The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics

Karma R. Chávez, University of Texas - Austin

Photo by Amer Nasser ©

 

The weirdest thing for me about being in Israel in 2015, was how like the United States it was. I hadn’t expected this, that the character of the people and the culture would be so similar to the character of white America, that the English spoken would approximate the English I was accustomed to, that the energy of Israelis as they hustled about their ordinary days would feel like an energy I already knew. There were of course marked differences too--like the teenagers in army green military gear jostling their way onboard the busses and trains, laughing and chiding one another, wearing wired Apple headphones and casually swinging large assault rifles over their shoulders.

When I arrived back home after three weeks, I told friends Israel was the most beautiful and the most terrifying place I’d ever been; beautiful because of the lush countryside and terrifying because militarization was baked into the normal goings-on of each day.

I didn’t go to the Middle East to visit Israel; I went for the West Bank. I stopped in Israel first because you can’t land an international flight in the West Bank, and I did so carefully because I am a signed supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against the Israeli state's occupation of Palestine. Entering the country is full of worry and trepidation at being "caught" as a supporter of Palestine, and refused entry. Friends in Haifa invited me to visit them for a few days so I could offer their address to the suspicious border guard who checked my passport and sternly asked why I was there. I carried library books about holy sites in my bag in case the interrogation went further–as I was warned it could. An atheist friend arriving later wore an old crucifix necklace on a delicate gold chain to lend credibility to her own holy site story.

I’m not an expert on Palestine or Israel and I don't speak Arabic or Hebrew. I'm a professor of Mexican American and Latino/a studies and I focus on social movement building, activist rhetoric and coalitional politics. I traveled there to give a presentation on my research at the BDS-friendly feminist organization, Isha L’Isha. The women there promised to show me around and introduce me to Israeli citizens of Palestinian descent. They would help me learn about their plight and what it was like for them to live in the "48," a reference to the national borders established upon the Nakba. The Nakba, or "the great catastrophe," was the systematic, violent military removal of three quarters of a million Palestinians from their homes, villages, and lands to create what would become Israel. Zionist Jewish settlers and their European supporters made 750,000 Palestinians into refugees in a matter of months in 1948.

I'd joined an academic solidarity trip sponsored by a Palestinian research organization, which invited US-based professors to come to the West Bank for two weeks to visit universities, scholars, and cultural workers, to learn what it meant to be a professor under occupation.[1] Given the immense challenges scholars have in the West Bank producing their research under the many restrictions the Israeli state imposes upon them, the trip was also intended to build relationships between us for potential research partnerships. At the end, our new colleagues asked us what we could do at home to support Palestinian self-determination.

A few weeks in a place with layered, complex dynamics doesn’t grant one a completely informed perspective, but my trip was life changing: it turned my schoolbook understanding of Israel/Palestine and my leftist and anticolonial sensibilities about the region into a principled point of view with firsthand evidence to support it. The question of what I could do at home to support Palestinian self-determination has been with me every day for the last nine years since returning home.

 

Heba

One of our group's visits was to an-Najah University in Nablus in the West Bank. On the way back to our hotel in East Jerusalem, we stopped at a garden and olive grove. Imagine the greenest parts of the rolling hills and mountains of northern New Mexico with full green brush bursting between limestone rocks and gnarly, brave trees dotting the landscape in between modest homes scattered across the horizon. Our tour bus crawled slowly up a rocky driveway, where we were faced with a plush green garden of flowers, herbs, and vegetables. At the head of the road was a small dwelling built of rock. A man in his 50's came out to greet us. He wore a loose-fitting grey button-down atop grey linen pants. His face was carved with deep lines etched by the sun. He had a mess of wind-blown salt-and-pepper hair on his head and busy eyebrows and moustache to match.

He greeted us with a smile, waving us into the yard with a full-armed gesture as he stood beside a patch of green flowers as tall as his body. He forewent the niceties. He knew we were there for a short time at the end of a long day. So, he welcomed us, but he wanted to use the opportunity to educate us about the realities of what he and his family faced.

