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“Children should not be drawing tanks and dead bodies”

Interview with Awni Farhat (Palestine Humanitarian Response Campaign) about the exhibition Witness: Genocide through children’s eye


14/08/2024

Thanks for talking to us. Could you start by briefly introducing yourself?

My name is Awni Farhat. I’m the founder and director of the PHRC, the Palestine Humanitarian Response Centre. It’s a nonprofit organization. We work in Gaza, mainly on issues around children with trauma. We have a team of experts in different areas, and our focus is on trauma relief. 

In Gaza, during the beginning of this genocide, we built a Children’s Village in Rafah. And every day we had more than 250 children come and join our activities. We have different corners, we have theatre, we have a music corner, we have different small games, we have music, we have different spaces where children can get a sense of childhood again. Because what’s happening now in Gaza takes their childhood away.

It’s just very, very horrific that a lot of people don’t even have spaces to be with their own children. We have created a space where children can be reminded of their own childhood.

And you had to move the space from the original venue?

Since May, after the ground invasion, everyone has relocated, and were forcibly moved from Rafah to other places. Rafah now is a ghost town. Families, children, team members – everyone has evacuated from Rafah.

We now have two locations. At the same time we are building a big location on the beach. The beach has a very strong connection with Palestinians. It’s the only open space. In Gaza, everything’s landlocked. There are no spaces for breathing. But the beach is the main space for Palestinians to connect with the outside world. 

Also for trauma relief and trauma therapy, being close to the beach plays a huge role in dealing with the situation, and creates a space for hope and light. It’s really important, especially at this time when children develop their understanding of the world. If everything around them is dark, they’re going to develop a very dark understanding of the world. 

We’re trying to change this. We’re trying to plant seeds of hope and lightness in these dark times.

Do you think that the bombing affects children in a specific way differently to adults?

Children are very resilient. It depends more on where you are and how old you are. The aware children are affected more – those who are 14, 15, 16 get impacted the most. Those who are 5, 6, or 7 are still developing their conscious and understanding of the world. If they are not treated, they’re going to develop mental disorders forever. And then there are the ones in the middle who are very resilient and very, very smart – they need care. I think it’s important to provide care and love.

But Palestinian children are very resilient. If you grow up in a situation like this, you build a ceiling which is quite high compared to another child who is outside this situation. 

It affects them deeply. And the drawings in this exhibition are the living proof that we have today. Children should not be drawing tanks and dead bodies and rocks. They should be drawing rainbows and flowers and happy faces and not this.

Let’s talk about the drawings. We’re here at Witness, an exhibition of drawings from children in Gaza. It was in Amsterdam, it’s now being shown in Berlin. Can you tell me a bit about the idea behind the exhibition?

This exhibition features artwork made by children. And we wanted to bring the original drawings for people to come and see them. You don’t have access to what’s happening in Gaza. You don’t have access to what’s happening in Palestine. You see it from behind your phone and everything is peaceful.

We are breaking the censorship, and bringing physical proof to people to come close to it. You’re standing in front of an A4 picture which was drawn by a child. You don’t have access to this visible proof because everything is monitored, everything is censored. 

So we are trying to break these boundaries and come close to people. People can witness it, people can see it, people can look at it, people can relate to it, because a lot of people would have children, they have siblings, they have young people in their life, and this can be anyone in their own family. 

What has been the reaction of people so far to the exhibition?

It’s important. Everyone reacts differently. It’s quite shocking for most people to see that children can draw things like this. At the same time, it’s very different. They are not used to saying things like this. It’s quite shocking because they never even know what a tank looks like, what a rocket or a bullet looks like. Children in Gaza do, because this is the reality they have around them. It looks like this. 

For me, children are the most pure, honest people in the world. They can communicate their feelings and emotions much easier than speaking. They can put it on paper. It’s my responsibility to bring this message to the people who don’t see. 

I went to Gaza. I was there during November. Now no one can get in and no one can get out because they’ve closed the Rafah crossing. It’s completely detached from the entire world. Unfortunately, Palestinian people don’t have freedom. They can’t freely travel, and they can’t bring their voices to people outside.

These drawings are screaming out in this exhibition area to show the reality of what’s happening in Gaza. These are the voices of these children. I wish everyone can come and see it. 

How would you like people to react? They come, they see the drawings, they see the films you’re showing. What should they do?

It’s a call for action. You can’t control how people react. You can’t control how they will feel. But the main objective is a call of action. I hope that people leave this exhibition and feel responsible. They are a witness who can do something about it. 

We can do so much here. We have so much privilege. Unfortunately, of course, in Germany you live under a very difficult political reality. But there’s still hope for change. And we need to change the political reality. We need to change the system. Because what’s happening outside the border of Europe is going to impact the policies and the core cause of our political stand.

Do you see that art has a role in changing realities? 

Yeah, definitely. Art is art. It is the window that artists, or creatives, can use to connect with people through a community understanding of taking action. And now we’re using this as a tool to connect and let people come close.

These pictures have been drawn by kids in Gaza. Have you talked to the kids afterwards? How are they now?

Unfortunately, after the Rafah invasion, we lost contact with most of the children, because they have relocated. Some of them are still in Khan Younis and other areas. A lot of families are following us on social media. So we are in touch with some of them, we have their phone numbers and contact details. Some of them are also following the exhibition. 

We are trying to keep in touch, but people are evacuating every day to survive. And it’s very difficult to maintain the connection. But we know the faces, we have the names, we have the contacts.

And if somebody is interested in putting on the exhibition somewhere else, what should they do? Who should they contact?

