REFLECTIONS ON THE GAZA YOUTH MANIFESTO

NOVANEWS

People have been asking me what I think of the Gaza Youth Breaks Out statement. Here are my thoughts, pro­vi­sion­ally; I’m still asking around. The youth who wrote that document could face con­se­quences, and they were brave to have written it. There is a lot in the document that anyone should agree with. It expresses certain shared frustrations here. There are also unfor­tu­nate equiv­a­lences acci­den­tally implied that good people, including the manifesto’s authors, should reject, and have abjured.

Fateh bureau­crats live lux­u­ri­ously in Ramallah, while Bedouin in Gaza struggle for wells to draw undrink­able water from the Strip’s dying aquifer, and Israeli soldiers gun down sleeping Pales­tin­ian men in Hebron and Israeli snipers shoot shepherds in the back in Beit Lehiya.

Those who make martyrs are not equiv­a­lent to the gov­ern­ment that avenges them. Whatever problems—some under­stand­able—people have with the Hamas gov­ern­ment, it was Hamas militia who were murdered defending their country during the Cast Lead attack, and I am sure that the authors of the manifesto are aware of this.

Their Pales­tin­ian critics certainly are.The statement has attracted attention both from eager pro­gres­sives and leftists peering at Palestine, and from the Zionist media and Israeli youth who have fixated on the manifesto’s opening line and probably ignored too much of the rest of it, as they ignore students’ letters that lack that beguil­ingly profane beginning. As Israeli has­barais­tas know, wars are also mediatic, and they pay attention to the dis­gruntle­ment of the natives when it’s con­ve­nient, not because they care.

For activists for Palestine and those otherwise intensely concerned with the lib­er­a­tion struggle here, attention is under­stand­able. For others, there’s more than a bit of colonial voyeurism visible: look at them look how they hate their gov­ern­ment look how they hate the Islamists they are secular we are secular maybe they’re pro-Israel a nascent PA? The group’s message board is filled with racist joy that some people within Gaza are crit­i­ciz­ing Hamas.

If those people cared, perhaps they’d pay attention to theexchanges between the gov­ern­ment and the Inde­pen­dent Com­mis­sion on Human Rights, or to the work of the PCHR. They never do. The people who wrote the manifesto know the dif­fer­ence between sup­port­ers and those mas­querad­ing as sup­port­ers, and few here are so stupid to confuse the two. There is a big dif­fer­ence between the gov­ern­ment that shuts down Sharek and the gov­ern­ment that has penned them into the last ghetto, and they know that.

An older friend told me he thinks the manifesto will blow over. Maybe, but maybe not. To me, the manifesto is important because of what it conveys: frus­tra­tion, and a wish for change. No one writes such a dangerous manifesto just as catharsis, and the way it has moved through the English-reading Pales­tin­ian uni­ver­sity community cannot be read as just an upper-class fad, espe­cially since that community cuts across class and religious lines.

I know kids from the camps who have enthused about the document, and religious people from poverty-struck families who have done the same. Frus­tra­tion with the political horizon is not restricted to the rich here, desperate to live debauched lives like their peers in the West. One student writes, “Our feelings of despair, irri­ta­tion and resent­ment are the same” as those who drafted the manifesto, admon­ish­ing them for not making it better. And it will be re-written. The authors have already released a clar­i­fy­ing statement.

They are not dumb, and know which sparkles caught the eye of their tor­men­tors to the north and west, and it wasn’t the stuff about “fuck Israel.” Meanwhile, it has inspired debate—where’s the political vision? Where’s the call for tactical sol­i­dar­ity? Why no mention of BDS? Why the hint of nihilism?–and that’s good, because we never know which spark will set off fiery revolt, which enraged polemic will make people think through the steps required to get unity, something that won’t come from above–it’ll come from below.

We cannot but barely directly affect the internal dynamics of mobi­liza­tion of Pales­tin­ian society. Those who care will critique, highlight, tend, support, fund, hope, struggle, and all the while, do our best to overthrow our own gov­ern­ments, the most important work we can do to support the people of Palestine, be they Hamas or Fateh or neither, keeping front and center that this is an anti-colonial struggle—the last one—and that while Gaza remains a ghetto we all live in a world of walls.

Technorati Tags: Gaza, Gaza Youth Breaks Out, Hamas, Israel, Palestine, resistance movements

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