Young Men like Roses

The West's Dehumanisation of Palestinian Men

A young man rides his horse along the Apartheid wall. Bethlehem, West Bank, Occupied Palestine, 2011. © Gabriela Gutierrez

As the genocide in Gaza rages on, I can’t not write about things relevant to Palestine. I find myself digging deeper and deeper into the mythic imagination, trying to gain more insight into the mythological, archetypal and psychological undercurrents that continue to justify such barbarity for over two months now.

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As the genocide in Gaza rages on, I can’t not write about things relevant to Palestine. I find myself digging deeper and deeper into the mythic imagination, trying to gain more insight into the mythological, archetypal and psychological undercurrents that continue to justify such barbarity for over two months now.

Antonio Gutierres, the UN Secretary General who has been one of the all-too-scarce voices for Palestinians, recently made the following statement:

In a matter of weeks, a far greater number of children have been killed by Israeli military operations in Gaza than the total number of children killed during any year, by any party to a conflict since I have been Secretary General.

As I write this, on Friday the 8th of December, 21,732 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza in the last 60 days. This includes 8,697 children. Eight thousand… six hundred… and ninety seven… children…….

Thanks to the social media posts of regular Palestinians and the otherworldly bravery of the journalists - the ones who haven’t been slaughtered, that is - we are witnessing a genocide live for the first time in history. They are reporting the atrocities directly from on-the-ground. And chillingly, the images are a world apart from what we’re being shown by western news channels heavily influenced by Zionist propaganda.

This week, we learned of a new stage in the genocide. According to the folks behind the podcast Let’s Talk Palestine and the American activist Shaun King, the Israeli Occupation Forces (IDF) launched a mass abduction campaign against displaced Palestinian men who were taking shelter from the bombing with their families in abandoned schools in Northern Gaza.

The IOF rounded up the men, forced them to strip down to their underwear, and severely beat them in front of their families. When they arrived at the school, they reportedly shot at anyone who tried to leave the area, even those raising white flags.

The men they rounded up are not Hamas. They are not militants. They are husbands, fathers, boyfriends… Among them are doctors, academics, journalists and elderly men, as well as teenagers as young as thirteen years old.

Seven young men were shot because they refused to comply with the humiliating orders.

The men were photographed naked but for their underwear, sitting on their knees with their hands tied behind their backs, eyes blindfolded, clothes and shoes scattered everywhere.

They were then seen riding in the back of military trucks as they were taken to an unknown destination.

Among them is the journalist Diaa Al-Kahlout, Bureau Chief of Al-Arabi Al-Jadeed newspaper in Gaza. His sister reported that he was taken at gunpoint, and forced to leave his seven year old disabled daughter, Nadia, on her own. Like the other hostages, he was forcibly stripped to his underwear, beaten and taken to an unknown location.

Why is no one talking about the Palestinian hostages? Israel is currently holding more than ten thousand Palestinian hostages and calling them prisoners. This number has doubled since October 7th. Israel has been abducting Palestinians and keeping them hostage in prisons since the beginning of the occupation.

In April 2022, there were 4,450 Palestinian hostages held in Israeli prisons – including 160 children, 32 women, and over 1000 “administrative detainees" (meaning indefinitely incarcerated without charge). This is very common in Israel.

Since October 7th, Israel has kidnapped 4,000 labourers from Gaza, and more than 1000 people in the Occupied West Bank.¹

And yet there is no coverage on western news channels.

But when white Israelis and international folks are taken, it’s all the hype.

I mean, come on. This is not to disregard the lives of these hostages (I really shouldn’t even have to say that). But to draw attention to the double standard of the western mind. And to shed a bit of light on the racism and colonial mindset inherent within us.

Why do we see some people as hostages and others as prisoners?

All wars begin in the imagination. It is the stories that we tell that uphold our worldviews. And if we are to change the West’s incredibly damaging, racist and colonial perception of the Arab world, we need to change the stories we tell about Palestinians.

How often do we see images of angry Arab men on western news outlets? Draped in the keffiyeh, the traditional scarf and a Palestinian emblem of liberation that is dismissed in the West and Israel as a symbol of terrorism.

Before she retired, my mother was a documentary filmmaker. She worked for the UN for about ten years, traveling to high-conflict areas of the world and documenting environmental and human-rights abuses. On her way back from Palestine one year, she was interrogated by the Israeli border guards at Tel Aviv airport for having keffiyehs in her luggage - gifts she had bought for my sister and I when we were teens and which we have worn ever since.

This association of the Arab world with terrorism relies entirely on the narrative that Arab men are misogynistic, extremist fundamentalists who are a danger to progressive, inclusive and democratic thought. It is this view that upholds the western narrative on Palestine and subsequently justifies the current genocide in Gaza.

Though there are indeed fundamentalist, misogynistic militant groups in the Middle East - as there are all over the world, I might add - not all Arab men are terrorists. Not all Palestinian men are terrorists.

The sensibilities of Palestinian men are displayed in their poetry, their art, their music, their academic scholarship… These are tools that, like all peoples who have experienced occupation and colonialism throughout history, are used to express indigenous identity and resistance.

Palestinian men were and are poets, artists, musicians, scholars… They are loving fathers and unruly sons, gentle lovers and sharp-witted elders...

As I wrote in my manifesto to my western friends a few weeks ago (here), that there is even a need to say this and petition western compassion for Palestinians is disgraceful. I am deeply ashamed of the international community’s continued support of Israel.

We have countless examples of the poetic sensibilities displayed by Palestinian men. We have Edward Said the scholar, Mahmoud Darwish the poet, Sliman Mansour the painter, all the way through to the modern-day fellas behind the Palestinian electronic hip hop band 47SOUL, to name but a few.

