A GLOBAL PEOPLE

Abstract

When the United Nations predicted in 2012 that Gaza would be "unlivable" by 2020, it was responding not simply to the deterioration of economic conditions that Sara Roy first described as "de-development" in the mid-1980s, but also to the continuous cruelty of a multi-year siege and blockade that has immiserated and isolated the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip.5 And yet, Gaza only captures headlines when it is bombed in spectacular fashion. At the end of the track, "Palestine Live!" reverberates as a powerful refrain: "Dancing eyes collect your prize / Palestine Live! / Rise up like the star you are / Palestine Live!" In his 1986 book with the Swiss photographer Jean Mohr, After the Last Sky, Edward Said recounted the massive corpus of Palestinian biography, autobiography, memoir, and self-statement that stands in opposition to Zionist erasure. While Third World women have long been aligned with Palestine, it is no small feat that a few months ago centers and departments of women's and gender studies across the country and the world signed a statement in explicit support of Palestinian liberation.8 Of course, it was the organized women's movement in the colonized world which first insisted that the Palestinian cause be a global one. After teaching for a time in Iraq, Bseiso returned to Gaza in 1953 where he became the secretary of the Palestine Communist Party in Gaza and poured his efforts into the organization of workers and refugees.

Palestine is often buried in negative representations. It is seen as a place of indecipherable complexity or Muslim fanaticism. But, as a site of continuous struggle and resistance against colonialism and its imperial patrons, Palestine has meant a great deal to a great many people around the world. The international dimensions of the Palestinian struggle for freedom are now well known. Its links to Cuba, to Algeria, or to Vietnam are impossible to deny today. The political and emotional resonance between Palestine and Vietnam, to give one example, is laid bare in an evocative anecdote about Ghassan Kanafani, who, at a meeting of the Afro-Asian Writers in China, burst into tears after a North Vietnamese writer distributed shrapnel from an American fighter jet shot down the week before. Kanafani was reportedly so moved that he did not read his prepared speech, saying he had nothing of such magnitude to offer but promising to do so at the next meeting.1

The first intifada, announced from Gaza in 1987, altered the dynamics of Palestine's international circulation. A stream of slovenly journalistic accounts rolled off the presses, promising wisdom about a benighted holy land, the impressions akin in politics and practice to the voluminous Victorian travelogues of a century earlier. The piece de resistance of this corpus was Thomas Friedman's inaugural book-length excreta, From Beirut to Jerusalem (1989). More significant, however, for Palestinians at least, was the arrival of new cadres of writerly fellow travelers. While Palestinian camps in Lebanon, Jordan, and elsewhere had long welcomed foreign visitors of many kinds throughout the revolution, the intifada initiated a powerful new genre of eye-witness accounts from inside the so-called territories. Although such writings may be cliché now, as they have proliferated under the conditions of the Oslo regime, those written in the heat of the intifada register the lost sentiments of a wholly different era of popular activity.

C. M. Naim, the great scholar of Urdu letters who was born in the north of British India in 1936, visited Palestine in 1989. Naim's account of his trip is rich and detailed. It is at once critical, sympathetic, and learned. Throughout the piece, Naim drew comparisons between India and Palestine. "People asked me where I was 'originally' from," Naim wrote, "and when I told them they responded with unusual warmth: India is seen as a staunch friend of the Palestinians. I don't speak Arabic, but having been raised a Muslim I know a few verses from the Qur'an and the traditional, formulaic responses on occasions of grief and loss. As I uttered them I felt a bond being formed, superficial perhaps, yet very real in that moment."2

In Gaza, Naim met with the prominent feminist leader and pedagogue Yusra al-Barbari, "one of the most remarkable persons I have ever met." Born in Gaza in 1923, al-Barbari, who died in 2009, also in Gaza, was an important teacher and later trainer of teachers. She was also involved deeply in the organization of women in Gaza and across Palestine as well as with women athletes. She would, like many Palestinians, carry the Palestinian cause around the world, in delegations and at conferences, tournaments, and meetings. Her global project was severely curtailed, however, when in 1974 she was forbidden from exiting the Gaza Strip by the Israelis. Given her passion and energy, Naim remarked, "it was no wonder she was not allowed to stir out of Gaza."3

The same year Naim toured our intifada, the British-Jamaican dub poet, Benjamin Zephaniah, made a visit. Rasta Time in Palestine, the account of his trip he published a year later in 1990, is a slim and evocative volume, illustrated by Jez Coulson's black-and-white photographs of Palestinians. Zephaniah moves effortlessly across subjects. He examines Israeli meddling in African affairs and the politics of Rastafari, including a section on "Rastafari and Zionism." He writes that everywhere he went in the "Arab world" he fielded questions about Rastafari symbols and tropes. "Zion in Rastafari terminology has always been Ethiopia," Zephaniah makes clear.4

