Palestinian Trail of Tears: Joy Harjo’s Missed Opportunity for Indigenous Solidarity
By Sa'ed Adel Atshan
Many Palestinians and those in solidarity with our struggle had hoped that Joy Harjo would be principled in heeding the calls of another subjugated people. We have been profoundly dismayed by her recent decision to accept funding from Tel Aviv University, an Israeli state institution, and to not only perform there on Monday but also to serve as a Writer-in-Residence. Soon after hearing this disappointing news, Native American peers of Harjo, including Robert Warrior, called on her to boycott the event. The Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) sent an open letter to Harjo imploring her to honor the boycott. A USACBI petition generated over 2,000 signatures within 36 hours. Harjo disregarded these requests and announced that she would proceed with the performance. Her statement expressed sympathy for Palestinian and Jewish suffering without acknowledging that many American settlers—like their Israeli counterparts—had also faced persecution in Europe, and that Jewish and Israeli voices have been invaluable to the BDS movement. Harjo crossed the picket line. She helped provide legitimacy to an institution that sits above the ethnically cleansed Palestinian village of Shaykh Muwannis while supporting the Israeli military occupation which is illegal under international law.
In Israel/Palestine, the displacement of Native Palestinian Christians and Muslims continues in an Israeli campaign to maintain a “Jewish state” privileging one ethno-religious group and institutionalizing segregation and discrimination with impunity. Israel just announced approval for 3,000 new Jewish-only settlement units in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Each day, Israel steals more Palestinian land, bulldozes more homes, uproots more trees, and detains more children. The Palestinian cry for peace and justice continues after over six decades of dispossession. We look to people of conscience around the globe to hear this cry. Considering that Israel is the world’s largest recipient of U.S. aid, American tax dollars prolong the oppression of Palestinians.
Although this Trail of Tears continues, we have the power to stop it. The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) call was issued in 2005 by over 170 Palestinian civil society organizations. This has become a global movement that draws inspiration from the South African struggle. Israel was one of apartheid South Africa’s greatest allies. Israel adopted many of South Africa’s policies which have been fundamental to the apartheid system imposed on indigenous Palestinians. Apartheid came to an end in South Africa as a result of external pressure through a global boycott, and the movement today boycotting Israeli organizations that are complicit in segregation and ethnic cleansing has been growing dramatically. The power of this approach comes from its effectiveness, nonviolent nature, targeting of institutions rather than individuals, and our demands for basic rights and Israeli compliance with international law.
Many activists have devoted countless hours in reaching out to Harjo on her Facebook page. So many of us have written respectfully as fans. I posted a comment explaining that Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip could not attend her performance because of the nature of the Israeli apartheid system, forced removal, and severe limits on mobility, including the right to travel from one Palestinian village to the next. It has been painful to see Harjo respond to various messages except those coming from Palestinian voices. She later posted: “I invite anyone here to sit at my kitchen table to speak with me.” Palestinians replied. I, too, sent a private email in addition to a Facebook message reiterating that we have limited mobility:
I understand what means to be indigenous to a land and to feel the spirit of our ancestors calling on us to return in the face of ethnic cleansing and colonization…My relatives and friends, who are now refugees in the West Bank… would all love to hear you speak, to meet you, to break bread with you on your kitchen table in Tel Aviv. Our village and ancestral lands are actually there beside you in Tel Aviv, yet we are refugees, and Palestinians are denied our right to return to homes and lands. My family and loved ones, who would be eager to accept your invitation cannot even travel freely within our own country, finding ourselves like animals behind cages, within Israeli prison cells, with a Wall three times the height of the Berlin Wall, hundreds of checkpoints between Palestinian towns, and Israeli settlements with Jewish-only roads devastating the earth.
I still have not received a response from Harjo.
We also drew her attention to those who have joined the boycott movement such as Alice Walker, Angela Davis, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Naomi Klein, Judith Butler, Roger Waters, Jewish Voice for Peace, among many others. We shared our recent victory with Stevie Wonder. We posted about our work with Palestinian Queers for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions and an LGBT delegation from the U.S. to Palestine who endorsed BDS. The Indigenous and Women of Color delegation also called for BDS. We cited the Russell Tribunal on Palestine which included Dennis Banks from the American Indian Movement. We also posted that South Africans are helping to lead the global boycott struggle including Mbuyiseni Ndlozi. We shared the African National Congress’ official support for BDS and the statement by Baleka Mbete after her visit to Palestine that the Israeli regime “is far worse than Apartheid South Africa.”
No amount of pleading could move Harjo. She was persistent on accepting funds from—and granting legitimacy to—an institution complicit in Israeli colonization of Palestinian lands. Sarah Schulman, an esteemed writer and activist, who is lesbian, Jewish, and a supporter of the BDS movement also reached out to Harjo in an effort to convince her that the trip could instead engage Israelis and Palestinians in Tel Aviv and in the West Bank at venues that abide by the boycott guidelines. Schulman, too, had previously been invited to speak at Tel Aviv University and declined in order to honor the BDS call and used that as an opportunity for a solidarity visit that she chronicled in her recent book. Harjo refused Schulman’s request.
