If I Were A Palestinian, What Would I Do?

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Response of religion – multi-ethnic?

On 30 July, the Washington Post published the names of 18,500 children.  These were the names of children killed in Gaza by Israel after 7 Oct 2023: Nabil Salama – killed at 7 years old, Dalia al-Jaal – killed at 1 year old, Mohammed Abu Nasr – killed before 1st birthday, Hind Rajab (many of you may know the name) – killed at 6 years old. On it went.

The number is now almost 20,000, and we haven’t counted the maimed, traumatized, starved or those buried in the rubble. No human or religious sensibility can accept this. Yet it continues to happen – everyday, before our eyes.

Has a clear multi-religious, multi-ethnic voice arisen in Malaysia condemning this, or taken part in marches, campaigns, boycotts in cross-communal solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for freedom and justice, and now against genocide?

I am not convinced such a truly collective Malaysian voice has arisen. On the contrary, most of the voices and actions in Malaysia condemning Israel’s barbaric atrocities, are Muslim. Have we reflected our own ethnic lines onto how we in Malaysia respond or don’t respond to the Palestinian issue? 

Where do faith and religion fit into the picture? I do not profess a religion although that does not mean I do not have faith. One could even be, in the words of Albert Einstein, “a deeply religious unbeliever”.

But if we are Christian, what does it mean to bear witness while we also bear witness to mass destruction, repeated forced displacement and induced famine, where the victims, as with everyone, are also God’s creation?

How can religious teaching be dispensed such that, say, a devoted Buddhist practitioner, upon seeing how Gazans are suffering does more than to say, “If their Karma was good, they would not find themselves in such a position?”.

As individuals we may revulse instinctually against the atrocities. It may drive us to donate to aid organisations. It may also drive us to pray for peace and for the violence to end.

These are appropriate responses. But it is also important to understand root causes to counter powerful narratives and propaganda in the public domain that enable the repeated dispossession and slaughter of the Palestinian people. As Buddhist guidance might indicate – right thought leads to right speech and right action. If we can understand who the weak and the oppressed are, would religion teach us to be compassionate with them and to act in their defence in ways we can?

What’s the fundamental context?

So what is the fundamental context? It is common to hear that the problem of Israel-Palestine is complicated, or that we need to be neutral. But false arguments of forbidding complexity and artificial neutrality serve the convenience of the oppressor to the detriment of the victim.

I will leave aside unarguable arguments about land promised to one chosen people among many, messianic return or being deserving of divine love if but you love the chosen people. But as to whether the issue is complicated, I say that the fundamentals are not complicated. To quote, “Europeans needed land, the indigenous population resisted its seizure, and so they were exterminated. That’s the nutshell.

A people, the Jews, long persecuted in their history seeking refuge and safety. This is an impulse anyone can understand and empathise with. Any group of people who have been historically victimised, expelled, forcibly displaced, discriminated against and had the Nazi Holocaust inflicted on them will want to seek refuge and safety. That’s not difficult to understand. Thus, out of 19th century Jewish life in Europe came a nationalist ideology, Zionism, that sought to create a refuge and homeland for the Jews. The impulse for safety was not the problem. The problem was in how it was done.

Zionism and Palestine

Zionism gained ground for various reasons including its alignment with British imperial interests in West Asia. Later, it also benefited from Europe’s guilt and need for compensation of the Jewish people for the Nazi Holocaust.

The problem was the people of Palestine had nothing to do with the Nazi Holocaust. But they would pay for it. The programme of Zionist Jewish transfer and migration into Palestine was done without consultation with the Palestinian natives of the land – in fact, they were treated as nonentities by the British government under whose arrogant 1917 Balfour Declaration did not even bother to refer to the Palestinians by what they were, i.e. Palestinians, but by what they were not, i.e. non-Jewish – and which, by British imperial decree, decided it could give away land that wasn’t theirs in the first place.

Palestinian erasure had begun.

The League of Nations after WW1 had a system of mandates and Britain had a mandate over Palestine. It was a condescending, racist system predicated on the inability of black and brown people to stand by themselves and self-rule. Britain, in dispensing its “sacred trust of civilization” over Palestine, essentially facilitated the Zionist takeover of Palestine.

In the event, Palestine became a hot potato and Britain threw it on to the lap of the subsequent United Nations which then proceeded to partition Palestine in 1947 in ways highly unjust to the Palestinians.

And how did the new Zionist Jews accentuate the situation to advantage? They embarked on the ethnic cleansing of Palestine starting the day after the UN resolution that partitioned Palestine. They employed terrorism to gain as much land as possible with as few Palestinians as possible. They employed myths, i.e. lies, saying, for example, that the Bible provided “the myth for their right over the land” – or that the land of Palestine was empty anyway awaiting the arrival of Zionist Jews to make the desert bloom.

They denigrated the Palestinians in racist ways expressing disgust by the sight of so many Arab men, women and children. They dehumanised Palestinians by calling them two-legged beasts, grasshoppers to be crushed and, more recently, human animals – none of which, however, quite match the racist wit of Winston Churchill who called Palestinians “the dog in a manger”.

In subsequent years, Israel has forcibly occupied all of Palestine through war against international law despite the UN resolving that it is inadmissible to acquire territory by war.

Palestinians have thus been and continue to be dispossessed.

