Jian Ghomeshi and the Dangerous spectre of “Authentic Feelings”

On May 6th in Toronto, Jian Ghomeshi hosted an event honouring Morgan Freeman in which he received a cultural prize from Hebrew University. Because such events wash Israel’s image, and because Hebrew U colonizes palestinian land in East Jerusalem, PACBI (Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel) asked both Freeman and Ghomeshi to withdraw from the event. There has been a concerted social media campaign attempting to pressure the figures to not participate in this event, which is a normalization of Israel’s apartheid practices in East Jerusalem. To quote in part the letter sent by PACBI to Jian and Morgan Freeman, 

The intention of the award is to honor your work in ‘combating racism and promoting knowledge and education worldwide.’ Given that Israel practices forms of racism through its system of colonialism, occupation and apartheid, and violates the rights of Palestinians to education and life, it is cynical, and nothing short of a dishonor to your lifelong achievements to be accepting an award from a group that is in deep support of an Israeli University complicit in Israel’s systematic violations of human rights and international law.

 

The Hebrew University is specifically implicated in serious violations in a number of ways. The University illegally acquired a significant portion of the land on which its Mount Scopus campus and dormitories are built. On 1 September 1968, about one year after Israel’s military occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, the Israeli authorities confiscated 3345 dunums of Palestinian land. Part of this land was then used to build the Mount Scopus campus of Hebrew University.

On Monday, Jian responded to the concerns:

In simple terms, this event is not political for me. I am not doing this as a product of political affiliation or to make a statement. I am doing this to honour a great man and to advance dialogue around global education. That is what I signed on for.

Jian’s reference to his own internal motivations as a response to the claim that his event legitimates and normalizes the daily crimes against the Palestinians satisfies a little less than half of those who responded by commenting on the post (it was put up on Facebook). What is interesting about the comments is that not one of them is explicitly pro-Israeli, those who Jian has convinced agree with the non-political nature of the event, and applaud him for sticking to his convictions in the face of criticism. They perceive in Jian an authenticity for sticking to his beliefs.

What is strange about all this is that normally we applaud others for sticking to their beliefs when they are challenged because we agree with their beliefs. But Jian’s beliefs here are not self-understood or represented as political, so instead of a political conflict between two sides we have a conflict between one side that denies its political nature, and another side that declares the political implications of the event.

This is special because while we are used to politics presenting itself as a-political, I can’t think of many examples where the a-political represents itself as a-political and becomes a politics of anti-politics. To be fair to Jian, he is not against ever being political, rather he is arguing for a suspension of politics. In the case of participating in the Hebrew U event, his justification is the assertion that there “will not be an easy resolution soon” to what is “a longstanding political debate”, and that he “will speak out when [he believes] the timing is appropriate”.

So, Jian, when will the timing be appropriate?

Perhaps we can take a clue from his reference to Margret Atwood, which appears at the end of his piece. After all, he said “She articulates what is in my heart…” However, upon opening the piece, we find that Atwood is making a distinction between a cultural prize that comes from a private Israeli foundation, and a prize that would come from the Israeli state or a state university:

the Dan David Prize is a cultural item It is not, as has been erroneously stated, an “Israeli” prize from the State of Israel, nor is it a prize “from Tel Aviv University,” but one founded and funded by an individual and his foundation, just as the Griffin Prizes in Canada are. To boycott an individual simply because of the country he or she lives in would set a very dangerous precedent.

Margret Atwood’s distinction between the boycott of Institutions and individuals is not a hack job, in fact, it echos PACBI’s own language on the boycott of individuals:

In its 2005 BDS Call, Palestinian civil society has called for a boycott of Israel, its complicit institutions, international corporations that sustain its occupation, colonization and apartheid, and official representatives of the state of Israel and its complicit institutions. BDS does not call for a boycott of individuals because she or he happens to be Israeli or because they express certain views.

Jian has no right to use Atwood’s piece to defend his own complicity in Apartheid. Atwood argues against cultural boycotts, but at least she argues rather than appealing to unstructured inner motivation. An argument can be responded to, can be part of a reflexive process of mutual growth and understanding. But a statement that culture is not political is not an argument, and thus what is disturbing about Jian’s remarks is not simply that he choses to stand on the right side of history, but that he chooses not to stand at all but simply hunch and shrug his shoulders, appealing to his own feelings and ignoring those who believe that when it comes to speaking out against human rights violations, there is no need to wait until “the timing is appropriate”.

