And they aren’t entirely wrong. In many situations, especially personal situations, even engaging in dialogue is a sort of opening up to others, allowing ourselves to be affected by the needs of others. In dialogues where the implicit rule is to not come off as a jerk, the mere exchange of perspectives can be enough to motivate change.

The key quality of a successful dialogue is that the exchange of perspectives between the parties have a reflexive character. What I mean is that in the dialogue the position of each of the parties bend, or flex, in re-lation to each other. The “re” is both recognition and re-peting. This relation is an integration, a crossing, a crux. Mutually affective, but not in a material or mechanistic sense – after all we are human, cognitive, understanding beings. In the reflexive dialogue our understanding works on our interest and our interest on our understanding, and we engage in a mutual becoming which facilitates new forms of life, new ethical postulates, new I’s and We’s. It is essential is that these transformations are both individually and mutually willed, or at least accepted consensually so that we can imagine transitioning to a point where we do will the compromises. But what is most crucial is that between the parties, a higher and more considered intelligence emerges – we might call it an inter-subjective comprehension of the situation as a whole. If you want to call this a metaphor, that’s fine, but it’s a metaphor for the active role that the relation, rather than the individual parties themselves, play in transforming the interpretation of the situation and therefore the situation itself.

But as was clear from the introduction, in my view the whole liberal project is a little naive. Naive because where there is a need for dialogue, there is often a power imbalance – which itself might a reason why grievances emerged. Asking people to dialogue in a situation where one party has more power than the other is to presume a false equivalency between unequal parties. Even if the stated goal is to overcome the injustices on the table, the effective goal is to normalize the status quo, and to get the weaker parties to accept their oppression as the condition of moderating it. More often than we would like to admit, slight improvements in their situation are offered as the payoff for peacefully acquiescing to the order in which the subordinate group is structurally under-privileged.

From the perspective of dialogue as reflexivity, we can state more precisely what is wrong with dialogue across large imbalances of power. Reflexion is self critique, and mutual critique, but most importantly it is allowing the perspectives of others to affect your own perception of your own needs. But if you are much more powerful than the other you are claiming to “dialogue” with, you don’t need to do this, you don’t need to change your own view of yourself – you can simply make an offer and then say that the cost of not accepting the offer is you will continue to enforce the status quo with your superior force. This is why accepting the status quo is a precondition for dialogue with rebel groups, even when accepting the status quo means accepting the superiority of the stronger party. This can not be called dialogue, it should rather be called discussions regarding the terms of surrender.

In order for dialogue to take place, there must be some equivalency between the parties in their experience of precarity. If your life is in no way precarious, then you have no reason to expose yourself to the possible transformative effects of a genuinely reflexive interchange with another. In inter personal drama, the mutual precarity of losing friends in common, or simply appearing to be a jerk, might be enough to drive both parties into a dialogue and genuine compromise.  However, in dialogues between representatives of groups, the stronger party can only be forced into dialogue if the conflict creates a precarity which is unsustainable for its own members. Thus we should be highly suspicious when governments say they “will not negotiate with terrorists” – because in fact governments can only negotiate with groups which create a precarious situation for their own citizens. A government declaring that it will refuse to negotiate so long as the precariousness situation caused by the attacks is maintained, is effectively declaring that for the sake of avoiding a dialogue with the rebels it is willing to sacrifice whatever human lives that might be lost in the military campaign to wipe out all of the rebel forces, to the point where their ranks are so weakened that they can no longer resist the status quo and will instead sign terms of surrender, or simply return quietly to their unrecognized subordinate position.

Rather than thinking about force and dialogue as opposed to each other, we should see how they work together. Force can prevent the possibility of genuine dialogue, but force that restores a balance of force can restore this possibility. Only precarious lives can dialogue, and in situations where force makes some lives precarious white protecting others, a countervailing force is one of the things that can restore equivalency.

Of course, on the other hand, precarious situations can drive people into recalcitrance, especially if they think they can appeal to their ability to mobilize enough force to blot out the source of their precarity. The anguish of fear is a prime breeding ground for fascism, for tribalist thinking, for racism, sexism, an idealization of the “golden age”, and all forms of cultural inertia. A complete account of the dynamics of reflexive dialogue across different situations of force would require unpacking this tendency, and distinguishing more closely what forms of precarity motivate entry into reflexive dialogue, compared to which tend towards greater and more self-destructive appeals to might-as-right. It is, however, possible that the difference between these reactions is not a matter of external factors, but the internal decision and freedom of the members of the society under pressure.

