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.

It’s hard to visit the Gaza Strip and not fall in love with the people. Sadly, very few people get the opportunity to visit. Israel has controlled the checkpoints with a heavy hand since they imposed a siege and blockade in 2007. They only approve a small number of permits to enter and exit, and only for very specific and self-interested reasons. 

I was extremely fortunate to get consultancy jobs that took me to Gaza several times. I used those opportunities to develop a now-defunct project called Aid Watch Palestine–perhaps the most exciting grassroots advocacy I’ve ever gotten to work on. Community members learned how the international aid system constrained their lives (in addition to the Israeli occupation), and they took action to claim their rights from international donors.

In 2015, on one of these trips, I met the Abu Jamous family in Khuzaa near Khan Younis. Marwan and Hanady’s  family was one among thousands whose homes were destroyed in the 2014 Israeli attack on Gaza and who were poorly served by the international humanitarian response. I wrote an article about their experience to bring attention to the problem. They were also represented in my photo essay of 2016. 

I stayed in touch with the family over the years, celebrating the birth of each new child, fretting about their many health crises, following their creative efforts to take care of one another despite having insufficient resources. In 2017, I wrote another article describing the family’s unacceptable living situation resulting from the ongoing blockade and the lack of proper help. Also in 2017, Hanady’s brother helped my group create a powerful, short video infographic showing that the only way to genuinely help Palestinians in Gaza is not to provide humanitarian aid, but to end the Israeli blockade. 

I stayed in touch with Fathi too, congratulating him when he married and had a son, and stressing when he decided to smuggle himself out of Gaza with the intention of reaching Lesbos for asylum. It was harrowing and dangerous but ultimately successful, and that’s how Fathi found himself outside of Gaza on October 7th. Marwan was also outside of Gaza on October 7th, getting much-needed medical care in the West Bank. When the bombs started falling, the women of the family bore the brunt, trying to protect themselves and their children, even though there was and still is no place that is safe from Israel’s indiscriminate violence. (Marwan was abducted by the Israelis from the hospital in Nablus and thrown back in Gaza in the midst of the bombing. He’s now with the family but sick, having not completed his medical procedure.)

I had hoped my friends in the Abu Jamous family would at least be spared from the worst of the violence, but they weren’t. With much difficulty, the family of 36 people (Marwan’s family and Fathi’s family, including all their brothers and sisters and their spouses and children and parents) were finally able to escape Khan Younis to go to Rafah. Although it was supposedly (but not really) safer, Israeli soldiers confiscated all their belongings at the checkpoint entering Rafah, and they started shooting randomly.

Fathi’s 10-year-old nephew Anas was shot in the back by Israeli soldiers.

Anas went back to Khan Younis with his father to the European hospital while the rest of the family moved forward, setting up three tents between Khan Younis and Rafah – one for the many men of the extended family, one for the women, and one for the children. Anas got x-rays that confirmed the bullet was lodged in his spine. My friend in Boston, a prestigious spine surgeon, reviewed the images and said that Anas needed surgery immediately. He needed to be moved out of Gaza, but not on a commercial flight. His spinal fluid needed to be monitored. He needed to be catheterized. He had to be moved carefully to preserve the possibility that paralysis might be avoided, and he needed the bullet removed to avoid lead poisoning.

Naive me got to work trying to get Anas moved to another country for treatment. A pediatrician friend liaised with the doctors at the European Hospital who explained that Anas had been put on a list. The Israelis would need to approve his transfer. Visas would need to be secured. A foreign hospital would need to admit him. Funds would need to be raised. And more relevant – there were thousands on the list before Anas.

Fathi told me that the hospital was releasing Anas back to his family, back to the tent where he would sleep on the wet ground. There was no point in keeping him in the hospital since they didn’t have the material or tools to treat him. They don’t even have paid medication to treat the poor kid; he cries constantly from the unbearable pain.

As of this morning, though, Anas is still in the hospital in Khan Younis. When they ultimately ask him to leave, he will return to a family that has no shelter, insufficient food and water, no access to medications, no money for diapers, and no prospects – because Israel continues to deny these basic rights, even while they continue bombing, despite the warnings of the International Court of Justice.

No child should be shot. Anas was shot in the back! He was shot by Israel while following Israeli orders to move to Rafah!! Anas was learning to play soccer. Anas loved playing soccer.

If you would like to help Anas and his family, please contact me at nora@noralestemurad.com. I have a secure way of getting money to them that is still working. It won’t help Anas walk, and it won’t make the family safe from the ongoing genocide, but it may in some small way lift the family’s spirits to know that we care and we wish them the best.

