A man once walked into a Black Laundry meeting, a group of radical queers against the occupation in Palestine:

“‘I am not gay, and I do not care much about the occupation.’

So [we asked] ‘What brings you to a group of queers against the occupation?’

‘Well, I am very interested in environmental issues and how military bases pollute our environment . . . I feel as if I cannot talk about this connection in other groups.

When I go to environmental groups they do not want to take on ‘political’ issues and discuss militarization. When I go to anti-occupation groups they do not consider the environment an important priority’”[1].

When the struggle against the budget “crisis” at UCSC turned from protests, walkouts and speeches to occupations of university buildings I was ecstatic. Finally, I thought to myself, something is actually being done. I closely followed the occupation of the graduate student commons, checking the OccupyCA blog multiple times a day, always finding new messages of solidarity from all over the world and analyses of the action by its participants. Having spent the last few months on field study in Israel/Palestine, it was nice to joke around, to call what was happening on campus “my kind of occupation.”

Having not been there to take part, I am not able, like many of my friends at home, to criticize the tactical and strategic choices that were made. However, one thing that I found myself constantly contemplating was the language of the struggle. Calls to “end capital” were prominent among the blog posts, protest signs and speeches; although some analyses of the situation did attempt to explicate the slogan by discussing the privatization of the university within the larger context of neoliberalism, what I would like to question here is the emphasis placed on “end capital” as one of the defining slogans of the struggle. While it is certainly important to contextualize the budget situation as a failure of neoliberalism, if we are calling for an inclusive struggle, it becomes especially important to ask ourselves where and how slogans may be counter-effective and suppress opportunities to foster broader networks of struggle.

A recent article published in City On a Hill Press substantiated my frustrations. The author no doubt agrees with the recent email sent out by “OccupyUCSC”—that the struggle against increased fees and the privatization of education is a collective struggle. But the author also does not hesitate to ask the questions that many in the student body must be thinking, primarily that “this is getting serious, and we’re very confused about what lies ahead and how it involves us […] we can’t help out without a nudge in the right direction. And while there’s been lots of dancing, if there’s no clarity in your revolution, we’re not coming”[2].

It is important for me to say that I consider myself an anarchist; I am always suspicious of myself when identifying as such, and always do so with the intent that it be a beginning to a conversation, not an end to one. I even feel uncomfortable (and slightly pretentious) stamping myself with that infamous ‘A,’ knowing that I will not be able to engage in dialogue with many of those who read this. Nonetheless, I do so to keep short the explanation of where I’m coming from, as well as to contextualize the questions that I am asking of myself and of the movement: I too see the struggle against the cooptation of our education as part of a larger struggle against capitalism; direct action is not always the right way, but one way within a strategy consisting of a diversity in tactics. But we cannot make our struggle against capitalism and privatization everyone else’s struggle. Trying to rally people around radical understandings of social relations rather than common points of unity misses the essence of solidarity.

We are right to call for a broad, collective struggle that encourages people to “pursue their own ways of fighting against this ongoing trend toward the destruction of our education”[3]. Yet, we cannot expect everyone to have the analytical and theoretical tools (and the privilege to acquire/develop them) to draw the connections between occupying spaces (or militant actions in general) and a larger struggle against privatization. Neither can we expect everyone to want to take part in an anti-capitalist struggle. In other words, to explain that occupying a building is to localize a global struggle against capital presupposes that a critical understanding of capitalism in general, and neoliberalism in particular, is self-evident; it assumes a knowledge of histories of anti-globalization resistance, and even more pointedly, it assumes that people should want to be a part of this movement. What about those who just want to be able to afford their education?

The current discourses of the struggle—at least those which are projected outward through emails, blogs, etc.—converge at the phrase “end capital” (and other anti-capitalist phrases similar to it): pictures from the rallies so clearly convey the anarchist ambiance of the space. Such a discourse implies that people should join the struggle because it is also an expression of a larger resistance to capitalism and privatization. But do we not betray our mission of encouraging people to pursue their own ways by trying to convince them that struggling for true public education must go hand in hand with resisting capitalism? I agree that real public education is impossible within neoliberalism, but if someone aspires to be a CEO should they not be a part of our struggle? Do they not deserve the opportunity to complete their business degree without racking up massive amounts of debt?

