Steal of the Century

Posted on April 7, 2020 by Derek Gregory

I’ve just received the welcome news from Ghazi Falah, editor-in-chief of the Arab World Geographer, that the latest issue (vol. 23, no. 1) is available (or soon will be!) on open access here. Its focus is on the absurd Trump/Kushner “Deal of the Century”….

Contents:

Reflections on the DoC Robert W. McColl

The Steal of the Century: Robbing Palestinians of their Past and Future Ilan Pappe

Israel: Never Missing an Opportunity Walter L. Hixson

The One-State Reality: Reading the Trump-Kushner Plan as a Morbid Symptom Ian S. Lustick

The Changing Geopolitics of Settlements and Borders in Trump Deal of the Century—It is Time to Think Beyond the Territorial Box David Newman

The Trump Administration’s Peace Plan: Palestinian Public Opinion and the Future of Conflict Karl Kaltenthaler

The Deal of the Century in Context – Trump’s Plan is Part of a Long-Standing Settler-Colonial Enterprise in Palestine As’ad Ghanem

Googling military occupation

Posted on October 6, 2018 by Derek Gregory

A new report from the Arab Center for Social Media Advancement, Mapping Segregation: Google Maps and the Human Rights of Palestinians, adds another dimension to contemporary discussions about the weaponisation of social media (and, not incidentally, about Google’s claims of social responsibility).

The report outlines the restrictions imposed by the illegal Israeli occupation of the West Bank on Palestinians, and compares three cartographic apps: Google Maps, Maps.me and Waze. The focus is on what is missing from their digital maps – the misrepresentation or erasure of Palestinian villages (though illegal Israeli colonies are clearly marked) – and the cartographic attenuation of the all-too-real restrictions on the movement of Palestinians. For example:

On routes within the West Bank, Google Maps prioritizes directing users through Israel rather than through the West Bank, even if this adds considerable distance to the journey. The drive from Ramallah to Nablus through the West Bank usually takes 45 minutes, however when using Google Maps, the journey takes a long route through Israel and takes 4.5 hours. In contrast, the shortest route from Ramallah to Bethlehem takes the driver through Jerusalem, which is inaccessible for Palestinian West Bank ID holders. Whenever a route passes through the West Bank, Google Maps shows two warnings on the route description: “This route has restricted usage or private roads” and “This route may cross country borders” and fails to highlight Israeli settlements or checkpoints. Google Maps is unable to calculate routes within Palestinian rural communities, or to and from Gaza, displaying the message “Sorry, we could not calculate driving/walking directions from x to y”. The app offers the option to “add a missing place” and edit information, but this “might take some time to show up on the map” as they must be reviewed first.

The Dis/Appeared

Posted on March 14, 2018 by Derek Gregory

A note from Ian Alan Paul – I’ve noticed his Guantanamo Bay Museum before, but he’s produced a host of other interesting projects too – brings the welcome news of his experimental video The Dis/Appeared: 25 Notes on Colonial Regimes of Perception:

“The Dis/Appeared” (2018) is an experimental video essay that examines the totalizing imposition of colonial perception in contemporary Palestine. The project theorizes the Israeli state’s establishment of perceptual regimes that confine the colonized to the liminal thresholds of view, never allowing Palestinians to entirely appear or disappear but instead perpetually rendering them dis/appeared. Through narration and a montage of images that are at once ordinary and unsettling, the video essay gives an account of settler-colonial instantiations of power while also proposing a tactical repertoire to be taken up against colonial rule. The project was produced over the course of 2017 while the artist was living and teaching in the West Bank of Palestine, and is the first part of a series of films, installations, and texts that examine the conjuncture of coloniality, governmentality, and memory in global contexts.

You can view it here (33 minutes) and download the script here.

