· Web viewAnd why are some Jews in Australia so uncomfortable with this word? ... in fact give humanity and virtue to the Palestinians whom Israel is vested in dehumanising and

Just Voices Issue #16: August 2018.

Israel/Palestine 1948.This issue of Just Voices is on the theme of the 70-year anniversary of the birth of the state of Israel. The creation of this ‘state for all Jews’ is something that has been widely celebrated amongst global Jewish communities. But as we are seeing a growing number of us dissenting and questioning Israel’s human rights abuses and policies of occupation today, we look back through history to this year, 1948, and the ways that Israel’s beginnings are woven into its political and social structures

Articles in this issue have been selected to provide a collection of contemporary commentaries on 1948 and current issues on Israel/Palestine from Jewish and Palestinian writers. Articles in this issue do not necessarily represent the views and policies of the AJDS. What does the Nakba mean to Jews

Yael Winikoff is the AJDS community organiser.

This year marks 70 years since Israel became a fledgling nation-state. In our communities we have seen celebrations marking Israel’s 70 years, and commemorations of 70 years since the Nakba. And challenging conversations in between. This year I noticed that the term Nakba is most commonly prefaced with “to Palestinians, the Nakba is…” This got me thinking. Does the Nakba only hold this meaning and significance to Palestinians? Is it a narrative that is at odds with non-Palestinians? What does the Nakba mean to those of us who aren’t Palestinian? What does it mean to those of us who are Jewish? And why are some Jews in Australia so uncomfortable with this word?

Let’s begin by framing what the nakba is.

The Nakba, an Arabic word meaning catastrophe, refers to the exodus of some 700,000 Palestinians in 1948. It is commemorated on May 15th every year, a day after Yom Ha’azmaut (Israel’s Independence Day), and the same day that the armies of neighbouring Arab states invaded to take control of the Arab areas of the UN partition plan. But the Nakba is not about May 15. It spans the beginnings of the state of Israel and the dislocation of Palestinians from their lands and the decimation of Palestinian society in 78% of historic Palestine (what some refer to as ethnic cleansing). It saw 531 Palestinian villages destroyed, and 700,000 Palestinians uprooted from their homes, out of 900,000 from the area that became Israel.

The Nakba is not confined to May 15, because by May 15, 1948, around 250,000 Palestinians had been expelled, or fled. On March 10, 1948, the national Haganah (Jewish paramilitary during British mandate) headquarters approved ‘Plan Dalet.’ This military policy document contains a premeditated intent to expel as many Palestinians as possible from the territory to become the Jewish state. (1) On April 14, 1948, David Ben

Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister and one of its primary national founders, proclaimed: “From day to day we expand our occupation. We occupy new villages and we have just begun.”

Once upon a time the Israeli narrative of 48 was that most Palestinians left of their own accord. That in fact Palestinian and Arab leaders encouraged Palestinians to leave until their armies could secure all of Palestine from Israel, and they could safely return to their Arab lands. Robin Rothfield in his article for Just Voices quotes the “accepted expert on this subject,” Israeli historian Benny Morris; “The Palestinian refugee problem was born of war, not by design, Jewish or Arab.” In the 1980’s Morris and other ‘new historians’ confirmed what Palestinians have been saying for decades, that the majority of Palestinians left because they were instructed to do so by their leaders is a myth. In most regions, the vast majority of Palestinian exodus was a direct result of Israeli military intervention.

Causes of abandonment of Palestinian villages according to Benny Morris.

Decisive causes of abandonment Occurrences

military assault on settlement 215

influence of nearby town's fall 59

expulsion by Jewish forces 53

fear (of being caught up in fighting) 48

whispering campaigns 15

abandonment on Arab orders 6

unknown 44

David Ben Gurion, 1948: “We must do everything to insure they [the Palestinians] never do return … The old will die and the young will forget.” After 48, Palestinians who had fled their villages were not allowed to return. Even attempting to collect possessions or crops from their fields could be met by IDF open fire. The “Palestinian refugee problem” is a direct result of this policy, a policy which continues to this day. And so, the Nakba continues. The absentee property law, which was passed in 1950 to allow Israel to take control of Palestinian refugee’s houses, still presides and is used today to continue to take control of Palestinian’s properties for Israeli settler expansions. In 2015 the Israeli Supreme court legislated to be able to use this law in East Jerusalem, territory occupied in 67. When we speak of the Nakba, we not only speak about an historical event, we also speak of the ongoing impacts this has had on Palestinians and the region.

Samah Sabawi: “Nakba is not an isolated incident in history. Not a single memory that stands distant and frozen on the pages of time. Its commemoration is a reminder of the beginning of an ongoing crime. It forces us to reflect on a relentless inescapable reality. We carry it in our collective conscience, a precious pain that cannot be extracted from our identity. We are Palestinians and we cannot forget what has not yet ceased to be.” (2)

There is a section of the Jewish left who oppose the 50-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza but choose to ignore or deny the relevance of the Nakba. 67 did not occur in a political and historical vacuum. Orly Noy, Israeli writer and journalist writes: “One cannot truly understand the atrocities of the occupation of 1967 without recognizing the catastrophe of the Nakba in 1948.” (3) Speaking on the 67 occupation, Dr Micaela Sahar says:“I would say that for Palestinians, while there are material changes created by the Six Day War, and while it is the date at which an idea of Occupation commences, in fact this is a date that forms part of a continuum of

processes that crystallise in the creation of the Israeli State in 1948.” (reproduced in Just Voices, 2017)

To Palestinians, the Nakba is the pain of being dispossessed from their land, and the struggle to return to it, and that should matter to all of us. One cannot engage in a truly meaningful way with Palestinian rights and justice without addressing the Nakba. Palestinian political and social activist Abir Kopty writes: “The right of Return is at the core of the Palestinian struggle for liberation. The Nakba .. is what unifies Palestinians; this is where injustice and colonization of Palestine began, not in 1967. The issue of return is a collective issue; the dream of return is present in every Palestinian.”

Why is Israel so afraid of the Nakba?

In 2011 the Israeli Knesset passed an amendment which became known as the "Nakba Law," authorising the Finance Minister to reduce state funding or support to an institution if it engages in an activity deemed against the

state. This includes; "commemorating Independence Day or the day of the establishment of the state as a day of mourning."(4) The original intention of the bill was to completely criminalise any mentioning of the Nakba, with a punishment of up to three years in prison. (5) What is it about acknowledging the historical account of 48 that is so threatening to Israel and its fervent supporters?

There is an argument that those who commemorate the Nakba espouse the view that the state of Israel should not have been created and/or that it has no right to exist. This year some 50,000 people marched in the streets of Melbourne at the invasion day rally. For those of us who marched, did that mean that Australia should never have been created and it has no right to exist? The point is, this is the wrong question to ask. Acknowledging a communities suffering does not equate to eradicating the existential rights of anyone else. Decolonisation is not about saying Australia, or Israel, never had a right to exist, it is not about travelling back in time to condemn early colonial history and see how much we can reverse. It is about acknowledging the effects of colonial dispossession and actively addressing its ongoing impacts. It is about reparation to Indigenous peoples and affirming their sovereignty. Is Israel avoiding these reparations?

Are we scared that acknowledging a historical account of events in 48 will unravel the false narratives of hostile Palestinians and neighbouring Arabic countries, and in fact give humanity and virtue to the Palestinians whom Israel is vested in dehumanising and demoralising for its ‘security concerns and right to exist?’

For Jews. the Nakba means facing the responsibility for the crimes which have been, and continue to be, committed in our names. It means acknowledging and supporting Palestinians struggle for justice as we hold our own dreams of self-determination and security. It means holding multiple narratives, histories and traumas and pouring truth to tales which have been weaponised for the sake of the State. It is holding Palestinian

realities and aspirations with our own rather than eradicating them, and from here, dreaming and forging a future for us all.

The Nakba and anti blackness

Noura Erakat is a Palestinian American legal scholar, human rights attorney, activist and writer. She recently visited Australia on a speaking tour for the Edward Said memorial lecture. This article is accessible on her websiteReproduced with the authors permission, originally published in the Nakba files

The Nakba marks a momentous rupture in the history of Arab connection to the land of Palestine. The forcible, mass removal of native Palestinians in 1948 thus overwhelms the history, literature, activism, and memory regarding the Palestinian Question. To begin in 1948 is to narrate a story of collective loss, one that gives vivid expression to the collusion of state powers, the asymmetric capacities between industrialized and developing nations, the unyielding sway of nationalism, and to the remarkable expendability of certain human life.

Credit: Jaafar Ashtiyeh

While these expressive lessons are particular to Palestine and Palestinians, they are also plainly unexceptional. The question of Palestine is like so many other case studies of settler-colonialism, institutionalized racism, and state-led practices of systematic dehumanization. And so many other case studies are like Palestine in their modalities of repression and technologies of violent domination. If, indeed, there is no Palestinian exception, what does that freedom from anecdotal particularity afford us in the way of understanding the conflict and its possible solutions?

One productive approach is to try to understand how anti-blackness informs the conflict. Here I draw on the work of afro-pessimists who have theorized anti-blackness as an analytical framework with a focus on the afterlife of slavery in the New World. This framework informs how the nation-state comes to embody technologies of power, coercion, and violence that determine death and the possibilities of life. Scholar Rinaldo Walcott explains:

“What it means to be human is continually defined against Black people and Blackness….It is precisely by engaging the conditions of the invention of blackness, the ways in which its invention produces the conditions of unfreedom and the question of how those conditions produce various genres of the Human, genres that are continually defined against blackness, that any attempt to engage a decolonial project may avoid its own demise.”

