Nora Lester Murad - The View From My Window in Palestine

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I wrote three OpEds for The Forward. They published zero.

August 20, 2024 by Nora Lester Murad

On May 30, 2024, The Forward contacted me in response to a tweet of mine criticizing an article they published. They asked me to write an OpEd, and after checking with some friends in the Palestinian solidarity movement, I decided to accept the offer as long as they didn’t censor my ideas. Over the next several months, I wrote three OpEds, none of which were published. The first got stale when The Forward didn’t respond in a timely way. The second was completely rewritten and my politics misrepresented, so I refused to agree to their edits. I sent a third one with a new hook, but after agreeing to publish (and pay for it), The Forward stopped replying to my emails. They also didn’t respond to my invoice for payment. For what its worth, I’m sharing one of the OpEds here.

What are we keeping Jewish students safe from?

As the new school year approaches, I am being bombarded with emails and texts about the imperative to keep Jewish students safe in the new politicized atmosphere. But safe from what? One text message noted that the BDS movement has been training campus activists and that anti-genocide encampments will be back.

There are actual right-wing racists, including white supremacists and Christian nationalists, who are being emboldened by MAGA rhetoric, but the self-appointed antisemitism watchdogs don’t mention those real threats at all. They focus on students who believe in the humanity of Palestinans and support their right to be equal and free. 

I wonder how Jewish outlooks might change if they understood their fate not as aligned only with one another against the world, but as inextricably linked with the people of color, including Palestinians, who constitute the global majority. What if Jews believed that that Jewish wellbeing depended on Palestinians also being safe?

I sought insight from one of my cousins, a liberal Zionist with whom I’ve had many respectful exchanges: “Why can’t everyone in Israel live together in equality? Isn’t that what we strive for here in the United States?” 

When I pose this question to most liberal Zionists, I hear some version of “We would love to, if only they didn’t hate us.” I tell them how my own, albeit unusual, lived experience proves that Palestinians don’t hate Jews – they only hate being oppressed. But most liberal Zionists simply don’t believe me. 

A Jew who married into a Palestinian Muslim family, who is loved as a daughter- and sister-in law, who is accepted as a neighbor and friend, and has had significant roles in Palestinian civil society does not fit into the story of Palestinian antisemitism and Jewish vulnerability they tell themselves. In fact, when Palestinians learn that I’m Jewish, they frequently recall stories from their elders about the good ole days when Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Palestinians lived peacefully as members of one united community, and they long for a country where once again everyone can live together in peace.

I learned these important truths serendipitously. When I was a 19-year-old college sophomore still lacking a plan for my life, the Sabra and Shatilla massacres shocked me into understanding that as a Jew I was implicated in a conflict “over there.” I assumed that understanding Palestinians would be difficult, so I sought them out with a genuine curiosity and concern I inherited from my Jewish ancestors. I studied in Cairo, then in Jerusalem. Taxi drivers taught me Arabic, and women I met in vegetable markets taught me to cook. I made friends on travels in Sudan, Jordan, and Syria.

Unexpectedly, I fell in love, got married, and after years in the U.S., we moved to the West Bank to raise three daughters under Israeli military occupation. 

It hasn’t always been easy being part of the Palestinian community. It hurts to see how statelessness disperses families around the world. It hurts to break bread with families who live under constant threat of home demolition. It hurts to hear friends recount settler attacks on their children and not know how to help.

But being part of the Palestinian community has also been uplifting and fulfilling in countless ways. Palestinians have shown me how the world appears different depending on your relationship to power. They have inspired me to pay attention to life’s smallest gifts. They taught me that safety is found not individually, but within the collective.

Now, 11 months  into a historically brutal slaughter in Gaza by Israel, I am struck by how divergent my perspective of the power to be found in connecting with Palestinians is from the deeply held beliefs of many Jews around me, including those who self-identify as liberal.

Lawn signs reading “I Stand with Israel” confound my Jewish and humanistic sensitibilites. Do we stand with Jews even when they are wrong? Labeling ceasefire demands as antisemitic infuriates me. If it is wrong to be killed, isn’t it also wrong to kill others?

At least right-wing Jewish Zionists are consistent. They weaponize antisemitism against everyone whose politics they don’t like, shamelessly using their Jewish identity as a shield against criticism of their unadulterated violent politics. These are the same people who oppose affirmative action, blame crime on immigrants, and deny health care to trans people. Like their white Christian nationalist pro-Israel political allies, they have no incentive to change the system to include others when the current system is working for them.

