teaching: November 2007 Archives

Interestingly, the Israeli press has engaged this effort seriously. Meanwhile, the main discursive threads in the international press are superhype (George Bush/America to the rescue!) and dismissal (expectations low).

This is how Bush got himself elected, if you recall.

From openDemocracy, "on the eve of" the meeting comes an offering from Prince Hassan bin Talal of Jordan outlining the key features of a potential Israeli-Palestinian and regional peace agreement.

Prince Hassan describes the need for "genuine reconciliation. This has to start with an acknowledgment of the genuine claims of the Palestinians and the acceptance of responsibility for what happened to them." In the everyday talk of average Palestinians, this is what they called "really peace."

The time has come to shed prejudice and build intra-societal dynamics and respect for the other irrespective of national origin, religion, and creed.

Of course this ethic applies to Palestinians as well.

The consensus is - basically - that all mechanisms and principles are already agreed and accepted. In fact, these were forged out under Anwar Sadat, Menachim Begin and Jimmy Carter at Camp David (1978) and hammered out by Arafat, Rabin, Shimon Peres, and Bill Clinton (1993). Bush needs only to inspire the finalization of what his predecessors labored to put in place.

As a relative newcomer to the finer nuances of this struggle - embarrassed to admit how little I've previously known of the Palestinian side, product of the American educational and news systems that I am - it seems to me that the timing is right because of Israeli fears that if they do not act now, Palestianians will drop the demand for a separate state and insist more and more loudly on a one-state solution. Everyone I spoke with already prefers this solution because Israeli's aggressive development of settlements on Palestinian land - inside the West Bank, that is beyond the international boundary of Israel - has furthered the integration of the two peoples more than it has furthered the cause of separate, independent nations.

I'm not holding my breathe - the institutionalized torrents of violence (all forms, from symbolic to literal) and historical realpolitik maneuvering may yet be too much for mere pathetic human beings to overcome.

And then again . . . when will the ideology of non-violent resolution of human conflict and competition assert itself as a higher ideal? And who else better to model and set a new bar for the rest of us? When will there ever be better time than now?

“First there is the forest and inside the forest the clearing and inside the clearing the cabin and inside the cabin the mother and inside the mother the child and inside the child the mountain.” (p. 1, Prologue. Gut Symmetries by Jeanette Winterson.)

I melted down in the bathroom of Continental Flight 85 from Tel Aviv to Newark. The upwelling of grief had threatened several times this trip but not yet spilled. “Perhaps,” I thought, “the willed capacity to transmute sensed and felt pain into some other energetic form has finally exceeded the body’s glandular production of tears.” Ah well. The problem, as I see it, is not to squash the senses but channel their expression in nonviolent forms. How does one expel emotion without perpetuating a residue of symbolic violence?

The last couple of conversations in Qabatiya with Palestinians who advocate reactive violence as the only possible response to Israeli violence weigh upon my heart. How does one refute the logic of a man who believes “it is no surprise Europe strove to expel its Jews,” when his daily experience – for every day of his entire life – is of inhumane, systematic, vicious oppression? If, as a child, you only see the uniform and a gun, witness murder, and suffer the loss of friends and family members. . . and eventually hear stories that the people wielding these weapons were subject to a forced expulsion from other lands – what counterlogic is necessary to interrupt such a seamless, causal argument? The perspective of long-term history that contextualizes humanity’s fierce competition for power and resources casts an invisible shadow in the glaring light of today’s stark dialectic between privilege and powerlessness.

Israelis moral ambivalence about the occupation of Palestine has its own long root of rationalization. I heard many excuses, including “if the US did it [with American Indians] why can’t we?” Copying someone else’s wrong does not make it right. Just as Palestinians have logics that demonize Jews, Jews have logics that dehumanize Palestinians: “They didn’t cultivate the land.” False.

I cling to what I learned from Sandy Tolan’s (The Lemon Tree) tracing of the thin thread of possible cooperation and cohabitation in a delicate balancing act between the horrors of the Holocaust and a meticulous description of the forcible removal of Palestinians from their homes, lands, towns and properties. Both groups, in the present day, have not only allowed the past to become the present, they have embraced its discourse. “The unconscious, it seems, will not let go of its hoard. The past comes with us and occasionally kidnaps the present, so that the distinctions we depend upon for safety, for sanity, disappear” (Gut Symmetries, p. 105).

“When we killed what we were to become what we are, what did we do with the bodies? We did what most people do; buried them under the floorboards and got used to the smell. I’ve lived my life like a serial killer; finish with one part, strangle it and move on to the next. Life in neat little boxes is life in neat little coffins, the dead bodies of the past laid out side by side. I am discovering, now, in the late afternoon of the day, that the dead still speak. Past? Present? Future? The language of the dead. The totality of time” (Gut Symmetries, p. 49).

