2. On discourses about Zionist domination.

2). Some thoughts on the discourse of Zionist domination and Palestinian resistance.

The mayor of Abu Dis addressed our group in the evening.  He looked bowed down by grief and responsibility, and at the same time defiant and determined, so that it was quite hard for me to judge his age, whether he was younger or older than me - one of his sons had been killed by an Israeli sniper near the Wall; he spoke of “Nakba after Nakba” - the wall is just the latest, he said, making life in Abu Dis very difficult, as it is cut off from its roots as the eastern gate of Al Quds - families are divided, and the whole town cannot function normally, since Al Quds was always the cultural and religious centre of life here; moreover the infrastructure which was organised from the main city cannot function -  for example there is no hospital for the 80,000 people; life is slowed by the checkpoints and the unpredictable amount of time people are kept waiting, resulting in deaths of the sick and women giving birth in cars.  There is a shortage of water and electricity, and continuous and crippling wealth extraction, with connivance of some wealthy owners connected with the PA in Ramallah, through high costs of these basic amenities.  This is on top of heavy taxes and the fines through which Palestinians pay for their own occupation.  Large buildings have to be built but the Israeli authorities will not permit any sewage system to be created.  

A few things that the mayor said echoed word for word things that I had heard from the Palestinian 17 year olds I had met at a meeting in London a couple of weeks before, and troubled me in the same way:

1). “We want to live like others across the world.”

No other population in recent times has lived for so long under military occupation and after expulsion from their original homes and land: the Palestinians are indeed living under a uniquely oppressive regime of domination.  The mayor was addressing visitors who by our just being able to be there are demonstrating the possession and use of freedoms that he is denied.  Nevertheless if the situation in Israel/Palestine is a particularly sharp and brutal focal point, racism based on skin colour, religious affiliation or other markers of difference is a worldwide feature of capitalist systems  - it arises inevitably from the defence of private property as a licence to exploit the vulnerable, and to exploit some, marked as ‘Other’ particularly harshly - and it has victims everywhere.  Effective solidarity faced with domination, in all its different but related forms, needs to move towards involving all its victims in identification with one another’s plights.  If we do not conceive that we ourselves are also victims of a system - militarist patriarchal neoliberal corporate capitalism or whatever - confronted with such terrible stories of oppression and domination as we had heard in Abu Dis, we are left feeling pity and shame and guilt, and we are motivated to acts of charity or aid, rather than to acts of solidarity.  The oppression and domination of the Palestinians is overtly harsh and overtly racist,  but it has many of the same characteristics - the attack on communal solidarity and the promotion of individualism through forcing households into debt, by relentless extraction of university fees, legal fees, fines, and high costs of basic services, for example,  is a process of neoliberal control over subordinate populations that is ubiquitous.  The techniques of domination that have been developed in Israel/Palestine, as it says in Elbit Systems advertising brochures for its drones and other weapon systems, are being field tested for wider application; the techniques of deploying massive walls to separate communities from resources they need and to restrict their rights to move freely, likewise.  We can look at Palestinian resistance and resilience for leadership and for inspiration, as they face already what we face already in a milder form, what the wind is blowing towards us.

Franz Fanon wrote in  ‘The Wretched of the Earth’ (1963), in pointing to the clarity of domination by race in a colonial situation, that this turns upside down there the relation of economic base to ideological super-structure:  (p5): 

 ‘The originality of the colonial context is that economic reality, inequality and the immense difference of the ways of life never come to mask the human realities.  When you examine at close quarters the colonial context, it is evident that what parcels out the world is to begin with the fact of belonging to or not belonging to a given race, a given species.  In the colonies the economic substructure is also a super-structure.  The cause is the consequence; you are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich.’ 

Here Fanon points to a limitation of traditional Marxist thinking about capitalist society - though Gramsci, Raymond Williams (and Marx himself) had already taken Marxist thought beyond that simple tiering of base and super-structure.  However, Marx did tend to see ‘primitive accumulation’ as something in the past rather than as something ongoing, and indeed something flourishing in his own time in the imperialist colonies.   Nowadays it is being brought back from the erstwhile colonies to be practiced as accumulation by dispossession in the old imperial centres once again, in today’s rentier capitalism - a financialised capitalism where wealth is made more easily and profitably from directly robbing poorer people - whether by high rents or by privatising public services - than by stealing part of the value of their labour in production.  Fanon argues that the colony displays fully the racism that is at the heart of capitalism; and again in the years since he wrote these words, through more migrations and the increased use of immigrant labour as cheaper and more subordinate labour, this racial domination has moved from the colony to the centre of Europe’s politics.   Fanon’s strong identification with the Algerian resistance to French colonialism no doubt had a lot to do with his being Afro-Caribbean, and his sense of being made into who he was, inescapably, by French colonialism and racism.  There must have been a lot of other psychiatrists working in Algeria at that time for the French state, but they could not transcend their whiteness to identify with the oppressed as he did.  I have to fear that I may be with them, commenting perhaps, and seeing, but unable to act effectively to promote change - trapped by whiteness.  However, I comfort myself that perhaps it is becoming easier to escape this fate, as everyone knows now that the system of militarism, accumulation and extraction, and all of its associated layers of privilege, has got to be replaced, and fast, unless it be accepted that millions drown and starve and the world heats up to where even the super-rich start to find life intolerable.

