Tag Archives: Palestine

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Jacob Engelberg: The Palestine solidarity encampments in Amsterdam: “We must refuse this cynical ploy” (introduced by Luisa Steur)

Image 1: Encampment at the University of Amsterdam on the 6th of May, photo by Luisa Steur

In the morning of the 6th of May, inspired by the swelling global wave of student solidarity encampments for Palestine, a group of students set up tents on a field of the University of Amsterdam Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences. The aim was to push university management to meet the students’ long-standing demands to disclose, divest and cut ties to Israeli institutions and thereby end the university’s complicity in genocide. At 6 pm that evening, staff was called upon to stand in solidarity and I went together with many colleagues. The atmosphere was euphoric as we had eagerly awaited a moment of collective political action to confront the ongoing bombing and starving of Gaza. Together, university management, police and the mayor of Amsterdam however decided to set the inglorious global record of being the quickest to shut down the encampment: at 3 am that night a bulldozer cleared the barricades and police violently evicted the camp.

Shocked at the police violence, a gathering was called the next day at 4 pm, in which many more students and staff showed up, in solidarity with Palestine and with our students who had suffered police violence. The gathering was full of energy and at the end of the planned speeches it turned into a demonstration of thousands marching to the inner-city campus of the university where a group of students occupied its famous “Oudemanhuispoort”. This time, the university management decided to let the encampment be for the night and set up a series of negotiations on the students’ demands.

Image 2: Clearing of the occupation of Oudemanhuispoort, photo by Luisa Steur

And yet, the next day, when these negotiations had only just started, a massive police force was again unleashed on the student protestors, this time with two bulldozers clearing the occupation. From a short distance, behind the police cordon, students and staff who had rushed to the spot chanted “you are not alone” to show their solidarity and others tried to block the police vans carrying off student activists. That Saturday, the demonstration to commemorate the 76th anniversary of the Nakba in Amsterdam attracted as many as 10.000 protestors from all walks of life.

The Monday after – the 13th of May – a walk-out was called at the campus where it all started, and many students and staff again showed up. Standing on the bridge in front of the main entrance and surrounded by students holding up poster-size images of the covers of academic books on Palestine, an impressive line-up of speakers addressed the crowd. But none received as much applause – and elicited so many tears – as Jacob Engelberg. We are honored to reproduce his speech, as he gave it, here on Focaalblog:

Toespraak van dr. Jacob Engelberg bij de walkout van het UvA-medewerkers from Jacob on Vimeo.

“Hello friends. I join you today as a Jewish anti-Zionist member of staff here at the UvA [University of Amsterdam]; I name myself as both Jewish and anti-Zionist, as dominant discourses circulating—from the Israeli state to the Dutch media to our own CvB [Executive Board]—tend to imply that we do not exist. I assure you, we are many.

I have been working with colleagues in negotiations with our CvB to demand moral action from our university in the face of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza. I have been deeply inspired by the passion and the moral clarity shown by our students in their call for the university to disclose, boycott, and divest. These urgent calls have been met, however, with repression, intimidation, defamation, and violence, as the CvB refuses to negotiate in good faith, spreads lies about its own students, and then recruits the police to violently repress dissent. We will not stand for the erosion of democratic freedoms at the institution in which we teach and learn. Indeed, teaching and learning cannot take place without the democratic freedoms we hold dear.

I stand here today not only as an academic, but as a Jewish member of our university community. Much has been said about how Jewish people are feeling on campus, but always in a way that erases the presence of Jewish students and staff, including Israeli students and staff, within our Palestine solidarity work. Instead, our community is presented as monolithically Zionist, and critique of the state of Israel is rewritten as antisemitism. In Dutch media and politics, we have heard the lie that the student movement at the UvA is antisemitic. This is a characterisation unrecognisable to those, like myself, who visited the encampment and joined students in their various forms of protest. These lies efface the Jewish students and staff whose efforts in these actions have been steadfast, and who were among those brutalised by the police. The notion that these forms of violence are necessary to secure our safety is a risible distortion of the notion of safety.

