GENE DEMBY, HOST:
Just a heads up, y'all - this episode contains some language that might not be suitable for sensitive listeners.
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DEBMY: What's good, y'all? You're listening to CODE SWITCH. I'm Gene Demby. I've been thinking a lot about this quote I read recently. It's from Ruth Wilson Gilmore. She's a prison abolitionist. She wants us to imagine a world where we do the hard work of trying to live alongside each other without thinking of some people as problems to be solved and then throwing them away when that project becomes too difficult or those people become too inconvenient. Her quote goes, "where life is precious, life is precious."
In the context in which I read that quote, the point that was being made was that violence begets violence and that everyone, even the perpetrators of that violence, will eventually be bloodied and debased by it. And I think, in the U.S., a lot of us struggle with that idea because we grow up with the notion that safety and human dignity and all the things we need to live full lives are finite things. They're resources to be hoarded, to be fought over - and that if some people get to have those things or deserve those things, then other people necessarily cannot.
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DEBMY: And the larger point was, that binary - it's a trap. It is not real, or at least it doesn't need to be. The way out for all of us is to work at making sure no one is bloodied and no one is debased. And that notion feels so, so far away, particularly right now during the latest paroxysms of violence in Israel and Gaza and now the West Bank.
In the last few weeks, that region has again moved to the front and center of American politics. Historically, there seemed to be something like consensus around this issue. Support for Israel is one of the few areas where there is reliable, robust agreement between Democrats and Republicans. Israel has been, by a pretty comfortable margin, the biggest recipient of American foreign aid. It gets billions of dollars from the U.S. every year, and most of that is designated as military aid. After the Hamas attacks on October 7, everyone from elected officials to retailers to the NFL and the NBA put out statements of sympathy and solidarity with Israel and Israelis. There is very meager support in Congress for a cease-fire to Israel's bombardment of the territory, and there have been relatively few official statements of sympathy from big, name-brand companies and elected officials for the Palestinian civilians in Gaza. But when it comes to the public, we're seeing something really different. There have been massive rallies across the country in recent weeks...
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Long live Palestine.
UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: Long live Palestine.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Free, free Palestine.
UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: Free, free Palestine.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Free, free Palestine.
DEBMY: ...Including in Washington, D.C., which saw the largest-ever rally in support of the Palestinian cause in U.S. history. Those rallies have been notably diverse - lots of people of color, lots of white folks, Jewish people, Muslims. And there appear to be deep and deepening divides over this stuff among the American public. A poll from NPR found that while overwhelming majorities of older folks thought the U.S. should support Israel, a majority of Millennials and Gen Zers - those are the two youngest voting-age generations - did not feel that way. The poll also found big racial divides on this question. While 72% of white folks felt the U.S. should support Israel, only about 51% of people of color did.
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DEBMY: Palestinian Americans themselves tend to be overlooked until moments like this one, when we again turn our attention to the bloodshed in the Middle East, which is to say they're understood in relationship to these debates and understood as adjacent to violence and bloodshed. They're seen as instigators of that violence or seen as being obliterated by it. It's a kind of thinking that is dehumanizing and has real, material consequences on the personal, human level, but also on a broader political one.
Over the last few weeks, my colleague Sandhya Dirks has been talking with Palestinian Americans. Sandhya is a correspondent here at NPR on the race and identity desk. Sandhya, what's good with you? Welcome to CODE SWITCH.
SANDHYA DIRKS, BYLINE: Hi, Gene.
DEBMY: So you started talking to folks after October 7.
DIRKS: So that's right. That's when Hamas attacked Israel. Israel says they killed around 1,200 people and took another 240 hostage.
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ADRIANA DIAZ: From Gaza - thousands of rockets were fired into Israel as gunmen infiltrated...
DIRKS: And then after that, Israel started bombing Gaza. And they cut off power and water, and the Palestinian death toll started to swiftly rise.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Gaza has never seen anything like this.
LAUREN FRAYER, BYLINE: Also have suspended operations for lack of fuel and electricity. Those officials say more than 11,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the war began, two-thirds of them women and children.
