Merdeka, Palestine

In 1960, the Singaporean Malay public intellectual Harun Aminurrashid travelled to Jerusalem. It was a stop on his journey through Arab countries after a pilgrimage to Mecca. He wrote about his experiences in Meninjau ka-Negara Sham (Viewing the Levant). In Jerusalem, past and present forged tangled paths. Narrow lanes, mules, and antique houses transported Harun to “a society of olden days, untouched by the influence of this atomic age.” 

However, anti-colonial struggles for freedom in the Third World crept into conversations with locals. When Harun mentioned Singapore’s proximity to Indonesia, the imam of Al-Aqsa Mosque praised Sukarno for fostering Afro-Asian solidarity. At Harun’s hotel, a waitress asked why he carries a British passport. Harun explained that his government only controlled internal affairs then, but “before long, Singapore will most certainly become a free nation.” Negara merdeka. In the dying rays of a colonial sunset, Harun’s imperial passport let him move through an increasingly bordered world. His optimism belied the bitter quarrels to come over merger, Malaysia and race, over which Palestine also loomed.

All around him, people seemed to be heading farther away from sovereignty and freedom. The waitress, a Christian Palestinian, took Harun to a rooftop and pointed at the town of her birth, annexed by Israel, to which she could not return. Harun’s Palestinian driver, Herrand, narrated what he and others he knew experienced during the 1948 Nakba, the mass expulsion and dispossession of Palestinians. His trembling voice often went silent, and grief was written on his face, said Harun. Jordan’s troops patrolled the West Bank, areas it controlled until Israel captured them in the Six-Day War of 1967. UN flags marked its buffer zone with Israel, a “No Man’s Land”. Palestine was, and remained, a fractured landscape.

“Doctor, are you going to Lebanon to help my people?” said a Palestinian professor to Ang, as she recalled in From Beirut to Jerusalem. He was from Jaffa, he said, where the famous Jaffa oranges first grew. His people became refugees, but “Palestine” was a real place. “Doctor, you must see Palestine.” 

She was not entirely convinced, but in the Beirut camps of Sabra and Shatila where Palestinian refugees lived, Ang met “people who were warm and generous and who kept telling me of a home their young had never seen. Of a place called Palestine they were forced to flee in 1948. And their determination to return one day.” They taught her Palestinian history, songs, dances, and the patterns they wove on cloth. She tasted za’atar and Arabic coffee for the first time in a bombed-out home. 

In their encounters with Palestine, both our travellers were proven wrong. Harun knew it was a historical space shared by all three Abrahamic traditions, but was nonetheless struck by the peaceful Muslim-Christian relations he saw, which predated the state of Israel and thrived in spite of it. While a Muslim pilgrim, the sites he visited—associated with Rachel, Jacob, Abraham and the Virgin Mary—occupied less bounded identities, being revered by all Palestinians. Harun was puzzled that locals of both faiths say “alhamdulillah” (praise be to God) and “in sha’ Allah” (if God wills it). 

Ang, meanwhile, held convictions about Israel’s special place in religious narratives, where a biblical past provided a framework to explain modern territorial claims. No matter how much that past was being imposed on the present, however, to drive it in a particular direction, the present refused. Ang reckoned with the reality in front of her. In September, a month after she arrived, Israeli-backed Lebanese militias murdered perhaps as many as 3,000 Palestinians over two days and nights, in what’s known as the Sabra-Shatila Massacre. Ang was there, treating a relentless stream of the injured and dying, surrounded by screaming and gunfire outside the hospital walls. Ordinary people did not despair, however, inspiring Ang to become an outspoken advocate of Palestinian liberation. While Ang painted this as a dramatic transformation, it also feels rooted in her existing commitment to humanitarian justice. She founded the British NGO, Medical Aid for Palestinians in 1984.

Palestine blurred the lines and boxes both Harun and Ang were conditioned to see, especially religious ones. Object, text and practice have long connected Singaporeans to Palestine as a sacred geography and past. Generations were raised to know the Hebrew prophets, with Bethlehem and Nazareth on their lips. As a child I was regaled about the Night Journey of Muhammad, who travelled from Mecca to Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, then up into Heaven and back. Along the way he meets all the prophets before him before speaking to God, with Palestine at the centre of this movement across time and dimensions of existence.

