Palestine Should Have Been Easy
By Madiha Tahir (Yale University)
(This is a revised version of a talk delivered at the “Holding onto Palestine: Reimagining Anthropology at a Time of Genocide” hosted by Insaniyyat: Society of Palestinian Anthropologists held September 12-15 2024)
There is a holocaust unfolding in Gaza. Disciplines, expertise, analyses, UN resolutions, human rights reports—they have made not a shred of difference.[i] Today, I saw a curly-headed child with a perfect golden face. A little sleeping darling save for the back of his tousled head which was blasted open into pink flaps. His brain had fallen out in the rubble. Every day the photos and videos from Palestine issue forth from some dark void beyond language and sense.
Palestine should have been easy. A classic occupation. A livestreamed genocide. Today I witnessed a woman cradling her baby twins in the smallest shrouds. What more do the empiricists, the positivists, the statisticians, those peddlers of “objective facts” at the New York Times want? Palestine is a defeat of information-led activism, of oh if they only knew activism, of exposé journalism, of transparency, secrecy, revelation. In Gaza, there is no secret. There is nothing to discover except the shriveled heart of the Global North—its total and utter failure of feeling.
***
How difficult is it for one body to feel the injustice wheeled at another? asks Claudia Rankine (2014). In 2019, at a border checkpoint, I waited for hours to enter Palestine. On the third round of questioning, to the Israeli immigration official who was finally forced to ask me what is your relationship to Palestine? I wanted to say many things. But against my better judgment, my face betrayed me, and I stupidly, silently grinned. Zionists expend so much violent energy enforcing the fiction that Palestine does not exist that his resort to this question felt to me, exhilaratingly like a crack, a colonialist breakdown. If colonial power operates on the logic of non-reciprocity, as Palestinian scholar Nasser Abourahme (Rosales 2023) reminds us, if it works “on its ability to live in proximate, intimate, geographical relations with those it subjugates but without being touched by them,” then anticolonial struggle consists of challenging that logic.
To that Israeli official, here is what I wanted to say: Palestine was my first lesson in American taboo. It was also my first experience in relation and reciprocity: Palestine is how I found my place as a refugee in New York City among Arabs, Palestinians, anti-Zionist Jews, and other inspired anticolonial, anti-imperial leftists, each of us holding the other even as we argued, sometimes bitterly, over how to demand liberation. Palestine is a collective memory. Palestine is a spark. Palestine is most of my relationship with family who understands nothing of academia and everything about colonialism. Palestine is a language of the Global South.[ii]
Do not misunderstand me. Palestine is complicated. In Turkey, writes Ayça Çubukçu (2024), the Turkish government claims solidarity and supports Hamas “even as it arrests Palestine solidarity activists.” In Pakistan too, the country of my birth, the old solidarities are fraying. In the heady decades of the 60s and 70s, as Pakistani officials raised the question of Palestine at various fora demanding its liberation, its military was violently doing otherwise. General Zia ul-Haq, who would go on to rule Pakistan under US-backed military dictatorship, trained Jordanian soldiers and even led Jordanian troops during Black September in 1970 in which thousands of Palestinians were killed (Reidel 2014).[iii] A year later, the Pakistani military was committing massacres of its own population in East Pakistan—now Bangladesh—and then Balochistan where a rebellion of ethnic Baloch was underway. Along its northwest, the government attacked ethnic Pashtuns as suspicious fifth columns for Afghanistan; it banned the progressive National Awami Party (NAP) and imprisoned its Pashtun leader, Abdul Wali Khan. Even as the elected and unelected rulers of the country sharpened their blade on the necks of Pakistanis and Palestinians, they continued to raise the issue of Palestine in part as a strategic ploy to censor domestic dissent.