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”.

Many are not so lucky. The film Streets of Plenty reveals how homelessness can cause people to become ill and prevent their bodies from recovering, creating a vicious cycle which is incredibly damaging to people’s health. Shelters may be warm, but the huge rooms full of beds are an ideal place for diseases to spread, and you probably won’t be able to sleep because at least one person will be up coughing all night. Outside may be quieter, but unless it is warm the cold makes it difficult to sleep, and because your body is hard at work keeping itself warm the immune system will be down, making one more susceptible to illness if one is exposed. Private rooms are sometimes available, but getting one is akin to winning the lottery.

So, when I’m sick in bed, lucky enough to have a bed to be sick in, I think about how perverse our world is that it is such a privilege to have a bed, such a privilege to have a clean warm place in which to recover. Everyone should have a room, have a bed, a blanket, a clean bathroom and warm water. Treating every human being with decency is expensive, but in a world of billion dollar yachts, we clearly aren’t trying hard enough.

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.

Travelling to, or in this case travelling through, the United states, is always an opportunity to raise a few eyelids. Sitting here in the terminal at Newark airport, everything looks about normal. However the drone of CNN in the background discussing the “Boston Bombing” reminds me I’m in a fascist country. Just a little bit fascist, mind you, a kind of Germany 1931.

I make an effort when I’m travelling to look people in the eye, to engage with them on a human level whether it’s at a shop or an airport desk. Probably more so than when I’m in Toronto, actually. I’ve been told customs officials refuse to engage in any human level interaction, but in my experience that’s not true. We were heavily delayed (waited about 2 hours) on the tarmac before take-off to Newark today. But everyone’s mood seemed good, and I had a very informative and friendly discussion with the staff, who were happy to explain that the delay was caused by federal government’s cuts to the air traffic control system. 

Flying into Newark, everything looks a kind of placid and plastic nightmare. The airport looks dirty, and is located next to a dozen freeways and an oil refinery. It reminds me that America is a poor country, or at least it is becoming an increasingly poor country for the 99%. A country over stretched, that can’t maintain its infrastructure, that doesn’t value keeping things clean. When you fly into England or Switzerland, the values of the place are laid out for you  to look out in the towns and villages, and parks and waterways and forests. North America (including Canada) by comparison always have a kind of wild-west look to the development when seen from the air.

Above all, I’m reminded that every situation has a mood, a befindlichkeit, and the mood of this place is languid and dusty and not very life affirming. Not depressing persay, just deeply boring.

I start to wonder, and for some reason New York really elicits this wondering, why we value cities so much. We build in this very high density around a centre, which we celebrate as a centre of culture and architecture, basically a high point of human achievement. But why? Some cities fit into the geography in a way that makes them look natural, and insofar as the  physical geography influences the development of the city then there is a natural aspect to them, but this doesn’t resolve the question, in fact it’s only an illusion because the geography never gives the fundamental cause of why a city is built, or what attracts people to a place. And most cities, it just seems so arbitrary where they are. Why is Manhattan such an expensive place to buy property?

Perhaps it is appropriate to wonder about cities while I’m on my way to Ireland, because the summer school I’m teaching at is most assuredly not in a city, but a small village. And at the location itself there is no internet (thank heaven). Perhaps it is mere pastoralism to feel malaise at the city, and at the endless suburbs. But if we take seriously the idea of a situation proscribing a mood, then we should also think at what limits a place puts on thinking – what can be thought might be different in a city cafe, in an airport terminal, and in a mountain castle.

Perhaps most of all, sitting in an airport terminal reminds you how small you are. How many people whizzing by in every direction. It reminds me of an Old Phoebe song, “The Machine”

We’re trying to make sense of things

We’re trying to change things

We don’t wanna be a part of the machine

it just eats your work, and ploughs over everything

Maybe this song, written by two pure-spirited teenage girls in Nanaimo, BC, actually does a better job of expressing the paradox of man in modern society than a dozen key texts in sociology or psychology. What more is there – people working, trying to make things better, all while recognizing that the systems that we enter into co-opts our efforts, and makes our wills other than our own. Maybe this isn’t just a particular situation, but every situation, every situation insofar as someone is committed to not only their own interest but the interests of all. I realize we’re trained by modern economics to believe we’re essentially selfish, but we’re also trained by traditional moralities to care about the whole, and we shouldn’t reductively give into neo-liberal normativity because maybe it only functions because people still believe they are acting virtuously? This is probably too abstract. There remains something very appealing about the simple thought uttered in the song, a thought somehow appropriate to sitting at this airport, in a little-fascist country, in a deathly ugly city, waiting for a flight to the green and gold paper tiger to live in a Castle for a week.

