[lbo-talk] "You Got Your Keffiyeh in My Burka: Reflections on a Demonstration In Solidarity with the People of Palestine, " By Joel Schalit

[Michael Pugliese]

You Got Your Keffiyeh in My Burka
Reflections on a Demonstration In Solidarity with the People of Palestine
 From other issue one, June 2003

By Joel Schalit
Illustrations by Duncan Long

As red, white and green Jordanian flags fluttered in the fall wind over  
San Francisco’s Dolores Park, I wondered if this city’s community of  
Jordanian cafe owners had decided to stage a demonstration against  
discrimination directed at Arab-Americans in the wake the September 11th  
attacks. Driving closer to throngs of keffiyeh-wearing protesters, I could  
hear shouts of "Free Palestine" and "Another World is Possible," two  
slogans increasingly synonymous with anti-globalization gatherings over  
the past year.

No, I'm obviously wrong, I wagered as I surveyed what, upon closer  
inspection, turned out to be a distinctly white, middle-class crowd of  
tattooed and pierced punk rock activists. I probably should have known  
what to expect: this was supposed to be a demonstration of solidarity with  
the Palestinian people, not by them. Besides, how many Arab-Americans does  
one ever see at any of these kinds of gatherings in the gentrified Mission  
district? Not that many.

Given how similar the color schemes of Jordan’s and Palestine's flags are  
(red, white and green), it became increasingly apparent that the  
pro-Palestinian protesters had quite possibly mistaken the two. They were  
waving Jordanian flags around, thinking that they were Palestinian. I  
could be wrong. But, as several blonde women departed from the  
demonstration wearing Israeli flag-colored blue-and-white keffiyehs around  
their shoulders, I suspected the worst kind of stereotypical provinciality  
to be at play.

How many Americans know the distinctions between the color schemes of the  
keffiyehs of Palestinian resistance organizations? I wondered as I watched  
these ethnic headdress-bedecked progressives disappear around the corner.  
Black and white stands for Yassir Arafat's organization, Fatah. Red and  
white designates the color scheme of the communist Popular Front for the  
Liberation of Palestine. Green and white symbolizes the color scheme of  
Islamic fundamentalist factions such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

At least they weren’t wearing burkas.

Where Have All The Colors Gone?
It would be nice to think that the left’s years of historical interest in  
the third world would make a difference at such protests, especially given  
its long history of appropriating the aesthetics of rebellious cultures.  
At the very least, progressives like these might have taken the time to  
figure out the distinctions between Middle Eastern political  
iconographies. More importantly, they could have chosen between the  
symbols of political factions within the Arab world, identifying which  
ones American leftists ought to support. Not all Arabs wear keffiyehs.  
Very few, if any, would want to be caught dead wearing ones bearing any  
resemblance to Israel’s national colors.

Sadly, the lack of attention these activists placed on the aesthetics of  
Middle Eastern politics is indicative of a profound lack of learned  
sensitivity towards the symbolic nuances of the Arab-Israeli conflict. But  
my point isn’t to offer up the usual cynical truisms about the lack of  
attention to detail in American activist ideology, or to indulge the  
neoconservative cliché that American progressives are guilt-ridden white  
liberals who collapse all ethnic peoples into sympathetically-dominated  
exotics. Instead, I want to propose reading such examples of upsetting  
naiveté as crucial exposés of the complexities of Middle Eastern politics.  
What if we were to consider such political faux pas as necessary to the  
education of the left, because of how they might ironically invoke real  
subjects of debate in the Arab-Israeli conflict?

Take for example the fact that Jordan has a disproportionately high  
percentage of Palestinian citizens, whom some right-wing Israelis claim to  
represent as much as eighty percent of the country's population. If one  
did not know that this demonstration was staged on behalf of Palestinians  
suffering under the weight of Israeli military occupation, it would be  
just as easy for observers to conclude that they'd witnessed a  
demonstration by American Jews against a de facto Palestinian colonial  
occupation of Jordan. The presence of blue-and-white keffiyehs on the  
shoulders of female protesters would almost be enough evidence to help  
support such a depressing hypothesis.

