One of the most fundamental misunderstandings about the struggle between the Palestinians and Israel over which people has rights to the small parcel of land that many of us call the Holy Land, lying between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, is that the struggle is of little geopolitical importance. For most Americans, the Jewish people and their right to a sanctuary in the aftermath of their horrific persecution in the mid-20th-century Holocaust are of great emotional importance. For those who know something about the struggle, the United States’ enduring support for Israel is seen as wholly appropriate—because of that initial Jewish need for a sanctuary and Israel’s continuing need, even decades later, for protection against its enemies, and because Israel is a US ally, always standing with us against “those Arabs” and Muslims who “hate” us.
But the notion that Palestinians, as they struggle for liberation from Israeli dominance, are of any political importance except as a supposed threat to Israel, or at best a nuisance to its emergence as an advanced Western state, rarely occurs even to most educated, well informed Americans, including among the media. Even among political progressives who may have struggled against South African apartheid a quarter century ago, who today recognize racism and white privilege as the moral evils they continue to be in this country, who actively oppose 21st-century US militarism, who stand in solidarity with Native Americans and immigrants and others struggling for justice, often nonetheless fail to recognize that Palestinians are fighting a key battle for their own liberation and play an integral role in today’s global postcolonial movement against fascism, racism, and oppression of all kinds.
As its title indicates, Why Palestine Matters places Palestinians front and center as an important cog in the 21st century’s moral and political struggle against oppression. Bringing Palestine into focus through a lens of intersectionality, this colorful, graphically stunning, 110-page study guide is the third in a series of study guides on the Palestine situation published by the Israel/Palestine Mission Network (IPMN) in the last decade. IPMN is a Presbyterian mission network with a mandate to “create currents of wider and deeper involvement with Israel/Palestine.” Under this mandate, its two previous publications, Steadfast Hope and Zionism Unsettled, were designed as study guides for congregations with an interest as faith communities in learning more about the Palestine situation and working toward peace and/or aiding the Palestinians in some way. WPM is also arranged as a study guide but has a broader, more secular orientation and is intended as an educational text for any group—established or ad hoc, secular or faith-based, including non-Christian—desirous of knowing more about the current political situation in Palestine-Israel.
“The quest for justice in Palestine,” WPM’s Introduction begins, “is rooted in values found not only in religious texts of all Abrahamic faiths, but in the secular founding documents of the United States and other democratic nations, and in the founding principles of the United Nations. Justice is indivisible. Peace is indivisible.” Martin Luther King, Jr.’s admonition that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”—an inspiration that guided justice struggle leaders such as Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu and that, well before King, shaped the philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi—is the mantra of today’s intersectionality movement, and a full chapter of WPM is devoted to a montage of photographs and text showing how inextricably resistance movements against empire, colonialism, racism, patriarchy, heteropatriarchy, mass incarceration, and so on are linked.
WPM leads off with a thorough examination of international law as it applies to Palestine—and has been consistently violated by Israel—written by noted international scholar Richard Falk, emeritus professor of international law at Princeton University who served as UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories from 2008 to 2014. Falk concludes strikingly that, whatever the level of Palestinian violence, it should not distract from the fact that Israel is imposing an apartheid system in its control over and fragmentation of Palestinians, or from the reality that Israel’s “discriminatory structures of domination” are “far in excess of any reasonable security justifications.” Sustainable peace, Falk says, will be possible only if Israel first disavows and abandons its apartheid regime.
The remainder of WPM covers all aspects of Palestine geographically, politically, culturally, and economically. The situation in Gaza is thoroughly examined, along with Palestinian East Jerusalem, and the West Bank. Veteran British correspondent Jonathan Cook, who lives in Nazareth, contributes a detailed look at the situation of Palestinians living inside Israel who, despite being Israeli citizens, enjoy few of the benefits of citizenship. There is a chapter, including main articles and informative sidebars, on Palestinian refugees; another on resistance, including Palestinian sumud or steadfastness and the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement; yet another on Israel’s cultural appropriation of such things as Palestinian foods and clothing items like the kufiya.
Why Palestine Matters has a dedicated website, that provides numerous videos, organized to accompany the various chapters; news updates; further depth for the four- to five-session Discussion Guide laid out in the book; an extensive bibliography; and other resources. The contributors to this book, all with extensive expertise in various aspects of the Palestine situation, are talented and numerous. Three merit special mention: Noushin Framke, an editor, writer, and IPMN member who was involved with the publication of IPMN’s two previous books; Susan Landau, a clinical social worker and member of Jewish Voice for Peace, who has worked with an interfaith group in Philadelphia for years to teach the two previous books; and Martina Reese, a communications professional who designed WPM and its two predecessor publications. Framke and Landau conceived WPM, its outline and content; oversaw its gestation and wrote many of its articles; and did a remarkable job of marshaling the contributors and the contributions. Reese made the book into a beautiful piece of informative art.
Two PIN members contributed articles to Why Palestine Matters: Harry Gunkel wrote, from the heart, two moving reflections on the situation of Palestinians in Gaza and of Bedouin in the South Hebron Hills; and, in the interests of full disclosure, this reviewer wrote articles on the West Bank and on Resistance, as well as two shorter pieces.
