Alternative Strategies for Realizing Justice in Palestine

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Dec 1, 2015 Palestine-Israel
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Alternative Strategies for Realizing Justice in Palestine

By : George Bisharat

Between 13-15 December, the Civic Coalition for Palestinian Rights in Jerusalem, Mada al Carmel, the Birzeit University Institute of Law, the Stop the Wall Campaign, the Trans-Arab Research Institute (TARI), and the Arab Studies Institute (ASI) will be convening a conference under the banner: Alternative Strategies for Realizing Justice in Palestine. The conference will take place in Jerusalem, Birzeit, and Nazareth to highlight, and attempt to rehabilitate, national fragmentation and explore strategies for resistance.  What follows is a summary of the ideas that led the aforementioned organizations to join together in this effort. The summary is by TARI president George Bisharat, in coordination with, and on behalf of, the conference organizers.The conference program can be found here.

More than twenty years ago, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) made a strategic decision to seek a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip through bilateral negotiations with Israel. Yet today the Palestinian people remain in practical terms stateless, and are divided and fragmented in a manner that rivals the immediate post-1948 period. Israeli colonization has relentlessly eroded the land base for a genuinely sovereign Palestinian state. The United States has posed as the broker of the negotiating process, even though it has repeatedly proven Vice President Joe Biden’s insistence that “There’s absolutely no daylight -- none -- between us and the Israelis on the question of Israel’s security.” 

Israel eventually suspended the seemingly endless peace negotiations in 2014, but this did little to slow it from further entrenching its project of apartheid and colonization on Palestinian land. In response, the Palestinian leadership, for a brief period, opted for the “internationalization” of the Palestinian struggle through accession to international treaties and multilateral bodies, including the International Criminal Court.

It also continued to pay lip-service to “national reconciliation,” a goal shared by virtually all Palestinians. At this point, there is no indication that such reconciliation will be implemented. Thus, there is no chance that it could lead to a distinctly different Palestinian strategy for liberation and more participation by all sectors of the Palestinian people.  Indeed, the rhetoric of national reconciliation of the Palestinian leaderships on both sides of the divide seems no different than the Israeli commitment to the peace process or to a two-state solution: an empty political gesture. Meanwhile, there is little question that the Palestinian people are facing a transformed economic, social and political landscape.

We now have more than two decades of empirical evidence that the peace process, as practiced so far, is not a viable path to justice for the Palestinian people. We also have sufficient evidence that the current Palestinian leadership has little incentive to change its course, least of all by adopting strategies that empower its constituent base. It is therefore contingent upon those concerned with Palestinian rights, and with justice more generally in Israel/Palestine, to formulate alternative strategies for achieving liberation and establishing a just society for all people entitled to live in the country, including Palestinian refugees.

In recent years, Palestinians have developed two alternative approaches that have proven more promising than U.S.-brokered negotiations and have gained considerable global support. One is the civil society-driven BDS movement. The other is a multilateral approach to diplomacy based on moves through the UN General Assembly and other international bodies that are relatively less hostage to U.S./Western dominance. 

One successful example of the approach within the United Nations system was the request for an Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on the legal consequences of Israel’s construction of the Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. That initiative resulted in a sweeping legal victory for Palestinian rights in 2004.  As such it suggests the gains that can be achieved through international bodies when backed by a committed Palestinian leadership - one that is not afraid to displease Israel, and most especially, the United States, in its pursuit of the rights of the Palestinian people.

While the ICJ’s rulings have yet to be implemented, the decision itself has spurred the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel.  The BDS call requires that Israel dismantle its regime of apartheid and settler colonialism and respect the internationally-recognized rights to freedom, justice and equality of all Palestinians, including those occupied since 1967, those living in Israel as second-class citizens and the exiled Palestinian refugees who are entitled to return. Palestinian civil society launched the Call on the one-year anniversary of the ICJ decision. The global movement in response has gained significant momentum, public notoriety and mounting tangible successes over the last years.

