Slums on the Bagmati river

For example, when Nepal is introduced as a “poor” country,  what is being referred to is the present. On the one hand, they are talking about the government’s tiny budget, endlessly supplemented by program-specific grants from non-governmental organizations, foreign governments and different branches of the international government like the World Bank. More than 80% of the health, education and probably other budgets comes from these non-governmental governments, systems that are largely dysfunctional and unaccountable (while the Nepali Royal Army is an image of efficiency and uncommon job security). The idea is that the government is weak and poor, so the nongovernments have to help the government. The assumption is that if the government “worked,” then everything in Nepal would be fixed, that essentially the problem with Nepal is poor governance.

On the other hand, they are talking about the poverty of the people. Although the vast majority of people in Nepal live in rural villages, when foreigners talk about poverty they are mostly talking about what they see in Kathmandu, the extremes symbolic of the rule. People collecting garbage to recycle, fishing through trash to find fruits to sell. Child porters carrying 170kg at a time, many under 12 years old (10% of the GDP or more is from child labor). Slum dwellers living on the banks of the garbage-choked Bagmati river, where no one else wants to live because of the monsoon floods. And of course, the infamous street children, who live their lives in the streets getting high on glue. Yesterday, one of the kids pointed to a stray dog and said cheerfully in Nepali “Just like me.”

Probably like many third-world cities, Kathmandu assaults the average middle-class first worlder with both presence and absence. The presence of piles of burning garbage and throngs of people. The absence of recognizable signs of authority, from street signs and street lights to animal control, from paved roads to city planning. On the other hand, the absence of central authority only makes it all the more amazing at how good people can be at managing with each other. Although most of Kathmandu’s residents have no access to any discussion on governance, Kathmandu (miraculously) works, day after day, probably with less theft and violent crimes than most of America’s heavily-policed cities. Despite the poverty and inequality, Kathmandu’s residents offer each other admirable amounts of their already limited space. One of the TBT workers said that his greatest culture shock upon returning to Israel is all about buses. In Nepal 30 people or more cram into a microbus and still manage patient smiles, even when sitting on top of each other. On the other hand in Israel, despite the large, roomy, air-conditioned bus traveling on the fully paved road, the people are far more impatient to say the least.

The poverty in Kathmandu is undeniable, sometimes described as “crushing.” But when we say these people are ‘impoverished,’ that implies causes, agents, reasons. If they are impoverished, who or what is doing the impoverishing? And if they are crushed, who is doing the crushing? (And no, it can’t just be a ‘lack of awareness’). Unfortunately, the questions implied by the word ‘impoverishment’ remain largely inert in the absence of history.

My first exposure to history in Nepal is Forget Kathmandu: An Elegy for Democracy by Manjushree Thapa, a problematic and conflicted book by one of Nepal’s elite liberal humanists trying to understand her country. What I understood from the book and from the smattering of historical content in the program is that Nepal’s “history” is actually two histories. First there is the widely known ‘political history’ of Nepal, frustrating as it is irrelevant. Beginning with the ‘unification’ of the country by a particular royal dynasty 250 years ago, this history is an endless series of soap-opera successions, betrayals, and power struggles with local and international powers backing opponents and making deals to top the intrigue. Most of Nepal’s people are not mentioned, the assumption being that they are somehow implied in the endless royal drama. In 1950 the royal dictatorship was briefly replaced by their elite challengers/inheritors, political parties, who rode on popular desire for some alternative. They behaved in much the same way as different lineages of royal inheritors had, except with more instability, with ten governments taking power in as many years. The second half of the 20^th century is a struggle for power between different segments of the royal family and the political parties, culminating in a second 1950’s style popular movement followed by the reinstitution of parliamentary democracy in 1990. Then, out of nowhere, the People’s War from 1996 to 2006, a ten year insurgency led by the Maoist communists of Nepal. Violence, refugees, natural disasters, broken treaties, a strange massacre in the royal family, and the negotiated settlement with the Maoists come in a rapid and incoherent succession, a feeling of watching a massive spectacle that one has no active part or understanding in. Thapa communicates this brilliantly in her book.

On the other hand, very much in the background and totally separate from this traditional telling of Nepali history, is the (depoliticized) economic history. Development projects exploding with the reinstitution of the royal dictatorship in 1960, and roughly since then a growing corpus of increasing statistics in a myriad of areas such as literacy, poverty, nutrition rates, number of schools, number of people. The arc of progress made of tiny numbers stretching out like  rainbow while the politicians bicker.

If accepted, this history would lead one to forsake politics for the sake of the pure, light-bringing progress of economic development. While the politicians quibble, the apolitical non-governments have been the only ones to do Nepal any good. Give us economics, save us from politics. Although this history is unintelligible and explains nothing, it is its very unintelligibility that achieves its political ends: to make people stay as far away from politics, to make it reasonable to think that economic development can be apolitical, to dismiss history as hornet’s nest of cynical power-politics that no person should even try to know or understand.

But under scrutiny, this history raises questions. For example, the People’s War turns out not to have been launched by the Maoists. It began with government attacks on villages where the movement later to be known as the Maoists was operating. Apparently, they were trying to organize people separately from the political system, something that threatened the sovereignty of the government was considered a threat existential enough to warrant massacring some unarmed civilians (this pattern would be repeated). The resulting insurgency fought the government to a standstill and even today controls large swaths of Nepal’s countryside.

Now, I’m not saying that the Maoists were perfect or selfless or even good, but rather that no insurgency can survive for one year, much less ten, much less fight the government to a standstill without massive popular support whose origins cannot be dismissed. Apparently they redistributed land in some places, forced banks to return confiscated land deeds, made landlords forgive massive debts, etc. On the other hand, Manjushree Thapa, the author of “Forget Kathmandu,” probably echoes widespread assumptions among Kathmandu’s urban intelligentsia about the Maoists: that the Maoist insurgency is a mindless pastime of impressionable villagers trying to vent their frustration at their own backwardness, or that most of their rural supporters are being coerced or threatened. These liberal elites explain that the insurgency is just an extreme symptom of a lack of development and/or “true” democracy. The march of development must be restored. The cynical, political past must be left behind in favor of it.

But there are more troubling facts. Leaders from a new ‘Janjati’ (ethnic/indigenous) party came to visit TBT, and they talked about all kinds of crazy things like the imposition of the caste system through a ‘Hindu state,’ how this imposition was used to dispossess people of their lands, how as recently as sixty years ago many people lost their land because elites had registered it in their own names. And of course, the sharecropper system that is one of the universal constants in Nepali rural life: most villagers must work the lands of rich, upper-caste, absentee landlords and pay half of their harvest as rent. Many if not most have lived on land that is not legally theirs for hundreds of years. Although the leaders who told us this were themselves elites with long histories in politics, quite possibly instrumentalizing their ethnic background for political support (but why is that only a problem when members of indigenous or marginalized ethnic groups do it?), this history was something different than the banal power contests that passed for history until then.

