‘Occupied territory is occupied territory’: James Baldwin, Palestine and the possibilities of transnational solidarity

Abstract

In his 1966 essay ‘A Report from Occupied Territory’, James Baldwin wrote that ‘occupied territory is occupied territory, even though it be found in that New World which the Europeans conquered’. Though written 50 years ago, Baldwin’s observations continue to resonate, indicating historical trends across geographical experiences affected by the legacy of colonialism. A growing theme in development and peace building studies relates to a kind of boundary crossing that sees academics and activists drawing linkages across spatial and temporal divides. The situation in Palestine–Israel has taken an increasingly central role in mobilising transnational solidarities that cross such boundaries. By examining James Baldwin’s analysis of Harlem’s ‘occupation’ – as well as drawing from a range of voices such as Achille Mbembe, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Toni Morrison and Laleh Khalili – this paper will explore the shared experiences of racism, colonialism, military occupation and dispossession that separate and divide, and the possibilities for transnational solidarities that defy those separations.

Keywords:

• James Baldwin
• occupied territory
• Palestine
• postcolonialism
• race
• resistance
• transnational solidarity

Edward Said Award 2016

TWQ/Global Development Studies paper

Third World Quarterly (TWQ) and Global Development Studies (GDS) of the International Studies Association (ISA) are pleased to introduce a new annual feature to the journal, the Edward Said Award. In the spirit of Professor Said’s patronage of incisive and critical research, the Award showcases emerging scholarship in the politics of global development. He was a founding editorial board member of TWQ.

Introduction: ‘occupied territory is occupied territory’

Occupied territory is occupied territory, even though it be found in that New World which the Europeans conquered; and it is axiomatic, in occupied territory, that any act of resistance, even though it be executed by a child, be answered at once, and with the full weight of the occupying forces.¹

In his ‘Report from Occupied Territory’ James Baldwin writes about 1960s Harlem and, in particular, the case of the ‘Harlem Six’. In order to give his readers a glimpse of what it means to talk about Harlem as ‘occupied territory’, Baldwin describes a young salesman named Frank Stafford who witnessed policemen beating a group of boys. When Stafford approached to ask what was going on, he was beaten by the same officers. ‘Perhaps some sense of what it means to live in occupied territory’, says Baldwin, ‘can be suggested by the fact that the police took him to Harlem Hospital themselves – nearly 19 h after the beating’.² As well as suffering a bad beating, Stafford lost his vision in one eye, and Baldwin chooses this case for its particular symbolic power. He notes that, when Stafford continued with his job as a door-to-door salesman, his eye patch – a sign of loss and disempowerment – made him, paradoxically, more visible, especially to the police, who kept a close eye on a man who had dared to raise his head and question them.

‘Harlem is policed like occupied territory’,³ writes Baldwin. He goes on to describe the occupation forces of Harlem and their impact on the occupied:

The police are afraid of everything in Harlem and they are especially afraid of the roofs, which they consider to be guerrilla outposts. This means that the citizens of Harlem who, as we have seen, can come to grief at any hour on the streets, and who are not safe at their windows, are forbidden the very air. They are safe only in their houses – or were, until the city passed the No Knock, Stop and Frisk laws, which permit a policeman to enter one’s home without knocking and to stop anyone on the streets, at will, at any hour, and search him. Harlem believes, and I certainly agree, that these laws are directed against Negroes. They are certainly not directed against anybody else.⁴

Whether it is the police or the larger experience of segregation, it is not unique to Harlem. Baldwin points out that what is true of Harlem is true of Chicago, Detroit, Washington, Boston, Philadelphia and every Northern city with a large African American population. And in these places the police ‘are simply the hired enemies of this population. They are present to keep the Negro in his place and to protect white business interests.’⁵

This is occupation, reports Baldwin. And he goes on to generalise to a larger trend in the USA where these things happen ‘in all our Harlems, every single day’. Baldwin invokes the powerful frustration voiced by Daniel Hamm, one of the Harlem Six, who, speaking of his country, said: ‘They don’t want us here. They don’t want us – period! All they want us to do is work on these penny-ante jobs for them – and that’s it. And beat our heads in whenever they feel like it.’⁶ ‘This,’ Baldwin reminds readers, ‘presents a very bleak image to those who live in occupied territory’.⁷

Though written almost 50 years ago, Baldwin’s observations continue to resonate with the experiences of marginalised and dispossessed communities today, indicating historical trends across geographical experiences. A growing theme in peace building and development studies relates to a kind of boundary crossing that sees academics and activists drawing linkages across spatial and temporal divides. Whether it is the construction of walls, militarisation of borders, the confiscation of land, or the brutalisation and incarceration of bodies, activists and academics are identifying commonalities across experiences that transcend national boundaries and identities. The situation in Palestine–Israel has played an increasingly significant role in mobilising transnational solidarities that cross such boundaries. This article will explore the articulation of some of these shared experiences of racism, colonialism, military occupation and violence that separate and divide people and communities, as well as the possibilities generated by transnational solidarities that cross boundaries and defy those separations, seen for example in the #BlackPalestinianSolidarity movement. It will argue that these transnational solidarities are examples of boundary-crossing work which, by bridging gaps maintained by systemic oppression, become powerful acts of resistance and create spaces where new opportunities for transformation and change can emerge, reminding us to constantly revisit and rethink the ways we inhabit a world shaped by colonial history.

