Beyond reciprocity

Published in The Sunday Paper’s first issue. (2021)

Full text republished here:

Imperialism has laid its body over the world, the head in Eastern Asia, the heart in the Middle East, its arteries reaching Africa and Latin America. Wherever you strike it, you damage it, and you serve the World Revolution. - Ghassan Kanafani

To be Palestinian is to be of the world, belonging to somewheres and elsewheres, finding home in exiles. To be Palestinian is to occupy multiple subjectivities simultaneously; refugee, displaced, dissident, diasporic. Being Palestinian for me is embedded in my growing up as a citizen of Aotearoa (New Zealand) and then ‘Australia’. I’m a part of what this place is today and have a home here. I am also of Palestine, my homeland, where I have never stepped foot.

Unlike me, my children have only known ‘Australia’. I was born in Jordan, where my extended family fled the ethnic cleansing inflicted by ‘Israel’. They too are of this place, and their future will intimately be determined by Indigenous resistance striking at the arteries of this colony. We are Palestinian, and more.

With this in mind, I do not know if I am the Palestinian intended to be evoked when we speak of Black-Palestinian solidarity. To me, internationalist leftist solidarity building between two indigenous peoples cannot proceed without commitment to Indigenous sovereignty and struggle on this continent. In the name of solidarity I must centre the deep care I have for this land, as my experience is different to a Palestinian who has not grown up here in diaspora.

Two years ago, a few activist friends and I found ourselves coming head to head with a Labor MP at a Black-Palestinian solidarity event. She attended to share with us the support she expresses in Parliament and within the Australian Labor Party for the Palestinian people and their struggle against Israeli occupation. Read: not settler colonialism, or the ethno-nationalist project of Zionism; she wants us to regard her as a friend, who sets her own parameters around what being ‘pro-Palestinian’ can entail.

My friends and I, all people of colour from refugee or immigrant backgrounds, confronted the MP. One of us asked her, “you speak against Israeli occupation, would you use that term to describe Australia’s stealing of Indigenous land?” I think we sounded like killjoys, or social justice warriors within a mainstream right-wing registry that mocks overt leftist speech and turns it into a detestable caricature.

She dismissed the question and continued to articulate her position of pro-Palestinian solidarity and her hope that the Australian Labor Party will soon recognise Palestinian statehood; in her mind a marker of progress that deserves commending, a good thing. We put it to her again, “do you consider the Australian state an occupier or coloniser?”

We made mention of Labor’s shameful refugee detention position and its similarity to Israeli forms of oppression. The MP offered her circular insistence that she's here as a supporter and that she faces a lot of opposition in Parliament for speaking out against ‘Israel’. She appeared confused as to what these questions had to do with the Palestinian cause. It was clear that she wasn't sitting with us to talk about things we found fitting to a conversation on solidarity building.

The encounter revealed the silences required to sustain Palestinian solidarity in ‘Australia’. Should we care whether pro-Palestinian liberals who claim to support our cause are inconsistent on issues that affect us, us not being the figurative Palestinian, but Black and Brown people in ‘Australia’? Is their attention to Israeli human rights violations, which effectively works to shift our gaze away from Australia's human rights violations, worth problematising? Does caring about this inconsistency obstruct the progress of the Palestinian cause?

There is little room within this quasi pro-Palestinian politics for either anti-Zionism or Indigenous resistance. The native cannot speak. We are muted by western progressives who take it upon themselves to decide what futures are appropriate for us and how far our courage can extend. We see this in their favouring of both the two state solution and reconciliation over popular radical Palestinian and First Nations movement ambitions.

Those whose politics are grounded in liberalism and whiteness as universal humanism are unable to enact solidarity with native struggles. Whiteness imposes liberal secular notions upon which relationalities between First Nations people and Palestinians on this continent are to be premised: we are bonded by our citizenship and a modern social contract in our belonging to the multicultural nation. Our meeting, our collaborating and aiding outside the epistemic borders of the nation state, our care for one another, our sense of shared futures, tends to upset settler-colonial organising principles.

On this, in Decolonial Self-Determination and ‘No-State Solutions’, Professor J. Kēhaulani Kauanui observes that ‘for many in the Palestine solidarity movement, in ways that parallel the Hawaiʻi case, there is a split between those who call for the end of the occupation, and those who insist on getting to the settler colonial roots of the entire Israeli national project. Given all the problems inherent in a discussion of occupation under nation-state paradigms, if we shift away from statist solutions, we can envision other possibilities’.

Kauanui’s generous work is instructive. If our faith is placed in the modern democratic state – rather than the potentialities of Blak power – our efforts to shift the dominant narrative on ‘Israel’ in ‘Australia’ may actually entrench white supremacy. How do we do pro-Palestinian activism in a way that doesn’t legitimise this colonial project? What does Black-Palestinian solidarity require of us as Palestinians, or as staunchly pro-Palestinian Arabs and Muslims (two communities to which I belong), resisting from within this settler colony?

