PALESTINE AND WORLD-MAKING LANGUAGE – A HISTORICAL TESTIMONY

When I was 14, and during the second Intifada (1), a friend of my dad told me: “The bullet that kills you is the bullet that you don't hear, usually death is faster than the sound it makes.” I remember feeling relieved, but I quickly realized that this rule is only applicable if you were lucky and died. Yet the unimaginable suffering is actually owned by the wounded, the survivors, by the living. 

As a teenager, I was obsessed with language and wanted to be a journalist. At this point, I was constantly attempting to understand the absurdity and injustice of our history, trying to find words, but language was never enough to describe anything about our reality. At the same time, language is also the reason why we feel so abandoned by the world, violated, and dehumanized as Palestinians.

 My grandmother is a survivor. In the family, we always debated her sense of humor. When she talked about her memories of Palestine and the massacre in our village, she always found something to laugh at in the end. But it didn't take me a long time as a young adult to understand the polarity of her reality. Is there anything more violent than witnessing a massacre and seeing your mom murdered before your eyes? The extremity of this event reached the intangible; it reached a threshold of extreme darkness, which in the hierarchy of things, there isn't anything darker. Yet life continues, and living beyond the darkness of a massacre is to reach absurdity, and sometimes the absurd is laughable. This transition from violence to absurd takes decades, and for others, it can never happen. Gaza is not making us laugh at all as we still expect the worst is yet to happen. We know 10,000 martyrs is just the beginning of a bigger disaster that will live in us for generations.  The price of dismantling the imperialist colonial settler’s state of Israel is our children's bodies on the ground and probably our sanity and careers around the world.

“As a teenager, I was obsessed with language and wanted to be a journalist. At this point, I was constantly attempting to understand the absurdity and injustice of our history, trying to find words, but language was never enough to describe anything about our reality. At the same time, language is also the reason why we feel so abandoned by the world, violated, and dehumanized as Palestinians.”

Just a week before the genocide in Gaza started, we opened the group exhibition “Landing” in Kongegaarden. My work Where Language Goes to Hide can be understood in the light of this context or another. I wanted to make something timeless, and maybe ‘Stateless’ as the political status imposed on me. I placed language in the threshold between two spaces. The two portals dividing the space not only offer language a place to hide but also a place to regenerate itself, which gives language the power to be poetic and magical, and at the same time violent and destructive. This understanding of language started two generations before me and has been linguistically introduced to me since I was 4 years old when I asked my parents the meaning of the word ‘occupation.’ I had heard the word on the news, and gently, my dad explained the story to me. My dad, the intellectual artist he is, with two black portals for eyes, is an amazing storyteller. Because he too, had to understand the manifestations of language and the way you portray narratives. My dad told me our story in a serious but very kind sense for a kid at 4 years old. I do remember it clearly.

 I am not writing to lay history out. Yet my personal life in intersection with the collective is a story of language, history, suffering, exile, separation, hope, love, tenderness, friendships, and the continuous destruction and making of my world as an example of many. And all of that starts and ends with language. Tantura is the name of an ancient fishing village south of Haifa with seven little islands and a natural harbor. Before the Iron Age, Tantura inhabitants were called the sea people, as my ancestors lived directly on the beach. My grandfather said that some houses were designed so that the sea could enter during tides and leave fish behind for breakfast.

 In 1948, the Haganah (a zionist paramilitary organization) committed a massacre in my hometown Tantura (2). My grandmother was 7 years old, and my grandfather was 10 by then. An earlier explosion of a bomb leftover from the British mandate period had sent a splinter into my grandfather's face and taken his left eye out; the splinter stayed in his brain for many decades which doctors were baffled about. They both survived the massacre and became orphans. The village was ethnically cleansed, and those who survived were forced to leave. Later, Israel turned the village into a tourist resort on top of the mass graves of men and raped and killed young women.

The resort in Tantura and the only ancient house that they couldn’t destroy. Photo: Shabatashtiot project (Wikimedia Commons).

The details we carry as part of the story are horrific and almost unnameable. Israel denied this massacre and many many more. The language used by the Zionists to occupy the land was the start of 120 years of Palestinian suffering and more.

“We were obliged to clear a country of wild beasts, we should not set about the task in the fashion of Europeans of the fifth century. We should not take spear and lance and go out singly in pursuit of bears; we would organize a large and active hunting party, drive the animals together, and throw a melinite bomb into their midst.” Theodor Herzl, 1896 (3).

