Look Behind the Mask: Normalization in Palestine

NORMALIZATION, 2017

Normalization: to make appear normal, to accept as normal; or just to get so used to something that you don’t think about it anymore. The “it” in this case is the existing relationship between the state of Israel and the people of Palestine.  I have written about it before, but it is a layered concept and not easy to explain.

Fifty years of Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem has numbed us, even those of us who have advocated for Palestinians to have a free, autonomous state.

We have become so used to this illegal status that we have forgotten about how it got its start in 1948 when Jewish forces used terrorism to expel 750,000 native Palestinians from their homes - the ethnic cleansing of 2/3’s of the population. This might have been seen as acceptable - you could say normal behavior in that post-war colonialist world.

Fast forward to 2017. An article in the October 11 Israeli edition of the NYTimes titled “Peace through music and backgammon” describes a concert that organizers titled “Kulna”, using the Arabic word for “all of us.” and promoted as “a night without borders.”  It featured Palestinian and Israeli artists and attracted  “2000 people, most of them Israelis.”  The article also featured a backgammon contest between Israeli and Palestinian players, “an activity that would let people engage with one another.”

The same article reported that on October 8, 2017 Women Wage Peace, “a Jewish-Arab movement established after the Gaza War of 2014,”   brought Israeli and Palestinian women to a “reconciliation tent” in the West Bank city of Jericho and then to a rally in Jerusalem.   As I read about this effort,  I thought that if I were an Israeli woman who opposed the occupation, and was looking for ways to express that opposition in the face of overwhelming state power, I might join the women’s march, because there aren’t many avenues for Israelis to say “no” to their government’s policies.  However, I also wondered if this could be an example of normalization. 

Attempts to bridge the divide between Palestinian and Israeli citizens sound good and can seduce us into thinking that peace is possible.  Concerts, backgammon contests, marches that include both sides:  signs of hope that at least on this level the isolation that allows hate of “the other” to develop will be overridden by contact.

And that does happen.   But the article included this paragraph: “Even in peacetime, though, attempts to escape politics can be viewed as political. Many Palestinians , for instance, reject what they call cultural normalization with the Israelis.”  One musician seemingly for that reason “denied being scheduled to perform in Jerusalem.”

I showed the article to a Palestinian activist whose judgement I trust. “This is pure normalization,” he said, “because it is not resistance.”

Maybe you have to be Palestinian to sense when an activity normalizes or when it contributes to the struggle for freedom, and clearly not all Palestinians are in this camp.  Maybe too the Israeli activists are doing the best they can to reach out and tell Palestinians that they care.  For them it is huge step to get to know an Arab and to defy their government by doing so.  For some this is a first step that will lead them on to the next step.  I want them to take these steps, but I must stand with my Palestinian friends in opposition to normalizing activities.  I must be clear that normalizing does not help the Palestinian struggle for freedom.

Real solidarity requires accepting Palestinian leadership and accepting some uncomfortable truths:  The truth that Zionism originated as a secular colonialist movement, not a religion-based ideology.  That Zionists intended to take over the entire historic Palestine for a Jewish state, and this required removing the indigenous population.  The truth that to accomplish ethnic cleansing Jewish underground guerrilla forces carried out many atrocities starting well before 1948. The truth that today’s Israel is an apartheid state which by its own hand has made a two state solution impossible. The truth that without the military and propaganda support of the United States, the occupation would collapse.

As for Palestinian leadership, a broad section of civil society in Palestine has called on us to join the secular Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, while the Palestinian Christian community has issued its own impassioned plea for support of BDS and active intervention to end the occupation before it is too late. (Kairos Palestine, 2009 and Letter to World Council of Churches, June, 2017)  My Palestinian friends tell me that leadership of joint Israeli-Palestinian initiatives is often usurped by Israelis. I am quite sure that this phenomenon sounds familiar to black/white civil rights groups in the U.S.

 It is not popular to speak out against normalizing events such as concerts, summer camps like Seeds of Peace, women’s peace marches,  or Combatants for Peace (Israeli military and Palestinian fighters who have renounced violence and together  advocate for non-violent solutions.)  There is a moving documentary about about the latter called “Disturbing the Peace”. I recently helped to host a public showing of this documentary as a means of keeping the issue of Palestine in the consciousness of my community.  But the film lacks historical context and does not show the power dynamics on the macro level of the politicians in Tel Aviv and Washington, D.C..  And combatants laying down their arms does not necessarily change the equation.

The problem with normalization is that it makes it look like there is a level playing field, with two equal opponents, who just have to recognize their common ground and learn to get along.  The truth is that Israel is the oppressor, much more powerful economically and militarily; and the injustice of the occupation started not in 1967, but in 1948 when Palestinian land was stolen at gunpoint by Jewish colonial settlers.  For there to be peace, the roots of injustice must be recognized, and not covered over by concerts.  Our actions must follow the lead of the Palestinians whose main non-violent weapon of resistance now is the BDS campaign.  

Normalization further confuses us by framing this as a “conflict” over territory instead of an issue of violation of human rights.  “Conflict” presumes these are two neighbors who are quarreling over the same piece of land. Instead, we have a bulldozer against an olive tree. The bulldozer has an army behind it, while the olive tree has just the farmer who owns it.  The farmer has rights.

By international law Palestinians have a right to return to their homes and villages.  They have a right to the water that used to fill their wells.  They have a right to move freely in order to attend school, get health care, hike in their hills or swim in the Mediterranean Sea. Palestinians have a right to dignity, which they now preserve at great psychological cost. Do you know what it takes, for example, for a man not to show any emotion as he is emasculated in front of his wife and children at a checkpoint? “Pull up your shirt! Pull down your pants! Shut up!”  Can you imagine how children endure learning that their parents cannot protect them from soldiers who take them from their beds at 2:00 a.m. or demolish their homes in front of their eyes? How parents endure that they cannot protect their children?

I know a young Palestinian man, a non-conformist by his own account, who spent a year on an Israeli kibbutz in a program designed to bring Israeli, Palestinian and international students together to study the environment and conflict resolution. He enrolled in the program because it was a full scholarship, and because he was disgusted with his life as a Palestinian and thought he would feel freer in Israel.

Yet the more he heard from Israelis defending their points of view, the more critical he became of the program. “But It was good for me. I got to hear how they think about themselves and believe the things they have been told about Palestine.  They want us to forget about our past, but they won’t forget about the Holocaust.”  When the program ended, this young man came back to Palestine and is volunteering at a Palestinian organization which is dedicated to preserving the heritage and natural resources of the land he is supposed to forget.