SHARE UNVARNISHED TRUTHS ABOUT PALESTINIANS’ LIVES
On May 11, Palestinian American Shireen Abu Akleh, a beloved Al Jazeera reporter born into a Christian family in Jerusalem, was targeted and shot by Israeli Defense Forces, according to Palestinian authorities and her colleagues and new evidence reported by CNN and The New York Times on June 20.
The Israeli military says it is unclear who fired the fatal shot, but mounting evidence points to one of its bullets. Abu Akleh is among numerous Palestinian journalists killed while doing their job in recent years.
Armed with a camera, Abu Akleh gathered her people’s struggles, disjointed lives, losses and survival under decades of merciless violence. In ancestral villages and in refugee camps, humor, love and compassion were her gifts. A bullet entered her head through a gap between her helmet and bulletproof vest. Absurdly, Israel routinely “investigates” war crimes it commits, yet its leaders think it should investigate last month’s death of Abu Akleh. Would we anoint Russian President Vladimir Putin to lead an investigation of war crimes against Ukraine?
We Americans must demand Israeli accountability for and America’s acknowledgment of its complicity in the chronic inhumane conditions of Palestinians. After all, the U.S. finances Israeli weapons and shares intelligence with Israel. Are we not responsible?
How do Americans find unbiased news that may prompt them to question the diet of falsities we are fed, permitting us to overlook routine travesties of justice? Arab Americans comb through the lines of our media for semblances of truth.
Palestinian Americans routinely suppress their narratives. Like Jewish Holocaust survivors before them who began to detail unvarnished truths in the 1970s and 1980s, Palestinians have taken many decades to claim their legacy of continued and unspeakable losses. One such unreported story concerns the bodies of Palestinians held by Israel.
In 2020, 27-year-old Ahmad Erakat, a cousin of acclaimed Palestinian American attorney Noura Erakat, was killed at a checkpoint in the West Bank and his body has yet to be released to his family for burial. Some bodies have been in Israeli cold storage for years.
Israel’s retaliation narratives are an integral part of America’s diet of misinformation. Every violent action Israel commits is “balanced” by a justification of retaliation. Why are Palestinian actions, reactions and acts of resistance not classified as retaliatory? After all, Palestinians do experience violence from the Israeli military apparatus and colonizing settlers around the clock.
Israelis are also allowed to make the most inhumane comments. Dov Weisglass, a senior adviser to the thenIsraeli prime minister, announced in 2006 the strangulation of Gaza, saying the idea was “to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.” Would we condone these inhuman sentiments from government officials in the United States or elsewhere? Imagine if Putin made such a comment about Ukrainians.
The Gaza diet quickly became a stark reality. Gaza has, in fact, been starved. Gaza’s water is not drinkable with little chance of conversion into potable water. Gaza’s food sources and medical supplies are intermittent and unreliable. The Mediterranean Sea, a source of food and desalinated water, is off-limits.
Terrorism and terrorists are regularly used terms, though undefined by the State Department. However, Americans are conditioned to know the terms often apply to Arabs and Muslims. Examples of unquestioned verbiage allow the inhumanity of Arabs and Arab Americans, especially Palestinians, to slip under our supposed discerning radar.
Every year from mid-May into June, millions of Palestinians around the world grieve two cataclysmic events. One is the Nakba or “catastrophe.” This is the violent expulsion of about 850,000 Palestinians who ran from death, massacre and their ancestral homes in 1948 when Palestinians lost nearly 80 percent of historic Palestine, and hundreds of villages were emptied. The other is the Naksa (the completion of ethnic cleansing of about 600,000 Palestinians). This occurred in 1967 and burgeoned the number of Palestinian refugees whose losses, like their 1948 counterparts, have yet to be acknowledged or compensated.
Today, like violence inflicted in South Africa’s apartheid, killings continue, crops are burned, olive groves are uprooted, homes are demolished, aquifers are stolen and children are abducted.
Palestinians living in San Diego County have vital stories blazing with grief, pain and a cry for justice. As the world’s attention is focused on the horrific Russian invasion of Ukraine, Palestinians live a 74-year violent occupation, normalized by American politicians and the press. Shireen Abu Akleh’s killing motivates us to acknowledge and share the unvarnished truth of Palestinian lives. Let’s listen to the stories of Palestinian San Diegans among us.
Violent actions by Israel are justified as appropriate retaliation. But not responses by Palestinians.
Bittar is an artist, educator, writer and California organizer for the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. She lives in North Park.