The same ground you walk
on, we do too…
These words, excerpted from a poem written by Tyeema, one of
our students, and translated into Arabic for a mural now hanging in
Balata Refugee Camp in Nablus, speak to a journey we have been
making with students and educators in Brooklyn for the past three
years.
Drawing on popular education models, and making use of
grassroots media tools such as digital stories, hip-hop tracks and
poster art, the Palestine Education Project (PEP) teaches a class
we call “Slingshot Hip Hop: Culture and Resistance from Brooklyn to
Palestine” at a small alternative high school.
The school has its roots as a “transfer” school, a sort of
last chance for students who have not “succeeded” at their previous
schools, though as one of our students, Rahking, recently said, “we
don’t say transfer school anymore – it is more of a school of
transformation, a place where we learn how other schools have
failed us and how we can educate ourselves.” A collaboration
between students, teachers, artists, and community organizers, the
class is collectively designed to examine systems of oppression,
both globally and locally; to identify the common struggles people
of color share against racism, militarism, and displacement; to
empower students to discover their own voices of resistance; and to
break down the walls that separate us. Our work is grounded in the
belief that increasing our awareness of how our struggles are
connected to others’ can prove a powerful means of challenging the
systems of oppression that adversely affect all of us. What follows
is a sketch of a journey that has inspired us to continually
re-imagine what is possible both in and out of the classroom.
We start with what one teacher at the school has called “how
the media gets between us.” Living in New York, there are very few
positive associations with the word “Arab.” We ask our students why
that is. Many will point to the 9-11 attacks and the so-called “war
on terror.” We follow the discussion with a screening of Jackie
Salloum’s “Planet of the Arabs,” a mock trailer based on Jack
Shaheen’s book Reel Bad Arabs about Hollywood’s
overwhelmingly negative portrayal of Arabs in film. As clips play
from films we are all familiar with, an understanding emerges --
these negative associations are constantly being fed to us.
The students we work with, growing up in predominantly Black and
Latino/a communities, are familiar with being stereotyped and
criminalized, and it doesn’t take long before we are able to engage
in a deeper discussion about how and why the media reinforces these
negative stereotypes. One of our first activities is one in which
we watch and analyze the closing montage of Spike Lee’s film
Bamboozled, a painful, but revealing history of how negative
stereotypes of African Americans were, and continue to be,
perpetuated through the media. Through this exercise, the gravity
of misrepresentation hits home and the subsequent discussion helps
lay the foundation for what will later become a deeper global
political analysis of racism and white supremacy, and its effects
on how we see ourselves and others. Developing this sort of
awareness of how media can shape our image of the Other and
ourselves is a key component of PEP’s work, especially as one of
our main goals is to empower students to intervene in this process
through the creation of a media of their own.
From deconstructing media (mis)representation and unpacking
the negative stereotypes that surround most discussions about
Palestine in the U.S., we move onto explore the history of
colonization and resistance in Palestine. Gaining a sense of this
history is crucial to understanding the current situation, and we
have discovered it is important not to approach the history as a
series of dates and events, but as people’s lived experience. With
this in mind we’ve developed one of our most valuable and adaptable
teaching tools -- a participatory activity that invites students
out of their seats and onto a large map of Palestine which is
outlined before class with tape on the classroom floor. Some
students are cast as Palestinian Arabs, while others represent
Jewish settlers.
Where am I standing?
Student: The West Bank.
And now?
Gaza.
And Now?
Jerusalem.
Ok. So now that we have a lay of the land, can everyone who
has a “Palestinian Arab” label take a step onto the map. Let’s have
two of you living in Gaza, a few in the West Bank, and the rest in
what will later become Israel. There is also a small Jewish
population that has been here for a long time, so can we have
someone with a “Jewish” label come live here, near Jerusalem. The
year is 1920 and we are in British occupied
Palestine.
With the help of narration and a slideshow of images and maps,
students begin to physically “move” through the history of
colonization and displacement in Palestine. For instance,
when the state of Israel is unilaterally declared in 1948 --
taking seventy-seven percent of the land, destroying more than 530
Palestinian villages and expelling over 750,000 people who became
refugees, all except one or two students playing Palestinians are
pushed into refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza. As the
activity moves through the further military occupations of 1967 and
approaches present day, Israeli settlements that further displace
local inhabitants are established in the form of hula hoops.
Selected students with “Jewish Israeli” labels are given hula hoops
and invited to “move in” to areas in the West Bank and Gaza. The
hula hoop settlements take up so much space that students with
“Palestinian” labels are forced to live on increasingly smaller
portions of the map.
The activity is supported by projecting maps of land ownership
and confiscation, military repression, and occupation, as well as
images of Palestinian resistance. Parallels are also made to South
African Apartheid and the colonization of Native American
lands.
In processing the experience, many students initially talk about
the violent nature of the oppression in Palestine -- concrete
walls, military incursions, checkpoints, mass arrests -- as
something that is extreme, far from them. “At least we don’t have
it that bad,” is a common initial response. But the map activity
invites students to move beyond this initial response and make
connections they haven’t made before. For instance, as those
role-playing Palestinians are stripped of their identity (no longer
Palestinian but now “Israeli-Arab”), or heavily policed and
imprisoned, students often relate experiences of being targeted by
the police in their neighborhoods based on their ethnic and
cultural identity. During one class, after learning about the
Apartheid Wall being erected in the West Bank and how it often
separates Palestinians from each other and their land, Carlos
offered: “we don’t have actual walls, but come to think of it,
there are other kinds of walls put up in our community that keep us
divided --economic and cultural walls.”
