Bearing Witness & Making A Fuss

Palestinians may be facing annihilation, but their humanity & resistance are an example to us all. They need us to continue to speak out, and stand up to our cowardly, morally bankrupt leaders.

(If you have received this by email, please click on the title to read the latest version. I often correct typos and continue to edit my essays, after publishing the first version).

On Friday evening I attended a screening of Mohamad Zwahra’s film, ‘On My Land’ at Eden Court in Inverness. The almost booked-out event was organised in something of a rush by dedicated local activist, Wendy Davidson. Mohamad Zwahra, was one of four speakers due to speak at a Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign (SPSC) event in September. 'Land and Resistance’ was to be held at the Eastgate Theatre in Peebles, on the Scottish borders. The venue cancelled the event with just three days’ notice, because of one(!) Zionist complainant. A month later, the publicly-funded theatre apologised for cancelling the event.

Despite the short notice, Paul MacDonald-Taylor, Eden Court’s Head of Film & Visual Art, agreed to host Friday’s event. Following the Peebles cancellation, it was important to give Mohamad other opportunities to screen the film and speak. I am grateful to Eden Court, which has always been supportive of the Palestinian cause.

Even in Scotland, where there is a great deal of public concern, empathy and support for the Palestinian people, it can be a struggle to hold events and give a stage to Palestinians. The Inverness Campus of the University of the Highlands & Islands (UHI) refused to allow Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh to speak on Campus during his recent visit to Scotland. Highland Palestine, the organisers of Professor Qumsiyeh’s speaking tour were forced to find an alternative venue.

Mohamad Zwahra last night at Eden Court.

Mohamad Zwahra is from Al-Masafar village, south of Bethlehem. His UK tour was organised by the Scottish Gundelia Trust.

The Gundelia Trust flyer we received last night at the event

Do not allow your minds to be colonised

‘On My Land’ begins with footage from 2006 of the weekly demonstrations at the village of Al-Masafar just south of Bethlehem. The demonstrations were filmed by a Jewish activist from the US who left a copy of the recordings with Mohamad’s family, before returning to the US. Mohamad used the footage in his documentary, along with his own material. As a photographer he has spent years documenting the communities and events in the colonised West Bank. Photographs and films do not just honour people and their lived experience, they provide irrefutable and invaluable evidence of the crimes Israel is committing. This evidence makes it difficult for Israel and its supporters to continue to lie, and deny the truth.

Mohamad is a tall, softly-spoken, humble, and quietly powerful young man. He was a child in 2006, and I was stunned to realise he is only twenty-five. His father was the leader of his village’s weekly demonstrations back in 2006. Over the years Mohamad’s father was arrested and detained multiple times by the Israeli forces. Fortunately, he is still alive and well, and Mohamad told us that his father has just completed a PhD in peace studies.

Like many families in the colonised and occupied West Bank, Mohamad’s home and family were regularly targeted by the Israeli army and by armed colonists (aka ‘settlers’). Mohamad insisted that his story is not unique, and that his and his family’s experiences are shared by all the Palestinians living in the West Bank.

The film shows clearly how enclosed and trapped the Palestinians are by the sterile and featureless urban ‘settlements’ that are expanding all around them, gobbling up what is left of Palestine’s land. While the focus of the film is on the West Bank, it is important to remember that all of Israel is built on stolen Palestinian land. I could feel the suffocation, and the frustration from being restricted to smaller and smaller spaces. In some of the 2006 footage we see Mohamad’s grandfather tending to his small flock of sheep in an ever-diminishing area. Mohamad grew up on his grandfather’s stories about how he and his generation used to be able to take their sheep all the way to the outskirts of Jerusalem, and about their life before Israel erected the annexation wall and their illegal colonies.

That ugly, monstrosity of a wall, which should have been banned for harming the environment, let alone human rights, has cut villages in the middle, and separated families from their fields. Like everything Israel does, this was calculated and intentional. In blatant violation of international law, Israel placed ever increasing restrictions on the movement of Palestinians. Anyone who needed to cross the wall to work on their land, or go anywhere, now had to ask for a ‘permit’. This illegal permit system is just another means of control, and a way to torment the Palestinian people. Permits are granted, or not, at the whim of whomever happened to be in charge.

Israeli solders and officers who served in the West Bank have testified that they were under specific orders to ‘disrupt Palestinian daily life’. Waking people up at all hours of the night, demanding that they bring out their families, and show their IDs serves no purpose other than to torment the Palestinian population. Mohamad told us that his family suffered from this kind of treatment many times throughout his childhood. During these raids things can get very dangerous. Soldiers’ mood determines how things would go, and it does not take much for things to escalate and for people, including children, to be arrested, beaten, or shot. Making the lives of Palestinians difficult in every possible way has always been an important part of a psychological war intended to pressure Palestinians to leave their country voluntarily.

Imagine growing up not only under occupation, but under a settler-colonial system whose ultimate goal is the complete removal of your people. It was obvious that Mohamad had no illusions about what he and his people are facing. They resist by staying as they are, and where they are, by continuing to live their lives and plant their fields, even if they have to do so under the cover of night to evade the ‘settlers’.

Israel has been harming Palestinian children for decades in complete disregard of international law and treaties on child protection. Israel arrests children for no reason, and keeps them in adult prisons where they are routinely abused. Incarceration can be indefinite, and parents or relatives are not allowed to visit. Israel does not allow representatives of NGO’s to enter the prisons, which means there is no oversight, and Israel is free to do as it pleases.