My grandparents ended up in Damascus, Syria in what was built to be called Yarmouk, previously home to the biggest Palestinian refugee community outside of Palestine and it is where my parents and I grew up.

I say previously because when the Syrian revolution turned into a civil war in 2012, this 2 kilometers municipality was ethnically cleansed by Al-Assad regime, and now, the 180,000 Palestinians are between death and imprisonment while the rest are spread all over the planet even in a smaller scale as the case of my family.  One of my close friends by then Khaled Bakrawi was tortured to death by Al-Assad regime just a week before I fled to Algeria, there was a deliberate attack on civil workers, artists, and intellectuals, so no one can call what happened in its right name ‘ethnic cleansing’. The details of this war too are too devastating to even list them and other details that my memory chose to wipe out.

 But this event too got lost in language manipulation of terror, media propaganda, and endless political deals and conspiracies. And now, the biggest Palestinian community is not a community anymore but merely lonely, stateless, powerless individuals, dying young in the coldness of Europe of broken hearts and depression. This large, educated community, seeking the right of return, was seen as another threat to Israel, prompting the decision to cleanse in the middle of the Syrian civil war.

“While witnessing what is happening in Gaza right now, I find myself using the pronoun ‘we’, to say “we are dying.” In a way, it is them being torn to pieces by the Israeli strikes, yet I feel every bomb in my own body, and the trauma of three generations awakes in my veins. Is it still ‘we’?”

 These memories come back to my body because it was the same tactics used in Gaza and Yarmouk. There was no electricity, water, or medical assistance, and people were starved to death (4) while being bombed. While writing, I'm trying to be careful when using the pronouns of ‘we/ them/ you/ us and I.’ One thing I am certain of is that these pronouns can clearly delineate feelings of alienation and estrangement, both internally and externally. Regardless, on special occasions, I fell into the trap of ‘we’. While witnessing what is happening in Gaza right now, I find myself using the pronoun ‘we’, to say “we are dying.” In a way, it is them being torn to pieces by the Israeli strikes, yet I feel every bomb in my own body, and the trauma of three generations awakes in my veins. Is it still ‘we’? How many times can a heart break? My heart is still beating yet my body responds with countless anxiety attacks every time language feeds the media with more lies. And every time the number of martyrs becomes even more ‘unimaginable’.  

Zaki Sallam (Samara Sallam’s dad), *Nakba, the Arabic name for catastrophe*. Photo: Zaki Sallam.

A few months ago, my brother brought up to the surface of our conversation a text by Jean Genet (5) called Four Hours in Shatila which offers an account of his visit to Shatil (6) shortly after the massacre took place in Beirut in 1982. We talked about the poetic language he used to describe what he saw, aestheticizing a massacre as a westerner while feeling one with Palestinians.

Genet as a character and novelist is very present in our generation, his popularity came from his history as a thief, vagabond, novelist, and revolutionary gay man who joined the Palestinian fedayeen ‘freedom fighters’ and loved them deeply. Not only that, he was also a friend of Sartre, Derrida, and Foucault and fought against French police brutality during the Algerian War of Independence in the late 50s. When reading this text again, Genet was also confused about ‘we’ and ‘them’ and ‘us.’ But he was very consciously aware of when ‘I’ plays as a white French man fantasizing about Palestinian men and when “we” is more of an emergence and a feeling of deep love for the culture and the struggle. “I am French, but I defend the Palestinians wholeheartedly and automatically. They are in the right because I love them. But would I love them if injustice had not turned them into a wandering people?” (7) Since forever western media has heavily fantasized, romanticized, and idolized the images of Arabic weeping women, and PLO (8) guerilla fighters while still calling them/us terrorists. Edward Said wrote at length about Orientalism. Naji Al-Ali drew many world-famous critical caricatures before his assassination in London. Yet these few sentences from Genet’s memoir about his time with the Palestinian guerillas sums it all up:

“Whenever Europeans looked at us their eyes shone. Now I understand why. It was with desire because their looking at us produced a reaction in our bodies before we realized it. Even with our backs turned we could feel your eyes drilling through the backs of our necks. We automatically adopted a heroic and therefore attractive pose. Legs, thighs, chest, neck – everything helped to work the charm. We weren't aiming to attract anyone in particular, but since your eyes provoked us and you’d turned us into stars, we responded to your hopes and expectations. But you’d turn us into monsters, too. You called us terrorists! We were terrorists stars.” (9)

Before fleeing from Syria to Algeria I had finished two and a half years at the Media University in Damascus. During the revolution, I realized that Media and journalism were the Lerna swamp (10) where the Hydra monster lives. Its scent is deadly poisonous, and it has nine heads. For every head chopped off, two heads grow back in its place. A monster even Hercules struggled to tackle.   In the myth of the twelve labors of Hercules, after hours of fighting the Hydra, Hercules remembered the advice his teacher gave him before embarking on this specific labor:   “One word of counsel only I may give,” the Teacher said. “We rise by kneeling; we conquer by surrendering; we gain by giving up. Go forth,... and conquer.”

