On Palestine & Growing Up With Rednecks
I'm not going to preach (much). I just want to take a moment to share some things that most people don't know about my upbringing that I think might have some resonance with many of you. I'm still recovering from it in a lot of ways, so consider yourselves my therapists for a moment or two here...
I was raised in a conservative shit hole; rodeos, rednecks, and Republicans... and football, and guns, and most of the people I grew up with are most likely cheering for Trump right now, and most of the rest are definitely voting Republican... and they had a chapter of the KKK in the inbred even shittier shit hole town next door. You get the idea. In the midst of this hotbed of liberal values and scintillating intellectual engagement, I also happened to be raised in a straight Republican-ticket-voting Christian Evangelical household. I was easily one of the last guys you would ever have expected to take an interest in advocating for Palestinian rights. I was not a politically minded person in any way until after college, and even then only by accident and with a lot of confusions and conflicting viewpoints. I cringe now when I think about it, but I used to run around wearing IDF t-shirts because I thought they were cool, and because our minister told us about the need to stand with Israel, because of some 'end times gobblydygook' reading of the Bible, which I have since come to learn is quite mainstream in the US Evangelical Protestant community. On more than one occasion Jewish friends took me aside and encouraged me to do a little more homework before advertising my support for Israel. But nope. I looked into working on a kibbutz one summer in college (I never wound up going, but only because I couldn't afford it). The pulpit in my departed mother's last church was flanked by both American and Israeli flags. In short, I was not raised by left-leaning revolutionary hippies. Nor did I live in an environment that predisposed me to be open minded, or even interested, in this particular subject. It's been a journey, and I fought with what I saw and with what people told me all along the way to where I am today.
I wrote my undergraduate thesis paper on the Old Testament because I was fascinated with Judaism and with Israel (though I knew almost nothing about the modern state of Israel at the time). I have no issues with Judaism any more than any other religion. I believe people should be free to practice their faith however they see fit, so long as they don't impose it on others. I suppose that makes me a secularist or something. And I enjoy talking to people about their beliefs and what those beliefs mean to them personally. However, my opinions on just about everything else I have mentioned have changed massively... and through a combination of accident and opportunity. Because I mostly stumbled into a lot of startling realizations in my mid 20's I also feel that it's important not to be an overly confrontational dick to people who have perhaps annoying and uniformed opinions on the subject, especially Americans. And it's not because I'm a self-hating American apologist, or because I like to pander to international progressives by suggesting that Americans are stupid. As far as I can tell we're not any more or less intelligent than other nationalities that I've encountered, but a lot of us are ignorant as fuck because we can afford to be, because politics rarely kick our door down in the middle of the night. And it's not because I think traveling a few miles has made me exceptional or enlightened. Quite the opposite, I'm privileged as hell to have had this random opportunity continue on for so long, and I'm confronted with my profound ignorance of every culture I interact with on an almost daily basis. I say *especially Americans* simply because I am one and that's the cultural context that's informed most of my political journeys.
So here we go. Israel may not be what you were raised to think it is, whether your opinion was formed by your parents, by your encounters with your religion, or by your television. I say this specifically to Americans, though it likely holds true for a lot of people from Western countries that support Israel financially or politically. I know this was the case with me growing up in Christian Hicksville, USA.
My journey to where I stand at this moment was largely about being shaken out of a default Christian Zionist upbringing. I wasn't so much indoctrinated by my religion as I was encouraged to look at one very narrow and politically uninformed perspective (with the heavy weight of Christian guilt to back it up) and given no information about the realities on the ground or even any knowledge of what a Palestinian was. Ok, maybe that's indoctrination. However, I was blessed with an education that gave me basic critical thinking skills and that inspired a lot of intellectual curiosity. And I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to see the reality on the ground in the Middle East, and Palestine specifically, and to meet people on all sides. I completed my graduate research while living in the West Bank, and it involved doing a lot of interviews with Israelis living in kibutuzim from Rosh Hanikra to Be'er Sheva, and in Tel Aviv and West Jerusalem, and Haifa. Most were former elite Jewish commandos from 1948 (called the "Palmach"), and included a retired IDF general. I also visited a number of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and spoke with Jewish settlers at length. On the Palestinian side I met and interviewed refugees in six Palestinian camps in the West bank, from Jenin to Balata to Dheisheh, and in heavily occupied Hebron, and East Jerusalem, and with the Druze in the Golan Heights, and Palestinians living in rural villages in the shadow of Israeli settlements. I also argued and debated with a lot of IDF soldiers at checkpoints in the West Bank, who were wondering what this non-Arab, non-Jewish, non-Muslim... but apparently Jewish-looking and Arab-looking guy was doing there. An Israeli once mistook me for another Israeli because of my haircut. I had just visited a barber the day before, in a Palestinian refugee camp in Bethlehem. With the exception of the first few weeks hanging out with my buddy Greg, I had no counterpart to ground me or to help me filter what I was seeing. I traveled alone for a couple of months to conduct my interviews, jumping on buses all over the place and sleeping in spare rooms, or coming back to the camp at odd hours. After spending one night in an empty hospital clinic in Tulkarem I woke up to see the sunrise from the rooftop. I peered at the traffic rushing by in Israel just a few hundred meters away, one of countless moments that brought home the intimacy of this conflict. I was lonely a lot of the time, but in retrospect I'm really grateful to have had that solitude. I had to feel my way through most of the confusion without anyone else supplying easy explanations or familiar distractions. A lot of things weren't fully processed until many months or even years later.
