“Palestine Is About Living in Spite of Everything”
“Belonging isn’t about a claim of ownership, it’s actually about this notion of love and longing. And so I’ve come to say, I don’t claim that Palestine belongs to me. I just know that I belong to Palestine,” says Palestinian author Rana Barakat. In this episode of “Movement Memos,” Barakat and host Kelly Hayes talk about Palestinian history, Indigenous solidarity, how colonial violence disrupts ancestral and familial relationships, and what resisting that disruption can look like.
Music by Son Monarcas, David Celeste, Raymond Grouse and Peter Sandberg
Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.
Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. Today, we will be hearing from Palestinian feminist Rana Barakat. Rana is an assistant professor of history at Birzeit University in Palestine. Her areas of research include Palestinian history and the study of historical writing on colonialism, nationalism and cultures of resistance. Rana is currently working on a book monograph titled, “Lifta and Resisting the Museumification of Palestine: Indigenous History of the Nakba,” which advances an Indigenous understanding of time, space and memory in Palestine.
Since the so-called humanitarian pause of the Israeli bombardment came to an end last week, renewed attacks on Gaza have been merciless. While U.S. officials claim to be urging restraint, Israeli bombardments killed at least 700 Palestinians in Gaza on Saturday alone. Over 16,000 Palestinians have been killed since Israel began its genocidal retaliation for the attacks waged by Hamas on October 7, during which 1,200 Israelis were killed.
Amid so much atrocity, I was so grateful to talk with Rana about Palestinian history, Indigenous solidarity, how colonial violence disrupts ancestral and familial relationships, and what resisting that disruption can look like. We also talked about Indigenous understandings of time and the museumification of Palestine. You will be hearing less from me than usual during this episode because I wanted to yield my time to Rana, as much as possible, as a gesture of solidarity during this difficult time.
I have been grateful for the opportunity to focus on Palestine, over the last couple of months. We are living in a media climate that routinely erases Palestinian history, Palestinian suffering and Palestinian joy. The popular dehumanization of victims of settler-colonial violence is a practice as old as colonialism itself. I am really grateful to Truthout for the opportunity to disrupt those narratives. We have always worked to make each episode of this podcast an educational resource, and I hope you have experienced the show that way this year. I have been talking a bit less lately about what you can do to support the show, because it’s tough to focus on things like fundraising and newsletters while discussing a genocide. But I do want those conversations to continue. So given that this is our last episode of the year, I do want to mention that Truthout is in the midst of a crucial fundraising push. We are a reader- and listener-powered organization and your support is the only reason we’re still here, while so many other great independent publications have been forced to shut down. So if you believe in what we are doing and want to support the show, you can help sustain our work by subscribing to Truthout’s newsletter or by making a donation at truthout.org. You can also support “Movement Memos” by subscribing to the podcast on Apple or Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, or by leaving a positive review on those platforms. Sharing episodes that you find useful with your friends and co-strugglers is also a big help, so if you are doing any of those things in support of the show, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart. And with that, I hope you enjoy the show.
(Musical interlude)
KH: Rana Barakat, welcome to the show, and thanks for making time to talk amid everything that’s happening.
Rana Barakat: Thank you for hosting me. This is an honor and a pleasure.
KH: Can you tell our audience a bit about yourself and your work, and what’s happening right now in the West Bank, where you live?
RB: My name is Rana Barakat. I teach history at Birzeit University in occupied Palestine, and I’m also the director of the Birzeit University Museum, which is on campus. Birzeit is a town right north of Ramallah, located in the West Bank, which I’m sure your audience would understand is the West Bank in occupied Palestine. That’s where I live now. It’s where I teach now. And given the heightened and intensified settler-colonial violence over the last 55 days, I have a feeling that your audience might know where I’m located geographically, but in case they don’t, Palestine is where I’m from. I am Palestinian. It is located in the Arab World or in the Eastern Mediterranean shore, and it has a long and illustrious history. For the last 75 years, Palestine has been occupied by a settler-colonial project called Zionism and the settler state named Israel.
