Our Friday call will be with Rula Jubreal, the talented Palestinian-Italian-American journalist who wrote the film, “Miral.” Rula is one of the most prominent critics of the incoming, neo-fascist government in Italy and will talk about that country’s authoritarian turn.
Sources cited in this video:
The attack—apparently by Ukrainian forces—on the bridge linking Crimea to Russia.
The New York Times report that US officials believe Ukrainian forces assassinated Daria Dugan.
Martin Luther King on violence in 1967.
Nelson Mandela on violence in 1961 (starts at 3rd minute).
Something I wrote this spring on Ukrainian, Russian, Palestinian and Israeli violence.
Other Stuff:
Last week I talked to MSNBC’s Ali Velshi about how Saudi Arabia weaponizes American political corruption.
In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Corey Sherman reports on efforts by Republican members of Congress to help Kahanists in Israel build a third Temple on the Temple Mount.
In response to my video last week about the story of Hagar that Jews read on Rosh Hashanah, a reader, Mai Abdul Rahman, wrote about how Muslims tell her story.
“The similarity between the Torah and the Quran in relating the story of Hagar or Hajir (which in Arabic means emigrant) is uncanny. Hajir is central to the Muslim faith because of her adamant trust that Allah would hear her pleas and provide her and her son Ismail (Arabic meaning heard by God) with water. According to the Quran she was born in Egypt, was a slave, but of noble birth. She was abandoned by Abraham in a desolate desert and was consumed with the need to find water. Hajir is the reason why Muslims perform the ritual of twaf or circumambulations of the holy Kaaba during Hajj and Umra (pilgrimage), which includes the area where Hajir found water well (zamzam) right near her crying son. It fascinates me that although we are told she never lost her faith in God, the ritual of twaf honors the fact that she was not idle waiting for water- she relentlessly kept running back and forth looking for water and finally found it and praised God for saving her and her son. Most Muslims relate this story that no matter the circumstances keep faith in God and keep working hard to attain the goals you seek with the help of God. Her deep trust in God while doggedly looking for water is a central principle among Palestinians- especially women.”
See you on Friday,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
I wanted to start by saying that this Friday we’re going to be talking to Rula Jebreal, a very talented Palestinian journalist who made a wonderful film called “Miral” about her life. But Rula’s also Italian. She’s lived for many years in Italy. She’s one of the most prominent Muslim Italian journalists, one of the most prominent women of color journalists in Italy. And she’s been a fierce critic of the new right-wing Italian government, and it also has been going after her in very nasty ways. And so, I thought she’d be a wonderful person to talk about the rising hyper-nationalism and the racism in Italy.
I wanted to say something about the news that just broke. I just heard about it here on Saturday night about the Ukrainian attack on this bridge connecting Russia to Crimea. And I wanted to put it in the context of another news story that we found out this week, which is the New York Times reported that the assassination of a woman named Daria Dugin, the daughter of a very prominent right-wing nationalist figure in Russia, Alexander Dugin, was likely assassinated by Ukrainian forces. The reason I think these are interesting is they allow us to think about how we talk about acts of violence against civilians in context where we have empathy for the people who are suffering oppression—in this case the people of Ukraine. And that might help us think about maybe the ways we could talk differently about acts of violence by people suffering oppression like the Palestinians, for whom sadly many in the United States don’t have the same level of empathy. So, in the case of this assassination of Daria Dugin, it seems to me this was immoral. It was immoral because this Daria Dugin, she might have had terrible political views. She supported the Russian government doing terrible things. But she was not on the battlefield. She was a civilian, and the Ukrainians were wrong to assassinate her, if the New York Times is right that they did.
On the case of the bridge, I think it’s a little bit more ambiguous, because this was fundamentally an attack on property, and it probably may help the Ukrainian war effort in what I think is a just cause. But three civilians died, or three people died, in that attack. I don’t know that much about them. But I think anyone who was blowing up the bridge should have known that they would likely take innocent civilian life. So, it seems to me that that case is at best morally ambiguous, whether it’s morally legitimate to take innocent life in an effort to try to improve the Russian military effort and the war morale. But it seems to me in the Ukrainian case, we can have that conversation. We can say: we think the Ukrainians were wrong in that assassination. We’re not sure that the morality of blowing up this bridge was necessarily so clear cut. But we can also recognize two really important things: that even if we disagree with these particular Ukrainian actions, it doesn’t delegitimize the entire Ukrainian national movement. The basic Ukrainian cause is just because the Ukrainians are being occupied against their will. Their human rights are being massively violated, and so if they did something that we think is morally wrong, strategically unwise, it doesn’t delegitimize the larger movement for basic freedom and self-determination That’s the first thing we can recognize.