They can contact me at awnifarhat@hotmail.com. They can contact us on the website or Instagram. We did the exhibition in La Hague, we did it in Amsterdam. This is the third time. Hopefully, we will have a good experience in Berlin. I was quite skeptical at the beginning, given the situation here.

Is there anything else that you’d like to say? 

I wish more people come and see this exhibition, more people who don’t have any relationship with Palestine, or what’s happening. I wish more parents come and see it. I wish people who don’t have this exposure to come and get exposed. I don’t want to convince them, I don’t want to talk to them, I just want to see.

That’s the main thing. Because we are creating space and access. The exhibition’s name is Witness. And I think it’s important that if you have access to exposure, you can’t unsee it again. That’s the main thing. As humans, you have responsibilities to live your life with due responsibility. You create a life where everyone is equal, not as someone having power over your rights.

These children, they don’t have rights, because others decided to take these rights away. 

What do you think people can do to help the children?

First, given where we are now, I think we need to push a lot to change things in politics. We need to change how people perceive Palestinians. We need to humanize Palestinians again. There has been a long, long, long history of propaganda and brainwashing creating a narrative which is only based on one side. We need to change this now.

I am here as a Palestinian man, as a human, and I think it’s quite scary sometimes just to walk around and wear the kuffiyah. This is only because there’s a huge propaganda happening against what’s happening in Palestine. I wish we can change this. I want people to be the voice. This can be any of their family members. We need to act as a collective to protect these children.

Queer Pride in a Time of Genocide

A report from Berlin’s Dyke* March


13/08/2024

July 26, 2024, Karl-Marx-Platz, Berlin Neukölln. I’ve arrived early, and now I am observing the changing scene, as more and more demonstrators are flocking in. I am equal parts tense and excited because the Dyke*March is not predictable. There are quite a few Kufiyas to be seen, but soon I also observe a small group at the corner of Karl-Marx-Straße who are holding up Zionist posters. And where is the Dykes4Palestine block that was announced on Instagram? Is it that group over there? Or the roughly equal-sized group over here?

“Excuse me,” someone asks me in German, “is this protest for Palestine?” “Well,” I say, and then I tell them what I know: that it’s a march for lesbian visibility and that the organizers made a statement condemning the genocide in Gaza. 

Does a condemnation of the genocide make the Dyke March “for Palestine”? And what are we going to do about that Zionist corner over there?

There are all these uncertainties in the air.

Then it happens. There is motioning, we move over next to the van, and we erupt chanting Free-Free-Palestine from the depths of our lungs, and Zionism-Is-A-Crime, Yalla-Yalla-Intifada, Stop-the-Genocide, Freedom-for-Palestine, Freedom-for-Sudan, Freedom-for-Kongo, Freedom-for-Kurdistan and on and on. The energy is high. When one chant leader drops out, the next one picks up. We are many!

I also see those who are not chanting but watching us, calmly, their faces revealing nothing. They must be taking note in some way.

After maybe ten minutes we shout a last loud “Free Palestine” and then the air space is taken by an organizer’s voice resounding through a megaphone. The voice announces that the demonstration will start soon, and it reminds everyone that it is a demonstration for lesbian visibility. They also suggest that we should practice solidarity among each other. Somebody translates into English for their comrades, and they chuckle.

Apparently the intensity of Palestine solidarity messages overwhelmed at least this one organizer’s expectations and preferences.

The organizer’s lack of experience with Palestine solidarity also became apparent in a funny little moment when they had to read out the restrictions. Anybody who has been to the anti-genocide protests has heard these anti-Palestinian litanies that routinely remind us of the names of all the Palestinian factions that we are forbidden to support, among other things, before we get to have our demonstrations. 

The Dyke* March organizer, unfamiliar with the procedure, approached the task by attempting to paraphrase the restrictions in their own words, integrating as it were their own political messaging with the restrictions on the right of assembly conveyed by the cops. The cops seemed not to appreciate the integrative gesture, though, as the organizer was interrupted and instructed that this is not how it goes, until they read the statement verbatim.

When the march started filling into Karl-Marx-Straße, the pro-Palestinian demonstrators walked ahead, and we took to chanting again. There were many cops lining the demo. At some point I dropped to the side, looking for my friend and demo buddy with whom I had failed to united with so far because of all the excitement on Karl-Marx-Platz. There was a strong presence of Palestine solidarity for as long as I could see, and I waited a few minutes, letting the march pass by.

“We ain’t family until Palestine is free,” read one memorable sign that spoke well to the Dyke* March setting and also resonated with its North-American connections, since it is in some North-American contexts that “family” is used among (mostly older generations of) queers as code for a shared fate of queers.

 “FLINTIFADA” was penned on another sign, merging the German acronym FLINTA (which stands for Women-Lesbians-Inter-Nonbinary-Trans-Agender) with the Arabic intifada, meaning uprising. 

Another prominent sign exhibited the ACT-UP slogan SILENCE = DEATH with a watermelon-themed graphic, placing the protest against the genocide of Palestinians in the tradition of protesting the AIDS crisis while highlighting the issue of silence and apathy among large groups of people. As  the Jüdische Stimme für gerechten Frieden in Nahost pointed out, the disruptive actions of ACT UP against the AIDS crisis have impacted other protest movements since then and they are present in today’s anti-genocide protests. The New York City Dyke March, which the Dyke* March Berlin cites as in inspiration, was founded by activists from ACT UP and Lesbian Avengers among others. Fittingly, the New York City Dyke March this year marched under the theme “Dykes against Genocide.” 