But which level of time and space do we attend to? Many lament the burden of millennia here, over which people manipulated by stories have been fighting over hallowed soil. Our ministers now say that it’s not our place to interfere in an ancient struggle between “Semitic tribes”. Yet the refrain that there is “too much history and too many prophets” in Palestine is often invoked to dismiss the urgency of the present. Scholars point out the centuries of peaceful co-existence in historic Palestine between Muslims, Christians and Jews, who all enjoyed status and security under Ottoman rule. The stranger is Zionism, which alongside events unfolding now, have far more recent origins. 

As a modern political movement, Zionism attempts to identify all Jews with its aims of creating a mono-ethnic state. Its founders, including the Hungarian-Jewish journalist Theodor Herzl, were honest about the colonial plan that was needed to ensure its success, as he wrote in a plea for help to the notorious British imperialist Cecil Rhodes: “How then do I turn to you, since this is an out-of-the-way matter for you? How indeed? Because it is something colonial…” In 1895, Herzl wrote in his diary of the need to “spirit the penniless population across the border”, thus making Palestine’s ethnic cleansing central to the Zionist project. 

The myth of an ancient conflict also holds that the state of Israel fulfils an “indigenous” right of Jewish return after a long time of exile. While the “Promised Land” has doubtless been meaningful to Jews for centuries, the idea that they are entitled to their own state in Palestine was a 19th-century invention. Zionism’s disdain for Palestine’s local population as inferior or non-existent, its narrative of a divine mandate, and objectives of territorial conquest and demographic replacement share much with modern European colonialism. 

The Ottoman state’s leadership of the Muslim world had been acknowledged by the Malays in distant South-east Asia, but internal discontent and the outbreak of world war one provided a pretext for Arab nationalists to revolt. In return, European powers agreed to support an independent and united Arab state. Instead, the British and French carved up the Ottoman empire for themselves. Zionist colonisation of Palestine must be situated in this context of Europeans establishing forms of political and territorial control over former Ottoman lands. The British took over Palestine as a “Mandate”, and as per the 1917 Balfour Declaration promising the Jews a “national homeland” there (without Arab consultation), provided a system for mass Jewish immigration and settlement. Under British cover, Zionist militias seized land and depopulated Arab towns and villages. The Balfour Declaration’s second-half, saying “nothing shall be done to prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”, continues to contradict Israel as a Jewish-supremacist state.

Attending this recent past contextualises why Singaporeans have developed distinct relationships with modern Palestinian history, that aren’t reducible to their membership in religious groups programming them to act in ways they “always” have. Policing discussion in the name of preserving “racial and religious harmony” removes what’s happening from its material, historical reality. For we are in fact, in history, and for Palestine this has been described by scholar Rashid Khalidi as “a colonial war waged against the indigenous population, by a variety of parties, to force them to relinquish their homeland to another people against their will.” Singapore is no outsider to this history, embroiled as we were in the 20th century’s battles over who had a right to a homeland. 

Colonial officials in British Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, fearing the mobilisation of their subjects against them, portrayed Islam and Arabs as a subversive foreign influence on hapless “native” Muslims. Never mind that Arabs had been both opponents and collaborators of colonial rule: the gentlemen-sayyids of British Singapore served as community representatives and Justices of the Peace. Yet that stereotype echoes today, in ominous terms like “Arabisation”, or the trope of Singaporean Malays’ divided loyalties. Nowadays our ministers speak of Singaporean Muslims as a “model” of success, thanks to the nation’s guiding hand. That Islam was once a resource for radical action, in response to unequal structures, is buried under the narrative of a clash between Western (thus secular) and Islamic “civilisations”.

