Preceded by “A day in the life of a Bedouin,” Beatrice Gomez, one of miss universe’s contestants captioned her post in promotion of “visit Israel,” a campaign launched by the occupation.
Traditional Palestinian thobes, rolling grape leaves, and celebrations on stolen land: this is the content posted by the pageant’s participants, appropriating Palestinian culture in quite inconvenient manners.
“We had stopped at a Bedouin Settlement in Israel and plunged into their culture and traditions,” shares Hanna Neepliakh of Ukraine on her Instagram account, relating to a photo of herself preparing traditional sweet maamoul, with no mention of the date-filled-sweet, a popular and symbolic food of the Palestinian culture.
The contestant tour began in occupied Jerusalem and ended in Eliat, a city built upon the small Palestinian ruins of Al-Rashrash, a small Palestinian fishing town. 75,000 Palestinians were forcefully and brutally expelled out of this town during the Nakba by the Zionist militia. The same settlement that stripped the people of their land is now coming to present it to the world as a place of celebration of “beauty.”
While some chose to withdraw from the competition to support the Palestinian cause, several other contestants defied the pressures to boycott it.
Greek contestant Rafaele Plastira was one of the boycotters after Israel’s hosting was announced. She announced through her instagram page that she had “waited so many years to make [her] dream come true” but “can’t go up that stage and act like nothing is happening when people are fighting for their lives out there.”
Another withdrawal came from the South African government, citing the Archbishop, and declaring that “Palestinians’ humiliation is familiar to all black South Africans who were corralled and harassed and insulted and assaulted by the security forces of the apartheid government.”
Even though the contest was faced with resistance, it was still held last Monday. Hence, some could deduce that the contest can be considered as a distraction from the previous events that happened earlier this year in towns like Sheikh Al Jarrah. However, what we can say is that the Palestinian cultural identity is the product of hundreds of generations who were able to sustain it and pass it on. And this, alone, cannot be dismantled easily, despite efforts in trying to do so.