Dyke* March Berlin’s organizers did not adopt such a theme, but a rather large group of its participants did by means of the banners and slogans that we brought. It was the first time that I experienced Palestine solidarity to be dominant in a minimally defined leftist and/or queer space in Germany. Minimally defined in the sense that the Dyke* March has no elaborate political commitments. Very much unlike the Internationalist Queer Pride Berlin (IQPB), which was to take place the following day. IQPB has a clear position, equally put down in writing and born out in the living practice of organizing alliances, where unequivocal solidarity with Palestine is an integral part of a coherent anti-colonial, anti-capitalist internationalism.

The Dyke*March Berlin is different. Its goal is lesbian visibility. It takes no corporate or state funding. And it is trans-inclusive. That, in a nutshell, is it. There are no speeches and usually no long statements. It is a march followed by a party.

Yet, it also embraces the self-image as “a protest demo, not a parade.” And in any protest, the question what the protest is for or against, matters. The Dyke* March Flyer spoke only vaguely about “taking a stand against hatred”.

The condemnation of the genocide in Palestine came later, and not very prominently placed, in an otherwise untitled “Statement by the organisers on the solidarity bar at Möbel Olfe on July, 7th and on the Dyke* March Berlin 2024.” Summed up briefly, one learns that there was a fundraiser for the Dyke* March at the bar Möbel Olfe, which was ended early after a course of events that was provoked by a group of people who stickered Israeli flags, among other things, and declared their table a “safe space for Jews and Israelis.” The Dyke* March organizers condemn the “unannounced political action” of this group, accuse the group of wanting to provoke and divide, and blame it for the premature end of the fundraiser.

A statement by the anti-colonial feminist collective Perrxz der Futuro describes the course of events at said fundraiser differently. In a statement titled “No Dyke Pride in Genocide” they write this about the fundraising event:

“After several hours into the party, we noticed that, in a very visible space inside the bar, there was a table with five people with stickers, flyers and signs that said “No pride in Hamas”, ”believe Israeli women”, “safe table for Israelis”, among other things. The situation generated great alert in us so we sought to speak with the organizers of the Dyke march, who ignored us, did not give importance to the situation and referred us to speak with the people at the bar.”

The statement goes on to describe that the Dyke* March team later yelled at the anti-colonial group, while the Zionist group filmed the anti-colonial group and called the cops on them. 

I conclude, or suspect, that there was some internal reckoning after the fundraiser on the part of the Dyke* March organizing team which led them to articulate a statement more critical towards the Zionist group, and more embracing of the anti-colonial feminist group than they had been in their actions on that evening. In that statement they also wrote down the following: “As we demonstrate on the streets of Berlin, we want to reaffirm our solidarity with marginalized, oppressed groups worldwide. We condemn the current genocide in Palestine and other parts of the world.”

Perrxs del Futuro comments as follows:

“In the light of the recent statement published by Dyke March Berlin, we believe that taking a stand is necessary, but not sufficient.
The fight against oppression, violence and genocide must be firm. It is not enough to declare it in writing, but to act accordingly.
Without the insistence on those of us who were alerted to the presence of Zionist propaganda in the place, neither the organization not the bar would have done anything about it.
It is not enough to denounce antisemitic attitudes, but also Zionist attitudes, calling them by name.
It is not enough to say that they are on the side of the oppressed, if at the moment when they are needed, they ignore us, mistreat and violate us.”

Many contradictions remain with the Dyke*March Berlin, as the statement of Perrxz del Futuro make clear. The insistence by a small group of anti-colonial feminists to challenge the Zionist propaganda at the fundraising event had a big effect. Without it, the Dyke* March team may never have published their condemnation of the genocide. Insufficient and shaped by contradictions as it was, this condemnation made a significant opening in the Zionist-dominated (queer/political) landscape in Germany and was likely motivating many pro-Palestinian lesbians, queers and trans people and our allies to come out and participate in the Dyke* March to protest for an end to the genocide.

The experience of the Dyke*March Berlin shows that the Zionist German ruling ideology is full of cracks, and that political spaces are capable of starting to rid themselves of it. Not being dependent on public or corporate funding may well have been a significant factor.  I am convinced that a newly powerful Left (in Germany) will be anti-Zionist, or it will be non-existing. The experience at the Dyke March gave me hope that we may see the first, thanks to all the relentless acts of confronting and challenging and protesting in spaces big and small. Gaza is changing all of us.

There was brutal violence by cops and there were detentions. One widely circulated video captured a moving act of spontaneous, very soft-spoken solidarity with a detained protester: A young protester is pressed against the wall of a pharmacy in Karl-Marx-Straße while getting detained by a cop, and an older woman who was resting by the windowsill of the pharmacy comforts the protester by gently stroking and kissing her arm. With this scene I shall end my report.

The obvious solution

“Equality or nothing!” from the river to the sea.


12/08/2024

Nothing is left of human dignity in Gaza, while the world simply looks on in horror. But at the same time global civil society resistance grows in spite of massive intimidation. Forward-looking Palestinians and Israelis campaign for a common perspective on one democratic state. Now more than ever.

By now even in Germany and in other countries with close ties to Israel,  more and more people are dismayed by the horrendous images and news from Gaza. When they hear about the “two-state solution”, which has recently come back into vogue, this seems to them a way out.This to them means Israelis and Palestinians living “peacefully side by side“, protected from each other in their ethnically defined little states. Anna Baerbock recently tactfully reminded Israel to re-consider this „conflict resolution“. 

