Thinking the future

Sharda Patasar

This past week I binged on the TEDx Holy Land talks. The event which came off seven years ago had been organised by Israeli, New York-based Liat Aaronson and Palestinian, UK-based producer Hanan Kattan. It brought together women from Israel and the Arab nations who would not have met on a normal basis, to dialogue about their experiences in their various fields. With the current Gaza killings precipitated by the US Embassy recently setting up shop in Jerusalem, the talks become even more relevant. But, I might add, relevant to a rational mind, one that has not lived the emotional reality of Israel/Palestine. But let us not discount its importance (Butterfly Effect and all considered).

While I extracted sense from the talks, I was also aware that I was sitting here in the West Indies where my political reality is different. But, distance from the issue also made me wonder whether the subtle resistance to Israel interwoven into the presentations didn’t border on tokenism. The conflict within myself was difficult – from appreciation because I saw the venture as an attempt at unity (the gender perspective is also difficult to ignore), to standing on the Palestinian side to say “you are normalising again.”

Normalisation, for those who have never met the term, is defined from the Palestinian perspective, as a process of making Israeli occupation a norm, to say “let’s move towards peace and forget about the violence and killings.” For the Palestinians, resisting normalisation is about resisting any attempt at colonising their minds. What this means is that any gathering (academic/intellectual) in which there is no dialogue that resists Israeli oppression, is seen as an attempt to muffle the Palestinian reality, to make it look like colonisation is normal and that the progressive Israel is just another “normal” state protecting itself.

Think about this as an abusive relationship. Two people go to counselling and that terribly inept counsellor says, “Well how do you feel?” Feelings are discussed and the second meeting starts with, “Let’s move forward now.” But unfortunately you haven’t worked out the years of pent up anger that you have felt, the other person hasn’t asked forgiveness or shown any remorse for the physical and/or emotional abuse, yet we are both expected to move forward to mend relationships assuming that both partners’ presence there is evidence of a desire to mend the relationship. But, you the abused have been slowly robbed of your resources so therein lies an inequality. How do we then begin to reconcile when one partner feels materially and emotionally disempowered? How do we allay the fear that this abuse is not going to happen again? How much can dialogue under the inept counsellor solve the problem?

The TEDx Holy Land series was a progressive initiative but as with any venture, there is a limit. This is just one group of women, the ones who are privileged. How do we bridge that gap between one reality and another? How can they speak for the reality of the thousands of other women who feel disempowered? Yet, one cannot totally discount the talks as just another attempt at normalisation for each presentation contained a common idea that is useful. It is the recognition of the fact that was best put in the words of anthropologist Safa Abu Rabia:

“I realise that…I cannot belong to one narrative, one history one place. I belong to more than one place, more than one history, more that one narrative. Knowing that there is no definite answer, no definite truth, no definite justice…has released me from struggle with self.” And physicist Sayfan Borghini further asks “How do we think the future?” Where science has moved from seeing the future as a screen upon which we were projecting to recognising that the “future is a collaborative, active event… a plurality of open-ended narrative that each one of us is telling right here right now. So how do we think about the future and how do we learn to think it today?”

That is the essential question and it is applicable not only to the Israel Palestine conflict and how the two resolve the conflict but to us here too. How do we, as a society, think the future today and how do we collectively build the future that we want? But furthermore, what kind of a future do we want? And perhaps our first ventures should be resistance to further colonisation and attempts to open our collective minds to possibilities. Easier said than done, because I have an inkling that some of us are not aware of who and what have been the colonising forces apart from the historical records that present the universally accepted norm: European and British colonisers. And so the work continues.

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