As bombs rain over Gaza and settler lynchings in the West Bank increase apace, it is more important now than ever for Palestinians to be able to act as the narrators of their own oppression. This is especially so in the United States, where the Zionist party line has methodically crept its way into every facet of our national discourse. Though the former’s star is now thankfully on the wane (due in no small part to the sheer barbarity of Israel’s blitz), there is much else besides that remains to be done. Above all, it is well past time that we trust Palestinians to tell their stories as they are, rather than as distorted through the prism of Israeli spin control. In this vein, I recently decided to contact a Palestinian student at LHS who I predicted might be willing to contribute her own account to these pages. Sure enough, Bisan (a pseudonym she opted for in lieu of her actual name) assented, and shortly thereafter we arranged an hour-long interview regarding everything Palestine, from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea. What follows below is a tour (though not a transcript) of our conversation, with certain moments lightly edited for length and clarity.
While speaking with Bisan, I took note of a recurring theme in her characterization of Palestinian identity. In her words, “being Palestinian to me means that my existence is resistance. I feel like simply by saying that I’m Palestinian, I’m resisting the fact that there are people who deny my existence.” Bisan contrasts this to the legendary Zionist canard that Palestine had been a desolate No Man’s Land before the formation of the State of Israel, as embodied by the phrase, “a land without a people for a people without a land.” Indeed, that Palestine would not be given up without a fight was known to some of the Jewish state’s earliest architects, a fact which continues to be borne out by the persistence of Palestinian culture across generations. Bisan highlighted two examples in particular to underscore this latter point. The first, dabke (دبكة), is a style of dance native to the Levant which is traditionally performed at joyous occasions like weddings and graduation parties. A type of line dance, dabke serves as a living record of Palestinians’ rootedness to their land, with certain moves drawing inspiration from such quotidian acts as reaping crops, praying for rainfall, and milling flour by hand. Another tradition Bisan told me about was the art of tatreez (تطريز), a form of Palestinian embroidery which dates back centuries and has historically been passed down from mother to daughter. Like dabke, the practice of tatreez tethers Palestinian women to their ancestors in an environment that fights aggressively to divest them of their history. Though most tatreez patterns were once geographically bound by the villages in which they originated, this changed after Palestinians were corralled into refugee camps by Zionist forces during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, by which point intracommunal distinctions began to fray and tatreez turned into a mobile symbol of resistance to the occupation.
Figure 1: Tatreez patterns hand-stitched by Palestinian women from the Baqa’a (البقعة) refugee camp in Jordan which Bisan shared with me. The first of these originated from Gaza, while the second hails from the historic cultural capital of Arab Palestine, Jaffa (يافا). Both designs are specifically meant to evoke their place of origin, as is the case for most tatreez patterns.
Certain dimensions of Palestinian identity are of a more recent vintage, however. Among the most important which Bisan mentioned during our conversation is the symbolism of the key. She elaborates: “Many of the Palestinians who were expelled from their land after 1948 (and later after 1967) have held onto the keys of their homes [which Israel forbade them from returning to].” This joint process of displacement and dispossession is known to Palestinians as the “catastrophe,” or Nakba (نكبة) in Arabic, and as Bisan explains, one way in which they keep the memory of that experience alive is by raising physical mementos of their life in Palestine before 1948. This category includes not just keys, but also Ottoman/British-era land deeds certifying that Palestinians had once been the lawful custodians of most of what we now call “Israel.” Despite the longstanding nature of Palestine’s Arab character, however, the process of undoing it took hardly any time at all. In Bisan’s words, “people became refugees overnight…people left their homes furnished, people left goods, a lot of families left money and valuables because they expected they were coming back only to learn that they weren’t.” In the event, Zionist forces ended up industrially demolishing most of their villages, with several of the goods, heirlooms, and properties Bisan alludes to having been de facto expropriated to service the newborn Jewish state’s fledgling economy. The demographic legacy of this plunder continues to loom large: as Bisan perceptively notes, at least 70% of Gazans either are or are descended from refugees who were uprooted from their homes by Israel in 1948.
Figure 2: “Waiting for the Return,” painting by the Palestinian artist and legal scholar Ahmed Hmeedat.