I no longer know

how to grieve

“innocent” American victims

 

I can’t remember how

to bear my head down low

and wring my hands and nod

in agreement yes,

this was a horrific act of violence,

yes, of course, violence is never okay

 

I can no longer bear

the violence of these

ritualized gestures,

the violence

of this language of mourning

reserved only for the upstanding

Citizens of Empire;

lives vaunted

and cherished,

infinitely more valuable

than the hundreds of thousands

of brown bodies that now litter

the Middle East because America

was too hurt

or too angry

or too traumatized

to see beyond its own

misty haze of grief

 

There is too much pain in this world

and I’m afraid

I no longer remember

 

how to grieve

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”.

At a basic level, the whole thing to me is absurd. What is “National identity” if two Palestinians can grow up so close to each other, and yet live lives so different? The answer is of course “Israel” – these divisions between Palestinians are a colonial effect, and the apartheid wall exists to harden them. The divisions are maintained and exploited by the zionist presence – divisions between Palestinians of 48, Palestinians in the West Bank, and Palestinian refugees living outside the borders of Palestine. It’s one thing to assert these differences in text, but quite another to really feel the emotional and social gaps that are made to exist. That they are one people, and yet not one people. But at a less intellectual level, it also feels absurdly unfair, how is it that one Palestinian doesn’t know a single martyr, and another, so many of his friends growing up are killed by the occupation? Not that anyone deserves to grow up under oppression, even the more moderate oppression of Palestinian citizens of Israel. But when Palestinians speak of Revolution, of the Palestinian Revolution (although, what Palestinians speak of this revolution any longer?), how can you expect people to understand each other across such extreme gaps?

In this friend’s difficulty and struggles to understand the “other”, I see my own. In the prejudices instilled in them by the old generation, I see the prejudices of white liberal society – focus on your own business career, ignore the wretched and the downtrodden, or at best treat them with charity. And that’s not an accident, but the basic logic of colonization which is “your benefits exist and the expense of someone else, so just ignore them and enjoy your life”. And especially if you are a racialized person, this is a very understandable tactic because the “wrong” course of action could very quickly have your status reduced to the status of the lower ranked person you’re encouraged to ignore.

It’s in this context that I want to talk about martyrs. Martyrs remain a taboo subject, even amongst solidarity activists. We talk a lot about the crimes of the occupation, but we rarely honour the martyrs beyond at most reading their names. I feel something nefarious is going on here. For one, if an Israeli is killed by a Palestinian, immediately the whole world will know their life story, we will hear interviews with their friends and made to empathize with their loss, etc… But I’ve never ever seen so much as a single martyr’s poster put up on campus or at a Palestinian solidarity event – ever.

I think two related things going on here. The first is that we are actually all racists – the death of a person labelled “white” is of much more significance, even to people who identify as anti-racist, because of the subconscious success of the western colonial mindset. This is perhaps an overly strong way of putting it, but what I mean is that a Palestinian who is killed doesn’t enter the realm of the personal, we don’t identify with them, with their family – we see them as ‘other’. We don’t imagine it could have been us, or our family, or our friends.  The second thing is our paranoid fear of the violence of the oppressed. If we are honest, we will admit that many martyr posters of killed Palestinians show photos of young men carrying guns. This does not mean that they were killed in active service of the resistance, it just means that they had a photo taken of themselves holding a gun, and this photo was used to make the martyr poster. As a friend of mine who I was speaking with about these things said, “the world will never forgive a brown man with a gun”. Again this reenforces the gap, the safe distance between the “civilized” solidarity activists, which in many cases might include the relatively privileged Palestinian citizens of Israel, and the “uncivilized” Palestinians living under military rule, or in native-authority areas, who are much more likely to have some kind of connection to armed resistance. This paranoid fear, this absolute need to create a safe distance between the charitable activist and the dispossessed who might make unacceptable decisions, this is a big reason why we refrain from humanizing the martyrs, why we don’t even talk about them as martyrs but only as people killed by Israel.