Transcendence and Reflexivity in Fanon: Nationalism and National Consciousness

The key distinction between nationalism and national consciousness with respect to culture is not, as it first appears, the mere redefining of relationships. Now, you could make an argument that it is just about redefining relationships. If you did this you would say something like the meaning of inertia is stasis, relationships staying the same, whereas the dynamic culture is one in which relationships are changing, redefined. This would not require a notion of transcendence, you could think it purely in terms of transformation on a single theoretical plane, no reflexion only disruption. And perhaps the birth of national sentiment, and the initial attempts to “to reanimate the cultural dynamic and to give fresh impulses to its themes, its forms, and its tonalities” remains for Fanon on an immanent plane, not yet reflexive, not yet “conscious”. The evidence for this is that the effects of these re-animations are “nill”. If they are reflexive, their reflexivity will show up in their taking account of not having an effect. To speak simply: those who re-animate cultural dynamics in a way that merely reproduces existing power relations and acts as a pacification for settler colonialism or other forms of oppression are only reflexive insofar as they actually reflect on the political impact of their work.

 

Now, the reason why I think you need a notion of transcendence is that in order to move from nationalism to national consciousness you need a “consciousness”. The consciousness is the national culture becoming conscious of itself as having a role at reforming the culture, meaning the “whole body of efforts made by a people in the sphere of thought to describe, justify, and praise the action through which that people has created itself and keeps itself in existence”, and directing that reform towards liberation and against the colonizer. This reflection is transcendental, or transcending if you want, because it doesn’t remain fully embedded in the thing it is reflecting on. You could think about it this way: if self criticism isn’t transcendental, then you could never come to any answer in self-reflection other than everything you’re doing is great, all your ideas and the relationship between your actions and your ideas and your beliefs don’t need any change, and everything you’re doing is having all the effects you are expecting it to have. This would amount to a kind of un-consciousness, and that’s I believe what immanence literally is, a kind of pure determinism. And of course we may believe that we are more determined than we think we are (i.e. Foucault especially early Foucault). But there is something weird about this – from the fact that we can criticize our self-consciousness as not really self conscious but actually secretly determined actually implies that we are even more free than we thought, because we can stand above our whole forms of seemingly free discursive production and recognize the unfreedom in it and then try to effect changes to moderate those forms of implicit coercion.

 

Using transgressive Artists as an example, there is no reason to think this reflection should be theorized only abstractly, you can as easily do an anthropology of it by interviewing artists who are criticizing their own work in terms of its political impacts, and evaluating art cultures which are collectively engaging in this self criticism. Self-criticism is a part of the struggle as important as force because force without self-criticism can probably always be contained by a counter force which is self critical (not only the revolutionaries are conscious and reflective – the state is eminently reflexive with how it responds to resistance!). And of course analysis of this self criticism can benefit from critiques like Foucault who might show that what we thought was self-criticism was actually much more determined than we thought – but again this is not an argument for the non-transcendental quality of reflexivity rather an empirical and political matter about the difficulty of such criticism – and the reflexive/transcendental attitude is the one that doesn’t give up the possibility of criticism because it is hard but faces this difficulty as a challenge.

 

There is perhaps an ambiguity in the notion of ‘dynamic’ and this gives rise to the multiple possible interpretations of Fanon’s work, if we think that dynamic just means changing then any random chaotic and/or externally determined process is dynamic. But liberation is not merely a reaction against the colonizer (anti-colonial) but also the overcoming of internal repression and inertia in which the colonized liberate themselves and become freely, actively, consciously engaged in the production and reproduction of their lives, which means, their culture. Now I’m perfectly guilty of perhaps over stressing the anti-colonial aspect of Fanon’s theory (in reaction against the notion of post coloniality), but if we take this idea of “consciousness” seriously we must admit that Fanon is not merely anti-colonial but also a theorist of beyond the anti-colonial. But this is not “post colonial”, at least not the common meaning of the term, because all postcolonial theorists ever talk about are the remnants of coloniality in the “post colony”. The true after of anti-colonial struggle is not “freedom-from” colonial oppression (i.e. defined as “after” the colonial period), but “freedom-for”, in other words a self-conscious liberated culture that determines itself.