I called my cousin to say that I don’t understand why liberal Zionists think they are better than right-wing Zionists. I see liberals fighting passionately against discrimination in the United States, but when it comes to Israel, they uphold a political ideology that values Jews over non-Jews. He didn’t respond with some implicitly racist message that Jews can never be safe without being dominant. 

He surprised me by saying, “Of course, every person and group should enjoy the same rights to land, safety, and dignity.”

“Then you’re like me!” I said, with great relief. “You’re not a Zionist!” 

“Yes I am a Zionist. I care about Jews and want Jews to thrive.”

“I care about Jews and want Jews to thrive, too!” I countered. “But that’s not what Zionism is.”

People like to say that Zionism can mean different things to different people, but the Zionism explicitly espoused by many of Israel’s founders, and the Zionism that Palestinians experience in their everyday lives, is an ideology and practice of Israel as a nation-state for the benefit of Jews and only Jews. Under that ideology, non-Jews will always have an inferior status, because they do not share the right to collective self-determination It is the imperative to keep Jews dominant that drives Israel’s rejection of refugees’ legally-enshrined right to return, the military occupation of over 5 million Palestinians in a brutally repressive regime that controls all aspects of life, and also the reality that 20% of Israel’s population, the indigenous Palestinians who are legally citizens of Israel, are deemed by law to have lesser rights–not only than their fellow Jewish citizens, but also fewer rights than non-citizens anywhere in the world who are Jewish.

My cousin said I gave him a lot to think about.

I keep thinking, too. What if Jews did not work only to protect Jewish students, but instead dedicated themselves to protecting all students, including those who are Palestinian? What if Jews saw their prospects for thriving as tied to a world where bombs and starvation and dehydration and disease were not tolerated – no matter who the victim is, and regardless of the identity of the perpetrator? 

I believe with all my heart that a just peace with Palestinians could not only save tens of thousands of Palestinian lives, but it would also save Jewish lives, and could spare Jews from the anxiety of living with a perpetual sense of existential threat. It could save Jews by re-focusing us on the ways that antisemitism works in concert with anti-Blackness, patriarchy, militarism, and other forms of bigotry, to uphold white supremacy. It would save Jews by reminding us that Palestinians are human beings.

But to achieve a just peace with Palestinians, it is not enough to trust in their humanity. We also need to do the sometimes painful work of living up to our own. 

How to justify the genocide of Palestinians in 14 easy steps: A graphical guide

April 25, 2024 by Nora Lester Murad

This comics-based opinion was co-authored with artist Maryam Aswad and published by The New Arab.

Step 1: Erase history. Bury any fair and accurate analysis of how today’s violence came to be.

Step 2: Remove all context. Always depict Palestinians as the aggressors. Blame Palestinians for their own oppression.

Step 3: Monopolise the media. Discredit Palestinians and normalise their exclusion – including by threatening, firing, or even killing them.

Step 4: Dehumanise Palestinians. Use words that play into pre-existing anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and anti-Muslim stereotypes.

Step 5: Misinform the public with boldface lies.

Step 6: Weaponise antisemitism. Accuse any Palestinian who tries to tell their story of hating Jews.

Step 7: Co-opt liberal and antiracist language so you appear to be the good guys.

Step 8: Criminalise liberation activities. Punish all Palestinian efforts to claim their rights, including by non-violent means.

Step 9: Repeat sensational Israeli claims without investigating in order to elevate emotion over rationality.

Step 10: Market trauma. Remind Jews of horrible things that have happened in the past so they’ll be scared of peace with Palestinians.

Step 11: Make token gestures to trick people into thinking there is progress towards respect and equality while you protect the status quo.

Step 12: Throughout it all, pretend you are being balanced and fair.

Step 13: Manipulate people into choosing sides as if well-being is mutually exclusive. Hide the fact that a just, political solution will uplift everyone’s rights, security, and dignity, and it offers the only sustainable future.

Step Fourteen: Rinse and repeat

Nora Lester Murad is a writer, educator, and activist. Her young adult novel, Ida in the Middle, won the 2023 Arab American Book Award, the 2024 Middle East Book Award, a Skipping Stones Honor Award, and was a finalist for the 2024 Jane Addams Peace Association Children’s Book Award. She is a Policy Member of Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network and supports many social justice issues. From a Jewish family, Nora raised three daughters in the West Bank with her Palestinian husband. She now lives in Massachusetts and can be reached through her blog at www.NoraLesterMurad.com

Follow Nora on X: @NoraInPalestine and Instagram: @nora_lester_murad

Maryam Aswad is an Iraqi-Canadian student, teacher, artist, and mathematician at the University of New Hampshire. She grew up first in a war-torn Iraq, then as part of a diverse refugee community in the UAE, and finally immigrated to Canada in high school. Maryam hopes to use her journeyed perspective to view and illustrate the world with both logic and compassion.

