Debunking The Feeble Narrative On Which I’ve Constructed My National Identity Is Racist! Sexist? Transphobic? Help Me Out Here.

By Hussein Abubakr, Palestinian activist

Gaza City, February 21 – It’s tough to have one’s sense of self challenged. Most people’s reflexive reaction involves anger, perhaps a threat – or more than a threat – of violence, since a sense of self occupies psychological space on par with physical threats to one’s life. Sometimes, however, facts, those stubborn things, combine to chip away at the self – individual or group – that has taken shape over the course of time, and one must reach for tools to keep those facts at bay, tools that resonate so profoundly with emotion that the facts dare not penetrate. Thus our need, as Palestinians, to invoke the progressive trope of the day in enlisting solidarity from outsiders: our sense of self rests entirely on denying the peoplehood and national rights of Jews, requiring us to generate uncritical emotional support among credulous or antisemitic activists to bolster our crumbling self-conception – which we do by calling the use of facts to assail that untenable construct whichever epithet holds the most currency among progressives. Are we still on white supremacy? Transphobia? Anti-immigration?

When one’s identity grows not out of a distinct local culture, but out of a visceral drive to keep another in his or her traditional, second-class station, robust defenses of that identity prove elusive. Islamic society kept Jews as an underclass with varying levels of restrictions on their political and social status, in addition to the occasional massacre, forced conversions, or whatever abrogation of the Pact of Omar we Muslims felt like perpetrating at the time. But then the Jews came up with Zionism, a national liberation movement, and not only tried, but succeeded in, establishing, defending, and expanding a state of their own – a blow to the honor the Islamic world that had kept the Jews inferior and defenseless but now could not muster the might necessary to defeat a ragtag group of Holocaust refugees! The shame! But the very same honor-shame dynamic forces us to find an outside force to blame, and what better outside force than whichever bogeyman preoccupies the Zeitgeist of the wealthy western world, to coopt that outrage, and, hopefully, funding? That Zeitgeist will never really oppose antisemitism, but I can’t keep track of it. Police brutality? Income inequality? Diversity?

Whatever. I know our supporters will parrot our assertions, no matter how detached from reality those assertions have become. Just for my idiosyncratic sense of order, I’d prefer to keep things making some internal sense. But that might also be a Zionist plot! It’s all so misogynistic! I think. Unless it’s anti-science? I’ll have to get back to you.

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