Academics and artists are not exempt from ethical responsibility. Just like with Sun City in apartheid South Africa, we saw the importance of musicians refusing to perform in solidarity with blacks and whites who expected action, not just words, in support of equal rights. Today, Palestinians and people of conscience around the world, including Israelis who are members of Boycott from Within are leading the struggle against ethnic cleansing and colonization despite the Israeli government’s criminalization of BDS activism. Though I am filled with sadness by Harjo’s actions, I am also filled with gladness that our movement will ultimately prevail because the arc of history bends toward justice. As Kahlil Gibran reminds us, “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.”
By Richard Lightbown
I didn’t know that a “human rights supporter” (her words) would dare to write “I didn’t know about the boycott [of Israel].”
I didn’t think anyone associated with the struggle for universal human rights would be able to ignore a military assault on an urban area where 1.6 million people are trapped and unable to flee to safety when advanced technology weapons are targeted at them.
I didn’t think there were people so hypocritical that they could continue with a concert for the nation which has just killed more than 30 children in Gaza in “self-defence” and then write “I have always stood in support of human rights, and the Palestinian cause has always been close to my heart.”
“I didn’t know.” History has heard that excuse before. From the Germans who didn’t know what the Nazis were doing. Or the English that didn’t know that four million Irish were dying of starvation even as food was still being exported from the Emerald Isle. But it sounds particularly lame in the 21st century world of instant communication when the last Israeli full scale assault on Gaza was only a couple of weeks ago.
I didn’t know or I didn’t want to know?
How much longer can you not know? As you step on stage and hand your victory to the criminal oppressor and give succor to the people who said that Israel should flatten Gaza on top of its inhabitants, will you still not know?
Will you still lie to yourself like you did earlier today when you wrote “I admire and respect the scholars and artists who have backed the boycott. I stand with their principles [sic (or should it be sick?)].”
But you can’t have it all ways you know. You can’t have your soul and the thirty pieces of silver. You can’t be all things to all people and be “in support of justice and compassion.” No you can’t; because supporting justice and compassion means opposing oppression and injustice. And you have just shown that you won’t oppose it. You’ve took the pieces of silver. You’ve just sold your soul and flaunted your lack of integrity to the whole world.
I didn’t know a Native American poet, musician and writer could ever show solidarity with an apartheid state, a terrorist state, a neo-colonial state and then claim to be doing so in support of justice and compassion. So what does that make me?
1) It sounds like Tel Aviv University is an especially bad place to give a boycott-busting performance. If Harjo felt she had to honor her commitment, she could've insisted on a different location. Perhaps one where Palestinians as well as could freely attend.
2) If she's a Writer-in-Residence, she's probably living in Tel Aviv for a school term--three months, or something like that. A couple of performances is one thing, but a lengthy stay puts that much more of a burden on her.
She should've researched what a lengthy stay would mean in terms of the worldwide protest against Israel's actions in Gaza. And either a) canceled or cut short the trip, or b) set the terms of her stay. For instance, she'd hold Israel-Palestinian discussions three times a week during her stay.
If she's merely going to perform and write and talk about herself, her feelings, or vague hopes about peace and love, that's not much help. Moreover, as her critics have said, it helps to legitimize Israel's actions. The only way her presence doesn't legitimize Israel's actions is if she actively challenges them. By holding debates, questioning the Israel orthodoxy, and making sure Palestinian concerns are heard.
For more on the subject, see Harjo Performs Despite Palestinian Criticism and Harjo Faces Boycott of Israel.
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For more on the subject, see:
http://www.jpost.com/ArtsAndCulture/Arts/Article.aspx?id=296481
Crazy Brave
American Indian poet Joy Harjo didn’t realize that her visit to Israel last week would be politicized.
She sees similarities between the Palestinian story and her own people’s story, including some settlers’ belief that God gave them this land, that it is their right to live there, and the native people are primitive and don’t know how to use it.
“The language of conquest is very similar,” she says.
The use of gun power, she says, also resembles the American story.
“You have guns at your face. What use are words? What do you say? You’re a people and you’re faced with guns or have guns at your back while the people are walking you out of your lands, which is what happened to my people, to my particular tribe.”
But Harjo, who doesn’t like to be backed into a corner, kept her obligation to Tel Aviv, and requested to add in the last couple days of her trip a visit with Palestinian students and artists living in east Jerusalem and the West Bank.
“I don’t believe in the political hard-lining [of] the arts. It goes against the nature of art for me,” she says. “I don’t want to be legislated. I don’t want that voice [the spirit of poetry and music] to be legislated by either side. I don’t think that’s in the spirit of the arts at all or cultures or of ideas.”
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