In this article I argue that Baldwin’s claim that ‘occupied territory is occupied territory’ has not diminished in terms of the contentious politics and transnational solidarities that continue to carry that claim. In addition to the historical–material elements that characterise the shared experience of late modern colonial occupation, it is a critical element of the transnational discourse that serves to provide a chain of equivalence in efforts at transnational solidarity and resistance.

I also draw here from the concepts of transnational solidarities because this mobilises identities that contest the state and state borders in Palestine–Israel. By exploring identities that are multiple and overlapping, primarily as they are expressed or mobilised through transnational solidarities, the article examines the state decentred as an actor in international politics, looking at how transnational solidarities constitute (civil society) actors presenting alternatives and alternative politics to the state. In this way it is an inquiry into what constitutes international politics in general and more specifically in Palestine–Israel. These identities mobilised and geographies imagined by transnational solidarities not only contest the borders and limits of the state, they also, I argue, contest the borders and limits of international politics.

Contentious politics, transnational solidarity and resistance

I approach the topic of peace building and development by drawing from the categories of contentious politics and transnational solidarity and resistance. Conflict resolution as a body of knowledge and practice has been critiqued in recent years for its tendency to de-historicise, de-politicise, and de-spatialise (or dislocate) conflict. For example, Vivienne Jabri argues that the standard elements of conflict resolution are subject to controversy – hence ‘steeped in political contestation’ – and makes the case for bringing politics back into our thinking about conflict transformation and change.⁸ One of the ways conflict is de-politicised, Jabri observes, is when the complexity of conflict in international or intercultural contexts is reduced to the interpersonal. Focusing on the dynamics of the interpersonal has its attractions and even benefits (e.g. in terms of focusing on more manageable conflict elements), but it has the effect of de-historicising and ‘dislocating’ conflict from a specific time and place. This denial of particularity is no neutral act, as it serves to enable, even naturalise, some institutions and institutional practices – such as the state and the international political economy – while constraining others.

By talking about peace building and development in terms of contentious politics and transnational solidarity, I am attempting to (re)politicise, spatialise and historicise our analyses of conflict in general, and to signal the critical need to do this in the particular case of Palestine–Israel. Indeed, some have argued that the situation in Palestine–Israel is not a ‘conflict’ in the conventional conflict-resolution sense of two parties vying over perceptions, interests, needs or material resources but rather a settler-colonial occupation that requires a different analytical approach altogether than one wedded to the liberal peace tradition. The interrogation of the liberal peace tradition reflects another significant ‘critical’ turn in the peace building and development literature.⁹ As Jabri observes, far from being an emancipatory project, the liberal peace project reinforces ‘a hierarchical conception of subjectivities premised on the primarily European liberal self as against others whose modes of articulation remain “other”’.¹⁰ She argues that the liberal peace project is not about peace, at least in terms of a peace that would recognise the self-determination of others, but is rather a project of dispossession ‘that seeks to depoliticize the temporal and spatial articulation of selfhood in place of a globally affirmed, institutionalised discourse that seeks conformity to a liberal international political economy that is, in late modernity, total in its manifestation’.¹¹ It is with this in mind that this article will also use the language of resistance, and transnational resistance in particular, to talk about social change, development and peace building in Palestine–Israel.

Tilly and Tarrow define ‘contentions politics’ as interactions in which actors ‘make claims bearing on someone else’s interests, leading to coordinated efforts on behalf of shared interests or programmes, in which governments are involved as targets, initiators of claims, or third parties’.¹² It is a way to talk about politics outside of the formal mechanisms of governments, and to talk about the actions of actors other than the state as political.

They identify this sort of politics as the convergence of three features of social life: (1) contention (making claims that bear on someone else’s interests); (2) collective action (coordinating efforts on behalf of shared interests or programmes); and (3) politics (interactions with agents or governments, which can be targets, initiators of claims or third parties).¹³ To give just one example, social movements are one expression of contentious politics. They produce sustained campaigns of claim making, using repeated performances that advertise the claim, based on social movement bases, i.e. the organisations, networks, traditions and solidarities that sustain the activities. In the next section I describe transnational networks as examples of solidarity and resistance that express a contentious politics that pursues social and political change.

Transnational solidarity and resistance as contentious politics

World politics and international relations are defined not only by states but by a range of non-state actors that interact with states and international organisations. The term ‘civil society’ is often used to refer to the arena constituted by these non-state actors. The networks that emerge that structure interactions among these actors can be constituted in a number of ways. For example, they can be knowledge-based ‘epistemic communities’ interested in shaping policy. Or they can be networks of activists or ‘normative communities’ characterised by shared principles, values and the belief that individuals can make a difference. Keck and Sikkink describe these as transnational advocacy networks (TANs).

TANs are ‘transnational’ not simply because they cross national boundaries but because they unsettle those boundaries, moving goods, information and ideas that cannot be quantified or easily mapped onto a foreign/domestic dichotomy.¹⁴ Keck and Sikkink talk about this in terms of ‘the negotiation and malleability of identities and interests’ that unsettle the inside and outside of foreign/domestic political divides. These networks participate in both ‘domestic and international politics simultaneously, drawing upon a variety of resources, as if they were part of an international society’.¹⁵ Keck and Sikkink point out that the goal of these networks is to change the behaviour of states and international organisations. TANs frame the issues by ‘bringing new ideas, norms, and discourses into policy debates’, and promote ‘norm implementation, by pressuring target actors to adopt new policies, and by monitoring compliance with international standards’.¹⁶ In this way TANs contribute ‘to changing perceptions that both state and societal actors may have of their identities, interests, and preferences, to transforming their discursive positions, and ultimately to changing procedures, policies, and behaviours’.¹⁷

Keck and Sikkink use the language of transnational ‘networks’, as opposed to coalitions, movements or civil society, to get at the ‘structured and structuring’ dimensions in the complex interactions of these agents, who both participate in and shape new areas of politics. Here I will use the language of solidarities and not just networks. This is because the language of solidarities evokes a greater sense of the power imbalance and the systemic oppressions that these transnational linkages are working to overcome simply by building relationships, let alone expressing contentious politics.