DIRKS: In that first week, I was mostly hearing coverage of Israel and Israelis. And I wanted to know what it was like for Palestinian Americans, especially those with family in Gaza. I talked to over a dozen Palestinian Americans - people who said they were asking for Palestinians to be seen not as they were being described by some Israeli and American politicians, as terrorists or animals, but as human beings - as people with stories.
DEBMY: So in this episode, we are going to focus on two of the people that you've introduced me to.
DIRKS: That's right. First up is Tariq Luthun.
TARIQ LUTHUN: I don't really identify as Palestinian American necessarily. I'm a Palestinian in America. I'm a Palestinian in the diaspora. Because if it wasn't for what was happening in Palestine, who's to say I'd be in America in the first place?
DIRKS: He lives in Detroit, Mich. He was born in Dearborn, where his parents still live. Tariq does data engineering by day. By night, he's an activist and a poet. And I came to notice that being a writer, writing - it's kind of a common thing for a lot of Palestinians.
LUTHUN: The same way you're like, you're all writers? I'm like, yeah, we're all organizers and activists. Like, I don't know a single Palestinian who hasn't shown up to a protest, but I know plenty of people who are not Palestinian who have never been to a protest - who've never, like, had to call their representatives, who've never had to do any of these things that, to be Palestinian, unless you've been extremely sheltered your entire life, you will have at one point done.
DIRKS: Tariq says that's because just being Palestinian in the world causes controversy, and he says that's something that existed long, long before October 7.
DEBMY: For example, in 2020, a bunch of mostly Palestinian American writers, like Tariq, decided to get together. And this was during the pandemic lockdown, so they did that virtually. And they convened this conference, Palestine Writes. Get it? Palestine Writes - like W-R-I-T-E-S - but also rights - like R-I-G-H-T-S. I didn't - I ain't going to lie. I didn't really get it at first. I just - I realized that when I wrote it down for the script. Anyway...
LUTHUN: We had people trying to, like, you know, Zoombomb. There are plenty of people who - like, folks who just found a way to get into the rooms. I don't know how you say - I don't know what the thing is. I just know people called it Zoombombing. But also, I don't know if I should say bombing. I might get in trouble for saying that as a Palestinian.
DEBMY: This year's Palestine Writes festival, though - it was held IRL in September on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. And this was not an official University of Pennsylvania event, but the school played host. And from almost the moment the festival was announced, there was controversy. And I'm putting that very mildly.
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DIRKS: So lots of people were upset that there were folks on the festival's lineup who had been critical of Israel's policy toward Palestinians. And there was a lot of misinformation before the event about who was going to be there and what it was going to be about.
DEBMY: And we know this gets tricky because antisemitism and anti-Zionism and just criticism of Israel's government's policies - that those are all theoretically distinct ideas, but they tend to get collapsed together. And adding to that - you can find someone at any quasi-political event who might be there for janky reasons, and you can read the whole thing uncharitably because they're there. But the impulse to read something like this uncharitably is easier when a lot of folks already interpret certain things - you know, like, a gathering of Palestinian writers - as inherently antagonistic.
LUTHUN: Somebody hired a truck to drive around saying, Jew haters - these people hate Jews. They want Jews to die.
DEBMY: The organizers had to beef up security.
LUTHUN: I mean, the festival itself was really lovely, but we had to spend a lot of time talking about the ways in which we almost saw the literature festival get shut down.
DEBMY: And after the pressure started mounting on her, the president of UPenn issued a statement condemning antisemitism but maintaining that it was important that Penn remain a place open to ideas. And then October 7 happened.
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DIRKS: The controversy around a Palestinian writers' conference held in September got even more supercharged, and it became linked by its critics with the Hamas attacks in October. Wealthy donors pulled their funding from Penn. Some trustees resigned from the board.
