Racism in the Defense of a Racist State: Some Reflections on BDS at the Modern Language Association

Racism in the Defense of a Racist State: Some Reflections on BDS at the Modern Language Association

Racism in the Defense of a Racist State: Some Reflections on BDS at the Modern Language Association

By : David Lloyd

It is beginning to seem as if the arrival of winter spells academic boycott season as well as the festive season.  This year in November, the business meetings of two major associations voted overwhelmingly to endorse the call of Palestine civil society to engage in a boycott of Israeli academic institutions until such times as they—and the state with which they are so deeply intertwined—respect the internationally recognized human rights of Palestinians.  Those associations, the American Anthropological Association and the National Women’s Studies Association, voted to endorse the boycott by 86% and 88% respectively.  While AAA has yet to send its vote to the membership at large, those numbers are, as they say, major, exceeding by far even the American Studies Association’s vote in December 2013. 

This steady procession of endorsements, initiated in May 2013 by the Association for Asian American Studies’ unanimous vote for the boycott, suggests that the logic and justice of the Palestinian call for justice are making themselves heard more and more broadly in American civil society.  What was once the concern of the political left is gradually becoming to seem a moral imperative to more and more people, much as the divestment movement against South African apartheid shifted in the mid-1980s from being a marginal issue to becoming one of the defining social movements of the decade.  It would be hard now to find anyone who was at Berkeley or Columbia in those years who would not claim to have been part of the anti-apartheid struggle.  

Clearly, something similar is taking place around Palestine: activists with Black Lives Matter or for justice for the undocumented routinely make the connection between the violence and discrimination they confront and the situation of Palestinians under Israeli occupation, systematic discrimination, and dispossession.  That most major US police departments have engaged in training exercises with Israeli security forces, or that the Israeli hi-tech firm, Elbit Systems, furnishes the surveillance equipment for both the apartheid wall that segments and annexes Palestinian land and the fence along the Mexican border are now common currency in the language of social activism.

That awareness is no longer confined to civil rights activists.  Religious organizations, trades unions, and civic groups are increasingly turning to endorse the movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions [BDS] and Jewish Voice for Peace has become the fastest growing Jewish organization in the country.  All this is taking place despite increasingly vigorous efforts by Israel’s supporters to suppress by legal or formal political means any criticism of Israel, labeling it, with mind-boggling cynicism, anti-Semitic.  Coercion, to which powerful actors resort when they know they have lost the debate in public, is not a very strong argument and, as ever, ordinary people with a sense of justice refuse to bow down and shut up when bullied or threatened by lawyers or demagogues. 

Meanwhile, the Modern Language Association—the largest association of humanities scholars in the world—continues to deliberate whether to endorse the boycott of Israeli academic institutions.  The membership vote will not take place till 2017, but at this year’s convention its Delegate Assembly hosted two debate panels focused on Palestine and the question of academic boycotts and the conference itself featured numerous panels devoted to the topic, many of them sponsored by the MLA’s subdivisions or “forums”.  Next year will feature a town hall meeting on the boycott, preceding the business meeting of the Delegate Assembly that will decide whether to refer the resolution to the membership as a whole.

The effort to persuade the MLA to endorse means breaking new ground for the BDS movement.  It is no accident that the Asian American Studies association was the first to do so.  Almost without exception, the scholarly associations that have endorsed are ones whose disciplinary commitments have required the study of race, colonialism, and social justice: in addition to Asian American Studies and American Studies, one can add Critical Ethnic Studies, Native American and Indigenous Studies, the African Literature Association.  Anthropologists have long debated the discipline’s colonial legacies and largely committed to a more ethical relation to ethnographic study. Women’s Studies has over decades come to terms with feminists of color’s emphasis on the intersections of gender with race.  It is, then, hardly surprising that scholars whose work has been sharpened and enhanced by such debates should recognize the outlines of systematic racial discrimination, settler colonialism, and injustice in the case of Israel’s ongoing dispossession of the Palestinian people.

That recognition cannot be taken for granted in the case of scholars of literature and language, despite the many forums in the MLA devoted to topics like postcolonialism, global anglophone literature, or race and ethnicity studies.  Such divisions are greatly outnumbered by the many other forums devoted to the traditional rubrics of literary study that reveal little sign of the way the discipline has been roiled and reshaped by the insights of critical ethnic studies or postcolonial theory as to how the whole edifice of literary scholarship and pedagogy was shaped by the racial formation of modernity itself. 

One might say, indeed, that the blithe disinterest of the traditional literary scholar, which remains the cherished self-image of all too many humanities professors, is the shadowy double of a white supremacy they would hasten to disavow.  It lays claim to an unearned universality of perspective, indifference more than ethical disinterest, which justifies disengagement from the world while ignoring the extraordinary historical and personal privilege that is the condition of that stance.  Disinterest in the face of injustice is the scholarly equivalent of the financial dividend that all white people have inherited from slavery and colonialism.  Not having to suffer from or contest injustice on a daily basis, living in relative social and institutional security, relying on those to conduct dispassionate scholarly research, are the gifts of fortune that enable scholars to enjoy but not to have to use the academic freedoms that opponents of the boycott claim to be defending.  Those privileges also enable the claim that questions of social justice, even in situations that our tax dollars and our elected politicians daily enable, are not the proper concern of individual scholars or their associations.  Properly considered, that claim appears remarkably and self-interestedly partial.