Even if you can’t help Anas, PLEASE help stop the violence in Israel/Palestine by calling on the your governmental representatives to demand their constructive intervention. If you live in the United States, tell your senators and congressional representative to call for: an immediate, sustainable ceasefire; release of all captives in Israel and Gaza; Israeli facilitation of humanitarian aid, including medical; resumption and expansion of US aid to UNRWA; an end to US weapons transfers to Israel until they comply with all international law; facilitation of accountability for Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity; accountability for US complicity in Israelis violations of Palestinian rights; an end to the siege on Gaza; an end to the occupation and colonization of Palestine; and a just political solution that respects the rights, dignity, security of everyone. (Here is a tool and here is another tool that will help you make those calls and send emails. Please call EVERY SINGLE DAY!)

UPDATE! Anas and his mother and siblings (not his father) have been evacuated to Cairo where he is being evaluated by a doctor! This is absolutely miraculous! Of course the road ahead will be painful and costly, and his family continues to need as much support as they can get.

ANOTHER UPDATE! Marwan’s father and nephew were hit by a bomb strike. Marwan’s father lost both his legs and died two days later. The nephew lost an eye, but I don’t know if he lived. I can’t reach the family.

This article was original published in The Hechinger Report.

In Newton, the liberal suburb of Boston where I live, parents of Palestinian, Arab and Muslim children gather weekly to discuss our concerns about how schools are responding to events in Israel/Palestine. We come together to find community and safety amid escalating hostility toward us because of a crisis we did not create and do not condone.

Schools should support the well-being of all students equally. They should help children develop a healthy sense of identity and belonging, encourage curiosity about divergent perspectives and teach the skills needed to constructively address conflict. Unfortunately, we feel that Newton schools, like others throughout the United States, not only fall short, but are complicit in perpetuating divisive anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiment — and their complicity is not new.

When 9/11 happened, my oldest daughter was in school in Newton. The principal took great pains to tell the children that they and their families were safe. But it felt like she was only considering the white kids, oblivious to how others, especially Muslims, would increasingly be subject to suspicion. My daughter, just 5 at the time, got the message at school that being a Muslim Arab was something “different” and to be ashamed of.

Schools should support the well-being of all students. They should help children develop a healthy sense of identity and belonging, encourage curiosity about divergent perspectives and teach the skills needed to constructively address conflict.

Seeing the writing on the wall, our mixed American Jewish-Palestinian Muslim family relocated to Jerusalem so the kids could find pride in their culture. When we returned to Newton 13 years later, our youngest daughter found friends here, most of whom were Jewish. But the kids worried they would be ostracized if they spoke about Palestine at school, and when my daughter raised concerns about censorship with school staff, they dismissed it as a simple misunderstanding. She decided to leave the district and graduate from a school where kids from marginalized backgrounds were believed when they talked about their own life experiences.

Related: OPINION: Palestinian American educators deserve support from their peers

One year later, during the 2021 Israeli attack on Gaza, a teacher was dismissed from that same Newton school for writing a pro-Palestinian (not anti-Israel or anti-Jewish) statement on a white board. While we do not know enough about what happened in the classroom to determine if the termination was justified, the principal’s explanation to the community was definitely not appropriate. He wrote that “our students” had been put in an emotionally vulnerable position – but he certainly wasn’t talking about the district’s Palestinian students. My daughter read the letter and said it felt like being told that “others need to heal from your existence.”      

Now, in 2023, everything is exponentially worse.

In the last three weeks in Newton, as in other cities, the superintendent, school principals, PTO groups and a local antiracism group issued statements about the current violence. A few expressed compassion for all those affected by events in the Middle East. But those messages were quickly walked back under pressure and revised to clarify solidarity only with Israelis. To us, it felt as if our city was condoning the killing of innocent Palestinian civilians.

If teachers and students are too frightened to learn about Arabs and Muslims and too uncomfortable to discuss the role the U.S. plays in international affairs, how can schools help kids become informed, global citizens?

References to the historical context, including 75 years of Israeli expulsion, colonization and occupation of Palestine, were absent. Uninformed people were left to misunderstand that the deplorable violence against Israeli civilians on October 7th was motivated solely by some kind of innate or religious hatred of Jews.

False accusations of antisemitism make Arabs and Muslims targets, threatening their children’s safety, both inside and outside of schools. A six-year-old Palestinian boy was murdered, and his mother seriously injured, by their Chicago landlord who was motivated by anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim hate, fueled in part by media bias that relies on inflammatory words like “brutal” “and “violent” in relation to Palestinians. In Newton, a Palestinian American mother, who was fearful that flyers of Israeli hostages posted around the city would increase division between Muslims and Jews, removed them with the approval of city hall. She was subsequently doxxed, lost her job and now has police protection because of threats against her family.

