How Israel tries to instil despair
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Resisting Despair: A homage to Dr Eyad El-Sarraj
By Lynne Segal
February 2015
‘I hope she doesn’t get lynched’, one member of the audience was overheard saying, after my talk in Tel Aviv last week. I have just returned home from a conference on ‘Non-Violent Resistance’ in Tel Aviv hosted by Psychoactive: Mental Health Professionals for Human Rights, based in Israel. It was held in honour of Dr Eyad El-Sarraj, the pioneering and charismatic Palestinian psychiatrist who founded the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme in 1990, devoting his life to searching for non-violent methods to overcome trauma and create peace in Israel-Palestine. A few Palestinians had managed to get permits to come from Gaza and the West Bank, but the majority of my audience were Jewish Israeli clinicians, many hearing my words as provocative and unsupportive of their hopes for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Perhaps they were right. Despite the inspiration Eyad had offered right up to his death a year, I found it hard to stay hopeful, even while sharing with my audience his dream of a just and peaceful future.
Eyad himself could always grasp at the tiniest thread of hope. I recall him feeling hopeful when Hamas won the municipal elections in Gaza in 2005, suggesting – with some evidence – that Hamas, like other radical movements, had begun to moderate its militant stance with its rise to power, and was now likely to focus more on security and welfare. We know what did happen next, when the USA and EU joined Israel in trying to smash this newly elected government, withholding both tax revenues and foreign aid. As so often in Palestine, this produced the ‘surreal situation’ whereby, in Avi Shlaim’s words, economic sanctions were imposed ‘not against the occupier, but against the occupied, not against the oppressor but against the oppressed’. Things could only get worse, and quickly did, even as Eyad himself struggled to embody the position of an early British New Left British thinker, Raymond Williams, who in his last book, Resources of Hope declared: ‘To be truly radical is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing’.[1] That is what I wanted, but find so hard, to do.
Dr Eyad El-Sarraj, was a pioneering psychiatrist and human rights defender in Gaza. He died from cancer in 2013, Photo Vimeo
Perhaps, right now, it is just a matter of surviving despair. That, of course, is a type of resistance. It is one thread of hope! I recalled John Berger’s powerful summary of his impressions visiting Palestine eight years ago. Surrounded by rubble on all sides, including ‘the rubble of words’, he found what he called an ‘undefeated despair’ amongst many of the Palestinians he met. This despite the fact that over the last half century there is scarcely a Palestinian family that has not been forced to flee from somewhere, hardly a town in the occupied territory where buildings are not regularly bulldozed by the occupying army, and few families without one or more of their members imprisoned in the 800,000 arrests of Palestinians over those years. [2]
Despair, surely, is what Israeli policy has been resolutely instilling in Palestinians from the beginning. It is pointless to resist! Abandon any dreams of justice and sovereignty. This is why, for many Palestinians, resistance is simply about surviving. It is what Eyad himself emphasized, observing ‘the long path of humiliation and despair’ that lies behind the creation of a so-called ‘terrorist’: ‘the struggle of many Palestinians is how not to become suicide bombers’, he wrote thirteen years ago. [3] He tirelessly sought to prevent such destructive martyrdom, standing implacably against all forms of violence, whether from Palestinians or the infinitely deadlier modes of Israeli state violence: that ‘eye for eyelash’, as Schlaim put it. Eyad liked to insist that the Israelis and Palestinians needed each other: ‘for only the Palestinians can release Israel from its moral guilt, from all that has gone wrong since those first Zionist dreams to the nightmare of living in a country permanently at war with its neighbours; while only the Israelis can negotiate a just peace with Palestine, allowing them control over their own affairs and thereby laying the basis for security, freedom and dignity for both sides’.[4]
He was surely right. Yet, in the meantime, the inordinate imbalance of power can only be maintained through ruthless force. Worse follows, for the greater the violence needed to ensure Palestinian submission, the more totally the aggressors demonize their victims, those who might trigger guilt. As Fanon knew, in the colonial situation the black man – here we can insert, the Palestinian – is not recognized, and non-recognition shatters selfhood, rendering racism alive on the skin. Only genuine mutual recognition can resolve the resulting conflict.[5] But mechanisms of denial and projection still drive mainstream Israeli perceptions of Palestinians, of Arabs generally, and result in the normalcy of today’s endless cycle of violence. It is why the Israeli government sees no reason to change course, while 96 per cent of Israelis seemingly supported the renewed bombing of Gaza this summer.
I think of Martin Luther King, that other man who promoted resistance and direct action but rejected the use of violence, when he wrote from jail in 1963 of his despair over white moderates, suggesting that, ‘shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will’: ‘I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block … is not … the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice … who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”’. While survival is indeed the bottom line for Palestinian resistance, those whose spirits have not been entirely crushed by Occupation like to invert this slogan, asserting: ‘To Exist is to Resist.’ Survival and resistance also underpin of the angry but gentle writing of the Raja Shehadeh, the inspiring lawyer who founded the Palestinian human rights organization, Al-Haq in1979.
