In 1988, the Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani, the most celebrated Arab poet of the modern era, wrote The Trilogy of the Children of the Stones. The poem was dedicated to the children of the first Palestinian intifada, who, in hurling stones at Israeli soldiers, became symbols of the era. The intifada was triggered in 1987 by frustration over the Israeli occupation in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and was characterised by civil disobedience, non-violent protest and, most iconically, those children.
“O Children of Gaza, don’t mind our broadcasts”, Qabbani wrote, counting himself as part of an older generation whose attempts at compromise with Israel had failed to deliver freedom for the Palestinians. “Don’t listen to us / We are the people of cold calculation … The age of political reason has long departed / So teach us madness.”
Qabbani was part of an Arabic tradition of art and literature that channelled the despair of the Palestinians, and how their only recourse was the “madness” of children throwing rocks at a heavily armed force. How all they had left was a refusal to accept their defeat and to tilt against the powerful – without allies, at huge risk and without a plan. As long as that happened, Palestine still existed, a place kept alive through the assertion that its people were still here, still claiming their right to their identity, still free simply as a result of never abandoning that claim. Followed closely in a region ruled by autocrats, military men and absolute monarchies, the first intifada planted its message deep in the popular Arab psyche: political overlords could control everything but people’s right to nurse a vision of what they deserve.
To those from that generation, and I am one of them, the word “intifada” meant just that; the “shaking off”, the convulsion, the uprising. To our ears it meant a demand for civil rights rather than violence and bloodshed. It was also a word that had no explicit end goal, no specific purpose other than to refuse and resist – a demonstration of rootedness.
Ana Dammi Falastini (“My blood is Palestinian”), a 2015 popular protest song that has been played during protests in the west, builds on this theme. It’s also notable that its Palestinian singer, Mohammed Assaf, won the second series of Arab Idol in 2013 after a competition in which he performed traditional Palestinian songs that captured the hearts and minds of the pan-Arab viewership.
Along with many other poems, artworks, works of literature and snippets of quotes and slogans, these examples constitute an entire heritage of Palestinian identity forged not on western campuses or in western media, but in refugee camps, on the remaining walls of bulldozed houses, in prisons and in segregated populations, among those driven from their homes and yearning for a right of return. Together they create a notional place, disembodied from wretched reality, that nurtures solace, bravado and connection between a scattered and uprooted people who aspire to something you and I take for granted: statehood.
The passing of this culture into mainstream English language discourse since 7 October has reduced the words within it to literal meanings, projected on to them by observers with little knowledge of their history and nuances. The term intifada has been treated as nothing short of an unambiguous declaration of holy war. The phrase “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, which doesn’t originate in Arabic but expresses a Palestinian longing for their historic homeland, has been stretched to imply nothing that it says. Britain’s then-home secretary Suella Braverman said it was “widely understood as a demand for the destruction of Israel”. But how exactly Palestine will be free is not something the Palestinian people have ever had the privilege of fully specifying.
In Oslo, they were offered not even an outline of the borders of what could become a Palestinian entity, and no right of return to the homes they had been driven out of since 1948. In 2020, Donald Trump’s peace plan did not even offer them full statehood. In the light of 7 October, it is understandable that, to some, expressions of Palestinian uprising and claims to land take on a threatening pall. But the story of these terms and chants is much longer than the one condensed and condemned over the past seven months. A Palestinian history of resistance, which spans decades of expulsion, massacre, humiliation, segregation and surveillance, is not represented exclusively by Hamas.
There is also something about the projection of lurid intentions on to Palestinian solidarity and calls for self-determination that misreads the very nature of protest as something that needs to be measured and rational (in ways that are never quite specified) for it to be credible. But protest becomes necessary precisely because authorities have not been responsive. And it is defined by asymmetry of power and access to political tools. Politicians have executive power, and protesters have one thing: their voices. Protest movements are by their very nature performances of opposition and they often have this miraculously consistent quality – quickly expanding from political spaces to community ones, incorporating song, dance, poetry and protective fraternity among strangers.
Crushing these spaces – and the causes they represent – is most effectively done not by brute force, but in portraying the participants as villains. Hence the image of such people as Putin-backed, pro-Hamas, or led by professional infiltrators. The harder it is to discredit the earnestness and necessity of Palestinian solidarity, the wilder such allegations become.
It is now clear that the hundreds of thousands of protesters who march for Gaza, from London to Washington, are not hate marchers. A study reported last week found that 97% of US campus demonstrations over Gaza have been peaceful. But what makes the propaganda war against Palestinian solidarity most urgent is the fact that Hamas’s bloody actions on 7 October are clearly no longer a credible alibi for what Israel is doing. The smear effort is constantly thwarted by relentless scenes of death and starvation in Gaza, and indeed the belligerent words of Israeli authorities themselves: representatives of a powerful US-backed, nuclear state who are not subject to the same restrictions as the scrutinised slogans of protesters that fade into the air.
In such a world, as Gaza is razed, what is left but to continue to construct, more vividly and forcibly than ever before, a Palestinian identity defined by its right to exist rather than its risk of erasure? What is left but to continue to reject this age where political reason has long departed?
Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist
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