LUTHUN: There are so many spaces where, like, even just advocating for Palestinians and for Palestinian lives - uplifting Palestinian lives - in a lot of ways, a lot of the rhetoric has been almost adjacent to the ways in which people would say Black Lives Matter, and people are saying, what about white lives? And I'm seeing the same type of thing happening, where somebody's just literally - I'm literally just affirming Palestinians and their right to exist. And then, out of nowhere, people are like, what about Jewish people? I was like, nobody said anything about Jewish people. Jewish people are fine. We're friends. I have so many Jewish homies. Like, I have - so many of - like, actually, some of, like, the most staunch supporters of Palestinian liberation have been my Jewish peers.
DIRKS: Tariq says to have your entire identity proscribed as only existing in opposition to another group's identity, it's a kind of erasure. He says to be Palestinian and Palestinian American is so much more than that. It's a small and tight-knit community.
LUTHUN: Yes, I know Fady Joudah.
DIRKS: He's the other person that we're talking to because - I don't know why it ended up being primarily two male poets.
LUTHUN: Oh - who know each other.
DIRKS: Who know each other. But I didn't - you know, look, the Palestinian community is small.
LUTHUN: The Gazan community is small.
DIRKS: So that name he mentioned, that's the other person we're speaking with.
FADY JOUDAH: My name is Fady Joudah.
DEBMY: Fady Joudah is a physician. He's an award-winning poet. He was born in Texas, but he grew up in Libya and Saudi Arabia, and he came back to the U.S. to go to undergrad, then to go to medical school. That's when he says he experienced what it's like to be what he calls Palestinian in English.
JOUDAH: I learned that there was no recognition and hardly any room for receiving the Palestinian as a person with a right to a story. One of the other things you learn as being a Palestinian in English is that you're constantly encountered through necropolitics. You're only alive when you are dying. And then in the last 20 years, when you - when I, as a Palestinian, see the siege of Gaza and the multiple wars on Gaza - Israeli wars on Gaza - and the language around it or the absence of language around it, you start to believe that erasure is not a joke nor a poetic feeling here.
The Palestinian narrative has not been given a name yet. There has been very little permissibility for the human imagination to open up to the Palestinian narrative, to see it for what it is or what it has been other than what we are fed it is and has been. And I sometimes find strange comfort in that, like that verse from the Quran - you cannot guide those you love to light; only God's will can. And in this case, I would say only history's archives can. Everything is quite documented, and it will come out. And people then will have to come to terms with it.
DEBMY: A lot of Fady's family in Gaza - his cousins, his uncles, his aunts - have been killed in these most recent Israeli airstrikes. His parents are from there. They're from Gaza. They actually came to the United States as refugees.
JOUDAH: My mom had to leave behind a people who had been, less than 20 years earlier, kicked out of their villages.
DEBMY: OK. Explanatory comment time, y'all - this is a big one. So 20 years earlier, as Fady just said there, that was 1948. And that was when the land historically known as Palestine was under the colonial control of the British Empire. And to end that mandate and to address the horrors of the Holocaust, the United Nations came up with a plan. The plan was to create a nation for the millions of European Jews who had been displaced in that genocide. That plan was to divide the land of Mandatory Palestine into two separate states, and they gave more than half of this land for the establishment of a Jewish state.
DIRKS: So leaders of surrounding Arab countries rejected what they saw as an unfair proposal. And when that mandate for British control ended and the Brits left, they sent in their militaries. This became what is known in the U.S. as the Arab-Israeli war. In Israel, it's known as the War of Independence. Palestinians call it the Nakba, which, in Arabic, means catastrophe. The catastrophe refers to the mass displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who weren't allowed back. They still aren't.
DEBMY: And just a quick side note, y'all, our play cousins over at Throughline have a great episode about this called Palestine, which dives very deeply into all this history, and you should go holler at it.
DIRKS: Fady's dad was a child in 1948. His mom, who is younger than his father, she was 7 during the next war in 1956. And after the two got married, the reason they fled to the U.S., that was another war in 1967. Fady's dad is a historian. He says that's the lens through which he learned all of this. When you hear Fady talk about the history of Palestine, it's like he's reciting an unending list of death and displacement.
JOUDAH: By 1948...
1956, there's a war for many. And 11 years later, in the 1967 war...
Military occupation of the Gaza Strip by...