There are cultural differences. The immediate present holds vital currency in the Palestinian way. I hazard this prioritization of “the now” as the basic principle underlying the relaxed orientation to time and accompanying gracious hospitality that most appeals to constantly harried and hurrying westerners. Prioritizing the short-term is a Palestinian virtue that Israeli political ambitions have exploited in every international negotiation to date.

“Time.
“Newton visualized time as an arrow flying toward its target. Einstein understood time as a river, moving forward, forceful, directed, but also bowed, curved, sometimes subterranean, not ending but pouring itself into a greater sea. A river cannot flow against its current, but it can flow in circles; its eddies and whirlpools regularly break up its strong press forward. The riverrun is maverick, there is a high chance of cross-current, a snag of time that returns us without warning to a place we thought we had sailed through long since” (Gut Symmetries, p. 104).

The Israeli media is harder than the U.S. media on Israeli policy (both official and de facto). Quarter page ads, long reports, and extensive editorials in November 23rd’s Haaretz call on Prime Minister Olmert to make peace at the upcoming Annapolis conference. Meanwhile, none of the Palestinians I spoke with had one good word to say about Annapolis: “it is all for the Israelis, there is nothing of us.”

“I have noticed that choices seem to be made in advance of what is chosen. The time gap in between the determining will and the determined event is a handy excuse to deny causality” (Gut Symmetries, p. 120). There is, of course, no way to guarantee that certain actions or decisions will produce the precisely desired effects, but we can learn to attend to the effects we set in motion. I watched Palestinians choose to tease and talk and be with each other so successfully that time ceased to be a burden, the structural limitations and restrictions fade into the background, and living is a pleasure. I also saw mood shifts as a memory or bit of news triggered a deluge of political criticism and idealized problem-solving. Even when banished by interpersonal connections, the occupation warps each and every link in the chain of human relations.

Israelis have much more luxury. The occupation is removed from daily living; its crimes committed elsewhere. One of the most devious policies currently in effect is the restriction on travel of Israeli citizens into the densely populated portions of Palestine – in particular where refugee camps are located, but also all major Palestinian cities. The occupied have no face, and little possibility of establishing interpersonal relationships with Israeli citizens. No friendships, no peace? Israelis cannot go to Egypt, either.

“In space-time there is always a lag between prediction and response . . . sometimes of seconds, sometimes of years, but we programme events far more than we like to think…I have seen my father pushing the world, he quite unaware of what was pushing him. He did not believe…as I did, that the mind is a self-regulating system, where consciousness and unconsciousness work as load-balancing pulleys” (Gut Symmetries, p. 120).

The mechanisms for a two-state solution have long been in place. It seems the growing discourse of a one-nation solution (as well as the reality of an ever-deepening intertwining of "facts on the ground") may push Israel to actually follow through on the hard core commitments: ceding East Jerusalem, no more settlements, closure of outposts, in addition to millions of dollars of compensation for refugees. More is needed than positive spin in the Israeli media, but the Aix-en-Provence group's "'reverse engineering' approach" seems to me like evidence of substantive behind-the-scenes progress: "The sides first agree on their destination, that is, on the blueprint of the final agreement, and then decide how to get there."

A nonviolent strike by lawyers in Ramallah after the Six Day War demonstrated, as Sandy Tolan records, "Palestinians could rely on themselves to deliver their own justice" (p. 142, The Lemon Tree). Hope is not enough, compromise will feel unfair, but the courage to end the occupation and adapt the energies of resistance to building anew is the only way to alter the course of this wide river's flow. "I know the action-reaction of violence is negative to us and to them," Ahmed told me, "but the only way is to meet [Israeli] violence with violence until finally someone will make the Israeli government stop."

When I asked Elana Shohamy if I could reference her in my talk and blog she said, “I don’t own the words.” Later, when I asked about pronunciation, she carried it even further, “I don’t own my name.” This is true. We say what we say and others do what they will with our words, just as we – and me, quite explicitly – do what we will with the words we hear.

There were two points of contention during my presentation yesterday afternoon. A spontaneous dialogue burst out in the middle concerning my use of “we” to refer to participants at both DUO conferences (last year in Chicago and this year in Abu Dis) and my assertion that we need to be in dialogue with the military.

Aide, Shelley and I had quite a conversation about this (interrupting my blogging! Ah, the nerve!) prior to Friday morning’s final plenary. :-) We need to be engaging the military argument directly so that we can learn to articulate our own argument. How do pacifists persuade people that another framework for security is possible? We take for granted that we, in attendance, are all in agreement that peace is the answer and non-violence the strategy. We do not have to explain our reasons to each other; hence, we lack the language for persuading others. Even as we describe the dilemma we utilize military terminology. I am reminded of a supremely ironic moment at DUO I, when one of the most vocal advocates for justice mimed hitting me in the face while telling me if those opposing her point-of-view did not hurry up and come around to implementing her recommendations she’d “punch them in the nose.”

