NOURA ERAKAT
I am the daughter of first-generation immigrants from Palestine. My parents began to build their new lives in the Bay Area of California in 1975. We were immersed in a vibrant immigrant community—Arab, Afghan, Chinese, Filipino, Mexican, Desi (people of or from the Indian subcontinent). I stood out, not because I was the only brown kid, but because I was the only Arab in class. In fact, the reason I retained my family’s Arab tongue is because my elementary schoolteachers told my parents to speak their native language at home, and they would speak to us in English at school. I didn’t know it then, but I was lucky: this immigrant haven shielded me and allowed me to live outside the debilitating shadow of white supremacy. I never wanted to be anything but my Palestinian, Arab, Muslim self.
As I saw it, my first encounters with injustice had to do with being a girl in the world. I grew up with three brothers and, for no reason besides the sheer fortune of cisgender assignment, I was responsible for social reproduction—all the things that maintain domestic order, like cleaning and cooking along with my mama—without benefitting from any of the privileges that my brothers seemed to have without limit, like playing basketball, walking to the local 7-11 to buy a bag of chips, or hanging out at the mall with friends. I refused to accept this unequal labor/privilege distribution as divine destiny. Thus began my first protests: I rebelled against my family. Though I succeeded in assigning my brothers some household chores, it was hardly equitable. I definitely never enjoyed their freedom in the public sphere, a key and enduring feature of patriarchy.
My parents, having just arrived in the United States, raised me in fear. They feared they would lose me to a culture they hardly understood; feared that their missteps with me would earn them the ire of the broader Arab immigrant community; feared that I did not understand the risks of my heady rebellion. So they raised me with an iron fist. But because those fears were mitigated in Palestine, where close-knit communities and extended family networks made the public sphere less daunting, and because I had heard stories of my girl cousins who roamed the streets with their friends in Jericho and Abu Dis, I craved going to Palestine to experience that freedom. At fourteen, I finally got that chance, when I traveled there for the first time with my aunt and great-uncle. And while I searched for an uncomplicated childhood, I found another grave injustice in Israel’s domination of our lives.
Upon arrival at the airport, I was pulled out for interrogation and thoroughly searched for hours. How was I, a young girl, a security threat? Traversing militarized checkpoints, I witnessed how my blue U.S. passport worked like some superpower. Then, driving from the underdeveloped roads of Abu Dis, I seemed to time travel into lush waterparks, beach shores, and restaurants with terraces and glossy menus across the Green Line.
As my friend and I played Monopoly (or “moe-no-po-lee,” as she referred to it) in her yard, I listened to her tell me about her two-month detention in an Israeli prison because she joined high school protests. The same visceral revulsion I had felt to patriarchy rocked my body once again, this time in response to colonialism.
I did not know the word for it yet. My parents had never taught me about Palestine as a place of struggle. Of course, they told me the basic facts: that it was stolen from us by Jewish Zionists in 1948, and that more of it was taken in 1967, forcing them to leave and carry Palestine with them. But, as working-class folks who, like many immigrants, escaped their homelands so their children could forge better realities, they desperately tried to steer me away from Palestinian advocacy as my life’s work. My parents would complain, “If Arafat couldn’t do anything, what makes you think you can?”
It wasn’t that I believed I could. But I could not do anything else after witnessing Israeli colonialism. My commitment became entrenched in 2000 when I returned to Palestine as a university exchange student and lived through the first few months of what was to be known as the Second Intifada. In Abu Dis, where I lived, we learned that the uprising had started because of the announcement that, following Friday prayer on September 2, when Ariel Sharon led one thousand Israeli troops into the Al Haram compound, our neighbor was among the first five Palestinians shot dead at the Al Aqsa mosque. And, as we gathered in this man’s home, with his wailing wife and his red-haired infant daughter, I realized that my family’s pursuit of a life free from this colonial violence in the United States actually sustained this violence in Palestine. After all, wanting to fit in and do well, they paid taxes. And everyone’s taxes in the United States go to military aid. There was no escape from it and nowhere to take refuge.
