{"id":11697,"date":"2021-01-22T08:55:53","date_gmt":"2021-01-22T08:55:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiofree.org\/?p=153302"},"modified":"2021-01-22T08:55:53","modified_gmt":"2021-01-22T08:55:53","slug":"fearing-the-palestinian-narrative-why-israel-banned-jenin-jenin-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/01\/22\/fearing-the-palestinian-narrative-why-israel-banned-jenin-jenin-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Fearing the Palestinian Narrative: Why Israel Banned \u2018Jenin Jenin\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photograph Source: IDF Spokesperson\u2019s Unit \u2013 CC BY 2.0<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

On January 11, the Israeli Lod District Court ruled against a Palestinian film-maker, Mahmoud Bakri, ordering him to pay hefty compensation to an Israeli soldier who was accused, along with the Israeli military, of carrying out war crimes in April 2002, in the Palestinian Jenin refugee camp located in the northern occupied West Bank.<\/p>\n

The case, as presented by Israeli and other media, seemed to deal with typical legal matters such as defamation of character and so on. To those familiar with the massive clash of narratives which emanated from that singular event, known to Palestinians as the \u2018Jenin Massacre\u2019, the Israeli court verdict is not only political but historical and intellectual, as well.<\/p>\n

Bakri, a native Palestinian born in the village of Bi\u2019ina, near the Palestinian city of Akka, now located in Israel, has been paraded<\/a> repeatedly in Israeli courts and censured<\/a> heavily in Israeli mainstream media simply because he dared challenge the official discourse on the violent events which transpired in the Jenin refugee camp nearly two decades ago.<\/p>\n

Bakri\u2019s documentary, \u201cJenin Jenin\u201d, is now officially banned in Israel. The film, which was produced only months after the conclusion of this particular episode of Israeli violence, did not make many claims of its own. It largely opened up a rare space for Palestinians to convey, in their own words, what had befallen their refugee camp when large units of the Israeli army, under the protection of fighter jets and attack helicopters, pulverized much of the camp, killing scores and wounding hundreds.<\/p>\n

To ban a film, regardless of how unacceptable it may seem from the viewpoint of the official authorities, is wholly inconsistent with any true definition of freedom of speech. But to ban \u201cJenin Jenin\u201d, to indict the Palestinian filmmaker and to financially compensate those accused of carrying out war crimes, is outrageous.<\/p>\n

The background of the Israeli decision can be understood within two contexts: one, Israel\u2019s regime of censorship<\/a> aimed at silencing any criticism of the Israeli occupation and apartheid and, two, Israel\u2019s fear of a truly independent Palestinian narrative.<\/p>\n

Israeli censorship dates back to the very inception of the State of Israel atop the ruins of the Palestinian homeland in 1948. The country\u2019s founding fathers had painstakingly constructed a convenient story regarding the birth of Israel, almost entirely erasing Palestine and the Palestinians from their historical narrative. On this, late Palestinian intellectual, Edward Said, wrote in his essay, Permission to Narrate<\/a>, \u201cthe Palestinian narrative has never been officially admitted to Israeli history, except as that of \u2018non-Jews,\u2019 whose inert presence in Palestine was a nuisance to be ignored or expelled.\u201d<\/p>\n

To ensure the erasure of the Palestinians from the official Israeli discourse, Israeli censorship has evolved to become one of the most elaborate and well-guarded schemes of its kind in the world. Its degree of sophistication and brutality has reached the extent that poets and artists can be tried in court and sentenced<\/a> to prison for merely confronting Israel\u2019s founding ideology, Zionism, or penning poems that may seem offensive to Israeli sensibilities. While Palestinians have borne the greatest brunt of the ever-vigilant Israeli censorship machine, some Israeli Jews, including human rights organizations, have also suffered<\/a> the consequences.<\/p>\n

But the case of \u201cJenin Jenin\u201d is not that of routine censorship. It is a statement, a message, against those who dare give voice to oppressed Palestinians, allowing them the opportunity to speak directly to the world. These Palestinians, in the eyes of Israel, are certainly the most dangerous, as they demolish the layered, elaborate, yet fallacious official Israeli discourse, regardless of the nature, place or timing of any contested event, starting with the  \u2018Catastrophe\u2019 or Nakba<\/a> of 1948.<\/p>\n

Almost simultaneously with the release of \u201cJenin Jenin\u201d, my first book, \u201cSearching Jenin: Eyewitness Accounts of the Israeli Invasion\u201d, was published. The book, like the documentary, aimed to counterbalance official Israeli propaganda through honest, heart-rending accounts of the survivors of the refugee camp. While Israel had no jurisdiction to ban the book, pro-Israeli media and mainstream academics either ignored it completely or ferociously attacked it.<\/p>\n

Admittedly, the Palestinian counter-narrative to the Israeli dominant narrative, whether on the \u2018Jenin Massacre\u2019 or the Second Palestinian Intifada, was humble, largely championed through individual efforts. Still, even such modest attempts at narrating a Palestinian version were considered dangerous, vehemently rejected as irresponsible, sacrilegious or anti-Semitic.<\/p>\n

Israel\u2019s true power \u2013 but also Achilles heel \u2013 is its ability to design, construct and shield its own version of history, despite the fact that such history is hardly consistent with any reasonable definition of the truth. Within this modus operandi, even meager and unassuming counter-narratives are threatening, for they poke holes in an already baseless intellectual construct.<\/p>\n

Bakri\u2019s story of Jenin was not relentlessly attacked and eventually banned as a mere outcome of Israel\u2019s prevailing censorship tactics, but because it dared blemish Israel\u2019s diligently fabricated historical sequence, starting with a persecuted \u201cpeople with no land\u201d arriving at a supposed \u201cland with no people\u201d, where they \u201cmade the desert bloom\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cJenin Jenin\u201d is a microcosm of a people\u2019s narrative that successfully shattered Israel\u2019s well-funded propaganda, sending a message to Palestinians everywhere that even Israel\u2019s falsification of history can be roundly defeated.<\/p>\n

In her seminal book, \u201cDecolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples\u201d, Linda Tuhiwai Smith brilliantly examined the relationship between history and power, where she asserted<\/a> that  \u201chistory is mostly about power\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is the story of the powerful and how they became powerful, and then how they use their power to keep them in positions in which they can continue to dominate others,\u201d she wrote. It is precisely because Israel needs to maintain the current power structure that \u201cJenin Jenin\u201d and other Palestinian attempts at reclaiming history have to be censored, banned and punished.<\/p>\n

Israel\u2019s targeting of the Palestinian narrative is not a mere official contestation of the accuracy of facts or of some kind of Israeli fear that the \u2018truth\u2019 could lead to legal accountability. Israel hardly cares about facts and, thanks to Western support, it remains immune from international prosecution. Rather, it is about erasure; erasure of history, of a homeland, of a people.<\/p>\n

A Palestinian people with a coherent, collective narrative will always exist no matter the geography, the physical hardship and the political circumstances. This is what Israel fears most.<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on Radio Free<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Photograph Source: IDF Spokesperson\u2019s Unit \u2013 CC BY 2.0 On January 11, the Israeli Lod District Court ruled against a Palestinian film-maker, Mahmoud Bakri, ordering him to pay\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":68,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11697"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/68"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11697"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11697\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11698,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11697\/revisions\/11698"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}