In describing his visit to Gaza, Zephaniah reached for the same analogy many Palestinian writers had come to on their own in years prior, "it reminded me of pictures I have seen of Nazi concentration camps. Some may argue that there are many differences, but again, it was similarities that I notice: the large fences, people being marched off, etc." The situation today, more than seventy years since Gaza's initial enclosure, has only worsened. When the United Nations predicted in 2012 that Gaza would be "unlivable" by 2020, it was responding not simply to the deterioration of economic conditions that Sara Roy first described as "de-development" in the mid-1980s, but also to the continuous cruelty of a multi-year siege and blockade that has immiserated and isolated the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip.5 And yet, Gaza only captures headlines when it is bombed in spectacular fashion.

Gaza's past is little known and rarely studied, but it is a revolutionary past rich in ideas and movement, not simply death, destitution, and isolation. Recalling its political and intellectual history is an ever necessary task. The history of Gaza cannot be buried beneath the present's rubble. There is no need to "humanize" the people of Gaza, but it would be prudent for the world to consider their aims and desires. "What the people wanted was a poetry reading," Zephaniah wrote from Gaza, "and I was really excited by the idea. Word spread quickly that I was a poet and I had to prove it, but after making inquiries, I learned that poetry was not allowed because I could draw a crowd."6

"Palestine," on Zephaniah's 1995 album Back to Roots, is a moving poetic tribute: "Work your land work your plan / You are a live nation / You are a global people / Suffer much evil / And now you just want get along." At the end of the track, "Palestine Live!" reverberates as a powerful refrain: "Dancing eyes collect your prize / Palestine Live! / Rise up like the star you are / Palestine Live!"

In his 1986 book with the Swiss photographer Jean Mohr, After the Last Sky, Edward Said recounted the massive corpus of Palestinian biography, autobiography, memoir, and self-statement that stands in opposition to Zionist erasure. In his rehearsal of Palestinian narrative, however, he also acknowledged its limits: "I recognize in all this a fundamental problem-the crucial absence of women." Without narrating their statements, Said concluded, "we will never fully understand our experience of dispossession."7

Today, women's utterances are better accounted for. No observer of the events in Palestine of last May could ignore the eloquent testimony and the powerful ideas written and spoken by Palestinian and Arab women. Where would we be without Muna El-Kurd's fiery taunts? Or the organizational acumen of the Palestinian Feminist Collective? While Third World women have long been aligned with Palestine, it is no small feat that a few months ago centers and departments of women's and gender studies across the country and the world signed a statement in explicit support of Palestinian liberation.8

Of course, it was the organized women's movement in the colonized world which first insisted that the Palestinian cause be a global one. When Huda Sha'rawi resolved to organize a women's conference in defense of Palestine in 1938, the formidable Palestinian nationalist Akram Zu'aytir urged her to call it the Arab Women's Conference. Sha'rawi, however, insisted that the horizon of their effort be wider and that the meeting be referred to as an Eastern Women's Conference, and it was.9

In 1957, Sahba al-Barbari, the niece of Yusra al-Barbari and an aspiring educator herself studying then at Cairo University, joined a group from the General Union of Palestinian Students on a trip to the infamous al-Qanatir prison. They went to visit the Palestinians who had been arrested in Gaza two years earlier during the uprising against the joint UNRWA-Egyptian scheme to resettle refugees on the Sinai Peninsula. Al-Barbari and her comrades carried with them cigarettes, fruit, clothes, a little money, and other useful things for the political prisoners. There she met Mu'in Bseiso, the communist and writer who would later become her husband.10

Born in Shuja'iyya, Gaza in 1926, Bseiso died in London in 1984, en route to Moscow. He wrote poetry, plays, memoirs, and journalistic articles and is perhaps Gaza's best-known writer. His plays, including one on Che Guevara, another on the Zanj Rebellion, and a third on the Biblical story of Samson and Delilah, were allegories of the Palestinian experience. In the 1940s, Bseiso began publishing poems in the Mandate's newspapers. In 1948, he enrolled in the literature department at the American University of Cairo. He published his first collection of poetry al-Ma'raka (The Battle) in 1952.

