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Israel's bombing and reckless destabilization
of Gaza is ongoing.
Yet, given the past century
and the consistent abuse by Israelis, it has become clear that
Israel can attempt to diminish the Palestinian claims on Palestine
or weaken their resolve, but it's highly unlikely it will succeed.
No matter the strength of bombs, missiles and Caterpillar bulldozers,
the most potent cache of weapons that the Israelis can never
destroy are the ancestral stories and culture that are rooted
in the Palestinians themselves.
Probably no one says this better than contemporary Palestinian
poet Mahmoud Darwish:
I Come From There
I come from there and I have memories
Born as mortals are, I have a mother
And a house with many windows,
I have brothers, friends,
And a prison cell with a cold window.
Mine is the wave, snatched by sea-gulls,
I have my own view,
And an extra blade of grass.
Mine is the moon at the far edge of the words,
And the bounty of birds,
And the immortal olive tree.
I walked this land before the swords
Turned its living body into a laden table.
I come from there. I render the sky unto her mother
When the sky weeps for her mother.
And I weep to make myself known
To a returning cloud.
I learnt all the words worthy of the court of blood
So that I could break the rule.
I learnt all the words and broke them up
To make a single word: Homeland.....
The land holds the stories,
the history. The land holds the roots. The land embraces the
ancestry of thousands of years. The Palestinian people will preserve
this no matter what. This is the most powerful weapon of all.
You cannot bomb it away. Middle Eastern Jews also have this history,
but it's a shared history with Palestinians.
The Israelis have tried to erase the Palestinian history in any
number of ways. Destruction of records is one example. Just recently
in bombings in the city of Nablas, the Israelis decimated an
administration building holding thousands of Palestinian documents,
some more than 100 years old, of deeds and family histories connected
with land. In Gale Courey Toesing's recent article "First
Destroy the Archives: 9/11 Nablas" (Counterpunch July 27,
2006), she quotes Abed Al Illah Ateereh, the director of the
Ministry of the Interior in Nablus:
"There is 100 percent damage," Ateereh said. "They
destroyed the building completely, but that wasn't enough for
the Israelis. They then used their Caterpillar bulldozers to
churn up everything and mix all the documents with the soil so
that nothing is able to be preserved," Ateereh said.
The ministry had at least 175,000 individual case files each
containing multiple documents. It will be impossible to recover
an entire case file, Ateereh said. Some of the newer documents
are backed up on a computer, but the old historical records are
priceless and irreplaceable.
In David Barsamian's "Culture and Resistance: Conversations
with Edward W. Said" (2003) Barsamian writes that in one
of the 1982 incursions into Beirut, Lebanon led by Ariel Sharon
the Israelis destroyed offices holding Palestinian archives.
Then 20 years later in another Sharon led invasion, the Israelis
"ransacked" the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center in
Ramallah.
The late Edward Said noted that the Center was named after Khalil
Sakakini who was a friend of his family. "He was famous
for a school that he ran (prior to 1948) it was a national
school. It was non-sectarian. And it taught young Palestinian
men the understanding of their cultural and political heritage.
So the Center in Ramallah, which is named for him, is a symbol
of Palestinian national, intellectual, and cultural life, and
therefore a target for the Israelis."
The Palestinians are not unlike most ethnic groups anywhere in
the world who hold a cultural identification with land. In 1989
I was in the Cordillera located in the northern part of Luzon
in the Philippines. I talked with a Filipino elder about land.
I shared with him that earlier I had encountered an Australian
contractor who was mapping the Philippines into parcels of land
for Philippine tax purposes. I told him that I hoped in the process
he would consider advocating the Philippine government for land
reform and the ownership of land for the 75% of the Filipino
population who were landless peasants and "squatting"
on someone else's land. He looked at me with disdain.
The Filipino indigenous population is largely tribal. Throughout
the Philippine islands the various tribes claim their ancestral
land and with it their history, their culture, their stories.
They don't own the land. It is simply and profoundly their land
by virtue of ancestry and it belongs to everyone in their group.
It's a collective experience. By virtue of that definition, the
75% Filipinos who squat on land are, in fact, on their own land
but the "state" does not recognize this as such.
As I discussed the question of land ownership with the elder,
he said, "How can you own something given to you by God?"
If there are disputes over land or virtually anything else, the
elders of the respective tribal groups in the Cordillera will
hold a "budong" to resolve the conflict. The effected
parties will appear before the elders of the tribes involved
who are convened to resolve the dispute and, if necessary, determine
the punishment. Part of the ceremony includes the sharing of
rice wine, drumming and dancing by the members of the tribal
groups participating.
