Please write your reflection paper based on the texts for this week:
The Oscar-nominated short film, The Present at
https://www.kanopy.com/en/product/11419624?vp=seattlecentral
The Amnesty International report
https://www.amnesty.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/MDE1551412022ENGLISH.pdf
on the crime of apartheid against Palestinians.
Palestine Remix
https://remix.aljazeera.com/aje/PalestineRemix/born-in-1948.html#/25
. This is an ethnographic mix of first person commentary by Palestinians and Israelis.
Basic Law of Israel
https://www.adalah.org/uploads/uploads/Basic_Law_Israel_as_the_Nation_State_of_the_Jewish_People_ENG_TRANSLATION_25072018.pdf
. This is the primary document of the Israeli state which defines its mission in terms of ethnic primacy.
Additionally, here are two documentaries about the history and contemporary treatment of Palestinians by the Israeli state. They are compelling and will give you background not normally available on mainstream American media:
Tantura
This 2022 documentary reconstructs, through eyewitness testimony, a 1948 massacre of a Palestinian village by Israeli forces. Massacres such as this helped drive 750,000 Palestinians from their homes during the formation of the state of Israel. The film also considers how the memory of this action has been cleansed from the official Israeli narrative.
The Settlers
This 2016 French documentary examines the continuing theft of Palestinian land through the creation of settlements, illegal under international law, in the occupied territories which the Israeli state seized in its 1967 surprise attack on its Arab neighbors. The settlers in the film justify their appropriation of land with classic ethnocentric honesty.
As U.S. citizens, we are directly involved in Israeli policies towards Palestinians through our tax dollars. According to Human Rights Watch
https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/11/14/us-military-aid-israel-another-perspective
the U.S provides 18.5% of the Israeli budget and has supplied the Israeli state with over 127 billion dollars in military aid over decades. To support the Israeli offensive against Gaza, the U.S. Congress and President recently approved 17 billion dollars in military aid. This is in addition to the 3.8 billion dollar annual U.S. subsidy.
Currently, the world is watching as a Gaza genocide takes place and is streamed live on social media. Seeking revenge for the October 7 Hamas attack, the Israeli state has destroyed most of the housing stock in Gaza, the hospitals, the universities, the mosques and churches. UN authorities state that famine is sweeping over the population of 2.3 million Palestinians as the Israeli state denies food, fuel and medicine to the population.
Over 2000 American college students have been arrested in anti-genocide protests in recent weeks. Currently, there is a large ongoing protest at the University of Washington.
In many ways the Israel/Palestine conflict parallels and echoes the history of the United States. There is a similar cultural unconscious reflected in pioneer tropes and the idea of an empty land awaiting productive labor. Both Israel and the United States are fundamentally settler-colonial states which displaced indigenous populations through violent means. Just as the U.S. Declaration of Independence refers to native peoples as “merciless savages” so too are the native Palestinians often portrayed as “terrorists” in Israel and the U.S. when they act to resist the the theft of their homes and lands. Even though there were native American massacres of white settlers and there continue to be Palestinian attacks on Israelis, the institutionalized violence of both the U.S. and the Israeli state against existent populations is far greater.
If you follow current mass media coverage in the U.S. you may receive the impression that the conflict is between two equal and intransigent parties. This claimed equivalence belies the reality on the ground in which millions of Palestinians live under Israeli military occupation and are treated as lesser citizens in Israel itself. For historical context, I would recommend Noam Chomsky’s book Fateful Triangle
Links to an external site.
, multiple works by Palestinian-American Edward Said
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Said
such as The Question of Palestine
Links to an external site.
, or the work of Israeli historians Simha Flapan
Links to an external site.
or Ilan Pappe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilan_Papp%C3%A9
. For current coverage of the conflict I highly recommend watching the daily coverage on the site Democracy Now!
https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/04/23/us-states-use-anti-boycott-laws-punish-responsible-businesses
Here are some relevant terms for this discussion:
institutionalized ethnocentrism: systematic and legalized discrimination promoting the supremacy of one ethnic group over others.
ethnocracy: rule of one ethnic group over another
ethnic cleansing: a term referring to the forced removal of an ethnic group from a territory
apartheid: originally an Afrikaaner term from South Africa describing an institutionalized system of discrimination against a group. Now recognized internationally as a crime against humanity.
zionism: a term somewhat analogous in practice to the U.S. doctrine of Manifest Destiny. The word describes the Jewish nationalist movement which provided a moral/religious charter for the founding of the Israeli state.
semite: a member of any of a number of peoples of ancient southwestern Asia including the Akkadians, Phoenicians, Hebrews, and Arabs who speak a language derived from the Semitic language family. It is a cultural category, not a biological one.
anti-semitism: a term denoting the long history and contemporary fact of anti-Jewish persecution.
Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS)
https://bdsmovement.net/what-is-bds
: An international movement calling for a boycott of Israeli businesses and settlements which operate in the occupied Palestinian territories seized by Israel in 1967. It is patterned on the boycott of South African businesses during the apartheid era. According to Human Rights Watch
https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/04/23/us-states-use-anti-boycott-laws-punish-responsible-businesses
, 27 state legislatures in the U.S. have passed laws which penalize businesses which support BDS boycott efforts.
