������Ƶ

On Oct. 4, I had lunch with my longtime friends in the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of Hawaii Manoa — Ibrahim Aoude and Noel Kent — or as I call ourselves as emeritus professors, the “ES Geezers Club.” I asked Brahim (his nickname) what he’s been up to, and he told us that he had been invited to give the keynote address at a conference on the Middle East in Turkey at the end of the month.

I wasn’t surprised to hear this because I knew that Aoude, as an internationally recognized scholar of Middle East politics, has been speaking regularly at academic conferences in Turkey for more than a decade. This particular conference would be the 8th International Middle East Symposium at Gelisim University in Istanbul.

I asked what he would be talking about, and he said the title of his lecture was “The Centrality of West Asia in Global Politics.” Aoude added that within this larger argument he would be making a secondary thesis on the centrality of the Palestinian struggle for liberation for world politics.

Just three days later, on Oct. 7, Aoude’s arguments were demonstrated to be painfully true with the tragic, if not horrific, events that have rapidly unfolded in Gaza.

As I wrote in a previous column, he is one of the key leaders of the local Palestinian liberation movement in Hawaii. For some time now, I’ve regarded him as the most knowledgeable and astute person in Hawaii concerning the Middle East, particularly the situation of his Palestinian people. Beyond Hawaii, his scholarship in Middle East studies and his activism in support of the Palestinian nationalist movement are widely acknowledged, despite his living about 9,000 miles away from his Palestinian homeland.

I decided to interview him on his assessment of the current and increasing conflict in Gaza, which has quickly spread to other places in the Middle East, including Lebanon, the West Bank and Iraq. He told me that he had been closely monitoring developments by watching multiple Arabic-language television channels in Qatar, Lebanon, Egypt and other countries, as well as ABC, CNN and even Fox News.

In addition, Aoude is in daily contact with friends and colleagues in Lebanon, Jordan, Tunisia and other countries in the Middle East. Not only does he have ready access to these current sources of information, particularly those in Arabic, that few people in Hawaii have — he has a scholarly perspective and understanding of Middle East politics spanning more than 40 years since his doctoral dissertation research on Lebanon.

Much of the U.S. news coverage of the Hamas attack into Israel would leave the uninformed to believe that it was the primary instigating factor of the current conflict. However, Aoude remarks, “Immediately, Israeli and Western propaganda described the attack as an unprovoked attack by Hamas fighters, intentionally neglecting the history of Israeli atrocities on the Palestinian people.”

He notes the historical seizure and occupation of Palestinian lands since 1948 when the state of Israel was created. Aoude also emphasizes that since then the majority of Palestinians in Gaza have been “ethnically cleansed” from areas where Israeli settlements and towns have been constructed and where Israeli settlers have attacked Palestinian civilians.

As for the Israeli position on the Hamas attack, it can be summarized by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s statement issued shortly after the invasion began. “Citizens of Israel, we are at war. Not an operation, not a round (of fighting), at war! This morning Hamas initiated a murderous surprise attack against the state of Israel and its citizens,” he said.

Nonetheless, Aoude has ideas about how the U.S. can defuse the conflict. His recommendation is that “this dangerous situation can be averted by the U.S. pressuring the Apartheid state (as he refers to Israel) to cease its bombing of innocent civilians, and hospitals, churches and mosques, instead of helping Netanyahu continue with his plan of ethnic cleansing beginning with Gaza, continuing with cleansing the West Bank, and finally ethnically cleansing the 1.4 million Palestinians inside the Apartheid state.” He views the increasingly likely Israeli invasion of Gaza as intended to result in its eventual takeover.

Another action the U.S. can take, according to Aoude, is to urge the United Nations to implement its Resolution 194, adopted in 1949 and affirmed numerous times subsequently, which calls for the return of Palestinian refugees to their lands in Palestine that were seized in 1948.

He argues that implementing Resolution 194 “would save the Apartheid state from itself by having Jews, Christians, and Muslims living in a democratic state.” As is evident, he does not support the “two-state solution” that is still U.S. policy toward Israel and the Palestinians.

Aoude is critical of how the Western news media and Israeli government have characterized the Gaza attack as comparable to the 9/11 attack on the U.S. As he says, “All this talk about what happened is “Israel’s 9/11” is Western/Zionist propaganda to plant in the Western public mind that the Palestinian resistance is terrorist.”

To his credit, President Biden during his visit to Israel on Oct. 18 affirmed, “The vast majority of Palestinians are not Hamas. Hamas does not represent the Palestinian people.” The false equation between Hamas and Palestinians is being advanced by conservative media and politicians, such as Lindsay Graham.

This disinformation campaign perhaps contributed to the brutal stabbing death of a 6-year-old Palestinian American boy, Wadea Al Fayoume, and the serious wounding of his mother in a Chicago suburb last Saturday in a possible hate crime by their landlord. He allegedly shouted before attacking them with a knife, “You Muslims have to die.” Such racial blame-pinning poses a very real danger to innocent Americans, such as Wadea, thousands of miles away from the actual violence.

In addition to Aoude, the Palestinian movement in Hawaii includes Students and Faculty for Justice in Palestine at UH, an organization based at the University of Hawaii that advocates for solidarity with Palestine and Palestinian feminist narratives. Co-founded several years ago by UH Manoa English professor Cynthia Franklin, they held a demonstration at the state Capitol on Oct. 13 expressing support for the Palestinian people.

This past week, SFJP co-sponsored several events featuring a Palestinian painter from Gaza, Malak Mattar, including a lecture by her at the UH Manoa English Department, “Art, Gaza and Decolonization,” and the unveiling of a portrait of Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan. Those events were followed by a reception with poetry and music performed by several Native Hawaiian students and faculty, including ‘Ihilani Lasconia, Brandy Nālani McDougall, and Jonathan Kamakawiwo‘ole Osorio.

On Friday, an informal discussion was held with Mattar about her book “Sitti’s Bird: A Gaza Story.” The next evening, an exhibit and roundtable discussion on “Art and Activism: From Hawai‘i to Palestine” was moderated by Māhea Ahia and featured Mattar, ‘Ihilani Lasconia, D. Kauwila Mahi, and Nicole Naone.

The active participation of Native Hawaiian faculty and students in these events featuring a Palestinian speaker is a manifestation of their mutual awareness of occupation under militarized settler colonialism of their respective homelands. But it also demonstrates a shared commitment to resistance against racist oppression and to self-determination for their people.