Why the Solidarity?: South Asian Activism for Palestine

In Memory for Forgetfulness, Darwish's lament and anguished plea for the city of Beirut and the Palestinians living there in exile, he constructs a conversation with the famous Pakistani poet, Faiz Ahmed Faiz: [O]ur great friend from Pakistan, Fayiz Ahmad Fayiz, is busy with another question: "Where are the artists?" "Which artists, Fayiz?" I ask. "The artists of Beirut." "What do you want from them?" "To draw this war on the walls of the city." "What's come over you?" I exclaim. "Don't you see the walls tumbling?" (Memory for Forgetfulness, 65) (1) Fayiz, or Faiz, as his name is more commonly spelled, lived in self-exile in Beirut from 1979 to 1982, where he edited Lotus, the publication of the Afro-Asian Writers' Union. (Faiz left Pakistan to escape the oppressive leadership of President Zia AlHuq.) The calamitous and destructive bombing of Beirut in August, 1982, led Faiz to write the poem (in Urdu) "For the Palestinian Martyrs," whose concluding lines read: Wherever I unfurl The banner of my blood, There flutters the flag of Palestine. One Palestine has been destroyed By my enemies But my agony has given birth To Innumerable Palestines. (2) Faiz is among numerous South Asian writers, scholars, and activists who find the predicament of the Palestinian people profoundly disturbing. In 1947, when the British left South Asia after 200 years of their presence and colonial rule, the Indian subcontinent was torn in two, and the nations of India and Pakistan were born (and, further, in 1971, Bangladesh was engendered out of East Pakistan). These births were fraught with bloodshed and slaughter. Partition, as the 1947 event signaling the emergence of two nations is known, was accompanied by dislocation and division along religious lines, with many hundreds of thousands of people moving in either direction of an arbitrarily drawn geographical boundary. The devastating deaths accompanying Partition, the loss of property, the breakup of families, with some members remaining on one side of the border and others on the opposite side, are traumas of such magnitude that even today, 62 years later, memories of that horrific time haunt the two nations. Likewise, the birth of Bangladesh in 1971 was a bloody rupture of the Bengali-speaking Pakistanis from their largely Urdu speaking compatriots in the western part of the nation. The loss of homes, the shock of a life pulverized--these are the actual and inherited experiences that preoccupy large numbers of South Asians. Bollywood and independent films revisit the legacy of Partition (e.g., in the films Veer Zaara, Ghoom Tana, LOC Kargil, Dhoop, and Ramchand Pakistani), a testament to the enduring hold of this defining moment in the recently decolonized nations' lives. Perhaps the nearness of this history in our collective conscious ness is the reason that South Asians are drawn to the struggles of the Palestinian peoples. Or it may be the experience of colonization and then decolonization. Perhaps the Palestinians are a compelling reminder of what can happen when an erstwhile colonizer leaves a messy political situation behind. The Palestinians are the visible and everyday evidence of injustice endorsed and accepted by the majority of the international community and transmuted into international approbation. And this acquiescence to injustice by numerous governments stands as an affront to many South Asians, who remember in their muscles and bones what it means to be coerced to leave one's home and land. But let me caution that I am not suggesting an exact parallel between the postcolonial situations of India/Pakistan and the circumstances of present-day Palestine. When the British left the Middle East in 1948, not only did they leave behind a situation of unimaginable turmoil by neglecting to articulate clearly the political rights of Palestinians, but also they and the governments of the West implicitly anointed the state of Israel the new colonizer, giving to it the kind of international legitimacy and latitude in its seizure of erstwhile Palestinian territory that was denied the Palestinians, hundreds of thousands of whom had fled their homes during the Israeli attack and longed to return to their, in many cases, ancestral dwellings. …