The second thing we recognize is that if we want to talk about these acts of Ukrainian violence or other acts of Ukrainian violence, we shouldn’t talk about them in isolation. We need to understand that there’s a larger context, that this larger context is the massive violence of oppression and occupation that Russia is imposing on Ukraine. So that if the Ukrainians are committing acts of terrorism, and I think this act of this assassination of this woman in Moscow certainly probably was an act of terrorism—if terrorism is generally defined as violence against civilians for political ends—that doesn’t mean that the Ukrainian national movement is depraved, pathological, fanatically anti-Russian. There’s a larger context. It is of the violence that exists because of Russia’s occupation. This is a simple point, but it’s a point that Martin Luther King made repeatedly when he was asked to condemn violence by Black Americans in riots in the 1960s. He said: yes, I’m against violence, but we can’t talk about this violence without talking about the violence of racism in America. When Nelson Mandela, who was not a supporter of non-violence—Nelson Mandela helps move the African National Congress towards supporting arm struggle—when he was asked similar questions, he said: we will be nonviolent when the apartheid government is nonviolent.
So, as you may have guessed, the reason that I’m saying all of this is that I think this is helpful for us in thinking about how we talk about Palestinian acts of violence. I do not support attacks on civilians. In fact, a close friend of mine from college was killed in a suicide bombing by Palestinian suicide bomber in the 1990s. I don’t think that was just strategically unwise for Palestinian factions to do in the 1990s, I also think it was immoral, just as I think it’s immoral for Hamas to launch rockets that are aimed at civilians or are likely to kill civilians. But it’s also important to understand—as we can understand in the Ukrainian case—that just because certain elements in a national movement might do things that one disagrees with, that one thinks are immoral, it doesn’t mean that the basic cause of a people that is under occupation, that is being denied basic freedom, basic human rights, basic equality, that that cause is unjust. And in the Ukrainian case, we would see that obviously. It would barely even require us to say that. We would know that. Also, in the Palestinian case, we should be able to understand, as we do in the Ukrainian case, that if there are acts of Palestinian violence, they have to be contextualized within the larger system of the violence of oppression. Oppression is by its nature profoundly violent. Palestinians live under systems of violent domination every day in the West Bank, in East Jerusalem, in the Gaza strip. And so, to talk about that context—where in the Palestinian case as in the Ukrainian case—is not a way of excusing things that one opposes. It’s quite the opposite. It is to say if we want to end violence—violence against Russians and violence against Ukrainians, violence against Israelis and violence against Palestinians—we have to talk about the larger system of violence. You’re never going to get Ukrainians to stop acting violently against Russians, including even against Russian civilians, unless you deal with the larger problem of the violence they are experiencing. Similarly, with Israelis and Palestinians. You’re not going to end Palestinian violence against Israeli civilians unless you deal with the problem of the massive violence that Palestinians experience.
What I think is so important about the Ukrainian case is not only that Ukrainians themselves deeply deserve self-determination, freedom, human rights, all the things that all peoples do. It’s that in this crucible of the war in Ukraine, because of the deep empathy that so many Americans and so many people in the West have towards them, this could be a way of expanding our empathy towards other people who maybe don’t have some of the same cultural similarities that make them easier for some Americans to appeal to. But we need to be able to look at the Ukrainian case, and then channel that empathy towards other people who also suffer from occupation, from domination, from subjugation, from massive violence, and be able to have the same kind of empathy and context for their struggles even in those moments in which they may take actions with which we disagree, as has been the case in Ukraine again, particularly, I think, with the assassination, and perhaps also with the attack on this bridge.
I hope that was interesting. I always really, really appreciate your feedback. Happy to get feedback on style questions. I know I still have work to go on that and, of course, substantive questions. One of the things that I really appreciate about people who watch these videos is, first, just that they’re very smart, and they say things that I don’t know. But secondly, that there are a range of opinions including folks who don’t agree with me lots of times, and I like hearing from you too. So, thanks very much. Hope to see you on Friday.
Learning from Ukraine