Global Palestine: A Collision for Our Time

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Notes

¹ On the similarities between Israeli tactics in Palestine and American tactics in Iraq, see Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2004); on the ‘Israelization’ of American foreign policy, see Tarak Barkawi, Globalization and War (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), pp. 157–166.

² As Gregory notes, American forces ‘turned Iraqi towns and villages into simulacra of the West Bank’ through the use of razor wire fences and military checkpoints, prompting Iraqi civilians to draw the obvious parallel: ‘I see no difference between us and the Palestinians,’ remarked one man waiting at a checkpoint, while another argued bitterly that the US actions were ‘just what [Ariel] Sharon would do’ (The Colonial Present, p. 243).

³ The shifting of these political alignments after September 11 also has produced a growing neo-McCarthyist backlash against Middle East scholars who fail to toe the dominant US / Israeli line. See Beshara Doumani (ed.), Academic Freedom After September 11 (New York: Zone Books, 2006).

⁴ On the ISM and global solidarity activism in general during the second intifada, see Roane Carey (Ed.), The New Intifada: Resisting Israel's Apartheid (London: Verso, 2001); Josie Sandercock et al. (Eds), Peace Under Fire: Israel, Palestine and the International Solidarity Movement (London: Verso, 2004); and Nancy Stohlman & Laurieann Aladin (Eds), Live From Palestine: International and Palestinian Direct Action Against the Israeli Occupation (Boston: South End Press, 2003).

⁵ This ideology of exceptionalism is not unique to Israel but is rather a common trope in the national(ist) discourses associated with settler-colonial projects in general, including the United States. The long history of US vetoes of United Nations Security Council resolutions, particularly those critical of Israeli policy, is one manifestation of this exceptionalist orientation. More recently, the United States and Israel were the only two nations to vote against the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions when the Convention was approved by the UNESCO General Conference in October 2005. Australia, also a settler-colonial society and a strong US ally in the ‘war on terrorism,’ was one of four nations (the others were Honduras, Liberia, and Nicaragua) that abstained from the vote.

⁶ In offering an initial contribution in this direction, I am following consciously on the work of Edward Said, Barbara Harlow, Eqbal Ahmad, and others who helped place the Palestinian struggle in the context of other ‘third world’ liberation struggles. Their emphasis on solidarity as an antidote to discourses of exceptionalism opens up the possibility of a truly global examination of what ‘Palestine’ has meant, and continues to mean, not only for particular individuals and communities the world over but also for our understanding of a host of processes that are global in scope.

⁷ On Benjamin's idea of the ‘monadological fragment,’ see Graeme Gilloch, Walter Benjamin: Critical Constellations (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), p. 40.

⁸ Benjamin, ‘The Image of Proust,’ in Illuminations, Hannah Arendt (Ed.), Harry Zohn trans. (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), p. 202.

⁹ See, inter alia, Mourid Barghouti, I Saw Ramallah, Ahdaf Soueif trans. (New York: Anchor Books, 2001); John Collins, Occupied By Memory: The Intifada Generation and the Palestinian State of Emergency (New York: New York University Press, 2004); Mahmoud Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982, Ibrahim Muhawi trans. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); and Ted Swedenburg, Memories of Revolt: The 1936–39 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).

¹⁰ Paul Virilio, ‘The Suicidal State,’ in: The Virilio Reader, James Der Derian (Ed.) (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 29-45.

¹¹ Virilio, Ground Zero, Chris Turner trans. (London: Verso, 2002).

¹² Barkawi, Globalization and War, p. 36.

¹³ On total war and the creation of the war economy, see Virilio and Lotringer, Pure War, M. Taormina trans. J. Der Derian (Ed.) (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 1997 [1983]) pp. 9–17. Eisenhower's prescient warning about the growing power of the military-industrial complex provides the point of departure for Eugene Jarecki's documentary, Why We Fight ⟨www.whywefight.com⟩.