Follow Maryam on Instagram: @meryemaswad

Unleashing Abolitionist Logic on International Aid

April 25, 2024 by Nora Lester Murad

Abstract: “The abolitionist thinking, proliferated particularly by U.S. Black feminist radicals in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd in 2020, exposed police reformism as liberal subterfuge facilitating the expansion of the carceral state. This article utilizes the relationship between police reform and abolition as a prism through which to look at international development aid. If international aid is thought of as a reform effort serving the interests of colonialism, what is the abolitionist approach to international development? This commentary suggests that abolitionist logic grounded in the US-based movement for Black lives can expose international aid reform as a neoliberal tool and simultaneously unmask the potential for a radical vision of development based in a commitment to liberation rather than white/western/northern supremacy. Keywords: abolition, police reform, international development, international aid, colonialism, decolonization, mutual aid, redistribution, reparations.”

This is one of my stranger articles. Writing it made my head hurt! It was informed by my years as an aid accountability activist in Palestine and my experience organizing with the DefundThePolice movement. Read my article in the journal, Decolonial Subversions, main issue, 2023.

Reflections on Gaza: The Day After

March 22, 2024 by Nora Lester Murad

This article was originally published on on January 3, 2024 in American for Middle East Understanding’s The Link (scroll down or download issue).

“There won’t be a ‘day after’ this genocide,” a friend in Nablus tells me on Signal. “The bombing may stop, but the project to erase Palestinians will persist in one form or another until Israel either wins or loses.”

True. We are in an existential fight against White Empire, and it won’t end just because Israel needs a bathroom break. 

As an anti-Zionist Jew, it is crystal clear to me that if the Jewish supremacist colonial regime of Israel wins, both Palestinians and Judaism will be annihilated. Since I married a Palestinian and have Palestinian daughters, my mama bear energy is fully invested in the scenario where we all live together in equality with dignity, rights, and security for all.

But first, we must stop this goddamned genocide. 

Like everyone, I’m running 24/7 with the heavy, sharp pieces of my broken soul dragging behind. Contemplating the “day after” feels like a Herculean task of acumen at a time when I can barely fathom reality.

Today, a friend in Rafah texted me on WhatsApp that he was depressed. What could I say? I replied, 

Coming from someone who takes a hot shower every day, it sounds ridiculous. If I see him again when this is over, how will I look him in the eyes? I am overcome with shame about my powerlessness while he literally protects his small children with his body.

Yesterday another friend called me on Messenger from Khan Younis, chaos in the background. His daughter said, “Auntie, please tell Baba not to make us walk to Rafah.” My friend explained they are being forced to move from their shelter. He can’t afford a donkey cart, so the family of eight would have to go on foot, carrying whatever belongings they have left. 

I didn’t know what to say.

Before this genocide, I stood on one side of a huge chasm. On my side were people who cared about houselessness, mass incarceration, discrimination, censorship. But many of those people have since planted “I Stand with Israel” signs on their lawns. I am dumbfounded! How can intelligent, decent people argue against a ceasefire? If it was wrong for 1,200 people to be killed, then isn’t it also wrong to kill 25,000? 

How will I continue to work for social justice when I have lost faith in people?

Yet there are people who care:

When I read this tweet to my grownup daughter, her response surprised me. “What the fuck is the point of apologizing?” she erupted. “Palestinians never asked for pity.” 

But I am sorry, I tell her. I’m so sorry. I’m so very, very sorry.

She says that like the woman of color in Samer’s tweet, my pain is from empathy not sympathy. “It’s happening to you too, mama,” she consoles, and I am momentarily relieved. But seconds later, an old colleague sends me photos of the shelter in Nuseirat camp. Feces is everywhere, and there is no water to clean up. How can I face her on the “day after” when all I have are empty platitudes like “May God protect you and keep you?”

My daughter reminds me that faith is inextricably ingrained into the Arabic language. The culture of collective care is upheld in every phrase. The idioms and invocations are not platitudes, she explains patiently. They manifest our hopes for others. The obligatory response, which is nearly always “praise to God,” shows how gratitude breeds strength. “Even during a genocide, every hard day lived is a privilege,” she tells me.

“Never hesitate to look them in the eye and reassure them, even though their wellbeing and liberation are not in your hands,” she says.

I nod, and I’m sure she feels my commitment across the long-distance phone line.

Because no matter what I do or don’t do, on the “day after,” whenever it comes, Palestinian steadfastness will be stronger than ever. And if my faith falters, my friends in Gaza will reassure me.

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