Just before the 1948 Nakba, Muslims in Singapore—Malays, South Asians, and Arabs—stood with Palestinians against the ongoing Western intervention. In December 1947, 4,000 Singapore Muslims protested in Kampung Gelam against the UN’s plan to partition Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states, with one speaker threatening jihad (struggle for a noble cause, often glossed as “holy war”). The catastrophic and blood-soaked Partition of India by the British, also along religious lines the British long exacerbated, had just unfolded in August that year. 

Were these Muslims just Jew-hating fanatics? The call for jihad issued in this period was hardly different from that declared by the Ottoman sultan against the Allied Powers in world war one. Are “secular” wars more acceptable than “holy” ones? There’s little to suggest, in the Singapore newspapers at least, that Muslims perceived something particular to Jews or Jewishness that made them especially loathsome. Further, Jews had been in South-east Asia since at least the 11th century and there’s scant evidence that antisemitism existed in the old Malay world to the endemic degree it did in Europe since mediaeval times. 

While the historian Ronit Ricci found that some popular Islamic texts circulating in the Malay world portrayed Jews ambiguously, pantuns depicted them as neutral features of Malayan life. One 19th-century ballad of romance and adventure, the Syair Siti Zubaidah Perang Cina, even imagined a Jewish quarter in a prosperous Malay royal city: 

Di ujung negeri kampung Yahudi
Kotanya batu gedung bersendi
Kerjanya masak air berandi
Ada yang mengisar gandumnya padi

At a corner of the city is the Jewish quarter
With stone fortifications, and well-joined storehouses
Brewing brandy is their work
Some of them mill wheat into flour

Neither were Jews outcasts in British Malaya. Once there were hundreds of Jews in Penang and Singapore, mostly Sephardic trading families from Iraq and Iran but also wealthy European (Ashkenazi) Jews. It’s unsurprising that there was Zionist activism in Singapore, given its importance as a major port-city where several nationalist movements converged. The Singapore Zionist Society (SZS), most active between 1920 and 1930, raised thousands of Straits Dollars for the Jewish National Fund, an organisation that bought land in Palestine for Jewish settlement. When Albert Einstein, a German Jewish physicist visited Singapore in 1922, the SZS gave him a lavish reception. 

Einstein’s position on Israel wavered his whole life, sympathetic to a “Jewish homeland” but disturbed by Zionist violence. Most of Singapore’s Jewish community were indifferent and even critical of Zionism, unlike the handful of elites who led the SZS. This was especially pronounced following the 1930 Passfield White Paper, which stated Britain’s obligation to protect Arab interests and halt Jewish immigration to Palestine. The policy was later reversed by the MacDonald Letter of 1931, but most of Singapore’s Jews remained wary of the Zionist cause, lest it be construed as disloyalty to the British. David Marshall, later Singapore’s first chief minister and probably our most famous Jewish citizen, publicly condemned a Zionist agent—one who had come to Singapore in 1934 and scolded local Jewish residents for ignoring his house-to-house donation drive.  

Jewish life in Singapore reflected an expansive “Jewishness” beyond Zionism, that was irreducible to national borders. Most of the Baghdadi Jews spoke Arabic as their first language, just as Jews from throughout the Middle East had for centuries. Yahya Cohen, a respected Singapore surgeon of Yemeni and Iraqi Jewish parentage, spoke a Judeo Arabic patois. Singapore’s Jewish quarter—between Selegie Road and Waterloo Street—was called by an Arabic name, the mahallah (“place”). Adding to those long histories of living across regions and cultures, Jews adopted the Malay language when they came to this part of the world. 

“We spoke Malay and English (perhaps a bit of Mandarin), and used many expressions I recognize now as Arab (but which still register as Jewish),” wrote Hilda Daniel, whose grandparents came to Singapore from Bombay and Baghdad. The European Jews were not much different. Annetta Ginsburg’s “proper Queen’s English”, recalled her granddaughter Lisa, “was mixed with Malay phrases and a colloquial syntax, reminiscent of the Yiddish spoken in shtetls her grandparents had left behind.” Ginsburg’s Lithuanian Jewish grandparents fled to Singapore from Russian pogroms. In return, Jews have left visible legacies in Malaya. Elias Road in my hometown Pasir Ris was named after the Calcutta-born magnate Joseph Elias, who had a seaside villa there. Victor Clumeck, raised in Cairo’s Jewish community, ran Ayam Brand in Singapore together with its founder Alfred Clouet, and imported the European majolica tiles that adorn Malaya’s shophouses.

