Rami Barhoush: Occupation, identity, and olive trees in palestine (ep356)
“For Palestinians, agriculture seems to be the only option. This is why we see the vicious, atrocious, and systematic attacks against Palestinian farmers.”
In this episode, we welcome Rami Barhoush, an activist and president of the Arab Group for the Protection of Nature (APN), based in Amman, Jordan. The independent non-profit organization seeks to enhance the capacity of Arab peoples, including those living under occupation and armed conflicts, to protect, sustain, and establish sovereignty over their natural resources and food, while strengthening the advocacy efforts of civil society organizations on regional and global environmental issues.
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Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Luna Bec
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Transcript:
Note: *Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Rami Barhoush: Both my parents and all of my grandparents were born in Palestine. I was born outside of Palestine because of the occupation. My parents had to leave. I lived in Jordan for the past decade at least.
APN was founded about 20 years ago to help farmers in the Arab region return to their positions and their roles as providers of fresh and healthy food to their communities. We focus on supporting local food systems and we promote food sovereignty in this region.
These are big goals. We have only been able to launch projects in Jordan and Palestine. We partner with villages and with local farming organizations and help them plant fruit trees, improve their water harvesting, rehabilitate their lands, and so on.
Farmers are facing mounting challenges due to climate change, globalization, and penetration by multinational corporations.
This leads them to leave their farms and seek employment in the cities. This affects the availability of fresh and natural local foods [and] leads to reliance on imported food that is supplied by multinational agribusiness corporations. It also increases the dependence of smaller countries and further empowers the industrial countries, adding to their hold and to the prioritization of their interests at the expense of other populations. We try to mitigate that.
Kamea Chayne: To first provide a backdrop for our conversation, I would love for you to share the critical points of contention from history that essentially explain the primary struggles that Palestinians are facing today, and specifically how we might distinguish the identities related to religion, indigeneity, and nation-state within this context.
Rami Barhoush: The founding of the state of Israel in 1948 came at the expense of the Palestinian people who had lost over 500 villages. [There were] tens of thousands of casualties and hundreds of thousands of refugees that were forced out of Palestine. This has been perpetuated until this very day.
For the Palestinians, 1948 is called the Nakba, which is the catastrophe. But this date is not when it all started. It all started before that.
It started with the Zionist project.
The Zionist project was seeking to establish a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, in complete disregard for the Palestinians, who constituted over 95 or 94% of the population of Palestine, who had their cities and towns, villages, schools, and offices. Palestinians had factories and farms, and imported and exported. Palestinians in 1927 exported over one and a half million boxes of oranges [from] Jaffa [to] Europe and exported olive oil to many other regions.
The Palestinians had complete nationhood, and this was abruptly damaged by the Zionist project during the First World War. The Minister of Foreign Affairs in Britain, James Balfour, on behalf of the British government, gave a promise to the Zionist organizations that Palestine, which was becoming under the domination of Britain as it was winning the war against the Ottomans, could become a national home for the Jewish people. This was a promise by someone who doesn't own [Palestine] to someone who doesn't deserve [it]. The British government got a mandate over Palestine and began implementing this promise.
Jewish Europeans and Americans—especially Europeans—were being transferred to Palestine en masse in big ships and were given weapons, places to stay, all at the expense of the Palestinian people. From then on, the Palestinians tried to resist. They didn't have the power. They didn't have the organization of the British Empire. They didn't have the ability to stop the influx of all of these settler-colonialists.
By 1948, the state of Israel was founded. Immediately that state started establishing itself as a Jewish state. It established a law that was called the Aliyah Law. It was a 1951 basic law that said that any Jew anywhere in the world that wants to immigrate to Israel can do so and will get citizenship upon arrival at the airport. Whereas the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians whose ancestry had been in Palestine for millennia were not able to attend to their homes and to their offices and to their lands and farms in Palestine.
Because they were not able to get back to Palestine, thus came the next law, which was the Absentee Property Law. Israel issued a law that said that any absentee property should go back to the state. The property of all the Palestinians who are not able to go back was confiscated and given to the Jewish settlers who came from Europe. Those who stood against them and who resisted were, of course, terrorized: either killed, tortured, or kicked out.