Yes, it turns out that not all is quiet and pastoral in the average Nepali village. In the two villages that I visited as part of the orientation, TBT workers explained that most farmers did not own enough land to feed themselves, with the best land usually owned by a minority of wealthy (sometimes absentee) landlords. The unequal land situation forces poor/impoverished farmers to relentlessly plow both their lands and the lands they sharecrop, leading to soil degradation and decreasing yields. The choice between rural hunger and backbreaking labor on the one hand, and urban poverty on the other is steadily sharpening. Like so many third world cities, Kathmandu actually a refugee camp for the rural poor, whose minimal services are mostly funded and partially administered by nongovernmental organizations and foreign grants to prevent the situation from becoming too bad to be suffered quietly. Through first-hand experience, Tevel Be’Tzedek workers have learned that virtually all of Kathmandu’s poverty is village poverty transported, that the urban poor are largely first generation rural refugees exchanging rural debt slavery for urban wage slavery.

Virtually everyone with a grassroots experience of social problems in Nepal knows that the problem is in the villages, that the problem disproportionately affects lower-caste/ethnic groups, and that the problem is land. Much fewer people have an idea of how this situation came about, how 80% of rural people came to own only 20% of the arable land.

But precisely at this point, the conversation ends. This is the end of the road for NGOs, because the history of land ownership is Nepal is a political history, and the question of land distribution is a political question. The separation of Nepal’s political history and its economic future must remain sacred and respected. After all, politics/history is impossible to understand and frustrating, it is best avoided. For all intents and purposes, then, the question of the historical origins of the very crushing poverty that NGOs seek to address is avoided.

This is a testament to how coincidental history is to the work of most development NGOs, a testament also to the limits of what “impoverishment” can mean in these circles. Obviously, the answer to the question of “how things came to be this way” would force nongovernmental organizations to deal with what is politically wrong in Nepal, to trace economics and politics back to the point where they become inseparable, then to trace it back to the present and stitch economics and politics back up again. It would force NGOs to grapple not only with the “impoverished,” but also with the political, economic and social actors, processes and systems that have and continue to impoverish them.

Perhaps the negative practical consequences of such a move are so great that they make it impossible to think it about openly. Wealthy land owners are after all actively running both Nepal’s government and many of its non-governments. But there is also a sense that TBT as a foreign organization has no legitimacy to look at the issue historically and politically. In Tevel B’Tzedek a series of largely informal understandings have arisen out of the direct experience of two years of trial and error. One is the sense that the mission is to learn about and empower the people we work with to think about the problems themselves, because they have legitimacy we do not to resist their enslavement. Although TBT volunteer activities have been formally confined to educational work related to health, nutrition, and agricultural improvement, there is a sense that there is a broader direction to the work that will somehow lead to greater autonomy and independent action, mainly exemplified by women’s groups and theater groups that aim to develop autonomous thought and expression in groups.

Needless to say, I believe that TBT needs to have a broader vision for their work that is firmly grounded in an explicit historical analysis. I believe this vision should include the creation of eventual creation of autonomous community organizations and networks with independent agendas that TBT can support and be a part of rather than proscribe. But I also believe that TBT’s unique model of direct and open-ended engagement of volunteer groups with village and urban Nepali communities and the willingness to follow and build on the conclusions of each group allowed TBT to reach deeper understandings of the issues than many (large, hierarchical) NGOs who have been in Nepal for years or even decades. Although I call for more historical analysis and reflection on the origins of present problems, I think that TBT is some proof of how loose, nonhierarchical structures and grassroots engagement more naturally lead to political directions. If nongovernments adopt more decentralized, democratic structures, it might only be a matter of time before they can no longer see themselves only as unpaid government assistants and start seeing themselves as allies of Nepali activists working for their liberation.

From Activestills from a photoessay entitled "Life Under Occupation"

I don’t remember if that’s exactly how it went, but I do remember the teacher, Professor Gillian Hart, saying that apartheid was actually much more about what that old man was talking about than about even the most gruesome instances of physical violence. The violence of the white state was necessary to maintain and continue the unequal land and resource distribution created by hundreds of years of dispossession. The violence of the state and of the different militant organizations were all in the context of the systematic dispossession of black South Africans. Somehow, the TRC’s contributed to making reconciliation and truth all about confessing to different forms of physical violence while largely ignoring dispossession as the original, continuing, and fundamental form of violence that the modern apartheid regime itself was created to maintain.

This memory came to me during a recent discussion of the Israel/Palestine situation with a close friend. Though he recognized everything I had to say, he insisted on the familiar tropes of balance, symmetry, and “extremists on both sides.” When I pressed him on it, he recognized the power imbalances that made “balanced discussion” contrived and morally impossible, but he maintained that “both sides” have to stop using violence against each other, that nothing justified violence. Another close friend of mine recently posited a familiar Israeli perception, that if it hadn’t been for Palestinian attacks on Israelis there would be no checkpoints, no Israeli night raids, no hundreds of civilians mowed down and burned with white phosphorous in Gaza.

I began talking to him about how I am for the nonviolent resistance for this and that reason, and I mentioned the difference in casualties and how that reflects the power imbalance and so on and so forth. But at some point, I realized that when we were talking about violence, we were talking exclusively about a certain kind of violence: homemade rockets versus F-16 strikes, military assaults versus suicide bombings, even kidnapping vs. warrantless arrests. Our conversation was circumscribed solely by a particular kind of “point source” violence involving the violation by one human being of another’s physical body. I realized that this is how the conversation gets to be about how best to maintain Israeli security, because people see the conflict as one about physical violence: Palestinians attack Israelis, Israelis strike back, and so on and so forth about the cycle of (physical) violence. The problem then becomes about how to get each “side” to understand how badly each side wants to live without this physical violence. This probably explains why outsiders who accept the validity of this model become somewhat disgusted with the entire issue. After all, who doesn’t know that physical violence is not good? Do they really hate each other that much that they attack each other just for the hell of it? Good riddance to both of them.

Absent from the conversation is the entire question of Palestinian security. People can talk very well about Israeli security needs, which for most Israelis remains the only rationale that could come close to any justification for the occupation. But I think that the same people have a very vague idea of what the Palestinians’ “interests” are. Do they want a Palestinian state? Do they want more/our/the land? Maybe they just want to stop being attacked, or maybe they want to be richer and have their economy developed, or maybe they want to stop being humiliated at checkpoints, etc. etc. All these ideas are floating around, but the question of security never appears next to the adjective “Palestinian.”

I think that part of the reason that the question of Palestinian security is never asked is because it would immediately lead one to inquire about what happens to Palestinians when there is no physical violence,  before or laughter the latest round of fighting. One would have to ask, “when Israelis are secure, when they are safe, are Palestinians secure?

To anyone who is aware of the dispossession of Palestinians in the last 100 years, the answer is obvious. In the absence of physical violence or in its presence, in the absence of peace negotiations or in their presence, there is a systematic project of dispossessing Palestinians of their land and resources and turning them over to Jewish-Israeli purposes, on both sides of the Green Line of 1967. Palestinians who hold land are under constant attack from settlers, the army, and the occupation bureaucracy to give it over. Palestinians who have houses are in constant danger of having them destroyed, as construction permits are systematically denied to Palestinians and construction “violations” of this are enforced almost exclusively for Palestinian construction rather than Jewish settler construction. Palestinians are constantly in danger of being arrested for any reason. Palestinians who own businesses are entirely dependent on arbitrary permits to transfer buy, sell or transfer goods, and are in constant danger of having them taken away for any arbitrary reason. Palestinians who used to own land and now must sell their labor are in the constant mercy of this permit system as well. Palestinians are in danger of going thirsty, going poor or going hungry because of this ongoing dispossession, while settlers build subsidized villas beside them in an open bid to replace them.