Related: COLUMN: No son, war is not necessary

I understand why educators are scared to talk about the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. A few years ago, the Newton school district and several individuals were sued by the pro-Israel group Americans for Peace and Tolerance, which falsely asserted that the district’s instruction on Islam, the Middle East and Palestinians was antisemitic. Teaching accurate, nuanced history and providing unbiased context about the Israeli-Palestinian crisis has become dangerous for educators, not unlike the dangers they face from anti-critical race theory forces who seek to limit learning about the role of colonialism and slavery in U.S. history.

Unfortunately, that fear has led schools to avoid teaching about Palestinian experiences and narratives. To us, this censorship feels very much like blatant anti-Palestinian racism.

But it is not only Palestinian, Arab and Muslim students who suffer when fear and anti-Palestinian racism are normalized. All students do. If teachers and students are too frightened to learn about Arabs and Muslims and too uncomfortable to discuss the role the U.S. plays in international affairs, how can schools help kids become informed, global citizens?

The consequences of having an uninformed citizenry are dire. Without quality, unbiased information and antiracist education, U.S. citizens are less likely to support rational, humane policies and more likely to acquiesce to violent ones. As I write right now, Palestinian children are being killed in Gaza and Israeli hostages remain captive.

For all these reasons, Palestinian, Arab, Muslim and allied parents will continue to meet to support one another and the rights of all children. We will continue the important but often exhausting work of advocating for the recognition of Palestinian humanity in our schools and in Gaza and the West Bank. Only when U.S. educators stand bravely to uplift everyone – including Palestinians – can our schools ethically and credibly teach the next generation how to pursue justice and peace.

I’ve succumbed to my current irrelevance in the big project of peace with justice in Israel/Palestine. Please don’t email or text me messages telling me I’m a good person. I don’t feel bad about myself–I feel bad about the world. Even though I genuinely believe that crisis offers the most fertile opportunity for meaningful change in the mainstream narrative that constraints people’s understanding, I simply can’t make a dent there. Fortunately, there are those with the brilliance and the platform to make a difference. Follow these brave human beings:

https://www.instagram.com/motaz_azaiza/reels/

https://www.instagram.com/byplestia/reels/

https://www.instagram.com/wissamgaza/reels/

https://www.instagram.com/wizard_bisan1/reels/

https://www.instagram.com/ahmedhijazee/reels/

https://www.instagram.com/hindkhoudary/reels/

https://www.instagram.com/joegaza93/reels/

https://www.instagram.com/nouralsaqa/reels/

https://www.instagram.com/ajplus/reels/

https://twitter.com/m7mdkurd
https://twitter.com/PeterBeinart
https://twitter.com/iyad_elbaghdadi
https://twitter.com/theIMEU
https://twitter.com/palyouthmvmt
https://twitter.com/DecolonizePS
https://twitter.com/IfNotNowOrg

My niche now is smaller, but also important. To those of you who are only connected to the Middle East through me, I’m sorry I’ve been silent this week, leaving you to try to make sense of the senseless with few resources beyond the racist and distorted CNN and New York Times. I don’t imagine I can change your minds, but I hope that I can support you in your sincere efforts to learn, and I hope that by sharing my perspective and my anguish, we can at least stay in relationship. Or, dare I hope, perhaps we can work together to demand that world leaders end oppression and war?

-Nora

This video is long (26:42) and probably not interesting for those of you who are well informed about the Palestinian experience in Gaza, but I’m sharing my perspective nonetheless and welcome comments:

Some Articles I’ve Written Over the Years about Gaza
It’s 2020. Does the United Nations Care about Gaza? (September 6, 2020)

What Do I Say to Abu Fathi? (May 25, 2017)

Come With Me to Gaza (photo essay) (April 23, 2016)

One Year After Ceasefire, ‘Temporary’ Housing for Gazans Seems to be Permanent 
(August 28, 2015)

My Trip to Gaza 2015 (April10, 2015)

Israel Devastated Gaza, but “Aid” Helps Keep it That Way (April 9, 2015)

Malala, Where is Your Money? (December 16, 2014)

During Gaza, a poem (November 2, 2014)

Rant on Humanitarianism (September 18, 2014)

Guest post: “I thought I was going to die, but it turned out to be my cousin” by Ahmed AlQattawi (September 8, 2014

Guest post: “When the Gaza Sky Burst into Flames” by Mahmoud Khalaf (August 2, 2014)

US Complicity in Israel’s Attack on Gaza (July 11, 2014)

Gaza Under Fire: What Does it Mean for Philanthropy? (July 8, 2014)

B- for my Gaza Birthday Campaign but an A for Effort (July 4, 2014)
With links to tens of videos of interviews with friends in Gaza

How Can You Help?