These legacies, coupled with the forced demise of the Left has resulted in a cynical skepticism towards mentions of Palestine (or Kashmir for that matter). It is largely the Islamists who now voice these causes as the secular Left vacated them. Still, I now hear Pakistanis of many walks talking, discussing, commiserating with Palestinians. Whatever the fortunes of Palestine (and Kashmir) on the activist circuit, these geographies continue to be part of the daily warp of life, of our basic understanding of ourselves and our place in the world.[iv]
In the US, again, the situation is different. It is not postcolonial but imperial, a DEI imperialism couched in a narrow identity politics. Enchanted by the prospect of being included in imperial governance, staunch supporters of Kamala Harris lash out. Petty, small-minded videos begin to appear that claim to speak for Black Americans. They do not of course: there is nothing to suggest that those making them have any connection to Black activist struggles in the US. In fact, Black activists from Ferguson and beyond respond recalling the anticolonial politics of the Black Panthers as well as more recent Black-Palestinian engagements during the height of the BLM protests.[v] I mention these videos, however, because they say something about the flexible power of DEI imperialism. They reveal a style of thought that has become possible in the US. The video-makers suggest that solidarity with Palestinians is an act of charity; they attack Black Muslims as suspect because of their solidarity with Palestine; they claim an absolute victimhood. To my mind, they function through a logic of non-reciprocity, an un-relation.
How difficult is it for one body to feel the injustice wheeled at another? At the inaugural townhall of Black People Against War in the Gulf in February 1991, activist A. Sivanandan (1991) delivered an address called “A Black Perspective on War.” Speaking of the Gulf War, he declared: “This is not our war, this is not the war of Black and Third World peoples.” It is Global South states who are being won over, Sivanandan explained, not the “people of the Third World.” He put his analysis bluntly. “Black dictatorship and white imperialism are two sides of the same coin,” Sivanandan said, “Our problem is to get rid of both.” Sivanandan’s pronoun—our/we—is not wedded to the state. This our/we is transnational but alive to multiplicity. Sivanandan’s we is an analytic. It is a method, a way of cutting a path, charting a freedom dream (Kelley 2002).
There was once a slogan: ‘We Are All Palestinians.’ In the late 90s, it was emblazoned on the t-shirt of an organization called S.U.S.T.A.I.N (Stop US Tax Aid To Israel Now) that was organizing tax resistance to put pressure on the US government to stop paying for Israel’s crimes. I own a t-shirt with their slogan. But, in the ensuing years, I stopped wearing it because in an era of increasingly bounded identity claims, the shirt began to seem out of step. I know the million critiques that can be made about such a statement today. I know. Yet, I now think that at its best, ‘We are All Palestinians’ is a worthy aspiration. It is a call for us to act as if we share the stakes of the situation, to move and groove together. It harbors—in Edouard Glissant’s elegant terms, a poetics of relation. I see this poetics at play in the militant student protests on campuses now; in the encampments, in the clarity of their principled solidarity, in the refusal to be compromised or negotiated out of an ethical position.
Today, I wake up to Bisan Owda smiling. She bids everyone good morning as she takes her viewers around Gaza and documents the macabre and the quotidian. “I’m smiling because I’m alive,” she says. I find myself smiling back at her—elated with her that she is alive and breathing.
***
Palestine forces us to ask other questions. For instance: How do you breathe through a genocide? For instance: How do we move together? For instance: what are our freedom dreams? For instance: what is your relationship to Palestine?
In my own academic life, I work on war, militarism, and technology. We don’t ask these questions. The body and being of the colonized are largely absent in these academic and journalistic discussions except as dead matter.[vi] Witnessing the genocide in Gaza today, I am struck by the same dissonance I experienced reporting, and then later, doing fieldwork on the ‘war on terror,’ the US drone bombardments, and the Pakistani military operations in and around the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands. Very little in the literature on digital war speaks to the conditions of these worlds—or how such conditions might inform our theories of what digital ‘war’ is.[vii] This is why, as Palestinians livestream their own murder, our theories of distance and remote mediation have almost nothing to add to the conversation. Israel’s “violence workers” (Correia and Wall 2018) are gleefully blasting people and children into oblivion; they murder with and without algorithmic assistance; they have no trouble killing at a distance or up-close. It is not accidental that scholars of digital ‘war,’ most of us physically and intellectually located in the Global North, are only trained to answer some variety of the question: How do you kill? And yet more, to do so from the unmarked perspective of the killers.[viii] We have mistaken taking apart the mechanism of violence for anticolonial, anti-imperial critique.