I am, of course, well aware that there are many within my community aligned with Zionism, who consider it intrinsic to their Jewish identities, and who see denouncements of Israel’s actions as a threat to their very being. To the Jewish students and staff who feel afraid at the sight of Palestine solidarity protest: I believe your fear. I implore you, however, to reflect on the roots of that fear. My wager is that, like me, you were taught by figures in our communal institutions to equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism. I expect you might have a visceral response to seeing the Palestinian flag, to hearing the phrase “From the River to the Sea,” or even at the very mention of the word Palestine. I want you to know that these responses are the cumulative effects of years of distorted narratives about Palestine solidarity, the history of the Zionist project, and the meaning of a free Palestine. I call on you to think critically about the presuppositions we have been taught to make, to listen to the voices we have been told to ignore. The university, at its best, should be a place where you can do this work of critical reflection.

The state of Israel’s impunity depends upon the support of a terrified diaspora, whose approval is garnered through distortions of real fears of Jewish unsafety, against which Israel then positions itself as the antidote. It uses the trauma of intergenerational experiences of antisemitism, and particularly the trauma of the Shoah, to justify its actions. Let us be clear that a Jewish ethnostate that subjugates, displaces, and murders Palestinians in our name does not make anyone safe. Crucially, Israel’s cynical deployment of Jewish fear turns our attention away from where antisemitism is burgeoning in our societies: in the far-right nationalist parties gaining momentum globally; in the transnational conspiracy theories circulating centuries-old lies about our people; in the rise of neofascism that has already taken the lives of our community members as they pray in shul. Zionism turns our eyes away from where antisemitism needs to be most forcefully resisted, encouraging us, instead, to turn on our Palestinian, Arab, or Muslim siblings. We must refuse this cynical ploy.

It was in my years as an undergraduate that I first began to question the Zionist doctrines with which I had been raised. I felt many fears, among them the fear that were I to critique Zionism, I would find myself bereft of community, bereft of ethnicity, bereft of identity, bereft of culture. What I discovered, however, was a rich tradition of Jewish anti-Zionism with a legacy that stretches from the Bundist movement in Imperial Russia to the very student protests we see globally today. Jewish anti-Zionists have built and will continue to nourish Jewish communities that stand, without reservation, in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle.

I am grateful for the invitation to speak today and I stand beside you in the struggle for a liberated Palestine in which all can live freely under conditions of radical equality from the river to the sea. Thank you.”

Jacob Engelberg is Assistant Professor of Film, Media, and Culture at the University of Amsterdam Department of Media Studies and the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. His research considers the relations between sexuality and the cinema. He has completed research into pornographic film, articulations of Jewishness in transnational cinemas, and the cinema of Ingmar Bergman.

Luisa Steur is Assistant Professor at the Department of Anthropology, Universty of Amsterdam, and Managing and Lead Editor of Focaal—Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology. Her research interests lie in the field of political anthropology and the anthropology of labor with a regional focus on Kerala (India) and Cuba.

Cite as: Engelberg, Jacob 2024. “The Palestine solidarity encampments in Amsterdam: “We must refuse this cynical ploy”” Focaalblog 17 May. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/05/17/jacob-engelberg-the-palestine-solidarity-encampments-in-amsterdam-we-must-refuse-this-cynical-ploy-introduced-by-luisa-steur/

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Letter of support for Prof. Ghassan Hage from Israeli scholars

12.02.2024

Prof. Dr. Patrick Cramer,

President of the Max Planck Society

Old Town, 80539

Munich, Germany

CC: Dr. Ursula Rao, Dr. Biao Xiang, Dr. Marie-Claire Foblets

MPI for Social Anthropology, Halle

Dear colleagues,

We write as Israeli Jewish scholars, working in Israel and worldwide, in support of Prof. Ghassan Hage and in protest of the accusations against him. Prof. Hage is an outstanding contributor to the field of anthropology, who has made a professional impact on us all. His critical analysis of ethno-nationalism – be it Australian, Israeli, or Palestinian – and his vision of an alter-politics for Israel/Palestine both invoke an alternative to nationalist political structures and the possibility of egalitarian co-living between Jews, Christians, Muslims and others.

The significance of this moral and intellectual vision to anthropologists in Israel was reflected in Prof. Hage’s invitation to deliver a keynote address to the Israeli Anthropological Association (IAA) in 2016. Though he refused the invitation, the published correspondence between Prof. Hage and Prof. Nir Avieli, then President of the IAA, demonstrates his sensitivity to the complexity of the political situation in our country. His stance is political and critical, but it is not antisemitic. Accusing Prof. Hage of antisemitism is malicious and betrays a lack of good faith.

