Gaza is Beautiful

August 2005

In This Edition
Commentary Gaza is beautiful: Orientalism on the left and right
What's New at JVP Gaza demonstration, US Campaign to End the Occupation and more
Quote of the Month A state without boundaries

Gaza is Beautiful: Orientalism on the left and right
Cecilie Surasky, Director of Communications, Jewish Voice for Peace

(Learn more about the Gaza withdrawal. Download our Gaza flyer here or read our FAQ here.)

Climbing the stunning walls of the lost city of Petra in Jordan, it is less than 24 hours since I have left Ramallah where I have been staying the past few weeks. My traveling companion and I encounter a friendly American tourist who quizzes us on our journey. “We just got back from the West Bank and Gaza,” we say. “I just love Israel,” the tourist replies. “I’ve been to every single corner. I was just in Gaza, too. Gaza is beautiful!” she announces with a big smile on her face.

I scratch my head. Gaza is one of those places that make you say “Oh my God!” “Oh my God” as in, can you believe the Erez checkpoint and what it’s like to try and get through, and can you believe the sight of dozens of sick people waiting 10 hours or more in the open air just to leave Gaza for special medical care? “Oh my God” as in did you see how the destroyed street to Gaza looked right out of the set of an apocalyptic Mad Max movie? “Oh my God” as in, have you ever seen so many houses riddled with bullet holes?

What I did not expect her to say was, “It is beautiful.” Before I realized she was talking about the settlements, I thought of the many beautiful and wise people I met there-- the flickering multi-colored umbrellas that lined the beach of Gaza, the little boy in the crisp white sailor suit flying his kite with his brothers, the women in the family I stayed with who removed their hijabs and laughed uproariously about their father the English teacher and their mother who birthed ten children, the raucous sounds of dancing at a wedding on the top floor of a nearby hotel, the wise words of a psychologist I met named Mohammed who taught me much about forgiveness. I thought, yes, indeed, Gaza is beautiful. More beautiful in fact than I had ever imagined or dreamed it could be.

Of course, the American tourist wasn’t talking about the Gaza Strip I had just seen. She was talking about Israeli settlements like Gush Katif, the gorgeous beachside suburbs surrounded by walls and military posts that stand just a few hundred yards away from the Khan Younis refugee camp, where the buildings that remain standing are packed in amidst empty fields of rubble, rebar, and scraps of household belongings.

Often described as one of the most crowded places on earth and the world’s largest open- air prison, people warned me about the crime and desperation I would encounter. A Palestinian acquaintance in the West Bank opened his eyes wide when he heard we were going to Gaza and said “Wow, that’s hard core.”

It doesn’t take long to find trauma in virtually every family and every person who lives there. As one man told me, "our reality here is insane." But the fact is that I went there expecting to find people dying. Instead, I found people living. I even met people who chose – yes, chose – to live there: people with dual citizenships and a means of supporting themselves who had decided to raise their families in Gaza instead of Canada or the UK

I was shocked by how much worse Gaza was than I expected, but also by how much better it was.

This was no less true in the West Bank, where I was introduced by my Palestinian-American friend and traveling companion to a whole world of people I did not know existed. I saw sharply-dressed young people going to cafes and parties, or attending weekly gameshows held in restaurants where contestants competed to answer obscure political, historical or geographical questions. Throughout the West Bank, where I expected to see only martyr’s posters, I saw advertisements for lingerie, computer services, and sometimes even art shows. I could not believe the young single mother I met who actually moved from the US to the territories at the beginning of the second intifada to raise her seven-year old because, she assured me, it was SO much easier to raise a child in Ramallah than in the United States. And when I asked about Western singers popular in the territories, I laughed to learn that Dido, a British pop singer I enjoy listening to, would surely draw a huge crowd.

Representing Palestinians
This recent trip and the last few weeks have driven home how the great Palestinian academic Edward Said’s most enduring work, Orientalism, is more relevant today than ever. He offered us a language for understanding how racism and colonialism undergird our way of seeing the Arab world. Knowledge, he argued, is inseparable from power, and our analysis and representation can ultimately tell us more about ourselves than about the Arab world – a remarkably complex population of three hundred million people that Westerners have somehow managed to reduce into one fixed identity. In a sense, defining Arabs as wholly “other” has allowed us in the West to define ourselves. We are that which Arabs are not. We are civilized; they are not. We are educated; they are not.

We’ve seen this phenomenon play out dramatically in the mainstream media coverage of the Gaza withdrawal over the last few weeks.

Day after day, the front pages of papers around the world have featured photos of crying settlers, many of them young women, being removed from their homes by the Israeli Army. Only an ogre could not be moved by this heartbreaking spectacle. And while there is a question as to how much of this is theater meant to enforce the trauma of removing settlements, the truth is that no one should ever have to be forcibly removed from their homes.

It has been amazing to see how the media seems to possess a limitless ability to portray every nuance of the suffering of Israelis, whether they be victims of suicide bombings or settlers being moved from homes. The US media has largely made Palestinians so wholly the other that they barely warrant a mention as human beings, equally capable of speaking for themselves, equally capable of feeling loss, equally capable of loving their children. Because of this one-sided perspective, each image that humanizes a settler, all of whom by definition have played a role in the robbing of Palestinian property and even life, has served as a profound negation of Palestinian humanity and the Palestinian experience.

As a consequence, it is a virtual secret that over 3 times as many Palestinians as Israelis have died during the second intifada or that in the last 60 years, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, without benefit of cushy compensation from the government, have been forcibly expelled and displaced from their homes, often with little or no warning, to make room for Israelis. In fact, only in their wildest dreams would the Palestinians, whose suffering is truly legion, receive a fraction of the sympathy given to this relatively tiny group of settlers in just a few days.