But these are all lies. First, it is important to call martyrs what they are – martyrs. They are martyrs because they are killed by the occupation, or killed in the struggle for the liberation of their people. Their death is not only a crime but also a sacrifice, and when we reduce their deaths to Israeli criminality we take from them the agency of their sacrifice. I’m going to talk about just one martyr, Amer Nasser, who was killed at the recent funeral of Maysara Abu Hamdeya. Amer was 17 when he was shot in the head by a hollow point bullet from an Israeli soldier’s gun, causing his head to explode instantly. The reason I specifically want to write about Amer is because an article has been published on a website called Dissident Voice which includes a poem he wrote two weeks before his death:

Point your bullet where ever you like in my body
I will die today, but my homeland will live tomorrow
Be careful, Palestine is a red line.

If we take this poem seriously, we see a young man who does not fear death, who understands the sacrificial meaning of death in the struggle. We would be wrong to only mourn his death as a crime, not to recognize that his death is, to a meaningful extent, the result of his choice to stand against the occupiers. He accepted the possibility of death. This does not mean that we should welcome his death, or that we should not protest against his death as a crime (although, realistically, do we even do this? Do we even read the names of those killed at our events? No we treat everything as so abstract that there are hardly even “people” being oppressed just this idea of “the palestinians”). It means though that if we truly want to stand in solidarity with the oppressed we should not reject the oppressed’s interpretation of death as martyrdom.

The normal way we relate to martyrs is in fact a form of disavowal. We want to say that he people killed are just like us, to satisfy our universalist outlook, but because their ideas may differ from ours we don’t look at their ideas and just call them victims. So the condition of identification with them is reducing their identity to pure victimhood, empty of content.

Said simply, the solidarity movement largely sees Palestinians through the lens that Israel has created for us to see them through. Maybe this is because we are afraid there might be some truth in this story, that we of course denounce it publicly but then go along quietly with what it tells us to refrain from doing. And we go along with it – we don’t let ourselves listen to Palestinian voices that step outside our comfort zones, or to really identify with Palestinians who are killed. Thereby we are kept safe from the dangerous other. The Israeli narrative of “terrorism” is never confronted but only denied.

At a talk I attended on last week, a professor that I know and respect made a four-part distinction concerning the uprising in Syria, a four-stage theory of the revolt, the thaura. He distinguished between (1) causes behind the peaceful protest movement, which called only for reforms and not for the fall of the regime, (2) its transition into a more militant and eventually armed opposition calling for the fall of the regime, (3) the growth of sectarianism in the conflict, and (4) the reasons behind the difficulty of reaching a negotiated settlement to end the violence. I won’t repeat the details of the talk here, but in essence, he argued that the conditions for the protest movement were socio-economic, increasing poverty especially in rural areas, as well as changes in the state which saw it become more of a “family affair”, rather than run by the Ba’ath party. The protests then turned increasingly militant in reaction to the regime’s torture and killing of peaceful protestors, and in the context of the armed rebellion sectarianism has flourished. And peace is so difficult to achieve because none of the centres of power see it as in their interest. So what exists today in Syria is a corrupt, ossified state which is at war with an ever increasing section of its population, its people. And this has been the case now for more or less two years. What exists also is the increasing sectarian-ization of the conflict, people identifying with smaller than state identities for protection. And a military-political situation where neither side sees value in backing dow; all sides prefer to continue the fight rather than make a deal.

It’s in this context that, as Canadians, we’re obliged to have some sort of attitude towards the violence. As Canadians we are a NATO country, and virtually all the arms going to the rebellion are passing through a NATO country – Turkey. As Canadians we are also a strong US ally, and according to Rebel commanders, no weapons get through to the rebels without Turkey getting prior approval from the USA. As members of a NATO state we can agitate and demand that arms shipments stop, or that they be increased, or that they be changed in kind. We can argue that the shipments of US made arms from Gulf states through Turkey are illegal according to US law and pressure America to stop them. Or we can pressure our governments to increase support for the rebels, to give them higher tech weapons which they need if they are to fight in open confrontation against the regime. This external involvement, these western hands inside the conflict that give us a responsibility to know about it, it does not make everything automatically a conspiracy. At present, all it means is that America has its hand on the flow of arms into Syria. America isn’t supplying the arms, isn’t paying for them (this seems to be coming largely from Gulf pockets). But even if they were, Americans aren’t fighting and dying to bring down Assad.