 I re-read the psychological analysis that Alice A. Bailey gave of this labor:

“As long as Hercules fought in the bog, amid the mud, slime, and quicksand, he was unable to overcome the Hydra. He had to raise the monster into the air; that is translate his problem into another dimension, in order to solve it. In all humility, kneeling in the mud, he had to examine his dilemma in the light of wisdom and in the elevated atmosphere of searching thought. From these considerations we may gather that the answers to many of our problems come only when a new focus of attention is achieved, a new perspective established.” (11)

While thinking of language and media, and my traumas, I can't distinguish between ‘we’ and ‘you’ in my speech anymore. Maybe because of all the millions of people who walked the streets around the world in support of Palestine. For a moment, a very short moment, I felt that we as Palestinians are not totally alone. It is the first time in my life that I hold the hands of my white friends and we cry together grieving and casting words for free Palestine.  Yet in the midst of this loneliness, grieving, shock, and trauma we are experiencing, I can’t but feel that we are all, in all our colors, for the first time realizing that we are an outcast. We are all alone in a system lead by wealthy corporations, weaponry businesses, genociders, and ecociders too, because even your voices are not heard, and your democratic leaders are fascists in disguise.  We are seeing how the Palestinian struggle is participating in formulating the language exposing this order. World-making and world-destroying language. The global movement as tender and as young and as shaky as it is has caused the image of a democratic West to fall like a dead bird that dried up a long time ago.

 The age of language has begun, this language that hides between the earth and the hell on earth can take us down if we don't pause, think, and conquer together.  Language has been and still is shaping the world around us, even the words we say subconsciously. The Palestinian suffering remains immense, and it continues to manifest through thousands of creative methods utilized by Israelis to torture us not only in Gaza but all over the world.

“ The age of language has begun, this language that hides between the earth and the hell on earth can take us down if we don’t pause, think, and conquer together.  Language has been and still is shaping the world around us, even the words we say subconsciously.”

Do not be afraid to cast words that shape the reality of all of us, do not be afraid to speak counter words for calling us terrorists. Terror is colonialism that is not afraid to massacre 2 million people before the world’s eyes. Natives of the land will never cause this destruction, only the occupier will. And only partners will be silent and protective of the crime. Our grief is powerful, the grief of the global south, and the grief of our allies in the global north. We owe one another hugs and accountability. Do not let the settler's colonial state cover up its crimes by using aesthetics and language.

Speak up, resist, strike, and fight even when resistance is not comfortable. We have been suffering for more than 75 years. And finally, just to say it out loud, I’m definitely against violence but resistance in all its forms is legal in the face of occupation including armed struggle. Resistance is a right.  

Dismantle the colonial settlers' state of Israel and every other colonial sector. 

From the river to the sea.

Free Palestine    .

NOTES:

The Second Intifada was a second major Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation, Sept. 2000 - Feb. 2005.
Tantura – A documentary released in 2022 describes the massacre by the israeli soldries who commited it.
Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) was the father of modern political Zionism. Herzl formed the Zionist Organization and promoted Jewish immigration to Palestine in an effort to form a Jewish state.
According to the report “Squeezing the lift out of Yarmouk” by Amnesty International around 200 people died of starvation, including 12 kids.
Jean Genet (1910-1986) was a French novelist and political activist. He worked with fedayeen, Palestinian fighters in Jordan in the 70s.
The Sabra and Shatila massacre refers to the 1982 killings of 3,500 civilians – mostly Palestinians and Lebanese Shias – in the city of Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War.
Four hours in Shatila / Journal of Palestine Studies Vol. 12, No. 3 (1983).
PLO is the acronym for The Palestine Liberation Organization.
Prisoner of Love is a memoir of Genet's encounters with Palestinian fighters and Black Panthers.
Lerna was reputed to be an entrance to the underworld in greek and roman mythology. Known from The 12 labours of Hercules.
The Labours of Hercules by Alice A. Bailey, 1974.