As Jews, some of us descendants of victims of the Nazi Holocaust, and some who research the Holocaust and racist violence more generally, we take this opportunity to voice our concern over the conflation between criticism of Israel and antisemitism, which is putting Jewish life in the diaspora, and Germany in particular, at risk.

It is well-known that Prof. Hage is a proponent of the boycott of Israeli academic institutions as part of the BDS movement. While many of us disagree with the methods of this movement, we acknowledge that its guidelines do not mandate discrimination against individual Jews or Israelis, and can affirm that Prof. Hage does not practice such discrimination. Several Israeli Jewish scholars have had the privilege of consulting and debating with him, and have always been welcomed with respect, kindness, and a professional response.

In the harsh time our world is going through, a time of polarization, deep mistrust, nationalist radicalization, and the persecution of dissenting voices, we urge you not to succumb to the brutal silencing of critical voices, and to uphold the academic value of unbiased evaluation and fair dealing.

Best regards,

Alma Itzhaky, Leibniz Zentrum für Literatur und Kulturforschung

Alma Miriam Katz, University of Oxford

Amalia Sa’ar, University of Haifa

Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin Ben-Gurion, University of the Negev

Amos Goldberg, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Anat Matar, Tel Aviv University

Anat Rimon Or, Beit Berl College

Avital Barak, Nova University

Barak Kalir, University of Amsterdam

Dafna Hirsch, Open University of Israel

Daphna Westerman, Goldsmiths University of London

Eilat Maoz, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Eli Osheroff, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Erella Grassiani, University of Amsterdam

Gadi Algazi, Tel Aviv University

Gaia Dan, Anti-occupation Bloc, Haifa Guy Shalev University of Haifa

Hadas Weiss, Humboldt University of Berlin

Hedva Eyal

Hilla Dayan, NYU Remarque Center Visiting Fellow

Inna Leykin, Open University of Israel

Itamar Haritan, Cornell University

Itamar Shachar, Hasselt University

Keren Assaf, University of New Mexico

Livnat Konopny Decleve, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Matan Kaminer, Queen Mary University of London

Micah Leshem, University of Haifa

Mieka Polanco, Jefferson Consulting

Naor Ben-Yehoyada, Columbia University

Neve Gordon, Queen Mary University of London

Nira Yuval-Davis, University of East London

Nitzan Lebovic, Lehigh University

Nitzan Shoshan, El Colegio de Mexico

Niza Yanay, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

Nomi Erteschik-Shir, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

Ophira Gamliel, University of Glasgow

Pnina Motzafi Haller, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

Professor Amalia Sa’ar, University of Haifa

Professor Avner Ben-Amos, Tel Aviv University

Rafi Grosglik, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

Regev Nathansohn, Sapir College

Ronnen Ben-Arie, Technion, Open University of Israel

Shifra Kisch, Utrecht University

Sigel Ronen

Smadar Sharon, Tel Aviv University

Tal Dor, Nantes Université

Tamar Barkay, Tel Hai College

Tamar Schneider, Open University of Israel

Udi Raz, Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies

Uri Gordon, CES

Uri Hadar, Tel Aviv University

Yael Assor, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Yael Berda, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Yali Hashash, Isha L’isha Feminist Research Center

Yehouda Shenhav, Tel Aviv University

Yinon Cohen, Columbia University

Yuval Yonay, University of Haifa

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Arpan Roy: “Is this Narrow Coastal Strip Worth All this Blood?” Bassel Al-Araj on Armed Struggle in Palestine

By taking control of 22 Israeli military bases and localities, sequestering over 200 hostages, and killing more than 1,000 civilians and soldiers (although many details remain ambiguous), Hamas accomplished militarily on October 7, 2023 what no other Palestinian faction has ever accomplished. Early on during the operation, Hamas declared that its goal was to liberate the 5,200 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons by means of a hostage exchange;[1] meaning that the uprising was a spectacular show of force by which to negotiate on better terms with the enemy. In this crux between military success and negotiated exchange, Hamas burst open old-new debates regarding the role of armed struggle in Palestinian movements. The predictable Israeli response is the currently unfolding psychotic war of revenge and accompanying propaganda campaign. As of the time of writing, there are some 20,000 dead Palestinians, tens of thousands more injured, over a million displaced, critical infrastructure irreversibly damaged, one of the oldest cities in the world all but razed to the ground, and 3,000 newly arrested prisoners. More horror likely awaits in the very near future. Was the uprising worth all the death and destruction? Will any good come out of this? Away from the media frenzy of political talking heads and party pundits, these are the kinds of questions that have emerged on the streets of Ramallah, Jerusalem, Amman, and elsewhere, where misery and despair fuse headily with pride and possibility. Misery and despair, that is, because a genocide of Palestinians not only in Gaza but also Jerusalem and the West Bank seems frighteningly plausible; and pride and possibility because for some it has become conceivable for the first time—unlikely perhaps, but somehow still conceivable—that Israel can be defeated militarily.

