[Editor’s note: I’m not going to have ads or comments on this post. Nor, in fact, did I edit it, other to remove hashtags and emojis from the text in graphic you will find below. I saw this posted on my friend OC activist Iyad Afalqa’s Facebook page — as part of his recurring “Iyadology” feature — and it was not written for this sort of broader publication. But I found it moving, so I asked him if he would allow me to publish it so that it could have its own URL and be more easily found in a permanent location; he agreed. It can and should stand on its own, hence no comments, though you may post them in reply to this earlier post. I’ve allowed myself a short Afterword from my position as a Jewish man deeply distressed by the carnage occurring in Gaza. Note that Iyad chose to alter the spelling of both “Israeli” and “Palestinian” to evade Facebook’s robo-censorship; I’m not going to do so here in this transcription. — GAD]
Posted by Iyad Afalqa, December 10, 2023
[Preface: With images of kidnapped Palestinian men stripped naked in Gaza on the hands of IDF, it triggered this memory!]
On December 9, 1987, the First Intifada (uprising) broke after an Israeli settler ran over 8 Palestinian workers with his car while they were waiting for the bus. I was 13 years old and I lived it all.
I was born in Jerusalem, but spent my formative years under Israeli Military Occupation in the Northwest Jerusalem area and as grandson of Palestinian refugees I was only one valley away from where the 1948 Dir Yasin massacre took place.
It was electrifying to see an entire national risen fearlessly with a common vision of a better future for coming generations. It is beyond tragic that all of their sacrifices led to nothing more than the Bantustanization of their lives.
I lived every second of it, and survived the collective punishment. Controlled movement, Segregated schools, Check-Points, portioned water, intentional power outage, separate roads — Apartheid at its best.
I remember in 1989, the IOF used to come 3 o’clock past midnight and round up all males 15 years old and up, in the town square. Barefoot, no coats, and ask us to sit n the mud in the middle of the bone shattering cold winter for two or three hours until the break of dawn. Make arrests, search the houses, terrorize women, seniors and children. Turn the houses furniture upside down and publicly humiliate activists in front of the whole town. And once done, they us to choose teenage kids to be tied on the front of the jeeps as human shield so that they leave the town without being attacked.
As an adult in my late 40s, I AM still HAUNTED by those memories and I don’t want any human to go through such savage and inhumane treatment. As a leader in California Democratic Party along pro-Palestine human rights activists, when we call upon our party to recognize this as an occupation and apartheid, we get blocked cowardly and our pain goes unnoticed, instead the pains get monopolized for the oppressors. This is my story! I am speaking from my own lived experience! When Democrats say that they believe survivors, they are liars. They don’t! Their fight for human dignity and justice is selective!
Greg’s Afterword: I think that many American Jews have a difficult time thinking of the Israelis as bullies. We’re raised on tales of the Holocaust and the struggles to regain and protect our homeland, so we tend to reject talk of colonialism, settler acts, and apartheid conditions. I understand why we want none of that to be true. But at some point one has to accept that, regardless of whatever right and nobility may exist in our purposes, they still have to translate into actions — and that is what Iyad illustrates so movingly. This is what goes on. We know, at some level, that this is what goes on. South Africans knew about the sins of apartheid; Southerners knew about the rejection of equal status attending both slavery and Jim Crow and now again police violence and voting rights; Colonial and Manifest Destiny Americans knew, even if they made up stories to justify it, that we were taking land from people and it did not make sense that they had no real stake in it and so were giving it up freely. We may not have wanted to know. but we know.
When we know what we don’t want to know, we have two reactions: we may want to justify our way out of the dissonance between our self-perceptions as just and moral beings, but at a more visceral level we think that it really doesn’t matter. We will never be safe around those we have subjugated.
All of the above have in common that the problem is that the subjugated won’t just accept the current social order — that is the problem! The Native American we have stolen from will always hate us and will someday take revenge. The Blacks who we enslaved, then lynched, then redlined away from prosperity, then kept from voting, and always murdered — they would of course grow up hating us, so what else could we do but continue to keep powers out of the hands of the resentful? So we have to keep them down. Once you ride the tiger, you can never safely get off. And so it is for Israelis with Palestinians. How could teenage Iyad grow up without overweening, implacable, violent hatred towards his oppressors? (And yet he did make a point of learning about Jewish culture and fighting for a just peace.) Yet, even now, he finds himself kept down by those who thinks that he endangers us because he gets in the way of inculturation. And others of us, Palestinian or otherwise, are also attacked if we stand against attempts to obliterate Palestinian hope.
Our own subjugation of others justifies subjugation forever — unless their spirits and forever and implacably broken. Giving them hope is literally dangerous, because without loss of power and self-respect they may someday stand up and destroy us. The slave revolt was Thomas Jefferson’s greatest fear. It was why the father of American democracy quailed at the existence of a revolution similar to ours in Haiti.
Americans do not by and large understand that much of the rest of the world sees Israel as bullies, because they can see clearly that Israel evinces these same views that only humiliating and terrorizing the children of Gaza can offer them protection against what their grown-up selves might do. That is why people speak of Gaza as a genocide — because it is a declaration that such people cannot be allowed to live unless they do so without pride or potency. For some people, hatred of Jews based on ancient conspiracy theories may be a motivating factor. The rest are just seeing what’s happening and following the curve to its horrific end.
No, you might not. But the idea has certainly alienated his colleagues and rightfully so. What's the real motivation, loneliness?…