Every time there’s an attack on Palestine, people ask me where to send donations. This is a wonderful but problematic dynamic. Palestinians need and deserve support, but real solidarity must be more than money. It must also be political. And donations and solidarity must be ongoing, not sporadic, emotional responses. Funding has to go to local organizations, not sent for convenience sake to international agencies that build capacity and credibility at the expense of Palestinian civil society. Also, support has to flow to all Palestinian priorities, not be diverted from Jerusalem or Hebron or Jenin just because Gaza is on the front page.

To explain, and to answer people’s frequent questions, I wrote a book chapter called “Aiding Liberation” (pages 396-409) in Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak Out edited by Ramzy Baroud & Ilan Pappé. Clarity Press and The European Centre for Palestine Studies, 2022. You can read it at https://www.academia.edu/105722870/_Aiding_Liberation_Book_Chapter.

A lovely conversation with Areen Bahour at Brookline Booksmith on November 16, 2022. We talked about growing up #Palestinian, “Ida in the Middle” and the importance of books about Palestine for both Palestinian and non-Palestinian kids. (1:05)

This brilliant analysis of Palestinian children’s literature and teaching about Palestine includes a review of Ida in the Middle. It originally appeared in Middle East Eye.

One of the courses I regularly teach at my university is “Introduction to Arab American Studies”. Most students take it because it fulfills one of the university’s “diversity” requirements, not because they are invested in the topic. 

We get to read about the strong sense of community that sustains Palestinians as they navigate life in these extremely difficult circumstances

For me, the course is a window into mainstream America’s glaring lack of exposure to any Arab-American issues in the K-12 curriculum. It has been sobering to realise that most Americans can go through their entire school education without reading a single novel, or social studies chapter, about the diverse Arab American communities that are part of the fabric of broader American society. 

For most of my students, there are Arabs – swarthy foreigners living in inhospitable countries half a world away – but no Arab Americans; the doctors, teachers, cab drivers, grocery store owners and neighbours who may live next door to them. 

They have even less awareness of the effects of US foreign policy in the Middle East and the experiences and stories this policy shapes among immigrants from these communities.

What it means to belong

A new young adult novel, Ida in the Middle, by Nora Lester Murad, explores the deeply unsettling feeling that members of these communities’ experience, as they are told in both subtle and overt ways that they do not belong in the United States, even when it is the only country they have ever known.

In this debut novel for Murad, Ida, a bashful Palestinian American teenager, is dreading the final class project: discussing her “passion” with the rest of the class. 

Her anxiety skyrockets when the school principal informs her that she will be representing her school in this eighth-grade capstone for the entire region.

She is terrified at the thought that someone in the audience will shout out “terrorist” as she ascends to the stage, just as someone had scribbled that insult on her school desk. Home alone one afternoon, as she worries yet again about that presentation, she reaches for her comfort food, green olives sent by her aunt all the way from Palestine. 

Olives, as every Palestinian knows, are not just a savoury snack; they encapsulate our culture in each dense nugget. When they are cured by a favourite aunt, they can have magic powers. As she eats the olives, Ida is transported to her parents’ village, Busala, just outside Jerusalem, where she immediately feels at home. 

In this alternate reality, her parents have never left Palestine, and she has grown up with feelings of belonging amid kids who look like her, speak Arabic, and can pronounce her name correctly: ‘Aida, with an ‘ayn.

But life in Busala is also unpredictable, scary, and dangerous because of Israel’s occupation. Here, Murad skilfully weaves the narrative between Ida’s fantasy and the all-too-real events of life under occupation, as Ida has to brave Israeli military raids, curfews, and home demolitions. 

We get to read about the strong sense of community that sustains Palestinians as they navigate life in these extremely difficult circumstances. We witness the immense courage of Palestinian children – including Ida herself – as they dodge the occupation forces; and we hear discussions about survival and resistance, including the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. 

There are some exhilarating moments, such as when Ida carries a terrified three-year-old boy to safety, telling him his name, Faris, means “knight,” and that he is their leader, while he explains that her name means “Returning,” and he knows she will not leave him behind, as she scouts their whereabouts for a safe path home. 