Mind you, when the Zionist Jews first started arriving in Palestine in the 1880s, they were welcome by the native Palestinians who taught them how to farm the land, and who had no problems living with Jews and Christians which was something they had done for centuries anyway. This was consonant with how, on the whole, Jews have historically been relatively well treated by Muslims. So imagine  – European Jews were taking refuge from Europe and they found welcome in Palestine.

If I were a Palestinian, what would I do?

But when it became evident that the new migrants had not come to live alongside but to replace the native population, Palestinian resistance began. When a people – any people – are subject to extremes of injustice what do we expect? I can see how, if I were a Palestinian, I could now very well be involved in some level of action and resistance.

If I were a Palestinian, and for generations my family and I – parents, grandparents and further back – have been made refugees and prisoners in our own land – what would I do? And whole generations have grown up hopeless and yet, when they peer over the fence, they see their former villages and land occupied by Israeli settlers with swimming pools – what would you do?

When you strangle a people you create the conditions for resistance movements to arise – be they a Hamas, Islamic Jihad, PLO, PFLP or a Hezbollah. That is their self-defence against your occupation and oppression. They are not people you impute to be barbaric. And when you retaliate, you do so as an oppressor, which is not self-defence. It is the victim of a murderous robbery that defends himself against the robber – it is not the other way around.

So long as the root causes of occupation, dispossession and colonisation remain, resistance will remain.

Remember that despite being the victims, the Palestinians have repeatedly made compromises and tried non-violent means to arrive at peaceful solutions. For instance, the PLO, over time, went from no Israel, no new Jews, all-have-to-leave to a one-state concept where all Israeli Jews could stay, to recognising the state of Israel and accepting two states in a “land for peace” proposition.

Even Hamas has attempted peaceable means in the past. After Hamas unexpectedly won the Palestinian legislative elections in 2006 it signaled that they were prepared to negotiate a settlement with Israel on the basis of international law. But this again came to nothing as Israel refused to recognise Hamas even though it had been democratically elected.

In fact, as recently as 2019, Benjamin Netanyahu was telling his Likud Party colleagues that “anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas [emphasis mine] and transferring money to Hamas” – a double-faced colonial device of divide-and-rule that came to deadly self-harm in October 2023.

There was even a non-violent initiative in 2018 – the Great March of Return where Gazans demanded their right of return to lands they had been displaced from. Palestinians have also repeatedly appealed to the United Nations, the ICJ and the ICC. And, reportedly, about mid-August Hamas made concessions in the Gaza peace negotiations with Israel mediated by Qatar. Then what happens?  Israel bombs the Hamas negotiators – in Qatar.

In other words, over time, Palestinians have employed compromises, peaceable ways and international law but they have been repeatedly rebuffed by Israel with the slavish backing of the United States. Pushed into corners the resistance resorts to violent means (with excesses, no doubt) and then they are painted as Islamic terrorists prone to radicalism and violence because that’s the way they are – in the circumstances, an accusation that is racist.

Where does this leave us today? Let’s drop the hand-wringing and hair-splitting – Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.  The victims of the Nazi Holocaust inflicting a holocaust on another people. Some of you may have seen in a clip of Mandy Patinkin, the Jewish American actor and singer, who said with great indignant passion, “Is this acceptable and sustainable? How could it be done to you and your ancestors, and you turn around and you do it to someone else?”.

Religion cannot condone this

Surely, none of this can be condoned by any great religion. There must be unity among all religious traditions as to the wrongfulness of genocide and willful starvation of a whole population. Apartheid and ethno-nationalism cannot be sanctioned by any faith. How can groups such as this interfaith conference come together and take a position?

Religion can be strength. How can it go from personal practice and prayers to helping defend the oppressed?  How do we avoid individual practice and devotion becoming self-comforting activities that keep people self-satisfied but oblivious?

It may mean reflecting with adherents why suffering occurs not only theologically but also for the worldly historical reasons behind it; reflecting how to be charitable but also to support the persecuted. It may mean questioning silence and ambivalence in the face of genocide and gross cruelty.

Each little action counts whether or not we see the results. But duty, we must do.  Indeed, acting and doing our duty without becoming attached to results is a powerful teaching from the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads. And as in the Gita: “Action is greater than inaction : perform therefore thy task in life” (3:8).

As a retired engineer, I might use the analogy of a landslide. Before it actually happens, you don’t see movement. Yet movement there is, bit by bit. As things progress, the signs start showing. Then suddenly, the over-bearing weight comes down. Perhaps that’s what happened with apartheid in South Africa. Perhaps that is what will happen with Zionism in Israel.

But for today, I think it would be a good outcome if this inter-faith conference could adopt a conference statement endorsed by all the participants that takes a stand against the atrocities in Gaza and which denounces the underlying injustice of Israel’s occupation of Palestine. Such a joint statement would show multi-religious, multi-ethnic solidarity, in solidarity with the struggle of the Palestinians whose resilience we salute.

Thank you.

Tong Veng Wye
Aliran & Palestine Solidarity, Penang

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Tong Veng Wye is a member of ALIRAN, a long-standing Malaysian NGO for justice and freedom. He is also a spokesperson for Palestine Solidarity, Penang, a loose grouping of organisations acting in solidarity with the Palestinian cause. 

He is a retired engineer in a global multi-disciplinary consulting firm. As a non-Muslim, he sees the need for diverse multi-ethnic voices in advocating Palestinian rights and freedom. Especially in the Malaysian context, where there is need for strong and visible multi-ethnic, rather than mainly mono-ethnic, support for the cause of Palestine – a struggle that concerns all for it embodies many forms of dominance and injustice including racism and empire.

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