[Salon] ArabDigest.org - A Gen Z response to the Gaza war -

A Gen Z response to the Gaza war Summary: the Gaza war has reinforced the conviction among young Arabs that the West has little or no concern for the rights of Palestinians and that much of what it says about freedom, justice and equality does not extend to the Arab world. We thank Tharwa Boulifi for today’s newsletter. Tharwa is a 22 year-old Tunisian writer and medical student who was first published at the age of 15. She writes in Arabic, French, English and Spanish focussing on women’s rights with an emphasis on Arab and African women, culture and LGBTQ+ rights. Her work has been published widely in, amongst others, Teen Vogue, Herizons, Africa in Motion, The New Arab and Newsweek. Tharwa is a regular contributor to the newsletter. You can find her AD podcast Tunisia’s Gen Z here. It wasn’t the first time that I saw an Israeli attack on Palestine. Sounds of bombs exploding, rifle fire, images of destroyed buildings, children crying, and their parents fleeing war zones while carrying their babies on their backs or in their arms were things I grew up watching. In the living room, in my home in Tunis, my parents would be following the news attentively while my brother and I were playing by their side, with cries of pain and despair in our ears. We could feel that our parents were alarmed by what they were seeing on TV; at times, my mother would call us to hold us in her arms very tight. During the bloodiest phases of this continuous war, my parents would stay up till very late at night, and then my mother would come to check on me and my brother to see if we were safe. In family gatherings, as a child, I was able to discern resignation in the eyes and voice of adults, who when talking about Palestine’s war would keep praying for the enemy’s destruction. From this came the duality of “them versus us.” I grew up hearing adults around me saying things like “For the West, we’re just sheep, and our lives matter as little as those of animals” or “They’d prefer if they lessen the number of people in the Middle East and North Africa”. When my father left to work in a Gulf country for a year, the five-year-old me cried very much and kept repeating “ Papa is going to the country where there’s war and will die there,” though there was no war in that country. At school, my peers and I would talk about the horrific scenes we saw on the news channels and Palestine’s war without understanding it. The children of my generation, like all Arab children, were confronted with the terms of war quite early in life, but it was hard to process the concept that people would steal someone else’s land and that those who had their land and homes stolen would fight to get it back. We learned Arab songs that were full of optimism and resilience like “Ajyal Wara Ajayl (Generations after Generations)” or Fairouz’s “Zahrat Al Madaen ( The Flower of cities)” and the songs raised our spirits and gave us hope for a better world. A pro-Palestine protest on the online game platform Roblox [photo credit: Roblox] In the same time, Africans and Arabs who were under the influence of Western propaganda have always believed that there’s a brighter future for their children in Europe than in Arab/African countries, where wealth was plundered by these same propagandists. Following this mindset, my upper middle-class parents put me in a French public high school in Tunis. History was my favourite class and I excitedly discovered Western values like democracy, freedom, and justice. Our French teachers taught us about both World Wars and how Western human rights and institutions would make sure that the horrors committed during these wars would not be repeated again. The teenage me was fascinated by these idealistic values and the utopian world France and the West were promising to build. However, although history classes in the French curriculum were based on analysing historical events and discussing different perspectives, the Palestinian war wasn’t even a lesson, and the Nakba was mentioned in only a short sentence, as part of post-WWII events. While most of my peers who grew up in “Westernized” households didn’t have a problem with it, I, who come from a strong Arab cultural background, was surprised by this, and raised questions inside my head : “Why didn’t we talk about it like we do about both World Wars or the Cold War? Is this a taboo topic?” I thought that even if I asked these questions, I’d have received cliché answers like: “We’re mostly focused on Western history”. While my teachers from France always told us that the history curriculum’s goal is to help us develop critical thinking, I guess that our learning doesn’t include questioning and criticising Western policies in the Middle East. After graduating from high school and gaining some distance from this Western propaganda, as time passes I realise how much the ‘developed’ world make words like “justice” and “democracy” void of meaning. People in the society I grew up in, often say that once one gets to Europe or the US, full rights will be guaranteed. I think many of them would change their minds now, as countries like the US, France, and Germany look at the genocide happening in Gaza, not only without calling it out, but also with demonising Palestinians. Besides, Instagram and Facebook stand accused of censoring Palestinian-related content by deleting all posts against Israel. As if it wasn’t enough that they are oppressed in real life, Palestinians are also silenced on social media, supposedly spaces for freedom of speech. Reputable American media outlets try to claim neutrality but have ended up as the accomplice of Israel, since the oppressor and oppressed can’t be on an equal footing even when analysing the situation objectively. And when the Arab diaspora tries to protest and to express their opinion, the police in France repress it by teargassing protestors and in Germany by arresting them. These recent weeks, the message from powerful Western countries is that Arab lives don’t matter as much as those of white people and Arab grief and anger shouldn’t be expressed. Israel’s colonisation of Palestine will remain a perpetuated trauma through generations. However, Arabs and the Palestinian people won’t only pass grief and anger to their children but also resilience and resistance. 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