Tag: Israel

Categories
Books & printed materials Conflict & disaster History & heritage

[3011] Mornings in Jenin and Palestinian narrative in literature

There is a short author’s note near the end of Susan Abulhawa’s novel Mornings in Jenin. In the last paragraph, the author recounted the time she met Edward Said and how that influenced her. Abulhawa is a Palestinian American, just like Said. In that page, she mentioned that Said lamented how “the Palestinian narrative was lacking in literature.” After that conversation, she “incorporated his disappointment into [her] resolve.”

Reflecting on that, I think in some instances literature and art in general can be more effective in promoting a cause than academic or non-fiction pieces of work.

Over the past two years or so in response to the killings in Gaza as well as the constant illegal Israeli settlers’ violence in the West Bank, I have attempted to educate myself further about the Palestinian experience. Wikipedia has been a constant companion because it is the easiest access to a generally good source of information. But reading Wikipedia might be dissatisfying and it is easy to drown in a sea of dry hyperlinks and articles that are too long for the screen.

Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine has been helpful in guiding me through the narrative and make sense of all the information on Wikipedia. The book is the best non-fiction work on Palestine I have read yet.

But non-fiction makes you work for it. This might not work for many who read for entertainment purposes instead of learning. And non-fiction can be dry. I think the reason The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine reads great is because Khalidi merges his personal stories to make sense of the facts, which makes the grand historical narrative spanning for more than a lifetime more human.

Here is where Mornings in Jenin excels. First published in 2006 under the more controversial original title The Scar of David, the novel for me is the most emotional book I have read in a long time. The characters are fictional but they live through real events described in The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. There were multiple segments of the novel where I was on the verge of tearing up. Reading it was an emotional rollercoaster that makes one sympathizes with the Palestinian people even more. It adds an extra dimension that is hard for most non-fiction to tap into.

As it turns out, Mornings in Jenin is the first English literature that explores the Palestinian experience and so, fulfilling Abulhawa’s promise to herself to incorporate Palestine into modern literature. That makes Mornings in Jenin an important novel to read in order to understand the Palestinian sufferings better.

And so, I feel Edward Said is right about the importance of literature to the Palestinian experience.

Categories
Books & printed materials Conflict & disaster History & heritage Politics & government

[3005] Reading Revolutionary Iran, or an appreciation for glossary

My readings could be driven by current affairs. That was the reason I picked up Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. And that was the reason I recently read Michael Axworthy’s Revolutionary Iran: the Twelve-Day War between Iran and Israel had just concluded. These books always remind us that there is almost always a long history behind contemporary events. Things very rarely just happened on a day.

Revolutionary Iran, first published in 2013, focuses on the 1979 Iranian Revolution. But it also covers a hundred years’ worth of history, starting from the early 20th century (with the fall of Qajar Iran and the rise of the Pahlavi dynasty) up to the controversial 2011 Iranian presidential election. The long sweep of history is written up all with the aim of setting the revolution in its proper context.

As with any kind of similar books (such as much thicker and expansive The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya), the breadth and depth of the discussion are a challenge to casual readers equipped with only general knowledge of the country: there are just too many names, too many years and too many events to remember and make relevant to the whole exercise. These names and events are all interrelated, making reading Revolutionary Iran complicated. One could get lost along the way. That could cause frustration and eventually DNF: ‘did not finish’. The phone is always ready to dumb us down with social media, ever jealous of any of us perusing long-form materials.

The complexity reminds me just how useful a glossary and an index could be. It kept the story in my head straight while going through the pages of Revolutionary Iran.

Referring the glossary and the index could be a pain. Flipping pages back and forth is disruptive to reading flow. It is almost like reading while consulting a dictionary or an encyclopedia at the same time. It almost feels like reading Wikipedia with all of its hyperlinks could have been a more enjoyable endeavor.

But reading Wikipedia has its own pitfalls. Those hyperlinks are rabbit holes to be explored. With an undisciplined mind, one could easily end up reading about Kurdish nationalism or the history of Azerbaijan all of which may have some relevance to the events of 1979, but does not assist us in understanding the nuances of the Iranian revolution any better. Wikipedia’s hyperlinks could provide context, but an overload of information could also drown out of the context. Some who wander are lost.

So, a book, unlike Wikipedia, is a guided tour. It keeps the fluff out by focusing and contextualising the essentials. It is the model-building tool. And the glossary and the index, often forgotten, are little manuals useful if the reader needs help along the way.

Categories
Books & printed materials Conflict & disaster

[2995] Reading The Lady from Tel Aviv

Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine was the first in a set of books I bought and read during the height of Israel’s latest aggression against Palestine. Khalidi’s work turned out to be the authoritative must-read book of the year and it reframed things I thought I knew about the Israel-Palestine conflict from before. A mixture of personal and national history, the book helps me understand the messy Israeli-Palestinian history easier, compared to the effort of going through Wikipedia’s voluminous and even messier entries.