“Conflict resolution” assumes that two populations – or two quarreling kids – with different interests are at loggerheads with each other. In the case at hand “the two sides“ are apparently unable or unwilling to come to an agreement. So better separate them and give them each their own territory . However, this “solution” with two states, one Israeli and one Palestinian, has been off the agenda for some years. It became impossible to overlook the fact that on the one hand there is a state with considerable power, on the other hand a powerless population. In the world we all live in a population without a state is virtually nothing, individually as well as collectively/politically. 

The Palestinians are confronted with Israel, a state. Whereas they themselves are scattered across the West Bank, Gaza, Israel “proper“ (with 2nd class citizenship), and “ware-housed“ (Jeff Halper) in refugee camps in neighbouring states and elsewhere in the world. Israel is equipped with all the means of power that statehood implies. It rules over all the inhabitants and the entire territory, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, in every respect (borders, economy, resources, jurisdiction, legislation, military …). Israel has never questioned this supremacy, neither in the times of the “Oslo Peace Process“ nor at any time before or after, neither under left-wing nor under right-wing governments. Indeed, Israel has consistently and systematically created conditions that do not allow for two separate, contiguous territories for two sovereign states.

In any case, Netanyahu recently candidly proclaimed that his government completely denies Palestinian claims to their own state. He shattered a fiction that the international community, peace loving people in Israel and all over the world and for a while even Palestinians believed all these years.

You can almost feel sorry for Anna Baerbock and colleagues.

How much longer can the structures and practices that keep Israel the uncontested owner and ruler of Palestine be overlooked? How much longer can “The Emperor’s New Clothes” politically convenient denial of reality continue? It was acceptable to the western supporters of Israel as long as the conflict stayed safely contained in the Palestinian ghetto. But now things get out of control, and “spill over“ into further catastrophes and wars…

Since the beginning of the Oslo “peace process”, with the “two-state solution”, some Palestinian and Israeli intellectuals/activists agreed on what the process was about: not peace but pacification by endless negotiations. That enabled Israel to realize its ambitions without restrictions. In this  undertaking  Germany was more helpful than any other ally.

At first glance it is suprising this was accomplished mainly via the generous financial support of the Palestinian Authority (PA). This Palestinian “government“ – of some patches of the Westbank (and formerly also Gaza) – uses German aid to pay for what the Authority needs to provide for the Palestinian population. German aid also pays for a considerable proportion of what Israel (as occupying power), is obliged to provide to the occupied Palestinian civilian population in the zones under direct occupation.

The civilian infrastructure regularly destroyed by Israel in the PA or occupied territories is rebuilt mainly with funding from the Federal Republic of Germany. What’s more, Germany has always been happy to ensure the security of the occupying power and the violent settlers. The Palestinian “security forces” are fully equipped and trained with German assistance. They are regularly deployed by the PA to brutally repress any protest against the occupying power or the PA. They are absolutely not meant to protect Palestinians against IDF and settler brutality. 

In short, Germany helps financially and in word and deed to keep the gig running in the sense of Israel as long as “peace” and the “two-state solution” are the order of the day. Neither was ever intended to be fulfilled.

In 1993, immediately after the handshake between Arafat and Rabin, the Palestinian-American literary scholar Edward Said understood what this agreement was about: “The vulgar staging of the ceremony at the White House, the humiliating performance of Arafat as he thanked the world for giving up most of the rights of the Palestinian people… All this could only temporarily obscure the truly unbelievable extent of the Palestinian surrender.” 

The only alternative for Edward Said was co-existence of Palestinians and Israelis in a common state on the territory of historical Palestine:

“I see no other option than to now finally address the sharing of the land in which we are thrown together, to share it in a genuinely democratic way, which means equal rights for every citizen. There can only be reconciliation when both peoples, both communities of suffering, realize that their existence is a secular fact to be dealt with as such.“

The Israeli historian Ilan Pappé wrote a few years ago that the failure of the Oslo process to achieve Palestinian sovereignty was inherent in it from the beginning: “The failure of Camp David in 2000 was not the end of a peace process. (…) Rather, the year 2000 marked the official establishment of the apartheid Republic of Israel.”

In light of the genocide in Gaza the world definitely no longer accepts this model of an apartheid state and settler colonialism. At least not the millions of people who since last October took to the streets, set up university camps, put pressure on parliamentarians and governments. They made it clear in a variety of peaceful ways that a ceasefire is essential, but also that any “solution” afterwards cannot be in the tradition of the disastrous “peace process”. 

This means that peace and reconciliation cannot be based on compromise, but only on the recognition and implementation of rights – including the Palestinian Right of Return as stipulated in the UN General Assembly resolution 194.

Emblematic of this concept are two authors/activists, one a Palestinian from Gaza, the other an Israeli Jew: Haidar Eid and Jeff Halper. I pick these two out of the long line of Palestinians and Israelis (and Jews) who over the decades have campaigned for and published on the prospect of a common state.

It is no coincidence that the titles of their most recent publications dove-tail as if previously agreed upon: Decolonizing the Palestinian Mind; and, Decolonizing Israel, Liberating Palestine: Zionism, Settler Colonialism and the Case for One Democratic State.

Those who assume “the two sides”, Israelis or Israel vs. Palestinians or Palestine, should pause. Which publication is the one by the Israeli, which the one by the Palestinian? In fact, both are characterized by a consistent criticism of what supposedly is “our side”. This independence of thought characterizes both Palestinians like Eid and Israelis like Halper who justly and uncompromisingly reject the Zionist project.

Eid’s book although written by the end of 2023, became overshadowed by   the ongoing genocide in Gaza. He left the Gaza Strip with his family early this year. As a well known voice from Gaza, he has been in great danger. It is not only journalists who have been particularly at risk in Gaza since 7 October 2023, but also other voices from Gaza that are perceived in the world, such as Refaat Al-Areer, poet and professor of Anglophone literature, who had connections in the USA and the UK, or the journalists killed by the IDF in Gaza since 7 October 2023.

