Why has Israel banned Jenin, Jenin? It fears the Palestinian narrative
By Ramzy Baroud | MEMO | January 19, 2021
On 11 January, Israel’s Lod District Court ruled against Palestinian film-maker Mahmoud Bakri, and ordered him to pay hefty compensation to an Israeli soldier who was accused, along with the Israeli military, of carrying out war crimes in April 2002 in the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank.
As reported by Israeli and other media, the case seemed to be a relatively simple matter of defamation of character and so on. To those familiar with the massive clash of narratives which emanated from the singular event known to Palestinians as the “Jenin Massacre”, the court’s verdict not only has political undertones, but also historical and intellectual implications.
Bakri is a Palestinian born in the village of Bi’ina, near the Palestinian city of Akka, now located in Israel. He has been paraded repeatedly through Israeli courts and censured heavily in the local mainstream media simply because he dared to challenge the official discourse about the violence in the Jenin refugee camp nearly two decades ago.
The director’s documentary Jenin, Jenin is now officially banned in Israel. The film, which was produced only months after the conclusion of this particular episode of Israeli state violence, did not make many claims of its own. It largely opened up a rare space for Palestinians to convey, in their own words, what had befallen their refugee camp when units of the Israel Defence Forces, with air cover provided by fighter jets and attack helicopters, pulverised much of the camp, killing scores of people and wounding hundreds more.
Israel claims to be a democracy, remember. For it to ban a film, regardless of how unacceptable its content is to the authorities, is wholly inconsistent with any definition of freedom of speech. To ban Jenin, Jenin, indict the Palestinian filmmaker who made it, and then compensate those accused of carrying out war crimes is outrageous.
The background of the Israeli decision can be understood within two contexts: one, Israel’s regime of censorship aimed at silencing any criticism of its occupation and apartheid; and two, Israel’s fear of a truly independent Palestinian narrative.
Israeli censorship dates back to the inception of the State of Israel atop the ruins of the Palestinian homeland in 1948. The country’s founding fathers painstakingly constructed a convenient story regarding the birth of the state, erasing Palestine and the Palestinians almost entirely from their narrative. The late Palestinian intellectual Edward Said had this to say in his essay “Permission to Narrate“: “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.”
To ensure the erasure of the Palestinians from Israel’s official discourse, the state’s censorship has evolved to become one of the most elaborate and well-guarded programmes of its kind in the world. Its sophistication and brutality has reached the extent that poets and artists can be put on trial and sentenced to terms in prison for merely challenging Israel’s founding ideology, Zionism, or penning poems deemed offensive to Israeli sensibilities. While Palestinians have borne the brunt of Israel’s ever-vigilant censorship machine, some Israeli Jews, including human rights organisations, have also suffered.
The case of Jenin, Jenin is not one of routine censorship, though. It is a statement, a message, to those who dare give voice to oppressed Palestinians and allow them to speak directly to the world. These Palestinians, in the eyes of Israel, are certainly the most dangerous, as they demolish the layered, elaborate yet fallacious official Israeli discourse, regardless of the nature, place or timing of any contested event, starting with the Nakba (“Catastrophe”) of 1948.
My first book, Searching Jenin: Eyewitness Accounts of the Israeli Invasion, was published almost simultaneously with the release of Jenin, Jenin. The book, like the documentary, aimed to counterbalance official Israeli propaganda through honest, heart-rending accounts from the survivors of the violence brought down upon the refugee camp. While Israel had no jurisdiction to ban the book, pro-Israel media and mainstream academics either ignored it completely or attacked it ferociously.
Admittedly, the Palestinian counter-narrative to the dominant Israeli version, whether on the “Jenin Massacre” or the Second Intifada which was still underway at the time, was humble, and largely championed through individual efforts. Still, even such modest attempts at narrating a Palestinian version were considered dangerous, and rejected vehemently as irresponsible, sacrilegious or anti-Semitic.
Israel’s true power — but also its Achilles heel — is its ability to design, construct and shield its own version of history, despite the fact that the narrative is hardly consistent with any reasonable definition of the truth. Within this modus operandi, even meagre and unassuming counter-narratives are threatening, for they poke holes in an already baseless intellectual construct.
Bakri’s story of Jenin was not attacked relentlessly and eventually banned simply as the outcome of Israel’s censorship, but because it dared to blemish Israel’s diligently fabricated historical sequence, starting with a persecuted “people with no land” arriving in the alleged “land with no people”, where they “made the desert bloom”. These are two of Israel’s most potent founding myths.
Jenin, Jenin is a microcosm of a people’s narrative that successfully shattered Israel’s well-funded propaganda. It sent (and still sends) a message to Palestinians everywhere that even Israel’s falsification of history can be challenged and defeated.