The nature of Palestinian resistance has had historical ebbs and flows (see Qumsiyeh 2011). Tracing Palestinian uprisings from their first instances in the 1920s (four decades after the establishment of the first Zionist settlements) to October 7, one can observe clearly identifiable Zeitgeists, from periods of political petitioning, times of boycotts and other grassroots satyagraha, other times kamikaze attacks, and seasons of war. In recent decades, the pax americana that was supposed to have been the Oslo Accords ushered in an era of liberal politics in the 1990s (see Haddad 2018, Rabie 2021), which then exploded into the Second Intifada in the early 2000s. After this, the nature of Palestinian movements changed; fragmented, the Palestine Liberation Organization[2] placated by an end-of-history worldlessness,and a Palestinian public was left disenchanted with the failure of liberal politics but without knowing where else to turn. Hamas, during this period, became the unlikely vanguard of Palestinian resistance; a national liberation movement without the nation mentioned anywhere in its name.[3]

In contextualizing the place of armed resistance in the current chapter of the Palestinian story, I present below translations of three short texts by Bassel al-Araj (1984-2017), a Palestinian pharmacist by day and blogger by night who was assassinated in his apartment by Israeli forces in 2017. Al-Araj left behind a body of writing, often blog posts, that has greatly inspired the current generation of leftist Palestinian activists. Al-Araj advocated that the intellectual in Palestine not be a passive commentator but actively “engaged” in resistance, and he coined the term al-muthaqaf al-mushtabak “engaged intellectual;” a nod to the New Man of Guevara-esque romance, in a play of words that is more poetic in Arabic than in English. Some erroneously confuse the epithet with the even more irresistible al-muthaqaf al-musalah “armed intellectual,” a slip that Al-Araj would not have protested. His agitating against the security coordination between the Palestinian Authority and Israel landed him in a Palestinian prison in 2016. He was released following a hunger strike. Six months later, he was killed by Israel. He was thirty-three years old.

The following pieces are translations from Arabic taken from a collection of Al-Araj’s writings, letters, and Facebook posts, published by the Beirut-based leftist publisher Bisan in 2018. In the first piece, written after the 2014 Israeli campaign in Gaza, Al-Araj offers a very original analysis in the aftermath of this event, observing that Hamas’s strategy of armed struggle does not break from the overall arc of armed struggle in Palestinian history. Al-Araj insists that Hamas’s strategy in the conflict was not to defeat Israel militarily, but to arrive at better conditions for negotiations. In the second piece, Al-Araj examines the gains and losses of the Second Intifada, challenging the position that the lesson from Israel’s brutal quelling of the uprising is that such uprisings are not to be repeated. Rather, Al-Araj speculates on what lessons can be learned from the intifada’s defeat so as to be able to succeed in a future iteration. In the third piece, more literary in flavor, he asks whether Palestine, as a national-territorial concept, is worth all the blood that is shed in its name. In this brief communique, he employs a revolutionary-poetic minimalism reminiscent of leftist writers of the twentieth century like, for instance, Eduardo Galeano.

Reading Al-Araj in the context of the current bloodshed, hopelessness, and despair, we might ask again: Was the uprising worth all the death and destruction? Whatever the answer may be, Al-Araj invites us to recognize the complexity of this question, and to remain faithful to rational analysis even in times of an unbearable irrationality of being.

Image 1: Soldier (1970), by Inji Aflatoun

1.

Yezid Sayigh says in his book on the Palestine Liberation Organization that the Fatah movement never took the military conflict seriously, and never viewed the armed struggle as an end in itself or the only path to liberation. Rather, the armed struggle was a means by which to negotiate a diplomatic solution.

I believe that Hamas’s experience in Gaza follows the same approach. Their political leadership views armed struggle exactly as Arafat [4] viewed it.