There are a number of situations in which these sorts of networks and solidarities are likely to emerge, and which can be observed in the cases described below. They may include scenarios in which channels between domestic groups and their governments are blocked or prove ineffective for resolving conflict (initiating a ‘boomerang pattern’). Other scenarios involve activists or ‘political entrepreneurs’ who believe that networking, including social media networking, will further their missions and campaigns. Networks and solidarities are also likely to emerge when conferences and other forms of international contact create arenas for forming and strengthening networks.¹⁸

When local engagement is blocked by a state’s domestic policies, and no progress is available within existing structures and relationships, people may use a ‘boomerang pattern’ as a strategy to help them overcome apparently insurmountable barriers. This involves local actors turning to the international arena in bids to gain attention for their issues, and to seek redress for their grievances. In this triangulating pattern local or domestic actors bypass their state and directly seek out and engage international allies in an effort to bring pressure on their states from outside. As Keck and Sikkink put it, ‘Linkages are important for both sides: For the less powerful Third World actors, networks provide access, leverage, and information (and often money) they could not expect to have on their own; for northern groups, they make credible the assertion that they are struggling with, and not only for, their southern partners’.¹⁹

Given the relative power differential between state and non-state actors, TANs must use the power of their information, ideas and strategies to alter the information and value contexts within which states make policies. The tactics that networks might use to bring pressure include:

(1) information politics, or the ability to quickly and credibly generate politically usable information and move it to where it will have the most impact; (2) symbolic politics, or the ability to call upon symbols, actions, or stories that make sense of a situation for an audience that is frequently far away; (3) leverage politics, or the ability to call upon powerful actors to affect a situation where weaker members of a network are unlikely to have influence; and (4) accountability politics, or the effort to hold powerful actors to their previously stated policies or principles.²⁰

These tactics of framing, naming and shaming describe well the politics seen in transnational spaces overlapping with Palestine–Israel. But as the cases below will demonstrate, patterns exist outside the kind of hierarchised models outlined by Keck and Sikkink, which involved actors seeing support from powerful outsiders in the framework of mutually enriching patronage. Transnational solidarities between Palestinians and African Americans present a quite different dynamic to that observed in the ‘boomerang pattern’, because solidarities become mutual in relationships where both local actors and their external supporters operate from positions of marginality. These relationships are not about a Northern partner gaining credibility by establishing their solidarity ‘with’ (and not ‘for’) a disadvantaged other; they are about disadvantaged ‘Northern’ partners also looking to put pressure on the ‘Northern’ state.

In this way these reflexive linkages and networks not only problematise the category of transnational (in terms of where is the ‘North,’ where is the ‘South,’ and where and when does ‘transnational’ begin and end); they also point out the multi-directionality of these transnational relationships. When a double boomerang effect, or at least a double shaming effect, occurs, the pressure exerted from North to South rebounds and sends its effects back from South to North. Simple boomerang situations involve a domestic actor appealing to an international actor who appeals to their international state on behalf of the original complainant. The international state is prompted to exert pressure on the state that has responsibility for, and has violated the rights of, the original actor. When a double boomerang takes effect, that original actor turns pressure back towards the intervening international state, which is called on to answer for its violation of the rights of its own citizens and, specifically, of the people who petitioned it to act overseas. As will become clear, the domestic/international distinction becomes unhelpful in this situation, because we are talking about two groups who are similarly experiencing domestic blockages. And while these groups are not without their particular differences, their connection points to the existence of a different kind of transnational network of mutuality and solidarity built through information sharing, relationship building, and joint narrative shaping that constructs new ‘transnational’ identities.²¹

In what follows I present a case of the emergence of transnational solidarities with Palestinians as an expression of contentious politics that pursues social change.²² This case considers the experience of African Americans and the growth of #BlackPalestinianSolidarity in order to examine the possibilities that are emerging for change in Palestine and the USA. However, before moving to this particular case, I am interested in building from Baldwin’s discussion of Harlem as occupied territory by considering the key features of colonial occupation described by Achille Mbembe.

Mbembe (and Fanon) on late-modern colonial occupation and necropolitics

Achille Mbembe offers an important analysis of life and death in occupied territory. Extending Foucault’s discussion on governmentality and biopower in late modernity, Mbembe argues that ‘contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death (necropolitics) profoundly reconfigure the relations among resistance, sacrifice, and terror’.²³ Claiming that Foucault’s concept of biopower is no longer sufficient to explain these forms of subjugation, Mbembe examines sovereignty, the state of exception and the concept of ‘necropolitics’. In the era of necropower, ‘technologies of destruction have become more tactile, more anatomical and sensorial, in a context in which the choice is between life and death’.²⁴ As such, the era of necropower is characterised by the deployment of weapons ‘in the interest of maximum destruction of persons and the creating of death-worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead’.²⁵

And this is what is different for Mbembe. Late modern colonial occupation differs from early modern occupation in its combining of the disciplinary, the biopolitical and the necropolitical. Important for this discussion is Mbembe’s assertion that the ‘most accomplished form of necropower is the contemporary colonial occupation of Palestine’.²⁶ Drawing on Fanon’s spatial reading of colonial occupation, Mbembe explains that for Fanon:

colonial occupation entails first and foremost a division of space into compartments. It involves the setting of boundaries and internal frontiers epitomized by barracks and police stations; it is regulated by the language of pure force, immediate presence, and frequent and direct action; and it is premised on the principle of reciprocal exclusivity. But more important, it is the very way in which necropower operates: ‘The town belonging to the colonized people…is a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute. They are born there, it matters little where or how; they die there, it matters not where, nor how.’ In this case, sovereignty means the capacity to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not.²⁷

Mbembe observes that the late modern colonial occupation in Gaza and the West Bank presents three major characteristics in relation to the working of the specific terror formation he calls necropower. These characteristics include territorial fragmentation, vertical sovereignty and splintering occupation.

