POLITICS
Palestine Scholars Echo Protest and Popular Resistance A discussion of the Palestinian struggle on the ground in Sheikh Jarrah. BY ALY TANTAWY
F
or weeks, crowds of Chicagoans have been filling the Loop to express their fierce desire for Palestinian liberation. Armed with keffiyehs and tablas, protesters in Chicago and across the world have been crying “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”—a decades-old slogan referencing the original land of historic Palestine between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. On May 19, five Palestinian scholars echoed these sentiments of resistance at a University of Chicago panel on the ongoing attempts to expel indigenous Palestinians from their homes and the mobilizations across Palestine to resist them. The panel, part of a series at the University’s Pozen Family Center for Human Rights, was presented in partnership with the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, the Global Studies Program, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and the Arab Studies Institute. The recent bombings in Gaza were present in the Zoom panel even as the discussion unfolded; one panelist, Jehad Abusalim, anxiously checked his phone throughout the event for updates from his family because his hometown in Gaza was being bombarded by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). “Even when we are thousands of miles away [from Palestine] we get suspended in time—our lives are completely dominated by this violence each and every moment,” said panelist Rabea Eghbariah, a doctoral candidate at Harvard Law School.
Hadeel Badarni, a doctoral candidate in anthropology at the UofC, said that the protests function as both acts of solidarity and acts of defiance against a global order of capital and violent domination. “Palestinian popular resistance has caught up to the simultaneity of its oppression and is mobilizing with it movements on regional and global scales.” The panelists condemned twosides discourse that equates Hamas and other Palestinian resistance with the IDF. Describing the Israeli oppression of the Palestinian people as a conflict between equals does rhetorical violence, said Eghbariah, because it erases the unequal power dynamic between the Israeli state—which enjoys funding and legitimization from the United States and other global powers—and the Palestinian resistance. Eghbariah, who is also a human rights attorney with the Haifa-based Adalah legal center, called such framing “epistemic violence,” a term that describes harm exerted by colonizing powers when they produce narratives to maintain their supremacy. In Palestine, and for Palestinians across the world, its application damages their ability to speak, be heard, and craft their own narrative and identity. “The violence extends to the way that the Israeli propaganda machine extends its framing to mainstream media, not only in Israel, but also around the world,” Eghbariah said. Randa Wahbe, a PhD candidate in anthropology at Harvard University, agreed. “Palestinians, especially Palestinian women, are doing the work
“Sheikh Jarrah is a microcosm of Israel’s larger settlercolonial project, which views the Palestinian population as a demographic threat.” and the labor everyday to change the discourse, to reject the language of occupation, of clashes, of two-sides, and to center settler-colonialism, indigeneity, and liberation,” she said. Settler-colonialism is a form of colonization that aims to replace the indigenous population of the colonized area with a new population of settlers, rendering the indigenous population either stateless and displaced, killed, or second or third-class “citizens.” According to the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions Movement (BDS), Israel’s settler-colonial foundation is enshrined in its laws: “The superior status and rights of nationals are reserved for persons classified as “Jewish” in Israel’s Law of Return (1950), including new immigrants and settlers.” A Jewish resident of Chicago has the right to go to Israel and claim citizenship, while a Palestinian resident of the Gaza Strip does not. The 1950 Law of Return gives Jewish people across the world the right to live in historic Palestine and gain Israeli citizenship. “We need to destroy the rhetorical
separation between settler and soldier; they work in tandem, together and for the continued expulsion of Palestinians,” Wahbe asserted. Other examples of settler-colonial societies include the United States and Canada, where Europeans displaced and exterminated the Indigenous populations across Turtle Island—a name for North America based in Indigenous creation traditions—and settled there permanently. Eghbariah underscored the importance of counter-framing Israel’s narrative of equal citizenship for “Arab-Israelis,” calling it a myth. He explained that the Israeli state promotes Palestinians living in historic Palestine as “Arab-Israeli” citizens with the same rights as Israeli settlers. “This is an official story of Israeli propaganda to try to create a façade of ostensibly equal citizenship that applies to Palestinians,” he said. “But of course we know that this is not true.” Eghbariah said that Israel regulates Palestinians using multiple distinct legal systems in order to divide and conquer JUNE 10, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7
