(Transcript) Ep 10: The 3P’s: Public Opinion
Noor Tagouri:
Three, two, one.
Isabella Khairiah Hadid:
I don't know if I'm ready today. I have this overwhelming anxiety of not saying the right thing and not being what everybody needs me to be at all times, but I've also realized that I have done my education enough. I know my family enough. I know my own history enough, and that should be enough for coming to talk with my girlfriend about things that mean a lot to both of us.
Noor Tagouri:
This is my friend, Isabella Khairiah Hadid. You may know her as Bella Hadid, the half Dutch, half Palestinian supermodel, co-founder of the drink brand Kin Euphorics and a passionate advocate for the Palestinian people. We are in her New York city apartment, curled up on a couch. Our current soundtrack is the soft hum of rush hour traffic. At the moment, we're having a conversation Bella has never had publicly before.
Isabella Khairiah Hadid:
I think for so many years, I was pushed to do interviews and do things when I genuinely didn't know who I was or what my favorite color was or what I like to eat on a Thursday night, because I was focused on different things like work and work and work and work.
Isabella Khairiah Hadid:
But now, I realize that I still have this lingering anxiety of feeling not good enough, whether or not I say all of the right things or constantly do the right thing, I know that this is my truth and I know that regardless which way I say it or how I put it, it's still going to be my truth.
Isabella Khairiah Hadid:
My intention is that my truth can possibly mirror somebody else's truth. That gives them the opportunity to look deeper within themselves. When I was 14, I wrote, "Free Palestine," on my hand literally with flowers in paint on my hand. And I was being called names and being immediately blasted as a person of hatred for another people. But all I was talking about was freeing my father's people, my people who are deeply hurting at the moment and not only that, like we're witnessing their pain, were witnessing it happen. Still, I can't speak about it? Okay. That was the start of me attempting to be vocal about the Palestinian cause.
Noor Tagouri:
When Bella says, "Attempting to be vocal about Palestine," I know what she means. All my life like many Muslim and Arab kids in the States, I've seen the protests, heard the stories, demands and cries for a free Palestine. We view it as an occupation. In 1948, 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly removed from their homes in what is known as the Nakba, which translates to The Catastrophe.
Noor Tagouri:
This was the first great act of oppression towards the Palestinian people in the newly created state of Israel. Today, there are 7 million Palestinian refugees displaced around the world. Some still carry the keys for their homes that were either seized or demolished. Many of them were born stateless and will never be allowed into Palestine. There are also about 2 million Palestinians who are internally displaced, holding Israeli citizenship, but are far removed from their ancestral villages.
Noor Tagouri:
Those who remained after the formation of Israel suffer under what amnesty international calls a modern day apartheid enforced by military occupation. The US government supports this occupation politically and financially with 247 billion in tax dollars from 1946 to 2021, adjusting for inflation and including military support. I grew up learning to view the Palestinian people as victims of Israeli oppression, but that is only one piece of the region's history. Israel is only the latest nation to vie for control of the region.
Noor Tagouri:
On old maps, you might have seen the region simply called The Holy Land, signifying no one could own it. This land is mentioned in the Torah, the Bible and the Quran. It was and remains sacred ground. In the beginning, groups waged war to occupy and control the land so perfect, it would be dubbed by historians, The Fertile Crescent. The ancient's Egyptians ruled it. Then the Israelites, then the Romans, followed by Islamic Umayyads, the Abbasids, the Seljuk Turks, then the Crusaders and then the Ottoman empire for 400 years.
Noor Tagouri:
So the land has been wared over for centuries, until World War I, when the British encouraged the Palestinians to revolt in exchange for their independence. After the Ottoman empire fell, the land was established by the British as mandatory Palestine, but the British did not honor the agreement and competing nationalist groups fought.
Noor Tagouri:
When the dust settled in 1948, Israel declared independence. In an effort to keep the peace, the UN and the international community of nations negotiated a two state solution, dividing the land between the Israelis and Palestinians. But the summit failed to reach an agreement. The Palestinian people could not secure their statehood. Neighboring Arab nations joined the fight against Israel, waging war over The Holy Land once again, but none could secure a decisive victory.
Noor Tagouri:
Today, the Palestinian people remain stateless with their hopes shrinking year by year, as their territory shrinks due to incremental annexation from Israeli settlements. The fight over The Holy Land has no end in sight. This is a very brief history of Palestine in living memory.
Noor Tagouri:
Israel, Mandatory Palestine, The Holy Land, whatever you call the region, the question remains, what about the people who call themselves Palestinians? This is why it is so important that we focus on them. Not as the oppressed, not as victims of Israel, not as the occupied, but as people. It can feel impossible to talk about Palestinian people in public, without someone assuming you're really being hostile towards Israel Israelis and the Jewish diaspora, but Zionism is not about Palestinians. It's about land.
Noor Tagouri:
I believe one can speak about Palestinians outside the context of Zionism or Israel. In fact, we need to be able to focus on the Palestinian people as their own people and not in relation to anyone else. Now, what I can't remember is despite all of the fundraisers and rallies and protests and just general social gatherings I've attended, when was it that I began to self censor when speaking about Palestine outside of my time spent in these safe spaces and in group settings? When did I first begin to feel the fear? That self-protective mechanism that drives a person to avoid the subject of Palestine. It often feels like a trap.