Every consciousness-raising movement has to endure such moments of  
well-meaning cluelessness - they are one way progressives overcome their  
own naiveté about the subjects which they seek to make issues of public  
conscience. But how might such movement learning-processes ideally happen?  
One way would be for pro-Palestinian activists to consider how their  
appropriations of Middle Eastern political iconography fit into the  
region’s post-colonial history. In particular, they might ponder how their  
protests reflect the beliefs of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. He  
may be almost universally despised, but one of the main sources of  
Sharon’s strength lies in his ability to command reasonably sound  
historical arguments about the ethnic makeup of Israel’s neighbors in  
order to defer granting independence to the Palestinians.

The Devil Is In The Details
Over the years, when asked why he has not moved towards permitting the  
establishment of a Palestinian state in the occupied territories of the  
West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Sharon is famous for invoking the half-truth  
that a Palestinian state already exists in the form of Israel’s neighbor,  
Jordan. Ruled by a monarchy imported from the Arabian Peninsula, Jordan  
was set up by British colonial authorities in order to defuse local tribal  
conflicts in the years following the First World War. Palestinian refugees  
flooded into Jordan during Israel's 1948 War of Independence, making it  
(according to Sharon) a Palestinian state ruled by ‘foreigners’ who will  
eventually pass into history and inevitably yield to an ‘indigenous’  
Palestinian regime.

This hypothesis about Jordan's future cannot be anything but repugnant to  
progressives seeking a just resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian  
conflict, because it doesn’t address Israel's territorial dispossession of  
the Palestinian people. Yet there’s an ugly truth in Sharon's argument for  
the existence of a Palestinian state on the east bank of the river Jordan:  
after all, Jordan is just as much an artificial construct as the state of  
Israel. Like Israel, Jordan is both a product of British colonialism, and  
a country with a large Palestinian population that cannot fully  
participate in its politics. Palestinians are nevertheless an essential  
part of Jordanian national life - just as they are in Israel - no matter  
how disenfranchised they might be, whether they live in refugee camps or  
are the descendents of those who fled across the border in the 1948 or  
1967 wars. And like Israel, Jordan is an incomplete national construct  
whose future is just as dependent on the resolution of the so-called  
Palestinian problem as Israel’s.

When the Palestinians finally achieve independence in the West Bank and  
Gaza, Jordan’s relationship to the Palestinians will remain the same as it  
is now under Israeli occupation. The only difference might be that  
immediate threats to Jordanian stability will be remarkably reduced.  
However, one could conjecture that given the status of Jordan’s large  
Palestinian population, and the quasi-authoritarian nature of the  
country’s government, the establishment of a Palestinian state in the  
occupied territories would open debate about the status of Jordan. Such a  
debate could potentially lead to a confederation of both countries under  
Palestinian rule. Such a development would be anathema to Israel, though  
it might be something of a dream to autocrats like Sharon. This could be  
the easy out he’s been waiting for - it would certainly take pressure off  
Israel to grant territorial concessions to the Palestinians.

The potential emergence of a greater Palestine hovers in the background of  
international relations, much like the notion of a greater Israel, or a  
greater Albania. These kinds of possible futures have always haunted  
nations with large minority populations, especially when those populations  
have been long-term refugees or are divided by arbitrarily drawn colonial  
borders. But Israel will remain an ineradicable fact, unwilling to absorb  
returning Palestinian refugees who want to reclaim their homes and  
property in Israel proper after a final designation of Palestinian and  
Israeli national boundaries. In the future, debates about independence,  
domination and freedom in the Middle East will simply transfer themselves  
to their next tragic phase.

The potential emergence of a greater Palestine hovers in the background of  
international relations, much like the notion of a greater Israel, or a  
greater Albania. These kinds of possible futures have always haunted  
nations with large minority populations, especially when those populations  
have been long-term refugees or are divided by arbitrarily drawn colonial  
borders. But Israel will remain an ineradicable fact, unwilling to absorb  
returning Palestinian refugees who want to reclaim their homes and  
property in Israel proper after a final designation of Palestinian and  
Israeli national boundaries. In the future, debates about independence,  
domination and freedom in the Middle East will simply transfer themselves  
to their next tragic phase.--
Michael Pugliese