Nour Joudah,
Nisreen Zaqout
Excerpt, editing, brief comment by Carolyn Bennett
As it is with most pathetic, easy-way-out shortcuts, transparent, often
desperate and patently ineffective doing-anything-to-get-grant-money gestures –
it seems so with something called a “Normalization” program for Palestinians and Israelis. Sounds to me like programming,
a mind-manipulating measure cloaked in do-good-ism.
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xiled Palestinians Nour Joudah and Nisreen Zaqout
U.S. “‘Normalization’ programs attempt to build ‘harmony’
between Palestinians and Israeli Jews … without
addressing underlying inequalities,” Nour Joudah writes.
This is a congenital malady in the USA, an epidemic
condition among the “exceptional.”
Americans wheedle themselves into key
positions in which they pretend to be doing something constructive (“humanitarianism”)
all the while deliberately or inadvertently making matters worse.
Nour Joudah quotes Gazan Nisreen Zaqout who was speaking to an
audience in Washington, D.C., at the closing session of the 2014 “New Story
Leadership” Normalization Program. Joudah writes --
Unlike the Israeli participants, Nisreen
Zaqout’s ‘firsts’ were not meeting someone new or going sailing for the first
time.
Nisreen Zaqout’s ‘firsts’ were:
hearing ‘fear in her mother’s voice’; [hearing] ‘her brother cry over the death
of a young friend’; [hearing] her grandfather say ‘no’ to evacuation -- ‘not
again’ .
The ethnic cleansing and dispossession Palestinians experienced in
1948 — the year of Israel’s establishment — was enough.
Turning “ ‘Normalization’s’ beloved rhetoric of hope” on its
head, Nour Joudah comments, Zaqout declares
that “there is no hope to tout when we start talking about human lives in
numbers and when we are so willing to focus only on the hundreds of women and
children — as if every Palestinian man in Gaza were a legitimate target.”
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Joudah interprets Zaqout, “Hope comes when the will of Palestinians is respected and when
their rights are affirmed and granted.” Hope derives from “Gaza’s fight to live.”
Sources and notes
“Palestinian student ‘wanted to quit’ normalization group
over Gaza ‘torture’,” submitted by Nour Joudah, August 20, 2014, http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/nour-joudah/palestinian-student-wanted-quit-normalization-group-over-gaza-torture
Nisreen Zaqout, who participated in 2014’s New Story
Leadership program giving voice to her home and family, is a 21-year-old
Palestinian woman from Gaza who is studying at Illinois College in mid-state
Jacksonville, Illinois (Pop. around 19,000).
A Master’s graduate in Arab Studies from Georgetown
University in Washington, D.C., Nour Joudah had returned to Palestine and was teaching
high school and living in Ramallah before she was denied reentry and banned from
traveling to Palestine. She has since been re-exiled and is living and working
in Washington, D.C. Joudah has worked as
the Assistant Editor for the Journal of Palestine Studies, is currently a
researcher for the Arab Studies Institute and the Institute for Palestine
studies; and blogs at isdoud.wordpress.com. Nour Joudah’s blog
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