The Politics of Humiliating and Alienating Palestinians
On March 23rd a New York City Councilman, Kalman Yeger, representing District 44 in Brooklyn tweeted:
Palestine does not exist. There, I said it again.
The aftermath of the tweet resulted in rebukes and calls for an apology from Mayor Bill DiBlasio, Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, Attorney General Letitia James and other elected officials. City Council Speaker Corey Johnson removed Yeger from NYC’s Immigration Council, and there has been strong public reaction on Twitter, social media, and by news outlets here in New York and around the country.
I’ve lived in Brooklyn for 18 years and while this is unique for an elected official to air out his views, believe me, his views are nothing new — to many hard-line Jewish-Americans and some dual Israeli-American citizens they really hate Arabs and don’t believe Palestine/Palestinians exist. Notice Yeger’s language “there, I said it again”. What is remarkable is that an elected official is comfortable using his minuscule platform and limited power to alienate a group of people thinking that it would have no repercussions. (The rest of his tweet about Congresswoman Ilhan Omar will have to wait for another day, another post…)
One reason this councilman may have offered his view is that his constituency might be made up of dual Israel-American citizens who vote in the upcoming Israeli elections and so he might think it’s permissible to be a proxy for Netanyahu’s positions and policies. Netanyahu recently came straight out on Facebook and said:
Israel is not a country of all its citizens. According to the Nation-State Law that we passed, Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish nation — and it alone.
Netanyahu has used this rhetoric in prior campaigns, scaring voters into believing that his opponents will bring Palestinians further into Israeli government and society, stoking fear of Arab demographics overtaking Jews. But the rhetoric is the tip of the iceberg as he continues his policies of settlement building, land grabbing, disenfranchising Palestinians, and destabilizing the Palestinian Authority. Perhaps Kalman Yeger is sharing these views with his constituency?
Political messages of hope and change feel like ancient history, but once elected you become a public servant, you’re a representative. Since when is it good politics to disenfranchise people? As we’ve found out in the time following his tweet, besides losing his committee membership, there is a growing movement that it’s not okay to dis Palestinians.
Identifying as Palestinian-American has been and can be incredibly isolating and alienating. Many of us master a kind of code-switching, using diplomatic tact to make people comfortable in conversations. Outside the realm of politics or international relations simply mentioning Palestinian ancestry can be dicey, especially if people hate Arabs, either Muslim or Christian. It takes effort and tact to stand up for the rights of Palestinians without harming relationships. People have made awkward jokes about terrorism or throwing rocks or feel they must immediately point out their position. I’ve been asked if I hate Jews; asked if I should be enemies with the person I’m speaking with right then; asked if I believe Israel should exist or if my grandparents believe the state of Israel should or should not exist. My grandfather was born around 1896, my grandmother not long after, so they kind of pre-dated the state of Israel, so how am I supposed to answer that?
My grandfather left Jerusalem around 1915 to avoid conscription into the Ottoman Turkish army. He made his way to the United States where he peddled his way across the country to Utah and then enlisted in the U.S. Army and served as an artillery man in France during World War I. After the war he came back to Provo, Utah nearly deaf, purchased veteran discounted land to start his farming life, later returning to the “old country” to marry my grandmother to start their family. My father grew up Muslim, Arabic-speaking in Utah, one of ten children who lived into adulthood.
My mother’s family traces back to England, Wales, Denmark, and Scotland who became Mormons somewhere along the way and followed Brigham Young and the Mormon exodus from the midwest to Utah. Our Mormon ancestry is that of pioneers, polygamists, co-operative survival, and good old patriarchy. My grandfather was a surveyor and engineer and worked on WPA projects. My grandmother a nurse, a career my own mother followed before she went on to doctoral work in medical ethics.
My parents met at Brigham Young University in the early 1960’s and fell in love at a time when less than 2% of relationships were considered “interracial”. Early Middle Eastern immigrants identified as “white” in society and on the census, which they likely did to assimilate and avoid racism. But I grew up interracial whether it fits a neat definition or not. The only people like me were my three older brothers and first cousins. We moved away from Utah to a relatively diverse suburb of Washington, D.C where we were better understood, yet still rare. Telling our family story is an attempt to acknowledge our place, that we belong, that we’re part of society. Further, some of us hope to make an impact, make good on our grandparents risky migration, many of us are driven to succeed and make our families and communities proud.