At the same time, there are many indications that Israel’s position within the international community is increasingly tenuous. Outside of the United States, there is very little question about Israel’s substantial responsibility for undermining the two-state solution. That awareness is growing within the United States as well. As Israel’s government, policies, and people turn to even more extreme nationalism and overt racism, its record of serial aggressions and constant war-mongering is harder to ignore or defend. This underscores the urgency for determined, pro-active strategies of liberation.

Naming and Resisting Fragmentation 

Since 1948, geographic dispersion and subjection to a variety of foreign sovereignties has challenged the sense of unity of the Palestinian people. After 1967, the PLO effectively forged such unity among the Palestinian nation. That hard won unity, however, is currently under threat among the global Palestinian nation, politically, as well as domestically among Palestinians. This is largely a consequence of the diminution in the stature and vitality of the PLO, the unresolved split between Fateh and Hamas, and the fragmentation and elite domination of politics that as ensued as a direct consequence of the Oslo accords.

Palestinians live parallel lives in discrete communities, under different systems of law and government. We pursue diverse models of political participation and representation via community-based organizations, NGOs, political groups, and movements, the Palestinian Authority, and the Israeli parliament (Knesset), with relatively little opportunity to meet, discuss, and debate national goals and priorities. Beyond political representation, the differences in daily experience, are particularly acute between the relatively privileged and virtually all other Palestinian communities as is the case of those Palestinians in the West Bank who inhabit what is widely referred to as the “Ramallah bubble,”  home to Palestine’s political and economic elites. The Palestinian body politic is being subject to incremental dismemberment.

Even within Palestinian communities, moreover, distinctions have widened between the category of individuals who have profited from the current conditions, and the far greater majority of Palestinians who have been impoverished in these same conditions. Thus pre-existing vertical or class divisions have been exacerbated within Palestine alongside geographic and other forms of fragmentation.

It is crucial that we recognize the damage to virtually all Palestinians inherent in these processes of dismemberment, and devise strategies to resist them. For this reason, the first roundtable set in Jerusalem asks the discussants to consider how local strategies for resistance can reflect the interests of, and perhaps mobilize, the entire Palestinian nation. Similarly, the last roundtable in Nazareth brings together discussants from Gaza, ’48, the West Bank, and the United States to explore ways for rebuilding Palestinian unity.

Strategies for Justice and Liberation

It is possible to identify a number of categories of strategies for justice and liberation: legal, diplomatic, economic and popular resistance, international solidarity, and for Palestinian citizens of Israel, partaking in Israeli domestic politics and its legal system at a variety of levels. There is, of course, overlap between all of these categories, yet each seems sufficiently distinct to serve as a pole around which to orient fruitful discussion.  

Legal strategies


How can law be used to advance liberation and justice in Palestine? “Law” here is not limited to courtroom litigation, but also comprehends uses of law in public writing, scholarship, diplomacy, and elsewhere. What kinds of legal actions are feasible to advance Palestinian rights in our own legal systems, in the legal systems of foreign nations, and in the international legal system, especially the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court? In addition, do the advantages of legal actions within the Israeli system outweigh the risks, particularly the legitimation effects of seeking justice from the oppressor? 

This discussion seeks to build on the May 2013 conference at Birzeit University that highlighted the advantages of augmenting the legal conceptualization of Israel’s control of Palestinian lands as mere “occupation,” by invoking legal principles of apartheid, colonialism, forced population transfer/ethnic cleansing and associated criminal responsibility and third-state obligations. The conference eventually generated a set of guidelines for activists that have been distributed widely; it is time, therefore, to evaluate their impact, and to either revise or reinforce those guidelines according to experience.

Economic and Popular strategies

The Oslo process has  also induced economic dependency of significant segments of our people, either through neoliberal policies in the private sector, or via public employment in the Palestinian Authority. Some Palestinians have profited from current circumstances, and/or have vested financial interests in their continuation. The vast majority, however, have suffered major economic deprivation. A clear analysis of the situation is crucial, especially in view of the recurring suggestion to dissolve the Palestinian Authority.  

