Derek Newton reivews Becoming Pro-Palestinian: Testimonies from the Global Solidarity Movement, edited by Rosemary Sayigh (I. B. Taurus, 2024).
What makes someone who isn’t Palestinian become an active supporter of the Palestinian people ‘s struggle for equal rights and self-determination? The question may seem redundant at a time when mass demonstrations around the world are calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, and the International Court of Justice has ruled that the Palestinian people have a plausible need for protection from genocide. Surely, the urge to become ‘pro-Palestinian ‘is self-explanatory? Perhaps, perhaps not.
Published earlier this year, this volume of personal reflections, almost a Who ‘s Who of an older generation of the international Palestine solidarity movement, offers over 40 different perspectives on the experience of being committed to Palestinian liberation, and stands as a timely reminder that ‘it ‘ [the Palestinian catastrophe] didn’t start on the 7th October 2023.
Edited by Lebanon-based oral historian and anthropologist Rosemary Sayigh, and covering a period of some 60 years, this collection presents activist narratives from every continent. In doing so, it offers insights not only into the personal experiences that underlay and sustained a commitment to the Palestinian cause, but, at the same time, weaves a tapestry depicting the global politics of the period and the alternative political movements within which that commitment was engendered and nurtured.
Some of these contributors grew up in countries and at a time when support for Palestine was taken for granted: Turkey, South Africa and Brazil in the 1990s, and India in the 1980s, for example. “We saw Palestine, in other words, as one of a network, social, national, and ideological, of popular struggles for justice. “(Roger Heacock, France). This perspective is allied to a recognition of the contradiction between Western rhetoric about democracy, the rule of law and human rights and the support by Western governments for Israeli exceptionalism, impunity and lack of accountability.
There is a particularly vibrant account by university professor, M.H. Ilias, of the situation in the State of Kerala, South India, in the 1980s: “the question of Palestine was politically intimate not just to intellectual and activist circles but to ordinary people as well… Imagine student organisations using pictures of Yasser Arafat in posters, and quoting the words of Mahmoud Darwish and Ghassan Kanafani in pamphlets.“
For others, ‘becoming pro-Palestinian’ was akin to a conversion experience, a personal crisis brought on by the shock of an unanticipated recognition. In this respect, the 1982 Sabra-Shatilla massacre stands out as a key event for many: “The Sabra-Shatila massacre exploded the myth that Palestinians were terrorists.”
According to her own testimony, Singaporean-British doctor Ang Swee Chai, who went on to co-found Medical Aid for Palestinians, had been baptised in a fundamentalist, pro-Israeli church and was an active Christian Zionist when she first saw images of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Her account could have been written about recent events in Gaza: “There were pictures of wounded victims, many children, some dying, in partially bombed hospitals. Charred bodies were pulled out of bombed out buildings, including small children. My heart was torn apart watching the suffering.”
Then again, for many contributors it was the experience of encountering and being with Palestinian people that gave them a qualitatively different understanding of the Palestinian predicament and the steadfastness (sumud) needed to deal with it: “many others peopled and enriched our existence as we got our full-bodied taste of the real Palestine, so different from the abstraction of the cause, so much more contradictory and yet so much more dynamic. “As Scottish artist Jane Frere says of her time spent working with Palestinian refugees, “The whole experience of becoming deeply involved with the Palestinian people I worked with for Return of the Soul made such an impression on me that I did not want to leave. You cannot be a witness, a tear collector and then walk away, forget and move on.”
From Empathy to Activism
How does empathy translate into political strategy and organisation? This question is especially germane for Jewish Israelis beginning not only to challenge ‘Zionism ‘ but to deal with their own personal relationship to it, their own implicatedness. In an early chapter of the volume, Amira Hass, a well-known and highly-respected Israeli-born journalist, questions the premise of the book ‘s title, Becoming pro-Palestinian: “even within a historical-political context – [the definition, ‘pro-Palestinian ‘] takes national identity as a frame of reference. “For her, there was never a time when she had to ‘become ‘ someone who challenged and opposed ‘ongoing, structural injustice ‘, injustice that originated with the founding of the state of which she is a citizen.
Ilan Pappe, by contrast, took a more tortuous “journey out of zionism “having been “the object of intense indoctrination in school, at home, and in the army. “Despite having identified, through his research in the 1980s, the ethnic cleansing inherent in the creation of the state of Israel, it wasn’t until 1992, amidst a number of personal crises, that he took ”a huge leap out of the warm embrace of Zionist consensus“. He talks movingly of “the personal repercussions incurred by the substitution of an ideology that was taken for granted by an unconditional commitment to the Palestinian cause.”
This visceral connection to Zionism as something rooted in family and community sympathies and allegiances, may go some way to explaining why so few Israelis emerge from their military experience with the perspective of American-born IDF volunteer Rafi Silver: “what the army experience gave me was a real education in the Israeli/ Palestinian conflict: an education in lies, brutality, and inhumanity that I had never imagined possible. … Suddenly I began to see the Other as a person just like me, instead of the enemy I had been taught about.”
A significant number of these accounts centre on the experience of meeting and spending time with Palestinian refugees, especially in the Lebanese camps. Anyone wanting to understand the ‘refugee issue ‘ will appreciate the excellent summary of the situation and legal status of Palestinian refugees in the chapter written by Indonesian academic Dr Ryantori.
