#03 A COMMON CULTURE

All Eyes On > #03 A COMMON CULTURE

The future of -Semitiche-

Alba Nabulsi

She/Her

IG:@nabulsi_girl_in_italy

@zaituna_collettivo

@rigeneri

Reading time: 6min 44 sec

Speaking time: 12min 57sec

Meeting Alba Nebulsi leads to an automatic state of active listening, which leads to the discovery of the idea of a new podcast, a project full of hope.

"Semitiche is still in its very early stages and sometimes seems more difficult than expected because there is a lot of pressure on identities in both Palestinian and Jewish/Israeli communities, somehow anyone who talks to the other is seen as some kind of traitor to their cause or a dreamer poet. I, on the other hand, think that how we have come to conceive of this opposition is entirely linked to how nationalist ideologies helped to create certain paradigms in the 20th century and that these ideologies should be overcome so that people can finally live in peace. If we cannot overcome the concept of the nation with all its colonial past on the Western side and with all its chimeras and difficulties on the Arab side as well, we cannot think of a model that instead is of a single confederate state which, I believe, is the only way to solve the Palestinian issue.”

"You can't call it a conflict, it's a slippery word, it presupposes that there are two equal parties, equally recognised, of equal status, facing each other. Instead, there is an asymmetrical relationship, but even in asymmetries, I think if you find someone who manages to recognise their privilege, as I managed to do with Sarah, then dialogue is possible, not because you agree on everything, but perhaps because there is an attempt to re-establish identity and these two ethnic groups, who have been claiming the same pieces of land for years in history, and in any case, when they fled Spain from Portugal during the Inquisition, they found themselves in the Arab world, they were certainly treated better than Westerners in the 20th century. "

"So to be able to re-evaluate historically the reason for the Arab-Jewish, Israeli-Palestinian opposition and to be able to create a new identity in which people can recognise themselves, not from their nationalist ambitions, but from the recognition of a common culture, I think is a good omen for being able to reopen a dialogue that is also aware of the differences and historical asymmetries of power relations.”

"The idea of Semitiche is to tell the story of Arabs and Jews not necessarily just in the Israeli-Palestinian context. 

but also in the context of the wider Arab world, for example, Sephardic Jews, or Jews who live in the Western world but are of Semitic origin, and so on... This would give a voice to those people who refuse to see the Arabs as the enemy, or in the Palestinian world, to those people who are visionary and believe in the one-state solution as a way of resolving the issue, obviously on the condition of equal rights, of not being in an autocratic state, a state defined ethnically as neither Arab nor Jewish."

"This would mean giving up sovereignty on both sides, that is, leaving aside even the dreams of previous generations or some slogans, some battles... it is not an easy path because it is very ambitious."

"Most states, however, are based on a national concept, even those that integrate Ius-soli have an identity, a strong national myth, even if you go to the United States, there is the myth of the pioneers: the myth of the individual who emerges, the self-made man, perhaps the emphasis is more on militarism in the United States or Israel, whereas in France there is the myth of republicanism..

All myths create exclusions, but our battle is to say - let's try to generalise more inclusive myths, why do we always have to recognise ourselves in an iconography that is perhaps white, such as the Marianne in France?

How can an Arab recognise himself in the Marianne in France, which is a rhetorical figure with a bare breast on one side and the French flag on the other with light, wavy hair?

-Why do we choose to personify our icons?!-

Let no one tell me that in those days the French were all blond and Gallic because the French have always been a colonising population full of legionnaires and soldiers who were not white and who fought and died for France.

And when they existed they were always represented in a caricatured way, such as the icon of BananIa . The Senegalese soldier is portrayed stereotypically, with the red cap, the big teeth, and all the ethnic clichés.

Juxtapose the smiling soldier, looking a little silly and wearing a beret, with Marianne, who is beautiful and stands out on the barricade in her French dress, and there is certainly no doubt as to which of the two is represented in an iconographic and flattering way, so the theme is: "Why don't we go and see if there is a Semitic soldier? Why don't we go and see what's there, if there is a Semitic identity, if we can base our confrontation and our narrative on the fact that we have a common root as a people that history has then violently re-proposed as a forced cohabitation that is also difficult to develop and pacify because there is an open wound and the open wound is not just me, a person living in a Western diaspora with a roof over my head, a red passport and my human rights respected, but the wound is millions of people stranded in refugee camps in Syria, in the West Bank, in Jordan, in Gaza there are even internal refugees and external refugees, in Lebanon . . and millions of people who are not assimilated by the countries in which they live, who in some cases are not given citizenship and therefore continue to live in camps, who cannot even buy a house in Beirut, for example. Could they do it through marriage? But who marries someone from a refugee camp?"

"We are talking about people who live in neighborhoods where there are no sewers, where you can die because an electric wire hangs down and comes into contact with the rain, because of a meter that does not have a surge protector, because of things that we cannot even imagine.

So when the wound to be healed is that of millions of people who are excluded from basic human rights, it also becomes difficult to understand how to solve the problem, because there is an enormous burden in terms of ethical debt to the space you occupy, 

It is a very rare and very special historical process, rarely in history does a pioneering process that wants to go and reactivate a descent of two thousand years before succeeding in settling within a colonial dynamic.

Israel was lucky enough to have very strong international support from the beginning, and so it succeeded. 

Many Palestinians, at the beginning of the first migrations, went to live in historical Palestine in a very precarious way, because they had been dispossessed in the countries from which they came because they were threatened by pogroms or similar events."

"Even if we Palestinians are victims of this process, it is important to be aware that a struggle between diasporas has been created at some point in history, so the challenge of SEMITICHE would be to give voice to a new identity and a way of seeing a perspective in the conflict between identities.

After analysing this from different angles, I realised that there is no two-state solution in a world where settlers have now eaten the West Bank, where to live there they are building walls which, in addition to the function they claim to have, that of protection, in reality, have the function of continuing to take land and redefine borders, and so I don't see any other chance than to work on this new identity."

-Semitiche- is Sarah and Alba's  multimodal project:

Sarah P. is a Jewess from Padua who moved to Israel when she was 17 years old and works as a therapist, translator, interpreter, columnist, and journalist a few years ago she started to denounce what is happening to the Palestinian population inside and outside the borders of the 48, both Palestinians in Israel as they are defined and those in the West Bank and she is someone who has dared to raise her voice also with an impact on the way she is perceived within her community. She tried to do something with a Palestinian.

Alba's path is that of activist, journalist, translator, and editor.

"I write articles for international newspapers that are related to the Arab world, I am starting a new collaboration with 972 (the prefix that unites Palestinian telephone numbers), a mixed newspaper of people who came out of Haarez and Palestinian journalists, and then  I might start collaborating with other platforms like Jewish Voices for Peace, I am currently working with The New Arab , an English-language newspaper. I want to develop this part of my work, which combines a bit of activism with in-depth reporting. 

Semitiche is a project I would like to see grow, to become a book, an ambition to be carried forward, is an idea that can be expressed in the form of the double reciprocal interview between Sarah and me because we have very often wondered how to respect the understanding of symmetry and not reproduce it when avoidable.

For the podcast, we have also found a person who will help us both technically and in terms of content, someone who is very sensitive to the Palestinian cause. We want to give new forms to the content we produce, also with technology, to have the possibility to reach a lot of people,

We have worked very deeply on how to give a voice to the voiceless. So not necessarily to have the will to express ourselves in an equal way, but perhaps to give a different space to those who are not usually represented, and so it is an ambitious project that we would like to see unfold in different ways".

We need cultural heritage education, not more blue checkmark badges.