After teaching for a time in Iraq, Bseiso returned to Gaza in 1953 where he became the secretary of the Palestine Communist Party in Gaza and poured his efforts into the organization of workers and refugees. It was this political activity that, in 1959, following the establishment of the United Arab Republic and the banning of political parties in Egypt, led to Bseiso's second arrest and imprisonment by the Egyptian government. Bseiso describes how the Muslim Brotherhood worked with the secret police and the "chauvinists" to find and arrest communists. Many of those communists were teachers in Gaza's schools, like Bseiso and Sahba al-Barbari, who was also arrested at that time. Al-Barbari was placed in solitary confinement for forty-two days. Just below her windowless cell was the chamber where Egyptian communists would regularly be brought in and tortured; hearing their screams from her isolation was its own torture, she recalled.

"As soon as the crusade began," Bseiso wrote of the raids on the communists, "the Muslim Brothers took over all the minarets in Gaza, Khan Yunis, Rafah, and Deir al-Balah. And from the minarets they shouted, not 'Allahu Akbar!' but 'Down with Communism!'"11 Ironically, the passage recalls Ra'if Khuri's speech at an anti-fascist meeting in Damascus on 11 July 1942: "Allahu akbar means, in plain language: May the greedy moneylenders be punished! May the property of the thieving monopolists be confiscated! . . . May the bread of the people be protected! May the road to education and progress be opened to women! . . . May science be sought even as far as China (China today, not only China of the past)!"12 Left-wing intellectuals in the Middle East were not interested in denying the historical and religious salience of Islam. Rather, Marxists like Khuri and others, Muslim or not, regularly reworked the language of Islam in their efforts to generate liberatory and internationalist thought.

Bseiso's play about the Zanj Rebellion is notable in this regard. By narrating the struggle of the Zanj-enslaved Africans who revolted against the Abbasid Caliphate-rather than rehearsing the glory of the caliphs, Bseiso was both subverting Islamic history and writing it. He was also confronting the secular Arabist valorization of the Abbasid past, ever conscious that Arab nationalism alone would not free Palestine. "The great Palestinian revolution that started in 1956," Bseiso wrote in an article for the magazine al-Usbu al-'Arabi, "was a revolution for the world."13

Gazans today face an Israel that can count on unwavering American support and Arab acquiescence, or worse. Consequently, the situation in Gaza today is more dire than it ever was. But the courageous resistance of the many Gazans dreaming of return and of freedom is not an aberration. Gaza's history of revolution has echoed across the world before. And it will again.

Footnote

ENDNOTES

1 George Hajjar, Kanafani: Symbol of Palestine (Beirut: Karoun, 1974), 71.

2 C. M. Naim, "Two Days in Palestine," The Message International (August-September 1989). The full text was republished on Naim's website in April 2009: http://www.columbia.edu/ itc/mealac/pritchett/00litlinks/naim/txt_naim_palestine_2009.pdf, 8. Page numbers refer to Naim's PDF version.

3 Naim, "Two Days in Palestine," 12.

4 Benjamin Zephaniah, Rasta Time in Palestine (Liverpool: Shakti Publishing Ltd., 1990), 8.

5 Sara Roy, "The Gaza Strip: A Case of Economic De-Development," Journal of Palestine Studies 17, no. 1 (1987): 56-88. For the 2012 report, see United Nations Country Team in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Gaza in 2020: A Liveable Place? (August 2012), https:// www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-195081/.

6 Zephaniah, Rasta Time in Palestine, 18-19.

7 Edward W. Said, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 7.

8 "Gender Studies Departments in Solidarity with Palestinian Feminist Collective," https:// gws.illinois.edu/news/2021-05-24/gender-studies-departments-solidarity-palestinianfeminist-collective.

9 Ellen Fleischmann, The Nation and Its New Women: The Palestinian Women's Movement, 1920-1948 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), 296, n. 47.

10 Hamalat al-Jamra, directed by Najah Awad Allah (2010).

11 Mu'in Basisu, Descent into Water: Palestinian Notes From Arab Exile, trans. Saleh Omar (Wilmette, Il.: The Medina Press, 1980), 61.

12 Quoted in Maxime Rodinson, Marxism and the Muslim World, trans. Jean Matthews (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1981), 107.

13 Mu'in Bseiso, "Hamlet al-Filistini," al-Usbu al-Arabi, no. 793 (10 June 1974): 58.

14 Nadim Rouhana and Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, "Settler-Colonial Citizenship: Conceptualizing the Relationship between Israel and Its Palestinian Citizens" Settler Colonial Studies 5, no. 3 (2015): 205-25.

15 "Breaking the Wall," Almayadeen, 17 May 2021, https://bit.ly/3izGeuK.

16 "The Dignity and Hope Manifesto," Mondoweiss, 18 May 2021, https://mondoweiss. net/2021/05/the-manifesto-of-dignity-and-hope/.

17 "Breaking the Wall," Almayadeen, 30 May 2021, https://bit.ly/3sbf6p5.