It's taken me years to realize the level of hidden pain that they had both been dealing with all their lives, so that this is not the narrative they can tell completely or cohesively, if you will. My son - years ago, we all went out to dinner, and he was talking to my dad about some event in 1948 during the war. And my dad mentioned in the story a dead body. And so he asked him, was this the first time you've seen a dead body? And my dad said, I think so, but, you know, I remember my young sister who died, you know, as a young child from illness. But I didn't see her dead, but I remember her eyes, etc. And when he turned to my mom, she avoided the question altogether.
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JOUDAH: Just last week, my mother, for the first time, was telling me a story about 1956, when she was 7 years old, and she mentioned to me how she was walking with her mom, who suddenly told her - grabbed her firmly by the hand and told her, don't look behind you. Keep walking straight. And there was a Palestinian forced, probably, to load up the bodies of other dead Palestinians on his donkey cart, Israeli soldiers marching by. And when she looked, she saw them shrouded and still dripping with blood. And her mom, my grandma, saw the terrified look on her face. And my mom - what she remembers about that, too, is the force with which my grandma yanked her arm and told her, I told you not to look. But that was nearly seven years later that she would come and tell me this memory, even though her grandson had asked her point-blank. She either did not have the memory close enough to the surface to share, you know, or wasn't willing.
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DEBMY: Right now in Gaza and in the West Bank, there's another massive historical trauma unfolding. This is from the Associated Press. Quote, "the soaring death toll from the bombardment is unprecedented in the decadeslong Israeli-Palestinian conflict," end quote.
DIRKS: Fady and his wife - they've got two kids. He says he's got the same impulse that his parents had to protect them from all of this.
JOUDAH: So I think I didn't want to burden my son with that. But then you - I realize now that, you know, whether I like it or not, I have to.
DIRKS: Fady's parents live not far away from him in Houston. But right now, him, his parents, his wife and their son - they're all living under the same roof pretty much since the bombing in Gaza began. They don't talk much about what is happening in the news, even about the family that they've lost. But there's comfort, whatever comfort is possible, from being together.
DEBMY: When we come back, what it means to be Palestinian beyond all this suffering.
LUTHUN: I think about playing soccer in the garage with my cousins, eating some seeds, drinking tea with your family.
DEBMY: Stay with us, y'all.
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DEBMY: Gene.
DIRKS: Sandhya.
DEBMY: CODE SWITCH. So when we left off, y'all, we were talking to Fady Joudah and Tariq Luthun. They're both poets who have family in Gaza.
DIRKS: I first talked to Tariq in early October. His parents lived nearby him in Dearborn, but he has lots of extended family members in Gaza. I asked him to keep me updated, and almost immediately, he started sending me voice notes.
LUTHUN: Hi, Sandhya. So I don't know what I've already told you. I haven't slept much, barely have time to, like, engage in the act of living. I worry about my family. I said it before. Half of them have migrated - have evacuated south. Excuse me. Half of them have evacuated south. The other half have not, for those who weren't already there. And, you know, I check in with my mom and my dad each day and I say, are there updates? Are there updates? Are there updates? And luckily, all of my family members are OK for now. But that doesn't mean that I don't feel everything that's happening and I don't see the pain in my friends who have lost so many loved ones.
I know of, like, folks in different group chats who have lost, you know, whole parts of their families. And so that's been devastating. And it feels like there's no end in sight because we're - we basically are being slaughtered, and then we're being blamed for being slaughtered. And then whenever we're not being gaslit on our own slaughter, we are erased as if we don't exist and that this isn't happening to us. So, yeah.
DEBMY: So Tariq was telling us this not long after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7. So there have been this outpouring of sympathy for Israelis from officials and institutions here in the United States that we talked about. But as the death toll in Gaza keeps climbing, there still haven't been many official expressions of support towards Palestinians in Gaza.
DIRKS: Around a week or so into the bombardment of Gaza, Fady made the rounds on a couple of cable TV shows, Jen Psaki and ABC. He didn't really want to, he says, but he was asked by a Palestinian nonprofit that uplifts Palestinian voices in the media.
