BradfordToday and InnisfilToday welcome letters to the editor at [email protected] or via the website. Please include your full name, daytime phone number and address (for verification of authorship, not publication). The following letter is in response to a letter responding to an earlier letter regarding a Bradford Library decision not to show a film it previously had planned to.
Dear Mr. deGeus and readers,
The opinion letter you were responding to was an exemplary call to learn to listen to the voice of the oppressed.
In contrast, your response reads like a petulant child who has to share the spotlight with a sibling. Your response is, ironically, an embodiment of the oppression and erasure of the marginalized voice.
My in-laws are from Palestine. My father-in-law was born in Beyt Lahem. His parents, his grandparents and so on owned that land, weathering occupation of empire after empire. Mention the family of Salaamah, beit Abu Ghoorah today and you will meet their descendants and hear their stories, preserved in the oral traditions of Palestinians.
In 1920, upon the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the British Empire came to occupy Palestine. Britain had a massive problem to deal with — European antisemitism had culminated in the most horrific crime against humanity — the Holocaust. In what is perhaps the most overlooked act of antisemitism the Jews of Europe were expelled to Palestine.
Thus the Balfour declaration is a manifestation of Europe’s Eurocentric, xenophobic, white supremacy. To take a land that does not belong to them, inhabited by a people and divide it at will. Did you know entire families were divided by these arbitrary borders? My father’s Great Aunt is now Iraqi as they were working in Iraq at the time.
Your history fails to mention Palestinians have Canninte blood while Ashkenazi Jews do not — answering the question of whose land. As for the Jews who were peacefully coexisting in Palestine before Israel, they also have Canninite blood. Now those who moved to Israel are Mizrahi Jews and treated as second-class citizens.
Then you skip to 2005 without mention of the Tantura or Deir Yassin massacres that cleared the way for Israeli settlers. Nor the Nakba, the great catastrophe that saw my father-in-law and 750,000 other Palestinians ethnically cleansed through expulsion.
No mention of the illegal settlements, the apartheid wall, the illegal checkpoints, and the limited rights of citizens in the West Bank — all where there is no Hamas.
No mention that while Israel physically withdrew from Gaza, it imposed a 16-year illegal blockade. The complete control of the air, water, land, import, export, electricity, and clean water thereby holding a population prisoner on a strip of land smaller than most Canadian cities.
It fails to mention how often ceasefires have been broken by Israel assassinating arbitrary targets.
Then, your settler colonial history brings up the piste de resistance: Hamas and the charter. The charter that has long since been amended by the current leadership of Hamas to specify the fight is not with Jews but rather with Zionists.
These historical facts would contradict the colonial narrative.
As for the two-state solution, Mr. deGeus, I have a proposal. I’m going to sign over half of your home to a refugee family. You’ll still have ownership of half the kitchen and a bedroom, but you won’t be able to go between the two and you’ll need permission to enter and leave your home. I’m sure you won’t reject this two-owner solution.
Before you attempt to promote the propaganda that has allowed and whitewashed the oppression, ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians for 75 years, Mr. deGeus, know that we, the marginalized and colonized, will no longer remain silent and sit idly by as our stories and voices are erased.
Walaa Katoue
Calgary, Alta