Eid assumes that de-colonization or de-Zionization of Palestine/Israel as a whole must be the goal. For him Palestinians must repudiate  the role played by the collaboration of all Palestinian parties of the PLO and Hamas in maintaining Israeli colonialism and apartheid. He accuses Hamas of having adopted the long-disavowed two-state solution like everyone else. And: “The experience of Hamas‘s rule in the Gaza Strip offers a model en miniature of an Islamic state, while the West Bank stands for a Bantustan ‘state’ to be proclaimed.” The PA is currently offering to (co-)manage the Gaza Strip under the aegis of Israel and its allies. 

Eid points out Hamas’s role in subjecting Gaza „to an ideologically based social transformation… which has in particular further restricted women’s rights“.

Again and again, especially young Gazans, including many women, have risen up against Hamas’s rule. This shows how unfair reporting is, according to which the population of Gaza consists of nothing more than fanatical Hamas supporters and “innocent women and children”. Poor victims with no political agenda of their own.

Haidar Eid advocates a democratization of the traditional Palestinian institutions, which would also mean the dissolution of the PA (Palestinian Authority). Like many Palestinians he believes that this „government“ over (parts of) the Westbank has long been discredited. It has not faced an election for over two decades and functions exclusively for the benefit of Israel and a clique around the PA. Moreover, from the outset, this authority has only claimed to represent the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, not those of the diaspora. 

With Edward Said, Eid demands “equality or nothing”. No coincidence that Eid’s thoughts go hand in hand with those of Halper. Both are members of the ‘One Democratic State Campaign (ODSC). Both are convinced such a campaign is urgently needed. Halper‘s focus as an Israeli “colonialist who refuses, as a comrade in the common struggle” is the relentless critique of “Zionism as a settler-colonial project”. In the second half of the book, he draws logical consequences: the necessary and possible de-colonization of historical Palestine. Israel, as Halper explains, is structurally partly an ethnocracy, partly an apartheid system but essentially a settler-colonial state from the river to the sea. 

Halper’s reflections, at first sight rather utopian, are – on the contrary – pragmatic and  precise. He takes serious account of the obvious objection that such an undertaking of de-colonization and the creation of a common state of equal citizens in Palestine/Israel is completely illusory, especially now. 

However, he details the conditions under which this would nevertheless be possible and makes clear what needs to be done. It is a lot. It needs a civil society movement of Palestinians, Israelis and others around the globe. It already exists in nuce. This movement must have a vision, a goal in mind: the outlines of a common community, a common life, a common identity.

Through his book Decolonizing Israel, Liberating Palestine, Halper insists that the colonized indigenous Palestinans have the last word. I conclude with the Palestinian intellectual/activist Omar Barghouti, as quoted by a “colonizer-who-refuses“:

“In parallel with the process of ending injustice and restoring basic Palestinian rights, and while oppressive relationships are being dismantled and colonial privileges done away with, a conscious and genuine process of challenging the dichotomy between the identity of the oppressed and that of the oppressor must simultaneously be nourished to build the conceptual foundations for ethical coexistence in the decolonized future state. Only then can the end of oppression give birth to a common, post-oppressive identity that can truly make the equality between the indigenous Palestinins and the indigenized settler as just, sustainable and peaceful as possible.”

Explosions for a Morning Run

If war were a guy, he’d be the clingy type who sticks to you like glue.


In the summer of 2022, I still had my job. So, I woke up at 9:15 AM to get ready for a meeting at 9:30. 

Normally, I don’t turn on my camera. In the past, I had to come up with excuses, but recently we got a 20-year-old analyst who makes decisions based on feelings. Surprisingly, the boss accepted his emotional instability as a reason not to turn on the camera, so soon I started using that reason too.

At 9:18, I was already standing naked in the shower.

At 9:21, my partner joined me.

At 9:26, we were brushing each other’s teeth and inexplicably laughing, splattering toothpaste foam everywhere.

At 9:29, as usual, I opened my laptop and within 2 minutes, I was in the meeting.

By 9:34, when the whole team was assembled, a siren sounded. It came from my end first, then arrived at colleagues in western Ukraine. Someone sighed in resignation, like before starting something tedious. Eventually, we decided to postpone the meeting and head for shelter.

The issue is that there are few shelters in Ukraine. Budget funds were allocated for their renovation and construction, but this initiative, too, ended in a corruption scandal.

During the siren, residents are expected to descend to the basements of their multi-story buildings mostly built in the Soviet Union. However, these are just basements, not proper shelters. Often there’s no electricity. Instead, there are rats, cobwebs, strange odors, and mold.

Old buildings have thick walls, making the basement potentially sturdy, but dust, dirt, and unsanitary conditions make staying there not only unpleasant but also hazardous. In new buildings, basements are still relatively clean, however, it’s well-known that new buildings are structurally unsound. Budgets for building houses shrink several times due to corruption before construction even begins. That’s why people have to choose between thick walls with unsanitary conditions or clean but unreliable basements.

Personally, I preferred to hide not in basements, but in a deep underground parking garage located 10 minutes away from my home. 10 minutes! The siren meant to me not only that missiles were flying our way but also that it was time to prepare for a sprint. I’m not joking – I actually bought running shoes from Decathlon to better my survival chances.

But as the war dragged on, I found myself running away from the police more often than from missiles. Why even leave the house then? At the beginning of the war I instinctively reacted to the siren and immediately sought shelter. By summer I often didn’t react at all, just sighed in resignation like my colleague at the meeting.