In essence, Palestinians’ very existence is in danger in every part of Israel/Palestine, because as far as the authorities and the nationalist public are concerned, they are the only technicality standing between Israel and an empty, holy land awaiting their conquest. They can never be sure of what tomorrow will bring them.

In the ideal world my friend is implying, where no Palestinian lifted a single finger against Israelis for 100 years, then it is very possible that there would be less checkpoints, less raids, less soldiers having to perform them, and less dead Israeli and Palestinian children. But would the Israeli government be more interested in giving Palestinians equal rights as Israelis? Would those rights extend to control over land, resources, and equal protection before the law as well as voting rights? Would Israeli settlers and politicians be less interested in their land? When a village is demolished because an ancient synagogue was discovered beneath it (as happened in Susya), would the government step in because the Palestinians were nonviolent? Would Palestinians be allowed to harvest their olives in peace, or would the olive trees be burned and Palestinians beaten into submission, protected by Israeli soldiers counting the days to their release?

The forms of violence that fall under the heading of dispossession are unique in that Israelis never experience them. That is why these experiences are totally excluded or glossed over in coexistence discourse because Israelis would not be able to ‘balance’ the discussion as they are (to some extent) with experiences of physical violence. Talking about dispossession is a fundamental challenge to the idea that physical violence, rather than the violence of dispossession, is the problem. It would be impossible to insist on “quiet” for Israelis when one knows what continues to happen during that quiet for Palestinians. Physical violence can be an issue an issue that is ‘cyclical.’ Dispossession, on the other hand, is a crime in progress, a crime for its own sake, rather than a crime of passion or revenge. If there is a crime in progress, how can anyone apologize for it and expect its targets to move on? While physical violence can be a problem for two sides to resolve and reconcile about, dispossession is the relationship between colonizer and colonized, a relationship that has many sides but no symmetry, and many explanations but no justification.

All history of physical violence can be fully recognized, even apologized for, but a history of dispossession is off limits. The Nakba is not anathema to existing discourse because it was a physically violent act, not because of the cruelty of forcing Palestinians out of their towns, cities and villages. Rather, the Nakba is dangerous because it is about dispossession, land confiscation, and refugee camps; in essence, not allowing Palestinians to return and by doing so inscribing the act of violence into the very face of the land as “facts on the ground.” Physical violence, even the worst, is temporary. Dispossession has the flavor of forever, its influence stretching out into eternity.

Israel is not exactly like apartheid South Africa was, and I will point out some of the differences in another post. But if the TRC’s are any lesson to the future, then I believe they have one lesson to teach us. Right now as in the past, Israeli state policies are trying to dispossess as many Palestinians as possible and to bury their dispossession with thousands of cookie cutter Jewish-only villas and security fences, so that when the TRC’s/negotiations/enough pressure comes to Israel/Palestine, these “facts” will appear there, inscribing the dispossession of the Palestinians into the history books as an immutable fact. When the TRC’s come to Israel/Palestine, they must be about land. They must show the world that dispossession will not be forgotten, that it can be counteracted effectively, and if not reversed then at least written into the face of the land in such ubiquity that it will never be forgotten.

But none of that changes the fact that I frequently find myself sitting in front of a very nice man or woman talking about how the army changed their life, what a positive experience it was in retrospect. They speak fondly of  how hard/boring/demanding it was (in a way I might remember freshman year). The occupation? Palestinians being arrested without charges? Settlers being protected as they steal land, destroy property and beat people up? Exceptions, exceptions, not as bad as you see it here on TV. So funny that both anti-occupation activists and Israeli soldiers see American TVs as the place where everyone gets confused.

But of course, they are not equal sides fighting over the same reality from the same position of power. Millions of Palestinians are not lying about their oppression, and Israelis in general (and Israeli soldiers in particular), are systematically separated from that reality until they go to police it. I also know about Breaking the Silence and the amazing testimonies that they get. They speak of an entire shadow reality that is not discussed or recognized by most Israelis. I understand the conventional arguments about propaganda, about outright intentional lies by powerful people to hide the injustices that are being perpetrated. I don’t mean to imply that this is not part of the problem, but I want to think in this post about how it is not the entire or only problem. Rather than exposing and denouncing lies, I want to ask in this post about how the system creates and maintains the disjunctures in information and experience between soldiers and anti-occupation activists.

For example, something that could fall under this line of inquiry is the fact that because Israeli soldiers only go to Palestinian towns and villages armed and in uniform, Palestinians always correctly see them as representatives of the Jewish state (from which they are automatically excluded) restricting their freedoms and assisting in the dispossession of their land. Consequently, all former Israeli soldiers report a glowering, hostile attitude from Palestinians and unproblematically assume that this attitude would continue if they were not in uniform, if they were not armed, etc, with disastrous, highly racialized consequences (knifings, stabbings, lynchings). Perhaps because of this experience, of seeing people afraid of you and angry at you (without seeing what they see and why), Israelis are mortally afraid  of Palestinians. The overwhelming number of routine contacts between Israeli and Palestinian activists in the anti-occupation movement is dismissed as merely a massive exception to what they perceive to be an unbridgeable, violent border between the two national identities.

But maybe that’s not the case at all. It’s just an idea, something to look into.

Another idea I was thinking about is the division of labor in the IDF and how that serves to cut up and divide soldiers’ experience of the entire situation so that it will be more directly explainable. For example, for anyone familiar with the army it is well known that Israeli-Jewish women have a profoundly different service than Israeli-Jewish men. It seems that their service comprises teaching classes about weapons use, in the process of which they create really strong support systems for each other within the army. The men go off and guard the Kav (the ever-moving border, literally ‘the line’). It might be that for them, army service has little to anything to do with coming into contact with the people under occupation. And how could the male soldiers explain it to them without raining down on their parade? Isn’t it safer just to ignore what you think is happening and play along? As an Israeli male soldiers coming to spend a weekend at home, would you really want to waste your sparse vacation days trying to convince the women soldiers that there is something very wrong about what they’re doing?

Ok, all this is just prep for this last example, from which the post takes its title. MaGav, Mishmar HaGvul, the Border Guard or Border Patrol. Every unit in the IDF has its internal reputation that is the intersection of several categories: dedicated or lazy, smart or dumb, rich or poor, country or city, elite or run of the mill or worse. In some ways, the units act like Israel’s colleges, or more correctly Israel’s fraternities, with flags, slogans, shirts (a few of which became infamous), and reputations. One of the major differences is that a central authority decides what the role of each of these fraternities/units is going to be in the maintenance of…security, of course. What else?

Well, what’s the role of MaGav? If you’ve ever seen a film about Bil’in or a film of any other nonviolent protest area, you’ve seen them. They are the unit of the army in charge of policing Israel’s innumerable borders. In East Jerusalem, in the illegally annexed land next to the wall, and who knows what other places. Soldiers from this unit have been caught with YouTube videos showing humiliations of Palestinians passing through their areas. It is generally agreed that they do a lot of the dirty, day to day work of the occupation while other units are mostly all about one-night only raids, and guarding bases and outposts in rotations. Speaking of which, apparently MaGavniks don’t switch from place to place: they stay put in one place for their entire three years, getting extremely “bored,” which is why they begin doing “stupid shit.” Without exception, all the commentary I’ve heard from soldiers about MaGav has been negative. They are the outcasts of the army, the dumb ones, the violent idiots who make the rest of them look bad. If American TV is the number #1 cause of the bad image they get (unjustifiably in their eyes) MaGav is the second. They can’t speak lowly enough of them.