This is an essential difference between Hezbollah’s experience, for example, and our experience. It is also the difference between the Algerian, Chechen, Vietnamese, and Cuban experiences, and our experience.

In these other experiences, they believed that they could defeat the great powers that were their enemies. We came to the conviction that it was impossible to defeat Israel, and we never believed that returning to Palestine would involve changing the reality on the ground, but rather by appeasing the capitals of influence in the world.

2.

On the allegation: “The Intifada ruined us” [5]

2013/26/09

At the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s, the Black Hand uprising began in Palestine. It was completely crushed and its participants were eliminated within 4 months. They were either martyred, imprisoned, or exiled. During the same period, the Communist Party attempted to launch an uprising in Vietnam, which was also suppressed and the Communist Party was almost extinguished.

The important thing is that these two uprisings were two of the most excellent uprisings that humanity has ever seen: The Black Hand uprising, which was one of the most important factors leading to the 1936 Revolt [6], and the Communist Party uprising, which was one of the most important factor leading to the Vietnamese rebellion against France. The leaders learned from their mistakes, dealt with them, and corrected them.

People at that time did not renounce the option of armed struggle, nor did they brood over the colonial discourse regarding the usefulness or uselessness of armed struggle. Rather, they reviewed their experience, analyzed it, and launched subsequent uprisings that avoided the same mistakes. In contrast, Palestinians brood over the destruction the Second Intifada brought, and are reluctant to engage in any future uprising for fear of the same results.

I do not know whether Palestinians have sat down to evaluate the results of the Second Intifada in a scientific manner, especially the results of the Intifada’s military experience. Usually, when you hear a person talk about the destruction, the tragedies, the losses, and the setbacks, he is reproducing Zionist propaganda, but in his own language. This propaganda is constituted by multiple mechanisms and begins altering the Palestinian discursive space in a way that does not end only with the official line of the Palestinian Authority (the line of Mahmoud Abbas). The war against us has still not ceased, nor has the symbolic violence and hidden oppression that are the real masters of the situation. Usually when any experiment fails, the criticism focuses on the execution of the experiment, and not on the theory or ideology behind it. The results were not what we could have imagined. Was Gaza not completely emptied of settlers? And is Gaza not reaching a stage of fortification and hybrid warfare as a result of the Second Intifada? Were Tel Aviv and Jerusalem not hit hard by the early iterations of rockets that resembled cans of bug spray? Were settlements in the West Bank (in Jenin and Nablus) not dismantled because the occupation was no longer able to protect them and could no longer afford the cost of their continued existence? Did the Intifada not cost the enemy billions of shekels? And do we not realize what the Intifada did to delay the tragedy awaiting our people? Personally, I believe that the Intifada temporarily delayed a new expulsion process that was being prepared.

Evaluating the military experience of the Intifada, it appears that the armed experience of the Intifada was not actually the reason for its setbacks. Rather, there are other factors that led to this. The leadership was not able to deal with the responsibility of organizing society and preparing it for a sustained popular war. Some also had a naive understanding of armed struggle, and they flattened its essence to the extent that it did not affect the surface tensions. Recall the expression: “Carry a rifle and shoot, who will stop you?”

In addition to a lack of consciousness, as well as a lack of psychological and social readiness, there was no proper organization of the fighting forces. This led to incompetent leadership after the elimination of the first rank. As this social base was completely absent, there emerged a rift between the masses and those carrying out military action.

In addition to this, there was the counterrevolution against Yasser Arafat, and secret contacts and treasonous agreements were made under the table with the enemy. There was also an absence of preparations, equipment, strategy and combat tactics. The objective was the Oslo Accords (the homeland reduced to Gaza and the West Bank). And let us not forget here the Palestinian Authority’s dependence on the occupation for its financial, employment, and administrative system. Finally, there was a lack of conviction by some that armed struggle can change the reality on the ground. Rather, they were convinced of its use in improving the terms of negotiation, and nothing more.

In conclusion, the first thing that colonialism does is establish what is possible and impossible for oppressed peoples. Some elements of the oppressed people usually assist in this. This is done through direct and indirect brainwashing techniques, so do not trust this discourse that is transmitted and planted into our minds. Judge instead the testimonies of our people based on trusting logic and the power of liberation.

3.

Is Palestine beautiful?

