Taking back the right to narrate: lessons from Mohammed El-Kurd

 

"Apartheid-Free Space" mural in the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Source: Wikicommons.

by Claudia Saba

Amnesty International (AI) has followed Human Rights Watch (HRW) in issuing a warning that Israel's treatment of the Palestinians amounts to a crime against humanity, specifically, the crime of apartheid as defined in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Both reports, that by HRW and that by AI, found Israel to be also practicing persecution, another crime against humanity, defined in the Rome Statute as intentional and severe deprivation of fundamental rights against a group or collectivity by reason of their identity.  

For Palestinians, HRW's and AI's reports are welcome but also very late.

Why has it taken this long for organizations specialized in the identification and condemnation of human rights violations to call out one of the most flagrant human rights violators in the world? It is also curious that HRW and AI produced their assessments only after a number of Israeli NGOs had become vocal about Israeli apartheid. After all, Palestinian NGOs had long denounced Israel's treatment of the native population as constituting apartheid.  For example, Al-Haq, the oldest human rights organization in Palestine, worked closely with the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa to produce in 2009 a 300-page legal assessment of the situation that found Israel to be practicing colonialism and apartheid.

Why did HRW and AI only take license to apply the “A” label on Israel once Israeli organizations - B'Tselem and Yesh Din - said it first? Do victims' testimonies acquire value only when organizations within the perpetrator's polity confirm that they are valid? Whatever the reason for the delay, the sequencing of the reports reveals discrimination against Palestinians that permeates the Western human rights regime more generally.

What are Palestinian advocates to say in such a context of apparent bias? In the three decades following the Oslo Peace Accords, during which Israel continued to seize land designated to form a future Palestinian state, discourse around the issue had been dominated by the stronger party. The Oslo peace process effectively helped Israel to supplant Palestinians' vocabulary of "liberation, end of colonialism, resistance, fighting racism, ending Israeli violence and theft of the land, independence, the right of return, justice and international law’' with terms such as ‘'negotiations, agreements, compromise, pragmatism, security assurances, moderation and recognition’'. Today, there is little talk of a Palestinian state ever emerging, while Israel’s colonialism, racism and land theft continue unabated. Israel’s forceful expropriation of Palestinian land, along with the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes, continues to this day.  For example, in one Jerusalem neighborhood, Al-Bustan in Silwan, Israel has issued demolition orders on the homes of 1500 Palestinians.

While the majority of the West Bank has been taken for Jewish-only settlements and closed "military zones", Israel decided to apply a different solution to Gaza. After concluding that the 40km by 10km stretch of land in the southwestern tip of Palestine was not worth the trouble of directly managing two million undesirable Palestinians, Israel sought to contain resistance to its policies by policing the territory from the outside.  This "remote control" version of Israel's military occupation is enforced through a permanent blockade that features F16 fighter jets circling in the sky and gunboats shooting from the sea.

It is within this context that those campaigning to halt the destruction of Palestinian lives have learned to talk about the situation in terms that highlight the complicity of media pundits and peace industry professionals who propagate a "both sides" framing of the situation as though it were a conflict between two equally legitimate national movements. Instead, they highlight how Israel began as, and continues to unfold as, a project of settler-colonization aimed at dispossessing and scattering the indigenous people in order to replace them with foreign settlers. Such discourse discards with any fabricated nuance that is intended to obscure this central point.  By advancing the holistic framework of settler-colonialism Israel’s actions and Palestinian resistance to those actions may be more easily understood. 

One of the strongest voices advancing this framework in recent times is that of Mohammed El-Kurd. Mohammed's life experience is that of a Palestinian at the sharp end of Israeli apartheid - that's because there is an actual settler living on his property. At the same time, a US-registered settler organization has been using Israel's apartheid court system to evict him and his family from the remainder of their home. Mohammed happens to be very good with words - he's a published poet - and despite being a victim, he has agency and can articulate his lived experience with powerful clarity.

El-Kurd is among those that speak in the style of trailblazers such as Ali Abunumah, Noura Erakat and Susan Abulhawa (to name but a few) and who use their bi-cultural sensibilities to reach audiences in the English language. Since co-founding the Electronic Intifada in 2001, Ali Abunimah has been instrumental in exposing Israeli settler-colonialism through journalism that relies on Palestinians' lived experience. Moreover, Abunimah's personal media interventions are refreshingly frank, never shying away from pointing the finger at governments that maintain Israel's apartheid. When interviewed by Deutsche Welle during Israel's May 2021 bombardment of Gaza, he pleaded for Germany to stop arming Israel and went straight to the point about Germany's support for the self-styled "Jewish state":

It is time for the people of Germany and the German elite to stop making Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip pay for the crimes of the German people against European Jews. Palestinians are sick of paying the price for guilty German consciences. 

In the same vein as Abunimah, El-Kurd's discourse confidently names and shames those who shield or even endorse Israel's apartheid and ongoing settler-colonialism. Commenting on a recent confession by Israeli war veterans about a massacre committed at Tantura in 1948, he tweeted:

Our grandparents have viscerally narrated the harrowing massacres upon which the Zionist state was built. But our testimonies aren’t enough. It takes the “confessions” of an ex-soldier or the belated “miraculous epiphanies” of foreign human rights orgs for the world to listen.

In the same tweet thread, he called out foreign diplomats who witness Israel's ongoing transgressions against Palestinians but who avoid acknowledging the settler-colonial framework that explains these actions:

Journalists, human rights organizations, and diplomats come to our homes, eat from our tables, and indulge in our pain, all while ignoring our framing and analysis. Then they spend decades arriving at such "miraculous epiphanies," that we've spelled out for them decades ago.

We're stuck endlessly showing bloody photos of our dead & subjecting our children to dehumanizing, gazing cameras. But the proof is daily & abundant. The answer is there. My grandmother's haunting testimonies have more authority than an Israeli soldier's perfunctory confession.

Finally, El-Kurd urged Palestinians to seize their right to speak:

Palestinians must be given—must take—the authority to narrate, not on an identitarian basis, but relying on the historical lesson that those who have oppressed, who have monopolized & institutionalized violence will not tell the truth, let alone hold themselves accountable.

Voices such as those of Abunimah and El-Kurd offer a way forward on how to engage with power in a world where warmongers receive accolades instead of facing justice, and where the corporate media suppresses system-critical narratives. Across a range of crises facing the world - whether it is structural inequality, institutionalized racism, or climate change - it is crucial to interrogate the discursive practices handed down by powerholders when they obscure, distort, or evade the root causes of problems. Root causes which nevertheless must be addressed if a solution is to be found. In the context of an uncompromising oppressor in Palestine, a discourse of anti-colonialism is a necessary step towards dismantling apartheid. 

My full article, Mainstreaming Anti-colonial Discourse on Palestine: Mohammed El-Kurd’s Discursive Interventions, can be accessed through the pdf at this link.

About the author: Claudia Saba lectures in International Relations. She has a PhD in Political Science from University College Dublin (UCD) where she completed a dissertation on the evolution of the Palestinian liberation movement and its growing internationalization. She has published on this topic in The Irish Times, Interface: a journal for and about social movements, and in a collection by Cambridge University Press entitled Mobilising International Law for ‘Global Justice’. Her research is praxis-centered and interdisciplinary. She is a member of the research group Globalcodes (Spain) and the Irish Network for Middle Eastern and North African Studies (Ireland).