Territorial fragmentation includes ‘the sealing off and expansion of settlements’ and is meant both ‘to render any movement impossible and to implement separation along the model of the apartheid state. The occupied territories are therefore divided into a web of intricate internal borders and various isolated cells.’²⁸

Under conditions of late modern colonial occupation, Mbembe argues, ‘surveillance is both inward and outward-oriented, the eye acting as weapon and vice versa’.²⁹ Drawing from Weizman’s ‘Politics of Verticality’, Mbembe discusses ‘vertical sovereignty’:

Under a regime of vertical sovereignty, colonial occupation operates through schemes of over- and underpasses, a separation of the airspace from the ground. The ground itself is divided between its crust and the subterrain. Colonial occupation is also dictated by the very nature of the terrain and its topographical variations (hilltops and valleys, mountains and bodies of water). Thus, high ground offers strategic assets not found in the valleys (effectiveness of sight, self-protection, panoptic fortification that generates gazes to many different ends). Says Weizman: ‘Settlements could be seen as urban optical devices for surveillance and the exercise of power’.³⁰

This relates to the third feature of late-modern colonial occupation:

From an infrastructural point of view, a splintering form of colonial occupation is characterized by a network of fast bypass roads, bridges, and tunnels that weave over and under one another in an attempt at maintaining the Fanonian ‘principle of reciprocal exclusivity.’ According to Weizman, ‘the bypass roads attempt to separate Israeli traffic networks from Palestinian ones, preferably without allowing them ever to cross. They therefore emphasize the overlapping of two separate geographies that inhabit the same landscape. At points where the networks do cross, a makeshift separation is created. Most often, small dust roads are dug out to allow Palestinians to cross under the fast, wide highways on which Israeli vans and military vehicles rush between settlements.³¹

These three characteristics – territorial fragmentation, vertical sovereignty and splintering occupation – are evidence of a state of siege where ‘entire populations are the target of the sovereign’.³² So, for Mbembe, the Palestinian case illustrates late modern colonial occupation as a chain of multiple powers – disciplinary, biopolitical and necropolitical – that results in absolute domination over the inhabitants of the occupied territory.

#BlackPalestinianSolidarity

From Palestine to Ferguson

Mbembe’s Fanonian analysis of the necropolitical in Palestine is instructive in its articulation of these historical and spatial trends that demarcate occupied territory. This article began with James Baldwin’s description of 1960s Harlem as ‘occupied territory’. Whether Baldwin was also thinking about Palestine when he wrote his report from occupied territory (although, as I discuss below, we know he knew about it), there have been robust conversations in recent years that are making those connections and comparisons between the experiences of African Americans and Palestinians living under a colonial occupation. In one of those comparisons, David Palumbo-Liu identifies five congruencies in particular.

The first is the history of dispossession and displacement from land and homes, and the ongoing system of institutional oppression. For African Americans the ongoing impact of the history of slavery ‘shows up in unemployment, lack of adequate educational facilities and access, and institutional racism that expropriates black resources, curtails and contains minority rights, and maintains white advantage’.³³ For Palestinians the historical impact of the Nakba (or catastrophe) of 1948 – in which between 750,000 and 900,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes and over 500 Palestinian towns and villages were destroyed – continues to be felt today. As Palumbo-Liu describes it, it has been ‘a calculated and highly rationalised process of settler colonialism that resulted in the specific loss of the possibility of national autonomy and integrity and continues in contemporary form to do the same’.³⁴

The second is that both African Americans and Palestinians suffer from inequality and systemic discrimination, despite the claims of both the USA and Israel to be democracies. A recent example of this in the USA was the June 2013 Supreme Court ruling striking down key provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, an act which, after a history of disenfranchisement, was supposed to prevent racial discrimination in voting and guarantee full access to democratic participation. Palestinian citizens of Israel who have voting rights, as non-Jews, are disadvantaged in terms of employment, education and access to state services. The situation for Palestinians in the Occupied Territories is not limited to disenfranchisement but includes Israel’s consistent failure to comply with international humanitarian and human rights law, not least in regard to the ongoing construction of the Separation Wall, of settlements, to denied access to water and land resources, and to the continuing experience of displacement and dispossession of millions of Palestinian refugees since 1948.

State violence is another feature present in both situations. In the USA it can be observed in patterns of police brutality against African Americans that echo those noted in Baldwin’s 1966 account of occupation. Palumbo-Liu cites one report which estimated that, in 2012, one black man was killed every 28 h by police, security personnel or vigilantes, indicating a trend of extrajudicial killing as ‘an informal but deadly war against black men’.³⁵ The 2014 Israeli attack on Gaza - which left hundreds of Palestinians dead, thousands wounded and tens of thousands homeless – is another stark example of Israeli state violence against Palestinians.