Unsurprisingly, much of what Bisan and I discussed found ready parallels in her own genealogy as a Palestinian-American. On her mother’s side of the family, her great-grandparents were forcibly displaced from the Palestinian village of Um Al Fahem (أم الفحم) to Jerusalem in the aftermath of the 1948 war. A second wave of displacement followed in 1967, subsequent to which they landed in the current West Bank capital of Ramallah. Though her ancestors continued to maintain links with family in Israel, they were unilaterally barred from visiting the latter until the late 1990s, when the (ultimately abortive) Oslo Accords were being drawn up. Turning to her paternal grandparents, they also used to live in Jerusalem until 1967, when they were temporarily resident abroad and thereafter forbidden from returning to their homes by the Israeli government (this form of retroactive expulsion would ultimately affect up to 90,000 Palestinians).
But Bisan’s acquaintance with her homeland doesn’t terminate at the stories of her ancestors. Having visited Palestine multiple times, she can attest to their continued veracity. For example, while recounting her time spent at her grandparents’ house in the occupied West Bank, she noted the presence (perceptible by the naked eye) of just some of the illegal Israeli settlements encircling their land. According to her, these settlements are almost invariably “plopped up onto a really high mountain” (thereby echoing the modus operandi of the earliest Jewish colonies in Palestine) and designed to look as uniform as possible. The upshot is that they stick out like a sore thumb compared to their indigenous surroundings; to borrow her short yet apt phrase, “they look fake.”
Figure 3: An Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank
Abetting these settlements is the Caligulan surveillance infrastructure which Palestinians in the West Bank are subject to every day. Held captive to a perverse coalition of Israeli soldiers, CCTV cameras, and onerous military checkpoints, their every movement is constantly circumscribed by the threat of violence. In Bisan’s words, “it’s honestly really scary driving to visit your family, and just seeing someone with a gun who could shoot you at any moment if you look at them the wrong way.” All too often, however, threats can morph into sentences. Bisan recalls: “during my time there this summer (which lasted less than two weeks), three people were martyred [murdered by Israeli forces].” One of these, a Palestinian university student named Fawzi Makhalfa who was shot while going on a joyride with a friend, had been singled out for execution by an IDF officer simply because he “looked suspicious.” Bisan rightly analogizes this to US cops’ own longstanding practice of lynching black and brown Americans only to later claim they were simply acting in “self-defense” as post facto extenuation. And the similarities don’t end there. As in the Jim Crow South (along with the rest of America both then and now), “there isn’t a justice system to advocate for Palestinians,” with the inevitable result that Israelis are given carte blanche to visit all manner of torment on the people whose land they so highly covet.
Similar iniquities defined Bisan’s brief sojourn in Jerusalem. While there, she observed no less than two instances of the IDF accosting Palestinians, both within the span of an hour. The first involved an Israeli soldier randomly asking a Palestinian man who had been walking through a bazaar to furnish his ID (unlike Israelis, Palestinians’ presence in the Holy Land is subject to rigorous bureaucratic oversight). Though the man ably presented his papers to the soldier, this didn’t deter the latter from trapping him in an interminable game of administrative cat-and-mouse, one which dragged on for so long that Bisan was eventually forced to exit before it could be resolved. Likewise, another man was later arbitrarily pulled aside for questioning by Israeli soldiers, whereupon he was shoved against a wall and patted down for contraband. Predictably, absolutely nothing of note came up. But to assume that the point of these intrusions had anything to do with security in the first place would be erroneous. As Bisan explains, “their sole reason for doing this to Palestinians is to discourage them from ever trying to leave [their homes].” She continues, “when this keeps happening over and over again to Palestinians, the hope is that they’ll get tired. It’s to make, say, the trip to Al-Aqsa Mosque so strenuous and so exhausting that Palestinians don’t do it and eventually give up.” As it happens, Bisan has actually witnessed part of this bureaucratic terrorism secondhand. In her words, “I have family who live hardly 15 minutes away [from Al-Aqsa] who have just never been because it’s not only really difficult to get a visa, but the process itself is just so humiliating.” No doubt, these and other interventions have had a tremendous chilling effect on Palestinian civil society. Yet as Bisan shrewdly observes, they also provide conduits for Palestinians to fight back against the occupation in their own way. Quoting herself, she explains, “this is what I mean when I say Palestinian existence is resistance. Because yes, while the guy was obviously annoyed that he got pulled over for no reason, just imagine how much more annoyed the IDF soldier is going to be knowing he doesn’t care and is still going to come to Al-Aqsa to exercise what little freedom he does have.” In the face of impossible odds, steadfastness can sometimes be the most powerful weapon there is.
