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Salem Barahmeh

10 Jan, 10 tweets, 2 min read

1/ Love under Israeli apartheid.

Israel segregates Palestinians across different legal statuses to divide & rule:

- Citz. of Israel
- Res. of Jerusalem
- West Bank / Gaza
- Refugee/diaspora (+ foreign passports)

The category you belong to impacts who you can be with.

2/ Israel does this to geographically separate Palestinians from one another, break social, cultural & political cohesion & undermine a collective Palestinian identity.

Localizing each community or "status" is meant to undermine a connected NATIONAL movement for liberation.

3/ The other reason is to limit the number of Palestinians in Palestine.

Israel doesn't allow Palestinian refugees/diaspora to visit their homeland, let alone live in Palestine with a partner.

But any Jewish person anywhere in the world can return and live as they please.

4/ Regulating who you love, have as a partner and whether you can be together is the crux of this tiered system of fragmentation.

Israel has made it almost impossible to change your legal status in order to be with someone if they are from another legal category.

5/ For each combination of categories, Israel has placed draconian measures to prevent people from sharing a life together.

Suffocation through bureaucracy, revoking residency, outlawing places to live, refusal to grant visas or just physical separation are some of those ways.

6/ This system doesn't apply to Jewish Israelis who have full freedom and rights under this regime. There are no restrictions on whether someone from Tel Aviv can marry someone from the illegal settlement of Maale Adumim in the WB & have limitations on where they live together.

7/ Conversely a Palestinian from Jericho can't marry someone from Jaffa because Israel doesn't allow its citizens to live in the PA controlled parts of the West Bank and they would almost never give Israeli citizenship to a Palestinian from the West Bank so they can live in Jaffa

8/ Another entire category is that of foreign spouses. Non-Palestinians with different citizenships married to someone from the West Bank or Gaza are often denied residency to stay with their families in Palestine by Israel.

Families are forced to separate or move abroad.

9/ Tell me more about Palestinian sovereignty if we can't decide who enters and leaves, but also who is allowed to stay with their family or not.

Ultimately, Israel decides. Why would it allow Palestinians to end that fragmentation, if it imposed it on them?

10/ Israeli apartheid penetrates every part of our lives, including who we love and whether we can be with them. A system running across ethnonational lines regulates love to maintain the supremacy and domination of one people over another.

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More from @Barahmeh

Salem Barahmeh

@Barahmeh

19 Oct 20

A German art school stops funding the project “School for Unlearning Zionism” by Jewish Israelis because a right-wing journalist complained that it's anti-Semitic. It is terrifying and ironic that white Germans dictate what is anti-Semitic & which Jew qualifies as “good"/ "bad”.

This is a project in the spirit and tradition of anti-racism and intersectionality, seeking to promote a brighter future for all built on progressive values. Why did the journalist complain? Because some of the Jewish Israeli speakers promoted BDS.

This happens often in Europe and US and is built on normative and legislative precedents that equate advocacy for Palestinian freedom and rights/criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. In Germany, the parliament passed a anti-BDS resolution recently that paved the way for this.

Read 7 tweets

Salem Barahmeh

@Barahmeh

25 Sep 20

I was 11 when I first watched the footage. Mohamed Dura shielded by his dad from Israeli bullets. One moment they were pleading for their lives, the next they were dead. He was 12, we belonged to the same generation. The horror in his eyes still shakes me to my core 20 yrs later.

Those were the first day’s of the Second Intifada. TV channels aired the footage over and over again, and reported on other deaths ever hour. Israeli tanks patrolled our streets and helicopters were bombing our cities. Gunfire became our lullabies and lockdowns were our reality.

We tried going to Jerusalem for school but the main road out of Jericho had two zigzaged dirt mounds fitted with machine gun pits and the largest guns I’d ever seen. Negotiating that checkpoint became our daily routine. Would they or won’t they let us go to school today we asked?

Read 9 tweets

Salem Barahmeh

@Barahmeh

30 Aug 20

“You can BDS...but I will condemn and demonise you for it.” Because how dare us want to hold a country accountable for its oppression of an entire people? It’s oppression of us.

I can see how legally this might be a step forward but the phenomenon of shrinking space to advocate for Palestinian freedom and rights is a normative one as well. The fear of being smeared, attacked or have hate weaponised against you is a very powerful way to silence.

@RashidaTlaib

See the shit @RashidaTlaib, @IlhanMN and so many of us have to deal with because of just and moral positions. This environment of making Palestine radioactive is leading to self-censorship and a chilling effect that has a wider impact than any one law.

Read 6 tweets

Salem Barahmeh

@Barahmeh

15 Jul 20

Israel put us into fragmented territorial enclaves that serve as prisons. They control every aspect of our lives & land. When we demand freedom and right to movement, they say well we can’t visit Ramallah. The jailer is telling the prisoner they can’t visit the jail cell.

That’s the twisted logic of this apartheid system - it promotes the illusion that the oppressed and the oppressor are equal. Settlers live and roam our lands with more rights than we do and the Israeli military is in our cities every day arresting people. Yet we are being unfair.

We are not two equal countries. There is a one state reality where one people rules another through an unjust system. Now as we call for equal freedom and rights and the dismantling of that system we are treated to that logic by those who want to keep it.

Read 4 tweets

Salem Barahmeh

@Barahmeh

9 Jul 20

@PeterBeinart

1/ Let me start by saying, welcome @PeterBeinart, it's great to have you. I appreciate the overall message of the piece - although I disagree with some of the points used to get there - among them the role of violence in Palestinian politics and society.

jewishcurrents.org/yavne-a-jewish…

2/ I understand the target audience, the nuance in framing the argument and the importance of moving the conversation forward, which this piece does. But we need to be very careful from feeding ugly preconceived notions regardless of whether the end is desired and noble.

@PeterBeinart

3/ As many have pointed out and @PeterBeinart graciously referenced: these ideas are not new and part of a long Palestinian intellectual tradition. I'm glad we are having these conversations more widely but it seems that the world is just catching up.

Read 6 tweets

Salem Barahmeh

@Barahmeh

19 Jun 20

1/ Jericho is my hometown. This was my daily view of the Jordan Valley growing up from my grandparent’s house. The Barahmeh’s are one of the indigenous Jericho clans and their roots in the Jordan Valley go back centuries.

2/ From the moment I grew conscious of the world around me, I realized the valley didn’t belong to “us”. I’ve had the privilege of traveling the world but there are places few KMs away from home that I’ve never been too because I’m not allowed. That applies to the blue on the map

3/ When I was 19, I tried to visit Kalia Beach on the northern shore of the Dead Sea. Although it’s in the WB and 15 mins away, these beaches are owned/run by Israelis. They “should” be open to us. But I was immediately racially profiled and denied entry because I am Palestinian.

Read 18 tweets

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