This explains the big refugee problem that the Palestinians have been facing. This explains the 500 or so villages that were destroyed and annihilated during this period. From then on, the Palestinians have been facing the challenge of being second. Those who stayed in their homes in 1948 became second-class citizens of the state of Israel. In 1967, Israel took over the rest of Palestine, which we call the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem. These areas are considered by international law as occupied Palestinian territories. They were taken over in 1967.
Until today, these areas have been under military rule. The West Bank is under military occupation. The Gaza Strip is even worse. It's not only under military occupation, but it's under a complete siege where Israel controls everything that goes in and out, prevents movement in and out of people and goods—except as it pleases, of course. People in Gaza are going through what Palestinians in the West Bank are going through.
Also, with the confiscation of land, the systematic robbing of water sources, the restriction of movement of goods and people, and the building of the separation wall—which is a huge and scary 700 kilometers long, very high concrete wall that separates Palestinian areas—and hundreds of checkpoints that restrict movement, and so on.
Palestinian farmers have been facing all of these problems trying to reach their lands and cultivate their lands, because they really have no other viable option besides agriculture. Tourism is of course out of reach. Trade is also controlled—exports and imports heavily so. Palestinians even face the challenge of [procuring] raw materials and equipment, and so on.
For Palestinians, agriculture seems to be the only option. This is why we see the vicious, atrocious, and systematic attacks against Palestinian farmers.
Since the year 2000, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Agriculture, Israeli settlers and the Israeli army have uprooted over 2 million trees in Palestine and Palestinian areas. This is where APN comes in. We try to plant trees in place of those that were uprooted by the occupiers. Of course, the Palestinians are the losers, because when a tree is uprooted, most of these trees are old, they're big. They give a lot of fruit. The ones that they replant in their place are seedlings that will take many, many years to give enough food, and to give the same sustenance that the trees that were uprooted gave.
Kamea Chayne: I hear this come up a lot, going back to the historical piece prior to the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948, Palestine and the Palestinian people consist of people of diverse ethnicities and religions. So, the “conflict” is not a conflict between, for example, Jewish people and people of other religions.
Rami Barhoush: Palestine, as it had been known for thousands of years, is the area that's south of Mount Lebanon, north of Sinai, and west of the Jordan River. This area has always been known as Palestine.
This is even before the Greeks, going all the way to the British mandate that called it Mandatory Palestine. This area has always had Palestinians living there. Palestinians were Muslims, Jews, Christian Jews, and others. The Palestinians lived together regardless of religion, in the same areas. We didn't have in Palestine what they had in Europe as the ghettos and the separation of areas. The Muslims, the Jews, and the Christians lived together with no barriers at all.
In the 1800s, Europe was becoming more nationalistic, nation-states were being formed and Europeans were trying to establish their identity in a new way. There was some failure in accepting or integrating the European Jews within different European communities. The European Jews found that maybe they needed their own national movement at the time.
Theodor Herzl came up with something called the Basel Conference and called the European Jews to a conference in Basel in 1897. This inaugurated the idea of Zionism, which was already there, but it became a project, with the establishment of organizations and so on. They decided in the conference that they needed to actually redefine the Jews, from being part of a religion or a faith, into an ethnic group. To do so they needed a homeland.
The options were Argentina, someplace in Africa, and Palestine. Palestine became the most desirable one, for many reasons. First of all, because it is there in the Bible. Also, it was obvious that the British were going to control these areas with the weakness of the Ottoman Empire, and there was a bigger chance of getting some type of promise from the British.
So Palestine was designated as the new home for the Jewish people. The Balfour Declaration came in 1917, promising Palestine as a national home for the Jews. The Palestinian Jews at the time constituted about 4% of the population. The declaration said something about, “but still we have to respect the non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” This whole term should clarify the colonial attitude of the British and the Zionist organizations of the Zionists.
It was a colonial project, a settler-colonial project to take over a country, regardless of who lived in it and what it was, through the power of the empire. From that point on, the problems began.