2) “I apologise for having to say that you British played a significant historical role in the oppression of Palestinians.” 

This apology  assumed that I was ‘British’ in a way that I can hardly conceive, as an opponent for more than 50 years of the establishment that I regard as the British establishment.  I may be a bit of an outlier in this regard, but I deplore being British, and if I have to accept, reluctantly, that I am so, I certainly do not take any responsibility for the actions of the British state, not now nor 80 years ago.  People in Abu Dis are rich compared to Londoners in the strength of their community life - when someone dies, even though they will be buried within a very few hours, there will be 1000 people at the funeral; this solidarity is built from myriad daily practices.  Yet it seems hard to separate this community solidarity from the solid identification of the self as a Palestinian, which arises from the constant oppression of the Israeli domination, making everyone into Palestinians without the opportunity or even the conception of being ambivalent about their belonging in the way that I am. This  proud self-identification as a Palestinian is thus a part of the oppression being enacted and experienced, and also at the same time it is a key part of the resistance and resilience of the community.

It was not just in the mayor’s talk, but throughout the visit, that I was troubled by nomenclature, not that I was confused exactly, since the source of the oppression referred to, the Israeli state, its army and police and the settlers in the West Bank, was usually clear; but the naming of this enemy as  “the Jews” seemed problematic, particularly for one like me coming from the situation  in the UK in which anti-Semitism accusations are being used quite effectively to try to stop people with progressive politics, and particularly those opposed to  20th-century settler-colonialism, from being elected to or staying in positions of political leadership.   “Israelis’ obviously misses out the 20% of the Israel population who are Arab Palestinians, not to mention ignoring all the immigrant workers from other countries, such as Eritrea, Sudan or Ghana, in Israel who mostly lack full citizenship rights, and who are exploited and abused in much the same way as Palestinians from the West Bank were before the first Intifada, and indeed still are insofar as they can work in Israel with or without permits.  Both populations are seen as a demographic threat to the Jewish nature of the Israeli state and are accordingly abused, dominated, crudely exploited and cheated ( See May Guarnieri Jaradat, “The Unchosen, the Lives of Israel’s New Others, Pluto Press, 2017). ‘Zionists’ might be the best term for the oppressors, but it might seem to exclude a lot of perpetrators such as multinational arms manufacturers, HSBC bankers, and so on, who are not Zionists, or not Jewish at all but just want to benefit from the Zionist project, or from settler-colonialism generally.  It also ignores those who want to foster for political reasons an enhanced system of dividing populations into an in-population and an ‘Other’ population, such as Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, or Victor Orban, who support the Israel project for that reason.

 Even using “Palestinians” to describe the victim population in this conflict is problematic, or at least  if, as it seemed to be, it described Arab Palestinians, Christian or Muslim, and the Samaritans in Nablus it pays an unwilling tribute in acknowledging Zionism’s success in eradicating from history and from consciousness the Arab Jews of Palestine, some 5% of the population of Palestine 140 years ago, many of whom were anti-Zionists.  Theirs seems to be an identity that  has simply lost its possibility of being.  A future Palestine state which is just, and which has emerged from a process of Palestinian return and a recovery from the Nakba, will surely have to involve some sort of resurrection of Jewish Palestinians and Arab Jews.

The problem seems to be that in describing the system of domination and abuse in Israel/Palestine - and surely the same difficulty occurs in describing other epicentres of struggle across the uneven field of capitalist domination - one has to use  short easily comprehensible terms for oppressor and victim, but in doing so, it is very easy to have already conceded some very important political ground, as well as being in danger of slipping into racist language and conceptualisations.  To describe oneself as a victim of oppression, to articulate with pride ones’ belonging to a group which the oppressors have created to exercise domination over, to state “I am black, I am Jewish, I am Palestinian,” or to say “I am gay, I am a woman, I am working class” and so on has always seemed the essential first step in mounting a resistance.  We respond to bullying and domination by mimetically building our own Wall, albeit only in mind and language, and however low it is, it can still trip us up.

3) “We are not terrorists.” 

 Why should the victim of a regime of domination including the regular infliction of terror need to say this?  The university students I spoke to, several of them at different times, had said it too, as had the Palestinian children who came to London whom I had heard speak a few weeks before.  Perhaps many Palestinians struggle to understand how so many powerful states in the world can continue to allow Israel to continue  their settler-colonial project and to ramp up their practices of domination over the indigenous population, and believe that we in London are continually being told and lazily accept that Arabs are terrorists.  But  this denial was voiced in places where it was quite clear that the group of listeners were sympathisers of the Palestinian Arab cause, so I feel its irrationality must have a deeper cause.