Khalidi’s is excellent but non-fictions sometimes are unable to capture certain aspects of the real world. Over the years, I have discovered that the work of fiction can close the gap. So, I went on another spending spree purchasing a few Palestine-linked literature. One that I actually read (as opposed to being left on my shelf) was Rabai Al-Madhoun’s translated work The Lady from Tel Aviv. Originally written and published in Arabic in 2009, The Lady was translated by Elliott Colla into English and then republished a year later.

In summary, The Lady is a story about a Palestinian exile’s return to Gaza post-the Second Intifada. The book appears to a semi-autobiography of the author. The three layers of reality governing the story suggest as much: the author Al-Madhoun (a journalist himself) has his exiled journalist protagonist as an author working on a homecoming novel.

For quite a heavy subject, The Lady is a light reading. So light that I feel the novel could do with more details. The book skims the surface regarding the mistreatment Palestinians faced by Israeli occupying forces, the corruption of the Palestinian Authority and the general conflict between Fatah and Hamas. It is a picture of hopelessness that Gazans embrace as a way of life, that all the troubles they face are taken as given as stoics would.

Despite all the conflicts, corruptions and injustices, he does not explore any of them deep enough. He is content to have them mentioned and unexplored, taking it as a universal obvious truth unworthy of elaboration. And then there are loose ends left to the readers’ imagination. That I think is the most frustrating thing about The Lady.

But Al-Madhoun might be aware of this particular criticism even as he was writing the novel. In a scene where the lead character, the journalist, visits his blind childhood friend Muhammad (Abu Saber) for the first time in 40 years, who is now a poor beggar with nobody else to rely on:

I think I am going to leave. I shut my eyes, unable to keep looking at the shape Muhammad is in. This is an unrecognizably distorted copy of the boy whose friendship had lit up my childhood. Abu Hatem waits for me a short way off. I turn away so no one can see the tears in my eyes.

[…]

Abu Hatem turns the key in the ignition and Muhammad realizes I am about to go. He waves his cane around the air and screams so loudly it splits my heart. As we drive away, he calls out, “Who are you—you stranger who is not a stranger?”

[…]

“Why didn’t you tell Abu Saber who you were?” asks Abu Hatem. “You broke his heart—and mine too.”

“I couldn’t do it. It would have been worse had he known it was me. If he knew I saw him like that.

 

That makes me wonder whether the lack of details is just Al-Madhoun’s way to protecting the readers from the difficult reality in Gaza.

Categories
Books & printed materials Politics & government Society

[2992] Reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Message

Those concerned with the world would likely take Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me as an important work about racism in the United States. I could only believe the book’s importance would only rise further as the white identity politics entrenches itself in the western world. Coates there reveals the societal hypocrisy that exists in the United States with regards to racism vis-à-vis his experience as a black person. While the subject of Between the World and Me is grim, the language used by Coates across all its pages is beautiful.

Cover of Ta-Nehisi Coates's The Message.

When The Message came out in October this year, I was quick to pick it up. The controversy surrounding the book made me all the more curious about Coates’s latest work. That controversy involved him equating Israel’s treatment of Palestinians as apartheid. He had visited Israel and Palestine (and a few other places) and the book was published as Israel continue to commit horrendous killing not just in Palestine but also in Lebanon, while proceeding with its illegal land grabbing exercise in the West Bank.

Coates’s latest is beautifully written, no doubt, but equating Israel’s behavior to apartheid is hardly a new groundbreaking point. That message and other criticisms he lobs in Israel’s directions are only controversial because pro-Israel readers (and non-readers) consider any criticism of Israel as racism/antisemitism. To the wider world, there is no controversy but only a nod to Coates signifying the lack of moral authority Israel has in order to make such accusation.

Israel is not the only subject of the book. He speaks of his visit to Senegal to explore the history of slavery in the US and his own roots. It is here I think where the language is at its smoothest, hence my favorite section of the book.

In both parts of the book, the seeds are quite clearly the points on racism discussed earlier in Between the World and Me. Realizing this, I feel The Message is an extension of Between the World and Me. The former is expands the reality perceived by Coates in his earlier work with the wider world in mind.

But the act of expanding older points does not make The Message unimportant. Sometimes, profoundness of points made is not the point itself. Sometimes, the point is the realization of something had to be done. In justifying writing The Message, Coates writes:

…The figure is you, the writer, an idea in hand, notes scribbled on loose-leaf, maybe an early draft of an outline. But to write, to draw that map, to pull us into the wilderness, you cannot merely stand at the edge. You have to walk the land. You have to see the elevation for yourself, the color of the soil. You have to discover the ravine is really a valley and that the stream is in fact a river winding south from a glacier in the mountains. You can’t “logic” your way through it or retreat to your innate genius. A belief in genius is a large part of what plagues us, and I have found that people widely praised for power of their intellect are as likely to illuminate as they are to confound. “Genius” may or may not help a writer whose job is, above all else, to clarify.