 

Fanon’s belief in the transcendent imputus of armed liberation was probably too strong. He believed even that in places where the struggle was relatively short the fact that the people were involved in it would make them un-dupable, un-trickable, encouraging them to de-mystify their culture and take charge of their own destiny. This belief was probably justified, but not as a political philosophy but a truth which is the postulate of the militant on the barricade. No one dies on the barricade for incremental progress, and no one joins the FLN to theorize about how shitty the decolonized state will be to live in because culture won’t become self conscious, because people won’t internally decolonize, and because the armed struggle will create a culture where people believe problems can be solved by guns in which resort to armed violence is a normal part of the political process and every party has a militia.

 

Perhaps, then, Fanon’s belief in transcendence, and belief that armed struggle is a motivating source of transcendence is too strong a belief. Contestation, confrontation, maybe these forms of experience have less transcendence in them than Fanon believed. Not none, because that would be to deny the potentiality of political positive transformation altogether. But without reflexivity on the side of transgression, norms will adapt and win – and we should never under estimate the importance of security states like Occupied Palestine and in the past Ireland as laboratories in which the state uses force and reflection to strengthen its capacity and finess in responding to transformative disruptions. If those engaged in the projects of transformative disruptions, whether in non violent protest, art culture, or armed struggle, are not more reflexive, more transcendent than the state, then we may be properly be able to say that Revolutions have no future.

The Otherness of Martyrs

Last night I was speaking with Palestinian friend who grew up as a citizen of Israel, when I was viscerally overcome by the recognition of the gap that divides Palestinians living in Israel from green card Palestinians in the West Bank.

This friend went to a mixed university – Jews and Palestinians together. They were even friends with Jews – only left wing ones who refused to serve in the army. But in their classes would be zionists, soldiers getting their call on their cellphone to serve in the war against Gaza. Also in their classes were zionist students serving as spies on Palestinian professors, who would report things said in class to their political leaders, so that retribution could be threatened against any teacher who dared to speak against Israel.

But what was surprising to me, what was overwhelming, was not the thousand forms of regulation and oppression that Israel subjects its “Arab citizens” to, but the massive gap, the wall of silence, the effective class divide between someone growing up with the relative privilege of Israeli citizenship, and other Palestinians living not so many kilometers away, on the other side of the wall, in refugee camps and poor neighbourhoods. I was struck by the way this friend spoke about the poor Palestinian kids who got killed, even admitting they see them as “others”. And I couldn’t believe it when they told me that they didn’t know anyone who had been killed by the occupation. That they had been fairly “neutral” prior to the second intifada. That the focus growing up was on individual success and starting a family, not on any form of political activity. I was also heartened by talk that these were prejudices of the “old generation”, and that the youth are trying to shed these ideas and reach out to the “other”.

Syria: The Sovereignty of the Revolution Lives in the Bodies of the People in Struggle

Syria. Uttered in Arabic, we hear Sou-ree-ah. What is the meaning of this word today? Its utterance produces shivers, sighs, perhaps sparks of hope along with the horror. And of course fights. There is alive in the 2.0 world of print/blog media a war of words concerning Syria – is it a revolution? is it still a revolution? what about the islamists? what about Assad’s nominal anti-imperialist stances? What about resistance against American hegemony? What about American funding of the rebellion? It might be said that it does not matter so much what is said on blogs in the West about Syria, that the revolution or rebellion continues regardless of what we think about it. But there is a universal human obligation to try to understand those things to which one is connected. And a still more universal obligation to pay witness to suffering, and to those who stand up against oppression. There is something to be learned from every rebellion, every revolution, because there is a truth in the physical manifestation of standing up against injustice. Not because this standing necessarily leads to justice, but because it opens a door, a way towards justice. Because without sacrifice, there is no justice.

Remembering Rachel Corrie

Today is the 10th anniversary of the murder of Rachel Corrie by the Israeli occupation forces in southern Gaza. Last night I attended a screening of the 2009 film “Rachel” at Beit Zatoun, which also served as a commemoration, and as an opportunity to reflect on her life, her dreams and aspirations, her sacrifice, and her legacy.