The word “terrorist” carries a huge burden of stigmatisation, promulgated loudly by the proponents of the neoliberal world order defending militarism, wealth and exploitation, but perhaps it is effective as stigma because “terrorism” signifies a kind of directionless explosion of victims’ inescapable frustrated rage and anger at the bullying and injustice that is meted out to them.  Such explosions virtually never turn out well, and their victims are usually not the real oppressors.

These Palestinian voices are burdened by rage, humiliation, anger and sense of injustice, reinforced deliberately by their abusers on a daily basis - the real terrorism of the Israeli state and its allies eats at their personalities; in that sense terrorism is inside them, as an infliction.  This is the poisonous bile which they daily have to choke back, which some struggle to avoid mimetically re-enacting on themselves, through chain-smoking for example, or on weaker members of their households as in domestic violence.  Sometimes, particularly for the late adolescents who take a knife to a check-point, or pick up a stone to throw, it cannot be contained and in seeking a more appropriate object ends in fatal virtual self-harm.  The demand for social justice is felt emotionally by the victims of abuse as something terrible inside them.  Repression and denial follow.  This is the truth of human existence as social animals, our feelings and thus our motives to action are susceptible to determination by those who dominate and abuse us, just as much as they can be fashioned by loving attention and nurture.  

In the discussion that followed the mayor’s talk to us, our host was discussing the direction of Israeli politics towards a more open policy of displacement of the Arab Palestinians, with their extermination or total subjugation within a “greater Israel” when he declared that the Israelis need their common designated enemy, the Palestinians, and without them the whole project would fall apart.  This assertion echoes that made by Patrick Wolfe about the Zionist project in his “Traces of History, Structures of Race” (2016), which is a brilliant study of how ‘race’, created  in the European Enlightenment, takes its particular forms from all the settler-colonial projects across the globe that it spawned.

 This mutual dependency in domination and subjection also made me thing of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic expounded in ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’.  Hegel’s myth has interested me because it seems an attempt to show how self-consciousness cannot exist without an Other, through interaction that is simultaneously conceivable as an internal process of psychological development and as a historical unfolding; this “end to the antithesis between subject and object” is clearly relevant to the relationship of experiences of abuse and domination to subsequent self-damaging behaviour.

According to Hegel, the master emerges as such because he does not fear death, while the slave consents to his subservient role out of the fear of extinction; once enslaved, the slave makes things for the master, who eventually becomes dependent on the labour of the slave.  This is a demonstration that gross asymmetries of negative power in human relations cause fundamental damage to our capacities to think and to act - responsibility and authority should always be as commensurate and reciprocal as possible, not merely to satisfy moral requirements, but to enable both parties to flourish.  Acts of domination, particularly when inflicted on children, can inflict more or less permanent damage on these capacities, and unleash mimetic behaviours that are damaging to the self or seek new victims; but the abilities and potential of the bullying party are also damaged.  By negative power I mean acts that cause damage, such as sexual exploitation, physical violence, bullying, or neglect; there can be power manifested by acts that cause fulfilment and development, such as teaching and adequate parenting, which I would call positive power - and this perspective based on health outcomes is slightly different, I think, from Foucault’s ‘biopower’.  Of course there are a lot of circumstances in which the two are indeed mixed up, as in the role familiar to me of being a doctor, an agent of the state issuing certificates, an agent of normatively and of the naming and placement onto individuals of stigmatising labels, as well as someone capable of providing attention and care, and occasionally healing people. 

Hegel’s story - which may have been influenced by what he knew of the Haitian slave revolution - is a myth or an archetype, and I had to rein in my initial naive equation, when I heard this assertion of the populations’ mutual dependency,  of Israeli = master, Palestinian = slave; the roles are already less clear, for example in relation to the distribution of fear.  Obviously as the victims of constant and intrusive state surveillance, Palestinians in Jerusalem and in the West Bank live in constant fear,  but at the same time fear of the retribution of those whose land was stolen is strongly determinant of Israeli state propaganda and policy.   The Palestinian feminist writer Nadera Shalboub-Kevorkian in ‘Security Theology, Surveillance and the Politics of Fear’ (CAmbridge University Press, 2015), a study of Palestinian experiences of life and death in the context of Israeli settler-colonialism, asserts that Israeli political life is grounded on fear, elevated to the status of a theology, justifying a deeper and deeper slide into more extreme practices of domination.  The emotional state - fear and hatred -  in such a colonial situation, which effects the insertion of negativity into the mainsprings of almost every action, is associated with an asymmetry of material negative power afflicting both parties, though it is largely enacted by the party that has more freedom to act abusively.