In her seminal book, Decolonising Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, Linda Tuhiwai Smith brilliantly examines the relationship between history and power. She asserts that, “History is mostly about power… It is the story of the powerful and how they became powerful, and then how they use their power to keep them in positions in which they can continue to dominate others.” It is precisely because Israel needs to maintain the current power structure that Jenin, Jenin and other Palestinian attempts at reclaiming history have to be censored, banned and punished.
Israel’s targeting of the Palestinian narrative is not simply official contestation of the accuracy of facts or of some kind of fear that the “truth” could lead to legal accountability. The colonial state cares nothing at all about facts and, thanks to Western support, it remains immune from international prosecution. Rather, it is about erasure; erasure of history, of a homeland, of a people: the people of Palestine.
Nevertheless, a Palestinian people with a coherent, collective narrative will always exist, no matter the geography, the physical hardship and the political circumstances. This is what Israel fears above all else.
Share this:
Related
January 19, 2021 - Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Film Review, Timeless or most popular, Video, War Crimes | Israel, Palestine, Zionism
1 Comment »
Leave a comment Cancel reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Featured Video
IS A CLIMATE LOCKDOWN ON THE HORIZON?
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
The Curse of Chutzpa
By Nahida the Exiled Palestinian | March 12, 2013
Gilad Atzmon argues that in order to best support Palestine we must cease to view the Palestinian struggle as “just another apartheid” or “just another colonial project”
What makes the occupation of Palestine “unique” is not the “specialness” of the suffering of Palestinians, nor is it the “uniqueness” of their tragedy or the “importance” of their cause.
What makes it “unique” is the fact that: those Jewish Zionists who occupy Palestine, those Jewish Zionists who support them, and even many of those Jewish anti-Zionists who oppose them view themselves as “unique”.
Many Jewish anti-Zionists view themselves as unique in the sense that they frantically hold on to the notion of the “uniqueness” of the “Jewish suffering” and the inevitability of future “multi-holocausts” due to an historic, intrinsic and incurable human-condition called “anti-Semitism” which is in their view a “special” case of racism, of inexplicable “hatred” for Jews.
With a considerable majority, whether hard-core Zionists, soft, liberal, or anti-Zionists, they have acquired a distorted image of themselves, their suffering, their history, their morality, and that of the world. … continue
Blog Roll
-
Join 2,758 other subscribers
Visits Since December 2009
- 6,727,364 hits
Looking for something?
Archives
Calendar
Categories
Aletho News Civil Liberties Corruption Deception Economics Environmentalism Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism Fake News False Flag Terrorism Full Spectrum Dominance Illegal Occupation Mainstream Media, Warmongering Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity Militarism Progressive Hypocrite Russophobia Science and Pseudo-Science Solidarity and Activism Subjugation - Torture Supremacism, Social Darwinism Timeless or most popular Video War Crimes Wars for IsraelTags
9/11 Afghanistan Africa al-Qaeda Australia BBC Benjamin Netanyahu Brazil Canada CDC Central Intelligence Agency China CIA CNN Colombia Covid-19 COVID-19 Vaccine Da’esh Donald Trump Egypt European Union Facebook FBI FDA France Gaza Germany Google Hamas Hebron Hezbollah Hillary Clinton Human rights India Iran Iraq ISIS Israel Israeli settlement Japan Jerusalem Joe Biden Korea Latin America Lebanon Libya Middle East National Security Agency NATO New York Times North Korea NSA Obama Pakistan Palestine Qatar Russia Sanctions against Iran Saudi Arabia Syria The Guardian Turkey Twitter UAE UK Ukraine United Nations United States USA Venezuela Washington Post West Bank WHO Yemen ZionismRecent Comments
roberthstiver on Israel signals rejection of ce… roberthstiver on Israel acknowledges barbarous… roberthstiver on UN experts ‘appalled’ by Israe… Victor G on Columbia crackdown led by univ… peterjohnarnold on Columbia crackdown led by univ… elmerfudzie on China rejects US election inte… rediscover911com on Sweden rules out international… Balthasar Gerards on Inside story of mass graves at… peterjohnarnold on Iran’s Israel Strike Reshapes… peterjohnarnold on Yemen expands front against Is… peterjohnarnold on Starbucks continues to feel we… peterjohnarnold on Police State Revealed: US Stud…
Aletho News
- UN experts ‘appalled’ by Israeli military’s sexual violence against Palestinian women
- Israel acknowledges barbarous strike on UNRWA building in Gaza
- Israel signals rejection of ceasefire proposal accepted by Hamas
- Belgium working on Israel sanctions
- PA demands Marwan Barghouti be excluded from prisoner release deal
- Israel/Gaza: The Masks Come Off in American Society
- Russia issues military ultimatum to UK
- Macron deployed French Foreign Legion to Ukraine, claims former US official
- IS A CLIMATE LOCKDOWN ON THE HORIZON?
- Could Ukraine resort to terrorism against Russian and pro-Russian targets around the world?