Palestinian and Jewish participants challenged my insistence at combining last year’s conference attendees with this year’s, questioning the attendant implication that there is a kind of continuity between what was talked about last year and what has been discussed this year. Obviously the context here in Palestine is radically different than the context in the midwestern United States: this is reflected in the content of the conference program. For instance, “peace” is a much more significant thread of the discourse here than it was in last year’s conference, and the focus is narrower because the urgency of immediate occupation reduces the relevance of many of the topics that were embraced in Chicago. Nonetheless, one aspect of community-building is to claim members: I would very much like to belong with all those who attended last year and this year's conferences as participants in the task of enacting dialogue under - within, through, despite, and/or because of - occupation.





How to build these conferences into a movement, into "a small group....that could change the world" as Khader Abu-Alia reminded us with Margaret Mead's famous quote, is a tangible, material activity. The idea of preparing some kind of "statement" on behalf of the conference was raised; since then I've been considering what principles might guide such an endeavor. During my presentation I suggested that we should attend to the ritual functions such a statement might serve: how could a few sentences enhance our sense of membership and belonging with and to each other? What would such a statement celebrate?

I suggest three guidelines:

1. global application
2. non-exclusionary language
3. no military symbolism

First, no identity politics. The act of naming any group or cause necessarily excludes other groups and other causes. A statement from the conference membership of DUO ought to be able to be used to understand a broad range of "occupations" - from the literal and specific to the ideological and subjective.

Second, by refusing to name or list even the most egregious occupations, we shift the focus of the struggle from the conditions of occupation (the symptoms, if you will) to its causes, which are ideological.

Third, by rejecting the terminology of war we establish the foundation for another vocabulary.

In sum, we craft a statement that will lead us into the future we want by claiming that future now. We (and I index "us" on purpose) cannot shy from confronting the ironies in our own efforts to establish non-violence as

• the only sane and humane way to resolve conflict and


• a more secure solution than violence.

For instance, I am as "smitten" with Sulaiman Al Hamri as Dahlia but the title of his organization - "combatants" for peace - operates within the monologic of war. (In addition to running his own organization, Sulaiman works with the Jewish Alliance for Justice and Peace, among others. See Viewing the Occupation Up Close.)

Likewise, the challenge of those who “break the silence” is not only to implicate the rest of us as bystanders, but also to situate those who did not/have not confessed their own complicity in contrast with those who choose to tell. The refusers model for us all a higher ethic to which we might seek to strive: especially that small minority who take the ultimate stance of claiming shared humanity as the sole determinant of nonparticipation.

Prior to the closing panel on the last day of the conference, the membership had a conversation about where to hold the next conference. Many people would like us to return here, especially those who live here. Of course they want and need the stimulation, the infusion of energy and attention from the outside. In addition to the cost of travel is the denial of the right to travel. We heard an incredible presentation by Hagit Ofran of Peace Now's project called Settlement Watch, in which she detailed the enforced closure of Gaza and the persistent establishment of Israeli settlements in the West Bank/Palestine. Obviously, if we hold next year's conference somewhere else most Palestinians - unless there is a seismic shift in the political situation - will not be able to attend.

I argue that if DUO intends to intervene against the monologic of war, then we need both breadth of historical and contemporary content and depth of specific conflict in order to develop the conference as a tool for building alliances across movements and develop a larger rhetoric to counter military logic's absurd rationale that violence equals security. To this end, the privileges of citizenship must be utilized strategically and the luxury of free movement wielded as a deliberate tool.

The boundary of the contest is ideology itself: the logic of war justifying occupation must be engaged with a comprehensive logic of the nonviolent resolution of all differences, without exception. I offer something like the following as a possibility:

The Dialogue under Occupation conferences establish a temporary haven for critical creation and re-creation of nonviolent strategies and solutions to endemic problems. Members engage intensive self-reflection on the depth of our own complicity within the institutional systems and structures perpetuating war, and renew ourselves and each other to the logic of peace.

Thus Dr. Hassam Dweik wecomed us to Al Quds University in Abu Dis, Palestine, for the second international conference on Dialogue under Occupation.





Sabri Safadi wasted no time challenging our gathering of academics concerned with matters of occupation – literally and metaphorically. He was informative, calm, and measured in tone; this allowed most of the audience to listen. Essentially, he asked us: “What are you doing here?” Later in the day, Julia Schlam-Salman approached her study through a social constructionist lens. “The school,” she said, “is just a school”; it is guided by an educational ideology which is institutionalized and thus – metaphorically if not literally – determines things that you can and cannot do within the educational setting. The same applies to us, I thought: “the conference is just a conference”, we operate within a professional-academic ideology that is also deeply institutionalized. Julia went on to describe the additional burden of literal occupation on the inevitable educational occupation, while I reflected on how our conference itself is limited by form and the expectations of form.

