‘New dynamic’ in shattered Palestine offers hope
THERE’S a “new dynamic” in Palestine, says ambassador Hanan Jarrar. There’s no hesitation as she emphasises the words she has carefully chosen to light up.
She is calm. She is consistent and friendly and spontaneous. She answers her own media calls and replies warmly to questions. But she is furious and hurt, and her defiance dazzles under all that diplomacy.
Jarrar, who was appointed to her role in Pretoria by Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian National Authority, in December 2019, has been a tour de force in representing her people during this week of slaughter.
But she understands this story as she was born in occupied Palestine in the 1970s. The state of past, impending and possible violence that comes with colonialism was everywhere in Jarrar’s childhood neighbourhood. Everyone had their roots in the land on which they stood, and everyone was under threat.
Jarrar has been fearless as mainstream media stumbled around the devastation of dozens of children killed through Israeli airstrikes on Gaza during the past few days. She is unwavering in saying that young Palestinians are now only in the opening chapters of their liberation, which is imminent.
This is not through the intervention of left-wing Democrats lobbying their president in the US, she says – although that matters. It’s not even through the outrage against Israel that has massed throughout the world, although that solidarity is formidable, and Palestinians would not exist without it.
As tens of thousands of people fled aerial bombardment, and more than 200 are mourned, Jarrar says it’s “the unity shown among Palestinians” who protested and went on strike in defence of each other this week, which will now see in the end of the oppression.
More vitally, it is “the young generation” of Gaza, the Occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem and the diaspora, “using the instruments of counter-narrative”, who will remain in the front lines until they are free. Those “instruments”, social media’s terrifying zooming-in on children’s shattered lives, bear witness.
“Making use of their own media to expose the war by this apartheid regime has given young people a way of reintroducing the world to what we are experiencing,” Jarrar says. “The ethnic cleansing, the crimes against us. Our young generation is taking the baton for liberation against the Israeli
JOBURG-BORN Adam Broomberg is a giant of contemporary visual art credited with powers of clairvoyance about what is to come in this world. But a charged aesthetic is not responsible for the trouble he’s had sleeping lately.
Over the past week, Broomberg has shown very public solidarity with Palestinians against Israeli violence, and directed his gaze at a colossus: the mighty global art market. Among the ways he’s done it is by posting intimate letters online to a number of blue-chip peers about withdrawing their work from one of the world’s most valuable collections.
The London-based Zabludowicz Art Trust is that target. It has amassed a premier catalogue of more than 4 000 pieces, but its founders are connected to lobbying on behalf of aggression.”
But it comes at an incalculable price.
American law professor and leading scholar Khaled Beydoun responded this week on his Instagram to a follower who felt deep sadness over the murdered children, but said they didn’t have the words to express themselves.
“We all don’t know what to say, brother,” replied Beydoun to the post, which read: “Trust me. These images of the Israeli state through the controversial Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre, and investment company Tamares Group, which provides services for the Israeli Air Force.
This has so angered Broomberg and hundreds of other top-flight art practitioners, that they founded Boycott Divest Zabludowicz in 2014 to expose how the Trust weaponises culture as a “soft power”. BDZ encourages artists to de-author work acquired by or exhibited through the collection – an intentional act Broomberg this week personally took to British titans Jake and Dinos Chapman, German Wolfgang Tillmans and the Belgian-born Francis Alÿs, among others.
Accomplished young artist Rachel Pimm, who was born in Zimbabwe, was among those who have now withdrawn their conceptual content. She posted an apology on Instagram, saying “if anyone else made this wrong children being killed hit me more as a father than a Jew. I see my kids’ faces in their faces … and I care deeply, but don’t know what to say.”
Jarrar’s “new dynamic” is thus shadowed with sorrow. She struggles painfully with the impacts on that “young generation” in whom everyone has placed such dignity.
South Africans are, of course, significantly aware of what happens when a generation is expected to carry forward decision.. please be in touch … for collective action”. Pimm detailed her decision was made “against the brutality of the Israeli state”.
“I believe this is a very easy mode of recourse to the way (the Trust) art-washes the Israeli state’s ongoing racism and violence against Palestinians,” Broomberg explains.
