Palestinian Trail of Tears: strong reactions to Joy Harjo’s refusal to boycott Israel

Ali Abunimah Activism and BDS Beat 11 December 2012

The decision by Native American poet Joy Harjo to reject Palestinian calls to cancel her performance last Monday at Tel Aviv University has continued to generate strong reactions from Native American and Palestinian voices.

Meanwhile, it has become clear how invested extreme anti-Palestinian Israeli propaganda groups were in Harjo’s visit to score a victory against the Palestinian campaign for human rights.

Making complicity “fade away”

Joy Harjo (source)

Joy Harjo Wikimedia Commons

Writing on her blog Tequila Sovereign, Joanne Barker, Associate Professor of American Indian Studies at San Francisco State University, was critical of Harjo’s decision.

After summarizing what she called the “sound bites” of the controversy, Barker, a member of the Lenape tribe, zeroed in on Harjo’s justifications for refusing the boycott call:

Harjo has posted on Facebook and Twitter about her frustration with people’s judgmental criticisms of her decision—that they do not understand her political commitments and consciousness and instead seek her censure as an artist.

I do not understand these comments. I do not hear Palestinians asking for Native academics and artists to come to Israel to perform for an audience in which they would be an unwelcomed minority on lands from which they have been violently dispossessed. I hear something else.

Barker notes that “a deep ignorance about Palestine” and “an active looking away from Palestine characterizes U.S. and world news coverage, academic discussions, and the arts. And this is true of Native academics and artists as well.”

She empathizes with the “stressful” personal situation Harjo found herself in and calls for “compassion.” But Barker is unsparing in her political judgment of Harjo’s act, and has no time for claims that any individual’s art is so special that that person has an obligation to share it despite a clear call for boycott rooted in a struggle for human rights.

Thus, she writes, “I also want the facade of being misunderstood, censured, and bullied – of ultimately having so much to offer that one is obligated to go – to fade away.”

Noting that Native American governments have been complicit with, or coopted by Israel, Barker says:

I want Native governments to divest themselves from Israel as well (most immediately the Chickasaw and Navajo governments, who support Israeli products and send delegates to the Israeli government).

Notably, Navajo Nation President Ben Shelly was in Israel for an official visit at the same time as Harjo.

Palestinian Trail of Tears

In an oped for Indian Country Today Palestinian activist and scholar Sa’ed Adel Atshan compared Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleasing of Palestinians to the Trail of Tears, the forced expulsion by the United States Government of 15,000 Cherokee people from their homeland east of the Mississippi in 1838 and 1839 toward what is now Oklahoma, leading to the deaths of 4,000 amid immense suffering.

Atshan was particularly scornful of Harjo’s calls for “dialogue” while ignoring specifically Palestinian voices:

Many activists have devoted countless hours in reaching out to Harjo on her Facebook page. So many of us have written respectfully as fans. I posted a comment explaining that Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip could not attend her performance because of the nature of the Israeli apartheid system, forced removal, and severe limits on mobility, including the right to travel from one Palestinian village to the next. It has been painful to see Harjo respond to various messages except those coming from Palestinian voices. She later posted: “I invite anyone here to sit at my kitchen table to speak with me.” Palestinians replied. I, too, sent a private email in addition to a Facebook message reiterating that we have limited mobility:  

I understand what means to be indigenous to a land and to feel the spirit of our ancestors calling on us to return in the face of ethnic cleansing and colonization…My relatives and friends, who are now refugees in the West Bank… would all love to hear you speak, to meet you, to break bread with you on your kitchen table in Tel Aviv. Our village and ancestral lands are actually there beside you in Tel Aviv, yet we are refugees, and Palestinians are denied our right to return to homes and lands. My family and loved ones, who would be eager to accept your invitation cannot even travel freely within our own country, finding ourselves like animals behind cages, within Israeli prison cells, with a Wall three times the height of the Berlin Wall, hundreds of checkpoints between Palestinian towns, and Israeli settlements with Jewish-only roads devastating the earth.

I still have not received a response from Harjo.

Atshan’s entire article is well-worth reading.

“Don’t let them win”: Racists and ethnic cleansers for Joy Harjo

If Joy Harjo thought that her presence in Tel Aviv would generate reflection among Israelis, there’s been no sign of that. Quite the contrary.

An Israeli government-sponsored student hasbara (state propaganda) group called “What Is RAEL,” claimed victory in a tweet at what it called a “#BDSFail” and also claimed on its Facebook page, without offering any evidence, that Harjo had been subjected to “ugly threats from BDS activists - calling her to boycott Tel-Aviv University and its students.”

Before Harjo’s performance, extreme racist anti-Palestinian group Im Tirzu on Sunday posted an action alert on its Facebook page in Hebrew warning about the boycott calls Harjo was hearing. Im Tirtzu urged as many people as possible to show up. “Don’t let them win,” the action alert said.

The alert was shared from Im Tirtzu’s page by the official student union at Tel Aviv University. The Tel Aviv University student union is affiliated with the National Union of Israeli Students which assists the government with its anti-Palestinian propaganda.

Among Im Tirtzu’s more recent campus activities was organizing a rally at Haifa University supporting the Israeli army’s Israeli attack on Gaza, at which some students chanted “Death to the Arabs.”

Those are some of the allies and defenders Joy Harjo found in Israel.