It’s easy to be fatalistic when you have nothing to lose. In post-Soviet countries, love often resides in someone else and rarely reaches you directly. That’s why you start valuing yourself only when you value someone else. It’s almost like a duty to appreciate them, so as not to accidentally upset them with news of your own poor health.

Siren. Should I stay or should I go? I look out the window. Nothing’s happening. But suddenly I hear an explosion. Loud and prolonged. Run! 

I grab my laptop, a book, two new sweaters, and a power bank. Let’s go. My partner runs after me, waving two plastic folders with documents. We run down the stairs and laugh. We ran like this last week. And the week before. A few times a week. But suddenly, another explosion. This one was even louder. The missile landed very close. Even the railings trembled. We run!

My laptop, without which I couldn’t imagine my life, instantly became a meaningless and mute object. Money and documents – just paper. We run, leaping over 3 steps at a time. Each jump has me checking whether the floor will fall out from under us or the whole building will collapse.

By this point, I had already forgotten what I was going to talk about at the work meeting. The meeting itself had become pointless. I should have called my mom instead. I should have called my buddies and found out why we drifted apart. The silence at that moment wasn’t just silence – it was the distance between explosions, like the thread on which pearls are strung.

At one moment, we stopped to look out the window again. The aftermath of the explosion truly resembled a pearl. Dozens of large pearls – clouds of white-gray dust rising in a pearly column into the sky, expanding in intricate patterns, painting spheres in the air. The sight was mesmerizing. A massive pearly worm emerged above the 9-story building, which used to seem so ordinary, as if nothing could ever happen to it.

When the elderly are scared, they grow younger. A senior man and woman sprint past us. They run as if competing with us. When kids are scared, they grow older. Soon, the whole building fills with sounds of doors opening and closing. Dozens of doors and pairs of feet, among which are ours. We are in motion. A marathon that won’t be seen on TV. Fear that can easily be confused with a person’s true face.

Some people left the building and descended into the basement. But my partner and I couldn’t do that. At any moment, the police could come to the basement and take us as volunteers for the war. So, we had to stay outside and anxiously watch the sky, looking out for the next missile.

Point-U is a ballistic missile mounted on a mobile wheeled platform, developed in the 1960s. It can strike targets up to 120 km away and travels at a speed of 3,960 km/h.

“Storm” (X-22) missiles have claimed many Ukrainian lives. On January 14, 2023, one of them hit a multi-story building in Dnipro, killing 46 people and injuring dozens more. The same type of missile hit a shopping center in Kremenchug on June 27, 2022, resulting in the deaths of over 20 people. This supersonic cruise missile was adopted into service in 1968 and flies at speeds ranging from 4,000 to 5,630 km/h.

My cousin, who hasn’t left his rented apartment in Kharkiv for over 2 years, says he can now distinguish different types of missiles and other weapons by sound alone. I can’t boast the same. I don’t know which missiles have just been fired at my city. I’m in a panic. With one hand clutching my belongings and the other grabbing my partner’s hood, we run towards the underground parking garage. The sun is shining brightly. The air smells of freshly cut grass and doner kebab.

The sounds of ambulances are audible as they rush along the main road towards one of the tragedy sites. Three explosions. Will there be a fourth? A missile doesn’t have to travel at 5,630 km/h to bring us instant death. We must admit that even if a missile moves at the speed of a tired cyclist, most of us won’t escape it.

Shelling occurs both day and night. That day I didn’t yet know missiles would arrive on New Year’s Eve. I heard a story that during World War I, soldiers from warring armies climbed out of their trenches to celebrate Christmas together. In Russia and Ukraine, we don’t celebrate Christmas; our countries are not so religious, but we do loudly celebrate New Year’s.

Yet, for some reason, at the end of 2022, no one felt inclined to temporarily reconcile. It’s not like they could, anyway; poking their heads out of trenches when the maximum range of the X-22 is 600 kilometers.

Arriving at the parking garage, we saw crowds of men with their wives and children. Women with adult sons. The men avoided entering the garage so as to not be caught by the police or military. The women hesitated to go down without their husbands. Children perceive the blasts as part of an imaginary world where explosives have personalities, and if asked nicely, they won’t harm either mom or dad.

We also didn’t descend. We blended into the crowd. Listened to others’ conversations. No one talked about the war. They discussed anything else, even the smell of freshly cut grass, but ignored the column of smoke rising higher and higher into the sky.

It seemed like no one was expecting it, but then the fourth explosion rang out. The loudest one yet. It was so close that it was difficult to tell from which direction it came. It felt as if everything around us exploded simultaneously and only miraculously we survived. There were about 50 people outside, and everyone rushed deep into the parking garage.

If there had been police, I would have been ready to commit a crime. When faced with death, a person is capable of things they wouldn’t even consider in a calm state. But when you face death literally every day, you start to see death as an old friend, and madness becomes commonplace: it doesn’t scare or astonish anymore; surprisingly, it seamlessly blends into the landscape of a city burning from missiles.

There were no policemen inside, but suddenly a security guard in a gray uniform appeared from nowhere. He ushered the children into the safety of his booth. Those who had parked their cars in the garage hid inside their vehicles. My partner and I sat on the floor near a concrete column in the center. We were so accustomed to saying goodbye to life that now we only subtly nodded to each other.

When the panic subsided and the garage became relatively quiet, a middle-aged woman burst loudly into the parking space and shouted, “THE HOUSE NEAR THE SUPERMARKET IS ON FIRE! THE ROOF HAS BEEN BLOWN TO HELL!” 