It’s hard to square these stories with the idea that Jews only belong to one land, can only be safe there, and have one “true” language. These Malayan Jews were not more foreign than everyone else marooned on our shores. They’re also part of a bigger story that blurs supposedly opposite “Jewish” and “Arab” identities. In When We Were Arabs, Massoud Hayoun, who identifies as a Jewish Arab, painted a cosmopolitan world his family inhabited in Egypt before the 1950s, when Jewish actors in Arabic films wore fine suits and walked along the Nile. The Jewish Arab is not trapped in that bygone age, Hayoun said, for “there are elements of the Arab world that you carry with you even when generations of colonialism have made you feel that you must let it go.”

I do not wish to interpret away the lachrymose centuries of antisemitic persecution culminating in the Holocaust. But that was the Jewish experience in Europe, as the Iraqi Jewish historian Avi Shlaim has argued; not that of Jews in the Arab lands. “I now assert my right to narrate our own history, which is very different,” he said in a 2023 interview. “It’s a history of centuries of harmony between Muslims, and Christians and the other minorities.” 

These layered belongings, so much a part of life before nation-states, have shrunk behind hard edges. Jews once spoke Malay in a time and place when most other communities did, partaking in something resembling kinship. With several exceptions, the Islamic world—from al-Andalus to the Malay Archipelago—absorbed and permitted difference, which is why antisemitism was not invented there.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fabricated text claiming that Jewish leaders plotted a global conspiracy, also gained audiences in Indonesia in the late 20th century. In both countries, old European stereotypes about Jewish economic control were mapped onto a familiar racial target, the Chinese. Their dominance in South-east Asian business once led the Siamese king Vajiravudh to call them the “Jews of the Orient” in a 1914 article, though even that likely followed his exposure to European antisemitism. It’s worth pointing out that anti-Chinese racism in South-east Asia is also among the toxic byproducts of colonial rule, which accentuated class stratifications along racial lines and promoted notions of Chinese “foreignness”. But the post-colonial elites who perpetuated racism hardly seemed to practise it themselves: while Mahathir and Suharto, Indonesia’s president from 1968 to 1998, scapegoated the Chinese for fleecing “natives”, they reaped handsome gains from their Chinese cronies like Francis Yeoh and Liem Sioe Liong.

Like many Malays of my generation, I grew up with antisemitic ideas long before I met any Jewish people. They flowed through popular religious media and family talk. Unlike the Islamic discourses of the early to mid-1900s, however, these narratives offered thin political analyses, painting an epochal battle between Jews and Muslims that would culminate in the Day of Judgement. Because the issue was never discussed with sensitivity or nuance in the public sphere, this was my only explanation for what happened in Palestine. I heard outlandish theories about my favourite cartoons and video games being fronts for a Jewish “agenda” to brainwash or weaken Muslims. As Malaya’s Jewish population had dwindled after world war two, this was a peculiar “antisemitism without Jews”. 

A scroll of social media activism these days, however, shows how much Malays have unlearned these narratives. Like young Muslims elsewhere, we emphasise the historical and political stakes—rather than theological ones—of Palestine’s struggle. They are joined by Singaporean youths of all religious and ethnic backgrounds. There is a growing awareness that anti-Zionism must translate to principled solidarity with all oppressed groups, as criticisms mount over Malaysia’s and Indonesia’s poor treatment of groups such as the Orang Asli and Rohingyas. Pledges of “solidarity” by leaders there can ring hollow when one realises their political convenience.

The core objection to Israeli discrimination, land-theft, and murder of Palestinians should never be wed to racist generalisations about Jews as Jews. The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, signed in 2020 by international scholars on Jewish, Holocaust, Israel, Palestine and Middle East Studies, provides clear guidelines on what constitutes antisemitism. Opposition to Zionism as a form of nationalism, and evidence-based criticism of Israel as a state, are not antisemitic. This clarity is key given how accusations of “antisemitism” have become potent dog-whistles to discredit critics of Israel. 

