In her book My People Shall Live, Leila Khaled says: “I, as a citizen of Haifa, am not allowed to bask in its sun, breathe its clear air, live there with my people.”
As a citizen of this great nation of South Africa, her name should bask under the African sun and she should live in symbolism among the people who achieved the freedom she has struggled and longed for.
In a commendable act of solidarity with the oppressed people of Palestine, there's a proposal to rename Sandton Drive Leila Khaled by the Johannesburg city council.
Where the proposal originated is irrelevant to the question of its integrity — what matters is the attempt by the Johannesburg council to create space for a Palestinian in the face of decades of the erasure of Palestine by immortalising its beloved daughter.
Like all Palestinians, Khaled embodies the spirit of resistance to oppression, something South Africans can relate to and must always unite upon.
But unlike the Zionist state of Israel and its friends, there are South Africans in the Johannesburg city council who do not wish her away for simply being Palestinian or because she dared to assert her humanity and that of her people in an act of armed resistance.
Unlike all Palestinians, she dared to take the role of a practitioner of armed struggle — the legitimacy of which none of us will ever be qualified to pass moral judgments on.
She was expelled from her homeland in 1948 at the age of four. In our comfort of statehood and safety of sovereignty, we have a responsibility to firmly stand in solidarity with oppressed people against all manifestations of the chilling effects of repression.
A street name in her honour is the least we can do.
She has been denied a sense of home by a brutal Zionist occupation whose claim to a biblical birthright to Palestinian land has rendered her a refugee for life. Many of us will never go a day with the deep emotional disconnect of rootlessness that refugees like her contend with daily.
But unlike the Zionist state of Israel and its friends, there are South Africans in the Johannesburg city council who do not wish her away for simply being Palestinian or because she dared to assert her humanity and that of her people in an act of armed resistance.
My People Shall Live was published 53 years ago, two years after her first act of armed resistance against the harsh realities of the same global anti-Palestinian posture that has culminated in South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
For five decades, Khaled has remained a vocal proponent of the Palestinian demand for the right to self-determination, a state with Jerusalem as its capital, the right to return for refugees and the withdrawal of Israel from all the land it has occupied since 1967.
The response over the past five decades has been more confiscation of Palestinian land and resources and the wanton expansion of settlements to entrench the illegal occupation of Palestine, and the brutality of checkpoints.
Detentions and prosecution in the Israeli military court system of many Palestinians including children as young as 12 and the current decimation of the ghetto that is the Gaza Strip and its inhabitants persists.
Thanks to Donald Trump, the cementing of Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem, the little hope of East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state was squashed, and opposition by Palestinians has led to more deaths.
The great march of return, held peacefully by Palestinians in Gaza along Israel’s apartheid wall, led to hundreds of Palestinian deaths, much like any attempt to denounce Israeli expropriation of Palestinian land ends up. Meanwhile, millions of Palestinians languish in exile, some stateless in refugee camps such as Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon.
At 80 years of age, Khaled is a survivor of settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing, an Arab revolutionary voice and a lifelong fighter for the freedom of her people — her courage is equivalent to that of the heroes whose blood liberated this nation, her name belongs in South Africa.
She has not seen her beloved home on Stanton Street, Haifa, in 76 years, she lives in Jordan as a Palestinian refugee. And for a people in a city that triumphed in apartheid, to deny her a place in Johannesburg is to reject the Palestinian struggle.
Those, like myself, who would rejoice to see her name inscribed in the richest square mile in Africa will continue to sing “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.