The Second World War expedited everything. As Hitler came to power, he started oppressing the Jews, persecuting them. So, Palestine was the best place for them to go as the Zionist project was going ahead. They started going to Palestine in bigger groups, [as they were stopped at the border] during those years by the United States and many European countries.
When they went to Palestine, they didn't just want to live with the Palestinians. They wanted to establish a state with a Jewish majority, which could only be achieved by getting rid of the existing majority of the Indigenous people of Palestine. [Thus] the Palestinians have since been trying to resist what started in 1917.
Kamea Chayne: In terms of Palestinian struggles and resistance, a lot of people hear the term that they're dealing with the Israeli “occupation”, and this can sound abstract.
How is this actually being still materialized today to further the goals of the political project that is the nation-state? I wonder if you could share some of the more recent examples of how Palestinian self-determination, and even access to their own lands and means of survival, are continually being threatened and disempowered.
Rami Barhoush:
If you are part of a project that wants to displace a whole population from their ancestral land and replace them with new settlers from Europe, America, and the rest of the world, you have to do everything possible to make their lives unbearable.
There's a continual confiscation of land, and there are settlement expansions [at] a systematic [level]. In the West Bank, and the area that became Israel in 1948, Israelis have no issues. They control everything. In this area, the Palestinians constitute about 20 or 22% of the population. They have Israeli citizenship, but they don't have a national identity because in Israel as a Jewish state if you are a Jew, you have the nationality of a Jew. If you're a non-Jew, you're a second-class citizen, as a result of so many laws and so many regulations that make you a second-class citizen, in effect.
But these people have passports and they have health insurance. They can go to schools—not the same schools as the Jews—but they can go to the Arab schools in the small Arabic towns that clearly are second-class in terms of budgeting, opportunities, and everything else.
In East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, the state of Israel continuously confiscates land, to build new settlements, for existing settlement expansions, and to service these settlements. We have over 600,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank today living in over 200 settlements. You have these Jewish-only roads, and highways that are off-limits to the Palestinians. You have closed military areas to protect the settlements and to control movement. You have the construction of the separation wall that annexed more than 10% of the West Bank area, including some of the best farming lands there.
The Green Line did not, as it was declared to, only border the West Bank. It went inside the West Bank in so many areas, annexing over 10% of the West Bank just by stretching that wall. That wall had gates and these gates are controlled by the Israeli army. Whoever had farms [near the wall], this wall would go through a village separating the houses from the lands and from the farms in most areas.
When these farmers want to cross the wall and go to their lands, they can only do so at certain times. The wall opens a couple of hours in the morning, a couple of hours in the afternoon, and then closes overnight. If somebody gets stuck on the other side of the wall, they are unable to go back and eat across the wall. You need permits, and to get these permits, most of the time they are denied. When they are granted, they are only granted to the owners of the land.
So, if I have a piece of land and I want to go cultivate my olives, I cannot do that on my own. I need people to go help me. I need my family, I need workers, I need other farmers to go along. I can't go cultivate the land on my own. I can’t plow it, I can't fix it. I can't do water harvesting, and so on.
The walls are one of the things, but there is also the robbing of water sources and reservoirs. The Israeli settlers control over 90 to 92% of the West Bank water. There's untreated sewage from the settlements that are thrown into Palestinian valleys and Palestinian farming lands. There have been many, many studies by the United Nations and by international organizations about this. It's causing diseases and problems for the Palestinian villages.
There is, of course, the dependency on agricultural imports from Israel. Since the Palestinians are unable to cultivate their lands properly, they end up having to buy whatever there is, from the Israeli markets. The Israelis dump their extra or excess production on Palestinians who have to buy it when Palestinians aren’t able to produce anything, which also forces Palestinians to compete. So, these are the things that the Palestinians are going through on a daily basis.
What's going on in Gaza is much worse. The Palestinians are completely cut off from so many things.
Electricity is controlled by Israel. The movement of food, the movement of building equipment, building material, clothing, everything is controlled. Every couple of years, the United Nations comes out with a report that says in a couple of years, life for Gazans will be unbearable, and that Gazans cannot sustain themselves in a human[e] way. The Gazans are still surviving, but they are surviving at a very deteriorating human level.