This brings me to the point that I want to make. It’s easy to talk about “imperialism”, to talk about the flow of arms, to talk about conspiracies and the “middle east 2.0″. It’s easy to accuse the rebels of taking arms from the Zionists, to say they’re causing the destruction of their country, to write from the comfort of your computer screen that you support “only indigenous revolutions” and that intervention from outside, even US aid or approval, invalidates the cause. The fundamental mistake here is to place the sovereignty of the struggle according to the flow of capital rather than the flow of blood, to play into the imperialist logic and assume that only the positions of great powers are important in a conflict. But what about the Syrians? This talk of imperialism alienates Syrians who need guns to defend themselves from the regime, who can’t have a peaceful protest without protection by guns. This talk alienates those Syrians who have chosen to sacrifice their own safety for what they understand to be a revolution, for the freedom of their country. This is not to romanticize the one who holds the rifle, but to think about them honestly, as a locus of decision, and as a bulwark against oppression which can itself become a source of oppression. In other words, as a moment of sovereignty  We cannot seriously do without the one who holds the rifle because this would be for the people to give in to power unilaterally, to surrender in every way to the state. We must always remember that in Syria the rebellion was peaceful and was pushed to arms by actions of the regime! And by extension, we cannot condemn the one who holds the rifle if his or her rifle says “made in USA”, or if they can only find a bullet for it because a great imperialist has decided for them to have access to that bullet creates a “beneficial instability”. Perhaps revolutions are possible today only if great powers allow them, this is certainly unfortunate but does it remove the justness of the cause of struggle against oppression?

Naysayers always ask “but what will happen afterwards”, as if because the state can offer such a plan (but can it?), a rebellion must do so as well. The truth is, we know what happens afterwards – those groups involved in the uprising have a say in the power struggle insofar as they consolidated their power through the struggle. Whether a rebellion turns into a civil war even after the regime is defeated rests on the way of the rebellion – does the struggle produce unity, does it produce ideological affinity between groups strong enough to overcome differences between ideologies? Can a compromise be reached between comrades? The answer is always “perhaps”; there is always the possibility of revolution in an uprising. I can’t say why some uprisings turn sectarian, why others turn against all forms of oppression. But why do we say “we must stand with the oppressed”? Is it because the oppressed always have the correct political interpretation? Or, is it because it is from the position of oppression, and the victory of the oppressed over the oppressor, that universality and freedom emerges into the social world. That oppression is the site for the emergence of genuine revolutionary co-existence. Not that such an emergence is necessary, not that the oppressed cannot become oppressors, but rather that this possibility is perhaps the only possibility – that every attempt to move towards a universal politics from a position of privilege (i.e. liberalism, charity, reformism) will be merely moderations of systems of unearned privilege which ultimately serves to protect those systems. But if we are honest we must admit that the victory of the oppressed is only a chance, only a possibility. But without belief in the victory, without solidarity with the oppressed, then there is not even the chance, only the resentful condemnation of the real as impure. In truth, the real is always impure, or rather “purity” in the real does not mean the ideological perfection of the cause, but the absoluteness of the need and the trueness of the impetus towards brotherhood and freedom. In truth, the revolt never has the program of peace inside it as a series of propositions, but it carries the truth of freedom as a physical experience of revolutionary comradeship. Whether this truth emerges into a revolutionary political plane is only a chance, but it is not a chance which rides on which imperialist approves the shipments of the revolutionary’s arms. The sovereignty of the revolution lives, if it lives anywhere, in and between the bodies of revolutionaries.

thaura thaura hat al-Nasra

Doodle achieves a certain ideal in the world of today – it fits perfectly with our busy yet flexible schedules, it gathers exactly the information we need and nothing more, it’s a kind of parato-optimal market solution for your time.

However, doodle has a pernicious effect on the meaning of the events that it helps schedule. By making it on-the-fly, which means non-repetitive scheduling, so easy, we no longer need to commit to weekly repetitive patterns. Instead of a weekly group meeting, say on Wednesday at 8pm, the meeting can be planned weekly to fit at the ideal time for everyone in the group, even if such a meeting happens every week. This is the casualization of events which otherwise would have gained a weight, a gravity that comes from repeating a practice in a cycle of time. Monday choir practice, thursday PTA meeting, can you imagine the way the meanings of such events would change if they were re-scheduled every week?

