Why Should We Talk About Palestine?

By Sofia Silveira and Vitor Garcia
Israel’s armed forces, in response to Hamas’ attacks, have caused, according to a June WHO (World Health Organization) report, the “destruction of water and sanitation structures, along with the displacement of 72,000 Palestinians including 58,000 seeking shelter in UNRWA schools across the Gaza Strip as of 19 May.”

The recent Gaza’s Al-Rimal district bombing, which included the destruction of two different newspapers — Associated Press and Al-Jazeera TV — by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), made the size of Israeli forces clear to a global audience that should know more and better by now.

The colonial appropriation  of Palestinian territory and its control by other States is historical. The old British Empire has a strong influence on this as it was the British, controlling the territory from 1920 to 1947, who encouraged immigration policies of occupation and colonization of the Palestinian by terrorized and traumatized victims of the Holocaust. 

This problem was passed on to the United Nations (UN) in 1947, which split, in a resolution known as Resolution 181, the territory into a giant jigsaw puzzle occupied by both Arab and Jewish peoples. It led to a war in 1948, won by Israel, which gained State status and increased its territory, in addition to originating the Palestinian diaspora (the dispersion of more than 700 thousand Palestinians).

Under the rule of the State of Israel, the Palestine region lives now under an apartheid regime… Water, food, sanitation and the right to come and go are controlled by Israel.  The access to clean water is precarious, the type and amount of food produced within the Palestinian areas under Israeli rule is controlled, so it is scanty.  Several checkpoints have been built throughout the territory to determine who can enter or leave, thus Palestinian people need an authorization from the State of Israel to walk through Palestinian lands. Not even Palestinian fishermen can cross an imaginary line at sea set up by Israel without permission, and there's incentive to build different walls (something like what Trump intended to do on the Mexico border) and further Israel's control. Not to mention overt attacks by the IDF forces on the Palestinians, resulting in the bombing of regions such as Gaza. 

Israel's control is vast and continues to block one of the main demands of the Palestinian people: the right to return to their lands. This element is extremely important because it is part of Israel's population control strategy over Palestine. With the right to return being denied to the Palestinian people, hundreds of thousands of people cannot return to live in regions that historically belonged to them.

Counterattacks are organized, in smaller but equally violent proportions, most of them by Hamas. Other forms of non-violent counter attacks also exist, such as the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS), a Palestine-led movement which consists in the practice of an economic, academic, cultural and political boycott against the State of Israel with the intention of ending the Palestine occupation and colonization.

As with most things, a path to resolution starts with the admission of wrongdoing. Specifically, admission to the state of Israel’s colonial logic (here defined as preaching territorial expansion and appropriation without any consideration for the people who already existed, occupied and lived there. This process is violent, discriminatory and oppressive, involving  the take over and imposition of lands, habits, culture, language, religion, laws and principles) in the expropriation, exclusion and death of the Palestinian people. In a world of paramilitary war, it is important to differentiate Hamas and Palestinians, unarmed civilians and milicias.

The logic used by the State of Israel should be observed attentively by the rest of the world, for its replication can be catastrophic and where it already happens, we shall identify it. What Israel has done to Palestinians contains meaningful similarities with and is no less cruel than the state-sponsored killing of civilians in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas under the banner of fighting drug trafficking. 

As Netanyahu leaves office, let it be an opportunity for more people who think about state responsibilities, duties and transgressions see the parallels, exchanging trafficking for terrorism, poor Latinx for Palestinians. Let this be an opportunity to see the plight of Palestinian people, and the Israel-Palestine conflict as more than just a synonym to an issue to complicated to solve. 

Around the world, attentive observers should not be stepping on eggshells to repudiate attacks against unarmed civilians. Yes, the subject is complex and it has layers of economic, psychosocial, philosophical, historical, entanglements - but the pain of displacement, hunger, lack of hope for prosperity, security and access to education for Palestinians is easy to see. Advocating for humans, wherever they are, to have basic rights should not be hard. Even some of Israel’s former national security officials did it, and one would think these are some of the people least likely to do it.

Criticizing specific actions on the part of the state of Israel without condemning the state’s entire existence, or the Jewish people, should not be hard and yet, some of society’s most theoretically progressive circles have failed. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) pointed to a 75% increase in anti-Semitism reports since the beginning of Israel’s armed response to Hamas’ most recent attacks.

We should talk about Palestine because we should have been talking about it differently for a really long time. How long has it been since “the Middle East” is associated with something impossible to “solve”? So many bad jokes later, so many dead, and the general discourse around the subject can still be summarized by “hm... complex.” We should talk about Palestine because not talking about it normalizes state cruelties in the name of national security but, most of all, - not acknowledging the existence of a massive number of humans who suffer so profoundly and so publicly and so undeniably reveals who we are. Happy world refugee day.