Noor Tagouri:
When I first started my career, I'd hear the same advice from so many people who thought they were looking out for me. "Don't ever bring up or talk about Palestine at work." When I worked in radio, a Christian Palestinian colleague told me he was asked about the conflict during his job interview. When he said, "I don't talk politics at work," the interviewer said, "Good. That's the right answer." But how did the people of Palestine become a symbol first and human beings, second? How did a people become an untouchable subject to discuss? What role does our public opinion play in all of this?
Isabella Khairiah Hadid:
I had my friend's parents tell me that my dad was a liar and where he's been telling me he was from is fake and not true. Growing up with that, you lose who you are, because you don't know who you are because everyone tells you who you are is not true. And so I think that's a lot of where my imposter syndrome of who I am.
Noor Tagouri:
For Bella, being told who she was begun in middle school.
Isabella Khairiah Hadid:
I was called a terrorist by the head of the football team. So from that point on, like in eighth grade and you're just like, "Is it because of my dad's name? Or is it because of where my family comes from? Or is it because of me and the way that I look?" It's like at that point, you almost lose confidence in who you are. And you're like, "Oh. Well, maybe they are right." I never understood why I was in this position in my life. Then I just like am trying to figure out what my place on this planet is because I know that it's bigger than just living in this body.
Isabella Khairiah Hadid:
But I never knew who Bella actually was until I reconnected with my Palestinian side, to my family, where I felt this like depth of passion and pain through stories and through being able to sit in your truth and speak your truth, you're almost in some ways, healing generational trauma. Asking my dad for the first time about stories.
Isabella Khairiah Hadid:
My cousin, Lena, her telling me about all of the sisters and my dad and how, when they left Palestine and when they arrived in Syria and like just about their first initial movements after they were removed from their homes, that's when this red light came on. And I was like, "Oh my gosh! This is the pain I've been feeling. This is the disconnect I've been feeling." I wasn't around my Palestinian family. I was barely around Arabs growing up.
Isabella Khairiah Hadid:
I grew up my entire life going to Shabbat every Friday. I would go to church every Sunday and we would practice with my dad and have Ramadan and we would have Eid and that's when I would be with my Arab side of my family and that's how we grew up. I realized through stories again, like the same way that other people that have nothing to do with Palestine, they hear a story and they're able to relate. They're able to have empathy.
Noor Tagouri:
Empathy has been key on this journey of producing Rep. And for this chapter in particular, empathy is essential. When I thought about how I wanted to approach the topic of public opinion, I remembered what Houma Aberdeen said in our politics episode, that public opinion currently feels like a dark foggy cloud of unknown.
Noor Tagouri:
Rather than attempting to piece together the unknown, I want to challenge what we think we know and be more honest about what we don't know. In this chapter of Rep, our story guides show us why many people believe that Arab, Muslim and Middle Easterner are all the same thing and how this belief contributes to the dehumanization of people and specifically Palestinians. For our final consideration of the 3Ps, I examine how the dynamic of politics, pop culture and public opinion can lead to a people becoming an untouchable subject to discuss. My intention for this is to be open, to welcome the challenge of sharing the story in a way you've likely never heard. Like Bella, to fear less.
Isabella Khairiah Hadid:
I have no fear when it comes to this. I really believe that it's like what happens happens, and what is going to happen is bigger than me. If I lose every job, the reason why I did all of the work that I did was to get to this point.
Noor Tagouri:
At Your Service and iHeart Media Present Rep, Chapter Nine: Public Opinion. Rep.
Noor Tagouri:
To start off, I would love to ask you who invented the Middle Easterner?
Dr. James Zogby:
Well, in a sense, I would deny anyone invented us. We are our own creation, we exist. But the image, the construct of what is in the West, the Middle Easterner is almost by definition in the name itself, Middle Eastern. What the hell is Middle East?
Noor Tagouri:
Dr. James Zogby is the founder and president of the Arab American Institute. He's also the co-founder of both the Palestinian Human Rights Campaign and the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.
Dr. James Zogby:
I always say the way people define history is where they stand in it and what they're looking at. So if you're standing in great Britain and you're looking at the world, there's the East, China and then there's the Middle East, it's kind of halfway there. And so it was a construct of imperialism, to put us sort of in the middle. We were at a pivot point of three continents. There was importance to the region.
Dr. James Zogby:
Britain saw the people there of having no value other than the role they could play in protecting the pivot point. Britain and France conspired to divide the region, dismember it, dominate its people and in order to protect its access to the East. That's how we became. How were we viewed? We were viewed as paws on a chess board. Who if we didn't play, according to the rules that were laid out, we were unruly paws to be subjected, subordinated humiliated.
Dr. James Zogby:
Lawrence of Arabia, the myth of Lawrence, the little white guy who helped us understand ourselves because we couldn't organize ourselves. We needed a little white guy who didn't speak the language to do it for us. That was there. And if you listen in lines in the movie, even in Lawrence of Arabia, we're savages who only kill each other. And that persists even till today.
Speaker 5:
So long as the Arabs fight tribe against tribe, so long will they be a little people, a silly people, greedy, barbarous and cruel.
