the imperialism, racism and respectability politics of it all when your life is on the line... i keep thinking about how the people in gaza who made it out are the ones with dual nationalities (people with american and british passports were let out before people with egyptian passports coming back to their own country) who could afford the 7000 USD bribe to egyptian authorities, or the ones like mosab abu toha who had bylines in the new yorker and a literary community to advocate for him (helpful if you're kidnapped by the idf, not so helpful if you're killed instantly by bombs like poet hiba abu nada). your ability to speak english and advocate for yourself in the middle east can save you from so much, but sometimes not enough. it reminds me of mohammed el-kurd's speech:
On the other hand, those of us who are victims, who are depicted in newspapers and documentaries as wounded, wailing, and weak, are sometimes given the microphone. But this mic comes at a steep price. There are prerequisites these victims must meet. They’re often women, children, the elderly. They carry US or European passports and perform humane professions or have disabilities. Everyone will tell you, “They would never hurt a fly.” And even if they were once wolves, they are now docile and defanged, only howling at the moon in agony. They never charge, attack, or hunt in a pack. Their campaigning is individualistic, centered only on their personal tragedies, incentivized by humanitarian need rather than political ideology.
Let me tell you a story. Last year on May 11, I, like many around the globe, woke up to the news that the beloved Palestinian TV reporter Shireen Abu Akleh had been shot and killed by the Israeli occupation forces during a raid in the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank. Within minutes of the news breaking, I found an anonymous e-mail in my inbox, with a tip. The e-mail read: “Very urgent and necessary, please announce on Twitter and Facebook that Shireen Abu Akleh is an American citizen. This is a fact, not a rumor. The Israelis killed an American journalist.” I, of course, did not announce it. And when I wrote about the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh, I made sure not to refer to her as an American citizen but rather as a holder of a US passport. But it didn’t matter. The news that Shireen was an American was out in the following hours, and her alleged Americanness suddenly made her human.
[...]
Now, obviously I’m not saying that people who engage in a politics of appeal should be burned at the stake. Lots of people do this in good faith. A lot of the time, they say it’s a strategy. When we say that Shireen Abu Akleh was American or that Alaa Abdel Fattah, the Egyptian political prisoner, is British, we say that there’s a strategy behind this. It’s going to make them more relatable to the American public; it’s going to make justice more attainable for them. But in fact, this only shrinks the scope of humanity for the rest of us and reinforces a hierarchy of suffering. It makes the requirement to become “human” a lot narrower and more difficult to attain. And such practices of what I’ll call “defanging” reproduce the mainstream cultural order in which Palestinians are robbed of their agency, their right to self-determination, and ultimately their permission to narrate, as the Palestinian scholar Edward Said once put it.
so much of this moment we are living through comes down to not being able to convince the american public that palestinians are as human as israelis. but another and more ominous part of this is that the american public's heirarchy of humanity has permeated our own countries. who american empire deems worthy, egyptians let through their borders. who american empire deems worthy, egyptians let out of their prisons. and we call this post-colonialism.