After a certain point, disavowing antisemitism and terrorism becomes a ritual that people come to expect, if not demand, of Muslims to certify our innocence. This is especially punishing for Palestinians, as activist Mohammed El-Kurd described: “Not only do we live in fear of displacement at the hands of a colonialism that professes itself as Jewish, not only are our people bombarded by an army that marches under what it claims is the Jewish flag, and not only do Israeli politicians over enunciate the Jewishness of their operations, we are told to disregard the Star of David soaring on their flag.”

Perhaps Malays are more attuned to the Palestinian cause due to their own experience of discrimination. There is no comparison with what the Palestinians endure, but Singapore’s historic racism against Malays is explicitly connected to its self-image as a Chinese island in a Muslim sea and the Israel of South-east Asia: small but rich, high-tech, and guarded by the region’s most powerful military. Our deep defence ties with the Zionist state, dating back to our expulsion from Malaysia, are well-documented and publicly acknowledged. Only Israel, among other countries approached, agreed to help our military planners. This doesn’t mean we owe them a special debt, or ignore the fact that many Malay Singaporeans also oppose the Israeli occupation based on its assault on fundamental human rights and dignity. The humanitarian core of the Palestinian struggle is what captures the imagination of people across cultural and religious lines in Singapore today. 

That hasn’t stopped the issue from being clouded by old tropes of dangerous Malays and Muslims who need reform and surveillance. Muslims were seemingly singled out in the wake of Israel’s latest revenge campaign on Gaza, with the Islamic Religious Council of Singapore (MUIS)—a statutory board of the Ministry of Culture, Community, and Youth—releasing an advisory in November 2023 to help the community address events in Gaza in a “wise, constructive and positive way”. That meant praying for peace, strengthening relationships and participating in humanitarian efforts: admirable deeds in themselves, no doubt, but apolitical gestures for what demands a political response. They barely dent complicit structures and institutions. As individualised acts, they also curb the legitimacy of collective action as a vehicle to articulate principled positions. Only the state decides what is “constructive and positive”.

That’s all standard fare for the Singapore government on most other issues, not just Palestine. However, the paradox of the MUIS advisory is in its encouragement of racial and religious divisions even as it warns the public from doing so. Saying Muslims have a special responsibility to behave perpetuates the chestnut that Palestine is a specifically Muslim concern, while downplaying many Singaporean Christians’ passionate pro-Israeli stance, as Ang had attested. While the state restricts expression under the pretext of preventing religious tensions, it also places more burden on one community to exercise restraint.

When charismatic evangelical Christianity spread from the US to Singapore in the 1970s, so did its Zionist leanings. Offshoots of American churches here promote Israel’s role in hastening Jesus’ return to Earth. Opposition to Israel’s existence is equated with Satan’s attempts to obstruct the Second Coming. Similar to narratives promoted by Islamic ideologues from the 1970s, these apocalyptic themes are common in Christian Zionism, ideas held by Protestants since the 19th century which share a desire for the Jewish settlement of Palestine and belief in the modern state of Israel’s special role in God’s plans. 

While liberal Protestants saw Israel as a humanitarian issue in the years following world war two, conservative evangelicals galvanised around it as both a theological and political issue after the Six-Day War. Through the Cold War decades of the 1970s-80s, Israel stood for “Judeo-Christian civilisation” standing up to the “barbarism” of the communist Eastern bloc and Third World. A natural alliance formed between Christian Zionists and the Israeli right-wing, notably the Likud Party which rose to power in 1977 and dominates today’s Israeli government.

Our leaders don’t espouse these religious positions, but their appeals to the security of sovereign nations unwittingly serve these fundamentalists’ strategic narrative. Try as it might to separate the religious or racial from politics, Singapore’s approach aligns with a dominant discourse of Israel’s innocence as a state, in contrast to Arab and Muslim evil. This language grew louder after al-Qaeda’s attacks on September 11th 2001. Islamic “terror” replaced Soviet communism as the threat to Western “freedom” and “democracy”, represented by Israel as a lone outpost in the Middle East.

