This post without the interview was originally posted in regards to the burqa gate affair that happened last October. I had forgotten about it, but having remembered it, I wanted to recategorize it under RWOC Theorists. It is written by Nadine Naber, who is an amazing Arab feminist that I work with personally and love dearly. In searching for online information on her, I came across the interview that is linked–listen to it! It’s very good!!! :-)

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In this interview Nadine Naber, a Professor of Anthropology at the American University in Cairo, discusses identity formation in 2nd generation immigrants in the Bay Area, as well as the makeup of the Arab Community in general. Among the issues discussed are the idealization of Arab culture on the part of parents and the effect this on the second generation born in the United States, differing gender expectations with regard to the preservation of Arab culture, the degree to which constructions of identity are a response to popular conceptions of Arab identity in the United States culture as a whole, the relationship between the issues faced by Arab-Americans and other minority groups, the development of Arab-American feminism, the attraction of life in America to immigrants form the region and the degree to which Arab identity crosses sectarian lines. She also addresses the degree to which these perceptions have changed over time and in response to historical events. Finally she addresses the construction of a binary opposition between Arab and American culture, critiquing it as a false dichotomy that disguises political issues. This wide ranging interview, based on two years of field work, will give you a very clear sense of many of the issues faced by the children of immigrants in crafting their identity as both Arabs and as Americans.

From Critical Moment

The silencing of Palestine: Trying to locate Palestine in today’s discussions of colonialism
Nadine Naber

On January 27th, 2002 the world’s terrorist profile shifted from “man” to “woman,” and the racialized marker “irrationally violent Muslim extremist” was feminized with the emergence of “the first female suicide bomber” Wafa Idris.

In the aftermath of September 11th, with the reduction of the world to “those who are with us” vs. “those who are with terrorism,” and the U.S. media portrayal of Wafa Idris as brainwashed by Islam, will radical women of color shift the dominant discourse from a focus on whether we agree with Palestinian methods of resistance to a focus on what are the historical conditions that produce female-led martyr operations?

We have learned from African slavery and the colonization of the Americas that when women’s options are limited they will continue to resist. Wafa worked as a volunteer for the Palestinian Red Crescent society. She carried children on stretchers, witnessed brutal deaths and injuries, and evacuated bodies literally in pieces daily. A friend of Wafa who also works as a volunteer for the Red Crescent society found herself holding the brain of a young boy in her hands. Today, children’s games in Palestine mean making victory signs while playing on a stretcher carried by playmates, or playing dead in an alley several yards away from a place where older children are clashing with Israeli soldiers…

In spring 2001, journalists from the Egyptian newspaper Al Ahram Weekly interviewed international photographers who had been in Palestine to develop an art exhibit about children. According to the photographers:

The streets looked like a football match between kids and soldiers but the kids were being shot…it was surreal…the rules of the game: get shot or don’t get shot. […] Kids stand up and curse Israeli soldiers or they go in front of them and lift their shirt to bare their chest as they are shot. One kid had two bullets in him…he lifts his shirt and then points to the center of the chest calling, ‘Give the third…come on…give me the third!’

The photographers were there taking pictures and would see kids dropping and being shot at with no sound. They explained, “Israelis were shooting at them from behind us…from a bridge with sniper rifles-with silencers. You couldn’t hear a thing. They just started dropping.”

Since the Intifada began four years ago, over 3500 Palestinians have lost their lives and 27,500 have been injured. Palestinians have been locked up in ghettos controlled by the Israeli army-equipped with U.S. supplied Apache helicopters and tanks. F-16’s mow down people, houses, olive groves and fields on a daily basis. Babies die at birth at civilian check-points as Israelis shoot and kill ambulance drivers and target paramedics saving the injured.