Following her words, the garage vibrated again, much like the sound of missile flying high overhead. I noticed that the elegantly dressed woman was wearing running shoes on her feet. Now I looked at her as if we shared a secret passion.

Afterwards, we had a hearty breakfast at an Asian restaurant. When you think every meal could be your last, you start overeating. It’s been two and a half years of war, and I still wear several layers of clothing to avoid freezing, even in summer, and order oversized portions of food. It’s hard to break wartime habits, especially if the war isn’t over yet.

That day, the air raid alarm was ended at 12:50 PM.

At 2:15, I returned to work.

At 2:30, an additional meeting was organized.

I was the only employee from eastern Ukraine. Most of my colleagues lived in Lviv and Ternopil. While Ternopil was notorious for its harsh military round-ups of men, colleagues from Lviv, where missiles didn’t reach as often, liked to talk about how the war should go all the way to victory. No compromises. We need the borders of 1991. We need to take back Crimea. That’s what they like to repeat, not feeling war as it feels in Kharkiv.

I didn’t participate in these discussions. All I wanted was to stop saying goodbye to life every damn day and go for a morning run because I wanted to, not because missile explosions forced me to.

P.S: As of now, the longest air raid alarm was recorded in Kharkiv, lasting 16 hours and 33 minutes.

 

This piece is a part of  a series, The Mining Boy Notes, published on Mondays and authored by Ilya Kharkow, a writer from Ukraine. For more information about Ilya, see his website. You can support his work by buying him a coffee.

 

“Queers for Palestine” is not self-hatred

Queer people fight for a liberated and just world. Their solidarity with Palestine is therefore simply consistent.


11/08/2024

An alliance is forming and driving the right-wing worldwide into a white-hot rage: queer people are showing solidarity with Gazans. “Queers for Palestine” has emblazoned t-shirts across Western cities, where many of the demonstrations against the Israeli attack on Gaza are led by queer people.

Last weekend two large protest marches with tens of thousands of participants took place during Berlin Pride, both of which explicitly stood in solidarity with Palestinians: the Dyke March Demo for Lesbian Visibility and the anti-capitalist, non-commercial Internationalist Queer March. As was to be expected, conservative commentators in German media responded to both with public meltdowns. In the taz, Jan Feddersen wrote that those who believe queer people could be safe in Gaza might well take Nazi concentration camps for “health resorts”. Relativising the Holocaust is supposed to count as antisemitic, but the defenders of the far-right regime in Israel and its human rights violations has long since let all standards slip.

A few days earlier, the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu poked fun at gays demanding a ceasefire in a controversial speech in front of the US Congress: Gays for Palestine would be like Chickens for KFC. This slogan has been circulating for some time in right wing discourses. The metaphor is rather lacking. It must firstly be emphasised that far more queer Palestinians have been killed by Israeli bombs and the starvation blockade than by homophobic violence from fellow Palestinians. Furthermore, the fact that gay, lesbian and trans people are particularly empathetic with the suffering of the oppressed should not be surprising. Queer people know what it is like to experience exclusion and violence whilst the societal majority decides that their suffering is not worth mourning.

It is no coincidence that Judith Butler, the figurehead of gender theory despised by the right wing, tackled the question of who society mourns in her book Precarious Life following the American war of aggression against Iraq. It is only a generation ago that hundreds of thousands of gay men died of AIDS, a disease first diagnosed in 1981. The US president at the time, Ronald Reagan, took 4 years to even mention the topic. His hesitancy to allow the virus to be researched and fought made him complicit in the deaths of innumerable queer people. Their lives were not worthy of protection or mourning. It took pressure from the streets of the US for gay men to be recognised as “worthy victims”, as Noam Chomsky named those deserving of humanity and empathy in his book Manufacturing Consent. Today Palestinians do not count as “worthy victims” in liberal discourse, in contrast to queer people. This is why the two groups are played off against each other to justify unspeakable violence against Palestinians.

Following the right-wing rulebook

Another point of criticism that fans of war crimes like Feddersen happily reach for goes as follows: if queer people want to stand in defence of sexual minorities, why do they not demonstrate against the Islamist organisation Hamas? Islamic fascists are, with their misogynistic world-view and at times murderous homophobia, clearly not political allies of queer people and leftists. The accusation that there are too few protests against Hamas is nonetheless absurd. Hamas is listed in Germany, the EU and NATO as a terrorist organisation. It is already demonised. To protest against Hamas in Germany makes as much sense as protesting against the USA in Iran. In contrast to Hamas, Israeli military leadership is supported by the German state financially, diplomatically, legally, ideologically, and materially with arms shipments. The federal government is an obvious addressee for people that live and pay taxes in Germany, one that also has the power to institute their demands.

In Gaza and other parts of the Middle East there are doubtless many stereotypes regarding and violence towards queer people. But do people have to fulfil moral standards in order to be worthy of basic human rights? Who is supposed to establish the moral standards that decide who deserves the right to life, dignity and freedom? According to the 1948 UN Human Rights Charter, these are universal rights. They are in force whether we like someone or not.

If homophobia should justify the revocation of human rights, are we going to bomb the Vatican? Will we incarcerate Polish PiS voters in torture camps? Will we exterminate Upper Bavaria? According to this logic, Israel, too, would not escape a humanitarian intervention to benefit queer people. The legal situation for queer people in Israel is indeed better than in many other Middle Eastern countries. Gay marriage is not legal, but gay marriages performed abroad are recognised. Gay couples can adopt children. The Israeli state likes to boast with these socially progressive laws and say “look, Israel is an oasis for queer people and so much better than our surrounding, enemy Arab states – you Westerners therefore have to be on our side.”