A sample that really doesn’t do justice to the project and its artful exploration of colonial visuality:

Never entirely in or out of view but perpetually detained in the spectral thresholds between the two, Palestinians are made to be both apparent and transparent, signal and noise, conspicuous and concealed, evident and obscure, appeared and disappeared. Because Palestinians cannot decidedly and finally appear within view, Palestine can be perceived as a pristine landscape, a blank slate, an untouched surface, entirely vacant of Palestinians and inviting of ever-expanding Israeli settlements and colonization. Because Palestinians cannot decidedly and finally disappear from view, they remain perpetually available for increasing intensities of Israeli oversight, management, surveillance, policing, and control. If Palestinians manage to escape from the thresholds of Israel’s colonial regime of perception, the subsequent recognizability or clandestinity, transparency or secrecy, are all perceived by Israel as pure hostility.

To escape from view as a Palestinian is to be viewed as a fugitive threat. The proliferous destruction of civilian architecture in Gaza is preemptively and retroactively justified with claims that enemy combatants and weapon caches are being hidden inside of them, every bomb destroying the conditions for life and the conditions of concealment with the blinding exposure of its blast. Inversely, to enter into view as a Palestinian is to be viewed as an invasive enemy. In the West Bank, Palestinian demonstrations filled with cameras, banners, portraits of martyrs, and flags are made to vanish within toxic obfuscating clouds of tear gas. Attempting an escape from the view of Israel is to be marked as a hostis and fugitive in need of surveillance, capture, and elimination, while entering into Israel’s view is to be marked as an invader and as an infiltrator in need of exclusion, eviction, and expulsion.

Uncommon ground

Posted on January 8, 2018 by Derek Gregory

The latest issue of Critical Inquiry (44/2) (2018) has a special section on Israel/Palestine: The Occupied and the Occupier: that has its origins in the International Critical Geography Conference at Ramallah in 2015:

In the life of a scholarly journal there sometimes occur moments when radically different perspectives converge on a theme or argument. That is the case with the following group of essays. The first is written by Saree Makdisi, a Palestinian scholar who has studied the occupation of his country for many years and has attempted to analyze the institutions, languages, and political forces that sustain that occupation. The subsequent essays constitute a dossier of reflections by Israeli scholars writing from the standpoint of the occupiers, seeking to understand the history of the occupation and to reflect on the moral and political issues that accompany it. Organized by Ariel Handel and Ruthie Ginsburg, “Israelis Studying the Occupation” originated in the desire of a group of Israeli scholars to engage with Palestinians and international experts at a conference on Critical Geography that took place in Ramallah in 2015. As with so many attempts to find common ground in Israel/Palestine, this desire was frustrated. The present forum, therefore, is basically an attempt to name and locate that common ground as the occupation itself and to engage in reflection from the standpoints of both the occupied and the occupiers.

Critical Inquiry has a long history of engagement with the question of Israel/Palestine; a complete list of articles on this topic is available on our website [here] and includes work by Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said, Ariella Azoulay, Robert Griffin, Frank Gehry, Oren Yiftachel, and John Berger.

Here is the Contents list:

Saree Makdisi, Apartheid/~~Apartheid~~

Ariel Handel, Ruthie Ginsberg, Israelis studying the Occupation: an introduction

Hagar Kotef, Fragments

Hilla Dayan, For Occupation Studies, to cultivate hope

Amira Hass, Writing about the Occupation

Maya Rosenfeld, The transformation around the corner

Amal Jamal, Bypassing 1948: a critique of critical Israeli studies of occupatio

Irus Braverman, Renouncing citizehsip as protest: reflections by a Jewish Israeli ethnographer

Apart from its intrinsic importance, the forum bears directly on discussions around situated knowledges and positionality, so it’s perhaps appropriate that the issue as a whole starts with an essay by Bruno Latour, ‘On a possible triangulation of some present political positions’ (hence the cover image, reproduced above).

Occupied Paris

Posted on November 26, 2017 by Derek Gregory

I try to make sure all of my lectures are up-to-date each year, but this term I’ve added some completely new ones to my course on Cities, space and power. One of them – which I gave last week – is on Paris under Nazi occupation; elsewhere in the course I discuss Cairo under French occupation (1798-1801) and, later in the nineteenth century, Shahjahanabad (Delhi) under British occupation: but working on Paris during the Second World War swept me away for much of the term (when I was supposed to be doing quite other things…).