I found myself in confusing, comical, bizarre, and also deeply frustrating and upsetting situations. I got on people's nerves, on both sides. I worked hard to expose myself to as many points of view as I could during that five-month period, so I could start to cut through the propaganda and form my own opinions. I am still forming my opinions. But I'm also very clear on some of them. I worked very hard to be clinical and detached in how I conducted my research and my interviews, but something also clicked for me as a result of what I saw and the interactions that I had. At some point I felt that I ultimately had a moral responsibility to call bullshit when I realized that I was supporting brutality with my tax dollars. Are there other abusive regimes in other countries that are granted financial support and political cover by my government, abuses that I am not so vocal about? Absolutely. No question. And when I visit new places I try to learn and to call attention to the abuses that I discover. But the subject of Israel-Palestine is one that I have encountered directly and most intensely, as a student, as a researcher, as a solitary traveler, as an American... and as someone with the legacy of genocide-survival in their family narrative. And there's also just the facts that paint a picture of their own, once you start to examine them. Israel get's more U.S. tax dollars than any other country... and on occasion it adds up to more than the entire continent of Africa. When one pulls on the thread of "why" the follow up questions quickly lead to unsettling places.
You may have read some of my strong opinions on the subject. If not, I can tell you what my opinions are if you really want to know, and if you are willing to engage in a respectful discourse. It's hard to stick to those rules on this subject, I know. I also understand that certain terms are triggers for people that cause them to simply shut down and close their minds. I know this because I related to this subject in a similar fashion for years. I still get triggered by certain things. I think I always will. Sometimes I think it's helpful to be mindful of those sensitivities and those triggers and sometimes I think it's important to rattle people's cages and speak in terms that startle them. I don't post bullshit stories from bullshit sources. And I don't form my opinions based on them either. I feel that I came to my opinions rationally and that I can back them up with facts and direct experience. If I indulge what sounds like inflammatory rhetoric to you, there is a reason. I want people to wake up, as I am still doing, and some alarm clocks are more useful in certain situations. I more or less required a baseball bat to wake up, after my mind-fuck ideological upbringing. I was debating Palestinians while living in a Palestinian camp (which goes to show how open and patient my Palestinian friends are), and at one point a friend had to take me aside and tell me to chill out a bit, that not everyone was going to be so welcoming of my curiosity and my need for clinical detachment and critical inquiry. People were suffering, she said, and they needed to know if I was on their side or not...
And that brings us to the subject of 'who's side am I on'. That's ultimately what forms the subtext of most of my discussions on this subject anyway, no matter how philosophical or theoretical or factually grounded they might be, and no matter the ideological positions at play. People want to probe me and know which team I'm on. So here's my answer:
Those who advocate for basic rights for Palestinians are not default apologists for terrorism, patriarchy, antisemitism, or blind to the corruption or misdeeds of the Palestinian political establishment or to Jewish suffering. I have no love for either Fatah or Hamas. I do not hate Israelis. I do not hate Jews or Judaism. I don't subscribe to or tolerate bigoted conspiracy theories. The Holocaust happened. The Armenian Genocide happened. These are reasons why I feel the need to raise my voice against ethnocentric fascism. I do think that AIPAC is a very effective lobby, and I don't think any country should have that much influence over American politics, not the Saudis, or the Swiss or the Argentinians either. And I'm outraged at the suggestion that criticizing Israel's policies is inherently anti-semitic. If I critique American domestic or foreign policy does this make me anti-American? Fuck no. The notion is patently absurd. And were this sort of sophistry employed to shield America from criticism we wouldn't hesitate to label such deceitful demagoguery for what it is. It's not anti-semitism or even picking on Israel to expect its leaders to suffer scrutiny and criticism of their policies.