This reflected on a bout of insomnia he had in the early hours on Monday when he posted on social media as Israel prepared air-raids on Gaza which killed at least 42 that day alone. a nation’s expectations. It’s a weight of pure destruction. Jarrar feels that profoundly. Yes, liberation will come for the Palestinian children of today, she says, but “it’s going to take hundreds of years to actually heal”.
In the past week, more than 60 Palestinians killed by Israel in Gaza were children. For perspective, during the Soweto uprising in 1976, between 176 and 700 black children were murdered by the apartheid regime over a
The King David Linksfield-educated artist, who these days lives in Berlin, was reading foremost scholar Edward Said during his sleeplessness; drawn to Said’s views on “hallucinations Western people have about Palestinians”.
Broomberg quoted the former Columbia professor of literature, who was himself Palestinian: “(They) are a nuisance and occasionally a threat who have to be subjected to a structure of oppression. They exist as a danger and as an oppressed people”.
Noting he “wasn’t built to be a spokesperson or a politician”, Broomberg is nonetheless continuously affected by those “hallucinations”.
His support for the Palestinian struggle is not a late-breaking storm, and it’s not only the Zabludowicz Art Trust which is in his sights. He has been isolated by other robustly-funded platforms which seemingly equate strikes by Israel, a nuclear state with a sophisticated military, to rockets dispatched from Gaza which has no army.
Broomberg says his Jewish grandmother, one of only two survivors of six siblings in the Holocaust, would “have understood the impossible contradiction of violence committed by period of between a few days and a few months.
During the 1986 State of Emergency in South Africa, most of those injured by the security forces were black children who were targeted. Historical records show that about 8 000 detainees were under the age of 18, with some under the age of 10. They were tortured and treated as adults.
It seems we’ll never know the exact number of South African children killed, wounded and damaged, and somehow we live with that, and also don’t know what to say about it as the years go on.
The violence of apartheid is far from resolved. Around 1 000 children are still murdered every year in South Africa, because that ruin is entrenched. It was never able to be properly tackled, measured and attended to, each person affected, one by one.
“It’s very difficult when you grow up and believe that everything that’s happening around you is a normal thing,” Jarrar says, as much about her own childhood under occupation as children caught up in atrocities this week. “It’s only when you see from above and outside that you start to believe there were some abnormalities while you were living inside.
“All my young life, I didn’t know what freedom looked like. It was only when travelling outside because of my work, that I was lucky to have it for the first time. Most Palestinian children do not know even how to move from one place to another without being dehumanised. They grow up adapted to a way of life that has been imposed on them.
“One of my kids asked when he was small, can’t we use a plane to go from Ramallah to Jerusalem? He didn’t understand about standing in a very long line to get from where we were to Israel to get out, like a group of cows going to be slaughtered.”
Yet, that consciousness of a “new dynamic” is what has catapulted Jarrar into the forefront as a young Palestinian herself, speaking on a powerful stage on behalf of her people.
South Africa is, after all, in the front row of solidarity. She will be heard here, even as she insists “we, the Palestinians, can only rely on ourselves; change comes only from within”.
“Those false borders which were created for Palestine were also false borders in our consciousness and subconsciousness, so this counter-narrative from the young Palestinians is very important,” she says. “It’s a different dimension. It’s a turning point.”
Smith is an author, researcher and former newspaper editor
Palestinians”. It is “an essence that the self exists even if the oppressor seeks to deny it”.
The artist’s last week of being heckled for what is an integral part of his influential life, is thus a familiar state. He was a political-minded Jewish South African child when he was at school in the 1980s before he became one of the editors of the iconic Benetton Colors campaign magazine.
The other editor was Broomberg’s long-time artistic partner Oliver Chanarin, with whom he established a practice concentrating on photography that delivered shattering histories of racism and colonialism. Today, Broomberg is a professor of photography in Hamburg, and his work is in collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
He has, however, avoided colluding as a practitioner with the capitalist global art market where arms dealers may masquerade as philanthropists.
“I never had a career in America,” he summarises, “because if you speak out (on Palestine), you don’t have a career in (that) art world. When we were living through Black Lives Matter, my media was choc-a-block with institutions there posting. Now, when I don’t see a word, it’s shocking, from the heart.”