We hear this language doing its work throughout the global security net of information and coercion. Conscripted into the “war on terror”, Singapore upholds the violence of the state as an inviolable “right to self-defence” (as long as it obeys international law!), while the violence of non-state actors never has moral standing no matter the context. We are part of a liberal international order defined by what legal historian Samera Esmeir called the “sacred territorial mandate”. In this order, passive “civilians” with territorial rights are inherently considered blameless compared to those without territory who fight for those rights. Palestinians, who resist their confinement and expulsion, deploying any means necessary to return to their land, fail this test. 

Singapore naturalises that ethos in its red lines regarding Israel: our leadership doesn’t question the latter’s “right to exist” and it opposes any resolution that equates Zionism with racism. Despite its rhetorical support for a two-state solution, these non-negotiables enable Israel’s continued territorial expansion, making any viable Palestinian state elusive. Yes, Singaporean leaders occasionally denounce Israeli expansionism through settlers, and vote accordingly at the UN. But, according to political analysts Kevjn Lim and Mattia Tomba, sources close to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs claimed that Singapore generally supports Palestinian resolutions at the UN “irrespective of what we may think of their merits, in order to give ourselves political cover to develop substantive relationships with Israel.” There is no equal negotiation in a world ruled by the sacred territorial mandate.

In her novel And the Rain my Drink, the Chinese-Eurasian doctor Han Suyin mused over this merry-go-round of counterinsurgency: “Thus it had been in Palestine, with Jew and Arab; thus it would be in Malaya, with Malay and Chinese, the latter interlopers and Reds out for trouble, and to be dealt with. And, dealt with, all would be fine in the colonial garden, until somewhere else things would be hotting up and the surplus police would be shipping it to another Colony, another Emergency, further promotions, pensions and allowances.”

Han wrote thinly fictionalised versions of individuals like Gerald Templer, a British commander who helped crush the Great Palestinian Revolt (1936-39) before becoming High Commissioner of Malaya to do a similar job: quelling the communist revolution. Alex Josey was an intelligence officer in Palestine where he met the Mandate’s chief secretary, Henry Gurney. Both went to Malaya, where Josey headed psychological warfare against the communists, before becoming Lee Kuan Yew’s propagandist and biographer. Gurney was Templer’s predecessor, but was assassinated by MCP fighters three years into office.

Should we think of ourselves as being so far from Palestine, when our shared histories of colonial repression join us at the hip? While our government today warns against interfering in “external” events, it maintains strong cross-border relations with Israel, which hawks its military hardware at the Singapore Airshow. The war on Gaza was a selling point, according to Haaretz, Israel’s newspaper of record. Instead of thinking in terms of “us” Singaporeans as separate from national identities elsewhere, we are once again seeing the return of internationalist thinking amongst our ordinary citizens in solidarity with peoples abroad. Structures of power collaborate across borders just as they have since colonial times, and so can people.

The nation-state is the most dominant structure of power today, and we are responsible for its reform. Both Singapore and Israel share an ideology that glorifies the nation-state as the supreme form of human organisation, converting wilderness into civilisation, replacing lazy natives with industrious citizens. Israel’s popular claim that they “made the desert bloom” echoes Singapore’s epic transformation from swamp to garden city. All that existed before is demoted as prehistory; there must only be dunes and mangroves there, and people without a nation. Hardworking limbs bring the nation into historical time by “improving” the land. 

With the borders erect, old relationships and ties of kinship with immediate neighbours dissolve into suspicion. Like Israelis, Singaporeans may fancy themselves having more shared tastes and cultural references with distant residents of the “Global North” than countries next-door. These exceptionalist visions belie fundamental relations of dependency on the resources of the surrounding landscape, both human and material. Questioning Israel’s “right to exist” also interrogates whether nation-states should exist at all, which gets to the foundations of our postwar international system. 