Liberalism, Power and Justice and the Israel-Palestine Conflict

The question for liberals and radicals is a fundamentally different one. Liberals ask how can something proximate to justice be achieved, given the restrictions placed upon the situation by powerful interests? In other words, the oppressed are asked to compromise, to peacefully accept a more reasonable version of their dispossession  Those who refuse are called intransigent, impractical, or even “terrorists”, while those who accept are lauded with complements like “pragmatic”, “forward looking” and the like.

Radicals, on the other hand, ask how can the circulation of power be shifted to fit the requirements of justice, or even how can it be shifted by the requirements of justice. Radicals, in other words, take justice itself to be a power, a source of motivation, a cause for sacrifice. Not merely an “ideal”, but a force that aims towards an ideal, thrusting to bring it about.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and different approaches to “solving” it, serve as a paradigmatic examples of this divergence between liberal and radical approaches. I am not, however, going to argue that liberals are those who endorse a two-state settlement, whereas radicals are those who demand a one-state resolution to the conflict. Rather, the distinction can be found in what attitude a person takes towards the Israeli government and electorate, who have since the Palestinian leadership recognized Israel continually refused to accept the principle of partitioning the land according to International Law. Liberals take the feelings of those in power to be part of the game, and demand that a compromise acceptable to both sides be found in the space between the desires and aspirations of the two parties. In such a compromise, justice is never actualized but at best approximated, and the greater compromise is always taken by the weaker party. Radicals take the feelings of those in power to be part of the problem, an obstacle to Justice and something not to be appeased but struggled against. If the oppressor feels offended by the struggle, this is not a problem for a radical, although it becomes part of the tactical landscape. Whereas, for a liberal, it is more important to change the feelings of the parties concerned, so tactics that alienate are to avoided at all costs.

This distinction over tactics, over caring for the feelings of the oppressor, truly divides liberals from radicals. Not because liberals are nicer, or because radicals are mean, but because radicals believe politics to be about the reforming of the structures of power, while liberals believe politics is about changing what those in power do with that power. Liberals don’t want Israelis to have any less power, they just want them to use it for good rather than ill. Radicals, on the other hand, see the imbalance of power as a basic cause for the reproduction fo injustice in the situation, and something to be overturned through struggle.

Part of any radical position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will very likely include support of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS). This is because the BDS movement has adopted a set of goals that conform to basic requirements of justice and international law, and pursues them by means of a non-violent strategy that can be adopted equally by anarchists, marxists, and pacifists. Liberals will likely reject BDS on the basis that it does not propose a solution based on the mutual compromising of aspirations between Israelis and Palestinians, pretending them to be parties with equal power in a disagreement. However, there are also radicals who might reject BDS and appeal instead to another formulation of the requirements of justice, and try to mobilize a movement on this basis. Two examples of this have been the prominent intellectual and critic of Israel Norman Finkelstein, and the International Socialists.  Finkelstein has expressed concern over BDS not because he is a liberal, but because he is not convinced that its formulation of the requirements of justice can reach and motivate a broad public. The International Socialists reject BDS on the basis that it alienates the Israeli working class, and draws the delineation of the conflict along the colonial, effectively national lines, as opposed to along class lines. The International Socialists are not liberals, but they are radicals who draw the requirements of justice from a class rather than colonial analysis of the situation, and therefore disagree on the question of who is the oppressor, and therefore, whose feelings do we not need to consider when developing a politics.

It is easy to say that there ought to be unity between radicals, but radicals can be separated from each other almost as easily as they separate themselves from those who stand in the way of the requirements for justice. This is why it is so valuable for the prescriptions set by radical groups to not throw justice into conflict with power, but do so in a way that is motivating to a broad base. The BDS movement at this time is by far the largest radical Palestinian solidarity movement existing in the world today, due in no small part to the fact it has broad support from Palestinian civil society and approval from all the Palestinian political factions. There may be alternatives, but none that I know of which don’t alienate a significant portion of the Palestinian population, as well as a large portion of activists.

The question for intellectuals today is: do you want to be part of power’s self-justificatory functioning? Or, do you want justice to enter the field of power as an actor, do you want to be motivated by a social force which can turn against the realities of power, and be another actor in the field of history?

