Tag Archives colonisation

Tearing down the walls that colonise Palestine, a thousand bricks at a time

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Palestinians are showing enormous bravery during this moment of horror. The walls of intimidation and despair that Israel has erected in the minds of Palestinians to prevent resistance are being torn down. Now that everyone has seen that Palestinians will no longer be silent , we need the rest of the world to respond with corresponding acts of courage and support, tearing down the wall of silence, inaction and complicity so Palestinians can finally enjoy freedom, justice and equality.

A man waves the Palestinian flag for Eid al-Fitr prayers at the Dome of the Rock Mosque in the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in the Old City of Jerusalem, Thursday, May 13, 2021. (AP Photo/Mahmoud Illean)

Yesterday, without prior warning, a close relative of mine, 84, experienced an eruption of long-suppressed memories of his traumatic childhood during the 1948 Nakba and was overcome by mixed feelings of ominous fear and liberating hope. While unbearable, the images of the latest massacre of Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip did not bring him to this emotional tipping point, nor did the images of the brutal repression of worshippers in the Al-Aqsa mosque compound or the relentless forcible displacement of Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah and around occupied East Jerusalem.

What did was the view, from his little balcony in Akka (Acre), of young Palestinians struggling to fend off a mob of far-right Jewish Israelis roaming the streets, chanting “death to Arabs”, and hunting Palestinians to lynch. The same thing happened to indigenous Palestinian communities in Lydda, Jaffa, Ramleh, Haifa, Bat Yam and in other places, triggering calls for international protection.

As my relative looked on, memories of his beloved Haifa in 1948 gushed through his mind – of Zionist militias aided by British soldiers literally chasing Palestinians at gunpoint to the sea. Of the makeshift raft his family had to board, heading to Lebanon ‘for safety’. Of his father’s wise decision to disembark in Acre instead.

Yet, even as these memories filled his mind – memories of existential fear and the trauma of vulnerability – they shared space with a new and inexplicable hope. “My generation lost Palestine,” he said. He then continued with a defiant inflection and a smile: “But this new generation is courageous, resilient, determined to resist and to overcome 73 years of our ongoing Nakba. All they… I mean, all we need is some, just some, more courage from the world.”

Cracks in the walls that colonise the mind

It is not naïveté or fatalism that gives hope to my elder relative or the Palestine diaspora. It is the fact that the dual walls that Israel has so systematically erected over decades – the walls it is truly trying to ‘guard’ – are showing some serious cracks, if not beginning to topple. The first of these walls is Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s ‘iron wall’ of despair that has colonised Palestinian minds. The second, just as inhibiting and debilitating, is the wall of intimidation that inhibits many people of influence worldwide from speaking out for Palestinian rights.

In 1923, Jabotinsky, a prominent Zionist leader, theorised the necessity of the first wall: “Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonized…. Zionist colonization must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population.” He recommended an ‘iron wall’ to overpower the native Arab Palestinian population, partly by colonising our minds through instilling a sense of hopelessness and making us internalise a sense of inferiority, as Frantz Fanon puts it. Decades later, and backed by the United States and the European Union, Israel had built concrete walls and employed its Dahiya Doctrine (a doctrine of extreme, ‘disproportionate’ violence targeting Palestinian – and Lebanese – civilians and civilian infrastructure) precisely to sear into our collective consciousness the futility of resisting its colonial hegemony.

As for the other wall, Israel and its lobby groups have invested massive resources in building it in the minds of opinion-shapers globally, especially in the West, making the price of dissence, of defending Palestinian rights, ruthlessly painful to one’s career, reputation, and even mental health. Analysing this wall, Edward Said explained how ‘avoidance’ and “fear of speaking out about one of the greatest injustices in modern history [Palestine] has hobbled, blinkered, muzzled many who know the truth and are in a position to serve it.”

Cracks in both walls have started to widen under pressure from fearless Palestinian popular resistance across historic Palestine and the corresponding courage that Hollywood celebrities, prominent musicians, star athletes, and millions of activists worldwide are displaying in standing up against the injustice. The bravery of Palestinian families in Sheikh Jarrah defending their homes against forcible displacement is among the factors inspiring tens of thousands of other Palestinians to participate in acts of civil disobedience. The same Palestinian bravery was visible in the thousands who defended the occupied Old City of Jerusalem against a ‘pogrom’ by Israeli ‘Jewish fascists’ – a pogrom, moreover, encouraged by government officials expressing “racist, even genocidal animus towards Palestinians” – as the progressive Jewish American group If Not Now described it.