I am frequently asked this question. As easy as the question seems, it is one of the most difficult questions. It is more difficult than the question “How are you?” It is difficult to answer once you realize that the real meaning of the question is: “Is this narrow coastal strip worth all this blood?” We all know that beauty is relative and that one’s environment shapes one’s aesthetic sensibilities, and that this differs from person to person. Here you have to resort to comparison to arrive at an easy answer.

But Palestine, in my opinion, is actually the most beautiful place; not because of her greenness, blueness, yellowness, redness, crops, bounty, or nature. Her beauty is that she is the one who answered my search for meaning, and she is the one who answered my existential questions, and who justifies my existence and cures my chronic anxieties.

Endnotes

[1] This number has risen to approximately 8,000 after mass arrests made by Israel since October 7.

[2] The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), founded in 1964, was for much of its history a revolutionary guerrilla movement that eventually became Israel’s political partners with the Oslo Accords of 1993.

[3] Hamas, in Arabic, is a kind of acronym for harakat al-muqawama al-islamiyya “Movement of Islamic Resistance,” but hamas also means “excitement.”

[4] Yasser Arafat (1929-2004) was the co-founder of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and was a guerrilla-turned-politician. He signed the Oslo Accords with Israel in 1993 and became President of the Palestinian Authority.

[5] Al-Araj is referring here to the Second Intifada, the Palestinian uprising against Israel that lasted roughly between 2000-2005. Its outcome, on the one hand, was the evacuation of Israeli settlements from Gaza, but also the loss of thousands of lives and the expansion of the Israeli security infrastructure.

[6] The Great Arab Revolt in 1936 was the first large-scale Palestinian mobilization against British rule and the Zionist settlement project in Palestine.

The author would like to thank Abeer Juan for assistance in the translations.

Arpan Roy is an anthropologist researching in Palestine and currently based in Berlin. His book Relative Strangers: Romani Kinship and Palestinian Difference will be published by University of Toronto Press in 2024.

References

Al-Araj, Bassel. 2018. Wajadt Ajwabti. Beirut: Bisan.

Haddad, Toufic. 2018. Palestine Ltd.: Neoliberalism and Nationalism in the Occupied Territory. London: Bloomsbury.

Qumsiyeh, Mazin. 2011. Popular Resistance in Palestine: A History of Hope and Empowerment. London: Pluto Press.

Rabie, Kareem. 2021. Palestine Is Throwing a Party and the Whole World Is Invited: Capital and State Building in the West Bank. Durham. Duke University Press.

Cite as: Roy, Arpan 2023 “Is this Narrow Coastal Strip Worth All this Blood? Bassel Al-Araj on Armed Struggle in Palestine” Focaalblog 12 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/12/12/arpan-roy-is-this-narrow-coastal-strip-worth-all-this-blood-bassel-al-araj-on-armed-struggle-in-palestine/

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Júlia Fernandez: Outside of Humanity: Palestinian Children and the Value of Life

The algorithm swiftly gets it –yes, I am sucked in by news about Gaza- and collapses my social media platforms’ feeds into a monothematic thread that mirrors my recently (re)ignited preoccupation with the genocide of the Palestinian people. A Middle Eastern, female illustrator’s art work I started following on Tuesday shows up at the top of the screen. Her drawing of Wadie Al Fayoume – white eyeballs, embraced in an arch of red flowers, the same gesture and the same happy birthday hat he wears in the pictures that have circulated online after his killing – precedes the onset of my scrolling through the tawdry spectacle of death with an uncanny allusion to what it might have looked like to be alive.

Image 1: A mural artwork in a town in West Bank features a person wearing a keffiyeh and holding a Palestinian flag. The words ‘Resist to Exist’ can be read in English. Photo by Júlia Fernandez, August 2017.

After him, startled faces of terrified children, blood-dripping foreheads, cheeks covered in trails of tears and dust unfurl a grotesque witnessing of suffering; I am not immune to their affective power. ‘You Muslims must die’, the news says Wadie Al Fayoume’s murderer said before stabbing him to death in his house in Chicago. The pungent rawness of blurry video footages from Gazan hospitals revolts me, as they become, like Wadie, animated traces of lives that might soon be, if they are not yet, lost.