After all of the pressures on the Palestinians in 1993 and after pressuring the Palestine Liberation Organization, Israel and the United States were able to sign an interim agreement that was to last for five years with the PLO. This is called the Oslo Accord. The Oslo Accord said that Palestinians can start taking over the land, [but] not end the occupation, or that the Palestinians can start controlling some of the lands in the West Bank. The Israelis divided the Palestinian lands in the West Bank [into] areas A, B, and C.
A is the center of the cities, B is the center of the villages, and C is the farming areas. If you look at the Palestinian culture, you see that in most Palestinian villages, you see the houses clustered together, and around them are the farming zones. So, the Palestinians have always done this for thousands of years because they protect each other in times of bad weather, in times of raids, and so on. The farming lands would be around them.
Area A was under the policing and administrative control of the Palestinians, B would be under joint control between the Palestinians and the Israelis, and Area C, which is the farmlands, would be under complete control of the Israelis. This was only to be for five years, and then the Israelis were supposed to give that to the Palestinians.
Israel decided that area C was going to become Israeli land and they started denying permits for buildings, and for the natural growth of these villages. Since 1993, the natural growth of towns has been denied. The Israelis refused to build roads, refused to connect the electricity grids, refused to stretch water pipes to these areas. The Palestinians are unable to expand into these areas.
The Israelis have been taking these lands in a systematic, methodical way. The Palestinians are stuck in areas A and B, which combined constitute about 40% of the West Bank. Now, the West Bank, along with the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem altogether constitute 22% of the state of the area of mandated Palestine. Now, when you take 60% out of that 22%, you're left with about 8% of the area of mandated Palestine, which is left for the Palestinians...
The rest is completely being taken, confiscated, and expropriated by the Israelis through the Israeli army and through the Israeli settlers who continuously abuse, threaten, and terrorize Palestinians, especially during seasons of cultivation.
During the olive season, you will see all kinds of uprooting and raising of trees, beating up the farmers, terrorizing them, and so on. The Palestinians—this is what they're going through.
Kamea Chayne: From my understanding, there really is a parallel in the power dynamics at play between, for example, the European colonizers of what is now known as the United States or Canada, leading to the ongoing struggles for Native peoples, as well as the Israeli political power establishing itself as a nation-state among the lands of the region and the people of all religions and ethnicities there. Although I have come across people who are very much aligned with supporting Native sovereignty on Turtle Island or in Australia or Canada or elsewhere but don't recognize that similar power dynamic in the Palestinian struggle and try to instead portray it as an equalized conflict.
I don't want to equate the histories because I know they're very different. But might you have any thoughts on why this clear disparity in power and control and wealth seems to be so much more controversial and even taboo for a lot of people when we're talking about Palestine and Israel?
Rami Barhoush: Settler-colonialism is the same. The idea is the same. The basic tenets are the same. So, what the Indigenous people in today's United States and Canada, and other countries, what they went through is very similar to what the Palestinians went through.
The Europeans found a place and they would consider it theirs. Any country, any area that they wanted was considered terra nullius, which is empty land, if it didn't have any whites in it. All other people were considered non-people. The idea of settler-colonialism extended from then to the same mentality that helped create the Zionist movement. The Zionist movements were completely oblivious to the fact or intentionally oblivious to the fact that Palestine was inhabited by the Palestinians.
Of course, there are always small differences here and there. Now, many people will tell you or some people will tell you it's not the same, because settler-colonialism usually bases itself on a country, on an empire, or on a power that sends its army into other areas. We know that Israel didn't do that, without the patronage of the British Empire, without the Balfour Declaration, and without the mandate over Palestine, Israel could not have been established at all. Without the support of the United Nations and the unconditional support of the United States, from the 1960s until this day, Israel will find it very hard to sustain itself, with all the atrocities it's been committing against the Palestinians.
We are facing a settler-colonial regime that wants to displace us, weaken us, subjugate us, and accept the fact that we are “second-class citizens,” that we are the “weak people,” and that a new nation is being formed—at our expense.