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JEN PSAKI: He says he's already lost dozens of relatives in the airstrikes over the last week. Fady Joudah joins me now. Fady, I want to first offer my deepest condolences for the...
DIRKS: On that TV hit, Fady was sandwiched between a spokesperson for the Israeli military and the former U.S. ambassador to Israel.
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JOUDAH: I am completely drowned by whether you call them pro-Israel voices or anti-Palestinian voices.
DIRKS: Fady says the people who were on either side of him, they have political power in a way he doesn't. But Fady says it's not about one TV show. He says he sees small ways in which not just Palestinians, but Arabs and Muslims are subtly dehumanized so that their deaths don't matter.
JOUDAH: Because if you develop doubts about Arab identity - or, I should say, Arab humanity - then as we see, it becomes totally permissible to sanction the murder of Palestinians at a state level. You know, every time I've been on the news - a few times, I've been on the news, they ask me, do you have pictures of your lost loved ones? And I said, I don't have pictures, and there are reasons for this, and those reasons are also not part of the national narrative. The reasons are because I can't go back, and I haven't been able to go back into Gaza for 20 years to be able to have any memories with them that are my own. And if I could get in touch with them during this time, do you think I'm going to ask them for pictures so I can display them on American TV so I can win a few public opinion points? I couldn't bring myself to do that.
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JOUDAH: I'm not here to appear yet again as another grieving Palestinian so that I can only be seen as human when I am, you know, on my knees.
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DIRKS: Fady says they only want him to perform his pain. But the moment he tries to talk about the reasons and the systems that cause that pain, he says they aren't interested.
JOUDAH: So it is difficult to join the media knowing that I am sort of like brought up from drowning, and then I am able to breathe air, which is to say, speak. And then I'm not pushed down; I'm just let go, and I drown again.
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DEBMY: And then there's that question. Y'all know the one I'm talking about. It's the question so many Arabs, so many Palestinians, just anybody who sympathizes with Palestinians gets asked in moments like this one.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Do you condemn Hamas' sin?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Do you condemn the murder of women and children in the streets by Palestinian terrorists?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: Do you condemn what the Hamas terrorists did in Israel?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: Do you condone what Hamas has done, chopping off babies' heads?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: Do you condemn the terrorist massacre of innocent men, women and children in Israel on Saturday? Yes or no?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #7: It's not a yes or no.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: It is.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #7: I can't condone violence.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #8: Why won't you come out and condemn a terrorist organization?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #9: Why won't you equivocate and say that Palestinian lives matter?
DEBMY: Underneath that question is obviously this presumption, you know, whether it's intended or not, that you are guilty by association and you're guilty until you declare otherwise.
JOUDAH: I've been asked so many times that I almost no longer recognize the question because the question is actually disinterested in me. The question is only interested in me when it wants to - when it feels - when "it," I say in quotation mark - feels that I need to be threatened. The question is so pervasive that there is no possible argument around it. It feels like constantly an interrogation of one's humanity or a justification for oppression.
DIRKS: We so often talk about Palestinian identity only in relation to this ongoing conflict. So I wanted to ask Tariq.
What is a Palestinian identity outside of all of that?
LUTHUN: Oh, that's such a nice question. First and foremost, to be Palestinian is to be resilient. But I don't think resilience is unique to the Palestinian community. I think so many communities, including, like, the Jewish community, are very resilient. And I think ultimately it's what you do with that resilience and what you do in the aftermath of your survival that really dictates who you are. For me, when I think about being Palestinian, I think about playing soccer in the garage with my cousins. It is eating delicious food. It is going to weddings and spending time with your loved ones. It is staying up late at night, where you can just enjoy the breeze of the evening, eating some seeds, drinking tea with your family. I think to be Palestinian is to be communal, like many communities.
What's really weird is we have become exceptional because of the violence that has been brought upon us, right? To be Palestinian is imbued with a type of charge that I don't think would exist if it wasn't for the violence that we're faced with. As soon as I said, you know, we go to weddings, I kept thinking of all the weddings that have been bombed. I keep thinking of all, like, the fiancees mourning the person they were about to marry just two days later or were shot at a border on the way to their wedding. And so, like, that stuff has been happening forever. It's been happening for decades. But, you know, now we get to be put out of our misery at a faster pace.