I don't like slapping labels on myself (because they smack of certainty, and that's not really my thing), but most would describe me as decidedly "anti-Zionist". That does not mean that I want to exterminate Zionists, or that I want a nuke to go off in Tel Aviv. It means that I equate the philosophy of Zionism and the Zionist project with ethnocentric fascism, colonialism, and Apartheid. In practice Zionism is indisputably and institutionally racist and therefore unjust and in need of active subversion in the interests of civil rights and social justice. These words feel strong to some people. I have put a lot of thought into my decision to use them in how I define my position. I stand for Palestinian rights because Palestinians are human beings who have been denied sovereignty, dignity, access to protections that are afforded them under binding international treaties, and a fair hearing in the international body politic for almost 70 years (almost 50 years of that under military occupation). But, it's not about being "pro-Palestinian". I do not accept that label for myself. I don't support an ethnicity or a nationality (though I do support the right to full Palestinian political autonomy and to collective self defense). I believe in one state and full right of return. I support justice. That's the side I want to be on. But it's not something I can accomplish by simply wrapping myself in a keffiyeh and cursing Zionism at every opportunity. I never wear the keffiyeh (I have my reasons, but that's a longer discussion, and to each his/her own). I try to direct my anger at instances where groups or individuals are actively depriving others of access to their basic rights. Since that's the nonstop reality for Palestinians living under an indefinite half-century-old occupation, I'm not likely to shut up about it anytime soon. And so I focus a lot on the mechanisms of the continuing occupation and on the means that are used to maintain it and to obscure its brutality.
For some reason hypocrisy really gets under my skin. Maybe it's because some of that Bible learning stuck with me, along with some stuff my mother said about sticking up for what's right and never being silent when you see an abuse happening in front of you. She's gone now. She was only around for the very beginning of this journey. After my mom passed away I went through a lot of spiritual upheaval, and it has had a big impact on how I view my priorities in life going forward. We're talking recently, like just in the past 2 years. But that upheaval and confusion has not altered my desire to honor and to try to follow the principles that she taught me. I think those things are pretty universal. I think a lot of people have moms who taught them that stuff.
Maybe it's because I've encountered hypocrisy as a frequent stumbling block in my work and in my efforts to find supports for it. A side note on that: Funding organizations with lofty mission statements often say that they stand for x,y, and z, but I've found that many of them want to avoid anything that might be considered socially or politically disruptive in any way. Why? When organizations reach a certain size they want to protect their bank accounts and their donor lists and their reputations amongst decent establishment folks. So, when it comes to dealing with politically sensitive topics (i.e. most of the important shit in the Middle East), many funders want to support shit that essentially accomplishes nothing besides looking good on a brochure. In fairness, some of them simply have their hands tied by even larger institutions that cultivate this culture of high price tag bullshit. A lot of organizations pretend to promote social justice and the ideal of 'speaking truth to power', but in practice they actively stand in the way, and will even go after your reputation if they discover that you are actually sincere and therefore unpredictable. No shit. Learned that one the hard way. More than once.
Many Israel-Palestine "dialogue" programs have turned this glossy-bullshit-brochure type of engagement into an art form, and it actually perpetuates injustice by "normalizing" the conflict "Normalization", as some call it, essentially suggests that dialogue and "normal" interactions are where the focus should be if there is going to be an end to the violence (i.e. let's talk and cry and hug each other and pretend that it's just about "love" and "tolerance"), rather placing the primary focus on ending a 50-year-old illegal military occupation that hits every Palestinian in the face the minute they leave these "normalized" discussions with their Israeli neighbors and return home to their rubble and their "security fences" and their checkpoints and drone or attack helicopter or F-16 strikes, while Israelis get to go back to what is essentially California on the Mediterranean, where the occupation is only evident if they are actively participating in it or enduring the occasional "rocket attack" waged with armaments that one could make dumpster diving behind a medium-sized hardware store. I no longer subscribe to the theory that dialogue alone is effective. More than two decades of "peace process" talks have lead to almost no concrete action from Israel, except for a continuation of illegal settlement building on the land proposed a future Palestinian state, as well as arbitrary arrest and detention, and extra-judicial killings, and a PLO that is widely co-opted by the West. The "peace process" is simply a high profile example of the "normalized" dialogue programs and idyllic summer camps that (more photo-op or brochure-diplomacy) between Israeli and Palestinian youth. At either level, these engagements typically fail to address that one side of the table has almost all of the power, media sympathy, and financial and political backing, and that there is no arbiter with the power to press for any kind of fair or lasting resolution... and even American and Israeli diplomats are starting to say as much. Talk is cheap, both on the interpersonal and on the international level... but it's also a stalling tactic that is costing the Palestinians everything.
Or... maybe it's because my deepest feelings of shame come in those moments when I am confronted with my own hypocrisies and this is one area where I feel that I can address at least one form of hypocrisy with some measure of clarity and consistency. I like to think that I am at least aware of most of my hypocrisies, but sometimes I still need the baseball bat.
