Re-Imagining the Nature of Our Freedom And so, for Palestinians and black South Africans, what of our dream deferred? After more than 60 years of struggle, the Palestinian dream of emancipation must find a new face. The type of freedom and future we imagine must redefine the terms of our path forward, while not forcing a normative face on this dream such as a one-state or two-state solution. For Palestinians and our supporters, it is the post-Apartheid moment that should alert us to take stock and reframe, not only the form of our campaigns but the terms of any proposed resolution to this seemingly unending contemporary colonial tragedy. Whether we call the form of the imagined resolution the one-state, two-state, or rainbow nation solution is immaterial: Statehood, without radical structural and social changes, will simply formalize the current social hierarchy within an “open” neoliberal system. It will ensure that those privileged in the previous order of things are simply free to continue to live on the backs of those historically subordinated. We see in South Africa that the structural privilege of whiteness continues and that white privilege has not, in fact, had to give up much for the post-colonial moment. This is perhaps the most important lesson Palestinians can take from South Africa. It cautions us to qualify the nature of freedom imagined. We may wish to approach our future selves in what came before us – not in a memorialized past but as an anchor for collective renewal as dreams transform. To do so, we can re-remember the rich heritage that exists in us all, in our intellectuals, poets, and writers, in our musical and artisanal traditions, in the vibrant social spaces of our pre-1948 urban centers such as Jerusalem, in the seasoned knowledge of our agriculturalists, and in the people-land bond. This heritage has been largely lost to our youth, even forgotten, in the day-to-day workings of a settler colonial order that keeps Palestinians locked in a narrow present, a vicious system that attempts to splinter identities and beat self-esteem to a pulp. This heritage is a resource that can help our future “born free” generations, as those born after 1994 are referred to in South Africa, to stand tall, connected to the deep roots that support them. This is true of those children today who are part of the Palestinian folk music groups in Palestine. Their eyes carry pride and strength rather than the otherwise ubiquitous sense of emptiness and feeling lost. They feel and know that they are part of something bigger and older, which precedes the degraded state of the present. It is this living heritage that we must cultivate. This should not be in some nationalist effort to excavate and restore an imagined past but rather to re-inscribe the terms of our future. For this reformulation to bear fruit, it is essential that our youth experience their identity beyond oppression and beyond political slogans. The possibility of a thriving Palestinian humanity also requires the international delegitimization of the recurring insistence that Israel, in its current Zionist framework as the Jewish state, has a right to exist. The idea of Israel’s right to exist is not a given: It is generated through and dependent upon a structural amnesia rooted in a form of silencing that renders the ethnocide that occurred in the creation of Israel invisible. This everyday social amnesia is articulated and institutionalized in a number of ways including through laws, educational curricula and rubric, official historiography, in everyday acts of banal nationalism, military training, media, and popular culture. It does not only function to silence the ethnocide that enabled the birth of the Israeli state; it also cloaks the ongoing ethnocide that continues today. It is thus no small feat that Palestinians continue to exist. But we certainly deserve more than a debased humanity. As Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor reminds us, the term survivance entails an active renewal, beyond mere survival.4 The lesson that we must keep in mind from the South African experience is that the denial of the full and equal humanity of the majority of black people preceded Apartheid and has continued after Apartheid. Victories on paper are not the same thing as victories in practice. What kind of existence will we collectively accept and how will we build what is needed to support our preferred futures?
Posted on: Sat, 24 Jan 2015 08:35:34 +0000
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