¹⁴ Joseph Massad, ‘The Persistence of the Palestinian Question,’ Cultural Critique, 59 (Winter 2005) pp. 1–23.

¹⁵ Virilio and Lotringer, Pure War, p. 31.

¹⁸ Virilio, ‘The Suicidal State,’ p. 32, p. 32.

¹⁶ Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, surveying the long history of imperial discourse beginning in ancient Rome, argue that ‘[e]mpire is formed not on the basis of force itself but on the basis of the capacity to present force as being in the service of right and peace.’ See Hardt and Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 15. For a contemporary manifestation of this discourse, see Thomas P. M. Barnett, Blueprint for Action: A Future Worth Creating (New York: Putnam, 2005). Barnett's book, a sequel to his bestselling The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Putnam, 2004), lays out the author's vision of ‘global peace’ that is to be achieved through the continued supremacy of an American superpower viewed as half-’Leviathan’ and half-’System Administrator.’

¹⁷ Virilio, ‘The Suicidal State,’ p. 32.

¹⁹ Two recent events—the force-feeding of detainees at the US detention center in Guantanamo and the militarization of the Hurricane Katrina relief effort—illustrate some of the permutations that can result from this approach to the ‘freedom from want.’

²⁰ United Nations General Assembly Resolution 302 (IV), 8 December 1949.

²¹ See ‘UNRWA: Overview’ at http://www.un.org/unrwa/overview/index.html. The most comprehensive scholarly assessment of UNRWA is Benjamin Schiff, Refugees unto the Third Generation: UN Aid to Palestinians (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995).

²² Virilio, ‘The Suicidal State,’ p. 33.

²³ Giorgio Agamben argues that through the increasingly frequent application of the ‘state of exception,’ the twentieth century saw an ‘unprecedented generalization of the paradigm of security as the normal technique of government.’ See Agamben, State of Exception, Kevin Attell trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 14. See also Hardt and Negri, Multitude, pp. 3–35.

²⁴ In Darwish, Selected Poems, Ian Wedde and Fawwaz Tuqan trans. (Cheadle, Cheshire: Carcanet Press Ltd., 1973).

²⁵ See Rosemary Sayigh, Too Many Enemies: The Palestinian Experience in Lebanon (London: Zed Books, 1994) and Fawaz Turki, The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972).

²⁶ Virilio and Lotringer, Pure War, 92.

²⁷ For Virilio, these limits are ultimately planetary: when there is nothing left to incorporate into the world, the State turns its attention inward and begins to ‘underdevelop’ its own economy. He points to the Latin American military dictatorships of the 1970s and the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia as early examples of endocolonization: ‘What happened in Cambodia was a scale model, a schema, a caricature of what's happening on a worldwide scale. The military class is turning into an internal super-police. Moreover, it's logical. In the strategy of deterrence, military institutions, no longer fighting among themselves, tend to fight only civilian societies—with, of course, a few skirmishes in the Third World’ (Pure War, p. 94).

²⁸ See John Collins, ‘Terrorism,’ in Collateral Language: A User's Guide to America's New War, John Collins and Ross Glover (Eds) (New York: NYU Press, 2002), pp. 155–173.

²⁹ Virilio, Popular Defense & Ecological Struggles, Mark Polizzotti, trans. (New York: Semiotext(e), 1990 [1978]), p. 56

³⁰ Virilio, Popular Defense & Ecological Struggles, Mark Polizzotti, trans. (New York: Semiotext(e), 1990 [1978]), p. 56, p. 57.

³³ Virilio and Lotringer, Pure War, pp. 31–33.

³¹ For an alternative view of this dichotomy, see Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffey, ‘The Postcolonial Moment in Security Studies,’ Review of International Studies 32, 2 (2006), pp. 329–352.

³² Or perhaps, as Ross Glover argues, what used to be called ‘war’ is being replaced by ‘war on’ (poverty, drugs, terrorism), the better to wage open-ended struggles that require the endless diversion of resources to the national security state and the corporate-military complex. See Glover, ‘The War on _—,’ in Collins and Glover, Collateral Language, pp. 207–222.

