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Becoming Pro-Palestinian: Testimonies from the Global Solidarity Movement
Rosemary Sayigh (editor)
London: I.B. Tauris, 2024, 250 pages
Alongside the widespread horror that the Israeli genocide in Gaza has evoked, the Palestinian people have made notable achievements: Due to the bravery and tenaciousness of Gazans’ resistance and adherence to their land, they have unleashed an unprecedented wave of international solidarity with Palestine.
It is this momentum that oral historian and anthropologist Rosemary Sayigh captures in “Becoming Pro-Palestinian”. Having published three books and innumerable articles on the Palestinians, she was perhaps considering retirement, but found herself propelled into action once again by the tumultuous events since October 7th.
Most have seen images of the massive demonstrations in Western cities, but Sayigh gives her book a truly global perspective by arranging forty plus testimonies by country and continent, and putting Asia first in the book, followed by Africa. All of the essays are worth reading, but due to space limitations, this review can only highlight a few of them.
Hadi Borhani, an Iranian, has followed the Palestine question most of his life, but it was his work at Iran’s ministry of foreign affairs that showed him the centrality of the issue. “Above all, what engaged me to the point of obsession was a perplexing paradox: how Western countries, the same countries that established the widest and most influential civilization in history… could at the same time support such injustice in Palestine.” (p. 4)
Amira Haas, the sole Israeli journalist to have live in occupied Gaza, queries the concept of pro-Palestinian, which “takes national identity as a frame of reference. Identification and support, like my journalistic writing, do not originate from the fact that Palestinians are Palestinian, but because the founding of the state of which I am a citizen, and my own people, have placed them in a situation of ongoing, structural injustice…” (p. 8)
The essay by Turkish sociologist Sanem Ozturk reads like the evolution of a political activist. For him, Caravan Palestine 2005 was a very significant milestone, wherein “Hundreds of people from all over the world started a journey from Strasbourg to Quds” only to be thrown back to Jordan by the Israeli forces. (p. 15)
Indian Professor M.H. Ilias traces his country’s long-standing solidarity with Palestine to anti-colonial sentiments rooted in India’s own national movement, which ousted Britain from the subcontinent. This was only modified by the 1990’s neoliberal reconfiguration of the economy and the rise of Hindu nationalism.
Indian-born American, international researcher and journalist Vijay Prashad learned about the Palestinian struggle via the 1982 Sabra-Shatila massacre. His outrage at this and other cruel injustices led him to analyse imperialism’s crimes, repeated visiting Beirut and Palestine, and working with the BDS campaign.
Ang Swee Chai, raised in Singapore and trained as a surgeon in the UK, traces her long path to becoming pro-Palestinian. The impact of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon broke her attachment to Christian Zionism, and she travelled to Beirut to treat the victims. Here, the “Sabra-Shatila massacre exploded the myth that Palestinians were terrorists. The heaps of bodies in the camp alleys finally convinced the world—and me—that they were the victims of terror”. (p. 42)
In the context of 9/11 and the ensuing US-led attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, Japanese scholar Hiroyuki Suzuki cites a documentary of Edward Said speaking on the Iraq War, as what “inspired [his] interest in the Palestinian cause”. (p. 58)
Suraya Dadoo, South African journalist and BDS activist, asserts that the “fight against Israeli apartheid should be a natural step for ordinary South Africans who experienced and opposed apartheid. However, Israel’s well-oiled hasbara machine has been somewhat effective in making some South Africans believe that this is simply a real estate dispute between two equal sides… So, the task is to reach out to justice-seeking South Africans and get them to see that the Palestinian present is our past”. (p. 65)
Publisher and human rights activist Sahid Rajan recounts the development of solidarity with Palestine in Kenya, via education and especially film screenings, helping to dispel the “propaganda labeling the Palestinian struggle as a Muslim religious struggle”. (p. 84)
The remainder of the book includes testimonies from North America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Latin America. Here are many well-known persons, some of whom, like Sayigh, have spent much of their adult life in Palestine or Lebanon: Penny Johnson, Lori Allen, Helga Baumgarten, Chris Giannou, Anni Kanafani, Luisa Morgantini, Stuart Rees, Bianca Marcossi, Ilan Pappe and more.