Dr. James Zogby:
I just was waxing indignant a couple of weeks ago, over an article in the New York times that was comparing the West's response to Kuwait and the Iraq invasion of Kuwait with Russia's invasion of Ukraine, saying that we responded quickly to Kuwait, even though it comes from the war-torn Middle East. And Ukraine on the other hand comes from largely peaceful Europe. And I said, "Let's parse this out a bit."
Dr. James Zogby:
Number one, largely peaceful Europe in the last century murdered 65 million of its own people in wars that almost never ended. And at the end of them, was divided with an iron curtain, which saw horrific repression and murders and devastation of a continent. And at the same time they were doing that, oh, by the way, they were colonizing Asia, Africa and oppressing people and killing tens of millions of Indians, Pakistanis, Africans and Arabs. Yet, they define history. They define us. We're from the Middle East because they said we're from the Middle East.
Noor Tagouri:
That is why we use the term middle Easterner. We all do, me included. It's simple. Since the Middle East is represented as a place of confusion and conflict, using the broad term becomes convenient. But ethnographer and professor, Nadine Naber, challenges this.
Nadine Naber:
So people from the Arab region are exceptionally diverse and not everybody from the Arab region identifies as Arab. So I tend to say people from the Arab region rather than Arabs. Let me just read a quote that illustrates this diversity. Massad Joseph writes, "There are Palestinians Iraqis, Kuwaitis, Yemenis, Saudi Arabian, Bahrainis, [inaudible 00:17:51], Dubais, Egyptians, Lebanese, Tunisians, Moroccans, Algerians, Sudanese, Eritreans, Mauritanians. There are Maronites, Catholics, Protestants, Greek Orthodox, Jews, Sunis, Shia, Druze, Sufis, Alawites, Nestorians, Asyrians, [inaudible 00:18:08] and Baháʼís.
Nadine Naber:
There are Amazhig, Kurds, Armenian, Bedu and many others with different languages, religions, ethnic and national identifications and cultures who are all congealed as Arab in popular representations. Whether or not those people may identify as Arab.
Noor Tagouri:
I didn't even know some of these groups. There's a type of thought that explains why our knowledge of people from the Arab region is limited.
Nadine Naber:
In 1978, a scholar, Edward Said, Palestinian American created this term Orientalism to help us understand this system of thought that was created by Europeans. It's a type of thought that fabricates these categories, East or the orient or the Middle East, or maybe today, Arabs and Muslims versus the West.
Nadine Naber:
They attached definitions to each category and produced the categories as if they are opposites. That would mean that the East would be categorized as uncivilized, the West as civilized, the East as inferior, the West as superior. The East as Savage, the West as developed. So what Edward Said then said is that, I mean, it's part of his theory that knowledge is power. And so what he argued is that these categories became a form of knowledge because they were developed over two centuries in academic thought in art. They shaped what people think is real.
Noor Tagouri:
There it is. These simple categories like East and West were more than just Cardinal directions. They became a form of knowledge that has shaped what we think is real, that has shaped our opinions.
Nadine Naber:
So he was saying that actually, the way we define the categories East versus West is not real. In fact, all categories of knowledge aren't real. Categories are created by history and politics. One of the things that orientalist thought does is that it focuses on the culture and religion of people of the Middle East and takes culture out of history.
Nadine Naber:
What that means is it would be like saying Arab culture is sexist and homophobic. The reason why that's orientalist is because it's assuming that there is even such a thing as Arab culture that we could talk about in this abstract way. It would be like saying in Chinese culture, family is really important. The question is, what do we mean when we say Chinese culture? Do we mean Chinese culture 500 years ago? Do we mean in this one village? Do we mean in a urban space? Do we need among Chinese Americans?
Nadine Naber:
Edward Said would say, you can't talk about culture in the abstract. That's just going to lead us to racism. So if we want to talk about Arab and Muslim issues without reifying Orientalism, the answer's pretty simple, but it's also challenging because we're so used to talking about culture as an abstract thing in the United States.
Noor Tagouri:
When we simplify culture or talk about it in an abstract way, we remove the humanity that makes up that culture. When you remove the people from a culture, you make room for a stereotype or a commonly accepted caricature instead. Like the ones you've likely seen on TV, the news, or have even shot in first person video games. These images and conceptions are largely what ends up representing the general categories of Arab, Muslim or middle Easterner.
Nadine Naber:
What makes it a racial category is that in our society, people tend to actually imagine a person. It's a well-established that Hollywood, for example, has been creating horribly racist images of Arab people for decades and decades. And that directly shapes public opinion.
Nadine Naber:
If most people believe that Arabs are potential terrorists, then nobody's going to flinch when the US bombs a village and kills thousands of people and destroys their infrastructure and their access to water and healthcare. What's really just ridiculous about the whole thing is that the largest Muslim population is in Indonesia, which is not an Arab country.
Nadine Naber:
What's really important here is I'm distinguishing between the created category of the Muslim Arab Middle Easterner, and then the people. As an Arab Christian, if I say I'm Arabs, one might assume I'm Muslim. So I might be affected by anti-Muslim racism. So the people are really diverse, but then this category lumps us all together and treats us if we're all the same.
