This post was originally written in the aftermath of Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in 2008 / 2009. As Israel threatens to once again invade the territory, its determination to incite violence and provoke reactions remains unrecognized and unreported by our media. Some important correctives can be found here, here and here. This is, as it was the first time around, for my friends in Gaza.
Location: Jabaliya refugee camp, Gaza City. 2009
“And what projects are you working on at the moment?”
“An exhibition…and…I’m working on the completion of a new book, something very close to my heart.”
“What’s it about?”
“The Palestinians.”
There was a rather long silence…my friend looked at me with a slightly sad smile, and said “Sure, why not! But don’t you think the subject’s a bit dated? Look, I’ve taken photographs of the Palestinians too, especially in the refugee camps…its really sad! But these days, who’s interested in people who eat off the ground with their hands? And then there’s all that terrorism…I’d have thought you’d be better off using your energy and capabilities on something more worthwhile!”
Swiss photographer Jean Mohr describes a conversation with a friend.(1) Details »
In the 1970s, he [Eqbal Ahmed] formulated a suggestion, an extremely brilliant one, quite in keeping with his general attitude of non-violent aggressiveness, that the PLO should try to organize a march of Palestinians towards the Israeli borders in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. Inspired by the great civil rights marches of the 1960s, Eqbal urged Arafat and company to mobilize as many people as possible, walking unarmed to the border with banners saying “We want to go home.” I remember the look on their faces, when I patiently explained Eqbal’s proposal, of disbelief and mild panic, especially when I emphasized the need for peaceful means and disciplined organization.
Edward Said speaks about Eqbal Ahmed, in Eqbal Ahmed, Confronting Empire: Interviews With David Barsamian Details »
On June 4th 2009, President Barack Obama (a man I voted for!) took the stage on the soil of one of the region’s most despotic and repressive regimes. But more than that, he was standing in the center of the geography of American imperial projections that has been the Middle East since the British, Germans, French and other smaller European nations were forced to leave it in the 1940s.
(Originally written in response to Obama’s first condescending speech to the A-rabs back in 2009. Reposted to reflect that nothing really has changed.) Details »
This was nothing if not embarrassing – the hypocrisy of State Department representative P.J. Crowley, and the administration and imperial system that he so mindlessly represents, may as well be tattooed across this forehead. The news anchor tears through Crowley like a hot knife through butter, leaving him grasping for more lies and even deeper obfuscations. The anchor’s laugh at the end of the interview pretty much says it all, and pretty much reveals what the common man in these ‘allied’ nations with their billion dollar US military aid programs knows and understands. Worth watching.
Aaron Vincent Elkaim’s project on Morocco’s Jewish heritage immediately caught my attention not because of the photographs, but because of words that underpin the ideas and ideals of the project. These words immediately suggested a photographer of considerable intelligence and courage, and willing to accept and understand histories that today lie buried under propaganda, lies and sheer hypocrisy.
From The Series 'Jewish Morocco' By Aaron Vincent Elkaim
There are some issues where obfuscation and confusion are so prevalent, so pervasive, that we are unable to know what we are talking about any more. A recent example of such a situation is encapsulated and discussed in this new book by Gilbert Achcar called The Arabs & The Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War Of Narratives. There is a wide and popular set of writings that claims and insists that it is an inherent Arab anti-Semitism that informs the Arab resistance to the idea of Israel, and underpins the ongoing conflict there. That this Arab anti-Semitism is determined to destroy Israel and she is defending herself against this stain that aims to bring the holocaust back to the Jewish community. Details »
And in opposition, an unarmed people continue to resist with nothing but their voices, their bodies and their courage. Even the otherwise reluctant Christian Science Moniter had to confront this reality in a piece by Josh Mitnick called Borrowing From Gandhi? Palestinian Passive Resistance Gains Followers, where of course the writer refused to acknowledge that it has been predominantly non-violent resistance that the Palestinians have been engaged in for decades, and that the activities are Bilin are not the anomaly, which is what this piece makes it sound, or a revolution, but the result of a people, unarmed and abandoned, who have been engaged in such actions out of desperation. I quote from the piece:
“It’s not a war between two armies. By using non-violence, we take away the security excuse from the Israelis,” says Mohammed Khatib, a Bilin businessman active in the local popular committee organizing the weekly non-violent protest. “It shows the power of the Palestinian people, which is the right to live in this land.”