This framework urges us to rethink Zionism so that it is not just a settler-colonial movement predicated on the forced removal and annihilation of the native, but also a nationalist movement predicated on the racialized tropes deployed against Jews of Europe. An anti-blackness framework also urges us to think about other communities, besides native Palestinians, that intersect with the category of “black.” People of African descent have long been in Palestine/Israel, and their presence cuts across dominant categories: there are Afro-Palestinians (predominantly Muslim), Ethiopian Israeli Jews (whose mass migration begins to achieve momentum in the mid-eighties), and recently-arrived asylum seekers from Sudan and Eritrea (both Muslim and Christian). Such provocations unsettle a stark native-settler binary and illuminate broader implications for anti-racist commitments within the Palestinian liberation struggle.

Israeli Jewish society features a stark socio-economic and racial hierarchy. It includes Western European Jews, African Jews, Middle Eastern Jews, and Russian Jews, as well as other social groups like non-Jewish foreign workers. The oppression these groups experience cuts across various intersecting axes of race, class, gender, national origin, as well as other distinctive markers. Palestinians, including citizens of Israel, do not represent the most extreme site of oppression in this social order; rather, they are outside it altogether. They constitute a baseline equivalent with social death because of the extreme institutional deprivation they endure, which denies them access to opportunities, movement, family, nationhood, land, livelihood, and security in the physical and metaphysical sense. Palestinian nationalism equips us to resist this dehumanizing framework by exposing the annihilationist logics of Zionist settler-colonization and demanding a restoration of indigenous sovereignty. It does not, however, adequately grapple with the racial logics that mediate Palestinian deprivation and Israeli socio-racial stratification.

Among liberal Zionists, the treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is a matter of foreign policy, while racial discrimination, against Palestinians with Israeli citizenship and African descendants, is a domestic issue. In a Palestinian nationalist framework, Afro-Israelis and asylum-seekers might be seen as settlers, even if relatively less privileged ones, and Israel’s violent exclusion of them demonstrates its constitutive race-based logics. But what is the connection, if any, between the exclusion and discrimination against these native and settler classes?

Borrowing from afro-pessimist works on the condition of being human, we may reconsider Zionism as a civilizational project that reifies the ineligibility of Jews for European whiteness even as it divests Palestinians of any material or metaphysical value. As a derivative of Enlightenment Europe, Zionist nationalism reproduced the polarized binaries of the superior, enlightened West and the inferior, primitive East. It claimed that Jews as a national entity belonged to the superior, enlightened West despite their geographical origins in the East, and sought to enlighten (read: colonize) its primitive peoples. Accordingly, Zionist ideology inferiorized the non-Western Jew, and aimed to civilize her by erasing her difference, just as Enlightenment Europe had sought to do with its Jewish population. It combated anti-Jewish bigotry by internalizing and reproducing it.

The nationalization of Judaism (Israel refuses to recognize an “Israeli” nationality, only a Jewish one, as confirmed by the Supreme Court in the Ornan case) nevertheless ascribed significant value to Eastern and African Jewish identity; they remained superior to the Palestinian native. Zionism consecrated Jewish nationality in law and strictly regulated its acquisition and the myriad entitlements that flow from it. Palestinians who lacked Jewish nationality were not eligible for rehabilitation, or whiteness, at all, and had to be removed, dispossessed, and/or contained. The Palestinian body, as a site of exploitation, dispossession, and precarity, lacks material value. The value of Jewish nationality, and, by extension, Israeli Whiteness, directly correlates to the deprivation of Palestinian land, presence, and nationhood. Structurally, therefore, the approximation of whiteness within Israel necessitates the ongoing deprivation of Palestinians. And the deprivation of Palestinians reproduces and reifies the logic constitutive of Israel’s racial hierarchal regime.

The Occupation and the NakbaRobin Rothfield. [email protected]

Last year the Jewish Left remembered the 50th anniversary of the 6 day war and the occupation which followed this war. On the occupation the Left was united in its condemnation of the government of Netanyahu in its failure to curb the expansion of the settlements and to prevent the ongoing severe abuses of the rights of the Palestinians. On the issue of the retroactive legislation on settlements passed in the Knesset, leading figures in the Australian Jewish establishment expressed their disapproval.

Supporters of Netanyahu defend the existence of the occupation by arguing that it is in Israel’s security interests. So it may be noted that Ehud Barak, former Prime Minister and former Minister for Defence, addressing a security conference in Herzliya in November 2015, pointed out that in the opinion of 80 – 90% of Israel’s defence and intelligence establishment, Israel would be better able to defend itself from the recognised international borders than from the current borders.

But a serious rift in the Jewish Left emerged when elements argued that we cannot issue a statement on the occupation without mentioning the Nakba because the

Nakba is understood as a founding act of violence. I would argue that the founding act of violence was the decision of 5 Arab states to declare war against the fledgling state of Israel. Members of the hard left are aware of the 1948 war of independence but are reluctant to give it serious consideration as the primary cause of the violence and dispossession of Palestinians which followed. Had the Arab states decided to accept the decision of the United Nations General Assembly in 1947 to create a Jewish and an Arab state in Palestine, and to recognize and make peace with the subsequently declared state of Israel in 1948, does anyone seriously believe that the dispossession of more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs would still have taken place?

Members of the Jewish hard left find that they have a bond with Palestinians whom they see as the underdog, and that is perfectly understandable. But they also need to consider events such as the following:• The holocaust survivors who tried to reach Palestine in 1947 but who were deported back to Europe by the British Royal navy• The 20,000 Israeli soldiers killed in combat beween 1948 and 1997, the 75,000 Israelis wounded during this period and tens of thousands of[4] Israelis considered to be disabled army veterans• The fighters of Kibbutz Negba, who in the 1948 war of independence, using only small arms, overcame Egyptian heavy armour and halted the advance of the Egyptian army.

To some extent I believe that the difficulty of the hard left in coming to terms with the above events is a generation issue. While one might be aware of these events at an intellectual level, it is not the same as living through them.It should be noted that the following 5 organisations devoted to human rights issued a statement on the occupation without mentioning the Nakba:Amnesty InternationalMachsom WatchNew Israel FundT’ruah – Rabbis for human rights (USA) Meretz Australia

For the AJDS statement on the occupation a compromise was reached whereby the Nakba was mentioned as the view of the Palestinians but not as the view of AJDS.

For a more comprehensive discussion please refer to my full article on the AJDS website, which includes as an attachment the AJDS statement on the occupation.

Books: A Palestinian Tale

Larry Stillman is an academic who trained at Hebrew University and Harvard. He leads a community development project in Bangladesh with Oxfam.This is an edited version of the original article published in Arena magazine, 2012, Issue #120.

This is a story of a now old book and its connections to war, displacement, cultural destruction; the possibilities of an apology and reconciliation; and the remarkable things that connectivity can achieve. The story is about a 1937 copy (in very nice letterpress) of the now wonderfully eclectic and archaic A Dictionary of Modern English Usage by Henry Fowler. It is one of those blue clothbound Oxford University Books that were easy to find years ago.

I bought the book in around 1978 in a second-hand book shop in Jewish West Jerusalem when I was a student. I have been back in Australia for over twenty-two years now. I had never really thought much about the book’s previous owners, of which there were at least two. One owner’s name appears in English on the inside cover as ‘George Khamis’, without a date, accompanied by a number (perhaps a lot number), and the name of the used book shop. On the right-hand page, in Hebrew, it reads ‘from the library of Margalit Anda’.

Ever since my time in Jerusalem as a student in the 1970s, I had questioned the Zionist narrative. I knew that something was wrong in how the history of the city and country was presented, and that there was a myth about equality in the allegedly unified city. At that time, the Occupation was still ‘new’. The hills of Jerusalem were devoid of the plague of settlements that now exist, and it was still a relatively small place. Palestinian neighbourhoods in the eastern part of the city were intact. However, Palestinians appeared to be very much a second-class impoverished group, with whom one had little interaction. Mostly they seemed to be street-sweepers, cleaners or vendors of grapes in the neighbourhood, on whom

one could practice bad Arabic. This was no benign occupation. It all seemed quaint and colonial, and plenty of bullet holes remained from 1948 and 1967.

In this environment, I don’t think I ever thought that there had been a vibrant Palestinian middle class. I knew that just down the road from where I was later living in south-east Jerusalem, in an area known as the German Colony, there were many beautiful stone ‘Arab houses’ with Armenian tile work and inscriptions in Arabic.. Closer to my flat were large deco apartment buildings and houses that had been occupied by ‘Arabs’. In the park next to my flat, behind a stone wall, there was the Greek Orthodox Monastery of San Simon, and the neighbourhood below was known as Katamon Some people still used Arabic names to refer to neighbourhoods rather than more recent Hebrew additions. But like so much in Jerusalem, the past was being erased, and there was no indication of who the mysterious prior owners of property in Katamon were. The prevailing ideology was that ‘our national minority’ (Hebrew: mi’ut le’umi) was rural, conservative, undereducated and quaint. The Naqba was not a word used at that time, and in any case, it was considered their fault if they had left their country.

George Kharmis’ signature in the On the opposite page, in Hebrew,Inside cover of his Fowler’s ‘from the library of Margalit Anda’

I began to think about my Fowler’s. Who was George Khamis? And who was Margalit Anda? How did the book get to be sold?

In early May 2012, after a few searches on Google, I was amazed to find Khamis mentioned in an account of the intellectual life of late Ottoman and then Mandate Jerusalem until the Naqba. He was part of an active circle of mostly Greek Orthodox Palestinians who lived in the new south-easternsuburbs of Jerusalem. They gathered around the figure of Khalil Sakakini, who formed the ‘Vagabond Café’ and cultural group. Sakakini and his comrades were also active educators teaching at the Dusturiyyah (Constitutional) school which he founded.