Orientalism on the left
It is precisely in response to this sort of chronic invisibility rooted in a deep belief that Arabs are less human that we in justice movements tend therefore to focus on Palestinian suffering. But perhaps we should ask if our relentless focus on Palestinian victimization as a remedy to invisibility is merely a boomerang effect that repeats the original crime of making Palestinians less than human.

Whose interests are we serving when we define, indeed reduce all Palestinians almost entirely to trauma victims or, the converse, romanticized revolutionaries. While Palestinians are indeed traumatized, they are not only victims, nor are they only revolutionary actors engaged in armed resistance. They are complex individuals embracing, like virtually all people, a complex range of responses to an unspeakable situation. These responses might include embracing capitalism or communism, reasserting conservative religious values, rejecting religion altogether, spending free time playing video games or going to parties, taking advantage of others through graft and corruption, seeking advanced degrees in education, moving away to leave it all behind, just focusing on survival and keeping one’s family safe etc…

Instead of highlighting this depth and complexity of response, we rob some of the most well-educated people in the Middle East of their own agency by showing only images of victimized elderly women standing crying in front of the remains of their demolished homes. And we rob them of their complex humanity by showing only images of revolutionary young men wearing kaffiyehs and wielding Kalashnikovs—neither image which represents the true range of Gazan life or aspirations.

Like good Orientalists, we use the representation of Palestinians to further our political or personal agendas. For example, by refusing to ever call out the PA’s corruption or use of torture, we condescendingly reaffirm the idea that the PA is filled with people incapable of taking responsibility for their actions. Some of us use them as a way to prove our thesis that Israel is always wrong and always bad.

Worse, we take a complex people and turn them into a homogenous single identity that is in a deep and essential way, truly different from “us”. An exotic or perhaps simple people that can therefore only be “helped” by those of us, largely in the West, who “know better.”

As Jews, many of us are working for the liberation of both Palestinians and our own people. If we are to do that, we have to see Palestinians in their full humanity. Otherwise, we end up embodying the very post-colonial attitudes we seek to reject.

As Dr Eyad Serraj of the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme said to us, “As long as Israelis see we Palestinians as less than human, they can never be whole.” Wise words for all of us.

Contact Cecilie at Cecilie@JewishVoiceforPeace.org

to top

JVP News

JVP Gaza Activism

Members of JVP-Bay Area and supporters protest outside of Democratic Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi's office. Signs say "Remove ALL settlements" and "Gaza is the tip of the iceberg."

Jewish Voice for Peace members in the Bay Area were very busy this month educating and mobilizing around the Gaza withdrawal. Activists spent countless hours leafletting at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, the Bay Area's largest Jewish event, handing out over 1,500 brochures and Gaza flyers (available here). The reaction from movie-goers was generally positive.

On August 15, about 50 members and supporters gathered in front of Nancy Pelosi's office to demand that Congress push for the removal of all settlements. It was the height of a banner media week in which we virtually saturated local television with the message that all settlements are illegal and must be removed. Director of Policy Mitchell Plitnick briefed JVP supporters and journalists from across the country and Israel on a successful conference call, developed a widely used Gaza backgrounder, and gave background analysis for a large range of media outlets.

To see or hear just a small sampling of some two dozen recent JVP media appearances, listen to Laura Flander's Your Call Radio, watch us on the Bay Area CBS affiliate, or listen to audio of the KTVU-TV morning show appearance. Unfortunately we don't have video of DC-JVP member Josh Ruebner who appeared on Al Jazeera TV, and debated Zionist Organization of America President Morton Klein on MSNBC.

US Campaign to End the Occupation Adopts Caterpillar Campaign
JVP members Professor Joel Beinin, Sydney Levy, and JVP Co-Director Liat Weingart attended the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation's 4th annual conference in Atlanta earlier this month. Member groups from 24 US states, Ireland and Palestine traveled to Atlanta to attend the conference. At the conference, US Representative Cynthnia McKinney pledged to refuse any financial contributions from Caterpillar and to begin to launch an investigation of Caterpillar in the office of the US government that audits government expenditures. US Campaign member groups also voted to take on the Caterpillar campaign as a strategic focus for the upcoming year, to work together towards ending the sale of CAT equipment to the Israeli military. And finally, JVP member Amie Fishman was elected to the Steering Committee of the US Campaign. Amie is an incredible organizer and strategic thinker -- JVP is lucky to have her represent us on the US Campaign's Steering Committee.
JVP member Sydney Levy talks to Uda Walker of Middle East Children's Alliance and Mohammed Abed of the University of Wisconsin Divest from Israel Campaign.

JVP's First National Annual Meeting
JVP volunteers are hard at work planning our first Annual Meeting for October 1 and 2 in San Francisco. We are especially excited to be welcoming activists from our new DC chapter as well as Chicago's Not in Our Name, Boston's Voices for Peace with Justice, the Philadelphia Jewish Peace Network, and Seattle. We'll kick-off the weekend on Friday night with a celebrity panel discussing Jewish identity and how it is influenced by the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Over the weekend, we will vote on plans to proceed with incorporating chapters from major cities across the country. For more information contact Liat@JewishVoiceforPeace.org

to top

"An individual without boundaries is considered psychotic. So is a state."
-- Lily Galili, Point of View/Everything is topsy-turvy, Haaretz, August 17, 2005

to top

Are you a Jewish voice for peace?
Do you want to build a voice for the silent majority of Jews and allies who want an end to the occupation and settlements, and who want a US foreign policy based on justice?

The power of that voice depends on you.
Through grassroots organizing, education, advocacy and media outreach,
Jewish Voice for Peace works to achieve a lasting peace that recognizes the aspirations of both Israelis and Palestinians for security and self-determination.

Join us today!