This bravery has inspired an outpouring of support across new and vital parts of the US landscape. Expressing a growing sentiment in the US Congress, and connecting military funding to Israel with social and justice struggles at home, representative Cori Bush said, “The fight for Black lives and the fight for Palestinian liberation are interconnected. We oppose our money going to fund militarized policing, occupation, and systems of violent oppression and trauma… we are anti-apartheid. Period.” Susan Sarandon tweeted, “What’s happening in Palestine is settler-colonialism, military occupation, land theft and ethnic cleansing.” Halsey wrote, “It is not ‘too complicated to understand’ that brown children are being murdered + people are being displaced under the occupation of one of the most powerful armies in the world.” Viola Davis, Mark Ruffalo, Natalie Portman, and many others expressed solidarity with Palestinians.

These cracks, which shatter much of the silence that Palestinians have often witnessed, reflect the cumulative, creative, and strategic efforts exerted over years by Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) and other Palestine solidarity campaigners around the world, including those by progressive Jewish groups. A 2018 US poll for instance shows that 40 percent of Americans (56 percent of Democrats) support imposing sanctions or more serious measures on Israel to stop its occupation.

A particularly important source of Palestinian hope is the growing impact of the Palestinian-led nonviolent BDS movement, which aims to end Israel’s regime of military occupation, settler-colonialism, and apartheid and defends the right of Palestinian refugees to return home. Sovereign funds in Norway, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and elsewhere have divested from Israeli or international companies, and banks that are implicated in Israel’s occupation. Mainstream churches in South Africa have endorsed BDS, while major churches in the United States, including the Presbyterian Church and the United Methodist Church, have divested from complicit US companies and/or Israeli banks. The city of Dublin in 2018 became the first European capital to adopt BDS, while tens of other cities and hundreds of cultural institutions and public spaces across Europe have declared themselves Israeli Apartheid Free Zones. BDS has won the endorsement of major international trade union federations in South Africa, Latin America, India, Europe, Canada, and the United States. Thousands of artists, academics, and hundreds of student governments, LGBTQI+ groups, and social justice movements across the world have also endorsed BDS accountability measures.

The main contribution of the BDS movement to Palestinian liberation, however, is its role in decolonising Palestinian minds from deep-seated powerlessness, and in leading a radical praxis of globalised, intersectional resistance, transformation, and emancipation.

Today, more than ever, Palestinians are telling the world that true solidarity with our struggle for freedom, justice, and equality spells out BDS. We are shattering our wall of fear every day, and we need not just “some more courage”, as my relative from Acre said, but an eruption of meaningful solidarity that ends all complicity in Israel’s oppression.

This article was edited by Lize Swartz. The original appeared here.

Opinions do not necessarily reflect the views of the ISS or members of the Bliss team.

About the author:

Omar Barghouti is a Palestinian human rights defender and cofounder of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights, former ISS Visiting Research Fellow. He is corecipient of the 2017 Gandhi Peace Award.

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Women’s Month 2019 | Seed keepers, memory keepers: native women and food sovereignty by Leila Rezvani

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When North America was colonised, the relationship of indigenous people with food was also colonised. But a group of women acting as seed keepers for their communities are fighting back, practicing decolonisation in their daily work and addressing the legacy of food colonisation through the reclamation of seeds and the traditions, practices, and affective relations that nurture human-plant-environment relationships and keep Native communities thriving, healthy, and connected.

Understanding the colonisation of North America begins with understanding food. Europeans thought that Natives could be ‘civilized’ through their stomachs. Targeting Native diets and methods of food provisioning was a way to control and disempower. Native populations of humans, non-human animals, and plants were decimated due to disease and violence. In what is now called the United States, native groups were forced onto individual allotments, often marginal land away from ancestral homes. Sedentary farming was viewed as the rational form of land use, shaping the native in the white yeoman farmer’s image.

And in residential schools, Native languages, dress and diets were forcefully repressed and replaced with English, European clothing and foods like wheat and dairy, which were largely absent from Native diets previously (Vernon 2015).

The legacy of this physical and cultural violence is clear: today, at least 60 Native reservations struggle with food insecurity, and Native families are four times as likely as other US families to report having not enough to eat (PWNA 2017). This places many Native communities in a relationship of dependence with the US Government: the USDA provides canned goods, powdered milk, processed cheese and white sugar, contributing directly to high rates of diabetes, heart disease, and obesity (Vernon 2015).

Fighting back

Native women are addressing the legacy of food colonisation by asserting their communities’ right to grow food for themselves—food that nourishes human bodies, cultural tradition, and the wider web of non-human species and environments. These women and the groups they work with not only promote food sovereignty but practice it: Winona La Duke of the Anishinnaabe founded the White Earth Land Recovery Project, which bought back 1,200 acres of tribal land that had been appropriated by the US government and began a project to revive the collection of wild rice, an important traditional food.

