Love & Sabr in the Time of Monsters: Growing Up with Filasteen in My Soul

The personal is always political.

My Indian passport once barred me from setting foot in South Africa. It no longer does, of course, but disconcertingly, it does allow me to travel to Israel, another apartheid state. Thanks, but no thanks. I have no desire for visiting a violent fantasy of a nation built on stolen land, built on the blood and bones of murdered natives. Not when this adult remembers the child vicariously experiencing the fear of Palestinians as young as him, cowering and crying under the stare of an armed Israeli soldier ready to pull the trigger. A memory that feels even fresher than, if just as terrifying as, any of the last 600 days.

Growing Up with Filasteen has meant witnessing horrors from afar and feeling their pain as my own.

As much as our recent timelines have overflowed with incidents of unimaginable horror, little can diminish the initial distress I felt at the brutishness and frightening precarity of everyday life in Occupied Palestine (let’s give it its proper name), just as the pent-up feelings of a subjugated and demonised population blew up in the First Intifada, in 1987. Across the region, a storm of righteous fury was building…

I recall the scene, although the details have grown fuzzier with the decades. Kuwait, the place of my birth, sometime during the late 1980s. The emirate, home to one of the biggest Palestinian communities in the Arab world, was hosting the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), Yasser Arafat, hero in the eyes of millions of Arabs, terrorist in the minds of European settler-colonialists.

A large crowd had gathered, made up mostly of Palestinians, but also, I’d venture, including Kuwaitis and other Arabs. Exactly what they were chanting I forget now, but I’m fairly certain the sentiments would have invoked the liberation of Filasteen and – just as vociferously – the downfall of Israel. There may very well have been encomiums addressed to Arafat, the man in whom they invested their hopes of a return to Alwatan, a homeland brutally seized, scorched, eviscerated and occupied by the Zionists in 1948.

Was Arafat among the gathered? He may well have been. He was anyway a regular visitor to Kuwait, and the local office of the PLO was located behind where we lived, about a kilometre and a half as the crow flies. Close enough, in fact, for BBC programming (inoffensive to a naïve teenager, malevolently toxic now) on shortwave radio to be interrupted by on-off staccato blasts of unintelligible harangues, rebellion from the ether that felt as liberating as much as it did irksome to a young ear.

I spent my first ten and a half years in Kuwait (a couple more years followed, leading up to Iraq’s invasion of the country in 1990). While far from fully conversant with the savagery of the Nakba and the asphyxiating cycles of violence that followed, I recall disturbing visuals on TV, on the news and in documentaries, and images in newspapers, of Israel committing atrocities on Palestine’s young and old, on her women and men, a killing machine using the latest and deadliest weaponry at its disposal to terrorise a people. Here, after all, was a country that, like its benefactor, was erected and sustained on genocide.

By 1993, now in Dubai, our exit from Kuwait a distant but still painful recollection, the world had moved on – yet it had not. The Soviet Union had collapsed from the weight of its own contradictions, and for failing to stay true to the Marxist ideals it was founded on. Meanwhile, old enmities resurfaced in the Balkans, like a dormant volcano come ragingly to life. Dispiritingly, it was the Bosnian Muslims that bore the brunt of the vitriol, dehumanisation and carnage, just as the Palestinians had for the best part of a half-century. Indeed, in its aversion to ethnic diversity, the ideology of Christian Europe shared much with the naked Islamophobia of Zionism.

Besides, when peace is negotiated by the West, it comes at a price. In September of the same year, the Oslo Accords were signed between Israel and the PLO. Arafat termed it the “peace of the brave” and the idealist in me had little time for the sceptics. It didn’t take long, however, for the optimism to fade, for the passage of time to demonstrate the sheer inequity of the agreement. The gullible if well-intentioned Arafat was fooled by the duplicitous Zionists, the Palestinians cruelly betrayed by the two-state solution. The resistance, loath to lie low when the treacherous Israelis lurked, would find its voice again. With frustrations boiling over, the Second Intifada exploded in 2000.