We are driven to succeed and make our families and communities proud.
Palestinian history is a Gordian knot of Western and Asian history, thus the “Middle”. But we’re merely in the “middle” of more recent history. My paternal DNA line is the haplogroup J-P58 which only 1 in 300,000 report on 23andMe (with 5 million customers to compare to.) J-P58 stems off from the haplogroup J-M267 or the J-1 group, shared by many Jews (what up Cohn’s/Cohen’s!) and there were dramatic changes in the last 10,000 years as the fertile crescent civilization transformed. This illustrates the complexity and diversity of DNA and genetics, where the strands of rope that are supposed to delineate race, ethnicity, culture, and religion — what identity means — lead directly back to the knot. We all come from the same place and we’re still loving and fighting each other, and grappling for resources.
Islam, the Arabic language, culture and customs are not genetic, but they connect us, they have importance. But as the Zionist movement gained traction and the 20th century unfurled, the Palestinian struggle became pronounced, the contours of identity are shaped and defined by many forces.
My grandparents always maintained Palestinian identity, like it or not. My grandmother spoke kindly of her Jewish neighbors, what drew her ire were the British and French colonizers. My grandfather listed himself as from “Jerusalem, Palestine” on his draft card registry from 1917. So how can Palestine not exist? I’m sure people will offer me answers and what I’m telling those that deny us — with a polite “go fuck yourself” — is that we exist.
What I’m telling those that deny us — with a polite “go f*** yourself” — is that we exist.
What my identity means to me is that there is a village, now a bustling suburb, outside Jerusalem called Shufat and I can go there and tell people my name and be instantly recognized, welcomed by my family, get a hot tea, and some food. Visiting our ancestral home and never losing the connection means something to me, for some reason, and I want to extend that to my children.
My daughter is almost 11 and forming her identity around our ancestry, trying to figure out where she fits into the world. When we discussed Yeger’s tweet she joked that if there is no Palestine then what are they building the Separation Wall around? 1.) She’s brilliant. 2.) If a child can abstract enough to realize that denying Palestine’s existence is contradictory to reality, then how come an adult cannot? Yeger wants to take all the gray area of what’s happened in this region over thousands of years and paint it black and white, but that’s not possible. Palestine and Palestinians will not go away or be cleansed or disappear because of a tweet or just because people think it. I will not eradicate from my memory banks the influences of my grandmother and our family history.
I recognize how porous identity is, how slippery things can get with DNA and race, yet I still want to maintain some semblance of place, pass along any Palestinian cultural heritage I’ve accrued, show some solidarity with my family and friends in the diaspora and those who live there, who stand to lose more of everything each day. My extended family surely want to live in peace, but at what price? Second class status in a society and no citizenship, rights, or justice? Dispersal? Erasure? And Palestinian-Americans want to be regarded, be part of the discourse without political fallout. We certainly don’t need an elected official tasked with service and shaping citywide policies to have extreme biases. We don’t need an elected official who’s a bully, who seeks to dehumanize, to degrade, to humiliate, to alienate, to use language that stokes anger. So it’s not good politics, it’s the politics of humiliation and alienation, it is the wrong kind of human interaction, and it’s not really going to work for us any longer.
*UPDATE ON APRIL 12TH
This past Wednesday, Councilman Yeger was voted out of his post on the NYC Council Committee on Immigration and his name has been scrubbed from the website.
At the hearing Yeger was defiant, saying, “There is no state [Palestine], nothing I say or what we vote will change it,” and that he was “not denying the existence of Palestinian people.” Well, at least he’s not denying we exist — but kind of a hedge. In the meantime Yeger, and others who share the view, can continue to disregard international law and whatever they want to call East Jerusalem, Gaza and the space within the Separation Wall. Even the Animaniacs gave a shout out to Palestine:
**Also, Benjamin Netanyahu was elected on Tuesday, April 12th with the promise to annex the West Bank and protect illegal settlement outposts. Many are concerned about any prospects for peace in the coming years — the outcomes will not be good for the Palestinian people and we’re going to see what kind of “Democracy” Israel wants to become.