Noor Tagouri:
I've always said, if I was an Arab or Muslim and I consumed the same media as everyone else, I would totally be afraid of us too. Because of my experience, I know now that ignorance is always a choice awareness or a lack thereof is one thing, but ignorance is a decision. One chooses to ignore something. The saving grace is that we can turn our fear of others, our fears of the unknown into opportunities for connection, education, and expression. In fact, we need to, because you and I, we are being sold fear every single day.
Noor Tagouri:
Researcher and expert on this dynamic, Dalia Mogahed has quantified how the fear machine operates. Tell me about the Islamophobia industry.
Dalia Mogahed:
So the Islamophobia industry is a network of pseudo think tanks, pseudo experts, websites, foundations whose entire goal and sole purpose is to churn out hate for Muslims. This is a real thing. They've been documented, several reports Fear Inc, Fear Inc 2.0, another report that came out of Berkeley recently. What they found is that this network has access to more than $200 million from 2008 to 2013, to do nothing but churn out hate. Now, imagine that number, the kind of resources that they have at their disposal and then on the other side, people are trying to educate the public about who Muslims are and trying to just give them accurate information.
Dalia Mogahed:
It's like a tiny fraction of that number. The Islamophobia industry is a real danger to democracy because if you have that much money going into misinforming the public, making them afraid so that they are relinquishing the rights, we are in danger of destroying our democracy with our own hands.
Dalia Mogahed:
And what happens when we're afraid from neuroscience research, we are more accepting of authoritarianism, conformity and prejudice, three things that erode the very foundation of democracy. So fear kills freedom.
Dalia Mogahed:
Considering all of the information people are exposed to and is coming at them from every direction, it's a wonder that there isn't more Islamophobia than there actually is. It's almost like a testimony to in general the inherent goodness of the American public honestly. What we really have to change is the way that Muslims and Islam are covered, are portrayed, are spoken about.
Noor Tagouri:
Rep. Let's get specific again. Palestinians. Peter Beinart is a journalist and political commentator. He has a newsletter called Beinart Notebook, and he is the editor-at-large at Jewish Currents Magazine. I wanted to hear from him about the changing nature of public opinion and Palestine. So I asked him, how did talking about a people become equated with political risk?
Peter Beinart:
First of all, we can see just in this year's elections, that candidates who take even modestly pro-Palestinian stances, by which I mean candidates who challenge unconditional US support for Israeli policy in any meaningful way can find very large amounts of money spent to defeat them.
Peter Beinart:
This has been particularly the case since APAC created a super PAC, which can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money, but also an associated group, democratic majority for Israel with its super PAC. And so there's a huge gap between what ordinary Democrats say in public opinion and where the vast majority of democratic politicians are.
Noor Tagouri:
Beyond the money that is spent to defeat candidates who advocate for the rights of the Palestinian people, there is another tool that has often been deployed to influence public opinion about the plight of Palestinians.
Peter Beinart:
What has happened in the American debate. And this is not new. This is, this has been the case for many, many decades, is that because Palestinians have been so dehumanized, it's been very difficult to make a case for Palestinian freedom, for Palestinian's humanity without being coded as anti-Jewish, without being coded as antisemitic and given the shadow that the Holocaust and the history of antisemitism cast over American conversations and also given the strong identification that many Americans feel with Israel, which has deep roots in American Christian Zionism, it's extremely difficult to articulate a simple proposition about the fact that Palestinians deserve very basic human rights without immediately being attacked and coded in the mind of some as antisemitic.
Peter Beinart:
Just look at what Rashida Tlaib endures, for instance, ever since she entered into Congress as a Palestinian American advocating for Palestinian rights, this just endless constant effort to describe her not as pro-Palestinian, which she is, but actually is anti-Jewish.
Noor Tagouri:
This is a vital point. Many people tend to focus on Palestinians in relation to other people. They abstract the Palestinian's tragedies and talk about the conflict, but a person is not a conflict.
Peter Beinart:
I say this as an observant Jew, Judaism is the center of my life. Torah does not start with Jews. Torah starts with universal human beings. So even from a Jewish perspective, at the absolute center of our religious tradition is the absolute dignity of all human beings. But the problem in the American discourse is that in fact, if you don't support Jewish supremacy, this is the term I use, the term [inaudible 00:30:23], this is the term that B'Tselem, the Israeli Human Rights organization used to describe what it called Israel's practice of apartheid, a system of Jewish supremacy.
Peter Beinart:
If you don't support Jewish supremacy, which is to me, a situation where Jews have more rights than Palestinian, then you are considered to be... You were called antisemitic. It suggested that you don't believe in the right indignity of Jews. But Jews have the right to equality. And so if we think about it from that perspective, then in fact it shouldn't be hard at all to be pro-Palestinian and also pro-Jewish. America's rhetoric about standing for human rights and democracy and human dignity against authoritarian and repressive regimes like China and Russia will never be taken as seriously as we would like, as long as we simply decide that this is an exception that we have granted ourselves.
Noor Tagouri:
Remember my journalist friend, Aymann Ismail? He was a story guide in our fifth chapter, Tell the Truth, Truth. The episode was named after his journalism philosophy. When it comes to Palestine, Aymann actually investigated why it's harder to report on their truths.
