By ANTHONY ISSA
Last week’s “Local Gaza protesting decried” piece by Hannah Brown defamed Palestinians, Arabs and Islam. The piece perpetuated many harmful tropes and distorted the history of Palestine.
Brown’s narrative is unfortunately not unique. It is part of a wider effort to erase the historical struggles of the Palestinian people to undermine their legitimate claim to their lands. I will focus here on addressing her ahistorical claims and remarks that constitute anti-Palestinian racism, as defined by the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association.
To begin, Brown misleadingly claims that the Qur’an does not mention Palestine, while the Christian New Testament is set in Israel and the Hebrew Bible is filled with references to Israel and Judea. However, the term “Palestine” has a long history in the region. Its earliest recorded use dates to 1150 BCE in Egyptian hieroglyphics, where the land was referred to as “Peleset.” In fact, contrary to Brown’s beliefs surrounding Christian canon, the King James Bible translated the term Peleset to Palestina.
The historical ties to the name go even deeper. In the 5th century BCE, Herodotus referred to a district of Syria called “Palaistinê.” During the Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem in the late Ottoman period, the area was also commonly referred to as Palestine. During the British Mandate of Palestine, the term was officially revived and used to denote the territory under British administration following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The issuance of coinage, stamps and passports bearing the name “Palestine” during this period further solidified its geographical significance. Despite the absence of a formal administrative region called Palestine under Ottoman rule, the term was widely used to describe the region inhabited by Palestinians. The name has also been used by various civilizations, including the Greeks, Romans and Ottomans, to describe the region encompassing modern-day Israel, the West Bank and Gaza.
It should be clear that “Palestine” is not a modern invention but a historical term that has existed in the region for a good part of recorded human history. Hannah Brown’s imaginative geography and armchair analysis of history and religion seems to construct the region of the Levant and the Holy Land not as it is but rather in a way that is sympathetic to the modern, colonial State of Israel — and to be clear, colonization was the preferred word of many of the fathers of Zionism, including Vladimir Jabotinsky, who said, “Zionism is a colonization adventure.”
I take particular issue with Brown’s use of biblical stories to justify Israel’s ongoing occupation and system of apartheid against Palestinians in occupied territories. Using misleading interpretations of the Bible to downplay Israeli military actions in the almost 11-month-long siege of the Gaza Strip that has killed over 40,000 Palestinians is both morally repugnant and intellectually dishonest.
By the 20th century, Palestinian identity rose dramatically. Palestinians sought self-determination in response to colonialism and the rise of Arab nationalism. The UN Partition Plan of 1947, although never fully realized, recognized the Palestinian people’s right to statehood, a right that continues to be obstructed primarily by the ongoing occupation of Israel and international reluctance on the issue.
On the question of anti-Palestinian racism, Brown portrays Muslims as inherently violent, and Israel and its Western allies as inherently peaceful. Her statement questioning whether those killed by the Israeli military in the strip are truly civilians stereotypes Palestinians as deceitful and inherently violent, as well as not deserving of basic human rights protections. This blatant dehumanization also suggests that Palestinian civilians are indistinguishable from terrorists, rationalizing the collective punishment of the Gazan population who are under a brutal siege.
In short, Brown’s article is a clear example of anti-Palestinian racism, dismissing the severity of the violence inflicted on Palestinians and denying their suffering. I implore her and others who prescribe to this distorted belief of the region and its history to engage with balanced narratives in the region rather than perpetuate the age-old Orientalism used against a marginalized community.
The writer is a Montreal-based journalist and media analyst at Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East.