The (un-)holy land

The situation in Israel/Palestine/Gaza has caused a lot of discussion and uproar lately. I have tried to keep up to date with what’s going on, but somehow I have struggled to become ‘involved’. So, following the situation only superficially I came across an (in my opinion) well balanced essay in a Danish paper (for which the author was actually reprimanded for having misused the trust vested in him as a public TV presenter). It expressed some of the thoughts I myself have had about the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. My translations throughout:

“The common European discourse is often as follows: The Palestinians are being humiliated and scorned, it is natural that they will use violence, whereas jews, who themselves have been so hardly hit, should know better. So, the message to the Jewish population: You, who have yourselves experienced pogroms, extermination camps and expulsion, or are descendants of .. the victims of the Holocaust, You must simply learn to control yourselves when someone again is trying to kill you!”

“The attacks on Gaza will... presumably only make evil worse, but a country under constant attack must and should act, even though the approach is disturbing for nice people, who don’t know how terror influences a society.
Many European commentators think that it is a classic imperialistic situation where one party is right and the other party is the evil aggressor. In military terms Israel is of course more powerful than the Palestinians but any society, powerful or not, which is hit by terror must use means to protect itself that it would not otherwise accept.”

He quotes the Palestinian journalist Zaki Chehab’s book ’Inside Hamas’ (2007):

“Chehab ... shows how the Hamas continues to stand by their charter from 1988, which says that the fight is not over till the green flag of Islam is raised above all of the historical Palestine from the Dead Sea to the Mediterranean Sea.

A representative of the Hamas is quoted: “ You will find no-one in Hamas who will acknowledge Israel’s right to exist. If you hear anything else, you can be sure it is a lie”. This is Israel’s enemy right now.”

The inherent historical elements of this tale are crucial factors in the developments along the way, and will continue to influence the proceedings that take place.

I have failed to become emotionally involved in this until yesterday. I attended a seminar at UCL, Uneven Geographies, and it really got me thinking. The seminar dealt with contested spaces, uneven geographies, and the first 2/3 that I sat in on dealt with Belgrade during the Jugoslavian war, and with Palestine.

Obviously, when the seminar was planned and speakers invited the situation in Gaza was different than it is now. The current world-wide focus on Gaza right now meant that the discussion naturally gravitated towards current and historical occurrences in the Middle East.

What I particularly liked about the seminar was the fact that people were balanced in their observations. Generally speaking the news does not exactly get conveyed in a balanced manner, and academic discourse on a subject that is so highly publicized at the moment was a welcome, if labor-some and tiring.

Particularly Ms Adania Shabil, a Palestinian writer, was very powerful.

The speakers talked about contested spaces, the way in which spaces are scarred and how places remember conflict. They discussed the implications of space in conflicted situations, the aesthetics of war and the effect of imagery (symbolic and actual) on the conflict and about the political and social implications of being in a state of ‘refugeeism’ (is that a word?). They spoke of the representation of free (or not) movement in literature, of how the contestation of a space creates this space in the mind of the world.

The question of the dichotomy between Jews and Arabs as the basis of this situation was softened by comments that ‘this is not what it’s about, it’s about the people living these moments’. And I really agree with the sentiment that is at the core of this - a pure belief that we as people should behave and do to others as we wish they do to us, it’s in a sense a case of basic human compassion. However, the history of these religions, places and peoples make the ‘now’ that we live in more complex.

The places occupied by Palestinians were historically - way back - the land of Jews. But at other points in time, they were Palestine. The peoples that occupy either side of the fence now have historical claims to and feelings for the land.

The fact that the two religions that these peoples represent inherently dislike each other (one has a warning of the other in their holy book) does not make it simpler. The fact that the United Arab Emirates continues to aid the reconstruction of the Palestinian villages and settlements certainly does not keep the issue at hand clear of religion or preconceived notions of opposition and rights.

As the land lay now, figuratively and literally, I do not see an end to the oppression and suffering endured by the Palestinians, nor do I see the terror they employ ending. Nor a peace or a surrender of land by either side, nor the admission that the other deserves the right to exist.

When you are struck on the chords of your beliefs, be they social, political, societal, religious, it is hard to give.

The historical prosecution of Jews may be something considered a part of history (or for some, not), but it will always remain in the self-image of people who identify themselves with Jews, be it in a religious, social, cultural or political manner. If the Jews don’t remember and act accordingly to the situations they themselves have been in, they might very well be creating the same self-image in Palestinians for the future.

I leave you with some pictures from a large Danish newspaper recorded during the first week after the end of the recent war actions in Gaza. For those not literate in Danish, I trust the pictures will speak for themselves. Click the picture for more.