All of this became infinitely more interesting to me when I discovered that these unit categorizations occurred parallel with the recognized (yet unexplained) ethnic configurations of each unit. It seems that some of the units are more Ashkenazi (white Israeli-Jewish, descended from European Jews) while others, like MaGav, are known to be brown units. In a video of a recent protest in Bidu and Beit Surik, the well-known anti-occupation activist Ezra Nawi, who is himself Mizrahi (a Jew from Arab countries, literally ‘Easterner’), comments in a mixture of sadness and humor about the ethnic background of the Israeli soldiers who came to protect the annexation of the nearby Palestinian village’s land for Jewish uses. In minute 4:05, he says :

“Our Druze brothers came to make order here! And the Ethiopians should also say a kind word! And also our brothers the Frenks, who are the basis for the MaGav.”

Frenks is a slang word I don’t know. But the Druze and the Ethiopians are two groups of people who serve in the army but are also of a disempowered and racialized socio-economic class.Then he turns to the soldiers themselves and says:

“I want Ashkenazis in MaGav! Why aren’t there Ashkenazis in MaGav? ”

Nawi was recently arrested for trying to prevent a home from being demolished with the usual canard about “assaulting a soldier.” (more info).Nawi writes about the intersections between his Mizrahi identity and his relationship to the racism of the occupation apparatus. He expressed similar concerns about MaGav’s makeup in his article in the nation. In it he writes:

:…as a Mizrahi Jew (descended from Jewish communities in the Arab and Muslim world), a gay man and a plumber, I do not belong to the elite of Israeli society and do not fit the stereotype of the Israeli peacenik–namely, an intellectual Jew of Ashkenazi decent. Actually, the police officers who constantly arrest me and I are part of the same social strata. I was programmed like them, have a similar accent, know their jargon and our historical background is comparable. And yet, in their eyes I am on and for the other side, the Palestinian side.

This simple fact seems to disturb them so much that they have to vilify me; that is the only way their worldview will continue making sense. I threaten them precisely because I undermine the categories and stereotypes through which they understand the world.”

Here we have a surreal situation. Why would the most disempowered, racialized, socio-economically depressed communities be most represented in the army unit that, at least for activists and protesters, comprises the very face of the apartheid regime in the territories? Why would Ashkenazi (white), socio-economically elevated soldiers be effectively rerouted to other work?

I believe that I can speak with more confidence on the possible consequences of this practice rather than its actual causes. In practice, the groups most disenfranchised by the current system have their standing in society predicated and conditioned on the oppression and dispossession of people they would otherwise be more identified with, the Palestinians. The people with most sociologicaly incentives to cross the border between soldiers and Palestinian are literally placed in charge of it: Israel’s borderline populations are placed in charge of the border themselves, they are given the opportunity to hold themselves above one of the only populations below them on the totem poll, earning their membership in Israeli society with every border defended, regardless of the rationale. Each of these communities, the Druze, the Mizrahim, the Ethiopians, has and continues to have serious problems with the state and complementary histories of activism. Ethiopians are excluded from Jewish schools and work, and protested/rioted when their blood was rejected for far it was contaminated with AIDS. Mizrahi activists posed a powerful challenge to the state a generation ago with the Israeli Black Panthers. Druze activists are starting to claim a Palestinian identity. Unregulated, who knows what they could do?

But we have forgotten Ashkenazis, who are also being managed (this time with privilege). Most of the soldiers I’ve talked to are Ashkenazis, which is how my thinking about this post started in the first place. What does it mean for more white Israeli soldiers to get a pass on confronting protesters? For one, secular white Israelis usually have more power in society, so there is some incentive to keep their actions targeted and framed, rather than ongoing and contradictory. More powerful people might go out and get really militant if they were forced to do what MaGav does. They might even refuse in greater numbers, putting even more tension on the consensus. Further, most of the anti-occupation protesters from the Israeli side are Ashkenazis themselves; no one wants someone’s family member, classmate, or future roommate to be protesting against them, do they? Has that ever happened? Why or why not? And most importantly, what might the soldiers decide to do in those situations?

I may be totally wrong. I anticipate that some people will tell me I am, and I welcome these challenges. I’m sure that many high class Ashkenazis do the routine grind of the occupation and then keep it to themselves, or somehow justify it, or get their experience of things regulated a different way, or go to Breaking the Silence. And of course, I haven’t talked at all about upbringing in Israel, how the occupation is framed there, how the army frames actions etc. etc. There are no small number of causes for soldiers to not see the injustice of the Palestinian’s situation, and no small number of causes for them to say nothing about it even if they do see it.

But the situation I’ve outlined is in any way true, then it presents an interesting conundrum for the anti-occupation movement. Here I am, white Israeli, yelling at brown people to stop oppressing other brown people while at the same time, white soldiers and perhaps even Israeli society in general participate in the shaming of MaGav, the idiots, the incompetents, the violent, the cruel, all words that all over the world comprise different words for denoting one thing: “brown.” But what can we do with the actual cruelty?! MaGav enforces cruel laws, arbitrary policies, racist settler agendas, etc. etc.

If it’s true, we should start thinking about it. How can this awareness be built into practice? How can we talk to soldiers from disadvantaged backgrounds about the unjust position they have been placed in? How can we hold ourselves apart from and denounce discourses that assist in the racialization of MaGav, and the consequent white-washing of the occupation? How can we draw a connection between Israeli people of color (Israeli-identified Druze and Bedouin, Ethiopians, and Mizrahim) and the machinery of ethnic segregation in Israel/Palestine? Or is all that just condescension?

One more piece. The Movement for Dignified Living is a grassroots movement in Be’er Sheva that resists bank-initiated housing evictions resulting from predatory lending. They practice nonviolent direct action to radically challenge the power dynamics between their largely Mizrahi constituents and the banking system. One of the most amazing successes of this movement and its founder, Haim Bar-Yaakov, (who, by the way, reminds me a lot of Ezra Nawi– Mizrahi, middle-aged, amazing activist), is the ability to directly engage police officers who are of the same disadvantaged background and cause them to rethink the rationalizations they are given for evicting people (they are lazy, they are thieves, they need to be dealt with). The police actually inform the movement of evictions before they take place so that they have an excuse to stop!

The MDL (Movement for Dignified Living) is involved in a series of transitions. Their result will determine its future. But their experience suggests to me that confrontations with MaGav could be irrevocably changed if represented in the activism were people from the soldiers’ own neighborhoods, classes, or even families. In other words, the success of the movement in my mind depends to a greater degree than ever imagined on its racial diversity. If the movement is white, even radically deconstructing white privilege, it will be easier for soldiers from disempowered communities, like in MaGav, to dismiss them. The more diverse the movement, the more the contradictions of the system will be revealed, the more difficult it will be for MaGavniks to enforce the ethnic borders that are their charge.

