Arundhati Roy and Palestine

Arundhati Roy: September 11th has a tragic resonance in the Middle East too. On the 11th of September 1922, ignoring Arab outrage, the British government proclaimed a mandate in Palestine, a follow-up to the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which Imperial Britain issued with its army massed outside the gates of Gaza. The Balfour Declaration promised European Zionists a national home for Jewish people. At the time, the empire on which the sun never set was free to snatch and bequeath national homes like a school bully distributes marbles. How carelessly imperial power vivisected ancient civilizations. Palestine and Kashmir are Imperial Britain's festering blood-drenched gifts to the modern world. Both are fault lines of the raging international conflicts of today. In 1937, Winston Churchill said of the Palestinians, I quote, I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, a more worldly wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place. That set the trend for the Israeli state's attitude towards Palestinians. In 1947, the UN formally partitioned Palestine and allotted 55% of Palestine's land to the Zionists. Within a year, they had captured 76%. On the 14th of May 1948, the State of Israel was declared. Minutes after the declaration, the United States recognized Israel. The West Bank was annexed by Jordan. The Gaza Strip came under Egyptian military control. And formally, Palestine ceased to exist except in the minds and hearts of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian people who became refugees. In 1967, Israel occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Over the decades, there have been uprisings, wars, intifadas. Tens of thousands have lost their lives. Accords and treaties have been signed, ceasefires declared and violated. But the bloodshed doesn't end. Palestine still remains illegally occupied. Its people live in inhuman conditions in virtual Bantustan, where they are subjected to collective punishments, 24-hour curfews, where they are humiliated and brutalized on a daily basis. They never know when their homes will be demolished, when their children will be shot, when their precious trees will be cut. when their roads will be closed, when they will be allowed to walk down to the market to buy food and medicine, and when they will not. They live with no semblance of dignity, with not much hope in sight. They have no control over their lands, their security, their movement, their communication, their water supply. So when accords are signed and words like autonomy and even statehood bandied about, it's always worth asking, what sort of autonomy, what sort of state, what sort of rights will the Firdan have? Young Palestinians who cannot control their anger turn themselves into human bombs and haunt Israel's streets and public places. Each bombing invites merciless reprisal and even more hardship on Palestinian people. Although Palestinian attacks strike terror into Israeli citizens, they provide the perfect cover for the Israeli government's daily incursions into Palestinian territory. the perfect excuse for old-fashioned 19th century colonialism dressed up as a new-fashioned 20th century war. Israel's staunchest political and military ally is and always has been the U.S., The U.S. government has blocked, along with Israel, almost every U.N. resolution that sought a peaceful, equitable solution to the conflict. It has supported almost every war that Israel has fought. When Israel attacks Palestine, it is American missiles that smash through Palestinian homes. And every year, Israel receives several billion dollars from the United States, taxpayers' money. What lessons should we draw from this tragic conflict? Is it really impossible for Jewish people who suffered so cruelly themselves to understand the vulnerability and the yearning of those whom they have displaced? Does extreme suffering always kindle cruelty? What hope does this leave the human race with? What will happen to the Palestinian people in the event of a victory? When a nation without a state eventually proclaims a state, what kind of state will it be? What horrors will be perpetrated under its flag? Is it a separate state that we should be fighting for, or the rights to a life of liberty and dignity for everyone, regardless of their ethnicity or religion? The world is called upon to condemn suicide bombers, but can we ignore the long road they have journeyed on before they arrived at this destination? September 11, 1922, 80 years is a long time to have been waging war. I'm not going to speak about the demise of the free press in India. All of us gathered here know all about that. Nor am I going to speak of what has happened to all the institutions that are made to act as checks and balances in the functioning of our democracy. I've been doing that for 20 years, and I'm sure all of you gathered here are familiar with my views. Coming from North India to Canada or to almost any of the southern states, I feel by turns reassured and anxious about the fact that the dread that many of us up north live with every day seems far away when I am here. It is not as far away as we imagine. If the current regime returns to power next year, in 2026, the exercise of delimitation is likely to disempower all of South India by reducing the number of MPs we send to