Massacres sponsored by Israel cannot be viewed as accidents of history. They are systematized in an integral policy of the military. Israel was created by a process of war, by pillaging the very fabric of the indigenous Palestinian population; their land, their national identity and the Palestinian interpretation of honor (the violation of which has included violating mothers and daughters in front of their fathers, brothers or husbands). When we look back at the Israeli historical narrative we see how the massacres encouraged migration through fear. Moshe Diyan, the former prime minister and ex-Israeli general, admitted that every Israeli town in every Israeli neighborhood was built on the remains of a Palestinian village that had an Arab name with Arab people and an Arab history associated with it. Yitzakh Rabin, the noble peace prize laureate and the revered “martyr for peace,” massacred civilians in villages during the 1967 wars. Ariel Sharon, who the Israeli public chose to elect in order to send us a message, was responsible for many massacres, including the massacre of Kibya in 1953, of Sabra and Shatilla in 1982, and of Jenin in 2002.

Massacres were first instituted by Aba Even, the cherished dove of Israel, in order to isolate the Palestinian guerilla from the Palestinian masses by targeting the masses instead of the guerrilla. Massacres were often accompanied by violence against women-particularly of pregnant women as a symbolic gesture of uprooting the child from the mother or the Palestinian from the land-and body mutilation. Today, Israeli soldiers forbid pregnant women in labor from crossing borders for medical care and few newborns survive these circumstances.

Palestinians are clear about the message behind Israeli massacres because the Israeli army advertises it on bullhorns during massacres to trigger panic and fear. “If you surrender yourselves and leave your homes, you will not be hurt. If you don’t, remember what happened in Deir Yassin.” In Deir Yassin approximately 460 Palestinians, most of them women and children, were executed en masse, some tortured, some beaten to death. The survivors recounted the mutilation and torture of their own family members. As we look at the prospects for the future, we cannot forget the women and children executed in Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps in Lebanon in 1982-some of them killed using glass bottles instead of bullets so that the pain can be felt for hours. We cannot separate this from the current leader of the state of Israel, Ariel Sharon, for Israel is truly a democracy and the people have spoken, and they have said: “We have elected your killer and we know better-that Israel is a democracy for Jews and for Jews only-particularly white Jews, and particularly white Jews with money who come from the West.” Most of us here in the U.S. are subsidizing this with six billion dollars a year of our tax money. And it cannot be separated from the colonization of the Americas wherein U.S. democracy is founded on the genocide of African Americans, Native Americans, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and the list goes on…

Contrary to the U.S. media’s propaganda that portrays the occupation as a conflict between violent Palestinians and peaceful Israelis, as a religious war, and Palestinian deaths by “cross-fire,” there is a massive disparity in the balance of power. Israel is a settler colonial state with the intention to colonize the entire region economically with the help of its military arm. Today, Palestinian people can no longer exist within the dominant Israeli national consciousness in order for this economic project to succeed. Today, the dominant view emerging in Israel is: Kill Palestinians until they say “Uncle.”

According to this colonialist vision, the Palestinian people will become a relic of the past, at best, incorporated within a new Israeli construct as a minority, despite the fact that Israeli national and cultural consciousness is a European recreation of everything that is indigenous to the land of Palestine. The creation of Israel entailed a process of usurpation of indigenous cultural characteristics, including dance, food, clothing and the arts…all was renamed as “Israeli culture” and denied Palestinians. For the past fifty years, 70% of the Palestinian population has been forced into exile. Despite United Nations resolution 194 that defines the right to return as an inalienable human right, Israel continues to deny and violate the right to return every time it confiscates land, every time it displaces a Palestinian family, every time it demolishes a home, every time it harasses civilians at checkpoints, every time it holds up workers, and every time it imposes closure upon the occupied territories-. For those of you who wondered about the peace process, more land has been confiscated from 1993 until now than from 1967-1993.

Palestine is not an anomaly that stands outside of history. Israel, the U.S. imperial partner, has been an executor of discrimination and racism internationally. For example, Israel has provided its military expertise to other abusive undemocratic regimes in South Africa, Uganda, Argentina, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Indonesia.

What is missing in much of progressive activism in the U.S. is a critique of colonialism that links the Palestinian struggle to other indigenous struggles and all struggles against imperialism. Where then, do radical feminists of color, with our focus on intersections of race, class, gender, sexism, homophobia, colonialism and imperialism locate Wafa Idris? Will we explore the impact of colonization on Wafa’s family? Palestinian families? Palestinian communities? increases in domestic violence? shifts in women’s labor? Will we take interest in Palestinian feminists’ analysis of women’s resistance?

