Palestinian men are also deserving of our grief
Today we have a guest author for the Master in Love blog, Carolina Hidalgo-McCabe. She has written for Master in Love before and today she is sharing a reflection on her time working in Palestine earlier this year. Thank you Carolina for sharing these words with us.
On a late September afternoon, I emerged from a yoga class with women from the Aida Refugee Camp in Bethlehem feeling refreshed, only to look out and see the apartheid wall looming over us from three sides. I turned to the instructor and my colleague and wondered out loud what this world would look like if men did yoga and meditation. She agreed it would be revolutionary, but quickly reversed course and stated that Palestinian men couldn’t do it because “we can’t let them get soft, we need them to be hard to defend us.” The intentional hardening of men is a strategy of “protection” and a tool for survival in Palestine.
Living under occupation, my male colleagues and friends grew up witnessing their fathers being humiliated by Israeli soldiers during raids and through daily checkpoints. The emasculation of men is a concerted strategy in conflict and colonialism. In order to survive, many men found solace in hardening their shells.
On my third day in the camp, the sounds of banging woke me up to an Israeli forces raid on the camp. Later that morning, I would find out that 11 men in the camp were arrested, taken to the cemetery, interrogated over the graves of their community members by an Israeli general, and released throughout the day. Women and children bore witness to the horrors and humiliation, they picked up the broken pieces of furniture in their homes, and warily continued on with their day.
When I went to work, my colleague Sadam showed me pictures of him being blindfolded and marched through the street before he was then interrogated. I asked him how he was dooing and his response was “عادي” or “normal.” The raids happened every couple of weeks and it was part of what it means to live under occupation. Sadam, like most Palestinian men, has trained himself and been forced not to feel the depths of pain and dehumanization brought about by the occupation. The forced hardening of men through dehumanizing and desensitizing them is systematic. The Israeli forces aim to break their spirits.
Palestinian society, out of a desire for protection and safety, cannot afford to allow their men to feel the pain which is inflicted on them. It’s a survival mechanism for men to strive for protector and provider status in any society, but especially in one under occupation. On the other hand, women are seen as maintainers of society and culture through child rearing and preservation. Nevertheless, during my time in Palestine, I witnessed the deep care, dreams, and emotional vulnerability of Palestinian men.
Norms of masculinity are constantly being made and remade based on context, culture, and conflict. Since the war began, on October 7th, expectations and understandings of Palestinian men have been central in news articles and analysis of the war. However, it is the absence of their suffering and death from casualty numbers that aim to evoke care that has startled me.
The other morning, a news alert popped up on my phone: “Conditions worsen for women and children in Gaza…” the New York Times headline began. Of course they are worsening. There’s a crisis beyond imaginable for the people of Gaza right now. The UN warns that half of Gazans are starving. Over 1.9 million Gazans are displaced and the Israeli forces have killed over 20,000 Gazans.
Conditions are worsening by the second. Israeli attacks are only intensifying. But, what headlines like that of the New York Times miss, among a myriad of other biases, is that to only consider the conditions for women and children is to emphasize the notion that Palestinian men are disposable.
The assumption that all men are fighters when in conflict settings is not unique. Nevertheless, the presumption largely falls on Arab men in the Middle East due to harmful stereotypes and Islamophobia from the West.
The men and boys of Gaza cannot be assumed to be fighters or less worthy of our empathy. They are full human beings. They dream of becoming engineers, pilots, soccer players, doctors, journalists, taxi drivers and more. They are not targets, they are human beings that must not be overlooked.
As I scroll through social media, I bear witness to the cries of Palestinian men in Gaza. They are the first ones at the scenes of bombings, digging their children out from under the rubble; they’re holding their babies who have been killed by senseless airstrikes, they are leaning on one another in their grief and shock.
Last month, Abu Deya'a, a Gazan father and grandfather, lost his grandchildren to an Israeli airstrike. In the videos that emerged after, he is cradling his lifeless granddaughter, Reem. He calls her the soul of his soul in Arabic. His humanity, her humanity, our humanities are intertwined. Men, women, children. The people of Gaza are suffering deeply and men like Abu Deya'a must not be viewed as anything less than the caring human beings that they are.
I see Palestinian men courageously working on the ground as journalists, like Motaz Azaiza who shares his tears with the world as he continues to capture the horror that is unfolding or Wael Dahdouh who was recently shot by Israeli forces after he continued to report from Gaza even after his wife, son, daughter, and grandson were killed by a targeted Israeli strike.
But, Gazan men do not need to be exceptional to deserve our empathy. They do not need to be doctors for us to see them worthy of life. Valerie Kaur, a brilliant and thoughtful civil rights leader, calls on us to look at strangers and repeat in our head “father, brother, sister, mother, auntie, uncle…” and so on. We must look at the people of Gaza knowing that they are a part of us that we do not yet know.
When I see the men of Gaza, I see the faces of my friends and colleagues from my time in Bethlehem, Palestine. I see the face of my friend Rumi, who led the children’s circus school and was excited to learn Spanish. I see the face of Sadam, who learned that I loved sweet potatoes and grilled me one of the best meals of my life on the rooftop of the center we worked at. I think of Samir, who volunteered his time at the center and sat with me to make friendship bracelets in the office during my second week. “Brother, Uncle, Grandfather, Father, Son.”
The men of Palestine, and in general, men in conflicts or wars cannot be assumed as collateral damage or disposable. The loss of life of a man, along with women and children must be recognized for what it is: the tragic death of a human being who deserved to live a full life with freedom to move and dream.
Living in Amman, Jordan for the past two months of the war, I’ve heard from Palestinian and Jordanian friends similar frustrations at assumed guilt or fighter identity of Palestinian men. Recently, a Palestinian friend of mine asked me what it would take for the world to see him as fully human and fully equal. When I thanked him for his tremendous hospitality and kindness, he said Palestinians have the best hospitality because they crave to be received with that same level of love and respect one day.
When we are in times of profound darkness, we are afforded with the possibilities of imagining new realities, new worlds that are beyond what we have imagined. What would it mean to see the loss of life for men living through war as a full loss of life? To see the lives of teenage boys in conflict as worthy? To radically shift our assumptions and see the equal worth of every human life: women, children, and men?