Disruption or Annihilation of Palestinian Life Is Inherent to Zionist Project
| Truthout
The South African militant Barry Vincent Feinberg once observed that an “an
unusually large number of poems stem from Palestinian poets.” A Palestinian
poet responding to Feinberg’s comment replied, “the only thing my people have
never been denied is the right to dream.” This is an extraordinary but
consistent feature of Palestinian life despite one hundred years of colonial
violence.
The Palestinian poet’s words, like many other poets’, hold a brilliant
contradiction. On the one hand, Palestinian art chronicles the violent
expulsion/control of Palestinians from/within the social body, but on the other
hand the existence of this art in conditions of debilitation is a rejection of
Palestinian deportation. Such expressions of Palestinian lives in art and daily
living should prompt us to think through Marx’s contention that music was
“really free labor,” and that such labors constituted a continuous leitmotif
within and despite capitalist alienation.
Palestine today, I contend, actualizes this irrepressible human strain within
capitalism — a reason why, like the slave rebellions in Marx’s time and the
resistance of the Vietnamese in the 1960s, Palestinian struggle resonates today
with a wide swath of the oppressed who see their own struggle or their humanity
being articulated in that of the Palestinian’s.
The Zionist colonizers knew well the power of Palestinian humanity. General
Moshe Dayan once said that reading a poem by Fadwa Tuqan was like “facing
twenty enemy commandos.” This is how Tuqan spoke of Palestine:
our land has a throbbing heart,
it doesn’t cease to beat, and it endures
the unendurable. It keeps the secrets
of hills and wombs. This land sprouting
with spikes and palms is also the land
that gives birth to a freedom-fighter.
This land, my sister, is a woman. (Fadwa Tuqan, Hamza)
This “dream” of Palestine is of course beyond formal creative energies (such as
composing poetry or music), but a dream of return, of homelands, and of
histories — thus indicating a set of purposive conscious labors to sustain that
“dream.” Such “rational” labor, aiming at the fullness of human flourishing, is
quintessentially the species being of humanity. Bertell Ollman indicates that
the closest Marx comes to defining “human nature in general” is when he says,
“The whole character of a species … is contained in the character of its life
activity; and free, conscious activity is man’s species character.”13 What can
we call a people who constantly, ceaselessly, despite every attempt against
them, continue to perform “free, conscious activity?” In another time and
place, we called them revolting slaves, or resistant Vietnamese. Today, without
a doubt, we call them Palestinians. Or a people who despite sustained violence
and dispossession, continue to express the core instinct of humanity, what it
is to be free. In Mahmoud Darwish’s words:
A woman soldier shouted:
Is that you again? Didn’t I kill you?
I said: You killed me … and I forgot, like you, to die. (Mahmoud Darwish,
“Jerusalem”)
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