Shehadeh’s prose resonates with the sorrow created by that terrible Wall. These walls, he notes, have little to do with security, but convey the menacing message: YOU ARE TRAPPED! Watching how impossibly complicated, humiliating and painful Israeli restrictions render Palestinian lives Shehadeh concludes: ‘I became more & more convinced that we are living next to a mad people’, where even the ‘veneer of civilization and decency’ has entirely vanished[6]. Giving the Edward Said memorial lecture in London a few months ago, Shehadeh referred to Naftali Bennett’s contemptuous description of Palestinians as mere ‘shrapnel in Israel’s backside’. But he wondered, with its excessive violence and brutality, can Israel really live forever with the toxins it creates in its own backside?
Can it? I’m not sure either. Shehadeh’s conclusions are shared by ever more people worldwide. Celebrating the Jewish New Year two months ago Netanyahu repeated his country’s favourite delusion that in this New Year, ‘Israel will remain a beacon of freedom and human rights in an intolerant area … [it] will remain a source of pride & strength for Jews, no matter where they live …’.[7] That sounds from afar like madness. Huge protests against Israel’s war on Gaza occurred in almost every city globally this summer (with 85 per cent of Britons critical of Israel’s actions in Gaza).So why haven’t we been able to put more pressure on Israel to end its ‘madness’ and inhumanity, from the outside? Well, it has not been entirely for want of trying. But it is connected to who is not trying.
One thing is surely crystal clear today. The state of Israel has never been prepared to allow the world to recognize a Palestinian state. The reason for Israel’s refusal is not so much that it might threaten Israel but rather that it delegitimizes the goal of militant Zionism: to get recognition that the whole of historic Palestine belongs to Israel, the Jewish state, home to all the Jews of the world.
Militant Zionism cunningly ensnares criticism of Israel with accusations of antisemitism. No one has ever called me a self-hating Australian because I abhor the current Australian government, with its savage treatment of asylum seekers and brutal economic policies. But I am named a ‘self-hating’ Jew for my abhorrence of Israeli policy. The idea is as ludicrous as it is tragic: displacing criticisms of Israel from the injustice it perpetrates onto those who refuse to be bystanders to brutality. Earlier this year Eva Illouz commented: ‘Open Haaretz on any day and ‘half or three quarters of its news items … invariably revolve around the same two topics: people struggling to protect the good name of Israel, and people struggling against its violence and injustices’.[8] Equating condemnation of Israel with antisemitism is all the more absurd when many critics have been careful to argue in the name of their Jewish identity. Ironically, among their leading figures is the notorious anti-identitarian philosopher, Judith Butler, who counters her numerous traducers with the words: ‘I was taught at every step in my Jewish education’, she declares, ‘that it is not acceptable to stay silent in the face of injustice’. It is precisely as Jews that many condemn Israeli policies, the position Butler elaborates most fully in Parting Ways: Jewishness & the Critique of Zionism. She turns, in particular to Hannah Arendt, as well as Emmanuel Levinas, Walter Benjamin, Martin Buber and Primo Levi.
I too have pondered Arendt’s writing on Zionism and antisemitism throughout the 1940s. During that monstrous decade, three things distressed Arendt above all. First, the failure of the Jewish Agency, the operational branch of the world Zionist organization based in Palestine, to support the creation of a Jewish army to resist Hitler and rescue the Jews of Europe. Second, the Jewish Agency’s support for Irgun, the fiercely anti-Arab Jewish terrorist organization operating in Palestine when, in her view, Jews and Arabs should be trying to work together. Finally, she opposed the idea of a Jewish homeland, without reference to Arab Palestinians. That, she said presciently would amount to a declaration of war on the Arabs. Instead, Arendt was closer to the defeated hopes of the Unity movements, such as Ihud, founded by the Rabbi Judah Magnes, to establish an Arab-Jewish state as two equal parts in a binational political confederation. But Arendt hoped to see something grander, a ‘federation of peoples and nationalities, all of them having their own, if very restricted rights, none of them privileged and none of them dominated’, rather than a partition creating two tiny warring states[9].
For Butler, cohabitation is the true ethical obligation of Jewish identity: ‘To be a Jew is to make one’s way ethically and politically … within a world of irreversible heterogeneity’. Again echoing Arendt, Butler insists that to deny heterogeneity and try to maintain the homogeneity of the nation will always be to follow the logic of fascism. Today I read other plans for creating a peaceful future from Israelis who support the ‘One Space, Two nationalities’ initiative, carefully working through the slow and complex political and juridical programmes needed to make such a confederation work and create a shared homeland for both Jews and Palestinians
Militant Zionist nationalists hold the antithesis of this view. They believe in an entitlement of Jews alone to the biblical land of Israel. This underlines both the power and perils of identity claims. Some of us, myself included, feel more strongly called upon to fight for justice for Palestinians because of our Jewish identity. Others, more numerous, are propelled by the same identification into militant defense of the ‘Jewish state’. For those of us who refuse to turn our backs on the Palestinians, it is obvious that occupation brutalizes both the occupier and the occupied, especially when every form of non-violent resistance from Palestinians meets with massive arrest, and worse.