Further thinking must be done regarding how we, as a people, can shape our economy to render it less vulnerable to external political pressures. For example, it is time to explore the mutual benefits of building economic cooperation between Palestinians in the West Bank and those in the 1948 areas. Moreover, how can popular resistance (i.e., demonstrations, civil disobedience, tax withholding, boycotts, anti-normalization) transcend the divergent interests of various sectors, social and political, of Palestinian society and mobilize them into action?

Diplomatic strategies

Over the last several years the Palestinian leadership began taking steps toward “internationalizing” the struggle for liberation by joining numerous international treaties and organizations.  Palestinian officials have often appeared to take these steps with the greatest reluctance, in response to disappointment with negotiations, and possibly as a tactic to revive those negotiations with Israel under more favorable circumstances.

The implications of, and possibilities provided by, these accessions must be studied and discussed. Changing regional and other international circumstances bear implications for Palestine - such as the reemergence of Russia as a potential counter to U.S. power in the Middle East and the growing economic and political importance of the emerging economies.  We must examine how to effectively mobilize overwhelming support by international law and peoples worldwide for the Palestinian cause in multilateral initiatives inside and outside the UN system. 

Diplomacy is conducted primarily by Palestinian officials, and is commonly considered to be outside the reach of civil society. But critical focus should be trained on how civil society already engages in the diplomatic arena - for example, in the recent presentation of evidence to the International Criminal Court by an array of Palestinian human rights organizations - and under what circumstances this can be productive. Further, we must address the question on how to ensure accountability of Palestinian diplomats to the people they purport to serve. 

International Solidarity

In the course of ten years, the Palestinian civil society-led BDS movement has shown how international solidarity can be actualized in manner that changes the balance of power in favor of the Palestinian people and its fundamental rights.  It does so by working with civil society abroad to sever ties of support between, mainly Western, consumers, businesses and academic and cultural institutions and Israel’s system of settler colonialism and apartheid, and by challenging normalization of Israeli oppression. How can this movement be strengthened globally and how can it help further cohere a fragmented Palestinian nation?

Additionally, it is imperative to highlight transnational movement building at a time of increasing synergies between the Palestinian liberation movement and other communities, like the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States as well as movements for public spaces,  and indigenous people’s movements globally.

The Struggle Within

Palestinian citizens of Israel have, for many years, participated in Israeli electoral politics, including, in the most recent elections, via a unified list of candidates. What are the costs and benefits of that participation? How can Palestinian citizens of Israel take part in the struggle of the Palestinian people for justice and liberation, without invoking drastic retaliation by Israeli authorities? At various points in our national struggle, the initiative for achieving justice has shifted from the diaspora, in the days of a vibrant PLO, to the OPT’s, in the first intifada. Is it conceivable that Palestinian citizens of Israel could be the next to provide leadership to the nation as a whole? The third and final day of the conference to take place in Nazareth will consider these salient issues.

Conclusion

We may be entering a particularly critical transitional phase in the struggle for justice in Palestine. The Oslo peace process has not yet been buried, and the possible revival of negotiations in the coming months cannot be entirely dismissed. Still, the time is ripe for wide public discussion among all Palestinian communities about our collective future.  We must exploit every opportunity to engage in a national dialogue characterized by frank, informed, and respectful discussion of the problems that we currently face as a people. Faced with a lack of a national and popular leadership to initiate these discussions or steward the movement for national liberation, we must begin the discussions ourselves. This conference is intended as a first step, among many, in that direction. 
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Jul 9, 2013 Lebanon
Zeynep Gambetti By :
Zeynep Gambetti

Occupy Gezi as Politics of the Body

Since the Gezi resistance started with bloodshed on 31 May, it has had an “anti-depressant” effect, as a friend of mine puts it, as much as it has been nerve-racking. During this period where each day has been prone to new crises and normalcy was completely disrupted, we simultaneously experienced the peaks of ecstasy and the depths of sorrow.

