On Palestine

“Violins are an army, building and filling a tomb made of marble and Nahawund”

-       Mahmoud Darwish

Stories demand to be told. While some are so loud and domineering that their presence is almost oppressive; others reach out from the rubble and beg to be heard in muffled screams. Stories colonize us through the language of power. The language of power is the language of men, the language of the ruling class, and the language of diplomacy. Together, they create an undefeatable concoction of narrative violence, apathy, and bigotry. The story of Palestinian suffering and resilience is viewed from the colonizer’s lens—one that muffles every voice of resistance. However, the Israeli occupation goes beyond silencing because it is a simple and straightforward dismissal of existence—that Palestine does not exist.

The violence of the oppressor is wrong, but whether or not the violence of the oppressed is right is perhaps not the right question to ask when the supposed violence of the oppressed is a stone against an artillery. The violence of the oppressor is normalized to such an extent that when there is retaliation of any form, such an ‘offensive’ receives disproportionate attention and condemnation. Israel’s narrative of violence is a narrative of defense. 7th October will be memorialized as a black day; it will be given the attention that no Nakba ever received. 7th October will come every year and will be used to commemorate the story of Israeli victimhood, accompanied by a complete dismissal of years of persecution, bombardment, and death that the Palestinian population has been facing. When that happens, there is no going back because the politics of memorialization (of which story gets to be pedestalized and immortalized) serves to provide a continuous ringing of the past, a constant rewind to a curated history (and in turn, present) that conveniently puts a veil on Gaza and its humanity.

These narratives, driven by a sense of victimhood, with no regard for marginalities, come from the oppressor’s side and sanction brutalities of all forms. The victim-perpetrator binary is turned upside down, and the plight of the victim is appropriated to misrepresent the condition of the perpetrator. Self-victimizing narratives are not foreign to us. We encounter them every day through “Hindu khatre mein hai” warnings. We swallow them whole, unquestioningly, for had we questioned, we wouldn’t have turned away from recognizing India’s own Palestines.

Every colonial enterprise is an inherently masculinist project that seeks to grab, possess, and control. I would argue that every attempt to hijack and own something—a land, a people, a collective culture, a body—is one rooted in patriarchal tendencies. Institutions such as the police and the military are shaped within a macho framework. Visuals from the storming of Al-Aqsa mosque and from protest sites across the occupation show hordes of Israeli police dressed in black uniforms, carrying enormous weapons, using overwhelming forms of physical violence—a visibly masculine body cracking down upon an unarmed population. The imagery of the occupation through police and military forces becomes all the more problematic when the image of a woman is made to fit the macho framework. The news of Moriah Mencer, a British-Israeli IDF soldier who flew to Israel to fight Hamas, became extremely popular, and her story was covered by multiple western news outlets, including the Daily Telegraph. The story was popularized owing to the fact that it very creatively embellished the occupation’s victim complex. Through the use of the image of a white woman, dressed in a soldier’s attire with a keffiyeh wrapped around her head, it was made clear that Israel is the real victim. It was a deliberate attempt to feed into the idea of white female “innocence” coupled with Zionist “bravery”. When representing Israel through the military, the images that are used are celebratory. Headlines such as “Female IDF squad eliminates nearly 100 Hamas militants” initiate a gendered form of valorization of violence, through the appropriation of white feminism into the macho fold of the military. On the other hand, Palestinians are covered through the register of terrorism—through an image of a brown male body. When the image of white female innocence is pitted against that of a brown man—a perceived “terrorist”, the former receives more sympathy.

The occupation of Palestine goes beyond the occupation of land or a homeland. It extends to, and in fact begins with bodies that are sought to be owned and, in that process, dehumanized and mutilated. The act of massacring a people, un-peopling a land, needs to be driven by a certain sense of entitlement over their bodies. It is to assert that—I harm you because I can, because your agency over your body and, in turn, your identity is not yours but mine to control. Hashem Abushama writes, “There is a hierarchy of life and suffering at the root of this”. No amount of narrative manipulation, ahistoricity, and misinformation put in play to defend the occupation can make one dismiss the mass murder of Palestinians in Gaza. Yet, the genocide is dismissed, and on certain occasions, justified. At this juncture, logic fails ethics because the life in question is not human—it is subhuman, a brown body, a colonizer’s possession.