On Palestine: How to be an Ally
A Manifesto to my Western Friends
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There really is no easy way to do this. How to condense over 70 years of infernal suffering into a written piece that is short, simple and compelling enough to sway the hearts of those of you who are open enough to hear another side of the Palestinian story?
My venture to do this has no doubt included many a coffee and extended periods of time staring blankly into space. I feel both frozen and an immeasurable grief. My eyes tear at random moments boiling the kettle or brushing my teeth.
It is an impossible thing to understand the lack of humanity that we are capable of as a species. I find it staggering. And it is this very process of dehumanisation that allows for warfare in the first place.
Writing this piece has been a mighty undertaking. It took me all day yesterday.
But my grief is nothing compared to that of the Palestinians and others in the Middle East. And they are expected to not only move through this grief, but also educate the rest of the world as to why it should have compassion for them.
This is deeply humiliating and we in the West should be ashamed.
To be a western ally now is to step in and do our part to put the story straight.
So here goes.
And just to be clear here, I am not claiming expertise on the topic. I am writing this as someone who has been to the West Bank in the Occupied Palestinian Territories - where I studied Arabic and volunteered at a refugee camp - and my Bachelor’s degree is in Middle Eastern Studies from SOAS University. But again, I am not an authority on this, so please do your own research.
What is happening in Palestine is nothing short of a genocide and an ethnic cleansing of an indigenous people in a settler colonial state.
Palestine has been under Israeli occupation for 75 years.
Any Palestinian attempt at fighting back is violently suppressed.
And the violence that Israel uses on Palestinians is justified by the western world as Israel’s right to defend itself.
Just to put things into perspective, we’re talking about one of the world’s most powerful military systems against a people who don’t even have their own army.
Last Saturday, the Palestinian militant group Hamas fought back. They fired a large-scale missile attack from Gaza across Israel, and breached the boarder between Gaza and Israel, opening fire on Israeli civilians and taking hostages.
Israel’s response was to enforce an illegal blockade on Gaza.
The US is currently arming the Israeli military with weapons funded by American tax payers. And with those weapons, Israel is committing war crimes. They are currently targeting children and hospitals, opening fire on unarmed worshippers as they come out of mosques, using internationally prohibited gases, and giving civilians 24 hours to evacuate an entire region of Gaza and then bombing them as they flee... Gaza is collapsing.
It is a catastrophe.
In 2010, when I was nineteen years old, I went to Palestine. I went to Israel. I wanted to bear witness to what I considered to be the place of the greatest human rights abuse of our time. What I offer here is my testimony.
I am pro-Palestine.
I am anti-Zionism.
I am not antisemitic.
And I believe in a free Palestine. May these statements allow no space for misinterpretation that any of this is written from anything other than a stance for both justice and the basic human right of liberation for all people, indiscriminate of religious creed or skin colour.
I want to put a question to you that has been in my heart over the past week as the events in Palestine take a turn for the worst yet.
Why do we see a Ukrainian man throwing a molotov cocktail as a freedom fighter, and a Palestinian man doing the same as a terrorist? Why were we so quick to stand with Ukraine, and yet are unable to unbind ourselves from the “both-sides” Palestinian/Israeli rhetoric that is another way of saying All Lives Matter instead of Palestinian Lives Matter and is incredibly violent.
The image of the Ukrainian and Palestinian men throwing a molotov cocktail speaks to the hypocritical double standard at the heart of western media and politics.
If I must spell it out, the Ukrainian is white, the Palestinian, brown.
Palestine, now known as the Occupied Palestinian Territories, is made up of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Both are surrounded by an 8-10 meter segregation wall (at least twice the height of the Berlin Wall) and all entry and exit is controlled by the Israeli military. There are checkpoints and watchtowers along the wall, and entry into a particular region or town is often dependent on the mood of the Israeli soldier who happens to be on call.
Palestine has been occupied by the Israeli army since 1967. Israel began its building of the wall in 2002 to separate the occupied territories from the area it designated as Israel. It is considered illegal by the United Nations.
This makes Palestine the world’s largest open-air prison.
—> Please note: Since publishing this piece, in light of the ongoing genocidal slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, I am editing the term “open-air prison” and replacing it with “concentration / extermination camp.”
Historical Context: Setting the Record Straight
In 1917 during World War I, the UK announced its support of the establishment of a home for the Jewish people in Palestine. During that time, Palestine was under Ottoman rule and had a small minority Jewish population that lived peacefully alongside both Muslim and Christian Palestinians. Known as the Balfour Declaration, this letter was sent from the UK’s foreign secretary to Lionel Rothschild, a Zionist leader and member of the Rothschild family who currently have a networth of $20 trillion and are deemed the world’s wealthiest family by Forbes. It is no secret that through their banks they have discreetly influenced major global wars and pharmaceutical companies throughout the years.
The British Empire declared war on the Ottoman Empire in 1914 and had a vested interest in the future of Palestine. And so in the lead-up to the Balfour Declaration, a committee was established by the British Prime Minister H. H. Asquith to determine the partition of the Ottoman Empire, which included Palestine. Negotiations took place between the British and Zionists, with no representation from the local Palestinian people.
For those of you who don’t know, Zionism is a political movement that arose in the 19th century to push for the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, a land roughly associated with the Biblical Israel. Zionism, however, is separate to Judaism. Not all Jewish people are Zionists.
It is a tragic mistake to conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism. I have often been accused of being antisemitic because I support Palestine and am against Zionism. This is a very damaging approach; one that is conveniently used by political powers to silence solidarity with the Palestinian people.