If Americans Knew
- The long-dreaded evacuation of Rafah has begun – Day 212
- How an ‘antisemitism hoax’ drowned out the discovery of mass graves in Gaza
- United Methodist Church votes to divest from Israel bonds
- Palestinians in Gaza’s displacement camps face rampant disease due to destroyed infrastructure
- Northern Gaza now in “full-blown famine,” Netanyahu rejects free speech in Israel – Day 211
- Wave of Legislation Seeks to Penalize Criticism of Israel as “Antisemitism”
- Cable News Viewers Have a Skewed Attitude Toward Gaza War, Survey Finds
- Gaza holds its breath over possible ceasefire, invasion, or both – Day 210
- Israeli cruelty reaches new low; United Methodists divest from Israel – Day 209
- The ‘Antisemitism’ Moral Panic Has Officially Jumped The Shark
Richie Allen
- The Richie Allen Show Returns Tomorrow Wednesday April 24th
- Call Richie Today Monday March 11th From 4.30pm
- Connect To The Richie Allen Show WhatsApp Today
- NHS Asks Patients To Choose From 12 Genders, 10 sexual Preferences & 159 Religions
- The Richie Allen Show Moves To A New Time Slot From Monday Nov 20th
- Starmer Will Sack Shadow Ministers Who Vote For Gaza Ceasefire
- AI Tool Can Predict Heart Attacks Years In Advance
- Nepal Bans TikTok To Preserve Social Harmony
- Bloke Appointed Boss Of Womb Health Charity
- WHO – “Gaza’s Biggest Hospital Becoming A Cemetery”
No Tricks Zone
- Newly Discovered 90,000-Year-Old Human Footprints Reveal How Much Higher Sea Levels Used To Be
- Germany’s Economic Bloodbath Worsens As Green Revolution Causes Economy To Bleed To Death
- Water Vapor Absorbs 84 Times More Radiation Than CO2 … Clouds Drove 89% Of 1982-2018 Warming
- The 97% Consensus Claim Is In Fact 97% Bogus
- Post-1980s Increases In Shortwave Radiation Explains Europe’s Warming Trends Far Better Than CO2
- “A Thing Where Every Part Of Your Life Just Confirms What It Is That You Want To Believe”
- Nature Publication: Researchers Find Arctic Region 10,000 Years Ago Warmer Than Today
- New Study: A Warmer London Has Reduced The Winter Death Toll By 447 Per Year Since 1976
- “New Ice Age Has Begun,” Astrophysicist Warns…Due To Reduced Solar Activity
- 3 Physicists Use Experimental Evidence To Show CO2’s Capacity To Absorb Radiation Has Saturated
More Links
Contact:
atheonews (at) gmail.com
Disclaimer
This site is provided as a research and reference tool. Although we make every reasonable effort to ensure that the information and data provided at this site are useful, accurate, and current, we cannot guarantee that the information and data provided here will be error-free. By using this site, you assume all responsibility for and risk arising from your use of and reliance upon the contents of this site.
This site and the information available through it do not, and are not intended to constitute legal advice. Should you require legal advice, you should consult your own attorney.
Nothing within this site or linked to by this site constitutes investment advice or medical advice.
Materials accessible from or added to this site by third parties, such as comments posted, are strictly the responsibility of the third party who added such materials or made them accessible and we neither endorse nor undertake to control, monitor, edit or assume responsibility for any such third-party material.
The posting of stories, commentaries, reports, documents and links (embedded or otherwise) on this site does not in any way, shape or form, implied or otherwise, necessarily express or suggest endorsement or support of any of such posted material or parts therein.
The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
Fair Use
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more info go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
DMCA Contact
This is information for anyone that wishes to challenge our “fair use” of copyrighted material.
If you are a legal copyright holder or a designated agent for such and you believe that content residing on or accessible through our website infringes a copyright and falls outside the boundaries of “Fair Use”, please send a notice of infringement by contacting atheonews@gmail.com.
We will respond and take necessary action immediately.
If notice is given of an alleged copyright violation we will act expeditiously to remove or disable access to the material(s) in question.
All 3rd party material posted on this website is copyright the respective owners / authors. Aletho News makes no claim of copyright on such material.
This is mind-boggling. In other words, overwhelming. To wit: if the criminal can escape his crime exposed, then no crime was committed. Right?
If no crime was committed, then no punishment will be expected or forthcoming.
If no punishment is expected, then license to repeat the crime can follow without fear of exposure.
No wonder Israel and its partisans are so fanatic to keep any exposure, to keep secret the crime and the criminal.
But it’s even worse. For, you see, attempts to expose bring the criminal to crime against those who expose their crimes.
To paraphrase “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” to find strength, perhaps, “O fear, where is thy sting? O crime upon me, where is thy victory?”
For surely the crime that is Zionism, whereby war is waged upon its victims, guilt is seared on the complicit, and that can not be washed clean.
Israel is not an ally to any but itself. To the others, it is the opposite. Why share its crimes? Why ally with it? Unless to be as it is…
LikeLike
Comment by michael | January 20, 2021 |