This very bourgeois, cultured and Europeanised way of life was in complete contrast with the life of poorer Palestinians in the Old City or in villages around Jerusalem. Hala Sakakini also mentioned that Khamis entertained her family with records from his large collection of European music. As well as the documents about Khamis, I also found a photo.

Private collection. In this photo, George Khamis is standing on the far left,

with Khalil Sakanini sitting in front of him. Taken in 1919

Somewhat inspired by these finds, I started posting my finds on Facebook while looking for more information on the internet. On 28 May 2012, I found another reference to George Khamis that could not be coincidental. I discovered that there was an ongoing project—‘The Great Book Robbery’ <www.thegreatbookrobbery.org>—to identify books which had been collected by the prestigious Jewish National and University Library (National Library) in 1948 and stamped as ‘Alien Property’. Approximately 30,000 books were collected from abandoned Palestinian properties in Jerusalem in the period between May 1948 and February 1949 by librarians and soldiers. However, about 24,000 were disposed of because they were considered irrelevant or hostile material.

The Great Book Robbery project, established with the support of the Dutch-Palestinian MP Arjan El Fassed, aims to put online the entire catalogue of 6000 Alien Property books, with titles translated, as an independent source, The intellectual prestige of such collections is well known. Jerusalem housed many important private collections, such as that of the Nashashibi family who had been in the area since the fifteenth century. The National Library became increasingly caught up in holding onto, rather than restoring the valuable Alien Property. Initially the National Library had some discomfort at being engaged in such a form of book collection. Even Israeli Palestinians who worked on cataloguing books believe that intentions were originally benign. However, as Gish Amit puts it based on a study of the archived memos and documents from the period:

After a while, no one was willing to seriously discuss returning the books to their owners, who were already far from Jerusalem at that point, until this option had gradually become inconceivable. The people of the National Library did not pre-plan the pillaging; in the course of the war they learned from soldiers about the existence of the books, and they went to take them. Perhaps they sincerely believed they were saving them, and maybe they seriously considered returning them to their owners once the fighting ended. However, they very quickly fell in love with their plunder, and the possibilities which this plunder presented pushed away every other thought from their mind.

It is clear that Palestinian patrimony was considered fair game. A March 1949 memo listed the names of sixty Palestinians whose books had been collected—included amongst them the name of George Khamis.

A blog post by researcher and librarian Hannah Mermelstein on the Great Book Robbery website told the story of one person who gained access with a researcher to the archive: ‘… the very first book we opened together had the name “George Khamis,” to which my comrade said, “George! Let me tell you about George! He also drank tea every morning with my grandfather and Khalil Sakakini’.

I was stunned. This was a real person, and a connection to someone living, and there were other books that belonged to him. I sent a query, saying that I thought I had a book of Khamis’ as well. Shortly thereafter, I was then sent information by Mona Halaby, an American Palestinian whose family also came from Katamon. She sent me a photo of one of Khamis’ books and from comparing the signatures in the two books, there could be no doubt that I had his Fowler’s.

Now, what do we do this information?

With the Israeli victory in 1948, the post-Naqba period saw an attempt to eradicate where possible Palestinian presence, institutions and memory, whether by stealth, convenience, accident, or hegemonic pressure on bureaucrats like librarians. What happened and is happening in Palestine/Israel is what Baruch Kimmerling called politicide, ‘a gradual but systematic attempt to cause ...annihilation as an independent political and social entity’ in a land where two sets of conflicting aspirations and narratives have come into terrible collision. The destruction of Palestinian cultural capital has been aided by the National Library’s activity. I may be unable to restore Palestinians to their homes, but at least they should have their books back.

It seems to me that there is a good example for what should be done. Some of the books I studied with at Hebrew University contained a stamp in German from the Nazi research Division for the Study of the Jewish Question of the Reich Institute of the History of the New Germany (Forschungsabteilung Judenfrage des Institut zur Erforschung der Judenfrage). These books ended up at Hebrew University via the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Fund that was set up specifically to return books stolen from Jewish libraries or to place them in new ‘homes’ after the war.

Mermelstein quotes the 1954 Hague Convention for the Preservation of Cultural Property, Section 3, ‘to return, at the close of hostilities, to the competent

authorities of the territory previously occupied, cultural property which is in its territory’. Given that the National Library is a leading cultural institution internationally and the recipient of many books stolen in the Holocaust, it knows the importance of acts of restorative justice.

The steps to be taken are that the books that are now classified as Alien Property be returned to either their rightful owners (if they can be identified) or descendants, and for those items which cannot be identified, to a Palestinian cultural institution of which there are a number in the area, and a formal apology offered.

I realise that many Palestinians and supporters of Palestinian rights may regard such a proposal as a form of whitewashing and legitimisation of unequal relationships. But the outcome may well be positive for Palestinians and something of a watershed event for a major Israeli cultural institution, because it is such a clear cut case. There are other cases of joint activity on cultural property issues in Jerusalem, despite the political problems, but as far as I know, none have yet involved the restoration of property. In fact, despite considerable disdain for working with or acknowledging Zionists, moves to restore the books to their rightful owners may in fact lead to significant consciousness raising for Israelis and diaspora supporters who work in cultural institutions. This could also lead to courage to speak out on other issues. There is no logical reason to hold onto the books another than as a tainted war trophy.

Another option is for the issue to be addressed by the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA), a prestigious international body. There was a strong campaign of condemnation when Bosnia’s National and University Library was burnt down by the Serbian army and many other acts of destruction occurred. It appears to me that the stolen books of Jerusalem Palestinians (or those held in other places in Israel) are an equally valid cause.

As for my copy of Fowler’s, it is going back to George Khamis’ family, and I have now used this story at a Jewish learning event, as a form of consciousness-raising about the reality of the Naqba and the need to engage in restorative justice and I will continue to do so. I will be contacting the National Library in Jerusalem and

encouraging others in the library and archive world to also advocate to the Library that they give up what is not theirs.

Note: Thanks to Samah Sabawi for help with an Arabic transcription and to Hannah Mermelstein, Mona Halaby and the family of George Khamis for their cooperation. This article will become part of another study on the politics of archives, and libraries.

Where will hope come from?Bassam Dally is a Palestinian-Israeli-Australian academic, advocate and commentator. He is an executive member of AFOPA and Vice President of APAN.

“We should establish a new organisation called Palestine-Israel Liberation Organisation” said Obada in a conference on Palestine, late last year in Adelaide. He explained that Jews and Israel need liberation as well, to the surprise and approval of the attendees in the room.

“One democratic state with equal rights” said Gideon the evening before, to a standing ovation and approval of those in attendance.

“A bi-national state where everyone can live wherever they like” said Tamir, while discussing his initiative over a cup of coffee in Tel-Aviv.

“If they don’t want peace, we want All of Palestine” said Hanna while looking at images on my Facebook page.

Those are but few of the voices that I hear in different fora, social media and circles. They are responding to a crisis in confidence of the ability and intentions of the leadership in Israel-Palestine. They all watch in despair the daily news of increasing intolerance, ugly institutionalised racism and a public discourse reminiscent of Fascism and Nazism of the thirties of the last century, and wonder how to break this circuit and change the tide.

So, how did we get here and how do we get out of this dark tunnel?

Understanding the motives of the dark forces that led to such an abysmal state of affairs requires an understanding of the ideology that helped create the fatalistic us or them mentality.

On the Jewish side, the more than a century old nationalistic, some say racist, ideology of Zionism has helped create the Israeli state. It was conceived of at the height of the colonial era and is clinched to by many Jews in Israel and around the world believing that creating an ethno-centric state will help protect Jews even in diaspora!! Those same communities are well aware of its outdated premise of a purist state in a globalised world, and its obvious contradiction with their own lives in diaspora and when brandishing the “Jewish and democratic” slogan again and again. While this socio-political structure has been followed for the last seventy years, it is most recently that its absurd, racist and anti-social nature has been most obvious. Un-phased by almost unanimous criticism worldwide, the current government in Israel has legislated and adopted open policies of separation, segregation and dehumanisation. Not only against the Palestinians but also against the African refugees in Israel, solely because of their colour and race. Last Wednesday, the Israeli Knesset passed the Jewish Nation-state law that affords only Jews the right to self-determination, declares ‘Jerusalem united’ and encourages the establishment and consolidation of Jewish only neighbourhoods and towns. The supporters of this bill in the Knesset believe that they are acting to finally achieve a true manifestation of Zionism in Israel, the way it was intended.

This lurch to the extreme right has been fought by a variety of Jewish groups in Israel and elsewhere. Some have attempted to create softer versions of Zionism often referred to as ‘liberal Zionism’ and others declared their opposition to Zionist ideology altogether. Those groups understand the inevitability of the defeat of Zionism as an idea, in the 21st century. This is particularly so because of Israel’s

need to maintain its trade and relations with the rest of the world and avoid the risk of isolation and boycott.

On the Palestinian side, the influence of the secular liberation movement, namely the Palestine Liberation Organisation, PLO, has diminished giving way to the rise of hard-line religious based groups, like Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The demise of the PLO was due to the rise of political Islam in the Middle East, particularly in Egypt, the financial support from Saudi based groups with Wahabi ideology and the help provided by the Israeli government, especially in Gaza. It is well documented that the Israeli government worked to diminish the influence of the PLO in the Palestinian Occupied Territories and turned a blind eye to the flow of funds to Islamist groups. Those groups established civil society institutions and provided direct aid to those families who joined their ranks. In 2006, those Islamic parties entered the political scene and were elected to power on a platform of anti-corruption, social services and a strong stand against expansionist Israeli policies. What followed was a rejection of Hamas’ government by the West and the re-start of armed resistance. The decision to reject Hamas was later found to be counter-productive by many governments and commentators in the West.