He told us that our visit was part of an effort created by some European allies to protect his land by making it a tourist destination where refreshments were served (alongside political education). The thinking was that if this farmer’s home was a destination for tourists, then it would be a more difficult target for the perpetual encroachment and theft by settlers who believe, with the Israeli state’s blessing, that the West Bank--and indeed all of Palestine--should be theirs. He described how Israeli (and American expatriate) settlers take land by stealing it and evicting its owners from their homes, coming ever closer to established Palestinian towns and villages. They also take it by destroying orchards, poisoning wells, bulldozing--particularly the land that supports the precious olive trees, the life blood of the Palestinian families who’d lived there and tended the trees for millennia.

As we toured the vibrant grounds, we found ourselves behind the dwelling, overlooking verdant hills. Here, our host introduced us to a neighbor, an elderly woman and olive farmer. Heba couldn’t have been more than five feet tall and was in her seventies or eighties, with sun-weathered skin and lines tracing her smile cut into her face. She wore a sky-blue head scarf that fell in purposeful folds above her tie-died gray and red sweatshirt. She was lively and playful. Our tour guide, Mohammad, translated her rapid Arabic into English.

Heba told us that her family had resided there for many generations and subsisted with ease, until recently, on the profits from the olive oil they made and sold. The trees of their harvest had lived long before her, and her family cared for them with the utmost affection. Recently, Israeli settlers had set about destroying the trees by fire. The farmers did what they could to defend the trees and land, by patrolling the area and sometimes using their bodies to shield the trees from violence. But there were fewer farmers than settlers waging attacks. Her smile was so radiant you could hardly imagine the stresses her life entailed.

We could immediately support her resistance, she said, if she could sell us the fruits of her trees and labor, her olive oil. We pulled out our wallets and offered what we had in dollars and shekels. In return, we received the precious rich green liquid in small glass containers and clean plastic bottles that formerly held soda. We took as much olive oil as we had the cash to afford. She thanked us in Arabic, clasping our hands in hers, smiling at us deeply. She begged for our assistance, and we promised, in the ways we could, to help. We promised to bring her message to our friends and our elected officials. We promised to hold and remember her forever.

As we boarded the bus back to the hotel, sweaty and dusty, my colleagues and I buzzed with the impact this profound encounter with Heba had on us. We dripped her olive oil onto our fingers, noting that it was the best we’d ever tasted--grassy, sweet, complex, deep. We sat back into our bus seats, which rocked as we took the turns of the roads, and we wondered what we would, what we could, actually do. The ride was almost soothing, though with an undercurrent of anxiety about how the border crossing would go with the Israeli military checkpoint. We crossed the border uneventfully this time and arrived into East Jerusalem unscathed. A few of us convened in the hotel bar where a slim selection of Palestinian wines were served. We sipped the dark red wine, thinking about what it might take for farmers to defend their vineyards and produce it. We challenged each other about what our knowledge would mean, would result in, when we returned home. No one was certain.

This is still a challenge I don’t know how to fully embrace. When I got back from the West Bank, I held teach-ins at my home. People came over, mostly Black and Brown radical activists, and we shared food, sat in a packed circle as I talked about what I had learned, and discussed it together. I devoted the next month on my radio show to interviews with Palestinian liberation activists. From those interviews, I published a book called Palestine on the Air, sharing the voices of Palestinian and allied journalists, activists, academics and authors about the Palestinian struggle for justice, land, and self-determination. I’ve tried to be an ally and never stop speaking about Palestine. But that trying is called into stark relief at the time of this writing, in April 2024, six months into the Israeli genocide in Gaza. 

Photo by Amer Nasser ©

 

From a connection on Instagram in October 2023, I started following a young woman in Gaza, Rawan, who runs a rescue shelter for about 60 disabled cats out of her home. She posts very few photos of herself, but she's in her twenties, with dark hair, defined features and gentle eyes. Most of her photos before October 7, 2023 are of the adorable cats she cares for daily. There’s Caramel, an orange tabby cat who wears a makeshift diaper because he is paralyzed from his waist down. She posts videos of Caramel chasing a red laser pointer, his front paws working fiercely as he drags his back legs along a pink carpet, fixated on the dot. There's Milo, a young white cat with black spots who needs daily physical therapy to restore some mobility from his back legs; she moves, bends and massages his legs to exercise them. Milo and his sister, Oreo, also white with black splotches on her head and tail, cuddle and bite at each other’s necks with the fierceness of typical kittens, though only Oreo can run around, jump and pounce. Rawan has a special fondness for Milo; he's featured in many of her posts in recent months. She occasionally asks for donations to support the cats, and intermingled with the enchanting chronicle of the cats’ lives are short reports that she is okay after another Israeli bombing of Gaza.

