Palestine: A North African Perspective
Dounia El Barhdadi discusses Islamaphobia and Western colonial narratives, bringing a North African perspective to the language and rhetoric used to discuss Palestine.
From The Battle for Algiers by Gillo Pontecorvo, photo via Wikimedia Commons
This article has been amended post-publication upon request.
62 years ago, French police murdered hundreds of peaceful Algerian protesters in Paris - a massacre known simply as 17th October 1961. There are still no official statistics on the casualties of this historic evening because many of the Algerian protesters were thrown into the Seine and their bodies were never recovered. Today, only Algerian memory of the event endures, since the French State has never officially recognised its culpability, and the Algerian women who were left waiting at home in 1961 have still never been graced with the smallest solace of burying their brothers, fathers and husbands.
So great is the trauma of having the truth of one’s suffering denied, that French postcolonial literature in the 1990s was characterised by a phenomenon we now call ‘the memory wars’. Without official documentation or recognition, the only evidence of that suffering are stories repeated to one another, again and again. Jacques Rancière noted that this State-sanctioned ‘collective amnesia’ functions as ‘annihilation, but also annihilation of that annihilation’, and to this day, Algeria carries on her shoulders the weight of unfinished mourning, which permeates Franco-Algerian diplomatic and civil relations.
We can see in this how literature about Palestine may be characterised in years to come, whether we finally liberate Palestine, or whether she is drowned like Algerians in a sea of forgotten civilisations. Palestine has been overlooked for far too long, and Algeria knows this pain all too well - the French occupation lasted 132 long and brutal years. French Algeria is widely regarded as one the worst examples of colonialism in history: during the War of Independence alone, 8000 villages were destroyed, 1.5 million Algerians were killed, and 2 million were relocated to concentration camps. Between 8th and 22nd of May 1945, while Europeans celebrated the end of WWII, France exterminated 45,000 Algerians for daring to ask for a similar end to their suffering.
My father lived through those events, so that trans-generational trauma is inscribed upon my DNA. The plight of Palestine exists in parallel to the general Arab experience, and her suffering over the last century is a microcosm for that of the Arab world throughout modern history. Just as for our Palestinian brothers and sisters, the late 1940s did not mark the end of a dark period, but rather the beginning of one.
The portrayal of a people as ‘uncivilised’ and ‘barbaric’ by their oppressor is a tale as old as time. Marcel Bigeard, infamous military officer, justified French brutality with claims that FLN activists, and Algerian civilians by extension, were ‘savages’ and ‘animals’, and that their subjugation was a ‘necessary evil’. The same ideology existed in Apartheid South Africa, where the social, economic and legal divide between black and white people was characterised and maintained for almost 50 years by the idea that the latter were intrinsically superior. The myth of intrinsic ethno-superiority can be observed in comments made by Israeli officials for decades; the most notable recent comments include Netanyahu's description of Palestinians as 'children of darkness', as well as Yoav Gallant's assertion that Israel is fighting 'human animals', when questioned about the ethics of disproportionate reprisals in Gaza.
“Being an Arab or a Muslim in a post-9/11 world is exhausting.”
This kind of dehumanising propaganda is embedded in colonial history; every imperial power maintained control through one simple and unifying doctrine. It has many names: the French ‘mission civilisatrice’, the British ‘white man’s burden’, and the German ‘Kulturmission’. These doctrines operate by desensitising the colonial public to the suffering of the colonised through portraying them as ‘Other’, lesser, alien. Even more than this, these doctrines portray the actions of the colonial power as a mercy to the colonised - the latter must be ‘civilised’, and if they do not respond to their education, then it is necessary to remove them altogether. This sentiment was even more recently adopted by the USA in the aftermath of 9/11 through George W. Bush’s ‘War on Terror’. Ultimately however, these missions have one goal: to conceal colonial agenda in the region. This is why France, Britain and the USA have continued to support Israel for decades - Joe Biden admitted this confidently on camera in 1986. France wrote the playbook, Britain and the USA perfected it, and Israel is their biggest fan.
Western allyship to Israel is rooted in a shared colonial history, but, more so, in a shared culture of anti-Arab attitudes, intense Islamophobia, and more concerningly, the dangerous conflation of the two. The notion of unique Palestinian statehood is continually overlooked in favour of the idea that there is one Jewish nation, but 22 Arab ones, and that Palestinians should be absorbed into any one of those Arab nations - this stems from the idea that all Arabs and Muslims are homogenous in totality.
Within my lifetime, this Islamophobic rhetoric has had disastrous consequences, most notably in the Iraq War of 2003. Following 9/11, the US government and her allies farmed vitriol and Islamophobia in order to legitimise the invasion of Iraq, now widely considered to have been barbaric and illegal. As many as 1.2 million Iraqis were killed between 2003 and 2008 as a result of US and British war-mongering, and the wealth of hateful propaganda disseminated during those years planted seeds in the public psyche, easily revived by carefully selected narratives and inflammatory symbolism, reigniting an intense Western fear of Islamist terrorism that they themselves manufactured.