In the Nablus shopping district, a woman with bags and a balloon waited for transportation. The removal of an Israeli checkpoint has made access to the city easier.-- NY Times

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently went public with an Israeli plan for ‘economic peace’ with the Palestinian people. This concept is distinct from political peace, which addresses the stated demands of the Palestinian authority, in that it ‘circumvents’ this neutered government to give Palestinians what the Israeli government knows they want deep down: economic growth. Netanyahu: “[Economic peace]…means that we have to strengthen the moderate parts of the Palestinian economy by handing rapid growth in those area, rapid economic growth that gives a stake for peace for the ordinary Palestinians.”

The next section is under the heading “Development mitigates” and explains Tony Blaire’s perspective that problems must be mitigated before they are solved. I get the feeling that there is a very specific set of characteristics that go into the “ordinary Palestinian” category. Palestinians who are reasonable, humble, profoundly apolitical and even anti-political, who are concerned only with protecting and feeding their family and/or business. It’s this Palestinian which is the human material the authorities hope to use to remake the region.

A few days ago the New York Times published an article that seems to act as an ode to this hypothetical Palestinian’s hopes and dreams. Some quotes that smell of cheap perfume:

“The International Monetary Fund is about to issue its first upbeat report in years for the West Bank, forecasting a 7 percent growth rate for 2009.”

“Two years ago I couldn’t have even gone to Nablus,” said Tony Blair, the former British prime minister who serves as international envoy to the Palestinians, after a smooth visit this week. “Security is greatly improved, and the economy is doing much better. Now we need to move to the next stage: politics.”

“The Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says it shares the goal of helping Mr. Abbas, which is why it is seeking to improve West Bank economic conditions as a platform for moving to a political discussion.”

“Palestinian troops have been training in Jordan under American sponsorship.

There are now several thousand men trained in that way, and their skills, along with those of the European-trained police force here, have made a huge difference.

An important element in making the Palestinian force effective, American and Israeli officials say, was taking young Palestinian men out of the ancestral grips of their villages and tribal clans and training them abroad, turning them into soldiers loyal to units and commanders.”

The last sentence is frightening. Loosening the human material from its backwardness and tradition in order to outsource pacification? An original yet unmistakable reiteration of the colonial dynamic. Tzipi Livni, an Israeli-Jewish Ashkenazi politician offered these sometimes confusing words of wisdom on the nature of the state of Israel:

Sporadic clashes were reported in the operations focussed on the Old City area of Nablus. February 25, 2007, news.bbc.co.uk

“A Jewish state is a matter of values. It is not a matter of religion, it is more a matter of nationality. And a Jewish state is not a monopoly of rabbis, it’s what each and everyone feels inside, it’s about the nature of the state of Israel,” she said.

“Its about the Jewish tradition, it’s about Jewish history. But we need to keep the nature, the character of the state of Israel as a Jewish state because this is – excuse me for using French – the raison d’etre of the state of Israel.”

Maybe the authors of the NY times article will explain these views as proof of the ‘ancestral grip’ that Livni’s village or family has on her. Perhaps they should send her train as a soldier in Jordan so that she can be loosened from them.

It seems that the powers that be are drilling Palestinians to replace the IDF in the population centers (not the majority of the West Bank), and that cooperation is rewarded with ‘economic growth.’ All the Palestinians interviewed were high-class managers and vice-presidents talking about the importance of the rule of law, but I’m not sure whether the Palestinian attacks or Israeli checkpoints were holding their back their purely economic agendas.

Law and order, security, and economics, totally apolitical things that can be endlessly and apolitically improved to mitigate, to contain, to clean up the wound so political surgery can finally be performed. But there are too many echoes from South Africa here; it seems that all these apolitical interventions comprise a very political aim, namely building the basis for a Palestinian ‘government,’ a group of heavily armed municipalities, who are recognized by the world as a somehow separate entity from the Israeli government, which actually calls the shots.

Economic growth is not a substitute for being recognized as human beings. One of us should look into ‘economic peace’ in South Africa, in the American south after slavery, and in other places.

Richard Silverstein talks about this NY Times article here.

There are several possible responses to this idea:

1)      Every person’s knowledge about anything is fundamentally incomplete. Asking people to wait until they know everything there is to know is asking them to wait forever.

2)      Further, people usually have a particular type of knowledge in mind when they suggest that your knowledge is lacking, like ‘academic knowledge’ or what I’ve heard commonly referred to by Israelis as the ‘knowledge of the reality in Israel’ or something like that. Rather than advocating solidarity between different knowledges and trying to explain the gaps between them, this approach seeks to invalidate some knowledges at the expense of others.

3)      Acting and speaking on what we know (and think we know) is not the end but rather the beginning of discussion and the formation of more knowledge. If a person remains idle and at rest, then they are more susceptible to being receptacles of other more powerful people’s assumptions rather than their own. I feel that one of the very first essential action for a person or community to empower themselves is to take upon themselves the task of analyzing their world and producing knowledge about it. I believe that activist-minded people, people who take upon themselves the responsibility to see the world with their own eyes, should always be unsatisfied with what they know while at the same time never exchanging dissatisfaction with insecurity.

4)      Echoes are powerful things. One of the experience that radicalized me the most was the many similarities I noticed in my studies between different cases of repression of dissent and the criminalization of different communities in countries thousands of miles from each other. As one of my Palestinian friends once told me, “When I talk to a guy from the Zapatistas talking about the army taking their land, I understand him, he doesn’t have to explain it to me.” He did not mean that there were not differences between the Mexican government’s war against Mexican peasants or that these differences didn’t need to be explained in endless detail in order to suggest any possibilities for resistance, but rather that there is an essential pattern, i.e. state sanctioned dispossession of indigenous peoples, that he recognized. Just because this recognition should be a springboard to more discussion and mutual education does not mean that it cannot be a springboard for solidarity and action. For example, most Americans have inherited some (somewhat diluted) version of the discourse of the American Civil Rights movement, which essentially means that most Americans bristle when they recognize what they perceive to be racist language (“They’re all animals anyway,” “X people are much more violent that Y people,” or “I hate Z people”). If Americans hear speech that they recognize as what would be considered “racist” in the US, I don’t believe that they should ignore this recognition because “they lack the knowledge” to “have an informed opinion.” They should respectfully engage people who speak this way or are from that part of the world and offer their perspective. It may be that the speech they heard may have been something totally different, or it may be exactly what they thought it was. But people must act on these recognitions if any change is to be brought about.

5)      The exception exposes the rule. There are many, many theories of knowledge running around, but I am heavily influence by the anthropological approach to knowing: that the “exceptions” of the world have the potential to question our very foundational assumptions by suggesting new rules, new patterns that are fundamentally incompatible with what we previously thought.

It is due to this last point especially that I deeply appreciate articles like Gideon Levy’s “Mohammed Omer: ‘Why Did They Treat Me Like That?”

Palestinian workers line up before entering the Erez Industrial Zone in the Gaza Strip, from Btselem.org

The article focuses on one “exceptional case”: Once upon a time, a Palestinian was endowed by the Israeli occupation bureaucracy with the mystical ability to cross the border between Gaza and the world. He is exceptional in every way; a man moved by the oppression he has experienced growing up in Gaza to train himself as a grassroots journalist and photographer, whose work earned him a prize from a British journalists’ association. His case only grew in its exceptional nature: his border crossing required the intervention of diplomats, negotiations among powerful agencies, and a taxi running on cooking oil.