Lynne Segal, Anniversary Professor of Psychology & Gender Studies at Birkbeck College, is the author of many books including Out of Time:The Pleasures and Perils Ageing. Her 1994 book, ‘Straight Sex: Rethinking the Politics of Pleasure’, has just been republished by Verso as part of their ‘Radical Thinkers’ series.
During the fifteen years I have worked with various Jewish groups for peace, Jews for Justice for Palestinians, Independent Jewish Voices, the situation has only deteriorated. Yet, to borrow again from John Berger, though one fails to get the world to act, ‘one protests because not to protest would be too humiliating, too diminishing, too deadly. One protests … to save the present moment, whatever the future holds’.[10] And one protests to support others battling cruelty and injustice. I hear the desperation in the poetry of some Jewish Israelis, such as Aharon Shabtai: ‘The pure words I suckled from my mother’s breasts:/ Man, Child, Justice, Mercy, and so on, are dispossessed before our eyes,/ imprisoned in ghettoes, murdered at checkpoints….’.[11] Yet some people do see reasons for hope today, and I try to hope with them. Our UK and other European parliaments recently expressed support for a Palestinian state, and the EU has finally been persuaded in principle to recognize a Palestinian state.
Hardly known for his optimism, in his latest book Method & Madness Norman Finkelstein suggests that criticism of Israel has reached a tipping point. Concretely, he proposes encouraging Gandhian-style nonviolent demonstrations of Palestinian resistance, such as a million Gazans marching on the Israeli crossings under the banner, END THE ILLEGAL BLOCKADE OF GAZA, headed by the children of Gaza. That, he writes, was how the Black Civil Rights Movement broke the back of segregation in the USA in the 1960s. Simultaneously, he sees the vast numbers of Palestine’s international supporters, including Jewish Israelis, converging in our hundreds of thousands on UN headquarters everywhere. It’s worth thinking about.[12]
Non-violent resistance requires huge inner resources, especially near the borders of Israel, where it provokes frightening aggression.
But resistance can be expressed in words as well as deeds. ‘Poetry and beauty are always making peace’, Marmoud Darwish once wrote, ‘When you read something beautiful you find coexistence; it breaks walls down … I always humanise the other. I even humanised the Israeli soldier,’ which he did in poems such as ‘A Soldier Who Dreams of White Lilies’, written just after the 1967 war.[13] I close with a poem for Eyad, by Taha Mahammad Ali, because it reminds me of him. It is called ‘Revenge’.
At times … I wish
I could meet in a duel
the man who killed my father
and razed our home,
expelling me
into
a narrow country.
And if he killed me,
I’d rest at last,
and if I were ready—
I would take my revenge!
*
But if it came to light,
when my rival appeared,
that he had a mother
waiting for him,
or a father who’d put
his right hand over
the heart’s place in his chest
whenever his son was late
even by just a quarter-hour
for a meeting they’d set—
then I would not kill him,
even if I could.
*
Likewise … I
would not murder him
if it were soon made clear
that he had a brother or sisters
who loved him and constantly longed to see him.
Or if he had a wife to greet him
and children who
couldn’t bear his absence
and whom his gifts would thrill.
Or if he had
friends or companions,
neighbours he knew
or allies from prison
or a hospital room,
or classmates from his school …
asking about him
and sending him regards.
*
But if he turned
out to be on his own—
cut off like a branch from a tree—
without a mother or father,
with neither a brother nor sister,
wifeless, without a child,
and without kin or neighbours or friends,
colleagues or companions,
then I’d add not a thing to his pain
within that aloneness—
not the torment of death,
and not the sorrow of passing away.
Instead I’d be content
to ignore him when I passed him by
on the street—as I
convinced myself
that paying him no attention
in itself was a kind of revenge.
Notes
[1] Raymond Williams, Resources of Hope, 1989, London, Verso, p. 118
[2] John Berger, ‘Undefeated despair’, 13 January 2006, Open Democracy
[3] Eyad Sarraj, ‘Bombs and madness: understanding terror’, Index on Censorship, 4, 2001, p.7.
[5] Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks: ‘I want the world to recognize with me the open door of every consciousness’, 1967, p.232.
[6] p.23; p.32.
[7] Israel a Beacon of Freedom
[8] Eva Illouz, ‘47 years a slave: A new perspective on the occupation’, Haaretz, Feb. 7, 2014
[9] See Eric Jacobson, ‘Why did Hannah Arendt reject the partition of Palestine?’, Journal for Cultural Research, 2013
[10] John Berger, Bento’s Sketchbook, London, Verso, 2011, p.80; p.79, italic in original text.
[11] http://semiclassicallimit.wordpress.com/2012/08/09/mahmoud-darwish-a-candle-in-the-dark/
[12] Conclude with two poems:
As the Jewish Israeli poet, Aharon Shabtai, writes:
“The pure words I suckled from my mother’s breasts:
Man, Child, Justice, Mercy, and so on,
are dispossessed before our eyes,
imprisoned in ghettoes, murdered at checkpoints…. And so one resists.
[13] I will continue to humanise even the enemy from the beginning, I didn’t see Jews as devils or angels but as human beings.”