DIRKS: All of that makes me think of something Fady said. He told us that Palestinians are people who have been, quote, "bombarded to forgetfulness, bombarded to erasure." Being displaced, being bombed, he says, a person doesn't just lose people and homes and land, they lose photo albums and children's drawings, like, all this ephemera that makes up a life. It's another way in which Palestinians are denied their right to a story, Fady says. But the part he said that stood out to me is that even when physical objects are destroyed, you still have people.
JOUDAH: I've gotten to enjoy how memory lives on in my parents and how it returns as if it is a living thing. A trip that my dad took us - me and my older brother - to the town where we come from, Isdud or Ashdod - which is now in Israel. And he took us to where the village was, and it was a remarkable experience to see, you know, your father animated - complete paradox to the reality erased on the ground. He was walking the ghostly spaces as if they were all there. And I'm sitting there as a child, completely baffled at his joy. The child in him had become alive again, had transported himself back to when he was whole.
Even when we're silent or when the - that particular language of that memory is no longer spoken, it lives in us, which I would - if you would allow me - away from the language of the multi-generational trauma, I would like to think of the language of the mystic in each of us. How is it that early humans knew that stars were dead? They were in - they knew it. You can read poems from a thousand years ago, and you can tell these people knew, you know, that the light was already from the past.
DIRKS: Fady is, of course, himself a poet, and he speaks in metaphors and in ways that are big and profound. Not all of his poems are about loss and exile and oppression. Being Palestinian, he tells us, it's just so much bigger than that. One of the things we asked was for him to read one of his poems. It's from a collection he published in 2021, "Tethered To Stars."
JOUDAH: This one's called "Canopus." Or maybe some - "Canopus," some people call it. It's a - the brightest star in the southern hemisphere, after - you know, Sirius is the northern star, and it's the brightest in the entire sky. But I think it's also a character in Greek myth.
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JOUDAH: (Reading) Be an owl. Not even a sunflower turns its head 270 degrees. But may the need to ask me about my darkness never command you. Be a sunflower. Grow old to face east, warm in the morning, kind to insects and bees. And may our overlap be two - light and light in mouths that vary the 99 names for snow.
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JOUDAH: I want to say there is a beautiful saying, which will be the title of my memoir - the remainder is in your life. And it is a saying in Arabic you say to someone who had lost someone. So you come to them and you say, the remainder is in your life. Like, I am sorry that you lost your, you know, your wife or your husband. And they say - so you say to them the remainder is in your life. And the bereaved says back, and in yours. And it is a saying that believes in the continuum of memory and of the life force, right? And so we can say that what we have done today is us sharing the remainder in the lives of those who have been lost.
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DEBMY: All right, y'all. That's our show. You should follow us on Instagram @nprcodeswitch - all one word. If email is more your jam, ours is codeswitch@npr.org. Subscribe to the podcast on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. And you can sign up for our newsletter at npr.org/codeswitchnewsletter. And we just wanted to give some love to our CODE SWITCH+ listeners. We appreciate y'all. We thank you for being subscribers. When you subscribe to CODE SWITCH+, it means you get to listen to all of our episodes with no sponsor breaks, and, and, and it helps support our show. So if you rock with us, if you like our work, please consider signing up at plus.npr.org/codeswitch.
This episode you're hearing was produced by Xavier Lopez with help from Jess Kung. It was edited by Dalia Mortada with help from Leah Donnella. Our engineer was Josephine Nyounai. Special thanks to Tony Cavin, Steve Drummond, Gerry Holmes, Larry Kaplow, Keith Woods and Ammad Omar. And special thanks to Cameron Fraser for original music used in this episode. And we will be remiss if we did not shout out the rest of the CODE SWITCH massive. That's Courtney Stein, Christina Cala, Veralyn Williams, Lori Lizarraga, B.A. Parker and Julia Carney.
DIRKS: I'm Sandhya Dirks.
DEBMY: I'm Gene Demby. Be easy, y'all.
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