Rowen White of the Mohawk Nation founded Sierra Seeds, a company selling locally adapted and heritage varieties, and directs the Indigenous Seed Keepers Network (ISKN). In the winter of 2018, the ISKN came to an agreement with Seed Savers Exchange, a public access seedbank of rare and heritage varieties, to identify and rematriate[1] varieties of corn, beans and squash that originated in Native communities (White, n.d.).

Rufina Juarez, a Chicana Indigenous woman, helped organise the 14-acere South Central Farm, maintained by 350 primarily Central American families as a space to grow culturally appropriate, nourishing food in 20-by-30-foot plots. The farm was a haven for immigrants to grow food that connected them to the places they left behind: nopales, corn, squash, tlapanche and papalo greens, lettuces, strawberries, cabbages (Mark 2006). The farm was bulldozed in 2006 even after farm advocates were able to raise money to meet the $16 million asking price. (Juarez 2010, Gordon 2006).

And still, new challenges constantly arise: climate change alters traditional migratory routes of important game animals like caribou, land grabbing for industrial monocropping or extraction removes land from indigenous stewardship, and biopiracy[2] and corporate consolidation of the seed industry deteriorates crop biodiversity (Cultural Survival 2013). Native women continue to organise in the face of these challenges, recognising that colonisation is an ongoing, evolving process, deeply tied to the machinations of globalised capital.

Enduring practices

The work of seed keeping and the maintenance of community tradition it entails is often, but not exclusively, spearheaded by women. Collaboration between many stakeholders, Native or not, young and old, male, female, or otherwise, is key. I chose to highlight these initiatives because women are central and powerful, but are not burdened with speaking for ‘nature’, from an essentialised, gender-based position. Rather, their work builds on traditions of care, affectivity, and community network building that women and others have performed for generations, throughout the trauma of colonisation and the attempted, but unsuccessful, erasure of native foodways.

[1] “Rematriate” means returning the seeds to their place of origin. “Repatriate” is more commonly used, but here I chose to retain the word used in White’s article, which consciously imputes a feminine quality to the seed and the land to which it is returning.

[2] Biopiracy describes the process by which biological or genetic material (commonly from medicinal or crop plant or animal species) is obtained and exploited for commercial use without the knowledge or consent of the original ‘owners’ or stewards of the material. The most common situation is multinational pharmaceutical or agrochemical/seed companies using indigenous plant knowledge to locate commercially valuable species, stela them, and then patent them so they become exclusive property of the corporation. The term was originally coined by Pat Mooney of the ETC Group and popularized by Vandana Shiva of Navdanya.

References
‘Combating Food Insecurity on Native American Reservations'(2017) , pp. 1-4Partnership with Native Americans and Northern Plains Reservation Aid.
‘Maintaining the Ways of our Ancestors: Indigenous Women Address Food Sovereignty’ (Last updated 13 October 2013) (a webpage of Cultural Survival). Accessed 16 February 2019 <https://www.culturalsurvival.org/news/maintaining-ways-our-ancestors-indigenous-women-address-food-sovereignty>.
Alvarez, L. (Last updated 2019) ‘Colonization, Food, and the Practice of Eating’ (a webpage of The Food Empowerment Project). Accessed 13 February 2019 <http://www.foodispower.org/colonization-food-and-the-practice-of-eating/>.
Gordon (14 June 2006) ‘LA’s South Central Farm Shut Down and Bulldozed’ Tree Hugger. Accessed 16 February 2019 <https://www.treehugger.com/corporate-responsibility/las-south-central-farm-shut-down-and-bulldozed.html>.
Mark (9 June 2006) ‘Could the battle for South Central Farm be coming to a close?’ Grist. Accessed 25 February 2019 <https://grist.org/article/mark2/>.
Juarez, R. (2010) ‘Indigenous Women in the Food Justice and Sovereignty Movement: Lessons from the South Central Farm’, NACCS Annual Conference: Chicana/o Environmental Justice Struggles for a Post-Neoliberal Age, 1 April 2010. San Jose State University pp1-10.
Vernon, R.V. (2015) ‘A Native Perspective: Food is More than Consumption’, Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development 5(4): 137-142.
White, R. ‘Indigenous Seed Keepers Network: The Long Way Home; Seed Rematriation at Taos Pueblo’ (a webpage of Native Food Alliance). Accessed 13 February 2019 <https://nativefoodalliance.org/indigenous-seedkeepers-network/>.

This article is part of the series `Women´s Month 2019´, in which members of the ISS gender committee reflect on women´s issues on Bliss.

Image Credit: https://www.stopthewall.org/apartheid-wrong

About the author:

leilaLeila Rezvani is a Master’s student in the AFES major. She comes from Southern Vermont, USA, and is interested in the politics of scientific knowledge production, seed systems, plant breeding and thinking about how the agro-food system could be more just for plants, people and non-human animals. She misses the mountains and hopes to work for a small seed company or farm someday (soon).