Taken just on its own terms, Mohammed Omer’s departure describes a great deal of what the occupation means for many other people, and this both despite and because of its exceptional nature. The unique nature of the case made the entire Israeli apparatus that valiantly protected Gaza’s borders exceptional as well.

But the most instructive aspect of this case is also its most outrageous. How does the occupation apparatus respond to a Palestinian who has been granted exceptional rights of movement and exceptional recognition not only as a human being but as a respected journalist? What does it do when he tries to return?

“The policewoman at the border crossing asked him where he was headed and he said “Gaza,” in English. “That’s the place that causes problems,” she said. “I didn’t argue with her,” says Omer. A few seconds later she said he had no permit and told him to wait. After over an hour the authorities called him.

Over the phone from his room in the hospital, he describes what happened; it is evident that he has been traumatized. The security people took apart all his belongings, asked where the prize money was, and couldn’t understand why he was returning to Gaza. “Mohammed, are you crazy?” asked one. “Why did you leave Paris? Did you leave Paris to return to Gaza? You could have lived better in Paris. You are choosing to suffer.” Omer replied that he has chosen to document suffering, not to suffer.

Then he was forced to strip. He agreed to take everything off except his underpants, but says the interrogator pulled them off by force, pressing a gun to his body. He will never forget that humiliation. He broke into tears, fell onto the floor, partly unconscious, and began to vomit. He says the security guards hurt him, putting a foot on his neck and sticking their hands under his eyes and behind his ears. “I felt like an African under apartheid,” he explains. Afterward he asked his interrogator: “Why are you treating me like this?” The reply was: “Wait, you haven’t seen anything yet.” He says he was dragged on the floor of the terminal, while a female traveler shouted at the security guards: “Why are you doing that to him? Leave him alone!”"

This seems to me to be a “cutting down to size,” a ritual of humiliation and torture comprising a violent response to the contradiction between the man’s exceptional case and the fact that he is Palestinian, and holds a well-defined, subordinated ‘place.’ It seems that the border policemen were teaching the man what ‘being Palestinian means,’ re-inducting him into the world as a normal Palestinian under their supervision, rather than an exceptional one which calls their authority into question. Palestinians are subordinated, humiliated, immobile, and silent, not globe-hopping journalists who receive prizes.

The article ends with a flourish of banality: the cinder-block words of the occupation bureaucracy:

Shin Bet Security Service: “The search was done by a policeman with the assistance of security agents, according to the procedures usually used at the border crossings. It should be stressed that during the body search, the person in question received decent treatment and no extraordinary measures were taken against him. After the body search, a search was conducted of his belongings, after which the person in question lost his balance and fell for some unknown reason. Paramedics were called to the scene, as was an ambulance. He was taken for medical care to Jericho.”

“Israel Airports Authority (IAA), which is in charge of the Allenby crossing: “In response to your request to look into the incident at the bridge, a comprehensive investigation was launched. It emerges that the entry of Mr. Mohammed Omer was not coordinated with the relevant authorities at the crossing. Mr. Omer was examined by the members of the state security services working at the crossing, according to proper procedure and to the laws of the State of Israel. The security check to which you refer does not fall within the bounds of responsibility of the IAA, which operates the crossing.”

These descriptions try to act like checkpoints for the mind. They change from pathetic to outrageous when one finds out that all kinds of people find them compelling. Regardless of whatever gaps any number of people might see between the “laws of the state of Israel” and what the security forces did to Mohammed Omer, this case suggests a routine more powerful and relevant than written law. It suggests a system of values and practices that thrives on the gray areas, that feeds on the gaping holes in the ‘law’ of the occupation, that multiplies on contradictory mandates, laws and institutions so as to carve out a space for lawlessness made legal. The article presents a stratigraphy of this fungus of improvised “justice,” a pattern that we can ’sound’ against other injustices and other times and see if an echo comes back.

Nothing exceptional happened, they say. Order is restored, has in fact never been violated. Everything has been made normal by the security services. The article is vital because it exposes the savagery of this order, this normality, and challenges us to do everything we can to prevent its ‘restoration.’ The article gives us some knowledge of the injustice of normality in this situation, a knowledge that a violation of a norm based on violence is a crime worth committing.

Mohammed Omer’s news site can be found at rafahtoday.org.

The first school’s lessons usually involve the deployment of military force. A typical example is the Israeli Chief of Staff, who used the setting of Auschwitz to promote his government’s campaign to equate Iran and Nazi Germany, by falsely claiming the Iranians called for the physical destruction of the Israeli population.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/979478.html

(in fact, Ahmadinejad said he hoped the current Israeli regime would disappear, just like the Soviet regime and that of the Shah – without wishing for the Soviet peoples and his own Iranian nation to be exterminated http://www.mohammadmossadegh.com/news/rumor-of-the-century/ I am no fan of this dictator, but there is no need to exaggerate his words). The current Prime Minister, Netanyahu, recently stated quite bluntly “It’s 1938 and Iran is Germany” http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/787766.html

Such Nazi comparisons have often been used in the past to justify military operations: for instance, when the IDF bombed Beirut, killing PLO fighters and several thousand civilians during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Prime Minister Begin wrote to President Reagan that the destruction of Arafat’s headquarters felt to him like he was destroying Hitler’s bunker. http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2004/11/11/arafat/index3.html

I find the universal interpretation much more appealing: never forget to show solidarity. Here, the famous words of the theologian Niemöller come to mind:

“In Germany, they came first for the Communists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist;

And then they came for the trade unionists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist;

And then they came for the Jews, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew;

And then… they came for me… And by that time there was no one left to speak up”.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came…

However, recently I’ve been thinking about a third interpretation, concerning the dangers of extreme self-righteousness. I read and re-read the text of the speech given by Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, in Poznan, Poland, on October 4, 1943.  The address, of which there is a surviving recording, was given to his SS officers, and it seems to have been aimed at raising their motivation. Exterminating so many people was apparently difficult to cope with psychologically: Christopher Browning, in his wonderful “Ordinary Men”, recounts how sorry the members of the exterminating units felt for themselves decades later, because of the hard job they were expected to fulfill.

So Himmler wants to raise his listeners’ spirits. He tells them that many Nazi party members speak of extermination as if it is “a small matter”. But “none of them has seen it, has endured it”, unlike his audience: “most of you will know what it means when 100 bodies lie together, when there are 500, or when there are 1000″. Actually exterminating people is much harder than it sounds, but Himmler has words of encouragement: his subordinates “have seen this through, and – with the exception of human weaknesses […] have remained decent”.