As a student activist at UC Berkeley, drawn to the university because of its radical legacy, I was conscious of the fact that the United States began as a white settler colony and became an imperial power. When we in Students for Justice in Palestine developed the first divestment campaign from Apartheid Israel in the spring of 2001, we did it shoulder to shoulder with Movimiento Estudiantil Chicanx de Aztlán (MECHA), the Black Student Alliance, the Asian Student Union, antiwar contingents, and the progressive student parties in university government. We never called our alliance intersectional or described it as intersectionality; we were in joint struggle because we knew our oppressors were common and our freedom dreams intertwined.
I have since become an attorney, practicing law for several years in Washington, D.C., at the UN, and on behalf of NGOs. I have seeded Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) campaigns, lost many, won many, gone back to school. I am now a scholar-activist in the academy, still searching for ways to advance the Palestinian freedom struggle within a framework of collective liberation. What is clear is that we must imagine new ways of organizing ourselves socially and politically; we must dismantle racial capitalism and all of the myths about the unbiased and invisible hand of the free market. We must continue the struggle for decolonization; we must free the land.
Decolonization struggles gained new life in the aftermath of the Second World War, when national liberation movements around the world took up arms and coalesced their efforts to upend imperial domination. Their efforts ushered in a new world of independent Brown, Black, Yellow, and Red nations, but their decolonial projects remain incomplete. Not only did liberation movements not manage to establish a new international economic order or supplant European models of sovereignty; they also did not overcome Zionist settler-colonization as they dreamed they could.
The work that remains to be done requires something new from us. It asks that we shift from the strictures of political advocacy to the realm of spiritual transformation, where revolutionary potential lies. This is the realm of radical imagination that frees us from the shackles of what is possible; to emphasize, instead, what is necessary for our freedom. It is this radical imagining that has led me away from models of shared sovereignty, an incommensurate equation, to models of belonging, which are seemingly infinite.
Herein lies a pathway to decolonization, not predicated on the physical removal of the settlers, but on the transformation of the settlers, who must shed their claim to be owners of the land. Who must recognize their arrival as the conquest it was and not the redemption they had hoped; and who must change their relationship to the land and its Indigenous people from one of superior “masters” to that of cohabitants with native Palestinians in the valleys and on the hilltops and flatlands and coastlines, where they belong. Any pathway to Palestinian freedom is a decolonial process. It necessitates the confrontation and ultimate shedding of political Zionism as a legitimate ideology as well as our disavowal of historical colonialism and imperialism as legitimate systems of government.
A Land With A People is an exercise of decolonization in the form of reckoning that provides a path for others to follow. This collection of stories, poetry, and photography shares the stories of Jews who confronted Zionism. And it shares the stories of and by Palestinians, who, in Edward Said’s words, are the “victims of Zionism” whose reality makes clear that Zionism is not the triumphant story of Jewish emancipation from centuries of antisemitism but a colonial project facilitated by European imperial powers driven by a desire to remove Jews from Europe rather than combat their own white supremacy. These Palestinian stories make evident that political Zionism is predicated on the systemic removal of Palestinians, their dispossession and displacement through military technologies, hyper-surveillance, containment, securitization, and gross dehumanization.
Palestinian stories are essential to decolonization, yet they have been suppressed and are often only countenanced if supported by Jewish endorsement. For example, Palestinians have been saying that Israel is an apartheid state for decades, but it wasn’t until B’tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, acknowledged this fact in early 2021 that Israeli apartheid suddenly became universally credible. In an environment where they can only be heard if a Jewish ally confirms what they have been saying, Palestinians understandably grow angry.
This is a dynamic that Palestinians constantly deal with in relationships with our Jewish friends and allies in the anti-Zionist world. It is exacerbated by liberal efforts—especially from donors to multilateral processes, academic institutions, and gatekeepers—that insist on forms of “conflict resolution” that assume a false parity, eschewing the vast power differential between Palestinians and the Israeli government, and reducing our freedom struggle to hackneyed tolerance and diversity training.
This book is fundamentally different, tackling power head-on and charting the struggle against Zionism within the Jewish communities that Zionism purportedly serves. Its anti-Zionist Jewish stories are critical to decolonization, as well as for lighting pathways darkened by the punishing hand of imperial expansion.
May this book serve to crack the edifice of Zionist propaganda and institutional machinery that have worked to silence and punish opposition. May it lead to broader pathways toward decolonization. Until freedom for all.
—January 26, 2021