If Israel has opted for a war of attrition against the Palestinians on its eastern flank, however, then Gaza is a case apart entirely. Here the pitch of extermination has clambered to heights once thought impossible, and it doesn’t seem to show any signs of stopping. Per one UN-accredited source, to wit, over 25,000 Palestinians have been killed and 50,000 injured since Israel commenced its assault last October (both likely underestimates given the thousands of Palestinians estimated to be buried under the rubble of Gaza’s obliterated neighborhoods). Never content to let a good Holocaust go to waste, Israeli forces have seized on the opportunity to annihilate what remains of Gaza’s medical infrastructure, thereby signing thousands of premature death warrants for the Palestinians who have thus far managed to elude its latest reign of (necro)-terror. In parallel, some 90% of Gaza’s 2 million inhabitants have been rendered homeless, forced at gunpoint to go the way of their ancestors and likely without any chance of ever being allowed to return. Bisan aptly summarizes the chain of tribulations which led to this catastrophe thus: “Imagine having your home for generations only to be kicked out, building up a new home [in Gaza] for two or three generations, and then having that home be bombed and becoming a refugee again.” Indeed, from the moment the first Palestinian peasants were evicted from their land by Ottoman police to make room for Jewish settlers, the Palestinian experience has been centrally defined by the trauma of displacement; Gaza is only the most recent iteration of this process. In Bisan’s words, “Palestinians just keep on losing and losing, whether it’s their land, their dignity and freedom, their family, or, now, their lives.” Conversely, Israel has reaped historic dividends from its decades-long campaign of neo-lebensraum: as one Israeli real estate firm recently said of Gaza’s despoiled environs, “A house on a beach is not a dream!”
With that being said, nothing about the martyrdom of Gaza should incline us toward provincialism. The carnage Israel is unleashing right now touches all Palestinians regardless of their geographic provenance, and for good reason. As Bisan puts it, “the direction in which my grandparents moved during the Nakba could have been anywhere. It could have been Gaza, it could have been the West Bank, it could have been Lebanon, it could have been anywhere. That’s why with regard to what’s happening in Gaza right now, it’s so disheartening for Palestinians across the world to hear. Because even if our families aren’t from Gaza, just due to the fact that the Palestinian identity is one, that could have been us.” Nevertheless, virtually all of this righteous indignation seems to have fallen on deaf ears. As Bisan explains, “it’s so terrible to watch all of this happen knowing that this death doesn’t affect the United States.” Her referent at the time was Washington’s decision to veto a UN Security Council resolution which called for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza, justified on the spurious grounds that the latter had failed to acknowledge Israel’s “right to defend itself” (what this could possibly mean two months after Hamas’ attack and almost 30,000 dead Gazans later, one can only speculate). Indeed, not even Palestinian citizens of the United States are immune to this selective amnesia. Bisan here recalls the martyrdom of Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian-American journalist who was murdered by Israel last year and whose funeral procession was later stormed by the IDF in a murderous rampage against the thousands of Palestinians who had gathered to mourn her loss. Though she had been an American citizen, and though our government has historically waged war against other countries for far less, Israel’s cachet among the halls of Congress remained predictably unmolested. The message being relayed thereby is unmistakable: in Bisan’s words, “it’s as if the United States is personally saying to every Palestinian, ‘your life is worth less.’” She elaborates, “that’s exactly what makes being a Palestinian-American right now so conflicting: why is my country complicit in the genocide of my people?” As students at Lexington High School, we would do well to consider how this double standard ought to inform our community’s own perceptions of the crisis in Gaza.
by NEO CHATTERJEE & BISAN