And it has always been so; not a war, but an unarmed civilian population brutally occupied by a racist and xenophobic nationalism that uses its sense of being ‘chosen’ to deny others their rights, humanity and justice. The hideousness of religious faith that contorts itself into racism, hatred and a purely venal interpretation of scriptures to justify murder and pillage is perhaps what dismays me most about Abrahamic monotheisms. The sufferings inflicted on man because of that thread of humanity that claims to have emerged from this seed is truly unbelievable to face and can perhaps remain as the one real argument against the Abrahamic idea of God – it just can’t be his/her manuscript if it can be so easily bloodied!
Choose yours sides. Its about to become clearer than it has ever been before. Israel’s reality, a reality that has for decades been veiled behind euphemisms and outright lies (‘the middle east’s only democracy’, ‘peace loving’, etc. etc.) is thankfully now coming out in full light. It is about to get even uglier as the nation completely looses its mooring, trips over itself in these days of increasingly moral isolation, and lashes out more and more violently against a Palestinian generation (young and old) that is finding its voice, articulating its arguments, and refusing to bend to the jack boots of the occupiers.
On a side not, the Christian Science monitor article carried a small slide show of images, and this one caught my eye:
In Yeruham, 9 foot-high concrete blocks sit at a concrete factory in March. The blocks will be used in the construction of Israel’s separation barrier. Photo by Oded Balilty/AP/FILE
And it looked very family, very similar to something I had seen earlier. And then it came to me…..
Berlin Holocaust Museum. Photo By Paolo Pellegrin/Magnum
All these memorials to a self-righteous, exclusive morality and sense of outrage. The lessons of the holocaust are not to be universally understood, but cheaply exploited to browbeat those who speak out against the policies of Israel and her treatment of the hapless Palestinians. A genuinely European hypocrisy indeed, mired deep in the trenches of her ‘Enlightenment’ thinking.
As for example, Renan a man frequently celebrated as representing the ‘progressive’ spirit of Europe, and who could still in fact hold ideas such as:
The regeneration of the inferior or degenerate races by the superior races is part of the providential order of things for humanity…Regere imperio populos, that is our vocation. Pour forth this all-consuming activity onto countries which, like China, are crying aloud for foreign conquest. Turn the adventurers who disturb European society into a ver sacrum, a horde like those of the Franks, the Lombards, or the Normans, and every man will be in his right role. Nature has made a race of workers, the Chinese race, who have wonderful manual dexterity and almost no sense of honor; govern them with justice, levying from them, in return for the blessing of such a government, an ample allowance for the conquering race, and they will be satisfied; a race of tillers of the soil, the Negro; treat him with kindness and humanity, and all will be as it should; a race of masters and soldiers, the European race…Let each do what he is made for, and all will be well.
Aime Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism, page 16 (emphasis are Cesaire’s)
I think back to Fanon’s call to stop looking for this Europe that speaks repeatedly of humanity, and yet inflicts such horrors upon it. On the streets of Manhattan, in the neighborhoods of Brooklyn, and in the land that was once imagined as a new homeland for a persecuted people with justice and rights for all, we are witnessing the complete and absolute degradation and desecration of all that our modern world holds as moral and human. And it ties it threads to European colonial attitudes, prejudices and arrogance.
The Palestinians will prevail. There is no other place for this to end.
We only then have to remember that anything that takes billions of dollars of aid, millions of dollars spent on propaganda, thousands of soldiers, and tanks, and F-16s and miles of concrete walls and tens of thousands of voices to scream and shout at others, can’t be very strong.
I know for a fact that these demonstrations in New York repulse and dismay many, including the Jews. Israel is destroying not only itself, but the dream of the very nation that it could once have been. Her people have ignored her finest voices, from Yeshayahu Leibowitz to Deutscher, or Judt to Pappe who repeatedly warned her of the consequences of her policies and greed.
