Itxaso Dominguez de Olazabal lives fascinated with the resistance of the Palestinian people. For this reason, she has dedicated a large part of her life to studying it. Now, this admiration has been translated into the book ‘Palestine. Occupation, colonization, segregation‘ (Books of the Waterfall). With a global perspective, this international relations professor of advocacy in the European Union at 7amleh, the Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Networks, connects what has been happening on the ground in the occupied Palestinian territories for decades with the anti-racist and release around the world. She proposes, 75 years after the creation of the State of Israel and the catastrophic Palestinian Nakba, to flee from the framework of the conflict between two equal peoples.
Why should we speak of Palestine as a metaphor for the global context?
As was said in the 1970s when Palestine was a symbol of the internationalist cause, many of the global dynamics that today are an obstacle to global justice are represented in Palestine. From the most tangible, such as the occupation by a State whose impunity is not questioned by the international community, to the most immaterial, such as the impact of the economic effects of neoliberalism and much newer trends, such as the use of technology for repression. of the Palestinians. I can’t think of an international dynamic that is not present in Palestine. There are also very evident issues of climate change in the day-to-day life of the Palestinians, since the occupation is a drain and a theft of resources. Also social issues of class, the impact of patriarchy, the difference between the global north and the global south… The issues of racism are finally coming to light. Israeli colonialism cannot be understood without understanding the dynamics of racialization and hierarchization among peoples that have justified so much exploitation and suffering throughout the centuries.
In his book, he proposes to flee from the conflict narrative that implies two practically equal sides and forces positioning as it is a binary framework. “If we want the liberation of the first, we automatically pursue the disappearance of the second,” he writes. What alternative do you suggest to talk about what is happening in Palestine today?
It is not a football game, where you have to position yourself to be pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian. It is not a question of being for or against a people, it is being for or against a situation of violation of international law and justice, of human rights that, at a given moment, we consider universal . The situation in Palestine is not a conflict, it is not a war, it is a matter of settler colonialism. This situation has led to the reality of a State: Israel has sovereignty over all of historic Palestine and exercises its supremacy over the rest of the population through various mechanisms to achieve the elimination of the Palestinian people in various ways.
The accusations of apartheid are repeated by international and local organizations.
It is also characteristic of any phenomenon of colonization to empty the collective conscience of the oppressed people of all meaning and to question even their own humanity. The problem with settlement colonialism is that there is no international law to regulate it and, therefore, other frameworks are used. Like apartheid, as happened in South Africa, based on the idea that to better control a population you have to divide them and keep them domesticated. To have them perfectly controlled and send the message that there is a population here that is superior to the other and therefore deserves more rights and a different set of rights. I avoid saying I am pro-Palestine, I am pro-international law and then pro that human rights are fulfilled.
Palestinian society continually returns to the memory of the Nakba, the ‘catastrophe’ in Arabic, to refer to the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians by Zionist militias in 1948 for the creation of the State of Israel, as a space to preserve memory and exercise resistance. How important is memory in the “continuous Nakba”, the ‘Nakba al mustamirra’, that the Palestinian people denounce living?
I have not met any Palestinian who is not perfectly aware of the turning points in the history of suffering and resistance of his people. That mental map that the Palestinians have finds a meeting point in the Nakba, but there are also others such as the uprisings before 1948 and after. The Palestinian collective memory is shaped around those moments of collective resistance. The Nakba represents a central place because it was at the moment that the future of all its members was decided. But also precisely because of this idea of the ‘Nakba al mustamirra’ it is verified that at a given moment they were expelled but every day they continue to be reminded of what happened during the Nakba and what their objective was: ethnic cleansing to ensure a demographic majority as the only way to achieve the supremacy of the Jewish people.
“Much of the global dynamics that today are an obstacle to global justice are represented in Palestine”
You use the concept of ‘memoricide’.
Yes, because it is no coincidence that in Israel it is forbidden to speak or commemorate the Nakba. Israeli institutions and many Israelis recognize that the only way to establish the state of Israel was not just to expel the Palestinians, but to traumatize an entire people. Dealing such a huge blow to delocalize the Palestinian people and that it would take years or even decades for them to converge again to build their resistance from abroad. ‘Memoricide’ today takes the crudest forms such as the theft and looting of files, or the destruction of Palestinian settlements, or denying that the Palestinian people and Palestine exist as a place. In the end, it is propaganda that works at different levels and that if it were not for the Palestinian people’s emphasis on remembering their history, their memory and their presence there, perhaps Israel would have succeeded.
How do the Palestinians resist this context of double repression by the institutions of the Israeli occupation and the Palestinian authorities under the presidency of Mahmud Abbas?
Resistance takes different forms. In the case of the Palestinians, the idea of their own existence is very important. Their very presence is already a form of resistance. It’s staying dignified at a ‘checkpoint’, even if they insult you and point a gun at you and keep doing it every day. We are talking about this double oppression on which the colonial systems are also based, since they need a bourgeoisie that tames its own population to guarantee the tranquility and domination of the colonizer. That was the master key [los Acuerdos de] Oslo, it was one of Israel’s best plays. If there is a third Intifada it will be against the Palestinian Authority (PA) because now it is the one that holds the reins of security and they also share intelligence with Israel. It is the only way for the PA to survive as it depends on financial aid from the international community and tax transfers from Israel. It represents a very effective measure of pressure because we have seen the AP, and the patronage network created around it, suffer for months when it has been suspended. They are necessary operators in the international crime of apartheid and occupation.
Last month marked the 75th anniversary of the creation of the State of Israel and the commemoration of the Nakba. One could speak of a situation, somehow, entrenched. Beyond Israel and the PA, who benefits from this widespread context of violence?
Hamas, no doubt. The group was born as a movement rooted in the idea of resistance that Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) were abandoning because it was the only way they could maintain their legitimacy and international relevance during the first Intifada. They decided that armed resistance was pointless and accepted the two-state solution without asking anyone, without a consultative process. So, Hamas was created as a resistance movement against Israel but also denounced that cowardly resistance of the PA. To this day, it has become another fundamental guarantor of the status quo, in addition to becoming a government in power, where it must maintain a very delicate balance that has forced it to try to achieve international legitimacy and maintain support with military interventions. .
And how does Israel benefit from the existence of Hamas?
It is very paradoxical that only Israel can talk to Hamas because it is the only way to guarantee that, after each cycle of violence, no matter which government is in power, the population will forget about any kind of problem they had with it, Hamas will also gain all the popularity and the PA will continue to be perceived as the only guarantor that at some point, decades or centuries from now, a two-state solution will be possible peacefully and in accordance with the principles of the Oslo agreements.
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The recent protests in Israel further highlight the “Israel trilemma”, that is, the impossibility of the country being a Jewish state, a full democracy and an occupying power at the same time. But we hardly see mention of the occupation in this unprecedented civil movement. Is Israel really “the only democracy in the Middle East”, as they sell themselves?
Israel has never been a democracy. The very configuration of the State and the systematic discrimination of the Palestinians of 48 no matter how much they were accepted as citizens, invalidates it as a democracy. In addition, the very ethnic supremacy that has been created within Israeli society explains the uprising of the ultra-Orthodox. This supremacy of the Ashkenazi With respect to the Mizrahim, it is based on racializing principles between white Jews and less white Jews, not to mention what they do with African Jews or Yemeni Jews. Again, can a military state be a democracy? I do not think so.