The intimate connection between the partial defense of academic freedom and the defense of Israel’s systemically racist state became all too apparent during the debate panels at this month’s MLA convention.  It would be invidious to dwell on the breath-taking assertion let slip by one opponent of the boycott, that “Muslims are terrorists”, though it certainly revealed how swiftly indifference to the plight of Palestinians slips over into the scarcely concealed racism that underlies it.  But how could that not be?  Defense of the state of Israel, which labels itself  “the Jewish state” despite some thirty percent of its citizenry being neither ethnically or by religion Jewish, necessarily becomes imbued with racial discrimination. Peter Beinart is not alone among those who rather oxymoronically define themselves as “liberal Zionists” in admitting that he has to compromise his liberal principles if he is to defend Israel.  That flight from fundamental commitments to human rights and social justice is not a mere failure of rhetorical skill, but the inevitable consequence of seeking to defend what, in any other situation, would instantly be recognized as indefensible. 

The clearest symptom of that impossible contradiction, and not only at the MLA, is the complete discursive erasure of Palestinians and their experiences, intellectual lives, and simple demand for the acknowledgement of their rights.  One hundred and seventy Palestinian civic organizations, have endorsed the call for the academic boycott, including every teacher’s or students’ union.  Just as much as Israeli scholars, those are our colleagues and peers and should be embraced by the MLA’s commitment to academic freedom.  But never once was that fact acknowledged by opponents of the boycott resolution. In the course of both panels, they managed to invoke all of three Palestinians who opposed the boycott, including, rather disingenuously, Mahmoud Abbas, who was not only misrepresented as opposing a measure virtually unanimously supported by Palestinians, but is in any case widely despised and regarded as an unelected leader. The vast majority of Palestinians have, through their organizations, voiced their call to us to side with them and to rectify the vast imbalance of power between them and the Israeli state.  But that fact was drowned out in obfuscating rhetoric about how the academic boycott might impact the handful of liberal Israeli scholars who seek to continue the self-evidently bankrupt path of “dialogue” that has been going on for over twenty years while settlements have expanded, an apartheid wall extended, and more and more Palestinian land been expropriated.

Zygmunt Baumann once referred to the dehumanization of German Jews prior to their deportation and extermination as requiring their reduction to moral or psychological invisibility. Opponents of the boycott, even as they proclaim their liberal credentials, consistently engage in the moral eviction of the Palestinians.  Even Noam Chomsky, who should know better, will happily cite a slew of left-wing Israeli intellectuals while not mentioning a single Palestinian advocate of the boycott.  As Saree Makdisi noted on one panel at the MLA, this is the oldest colonial maneuver in the book.  And it was amplified by another opponent’s claim that “academic freedom is not a value universally shared” outside societies with liberal values, the implication being that Palestinians value neither academic freedom nor liberal values.  It is an astonishing claim.  It is an astonishing denigration of the Palestinians, who enjoyed one of the richest cultural traditions of the Middle East, whose books and archives were stolen along with their lands, and whose campuses were being invaded even as the MLA convention met in the peace and security of Austin, Texas.  Palestinian scholars are not fighting only for “academic freedom”, a right that is valued in any case in the advocacy of unpopular causes rather than in its hoarding as a private possession, but for the “right to education”.  They know that the ongoing Israeli assault on their institutions and on the simple right to travel freely to those institutions, is a form of “scholasticide” that threatens to destroy their capacity to reproduce and disseminate their intellectual and cultural life.  It is what Ngugi wa Thiong’o once described as colonialism’s “cultural bomb”, designed to obliterate not only the creative life but the social cohesion of a dominated population.

And yet, ironically, it is the Palestinians who have most directly and practically expressed their commitment to the universality of academic freedom.  In the midst of vigorous and often plangent defenses of Israeli scholarly rights, and amid dire prognostications as to the consequences of the boycott for scholarship and dialogue, never once did the opponents of the boycott acknowledge the extraordinary forbearance with which the Palestinian call respects the actual academic freedoms of all scholars.  Their guidelines regard as inviolable the rights that really do inhere in academic freedom—the right to research, to disseminate one’s work, and to travel in order to do so.  The same guidelines also respect the basic labor conditions of scholars, enabling scholars still to enjoy institutional perks, like grants to travel to conferences, as fundamental necessities of their work.  The institutional boycott, unlike the de facto Israeli boycott and blockade of Palestine, aims only at ending collaboration on an institutional level between our associations and institutions and Israeli academic institutions, all of which are directly tied to the maintenance and means of occupation, dispossession and discrimination.  While the boycott proposes only a temporary suspension of relations, Israel’s dispossession of the Palestinians threatens to become permanent unless global civil society intervenes.

Increasingly, it seems, literary scholars are recognizing these elementary facts and are ceasing to be intimidated or confused by the monotonous reiteration of misrepresentations and half-truths, slurs and invective, that have been the unchanging mantras of Israel’s supporters.  Some 250 members of the MLA have already signed an Open Letter in support of the boycott resolution, despite the well-known risks of doing so publicly.  What was once a minority concern is rapidly becoming a moral axiom in the Modern Language Association as it did in American Studies and among the anthropologists.  Persuading the members of a largely conservative professional association, which largely functions as younger academics’ gateway into scholarly careers, to vote for the boycott resolution remains an uphill struggle.  But in the corridors of the convention center and the lobbies of hotels, it was apparent that support for the boycott as a means to seek justice and redress continues to grow, just as it does—to Israel’s increasing consternation—throughout the United States.   

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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.]