Analyzing such an intense event naturally requires taking some distance. Pending systematization, however, the vivid memory of each day impels one to put on paper multifarious ideas that resonate well with the resistance. Each morning, many bodies with sleep deprived eyes wake up in Istanbul, Ankara, Antakya, Urfa, and Denizli to take to the streets once again, after having quickly checked the latest news in the social media. They are astonished and impressed that they can still walk, run, stand up, and carry provisions for those in the parks. Exhausted bodies rejuvenate with every new threat that the government utters, and with thousands, tens of thousands of others they begin flowing to Taksim, Kızılay, Kuğulu Park, Gündoğdu, Abbasoğlu, and Yeniköy Park carrying home-made gas masks, swimmer goggles, anti-acid solutions, and whistles.

No one does or can govern these bodies. The masses that gather in public spaces are not formed by virtue of transferring tax money into the wallets of partisans. No one provides shuttle buses for them; no one gives them flags, or feeds them with sandwiches. No one assigns them the slogans they shout out during the demonstrations. Bodies that take heart from knowing that they are not alone do not count, or count on, numbers to meet with others in communal or virtual spaces. One standing man suffices for thousands of others to take to the streets. After all, “one” is also a number…

The government, whose tactlessness prompts these resisting and standing bodies to convene again and again every single day, could not have missed the significance of this body politics. These bodies naturally do have a language, even a few languages that are at times congruent and at others incongruent; however, as a whole, they constitute a politics of the body. The rage and dreams that have been embodied in tweets and graffiti since 31 May turn into material realities through the physical existence, visibility, and endurance of the bodies. If history is being rewritten, then its subject is the body.

Four of these bodies lost their lives during this war that the government has waged on society. Thousands of bodies have been beaten up: some lost their eyes, some received irretrievable injuries. Skins were burnt under the water from the cannons, “laced” with chemicals for maximum harm; lungs were choked with tear gas. Pounded arms, legs, and heads got crushed and broken. The long-term effects of the tons of chemicals dumped on bodies are still unknown. What is known, however, is that these chemicals killed hundreds of cats, dogs, and birds, and that they did harm to countless insects, butterflies, and other smaller organisms.

The apparatuses of the state, and the vehicles of death that responded to Gezi’s politics of the body, attempted to imitate the life force that they failed to extort. In response to the huge numbers that filled the parks and squares and astonished everyone without exception, they hoped to gather partisans together in scripted rallies. They began comparing head counts; they calculated representative percentages. When the calculations did not match, they increased the number of police in body armor and helmets and moved them from protest to protest. They built walls of flesh and steel against the wave of resisting flesh. When that did not work, they offered these bodies—which have been in contact with each other physically and virtually through meetings, banners, and tweets—a mise en scène of dialogue, the conditions of which were more or less already determined. They could not even wait for this attempt to yield fruit; two warnings and a command were enough to launch an assault to remove the bodies that produced an alternative sociability from the park, from the space in which physical resistance could be transformed into a life style. They freed the public space of the public. They collected all the banners, pictures, and colors one by one to erase them from social memory. They stripped all the trees, each dedicated to victims of state violence; they appropriated the barricades that were named after tens of people who had undergone physical and psychological torture, and they tore them to tatters. They destroyed the efforts to keep alive the memories of Fikret Encü, who was a victim of Roboski; Metin Göktepe, who was tortured and killed in detention; Dicle Koğacoğlu, who could not take all the sorrow inherent in this society any more; and the Surp Hagop Armenian Cemetery, which was destroyed by Turkish racism.

The only thing that remains is a politics of the body—but the bodies that produce this politics differ from what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life.” They are not “mere” bodies that the arbitrary will of a sovereign can isolate from society, oppress unceremoniously, or push to the margins of the symbolic world. Rather, they evoke what Ernst Bloch calls “the upright man,” the collective Prometheus. Bloch writes:

Nothing is more fortifying than the call to begin from the beginning. It is youthful as long as it is; to it there belongs a young and aspiring class. It is innocent of the bad things that have happened, for it has never had a real opportunity to be guilty. When this happens, justice has the effect of a morning; it opposes itself to that eternal sickness which was handed down before it. Beginning anew is freshness through and through; it is a first if it appears completely ahistorical, and if it seems to lead back to the beginning of history….It carries the image of the pastoral mood, of the shepherd, of the simple and upright man; one can play with it even in the dark.[1]

Gezi is the struggle of disorderly bodies, those who do not have any dispositif other than their own bodies, against the death machines. If the machines are regulatory instances that follow commands and extort public spaces of mobility with force and violence, then the force they face is the resistance of life itself. Life flourishes at the most unexpected moments and places, just like weeds that crack the concrete and spring out of it. No apparatus of the state can succeed in dominating life absolutely.