Kamea Chayne: A critical part of your work has been to support storytelling that tells the truth about Palestine. How do you encourage people to sharpen our critical lenses when learning and hearing about Palestinian struggles?
Because we often hear this saying that there are two sides to the story. If you're being biased and you're supporting one side, then you're not credible. Yet again, equalizing the dynamic might dismiss the injustice and oppressive relationship at play.
So, what has your work looked like in support of truth-telling? What do you recommend people do to calibrate our analysis of what's going on so we can arrive as close to reality as possible?
Rami Barhoush: I really like the title of a book by Howard Zinn. The title of the book was You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train.
If you see a big muscular man beating up a little child, and you stand aside and say, I am neutral, I am not going to interfere. You're not neutral. What you are doing is promoting the oppression of that powerful man of that child [as] neutral. You have to protect the child and make them equal, or at least give the child the chance to defend himself with equal power.
People will tell you it is a problem between two powers—it is not. It is a military occupation. It is a violent and oppressive military occupation. Military occupations are, by default, violent.
The civil rights movement is accepted by most people now, by the mainstream, as a justified movement. When you look at somebody like Angela Davis, who is one of the ethical and moral spokespersons for the civil rights movement and for Black liberation, she equates Jim Crow laws to what is going on in Palestine. She was with a group that visited Palestine, along with many women with different Indigenous backgrounds and different other backgrounds, and equated Jim Crow laws in the United States to what is going on in the Palestinians.
She looked and saw the streets where the Palestinians are not allowed to walk or drive their cars. She saw the Israeli settlers walking with their machine guns on their backs, and she saw the areas where the checkpoints are everywhere, where the Palestinians are not allowed to do things, and the Israelis just roam freely.
Then you look at South Africa. This is another place that has been accepted by the mainstream as a justified movement against apartheid. You see somebody like Mandla Mandela, who was the grandson of Nelson Mandela, who visited Palestine a couple of years ago. He said, what I saw here in Palestine is 100 times worse than what went on in South Africa's apartheid. When you see these cases and these people equating their issues to the Palestinian issues, then you can tell that Palestine is a moral and human [rights] issue.
When you see some Jewish groups like The Jewish Voice for Peace, Independent Jewish Voices, and many other Jews marching—they don't constitute the majority, but they are growing—who equate what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians, to what's happened to them in the past, who say what we're doing to the Palestinians is what we said should not ever be done to us... There is a growing understanding of the [severity of the] Palestinian issue.
The biggest thing that happened in the past year was the report that came out of one of the most respected and ethical human rights organizations in Israel, called B'Tselem.
It issued a report in December last year that said something like from the river to the sea, one apartheid regime. For the first time ever, it said, “we did not want to get into this, but now it is very clear that now, whether you're in Israel in the 1948 area or the 1967 area, the occupied West Bank or the East Jerusalem or Gaza, you are all under one regime, which is the Israeli regime.”
Israel controls the airspace, the borders, the military, the movement of goods, and the movement of people all over this area. It's one apartheid regime.
Apartheid is a crime against humanity and [in the eyes of the] international law.
Three months after that, you saw one of the most respected human rights organizations in the world, which is Human Rights Watch, come out with another report that supported the report by the B'Tselem that that was called A Threshold Crossed. [It found that] again, Israel is an apartheid regime. This is apartheid and persecution. That Israel is not only an apartheid regime but was founded to be a racist regime against the Palestinians. (Zionist ideology was an ideology that wanted to give dominance to one group over another, which is part of the definition of apartheid or racism.) The UK Labor Party too, in their annual conference, came up with a declaration to say Israel is an apartheid regime.
All these major organizations for the first time ever, are coming out to say Israel is an apartheid regime, that Israel is persecuting the Palestinians, that Israel is an ethno-racist system that gives dominance and gives power to one group of people based on ethnicity against the others.