There is a particularly insightful and harrowing description of Lebanon in the 1980s by Dr Chris Giannou, a report based on his time working as a surgeon for the Palestine Red Crescent Society. In 1982 Israeli forces attacked the hospital he was working in, opposite the Ain el-Helweh refugee camp. Along with a number of colleagues, he was captured, imprisoned and subjected to brutality by Israeli forces before eventually being released. The parallels with the recent experience of doctors from al-Shifa, al-Ahli and other hospitals in Gaza is all too apparent, except that the whereabouts of the latter, in many cases, is still unknown.
A significant development in the discourse around Palestine occurred in the 1990s following the First Intifada. Beginning in 1987 in the Jabaliya refugee camp, the uprising spread to the West Bank and became a byword for popular resistance: “popular committees were flourishing, certainly attached to the various political factions, but deeply committed to the full panoply of rights, for youth, women, workers, farmers: in short, every section of a society. “Palestinian women played a key role and attracted the attention, admiration and support of feminists from many other countries. Palestine “became a turning point for the feminist movement in Italy, divided between those with a prevailing internationalist and anti-colonial agenda and those who were more invested in gender issues, both with regard to Palestine and at home.” (Elisabetta Donini, Italy)
For a time, the intifada and the emerging popular networks of resistance wrong-footed the PLO and left its leadership behind, only for Arafat and others to be co-opted into the Oslo process and what turned out to be the fruitless search for a two-state solution. Several writers express their regret about their optimism over Oslo and their failure to heed the warnings of Edward Said and Haider Abdel Shafi.
Oslo and the so-called ‘peace process ‘have shaped Palestinian politics ever since, and have also impacted elements of the solidarity movement. It’s in the post-Oslo context that the movement began to analyse and understand more deeply the systematic character of Israel ‘s settler-colonial project, and to identify it as implementing an apartheid regime. This analysis emerged publicly and internationally at the 2001 Durban ‘World Conference Against Racism‘, where South African activists drew on arguments originally proposed by Israeli scholar and Fatah member Uri Davis. For many South Africans, though, the identification of Israel as an apartheid state was already well-established: “To us, Israel looked like apartheid and Israel felt like apartheid, and its victims sounded and felt like Black South Africans. We who lived as Black people under apartheid know it when we see it, we know what it feels like on our bodies, what it tastes like in our bloodied mouths. “(Naeem Jeenah, South Africa). It’s this analysis that underpins the campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS).
The Long Narrative War
The past twenty five years have seen a sharpening of perspective among the Palestine solidarity movement, expressed very clearly by Ilan Pappe in his summary of the position that he has arrived at both personally and professionally: “Viewing Zionism as a settler colonial movement, informed by what Wolfe called the logic of the elimination of the native, framing Israel as an Apartheid state (again not pretending to be the first one who did it), and describing Israeli policies against the Gaza Strip since 2006 as an incremental genocide was now part of my daily, professional, and activist, discourse. It produced other understandings such as total disbelief in the validity and morality of a two states solution, full commitment to the BDS campaign, and above all a clear, and a very rewarding, stance towards the future that was not there before.“
In the meantime, Israel has moved further to the right or rather has followed more ruthlessly and more openly the logic of its settler- colonial project. In this, it has been aided by transformations in the ideological character of global politics, and the stance towards Israel of the so-called ‘international community’. In India, for example, the growth of the nationalist Hindutva movement under Nahendra Modi, and India’s drift towards adopting neo-liberal and US-friendly economic policies, has given rise to a rapprochement with Israel at a governmental level. The BJP has begun to characterise Palestine as a ‘Muslim issue ‘. This shift away from the policies associated with the Congress Party is underpinned by Israel‘s role in mediating the sale of US arms that would otherwise be unavailable to India as a nuclear-armed state. Something similar has occurred through the negotiation of the so-called Abraham Accords between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco, negotiations that were underwritten by arms deals.
While the Palestinian position has been weakened by these developments between states, international support for Palestine at a grassroots level has continued to grow, albeit unevenly. Spikes in support have generally been in response to Israel ‘s egregious military assaults on Gaza: Operation Cast Lead (2008-09); Operation Protective Edge (2014); Operation Guardian of the Walls (2021). This points to a contradiction in Israel ‘s sources of power: the more it deploys its hard, military power, the more it loses in terms of its soft, ideological power. It‘s this loss of control over the narrative (of victimhood, of being the world ‘s most moral army) which lies at the heart of Israel ‘s concerted ‘hasbara’ and its deployment of accusations aimed at delegitimising its critics, a strategy that was deliberately cultivated by Israel‘s Ministry of Foreign Affairs following the surge in support for Palestine in 2014. Perhaps we should see Israel ‘s threats, real though they are, not as a sign of strength but as a sign of weakness.
This volume, rich as it is in insights into the struggle for Palestinian freedom, does not provide much material for understanding the immediate origins of the current crisis. Its account stops somewhere in the earlier part of this century. However, if and when the time ever comes to write a history of the Palestinian cause up to the present, this book will be an important source. We should be grateful to those who have lived it and shared their experiences so eloquently with us.
Derek Newton is a founder member of Highland – Palestine, based in the Scottish Highlands. His own commitment to Palestine grew out of his experience of working in Jordan at the time of the Jenin Massacre in April 2002.