Palumbo-Liu explains that the fourth congruency involves ‘the permanent interruption and containment of everyday life’,³⁶ particularly in terms of how access to health, education, housing, or employment has been curtailed by the state and by racial prejudice.³⁷ For African Americans the police department’s ‘stop and frisk’ programme in New York is just one indicator of disproportionate harassment based on race. In the Occupied Palestinian Territories life is segregated and contained through an extensive system of closures and checkpoints, in which everyday life is disrupted. Israel’s Separation Wall is a highly visible form of this spatial containment. This again resonates with Mbembe’s discussion of the elements of late modern colonial occupation.

The fifth area Palumbo-Liu explores is immunity from prosecution. Echoing Baldwin’s description of the experience of the Harlem Six, Palumbo-Liu asks: ‘What possibility do blacks victimised by police brutality in the United States, and those who have suffered and continue to suffer from Israel’s persistent human rights violations, have for redress?’ In the USA questions of accountability surface when police brutality occurs, leading many people to feel that local justice systems hold police officers and civilians to different standards. Meanwhile Palestinians living under occupation are subject to Israeli military rather than civilian administration. This provides little in terms of legal recourse and reflects the apartheid nature of Israel’s occupation, which leaves Palestinians vulnerable to anything from containment to indefinite detention, or even extrajudicial assassination.

Transnational solidarity and resistance: ‘when I see them, I see us’

There are many examples of creative resistance and transnational solidarity to have emerged in recent years. One example from August 2015 saw more than 1000 Black activists, artists, scholars, students and organisations releasing a statement affirming their ‘solidarity with the Palestinian struggle and commitment to the liberation of Palestine’s land and people’.³⁸

On the anniversary of last summer’s Gaza massacre, in the 48th year of Israeli occupation, the 67th year of Palestinians’ ongoing Nakba (the Arabic word for Israel’s ethnic cleansing) – and in the fourth century of Black oppression in the present-day United States – we, the undersigned Black activists, artists, scholars, writers, and political prisoners offer this letter of reaffirmed solidarity with the Palestinian struggle and commitment to the liberation of Palestine’s land and people.³⁹

In addition to calling for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS), the group explicitly identified congruencies between the plight of Palestinians and those of African Americans:

While we acknowledge that the apartheid configuration in Israel/Palestine is unique from the United States (and South Africa), we continue to see connections between the situation of Palestinians and Black people. Israel’s widespread use of detention and imprisonment against Palestinians evokes the mass incarceration of Black people in the US, including the political imprisonment of our own revolutionaries. Soldiers, police, and courts justify lethal force against us and our children who pose no imminent threat. And while the US and Israel would continue to oppress us without collaborating with each other, we have witnessed police and soldiers from the two countries train side-by-side.⁴⁰

The statement co-organiser, Kristian Davis Bailey, pointed out: ‘We’re at a crucial moment in the global struggle against racism, in which the black and Palestinian struggles play a crucial role. We wish to send a loud and clear message to Palestinians, as well as the governments of the US and Israel that now is the time for Palestinian liberation, just as now is the time for our own in the United States.’⁴¹

In another interview, Bailey described Black support for Palestine as part of a longer tradition of ‘Black Internationalism’.

Malcolm X was talking about the dangers of Zionism in the 1960s. The Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee released its statement at the same time the Black Panther Party was training with the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] in Algeria. In 1970 you had a group of prominent Black activists or scholars take out a New York Times ad supporting Palestinian liberation from Zionism and some of those signatories also signed our statement today in 2015. So there is a rich tradition of Black solidarity with international struggles broadly, and specifically with Palestine.⁴²

Another example in late 2015 was a video released under the hashtag #BlackPalestinianSolidarity. It featured more than 60 Black and Palestinian artists and activists, who highlighted the congruencies between their circumstances and the similar challenges that both communities are confronting. The video featured Lauryn Hill, Danny Glover, Cornel West, Angela Davis, Alice Walker, Remi Kanazi, Rasmeah Odeh, Diana Buttu, and many others holding up signs which carried slogans such as ‘Gaza Stands with Ferguson’ and ‘When I see them, I see us’. Angela Davis explained:

Mutual expressions of solidarity have helped to generate a vigorous political kinship linking black organizers, scholars, cultural workers and political prisoners in the US with Palestinian activists, academics, political prisoners, and artists…That the Palestinian people have refused to surrender after almost seven decades of continuous struggle against Israeli settler colonialism is a great encouragement to black people in the US to accelerate our ongoing struggles against racist state violence. These powerful images represent a journey from struggle against tyranny to a collective hope for a just future.⁴³

Davis’s words of struggle and hope reflect Baldwin’s. In 1966 Baldwin was writing a report from occupied territory as a way to bear witness, but he also said that he wrote as ‘a plea for the recognition of our common humanity’. Without this recognition, he said, ‘our common humanity will be proved in unutterable ways’.⁴⁴

Conclusion: discursive linkages and the articulation of transnational solidarity

We do know something of what Baldwin thought about the situation in Palestine–Israel. His essay, ‘Open Letter to the Born Again’, written 13 years after ‘A Report from Occupied Territory’, reveals a deep familiarity with Middle Eastern affairs in general and the situation in Palestine–Israel in particular.⁴⁵ He wrote this piece in France in the summer of 1979, after Andrew Young resigned as US ambassador to the United Nations following disclosure of an unauthorised meeting with representatives of the PLO.

