Page 11 - Vo Vo 5

RIHAB CHARIDA
Pictured: The Sea of Galilee from Korazim
Tell us about your political/radical activism history.
I grew up in the eighties in a household that was very politi- cally engaged and at a time that activism was very dynamic. My father is Palestinian and he lost his home when his village was invaded and destroyed by Jewish militia gangs (that later became the Israeli military) in 1948. Of course it’s not just land that is lost during the colonisation process, but the stories and personal family history that literally becomes scattered and fragmented. For me, perhaps because I’m so sentimental, the starting point of my activism grew out of the desire to learn about my family story and glean as much information as I could about our family tree, half of which was erased by the massacre that took place during the armed robbery of our ancestral lands. The more I learned about this story, the more I began to form a sense of not only justice (or the lack of) but also about the processes of demonising a people in order to justify attacking and stealing from them. This story is so similar to people that have been attacked and robbed everywhere so it wasn’t hard to make the connections. From that what began for me was a ‘radical’ view of power relations everywhere.
How does your identity or experience shape your activism?
I believe that identity is a very transient thing. There are a few aspects to my identity and they of course inform my activism. But I believe that fixed identities, or
reading everything through the way we identify can be very limiting if we are not careful. There have been times in my life growing up where I believe identifying in a certain way was limiting. They were important processes that I believe I needed to go through, but it is important that we don’t become caged in by constructed identities. For example,
I believe that when a people are fighting for self-determi- nation, if we are not careful we can adopt ways of thinking of ourselves as a people that are limited, constrained and that are defined by that alone. Seeing self-determination
as a transition only (rather than an end) is to imagine ways of being and evolving that is not merely in response to (the sometimes brutal) attempts of annihilation. That we were more and are more than that and we are not defined by that fight alone. That our being is not in response to or defence of something. I believe this is very important.