The rise of political Islam in Palestine has shifted the focus in the mind of a sizeable minority from a national liberation struggle to a religious struggle between Jews and Muslims, and liberating ‘God’s land’ (Waqf). This shift in ideology has empowered the leadership to choose a path that has led to tragic and terrible terrorist acts of violence in buses, cafes and bus stops against civilians. Islamic groups have also found fertile grounds in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. Those impoverished and disenfranchised, and mostly stateless, communities found hope and future through Islamisation of the conflict. While support for the Islamists groups remains strong, the Palestinian Authority or the PLO did not change its stand on Jews or Israelis, did not change its laws and practices and maintained its willingness to reach an agreement based on the principles of Oslo.

The above, rather simplistic, analysis may provide some insight into the ideologies that have played some role in shaping the current state of affairs. Nonetheless, it does not include external factors, geopolitical factors and internal politics. Regardless of the underlying causes, it is clear to me, and many others, that the

current course of action is leading us, All of us, to a regrettable future of racism, continued bloodshed and wars.

Those who care to look closely, will find many positive signs in both communities that want to challenge the destructive path and look to reverse it. In Israel and among Jewish and Palestinian progressive groups around the world, you will find opposition to the occupation, the settlements and the racist laws and practices. Groups like Israeli Committee Against House Demolition, Breaking the Silence, MachsomWatch, B’Tselem, Adalah, Sikkuy, Mosawa, Peace Now, Jewish Voices for Peace, Jews Against the Occupation

and many others. Some deal with the symptoms and others fight the causes of the conflict, the discrimination and racism. These groups vary in influence and impact but play an important role in providing hope and the vision for others to follow.

In Australia, the absolute majority of Palestine support groups have the international law framework and human rights at the core of their beliefs and agenda. Few Jewish groups in Australia have stood on the right side of history and opposed the destructive policies, the racist laws and the bloody occupation. They do so under enormous pressure from Jewish and Zionists groups who provide blind support for Israel and its government policies, even though it contradicts their own set of beliefs and values. The term Progressive Except on Palestine, comes to mind.

In asking what role diaspora Palestinians and Jews should play to help forge the path out of this dark tunnel, one should leave ideology and anger behind and revert to basic human instincts. It is time that we, Palestinians and Jews in Australia, join forces to advance the cause of justice and peace, and work together to end the violence, the racism, the apartheid system and the occupation.

Equality, human rights, fairness, security and trust should be our guiding principles if hope for a better future is to eventuate.

An Open Letter to Nakba DeniersIlana Sumka, Jordy Silverstein and Sahar Vardi

Ilana Sumka lives in Belgium and is an educator, writer and activist working to end the Israeli occupation.Jordy Silverstein lives in Australia and is an historian and writer, and author of Anxious Histories: Narrating the Holocaust in Jewish Communities at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century (Berghahn, 2015).Sahar Vardi is a Jerusalem based activist.Originally published in Jewschool.

To those who refuse to speak about the Nakba,

We’re writing to ask you to reconsider your position. While you may think that narrating a story of the creation of Israel which avoids the truth about history is in the best interest of the Jewish people, you are, in fact, contributing to the spreading of lies and serving as an obstacle to a genuine and lasting peace in Israel-Palestine.

We are part of a network of Jews from across the globe, called Sedq: A Global Jewish Network for Justice. We come together from Brazil to Australia, the United Kingdom to South Africa, Canada to Belgium, the United States to Israel, in order to work across borders for justice for all peoples.

This May 15, Palestinians are commemorating seventy years of the continuing Nakba, the Catastrophe. As Jews concerned with the historic and ongoing role that the State of Israel plays in dispossessing Palestinians of their land, we’re asking you, who tries to deny the Nakba, to change your ways and stand with us.

Acknowledge the catastrophe that befell Palestinians in 1948.

Acknowledge that the Nakba is part of Jewish history. You can get a glimpse of some of our members in this video, in which Jews around the world speak up, recalling where we were when we first learned about the Nakba and why it’s so important for us to acknowledge it, remembering it as part of our history.

Please consider this an official invitation to join us. This is an opportunity to step away from erasure, to step towards a fuller history, present, and future. Towards a just peace.

For the past six weeks, we have watched in horror as the Israeli military has opened fire on Gazan Palestinians who are exercising their right to assemble. We have heard a deafening silence from most Jewish communities around the world in

response. And we know, as academics and activists, that it’s time – far past time – for the global Jewish community to recognize Nakba and acknowledge our role as Jews in the loss of land and life of Palestinians. It is time for us to answer the calls from the Palestinian refugee protestors in Gaza, and Palestinians in ‘48/Israel, the West Bank, and around the world, and talk

about the Nakba.

You don’t have to take our word for it alone. From respected Israeli scholar Benny Morris to the Israeli research NGO Zochrot, there’s a wealth of information detailing the history of the Jewish role in killing Palestinians, depopulating their villages and exiling them from their homeland, all in the name of claims to Jewish sovereignty.

Sure, you can continue to live with your head in the sand, repeating lies like “a land without a people for a people without a land.” You can attempt to absolve yourself of any responsibility for what’s happening now in Gaza by pointing all your fingers at Hamas. But when you do that, when you fail to take responsibility and distort history, as victors like to do, you further entrench the Nakba in daily Palestinian life.

But regardless of the differences between them, there is only one future for Israelis and Palestinians, and that’s a shared future. Whether it’s two states or one state or a federation of something that hasn’t yet been dreamed of, there’s no way around it: 7 million Jewish Israelis and 6 million Palestinians are in it together. But since 1948, ‘together’ has consisted of Israel standing with its boot on the neck of Palestinians, turning the Jewish people into a darkness unto the nations and ruining the lives of an entire people.But also, since 1948, ‘together’ has meant continual Palestinian protest, resilience, creativity, knowledge, inspiration. It has meant moments of Israelis and Palestinians working together, struggling together, to create something new and just.

Acknowledging Nakba would be one small but important step towards a different path forward for Palestinians and Israelis. Acknowledging our role in it as Jews would be a testament to our integrity and, ultimately, would need to unfold into an act of teshuvah. This would involve re-narrating our histories of the creation of Israel as a Jewish state, gaining an understanding of what this creation involved for all those who lived on that land.

Just as European Jews have been right to demand apologies and restitution from our past oppressors, Palestinians have every right to demand apologies and restitution from us.

The longer we delay in righting the wrongs of the past, the longer we forestall a future in which Israelis and Palestinians can live the vibrant, full lives they are entitled to. Won’t you refrain from allowing your erasure of history to serve as an obstacle to a thriving future for all, and join us in the pursuit of justice?

Respectfully yours,Ilana Sumka, Jordy Silverstein and Sahar Vardi

A more sensible two-state vision for Israel and PalestineAs any political solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict seems to have been pushed beyond the horizon by Israeli government policies designed to perpetuate the status quo, interesting new ideas are emerging. Here is one that is gaining unusual cross boundary traction.

Dr Said Zeedani is an associate professor of philosophy at Al-Quds University. This article is published in +972.

Political separation doesn’t necessitate geographic and demographic separation.

Just a few weeks into the al-Aqsa Intifada in 2000, I was enticed by and attracted to a unique idea for resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, which continues to entice me 18 years later. The contours of the idea — acceptance of the two-state solution, Israel and Palestine, living next to each other in peace and security, on the basis of the June 4, 1967 borders — remain valid provided the three following conditions are met:

1. Separation between the two states would be – or should be – political in nature, without being matched by the kind of strict geographical and demographic separation advocated and supported by successive Israeli governments and mainstream political parties.

2. Partnership between the two states in those matters which are difficult or undesirable to partition.

3. Preservation of the unity of the country and respect for the attachment of its people, whether Arab or Jews, to the entire country or part of it, whether that attachment is psychological and emotional, religious or historical.

The idea is simple and sufficiently clear, even if its implications, the commitments it entails and its implementation require clarification. It would require significant modifications to the two-state solution but would not alter its essence or affect its primary impetus.

On the one hand, this idea seriously engages with the fundamental Israeli-Jewish demand to preserve Israel as a state the majority of whose citizens are Jews. On the other hand, it also seriously engages with the fundamental Palestinian demand for an independent Palestinian state on the basis of the borders of June 4, 1967, and for the return of refugees, or at least those who so wish, either to the Palestinian state or their homes from which they were uprooted in 1948. Moreover, it presents a more promising approach to engage seriously with the other thorny issues, such as Jerusalem and the settlements.

Refugees: Any Palestinian refugee will be able to exercise the right of return, whether to the state of Palestine as a citizen with equal rights, or to Israel as a permanent resident, whose citizenship rights would be fulfilled in the Palestinian state. This distinction between citizenship rights and residency rights would make the right of return easier to swallow, especially for Israeli Jews who insist on a state in which Jews are the majority of citizens.

Settlements: Once the borders between the two states are agreed, the Jewish settlers finding themselves with the borders of the Palestinian state would be able to choose to remain wherever they are – naturally, without their current privileges – either as Palestinian citizens with equal rights, or as permanent residents in the state of Palestine, exercising their right of citizenship in the state of Israel. In most other formulations, the settlements remain an impossibly tough nut to crack. Annexing of the settlements to Israel, even as blocs, would diminish the viability and desirability of a Palestinian state. Evacuating the settlers and dismantling the settlements or their major blocs would be hard for any Israeli government to bear.