You see Europe, the United States, Canada, and all of the countries helping Israel sustain itself, supporting Israel financially and politically. Its citizens are fighting to “save the Dolphins” and “save [whatever]” and looking at all of these humanitarian causes and issues, and then they about Israel they say, “Oh, the Palestinians are the terrorists” or “The Palestinians are causing trouble,” and so on... This is a contradiction that is not going to last. When you have a double standard when it comes to Palestine, this cannot be sustained for long.
The whole world is going to understand what has been done to the Palestinians. It's going to spread to the young generations now with social media. A few companies that used to control the dissemination of information around the world are not controlling the information anymore.
There are bloggers and there are social media posts and stuff that comes out from different areas, from different people, from different ages. People are starting to see. We saw that in the last attack on Gaza. We actually saw mainstream media anchor people and journalists, mentioning things they never did before about Israel's breach of international law, the use of white phosphorous, the killing of children, the targeting of schools, the targeting of media stations, and so on.
These are things that I think are going to start pressuring Israel, pressuring Israelis, pressuring Americans, and Europeans who support Israel into looking at this, and changing their minds about how they treat the Palestinians and how they support Israel unconditionally, at the expense of human rights and at the expense of what is just.
Kamea Chayne: In support of Palestinian sovereignty and resilience, the APN has the Million Tree campaign, which focuses on restoring and planting native trees in the areas threatened by the expansion of settlements.
There's a heart-wrenching story of how the volunteer work of planting trees was repeatedly undone by the settlers. Can you share more about this and also how this tree planting project, in response to the trees being dug up for sale elsewhere, might be a representation of something more than the trees themselves, as perhaps a shared struggle between the peoples with relations to those lands as well as their flora and fauna?
Rami Barhoush: Around 2000 or 2003, at the beginning of the first couple of years we started working, we had been contacted by a German cyclist who had cycled from Germany all the way to Palestine.
He said he had gotten lost in one of the villages. One of the houses said, “Well, it's getting late. If you want, you can stay with us until the next morning.” He said he stayed that night, then the next morning he got up and got on his bicycle to keep on with his journey and he saw all this havoc going on in that village. He had his camera with him because he wanted to take photos of his trip. He said, “I saw the most disgusting view I had ever seen.”
He said all these people with machine guns were coming, protected by the army, with bulldozers and with these big tractors cutting down trees. He said all the villagers were running. Men, women, and children were just running towards that scene. They were prohibited from accessing that piece of land by the army [and their] machine guns, and teargas, and so on.
He said he went there and said, “What are you doing? What are you doing?” Nobody was listening to him, and he saw all these trees being uprooted. When he saw the trees get uprooted and the villagers falling to the ground crying, he said, “I couldn't stand. I fell to my knees and I started crying.” He had never seen something as horrendous. As they were taking the trees and putting them on track beds, he started taking photos.
He called the German embassy, and they came, and nothing happened. He followed up on what was going on and they said they sell [the trees] in Tel Aviv for a good price, if they can get them from the roots. They're not only uprooting trees, but they're also making money out of it.
From then on, we started contacting the villages, the local farming co-ops, and the agricultural organizations, and asking them who gets these kinds of visits, where they cut their trees and damage their lands. We started telling them that we would help them out with funding, buying seedlings, setting up fences, refixing their land, etc.
With this systematic way of cutting trees, the Israelis understand that this is not only disconnecting the people from their ancestral land. Many of these trees are thousands of years old. The oldest olive tree in the world is in Palestine. It is understood to be 5000 years old. Many of these trees are from before Roman times even.
So, when you cut these trees down, you're not only disconnecting the Palestinians from their past, from what their ancestors had planted for them, but you are actually cutting their income. The Palestinians will lose their income and lose their connection to the land.
The cutting of the trees with these big bulldozers—and some of these bulldozers were manufactured by Caterpillar especially for the Israeli army to demolish houses very easily, to demolish fences between lands, and so on—and even raising fences and partitions between the land so that farmers can’t tell where their land starts and ends, causes problems for farmers and prevents them from being able to figure out where the damage is, starting them from zero.
APN started with a dream of planting a million trees. This is what we call the Million Tree Campaign. We were so lucky that we had so much support from people all around the world that we were able to help Palestinians plant a million trees by the year 2008. We were able to do the second million in 2014, and now we're a little bit more than halfway with the third million.