Rawan posts about an Israeli bombing a few days after October 7th. She posts two images side by side. The first is hazy, taken from a window high up, looking out at the roofs of buildings. From the top of the photo, thin cloudy strings seem to fall on the buildings, which are engulfed in smoke. The second is taken from the ground, it seems. The image features just the roofs of several buildings atop a white cloud of dust. Tentacles finger down the sky like a jelly fish. “Israel is bombing us with internationally banned phosphorus bombs. If these bombs reach the body, they burn and dissolve it completely.” Although white phosphorus, which burns at 1500 degrees Fahrenheit, has legal wartime uses, it has been banned by international law from use against civilian populations. Despite these facts, Rawan voices no fear. Her reporting is concise and matter of fact.

I send $100 for the cats and for her.

On October 14, 2023, she posts again: a gray image of a street covered in debris. On the right, the shell of a tan apartment dwelling stands, its innards blown out and stained black with soot. On the left, a single power pole stands akimbo, its electric lines dangling like eerie branches. She writes, “There is no internet and it will be completely cut off after a few hours. My family and I are not really safe . . . The danger began to creep directly upon us . . . If this continues, I think we will die. Forgive me, friends <3.” In one comment, a resident of Gaza tells her that they will be evacuated to the south in 24 hours. Rawan replies, “Yes, there are people who went south... I have 60 cats, and some of the cats are paralyzed and I cannot move them. I decided to stay home and sacrifice for the cats.”

I can’t begin to parse her words, but I feel an urgency to understand her message and convey it to others. I’m struck by three things. Her use of the word “really” guts me in a way I can’t comprehend from the way I think of the word in American English. If I say I’m not “really safe,” what I am probably conveying is something less severe than if I say, “I’m not safe.” The “really” isn’t used literally; it is to downplay my lack of security. Does Rawan intend to downplay to comfort her virtual friends or is it that English is a second language for her, and she meant to convey the severity of her situation? Then she asks her friends to forgive her for the possibility that she will die. What can she possibly mean? That she’s letting us down? That we will no longer receive the pleasure of her posts? Forgive her for anything she may have done in the past? Or for not surviving a bombing? Or forgive her for not being able to continue to care for the helpless cats?

And then there’s the fact of her and her family’s sacrifice for the cats. I don’t know who she means by her family. I’ve never seen them in her photos and don’t recall her mentioning them.  My eyes welled with tears. My own feral cat colony is only about a dozen, and my immediate family here is only my partner, but I’ve often thought about the possibility of catastrophe and what that would mean for them and for my partner and me.

 

Phyllis

As I’ve been seeing the horror unfold on Rawan’s Instagram, I’ve been checking in with my Rwandan friend, Phyllis. One of my dearest friends, she survived the Rwanda genocide that occurred between April 7 and July 15, 1994, when Hutu militias killed between 500,000 and 800,000 Tutsis, the minority ethnic group. The situation in Gaza has sent her PTSD into overdrive. But the PTSD is always there.

For years she’s channeled her trauma into educating others. When we lived in the same city, I’d sometimes join her in these endeavors, usually at a local community college or university. One of her lessons puts students in an urgent, life-threatening simulation. She groups them into “families” of three or four and gives each group a long list of household items, ordinary things such as books and photos, identification cards and clothes. Then she tells the families that their oppressors will arrive in a short time, usually somewhere between 5 and 30 minutes. They have to collectively decide, right now, what they will take with them. They will be fleeing by car in some instances, by foot in others, and they have no idea how long they will be gone or if they will ever be able to return.

This is only a simulation, and these groups are not actually families. Yet, as with real families, the individuals don’t always know what the others’ priorities will be in a crisis. The groups try not to squabble over details, but they inevitably do. Because they’ve never been in this situation before, some forget to “pack” identification. Others forget food and water. Some family groups have only agreed on a couple of items to bring when the bell goes off letting them know that it is time to flee. Hardly any of the groups gets things exactly right (which is of course impossible because you can’t really anticipate what you’ll need) and no one thinks clearly under this kind of pressure.