The state seeks order; it can control only those whom it orders. It cannot cope with the demand of "freedom"; it has to ask questions such as “freedom for whom,” “freedom for what,” or “freedom under what circumstances” in order to tuck freedom into neat boxes. Order draws borders, fixes identities, and defines. It attempts to establish a hierarchy. By telling parents to take their daughters and sons home from the park, it both brands the resisting bodies as "children" and tries to trigger into action the nucleus of society: family. Through its rhetoric of security, it attributes the risks of its own making to the resisting bodies. It hangs its own flag or banner on the bodies that it prefers knocking down rather than protecting. It punishes those who do not obey; it uses punishment as retaliation. It operates through censorship, threats, and propaganda.

Life, on the other hand, is a constant flux. It challenges borders and moves beyond them. It opens up to circulation those spaces that are closed off due to construction; it paints such destructive vehicles as bulldozers pink; it transforms steps into tribunes, pieces of iron into wish trees, and trees destined to be cut down into monuments. It walks on highways and bridges that are closed to pedestrians. It does not like the empty and the sterile; it covers them up with banners, slogans, tents. It leaves its mark on every surface. It disrupts silence at times with pots and pans, and at other times with a tune from a piano. It plays with identities and definitions; it makes them fluid; it renders them indistinguishable. It can make fun of both itself and the established order thanks to its humor. By changing one single letter in a word, it can ridicule the heaviest of symbolisms. When the state apparatus sends a riot-intervention vehicle to pour tear gas on it, life stops to catch its breath for a while and goes right back to resisting. When a body grows tired, it gets replaced by a reinvigorated one. Life turns into thousands of fingers that tweet and take photographs when the state apparatus sends down vehicles of propaganda. It stops its wheelchair to grab the flag that fell on the ground while escaping from tear gas. It apologizes when it steps on someone`s foot while running; it calms down those who panic.

It is obvious that these bodies that fascism wants to militarize will not assume any ideological identity. When they do not drink alcohol, they ridicule conservatism; when they lie under a TOMA, they make fun of liberalism, which claims that life is the most valuable good. Orthodox Marxism cannot decide under which class struggle these "çapulcu" bodies are to be subsumed. As long as they stay in physical contact, as long as they remain as collective Prometheuses, as long as they—have to—continue the resistance, they grow accustomed to each other`s colors, languages, and genders. They disrupt the behavioral rules that ideologies and institutions expect from them. The natural or moral instinct of protection that has been attributed to mothers loses ground when female bodies participate in the resistance alongside their children. The nationalist and the Kurd exchange anti-acid solutions in gas-filled hotel lobbies. The upper-class college kid drinks the water handed over by the kid with an Anonymous mask without needing to ask what neighborhood he’s from. Soccer fans save their curses for the police rather than for their rivals.

What comes out of all this is trust, not chaos. That`s why the bodies multiply with every gush of tear gas, spaces expand with every police attack, and the quality of contact among the bodies increases with every propaganda speech. The life woven together by bodies born in Gezi is so tenacious that the government is right in fearing it. The power of these bodies stems from their capacity to mutualize endurance, rather than vulnerability (as Judith Butler envisioned they would). One would need to look into the extensive interstices of this politics of the body, rather than into macro-level discourses, to begin deciphering it.

NOTES

[1] Ernst Bloch, Natural Right and Human Dignity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 61.

[An earlier version of this article was published on 26 June 2013 on BIA ("Independent Communication Network"). The link to that version can be found here. This article was translated from Turkish by Gülfer Göze.]