Those demanding the closing of ranks in this manner are the useful idiots of the Israeli right wing. Bezalel Smotrich, Netanyahu’s finance minister, publicly described himself as a homophobic fascist. The far-right minister of national security, Itamar Ben Gvir, called the 2023 Pride March in Jerusalem a “Beast Parade”. This fits the dehumanising rhetoric of his boss, who called the inhabitants of Gaza “animals”. Are these the allies that Western defenders of queer people want?

The misuse of LGBTQ issues to present a progressive image with which to conceal unethical practices is called pinkwashing, analogous to greenwashing, the use of environmental measures to make a company or product look climate-friendly, even if it is not. Here it must be said that Israeli intelligence agencies repeatedly threaten to out Palestinians publicly – which could in fact be life-threatening – if they do not agree to work for them as informants. Such blackmail is not queer-friendly. Should Israel’s human rights violations be ignored because they are a bit nicer to gay people than Iran?

Critics complain that the charge of pinkwashing is antisemitic. However, pinkwashing was not invented to attack Israel. Corporations often resort to pinkwashing, such as Deutsche Bank, which puts rainbow stickers up at the doors of its branch offices, although the bank does nothing in particular to help queer people. Taiwan similarly likes to emphasise it is the first East Asian country to legalise gay marriage, in order to contrast itself with mainland China and pose as a liberal country deserving of military support.

Pinkwashing is particularly useful to gain geopolitical legitimacy in the West, as it activates a left-liberal reflex to take the side of the marginalised. This reflex has been cited at other historical junctures; the British colonised Nigeria with the stated goal of abolishing slavery. Feminism has also been deployed to justify wars of aggression. One of the Bush administration’s stated reasons for the US invasion & occupation of Afghanistan was a desire to free Afghan women from the yoke of the Taliban. A group of people that cannot speak for themselves in the framing of Western journalists are happily selected as proof that they need the protection of the progressive West. Societies are thus split, for example into queer Palestinians and the surrounding, oppressing patriarchal majority. The interests of queer people in Gaza (including among others, not being bombed and receiving enough food) are currently much more closely aligned with those of their heterosexual neighbours than with the interests of queer journalists in Western cities. Sexual liberation can only be fought for once basic human rights are secured.

Even if Israel scores well regarding queer-friendliness in comparison to Arab states, what is the goal of the comparison? Israel is a Western country, an OECD member, and – perhaps far more importantly – a Eurovision participant. When compared to other OECD countries, Israel looks much worse. To walk through the allegedly queer-friendly centre of Tel Aviv as a visibly queer person quickly demonstrates this. In a 2020 survey by the American Pew Research Center only 47% of Israelis surveyed agreed that homosexuality should be socially accepted. As such, over half of the Israeli population is homophobic and could be bombed into oblivion according to the logic of Netanyahu and Feddersen.

Left-liberals are thus willingly acting as henchmen to the right wing. They help those who have fought the social and cultural progress of the past decades; who despise gender equality, want to ban abortions, banish women back to domestic labour, disenfranchise migrant women, displace people of colour from the public sphere and deprive children of the opportunity to deal with their sexuality and gender in a self-determined manner. Their Kulturkampf is not only successful in and of itself, but also pushes urgent material struggles regarding wages and working conditions out of public discourse.

Those who suddenly designate feminists, postcolonial researchers or gender theorists as public enemy number one because of their tame declarations of solidarity with Palestinians are following the rulebook of the German right wing. Supporters of Israel themselves utilise antisemitic tropes alarmingly often, such as portraying Judith Butler as a puppet master behind queer movements seeking to entice the youth to stray from the straight and narrow and thereby destroy enlightened Western civilisation. This is a typical antisemitic line of argument, which sees said Zionists joining a long line of reactionaries who hold Jews responsible for the social progress they detest. The only difference is that they now claim to be doing so in order to protect queer people.

Change begins with solidarity

Social transformation and mutual respect grow from the experience of shared struggles. The late union activist Jane McAlevey liked to recount the story of a hospital in California where she wanted to organise the care staff. The White American nurses disliked their recently immigrated Filipino colleagues, complained about their pungent foreign food in the canteen, their odd language and so on. McAlevey argues that her fight for better working conditions, pensions and wages would have been lost if she had dismissed the nurses as racists. The results of the labour dispute were not only better conditions for the staff: White and Filipino even linked arms to block their managers from entering the hospital. Through this shared struggle the two groups transcended cultural boundaries to become friends.

A similar event occurred in 80s Britain: gays, lesbians and queers in the cities united in solidarity with striking coal miners who protested Margaret Thatcher’s 1984 closing of state-owned mines. These miners did not hold queer people in high esteem, to say the least. Yet the miners saw how the group “Gays and Lesbians Support the Miners” collected donations for their strike fund, and went on to support the queers themselves by forcing the 1985 Labour Party Conference to pass a resolution on LGBTQ rights. The queer protest marches against Israeli violence towards Palestinians has the potential to become a similar moment of solidarity between very different groups.

At protests like the Dyke March or Internationalist Queer Pride in Neukölln one experiences how women with headscarves walk up to trans men with mesh tees over their visible mastectomy scars and thank them for wearing a keffiyeh and showing their solidarity. Perhaps some young Arabs contradict their friends or family if they disparage gay, lesbian or trans people. After all, they have seen for themselves how queers take to the streets to support Palestinians’ right to live, how they are beaten and detained by the police. They have seen queers’ selfless solidarity. It is a selflessness that the genocide cheerleaders in editorial staff and governments cannot imagine. And therefore they will lose.