Rising Again from the Ashes and the Rubble...
Maryam Sakeenah
While the bombs have gone silent in Gaza, there is something that has fundamentally changed about the world as we know it, and about ourselves. The fragile assumptions on which most of us had constructed our worldview have fallen apart. So many things we took for given have been rendered questionable and uncertain. So much about our own selves has been laid bare before the mirror that Gaza holds up to us. The carefully crafted façade of modernity has turned out to be a dystopian abyss we cannot make sense of. Gaza has told us loud and clear that the Emperor has no clothes on.
The ‘isms’ that came from the Western Enlightenment boasting of human ingenuity and prowess have fallen apart. The horrific scale of genocidal violence unleashed upon Gaza exposes humanity’s blood-lust and makes us shrink from our own brutal and sadistic selves.
In the realm of international relations, the Palestinian genocide has made it clear that the Westphalian world order based on sovereign nation-states has had its day, and that world peace is as elusive and as nebulous as it ever was.
The near-consensus of Western states and institutions over the bloodbath in Gaza shows how violence has been engendered and endemic in the very body politic of modern Western nation-states with all pillars of state and society fully complicit- policy and governance, economics and finance, education and the media. Gaza lays bare the endemic structural violence built into the bare bones of modernity. Violence of these gargantuan proportions cannot occur all of a sudden in a vacuum. It takes centuries, millennia and generations to build a system in which violence against a group becomes normalized.
Under the veneer of democratic progress, supremacist narratives of ‘other-ization’ have been transmitted inter-generationally. Metanarratives of hate and fear lie at the very root of social structures which allow genocides to happen to ‘others’ for fifteen months. Violent ideologies that dehumanize the ‘otherized’ are interwoven into the very structures of modern secular societies, normalizing and mainstreaming hate, bias, discrimination and prejudice, letting the suffering of the target group continue as a matter of course. Gaza continued to burn for 15 months while for the rest of the world it was business as usual.
But what of our shared innate humanity, our capacity to empathize? As people are fed with narratives of Western moral superiority through mainstream media and education that celebrate secular democracy and liberty as progressive ideals, voices on the contrary are discredited and silenced. When this happens over decades, only the narrative of the powerful begins to hold sway. This makes the un-seeing of another community’s suffering and erasure of its voices possible. The enormity of the suffering in Gaza is apparently not enough to move those who believe a state implanted in the Middle East by the West has the ‘right to defend itself’ using all means fair and foul.
Gaza rubbishes all hegemonic narratives of Western essentialism. It makes clear that the Western colonial project that began in the 17th century and of whom Israel is the last vestige, never really ended. In fact, the might of the entire Western civilization is invested into the preservation of the Zionist blue-eyed boy amidst hostile brown Arabs.
Many systemic biases have come to the fore over the course of the Gaza genocide, reflected in the rhetoric of Western politicians and the way the global media covered the genocide- without, of course, ever calling it a genocide. According to Francesca Albanese in an interview with ‘The Thinking Muslim’, “There are double standards towards Palestine in the West, which are now fully exposed.”
It is important to understand the roots of this inherent bias that this rhetoric comes packed in. The roots go deep into the centuries-old deep-seated Orientalist biases in the Western imagination. Although the Jewish people have a history of victimization in Europe, over the years with the rise of the Capitalistic economy and the participation of the Jewish community in it on a global scale, Jews came to be seen as vital and central to the modern laissez faire economy. Driven by political and economic exigencies at the end of the First World War, it was Western diplomats who allowed the colonial implantation of the Jewish state upon Arab land. At the time, Europe was embroiled in conflict with the Islamic Ottoman empire, and it was expedient to get the support of the well placed and powerful Jewish community. Israel, therefore, began as a Western project. It was also a quick and ill thought-out ‘fix’ for a Western problem: the Jewish holocaust in Hitler’s Germany.