In Phyllis's simulation, after they are initially forced from their homes, each family is then given a different scenario. For one family, they have to pay someone to smuggle them out, but if they reach safety, they’ll be completely out of cash. For another, there’s a bus ride out of town but there’s not enough space for everyone, and they must decide who goes and who stays. In yet another family, each member can only carry a limited number of physical items to the next stop and then they have to proceed empty handed. Still another family must carry an injured or disabled family member as they flee for safety on foot. The exercise goes like this until, in an ideal world, some of the families--maybe even all--reach a refugee camp. Usually this is about a 30-minute exercise and all players are completely stressed out by the end, sometimes fighting. They’ve had to abandon crucial belongings and a beloved pet or person to reach safety. The hardships are long.

Phyllis then brings the whole group back together and explains that these were the conditions presented to her and her community when their oppressors arrived to town. Each scenario she’s given the students is drawn from someone she knows personally and their actual experience. Her goal is not to stress them out, but to give them a small glimpse into what it feels like when everything you know and value is changed forever in the blink of an eye.

Students learn a lot from this exercise and are often inspired to act. Many end up volunteering with refugees afterwards or otherwise commit themselves to learning how to intervene in state and vigilante violence at home or abroad. Phyllis leaves exhausted, having just relived her own trauma in the hopes that these students will work to ensure that no one else ever has to live it again. 

Photo by Amer Nasser ©

 

Since October 7, I've been telling Phyllis, "Stop watching TV. Stop looking at the videos on social media. Do something that makes you feel good. Don't bring all this trauma back up to the fore." She doesn’t need me to tell her these things, and of course, it’s just the connection, the communication with a friend that she needs. I don’t know what else to do but check in with her and with my Muslim and Palestinian friends in the US and Israel. Despite what I tell her, I can't stop watching TV or looking at the pictures and videos.

After nearly 48 hours of silence, Rawan posts from Gaza, in a caption beneath a photo from early this morning of the sky a blazing orange and full of thick smoke:

We lost the internet, it came back for a while. The situation is getting more difficult than before. We wake up every day and cannot believe that we are still alive. At dawn, we were subjected to a hysterical bomb attack. We were certain that the hour of death had come. I felt like my heart would stop. Oh God, help us."

Just after seeing Rawan’s post, Israel bombed al-Shifa Arab hospital in Gaza for the first time. On various social media accounts, Israeli officials originally took full credit for the bombing, but as the tide of public opinion turned against them, they quickly deleted and walked back those messages from X and said instead that a Hamas rocket had misfired and resulted in the carnage—some 500 Palestinians dead. The US government supports Israel’s version of events. Numerous “experts” on social media examine grainy and dark images of the explosion to defend Israel, while Palestinians and journalists who were on the ground insist it was Israel, that the Palestinian Health Ministry was warned by Israel to evacuate or be bombed, that Hamas’ rockets are not nearly powerful enough to do that damage.

I’m not an expert, but I believe those who were there. As I write in April, al-Shifa Medical Complex has now been bombed numerous times by Israel. Many hundreds of doctors and ill and injured patients, including infants and children, have been killed in raids by Israeli soldiers. Mass graves of doctors and patients, naked and with zip-tied hands have been uncovered. And Israel has now bombed and destroyed every hospital and medical center in Gaza.

It is well documented that Israel has a habit of lying when they’ve overstepped what the world's public can stomach. Take the case of the killing of Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in May, 2022.

Originally, Israel insisted that a Palestinian killed her. Several months later, they admitted that it was an IDF soldier. Or, as some say, an IOF (Israeli Occupation Forces) soldier. Shireen was shot in the head by an Israeli sniper while reporting in the Jenin refugee camp in the northern West Bank. She was wearing a blue Press vest and helmet. In March 2024, the Israeli army made a show of bulldozing her public memorial site.