You can find the raw slides under the TEACHING tab (‘raw’ because I couldn’t possibly use all of them in a single lecture, though I did my best, so this is the unedited version).

I hope the slides will be self-explanatory, but here’s the lecture outline:

1: Before the Occupation [civil defence or défense passive; the mass exodus from Paris; air raids; the departure of the French government; the declaration of Paris as an Open City].

2: The Fall of Paris [the entry of the Wehrmacht into a seemingly empty Paris; the Armistice and the creation of Vichy France; Hitler’s three-hour tour of Paris]

3: Occupation and the right to the city [Occupied Paris as object-space; German re-signing of the city; the cityscape and the administrative apparatus of Occupation; geographies of military tourism (the conceit that an anterior, vibrant Paris of leisure and pleasure can still be found beneath the grid of military occupation)]

4: Everyday life in the ‘City without a Face’ [the uncanny city; ‘Food is power’: rationing, the black market, the grey market and the administration of hunger; the Nazi control of time and space]

5: Paris’s Jews and the Nazi Genocide [registrations, regulations and round-ups; the co-operation and collaboration of the French police; Drancy camp; exclusions from public space; the Vélodrome d’Hiver]

6: The Allied Offensive and the Liberation of Paris [Allied bombing; ‘Is Paris Burning?’; post-Liberation violence]

A treasure trove for imagery, incidentally, is Parisien Images here; I’ve long maintained that image research – including a creative use of Google Images – is an absolutely indispensable part of research, since the results often provide insights and take you to places you would never have thought of otherwise. I also recommend Occupation de Paris, a wonderful, eclectic collection of images and commentary here.

Among the books I mined: Allan Mitchell, Nazi Paris: The History of an Occupation, 1940-1944; David Drake, Paris at War: 1939-1944 (brilliant); and Ronald Rosbottom, When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light Under German Occupation, 1940-1944 (suggestive but you’ll need to find the detail elsewhere). A good place for a quick start is Bernard Toulgoat‘s series on Life in Paris under Nazi Occupation: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4.

The Walled Off Hotel

Posted on March 22, 2017 by Derek Gregory

Many readers will already know of Banksy‘s most recent project – the Walled Off [not Waldorf!] Hotel on Caritas Street in occupied Bethlehem, which opened earlier this month. The hotel’s website is here, and this is extracted from the FAQ:

The hotel is located in a bustling area fully open to tourists from across the world. It has all the restaurants, bars and taxis you’d expect. We’re 500 metres from the checkpoint to Jerusalem and a mile from the centre of Bethlehem…

You don’t need a visa to enter Israel as a tourist and you can stay for up to 3 months. Visitors entering via Tel Aviv airport are given an entry card in their passport. So, unlike the locals, you’ll be permitted to travel wherever you wish.

The Walled Off Hotel is an entirely independent leisure facility set up and financed by Banksy. It is not aligned to any political movement or pressure group. The aim is to tell the story of the wall from every side and give visitors the opportunity to discover it for themselves. We offer an especially warm welcome to young Israelis.

The artist paid for the installation costs and has now handed it over as an independent local business. The aim is to break even and put any profits back into local projects.

You can find more images here.

Jamil Khader provided an insightful commentary on the project – especially the resonances with the colonial architecture of the Balfour Declaration and, amongst the installation-hotel’s many internal installations, the Gaza Memorial – for al Jazeera here. And now Jamil has provided a longer, spellbinding commentary over at the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) here. Here’s a key extract in which he discusses what he calls ‘Occu-tourism and the commodification of Palestinian suffering’:

Instead of culturalizing the political struggle and coopting it in the language of multicultural tolerance, Banksy draws attention to the contradictions of Palestine’s captive economy under occupation, and especially the sociopolitical effects of occu-tourism on the commodification of Palestinian suffering and oppression. For Banksy, no political solution is viable without sustainable economic independence.

