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The paradigms of Palestinian survival

June 30, 2016 at 10:13 am

Deterring Palestinians from resistance has proven to be futile. However, it has not prevented Israel from attempting to control every expression of defiance, even if it means suffocating the space for legitimate demands to be voiced. In the early days of the Jerusalem Intifada, the return of the bodies of Palestinians murdered by Israel was mired in secrecy and a refusal on Israel’s part to comply with such a basic demand for dignity, always under the pretext of “security concerns”.

The practice, which is not a novel idea within Israel, once again elicited discourse about Israel’s questionable motives behind such unwarranted restrictions and led to the creation of a movement led by Muhammad Elayyan demanding the return of the bodies. Elayyan, whose son was murdered by Israel last October, was detained on Monday before being released and sentenced to five days under house arrest; he was also banned from visiting Al-Aqsa Mosque for 15 days.

According to Addameer NGO lawyer Muhammad Mahmoud quoted by Ma’an news agency, Elayyan was interrogated about “his possible affiliation to a terrorist organisation, as well as his participation in a protest inside Al-Aqsa Mosque demanding that Israel returns bodies of slain Palestinians including his son.”

The various methods of collective punishment inflicted by Israel upon Palestinian families have been criticised heavily, yet much of the ire is directed towards demolition orders and restrictions on movement. Such reasoning is evidence of the perpetual sense of urgency for survival experienced by Palestinians, who have been forced into colonial dependency and additional subjugation thanks in large part to the Palestinian Authority’s collaboration with Israel.

Elayyan, however, managed to create a movement that encompassed awareness and protest with regard to both survival and memory. The battle between memory narratives and security narratives was exposed, revealing the perils arising from the international community obscuring the real issues at stake in exchange for promoting Israel’s deception and endorsing it as a universal concern.

Unlike the consistent agenda that has been utilised when dealing with countries whose exposure serves global interests, Palestinian victims are counted and archived by the international community but rarely remembered as individuals with names, backgrounds and personalities. Selective remembrance is already enforced according to the victims’ nationalities, strategies and allegiances. However, with Palestinians, the disposable attitude promoted by Israel has been endorsed internationally, to the extent that any campaign against Palestinian oblivion faces additional oppression.

Dead Palestinians are proof of colonial success; Israel is a colonial project in which the international community has invested heavily, despite feeble attempts to convince us otherwise. Even during Israel’s brutal military offensive in 2014 — “Operation Protective Edge” — the mutilated, dismembered bodies of Palestinians in Gaza were insufficient to elicit an unequivocal accusation of war crimes against the state. Palestinians have been forced into a situation where their narrative is relevant only to themselves; this is a result of the false propaganda by the international community which claims global support for Palestinians and their rights yet isolates them with generic platitudes which achieve little.

Moreover, there is nothing generic about international support for Israel’s security rhetoric. The falsehoods are accepted without any question and endorsed as a global concern while Israel is lauded as a competent and moral state. Behind the assimilation to the “war on terror” metaphor which is now also part of Israeli rhetoric, Palestinian bodies are preserved and withheld by Israel as a manifestation of its macabre psychological tactics against the families of the deceased. Needless to say, it is the unfounded premise upon which Elayyan was detained that will constitute the foundations of any dissemination of the “facts”, so as not to veer away from the profitable hyperbole of Israel’s overriding “security” narrative.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.