Romi Mahajan speaks to Visualizing Palestine’s Aline Batarseh and Jessica Anderson
For anyone who cares about the lives of Palestinians, the last year has been bleak. Israel’s all-out assault on Gaza has killed over 50,000 people, injured more than 100,000, and rendered millions homeless. The human toll of this “war” has been staggering. Perhaps even more surprising than the ongoing Israeli atrocities is the lack of meaningful support of the Palestinians from state actors, especially the United States.
Though the US since Israel’s inception has always sided with the Israelis, few thought that Uncle Sam would allow this slaughter and cruelty to reach these dimensions. Accompanying the destruction of Gaza has been a hollowing of the political culture in the US (and elsewhere) in which even a mere suggestion that Palestinian lives matter makes one subject to the epithet “antisemite” and other obloquy. Israel has with its sheer violence coupled with racist power made strange bedfellows including with noted and proven “real” antisemites on the Right. Despair can take over easily when one thinks about the situation in Palestine and in countries in which any support for Palestine is met with violence or censure.
I therefore had to ask Visualizing Palestine’s Aline Batarseh and Jessica Anderson if their new book “Visualizing Palestine: A Chronicle of Colonialism and the Struggle for Liberation” was borne of “hope or despair?” Both Batarseh and Anderson acknowledged the despair but said that their book, a labor of love, was one of profound hope.
Batarseh said that the book is a chronicle of events, narratives, and data of which some has been used before. Used effectively that is, with notable successes in raising awareness, spurring action, and taking meaningful steps even locally to help the cause of Palestinian liberation. Such results spur optimism even in the face of bleak material conditions. Anderson poignantly said that while she was in college, she was convinced that her generation of students was the last one that would see a captive Palestine; she now accepts that that optimism was unwarranted but wants to ensure that, very soon, another student can honestly say what she said so many years ago. She mentioned that the sad part was that so many Palestinians would perish before that day comes.
The book is a gorgeous volume, a coffee-table book that, unlike most coffee-table books, is filled with useful political content. Published by Haymarket Books, Visualizing Palestine is a series of essays, infographics, and images that make a clear historical case that Palestinians land and rights have been forcibly taken away, that Israel is an apartheid state nonpareil, and that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been murdered and maimed so that the West can maintain a colonial outpost in Asia. One can read the book leading with emotion or fact, but the conclusions will to an honest observer be the same.
With all such books, there is one inbuilt problem: Will only the “choir” read it or will it play a role in changing minds. Batarseh and Anderson suggest that this book has already done the latter. There has been a lot of interest to date, both in the US (where the book is published) and abroad. Both feel that the book’s contents are shared liberally. Both also hope that it makes its way to both formal and informal curricula.
Batarseh believes that Visualizing Palestine gives people the tools to make the case for the need for a liberated Palestine. Both Batarseh and Anderson want the book to spur action.
In that desire, I concur fully. We must arm ourselves intellectually and then not simply interpret the world but fight to change it.
Kudos to the Visualizing Palestine team and Haymarket Books for this ground-breaking work.
Available Here-
