If one listens to conventional media, our world seems to be constantly in need of being protected. Unexplained eruptions of violence disturb our life-trajectories and threaten our (world) order of things. This violence, we are told, is caused by unbridgeable differences, age-old rivalries, and unchanging traditions. In this constructed world, the borderline is the paradigm of sanity, an extension of other natural formations like mountains, valleys or coastlines. The borderline is the naturalized mutual-exclusivity of people.
The borderline is a means of protection, more precisely a means of protecting Us from Them, and still more precisely a means for the state to protect us from them. Borders are the essence of states, authorities charged with the end of protection. The ends justify the means. The more terrible the Other is, the more justifiable the border and the authorities that maintain it.
As Arabs and Jews with origins in the Middle East, we have experienced the crisscrossing borderlines that have and continue to force apart people, creating spaces of violence, exclusion, dispossession and disempowerment wherever they are imposed. We have watched how the separation between the governed and their governments has achieved new forms of absurdity from Syria to Egypt. And of course, we have watched how every inch of Israel/Palestine has been squeezed to the point of strangulation with borders; one side is Jewish, with people living in fear beside the borders that protect them, while the other is Palestinian, with people living in the shadow of the borders meant to exclude them.
However, the ‘borderlines’ we refer to are not only national borders between states. They include the borders between the governors and the governed, the borders between the privileged and the oppressed, the borders between academics and non-academics, and between disciplines and professions.
Borders don’t only control where we go. They imprint their barbs on our hearts and our minds, influencing what we can feel and what we can think. When the authorities miss a spot, when they forget to replace a guard post, reload a gun, or put up a sign declaring the violent consequences of border violation, we the people pitch in to reinforce the border and even create it anew if need be. In the end, our dependency on borders is what makes them holy. The logic of protection through exclusion comes to comprise how we see ourselves as well as others. It is evidence of our profound alienation that we can barely think of a world without borders.
The border rests on the assumption of difference as a cause of violence. It is predicated on total discontinuity. But throughout history, human life has been stubbornly resistant to discontinuity. Wherever there have been borders, people have (illegally) crossed them, questioned them, or pushed them.
The opposite of the border, the negation of its essence, is solidarity. It is the awareness of the continuities that the border disrupts but does not destroy, an understanding of the connections that borders deny but can never fully refute. Solidarity is a recognition of the many people and peoples throughout history who have united against separation and oppression, and who have disproved with their actions, their words, their very lives the idea that difference causes violence.
This blog is an expression of solidarity with those people, written by a few students, academics, Arab and Jewish activists trying to think about activism, identity, and critique in ways that violate the borders and suggest that crimes against some borders may not be crimes at all, but rather possibilities for action, connection, and liberation.