Baldwin notes that the state of Israel was not created for ‘the salvation of the Jews’ but for ‘the salvation of the Western interests’, and that ‘Palestinians have been paying for the British colonial policy of “divide and rule” and for Europe’s guilty Christian conscience for more than thirty years’.⁴⁶ Baldwin goes on to recognise the client status of the state of Israel, especially in its supplying of arms to those states the USA would rather not be overtly associated with, namely apartheid South Africa.⁴⁷

Baldwin goes on, in criticism, not necessarily of US policy not to negotiate with ‘terrorists’, but of what the language of terrorism is used to disguise, and explains: ‘There is absolutely – repeat: absolutely – no hope of establishing peace in what Europe so arrogantly calls the Middle East (how in the world would Europe know? Having so dismally failed to find a passage to India) without dealing with the Palestinians’ .⁴⁸ Indeed, Baldwin saw Young’s attempts in the late 1970’s as courageous and noble attempts to ward off more violence.

As this demonstrates, Baldwin understood Israel’s military occupation as an expression of a larger trend of racism and colonialism. Such trends are rooted in discursive and political frameworks that narrate the world in terms of ‘self’ and ‘other’, ‘us’ and ‘them’. The experiences described above point to historical–material linkages between these communities that transnational solidarities work to resist. But the historical and material also (always) have discursive moorings. Just as a discourse or regime of truth operates as a powerful producer of knowledge (and provider of meaning), it creates material consequences specific to its historical, social and political location, which (as it becomes hegemonic) are taken as self-evident, normal, and natural.

Stuart Hall described a discourse as ‘a particular way of representing “the West,” “the Rest,” and the relation between them’,⁴⁹ with power seen in creating and reinforcing Western dominance, not least by excluding the ‘other’ from the production of the discourse. The creation of these ‘grand narratives’ is a key feature of colonial occupations, one which at the same time produces strident binaries constituted by antagonistic, racialised identities of ‘others’.

Edward Said spoke about the function of this antagonistic other-ing, locating it in the larger Orientalist project he identified as part and parcel of Europe’s colonial and imperial ambitions. As one indicator of this:

In newsreels or newsphotos, the Arab is always shown in large numbers. No individuality, no personal characteristics or experiences. Most of the pictures represent mass rage and misery, or irrational (hence hopelessly eccentric) gestures. Lurking behind all of these images is the menace of jihad. Consequence: a fear that the Muslims (or Arabs) will take over the world.⁵⁰

These fears, paranoias and perceived threats from the Arab, Muslim ‘other’ have been, and continue to be, characteristic of this discursive project:

Since Islam has never easily been encompassed by the West politically – and certainly since World War II, Arab nationalism has been a movement openly declaring its hostility to Western imperialism – the desire to assert intellectually satisfying things about Islam in retaliation increases…The result is an invidiously ideological portrait of ‘us’ and ‘them’.⁵¹

This subaltern reading of history is not dissimilar to that of the African American writer Toni Morrison, who has noted that throughout American history dilemmas have been worked out by the domestication of the black body – a ‘foil’ for the white psyche. Morrison discusses what she calls ‘American Africanism’ and the ways in which ‘a nonwhite, Africanlike (or Africanist) presence or persona was constructed in the United States, and the imaginative uses this fabrication served’.⁵² This construction, caricature, distortion reveals what is in essence a scapegoating of the black body. Thus:

Through the simple expedient of demonizing and reifying the range of color on a palette, American Africanism makes it possible to say and not say, to inscribe and erase, to act out and act on, to historicize and render timeless. It provides a way of contemplating chaos and civilization, desire and fear, and a mechanism for testing the problems and blessings of freedom.⁵³

In this manner Morrison argues the centrality of ‘black’ to the definition and identity of ‘white’. The contrast is necessary. And this is what Said was getting at in Orientalism. One cannot be the ‘free’ or the ‘new’ or the ‘pious’ unless one is over and against another; thus the function of black to this burgeoning ‘New World’. ‘One can see that a real or fabricated Africanist presence was crucial to their sense of Americaness’.⁵⁴

As Baldwin, Said and Morrison demonstrate, the articulation of a discourse about the ‘black body’ and the Oriental ‘other’ produces material consequences in the histories of racism and colonialism which, as this article has shown, continue to affect and shape individual and community experiences. And a significant aspect of the sort of transnational solidarity and resistance described above is another effort at articulation – an articulation of a counter-narrative or identity that challenges dominant discourses. It works by re-conceptualising and resisting colonial discourse’s grand narratives and its localised systems of control. Wainwright and Kim call this work of re-conceptualisation the ‘labour of articulation’. It involves linking subjects and discourses, signs and bodies, and communities within and across borders in disruptive ways. In this context articulation acknowledges that, since society is always divided, people’s ‘general will’ is not self-evident but is constructed through political action that always requires representation. ‘Such representation’, they say, ‘always implies articulation, the forging of disparate positions into effective discourse’.⁵⁵ This is a critical element of the work going on in the above cases of transnational solidarity and resistance, because transnational mobilisation – ‘the difficult work of travel, coordination, translation, negotiation, mobilisation, alliance building, etc’⁵⁶ – hinges crucially upon the labour of articulation and a refusal to accept the binaries of self and other on which the survival of oppressive systems depends.

As I describe above, this is a significant aspect of the work done through these transnational solidarities, and it is central to the tactics of framing, naming and shaming that Keck and Sikkink identify. The focus on information politics in their discussion of TANs is helpfully supplemented by Laleh Khalili’s additional emphasis on how that information is packaged and deployed for the articulation and mobilisation of identity.⁵⁷ Khalili’s is a focus on narratives that resonates with Wainwright and Kim’s argument about the importance of the ‘labour of articulation’ in the development of transnational resistance. Yes, people need to show up in places, but the work those particular people do in those particular places, and the narrative in which they place their actions, represents the kind of ‘claim-making’ that Wainwright and Kim – as well as Tilly and Tarrow – refer to as constitutive of (contentious) politics and transnational resistance.