Our weeks, our cycles of time take on significance by, among other things, the things we do in them repetitively. This is why a Thursday afternoon has a certain feeling to it, why we might feel obligated to socialize or “have fun” on a Friday or Saturday night, and why Monday is the unofficial start to the week – despite the fact calendars tend to imply that the week starts on Sunday. By hunting for those empty spaces, and being so good at it, doodle moves us towards a world where our schedules have less and less repetition, where we can less so count on the familiarity of our own lives.

If we need to schedule important events that occur most every week by a Doodle poll, because we can’t find time in our schedules to give the event a repetitive, weekly time, we might ask ourselves if we are too busy? Which means, are we committed to too many projects, are we involved in too many involvements? Our involvements take time, but they should also give us time, in the sense of give us meaningful time, time activity which satisfies us, which grounds us, and which gives the time around it an aura of meaning too. If our involvements are becoming schizophrenic, if we are mere task-oriented, focussed on the completion of imagined goals and therefore lose track of time as not merely a resource but also the time of our lives, who has time become? Or rather, who have we become, such that time governs us, rather than we give meaning to time.

So, when I say I won’t fill out a doodle poll, I don’t literally mean that I won’t fill out a single doodle poll for the rest of my life. But what I do mean is that I will resist the causalization of events, the last-minute-ification of what ought to be planned carefully out in advance. It may be the case that this resistance will result in losing-track of some otherwise completable tasks, but this is better than losing track of ourselves, of not taking care of our own time, of being attentive to the meaning of our time. And when we take care of our time, we take care of ourselves.

The story of Rachel Corrie is one that I feel some identification with. She grew up in Olympia, a little over a hundred miles south of where I grew up. She was born in 1979, just four years older than me. In the play, “My Name is Rachel Corrie“, you hear her childhood through her own words – the entire play is built from her journals. Every word is her word. And while her childhood is not exactly average if we’re being honest about North American demographics, for those of us who grew up in the predominantly middle-class suburbs, we hear in her words the same emotions we felt when we questioned how “average” our suburban lifestyle really was. In her words we hear our own struggles with privilege, our struggles with recognizing the nearly omnipotent evil that acts in our names and supposedly in our interests, and the overwhelming and often stunting desire to ‘do something’. And, to speak crassly, while there are millions of privileged white kids who have felt these internal battles and desired to strike out against what we so clearly see to be wrong, and thousands of them who have gone to ‘do something’ in the form of solidarity work Palestine or elsewhere, we tell Rachel’s story because she is a martyr. Because her story expresses the truth of all the others. And while we don’t tend to say this explicitly, our actions speak it much louder than any declaration: she is our martyr.

And this is a problem, because the focus on Rachel Corrie always carries the danger of repeating the racism that she was trying to undo. There are new martyrs in the Palestinian struggle all the time. Just three days ago the Israelis killed a Palestinian in Fuwar, near al-Khalil/Hebron in the occupied West Bank.  On the day Rachel Corrie was killed, 9 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces. And yet we focus on Rachel, we obsess over the details of her death. The focus on detail in the film feels like a kind of obscenity to me – the almost endless interviews with military police, the medics, the doctor who performed the autopsy, the other activists who were with her, all going over the events of the day and the particular circumstances of her death. Because of course it’s all a matter of controversy – Israel denies responsibility, and so we have to endlessly argue about it.

But we all know they killed her. What’s the other explanation, it was an accident? We all know that the bulldozers had no right to be in Gaza, and that she was killed because she stood against the occupation. Whether her death was literally willed by the soldier who ran her over, and whether she died from suffocation from the dirt pushed by the blade of the machine, or from the blade of the machine itself,  when we focus on this without end we repeat the self-obsession that Rachel also stood against. She went to Palestine to understand about Palestine, and to stand with the people there against the injustices in that place. She was a social justice activist; she cared about her local community, and wanted to know about other locals. If we follow her lead honestly, we should move past the focus only on her death to the local situation that brought it about.