When we talk about the struggle for our education only in the context of a larger struggle against capitalism, we concurrently endow ourselves (intentionally or not) with the role of “radicalizing” the student body; thus, automatically placing ourselves in a position of power (we know and they don’t). But do we not, in this way, also belie anarchism’s opposition to all forms of domination? Is this not just another act of othering non-radicals? We may not intend to create teacher/student relations, but the slogans are what the rest of the student body sees; it is our responsibility to make sure that our slogans are not heard louder than our individual and collective voices.

This does not mean we should abandon our platform. Neither does it mean that we should not challenge and engage with people—of course we should, whether they are capitalists or anarchists. Nonetheless, many people who want affordable, public education may not identify with a struggle against capitalism. To make the struggle for education, first and foremost, about resistance to capitalism will alienate people we want fighting with us. Our challenge as radicals and anti-capitalists is not to convince people (capitalists or otherwise) that because capitalism drives this crisis, everyone’s framework must be anti-capitalist, but to find solidarity in that which unites us: a desire for real public education, for our university. Solidarity, in this way, is to be together in our differences: a coexistence of ideologies in contradiction and our aspirations in common.

Before I am accused of speaking in contradictions, allow me to accuse myself: “first he says that real public education is impossible within a neoliberal context, and then he says that we should work toward solidarity with capitalists.” Absolutely. Real public education may not be possible within neoliberalism, but slogans such as “end capital” only enforce a conception in which anyone who wants to participate in the struggle for our education must also adopt a personal struggle against capitalism: “to be included you must stand behind this slogan.”

People who are not necessarily anti-capitalists also went to those rallies and dance parties: to support a struggle against a deteriorating education system; they would not have shown up if they did not care about our education, but they could not be there without having that ‘A’ inscribed onto their foreheads. They could not be there as themselves, they were made anarchists. Yes, I was not there. But the pictures, videos and messages speak for themselves: banners occupied the space, from above, and all around. Was there any way to be present without standing just a few feet from anti-capitalist slogans? “We are all anarchists,” the space declared.

I am not asking whether the occupation of the graduate student commons and Humanities 2 building were good or bad, effective or ineffective—that depends on how each individual would define those terms. Its memory, and the memories it suppressed, are for us to learn from. As we encourage those who disagree with our tactics to pursue their own ways we must also encourage them to pursue their own frameworks. For some of us, the struggle against the world capitalist order informs and shapes our daily lives, how we resist, what we resist. For others, the struggle for a career and economic security frames everyday actions and everyday thoughts: such has been the struggle for many Palestinian residents of Bil’in, a West Bank Village south of Ramallah. As the construction of Israel’s “security barrier” imposed more and more restrictions on access to their agricultural land, the residents of Bil’in started organizing; while their resistance is no doubt representative of an overarching Palestinian struggle against the occupation, their message has not strayed from what is local—the right to access the land from which they make a living.

Every Friday over the past five years, locals, along with internationals and a group of Israelis loosely defined as Anarchists Against the Wall get together to protest the Israeli ‘security barrier,’ which today leaves nearly 60% of the village’s farm land on the ‘Israeli side,’ unreachable to farmers. Ideologically, Israeli anarchists and Palestinians have much to disagree about. Nonetheless, in Bil’in, the decision to unite based on common goals rather than ideology has set the stage for a struggle that is only growing. As such, it is an act of resistance that goes beyond the familiar slogan “end the occupation”: it is about the residents’ right to farm their land; it is about their right to their livelihood. Every week, Abdullah’s message to the soldiers on the other side makes it so clear: “we want to go to our land; we need to get to our olive trees,” he says through the megaphone. “This is Bil’in’s land; soldiers, go home.”