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Comments

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Rima Merriman replied on

The lameness of the note Joy Harjo posted announcing her decision to stay in Tel Aviv seemed to me worse than the decision itself. As your article and comments by others on Harjo’s FB page have pointed out, the reasons she gives are bewildering. Is it the inconvenience of having to rethink her plans at the last minute? Is it peevishness at her being made to feel coerced? Is it the fiction she weaves that Israeli society is all inclusive instead of the apartheid, segregationist regime it really is, or is it the baffling and condescending misinterpretation of the call for boycott as polarization and “bargaining” with “religions or ideologies” instead of a courageous attempt by a downtrodden and oppressed indigenous people to gain self determination through non-violent resistance that has been proven effective elsewhere?

I teach American literature at Al Quds University (AQU) – the only Palestinian university that has a presence in Jerusalem and that is unrecognized by Israel, making it difficult for Palestinian students who live in annexed east Jerusalem or Israeli Palestinian students who may choose to attend AQU to find jobs. In my course, I go to great lengths to expose my students to Native American literature and history, and to help them make connections, to see that the Palestinian situation is “a high-speed and high-tech version of the colonisation of our Indigenous homelands,” as Waziyata Win, a Dakota who visited Palestine expressed it.

My students have failed to understand how Joy Harjo, and what she supposedly stands for, could sit in her hotel room in Tel Aviv and write that she is “aware of the nearly unbearable political strife here”. They know, only too well, that “the strife” is not “here” in Tel Aviv; it is “there” in the West Bank and in Gaza. In Tel Aviv, it is completely obscured, and Joy is taking part in normalizing and further obscuring that strife.

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Intel replied on

If your students fail to understand it, perhaps you should explain to them the comprador nature of Fatah, or point out how the leadership of Hamas is backing US imperialism in Syria.

Then maybe they'll understand the nature of comprador stupidity, when you point out examples of it right in Palestine.

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Rima Merriman replied on

Intel unverfied: Check this out - in the news today.

RACIST HATE SENTIMENTS NO LONGER SO "EXTREME" AMONG JEWISH SETTLERS IN THE WEST BANK AND JERUSALEM WHO GO AROUND, UNCHECKED, CHANTING "DEATH TO ARABS"

On Wednesday (Dec 12, 2012) at dawn, a number of extremist Israeli settlers wrote racist graffiti attacking Christianity and Jesus Christ on the walls of a monastery in occupied Jerusalem, the WAFA News Agency reported.

Hebrew Graffiti says, "Jesus is a son of a whore".

https://www.facebook.com/photo...

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Sonja replied on

You forgot to mention 'there are worse tragedies in the world'. Bad hasbara ...tsk.

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ajamu chaminuka replied on

what does your comment have to do with the brutality that the Palestinian people have been suffering at the hands of zionist jews since 1948?

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Vincent D. Stravino, M.D. replied on

I am disappointed at your decision to support the Israeli government's official isolation of several million Palestinians into dozens of isolated deprived areas similar to the forced ethnic cleansing of your native people by cruel force in the 19th century in America.I can only assume you were paid well by the Israelis and kept far from hearing or seeing the truth in the cruel and unjust military occupation of Palestinian territories. I suggest you ask your Israeli hosts to allow you to visit Hebron, Nabi Saleh,Gaza,or BiLin for one hour each and you will leave Israel with a completely different opinion. I was sickened and embarrassed after witnessing my taxpayer money being used to furnish Israeli weapons used against unarmed Palestinian civilians. Like it or not, as a native American, you share a common bond with the indigenous people of Palestine whose land and resources are being stolen by a richer and more powerful nation.

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polus replied on

I'm not afraid
I release you... Joy Harjo

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stan van houcke replied on

why can't she identify with the sorrow of the palestinians. the only reason i can think of is her vanity. she should read mahmoud darwish' Speech of the Red Indian:

The white man will never understand the ancient words
here in spirits roaming free
between sky and trees
[...]
Take all the gold of the earth and sun
but leave the land of our names to us.

Then go back, stranger
Search for India once more!
[...]
Don't bury your God
in books that back up your claim of
your land over our land

What you white men need will be the memory of
how to tame the horse of madness
[...]
So take your time

as you dismember God.

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HHM replied on

Please check out the Article (and links within the piece) titled PALESTIN[D]IANS: FROM 4TH MEDIA.ORG (http://tinyurl.com/alvpknr) by Jim Craven on Zionism, racism, anti-Semitism and the like. This piece can be used as partial response to the Dine and other Native American Governments co-opted by Zionism.

About Jim Craven from his WordPress blog, (http://jimcraven10.wordpress.c...):

"Jim Craven, Blackfoot Nation, Canada, US citizen. Jim Craven, Professor of Economics and Geography over 35 years, levels from high school to post doctorate, in the U.S. Canada, Europe, India, China, Puerto Rico. I have lived and worked in six languages other than English and am learning Mandarin Chinese. Citizenship: Blackfoot Nation; U.S. and Canadian. Licensed FAA Commercial and Instrument Pilot, Ground Instructor, Advanced and Instrument; pilot over 40 years. Biographical subject in past and present editions of Maquis Who’s Who in: The World; America; The West; Science and Engineering; Finance and Industry; American Education"

Ali Abunimah

Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and author of The Battle for Justice in Palestine, now out from Haymarket Books.

Also wrote One Country: A Bold-Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse. Opinions are mine alone.