 

Starbucks and BDS

The issue of starbucks comes up repetitively in BDS discussions, and I think it’s relevant to listen to what Starbucks has to say on the issue.

Here’s the key bit:

Is it true that Starbucks provides financial support to Israel?
No. This is absolutely untrue. Rumors that Starbucks Coffee Company provides financial support to the Israeli government and/or the Israeli Army are unequivocally false. Starbucks is a publicly held company and as such, is required to disclose any corporate giving each year through a proxy statement. In addition, articles in the London Telegraph (U.K.), New Straits Times (Malaysia), and Spiked (online) provide an outside perspective on these false rumors.

Has Starbucks ever sent any of its profits to the Israeli government and/or Israeli army?
No. This is absolutely untrue.

Is it true that Starbucks is teaming with other American corporations to send their last several weeks of profits to the Israeli government and/or the Israeli Army?
No. This is absolutely untrue.

 

The fact Starbucks puts this kind of information on their page should be seen as a victory for BDS. I’m not saying we should all go out and support Starbucks. We might as individuals supporting BDS dislike the CEO of Starbucks, Howard Schultz who in 1998 was awarded an “Israel 50th Anniversary Tribute Award” from the Jerusalem Fund of Aish Ha-Torah for “playing a key role in promoting a close alliance between the United States and Israel”. Also, according to the Arab American News, Shultz “has championed and funded defense of Israel on U.S. university campuses.” In other words, Shultz has been actively involved in countering the work that anti-zionist activists (and even liberal-zionist peace activists) on American university campuses do when they criticize the US-Israeli relationship and ongoing Israeli colonization and crimes against humanity.

But, BDS is not about targeting individual, even if well connected, Zionists. It is not about boycotting people we don’t like, even people who try to work against us – it is about a principled and consistent economic withdrawal from companies, academic institutions, and cultural performers, who support the Israeli apartheid regime and help wash its international image. 

 

Shalom Belfast

This documentary, made by a Jewish-Israeli living in Northern Ireland, is a remarkable collection of perspectives on conflict and identity.

Ithamar Handelman Smith begins by investigating Unionist culture to find out why they identify so strongly with Israel. He finds it is because of their right-wing nationalism, and the similarity they see between criticism of Israel and criticism of militant Unionism in Northern Ireland. He then interviews Jews in Ireland – both people who were born into Jewish families, and people who have converted to Judaism who are also militantly pro-Israeli. Those born into Jewish families express hesitancy at the flying of Israeli flags by Unionists. Those converting or converted to Judaism express radical settler anti-Palestinian ideology, very far to the right of the journalist’s own stance on Israel. When he talks with Catholics that support Palestinian rights, he finds that it is always connected with a discourse of anti-oppression, although he never actually comments on or recognizes this.

The film ends with the filmmaker making a comment on how “ridiculous” it is that the people of northern Ireland would take up the middle east conflict after their conflict is “solved” (he does not address ongoing problems with the Good Friday agreement, such as the rise in Loyalist organized street violence or the unification of the Republican dissidents). The final claim made is that identity should not be based on states or nations but on one’s own decisions – a claim that totally ignores realities of oppression along national or ethnic lines.

Overall, I think the filmmaker is much less insightful than the film he has produced. But perhaps for this reason, it is a film very much worth watching.

Review of “From Beirut to Jerusalem” by Thomas Friedman

The problem with liberals is that, although they may have bleeding hearts, they are unwilling to confront or even denounce the existing realities of power. They search for redemption within realpolitik, rather than taking sides against it. And while they bemoan the injustices of the past, they are condemned to repeat them by constructing futures that overcome the stalemates of history simply by diverting our gaze towards the future. These perhaps overly boisterous claims express my sentiment after finishing Thomas Friedman’s “From Beirut to Jerusalem”, a journalist’s chronicle of two of the middle-east’s most contested cities over the course of the 1980s. I do not mean to denounce the book, to claim that it is simply a poor book, a book by a biased pro-Israeli journalist giving his straight-forward, communitarian take on the Palestinian-Israeli and Arab-Israeli conflicts. This is in fact a book of many virtues, a book which for the most part demonstrates honesty and sobriety in a region plunged into the quicksand of multiple myths. The problem with this book is not “bias” at all, because for the most part the bias of the author is his passion, his resolute commitment to understanding and truth – he recognizes that Israelis do themselves no favours by clinging to myth over fact. But in the end he remains trapped within his own kind of myth – not the myth of zionism, or the myth of Israeli idolatry, but rather the myth that we all live inside of in our normal political cultures: the myth that the elites can solve our problems for us.