Aymann Ismail:
When we do talk about Israel, especially in an American newsroom, it's very tricky because this is something that a lot of people are just plainly misinformed on, including Muslims. Everybody. Everybody is just so familiar with this story. There are opposing perspectives, not even competing, just opposing perspectives and the way that you see something will really greatly impair you from seeing things for the way that they are. Now, I'm affected by this too. What makes this incredibly difficult to report on is that not only do you have to consider how your colleagues feel about what version of the truth is the real truth, you also have to consider what your editors feel because your editors are the bosses and what their bosses feel and what the people who own the magazine feel. Because there is no middle ground. You're either the terrorist or the freedom fighter.
Aymann Ismail:
Now, I write about Palestine a lot and I have to be extremely careful with how I pitch stories, because not only does this piece need to be airtight, I'm also battling with this perception that as a Muslim, I'm also just an activist and that you can't rely on my reporting because it's just rehashing whatever the fuck my side, whatever that means, believes. Now, that's a damn shame because I don't think it's that clear cut where it's just two sides and they're the same and then they're just arguing all the time. I think it's a lot more sophisticated and complicated than that.
Aymann Ismail:
It's an occupying force who uses military power to keep civilian population basically neutralized, pacified. But as a Muslim journalist, that's not enough to base an argument on. I need to have sources. I need to show my work. I have to record every conversation and show it to my editors and there's so much more scrutiny on me because of my perspective.
Aymann Ismail:
Now, I've written about Palestine and have had articles shot down and spiked because of "unfamiliar sources." The sources need to be airtight and it has to be like BBC. It can't just be like an Arabic local news reporter, which sucks because there are certain things like the white phosphorus report that just don't make it into your piece because of where it was reported from or the death tolls. There's a lot of scrutiny on the death tolls because it needs to come from a Western source.
Aymann Ismail:
Now, I talk to other journalists, not all of them Muslim, I'd say half and half. Half of them were like Muslim, the other half were not Muslim, who weren't even Arab, who are just really high ranking people at their very highly respected news organizations who told me that they have the same trouble with sourcing because when they report their story and they write it out and if their source isn't already in like the BBC or in Reuters or The AP, if they're just using their own eyes witnessing or talking to witnesses, that's not good enough.
Aymann Ismail:
This is the only context that they told me that they've had to just throw away eyewitness report because of who they are and what they saw. There was one piece I wrote that really... Like somebody I was working with was very unhappy with. He saw my piece after it was published. It was about Marc Lamont Hill when he was fired from CNN for saying the phrase, "From the river to the sea," in his speech that he was delivering to the UN. My piece was about the phrase, "From the river to the sea," and where it comes up.
Aymann Ismail:
Because a lot of the reporting about this phrase when Marc Lamont Hill was fired, was this is a rallying cry for Hamas. And so all I did was the research. I found that this was that phrase specifically verbatim in the Likud, an Israeli Zionist political organization. It was in their founding charter. I found an example of somebody who's an Israeli politician one week before Marc Lamont Hill saying that phrase also said it about how Israel is going to be from the river to the sea. And how this is not just specific to Hames, even though Hames definitely 100% uses it. And when they say it, they want the land back, but it's more complicated than that and here's the evidence and here are the sources.
Aymann Ismail:
I link to the Likud's website, I link to [inaudible 00:36:34] who reported on some of these speeches that people gave. I used like sources like CNN with video of people like the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu using the phrase and nobody accusing them of supporting genocide. Then I pose the question at the end of the piece, what does that mean? If one side says it and you hear genocide and the other side says it and you hear something else, what does that say about you? Because that's really what it's about if it's the same phrase, but it changes meaning when a different groups says it.
Noor Tagouri:
American public opinion about Palestinian people and their rights is changing. Peter Beinart believes this is partly because among many Democrats, there's an association between the Israeli government and the American right, and more recently with the Trump administration. And of course, the role of pop culture.
Peter Beinart:
You have more people who might have additional perspective on the Palestinian question, might have a greater degree of sympathy and understanding of Palestinian rights, the Palestinian struggles than you did before. Some of those people, Bella Hadid would be one example, breakthrough into the popular culture.
Peter Beinart:
Another thing that's changed is a kind of reemergence of a lot of protest around structural racism in the United States. Just as there were folks in the '60s and into the '70s like Snake and the Black Panthers, who saw a relationship between what Black Americans were going through and the Palestinian struggle, we have seen a new generation of Black activists with Black Lives Matter, for instance, making that connection. And I think that also had an influence in popular culture.
Noor Tagouri:
Black Lives Matter protests were focused on issues unique to black Americans and the African diaspora. Yet the parallels were too obvious to ignore and too powerful not to include. Thanks to the added dimension of social protests, Palestine and Israel are in the news a lot. The issue has been reframed as of late and depending on what you're reading, watching or listening to, you're likely to form strong opinions based on what narrative you're exposed to.
Noor Tagouri:
But what if that story is passed down from your family? What if your truth exists in your blood? For Bella speaking candidly about her own Palestine story, the story of who she is, came at a cost.
Isabella Khairiah Hadid:
I really do believe that if I started speaking about Palestine, when I was 20, I wouldn't have gotten the recognition and the respect that I have now. I had so many companies stop working with me. I had friends that completely dropped me, like even friends that I had been having dinner with at their home on Friday nights for seven years, like now just won't let me at their house anymore.