³⁴ Agamben argues that these moves constitute a modern application of the Roman notion of homo sacer, a category reserved for those who could be killed with impunity because they were viewed as existing outside both divine and juridical law. Through its liberal use of the ‘state of exception’ in such cases, the State effectively ‘inexecutes’ the law itself. See Agamben, State of Exception, p. 50.

³⁵ In 2004, the Court of Appeal in Britain gave the British government the right to use evidence obtained through torture (for example, at the US military base at Guantanamo Bay) when holding suspected ‘terrorists’ in custody. In Israel, the Landau Commission in 1987 authorized the use of what it called ‘moderate physical pressure’ against Palestinian detainees suspected of ‘security’ offences, a policy that was overturned in a still-controversial 1999 High Court decision. This reversal notwithstanding, human rights groups such as B'tselem continue to document Israel's use of torture.

³⁶ See Michel Foucault, ‘Society Must Be Defended’: Lectures at the College de France, 1975–1976, Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontata (Eds) David Macey trans. (New York: Picador, 1997), pp. 1–19.

³⁷ Virilio, ‘The Suicidal State,’ p. 30.

³⁸ See Virilio and Lotringer, Crepuscular Dawn, trans. Mike Taormina (Los Angeles and New York: Semiotext(e), 2002), p. 101. For a detailed discussion of Israeli ‘nationalist biopolitics,’ including the aggressive provision of contraceptives and abortion services for Palestinians who live in Israel, see Rhoda Ann Kanaaneh, Birthing the Nation: Strategies of Palestinian Women in Israel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

³⁹ Martin van Crefeld, an Israeli military historian, warned in 2003 that Israel was in danger of provoking its own self-destruction if it continued on its present course. See David Hirst, ‘The War Game,’ The Observer (London), 21 September 2003.

⁴⁰ On the latter, see Thomas Thornton and Patricia Thornton, ‘Blowback,’ in Collins and Glover (Eds), Collateral Language, pp. 27–38.

⁴¹ Darryl Li, ‘The Gaza Strip as Laboratory: Notes in the Wake of Disengagement,’ Journal of Palestine Studies 35, 2 (Winter, 2006), pp. 39–40.

⁴² Virilio and Lotringer, Crepuscular Dawn, p. 63, emphasis in the original.

⁴³ Halper, The 94 Percent Solution: A Matrix of Control, Middle East Report, 216, p. 15.

⁴⁴ See Li, ‘The Gaza Strip as Laboratory,’ pp. 48–50.

⁴⁵ Virilio and Lotringer, Crepuscular Dawn, p. 75.

⁴⁶ Weizmann has in mind Israel's complex combination of strategies including roads and tunnels, hilltop settlement colonies, control over underground aquifers and sewage systems, and dominance of the air. See Weizman, ‘The Politics of Verticality,’ openDemocracy, 24 April 2002, available at ⟨http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article.jsp?id = 2&debateId = 45&articleId = 801⟩. See also Weizman and Rafi Segal (Eds), A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture (London: Verso, 2003).

⁴⁷ Virilio and Lotringer, Pure War, p. 36.

⁴⁸ Gregory, The Colonial Present, pp. 164–165.

⁵⁰ Said, ‘The Meaning of Rachel Corrie: Of dignity and solidarity,’ in Sandercock et al., Peace Under Fire, p. xv.

⁴⁹ Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), p. 311.

⁵¹ Virilio, ‘The Suicidal State,’ p. 43.

⁵² Virilio, ‘The Suicidal State,’ p. 43, pp. 42–43.

⁵³ Janet Varner Gunn, Second Life: A West Bank Memoir (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), pp. 43–44.

⁵⁴ See John Collins, ‘From Portbou to Palestine, and Back,’ forthcoming in Social Text, (Winter) 2007.