Edward Said (1935) was hugely instrumental in articulating what he called this “othering” of the Arab world. He was a Palestinian-American academic, political activist, and among the founders of postcolonial studies. I was utterly magnetised to his work during my Bachelor’s in Middle Eastern Studies at SOAS University, and he informs my imagination to this day.

On the antidote to the oppression of Palestinians, he wrote,

Humanism is the only – I would go so far as saying the final – resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history. Separation between peoples is not a solution for any of the problems that divide peoples. And certainly ignorance of the other provides no help whatever. Cooperation and coexistence of the kind that music lived as we have lived, performed, shared and loved it together, might be.

Edward Said, Image by west-eastern-divan.org

Western and Zionist news channels would have us believe that the savagery taking place in Occupied Palestine is at the hands of the Arabs; the Palestinians.

But thanks to all the evidence coming out of Gaza through their social media platforms, the savagery is in fact stemming from the men leading the genocide and those carrying it on. A narcissistic, power-hungry, blood-thirsty sociopathic brutism that we see in Netanyahu, in his military leaders, and in the IDF soldiers (both men and women).

And in them, we see a sense of superiority that is petrifying. We know what this type of ethnic and religious arrogance does. History has told us time and time again.

Israeli Zionists have self-appointed themselves with the force that the Greeks called kleos. Kleos was a type of imperishable glory that was bestowed upon someone by others based on the greatness of their humanity. It was not self-appointed.

If you have been to Israel and have the slightest of sensibilities towards human decency, you will know the Zionists of Israel have claimed kleos for themselves.

Again, I really shouldn’t have to say this: this is not to a jab at all Israelis. I am speaking specifically of the Zionist nationalist ideology.

There is a saying in the Middle East that refers to men as roses. شباب مثل الورد, shabab mithl alward, meaning “young men like roses”.

Perhaps this saying is rooted in the ancient Mediterranean and Mesopotamian beliefs that though the Earth was female, her vegetation was male. I just love this image.

The term “Earth Mother” so often used in contemporary spiritual cosmologies assumes the whole Earth is female. But to the cultures of Inanna, Ashtareh, Cybele and Isis, her flowers, vines, grapes and wheat were all understood to be masculine.

The creation story that imagines this process saw the Earth as a Mother Goddess and the vegetation as her Son that she gives birth to once a year. She was then believed to consort with her son, who re-seeds her, and the natural world is regenerated and birthed again.

This ties into the mythos of a Mother Goddess giving birth to a Divine Child all over the ancient world, surviving all the way through into the Christian myths of Mother Mary and her Divine Child Yahweh.

Ancient vegetation rites of renewal would take place once a year to mark and honour this process. The Hungarian scholar Carl Kerenyi (1897) puts it this way,

The archetypal situation that nature offered was taken into the Greek myth of Zeus. The bees offered men the essential sweetness of pure existence – the existence of infants in the womb.²

In ancient Greek myth, every year at a certain time of year, a great light streamed from the cave where Zeus was believed to be born announcing that the blood from the birth of the Divine Child had fallen upon the earth. Jules Cashford suggests that this rite was linked to the Bee-Goddess of the Minoan seals and her rites of renewal.

According to the myth, Rhea, the mother of the gods, gave birth to Zeus in a cave known as the Cave of Bees where he was nursed on milk and honey. One of Zeus’ epithets became Melissaios, meaning “bee-man.” He was also known as Kouretes, a title used in reference to the men who Rhea summoned to guard the cave. According to the myth, the young men would clash their armour outside the cave as a means of concealing the cries of Zeus from his vengeful father Kronos. The Hymn of the Kouretes, dedicated to Zeus, was discovered in the cave on Mount Ida, which is imagined to be where the god was born and hidden from his father.

Palestinian men hold hands… They are loving, affectionate; they send rose and heart emojis to each other (I know this through Arab friends).

My father and I have been studying Arabic for years. His current tutor called Abdou is from Syria. He lives in Cantabria, where the Spanish side of my family is from, and my dad goes round his house for Arabic conversation lessons. I just got off the phone with him and we were talking about this question of the west’s demonisation of Arab men. And he was telling me how Abdou sends him heart and flower emojis.

“Imagine one of our macho Spanish men doing that! They would never,” my dad exclaimed over the phone. “But here we are painting Arab men as macho. The heart emoji beats and everything!”

With Palestinian men in Nablus, bellies full after feasting on kanafeh - a traditional Middle Eastern sweet made with mild white cheese, shredded wheat and drenched in syrup, originating from the Palestinian city of Nablus. My heart breaks when I think of where these men might be now. Occupied Palestine, 2011.

We really must restore the dignity of Palestinian men by telling their stories. This type of violence will only go on if we continue dehumanising them.

I’ll end today’s piece with the words of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (1941). Like Said, his was another vital voice in humanising the Palestinians.

To Our Land
Translated by Fady Joudah from "The Butterfly's Burden"

To our land,
and it is the one near the word of god,
a ceiling of clouds
To our land,
and it is the one far from the adjectives of nouns,
the map of absence
To our land,
and it is the one tiny as a sesame seed,
a heavenly horizon ... and a hidden chasm
To our land,
and it is the one poor as a grouse’s wings,
holy books ... and an identity wound
To our land,
and it is the one surrounded with torn hills,
the ambush of a new past
To our land, and it is a prize of war,
the freedom to die from longing and burning
and our land, in its bloodied night,
is a jewel that glimmers for the far upon the far
and illuminates what’s outside it ...
As for us, inside,
we suffocate more!

1. https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/10/21/number-of-palestinian-prisoners-in-israel-doubles-to-10000-in-two-weeks

2. Carl Kerenyi, Dionysus: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, p. 31