Remembering Always the Nakba; Honoring the Truth
I gave the following remarks on Nakba Day, May 15, 2022, in San Jose, California. I had been invited to deliver a short speech for Santa Clara County’s “Palestine Day.” I knew I had a thin line to walk — I was filled with rage and sadness over Israel’s assassination of the celebrated journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, yet I did not want to cause trouble for the Palestinian sponsors of the event. They had told me that even inviting me to speak was likely to bring criticism from Zionists, that I would as usual be called an “anti-Semite” because of my activism for Palestinian rights. I would have given quite a different talk in other circumstances (I would not have included Obama’s remarks, for example), but, knowing that several elected officials were in attendance, and wanting to get their attention, I said this:
Remarks for Santa Clara County Palestine Day
David Palumbo-Liu
Thank you all for coming to celebrate Palestine Day. It is both a day for celebration, but also a day for remembering, and for thinking carefully about the past, present, and future of Palestine.
Today I speak as an educator, and I understand I am talking to an audience that includes elected officials. My remarks will be directed toward everyone, but especially them, for they hold positions of power, and responsibility.
Responsible people form their own judgment based on fair and unbiased information. They seek out information from an array of sources, diligently trying to make sense of often complex issues, because they wish to act as informed citizens. This is where education is of the highest importance.
Recently, President Obama devoted his talk at Stanford to precisely this subject. He said, “as citizens, we have to take it upon ourselves to become better consumers of news, looking at sources, thinking before we share, and teaching our kids to become critical thinkers who know how to evaluate sources and separate opinion from fact.”
Over and over again he referred to the importance of the press, and the demise of a healthy press under the twin pressures of the market, and of social media. Today I want to argue that in the case of Palestine, it is all the more important because information on Palestine is often missing, partial, and often distorted.
The great Palestinian intellectual and activist Edward Said was asked if he denied that Israeli Jews have a story to tell. He answered, no, he did not deny that Israeli Jews have a story to tell. But he added, “what I deny is that there is only one story.”
Until just a few days ago I had intended to speak on how the Palestinian story has finally begun to be heard, and that audiences like today’s — a vital and inspiring mix of Palestinians, non-Palestinians, young and old, people from all walks of life — are a sign that the story is being heard.
But on the 11th of May we heard the news of the killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. Abu Akleh was a celebrated journalist, a mentor to many, and a voice of truth. She was shot while covering an Israeli raid on a Palestinian refugee camp in Jenin. She was wearing a large bright blue press jacket with PRESS written large white letters. She was wearing a press helmet. The bullet that killed her hit her just below the ear, one of the few exposed parts of her body — it is very likely that she was targeted by a sniper. She was not the only Palestinian journalist shot that day, but she was the only one who died.
According to Reporters Without Borders, 144 Palestinian journalists have been wounded by Israeli forces across the Gaza Strip, West Bank and East Jerusalem since 2018. In April 2022, the International Federation of Journalists filed a complaint with the International Criminal Court accusing Israeli forces of systematic targeting of journalists.
The White House issued this statement: “We strongly condemn the killing of Al Jazeera journalist and American citizen Shireen Abu Akleh in Jenin today and we extend our deepest condolences to her family… We call for a thorough investigation to determine the circumstances of her death. Investigating attacks on independent media and prosecuting those responsible are of paramount importance… We will continue to promote media freedom and protect journalists’ ability to do their jobs without fear of violence, threats to their lives for safety or unjust detention.”
These remarks are consistent with the judgement of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize jury. They gave the prize to Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov, journalists whose work has angered the rulers of the Philippines and Russia. The jury cited their “courageous fight for freedom of expression” and noted, “At the same time, they are representatives of all journalists who stand up for this ideal in a world in which democracy and freedom of the press face increasingly adverse conditions,” the jury added, noting that “Free, independent and fact-based journalism serves to protect against abuse of power, lies and war propaganda.”
If we wish to be people of conscience, we must ground our morals and ethics on truth, facts, and information that is free. And here I especially call out to the elected officials, for your constituents have placed their trust in you, and you holding to what your conscience tells you.
As Ariel Koren has indicated, being at the center of power means being at the center of responsibility. And she has told us that what is true for ordinary people is even more true for those in power, and sources of power such as Apple and Google. I, too, have a story to tell about both, and I will end my remarks by recounting that story to you.
In 2017, I became involved in a protest about the disappearance of Palestinian villages from both Google Maps and Apple Maps. Both show Israeli settlements and outposts, which are illegal under international law and violate official US policy, while erroneously depicting an empty countryside that in reality contains hundreds of Palestinian villages.
In an August 2015, letter to Senator Diane Feinstein, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed, “Contrary to Palestinian claims that the area has been inhabited for decades, only a handful of structures continued to expand their illegal construction by exploiting a cease and desist order that temporarily prohibited Israel from demolishing these structures.” In contrast to this assertion, according to the Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem, “the Palestinian village of Khirbet Susiya has existed for at least a century. It appears on maps as far back as 1917 — decades before Israel began occupying the West Bank. Aerial photographs from 1980 show cultivated farmland and livestock pens, indicating the presence of an active community there.”
In October 2016, a group of Palestinians working with the Rebuilding Alliance of Burlingame, California, delivered letters to the Silicon Valley headquarters of Google and Apple, requesting that they both update their maps with data that had been missing — -they presented the media giants with accurate and detailed reconstructed maps showing the villages.
Donna Baranski-Walker, founder and executive director of the Alliance said that “on Apple Maps, at least 550 villages were invisible to the world. Google Maps miss about 220 villages.” Nava Sheer, a GIS mapping expert at Bimkom: Planners for Planning Rights claimed: “Thousands of children and families in Area C of the West Bank can’t locate their homes on Apple or Google maps, or on Waze (Google’s subsidiary) … They are real locations — however, in the virtual mapped world of the Web, they simply can’t be found. In today’s online society, that’s as good as saying you don’t exist.”
When I interviewed Rabbi Arik Ascherman, Director of the Israeli human rights organization, Torat, he told me, “These people have been moved and displaced time after time after time. The psychological toll on people is devastating. People end up in therapy and children … are traumatized for life. People need to understand that a) it is not a benign or neutral process. It’s a very intensively political process and b) that it’s not about security…. This is part of an intentional, political effort to displace Palestinians to allow for the expansion of settlements.”
What the Alliance and other human rights organizations are trying to do is nothing less than to make true information available to all — from members of Congress to school children doing homework assignments. The Internet is an incredibly powerful thing, for even if we are properly skeptical, it has at this point in history a frightening monopoly on information.
When you put together the fragility of truth, and the tremendous courage it takes to report the truth on Palestine, it is incumbent on all people of conscience to not just hear the voices of Palestinians, but to listen to them. No one should have a monopoly on the truth, and there are certainly many important debates to be had, but for the truth to have even a fighting chance, we need to do exactly what President Obama urged us to do: “we have to take it upon ourselves to become better consumers of news, looking at sources, thinking before we share, and teaching our kids to become critical thinkers who know how to evaluate sources and separate opinion from fact,” but in order to do so, we must have all the facts available to us.
I will close by asking for a moment of silence for Shireen Abu Akleh, and all other journalists who have given their lives so that we may make the best moral and ethical decisions possible.