And there are heartbreaking moments, as when Ida watches Israeli bulldozers demolish her friend Layla’s family home. This experience transforms Ida and, after having eaten more green olives, she is transported back to Boston, where she gives an impassioned presentation about the hardships that Palestinians endure under Israel’s settler colonialism. 

A resource for educators

As I put down the novel, I went over to the website that accompanies it, and where Murad, a longtime educator, has compiled a wealth of useful teaching resources. Murad addresses questions that other educators may have as they teach a novel about Palestine, linking to dozens of websites categorised by who compiled them (e.g. librarians, the Institute for Palestine Studies, the Middle East Children’s Alliance, and many more). 

There are lesson plans, Palestine-centric resources, resources about the Middle East and Muslim issues, and more valuable information than any book review can do justice to, all superbly organised and easy to navigate. 

In his endorsement of the book, publisher Michel Moushabeck wrote: “I have been waiting for this YA novel to be written since I founded Interlink 35 years ago.”

As for me, I can enthusiastically say this is the resource website I’ve been waiting for. But please don’t take my word for it, explore it for yourselves. Whatever your level of knowledge about Palestine, there will be something for you there. 

A seasoned activist, Murad knows there will be pushback against her novel. Ida in the Middle reminded me of Ann Laurel Carter’s The Shepherd’s Granddaughter about a young girl whose family home near Hebron is being threatened by encroaching Jewish settlements. The book won eight awards, including the Canadian Library Association Book of the Year Award for Children, and the Society of School Librarians International Best Book Award. 

But the Zionist advocacy group B’nai B’rith objected to what it described as its “anti-Israel propaganda”, and the novel has not been included in any Canadian school curriculum. 

Will Ida in the Middle suffer a similar fate because it mentions Israel’s demolitions of Palestinian homes – an absolute reality, yet one of Israel’s many crimes that are apparently taboo in American discourse? 

Pushing back

Murad was a speaker on the Boston Book Festival panel “Pushing Back Against the Pushback: Uplifting Marginalised Books for Young People in an Age of Censorship”, where she addressed the importance of assigning such novels in literature or social studies classes across the US, a topic she also discusses on the book’s website. 

On the FAQ page, the author addresses her identity as someone who was not born Palestinian. One of the questions she answers is: “You’re not Palestinian, shouldn’t people read books written by Palestinians?”

Her answer is an unequivocal “Yes”, and she lists some of the Palestinian authors she recommends: for children, Randa Abdel-Fattah, Ibtisam Barakat, Ahlam Bsharat, Susan Muaddi Darraj, Sonia Nimr, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Wafa Shami, among others.

For adults, some prominent fiction and non-fiction writers available in English are Susan Abulhawa, Hala Alayan, Ghassan Kanafani, Sahar Khalifeh, Edward Said, Adania Shibli, among many, many others. 

Educators have no excuse not to assign the wonderful books available to them about young Arab Americans
 

Murad herself is married to a Palestinian, lived in Palestine for 14 years, and mothered three Palestinian girls. Her sensitive portrayal of Ida is certainly that of a loving parent, steeped in Palestinian culture not as a tourist, but as an engaged member of a Palestinian family. 

Given her background, it is perhaps not a coincidence that the protagonist in Murad’s novel, like Susan Muaddi Darraj’s fabulous series, Farah Rocks, and The Shepherd’s Granddaughter, is a young girl, rather than a boy. 

Certainly, girls need all the empowerment they can get in our exceedingly misogynist, patriarchal world, and these books offer that needed boost. However, my wish is for the next YA novel about a Palestinian American child to feature a boy, even as I fully appreciate the present offerings, and would welcome more.

But a lack of narratives around young boys being sensitive, caring, or protective of their friends and siblings could inadvertently risk perpetuating the myth that Palestinian girls are redeemable, while Palestinian boys are always dangerous. 

For now, however, educators have no excuse not to assign the wonderful books available to them about young Arab Americans. And with the holidays fast approaching, everyone can push back against censorship by gifting precisely those novels that artfully inject our cultural and political experiences into the broader American landscape. 

Nada Elia teaches in the American Cultural Studies Programme at Western Washington University, and is currently completing a book on Palestinian diaspora activism.

Middle East Eye delivers independent and unrivalled coverage and analysis of the Middle East, North Africa and beyond. To learn more about republishing this content and the associated fees, please fill out this form. More about MEE can be found here.

A #MustWatch presentation! The Palestinian Museum US in Connecticut hosted a launch of “Ida in the Middle” and Luma Hasan, Sawsan Jaber and Mona Mustafa talked about the experiences of Palestinian students, Palestinian teachers and the challenges of teaching Palestine in US schools.