By Aleksandra Kuczynska
On the 10th October 2020, a demonstration took place in Holborn organised by Palestine Action. Protestors had gathered to rally against Elbit Systems, an Israeli defence company. The demonstrators were bubbling with vigour, waving Palestinian flags and chanting ‘shut Elbit down’. One of the protestors started to list out the names of Palestinians killed as a result of the continued Israeli annexation and military control of the occupied territories. The protest escalated when red paint was sprayed over the front door of the Elbit headquarters, and a swarm of police rushed to the scene, arresting five activists. The demonstration attracted a few counter-protesters waving the Israeli flag and holding up a placard stating “Israelis have the right to be protected from terrorists, just like the UK”. The image of pro-Palestinian protesters crying out names of murdered children at the pro-Israeli demonstrators, and the latter screaming back terrorist insults, encapsulated the contentiousness and polarisation of this conflict. While it was a powerful and awakening sight, it revealed the obstructions that lie on the path toward a just solution to this conflict. But what is the way forward? How can two sides so at odds with one another begin to work towards a resolution to this decades-long conflict?
This action followed a sequence of similar demonstrations in the last several months by the recently-established Palestine Action, which has been targeting Elbit’s factories across the UK. Palestine Action can be framed within the wider BDS movement (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions), which aims to mobilize unions, academic associations, churches, and grassroot organisations worldwide in opposition to Israel’s state-sanctioned occupation of Palestine. The global solidarity with Palestinians has emerged at the heels of changing public discourse with regard to this conflict. Since the late 1980s, there has occurred a progressive global shift of public opinion on the issue of Palestine. The West’s framing of Palestinians has gradually metamorphosed from the voiceless terrorist ‘other’ toward greater empathy with the population under occupation.
The BDS movement espouses anti-Zionism, which is a form of political solidarity that opposes Israel’s ethno-religious supremacist government and its continuous crimes against the indigenous Palestinian population. Importantly, anti-Zionism stands in stark contrast to anti-Semitic rhetoric, as anti-Zionism demands that all the inhabitants of historic Palestine, regardless of their religion or ethnicity, are granted equal rights and freedoms. Hence, we misunderstand the BDS movement if it is framed within interfaith relations. Omar Barghouti, the founding member of the BDS, reiterated this point stating that the “global BDS movement for Palestinian rights presents a progressive, anti-racist, sophisticated, sustainable, moral and effective form of civil, non-violent resistance … affirming the rights of all humans to freedom, equality, and dignified living”.
Still, while there has been a shift in the global public discourse, political and economic elites in the West continue to sustain enormous support for the state of Israel. No profound change on the ground has occurred, and the Israeli state continues to restrict freedom for the Palestinian citizens of Israel whilst pursuing policies of dispossession in the West Bank and Gaza. The UK, EU and US have long been complicit in Israel’s expansionism, and have continually upheld support through generous research and development funding for Israel Aerospace Industries. Since 1967, Israel’s economy has gone through a rapid process of militarisation. Its military-industrial complex has one of the most destructive capacities dedicated toward security. Elbit Systems Ltd stands at the heart of this military production for Israel’s IDF, and boastfully promotes its ‘field tested’ war machines.
The militarisation of Israel’s economy has been legitimised in leading Western and Israeli socio-political spheres by labelling the native Palestinian population as the ‘enemy-terrorist’, unhinged and unresponsive to non-violent treatment. This rhetoric frames armed combat as the only way forward, and shapes Israeli society’s understanding of self as reflected against the Palestinian other. Terrorism in this framework becomes a ‘metaphysical evil’ and the Palestinian entity is delegitimised, dehumanised, and dehistoricised. Edward Said continuously challenged the framing prevalent in strategic policy-making of the West. He posed the following question in one of his pieces:
‘Have we become so assured of the consequence of millions of Arab and Moslem lives that we assume it is a routine or unimportant matter when they die either at our hands or at those of our favoured Judeo-Christian allies? Do we really believe that Arabs and Moslems have terrorism in their genes?’
The short answer appears to be yes, at least for Israel and its political allies.
The dichotomisation of us versus them; enlightened Westerner versus terrorist Muslim, follows neocolonial patterns and permits the continuous crimes of the Israeli military. According to Noura Erakat, a Palestinian-American human rights activist, Israel has racialised its martial law and created “the veneer of legality while producing a violence that sheds every relation to law ”. The deployment of a ‘state of exception’ with regard to the occupied territories allowed it to be framed as a ‘suis generis’ phenomenon, authorising the expansion of settlements, while concealing colonisation and dispossession of the natives. Indeed, the peace process and its continuous insistence on a two-state solution where the two entities are meant to co-exist on equal terms disregards the inherent asymmetry of power and is used to erase de facto realities, and abdicate commitment to a practicable solution. It serves as a pretext for the Israeli state to grab more land, annex more space and build more settlements at the expense of the Palestinian people. The two-state solution has been at the centre of negotiations for decades, and has repeatedly failed to produce real changes on the ground.
We must then ask, what are the alternatives to an ineffective peace process? What should Palestinian activism strive toward?
The recognition of Palestine by the UN and the ICC’s investigations into the great powers’ war crimes in the Middle East (UK in Afghanistan, US in Iraq, and Israel in Gaza, 2014), reveal an emerging challenge to the neoliberal status quo and its maintenance of Western interests in the Middle East. Moreover, the appeal to non-state actors by the BDS activists widens the scope of mobilisation and valorises the civil society through promoting cultural, academic and economic anti-corporate boycotts. Thousands of scholars and students across the world have endorsed the academic boycott of Israel (UK, US, Sweden and many more). Artists, musicians, and filmmakers have also led cultural boycotts and activist art. Some consumer boycotts and divestment efforts have also been successful, though calls for states to impose sanctions have seldom seen results.
Ilan Pappé, a self-exiled Israeli scholar, believes that a new discourse must be adopted. In line with Said’s proposition, he argues that hegemony can be challenged through language and production of knowledge, via a promotion of a revisionist Palestinian historiography. The way forward for the BDS movement hinges on a new conceptualisation of the conflict: replacing ‘peace process’ with ‘decolonisation’ and ‘regime change’, demanding the present Israeli regime to be transformed into an entity inclusive of all its inhabitants. These articulations better reflect the actuality of Israel’s settler-colonial nature, and materialise the possibility of decolonisation of Palestine. Indeed, the aforementioned activists and scholars in the BDS movement are already advocating for this discourse. While the two-state proposals have reached an impasse, and the Palestinians find themselves with little political power to change the situation on the ground, they and their advocates still find power through narrative.
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