Palestine's freedom struggle is about all of us ( การต่อสู้เพื่ออิสรภาพของชาวปาเลสตีนคือการต่อสู้ของพวกเราทุกคน )

 Palestine's freedom struggle is about all of us

Worrying when the protest movement is made suspicious even by liberal forces

Elina Pahnke

This is a cultural article that is part of Aftonbladet's opinion journalism.

Published at 05.00

Pro-Palestinian demonstration in Malmö on October 14.

Pro-Palestinian demonstration in Malmö on October 14.

Photo: Johan Nilsson/TT

There are many ways to ensure that a person perishes. One way, of course, is to literally destroy her—erasing her from the face of the earth by bombing her home, and in the rare case she survives, also attacking the hospitals where she could have sought care.

As I witness Israel's annihilation of Palestinians, its invasion of Gaza and abuses in the West Bank, death no longer feels like an exception. Instead, I wonder how the Palestinians have survived this 75-year history of siege. How they actually escaped death we have witnessed in recent weeks - we have seen the men stop and dig out strangers from the ruins, we have seen children who have found new arms to rest in when their parents have been killed, and in the hospitals the doctors continue their work even when the electricity and water have been cut off and the patients are forced to be cared for on the hospital floor without any anaesthetic.

But for tomorrow to be something other than a repetition of today, it is not enough to keep breathing. Surviving is probably so difficult, but living, you only do that by holding on to the hope that the future offers something better than what the past has so far forced you to witness.

In recent weeks, we have been able to see how a global protest movement has taken shape. Hundreds of thousands of people have taken to the streets calling for a ceasefire in Palestine. It is an urgent cry for help, at a moment when every day has become associated with further destruction. It is a humble desire for the Palestinians' right to live in freedom. But I'm also convinced that the reason we're seeing people quit all over the world is about something more. If we accept freedom as a neutral space, and Israel's murderousness as the new normal, then we are not only abandoning the Palestinians. We have also to some extent given up on humanity.

When the Swedish public right now tries to cast doubt on those who resist the invasion of Gaza, I cannot therefore understand it as anything other than a negotiation about what kind of future we want to live in.

Swedish democracy should therefore be understood as meaning that you can only raise your voice if you want to flatter the prevailing order

In recent weeks, the government has made clear how they view the matter. Like Israel, they wish for a colonized mind, where lack of "respect in relation to basic Swedish values" can be grounds for deportation. What kind of values it might be about became clear when Ulf Kristersson held an open meeting in Gothenburg last week, where the audience criticized the government's defense of Israel. After being questioned, the prime minister wrote on his Instagram that he will never "accept that the parliament of the street takes over" and that he does not intend to bow to "aggressive gap-necks". Swedish democracy must therefore be understood as meaning that you can only raise your voice if you want to flatter the current order.

At Chalmers University of Technology, the rector recently went out and banned political demonstrations, understood as "people gathering and expressing political opinions in a way that makes it impossible for anyone passing by to see or hear the message". After criticism, the decision was reversed, but the government cheered the restriction.

That the government does this is completely in line with their policy. More worrying is to see how liberal forces are beginning to engage in similar reasoning.

Karin Pettersson recently wrote in a text on these pages that she will not join the demonstration marches calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. Not because they say something she can't stand behind, but because she can't possibly know the intentions behind certain slogans. Now it is no longer our actions that are to be examined, but our intentions, our innermost being. We say one thing, but are assumed to mean something else, and the result of this twisted view of semantics is to fail to protest an ongoing ethnic cleansing.

Do we join the freedom struggle, or do we devote ourselves instead to making those who fight for liberation suspicious?

At the same time, the voice of the people is increasingly undermined by claiming that everyone is the same and equally bad and that the protests should therefore end. In recent weeks, the deliberate misinformation of right-wing writers has begun to trickle down into mainstream news texts. When Nazis recently interrupted a pro-Palestinian demonstration, and were chased away, SvD's Tove Lifvendahl did not hesitate to spread the lie that the groups were making a common cause. That a bourgeois debater wants to label a popular protest movement as extremists should not surprise anyone. But the fact that the lie is then repeated - including in a TT text where a policeman claims that "right-wing extremists participate in pro-Palestinian demonstrations" indicates that no one reacts to untruths as long as they concern the Palestinian resistance. By way of comparison, no one believed that the queer movement was demonstrating side by side with Nazis when NMR stood in front of the Pride parade this summer.

The Prime Minister will continue to pursue his anti-human policy, and claim that Israel has a right to people's... I mean self-defense. In the name of self-defense, they will then limit our opportunities to protest. So we too become, to some extent, occupied. The question then becomes how the majority population responds to these measures. Do we join the freedom struggle, or do we engage instead in making those who fight for liberation suspicious? The answer to that question will not only be decisive for the Palestinians' future, but ours as well.

There are several ways to perish. One is to respond to any cruelty with inaction. I refuse such a definition of being human. For life to consist of something other than survival, we need to hold on to what the Palestinians have taught us through their 75-year liberation struggle. To live is to hold on to the hope of a better tomorrow.