The US being the ‘land of opportunity’ attracted sizeable Jewish populations who made the best of American capitalism and thrived, developing a powerful and influential Zionist lobby. The American Jewish lobby exercises tremendous power and influence over elections as well as the global news media. The lobby works to perpetuate unconditional political and economic support for Israel in Western houses of power and to mainstream the Zionist narrative through the media.
Most of those who settled in the ‘holy land’ were immigrants and refugees from Europe and then America. Most settlers are ethnically white Europeans and bring with them the culture and values of Europe and the US. Israel therefore became part of the West in the midst of a religiously and ethnically different yet strategically important region: the Middle East. It was perceived as part of the ‘Us’ pitted against ‘Them.’ The Palestinian Arabs whose lands and homes were stolen to make way for Israel were never perceived as worthy of human rights, dignity and self-determination, as they were the hostile ‘Other’ of a different race and religion, dehumanized and negatively stereotyped.
As the tide of manic Islamophobia rose in the wake of 9/11, Israel came to be seen as the victim of the common enemy of so called ‘Islamic terrorism’ or ‘Jihadism.’ Hence the legitimate struggle of the Palestinians came to be seen as violence and terror, and gelled perfectly well with the raison de etre of the US’s so-called ‘War on Terror.’ The Palestinian cause continued to be disregarded, even erased from the Western imagination, and Palestinians continued to be depicted as perpetrators rather than victims in Western discourse.
The same mindset has also dominated scholarship and academia. At the front of the effort to snuff out the Palestinian Solidarity Movement mushrooming in universities were academic administrations. Once again, UN Human Rights Rapporteur Ms Albanese lamented, “Human rights are only good to be taught in universities, not to be demanded in the streets trying to exercise freedom of assembly all the more for Palestine… that is what you are teaching your young generations.” Western universities which fully control higher education, academic research and scholarship have established an epistemic hegemony over Knowledge itself. The language and ideology of coloniality has infiltrated and dominated the Academy itself. It is academic scholarship from these seats of learning in the West that is mainstreamed, accorded prestige and credibility, whereas other forms of knowledge, learning and alternative education models are shorn of these.
Yet Gaza has created a paradigm shift. It has raised important questions about how lasting peace can ever be conceived within a system rooted in endemic structural violence. How can authentic knowledge be sought in an academic culture created by this epistemic hegemony of knowledge that sustains genocide and erasure?
Gaza has exposed the gaping-wide cracks beneath the veneer of modern civilization. The site of credible knowledge has begun to shift away from the Western Academy. The site of credible information has shifted away from the mainstream global news media. It is those standing against these oppressive structures- those marginalized voices- wherein a possible future for humanity resides.
The only task ahead of us worth taking up to save what remains of our humanity is to dismantle and challenge this metanarrative of coloniality and epistemic hegemony. To do so, the focus must shift away from institutions of power that have enabled the genocide. The hope to rescue our humanity is embodied by all those who have stood against the false narratives that come from powerful Western institutions: journalists, Gen Z students, poets, artists, academics and scholars, lawyers and activists, Imams and faith leaders… Their voices need to be empowered and their work needs to be projected.
Critical perspectives and voices of resistance, alternative reimagined systems of knowledge and education need to be explored and developed in order to decolonize education. In the alternative media, marginalized voices need to be mainstreamed as we question, reject and make accountable all those institutions that sustained the genocide. Engaged activism needs to continue with the same courage and spirit.
On the economic front, large corporations and enterprises that have contributed to the genocide need to be dismantled through sustained boycotts as we promote smaller cleaner businesses that do not serve political agendas.
The seismic waves for a tectonic shift to a better world where genocides are not let happen will not begin from Western corridors of power, podiums of authority or international forums. These will arise from the hearts and minds of artists, writers, poets, teachers, activists, speakers of truth, thinkers of meaningful change who can dare to dream and reimagine another world. From the debris and rubble of devastated, decimated Gaza, a new world must be birthed in order for our humanity to be salvaged.