Almost a year into the genocide, it is not the widely-published revelations of the mechanics of Israel’s Lavender AI targeting software, but Bisan Owda’s 8-minute documentary for AJ+ documenting the macabre quotidian of life in Gaza that has come under organized attack from Zionists. Owda’s short film was nominated for—and recently won—the Emmy to the chagrin of some of Hollywood’s entertainment industry. Over 150 Hollywood Zionists including actors, producers, and industry bosses demanded that her nomination be immediately rescinded. They claim that Owda is a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), an organization branded as “terrorist” by the US government. They claim that nominating Owda is tantamount to “glorifying a figure associated with terrorism.”[ix]
What is so threatening about Owda’s little docu-film? Terrorism, the Palestinian writer Fargo Nissim Tbakhi (2023), reminds us, is the name for an ideological category. In this space, it is only specific someones who appear and appear again. I venture that, in being nominated for the Emmy, Owda’s work begins to operate as a kind of epistemic disobedience. The potential legitimation of a Palestinian sensibility as worthy and even journalistically ‘objective’ enough to stand on its own without the voices of ‘experts’ and ‘analysts’ and all those confusion-makers is frightening for the Zionists. “For the native,” wrote Fanon (1963: 77), “objectivity is always directed against him.” Yet, Owda’s documentary sets up house inside that colonialist infrastructure and twists it till the camera is firmly focused on a Palestinian. In a camp. In Gaza. It is a fragile victory that can turn in an instant. But, it is also perhaps one instance of what Tbakhi means when they urge us to commit “narrative terrorism”—work that does infrastructural damage to institutions and disciplinary demands.
What might our research, our writing, our scholarship look like when it “is firmly on the side of those rendered terrorists, on the side of the colonized and the oppressed…What tactics, shapes, strategies and necessities do their struggles demand of our narratives?” What if doing damage to empire, wherever and however we can, were the explicit aim of our work?
Academia is drowning in specializations and sometimes pointless nuance (Healy 2017). Yet, imperial power is nothing if not expansive. The anthropologist Engseng Ho (2004) observed that most colonial powers were not just colonial but imperial in extent and outlook. “The many colonies which fired anticolonial nationalist dreams and became post-colonial states were merely parts of a single empire, when viewed from the imperial center.” That is, the technics of violence circulate. That is, they are crafted from the blood of our peoples stretching across vast continents from the abject conditions of mine workers who produce materials for violent technologies to the experimental subjects whose life-worlds become its feeding grounds. That is, to understand the killing machine with the explicit aim of destroying it, we must examine what is happening in the data centers, in the mines, and in the killing fields together.
This then is our work—we scholars, writers, activists, we freedom dreamers: to trace the death-worlds of empire and transfigure them into lively relation. This is not narrow work. It is expansive, relentless, militant. It is antithetical to the cramped models of academia. It brings Palestine into relation with Kashmir, with Haiti, Afghanistan, Congo, Sudan, Iraq, and a litany of other heaving, restless worlds that crave release. This is the work of building relation; our collective liberation depends on it.
Coda: I wrote the above before we all witnessed a young boy, Sha’ban al-Dalou, burning alive while hooked up to an IV. Each day, Israel’s armies display shocking malevolence, breed obscene horrors. In the present situation, we are arriving at the limit of language. I am not the first to realize this. We must write plainly and bravely. But it also seems to me, a time to act, beyond words, however and in whatever capacity possible. Nothing less will do.
References
Correia, David, and Tyler Wall. 2018. Police: A Field Guide. Verso Books.
Dean, Jodi, and Ayça Çubukçu. 2024. “Leadership and Liberation: An Exchange.” Boston Review. June 14. https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/leadership-and-liberation-an-exchange.
Fanon, Frantz. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. Grove Press.
Healy, Kieran. 2017. “Fuck Nuance.” Sociological Theory 35 (2): 118-127. https://doi.org/10.1177/0735275117709046.
Ho, Engseng. 2004. “Empire Through Diasporic Eyes: A View from the Other Boat.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 46 (2): 210-246. https://doi.org/10.1017/s00104175040001x.
Kelley, Robin D. G. 2002. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Beacon Press.
Rankine, Claudia. 2014. Citizen: An American Lyric. Graywolf Press.
Reidel, Bruce. 2014. What We Won: America’s Secret War in Afghanistan, 1979-89. Brookings Institution Press.
Rosales, Jose. 2023. “On Anti-Forgetfulness and Anti-Oblivion Stones: An Interview with Nasser Abourahme.” Radio Zamaneh, December 6. https://en.radiozamaneh.com/35638/.
