An Invitation to Belong: Challenging the Systemic Exclusion of Palestinians as Present Absentees

Abstract

This essay takes as its starting place the “present absentee” status of Palestinians in U.S. and Jewish discourse and engagement with Israel/Palestine. Ethnographic fieldwork in Jewish American communities demonstrates practices that reiterate a dynamic of Jewish belonging against the presence of Palestinian absence. The essay explores different initiatives to challenge this systemic exclusion of Palestinians, including public programs that amplify Palestinian voices and normalize hearing Palestinians as experts in their own lives and an experimental study group with Jewish American leaders that centers Palestinian perspectives in an effort to cultivate radical empathy. Insights gained in these initiatives point to the importance of articulating fuller visions of community and belonging in engagement with Israel/Palestine.

Keywords:

• Palestine
• Israel
• Jewish community
• present absentee
• radical empathy
• ethnography
• anti-Semitism
• identity
• belonging
• political education

Endnotes

Notes

1 Mahmoud Darwish, In the Presence of Absence, trans. Sinan Antoon (New York: Archipelago, 2011), p. 68–69.

2 Naftali Bennett, “Full Text of Bennett’s UN Speech: Iran’s Nuclear Program at ‘Watershed Moment,’” Times of Israel, 27 September 2021, https://www.timesofisrael.com/full-text-of-bennetts-un-speech-irans-nuclear-program-at-a-watershed-moment/.

3 FMEP, “The IHRA Definition and the Fight against Antisemitism Part 6: Implications and Impacts of the IHRA Definition on Palestinians” (video), FMEP, 19 February 2021, 1:20:00–1:22:00, https://fmep.org/resource/the-ihra-definition-the-fight-against-antisemitism-part-6-implications-and-impacts-of-the-ihra-definition-on-palestinians/.

4 The “Israel Funding Guidelines” for the Jewish Community Federation and Endowment Fund, which serves Jewish communities across the Bay Area, can be viewed at “Israel Funding Guidelines,” 18 February 2010, https://jewishfed.org/federation%E2%80%99s-israel-funding-guidelines; see also Hillel International, “Hillel Israel Guidelines: Hillel Guidelines for Campus Israel Activities,” accessed 9 November 2021, https://www.hillel.org/jewish/hillel-israel/hillel-israel-guidelines.

5 The original plan for the mural and the updated plan with the Handala removed are available at the Palestine Poster Project Archives, “Edward Said Mural (Original),” 2007, http://www.palestineposterproject.org/poster/edward-said-mural-original.

6 The executive director and chair of the board of directors of the JCRC published a description of their work, which can be viewed at Michael Futterman and Rabbi Douglas Kahn, “SFSU President Keeping Jews Safe with Mural Censure,” the Jewish News of Northern California, 6 October 2006, https://www.jweekly.com/2006/10/06/sfsu-president-keeping-jews-safe-with-mural-censure/.

7 Our grantees, primarily located in Israel/Palestine and the United States, include organizations working to end Israeli policies that violate human rights and break international law; to defend free speech and the Palestine advocacy sector as a whole; and to elevate new voices and ideas beyond status quo assumptions. We support efforts to create the conditions for a just, credible, and equitable postoccupation, postannexation, postapartheid future. A full list of our grantees is available at FMEP, “Our 2021 Grantees,” accessed 9 November 2021, https://fmep.org/our-2021-grantees/.

8 A full index of the more than one hundred webinars and podcasts FMEP has held and produced since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic is available at “FMEP Webinars and Podcasts,” 3 November 2021, https://fmep.org/resource/index-of-fmep-webinars-podcasts/.

9 See Maha Nassar, “US Media Talks a Lot about Palestinians—Just without Palestinians,” +972 Magazine, 2 October 2020, https://www.972mag.com/us-media-palestinians/.

10 See Alison Jaggar, “Love and Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Epistemology” in Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing, ed. Alison Jaggar and Susan Bordo (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989); or Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies (Las Vegas, NV: Central Recovery Press, 2017).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sarah Anne Minkin

Sarah Anne Minkin works at the intersection of human and civil rights advocacy, education, and philanthropy, with a special focus on Israel/Palestine. She is the director of programs and partnerships at the Foundation for Middle East Peace and earned a PhD in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.