We Are All Palestinians

 A few weeks ago, I went to the protest encampment on Newcastle University's campus, to sit, chant, listen and add another face to the group. Students were occupying a green space outside the King's Gate building (where students receive therapy, other forms of support, and where a student from the encampment was deliberately injured by a member of staff when they tried to set up a meeting with the Chancellor of the university, Chris Day). The group behind the encampment, Apartheid Off Campus Ncl, has three key demands: that the university disclose all investments with companies currently targeted by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement; that the university divests from those companies and ceases all connection to them; and that they protect the students' right to stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people. They also ask that the university makes a formal pledge regarding these things, and that they call for a ceasefire in Gaza.

Absolutely all of these demands are perfectly reasonable, and follow a non-violent tradition of activism that has roots in the movement against apartheid South Africa in the 80s. They also reflect the supposed values of the university itself, which is covered with images of Martin Luther King Jr. (who received an honorary degree from the uni in 1967). Back when King was still a "controversial" figure (he was jailed twice between accepting the Chancellor's invitation and actually attending the degree ceremony), the university believed it had a ‘corporate responsibility’ to engage with the great social issues of the day. What's changed?

Well, according to the university's website, nothing. "Newcastle is committed to social justice in all that we do," it states: "we are dedicated to working together to create a fairer and more just society". They've even got statements relating to Palestine on their main website. This article from the "Who We Are" page outlines the uni's policy on "Armed Conflict and Forcible Displacement": "any involuntary uprooting from one’s home is a deeply scarring experience," and "a violation of fundamental human rights". The same article goes on to call "the Israeli-Palestinian conflict... [a] gap in international law". So why won't they disclose their investments? Why won't the university issue a public statement calling at least for a ceasefire?

What does a commitment to "social justice" mean, if not standing with the subjects of genocide?

***

When politicians want to deflect attention from the reality of genocide in Palestine, they talk about inconsequential things, like particular chants at pro-Palestine demonstrations. "From the river to the sea", according to Suella Braverman, is "an expression of a violent desire to see Israel erased from the world", rather than the expression of a deep desire to see Palestine remain in the world. Naturally, I've had no objection or discomfort when chanting every expression of solidarity with the Palestinian people, whether it's "this factory kills children" outside the Israeli state-owned weapons manufacturer Rafael in Newcastle, or the simple "free free Palestine".

There is one chant, however, that did initially make me pause. It's come up at every protest and demonstration I've attended so far, and seems to be popping up more and more frequently. The chant, catchy and rhythmic, goes: 

"In our thousands, in our millions,

We are all Palestinians.

In our millions, in our billions,

We are all Palestinians."

Let me explain my discomfort. Even as a working-class person, when I wake, it's in my own bed, in my own home, with food and running water downstairs. When I eat, it's mostly without thought. I do not expect to eat my last meal any time soon. I do not expect a bomb through the ceiling, a gunshot through the window, or a leaflet from the sky telling me to evacuate the place I call home. I know that if I fall ill, or become seriously injured, there is a hospital nearby. I have never dealt with the grief of losing a close family member, never mind tens or hundreds of them, never mind multiple in the space of a month, a week or a day. When I show up to demonstrations, I do not do so with the fear that it may be my last act on earth. When I engage with the reality of the genocide in Palestine, I do so through a screen, through words on a page, and not as a lived experience. 

What right do I have to join this chant, and declare myself a Palestinian?

***

Martin Luther King, Jr., Newcastle University's favourite historical figure, once wrote: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

This is absolutely true. The more the military-industrial complex of Israel expands, the more weapons get sold to other parts of the world, and the more wars proliferate everywhere. The longer Israel wages its devastating assault, the more carbon goes up into the atmosphere, and the quicker climate disaster approaches everywhere in the world. A genocide on the other side of the world inflames tensions within communities in the UK, as well as driving our government intermittently into crisis, as happened with the petty squabbles in February over the wording of a call for a ceasefire, which nearly got the Speaker of the House sacked. Ethnic cleansings anywhere empower bigots and racists everywhere, giving them a cause to defend, a validating image of their own fantasies come to life, and often leading politicians to speak in the same genocidal terms as other, more economically disenfranchised fascists.

The more Israel pummels Palestine, the more bombs it buys from the rest of the world - and the UK is a major supplier. The more weapons the UK supplies to Israel, the bigger the UK weapons industry grows; and the bigger the weapons industry, the more power it has to lobby government to send us into war. STEM students find their post-graduate career options narrowed down to a handful of bloody industries - fossil fuels, arms, and banking. Most students, bombarded with debts and the knowledge of rising rents, don't have the courage to think twice about this, and suppress their own conscience to justify actively courting the interest of these employers. This constant effort produces a violent and unsettled university culture, and more often than not, women studying at UK universities bear the brunt of this violence.

As Omar Barghouti writes: "I do not think that, in a situation of oppression, intellectuals have a choice of whether or not to reflect the impact of conflict on them and on their society. Oppression, in a way, forces itself upon their work, their creative process. Their basic choice seems to be, then, whether to passively reflect it, or to actively transcend it. Oppression, it seems, has its own way of touching everyone within its reach, irrespective of one’s actual involvement in it or will to get involved in it."

Injustice acts like any other force - its energy cannot disappear. It can only disperse. Genocide in the Middle-East is not something we can choose to involve ourselves with or not; we are all already implicated. Our taxes, the investments of our banks, our pension funds, our universities. 

Those of us privileged enough to live in a place built from the labours of a brutal empire, rather than unfortunate enough to have lived in the places forced to actually build it, may think we have a choice here. We may think that we can step back, have other priorities, ignore a genocide our country started in the 1940s. But our lives will be affected nonetheless. The moral cost of suppressing your empathy, of shutting your eyes and averting your ears, is that what you really suppress is yourself.

You and I, wherever and whoever you are, have already changed as a result of the genocide in Palestine. That is mostly because we both know about it now, if we didn't before.

That knowledge can be liberating, or lethal, depending on how we respond.

***

All that being said, there's a meaningful difference between the psychological ill-effects of feigned ignorance and the daily threat of aerial bombardment. There's no way that "in our millions, in our billions, we are all Palestinians", which implies a global solidarity of struggle that includes even the privileged, compares the moral challenge of comfortable students with people who now live without water or shelter.

So how to make sense of it?

Simply by making this distinction: Palestinians are not defined by their suffering, nor by the geography of their homeland. Palestinians are defined by their resistance.

And given that the Israeli state is wrapped up in the warmongering of every other colonial state in the world, and given that Britain is the foremost coloniser of the last several centuries (even if overtaken by America in recent years), people living in Britain have a moral obligation to resist. To adopt the awe-inspiring courage, inventiveness and power it must take for Palestinians to confront a settler-colonial power head-on. We have a responsibility to look at examples of Palestinian resistance, listen to Palestinian people, and read Palestinian history, and let it guide us. The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is a perfect place to start. Local groups are a perfect place to start. Acknowledging this obligation is the only place to start.

I am not Palestinian. In my relatively luxurious, cushioned, comfortable life, I haven't developed a quarter of the resilience it must take to live as a Palestinian in the 21st century.

But collectively, in our struggle for an indigenous people's liberation, in our choice to confront the most powerful states in the modern world, our conviction that this choice is not a choice, but rather a fundamental moral duty, we are all Palestinians.