Jerusalem: Even according to the scenarios currently circulating, the solution for Jerusalem in all its aspects combines partition and partnership, as some of the dimensions of the problem of Jerusalem cannot be partitioned between two states. We therefore need to break this complex issue down to its components, and distinguish those which can be subject to partition and those that cannot. The vision built on this idea foresees Jerusalem as an open city, united on the municipal level, with West Jerusalem the capital of Israel and under its sovereignty, and East Jerusalem the capital of Palestine and under its sovereignty. The Arab population of

Jerusalem would be citizens of Palestine, while the Jews of Jerusalem would remain, as they are, citizens of Israel.

The country as a whole would remain one unit and one physical space, for the purposes of labor, travel, and residency. In this manner, both Palestinians and Israeli Jews would feel that the entire country is theirs, even though they would be citizens of a state that is only a part of that country. It is a mistake, at best, and misleading, at worst, to underestimate the importance paying credence to that attachment.

Finally, since the one-state solution is a faraway dream, and since the two-state solution, as propagated and defended from a Palestinian, Arab and international points of view, has begun to fissure and crumble as a result of continuous Israeli positions and practices, shouldn’t we seriously engage with ideas such as those outlined here? I would think so. And to the doubters and the fearful on both sides I say: let’s have an open, honest discussion.

How Gaza's Return March can elevate the one-state movement

Awad Abdel Fattah is a former head of the Balad Party and a co-founder of the One Democratic State Campaign (ODSc).Originally published in +972: https://972mag.com/how-gazas-return-march-can-elevate-the-one-state-movement/135870/

The Great Return March has the potential to lend its momentum to grassroots and popular struggles beyond Gaza’s fence, in the West Bank, Jerusalem, and inside Israel.

It is still premature to predict the fate of the Great March of Return, which is the brainchild of primarily young activists who managed, with great success, to involve the entire political spectrum in the Gaza Strip in an unarmed civil resistance. The march is being viewed by many as a remarkable and exceptional development that, if sustained, could open a new horizon politically and strategically for the

Palestinians — as well as for Israelis who are critical of Israel’s oppressive apartheid — to launch a serious campaign for an alternative vision and path of struggle.

Two main factors make this astonishing mobilization near Gaza’s apartheid fence distinctive. The first is the rise of young vanguards to motivate the entire Palestinian political polity to fully engage in this civil activity. For over a year, I have

followed the writings of one of the young, leading figures of the movement, Ahmad Abu Rtema; he too has followed my writings. We chatted several times before he, along with his partners, helped to turn the idea of the march into action. It was clear that Ahmad

represented a new and creative thinking among the young generation, and was eager to continue learning. What further attracted me was his civil discourse towards the Israeli public: his support for a single democratic state in historic Palestine – where Palestinian Arabs, including refugees, and Israeli Jews can live together as equals – is a part of his political convictions.

The second factor is the endorsement of the Return March by Hamas and other factions in Gaza. This indicates a shift in these organizations’ political thinking, which could resonate across Palestinian society and around the world. Hamas’ immediate support of the idea of the march was partly motivated by the severe humanitarian and political crises facing the movement and the entire population of Gaza. These include growing internal tensions and external pressures, aggravated by relentless Israeli aggression, the antagonism of Western governments and Arab regimes, and the latest sanctions imposed by the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, which have added insult to injury.

Indeed, in recent years, Hamas has been trying, without real success, to reform its political platform and discourse to make it more acceptable to the international community, and has cited its support for popular struggle on numerous occasions. The movement’s backing of the Return March is in line with this intention. However, the party which has the most interest in thwarting such a change is Israel, which wants to maintain Hamas’ image as a terrorist organization, and Abbas’ image as an objector to negotiations. The execution of Palestinian marchers along the Gaza fence also reflects Israel’s frustration with this type of struggle, because it cannot cope with its moral and nonviolent nature. This is further shown by Israel’s admittance that it lost the media war over Gaza these past few weeks.

Since it is not interested in starting a fourth war with Hamas, particularly due to the situation on the northern border with Syria, Israel may opt to silence the civil resistance in Gaza through an agreement that would temporarily ease the humanitarian crisis, without offering any major political or structural changes. The news about Israeli efforts to achieve such a short-term agreement worries the organizers of the march, because it could undermine their most important strategic political objectives: the full removal of the blockade of Gaza, and the growing momentum for the Palestinians’ right to return.

Two signs of hopeAmidst these difficult realities, two developments have emerged in recent years that offer important signs of hope. The first is the growing voices among Palestinians and allies working outside traditional factional structures who, like Ahmad, are calling for a single democratic state in historic Palestine as an alternative to partition, apartheid, and colonialism. These voices include prominent Palestinian and Jewish Israeli intellectuals, academics, activists, and organizations.

The second is the renewal of the Palestinian popular struggle, and the growing conviction among Palestinians that this method of resistance must be widely promoted and prioritized by all factions and movements. Although popular resistance and civil disobedience have always been integral to the Palestinian struggle (and have always faced suppression at the hands of Israel’s military force), over the last six years, Palestinians in Jerusalem and its neighboring villages, as well as other places in the West Bank, have witnessed small but notable “intifadas.” The most inspiring of these was the 11-day intifada against the metal detectors at the

Haram al-Sharif (Temple Mount), which achieved its specific goal of removing the electronic devices from the area.

How should we interpret and react to these two promising developments? The challenge, I believe, is to connect and utilize these developments as a catalyst and inspiration for building sustainable co-resistance, guided by a common vision: a united, democratic alternative to the existing apartheid regime. Given the demise of the two-state solution – which I believe is an unjust and racist proposal – we are finding ourselves in a historic phase where both the vision and the means to achieve an alternative future have become impervious to slander and defamation, and have become effective in rallying public opinion because of their morality and inclusivity.

How and where do we start?Even if Israel manages to stifle the Return March, or other states or parties manage to block its strategic goals, popular resistance should continue to be embraced as a key strategy of resistance – not only in Gaza, but in Jerusalem, the West Bank, in refugee camps in Arab countries, and inside Israel. For that objective to materialize, a clear and well-planned strategy of grassroots struggle, composed of different phases, is required. The shift by all Palestinian factions to unarmed resistance, in the style of the First Intifada, also offers opportunities not only for all Palestinians to partake in the struggle, but also for Israelis who fight against apartheid.

Earlier this year, some 20 Palestinians and Israelis met in Haifa and decided to start the ‘One Democratic State Campaign’ (ODSc). The number of supporters – intellectuals, academics, activists, and others – who have joined so far, within a short period of time, is far greater than we had hoped, showing that the time is ripe for such an initiative. Our mission is to engage in an organized framework to create an alternative political consciousness, which entails a moral obligation to fight injustices, colonization, racist separation, and all forms of oppression.

This movement can begin with Palestinians and progressive Israelis inside the Green Line, while networking and coordinating with interested groups in the occupied territories and in the diaspora. However, for this joint struggle to succeed, this progressive coalition must be transformed into a mass grassroots movement with wide public support. It is a long walk to liberation, freedom, equality, and

social justice – and it is not an easy walk. But we believe that it is the only way to promote life, instead of more death and destruction.

Why Jews Shouldn't Be Scared of the Palestinian Right of ReturnRebecca Vilkomerson is the executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace. Originally published in Ha’aretz.

Liberal Zionists: If you oppose injustice, white supremacy, Muslim bans and deportations in America, oppose them in Israel as well.

I joined Jewish Voice for Peace, then just a small Bay Area organization, in 2002. The first time I wore a JVP t-shirt, one that said "Jews Say End the Occupation Now," I felt vulnerable and unsure about professing such a sentiment loudly and publicly.Fast forward 15 years, and expressing opposition to the occupation is now the norm in most liberal Jewish communities.

Throughout JVP’s history, we have played the role of pushing and challenging the boundary of the conversations on Israel that are possible in the American Jewish community. We believe in the capacity of people to change, and we prioritize creating space for people and organizations to move and transform. In order to do our work well, we need to be in open conversation with those who do not (yet, we hope) agree with us.

JVP’s support for the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights is the most common barrier for many people who share a critique of Israeli policies towards Palestinians.

Surprising as it may be to some, JVP did not always fully support BDS. We supported forms of economic pressure on Israel, including ending military aid, but it took us a full 10 years from the initiation of the call from Palestinian civil society for us to sign on as an organization. We endorsed the full call for BDS, including the

Palestinian right of return, in 2015, following a multi-year organization-wide process of study and discussion.

Ultimately, we came to the collective understanding that recognizing the trauma of the Nakba, the displacement of Palestinians and the ongoing inability of many Palestinian families to unite in their homeland is a core obstacle to moving towards justice.

We don’t see the right of Palestinians to return to their homeland as a threat. We take inspiration from organizations like Zochrot and Badil, which are creatively imagining return, and what Palestinians and Jews living together in equality could look like.

Credit: Christopher Hazou

We often hear the critique that embracing the right of return is akin to the destruction of Israel. I disagree. What we are seeking is the full rights and equality of all people living in Israel/Palestine. This would transform the State of Israel, but in the long-term has a better chance of protecting the safety and the possibility of a just future for all people. For liberal Zionists who hear this aim as destructive, I

would invite them to think more deeply about how liberal values are compromised by the reality of the Israeli state.

The conversation on Israel/Palestine has changed over time, and so have we. We’ve been challenged by our Palestinian partners, allies and our own membership about the right of return, academic and cultural boycott, about race within our organization, and about our relationship to Zionism.

We just began a six month series with our members to study the politics and history of Zionism, as part of a larger process of examining our relationship to it. Up until now, our position on Zionism has not been part of our self-definition. Our membership has always included people who identify themselves as non-Zionists, anti-Zionists, post-Zionists, as well as certain forms of Zionists. This process will include learning from historians and long-time activists, including a range of voices within the Jewish community and Palestinians reflecting on how Zionism has impacted them. This process will culminate in an articulation of our organizational relationship to Zionism.

