Solidarity, democracy, and the future

In the June 2 issue of the New York Times, Thomas Friedman criticized the Palestinian solidarity movement for emphasizing the Israeli blockade of Gaza over other human rights crises in the Middle East. He writes: “I have no problem with Turkey or other humanitarian groups criticizing Israel. But I have a big problem when people get so agitated by Israel’s actions in Gaza but are unmoved by Syria’s involvement in the murder of the prime minister of Lebanon, by the Iranian regime’s killing of its own citizens demonstrating for the right to have their votes counted, by Muslim suicide bombers murdering nearly 100 Ahmadi Muslims in mosques in Pakistan on Friday and by pro-Hamas gunmen destroying a UN-sponsored summer camp in Gaza because it wouldn’t force Islamic fundamentalism down the throats of children.” Though he offers no evidence to support his point, Friedman uses this supposed lack of passion to suggest that the solidarity movement is, at base, motivated by hate. The argument that critics of Israel are closet anti-Semites is, of course, all too familiar, but in Friedman’s case, it comes with a prescriptive edge. If you want to talk about Israel and Palestine, he seems to say, address yourselves to all the other problems in the Middle East. Work those out, and then we’ll get back to you.

Friedman is an intellectual featherweight, yet his incoherent screed offers an opportunity for those of us in the Palestinian solidarity movement to clarify our position with regard to the struggle. When the Ahmadis are being slaughtered in Lahore, when the streets of Kingston are running with blood, and when the Gulf of Mexico is drowning in oil, what is it about Palestine that commands our attention?

The most reasonable answer to this question may be the overwhelming human misery caused by Israeli policies toward Palestine. Despite having the right of return under international law, Palestinians remain the largest and oldest refugee population in the world, with over 4.6 million in exile, 2.2. million of whom live in some fifty-nine refugee camps throughout the Arab world. Since 1967, the Palestinians who remained in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem have lived under Israeli military occupation; at present, the occupied territories are home to 3.2 million. Together, the landmass of the territories is less than one thousand square kilometers, making for a population density of 3,200 per square kilometer. By contrast, the most densely populated state in the US, New Jersey, has only 452 people per square mile. Since 2007, the 1.2 million Palestinians in Gaza have suffered under an Israeli blockade prompted by the election of Hamas in 2006. According to UNRWA, the Strip receives, at present, less than a quarter of the provisions it did before the blockade began, and no provisions are allowed into Gaza without Israel’s approval. Travel between the West Bank and Gaza is all but impossible, and commerce is almost unheard of, even as Israel builds new roads to facilitate Israeli settlers’ movements through the occupied West Bank.

Prior to December 2008, the situation in Palestine was merely intolerable. Since then, following over three weeks of airstrikes by the Israeli military, life in Gaza has been made almost impossible. Using the heinously retrograde logic that civilians were harboring terrorists—“terrorists” in this case referring to the democratically-elected Hamas government—the IDF bombed civilian targets throughout the strip, even, at one point, targeting UNRWA relief workers and civilian press. Israeli spokespeople argued that the bombardment was prompted by security concerns stemming from rockets fired from Gaza into Israel. If Hamas could not ensure Israeli security, they argued, the IDF would. In point of fact, rocket fire from Gaza into Israel had decreased more than 98% following the ceasefire of 21 June 2008; it only picked up after Israel violated the ceasefire agreement with an attack on cross-border tunnels in Gaza on 4 November. This date is very significant, and it speaks to the perfidy of the Israeli government when it comes to the question of Palestine or the so-called “peace process.” November 4, 2008 was, of course, the day before the US Presidential election; the attacks were called off within about twenty-four hours of Barack Obama’s inauguration. The Israeli siege of Gaza, in other words, was the consequence of a political calculation, because it was generally assumed that the interregnum between Bush and Obama would be the last time Israel had carte blanche when it came to enforcing its will over the occupied territories. This reading of the situation is more or less confirmed by the report issued by the UN Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, which states that “the attack on the only remaining flour producing factory, the destruction of a large part of the Gaza egg production, the bulldozing of huge tracts of agricultural land, and the bombing of some two hundred industrial facilities, could not on any basis be justified on military grounds. Those attacks,” the report concluded, “had nothing whatsoever to do with the firing of rockets and mortars at Israel.” Operation Cast Lead reduced much of the strip to rubble, and left more than 1300 Palestinians, and 13 Israelis, dead.