The Walled Off Hotel itself was allegedly planned to help reinvigorate the local economy in the Bethlehem area, by providing employment opportunities for local residents struggling for decent living under conditions of scarcity. However, it is not clear how such revenues can be generated and how sustainable they can be given the low daily rate charged for the limited number of rooms on offer. While other businesses in the same area have fallen off a cliff as a result of the wall, it is also unclear how this business can survive and thrive. And this is the point.

The installation-hotel thus becomes a parody of the many occu-touristic commercial ventures and other forms of alternative tourism and entrepreneurial activities that have developed around the occupation and apartheid wall in Palestine, both by Palestinians and international solidarity movement activists. However, some of these occu-tourism enterprises can collapse into staged spectacles for the entertainment of vacationing international travelers, who enjoy the adrenaline of confrontations with the Israeli military. Moreover, occu-tourism elevates Palestinian suffering into an ontological condition and erases histories of Palestinian agency and resistance. Rebecca Gould has thus correctly pointed out that “suffering is nowhere as globally implicated or heavily interpolated into the global public sphere as it is in Palestine.”

Nonetheless, the installation-hotel aims to move occu-tourists and other international travelers out of their comfort zone and educate them in the Palestinian struggle for freedom. First, Banksy invades the private space of these visitors by reworking a classic Western pastoral painting, in which he inserts a futuristic or cubistic bulldozer into the private space of a European family. He thus turns the idyllic rural European scene from Western art into a horror scene which is all too common in Palestine.

Furthermore, the installation-hotel provides ample opportunities for these visitors to educate themselves about the Palestinian struggle…. Many high quality photographs and posters present facts about the settlements, the wall, and checkpoints. In one interesting glass case, a cross-section from the earth reveals the contrast between the Palestinian and Israeli underground water distribution systems: The narrow rusty iron pipes used in Palestine pale in comparison to the thick, wide copper pipes that Israel uses in controlling the water resources and consumption in the West Bank.

A section of the wall in the educational area also pays tribute to the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement. It presents a sample of some major products, including Coca-Cola cans, Sabra salads and Ahava Dead Sea personal care items—all of which have been the target of the BDS. There is also information about BDS’ impact and reception around the world. In an adjacent section, a video loop plays the testimonies of former Israeli soldiers, detailing their daily violations of Palestinian human rights.

More importantly, Banksy situates occu-tourism within the contradictions of the Palestinian captive economy under occupation and the global capitalist economy in general. According to early reports, Banksy has also placed Israeli products in the hotel rooms, including Dead Sea bath minerals, in a clear statement about the ironies of Palestinians ultimately financing their own occupation.

Do read the whole essay (Jamil is particularly good on the image I’ve reproduced below).

There is, incidentally, another hotel – often known as the Banksy Guest House – in Bethlehem, and for a discussion of local (critical) reactions to the project see here. The issue is not only about the impact on the local economy (to which the FAQ above respond effectively, I think) but also the more general issue confronting so many artistic interventions:

“I see how [Banksy’s] work brings a lot of people to Bethlehem to see the wall and the city,” says Ayed Arafah, another local artist. “But now all the people who come to take photos of the paintings and graffiti… it’s become like Disneyland. Like you are living in a zoo.”

But I also think Jamer’s commentary squares that vicious circle too. See what you think.

Standing on occupied ground

Posted on February 17, 2016 by Derek Gregory

This is Reading Week at UBC, so I’m doing just that… At the AAG Annual Meeting in San Francisco there is a Plenary Session on Friday 1 April (sic) on Forging Solidarity: Taking a stand on Palestine:

In July 2015 the International Critical Geography Group convened its seventh conference in the occupied city of Ramallah, Palestine. The conference brought together scholars and activists committed to combating social exploitation and oppression. Altogether four hundred participants from over forty countries energetically took up issues on and beyond the violent frontlines of class, gender, race, sexual, and colonial divisions. Yet they also took critical steps beyond discussion and debate of our intellectual work towards concrete collective action. An example of this was the overwhelmingly vote of conference participants for a strong resolution to sign onto the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott and the broader Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel. The resolution adopted is both a political statement in solidarity with the anti-colonial struggle of our Palestinian comrades but also an agenda for a broader commitment to anti-capitalist, decolonial, anti-racist, feminist and queer social movements and struggles around the world against growing social, economic and political precarity, rising authoritarianism, encroachment of fundamental rights, dispossession, structural adjustment in the south and north, revanchism, ongoing colonization of public space, land and resources, the privatization of the commons, as well as structural and state-sanctioned violence against racialized, gendered, queer bodies, and other targeted bodies and communities.

Building on the momentum generated by the conference and this resolution, this discussion panel aims to open up a serious discussion about BDS and the academic boycott of Israel within the Association of American Geographers. This is, we believe, particularly relevant in light of the current situation in Palestine/Israel but also taking into consideration how academics from other professional organisations such as the American Anthropological Association, the Association for Asian American Studies, the American Studies Association and the Native American Studies Association, as well as a number of student councils worldwide, have already endorsed this call for solidarity. Our distinguished panel of scholars and activists will speak out about the importance and the urgency to adopt a political stand on Palestine and to further the work of decolonizing the discipline of geography. In doing so, we hope to reaffirm a commitment to critical scholarship and praxis by encouraging and enabling spaces of political and conceptual possibility for geographers in solidarity with ongoing socio-political, economic and environmental struggles around the globe.

In the wake of that ICG Conference in Ramallah, David Lloyd‘s moving reflections on another conference/workshop in the same city, ‘Walter Benjamin in Palestine‘, repay careful reading:

Activism is in fact the antagonist of complacency and of the satisfaction with familiar protocols that dulls thinking and makes the institutionalized academic a little stupid. But activism is not always expressed in headlong mobilization or fervent debates, nor is thought only the forethought that shapes or the afterthought that reflects on practice. As “Benjamin in Palestine” exemplified, it can also take the form of deliberate thinking in common whose very exercise is a form of resistance, however limited. As the BDS movement continues to advance, perhaps workshops like these, which step beyond mere “severance of relations” (as Benjamin described the act of striking) to shape conditions for new modes of relation, may offer a way to think the future of our resistance to Israeli apartheid. Perhaps too it offers a model also for an alternative to the insidious corporatization of our intellectual and creative lives under the neoliberal dispensation we all confront, wherever we reside, and not only in occupied Palestine. That, indeed, may be the insight we have been gifted by those who daily struggle for the right to education in the face of dispossession.

In its way this, too, is a modestly performative politics of assembly. So it’s good to see that panelists at the AAG plenary include this year’s Honorary Geographer, Judith Butler; full list is here. You can find Judith’s previous remarks on BDS (at Brooklyn College) here.

You can also find out much more about the American Anthropological Association’s stand (last year) here; the statement that accompanied the successful resolution is here; a series of FAQs (“Yes, but…”) is here; and other resources are here.

It’s opportune, too, that the latest issue of borderlands should be devoted to The politics of suffering – with a special focus on occupied Palestine. Among the many truly excellent essays three stand out for me.

First, Suvendrini Perera‘s accomplished contrapuntal reading of transnational justice, ‘Visibility, Atrocity and the Subject of Postcolonial Justice‘, which proceeds’ through a series of key sites – Congo, Belgium, Nuremberg, Israel, Gaza – that links past and present, colonial and colonizing worlds’, and then focuses on the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians on the beaches of Mullivaikkal in northeast Sri Lanka:

In the context of the 2009 atrocities in Lanka, in this paper I attempt to think through a set of questions about visibility, witness, suffering, accountability and disposability as they are played out in the relations between the necro-geo-politics of global institutions and the patchworks of local and transnational movements that attempt to materialize peoples’ suffering and realize the possibility of justice within fragile and compromised frameworks.