The cost is steep in all cases, but few have paid as high a price as the Palestinians. They have faced specific historical wrongs that cannot only be attributed to the design of nation-states. Israel, unlike most countries, is an aggressive, apartheid settler-colony that vastly overpowers its supposed threats. Its mythology of primordial attachment to the land is tied to the exploitation of Holocaust trauma, so Israel, unlike other countries, can never do wrong in a world of antisemites ever bent on its destruction. Palestinians are made to bear undue responsibility for compromising for “peace”. 

It is true, admitted Palestinian scholar Edward Said, that the Palestinian leadership hasn’t always served its people’s best interests, while the Arab governments are corrupt and incompetent. He nevertheless questioned why “alone of all people, Palestinians are supposed to be content with the denial of their right to self-determination.” The question will continue to be asked: why should Palestine pay for the sins and guilt of antisemitic Europe? Above all, the harrowing calamity in Gaza now demands an overhaul of the Oslo Accords and its two-state consensus, which Said called an “instrument of Palestinian surrender” to Israel. 

Space for such expression is more constricted today, but the diverse show of solidarity with Palestine here endured in efforts such as a Palestine Film Festival at The Projector in January, and a performance of the Gaza Monologues presented by theatre group Centre 42 and T42 Podcast. Students at the National University of Singapore, Nanyang Technological University and Singapore Management University organised teach-ins and demanded academic boycotts of Israel. There were predictable reprisals: such as police investigations against a private gathering called “Steadfast for Palestine” on February 2nd, which involved a 70-strong walk to the Istana to deliver letters to the prime minister demanding more pressure on Israel.  

Even when compared to the mass protests of tens of thousands in overseas capitals, we know that these gestures are not trivial. We know the stakes of claiming space in Singapore to shape the conversation and participate in global historical movements. We are teaching ourselves history, at a time when the education minister declares that classroom conversations about the “Israel-Hamas war” are not “a history lesson”.

This history is unteachable in the national classroom because it is far from “foreign”: the Palestinian struggle lies at the heart of ongoing struggles against global forces and structures that continue to entangle us in Singapore as well: imperialism, racism, the violence of the nation-state. This is the worldly idea of “merdeka” fought for by the generations of Harun Aminurrashid and Ang Swee Chai, which the leaders of the old Malayan Left had declared unfinished. At “Steadfast for Palestine”, activist Kokila Annamalai said, “We are not free until Palestine is free. But also, Palestine will not be free because we are not free...If we are to free Palestine, we must reclaim our freedoms, our power.”

Reasonable adults may wince at such lofty rhetoric. Perhaps the practical prose of the state will redeem us, with its favourite refrain on the “complex” saga here. But how much longer can we hide behind our aversion to the complex? Meanwhile our government seldom hesitates to oversimplify the complicated when its interests are served, especially the story of its rise to power. As another play of language, “complex” becomes a convenient way out of confronting what is difficult not just about others, but ourselves.

Rhetorical language is not always naïve. One evening in Lebanon, after a long day healing wounds, Ang wrote a letter to her husband Francis: “Darling, we are just two tiny individuals in this tide of historical liberation. Somewhere we may be washed away, forming the error margin—washed aside—but we know where the tide will flow, and nothing can stop it. It may sound rhetorical—but in the whole history of the oppressed people struggling for justice, nothing will ever sound rhetorical enough.” Ang had seen death; she knew what was complex. 

Singaporeans have been transformed by complexity, without descending into sectarian violence, without having to cleave to a drip-fed “official position” from the sky. To refuse complexity is to turn away from history, which we are all in, for better or worse. 

Iskandar Manis is a Malay-Singaporean writer.  

This is the second in a three-part series about Israel’s war on Gaza. “Genocide in Gaza? Our moral responsibility” by Jom’s team was published last week. “Ang Swee Chai’s urgent message” by Sudhir Vadaketh, Jom’s editor-in-chief, is scheduled for April 19th.

Letters in response to this piece can be sent to sudhir@jom.media. All will be considered for publication on our “Letters to the editor” page.