Nora Lester Murad - The View From My Window in Palestine

Black Lives Matter: The Best Thing That’s Happened to Palestinians in a Very Long Time

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This article originally appeared in LA Progressive.

At her last class on her last day of 11th grade in Newton, Massachusetts, my Palestinian-American daughter received a shock. Just before the zoom call ended, one student mentioned he’d be taking a gap year in Israel after graduation. Another student smirked, ‘I hear there’s a lot of land opening up over there.” The screen quickly went blank, and my daughter burst into angry tears.

I realize that many people reading this article won’t understand why. The fact that Israel may annex an additional 30% of the Palestinian West Bank is not widely known or understood. In the US and elsewhere, the discourse about Palestinian rights has been distorted and silenced, by fear of being called anti-semitic, by US foreign policy interests, by Christian zionism, and by Islamophobia. Perhaps worst is the common misbelief that Israelis and Palestinians constitute  “two equal sides” and that being “neutral” does no harm.

In the US and elsewhere, the discourse about Palestinian rights has been distorted and silenced, by fear of being called anti-semitic, by US foreign policy interests, by Christian zionism, and by Islamophobia.

As a white anti-zionist Jew from the US who married a Palestinian Muslim and lived in Palestine for 13 years, I see things differently. I see a “side” that wants equality and peace for everyone, and a “side” that believes that Israel should be a state for Jews maintained by institutional racism and military control over non-Jews.

The US has long supported Israel with money and political support that gives cover to Israel’s land grabbing. As a result, Israel, despite its ideology of Jewish supremacy, has been “normalized.” It is common for people I know to take family trips to Israel to celebrate a Bat Mitzvah or just to hang out on the beach in Tel Aviv. Despite being liberals, they are willing to ignore Israel’s ongoing human rights violations against Palestinians. This explains why my daughter, and so many other Palestinians, feel invisible, dehumanized, and unsupported—even in self-proclaimed “liberal” spaces.

But there may soon be a historic development in the Palestinian struggle.

It is August 2020 and we’re in the midst of arguably the most important escalation of the movement for racial justice in US history. The movement for Black lives calls not merely for Black liberation, but for sustainable transformation of our communities. The movement is black-led, intersectional, multiracial and has mobilized people all over the world. On the local, state and national levels, actors as diverse as corporations, schools and even restaurants are making public statements against institutional racism, a topic that was taboo in mainstream media just months ago.

And the protests are making a difference. Not only is there pressure for national police reform legislation, there are surprising and visible changes happening in local communities. In the city where I live, the police chief has resigned, possibly influenced by pressure for systemic change from our local Defund Newton Police Department group. Changes like support for Black businesses, the removal of statues glorifying confederate racists, and improvements to school curricula are real. Embedded in these changes is a dislodging of normalized inequality and the mainstreaming of ideas previously considered radical—like social transformation.

More and more white people seem to “get” that inequality isn’t accidental, but rather the natural outcome of a system that has institutionalized white supremacy.

This is a new chapter for Black Americans, one that will surely see both great gains and violent pushback. It also appears to be a new chapter for white people. More and more white people seem to “get” that inequality isn’t accidental, but rather the natural outcome of a system that has institutionalized white supremacy.

As for Palestinian rights, while there have been gains in recent years in US discourse, including by progressive Jewish groups, and while Black-Palestinian solidarity remains a strong pillar of both liberation movements, white people in the US are far from understanding Israel’s institutionalized racism against Palestinians, this despite strong parallels with the US.

Palestinians

White colonists took North America by committing genocide against Indigenous peoples; Israel’s colonization project is ongoing. Palestinian demands for self-determination remain a threat—not to Jews as people, but to the position Jews hold at the top of a highly racialized hierarchy in Israel. That explains, I think, the continued portrayal of all Palestinians as terrorists and Israeli violence against Palestinians being justified by “security” concerns.

So, while the image of unarmed Black men being murdered by US police (finally!) sparks outrage, the persistent murders of Palestinians by the US-funded state of Israel are met merely with muted criticism. And Israel’s historic decision to illegally expand its territory becomes a casual aside in a conversation among US teenagers.

I argue that Black Lives Matter may be the best thing that’s happened to Palestinians in a very long time. Because BLM targets the power structure of the United States—the very heart of global capitalism, the movement for Black lives is positioned to make real changes in the colonial, neocolonial, militaristic, capitalist and racist DNA of the United States that is wreaking havoc around the world.