Last week we asked members to reflect on their personal relationships to Zionism. The responses spanned a range from grief to anger; from empathy for parents and grandparents who fled to Israel escaping the Nazi Holocaust to shame about facing the realities of Palestinians forced to flee from Palestine because of the Nakba. I was moved by the depth and the range of reflections. This is a conversation that should be happening everywhere in the Jewish community.

What distinguishes JVP from other Jewish organizations is that we see our responsibilities as broader than just to the Jewish community. We are accountable to our Palestinian partners, to broader racial justice movements, and our collective visions of what equality and justice should look like. We speak directly to our fellow Jews, sometimes lovingly and sometimes more sharply, in the hope of hastening that change. We see it as our obligation to have difficult conversations with people who do not share our views, and also as our responsibility to challenge them. Sometimes that comes in the form of a conversation with family and friends, and other times it comes in the form of a protest.

In this political moment, with attacks from both the U.S. and Israeli governments on immigrants and Muslims, and rampant white supremacy and anti-Semitism in the streets, we are all being called on to stand up for the values and principles that we believe in. That means taking action. It’s no longer enough to say you oppose racism or support a two-state solution. We need people to get out in the streets, to fight for racial justice, to demand an end to occupation, and freedom for Palestinians.

It is not surprising that liberal Zionists are feeling squeezed when they show up in progressive spaces, where they often encounter people who speak out as loudly against the daily offenses of the Trump administration as they do against Israel’s brutality towards Palestinians.

Over the past several years - due in part to the work of a broad, multiracial, multifaith movement, and in part to Israel’s increasing repression of Palestinians - equality and freedom for Palestinians are increasingly seen as part of the broad progressive agenda.

If you’re out in the streets these days opposing white supremacy, Muslim bans and deportations, then it’s high time to get out in the streets with us to oppose similar policies in Israel. What we're pushing for is a consistent application of political principles, regardless if you're talking about the U.S., Israel, or anywhere else in the world.

The back of that t-shirt I wore in 2002 read: "Security for Israel Requires Justice for Palestinians." Then, advocating for the rights of Palestinians solely for the purpose of making Israeli lives better felt like a radical act.

But I’ve changed too. Justice for Palestinians is an imperative in its own right, not merely a tool or a condition of security for Israeli Jews. We all need to be able to examine our internal biases and assumptions. The collective vision of equality and justice for all people that we are building depends upon it.

Unearthing Truths: Israel, the Nakba, and the Jewish National Fund

The following is the editorial from the special edition of the forward commemorating the 70th anniversary of the Nakba. You can view the full edition here.

We present this special issue to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Nakba, the Arabic word for ‘catastrophe.’ The Nakba refers to the expulsion and dispossession of 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland during Israel’s creation (1947-1949).

In this issue, we lay out the historical record of those years to show that the Nakba was the result of a deliberate policy of mass expulsion, dispossession, and ethnic cleansing—a strategy designed to ensure that the Palestinians who had lived on the land for generations would be barred from ever returning. We also zero in on the fundamental role played by the 117-year-old international organization, the Jewish National Fund (JNF), in facilitating that dispossession.

Our goal is that there be a serious moral reckoning with this history, and it begins with that icon of innocence, the JNF’s small blue metal box that many of our readers will remember from their childhood, boxes that beckoned us to drop in coins that would help “make the desert bloom” and build the land of Israel. It was a

mission that was legitimized by the governing principle of the Zionist cause: “A land without a people for a people without a land.” As seductive as that slogan was, it was willfully false, as amply documented in personal testimonies of Palestinians and Israelis, historical records, and scholarly research. How, after all, could 750,000 Palestinians flee “a land without a people”?

From its founding, the JNF was encouraged by the Zionist movement to acquire land in Palestine for the purpose of settling Jews on that land. After 1948, aided and abetted by Israeli land law, the JNF continued to acquire land and also contributed to Israel’s dispossession of Palestinians from their land. This was accomplished by buying swathes of land from absentee landlords and then leasing it exclusively to Jews, by confiscating refugees’ land, and by forcibly—often violently—removing Palestinians from their land, a practice which persists today. By continuing to plant forests that conceal the ruins of Palestinian villages, the JNF seeks to erase history and memory, while hoping to whitewash its political motives and enhance its recent branding as an environmental organization. Ironically, however, it has earned widespread international condemnation for the degradation it has inflicted on the natural ecosystem.

While this year marks the 70th anniversary of the catastrophic events of 1948, we also know that the policies that informed Israel’s and the JNF’s actions back then continue to the present. With this issue we hope to expose the relationship between the Nakba and the Jewish National Fund; to encourage deeper conversation about the experiences and realities of Palestinians before, during and since Israel’s creation; and to facilitate among US Jewish communities—and more broadly—honest reflection, analysis, and action toward truth-telling and justice.

Tribal loyalties: personal stories of jewish peace activistsAvigail Abarbanel

There is an expectation in Jewish communities around the world that all Jews embrace Zionism and offer unquestioning support for Israel, ‘right or wrong’.

Jewish identity and Zionism are commonly and deliberately blurred. Jews who criticise Israel or question Zionism are often excluded, vilified and threatened. If they express sympathy for the plight of the Palestinian people, they risk being branded as traitors and accused of ‘supporting the enemies of Israel’.

Beyond Tribal Loyalties is a unique collection of twenty-five personal stories of Jewish peace activists from Australia, Canada, Israel, the United Kingdom and the United States. There is an age difference of more than fifty years between the oldest and the youngest contributor. The stories focus on the complex and intensely personal journey that Jewish activists go through to free themselves from the hold of Zionist ideology and its requirement to support all Israeli policies. Like many Jews, most of the contributors were once unquestioning supporters of Israel and Zionism. Something happened in the life of each of these extraordinary people that caused them to question and re-evaluate their understanding of the conflict and their relationship with Israel and the Palestinian people. In many cases this journey involved a reassessment of personal values, belief systems and identity. Beyond Tribal Loyalties seeks to discover what makes it possible for Jewish peace activists to

follow through with this transformative journey and their activist work, despite fanatical and sometimes violent opposition.

This is an inspiring book for anyone who is interested in the experience of being a peace activist. It offers a fresh and unusual angle on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and is a unique contribution in a field where political analysis is common, but where the personal angle is often lacking.

Call out for Submissions: Beyond Tribal loyalties 2

For details on submitting to beyond tribal loyalties, contact Avigail Abarbanel;E - [email protected] M - +44 7913 295 029

Am I an activist?

Sivan Barak is a social worker and member of the AJDS committee. Her chapter in beyond tribal loyalties. This is an excerpt from Sivan’s chapter in Beyond Tribal Loyalties.

A Palestinian friend recently responded to this question with the following:”If I conduct in the shower, does that make me a maestro?”

My name is Sivan Barak, a sister, a mother, a daughter, a friend and in my humble opinion I may well be an activist but the question that is far more interesting to me is why I became one and this is still not clear to me.

My education both formal and informal has not been mainstream. Learning to question everything has probably been the best lesson I have ever learnt but has also caused me and my family much turmoil.Questioning is an incessant quality that has affected every aspect of my life. There have been many questions big and small but one that recurs in a multitude of scenarios; it is a complex one to ask, so I always place it within a story. Let me ask you, the reader, my question and if you can share it with your friends and family.

Imagine two close friends driving along the beach road on a lovely spring afternoon, listening to music, seemingly without a care in the world. Suddenly a car swerves towards them, an accident occurs, the cars are destroyed yet they are untouched. After the terrible sounds of glass shattering, smell of oil and burning rubber, the adrenaline rush subsides, the body stops shaking, then there is silence.In these moments a shift could occur for the two involved in the incident, a deep shift in their perspective towards life.Why is it that one friend may emerge from this traumatic event with a renewed attitude to life, seeing it as a precious gift to be cherished and relished? Perhaps even re-evaluating their attitude towards what is most important and decide to live life fearlessly from now on, to take risks, ‘stop putting it off’ as they come to a realisation that life might end tomorrow? Meanwhile the second friend could see it in a completely opposing light. They could cling to the fear and drama experienced at that moment of impact, seeing the near-death experience in a fatalistic way and from that day on live in perpetual victimhood. What lies within our minds or hearts that lead us down two opposing paths?

Cross roads or turning points and the choices we make have always fascinated me. Is it the way we are wired, genetics, or our upbringing and family values? On the surface my destiny as an activist was set before I had any political or social awareness, but the road taken and the path down the Yellow Brick Road, never lead me to the Emerald City and I am still not sure where home is. To understand who Sivan Barak is and why I am in this book I need to tell my story which began in the United States in 1964, spanning across 3 continents and ending in Australia in 2011. To pinpoint the precise cross-road which morphed me into an activist I will trace my life junctions from both ends chronologically, taking a magnifying glass to significant moments which made me the woman I am today. To be honest until I was asked to write this chapter I never gave it a thought so in the process I’m hoping to locate the “car crash” that affected my inner moral compass so deeply that I became the person I am today. I will alternate between past and present dates working slowly towards that one moment which is somewhere in the middle.

Flash back to Scene 1 Cedars of Sinai Hospital in Beverly Hills.Los Angeles February 2nd, 1964 is the day I entered the world, the first born of a Jewish mother and Buddhist father. Sunny California is filled with organic food, hippies, soul music, peace activists, patriots, anti-Vietnam demonstrations, macramé bags and tie dye clothes. My mother was born in Palestine in 1943 to Jewish Polish parents who immigrated to Palestine in the early 30’s. My father was American born, the son of a Russian Jewish immigrant father and a 13th generation American born ex Mormon mother. Confused yet? With this kind of start I was seemingly on an inevitable path of a life of activism or soul searching.At birth I was bestowed with three citizenships, American, Israeli and Australian, thus began my wondering years in the quest of a sense of identity and a belonging to a place, a people, a tribe.

