[Saying the Palestinian issue is ‘complex’ is no excuse for
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BREAK THE FEAR BARRIER AND SPEAK UP FOR PALESTINE  
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Mark Muhannad Ayyash
May 11, 2021
Aljazeera
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_ Saying the Palestinian issue is ‘complex’ is no excuse for not
speaking up against Israeli crimes. _

This uprising is led by educated Palestinian youth that demand
attention , Getty

 

Scholars of social movements, civil disobedience, liberation
struggles, and revolutions have long known that fear is one of the
greatest barriers to overcome. For the oppressed to move from inaction
to action, they must break this fear barrier.

In extreme cases, such as Palestinians living under Israeli settler
colonialism, the fear is based on lived experiences of torture,
imprisonment, maiming and killing, daily humiliations and
dehumanisation, loss of income, livelihoods, homes, dignity, freedom,
and rights.

These last few days, the Palestinian people across colonised Palestine
have shown the world, not for the first time and not for the last,
their deep and awe-inspiring courage in the face of this fear.

For decades, the Israeli garrison state, as Hamid Dabashi
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accurately describes it, with its massive apparatus of
settler-colonial violence as well as its armed civilians have been
creating and building this state of fear in the everyday lives of
Palestinians.

I had a relatively privileged childhood in Palestine, but still, I am
acquainted with this fear, which you learn, not just by witnessing or
experiencing violence, but in the course of seemingly non-eventful and
ordinary days.

As a child in the early 1990s, I attended the Freres School within the
old city of al-Quds (Jerusalem). During recess, we would see armed
soldiers patrol the top of the city walls, looking down on us the way
that self-perceived superior beings look down upon a caged animal. And
when we would leave school and walk down the roads of el-Balad
el-Qadeemeh (the old city), we would regularly be confronted with
armed Israeli civilians walking around with their guns out in the
open, asserting their supremacy, reminding us that we ought not to
look at them the wrong way or else.

On many of these walks, conversations between us children would turn
to stories we heard about torture methods that the Israelis use, the
beating a friend or relative took at the hands of Israeli soldiers, an
armed Israeli civilian cursing and spitting on a Palestinian, the long
imprisonment and suffering of relatives and friends. This is merely
the background picture – and a relatively benign one at that,
relative to Palestinian standards, and certainly things seem worse
today than they were in those days.

Nevertheless, those days and stories pile up one on top of the other,
along with experiences of violent acts and events, building and
instilling in Palestinians a state of fear that we carry with us
everywhere we go and move.

That fear barrier was instilled inside me from the moment I became
conscious of the world as a child. And despite overcoming it now and
again, it never disappears. Even after immigrating to Canada, after
tasting some freedom, holding citizenship for the first time in my
life, feeling somewhat protected by a state structure (very much a
false sense of protection), that fear never leaves you. It did not
take long for me to realise that in these Euro-American spaces, I had
to be afraid of even speaking about Palestine.

The fear in Euro-America has a different basis though. Fear in those
spaces is based on lived experiences of being censored, fired,
disciplined, not hired or promoted, dragged through frivolous legal
cases, defunded, harassed, intimidated, and silenced.

This fear has become so naturalised, so ubiquitous, that some people
in Euro-American spaces seem to genuinely think now that they do not
actually fear this fear!

Let me, first, be very clear: this fear is not the main barrier
standing in the way of states like Canada, the United States, the
United Kingdom, Germany, France, etc, placing pressure on Israel.
These states and their political, academic, economic, and media
institutions are on the whole strategically aligned with the Israeli
state. These states and their institutions are actively participating
in and driving the colonisation, exploitation, oppression, and settler
colonisation of much of the world, as they have been for centuries.

But I want to speak here to people working within these institutions
who genuinely want to transform them, to decolonise them, but yet are
always quick to evade the question of Palestine and true decolonial
liberation. From privileged politicians to academics to journalists to
civil society organisers to artists, a litany of excuses other than
fear is often proclaimed as to why they will not touch Palestine. A
main feature of these excuses is the claim that the issue is
“complex and controversial”.

Of course, it is perfectly normal to not know enough about a
particular topic, issue, or question. There is nothing wrong with
wanting to learn more before commenting or taking a position. Asking
questions is a healthy exercise when you do not know.