Parliament. But delimitation is not the only threat we face. Federalism, the lifeblood of our diverse country, is under the hammer too. As the central government gives itself sweeping powers, we witness the sorry sight of proudly elected chief ministers of opposition-ruled states having to literally beg for their state's share of public funds. The latest blow to federalism is the recent Supreme Court judgment upholding the striking down of Section 370, which gave the state of Jammu and Kashmir semi-autonomous status. It isn't the only state in India to have special status, and it's a serious error to imagine that this judgment concerns Kashmir alone. It affects the fundamental structure of our polity. But today, I want to speak of something more urgent. Our country has lost its moral compass. The most heinous crimes, the most horrible declarations calling for genocide and ethnic cleansing are greeted with applause and political reward. While wealth is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, throwing crumbs to the poor, and manages to garner support to the very powers that are further impoverishing them. The most bewildering conundrum of our times is that all over the world, people seem to be voting to disempower themselves. They do this based on the information they receive. What that information is, And who controls it? That is the modern world's poisoned chalice. Who controls technology controls the world. But eventually I believe that people cannot and will not be controlled. I believe that a new generation will rise in revolt. There will be a revolution. Sorry, let me rephrase that. There will be revolutions. Hurrah. I said that we as a country have lost our moral compass. Across the world, millions of people, Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Hindu, communist, atheist, agnostic, are marching, calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. But the streets of our country, which was once a true friend of colonized people, a true friend of Palestine, which once would have seen millions march on too, are silent today most of our writers and public intellectuals all but very few are also silent what a terrible shame and what a sad display of a lack of foresight as we watch the structures of our democracy be systematically dismantled and our land of incredible diversity being shoehorned into a spurious, narrow idea of one-size-fits-all nationalism. At least those who call themselves intellectuals should know that our country too could explode. If we say nothing about Israel's brazen slaughter of Palestinians, even as it is live-streamed into the most private recesses of our personal lives, we are complicit in it. Something in our moral selves will be altered forever. Are we going to simply stand by and watch while homes, hospitals, refugee camps, schools, universities, archives are bombed, a million people displaced, and children in their thousands pulled from the government? The borders of Gaza are sealed. People have nowhere to go. They have no shelter, no food, no water. The United Nations says that more than half the population is starving. And still they are being bombed, relentlessly. Are we going to once again watch a whole people being dehumanized to the point whether it doesn't matter. The project of dehumanizing Palestinians did not begin with Benjamin Netanyahu and his crew. It began decades ago. In 2002, on the first anniversary of September 11, 2001, I delivered a lecture called Come September in the United States, in which I spoke about the other anniversaries of September 11. the 1973 CIA-backed coup against President Salvador Allende in Chile on that auspicious date, and then the speech on September 11, 1990, of George W. Bush, senior, then US president, to a joint session of Congress announcing his government's decision to go to war against Iraq And then I spoke about Palestine. I'm going to read this section to you, and you will see that if I hadn't told you that I wrote this 21 years ago, you'd think that I was talking about today. So I'm quoting from this essay. September 11 has a tragic resonance in the Middle East, too. On the 11th of September, 1922, ignoring Arab outrage, The British government proclaimed a mandate in Palestine, a follow-up to the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which Imperial Britain issued with its army massed outside the gates of Gaza. The Balfour Declaration promised European Zionists a national home for Jewish people. At the time, the British empire, on which the sun never set, was free to snatch and bequeath national homelands like a school bully distributes marbles. How carelessly imperial power resected ancient civilizations. Palestine and Kashmir are imperial Britain's festering, blood-drenched gifts to the modern world. Both are fault lines in the raging international conflicts of today. In 1937, Winston Churchill said of the Palestinians, and I quote, I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, a more worldly wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place. That set the trend for the Israeli state's attitude towards Palestinians. In 1969, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir said, Palestinians do not exist. Her successor, Prime Minister Levi S. Paul said, what are Palestinians? When I came here to Palestine, there were 250,000 non-Jews, mainly Arabs and Bedouins. It was a desert. more than underdeveloped. It was nothing. Prime Minister Menachem Begin called Palestinians two-legged beasts. Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir called them grasshoppers who could be crushed. This is the language of heads of state, not ordinary people. Thus began the terrible myth about the land without a people for a people without a man. In 1947, the UN formally partitioned Palestine and allotted 55% of Palestine's land to the Zionists. Within a year, they had captured 76%. On the 40th of May, 1948, the state of Israel was declared. Minutes after the declaration, the United States recognized Israel. The West Bank was annexed by Jordan. The Gaza Strip came under Egyptian military control. And formally, Palestine ceased to exist, except in the minds and hearts of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian people who became refugees, 760,000 to be precise. In 1967, Israel occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Over the decades, there have been uprisings, wars, intifadas. Tens of thousands have lost their lives. A cause and treaties have been signed, ceasefires declared and violated. But the bloodshed doesn't end. Palestine still remains illegally occupied. Its people live in inhuman conditions in virtual Bantustan, where they are subjected to collective punishment, 24-hour curfews, where they are humiliated and brutalized on a daily basis. They never know when their homes will be demolished, when their children will be shot, when their precious trees will be cut, when their roads will be closed, when they will be allowed to walk down to the market to buy food and medicine, and when they will not. They live with no semblance of dignity, with not much hope in sight. They have no control over their lands, their security, their movement, their communication, their water supply. So when accords are signed and words like autonomy and even statehood bandied about, it's always worth asking what sort of autonomy, what sort of state, what sort of rights will its citizens have? Young Palestinians who cannot control their anger turn themselves into human bombs and haunt Israel's streets and public places, blowing themselves up killing ordinary people, injecting terror into daily life, and eventually hardening both societies' suspicious and mutual hatred of each other. Each bombing invites merciless reprisal and even more hardship on Palestinian people. But then suicide bombing is an act of individual despair, not a revolutionary tactic. Although Palestinian attacks strike terror into Israeli citizens, they provide the perfect power for the Israeli government's daily incursions into Palestinian territory, the perfect excuse for old-fashioned 19th-century colonialism dressed up as a new fascist 21st century war. Israel's staunchest ally, and militarily and politically, is and always has been the United States. The US government has blocked, along with Israel, almost every UN resolution that sought a peaceful, equitable solution to the conflict. It has supported almost every war that Israel has fought. When Israel attacks Palestine, it is American missiles that smash through Palestinian homes. And every year, Israel receives several billion dollars from the United States taxpayers' money. So this was written 21 years ago. Apart from the war that is fought in Gaza, as you know, on the West Bank, where there is no Hamas, just in the last month, 200 people have been killed by Israeli settlers under the cover of Delta War. Today, every bomb that is dropped by Israel on the civilian population, every tank and every bullet has the United States name on it. None of this would happen if the U.S. wasn't backing it wholeheartedly. All of us saw what happened at the meeting of the U.N. Security Council on December 8th. when 13 member states voted for a ceasefire and the U.S. voted against it. The disturbing video of the U.S. deputy ambassador, a black American, raising his hand to veto the resolution is burned into our brain. Some bitter commentators on the social media have called it intersectional imperialism. Really, through the bureaucraties, what the U.S. seems to be saying is finish the job but do it tiring. So now, returning to the the old essay. What lessons should we draw from this tragic concert? Is it really impossible for Jewish people who suffered so cruelly themselves, more cruelly perhaps than any other people in history, to understand the vulnerability and the yearning of those whom they have displaced? Does extreme suffering always skin the cruelty? What hope does this leave the human race with? What will happen to the Palestinian people in the event of a victory when a nation without a state eventually proclaims a state? What kind of state can it be? What horrors will be perpetrated under its flag? Is it a separate state that we should be fighting for, or the right to a life of liberty and dignity for everyone, regardless of their ethnicity or religion? Palestine was once a secular bulwark in the Middle East. But now the weak, undemocratic, corrupt, but wildly non-sectarian Fiano is losing ground to Hamas, which espouses an overtly sectarian ideology and fights in the name of Islam. To support from their manifesto, we will be its soldiers and the firewood of its fire, which will burn the aliens. The world is called upon to condemn suicide bombers, but