Palestine’s long walk to justice: when culture outruns power

There is a saying, ascribed to Edward Said, the Palestinian-American thinker and advocate for Palestinian rights,  about the need to use ‘the power of culture over the culture of power.’

I first encountered it on my second trip to Palestine in May 2008, as part of a group of cultural figures and writers participating in the first edition of the Palestine Literary Festival.

At the time, Gaza had just been put under siege and was about to face its first military onslaught. The apartheid walls of the occupied West Bank were not yet fully built. Ehud Olmert was prime minister, and Benjamin Netanyahu was about to begin the near-uninterrupted reign that has brought us to the genocide we are witnessing today.

Back in 2008, Palestine was a taboo subject in cultural spaces, locked in silence by the charge of anti-Semitism.

Even use of the word ‘apartheid’ to describe Israel’s system of occupation was controversial, despite the 2004 International Court of Justice ruling declaring the construction of Israel’s wall in the occupied West Bank illegal under international law. At the time, the settler population in the occupied West Bank stood at 290,697; today it exceeds 700,000.

You don’t even need to squint your eyes at these last seventeen years to see how the injustice in motion has led to the disaster of the present.

Decades of impunity, fuelled by billions in military contracts from the US, Germany, Italy, and Britain, created the current monstrous swagger of Netanyahu, able to speak to a near-empty UN General Assembly, as if global opinion didn’t matter. 

And yet it does. The culture of power has created facts on the ground that are indisputable. But Israel’s legitimacy on the world stage has been shattered.

If the world had understood Israeli injustice towards Palestinians in 2008, or even earlier,  what might we be spared today? Perhaps the October 7, 2023, attacks would never have happened. Perhaps some of the world’s politicians would have been unelectable without a track record of solidarity with Palestinians, rather than the opposite.

It may seem naive to ask these questions of the past, but these are the questions we have to ask about the future. A major area of progress over these past two decades has been in the power of culture: through art, literature, film, music, and global solidarity movements.

The price of this genocide has been unimaginably high. But if the Holocaust was instrumental in creating the circumstances for Israel’s creation and Palestine’s dispossession in the Nakba of 1948, it is not unreasonable to ask if this genocide in Gaza might create the circumstances for a different solution, one grounded in international law and equal rights.

Politics is downstream of culture. It has been painful to be in solidarity with Palestinian liberation while trying to stop a genocide, knowing that the balance of hard power is heavily weighted in the direction of injustice. But global consciousness has finally shifted, after 77 years. 

1948 was also a significant year in South Africa. It was the year that formalised the apartheid laws that were not repealed until 1991. South African resistance was, of course, the core of the struggle, and seismic events, such as the end of the Cold War, affected the timeline of liberation.

But there can be no doubt that the power of culture, and the anti-apartheid boycott movement of the time, played a huge role in that shift.

How culture shapes change

Liberatory struggles are never linear, and the future often appears in the most unlikely of places. 

Thirty-five years after the South African boycott movement began, a key watershed came when Mary Manning, a 21-year-old shop worker, refused to handle the sale of a grapefruit in a supermarket in Dublin.

It was her act of solidarity that resulted in a strike that eventually drew Archbishop Desmond Tutu to Dublin, which shifted the profile of what was at the time a deeply unpopular form of civil disobedience, as boycotts often are. Two years later, Ireland became the first Western government to implement a full ban on South African goods.

Today, solidarity with Palestinians is rising globally – from the dockworkers in Italy blocking arms shipments to Israel, to 5000 signatories to the Filmworkers Pledge refusing to work with complicit Israeli institutions, from the Global Sumud Flotilla that attempted to deliver aid to Gaza to the UK’s largest fundraising concert for Palestine at Wembley Arena, to consumer boycotts at supermarkets and demands on UEFA, FIFA and Eurovision, with all these protests on the streets of every major city in the world, and all these celebrities, writers, and musicians joining the call for a Free Palestine - perhaps we will look back at this time as the tipping point.

For the first time since 1948, the year the Nakba began, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were first ethnically cleansed, understanding the Palestinian experience is no longer abstract; it is felt.

Hundreds of millions of people, if not billions, have wept over images of children and mothers and fathers, facing the unimaginable, as together we demand a different world.

This coming decade, these coming years are the opportunity for the power of culture to enter the world of political power and change it.

Every liberatory struggle of the past has walked this sometimes frustrating, non-linear path towards justice, smeared, imprisoned, and denigrated, but at the end of the long walk is freedom, and immense pride at having taken risks to be part of it.

 As Nelson Mandela said, it always seems impossible until it’s done.