Solidarity
In the film
Slingshot Hip Hop, Palestinian
rapper Suhel Nafar, talks about being inspired by American hip hop
-- how after he and his brother see the Tupac Shakur video “Holla
if You Hear Me,” they feel the scenes in the video could’ve been
shot in their own ‘hood of Lyd. Many American ghettos are plagued
by systematic discrimination and a lack of resources similarly to
Lyd, and many of our students in Brooklyn are able to identify
parallel conditions in their own lives. “Their occupation wears
green, ours over here wears blue,” wrote Khary in “
Brooklyn 2 Palestine,” a hip-hop track and
music video he made as a final project for the class in 2008. In
the same year that so many young people of color witnessed the full
acquittal of the New York Police Department's officers who shot and
killed an unarmed black man by the name of Sean Bell, this in-class
opportunity to hold up their own deep sense of injustice alongside
the injustice felt by Palestinians provided a collective space to
express not only frustration and anger, but also solidarity.
This sort of “border-crossing” conversation manifests in
different ways throughout the classes we teach, and becomes
particularly relevant and powerful when we take a look at how the
Israeli prison system operates as part of the criminalization and
repression of Palestinian society. Using Joe Sacco’s graphic novel
Palestine, we take students on a narrative tour inside an
Israeli prison for Palestinian political prisoners. Generations of
Palestinians have now spent time in prison – since the 1967 Israeli
military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, more than
forty percent of the adult male Palestinian population in the
occupied territories has been incarcerated, and since the 2000
Intifada over twenty-five hundred Palestinian children have been
arrested. As most of our students have friends or family members
who have been or currently are incarcerated, this lesson presents
an opportunity for students to reflect on how the prison system
here in the U.S. has affected their lives and communities, as well
as learning from the Palestinian experience. To that end, part of
this lesson allows students to fill in empty text bubbles that we
have blocked out in the graphic novel, inviting them to intervene
in the story they are reading, and by extension, the story they see
playing out in their own neighborhoods. Here’s what Leroy had to
say as he narrated a picture of Palestinian prisoners sitting in a
cell and looking at a newspaper.
We held meetings so we could try to fight back. But it
won’t be easy.
We need to do something about the soldiers. They are
treating us like animals. We need to act NOW!
They say we are being treated fairly. They're hiding the
truth from the people.
Beyond the classroom
Having explored strong notions of solidarity, some students
express that it is not easy to bridge the gaps that exist between
the classroom and the “real world,” where they must confront forces
that are actively putting up the very same walls we are trying to
dismantle in the classroom. For this reason the classes include
collaborations with artists, community activists and grassroots
media organizations working in New York City, the rest of the U.S.,
and in Palestine with the goal of creating their own media that
connects their experiences of gentrification and racism to the
experiences of apartheid and military occupation endured by youth
in Palestine. This media is then shared with other youth in the
U.S. and Palestine, fostering a larger network of solidarity.
We have also begun a partnership with the
Allied Media Conference, a forum for
grassroots media makers and young people seeking to share media
tools and develop strategies with each other. At the conference
students use the media they have created to conduct workshops for
those in attendance and take part in a live video conference with
youth in Palestine. For the first time, our students are able to
speak directly with Palestinian youth and to share the connections
they discovered. The media they create is translated into Arabic so
that the youth in Palestine can learn from our students as well,
making this a two-way exchange of stories and insights. The first
video conference was indescribable. The room was packed with other
conference participants who had heard about what we were up to and
wanted to witness the exchange. One student, Chanel, worried that
the young people in Palestine might be endangered by holding a
video conference. “Will they get arrested?” she wondered. This was
not just your typical youth exchange -- there was a deep concern
for those on the other end of the line. The conference went on much
longer than scheduled. It seemed nobody could stand the thought of
hanging up.
We have seen students,
many who
reportedly do not participate much in their other classes, open up
and contribute actively when given the chance to connect their own
sense of injustice with that experienced by Palestinians. Building
these relationships between struggles and people is a crucial part
of undermining the structures that for too long have been building
walls between us. We close with Botswana’s lyrics from last year’s
final student project, a collectively written hip-hop track
called “Tadamon”:
No peace from the Middle
East
Where the Palestinians is bein’
beat
With boulders, trying to take off
they soldiers
And it’s still a gold rush, hold
up,
let me load up my word
cup
My flow is Che
Guevara,
When I got the bones of Marcus
Garvey
My pen said, my brain’s
dead
Is just feeding off of
oppression
That’s was caused in the community
sections
That make mind relapse and come out
the front like a C-section
Chorus:
It’s time to be free
but its not just only
me
It must be we
to have solidarity…
Useful Resources
Jackie Salloum’s “Planet of the
Arabs,” and other valuable teaching tools, including the map
activity, can all be found at
www.thinkpalestineact.org