But every topic is complex and controversial. How your food ends up on
your dinner table is complex. But that does not stop the majority of
people from talking about food production, distribution, how they want
to shop ethically, and so on. The economics of sports is also
controversial. But that does not stop millions of people from spending
countless hours talking about player salaries, advertisement money,
revenue sharing among the clubs, and so on.

Palestine-Israel is not unique in its complexity or controversy. And
while most topics and issues are framed as complex and controversial
for the sake of commencing a deepened entry into the topic, exploring
its many dimensions, the statement that the issue of Palestine and
Israel “is complex and controversial” serves instead as an end to
the conversation. When it comes to Palestine, this statement is almost
never the beginning of a quest for more knowledge and better learning.
Rather, this statement is the extent of the learning process. It puts
a stop to it. It ends the conversation by declaring a non-position on
the matter.

When politicians, executives, journalists, academics, etc, proclaim
this statement, their intended goal is for the question of Palestine
to go away, to be removed off their desk. Why? In many cases, because
they are afraid of the consequences that I have outlined above. This
is what everyone admits and knows in private conversations, but almost
never openly acknowledges. Therefore, what actually drives this
non-positionality is the very fear that most people deny having.

The non-positionality of the statement, “it is complex and
controversial”, is far from neutral. This statement indeed maintains
the status quo by ensuring the continued toxification of Palestine and
Palestinians in Euro-American public discourse.

Israeli propagandists are the only beneficiaries of a statement that
posits for itself a non-position. Because non-positions are always
ultimately concealment of reality. When you declare that you will not
take a position, when you end the conversation because something is
controversial and complex, you are declaring that the reality of the
situation is hopelessly and infinitely indecipherable. You are
declaring that you do not know what position to take because nobody
knows the reality of the situation.

This statement thus declares that the reality of Palestine-Israel is
unknowable, which is precisely the conclusion that Israeli propaganda
is entirely comfortable with. Only the oppressed and colonised
Palestinians and their supporters are attempting to communicate the
reality of settler colonialism and apartheid to the world. Only they
are making it knowable.

Israeli and Zionist propaganda in Euro-America and elsewhere is
designed to conceal and hide that reality because it does not serve
the Zionist political project. Therefore, a declared non-position that
clouds reality and conceals it is in fact a statement of support for
Israeli propaganda.

This does not mean that Zionism does not understand its own reality.
In fact, within some Zionist discursive spaces, a space where, for
example, Zionist settlers speak freely, as we saw in the most recent
viral video, you will find a basic description of the brutality of
that settler colonial and apartheid reality: “If I don’t steal
your home, someone else will steal it.” They know that they are
stealing, that they are there to eliminate and replace the native
Palestinians.

Palestinians have broken a fear barrier the likes of which the
privileged in Euro-America will never know or experience. The lived
experiences of fear in Palestine are far more violent and coercive
than the lived experiences of fear in Euro-America. I am not
discounting the burden of the Euro-American based experiences of job
precarity, defunding, harassment and so on. These are real fears, and
they are deeply consequential for their victims, especially for
Palestinians and other racialised people, who face the most severe
consequences.

But those consequences are already a reality for those who speak up
for Palestinian rights. And for change to happen, there must be a
collective will and action to break the fear barrier and to face the
consequences for it together. And here is the good news: as we have
seen in many other cases, when action is collectively undertaken,
those consequences are neither strong nor do they last.

It is time to say, enough: enough of this imprisonment, occupation,
colonisation; enough of evading the issue; enough of this fear.
Palestinians continue to break their fear barrier. If you have not yet
done so, then, my dear reader, if you genuinely want to transform the
world, then you will have to.

_THE VIEWS EXPRESSED IN THIS ARTICLE ARE THE AUTHOR’S OWN AND DO NOT
NECESSARILY REFLECT AL JAZEERA’S EDITORIAL STANCE._

Mark Muhannad Ayyash
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Associate Professor of Sociology at Mount Royal University in Calgary,
Canada.
Ayyash is the author of A Hermeneutics of Violence (UTP, 2019). He was
born and raised in Silwan, Jerusalem, before immigrating to Canada. He
is currently writing a book on settler colonial sovereignty.
 

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