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Occupation magazine - Commentary

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Looking back at “September”: Reclaiming the Palestinian Story
Toine van Teeffelen--October 6, 2011--September was marked by a momentary sense of joy and celebration and also a sense of relief in the West Bank. Would Mahmoud Abbas keep his promise to submit the UN bid for a Palestinian state, or would he withdraw at the last moment under pressure of the Western powers? In Bethlehem we saw flags on the street and listened to the honking of cars, as normally occurs during wedding celebrations or when a political party wins the university elections. There was a sense of anticipation, of possibility. That sense was not felt since long.

But the honking and celebrations didn’t last long either. Nobody really thought that now or in the foreseeable future a Palestinian state would emerge or that the occupation would withdraw. In fact, if a change on the ground would happen, people felt, it would likely be to the worse. The cutting of economic aid by US congress, now implemented, and the “punishments” the Israeli government and parliament threatened to meet out, could plunge Palestinians in the occupied territories into deeper uncertainty. It could also lead to – as Abbas hinted in his UN speech – the collapse of the Palestinian Authority because of lack of funding and other resources.


But this sense of uncertainty and concern was not dominating. It was overcome by a sense of newly found freedom and dignity. To be sure: no freedom from occupation, but from a set of rules that have kept the Palestinians into captivity like chains. The talk about punishment came exactly because the UN bid showed the present Palestinian leadership willing and able to refuse to play the ground rules of the game. They dared to challenge them.

We know what the old, malicious game has been all about: “managing” the conflict. It has been about preventing an Intifada against the occupation to happen - the “explosion” of which so many political commentators have been afraid. It is about providing funds to the Authority in exchange for it being receptive to Western incentives and deterrents. The context is equally malicious: an American dominated peace process that has led to nowhere and in practice functioned as a cover for the continuing and deepening colonization of the West Bank and the strangulation of Gaza.

The PNA could not afford to be eternally imprisoned by this well-known paradigm of pursuing a peace-process-for-its-own-sake. It took the decision to bring the Palestine question onto the world stage and in front of global civil society. The geo-political factors that encouraged Mahmoud Abbas and the PNA leadership to make a leap into a new political paradigm are clear. They include the Arab Spring, which created a new regional sense of possibility. Turkey has become willing to defy Israel’s policies. Mubarak used to have a strong grip on Fatah and Palestinian factional politics, but is now gone. There is the emerging Turkish-Egyptian axis in the Eastern Mediterranean. Last but not least. the US shows itself unable, at least for the moment, to mold the new power configuration to its interests.

Besides these various amenable circumstances, the peace process has exhausted itself. It is publicly exposed as a lie by the hypocrisy of Netayahu and his government in speaking peace in public and destroying peace on the ground. Among common Palestinians there is a sense that the whole “process” has continued for much too long and has primarily been aimed at eating up Palestinian lands and rights, slowly but surely. Since long Mahmoud Abbas has not been identified with a people’s story of liberation. The PNA could not have continued for long to openly play a game without being able to explain its national meaning.

The sense of change contains an element of liberation, psychologically and educationally. In the West Bank, people for a long time have been tired and humiliated by the constant pressures of the occupation. At the same time, the inner human determination was eroded by the interfactional politics of Fatah and Hamas, and the continuous vulnerability of the PNA leadership to external pressures. Some people under occupation signed up to an economic peace for individual profit’s sake. The majority felt that neither endless negotiations nor a counterproductive armed struggle with its own repetitive scripts would lead to liberation. However, they could not see a clear alternative. While there is still no feeling that a new page is turned, there is a restored sense of dignity and confidence, and an openness to new possibilities.

If indeed a new paradigm is entering Palestinian politics, what are its contours? Engaging with the global civil society is not walking a repetitive script imposed by others but rather once again putting the Palestinian story center stage. It is about reclaiming and re-enacting the many Palestinian individual and community stories which together constitute the larger national story. Local protests against the occupation as well as the Arab Spring forced the Authority to incorporate people’s stories into its own politics. The drama of the UN and the Security Council vote add a much-publicized new national story to the earlier human stories on the ground.

These stories on the ground of organized popular and peaceful resistance receive less or more publicity but they are there all the time. The weekly demonstrations in Palestinian villages against the Wall, like in Bil’in, often designed with narrative imagination and drama, show international and local solidarity in the face of soldiers armed to the teeth. The initiatives to sail to Gaza and bring emergency relief is the basic human story of risking the military and facing the waters, just for the simple human goal of supporting a people under siege. In spring this year there were the courageous walks by Palestinian refugees from Syria and Lebanon enacting their right of return, trying to cross the border and facing the powerful Israeli army unarmed. There are the human stories of the boycott of Israeli products and events that sustain the occupation. The South African anti-Apartheid story of liberation still inspires. There are the countless stories of women showing their sumud or steadfastness in not loosing their human spirit; stories which also find their way to the world by the use of new media and genres of communication.

What brings back the national story instead of the imposed script is this element of human defiance and liberation which also characterized Abbas’ UN speech this time, as if he was saying: “Whatever you tell me to do, I have my rights and will fight for them.” It is a willingness to be pro-active in the face of deep uncertainty and many obstacles on the road to liberation.

To face the obstacles, conditions need to be fulfilled to increase the potential of a national story which incorporates community and individual stories. These conditions include a deepening connection to the Arab spring or “awakening” - both metaphors pointing to potentialities – which means a strong connection to the Arab peoples, also for moral and material support. They include a national unity which is not a slogan and which strives for unity among all sections of the people and not only Fatah and Hamas. It is about a restructuring and democratic reform of the PLO; free elections among the Palestinians, and a Palestinian leadership that is genuinely sharing and not only symbolically interested in people’s courageous stories of sumud on the ground. It requires pressures on Arab regimes, both in the neighboring and Gulf states, for a firm stand confronting the double standards of the US, whose only politics towards the Palestinians seems to be the threatening of cutting aid wherever the notion of Palestinian independence comes up (as in UNESCO). And of course it requires moral and material support from across civil society. The Palestinian nonviolent struggle of liberation is connected in myriad ways to the local, regional and global environment.

From among Palestinians themselves it requires a willingness to sacrifice once more. Engaging a people’s story implies the facing of deep uncertainty and risks, a dramatic struggle to attain a horizon of human values, and a challenge of inhuman obstacles to be taken.

In the wake of the September UN bid the economic situation on the ground may deteriorate, but at the same time the Palestinian story of liberation has returned to come on the foreground. Will it stay there? We don’t know. But a renewed sense of facing an open future, a sense of sumud or hope, rather than imprisonment by the past has come back, not just because of the UN bid, but because it is interwoven with the many human and community stories in the pursuit of dignity and freedom, both on the ground and in various local and international contexts.

Toine van Teeffelen is development director of the Arab Educational Institute in Bethlehem and anthropologist.
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