Noor Tagouri:
Even one of the world's most prestigious journalistic institutions engaged on May 22nd, 2021, the New York Times published a full page ad paid for by a right wing American organization. The ad featured the faces of Bella, her sister Gigi and pop star, Dua Lipa over an image of a rocket strike covered in bold and inflammatory text. The intention was clear. The ad attempted to link the three women to terrorism, genocide and antisemitism.
Isabella Khairiah Hadid:
In theory like that disregarded so many years of work and so many lives that have been lost. And so much that has happened because they just undermined all of us to the leaders of a terrorist organization.
Isabella Khairiah Hadid:
It was really disappointing for me because we all really have taken time and money, subscriptions to read something that we really felt was powerful, had integrity and educational. And at this point it was just, they sold their soul. I think that was really, the word is disappointing but the entire country of Israel, @Israel on Twitter tweeted at me. That's what's interesting is that when I speak about Palestine, I get labeled as something that I'm not. But I can speak about the same thing that's happening there, happening somewhere else in the world and it's honorable. So what's the difference?
Noor Tagouri:
The difference is we see some people as people and others, as a problem. You may have even seen the story Bella is just talking about on your own timeline. You may even be listening to this podcast because of it. But sometimes, the discourse around a story can be louder than the story itself. This is where I want to recalibrate. What are the questions I need to be asking myself before I even form an opinion? Ethnographer, Nadine Naber, has some suggestions.
Nadine Naber:
To what extent do we take the stories that are told to us across society for granted? Or are we engaging with stories with a critical lens? Are we paying attention to who created a story? Who told that story? Where did the ideas within that story emerge? Did they come from the people who that story is representing?
Nadine Naber:
Did they come from corporate funding that has intentionally push the story to go in a direction that might contribute to harm? Given that we're talking about a very relational society, it's really interesting that storytelling is essential to social relations and the sense of like collectivity. It's not just entertainment, it also serves people's needs it played a role in social life, in politics, in religion.
Noor Tagouri:
It is through this tradition of storytelling that leads us to what I call revolutionary representation. The kind that inspires us to rethink what we believe about ourselves and what we believe about others. For both oral historians, Zaheer Ali and Dr. James Zogby, it was the same television series that inspired an evolution of their personal narratives.
Zaheer Ali:
So Roots was a television mini series based on the book by Alex Haley. Alex Haley in part got the idea to do Roots after his work on Malcolm X's autobiography, because Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam had always claimed that Islam was the religion of the ancestors.
Zaheer Ali:
Alex Haley was like, "Well, let me research in this." And he actually found that story. This miniseries was the most widely watched television show in history at the time. This was event television. So not just Black people are watching this, like everybody's watching this right. It's a compelling story and this is as a kid, my first onscreen encounter with Muslims in America. Onscreen, of course I had known Muslims.
Noor Tagouri:
Yeah. But your first onscreen on screen was a positive representation.
Zaheer Ali:
Yes, yes. That was it. I was like, "Wow!" We always said this and now the world is seeing it.
Dr. James Zogby:
I remember when the book and TV series, Alex Haley's Roots came out. It was transformative. I watched it. This was the story of an African American reconstructing his past from Africa, slavery all the way forward. And as I'm watching it, I'm saying, "Wait, I have roots. I have a story."
Dr. James Zogby:
We were living through the Leave It to Beaver time where the ideal was to be white middle class blended in and no difference among us. It was the melting pot. The idea that we had some unique characteristics that were good, not that made us different. I grew up thinking my nose was a horror or that my dark skin was not quite... I wasn't fitting in. Then all of a sudden, roots comes in the cold cultural nationalist thing in the black community. And it was like, "Wait, it's not so bad to be this."
Dr. James Zogby:
What was interesting is that I chair the ethnic council, the democratic party, the Irish, Italian, Polish, Eastern, Central European and the Arab and the Turk. I discover as I meet with colleagues of my age group, that the same thing was happening with them, that they were also discovering their heritage and feeling proud. It wasn't bad to be Polish, it wasn't a problem being Italian. It was okay. It was good. We wanted to claim it.
Noor Tagouri:
Look at the revolutionary representation of Roots. Despite TV execs doubting its potential, Roots was the most watched television series of its day. With more than 51% of American households with a TV tuning in for the finale. It not only changed the Black American community, it influenced an entire nation.
Noor Tagouri:
For Zogby, it was through this representation that he and others changed their opinions about their identities. They channeled this empowerment into their work as public servants. But something I often contend with is, do we need labels for our identities?
Nadine Naber:
I think about identity labels in two ways. In one way, identity labels allow people to root themselves in their histories and their traditions and the power of our ancestors and where we come from can give us a lot of strength and power and shapes who we are today.
Nadine Naber:
In that way, I think identity labels are useful. But then I also think people rely on identity labels to resist oppression. We might understand that an identity label is limiting or even doesn't accurately represent who we are, but we still might mobilize it. For example, if we think of like black power or... That's a resistance to the way that the US government defined blackness. Reclaiming a category strategically in order to fight back.
Noor Tagouri:
Like free Palestine? Rep.