I am hoping that the new-found popularity of Black struggles will lead white US people to listen more, act more, and make reparations. I also hope they will consider BLM’s internationalist analysis and realize that the US original sins of genocide and slavery are being recreated against peoples of the global south right now—with US funding and political support. I am hoping that white people, including white people who identify as Jewish, will be able to expand their commitment to racial equality to include their engagement with the Palestinian struggle, for the sake of my daughter and all our daughters and sons.

Racism (like all the other isms) is a global industry in the service of profit, and therefore, struggles against racism must be simultaneously local, national and transnational. Today’s Black liberation movement will help challenge the root causes of inequality in the United States, in Palestine, and around the world—if we support it fully and work to make those connections.

Launching a book in the midst of a pandemic

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Copies of my second book, I Found Myself in Palestine, arrived from the publisher in the middle of March. The very considerate delivery guy put down the books and moved away. “I’ll sign your delivery receipt,” he said, “so you don’t need to touch my pen and clipboard.”

There is nothing normal about launching a book in the midst of a pandemic.

The cover was beautiful and I liked holding the compact little book in my hands, but it didn’t feel like an accomplishment. It didn’t feel like the culmination of literally years of work by me and the 23 writers featured in the anthology. Honestly, it seemed trivial.

Hundreds of thousands more people have died since then, and the stress of uncertainty in the United States and around the world has grown. But I’m ready to share the book with the world anyway. Some people are reading more these days, and friends tell me that the personal approach of the book may bring calm and inspiration to some people. I hope so.

There is nothing normal about launching a book in the midst of a pandemic, but I hope that I Found Myself in Palestine will remind people that Palestinians, like many others, have experienced uncertainty and death for decades and they have kept their humanity. I hope we can all do the same.

Do today’s concurrent actions by Central Americans and Palestinians show a historic convergence of protest?

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Freedom is claimed not granted

Do today’s concurrent actions by Central Americans and Palestinians show a historic convergence of protest?

This article originally appeared in Transformation: Where Love Meets Social Justice

 

NY protest in support of asylum seekers’ rights

A photograph of Maria Virginia Duarte sits on my desk, and as I watch the coverage of the migrant caravan approaching the US border I think about her again. Maria arrived in the United States without documents from El Salvador in in the early 1970s. She became part of my family, and when I had my first daughter Maria dipped her finger in a cup of coffee and put it in my baby’s mouth (apparently in El Salvador that’s considered good for babies).

In 1986, Maria was one of the almost three million “illegal aliens” granted amnesty by Ronald Reagan, and she no longer needed to live in hiding. When she and her sister decided to visit El Salvador for the first time since they had escaped, I went with them. I met their relatives on both sides of the brutal civil war that took the lives of 75,000 people between 1980 and 1992. I took rickety buses on narrow, unpaved mountain roads to visit relatives who had no water, sewage or electricity. I was in the marketplace when in the blink of an eye, all the young boys disappeared into shops and houses just minutes before government forces marched around the corner to “recruit” child soldiers.

Nearly four decades later, Central Americans continue to risk their lives to escape conditions caused in great part by US foreign policy, only to find themselves unwelcome in the oft-touted “land of immigrants.” But something feels different this time around. Individuals and families are marching together. It is not “merely” thousands of scared people risking their lives to stay alive, as we have seen in the exodus from Syria. It is also a protest of sorts, a refusal to comply, and it’s being met not only with humanitarian aid, but with political solidarity.

It might just be me, influenced by 35 years of being married into a Palestinian family including 13 years living under Israeli military occupation, but no matter how they are portrayed in the media, the Central American caravan and Gaza’s Great Return March feel to me like a convergence. Regular people taking brave steps, inspiring others to join, and building community while claiming freedom.

Today’s protests stand firmly on generations of resistance. They are parts of movements, cultivated over decades out of smaller attempts and in response to increasing repression that has made clear to people that freedom is claimed not granted. And our claims for freedom must be global.

Of course there are many differences in the situations of the Palestinians in Gaza and the Central Americans on the caravan, but there are also a surprising number of similarities. The Central Americans are running away from their homelands to find refuge in the United States. They are challenging the borders that prevent them from living in safety with respect for their human rights. The Palestinians in Gaza are running towards their homeland and challenging the blockade of a “border” that illegally prevents two million people from returning to their homeland (1.3 million of whom are documented refugees).

The Central Americans are seeking the legal status of asylum, which is part of refugee law, while in Gaza, legally-recognized refugees are denied their right of return. In both cases, the US and Israel distort the law in an attempt to claim that the relevant protections don’t apply.