Solidarity of the Semites

Muslims had lived in harmony with Jews and Christians for centuries but the Arabs of the 20th century – from the Maghreb to the Persian Gulf, from the highlands of Iraq to the deserts of the Rub’ al Khali – took having thieving Israelis in their midst personally; very personally. It was a diabolical strategy of imperialists old and new, to plant a white ethno-nationalist enclave in a part of the world dominated by people who were Arab and predominantly Muslim, to salve their guilty conscience for the Holocaust, to pamper to the Zionists and their Biblical wet dream, and more importantly, to ensure that the locals are kept in their place by their thuggish satraps and their ordnance.

Knowing the restiveness of their people on a very emotive issue, Arab heads of state could ill afford to be politically indifferent to the cause of Palestine, even if none could emulate the charisma and commitment of Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt’s socialist leader of the mid-20th century. What remains imprinted on my mind about that era was the Islamic world speaking in one voice when calling out and condemning Israel’s oppression. There was hardly any episode of Zionist inhumanity and sadism that escaped the attention of presidents, prime ministers and potentates of Muslim-majority nations.

Mollycoddled by the West, Israel was left isolated, exposed and damned by the Global South.

But, whither Arab brotherhood today? Where is Muslim unity now? Where have they been since October 7, 2023, when Hamas’ derring-do and effrontery caught the Israeli security apparatus sleeping, a failure that so riled Benjamin Netanyahu and his psychopathic colleagues that they launched the most vicious campaign of collective punishment and mass murder the world has likely seen, a deliberately targeted erasure of a people, their culture, and their identity? Yet, as we have observed with increasing exasperation, some lives are more precious than others, and outrage comes with conditions attached.

So, while ordinary folks, aghast at the utter depravity of it all, rise up in solidarity with the Palestinians, a minority of white exceptionalists high on a sense of entitlement long past its sell-by date, claims it cannot see the flames or the burnt bodies, just as it feigned ignorance when the Nazis were running concentration camps and overseeing gas chambers. These incorrigible racists, still smarting at the loss of empire, and their recidivist successor America, gasping for air in a sea of hubris, are desperately trying to save an old order predicated on cultural plunder, ecological destruction, and the relentless slaughter of the innocents.

Since that fateful October day, my emotions, like those of thousands of others, have alternated between rage, agony, helplessness and despair. In the years that separate the mind of the man with that of the boy – still to accept the reality that violence, not peace, is the dominant language of ‘civilization’ in the Anthropocene age – it’s hard to wrap my thoughts around the fact that the oppressed continue to feel the knee of their oppressor on their necks, that injustice upon injustice keeps being heaped upon the Palestinians.

Meanwhile, the morally bankrupt ruling class, the despots with petty minds but inflated egos who run Jordan, Egypt, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan – among the handful of countries in North Africa and the Middle East to have established diplomatic relations with Israel – have sold their soul to the devil. They count their dollars while their new buddies bully defenceless Palestinians by strafing their cities, towns and neighbourhoods with bombs that vaporise. For Israel, killing is a gladiatorial sport, one enabled by their partners in crime in Europe and North America, and the Arab elite appears happy to be guaranteed the best seats in this arena.

I remember wondering, with all the innocence of youth, how the international order could possibly sanction a state to get away – literally – with murder. But for the entirety of my life, the ‘civilized’ world has refused to listen to the Palestinians, refused to even consider them as human beings with human rights, callously abandoning them to their fate. Craven as they are, and craven as they have always been, Western governments will only turn against the Israelis once the groundswell of popular opinion becomes too loud and too truculent to ignore.

The tyranny will only end, and justice will only prevail, when the rogue superstructure of Israeli settler colonialism is dismantled, when the evil that is Zionism is defeated. And it won’t be because Arab régimes suddenly decide to grow a spine, or that India remembers Gandhi, Nehru, Azad and Patel, and all the other anti-colonialists who fought to free their Watan from the fiendish British. It is now 77 years and counting since the barbarians overran, displaced and dispossessed a people whose bonds with the land were as strong as the roots of the orange and olive trees that defined it. However traumatic the wait and intense the yearning, the indigene always returns home.

I’d like to think I’ll be around for a fair while on this vulnerable planet of ours, but whatever I end up doing or achieving, nothing will feel as fulfilling or life-affirming as setting foot on the soil of a Free Palestine. A Filasteen that will be humanity’s lodestar, for no force on earth can deny the Palestinians the chance to embrace their destiny, to finally wake up to a new dawn in their homeland.

Because the political is always personal. And nothing speaks of love more than a Palestinian’s attachment to her home.