The narrative and visual dimensions of social media portraits of ‘what is going on in Gaza’ invert the effacing of the traces of the living that numbers on the news do, but they do so through a grammar of compassion for ‘all souls lost’ – the recognition of those as (former) living beings, and thus, Judit Butler would argue, the assertion of their grievability – with which a staggering surge of posts unreflectively registers a moral inflection toward neutrality. What I find more disturbing is not the invocation of a denial of what is in fact the very real differential distribution of grievability that is at work in such sites of violence, but how the ‘both-sides’ -or ‘no sides’- rhetoric, articulated by people who bestow themselves with the title of ambassadors of a common humanity, is oblivious to the fact that Palestinian children are not really apprehended as living until they are dead.

When the suffering of some is rendered accessible only when it can be equalized to that of others, the presumably uncomplicated language of a universal value of lives carries in fact the implicit recognition, by virtue of its omission, of what the battlefield makes evident: not all lives are counted as livable.  Representations of common suffering elicit in fact interrogations of what counts as humanity, for they mobilise the term as if it were an empty signifier, sliding into ethically unfixed questions of what –and when this what– is a livable and grievable life, and what -and when- it is not. In positing a fantasy of equivalences, they omit the fact that in denying them the social conditions that enable the persistence, sustainment and thriving of life, Israel deprives Palestinians of life even before they are killed, inevitably tapping from a moral economy of suffering in which Palestinian deathis historically normalized and socially reified.

In a sort of collective aphasia (Stoler, 2011), accounts of suffering and pain are measured against each other through a grammar of false equality between what the colonizer’s absolute right to kill differentiates in terms of valuable and non-valuable lives. The long-standing pervasiveness of colonialism, dispossession and killing power becomes muffled; its monopolization of an unlimited right to self-defense denied in historically illiterate proposals of peacebuilding rooted in Solomonic repartitions of the territory and allocations of quasi sovereignties. Framings of the violence that often accompany such accounts as a ‘war’, or a ‘conflict’, often uncritically registering the tensions at stake through the performative solidarity of posting two flags together, raise unsettling questions about how the equation of the suffering of ones to the suffering of others – or the recognition of their shared humanity – seems so often to acquire meaning alongside a conceptual erasure of the long-standing power imbalances between the sides. To talk of suffering in order to speak about domination, Didier Fassin argues, is to do morals and politics with new words (2008: 532); but what kind of morals and politics are done by the omission of colonial domination that the articulation of frameworks of universal suffering seem to convey?

At the forefront of many calls for action, reflections on grief and loss, and denunciations of the ongoing violence ‘in and around’ the Gaza Strip are children whose suffering bodies, like those of Wadi or the children in hospitals in Gaza, seem to convey a sort of humanitarian discourse of ‘antipolitical moralism’ (Ticktin, 2011: 64). Children occupy, of course, a key place in dominant imaginations of the human and of the ‘world community’ (Malkii 2011), and they do so, in the case that concerns us here, by condensing very particular forms of violence into a moral problematization.

‘It is not a political view but a human response’ declares a dance school in London in their Instagram stories, now gone, imbuing the devastation felt for ‘the loss of innocent lives, especially children’, with a sort of affective affordance that attempts to justify a denial of the politics that are layered in the attribution of differential value to the lives of ones and the lives of the others. A pretension of depoliticisation that invokes in fact a very particular politics, one that reproduces the effacing of the precise context in which violence takes place. In those posts, the continued allegiance to the alleviation of suffering and the condemnation of violence emerges through a language of crisis and urgency that reproduces a particular genealogy of violence and reparation in abstract terms: victims are dispossessed of perpetrators; suffering bodies imagined outside of history and politics; they require help only out of a moral obligation (see Ticktin, 2011).

‘Let these poor innocent children be’ a Bristol based printmaker writes as a concluding demand, posting from the same city where I am. To be what? I wonder; what were Palestinian children being targeted by Israel’s last offensive? What kind of lives, if lives at all, were they living?

The idea of a morally legitimate suffering body collapses again in the figure of children in the words of Arab Israeli politician and journalist Aida Touma-Sliman: ‘a child is a child’; for which she is reprimanded by Knesset member Meirav Ben-Ari with invocations of a lack of symmetry that goes in fact the other way around. Toulam-Sliman is right, but she is also not; a child might be a child within the frames of humanitarian values, but in the rationality of occupation, a Palestinian child is not the same child.