Sivanandan, A. 1991. “A Black Perspective on the War.” Race & Class 32 (4): 83–88. https://doi.org/10.1177/030639689103200407.
Tbakhi, Fargo. 2023. “Notes On Craft: Writing In The Hour Of Genocide.” Protean Magazine, December 8. https://proteanmag.com/2023/12/08/notes-on-craft-writing-in-the-hour-of-genocide/.
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[i] I ran across a similar sentiment recently by historian Esmat Elhalaby (2023) who writes: “An endless stream of UN General Assembly Resolutions; libraries of humanitarian reports; commissions, committees, and tribunals convened regularly for decades; the indictment of Israeli officials in European courts; the collection of thousands of hours of testimony, the most detailed, comprehensive, account of dispossession, degradation, and death ever produced in world history, has achieved for Palestinians essentially, fundamentally, nothing.” See: Elhalaby, Esmat. 2023. “Our Siege is Long.” Public Books, October 27. https://www.publicbooks.org/our-siege-is-long/.
[ii] By Global South, I mean a relation and an epistemic formation rather than merely geography. See: Amrute, Sareeta. 2020. “Computing in/from the South.” Catalyst 6 (2): 1-23. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v6i2.34594.
[iii] Zia ul-Haq was at the time a brigadier in the Pakistani army and had been stationed in Amman for 3 years. According to then CIA station chief, Jack O’Connell, Zia led the Jordanian troops. Zia’s collaboration with the Jordanians may not have been official. The Pakistani military delegation in Amman viewed Zia’s actions as having violated his orders. He was sent back to Pakistan and the head of the delegation suggested he be court-martialed, a fate he narrowly avoided. See also: Nawaz, Shuja. 2008. Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars Within. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[iv] There is considerable entanglement between Palestine and Kashmir. See: Essa, Azad. 2023. Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel. London: Pluto Press.; Osuri, Goldie and Ather Zia. 2020. “Kashmir and Palestine: Archives of Coloniality and Solidarity.” Identities 27 (3): 249-266. https://doi.org/10.1080/1070289X.2020.1750200. as well as the rest of that special issue.
[v] On Black-Palestinian solidarities, especially in the context of Black American and Palestinian struggles, see: Erakat, Noura. 2020. “Geographies of intimacy: Contemporary renewals of Black–Palestinian solidarity.” American Quarterly (72) 2: 471-496. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/aq.2020.0027.; Kelley, Robin D.G. 2019. “From the River to Every Mountain Top: Solidarity as Worldmaking.” Journal of Palestine Studies. 48 (4): 69-91. https://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jps.2019.48.4.69.; Rickford, Russell. 2019. “‘To build a new world’: Black American internationalism and Palestine solidarity." Journal of Palestine Studies 48 (4): 52-68. https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2019.48.4.52.; Feldman, Keith. 2017. A Shadow Over Palestine. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.; Bailey, K. D. 2015. “Black-Palestinian Solidarity in the Ferguson-Gaza Era,” American Quarterly. 67 (4): 1017-1026. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/aq.2015.0060.; Lubin, Alex. 2015. Geographies of Liberation: The Making of an Afro-Arab Political Imaginary. Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press.
[vi] I mean to note here something similar to what Katherine McKittrick in her critique on the literature on racial violence. She writes that “the dead and dying black/nonwhite body becomes the conceptual tool [in this literature] that will undoubtedly complete, and thus empirically prove, the brutalities of racism.” (2011: 953). Racialized bodies are simply produced as evidence, in other words, for conceptual work that happens elsewhere. McKittrick, Katherine. 2011. “On Plantations, Prisons, and a Black Sense of Place.” Social & Cultural Geography 12 (8): 947–63. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2011.624280.
[vii] The genocide is, very starkly, not a war. Many of the conditions termed digital war are also not ‘war’ in the sense of two battling armies. In Pakistan and elsewhere, the US has been welcomed and enabled by domestic powerholders.
[viii] Heonik Kwon criticizes the literature of the Cold War similarly arguing that its overriding focus on the techno-fetishistic “imaginary war” was based on the North American and European experience. Kwon, Heonik. 2008. Ghosts of War in Vietnam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[ix] This can all be found on the website for the organization that released the letter, the rightwing but blandly named Creative Community for Peace. I choose not to assist its circulation and have therefore not provided a link.