Normalization
It’s not that easy
It’s fairly early in the morning for this culture, 10:30 a.m. in fact. It’s time for Alex’s first music lesson in Beit Sahour. We bang on the door and Tareq, with puffy eyes and his cheeks still red with pillow creases across his face, opens up the door. Within a few short minutes, Tareq had won over Alex’s affection, and he had my little boy making his own little brand of music and harmony. Seeing how my son had fully let himself go into Tareq’s care, I stepped outside to sip a coffee and have a smoke under the warm sun knowing that sometimes daddy can be a distraction.
I thought deeply about this in the context of “Normalization,” the dynamic shared when Israelis and Palestinians work together in a way that perpetuates the structures of violence and oppression. The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) lays out the definition of Normalization in pretty explicit and legitimate terms: “as the participation in any project, initiative or activity, in Palestine or internationally, that aims (implicitly or explicitly) to bring together Palestinians (and/or Arabs) and Israelis (people or institutions) without placing as its goal resistance to and exposure of the Israeli occupation and all forms of discrimination and oppression against the Palestinian people.”
It’s an understandable position, one which is essential to liberation. But nonetheless, one that is incomplete. While the PCABI and subsequent articles elsewhere have laid out the multitude of ways this manifests itself and as a result perpetuates the conflict, where I get tripped up on the full acceptance of this framework for assessing the virtues of programs and relationship dynamics is that understanding what is to “resist” is nebulous at best.
Over the years, “resistance” has meant different things at different times. But one thing for sure is, sometimes resistance is subtle. And in my life, I often lose the profound in the subtleties.
But when I look at the culture, the political structures, how the dominant narratives continue to demonize and perpetuate violence, I can’t help feel there is resistance to that when Alex, a young Israeli Jew takes a music lesson from Tareq, a Palestinian from Bethlehem. The formation of that relationship combats the narrative of “the other.”
It happens in a natural, unstructured way. But having said that, Tareq and I discuss the occupation. We acknowledge the existence and as such, recognize the inherent privileges that Alex has as result of simply being Israeli.
But I think this begs the question: What does it mean for Israelis and Palestinians to resist?