Image 2: Two young girls in a pro-Palestine protest hold banners that read ‘Bombing kids is not self defense’ and what appears as ‘To stand with Palestine is to stand with humanity’. Photo from Dania Shaeeb in Unsplash

In a public endorsement of the ongoing collective punishment against the Palestinian population, Meirav Ben-Ari declares that ‘the children of Gaza have brought this upon themselves’. In this rhetorical unravelling of a selective production and undoing of victims, Hamas’ attacks prove Gazan children’s culpability for their own victimization. Participants of war, children are a ‘category mistake’, Malkki (2010) would say, used in this case to deny the pretension of our shared humanity. Children are, in the colonizer’s rhetoric, perpetrators; they are Hamas’ human shields. They are, as Butler has argued, no children at all, ‘but rather bits of armament, military instruments and materiel’ (2016). The grammar of compassion with which the morally legitimate bodyof the child – and the fantasy of the equal grievability of its life in comparison to Israeli lives – is upheld fails to acknowledge that in the occupied territories, Palestinian children are not really alive as such. They are nothing but a threat against which an absolute power defends the lives of some and destroys the lives of others as it formulates itself. They are like rocks and steel, darkness in human form, a haunting specter of the pervasive threat of terrorism in its developing potentiality.

As highly politically charged sites, Palestinian children embody indeed the racial politics of reproduction that underpin Israel’s colonial settlement project. Perhaps because in the colonizer’s war on demographics Palestinian reproduction stands in the way of the continued success of colonization (Kanaaneh, 2002; Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2015), Palestinian children are produced through the inscription of colonial power in their mothers’ bodies not as made of flesh and bones, but as traces of an unruly destructive power. 

On October the 17th, the Israeli Prime Minister posts on Twitter: ‘this is a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle’. In the now deleted post, a divide operates through a narrative of impossible dichotomies between light and darkness, between humanity and savageness, mirroring the ubiquitous distortion of Palestinian people that articulates the same discourses that reproduce the frames of recognition in which their lives are considered nothing else but a threat to the survival of others. Perhaps in his post Benjamin Netanyahu uses Niebuhr’s novel’s title to refer to such an existential battle, yet the mention of children reinforces its emergence as a powerful signifier that seams together, even if in complicated ways, universalist understandings of humanity and the precise denials of it.

In what terms can this ‘poetics of our common humanity’ (Malkki, 2011) that permeates social media feeds not lose sight of the context in which such disturbing category mistakes – the, literally, ‘children’ of darkness – are produced? In what ways can such calls for compassion – which reify the moral authority with which children, presumably holders of an innocent, unadulterated, presociality (Malkki, 2011; see also Butler, 2016), are often indexed – be attentive to the everyday forms of criminal brutality that deny their mere existence as humans?

That there is no justification for the targeting of children, or any civilian of any age, is unquestionable. Yet, the way such claims for equidistance seem so often to compress the history of racialized and settler colonial domination into a ‘war against humanity’, obscure the frames in which Palestinian children’s lives are lives that are not only constrained and cut short, but that are ontologically already lost, placed ‘outside of humanity’, ‘dark matter’.

Júlia Fernandez is a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. She specializes in reproduction, care and forced migration. She has conducted research in the West Bank before, focusing on gender and political resistance.

References

Butler, J. (2016): Frames of war: When is life grievable? Verso, London.

Fassin, D. (2008): The Humanitarian Politics of Testimony: Subjectification through Trauma in the Israeli: Palestinian Conflict. Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 23, No. 3, pp. 531-558

Kanaaneh, R. (2002): Birthing the nation: Strategies of Palestinian women in Israel. University of California Press.

Malkki, L. (2010): ‘Children, Humanity, and the Infantilization of Peace’, in Ticktin and Feldman (eds): In the name of humanity: the government of threat and care. Durham, Duke University Press.

Shalhoub-Kevorkian, N. (2015): The politics of birth and the intimacies of violence against Palestinian women in occupied east Jerusalem. The British Journal of Criminology, Vol. 55, No. 6, THEMED ISSUE: In the Aftermath of Violence: What Constitutes a Responsive Response?  pp. 1187-1206

Stoler, A. (2011): Colonial Aphasia: Race and Disabled Histories in France. Public Culture, Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 121-156

Ticktin, M. (2011): Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitaranism in France. Berkeley, University California Press.

Cite as: Fernandez, Júlia 2023 “Outside of Humanity: Palestinian Children and the Value of Life” Focaalblog 31 October. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/10/31/julia-fernandez-outside-of-humanity-palestinian-children-and-the-value-of-life/