Palestinians must find 'true'
voice By Ramzy Baroud
What does a Palestinian farmer living in a
village tucked between the secluded West Bank
hills, a prisoner on hunger strike in an Israeli
jail and a Palestinian refugee roaming the Middle
East for shelter all have in common?
They
are all characters in one single, authentic, solid
and cohesive narrative. The problem however, is
that Western media and academia barely reflect
that reality or intentionally distort it,
disarticulate it and when necessary, defame its
characters.
An authentic Palestinian
narrative - one that is positioned within an
original Palestinian history and articulated
through Palestinian thought - is mostly absent
from Western media and to a lesser
degree, academia. If such
consideration is ever provided, everything
Palestinian suddenly falls into being a side note
of a larger Israeli discourse, or at best is
juxtaposed to a pro-Israeli plot that is often
concealed with hostility.
Palestinian news
stories are often disconnected, disjoined news
items with seemingly no relation to other news.
They are all marred with negative connotation. In
this narrative, a farmer, a prisoner and a refugee
barely overlap. Due to this deliberate disconnect,
Palestine becomes pieces, ideas, notions,
perceptions, but nothing complete or never whole.
On the other hand, an Israeli narrative is
almost always positioned within a cohesive plot,
depending on the nature of the intellectual,
political, academic or religious contexts. Even
those who dare to criticize Israel within a
mainstream Western platform do so ever prudently,
gently and cautiously. The outcome of this typical
exercise is that Israel's sanctified image remains
largely intact. In the meantime, Palestinians
constantly jockey for validation, representation
and space in a well-shielded pro-Israeli
narrative.
To counter these
misrepresentations, the pieces must be connected
to form a collective that would truly epitomize
the Palestinian experience - the story and the
history behind it. Once that has been attained,
there are chances for greater clarity regarding
the roots of the conflict, its present
manifestations and future prospects.
That
can only happen if we return to the basics of a
protracted tragedy that is draped with the names
and stories of individuals. Doing so would
ultimately articulate a consistent, generational
discourse that deserves to stand on its own,
without belittling juxtapositions or belligerent
comparisons.
All tragic stories of the
greater Palestinian narrative - of those enduring
the ongoing ethnic cleansing, those who are
fighting for freedom and those who are seeking
their right of return have the same beginning -
the Catastrophe, or Nakba.
But no
end is yet to be written. The storyline is neither
simple nor linear. The refugee is fighting for the
same freedom sought by the prisoner or the son of
an old farmer, part of whose family are refugees
in one place or another. It is convoluted and
multilayered. It requires serious considerations
of all of its aspects and characters.
Perhaps, no other place unites all of
these ongoing tragedies like Gaza. Yet as powerful
as the Gaza narrative is in its own right, it has
been deliberately cut off from other urgently
related narratives. This is the case whether it is
in the rest of the occupied territories or the
historical landscape starting with the
Nakba.
To truly appreciate the
situation in Gaza and its story, it must be placed
within its proper context like all narratives
concerning Palestine. It is essentially a
Palestinian story of historical and political
dimensions that surpass the current geographic and
political boundaries that are demarcated by
mainstream media and official narrators.
The common failure to truly understand
Gaza within an appropriate context, whether it is
the suffering, the siege, the repeated wars, the
struggle, or the steadfastness and the resistance
being presented, is largely based on who is
telling the story, how it is told, what is
included and what is omitted.
Most
narratives concerning Palestinians in Western
discourses are misleading or deliberately
classified into simplified language that carries
little resemble to reality. History however,
cannot be classified by good versus bad, heroes
versus villains, moderates versus extremists. No
matter how wicked, bloody or despicable, history
also tends to follow rational patterns and
predictable courses.
By understanding the
reasoning behind historical dialectics, one can
achieve more than a simple understanding of what
took place in the past. It also becomes possible
to chart a fairly reasonable understanding of what
lies ahead.
Perhaps one of the worst
aspects of today's detached and alienating media
is its reproduction of the past and
mischaracterization of the present as it is based
on simplified terminology. This gives the illusion
of being informative but actually manages to
contribute very little to our understanding of the
world at large. Such oversimplifications are
dangerous because they produce an erroneous
understanding of the world, which in turn compels
misguided actions.
For these reasons, we
are compelled to discover alternative meanings and
readings of history. To start, we could try
offering historical perspectives that attempt to
see the world from the viewpoint of the oppressed
- the refugees and the fellahin who have been
denied the right to tell their own story among
many other rights.
This view is not a
sentimental one. Far from it. An elitist
historical narrative is maybe the dominant one,
but it is not always the privileged who influence
the course of history. History is also shaped by
collective movements, actions and popular
struggles.
By denying this fact, one
denies the ability of the collective to affect
change. In the case of Palestinians, they are
often presented as hapless multitudes or passive
victims without a will of their own. This is of
course a mistaken perception; the conflict with
Israel has lasted this long only because the
Palestinians are unwilling to accept injustice and
refuse to submit to oppression.
Israel's
lethal weapons might have changed the landscape of
Gaza and Palestine, but the will of Gazans and
Palestinians is what shaped the landscape of
Palestine's history. This composition of farmers,
prisoners, refugees and numerous other
manifestations and characters of the oppressed are
resilient individuals. It is essential that we
understand the complexity of the past and the
present to evolve in our understanding of the
conflict, not merely to appreciate its
involvement, but also to contribute positively to
its resolution.
The Palestinian narrative
has long either denied any meaningful access to
the media or tainted through the very circles that
propped up and sanctified Israel's image as an
oasis of democracy and a pivot of civilization.
In recent years, however, things began to
change thanks to developments such as the Internet
and various global civil society movements.
Although it has yet to reach a critical mass or
affect a major paradigm shift in public opinion,
these voices have been able to impose a
long-neglected story that has been seen mostly
through Israeli eyes.
A narrative that is
centered on the stories reflecting history,
reality and aspirations of ordinary people will
allow for a genuine understanding of the real
dynamics that drive the conflict. These stories
that define whole generations of Palestinians are
powerful enough to challenge the ongoing
partiality and polarization.
The fact is
Palestinians are neither potential "martyrs" nor
potential "terrorists". They are people who are
being denied basic human rights, who have been
dispossessed from their lands and are grievously
mistreated. They have resisted for over six
decades and they will continue to resist until
they acquire their fundamental human rights.
This is the core of the Palestinian
narrative, yet it is the least told story. A true
understanding would require a greater exposure of
the extraordinary, collective narrative of the
"ordinary people".
Ramzy Baroud
(www.ramzybaroud.net) is an
internationally-syndicated columnist and the
editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book
is My Father was A Freedom Fighter: Gaza's
Untold Story (Pluto Press).
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