The physical toll of the occupation is more than enough reason to support Palestine, but it is—I want to suggest—only one of the conditions that compels our solidarity. Perhaps more important is the relationship between what Jean Genet used to call the Palestinian revolution and the future of the Arab world. Friedman claims that those of us in the Palestinian solidarity movement have not taken into account the myriad crimes committed throughout the greater Middle East by the various sects and regimes that control the region, suggesting that our support for Palestine is evidence of either hatred or a blind fanatical conviction. It is difficult to see how Friedman maintains any credibility on this point when he mentions Syrian involvement in the murder of Rafiq Hariri—a charge often advanced but never proven—and fails to mention the very real, systematic, and brutal abuses committed, as a matter of course, by the government of Saudi Arabia, or the suppression of Muslim communities in his darling of the developing world, India. Of course, the only constant in Friedman’s work is a general hostility to reason, so I won’t dwell overlong on the speciousness of his argument. Although the equivalence he poses between the scope of Israel’s crime in Palestine and the violence and human rights abuses meted out elsewhere in the Arab world is false, I would argue that our support for Palestine emerges, in part, from a consideration of these very crimes.

To support the Palestinian cause, in my estimation, is to support the cause of justice throughout the greater Middle East—or, what Friedman sometimes calls, for no particular reason, the Arab-Muslim world. Of the many facts about Palestine and the Palestinian revolution that have been suppressed in the United States, one of the most significant is that the Palestinian revolution has, at various points in its history, understood itself in opposition to the many autocratic and undemocratic regimes that control the Arab Middle East. This is one of the reasons why Palestinian rights are suppressed in places like Jordan, Kuwait, and Lebanon. Historically, most Arab regimes have been interested in the Palestinian cause to the extent that Palestine presents either a point of popular democratic mobilization against their rule, or a safety valve through which to redirect the legitimate political grievances that emerge under autocracies. For most Arab leaders who wield the power of the state, Palestine is important as a matter of state, and a matter between states, because of its potential to inspire a democratic popular front throughout the greater Arab world. One gleans hints of this potentiality in the aid flotillas that have attempted to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza; one sees it, as well, in the street protests that erupted in the capitals of the Arab world during the Gaza War in 2008-09. On the other hand, one sees the ineptitude of Arab statecraft in the 2009 summit at Sharm-el-Sheikh called in response to the bombing of Gaza. Lacking any signals out of Washington as to how the wind would blow under Obama, various statesmen from throughout the Arab world could not come to any meaningful conclusion about the crisis.

It would be easy to take this point as one more strike against the Arab world, or a backhanded case for the Zionist claim that Israel is the only democracy in the region. To do so would be to grossly misconstrue the point. Solidarity with Palestine, at its best, and at its broadest, has meant—historically—solidarity with democracy itself; not the democracy that George W. Bush or other missionary statesmen have sought to impose upon the Arab Middle East like so many other political “solutions” imposed upon the Middle East since the end of the first World War, but the real deal democracy that inheres in the collective and that is the only guarantee of the individual and her liberties. Democracy, as Fred Moten has argued, is to identify with the common, and the commons; it is the condition of all state structures in that it is the very thing that might undermine those structures. This is democracy at its most dangerous, its most powerful, and sometimes its most problematic. It is the reason why Fanon insisted—against the entirety of the Marxist tradition—that we attend to the lumpen, and that we learn from the lumpen even as they learn from an “us” that I’m not quite sure can be said to exist. This is the democracy that allows “us” to find ourselves as such. It is this democracy that has the only chance of saving this doomed world. I am in solidarity with Palestine because I am in solidarity with democracy and because I believe that, by being in solidarity with Palestine, we might yet save ourselves.