Saeed Teebi never envisioned himself writing You Will Not Kill Our Imagination: A Memoir of Palestine and Writing in Dark Times.
The Palestinian-Canadian author was accustomed to writing short stories and was working on a fiction novel when he found himself overwhelmed by what was happening in his ancestral land. “I couldn’t justify to myself spending more time immersed in the genre of fiction and in imagined and somewhat frivolous worlds in light of what was happening,” he tells Yahoo Canada from his home in Toronto.
Teebi’s grandparents and parents were exiled to Kuwait before he was born; he considers himself to also be in exile because he’s not allowed to be in Palestine. “I’m barred from there despite being 100-per-cent Palestinian,” he says.
“It’s frankly a mystifying situation to be in: the one place I’m barred from is the one place I’m from genetically through and through.”
As someone who cares about language, Teebi believes the term “exile” is an important one.
“I am not diasporic because I want to be,” he emphasizes. “This is something that was forced upon my family and continues to be forced upon my family.”
The one place I’m barred from is the one place I’m from genetically through and through.
Teebi says he wanted to write this book because at the beginning of the genocide — almost exactly two years ago — the permeating narrative was that Palestinians are barbaric people who invade, kill, and maim without discrimination and without cause.
“So ‘we,’ being Israel, are completely justified in doing whatever we have to do in order to get rid of them.”
That narrative wasn’t only totally false, it also gave Israel cover to do what it wanted. “So for me, recognizing that the Palestinian story has been obscured, I thought, as a writer, if I can’t at least help in my own small way in un-obscuring it, then I wouldn’t be doing what I should be doing.”
As the second anniversary of the October 7 Hamas attacks and the resulting massacre of Palestinians by Israeli forces looms, Teebi reflects on how much of that narrative has shifted, if it is a vindication of sorts, and whether it has the power and potential to incite actual change on the ground in Palestine.
Saeed Teebi: I think there are a lot of ways to think about it. One is to not even slightly be concerned with honouring the people you’re about to kill. It’s a strange concept to think about honouring the people you’re about to kill, but I’ve considered that there is a way to kill in which you show a basic minimum level of respect for somebody.
But here there’s a kind of indiscrimination and pleasure in killing that I’ve witnessed the Israeli army have with Palestinians in Gaza, and I think it’s indicative of a kind of performance: “We’d like everybody to see just what we do to these people, so that they would draw an inference about those people. Those people are so worthless.”
But there’s also another aspect. The killing is so performative in my view, that it’s intended to send a signal to the Palestinian that there’s just no way out for you. It’s a way of annihilating the Palestinian imagination which is what really prompted the first seeds of this book for me.
That’s an important tactic we’ve seen before, for example when the U.S. invaded Iraq, they employed the now-famous concept of “shock and awe.” You’re going to go in so strong, and so demonstrative, that the Iraqis will be awed by it. It’s a strange concept to think that you would be awed by the destruction of your own country, but it sends a very strong signal as to the intentions of the people doing it. And it’s an attempt to annihilate not just people, not just places, but also imaginations, and for me that killing of the Palestinian story is at the root of how performative the death and destruction seems to be.
You say that an ancillary to the human cost of the genocide is the loss of family histories.
When your people are being faced with the erasure of entire families … that means that you as a unit of people who are descendants from people who existed many centuries ago, it means that that’s one less unit of families that is tethered to the land. We take pride in that. Scores of families in Palestine don’t have a single person who can say that anymore because that whole family has been erased.
It doesn’t mean that it erases history, but it makes it more difficult to find that history. The best historians of families are the family members themselves, and if they’re not there, it’s hard to get at that history. I think this is part of Israel’s objective.
Israel has taken fairly sophisticated roots to what their PR looks like in this war. They say something to the West and they say a different thing to their own citizens — and they treat Palestinians in yet another way.
So killing Palestinian children is intended to stem the very ethnicity of Palestinians; it’s an ethnic cleansing tactic. Now when it comes to the West, Israel will tell you, “Oh, these children, we never meant to hurt them. We weren’t trying to kill children; it’s just that those dastardly terrorists hide behind their children and so our bomb had to go through the children in order to get to the terrorists.”
So on the one hand, they’re clearly targeting children, yet many doctors have reported seeing scores of children that have gunshot wounds to the head. That means these children were in some sniper’s line of target. There’s no other way to think of that than the child being targeted. Meanwhile, the story is quite different in the West.