Scene 4 Ben Gurion Airport strapped to a bright orange backpack with all my belongingsMay 1st 1983 At 18 i was a full fledged lefty Zionist who believed my country needed me to continue ‘flowering the barren land’ that was founded by our forefathers in the1948 War of Independence. I was familiar with the history of 1967, the occupation, Palestinian identity but it was mostly equated with terror and fear, certainly it was without any question a Jewish Homeland and my home.

In 1984 I voluntarily enlisted into the Israeli army and served for 2 years and 10 months. I remember one day during basic training I was at target practice and my target had an Arabic looking face drawn on it, cartoon style. My stomach turned, and I told my officer I refuse to shoot at it asking for a replacement one. He rolled his eyes and did it. During the 6 months duty I spent in the West bank I started to see the reality on the ground and more questions arose. I noticed a 2-tiered society comprising of us and them, we rule, and they are second class citizens with little voice or rights. Clearly I still felt we had a purpose, to protect and defend the innocent from terror and hatred. So I stayed on the path.

Scene 8 – State Library Swanston Street hosting an angry demonstration

Dec 2008 – about a week into Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, I’ve decided to join the masses all alone, uncomfortably marching down the main street of our peaceful city besides very angry demonstrators, shouting slogans of fury against the killing of innocent lives in besieged Gaza.30 minutes earlier another demonstration went down this same path, with many of my friends marching in support of the Israeli government. Now as I march I look around to see if anyone recognises me, I’m genuinely concerned to be labelled as an Israel hater or an enemy from within. Despite my fears I march as my heart tells me to do the right thing. Let my friends gaze in horror. “Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea!” the chanting made me cringe, but I marched on.

scene 2 – Kibbutz Nahal Oz in the NegevSouthern Israel 1970 - My mother, younger brother and I immigrated to Israel and settled on a kibbutz neighbouring Gaza. A socialist project in which I lived wonderful carefree days barefoot, free to roam, surrounded by nature and freedom. Hebrew became my mother tongue, Israel my Homeland and picking her wild flowers in spring time became a favourite pass time. My mother remarried a young Israeli kibutznik who worked in the fields and befriended several of the farmers from Gaza who worked across the fence. I recall we often hosted the Gazan’s and their families in our home and would drive down to share a magnificent meal at their home in Gaza. In my young mind I knew only of peaceful co-existence between “us’’ Jews and “them” Arabs, but then I was told very little of the narrative of the Palestinians. There seemed to be many blanks and fuzzy anecdotes around our histories.Following three years of peace came the Yom Kippur war. My new father was a paratrooper with a beautiful red beret and olive uniform and he soon left for the

Suez Canal to fight the terrible enemy. I was told we were fighting the Arabs and that they wanted to kill us all. During those months the kibbutz was suddenly empty of men and run by the women who worked in the fields, milked the cows, fed the chickens and baked cakes for care packages to send to their brave fighting husbands, brothers, sons, fathers and friends. For me these days were exciting, there was no school and we spent many nights in the bomb shelters, eating chocolate and watching television. In those days kibbutz was truly a socialist project so T.V was not allowed in the members rooms only in communal spaces like the shelters and club room, this was for the sake of equality for all. When my dad returned for a rare visit he told us heroic tales of battles won, about a bicycle he found in one of the villages which he wanted to bring back for us, the awful food they ate and how little they slept.

Scene 6 Trades Hall- “What do you think of me”July 2008 team building exercise in the big cold room six strangers standing awkwardly around sipping instant coffee and waiting for cameras to be set up so the workshop can begin. I’m feeling nervous and excited about this adventure, I love new experiences, and this looks promisingly different to anything I ever did before.

We were to stand up each pair at a time in the middle of the large room and face each other while the rest looked on. My partner and I were first to stand up, facing each other approximately 2 metres apart, hands by our sides, no facial expression, we were asked to stare into each other’s eyes and wait in silence. I could hear the film capturing the moment, I wriggled around uncomfortably giggling in nervousness, our eyes locked looking at each other but not yet seeing each other. I could feel my heart beating fast, resisting staring deeply into the eyes of a stranger, an enemy, who probably hates me and blames me for generations of his families suffering. But then I saw him, behind the conflict, the violence and the pain, beyond all that and for the first time in my life I saw the man opposite me. A human being like me, an equal, and the shift happened. It was a simple shift over in a second but with no going back.My cross road was as simple as that, from the day I stared into the eyes of a Palestinian and saw the human I started to see and fight against the injustices my people had instigated against his people. A cloud lifted in me and those who watched us, it was palpable. The path has at times been terrifying and ground

shattering, but I will remain on it until peace and justice has been set in place in the land I love which is my home and his.

FACING THE NAKBA

Donna Nevel is a community psychologist and educator living in the US. She is a coordinating team member (along with Nava EtShalom, Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark, and Rabbi Alissa Wise) of the Facing the Nakba project.

As a Jew living in the US, I know that many, if not most, of us from Jewish communities grew up learning little, if anything, about the Nakba even though we knew so much—we thought—about the establishment of Israel.

After being introduced to what actually happened before and during Israel's creation, that is, the dispossession of 750,000 Palestinians from their land and homes, I understood that this was a history that had remained untold or distorted within Jewish communities.

Several years ago, I joined with a group of Jewish women who were determined to develop educational resources about the Nakba and the consequences of the Nakba to share within our communities. Over the next number of years, we developed the Facing the Nakba (FTN) project, which includes a seven-session curriculum on the Nakba, past and present, accompanied by a facilitator guide. The resources in the curriculum are heavily drawn from testimonies, first-hand accounts, and histories shared by Palestinians. The goal of the project is to encourage US Jews and others to learn the history of the Nakba, past and ongoing, to reckon with that history, and to act accordingly. We also know all too well that Palestinians continue to be expelled from their homes and their land continues to be stolen as the Israeli government amps up its violence against the Palestinian people.

The FTN curriculum draws heavily on the work of Zochrot, (“remembering” in Hebrew), an Israeli organization that aims to educate Israeli Jews and others about the history and ongoing injustices of the Nakba and promote the right of return of the Palestinian refugees. FTN also draws upon the work of BADIL, a human rights organization committed to defending and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees and internally displaced persons, within the frameworks of international humanitarian and human rights law.

We remain deeply committed to sharing these resources with Jewish communities in the US and across the globe, as well as with anyone who wants to understand the Palestinian call for justice.

Rachel Liebhaber is a lawyer and member of the AJDS committee. Last May, she took part in a delegation to Israel and Palestine with the Centre for Jewish Non-Violence. She co facilitated the facing the Nakba workshops in Melbourne earlier this year with Jordy Silverstein.

Growing up, in a Jewish school and Zionist youth group, I hardly heard the term Nakba at all. When I did, it was explained to me that ‘Nakba’ (always contained in inverted commas) means a catastrophe, and is how Palestinians refer to Yom Ha’atzmaut. They might have added something like, ‘can you believe, that is what Palestinians insist on calling the miracle of Jews finally getting their own homeland?’

Today, the word seems to remain something of a taboo in the Jewish Community.

When Jordy and I decided to run a ‘Facing the Nakba’ session earlier this year, our motivation was to try and change the conversation in the Jewish community around Israel and Palestine. To my mind, this requires the important step of understanding what the Nakba actually means for Palestinians. I don’t think one can talk about peace or reconciliation without this understanding.

In our Jewish schools, youth movements and in the broader community, we hear about Israel as a realisation of a longed-for dream, a safe-haven for Jews, a centre for Jewish life. But we don’t hear about what the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 meant for those who were dispossessed from that land. When Australian

Jews do talk about Palestine, the conversation often focuses on the post-1967 occupation, without acknowledging the occupation that began with the founding of the state of Israel.

Change starts with the small things, with education and conversations. The ‘Facing the Nakba’ sessions developed by Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) are excellent for facilitating such conversations and discussions. These draw from the pioneering work of the Israeli organisation Zochrot (‘Remembering’), which published a study guide in 2008 called ‘How do you say Nakba in Hebrew?’ We were grateful that JVP made their sessions available to the public. These are a set of invaluable resources that any educator can use and adapt to their needs.

We were overwhelmed by the interest we had for these sessions, and our initial group came along ready to engage with challenging ideas and material. In one of the sessions, we undertook close readings of a number of source documents including Israel’s Declaration of Independence, the testimony of a Palmach soldier, two poems by Mahmoud Darwish, and the text of the Haganah’s notorious Plan Dalet. Reading these texts alongside each other was both illuminating and harrowing. Another memorable session involved engaging in Palestinian art works in response to the Nakba.

We hope that these sessions were a beginning, and that they will spark further reading, conversations, and ultimately, change. Given the interest we had in these sessions, and the encouraging responses from those who came along, it seems like attitudes in the Jewish community may be shifting. Perhaps the taboo over the Nakba in the Jewish community might be ready to be lifted.

If you would like to find out more about the facing the Nakba workshops, you can email Rachel at [email protected]

Yes, the right of return is feasible: here’s how Tom Pessah is a sociologist and activist. (translated by Yoni Molad).Originally published in +972

Seventy years after the violent displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, it is time to undo the injustice and to enable whoever desires to return as equal citizens to do so, while respecting the rights and identities of all who live in Israel-Palestine.

For millions of Palestinians worldwide, the right of return is a fundamental issue — the most important precondition for resolving the conflict. However, in Israel the matter is raised haphazardly and is not really dealt with seriously. Haokets recently published a series of important documents culled from the state archives, which show how the property of Palestinian refugees was transferred over to the Custodian of Absentees’ Property.

