The Kashmiri Bond With Palestine
Hafsa Kanjwal on Shared History and Struggle
The brutal execution of 12-year-old Muhammad al-Durrah in September of 2000, a few days into the Second Intifada, radicalized me. I was just around his age and the image of his father shielding him from the “Israeli” gunfire, the boy’s face in absolute fear just seconds before he was shot, remains imprinted in my brain. The next few months, I was glued to the TV, watching young Palestinian boys throwing rocks at “Israeli” tanks, in awe of their bravery against “Israeli” military might.
These scenes reignited memories of the 1990s in Kashmir, a period marked by armed resistance and a mass popular uprising — inspired by the First Intifada — against Indian rule. Amid the brutal war crimes committed by the Indian army, my family left Kashmir for the U.S. Growing up, I heard Kashmir and Palestine spoken about in the same breath — in the fervent prayers of the faithful and in the resigned explanations of the elders: yih chu Falasteenus manz ti gasaan (this is what happens in Palestine, too). Al-Durrah and the other young Palestinian boys felt like my own brothers and cousins; when I attended my first protests for Palestine, I was marching for Kashmir as well.
The Kashmiri bond with Palestine goes beyond the shared historical struggle for liberation or the realization that our oppressors share tactics. It’s rooted in a condition: of possibility, of human resilience, of spirit and faith, but also of constant disappointment amidst ongoing colonization. I felt this acutely when I first visited Palestine in the spring of 2010. The narratives of intergenerational trauma and fortitude, the stories of the martyrs and the fighters, felt achingly familiar. (I remember a young Kashmiri man who lost one eye to Indian pellets during a protest, only to say that he was ready to give his other eye the next day.) There were the everyday negotiations and compromises, too, in the way that so many people’s livelihoods were tied to the occupying power, the stinging betrayals of those who sold out the cause.
Kashmiris, like Palestinians, know what it means to be deprived of not only our homes, land, and livelihood, but also our dignity. What it’s like to ask a thief for your rights, to bow your head before an armed intruder, entreating them to release a relative from prison or to hand back a confiscated passport — these are the humiliations imposed by settler colonialism on both our peoples.
The most sinister tool in the arsenal of an occupying power is the narrative of its own inevitability. So many of us have come to internalize this sense of inevitability. Seeing Palestinians insist on the truth of their own history has returned me to my own. I am twelve again, watching, in awe, transfixed by the dawn of another world — where the death of our martyrs will not be in vain.