I remember the first protest I attended: about 200 participants marched through the olive groves, and then I saw the yellow gate in front of me, the fence itself stretching into the distance on either side. Beyond the fence, soldiers tell us through a megaphone (sometimes they do not tell us) that it is an “illegal” demonstration. Beyond them, hills: thousands of olive trees belonging to residents of Bil’in ripen every season, but this year too, they will not be harvested. Over ripened olives will soon litter the ground; not a single drop of oil can be squeezed out of dry olives. We chant, give speeches; the soldiers respond. It is just part of the routine.

Tear gas is a miserable experience and a protest is not going to bring down any fence. Yet, every week the demonstration is still on; it means different things to different people. The slogan “end the occupation” begs the question: “and after we ‘end it,’ then what?” While Palestinians do not agree within themselves about two states or one state, I would personally prefer a no-state solution. For me, this too is a part of a larger struggle against capitalism—the occupation is a profitable industry, there is high demand for a market in mechanisms of control. It is also a struggle against patriarchy and homophobia. But I do not go there to be an anti-capitalist or to be a queer. It is not my goal to “teach” Palestinians about queerness or anarchism—and yet, it does not mean that I have to abandon the things I am.

That said, the experience is not without its difficulties. I would not kiss a man in Bil’in. On Fridays, Bil’in is both Palestinian and Israeli, queer and homophobic; anarchists, farmers, dykes and sexist men march side by side, and afterward have lunch in each others company. Some of our differences are visible, and some are kept hidden, but our points of unity define our togetherness: it allows us to say in one voice that the fence needs to go. The farmers need access to their trees; those olives, whether as olive oil or marinated goodies, need to be sold (eaten too! Without food, how will we go on dancing?).

Togetherness gives truth to the fact that the differences we are forced to keep hidden are artificial in the first place. They are borderlines erected to keep us apart—queers from straights, Palestinians from Israelis. Such borderlines are constantly recreated, to include some to the exclusion of others, and thus, must also be constantly resisted. By going to Bil’in we engage in a process of resistance to these borders. We embody relationships between Israelis and Palestinians that ought to be and can be (and for many of us are), seeking to build a space in which individuals can empower themselves to acknowledge and resist their own prejudices. This is the potential of the space—friendship; it is why I kept showing up.

Interestingly, nations, too, seek to render difference invisible, but only within their own collective: to create togetherness only within themselves for the purpose of producing and highlighting the difference of the other (we are like this, they are like that; we want peace, they want to push us into the sea; we know, and they do not). Nations cover their citizens with a flag to propagate the myth that the “people’s” interests are all the same. The nation that covers me with its flag and its citizenship expects me to remain hidden, to allow myself to be subdued into silence, to be afraid of the other, to justify the brutal occupation it enforces (because they are all “terrorists,” right?).

I am not suggesting a ‘right way’ to continue the struggle that is taking place within our university—and yet, there are many wrong ways. Neither do I want to suggest that we should “pander” to non-anarchists; direct action needs to be part of a broad struggle. But if we are indeed engaging in localizing a global struggle against capitalism, then let us attend to what is really local: our education, the right to our education. Students have a stake in resisting the draconian policies of the regents and our administration; and yet, if we want people to pursue their own ways in joining this fight, we must also allow them their own reasons for doing so.

Slogans that arise from (exclusive and privileged) radical discourses, rather than from the aims that define our points of togetherness only give legitimacy to the border between ourselves and other non-radicals with whom we share a common struggle. We cannot expect everyone to resist capitalism with us, but we know that together we need to fight for our education. We must not let our banners turn into flags.

With respect to those for whom to resist is to build alternatives.

Lior

[2] City on a Hill Press. “You Say You Want a Revolution? Just Let Us Know What Kind.” City on a Hill Press, October 22, 2009, Op-Ed section.

[3] Email sent out by “OccupyUCSC”. “A response to Dave Kliger”. October 18, 2009.

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.