Noor Tagouri:
So you told me recently a story that I'll let you speak to about a woman who angrily approached you in the city and how that one on one human connection of sharing truths and stories and holding space for someone whose worldview, that's deeply ingrained in them is changing. Can you speak to that?
Isabella Khairiah Hadid:
I was just leaving, eating lunch and this woman came up to me and she's like, "I just moved to New York from Israel recently and I told myself that if I ever saw Bella Hadid in the street, I would walk up to her and ask why she hates me so much." I looked to her and I was like, "First of all, I want to hear you speak. I want to listen to everything you have to say, but I want to let you know, first and foremost, I do not hate you. I not only actually have a lot of respect for you coming up to me, which I don't think I would be able to do because it's an intimidating thing to do in the streets of New York city. But on top of it, to be open to having a conversation with me, I actually love you. So I want to start out by saying that in general. I appreciate you coming to say something to me."
Isabella Khairiah Hadid:
Even though in my head, that was the first time I felt, wow, can I do this? Can I have an educated and emotional conversation with this person that has already a projected thought of what they think and know that I am and can I change their mind anyways? And I realized I can stand in my truth and speak from my heart.
Isabella Khairiah Hadid:
I heard her up, why she genuinely... She started to go to school here, uptown. I won't say the school, but people were coming for her because she was Israeli. They were saying really, really horrible things to her. I stopped her again there. I said, by the way, I want to remind you of something. Nobody ever, ever, ever, ever should be spoken to like that. You not only do not deserve that, but who do I have to go talk to make them stop that because that is not okay and that is not what we stand for, especially as Palestinians because it's just not about you personally, it's not about me personally.
Isabella Khairiah Hadid:
What I said to her is, "The same way that I have my history, you have years as well, you were taught things from a young age and I'm not here to say that everything was wrong, but I do believe that they are in different context, things that maybe you might have been taught that I'm sure that you will grow up to learn are untrue." Because even in that conversation, she's like, "Wow, there were so many things I've learned that even by having this conversation with you, I'm realizing are actually very untrue."
Noor Tagouri:
While I was working on this chapter, I thought about the conversations we have about the Palestinian people, their struggle and their freedom. The stories are almost exclusively told in relation to their occupier. You'll hear about a mass killing of Palestinian people, you'll see news about an assassinated journalist or social media videos of forced evictions.
Noor Tagouri:
Instead of focusing on the tragedy, we speak about the narrative of sides. This side versus that side, who did what first. But the Palestinian people cannot and should not be reduced to a side. They are not an academic exercise. They are not a way to score points or to virtue signal or to bring about some form of Armageddon. They are people. As Shakespeare said, "If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?"
Noor Tagouri:
Those lines by the way, are from The Merchant of Venice, spoken by Shylock, a character who is Jewish. Or think of it as Malcolm X once said, "You cannot separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless they have their freedom." Peter agrees.
Peter Beinart:
I would like Americans to understand the centrality of the question of Palestinian dignity and Palestinian's freedom in the global struggle for human rights. I would also like Americans to be able to understand that they can be profoundly in solidarity with the Jewish people and with our struggle for safety or dignity, for equality to overcome our own history of trauma and persecution without denying Palestinian's fundamental rights. That in fact, ultimately, I think that the safety and future of both people is deeply intertwined.
Noor Tagouri:
It is with the same understanding of an equality of humanity and the shared desire for peace that Bella and an Israeli woman were able to deeply connect while standing amidst the streets of New York city.
Isabella Khairiah Hadid:
I said to her, I said just the same way that Palestinians did not choose to be Palestinian, you did not choose to be Israeli. He's standing there as well as my boyfriend and he is a son of a lineage of Holocaust survivors. For him to chime in and say, "Well, you also have to understand that this is where I come from too and this is not something that is about religion. It's something that is about people and undeserving treatment against them."
Isabella Khairiah Hadid:
She ended up messaging us like later that day, this long, beautiful thing being like, "Wow, this was a really moving conversation." And I also want her to know if she ever hears is that like, if that was moving for her, it was healing for me. I was so nervous. Like I said, I'm not scared of anything. I was nervous that I wouldn't be able to combat whatever she had to say to me. But I realized in that conversation, it didn't never had to be combative. All it had to be was two girls talking about their history and hopefully finding a common denominator, which is we want nobody to die.
Noor Tagouri:
How does it feel to share that?
Isabella Khairiah Hadid:
That was a story I kept with myself and I think of sometimes and smile. It keeps me able to speak through my heart and speak with emotion, because I realize that speaking from your heart, you can never go wrong.
Isabella Khairiah Hadid:
When I spoke to her about it, I realized that nobody has to fight. It's not about your facts being the right facts or your story being the perfectly correct story, because that's never how it's going to happen. If you go and tell somebody what you think your perfect story is, unfortunately, they've lived another life than you and they're going to have a different story to tell. And if you start to say, "My story is the only story, then it disregards everybody else's stories and that's not okay either."
Isabella Khairiah Hadid:
I only tell this story of me and this girl, because of the fact that I hope other people will go out and do that for themselves as well. It's about being able to show the world and show other people that we all came from the same place. We're literally like... That's how I grew up is we're all brothers and sisters. It's how my dad literally raised me, was that everybody from that part of the world, we grew up coexisting.