It is axiomatic to say that winners write history. And without a doubt, Israel’s version of events for the last 75 years has been the only version that most Americans have ever heard thanks to the US’s unwavering support of Israel, no matter its actions. This is why even US progressives will insist that there’s two sides to the “conflict,” that “Israel has the right to defend itself,” and that "Hamas is a 'terrorist' organization,” despite that under international law, the occupied have the right to defend themselves and resist their occupiers. Despite the fact that Hamas, as controversial as it may be even among Palestinians, is an elected political entity.  These are tired tropes. They ignore the violent founding of Israel by evicting the indigenous Palestinians, the blockade of the past 17 years condemned by every global human rights organization, the disproportionate costs and disproportionate power. Many progressive supporters of Israel in the US either don't know, or pretend not to know, these things. US presidents and other politicians state over and over again that the US is the best friend that Israel has; Biden parrots himself, in various decades, repeating "If there were no Israel, we'd have to invent one." The mainstream media repeats the talking points provided by Israel's public relations team.

Ordinary Palestinians in Gaza have so little power, as their lives are being stolen every day, yet, they have effectively harnessed the power they do have: a pathway to the eyes of the world. As long as a feeble internet connection exists, they post their stories to Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and X. They are sharing their first-person experiences of what is happening to them in bloody detail, showing their dead, documenting their starvation and mourning, explaining what has happened to them since the Nakba, and calling for those of us who pay for their destruction with our tax dollars to demand otherwise from our elected officials, calling for the entire world to stand with them now.

Some people only believe something once it's reported by a major news outlet. Conversely, I believe there is power in first-person experience, first-person testimony. This is why I went to the West Bank in the first place. I wanted to be able to testify to what I saw and what I heard from the people who live under occupation themselves.

Three months into the bombardment on Gaza in early 2024, and more than 85% of Palestinians in Gaza have been displaced--the ones who are still alive. Some 30,000 have been slaughtered, roughly 40% of those children, which as my friend Yasmin Nair has argued, is part of the point, to annihilate a Palestinian future. Those that live are mostly in the south, where Israel told them to go for safety. Yet, daily, Israel bombs them there. There’s no food. There’s no clean water. There’s been rain and cold and the makeshift UN tents provide little shelter.

Although more than 100 journalists have been killed in the Gaza strip, those that remain post regularly to their social media accounts, more and more first-person accounts of what they barely survive. I witness this daily. I write to elected officials with more desperation in each message. "Dear Representative Greg Casar;" "Dear Senator John Cornyn;" "Dear Senator Ted Cruz;" "Dear Representative Pelosi..."

“You are all useless,” Motaz Azaiza posts one day. He’s 24 years old and a journalist who has documented every second of Israel’s violent aggression in the bloodiest of detail, until he had to flee to Egypt to stay alive. Motaz, eloquent, understated, beloved Motaz, now has 18 million Instagram followers, more than every major US media publication. He's haunted. He’s right. We’re all useless. We’re so very fucking useless.

In fact, I’ve never felt so useless in my life, I tell a good friend who shares my politics. The protests, and the writing to senators, and the organizing, and the witnessing, just seems quite literally fucking useless. At least with immigration reform or police violence we can engage in small acts of defiance that actually can have some impact. It may not be structural change, but we can make things better for individuals, propose resolutions that get traction, or donate money and know it will get into the hands of people who need it. We can’t do most of those things in this situation. Nothing is having any effect. Congress continues to send arms, warplanes, and billions of dollars to Israel despite hundreds of thousands of people protesting. Trucks carrying food aid continue to be blocked by the Israeli army and citizens gleeful about starving Palestinians, despite global protest and censure by the International Criminal Court. Aid trucks are stalled in the Sinai desert, at the Rafah gate.

Even as I follow so many more Palestinians on social media than I did on October 6, I continue to check Rawan’s account every day. I was elated when I saw that she'd posted on November 5, 2023. But her dire message chilled me to my marrow:

The news is not good. My uncle’s family was bombed and died. The place has become completely unsafe, but we cannot leave. I believe that this barbarism will end when all the residents of the Gaza Strip are eliminated. In a scene before my eyes, barrel bombs were thrown at a house next to us, as if it were one of the horrors of the Day of Resurrection. Our doors and windows were broken, as if our house had risen from its place and returned from the intensity of the bombing. I felt as if I had lost my hearing. Everything was flying, even cats as well, and children were flying to pieces in pieces in the street before my eyes. A child took his breath. The last one of the street hit the sidewalk with his head exploding and blood. This is a drop in the ocean of what we live on a daily basis. I don’t know what comes next, but we are steadfast until our day comes and we ascend to heaven.