Second, Joseph Pugliese‘s characteristically innovative ‘Forensic ecologies of occupied zones and Geographies of dispossession: Gaza and occupied East Jerusalem‘:

In this essay, I work to develop what I term multi-dimensional matrices of suffering that envisage the understanding of suffering beyond the locus of the human subject. In my theorising of multi-dimensional matrices of suffering, I proceed to conceptualise the suffering experienced in occupied zones as both relational and distributed. In the occupied zone, suffering encompasses complex, multi-dimensional vectors that bind humans, animals, animate and non-animate objects and entities, buildings and land. In the context of the regimes of violence that inscribe occupied zones, I situate suffering, and a range of other affects, in ecological configurations that, through a range of forensic indices, evidence the impact of these regimes of violence on the broad spectrum of entities that comprise a particular occupied zone. The conceptualisation of suffering and trauma in occupied zones in terms of its relational multi-dimensionality, its site-specific matrices and relational distribution across ecologies, I conclude, enables an understanding of suffering that moves beyond anthropocentric approaches. I situate my analysis in the context of Israel’s drone-enabled regime of unrelenting surveillance, occupation and military control over Gaza [see image above] and its continuing occupation of East Jerusalem.

It really is a tour de force, only too literally so, and builds not only on Joe’s brilliant State violence and the execution of law and his previous research but also on Jane Bennett‘s work and – as the title signposts – on Eyal Weizman‘s project of forensic architecture. It’s doubly important because so much critical writing on military drones has virtually nothing to say about Israel’s use (and sale) of them.

Finally, Jasbir Puar‘s ‘The ‘right’ to maim: Disablement and inhumanist biopolitics in Palestine‘:

This essay argues that Israel manifests an implicit claim to the ‘right to maim’ and debilitate Palestinian bodies and environments as a form of biopolitical control and as central to a scientifically authorized humanitarian economy. In this context, the essay tracks the permeating relations between living and dying that complicate Michel Foucault’s foundational mapping of biopower, in this case, the practice of deliberate maiming. In doing so it demonstrates the limitations of the idea of ‘collateral damage’ that disarticulates the effects of warfare from the perpetration of violence, and notes that the policy of maiming is a productive one, a form of weaponized epigenetics through the profitability of a speculative rehabilitative economy.

This too is meticulously argued and imaginatively constructed, and adds important dimensions to my posts about Israel’s war on Gaza and, in particular, my preliminary speculations about the prosthetics of military violence.

City of Light, City of Darkness

Posted on December 18, 2015 by Derek Gregory

I’ve long been interested in cities under military occupation, and in particular in the ways in which armies spatialise the city in order to securitise it. I still have a detailed presentation on the French occupation of Cairo at the end of the eighteenth century – for Edward Said the formative and diagnostic moment in the formation of a distinctively modern Orientalsim – and the US occupation of Baghdad at the beginning of the twenty-first. The parallels are as striking as the differences, and one of these days I know I have to find the time to convert the image-stream into a word-stream.

So this explains why a new book on Paris under German occupation in the Second World War caught my eye.

David Drake‘s Paris at War, 1939-1945 from Harvard/Belknap was published last month:

Paris at War chronicles the lives of ordinary Parisians during World War II, from September 1939 when France went to war with Nazi Germany to liberation in August 1944. Readers will relive the fearful exodus from the city as the German army neared the capital, the relief and disgust felt when the armistice was signed, and the hardships and deprivations under Occupation. David Drake contrasts the plight of working-class Parisians with the comparative comfort of the rich, exposes the activities of collaborationists, and traces the growth of the Resistance from producing leaflets to gunning down German soldiers. He details the intrigues and brutality of the occupying forces, and life in the notorious transit camp at nearby Drancy, along with three other less well known Jewish work camps within the city.

The book gains its vitality from the diaries and reminiscences of people who endured these tumultuous years. Drake’s cast of characters comes from all walks of life and represents a diversity of political views and social attitudes. We hear from a retired schoolteacher, a celebrated economist, a Catholic teenager who wears a yellow star in solidarity with Parisian Jews, as well as Resistance fighters, collaborators, and many other witnesses.

