Why Israel cannot tolerate Palestinian expressions of joy, anger and grief
In his powerful article “Permission to Narrate”, published in the London Review of Books in February 1984, Edward Said wrote: “The Palestinian narrative has never been officially admitted to Israeli history, except as that of ‘non-Jews,’ whose inert presence in Palestine was a nuisance to be ignored or expelled.”
Just as the infamous phrase “a land without a people” cannot be seen only as a falsehood propagated for political purposes but also as an ongoing settler-colonial aspiration, Said chose the word “inert” not descriptively but to conjure up the Zionist fantasy about the ideal Palestinian body.
Perhaps for the coloniser, this ideal body should be lifeless or “disappeared”. But given the stubborn persistence of Palestinians to remain living on their land, they should preferably cause as little disturbance to the colonisers as possible.
Along with no displays of cultural identity, there must be no passion, no pride, no joy, no sorrow, no anger - indeed, no demonstrable emotions that might trouble their oppressors.
The late Palestinian psychologist Adib Jarrar said in 2016: “We must be the only oppressed people whose job it is to make our oppressors feel good about themselves.”
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I will return later to the extreme narcissism that characterises so many Israeli interactions with Palestinians.
The immediate context for this article is the Israeli diktat that, in the first exchanges of prisoners as part of the Gaza ceasefire, Palestinians welcoming back their loved ones must not demonstrate any public joy or celebration.
These orders were reinforced by soldiers arriving at the family homes of those about to be released. Most of the prisoners released in the first round were women subjected to illegal incarceration, and they did not arrive home until the early hours of the morning. Needless to say, they were greeted with exuberant public joy by all those who waited up for their return.
Stark contrast
We should pause and ask the question: what does this attempted prohibition of public joy signify? It stands in stark contrast to the public outpouring of emotion that greeted the release of Israeli captives.
This reflects narcissism, a sense of entitlement and a belief that only the feelings of Jewish citizens matter. This sense of entitlement is fostered by the impunity granted to Israel by western governments to consider only its own interests.
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It is mirrored by mainstream media that covers the suffering of Israeli captives and their families in detail, elaborating their narratives and always referring to them as individuals and by name, while the Palestinians held in Israeli jails are portrayed as an inchoate mass, with individual stories rarely attached.
The New York Times, for example, has published extensive human-interest stories about the released female Israeli soldiers but failed to cover in any detail the detention of the heroic Dr Hussam Abu Safiya.
The attempt to suppress displays of emotion that challenge the oppressors is deeply embedded in a racist and dehumanising worldview
This focus on Israeli Jewish feelings alone has been - and continues to be - replicated in the demand that anyone speaking about Palestinian suffering must first condemn the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023. Without in any way dismissing the trauma of that day for Israelis, we can see how this trauma was intensified by the relentless coverage on Israeli media, which amplified the sense of fear and reinforced a shocking indifference to the genocide being waged less than 80km from Tel Aviv.
Author Naomi Klein has referred to this as the “weaponisation of trauma”. She argues that the state of shock from 7 October is maintained so that there can never be recovery, keeping people in a state of raw emotion that precludes any possibility for empathy, thoughtful analysis, or any guilt or shame about the genocidal campaign taking place supposedly in their name.
The obverse of this hyper-emotionality is the refusal to accept that Palestinians are entitled to any emotional display and to label any such displays as a threat. The “banning of joy” fits with a pattern of surveillance over not only the movements, activities and speech of Palestinians but also their emotions.
The policing of emotions is another aspect of the deep intrusion of the settler-colonial state into the subjective and intimate worlds of the subject people. For example, Palestinians who are held up for hours at a checkpoint and express their frustration by shouting or hooting their car horns are liable to be punished. As a result, feelings of rage and fury have to be suppressed.
Bargaining chip
Public displays of emotion, whether joy at the release of prisoners or grief at the burial of martyrs, are policed in multiple ways. Israel has long had a practice of refusing to return the bodies of Palestinians subjected to extrajudicial killing, invariably accused of terrorist attacks but assassinated before they had a chance to stand trial.
In these cases, the body is often held as a bargaining chip, a means of control.
Former Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon admitted in 2015 that Israel refused to return the bodies of slain Palestinians unless their funerals were kept as “modest family affairs, held at night”. He added: “Where there is a commitment to quiet, modest funerals, we will continue to return [bodies]. Where there is not, we will not return them, even if that means us burying them here.”
The distress caused to Palestinian families by having to bury their loved ones under such imposed conditions is compounded by their inability to perform Muslim burial rituals and the very poor state of a body that has been deep-frozen for weeks. But expressions of distress aroused by these intolerable conditions are seen by those with power only as a political threat.
Dennis Ross, a US diplomat and committed Zionist, once saw fit to pronounce: “At the time of the Second Intifada, public funerals were used to mobilise big crowds and anger and feed the kind of passions that promoted violence against Israelis.” Emotions and passions are thus seen solely in terms of the effect they have on Israel.
One of the most egregious examples of disrupting public grief took place in 2022 in occupied East Jerusalem at the funeral of Shireen Abu Akleh, the renowned Al Jazeera journalist. Israeli soldiers attacked the pallbearers, almost causing her casket to fall to the ground.
The fact that they saw fit to do this at the funeral of a woman who was an iconic figure - beloved by millions in the Arab world and, moreover, killed by an Israeli soldier - indicates how little Israel and the US care about causing hurt or offence to Arab public opinion.
Devoid of context
Emotions, to quote Said’s comment about facts, “do not at all speak for themselves, but require a socially acceptable narrative to absorb, sustain and circulate them”. How emotions are “narrativised” is a function of power, and in a context of extreme power imbalance, only the emotions of those with power are allowed to count.
And yet, thousands of Palestinian scholars, journalists, activists, poets and novelists have shared the historical narratives forming the contemporary Palestinian experience and thereby placed actions and emotions - including the vengeful emotions of 7 October - in a context.
The refusal of Israel and its defenders to connect Palestinian actions to any history or context, along with their construction of all resistance as “terrorism” and their denial of what an unliveable context produces, are thus exposed as sterile practices of power, and the need to “police emotions” as ultimately a sign of weakness and vulnerability.
On the first day of the Gaza ceasefire, three young Israeli women emerged from captivity into the light to expressions of joy that few would begrudge them or their families.
In the middle of that night, 90 Palestinian women and children emerged from the darkness of their captivity. Releasing the prisoners at night was not because of shame over how they were treated - even though anyone who saw photos of politician Khalida Jarrar after a year of captivity knows how very shameful that treatment was - but rather because captivity itself is deemed to be the proper fate for Palestinians.
They are not intended to emerge into a jubilant, joyful light. The attempt to suppress displays of emotion that challenge the oppressors is deeply embedded in a racist and dehumanising worldview.
The families of the released detainees refused this dehumanisation and insisted on celebrating. This constitutes an act of resistance. The word “resistance” conveys, however, reactivity to oppression, which accords too much power to the oppressor.
Far more than resistance, it is an insistence upon the right to life, livability and the freedom to give voice to all human emotions - whether joy, sorrow, anger or pride.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
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