And so he traveled and wrote.

Categories
Books & printed materials Conflict & disaster

[2980] Reading Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of those things that is always present in the background. Almost everybody is aware of it, even those who do not give any headlines any serious thoughts. It is easy to take it for granted, expecting the conflict to last a lifetime if not for eternity. It is as if it is a trouble that has no beginning. It just exists.

Throughout the 2000s, that was definitely my context. And I remember the decade as a violent period for Israel and Palestine. The news on TV, radio and on the internet told me so.

As a member of a Malaysian generation at that time who had only (mostly) experienced peace, that violence was hard to stomach. What is more is that it was easy for an outsider like me to fall into the stereotype that the modern Middle East is doomed to an endless cycle of violence. So, from the outside, it felt natural to blame both Palestinian groups and Israel for the bloodshed all at the same time. The Palestinian groups were wrong for their bombing tactics, and Israel was wrong for its disproportionate and indiscriminate use of force.

My views of the long conflict have changed over the last 20 years. Previously, I was willing to give Israel the benefit of the doubt… because the whole business was complex. And Israel appeared different from the rest in the region.

Now, no longer. Benjamin Netanyahu and his far right government played a role in that. The Arab Spring, in some cases, showed the Arab states are capable of reforms and could be democratic. And over two decades since, Arab states definitely have shown capacity for economic growth. All these developments and more made Israel less special.

But the recent leveling of Gaza by Israeli military has removed completely any sympathy I might have for Israel.

The ongoing Israeli atrocities have prompted me to read more about Palestine and Israel beyond disparate Wikipedia articles. I bought several fictions and non-fictions to do just that. One of them was The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by historian Rashid Khalidi.

The book reframes my experience of the 2000s and makes me understand why I had some sympathy for Israel at that time.

During that decade, Palestine and Israel were going through what is now known as the Second Intifada. It involved suicide bombings and other deadly tactics carried out by multiple Palestinian groups. The violence itself was the result of deep frustration at a decade-long peaceful process that was never meant to succeed.

The deadliness of the Second Intifada, as Khalidi notes, had sapped global support for Palestinian cause, which was abundant before. Not too many governments (and definitely liberals, which I roughly identify myself as then and now) were willing to justify violence even in the face of injustice during the 2000s. The decade after all began with the September 11 Attacks that marked the start of the US War on Terror.

So, the Second Intifada was ruinous for Palestinian reputation as far as outsiders were concerned. And I was among the many outsiders who frowned at the violence.

But what I did not understand then was that the Second Intifada came after period of relative peace, even as Palestinians continued to suffer injustice. The First Intifada that began in the late 1980s and ended in the 1990s was a peaceful organic Palestinian resistance. But Israel would have none of it and suppressed it brutally. The non-violent Palestinian approach, and the violent reaction by Israel forces created deep international sympathy the Palestinian cause. At the time, for the first time in a long time, Israel was seen as the bad guys. So strong was the sentiment that it jumpstarted a peace process.

Unfortunately, as the author argues, that peace process was problematic. On the Palestinian side, the PLO led by Yasser Arafat was incompetent and shortsightedness (who themselves were victims of Arab states’ political maneuvering against each other and were victims of Israel’s policies). On the Israeli side, there was no sincerity about the peace process and about the establishment of the state of Palestine. Meanwhile, the US was not an honest broker; the author describes the US as Israel’s lawyers instead of arbitrators. Already during negotiations, Palestine’s legal team was no match for Israel’s. In the end, Palestine sacrificed too much for nothing with Israel offering no real concession. This brought the successes and the hopes of the First Intifada to naught.

This made many Palestinians bitter. The First Intifada was an organic resistance which was hijacked by PLO. And when PLO had the chance to do something do, they botched it badly.

In Palestinian eyes, as the author sees it, this discredited the PLO and Yasser Arafat immensely. They felt betrayed by the PLO, by the US and even angrier at Israel (especially as the peaceful route towards independence was closed). This created a split in the Palestinian leadership and a room for Hamas to rise in Gaza, at the expense of the PLO which after Arafat’s death, was led by an uncharismatic and ineffective Mahmoud Abbas.

As I mentioned, that recontextualizes the bloody uprising of the 2000s.

But the The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine is not just about the First Intifada, the subsequent 1990s peace process that failed and the Second Intifada in the 2000s. Rashid Khalidi goes back to the earliest days of Zionism to argue how the whole conflict should be seen within the lens of settler colonialism. He goes through the 1917 Balfour Declaration, the 1947-1948 war that led to the Nakba, the 1967 Six-Day War, the 1982 Israel invasion of Lebanon and all the way to the Trump years.

Each of these events represented a major turning point in Palestinian struggle for statehood over 100 years. In each of these events, the author demonstrates that it was never an even fight for the Palestinians.