How do you exterminate decently? “We have taken away the riches that they had, and I have given a strict order [… to deliver] these riches completely to the Reich, to the State. We have taken nothing from them for ourselves. A few, who have offended against this, will be [judged] in accordance with an order, that I gave at the beginning: He who takes even one Mark of this is a dead man […]We have the moral right, we had the duty to our people to do it, to kill this people who wanted to kill us. But we do not have the right to enrich ourselves with even one fur, with one Mark, with one cigarette, with one watch, with anything. That we do not have. Because at the end of this, we don’t want, because we exterminated the bacillus, to become sick and die from the same bacillus”.

http://www.holocaust-history.org/himmler-poznan/speech-text.shtml

Incredible as it sounds, the Nazis felt the need to morally justify their actions to themselves as they were systematically murdering millions of men, women and children. To do this, and to distinguish themselves from the “bacillus” (germs) they were eliminating, Himmler came up with a criterion that, to him, really proved his subordinates’ basic decency: they may be busy piling up bodies, but at least they weren’t looting them. They showed honorable self-restraint throughout this ordeal, so difficult for them to perform.

Many sides in the Israeli-Arab conflict “Nazify” their opponents: I find these comparisons exaggerated and highly dangerous, and as I wrote, they are too often a prelude to more violence. I believe the Jewish Holocaust should only be compared to other cases of organized extermination. One variety is a bureaucratic apparatus implementing a systematic plan to wipe an entire group off the face of the earth within a limited timeframe (examples include the Armenian genocide of 1915, and Rwanda in 1994). Another is repeated attacks of colonial armies on indigenous populations over a longer period, which are frequent and violent enough to lead to full-blown extermination – as happened in Northern California in the 1850s and 1860s, or in Tasmania in the 1820s and 1830s. Without detracting from their seriousness, I don’t think we have any evidence to support framing current events in the Middle East in this specific way.

But I think the Poznan speech can serve us as a yardstick, as a warning: this is how far self-righteousness can go. People can undertake a vast project of killing off an entire people, and still convince themselves they are morally superior. Read this text:  it is really worth your consideration.

http://www.holocaust-history.org/himmler-poznan/speech-text.shtml

New York Daily News photograph by Joseph Ambrosini of Stonewall uprising taken on Sunday, June 29, 1969 via OutHistory.org

Recently dozens of LGBT pride parades were planned in cities around the world to mark the annual pride week. For many people with commitments to LGBT liberation, this time is set aside in reflection on the struggle for the rights of LGBT people, their history and contributions, and on the need to reveal and oppose the separation and oppression of people with non-normative gender identities or sexual orientations. This year this spreading and increasingly accepted annual celebration has received extra attention in that it marks forty years since the “Stonewall Riots,” the unofficial ‘beginning’ of the contemporary LGBT rights movement in Euro-American world.

The fortieth anniversary celebrations have brought rare attention to an event that has historically been underrepresented and systematically forgotten in our society. In the week beforehand, the New York Times ran editorials and articles discussing the significance of the riots, while various LGBT activists were interviewed on the subject in the corporate media. President Obama himself commemorated the riots with an East Room reception. While many if not most other instances of insurrection, popular resistance, and grassroots activism go unmentioned except by radical intellectuals and historians, the pivotal Stonewall riots seem to have achieved a measure of attention that other uprisings have not, perhaps a testament to the rising acceptability of the LGBT issue as one of fundamental human rights and equal protection under the law.

I wholeheartedly celebrate the all too recent induction of this important event into the public consciousness. It’s not every day that an uprising that was not only spontaneous but also comprised physical force is honorably mentioned, much less honorably mentioned. However, I also believe that it is our responsibility to commemorate the memory of Stonewall not only through highlighting injustices that are uniquely (or exclusively) committed against people for their sexual orientation or gender identity but to draw connections between supposedly separate ‘issues,’ especially connections that cross the border between the acceptably and unacceptably rebellious.  We have the responsibility to examine historical continuities and similarities that extend to the present day and could prefigure unique ways to build solidarity, rather than section off ‘LGBT history’ from other histories of oppression and resistance.

For example, I was fascinated by a first-hand account published in the New York Times entitled “The Real Mob at Stonewall.” The article was written by a US army officer named Lucian Truscott who was one of the only reporters on hand to write on the riots. He mentions, for example, that the raid on Stonewall was not technically against gay people for being gay. Rather, the stated reason was based on the seemingly uncontroversial and much more palatable basis of ‘law enforcement.’ According to the police, the Stonewall (and many bars like it) had been raided for “…selling liquor without a license, which it was….”Truscott explains the process:

“It worked like this: citing disorderly behavior laws, the State Liquor Authority ruled that bars catering to openly homosexual patrons were not entitled to liquor licenses. Gay bars were thus made effectively illegal, which left them to the mob, which happily ran clubs without liquor licenses and paid the police to look the other way. Several more years would pass before the first clubs with openly gay owners would be licensed…and the mob lost its stranglehold, an early legacy of Stonewall.”

In this way, the systematic separation and oppression, the state-sanctioned culling of gay life from the face of cities across the United States, was both carried out through and obscured by the enforcement of liquor laws. Who knows, maybe many police officers themselves thought that that’s the only thing that they were doing as well, just keeping people safe from illegal alcohol rather than criminalizing LGBT community spaces. You’d need to dig just a little bit deeper to discover that gay people could not own bars and get liquor licenses in the first place, but unfortunately for most people that bit of depth accomplished its task.

This situation was immediately familiar to me as someone at least peripherally aware of the ‘law’ practiced in Palestine/Israel in general and the occupied territories in particular. After all, anyone familiar with house demolition practices under the occupation knows that demolitions are always explained as the simple application of laws applied equally to people regardless of their national identity. Palestinians simply build too many houses illegally, and that is why, we are told, there are tens of thousands of houses slated for demolition. But dig just a bit deeper, and you find that while Jewish West Bank settlers’ “natural growth” is staunchly defended by the Israeli government, you find that Palestinians are systematically denied construction permits on both sides of the green line, that no new housing or school infrastructure for Palestinians has been built in places like Jerusalem in forty two years, and that private Palestinian land is being confiscated for Jewish housing expansion. Akiva Eldar, an Israeli journalist and an expert on the settlements, published a straightforward piece on this phenomenon entitled “What about the Arabs’ natural growth?”

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1092430.html

I have also found these publications helpful from Ir Amim (“City of Nations” in Hebrew), an information-producing Israeli NGO working for equality in Jerusalem.

http://www.ir-amim.org.il/eng/_Uploads/dbsAttachedFiles/PlanningCrisisEng.pdf

http://www.ir-amim.org.il/Eng/?CategoryID=254

In this way, in both Stonewall era New York and present day Palestine/Israel, the essential injustice of each situation lies beneath a legalistic sheen, a stinking carcass sprayed with cheap perfume. This oppression, obstructed to outsiders by appeals to ‘the rule of law,’ is also something that both the patrons of Stonewall and the Palestinians of Israel/Palestine have learned and known about every day of their lives in one way or another. It seems to me that as spontaneous as the Stonewall rebellion was at the time, it was also based on deeply and widely shared experiences of oppression, a knowledge that every patron of the Stonewall possessed. And in a sense the Stonewall riots were not only a reaction to long-standing oppression of gay people in New York, but it also denied the police and the public at large the veneer of legality that justified the criminalization of gay life. After Stonewall, the police could still raid gay bars, but not with the notion that they were doing anything other than arresting people for who they were.