Rawan last posted on November 8. She wrote:

Bombs were dropped over my sisters’ house. Their house was burnt. Unfortunately, my sister used to raise cats like me. She could not save all the cats, who died from the smell of poisonous bombs and phosphorous. My sisters and their children miraculously survived.

We do not know of each other’s news because of the disconnection of communications and the Internet inside Gaza. Now I find it very difficult to provide cat food, there are no markets or transportation, everything is bombed. I did not go out to the south, I stayed with the cats in the city center in the danger zone.

I don’t know what will happen whether we will die with bombs or die of starvation. All possibilities are difficult in Gaza.

And all the countries neighboring us, the first of which is the country of Egypt, closed the crossing, does not receive the wounded, and does not enter aid except in a very, very, very little way. Most of the aid that arrived from Egypt is shrouds for the dead!           

I assume Rawan is a martyr now, wrapped in one of those white Egyptian shrouds if she’s lucky, left in a street or beneath rubble if she’s not. “Lucky” is such a disgusting way to even describe this. If she were lucky, she’d still be in her apartment caring for her cats, posting them on social media. If she were lucky, she’d be with her relatives and friends, have the right to return to whatever lands or homes belonged to her family before the Nakba. She’d have a nation, be able to exit and re-enter her country as she pleased. She wouldn’t live under occupation. She'd be alive. She'd be safe.

It’s been nine years since I visited Palestine. I vowed then that I wouldn’t stop talking about Palestine. Rawan’s story and Heba's story deserve to be told, even just the tiny fragments of them that I know. Six months have passed now since the bombardment of Gaza began. We've seen people carrying the tiny fragments of their family members in plastic bags. Nothing compares to this. What will the tiny fragments lodged in each of us who are witnessing, become? What will we do with them?

 

Coda: Rawan is Alive…for now

After months of silence on Instagram, Rawan posted two messages on March 17. There are no images, just two blocks of text. In the first she thanks everyone who cares for her and explains that because she lives in Gaza, her PayPal has been suspended. She has a brother in Sweden who can accept payments, but it is imperative we say nothing about Gaza in the comment so that his account is not also banned. There is no food for the humans, no food for the cats. She writes:

Here in the north there is a real famine and a high price, if available, to the extent that the 25-kilo bag of flour has reached $1000! For me, I can’t get the food basket because the planes don’t drop it in my area of residence. I want planes to drop food on the roof of my house.

She explains how much weight she’s lost, how much she’s bound to lose in Ramadan this year. Then she says:

A real death. I have a father, an elderly mother, and my nephew, he has cerebral and blind atrophy, and they have chronic diseases as well. They have lost many weights and they cannot bear it. A lot of talk and misfortunes, but we cannot do anything, whether with prayer and patience, either we live or we die, this is the end of the matter.

I comment that I am so glad to hear from her and that I am still praying for her. I send another $100 to her brother’s Paypal account, filling the comment with emojis of cats. It has been another month since her last post. I still feel so fucking useless.

And I want to feel like I can meaningfully contribute. Since last hearing from Rawan, I’ve continued to throw myself into supporting Palestinian students on my campus and their efforts to hold our university accountable to its financial and rhetorical complicity in Israel’s genocide. Our small group of allied faculty has counseled them, fed them, and uplifted their message at every turn. The students have organized incredible protests and educational events, and they have been met with the university’s and the state’s repression. It’s been challenging and devastating, and it’s been beautiful. The fight is so far from over I can’t even imagine it. But, we persist. And we must.[2]

 

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Karma R. Chávez is Chair and Bobby and Sherri Patton Professor in the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas - Austin. She is co-founder of her university's Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine and author of Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities (University of Illinois Press, 2013); Palestine on the Air (University of Illinois Press, 2019); and The Borders of AIDS: Race, Quarantine, and Resistance (University of Washington Press, 2021).