Drake enriches his account with details from police records, newspapers, radio broadcasts, and newsreels. From his chronology emerge the broad rhythms and shifting moods of the city. Above all, he explores the contingent lives of the people of Paris, who, unlike us, could not know how the story would end.

Here is the Contents list:

Prologue
Introduction: The Road to War: September 1938–September 1939
1. The Phoney War: September 3, 1939–May 10, 1940
2. Blitzkrieg and Exodus: May 10, 1940–June 14, 1940
3. Parisians and Germans, Germans and Parisians
4. Paris, German Capital of France
5. Unemployment, Rationing, Vichy against Jews, Montoire
6. From Mass Street Protest to the “Führer’s Generous Gesture”
7. Protests, Pillaging, “V” for Victory, the First Roundup of Jews
8. Resistance and Repression
9. Resistance, Punishment, Allied Bombs, and Deportation
10. SS Seizure of Security, the Yellow Star, the Vél’d’hiv’ Roundup, La Relève
11. Denunciations, Distractions, Deprivations
12. Labour Conscription, Resistance, the French Gestapo
13. Anti-Bolshevism, Black Market, More Bombs, Drancy
14. A Serial Killer on the Run, Pétain in Paris, the Milice on the Rampage, the Allies on Their Way
15. The Liberation of Paris
Conclusion

For a principled contemporary account, incidentally, and one that reverberates with the power of the literary sensibility that was so repugnant to the Nazis, it’s hard to beat Jean Guéhenno‘s Diary of the Dark Years, 1940-1944: Collaboration, Resistance, and Daily Life in Occupied Paris.

Bearing witness

Posted on August 19, 2015 by Derek Gregory

Lisa Tilley provides some sobering reflections on the recent International Conference of Critical Geography at Ramallah here:

The settler colonial condition can be fully understood only by those who live it. But the rest of us can at least bear witness in the place (Palestine) where it is most legible….

Yet in spite of the overtly political and defiant tone, the organisers had agonised over the decision to hold the event in the West Bank because doing so effectively excluded most Arab and Muslim scholars from other parts of the world, as well as Israeli allies who are prohibited from entering Palestinian urban areas, lest Israeli-Palestinian solidarities bloom. Some registered participants were turned away by border forces after being interrogated upon arrival at Tel Aviv, others, especially those with links to Arab or predominantly Muslim countries were subject to invasive interrogation and humiliation either on arrival or on departure.

Yet even these denials, sacrifices, indignities, and border dramas, much as they caused individual pain, actually served in their own way to fortify the overall political message of the conference by becoming part of the anti-normalcy performance of the event itself. Beyond this, physically being in the ‘critical’ geographies of the West Bank was politically and intellectually productive in a way that would be impossible to recreate in another time and place…

Palestine always stays on our lips, confronts our concepts and categories, even rendering worthless some of our carefully spun arguments. The real lessons took place in fertile valleys, poisoned by settler toxins, alongside the walls in which blast holes remain, at the sites of shootings and repressed Selma-style marches, witnessed by nobody…

There were moments when we all simply turned our faces away and wept. But the tears of three hundred critical geographers falling on Palestinian soil will not bring down walls or shatter a violent racist project. “We do not need pity” was stated from the start by Palestinian scholars. So instead the task is to bear witness to Palestine, to say that we know Palestine, that we know it exists, that it has existed, and will continue to exist. Palestinians continue the process of writing back, we can only echo what they say and join in the task of writing/speaking/thinking back in order to bring into being a global Palestine.

More (tweets) here. I so wish I could have been there.

War against the people

Posted on June 23, 2015 by Derek Gregory

I’ve long admired Jeff Halper‘s work with the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (though to me, haunted by the passages from The poetics of place that Edward Said invokes in Orientalism, ‘home demolition’s would carry even more resonance: it’s so much more than buildings that the Israelis so brutally turn to rubble).