Khalili adds to Keck and Sikkink’s description of the ‘transnational’ not only by interrogating the inside/outside, North/South dichotomies. She also argues that transnational solidarities can help to articulate ideas about the fluidity and inter-subjectivity of identities. It is ‘in the crucial interface between the local and the transnational’, Khalili says, that ‘nationalist commemorations, stories of peoplehood, and strategies of mobilisation are forged, reproduced, and transformed’.⁵⁸ Transnational discourses emerge at particular historical junctures but also at the intersection of global and local politics. In other words, they are ‘forged in particular places which are then borrowed, nurtured, translated, and transformed across borders’.⁵⁹ The power of such transnational discourses rests ‘in their ability to translate world-historical events into recognisable daily struggles and to create a sense of sympathy – if not kinship – and an imagined transnational community among people who, for the most part, ha[ve] never met and would never meet’.⁶⁰ These transnational discourses appeal to a transnational audience as well as a local one, working to forge a transnational identity or ‘imagined community’ that is sustained by institutions, networks and solidarities that ‘deploy a particular narrative with specific moral and normative import.’⁶¹

Alice Walker recognised this immediately when she set foot into Occupied Territory in Gaza:

Rolling into Gaza I had a feeling of homecoming. There is a flavor to the ghetto. To the Bantustan. To the ‘rez’. To the ‘colored section’. In some ways it is surprisingly comforting. Because consciousness is comforting. Everyone you see has an awareness of struggle, of resistance, just as you do. The man driving the donkey cart. The woman selling vegetables. The young person arranging rugs on the sidewalk or flowers in a vase. When I lived in segregated Eatonton, Georgia, I used to breathe normally only in my own neighborhood, only in the black section of town. Everywhere else was too dangerous.⁶²

Baldwin recognised the implications. As he saw it ‘any real commitment to black freedom in this country would have the effect of reordering all our priorities, and altering all our commitments, so that, for horrendous example, we would be supporting black freedom fighters in South Africa and Angola, and would not be allied with Portugal, would be closer to Cuba than to Spain, would be supporting the Arab nations instead of Israel, and would never have felt compelled to follow the French into Southeast Asia’.⁶³

When transnational solidarities name the historical realities of colonial occupation they are not simply reporting on current events; they are exercising the use of historical memory, making a contribution to the labour of articulation, and constructing transnational stories and identities that destabilise hegemonic narratives and subjectivities. When historical truths are named – with the recognition that ‘occupied territory is occupied territory’ and ‘when I see them, I see us’ – new opportunities for social change, solidarity and the reorientation and transformation of relationships open up, bridging gaps and defying separations in ways that become powerful acts of resistance.

Notes on Contributor

Timothy Seidel teaches courses on politics, development and peace building in the Department of Applied Social Sciences and the Centre for Justice and Peacebuilding at Eastern Mennonite University, Harrisonburg, VA. He is a PhD candidate in the School of International Service at American University, Washington, DC.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to the Global Development Studies (GDS) Section of the International Studies Association, the GDS Graduate Paper Award Committee, and Third World Quarterly who provided invaluable feedback and assistance in the publication of this paper.

Notes

1. Baldwin, “A Report from Occupied Territory.”

2. Ibid., 729.

3. Ibid., 730.

4. Ibid., 735.

5. Ibid., 734.

6. Ibid., 737.

7. Ibid., 738.

8. Jabri, “Revisiting Change and Conflict,” 69.

9. See, for example, Paris, “International Peacebuilding”; Philpott and Powers, Strategies of Peace; Richmond, Palgrave Advances in Peacebuilding; and Richmond, A Post-liberal Peace.

10. Jabri, “War, Government, Politics,” 43.

11. Ibid., 48.

12. Tilly and Tarrow, Contentious Politics, 4.

13. Tilly and Tarrow use the theatrical metaphors of performances and repertoires to capture the mechanisms and processes of contentious politics. Contentious performances are relatively familiar and standardised ways in which one set of political actors makes collective claims on another (such as demonstrations, petitions or protests). Contentious repertoires are arrays of contentious performances that are currently known and available within some set of political actors (such as the strikes, lockouts, contract negotiations and other performances known to connect bosses and workers).

14. See Sassen, The Global City; and Toenjes, “This Wall Speaks.”

15. Keck and Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders, 4.

16. Ibid., 3.

17. Ibid. This reflects the ‘constructivist’ conversation in International Relations (IR) theory, where actors and interests are inter-subjectively co-constituted, and where ‘states are embedded in dense networks of transnational and international social relations that shape their perceptions of the world and their role in that world’. Finnemore, National Interests in International Society, 2. While this provides an interesting counter to the hegemony of Realpolitik in IR theory, I am more interested in the postcolonial critique that problematises the ongoing Eurocentric character of these conversations, its totalising, ‘grand narrative’ ontologies and the Eurocentric teleology that normalises particular political horizons and privileges particular political actors that obscure or exclude subaltern experiences. See Wainwright and Kim, “Battles in Seattle Redux.” As I describe below, this informs my focus on transnational solidarities and resistance.

18. Keck and Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders, 12. As I describe in my case below, social media has become a significant forum or arena for contact as well, seen with Twitter hashtags such as #Palestine2Ferguson or #BlackPalestinianSolidarity.