We lived to watch the aftermath of al-Qaeda’s attack unfold in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), and eventually came to the tragic understanding that Bush’s ‘War on Terror’ was more concerned with American and British interests in the region than American security. From this, we can draw our own conclusions about Israeli interests on Gazan land, but regardless, Western reactions to 9/11 unequivocally led to the destabilisation and collapse of several governments in the MENA thereafter, thus inscribing still more trauma on the Arab genome. And yet, the incredible levels of hatred and fear incited from 2001 onwards cannot be so easily curbed, and already we are hearing reports that Islamophobia has risen by 600% since the beginning of October - no doubt that figure will continue to rise steadily.
Being an Arab or a Muslim in a post-9/11 world is exhausting; it demands constant hyper-awareness of what you are, how you are being perceived, and actively striving to prove people wrong at all times by excelling at being good. Born in Oxford in 2002, I grew up in a time and environment where hostility was constantly bubbling under the surface, and I was taught by my North African parents to be polite, well-spoken, generous and agreeable, all so as not to provide anyone with ammunition against myself or those I represented. I saw the way other mothers looked at mine, a small hijabi woman, and I wondered to myself why she wasn’t invited to brunch or asked to make cupcakes for charity bake sales. I wondered why my teachers looked so surprised at parents’ evening, when I, a gifted young student, walked in with two Muslims by my side and called them Mum and Dad. Children echoed words they heard uttered around their dinner tables at home, muttering ‘terrorist’ at me in the playground, ‘camel jockey’, ‘sand monkey’, little jabs about ‘where I came from’. As we grew up, this evolved into well-intentioned but invasive questions about why I didn’t wear a hijab, whether I was to have an arranged marriage and if I condemned radical Islamist terrorism.
“Watching events in Palestine unfold from here, I am overwhelmed with a debilitating, nauseating sense of helplessness.”
The men have it worse; the Islamophobia they face is not attached to white tears and feminist pity. Instead, disdain is transformed into hatred, and the same Islamophobia manifests much more aggressively. My older brother, a distinctly ‘Muslim-looking’ boy, grew accustomed to finding ham sandwiches and bits of pork stuffed into his rucksack by the boys at school every other day. He grew used to pig noises being made at him in the corridors, hateful comments by teachers about the ‘state of the school cohort’, and, after numerous opportunities to practise, he eventually learned to resist physical provocations.
The last of these altercations however, sparked by a cruel racist comment, cost him his place at school and changed the trajectory of his life. Watching him struggle through school was crucial to my understanding of the importance of disguise: no skill of mine was as valuable as my physical ability to look anything other than Arab. So great is the stigmatisation that my father, who experienced firsthand the cruelty of the French in Algeria, as well as long-awaited liberation from them, did not wish for me to be named ‘Dounia’. As the Islamic word for ‘earthly world’ or ‘life before the hereafter’, it evokes too much; I would be too easily identifiable as Muslim. Yet, my mother’s faith is steadfast, so much imbued in every fibre of her being, that she would not let his fear stop her from naming me as she wished, and so here I am today, and the by-line reads ‘Dounia El Barhdadi’.
Watching events in Palestine unfold from here, I am overwhelmed with a debilitating, nauseating sense of helplessness. I think of the remnants of Palestine trampled into the ground, the evidence of her children, tangible and intangible, washed away with blood and ash, buried under rubble and rhetoric. I would like to invite you, the reader, to consider how Israel soon will recover, and equally, how soon might Palestine succumb to her injuries? When all of Palestine only exists in our hearts and minds, will they build casinos and stadiums atop the corpse of Gaza? In a house on that land, will an Israeli family one day sit in their living room watching TV reruns while the bodies of a Palestinian one rot beneath the foundations? When all of this is over, will my children be taught at school that Palestine was a civilisation of savages, an obstacle for the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’? How long will the memory of Palestine live on before it, too, is smothered in the same undignified way as her people?
As humans, it is not death we truly fear the most - it is obscurity. We do not value life nearly as much as we value legacy, and although we mourn loss, the greatest pain is not to be mourned at all. More than that, it is the aching fatigue of trying to withstand the weight of genocidal justifications, while that precious treasure we call ‘self-determination’ still feels so far from reach. It is that remembrance that Algeria fights for to this day, and it is the shared trauma of that battle that bonds her and her frail sister, Palestine, in spirit - ‘Algeria will never truly be free as long as Palestine is occupied.’ If the sun soon sets on Palestine, the very least we can do is bear witness, bear witness to the final peaceful form of Palestinian resistance: to die on their land. And if Western media is so intent on characterising Palestinians as solely ‘Arabs’, and all Arabs and Muslims as one, then so be it - ana dammi falastini. Truly, my blood is Palestinian. And if my blood, our blood, is Palestinian, then Palestine may not die at the hands of Israel. Palestine will live in me, in us, in our children, and our children’s children - may we never forget and never forgive.