I'm reading Susan Abulhawa's Mornings in Jenin. Through its central narrator, Amal, it follows the story of Palestinians under Israeli occupation from the 1948 war until today. Although I had always vaguely followed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I had never really understood it. As I was growing up, white Christian South Africans were generally very pro-Israel. If I remember correctly, I would sometimes hear my parents offer a more balanced view, expressing compassion for the Palestinian position and questioning the legitimacy of Israeli action. But it was an issue I never took the time to fully understand.
Last year I had the opportunity to hear a talk by a young Israeli conscientious objector. He is part of a group of Israelis who refuse to join the Israeli military in protest to Palestinian occupation. I admired his very brave position. His views could result in his being jailed or worse. Yet even then, I don't think I fully understood the intricacies of the political history of the region.
On reading this novel, written from the Palestinian perspective, I was inspired to read up on this ongoing conflict, to understand better why this violence has been going on for so long. What shocked me most, from Abulhawa's novel, was the massacres that remain largely unknown to the western world, and particularly the Christian western world which continues to support Israel regardless of the violence it metes out on innocent civilians. Abulhawa describes in some detail the massacre in Lebanon (the Sabra and Shatila massacre) in 1982, where women and children were raped, totured and killed while Israeli defence forces looked on.
The sad tragedy is that the roots of Israeli violence lie with the Nazi death camps. And the roots of the Palestinian violence in the form of suicide bombers and the so-called terrorist attacks (for example, on American embassies) lie with Israeli occupation and the continuous humiliation and violence meted out to Palestinians.
What Abulhawa's novel shows is that injustice must be given a voice. Suffering and pain must be heard or it builds within people and communities until they can no longer bear the intensity of the helplessness and voicelessness and make themselves heard through violence. For the first time I understand that what inspires suicide bombers is not so much religious fundmantalism as generations of unheard and unacknowldged pain beyond imagining. Perhaps we need to start listening more to these unheard voices, taking a bit of effort to look for the marginalised stories.
4 comments:
Maybe in 1948 the UN made a mistake by granting the future state of Israel the right to occupy its land. One of the reasons is the deficient consultancy of the Palestinian population, terrorised by the Israeli colonists before 1940. You just cannot undo more than 1000 years of history, not even on so called biblical grounds. The holocaust was a western problem, not a Palestinian one. Bob
Indeed. And now its impossible to undo the past 60-odd years of history as well. I heard someone recently describe the revolution in North Africa and the Middle East as finding one of its roots in the Israel-Palestine problem, where the Arab voice in general has been ignored and Arabs feel their leaders have not represented them adequately to the western world (Israel being an example of this). An endless cycle...
There is a thing that Paolo Freire once said -- that the oppressed internalises the image of the oppressor. And it's very true.
As someone who lives in the ME I openly sympathise with the Palestine's. I often hear the situation in Israel and Palestine referred to as apartheid and long slow ethnic cleansing. What I find most difficult to comprehend is how a people who have been treated so badly at the hand of others can turn around and then treat another people so badly.
I also agree with the comment on suicide boomers. When you have no hope left you will do anything. When you can not envision a better life for your children you have nothing left to lose.
When will the rest of the world wake up and do something about this dire situation. Maybe the Arab Spring will force governments to take their heads out of the sand.
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