In many of these cases, we would plant an area with the volunteers, and then the settlers would come and uproot them. Then we would go again a week later and get the trees and they would go again and uproot them.
In some of these cases, they would just get fed up and they'd just leave them and we would keep these trees. And in other cases, we would just lose them and be unable to go plant them again.
The Israeli army deploys drones and they see where Palestinians and our volunteers are planting trees [and] early the next morning, these trees are all gone, because of the settlers and the army.
At the end of the day, there's nothing else for us to do.
The only thing we can do is help the Palestinians stay on their land and build resilience for the Palestinians, because for the Palestinians, there is no other option. They can't go anywhere.
Kamea Chayne: This really speaks to the resilience of the Palestinian people. And it's just so heartbreaking to picture these things happening.
We have often talked about indigeneity involving a deep relation to place. All peoples are or have historically been indigenous to somewhere. But no matter the ancestry of a people, if they are driving mass destruction of the land through deforestation, desertification, burning or uprooting of olive groves, even if to subdue and achieve dominance over another group of people with shared relations to the place, that to me is still indicative of a colonial relationship to the land, which represents a severance of ties to place and community that needs to be healed for our collective healing.
I wonder if you might have anything else to add when we try to look at this all through the lens of relationships with the land and their diverse ecologies.
Rami Barhoush:
What we see happening in the United States and Canada, in so many areas where the Indigenous people are trying to establish themselves on these lands... is reminiscent of what is going on in Palestine.
We see the pipelines that go through the Indigenous lands, the pipelines that contaminate rivers in the United States and Canada, the digging for oil, and the fracking. The only ones who are standing against this are the Indigenous people who have a true connection to that land, regardless of all the atrocities that they have to be subjected to. They have a true connection to that, and they are the ones who are standing in protests, to protect the rivers, to protect the lands, and what is under the lands.
It just reminds us of how we have been working in Palestine to try to fix or mitigate what has been done against us. Indigenous people everywhere have gone through the same injustice and suffering under settler-colonial powers. The difference is maybe in the past there wasn't the news and the media [so] the European settlers could do whatever they pleased.
Today, it is not that simple. Israel needs the acceptance of the US community. Israel needs to be seen in the West as not that criminal nor atrocious. They need to legalize their crimes, and display themselves as not the criminals that we see them as.
One of the examples of this is when Palestine was under Ottoman rule, the Ottomans had a rule saying that if anybody left the land uncultivated for three consecutive years, then that land goes back to the state so somebody else could cultivate it. The Ottomans did not see themselves as the owners of the land, but they saw themselves as the signers or the custodians of the land for the people. They never went and took the lands for themselves, but they gave it to somebody else who would cultivate it.
This was meant to limit the feudal power of the feudal lords in different areas. They didn't want feudalism to take over where a Lord would have a big chunk of land and many peasants working for him. They said whoever doesn't cultivate the land for three years just loses those titles to it so that somebody else can come in. Then they said if somebody cultivates a land—and this was the ultimate land code, Article 68—said whoever cultivates that for ten consecutive years can have a title to it that cannot be revoked. This is just to help these farmers who cultivate their last, to keep it for their heirs, for the future generations.
Then, when the Ottoman Empire was lost and the British took over Palestine and left the West, that came under Jordanian rule. Jordanians revoked Article 68 which said, if anybody doesn't use the land for three years loses it. They revoked that. They said whoever has the land can keep it. Then the Israelis took over. They legalized the confiscation of the land by saying that we will go back to the Ottoman land code. If anybody doesn't cultivate a piece of land for three years, it goes back to us. But they are not the state, they are the occupiers. But they put themselves in that shoe and they started going and confiscating lands.
When they are asked, “Why are you doing this?” by different countries and different diplomats that see what's going on, they say, “Well, we're going back to the Ottoman map code that says these people have not used their land for three years.” But when you look at it, Palestinians are not able to get to their lands because of so many reasons, because of the settlements, because of the dangers, because of the buffer military zones, because of the checkpoints, and the separation. Because of that, the Palestinians have a very, very weak economy due to the occupation.