Laila Abdel Meguid Tafesh, 78, from Rafah refugee camp, holds up a key from her house in Jaffa, May 15, 2009. (Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90)

Simultaneously, a debate has been taking place on the pages of Haaretz regarding the most appropriate attitude vis-a-vis the right of return. The contributors come from across the Israeli political spectrum: Ze’ev Binyamin Begin was a member of Netanyahu’s government. Shaul Arieli was a Knesset candidate for Meretz, and has

been fighting for years to expose the injustices caused by the construction of the separation barrier. Uri Avnery is the founder of Gush Shalom, who dared to meet with Yasser Arafat in Beirut at the height of the First Lebanon War. Shlomo Sand is a controversial academic whose aim is to shatter the myth of Jewish biological continuity.

Despite this apparent diversity — and the courage displayed by writers who veer away from the public consensus — it is interesting to note that, fundamentally, all the discussants are in agreement. Begin is “pessimistic” about peace because he does not believe the Palestinians will forego the right of return. Arieli proposes to prevent “the demographic threat to Israel’s Jewish identity” through measures such as compensation and resettlement in other countries. Sand offers compensation on the basis of recognizing that ‘this right is antithetical to the to the linguistic and cultural identity that exists in Israel, perhaps to its very existence.” And Avnery suggests absorbing only a limited quota of refugees on the basis that “no one expects Israel to commit suicide and agree to resettle millions of refugees.”

The discourse surrounding the right of return is trapped in slogans about “suicide” and “demographic threat,” dictated by a regime fearful of a real solution to the conflict, and the broad changes that this would entail. Is it not time to exchange these slogans for a serious discussion?Here are a few fundamental facts about the right of return demanded by millions of Palestinians as a condition of peace. First, the Palestinian identity that formed in this land was primarily a local one. For example, the Khalidi family has lived in Jerusalem since the Middle Ages, their ancestors are all buried there. Local identity is wrapped up in specific traditions — a certain accent, dress, cuisine, flora, and a sense of life provided by residing on the land where your ancestors have lived for generations.

Local identity is not a passing illusion. Refugees living for decades in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, or the U.S. still maintain this local identity, and therefore their resettlement on the outskirts of Ramallah will not enable a real fulfillment of their rights or identity. Israelis learn by heart the Declaration of Independence of a country in which Jewish spiritual identity was shaped over 2,000 years ago. They cannot expect that the core of the national identity of a people exiled from its land a mere 70 years ago will suddenly evaporate in order to make way for a peace

treaty. The probability that the Palestinians forego the most fundamental component of their identity is equivalent to the probability that millions of Israelis would “wise up” to their Israeli identity and “return” to the lands from which their grandparents emigrated. Both these fantasies are dangerous because they are unrealistic.

Palestinian geographer Salman Abu-Sita, whom Avnery mentions in his article, discovered that 85 percent of Israeli territory where refugees aspire to resettle is sparsely populated. Most of the 400 or so villages destroyed during and after the Nakba have been turned into national parks or converted into agricultural land, including villages whose former residents are today internally displaced refugees with Israeli citizenship. A survey conducted by the Smith Institute, shows that a quarter of the Jewish residents of the Galilee would welcome the return of refugees on the condition that they do not return to areas populated by Jews.

Only a minority of refugees seek to return to urban areas densely populated by Jews. In most of these areas the original houses have been destroyed, and there is no obstacle to having refugees live anywhere in nearby areas — much in the same way that Jews and Arabs live together today in cities like Haifa. As for the small minority of cases in which the original houses remain intact, the Israeli organization Zochrot teamed up with Palestinian NGO Badil to formulate a joint legal framework document, which provides a guide for current residents and original owners to reach a joint agreement.Furthermore, Zochrot, in collaboration with Baldana, the Arab Association for Human Rights, and the Council for Internally Displaced Refugees have developed different planning models for return. This is not “suicide,” to borrow Avnery’s phrase, but rather practical planning projects that provide housing solutions without generating further displacement. In other words, they offer hope.Seventy years after the violent displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, it is time to undo the injustice and to enable whoever desires to return to their homeland as equal citizens to do so, while respecting the rights and identities of all who reside there.70 Years of QuestionsLily Tamir-Regev; Hashomer Hatzair

How do we, as left-wing Australian Zionists, confront and balance the commemoration of the Nakba and the celebration of 70 years of Israel’s independence? When looking towards the future, how can we consolidate an egalitarian, but Jewish state? Moreover, how can we decide or discuss anything without hearing the voices of the oppressed?

The issues that I have been exposed to throughout my time at Hashomer Hatzair have always pressured my thought processes and I enjoy the mind map of solutions, resolutions and the plethora of unanswerable and existential questions that arise. When it comes to the never-ending topic of Zionism and Israel, the complications and need for discussion increases expectantly. But how do we overcome the paradoxical nature of the Israel-Palestine conflict?

Knowing that nobody has a concrete vision of what peace will look like, it is much more meaningful and effective to be proactive with good intentions. For example, it doesn’t matter whether or not you are really making a difference when you are recycling at home, but if you are a moral person, you stay true to your own values, as Aristotle’s virtue ethics in practise shows that with good character comes good intent. The same goes for dealing with left-wing Zionism in the 21st century; do your best to firstly acknowledge the problem. Furthermore, discuss it with your family and friends, work with your community, or write in the local newsletter!

Something that I think everyone in the world struggles with is the pressure from society and the epidemic of the ‘us and them’ syndrome, that there must be a answer to every problem – a simple yes or no, one or the other. But this is clearly unreasonable and unachievable when delving into the complicated history of the conflict and trying to understand, and sympathise with, the rich narratives of both

sides. This is why the best solution to handling the dichotomy of Israel’s independence and Palestine’s autonomy is to start the conversation and get the people of the world to talk and be aware, and soon enough, there will be a whole network of ideas and visions, and thus progress on the path to peace.

I forgot, like you, to die: 12 Palestinian writers respond to the ongoing NakbaComplete article published May 16, 2018 by Literary Hub

Yesterday, the global Palestinian community marked the 70th anniversary of the Nakba, the catastrophic destruction of the Palestinian homeland and dispossession of over 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and villages. Hundreds of villages were depopulated and razed to the ground, hundreds of thousands of people torn from their country. They were told by subsequent Israeli administrations—and most of their Western allies, chief among them the US government—there is no place for you. But anniversaries are a strange phenomenon when the past is a living, breathing, and unending current event. One has only to contrast the besieged Palestinians of Gaza—the site of months-long mass protests against erasure—with the dystopian paeans to “peace” and “freedom” at the opening ceremony for the new American embassy on stolen Palestinian land in Jerusalem to realize how easily words can be gutted of their meaning.

For many Palestinians, the permission to narrate one’s own stories in their own words has been at the root of struggle and survival, as important as delineating a physical space for existence. Palestine’s destruction figures prominently in the tense fugue of our imaginations. Across generations, Palestinians have witnessed what a foreign invader does to rip apart a nation, both in the physical and emotional realms. The coastal strip that has housed hundreds of thousands of refugees alongside its native families—refugees displaced from Yafa, Haifa, Lyd, Ramleh and so many centers of pre-1948 Palestinian life—is both microcosm and high-relief. Gaza’s camps are overcrowded, dilapidated and underserved, starved and weaponized. The clock ticks towards the inevitable—a place rendered uninhabitable for lack of potable water; for a profusion of untreated sewage; for land and sea crossings closed by iron fists; for a generation traumatized by, and

untreated for, the visible and invisible wounds of three punishing wars in ten years. Yet, Gaza makes an audacious claim on life; its people continue to resist.

LeaveZaina Alsous(originally published in Asian American Writers Workshop)

A hijacked plane in 1969 lands in Damascus. This means a plane was unable to fly away, to Tel Aviv. I read about the incident in the autobiography of Leila Khaled.This book is out of print. This means it is difficult to find her first hand account in text though much is written about her. I wanted to write a poem about Leila: a hero,or terrorist, depending on who you ask. Dareen is the name of a woman,who lives under house arrest. This means she is unable to leave her home.Israeli officials categorize her as a threat, she calls herself a poet.The speaker is an important part of a poem. A rule of poetry, trynot to let the reader out of a poem. At this point I will disobey and sayyou are free to go if you choose. Choice is a complicated part of describingPalestinian heroes or terrorists. The Israeli and Palestinian conflict is studiedin class. The word conflict in English, defined as “a serious disagreement”.If you are still here, doesn’t that sound fair? Two sides, equally at fault,each making a choice. Three generations later, I still do not knowhow to explain choices. A place was left behind. A place I have never seen.This means I still do not know how to write myselfinto existence. Three boys form a tributary of blood, on a beach in Gaza, elsewhere

a contained border, a family of bones, without broth; these will be described as incidents.The difference between violence and incidents in a conflict,depends on the speaker. What word would you choose to begin?Nakba translates as “Catastrophe”. Ha’atzmaut, “Independence”.Though Hebrew and Arabic share yawm or yohm,for day. Alan Dershowitz and other Israeli historians argueit was a choice of Palestinians to leave the land in 1948.Argue, a word used when choosing an explanation about why things are.History is a collection of choices. I have also inherited memories.Pink prayer beads on the counter. Creases in white fabric, black threadsembroidering live skin. Memories do not always obeythe lines of history’s choices. My grandfather fled the landwhen he was eight years old, leaving his mother at home.This means he never saw her again. Many will continue to argueleaving and never returning is a choice, not a violence.A poem, depending on the speaker, an act of incitementto violence. Concrete left in the throats of children, a mother’s final glance,a segregated beach, a segregated sun; it is all justa great misunderstanding, a conflict. I have changed my mind.I am leavingyou and this poem behind. A choice, I choose, this time.