Jeff’s classic, even canonical essay on ‘the matrix of control‘ (see also here) was a constant reference point for my chapters on occupied Palestine in The Colonial Present, and on my first visit to the West Bank I was part of a group that Jeff generously spent a day showing the materialities of military occupation and illegal colonisation: you think you know what you’re going to see, but all the reading in the world can’t prepare you for what Israel has done – and continues to do – to the people of Palestine.

So I’m really pleased to hear from Jeff that his new book, War against the people: Israel, the Palestinians and global pacification, will be out in September (from Pluto Press in the UK and via the University of Chicago Press in the USA):

Modern warfare has a new form. The days of international combat are fading. So how do major world powers maintain control over their people today?

War Against the People is a disturbing insight into the new ways world powers such as the US, Israel, Britain and China forge war today. It is a subliminal war of surveillance and whitewashed terror, conducted through new, high-tech military apparatuses, designed and first used in Israel against the Palestinian population. Including hidden camera systems, sophisticated sensors, information databases on civilian activity, automated targeting systems and, in some cases, unmanned drones, it is used to control the very people the nation’s leaders profess to serve.

Drawing from years of research, as well as investigations and interviews conducted at international arms fairs, Jeff Halper reveals that this practice is much more insidious than was previously thought. As Western governments tighten the grip on their use of private information and claw back individual liberties, War Against the People is a timely reminder that fundamental human rights are being compromised for vast sections of the world, and that this is a subject that should concern everyone.

I’ve noted before the ways in which Israel has used its continuing occupation of Palestine as a laboratory to test new technologies of military violence – and as a series of test cases designed to push the envelope of what is permissible under international humanitarian law and even international human rights law – but here Jeff radicalises the argument to develop a deeply disturbing vision of what he calls ‘securocratic wars in global battlespace’. It’s vitally necessary to remember that later modern war is not the exclusive artefact of the United States and its military-academic-industrial-media (MAIM) complex, and that what happens in Israel/Palestine has desperately important implications for all of us.

Many commentators have claimed – I think wrongly – that one of the new characteristics of war in the twenty-first century is that it has become ‘war amongst the people’: as though No Man’s Land on the Western Front was somehow roped off from the gas attacks and shells that assaulted farms, villages and towns behind the front lines, for example, and air raids were limited to exclusively military-industrial targets. Even if we confine ourselves to the trajectory of ostensibly modern warfare and track forward through the Second World War, Korea, Malaya, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia…. the story is the same: modern war has long been fought amongst the people (though increasingly amongst ‘their’ people). The deconstruction of the battlefield, as Frédéric Mégret calls it, is clearly visible in Palestine and is inseparable from its globalization. It’s hardly surprising, then, that ‘war amongst the people’ should so easily turn into what Jeff describes as ‘war against the people’.

Here is the list of contents:

Introduction : How Does Israel Get Away With It?

Part I: The Global Pacification Industry
1. Enforcing Hegemony: Securocratic Wars in Global Battlespace

Part II: A Pivotal Israel
2. Why Israel? The Thrust Into Global Involvement
3. Niche-Filling in a Global Matrix of Control

Part III: Weaponry of Hybrid Warfare and Securocratic Control (Niche 1)
4. Niche 1: Weaponry of Hybrid Warfare and Securocratic Control
5. Dominant Maneuver
6. Precision Engagement

Part IV: Securitization and “Sufficient Pacification” (Niche 2)
7. Niche 2: The Securocratic Dimension: A Model of “Sufficient Pacification”
8. Operational Doctrines and Tactics

Part V: Serving Hegemons Throughout the World-System
9. Serving the Hegemons on the Peripheries: The “Near” Periphery
10. Security Politics on the “Far” Periphery
11. The Private Sector

Part VI: Domestic Securitization and Policing
12. Serving the Core’s Ruling Classes “At Home”

Conclusions: Mounting Counterhegemonic Challenges and Resisting Pacification
Resisting Capitalist Hegemony and Pacification: The Need for Infrastructure
Resistance to Pacification: Focusing on the MISSILE Complex