That’s where I live. It’s difficult to summarize what’s happening here right now. I think the best way of going about describing that would be to give you this historical trajectory. History did not begin in October. This has been 75 years of settler-colonial occupation and a hundred years of imperialism. What you’re seeing now, what we’re all seeing and experiencing now is an intensification of what we call in Palestine and Palestinian studies, the Ongoing Nakba, which is the structural violence of settler colonialism on our land and on our bodies as a people. And the intensification has been horrific and raw from the eastern shore of occupied Palestine in the Gaza Strip through the hills, which is where I live in the West Bank.
Where I live in the West Bank, it is [like] trying to traverse a map of a settler army and armies of settlers. Where I teach, just to give you a small snippet because it’s really difficult to summarize violence as it were, but the university that I am teaching at Birzeit University has had 50 of our students arrested by the settler army over the last 50 days. The West Bank has over 200 martyrs over the course of this year. That means that these are the people that are being killed by settler-colonial violence. This is our daily life here, but over the last 55 days, it has, as I mentioned, been an intensification and I think we’ll talk about that intensification as we go through, as we move through our conversation.
KH: Yes, we definitely will. But first, can you talk about the language we use to describe Palestinian liberation efforts, in terms of calling those efforts an anti-colonial struggle or an Indigenous struggle?
RB: This is a really interesting question, and it speaks to the heart of my intellectual work in particular over the last five years. If I could share with you where my own personal trajectory was, and I’ll do this later on as well, is that my work can be categorized, if that’s the right word, as part of Palestine and Palestinian studies. And it’s an interesting field because it is what they call in academia interdisciplinary, but it’s actually across a political spectrum, and the reason that I moved along this political spectrum as I learned and grew more involved in different movement struggles across our globe. So the description of it as an anti-colonial struggle is actually the history of the movement. The PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization, came about in the mid 1960s. So if I could give you a timeline really quickly, 1948 was the war of the Nakba that came in four phases.
I don’t need to describe to you those four phases, but the result of that war was the violent implementation of a settler plan of occupation and expulsion. So it was dispossession and displacement. By the end of 1949 and the end of the actual war itself, more than three-quarters of the Palestinian population that lived in our homeland were expelled violently by the Israeli army. So ours is a history from that moment forth of refugeeness, being displaced and being not considered present, being an absent presence on our land, either as second-class citizens or as people under occupation. That moment didn’t end in that moment, and this is what we call the Ongoing Nakba. As I was saying earlier, it is the ongoing settler-colonial violence in Palestine. By the mid-1960s, activists and people in the Arab world had come together, different parties and political parties came together under the umbrella of the PLO, Palestine Liberation Organization.
And by 1968, the PLO had a charter, had membership, and it was a movement. And for all intents and purposes, it represented the political plan and motivation of the Palestinian population, Palestinian people. The 1968 moment was and remains this Third World revolutionary moment of internationalism. So it was about solidarity with the Palestinian people and solidarity with the cause.
Now, as an Indigenous struggle, I don’t like to think of it as a category or a metric, but because of the nature of the condition in terms of what is settler colonialism, there’s a great deal to be shared with other Indigenous peoples across the globe who have survived and challenged and faced the eliminatory and genocidal nature of settler colonialism. There in Palestine, as we see in North America where you are, oftentimes people say that Zionism is an ideology and Israel is a state, is actually an extension of what the United States is, as it was formed as a country, as a nation, and as a republic, but also the methodology of violence by which it came about and which it sustains itself.
So in that way, Palestine is also part of the Fourth World. I think I hesitate sometimes in calling it Indigenous struggle, and the reason that I hesitate with that is because I don’t want it to become an identitarian issue. And within the Palestinian context, this notion of who is Indigenous to the land is actually quite interesting historically because Zionism as an ideology grasps this mythology where actually often people describe this as occupying the land of Palestine and occupying the religion of Judaism. So in this way it becomes, I think, a non-productive conversation of who claims “Indigenous” as if it were an identity. This notion of 2,000 years in a return from Jewish exile is deeply, deeply problematic. And who’s on the land is of the land and that history — be it the history of Judaism, Christianity, and later, Islam — is actually a history of the people on the land.
And I don’t think it’s productive. That’s my history, that’s my people’s history. So in this way, I think instead of having a useless discussion about who is Indigenous, I think it is........
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