Dignified life

Palestinians are limited in their overall potential and well being due to Israel’s violent policies. Israel states that the laws they employ are for security, but it is clear that its colonial policies operate to prevent Palestinians from having any semblance of a dignified life. Whether it be through Israel demolishing the houses of Palestinians, imprisoning Palestinians without a trial – a brutal phenomenon called administrative detention– or bombing refugee camps, the violence of the settler colonial regime of Israel knows no limits. Palestinians are deprived of potential to thrive as their basic psychological needs are constantly under threat. As Palestinian doctor Samah Jabr notes on how common Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is among Palestinians: “There is no ‘post’ because the trauma is repetitive and ongoing and continuous.”  Yet despite this Palestinians remain resilient and powerful, even with Israel trying to limit their potential they are among the most educated and dedicated people. 

In Palestine, children suffer from the violent phenomenon of ‘unchilding’– a term used by Palestinian activists to describe the violent dispossession of Palestinian children from their bodies and agencies through the racialized and gendered structures of colonialism.  Perhaps one of the most brutal cases of unchilding in Palestine is Ahmad Manasra.  In 2015, Manasra was accused of participating in a stabbing operation. Settlers and police threw the 13-year-old boy onto a set of railway tracks in Jerusalem, causing him to fracture his skull before being detained.  Shortly after, a video was leaked of Israeli intelligence officers brutally interrogating Manasra as he cries that he does not remember what happened and pleads for a doctor to treat his head injury. In 2016, Manasra was sentenced to 12 years in prison and has been detained ever since, going to countless court hearings and being put in and out of solitary confinement, with his mental health deteriorating. A Palestinian child loses their potential to be a child, their ability to be a child. Black children in Philadelphia dealing with decades-long structural racism, manifested through gun violence, underfunded institutions, and the carceral state are similarly deprived of the potential to be children. 

The whole structure of settler colonialism relies on the logic and practice of dispossession. In order to maintain its oppressive structure and repress resistance, the settler-colonial state also enacts other more personal forms of violence that dispossess people from their bodies, their agency, and their community.  One such way the settler colonial state of Israel does this is through pinkwashing.  Pinkwashing is a strategy by which colonial states like Israel and the US claim to be queer-friendly havens in order to justify or hide committing war crimes and massacres.  This can also include pushing out a harmful image of Arab countries being oppressive of women and queer people, as if these conditions emerged and persist in a vacuum void of all material conditions imposed by colonial nations, and frame the colonization and pillaging of these nations as a white savior civilizing mission.  This narrative is extremely harmful for queer Palestinians and Arabs because it denies and erases their existence.  By employing this narrative, not only does the state deny the existence of these individuals, but also dispossesses them of any agency over their bodies, their identity, and their narrative.  Furthermore, Israel preys on these vulnerable individuals by threatening to out them to their families in attempts to force them into working as informants.  This implies yet another layer of alienation and violent dispossession by the state– that of being dispossessed from one’s own community.  

In Palestine, grassroots organizations such as AlQaws for Sexual & Gender Diversity in Palestinian Society are challenging this narrative and resisting settler colonial dispossession in all its forms.  AlQaws has worked on several initiatives in order to make queer Palestinians feel heard and seen, and to center their narratives at the core of resistance to the occupation.  They also have several educational materials challenging the narrative of the settler state. In Philadelphia, the Philly Palestine Coalition recently organized a ‘Queer Cinema for Palestine’ film festival in 2022, in order to stand in solidarity with AlQaws and queer Palestinians living under Israeli colonialism.