The connections between LGBT rights and Palestinian rights are not just comparative. They have been made flesh through activism and solidarity practiced by many activists. “Aswaat” (Voices) is an organization of Palestinian lesbian women who organize against the ‘circles of oppression’ they live as Palestinian and LGBT women. Al Qaws (the Rainbow) is the first Palestinian LGBT organization for all groups in the Palestinian population, based in Jerusalem but with related affinity groups in cities in the on both side of the green line. And of course, Ezra Nawi is a shining individual example of connecting his experiences as a working class gay man, a Mizrahi Jew, and an anti-occupation activist. His activism, like so many others’, was made famous by his recent arrest for “assaulting a policeman.” Writing on the situation in the Nation, Nawi writes of how the occupation apparatus uses his gay identity to undermine his work:

“Over the past eight years, I have seen with my own two eyes hundreds of abuses…and exposed them to the public–therefore I am considered a provocateur. I can only say that I am proud to be a provoker.

Because I am a provoker, the police together with their allies have threatened me, beaten me and arrested me on numerous occasions. And when I continued to “provoke” them, they did not hesitate to out me as a gay man; indeed, they spread rumors among the Palestinians with whom I work that I have AIDS.”

Nawi connects his own experiences of dehumanization to the dehumanization of the Palestinians he works with. Even though he is Jewish, the law enforcement and court systems and their participants see him as an Arab:

It is important to keep in mind, however, that the evil I confront every day in the West Bank could not have been carried out without the Israeli court system. Judge Eilata Ziskind not only mistakenly found me guilty but she instructed the court to invite a translator for the sentencing, as if I do not speak Hebrew; in her mind I, a Mizrahi Jew, am a Palestinian Arab–and Arabs are, almost by definition, guilty.

One the one hand, the oppression scantily clothed in the letter of the law, and on the other the utter dehumanization that Palestinians and to a lesser extent their allies face regularly, are both echoes of past and present experiences of the gay community in the United States. In my view, the lesson from Stonewall is to tear apart the tissue paper rules and legalistic justifications that paper over dehumanization and oppression, to require the apparatus to do its work in the light of day, and to resist in a manner that shatters the images that oppression engenders of the oppressed. When the gays were being arrested, they “…struck vampy poses, smiling and waving to the crowd. This was not the way gays were supposed to behave when they were arrested, and the officers started shoving them with their nightsticks.” What started the riots, then, was the fact that people not acting the way they were supposed to.

Patriotism in many right wing visions, especially nationalist ones, perceives the nation only synecdochically. Under this framing, the nation as a whole is used to refer only to the self. Thus when the nationalist right-wing says it “loves America” it is really only referring to a specific part of America, namely the part that it composes. In effect, then, what nationalist right wingers are actually saying when they profess that they love “America” is that they love themselves.

It first occurred to me to think of patriotism and right-wing nationalism in this way when I was reading a reflection by Frank Schaeffer, a former Christian Evangelical leader, who writes,

I came to realize that I was in bed with a group of people who were profoundly anti-American [the Religious Right and far right of the Republican Party]…. They wrapped themselves in the flag and ‘loved America,’ but it was an America in their imaginations only and cast in their image: white, middle-class, straight, born-again, homophobic and tinged with racism, not to mention misogyny.

The America most Americans lived in; diverse, open, tolerant, and multi-ethnic was the America that the right would hardly acknowledge. They ‘loved’ an America that didn’t exist, and hated the real country we live in.

Similar imaginations abound in Israel, which many nationalists (and many abroad) call a “Jewish state.” But over 20% of Israel’s population is not Jewish, just as the real America is not entirely white, middle-class, straight, or born-again. In other words, Israel is only a Jewish state in the imagination; in the real world, it is a state within which many different people live, even though government institutions marginalize and discriminate against those who don’t fit the norm of being Jewish–all with the encouragement of that subgroup of nationalistic Israelis who see the country as belonging to them and not to the others who dwell (or used to dwell) within it.

Nationalists attempt to re-inforce their imaginary version of the nation by designing institutions so that they are biased against other voices within the nation. The notion of being “unpatriotic” is really a byproduct of this hegemonic assertion. If a proclamation that you love “America” is really a proclamation that you love yourself, then an accusation that somebody is unpatriotic is actually an accusation that somebody else is merely against you and your ideas. The attack loses its force when it’s not about betraying a grandiose collective, but is merely a disagreement between two people.

Once the right wing’s nation is exposed as synecdoche for the self, it becomes illogical to accuse somebody of being unpatriotic unless by the accusation what is meant is that the accused is actually against himself. This is certainly a conceivable scenario, but it is unlikely to be the case in most situations where this crude accusation is leveled. To insist on the existence of a nation with regards to which one might be unpatriotic, an exclusive nation whose sanctity and purity is paramount to that of each person’s belonging to it, is to violate some of the most fundamental democratic principles regarding inclusion and equality–not to mention that it fails to recognize the dissenter as an actual person, rather than a mere enemy or threat.

Reading right-wing patriotism in this way–as “profoundly anti-American”–also draws into question paradigms about tolerance. Though tolerance is often a subject of praise, it is actually a sinister way to white-wash implicit inequality. That you will tolerate somebody merely means you are not out to extinguish their existence; it does not mean you recognize their independence, their equality, or their rights. It is one thing for Americans to “tolerate” homosexuals and homosexuality, for example, but it is entirely another for us to acknowledge that they have full rights and full equality to us. Tolerance is still a means of exclusion.

I believe it is important to think about notions of patriotism like this critically. Many Arabs and Muslims in the United States post-9/11, for example, sought to fit themselves within a particular notion of American-ness to guarantee their safety and security. Suhail Khan, a former Bush ally, is one example of the kind of approach that I’ve railed against in the past.

Under Khan’s approach, Muslims and other marginalized communities in the States should say, “we are Americans, like you [white, straight, middle class, born-again Americans].” That is the paradigm of oligarchic assimilation and integration. The appropriate response–the response that fights in the name of pluralism rather than uniformity–should instead be that “we are also Americans” (in addition to whatever else we are). This is the paradigm of democratic inclusion. It suggests parallelism and mutual legitimacy, without imposing uniformity of any kind, or requiring unshared belonging.

While the first approach might grant temporary security, it also comes at the cost of one’s own legitimacy. It makes difference illegitimate and is thus inherently unsustainable. The second approach resists the oppressive force of a category (like “American”) that has been usurped by some elite or nationalist sub-group that treats the nation as a synecdoche for itself. It takes back the category from those who try to selfishly possess it, transforming it into an inclusive one rather than an exclusive one. It also refuses to belong to only one category.

This methodology, of course, does not have a universal applicability, as it presupposes a container for itself. There can be cases where the category/container itself is hegemonic. One might think of the Palestinians in Israel–why should they be forced to identify as Israelis, with the state that dispossessed them of their lands, violently repressed them, and exiled their relatives, when their presence is not conditional on Israel’s existence but precedes it? Another might be the Tamils or the Irish. I am not sure that a universally useful and fair rule exists that applies to these cases where settler colonial populations expropriated the land of the indigenous peoples, especially as circumstances for those communities change over time.

It is nevertheless possible to identify the racist nature of the reigning regimes in these cases, which, as a by-product of their colonial roots, require subjugation and disempowerment of those peoples rather than genuine inclusion. In these exceptional cases, the mission is not necessarily to “expand” the nation (as it constitutes and purifies itself only by the institutional, geographical, and cultural exclusion of the aforementioned groups) but rather to burst its bubble, if only so that a new one might be formed.