They legalized their crime in a way that when asked, they could say [that they were] going back to these regulations and laws.
So, this is one of the ways where the Palestinians see the theft and understand the crime, but it is being displayed in a different way for the world to see.
Kamea Chayne: There's still so much more, and most people have yet to learn about the truth about what has been going on. We really appreciate this conversation and everything you've shared.
Finally, you share that your work with APN has been not just giving the Palestinian people something to survive, but giving them the means to survive. Can you expand more on this? And for our listeners who feel moved to action to support the survival and thriving of the Palestinian peoples, what do you recommend they do or learn more about from where they are?
Rami Barhoush:
What we would like to see is that people around the world respond to the call of the Palestinians for support.
The Palestinians need support, not necessarily monetary support. The Palestinians need the world to pressure Israel because Israel is using so many Palestinian lands, especially in the West Bank and the Jordan Valley, which is part of the West Bank, to export their tomatoes and their dates and different fruits to the rest of the world. If you go to many of the supermarkets in the West, you will see dates, Israeli dates that were grown in the Jordan Valley, which is part of the West Bank, and this is all stolen from Palestinian lands.
If normal people [want to] do [something], what they have to do is not buy these fruits and these products that were made on stolen lands. They can help the Palestinians also by understanding more, learning about the Palestinian problem, and disseminating the information to other people. The more Israel is pressured and embarrassed and exposed, the more it would be willing to sit with the Palestinians, maybe to change its ways to give up its ethno-racist ideology.
It’s similar to what happened with the apartheid regime in South Africa. They got to a point where the whole world saw them as a pariah state, as ethno-racist people who could not sit in the international community with this crime on their hands. They decided they couldn’t be doing this any longer. They couldn’t keep these populations under their control as modern-day slaves. The more [Israel is] exposed, the more they will be pressured to change their ways, to allow the Palestinians their self-determination.
*** CLOSING ***
Kamea Chayne: What's an impactful publication you follow or a book that's been really profound for you?
Rami Barhoush: If you want to learn about the Palestinian problem from beginning to end, there's a very, very good book by Professor Noura Erakat called Justice for Some. There's also a very good book about the BDS campaign, which is the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Campaign by one of the co-founders of the Palestinian Boycott Movement. It's called BDS. This is a very good book for people who want to learn something about Palestine and about what they can do.
The publications that I follow include alternative news sources like Democracy Now!, the podcasts of the Friends of the Moderate Rebels, Electronic Intifada… These alternative media sources will give you a different [perspective] from the one[s] that you will [find] in the mainstream media.
Kamea Chayne: What are some mottos, mantras, or practices you engage with to stay grounded?
Rami Barhoush: I would like to go back to Howard Zinn, because I'm a big fan of Howard Zinn. I remember one of the sentences, I don't know the exact wording, but it said something like “History is made by the countless actions of nameless people.”
I don't believe in the individual celebrity or the individual commander or the individual leader. I believe in collective movements and collective work. You don't have to be the leader of something big to make a change. Whatever you do in your own community locally will be a very big move if it's done collectively with others. These are the countless actions of nameless people who will change the world.
I like something that goes along the same lines that I think was coined by Greenpeace that said, think globally, act locally. This is a great example. I follow that everywhere.
Kamea Chayne: What has moved you personally the most that inspires you to keep going?
Rami Barhoush: The injustices we see every day. Every day we are seeing things happening to the Palestinians. Then you look at the bigger issue and you see that big, giant enemy to the future of all of us, which is climate change. It all fits together.
These people are uprooting trees. These people are throwing sewage on Palestinian villages. These people are causing damage to the environment and to a whole nation. It all fits together in the war against climate change. If you want to work against climate change, you have to fight all of these people who are damaging the climate.
Kamea Chayne: Rami, thank you so much for joining us today. It's been an honor to have you here. What final words of wisdom do you have for us as green dreamers?
Rami Barhoush: We have to keep going. We have to keep believing in ourselves that we can affect change. We can never give up hope because the minute we give up hope, that's it. There is no chance that we will go anywhere.