President Ferdinand Marcos had denied the holding of budongs
as he thought they were, potentially, an effective organizing
tool against his rule. When Marcos was ousted in the 1980's,
the budongs resumed. I was fortunate to attend a budong in 1989.
They insisted that I dance and, of course, laughed when I did.
The Spanish occupied the Philippines for 400 years, until the
United States became the next occupier in 1902 after the Philippine-American
War (1898-1902). Both the Spanish and U.S. occupiers were ruthless,
of course. Today, the Filipino elders in the Cordillera will
often use the bones of the long dead Spanish occupiers for their
drumsticks. That's the Spanish legacy! The Israeli occupiers
of Palestine and the U.S. occupiers of Iraq will probably have
similar symbolic fates.
This Spring in 2006 I attended the graduation ceremonies at Tuskegee
University in Tuskegee, Alabama. Later I went to the graduation
party of a Gambian student. The event was filled primarily with
Gambians, a large number of Nigerians and those from the Caribbean.
I listened with interest as the Nigerians introduced themselves,
as not all of them knew each other. What was important had nothing
to do with their individual interests or accomplishments. They
wanted to know about each other's family. They wanted to know
the ancestry. They asked each other about their respective tribal
groups. When asked to identify each other, even the Nigerians
born in the United States referred to their African tribal origin.
The place of birth was irrelevant. Some made reference to their
grandparents' or great grandparents' tribal affiliation as a
further confirmation.
What the students were describing was a profound sense of place
and belonging in the African context. It was identification by
virtue of the "group" rather than as an "individual".
It was almost as if without the tribal affiliation you had no
identity. And all of this relates to some particular area of
land in West Africa.
In South Carolina, a black farmer, whose land I visited, showed
me the graves of his great grandparents who had been enslaved.
They were buried close to the small house the great grandparents
had lived in on the farm that had been purchased by the family
after the Civil War. The roots run deep. The stories are profound.
His claim to the land reaches far beyond the deed.
My family's home is in Atlanta, Georgia on a 2-acre plot. There
are woods and a creek behind the house. This is ancient Cherokee
land. Hundreds of arrowheads have been found along the creek.
At night I am often thinking about the Cherokee and wondering
what they might have been doing in bad weather or while hunting,
cooking, eating. The land holds their stories and we are but
visitors. It is where I live and where my family has deed to
the land but it is not my place. We occupy it and take care of
it but our roots are not here.
I guess the question is when do you begin to say, "This
is my place?" I can't answer that. But this question is
particularly problematic because the Cherokee Nation was unjustly
taken from their land in the winter of 1838-39. It was when 13,000
to 17,000 of the Cherokee were forcibly moved to Oklahoma in
the devastating "Trail of Tears". Thousands died. There
was never fair compensation or a just agreement between the American
occupiers and the Cherokee. The Americans found corrupt Cherokee
collaborators to sign off on the treaty, but the vast majority
of the Cherokee, including Chief John Ross, opposed it. The deal
was corrupt from the start. The Cherokee will periodically claim
their rights to the land they were forced out of and rightly
so.
Edward Said says, "There's a whole assembly of cultural
expression that has become part of the consolidation and persistence
of Palestinian identity. There's a Palestinian cinema, a Palestinian
theater, a Palestinian poetry, and literature in general. Culture
is a way of fighting against extinction and obliteration. Culture
is a form of memory against effacement."
And while longing to return to Palestine, the refugees maintain
their culture. Said notes that "The inflection of Palestinian
colloquial speech are preserved into the third and fourth generation.
My son, for example, grew up in New York, subsequently learned
Arabic. When you hear him speak, you can hear the accents of
his grandfather. He obviously heard it from me and he heard it
from other Palestinians when we speak together. So speech itself
is the great tablet of memory."
A sense of place? What is it? It's hard to say. In most instances
it appears that the "place" of a people is associated
with history and culture that is usually land-based. Both Palestinians
and Jews have this. And land ownership? It's a very complex issue.
Further, grabbing land unjustly never totally succeeds. There
is almost always a backlash. There's almost always the threat
of violence and retribution. People will not allow injustice
against their own to continue indefinitely. If anything, it strengthens
their resolve as we've seen recently in the increased support
for Hezbollah in Lebanon in response to Israeli violence.
The stories, history and culture associated with land are profound.
They are always there, always in the hearts and minds, regardless
of attempts to destroy them. In fact, they are far stronger than
any bomb. For the safety of us all, the Israelis and Americans
should attempt to learn this and give up their reliance on bombs,
aggression and desire for empire.
Heather Gray produces "Just Peace" on WRFG-Atlanta
89.3 FM covering local, regional, national and international
news. She can be reached at hmcgray@earthlink.net .
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