Where do we locate Wafa Idris in terms of feminist theorizations of women’s desperation and women’s agency? Where do we locate her in the context of feminist heroine metaphors that highlight women’s transformations from passivity to agency? How might we address Wafa Idris through feminist lenses that explore the ways that women who have no options take extreme measures? How might feminist theorizations of the body grapple with a woman who deploys the body as a weapon against an unstoppable military machine?

Radical feminisms of color provide useful frameworks for historicizing Wafa Idris’ power-laden realities. Yet as long as we buy into the dominant corporate media propaganda that devalues Palestinian lives, blames the victim, and victimizes the oppressor, we will fail to recognize her struggle against the intersecting axes of colonialism, racism, classism, and sexism and we will fail to see her humanity. Let us explore more closely why we haven’t seen consistency among progressive people of color and women of color in their critiques of colonialism so that they call Zionism out just as they call out other colonialist projects?

Cultural biases that are colonialist in nature often play themselves out even in some of the most radical political circles. The racist notion that Arabs are close to Islam and that Muslims are backwards and uncivilized often leads to the conclusion that Arab politics can never be progressive because they are “Muslim” and therefore support patriarchy, violence, savagery, barbarism, etc. A racist logic homogenizes all Arabs and Muslims, constructs them as inferior to whites/Europeans, and assumes that “Arab” and Islam are inherently backwards and patriarchal. Cultural biases create a sense of discomfort when it comes to “working with Arabs” and leads to pushing Arab/Arab Americans out of leadership, speaking on their behalf, and rendering their struggles for liberation illegitimate. Among Arab/Arab American activists, a great deal of work is committed towards simply exposing the Palestinian struggle as a legitimate anti-colonialist struggle.

U.S. progressive politics of color that seek acceptance in U.S. society are an additional site of exclusion for those seeking national liberation. For decades, Arab activists (and Puerto Ricans, Filipinos, etc.) living in the U.S., have said to U.S. progressives: “I am not asking to become American. I’m not asking you to redefine me as a (U.S.) ‘person of color’ or a ‘woman of color.’ I’m asking you to recognize our struggle for liberation and our desire to return home.” Whether those seeking national liberation in the homeland might find solidarity among radical people/women of color spaces in the U.S. has yet to be seen.

Moreover, by rendering any and all critiques of Israel anti-Semitic, The Zionist project has played a key role in silencing Arab/Arab American voices in the U.S. Whether in labor, media, education, politics-or even among radical women of color-the maintenance of a pro-Israeli position silences critiques of Israeli policy and demonizes its critics. An additional strategy through which Zionist discourses de-rail scholarly debate about the Palestinian struggle is to label the discussion as “too political.”

Despite these struggles, several coalitions between radical people of color and the Palestinian struggle have come into their own. “Incite! Women of Color against Violence” and the “Women of Color Resource Center” are two organizations that have traced similarities between Palestinian women’s struggles and indigenous women’s struggles within the geographic borders of the U.S. and abroad. In these spaces, groups of women of color and immigrant and refugee women came together and affirmed that we will continue to fight against violence and colonization no matter how much they try and destroy us.

Post-September 11th, Sharon used Bush’s rhetoric of the “war on terror” to intensify its ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. As Israel slaughters Palestinians while the rest of the world sits back and watches, let us assert that Palestinians exist! And let us continue this struggle until Palestine is liberated from occupation and until all of Palestinians are granted the right to return to their original homes or town of origin. Let us continue this struggle until all peoples are granted the right to negotiate their destiny on their own terms.

This essay was first presented as a speech at the INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence! Color of Violence II Conference in March, 2002.

Nadine Naber is a board member of INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence!; the Arab Women’s Gathering Organization Committee; and Radical Arab Women’s Activist Network (RAWAN); She is an assistant professor in the Program in American Culture and the Department of Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan. Her work focuses on negotiations of race, gender and sexuality among Arab youth in San Francisco, California and shifts in the gendered-racialization of Arabs and Muslims after September 11th. Her writing has been published in The Journal of Asian American Studies, The Journal of Ethnic and Racial Studies, and Meridians: Race, Transnationalism, and Feminism.