Assaulting, arresting, incarcerating, abusing, and murdering children is a key element in the psychological warfare Israel has been waging against the Palestinians. One of the most horrific injuries any parent can suffer is to be prevented from protecting their children. It causes incredible harm to people’s mental health, and it can destroy the bond between parents and children and weaken families and communities. This is precisely what Israel is trying to achieve, and it is another way of trying to pressure the Palestinians to leave their country.

Children from Mohamad’s village and the area have to walk long distances to school, and have no choice but to pass close to the ‘settlements’ that are now everywhere. It is a dangerous journey, and the children are always at risk of ‘settler’ attacks. The thought of armed adults protected by the Israeli state, attacking children on their way to school should be enough to give people an idea of what Israel is, and what it is doing.

In the film we see an incident where an armed Israeli man was picking on a boy as young as eight or nine in the middle of a field. The man apparently removed the child’s shoes. He stood over him with his submachine gun, and kept him crouching on the ground at his feet. The child was crying in terror, while the man prevented his older sister from reaching him. The sister filmed the incident on her phone as it was unfolding. I could not help wondering what would have happened if the child decided to get up and run away. I have no doubt the child and his sister knew how dangerous the situation was.

The Hebrew logo on the man’s T-Shirt suggested that he was an employee of a private security company, one of many employed to ‘protect’ settlements from Palestinians. This armed bully harassed a child simply because he could. He was visibly enjoying his ability to overpower and torment the child and his sister. I do not know how the incident ended. But if this man injured or killed the child, or his sister, he would not have paid for his crime. He would be celebrated as a hero. As everyone has witnessed over the past year, and as Palestinians have known for decades, Palestinian lives mean nothing to Israel.

The peaceful 2006 demonstrations in Al-Masafar, Mohamad’s village, protested against the construction of the wall. No one stopped Israel from completing their illegal wall, just as no one is stopping Israel’s murderous settler-colonial expansion into Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria, or its attacks on Yemen. Mohamad joked with me that Israel will not stop until it takes Jordan too.

He told us that our activism is very important to him and to everyone in Palestine. When we stand with flags, banners and keffiyehs in our cities and towns; when we speak out, the Palestinians feel supported. It gives them hope, and makes them feel that they matter. Mohamad asked us to continue to do what we are doing. He urged us, activists, to resist the colonisation of our own minds by our media.

One of Mohamad’s most important messages was that Israel might be occupying Palestinian land, but it cannot occupy Palestinian minds. He also said that it is not the Palestinians who are colonised. It is the Israelis who are colonised, and are prisoners of their own mindset. This chimed with my own experience of the cult mindset that plagues Jewish Israeli society, and that keeps it soulless and blind.

A close friend who attended the event told me today how moving she found the film, and listening to Mohamad. She said she couldn’t help wondering what it meant to him to see Christmas lights everywhere. “We take so much for granted”, she said. “I just can’t imagine how they keep going. I felt so deeply humbled.” I share my friend’s feelings.

Mohamad’s life so far has been shaped by the aggressive and oppressive settler-colonial system Israel has inflicted on his people. At age twenty-five he is using his time, talents and skills as a photographer to fight for the survival of his people, and to bear witness. I wonder what he would be doing if he did not have to be an activist. Israel's brutal settler-colonialism intentionally leaves all Palestinians with limited, and steadily shrinking choices. From Israel’s perspective Palestinians have only two choices, leave or die. The Palestinians are choosing to stay true to who they are, their values, way of life, traditions and their humanity. This is the most powerful form of resistance there is. When it is also documented as it is in this and many other films, and through photographs and stories it provides evidence that ensures that we know, and that we do not forget. Israel can kill people, but it cannot kill their spirit, their achievements, their culture, their memory, their history, their stories, their cuisine, and our love for them. Nothing can kill the human spirit.

Israel bears a spreading bloodstain that will forever mark their society. Israel will never erase the mark of shame for its actions in the past seventy-six years. A stain this deep corrodes from within, and it will leads to their own undoing. Israel is the architect of its own decline. It will be destroyed not by external forces, but by its own moral decay.

I left the event with deep feelings of grief, anger and foreboding, along with awe and deep respect for Mohamad and all Palestinians. The evidence of Israel’s lies and deceit, and the fallacy of the indoctrination I grew up on is not in history books. It is in people and their lived experience.

When you meet a Palestinian from Gaza or the colonised and occupied West Bank, you come face-to-face with a human being who has a target on their back. Facing a fellow human being who is a member of a group marked for extermination, and who also has no illusions about their situation is one of the most humbling experiences you can have. I wanted to protect Mohamad, who could easily be my son. I wanted to keep him here, safe from harm. But he is clearly not concerned about himself. What he does, he does for his people, for his family, for the children of his village and all the other villages in West Bank. Through his film, photographs, and words, Mohamad shows us that his work is inspired by three powerful sources: an unwavering love for his people, a profound ancestral connection to the land, and extraordinary personal courage.

Israel plans to ethnically cleanse the population of the West Bank by any means possible as soon as it can. Israeli forces might not use the same methods they are using in Gaza — they cannot bomb the West Bank without damaging their extensive colonies there. But I can assure you their leaders are working on ‘solutions’. We know what Israel is doing and what it is capable of. If no one stops Israel, Mohamad and everyone he knows will either be murdered, or will be driven out and once more turned into refugees.

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More scheduled screenings around Scotland

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