Supporting Palestinians does not make you antisemitic. I was particularly shocked about the lack of knowledge on the issue in the US when I lived there a few years ago. I hope this article will indeed help to clear that up for any North Americans reading this who may not be familiar with narratives that do not depict Palestinians as barbaric Islamic fundamentalists.
That there is even a need to say this and petition western compassion is disgraceful and speaks to the success of western propaganda to continue ‘othering’ the Arab world.
At the time of writing this, Gaza is under siege. Israel has cut off their water supply, food and electricity. 600 Palestinian children have been murdered so far, either bombed or outright shot. We may be bearing witness do the complete annihilation of Gaza where there are currently over two million Palestinians.
And as excruciating as it is, we cannot look away now. The world finally has her eyes on Palestine. Do not look away now.
Israel does not exist to give Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and their descendants a safe place from persecution. The UK and the US had a vested interest in having a settler colonial state in the Middle East. The Jewish people were used as pawns to create this western foothold in the Arab world.
The western powers have literally put a European Jewish population in harms way. Is it not then antisemitic to create and sustain an Israel?
For the past 70+ years, the West has been backing the Israeli government to wipe out the indigenous population of Palestinians through military violence under the guise of self-defence. This is how they justify the ethnic cleansing and genocide of an entire race of people.
We Are Not So Different
When I was in the West Bank, I went to a public swimming pool in Ramallah where other Palestinian teenagers my age were wearing bikinis and flirting with young men. Their only preoccupation was getting a tan and whether their love interest was requited or unrequited. I had lemonades in cafes in Bethlehem. I even had a coffee with a Hamas militant and a Zionist settler. Not together, of course. But I needed to hear the story from the furthest-most extremes in order to feel like I could even near the possibility of understanding the middle.
The Hamas fighter told me that they don’t see Israelis as civilians. Because they have mandatory military service, he explained that Hamas treats them all as soldiers. Though I do not condone Hamas’ violence, I can understand that if you treat people like animals, caged and oppressed for long enough, it is only a matter of time until they bite back.
And in fact, the Zionist settler spoke of the Palestinians as no better than animals, and told me that they must be ‘tamed.’ Israeli settlers treat actual Palestinian animals just as poorly. During one of my first nights in the West Bank, when I was on my way home from an evening of Palestinian folk music, a shot of light like a fiery comet flashed in front of my taxi. We swerved to a stop and to my horror, the light was a Palestinian dog who had been set on fire by Israeli settlers. I raced to his quickly disfiguring body but it was too late, he stopped running and slumped into a pile of burned flesh at my feet, the flames ablaze around his little body. I vomited and couldn’t eat for days.
But in the middle of the pillars of the extremes upheld by these two men, I spent my time with Palestinians, normal people. I became very close with a girl my age called Marina who was a Christian Palestinian and who dreamt of being able to go to the beach and swim in the sea - a near impossible feat as it is on the other side of the apartheid wall and Palestinians need a permit granted by Israel.
As a mythologist, I understand that everything comes back to story. The stories we tell and the stories we view our world through are what make up our ideologies and political stances.
I hope that this piece will contribute to changing the story the western world tells about Palestine.
As the poet Diane de Prima wrote, ‘The only war that matters is the war against the imagination / all other wars are subsumed in it.’1
If anything, may this piece offer a new story. One that contributes to putting right so many of the wrongs committed as a consequence of misinformation and ignorance in the western world, and that ends the dehumanising narratives against Palestinian people once and for all.
What You Can Do
CHANGE THE NARRATIVE Use your voice, your social media accounts and any public communication platforms at your disposal to document the Palestinian struggle for liberation. AMPLIFY PALESTINIAN VOICES Here are some IG accounts to follow and share their news from on-the-ground: @danadajani.poetry @eye.on.palestine @theimeu @free.palestine.1948 @sbeih.jpg @ahmedeldin @wizard_bisan1 @joegaza93 DONATE Medical Aid for Palestinians - www.map.org.uk UNRWA - www.unrwa.org Palestine Children Relief Fund - www.pcrf.net World Food Programme - www.wfp.org BOYCOTT To pressure Israel to comply with international law - https://bdsmovement.net/get-involved/what-to-boycott PRAY & HOLD VIGILS Do not underestimate the power of collective intent and the miracles sparked by a new and fresh imagination.
Diane di Prima, Rant, from "Pieces of a Song: Selected Poems"
i am reading this over my coffee this morning with tears in my eyes.
i can only imagine it took a lot of courage to write this and send it out into the world, and i wanted to acknowledge that courage.
it’s beautifully, clearly and passionately written and a job well done and a very helpful resource and piece of storytelling. i’ll be forwarding it and using it as a reference.
thank you so much for the effort and grief and study invested in putting it together.
may peace, freedom and love prevail ❤️🔥
I just wanted to thank you for writing this piece dear Gabriela - I love that you did. Everybody needs to know the truth - what is really going on in Palestine.
Your views and feelings echo mine, and I was brought to tears while reading them - I've been trying to remain detached and not let what's going on affect me, because I feel so impotent, so powerless, and so filled with rage. I went to the West Bank when I was 25, as I was working there with Oxfam - I saw some of the horrors too, and I couldn't forget them. As a pro-Palestinian anti-Zionist I've been called an anti-Semite too, to be silenced...
Thank you for sharing your words and experience. I'm so glad that so many people will read them, and share them.
With love & gratitude ♥️🙏