The end of Palestinian Statehood is a beginning for Decolonization

The basic opposition at this point to the two state solution is not world opinion or america or geo-strategic considerations or the Arab world or the Palestinians, but Israeli public opinion and the Israeli leadership. Since Oslo, Israeli politiciens have used the “peace offensive” of the Palestinians to lower the cost of the occupation and speed up colonization in the West Bank.

The political difference between Israel/USA and the rest of the world rests on a disagreement about the basic principle at the basis of the negotiations. Even since before Oslo, the Palestinians and the global consensus have pushed for negotiations on the basis of international law, whereas Israel/USA have pushed for negotiations on the basis of “direct talks”, which means on the basis of the political power imbalance between a state and a resistance group politically tied to the commitment of ending resistance. Within the “direct negotiations” framework, the power imbalance is simply too extreme to come to a settlement which is acceptable to the Palestinian people – most would rather return to resistance rather than live in a non-viable state with no part of Jerusalem as its capital.

It’s easy to say that the the problem with the idea of compromise is it assumes that the stronger party is rational enough to give up some of its privilege to come to a settlement acceptable to both sides. Israeli society has been choosing against peace for years by electing governments more committed to counter-terrorism and colonization than to recognition of Palestinian rights and working towards creating a viable Palestinian state. The more difficult thing is to recognize the dishonesty in continuing to affirm a politics based on the lies told by entrenched elites, which no longer have the function of moving towards a two state settlement but are now mostly part of a game of maintaining their power.

The radical position to take today is to recognize that the Palestinian people are no longer represented by the leadership of the Palestinian Revolution – Oslo has gutted the PLO and has disenfranchised most Palestinians. Any two state solution based on the current elites will merely be an entrenchment and humanization of the occupation, with nothing for the refugees and nothing for the million Palestinians who have Israeli citizenship. However, the radical insight is not this but the recognition that Israeli society can no longer be considered a potential party in peace negotiations, but a racist, colonial people who have overwhelmingly chosen apartheid over peace by ramping up settlements and destroying the viability of a Palestinian state.

I think a more productive role that solidarity activists can take today is to ally not with the corrupt Palestinian leadership who continues to be committed to a solution systematically undermined by Israeli unilateral actions, but with the Palestinian diaspora against the intransigence, corruption and the lack of genuine political leadership on both sides. Rather than striving to create another Lebanon in Palestine, the time has come for the youth to embrace a future free of the quick equivocation between religion and nationality, but instead to recognize nationality as something only of worth insofar as it is liberating, and once national freedom is achieved to move forward to the next liberation. As a Palestinian poet I recently saw declared, “I would burn this flag and my keffiyeh if my people were not burning”.

Such a political program based on liberation rather than essentialized communities already has a historical figuration in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: it was taken up by Fatah and the Marxist factions in the late 60s and early 70s as they created alliances with anti-colonial third world liberation movements all around the world. And they developed quite a sophisticated analysis of how to persuade Israeli jews to join them in their struggle against the ethnic nationalism of the Israeli state. This program can be read about in this early 70s publication by the General Union of Palestinian Students in Kuwait.

Unfortunately, the PLO never lived up to its highest ideals and over time resentment and eventually religious nationalism won the day. This doesn’t mean a return to anti-racist politics is impossible, however, especially if led by the youth on both sides. Equality, religious freedom, and indigenous rights have a lot to offer to Palestinians. And all that Israelis are asked to give up is religious and colonial privilege. The principle of de-colonization, led by the youth, and supported by a non-violent resistance campaign around the world can give force to ideals worth fighting for in Israel/Palestine today. And while Israel has hardly been a light unto the nations, its decolonization could serve as a shining example of historical justice that could help open the way for the decolonization of other places around the world where European settlers continue to deny their role in the disenfranchisement of indigenous peoples.