Probably the worst thing about our obsession with Rachel Corrie is that when we condemn her death, we repeat the same racist distinctions which she went to Palestine to oppose. I want to talk about two of these distinctions. The first is the racist distinctions is to assume that white people are more valuable than other people, or that people from our community are more valuable than people in another community (isn’t this after all why we oppose Zionism?) We do this performatively in our constant commemoration of Rachel while we don’t even know the names of the Palestinian martyrs – even the famous ones that would be known by any Palestinian. We don’t try to understand the Palestinian situation from a Palestinian perspective. Not that there is any single Palestinian perspective, there are of course many, as there are in any community. But you can try to learn about them. You can read Palestinian authors. You can read Palestinian authors that are read and celebrated by Palestinians. You can read other authors who influenced the Palestinian movement, and you can read Palestinians writing about those authors. And you can try to understand something about the history from a perspective that isn’t obsessed with ‘peace-building’, that isn’t always portraying Palestinians as victims, and which recognizes and celebrates the specificity of the Palestinian struggle, rather than letting it fall under a concept as you feel obliged to after the forty sixth time some zionist calls you anti-semitic for caring about Palestine. I’m by no means an expert at these things, I can’t even read Arabic. But I can point to certain beginnings, certain openings that you can look at so that you can try to understand not from a totalizing perspective, but moving forward from a fragment. I’m getting off track so I think I will return to this theme in a future post.

The second racist distinction is the idea that anyone in another community who fights back against injustice is a “terrorist”, whereas when we do it we’re a “freedom fighter”, and when we oppress others we do in the name of the “law”, whereas when others oppress others they do it in the name of “tyranny”. Rachel speaks directly against this racism in her journals and these particular words are repeated in the play “My Name is Rachel Corrie” and also in and in movie “Rachel”. And I can quote them here because you can read them in her emails on the Rachel Corrie memorial website.

If any of us had our lives and welfare completely strangled, lived with children in a shrinking place where we knew, because of previous experience, that soldiers and tanks and bulldozers could come for us at any moment and destroy all the greenhouses that we had been cultivating for however long, and did this while some of us were beaten and held captive with 149 other people for several hours – do you think we might try to use somewhat violent means to protect whatever fragments remained? I think about this especially when I see orchards and greenhouses and fruit trees destroyed – just years of care and cultivation. I think about you and how long it takes to make things grow and what a labour of love it is. I really think, in a similar situation, most people would defend themselves as best they could. I think Uncle Craig would. I think probably Grandma would. I think I would.

I can’t actually read these words without tears coming to my eyes. And I can’t reflect on them without feeling anger at the way even the language of the International Solidarity Movement reflects the western logic of “terrorism”. When we say “we support non-violence not terrorism”, or “terrorism is not legitimate armed struggle” we are repeating in discourse the idea that fighting back is only for white people. If our lands came to be occupied by a foreign power, in our time, do you think we would insist on respecting the international law in those ways that we resisted occupation, especially if the occupier had resources and technology which eclipsed our own by a thousand times? Of course not, we would resist by the ways available to us, without regard to any morality higher than the struggle itself. These rights, which intuitively belong to us, we do not accord to others. In any honest consideration, the resistance has every right to operate in Gaza, which is Palestinian territory even by the International Law, and accordingly the Israeli military has no rights there. And if you want to talk about how some bombing in Tel Aviv is terrible, yes, fine, it’s terrible, it is full of suffering and awfulness – but you can’t de-politicize it, you can’t dismiss political violence as “terrorism” when you are occupying and colonizing somebody else’s land.

I honestly feel that a lot of the progress that has been made by Palestinian solidarity movements since the BDS call in 2005, and especially since the end of the Second Intifada, is in danger of being lost. This is because the progress in popular consciousness has been made based on an image of brutal Israeli repression with very little to no Palestinian resistance – in other words, an image of Palestinians as victims who don’t fight back, or who fight back largely ineffectively. We focus on the disparity of force in Gaza, and we focus on the non-violent demonstrations in the West Bank. We have not decolonized our understanding of political violence, and for this reason as soon as there is resistance again we will be forced to condemn it and say that everything that causes suffering is bad because we have not made the anti-racist distinction between the violence of the colonizer and the violence of the colonized.

We must have the courage to make the distinction between the violence of the colonizer and the violence of the colonized. Rachel Corrie can help us. For fellow western settlers in solidarity with Palestine, she is our martyr, and it is for us to be accountable to her legacy. Not to pigeon-hole into the same racist traps she struggled against, but to let her sacrifice open our minds, to help us understand the meaning of what is a martyr and why people continue to struggle in the name of martyrs. and help us take up decolonizing perspectives on Palestine-Israel. To not only condemn suffering, but also to stand up for what is true, and right, and pure, and strong.

RIP Rachel Corrie, April 10, 1979 to March 16, 2003