For example, the US government portrays Central Americans not as asylum seekers but as migrants – people who choose to move “not because of a direct threat to life or freedom, but in order to find work, for education, family reunion, or other personal reasons,” as the UN puts it (p. 17). This enables the authorities to evoke their rights as sovereign states to deny entry into their borders and say that caravan participants should apply using existing immigration procedures or face deportation. In fact, Trump has repeatedly called them “invaders,” subject to a security rather than a humanitarian response.

This is nearly identical to Israel’s portrayal of the Gaza protesters. They are deemed a security risk to Israel, criminal, and not subject to any rights and protections – certainly not the right to return to their homeland, the right to protest for their human rights, or the right to international protection from a belligerent occupying power.

In fact, according to UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency,

“State responsibility starts with addressing root causes of forced displacement. Strengthening the rule of law and providing citizens with security, justice, and equal opportunities are crucial to breaking the cycles of violence, abuse and discrimination that can lead to displacement (p. 34).”

Yet in both cases, the US and its allies have not fulfilled their obligations to prevent displacement. Instead, they have invested in funding conflicts and then erecting obstacles to rights-claiming by those who are displaced as a result. Israel constructed an Apartheid Wall that has been deemed illegal; Trump is trying to construct a similar wall along the US-Mexico border, even citing the Israeli wall as a model.

One mechanism used in both cases is the outsourcing of foreign policy enforcement, often paid for with foreign aid. Israel outsources enforcement to the Palestinian Authority (paid for by international donors), while the US has outsourced enforcement to Mexico, again paid for with aid.

In both cases, governments and multilateral organizations are complicit in the violation of human rights. The most obvious example is the Gaza Reconstruction Mechanism (GRM), ostensibly created to facilitate the reconstruction of Gaza after the 2014 Israeli attack by putting the United Nations in charge of vetting materials and beneficiaries using Israeli-approved criteria.

In my own research (pp.59-66) I found that the GRM potentially legalizes the perpetuation of a wrongful act (the blockade of Gaza), and potentially enables the perpetuation of violations by Israel, while the United Nations did not follow a correct process in becoming a legal party to the GRM agreement and inaccurately portrayed its role as a mere facilitator. In addition, the UN and other parties failed to fulfill their legal obligation of due diligence to ensure that the GRM agreement did not violate human rights, and the agreement appears unbalanced in assigning rights and responsibilities in Israel’s favor, while obligations are borne by the United Nations and the Palestinian Authority. Finally, the GRM potentially compromises the humanitarian principles of neutrality, impartiality, humanity and independence (for example, by allowing Israel a veto power over aid beneficiaries).

It doesn’t take much digging to find shameful failure of international organizations to protect the rights of Central Americans too. A recent article in an official United Nations news source reported that the “Secretary-General António Guterres was urging all parties to abide by international law, including the principle of ‘full respect for countries’ rights to manage their own borders.’” The failure to prioritize the protection of displaced Central Americans, Palestinians, Syrians, Rohingya, Afghanis, South Sudanese, Somalis and so many more demonstrates that an ongoing battle between human rights and states rights is at play – an existential fight to realize (or crush) the aspirational potential of international law and global governance.

When the declaration of a “humanitarian situation” becomes justification for military build up, checkpoints, and collection of personal information that threatens security (which is found in both these cases), people increasingly recognize this as a rhetorical slight-of-hand. When Donald Trump says that Central American migrants who throw stones would be shot, a policy almost identical to Netanyahu’s stance against Palestinian rock throwers, people see what they are up against: This cadre of power-mongers intend to criminalize communities that seek to protect human beings from the unconstrained power of militarized states.

But people like Maria Duarte and my friends in Gaza have no intention of giving up, nor of succumbing to the cowardly strategy of divide-and-conquer. Like the generations of activists on whose achievements we stand today, we will respond by recognizing the parallels and similarities in our struggles and in our aspirations for a safe place to live with dignity and call home.

 

Nora Lester Murad’s new book is “Rest in My Shade, a poem about roots,” co-authored with Danna Masad and published by Interlink Books with support from the Palestine Museum US. More information at https://www.restinmyshade.com.

 

 

BIO: Nora Lester Murad is a writer and activist. She is co-founder of the Dalia Association, Palestine’s first community foundation, and Aid Watch Palestine, a community-driven aid accountability initiative. She blogs at The View From My Window in Palestine and can be reached at @NoraInPalestine.

 

 

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