My friend Carol Que and I put this inquiry regarding migrant-settler solidarity more broadly in our correspondence for The Funambulist earlier this year, insisting that ‘We want to come together in all our difference and also refuse nullifying…solidarity constructs that impose one homogenous “ally” identity upon us, effectively cutting us off from any rootedness’.

From these commitments, I attempt to speak and write as a Palestinian and settler living on stolen land, not as a Palestinian in Palestine or a Palestinian in Turtle Island (from where much of Black-Palestinian solidarity theorising can be traced). I am more concerned with articulating why it matters to the work of solidarity building that I show up in a way that encompasses all that I am rather than trying to fit myself into a positionality that works for a horizontal Black-Palestinian relation.

For the 70th commemoration of The Nakba in 2018, I attempted to propose a way to think about our positionality with an ‘indigenous there, settlers here’ framework that considers how we can encourage a shift away from assimilationist politics inherent to the dominant Palestinian-Australian identification. I feel strongly that there is an imperative to sit with what Professor Aileen Moreton-Robinson refers to as ‘the limits of our knowing’. For me, this means understanding the specificity of the knowing subject while also realising that our knowledge as non-white people is relegated to the subjective and therefore ‘primitive’.

In the exchange I have illustrated, we came across as killjoys in the sense described by feminist scholar Sara Ahmed. It felt as though our inability to compartmentalise and leave our rage against the oppressions of the Australian state - that we know so intimately as racialised subjects - got in the way of solidarity work. It felt like we spoiled good work with our refusal to let an MP of good will tell us how much she is with us, pro-Palestinians.

Sara Ahmed has taught us that ‘when you expose a problem you pose a problem. It might then be assumed that the problem would go away if you would just stop talking about it or if you went away… The feminist killjoy begins as a sensationalist figure. It is as if the point of making her point is to cause trouble, to get in the way of the happiness of others, because of her own unhappiness’.

Our intervention posed a problem for pro-Palestine allies expecting a particular kind of politics from Brown activists. We were a problem in our inability to abide by the silences needed to advance what the ALP and some of its members consider to be a win for Palestine. We were not meant to speak about Australian colonisation. As non-Indigenous Brown people we were stepping outside of our role as immigrants by demonstrating care for Indigenous concerns. We're required to be ‘indigenous there’, from elsewhere, with no relation to this land and its people beyond allegiance to the generous white liberal nation. Consciousness of the ‘settler here’ in the ‘indigenous there, settler here’ construct is a problem to be managed.

Demanding that we discipline our fantasies of how solidarity amongst us can be imagined, sometimes Black-Palestinian solidarity in ‘Australia’ is conceptualised as solidarity between two indigenous peoples and cultures, erasing the asylum, diasporic, citizen, settler relationship Palestinians have with the settler-colonial project that is ‘Australia’. It’s a solidarity that thinks of Black-Palestinian solidarity as a two-track system, two intertwined yet separate international struggles. Black Palestinians, unrepresented, are erased in such a limited imagination.

Yet, Palestinians are third, second, first generation in ‘Australia’. Our local Palestine movement cannot be disembodied and disconnected from our obligations to the sovereign peoples of this land and place; with that we risk reinforcing white epistemology.

Eugenia Flynn and I gestured to this in a piece for IndigenousX, reflecting on the unprecedented nation-wide mobilising for Palestine this year. We observed that ‘Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are not living in large diaspora communities within ‘Israel’, whereas Palestinians are part of the Australian settler nation-state as Australian citizens, bringing reciprocity and mutuality into question’.

I think we need to spend more time as killjoys, contemplating how we can account for the ethical problems that arise in our experiments towards Black-Palestinian solidarity. And even as the body counts rise in Gaza and illegal Jewish settlements expand with Australian endorsement, I don’t think these questions can be swiftly answered in our urgency to mobilise for our people. The violences our peoples are subjected to are of such sophistication that I reject liberal calls to action that require our proximity to whiteness and the benevolence of the settler state.

Being part of the struggle for Black liberation is striking against Israeli colonisation, Australian colonisation and the global structure of imperialism as Ghassan Kanafani illustrates for us in the passage I have opened with. Thinking with Kanafani, I’m trying to hold true to my instinct that tells me that prior to Black-Palestinian solidarity building, and preceding Palestinian solidarity work, we need to join in the everyday acts of tearing down the prison walls and detention centre fences that we pay and vote for.

Rather than conceiving of Black-Palestinian solidarity horizontally, I believe that as Palestinians we need to be present for all that Black solidarity necessitates. Palestinian resistance for my children and I is epistemically grounded in our reality here and our being raised on this Indigenous land - against the rootlessness of whiteness.