GAZA

• The NDP’s disciplinary response and the removal of her from caucus cannot be separated from the current climate.
• It is right in the middle of a nationwide Islamophobic backlash, where scores of others are also experiencing a wide range of institutional discipline.
• But this wasn’t enough for the Progressive Conservative government, who put forward a motion the next week to censure her.

Controversy is nothing new

• For Jama, a Black disabled Muslim woman of Somali heritage, controversy is nothing new.
• As Jama has said: “Mak[ing] people feel uncomfortable” has always been part of her work.

Climate of Islamophobia

• To understand this surge, it’s crucial to recognize the influence of the “Islamophobia Industry” in Canada.
• Sociologist Jasmin Zine, a noted authority on Islamophobia, delineates this industry as a conglomerate of media outlets, political figures, far-right, white nationalist groups and Islamophobia influencers and ideologues, among others, fostering an environment where harmful stereotypes of Muslims as innately provocative and violent become commonplace.
• Read more:
  How Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism are manufactured through disinformation

  This racialization lumps more than a billion Muslims into an undifferentiated mass, exploited by public discourse that sensationalizes violent narratives, devoid of geopolitical context or history.

Examples of anti-Black Islamophobia

Navigating the multiple forms of jeopardy faced by Black Muslim women means simultaneously surviving both interpersonal and structural anti-Blackness and Islamophobia. Anti-Black, hate-motivated Islamophobia is often directed at women. Here are some examples:
Feminist geographer Délice Mugabo explains: “anti-Black Islamophobia” is the exclusion of Black people from the category of the human and Muslims from the category of the citizen. Consequently, fidelity to the nation, and constitution as a person is readily up for interrogation.

Read more:
CSIS targeting of Canadian Muslims reveals the importance of addressing institutional Islamophobia

The trouble ‘they’ cause

• In practice, this double jeopardy leaves Black Muslim communities suspended, saddled with heightened vulnerabilities, and often erased from dominant discourses surrounding both anti-Blackness and Islamophobia.
• There are few grounds available to provoke so called “trouble.” Trouble is disorder, disturbance, violation of expectations, norms and values.
• As a Black Muslim, you’re already seen as trouble incarnated.

Interconnected liberation

• However, just as oppression is interconnected, so is liberation.
• Jama made her first public appearance at a peace protest this past weekend in Toronto.

Nadiya Nur Ali has received funding from The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). She is also affiliated with the National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM).

• The Israeli bombardment of Gaza following the Hamas attack on southern Israel on October 7 has forced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians out of their homes.
• At least 43% of all housing units in the Gaza Strip have been either destroyed or damaged since the start of the hostilities, according to the Ministry of Public Works and Housing in Gaza.
• Israel says that 1,400 people were killed in the Hamas attack on Israel and more than 220 taken hostage.
• Domicide refers to the deliberate destruction of home, or the killing of the city or home.

The destruction of Homs

• My home city of Homs, Syria, which I focus on in my research, has been completely transformed since the 2011 uprising against the government of Bashar al Assad.
• Over 50% of the neighbourhoods have been heavily destroyed, and over a quarter partially destroyed.
• In Homs, for example, whole neighbourhoods that opposed the Assad regime were targeted and razed to the ground.

Domicide in Gaza

• There is no need to compare Homs and Gaza, as each place has its own context and struggle.
• Gaza has been described as an open prison and people in that open prison have been pushed away from their homes.
• Raz Segal, an Israeli historian, wrote: “Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is quite explicit, open, and unashamed.” Others argue vehemently against any moral equivalence with the Hamas attacks.

Catastrophe for Palestinians

• It’s not the first time that Palestinians in Gaza have had their homes destroyed.
• Many of the Palestinians who live in Gaza are people who have been displaced before.
• This is why many academics, activists, journalists and even Queen Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan, call for context, for situating the Palestinian struggle within a history of suffering, dispossession and forced displacement since the Nakba (catastrophe) in 1948.

Ammar Azzouz receives funding from British Academy for his research fellowship at the university.

• More than 5,700 people in Gaza have been reportedly killed by Israeli airstrikes in two weeks of relentless bombardment – at least 2,000 of whom are children.
• More than 200 more people, including women, children and elderly people, were seized and taken into Gaza.

How has such a tiny strip of land – less than half the size of Berlin – become so critical to the politics of an entire region? Over the past 75 years, the Gaza Strip has frequently been the focal point of the conflict between Israel and Palestine. Here are six key moments that led up to the current crisis:

1. 1948: Palestinian dispossession

• By this time, more than 750,000 Palestinians – around three-quarters of the population – had been turned into refugees.
• Their dispossession became known in Arabic as the Nakba (catastrophe).
• The Strip’s famously dense population today can be traced directly to the dispossession of 1948.

2. 1956: First Israeli occupation of Gaza

As Gaza was administered by Egypt after 1948, it became a key battleground in the 1956 Suez crisis. After Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal Company, Britain, France and Israel launched an attack on Egypt. As part of this, Israel occupied Gaza with evidence of plans for long-term occupation.
In the event, due to US intervention, Israel and its allies were defeated and Washington forced Israel to withdraw its troops early in 1957. But this would not be the last time it occupied the Strip.

3. 1967: Israel begins long-term occupation of Gaza and the West Bank

• It captured the Golan Heights from Syria, the West Bank from Jordan, and the Gaza Strip and the Sinai desert from Egypt.
• This began its long-term military occupation of the two parts of Palestine not taken in 1948: the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

4. 1987: First intifada begins

In December 1987, an Israeli army truck crashed into a car in Gaza, killing four Palestinians. The incident sparked the beginning of the first intifada (uprising), which would eventually spread across the whole of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
Palestinians in both occupied territories boycotted Israeli goods, refused to pay taxes, and withdrew their labour from Israeli employers. There was also widespread stone-throwing at Israeli army vehicles and soldiers. The intifada shook up longstanding Israeli assumptions that most Palestinians were passive in the face of the occupation, and is credited as a key factor in forcing negotiations in the early 1990s.

5. 1994: Yasser Arafat sets up the Palestinian Authority in Gaza

From 1993-95, the Israeli and Palestinian leaders, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, signed the Oslo Accords, a set of agreements designed to pave the way for a full peace deal. Oslo allowed for limited Palestinian autonomy in parts of the occupied territories.

• In 1994, Arafat was instrumental in establishing the Palestinian Authority (PA) in Gaza City, from which Israeli forces partially withdrew.
• Read more:
  Inside the Oslo accords: a new podcast series marks 30 years since Israel-Palestine secret peace negotiations

6. 2007: Hamas takes power in Gaza

• Again, the Gaza Strip was at the centre of this.
• In 2006, Hamas won Palestinian parliamentary elections, taking 44% of the vote.
• Since then, Palestinians in Gaza have faced continual violence, with particularly intensive Israeli bombing campaigns in 2008-9, 2012, 2014 and 2021.

Anne Irfan receives funding from the British Academy

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