Do you feel that the “Israeli justification” narrative that took hold in the aftermath of October 7, 2023 has changed — particularly in the past year?
I think the savagery of Israel’s ongoing assaults have been so severe and so unrelenting that it’s almost impossible for public perception, given the amount of first-hand coverage — not so much mainstream media coverage — about what’s going on over there, it was almost impossible for the narrative not to change.
Even Israel recognizes that it has changed because it has pumped many millions of dollars into their own hasbara and narrative makers in order to counter this increasing tide of people who know the truth of what’s going on.
So, for sure there has been a change in the narrative in the last year, but not nearly enough to substantially change governmental action, particularly in the West, towards the situation.
So does Canada’s — as well as France, the United Kingdom, and Australia’s — recent recognition of a Palestinian state mean anything tangible, or is it all just symbolic?
A lot of it can be considered symbolic: Canada is actively sending ammunition to Israel and covering it up. They are actively not sanctioning Israel, not putting any kind of real, substantive pressure on Israel. Simply recognizing a Palestinian state that was supposed to be recognized many years ago by virtue of the Oslo Accords, isn’t really doing anything. Canada is just trying to stave off the increasing grassroots and public pressure on it to do something.
The gesture is symbolic, and is not one, in my view, that has much chance of stemming the tide of violence all on its own. There is a lot more to do.
I found this paragraph particularly interesting: “It shakes me, as a person who has lived his whole life in a Palestinian body, I have felt that finally, things have now been demonstrated beyond argument. That finally, enough Palestinians have been brutalized…that finally, what we have always said about the cruelty and unjustness of those who perpetrate against us has been vindicated.” What do you mean by the word “vindication?”
I think the vindication that I was referring to is the idea that most Palestinians understand facts about Israel and Israel’s founding mythology. But the rest of the world has frequently not believed Palestinians about that. The reason is because of the huge narrative that has been installed by the Israeli PR machine for decades now.
But now there has been such a huge amount of proof to the contrary that even somebody who has grown and been nurtured in this Israeli narrative, can’t help but understand something different now. A lot of people will tell you: “I just didn’t know it was like this.” I have had those kinds of messages in my inbox throughout this war. That’s what I mean by what we knew has been vindicated.
Does this mean there’s been a shift in public perception? 100 per cent. And that’s measurable: you see it now in the U.S. It is absolutely unprecedented where you have the majority of people who were polled on whether they have a positive or negative opinion of Israel and they’ll tell you they have a negative opinion. They’ll tell you they have a much more favourable opinion of Palestine. That has never been the case before, particularly in the U.S.
Has it translated into policy results? No, it hasn’t. It has not translated into governmental action and the shifts that we notice there have been negligible for the most part, although we are seeing some shifts.
As we near the anniversary of October 7, what should Canada be doing? Obviously, we should be imposing sanctions.
At the bare minimum. First of all, let’s make sure we’re not sending them any weapons. There should be economic sanctions. Thirdly, there should be a renouncing of any kind of diplomatic ties with a state like that. You wouldn’t have any kind of ties with states that perpetuate this completely wanton violence on people, if it were any other state except this one.
We saw what Canada did as soon as Russia invaded Ukraine. Canada has still not found it in itself to reach that level of antipathy towards Israel, and it’s a maddening situation to be when Israel is, on the face of it, doing far worse and far more gruesome things than Russia has done. It’s not that I compare tragedies, what the Ukrainians have gone through is awful — but the level of savagery and destruction by Israel is certainly more than enough to warrant a cutting of all relations.
As a Palestinian, do you find it difficult to live in this country considering the government isn’t doing much to stop Israel other than giving out symbolic gestures, as you say?
I think it’s been an unpleasant couple of years in this country. I’ve lived in Canada for 35 years, and these have been easily the worst years. I have been ashamed of Canada on many occasions and I continue to be ashamed. I don’t know what it will take for the political apparatus to understand that they are acting against the will of the majority of Canadians, but I suspect they will figure it out sooner rather than later.
The future is always much closer than you think it is. If you had told a Syrian even a year ago that Syria would not be under their previous despot’s rule very soon, they wouldn’t have believed it. It always happens very fast and before you know it.
I think when we are in a moment of extreme violence and extreme pain, we sometimes forget how sudden massive historical shifts can be. It just takes one thing to break the dam wide open. We keep seeing incremental progress — and it is maddeningly incremental — but it’s progress nonetheless. Eventually, there will be a massive shift.
Yahoo News – Latest News & Headlines
Read the full article .