Noor Tagouri:
Isabella Khairiah Hadid, what does it mean for you to rep your story today? What do you hope that means for everyone who may be listening?
Isabella Khairiah Hadid:
Well, I have to chose for me to rep my story today is like for me to rep anybody else's stories that feels they can mirror me. I just hope that the magnitude of this is bigger than what I could understand it to be, because I do believe that even if it's just one Palestinian speaking, it's about personal stories of each of us and our families for other people to understand the common denominator.
Noor Tagouri:
I'm writing this a couple of days after my first ever family reunion. At the end of the night, we had a storytelling session. The Libyan elders shyly sat side by side like they were lined up for a panel discussion, dozens and dozens of their American born descendants surrounding them. I put on my best interviewer hat and nervously began asking the reluctant speakers to share with us stories of who we were, who we are.
Noor Tagouri:
The conversation began as, "We are a people who fled an oppressor and then continued to fight for Libyan freedom here in the land of the free." My aunt came up to me and whispered in my ear, "Try to get them to talk about something other than politics." So I shared with the elders, this story of Rep and how I am eager to know ourselves outside of our relation to an oppressor. My uncle, one generation younger than the elders took the mic and shared with us that Libyans are still figuring out our identity and culture because in living memory, there has always been an oppressor or power dictating who we were and in turn, defining us to the rest of the world.
Noor Tagouri:
My uncle proceeded. "It is on us, the younger generations to define who we will be in this world, an incredible responsibility." I've been thinking about his words ever since, because also in the last couple of days, Gaza has been brutalized and 15 children have been killed by Israeli airstrikes.
Noor Tagouri:
17-year-old Mohammed Salah Naijm, 16-year-old Hamed Haidar Nijm, 13-year-old Jamil Ihab Najim, four-year-old Jamil al-Deen Najim, 13-year-old Mohamed, 13-year-old Dalia and nine-year-old, Ahmed Yasser Nimr al-Nabaheen, 11-year-old Ahmad and five-year-oldman al-Nairab, 18-year-old Khalil Abu Hamada, 16-year-old Nazmi Fayez Abu Karsh, 16-year-old Ahmed Walid al-Farram, 14-year-old Mohammed Hassouna, nine-year-old Hazem Salem and five-year-old Alaa Qaddoum.
Noor Tagouri:
These children share the names of my cousins and my grandparents. These are children who will never get to grow into adults who can freely define themselves to the world. But that does not mean they will be forgotten. This does not mean we will ignore their existence and allow their stories to die with them.
Noor Tagouri:
So what will we do? What can we do? The people who can easily swipe left when the stories hurt too much. I asked my friend whose family is from Gaza. And she simply said, "Keep talking about Palestine. Be a witness."
Noor Tagouri:
And it's because of working on this chapter, that the words of be a witness resonated differently. Choosing to be a witness can be a part of our identity and culture. The one we are still shaping. Interrogating our own thoughts about how we view people who are oppressed or misrepresented is what we can do. Choosing not to reduce Arabs, Muslims or Palestinians to data, generalizations or headlines they are often obscured behind being responsible for your opinions about humans and their humanity, independent of any conflict or side. It's why, when Bella uses social media to post about Palestinian life, she says-
Isabella Khairiah Hadid:
Please, just in your head, imagine if this was your father or if this was your sister or your brother or your son. People that are living in Palestine right now, they can't swipe away from what they're living through.
Noor Tagouri:
This is what creates the shift in public opinion, preserving each other's humanity and protecting our stories. Considering the 3Ps, when we shift our public opinion, it will change our pop culture and politics, it starts with us. Make this personal because it is. How can your freedom and story ever truly be protected if other people's freedom and story is being attacked and erased?
Noor Tagouri:
The stories you collect, populate your world view. Rethink and revisit the narratives that have defined you. You can start by asking a question and more importantly, ask the question you were told never to ask. I'm Noor Tagouri, At Your Service.
Noor Tagouri:
Rep is a production of At Your Service, School of Humans and iHeart Podcasts. This show is written and produced by me, Noor Tagouri and Zaron Burnett. Assembly, editing, production sound design and scoring by Chris Childs. Theme song written and composed by Maimouna Yusuf AKA Mumu Fresh.
Noor Tagouri:
Our senior producer is Amelia Brock. Our associate producers are Sara [inaudible 01:02:30], Tyler Donahue and Betsy Cardenas. Mix and master by [inaudible 01:02:35] Fraser, fact checking by Savannah Hughley. Research consulting by [inaudible 01:02:39]. Our executive producers are Adam [inaudible 01:02:43], Zaron Burnett, Jason English and me, Noor Tagouri. Special thanks to Virginia Prescott from School of Humans and Will Pearson from iHeart Podcasts.
Noor Tagouri:
I'd also like to thank Bella Hadid, Aymann Ismail, Nadine Naber, Peter Beinart, James Zogby, Dalia Mogahed and Zaheer Ali for trusting us with these stories. If this podcast resonated with you and you'd like to support our show, please rate and review. Share with us how you personally related to this story of Rep. And for more Rep, tune in next time. I'm Noor Tagouri, At Your Service.
Noor Tagouri:
Rep.