in the last few days beginning with the "surprise attack" Hamas waged. But of course that's not the beginning of the story. And as crazy as this sounds, the question of where precisely the story begins is precisely the source of all the debate, controversy, violence, reaction to violence, and on and on and on.  But you don't have to be a historian or social scientist to grasp the deep unevenness of power and historical oppression that Palestine has been subjected to. Journalists and scholars far more informed than I am have broken all this down ad infinitum, and I won't even try to cover all that ground here. But I will say that any assessment of the current situation that refuses to engage the immorality and violence of Israel's actions towards Palestine is not worth its weight in gold. As Israeli journalist Gideon Levy said speaking on BBC News: "Gaza is a cage, is the biggest prison in the world. Nobody spoke about lifting the siege. People who live 70 years in a cage want to resist, and if they have the possibility they'll do it..."  If you don't want to take Levy's word for it, consider what one of the highest-ranking government officials in Israel said just two days ago in the wake of the Gaza attack. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant:

“I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly."

We are fighting human animals? And explicitly and openly announcing an intent to commit atrocious war crimes? If all bets are off during war, then apparently all filters are off too. There is no denying the grotesque racism and unlawfulness in the Defense Minister's statement. Nor can we ignore the racism and dehumanization that is at the core of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.

It's sad and deeply problematic that in the US, and more specifically in academic institutions in the US, naming what I just named is often read as a form of antisemitism. To be very clear, antisemitism is a serious and urgent problem. And it's on the rise in the US and should be dealt with swiftly, forcefully, and deliberately. This makes it even more critically important that we disentangle hateful acts of antisemitism against Jewish people from the baseless accusations of antisemitism that are often levied at scholars and journalists who speak out against Israel or Zionism. Or for the Jewish critics of Israel/Zionism (and there are many), that criticism of Israel is somehow a form of self-hate. That's pitiful and I fully reject that. To put this in a global context: While in the US support for Israel is widespread even amongst liberals and the so-called “woke” Democratic party, it is not so in the broader international community. Much to the contrary, there is a broad consensus that Israeli settlements are illegal and a violation of international law.

So if we are serious about truly grappling with the current devastation, can we do so without talking about colonization and occupation, racism, human rights violations, or the apartheid state? Clearly, no. Debate the terms and ideas and how they are applied, but insisting on the right of a deeply dispossessed people to struggle for their survival and resist their oppression is a necessary and ethical position in my view. And the challenge, the profoundly, insanely difficult challenge is to do that in a way that also insists on the right of Israeli families, children, women, and civilians to live peacefully and securely. And to treat that as also a necessary ethical position. Insanely difficult. Maybe impossible. But maybe not. Seeking justice and freedom means living in that razor-thin space of radical possibility and hope.

I am pained by clumsy social media posts taking up the predictable ideological positions for or against whichever "side," without a sensitivity for human suffering. Persian poet and philosopher Saadi said something deeply wise and poetic about the moral imperative to remain empathetic to the suffering of all humans. Look it up. So have countless other activists, writers, and dissidents from many cultures and political viewpoints. I think this message is especially important to heed when it's the suffering of "the other." And yes, I think this is even true, maybe especially true when there is a deep power imbalance as exists between Palestine and Israel. One of my students where I teach at Northwestern University emailed two days ago saying she has a sister in Israel right now, that her family is scrambling to find her a way out of the country, and as a result she will need to miss class.  Yes, of course. My heart goes out to her and her family. I don't have any Palestinian students in my class this year, at least not that I'm aware of. Nor do I have any Palestinian colleagues whom I see or work closely with on a daily basis.  But I do have Jewish friends and colleagues, several of whom have ties to Israel. I cannot pretend to understand their pain and fear, or their anger. My heart goes out to them as well. While we turn to theory and history to understand the complexity of the times, we must not lose sight of our capacity to feel. This excerpt from a CNN article really broke my heart.

One Israeli mother told CNN she had been on the phone with her children, ages 16 and 12, who were home alone when they heard gunshots outside and people trying to enter. Then, over the phone, she heard the door break down. I heard terrorists speaking in Arabic to my teenagers. And the youngest saying to them ‘I’m too young to go,’” the mother said. “And the phone went off, the line went off. That was the last time I heard from them.

I'm also deeply aware that I work in the privileged halls of an elite American university where Palestinian people, voices, concerns, and hopes are systematically and structurally underrepresented. I save space in my heart for the absence of Palestine and Palestinian people in the halls of power. Out of sight, out of mind? No. That is a choice. There are plenty of outlets that I encourage us to seek out (JewishVoiceForPeace, Democracy Now, AlJazeera, The Nation, Jadaliyya, Truthout, The Intercept, and many others...) where humanizing and heartbreaking stories centering Palestinian lives are more common. This is from yesterday on AlJazeera describing the state of affairs in Gaza:

Entire families find themselves homeless, their neighbourhoods flattened. Across the Gaza Strip, plumes of smoke haze the skyline. “When we ran out the door, all we thought was Israel probably would just threaten us to leave to push fear in our hearts,” Jamal says. “I did not believe they would air strike the whole area and leave it in black ruins.

And to just glimpse the injustice that precedes the current catastrophe, consider this assessment by Human Rights Watch written earlier this summer:

From 2017 to 2021, fewer than one percent of complaints of violations by Israeli military forces against Palestinians, including killings and other abuses, resulted in indictments, the Israeli rights group Yesh Din reported. Israeli forces killed at least 614 Palestinians whom the UN classified as civilians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank during this period. But only three soldiers were convicted for killing Palestinians.

It is also an ethical duty to seek these out and allow ourselves to deeply feel the pain and suffering that the people of Palestine, and most acutely the 2 million subjugated residents of Gaza feel and experience on a daily basis. Not so we can justify or excuse this or that, but so that we can retain our ability and capacity to feel. As hollow or trite as that may sound, that's the work.

A final word on this before I lose any more friends. Don't let the pundits or politicians tell you what's happening is fundamentally about Islamic ideology. I'm saddened by many in my own Iranian diasporic community who have expressed their support for Israel, condemning not just Hamas but the Palestinian cause altogether. This is trauma speaking. Iranians in Iran and in the diaspora have been struggling against a brutal Islamic government that also happens to be a financial supporter of Hamas. Whether it's resenting a beneficiary of Iran's corrupt government or a more general distaste for Islam, what is sorely missing is nuance and precision. As my friend and colleague Dr. Roozbeh Shirazi wrote on Twitter, "It is not only possible to maintain opposition to the Iranian government’s oppressive politics and to support the Palestinian people’s struggle for dignity and freedom, it is in fact the necessary ethical position." Equating Islamic ideology with the Palestinian cause is to be manipulated by a reductive and regressive politics. Speaking for myself, my solidarity with the people of Palestine has absolutely nothing to do with an affinity towards Islamic ideology. Just last week I was at the United Center watching Dave Chappelle tell jokes to 22,000 Chicagoans, and I probably laughed a bit extra hard when he poked fun at a Palestinian couple, asking a Hijabi woman where she was from (Palestine) then quickly pivoting to the husband asking, "I'm sorry sir, do I have your permission to speak to your wife?" The crowd roared with laughter, especially me. Being down with Islamic ideology is not a prerequisite for supporting and standing with Palestine. 

There is nowhere to end, so I will end here. I will never make light of human suffering, whether Palestinian or Israeli. My political stance doesn’t obstruct my ability to feel deeply for Israelis, as I do for the oppressed peoples of Palestine. I intend to continue my study of the region to deepen my understanding, clarify my thinking, and hold my humanity close.