19. Keck and Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders, 13.

20. Keck and Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders, 16.

21. The presence of Palestinians in both the ‘North’ (in the USA) and the ‘South’ (in Palestine) also problematises simple North/South binaries. In this sense the Palestinian liberation movement itself embodies a ‘transnational’ movement – and always has since the Nakba, as Palestinians are always both ‘scattered’ and ‘at home’, both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. Additionally the framework described by Keck and Sikkink can be problematic when describing Palestinians as a ‘domestic’ actor vis-à-vis the state of Israel, since Israel and many Palestinians would not identify (nor accept) Israeli sovereignty over Palestinians. While this topic is beyond the scope of this article, it can be argued that Israeli sovereignty exists de facto, if not de jure, in the Occupied Territories, making the claims of Palestinians against the state of Israel coherent within this framework.

22. While I will reference the role of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement as a critical element of transnational solidarity with Palestinians, it will not be the focus of my case study. For more on BDS in particular as transnational solidarity, see Hallward and Norman, Nonviolent Resistance in the Second Intifada; and Hallward, Transnational Activism.

23. Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 39.

24. Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 34.

25. Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 40.

26. Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 27. On the definitions and features of ‘colonies’ and ‘post-colonies’, see Mbembe, On the Postcolony. See also Massad, The Persistence of the Palestinian Question, in particular his essay “The ‘Post-colonial’ Colony.”

27. Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 26–27. The quote is from Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth.

28. Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 28.

29. Ibid.

30. Ibid. The Weizman quote is from “Politics of Verticality.”

31. Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 28–29. The Weizman quote is from “Politics of Verticality.”

32. Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 30.

33. Palumbo-Liu, “Ferguson and Gaza.”

34. Ibid. For more on this history of Palestine–Israel, see Pappé, A History of Modern Palestine; and Shlaim, The Iron Wall.

35. Palumbo-Liu, “Ferguson and Gaza.”

36. Ibid.

37. See Beinin, “Racism is the Foundation of Israel’s Operation Protective Edge.” Beinin argues that racism undergirds Israeli state policies towards the Palestinians in the sense that ‘racism has become a legitimate, indeed an integral, component of Israeli public culture…The public devaluation of Arab life enables a society that sees itself as “enlightened” and “democratic” to repeatedly send its army to slaughter the largely defenceless population of the Gaza Strip – 1.8 million people, mostly descendants of refugees who arrived during the 1948 Arab–Israeli war, and have been , to a greater or lesser extent, imprisoned since 1994.”

38. Bailey and Peterson-Smith, “1000 Black Activists, Artists, and Scholars.”

39. Ibid.

40. Ibid.

41. Palumbo-Liu, “Black Activists send Clear Message to Palestinians.”

42. Johnson, “Our Palestine Statement.” This framing was also articulated in reports from a 2015 delegation of leaders from Black Lives Matter, Dream Defenders and Ferguson who traveled to Palestine to connect and build relationships with activists (Bailey, “Dream Defenders, Black Lives Matter & Ferguson Reps”).

43. Robbins, “New Black–Palestinian Solidarity Video.”

44. Baldwin, “A Report from Occupied Territory,” 731. This reference to humanity brings to mind Fanon’s conclusion in The Wretched of the Earth and his plea to imagine living in ways other than European ones, because ‘Humanity is waiting for something from us other than such an imitation, which would be almost an obscene caricature’. Fanon implores us: ‘For Europe, for ourselves, and for humanity, comrades, we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man’. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 315, 316.

45. In “No Name in the Street,” 378, Baldwin recounted his reasons for not settling in Israel when he became an expatriate in the late 1940s: ‘And if I had fled, to Israel, a state created for the purpose of protecting Western interests, I would have been in a yet tighter bind: on which side of Jerusalem would I have decided to live?’

46. Baldwin, “Open Letter to the Born Again,” 786.

47. See Chomsky, Fateful Triangle, 20–27. Chomsky discusses at length Israel’s role as arms broker and proxy in Central American states such as Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, African states such as Rhodesia, Uganda and Zaire, as well as Asian states such as Indonesia and Taiwan.

48. Baldwin, “Open Letter to the Born Again,” 786. Baldwin notes: ‘The collapse of the Shah of Iran not only revealed the depth of the pious Carter’s concern for “human rights,” it also revealed who supplies oil to Israel, and to whom Israel supplies arms. It happened to be, to spell it out, white South Africa.” (pp. 786–787).

49. Hall, “The West and the Rest,” 56.

50. Said, Orientalism, 287. He makes the point earlier that ‘Europe’s effort therefore was to maintain itself as what Valéry called “une machine puissante,” absorbing what it could from outside Europe, converting everything to its use, intellectually and materially, keeping the Orient selectively organised (or disorganised). Yet this could be done only through clarity of vision and analysis. Unless the Orient was seen for what it was, its power – military, material, spiritual – would sooner or later overwhelm Europe. The great colonial empires, great systems of systematic repression, existed to fend off this eventuality” (p. 251).

51. Said, Orientalism, 299.

52. Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 6.

53. Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 7.

54. Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 6.

55. Wainwright and Kim, “Battles in Seattle Redux,” 528.

56. Wainwright and Kim, “Battles in Seattle Redux,” 529.

57. Khalili, Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine.

58. Ibid., 3–4.

59. Ibid., 11.

60. Ibid., 12.

61. Ibid., 13.

62. Walker, Overcoming Speechlessness, 43.

63. Baldwin, “No Name in the Street,” 463.