can't re-ignore the long road they have journeyed on before they arrived at this destination. September 20, 1942 to September 11, 2002, 80 years is a long time to have been waiting in a war, but now it's 100 years. We should somewhat advise the world and the people of Palestine. Should they just take and make a real effort not to exist? The idea of the Eurasia, the annihilation of Palestine, is being clearly articulated by Israeli political and military officials. A U.S. lawyer who has brought a case against the Biden administration for, quote, the failure to prevent genocide, which is a crime too, spoke of how rare it is for genocidal intent to be so clearly and publicly articulated. White Eagle has achieved their goal. Perhaps the plan is to have New Zealanders showcasing Palestinian culture and handicraft restaurants serving ethnic Palestinian food may be a sound and light show of how unlikely old Gaza used to be. The new Gaza harbor, at the head of the Ben Gurion Canal project, which is supposedly being planned to rival the Suez Canal, allegedly contracts for offshore drilling worth billions of dollars. I'm already being signed. 21 years ago when I delivered Come September in New Mexico, there was a kind of omerta in the US around Palestine. Those who spoke about it paid a huge price for being so. But today, in the US, the young are on the streets, led from the front by Jews as well as Palestinians, raging about what their government, the US government, is doing. Universities, including the most elite campuses, are on the boil. But capitalism, big capital, is moving fast to shut them down. Donors are threatening to withhold funds, thereby deciding what American students may or may not say and how they may or may not think. We're shot to the heart of the foundational principles of a so-called liberal education. Gone is any pretense of post-colonialism, multiculturalism, international law, the Geneva Conventions, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, gone with any pretense of free speech or public morality. A war that lawyers and scholars of international law say meets all the legal criterion of genocide. is taking place in which the perpetrators have cast themselves as victims. The colonizers who run an apartheid state have cast themselves as the oppressed. In the U.S., to question this is to be charged with anti-Semitism, even if those who are questioning it are Jewish themselves. It's mind-bending. Even Israel, where dissident Israelis like Gideon Levy are the most knowledgeable and incisive critics of Israeli actions, does not police free speech in the way the US does, although that is rapidly changing now. In the US, to speak of intifada, Uprising, resistance, in this case against genocide, against your own erasure, is considered to be a call for the genocide of Jews. The only moral thing Palestinian civilians can do apparently is to die. The only legal thing the rest of us can do is to watch them die and be silent. If not, we risk our scholarships, our grants, our lecture fees, and our livelihood. Post 9-11, the US war on terror gave cover to regimes across the world to dismantle civil rights and to construct an elaborate, invasive surveillance apparatus in which our governments know everything about us and we know nothing about them. Similarly, now, Under the umbrella of this new US McCarthyism, monstrous things will grow and flourish in countries all over the world. In our country, of course, it has begun years ago. But unless we speak out, it will gather momentum and sweep us all away. Yesterday's news is that gnu in delhi once among india's top university has issued new rules of conduct for students a fine of rupees 20 000 for any student who stages a dhana or hunger strike and 10 000 for anti-national slogans. There is no list yet about what those slogans are, but we can be reasonably sure that calling for the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Muslims will not be on it. So the battle in Palestine is ours too. What remains to be said must be said and repeated clearly. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the siege of Gaza are crimes against humanity. The United States and other countries that bankroll the occupation are parties to that crime. The horror we are witnessing right now, the unconscionable slaughter of civilians by Hamas as well as Israel, are a consequence of the siege and occupation. No amount of commentary about the cruelty, no amount of condemnation about the excesses committed by Hamas, and no amount of false equivalence about the scale of those atrocities will lead to a solution. It is the occupation that is breeding this monstrosity. It is doing violence to both perpetrators and victims. The victims are dead, The perpetrators will have to live with what they have done, so will their children for generations. The solution cannot be a militaristic one. This can only be a political one, in which both Israelis and Palestinians live together or side by side, with dignity, with equal rights. The world must intervene, the occupation must end, Palestinians must have a viable homeland, and Palestinian refugees must have the right to return. If not, then the moral architecture of Western liberalism will cease to exist. It was always hypocritical below, but even this provided some sort of shelter. That shelter is disappearing before our eyes.