Take Sabri’s questions. We have listened to the introductory logistics and official welcome, and have come to the end of the first presentation. The moderator, Dr. Munther S. Dajani, has responded and opened the floor to questions from the audience. In fact, Sabri spoke up at the first point in the structure of an academic conference in which audience members are explicitly invited to speak. (He told me his name means “patience.”)

1) What do we mean by "dialogue" in the title of the conference?
2) Do we have the transparency and the courage to speak out loud?
3) Are we legitimizing the occupation or do we want to end the occupation through this dialogue?
4) What happened to the initial, critical U.S. journalistic responses to the first Intifada that questioned what Israel was doing?


How did we (DUO participants) respond to these questions? We enacted group-level dynamics that established the primacy of academic discourse as the main mode of the conference, not dialogue. How did we do this? First, as moderator, Dr. Dajani acknowledged the importance of Sabri’s questions: “Very difficult questions you are asking!” The audience laughed in agreement. Sabri continued. Politely. At the end of his turn, the next woman returned to the official presentation with what she characterized as a "small question.” Twice, Sabri Safadi and his “very difficult questions” were discursively cut off. I am not advocating that we – those of us in the auditorium at this moment – ought to have done something different, only that we must learn to notice when we derail dialogue, no matter the reason. Only when we realize how we undercut ourselves can we begin to experiment with other tactics that may lead to political solutions.

I was fortunate to sit with Dr. Dajani during lunch. I asked him about his comment concerning the closure of universities for three days of mourning. "“There is another side of this, also to avoid any clashes between the students, we didn’t want the students to carry those problems to campus.” Was this an admission that the University lacked staff able to guide the students in dialogue? Is this a failure of the education system that they shunt the problem to the streets? "You do not understand the culture," he explained. The cultural values of friendship and agreement are intertwined. To the extent one agrees with another, the closer a friendship. The fewer areas of agreement, the weaker the friendship. "If you disagree, you are my enemy." Dr. Dajani described this as “my cousin against my neighbor, my brother against my cousin.”

Few people in Palestinian society, percentage-wise, have learned to recognize this cultural frame, let alone develop perspectives that enable different choices. The strategy, therefore, for addressing a potentially volatile situation are therefore unconventional.

University representatives (I am not sure who, I guess a mix of administration and faculty) met for seven hours on Tuesday with students from Fatah and Hamas, persisting from three in the afternoon until ten pm that night, when the students finally began to joke with each other and laugh, realizing and agreeing that the problem in Gaza was not a problem to bring to campus. I would like to know the moves in the talk that drew these youths along a path from the culture view equating disagreement with enemy and friendship with agreement. Imagine the perseverance, the commitment of time, energy, and patience required to sit in a room together and talk, and talk, and keep sitting, and talk some more . . .

The last event of the day was a viewing of Occupied Minds, followed by a discussion with journalist and co-producer "Jamal Dajani, a Palestinian-American, and David Michaelis, an Israeli citizen, who journey to Jerusalem, their mutual birthplace, to explore new solutions and offer unique insights into the divisive Israeli-Palestinian conflict" (Link TV program information). Dajani stunned the audience by telling us a one-state solution is the most practical political resolution because it reflects "the reality on the ground." Occupied Minds shows how the preoccupation with ideas one has already been taught - an "occupation of the mind" - is the greatest barrier to peace. Watch and you will witness some of the limits of imagination that lock the peoples of this "bi-national country" in futile animosity.

I was certainly not the only one who had never learned that the Palestinian people are more interested in equality (fair treatment under law) than a separate state. Oddly, the idea has been around at least since 2003 (see this article from The Nation; and this article from The Guardian). Our host later inquired whether we, as non-Israelis, found the idea as "difficult" as she did, admitting that she knew her reaction was irrational and being aware that she is relatively "awake" compared with many (if not most) of her compatriots. Her self-reflection is evidence, I think, of a partial response to Sabri's searing inquiry: are we - the participants of this conference - here to make a difference or simply to ride an intriguing academic current? It seems we desire to make a difference, even if we are unsure exactly how.

As I walked slowly through Yad Vashem, taking in - yet again - the history of humanity's immense cooperation in the attempted annihilation of the Jewish people, I could not help but draw connections between the strategies of the past and similar strategies adapted for the present. The Shoah (Hebrew for holocaust) is unique in its massive coordination of industrial, civic, cultural, and institutional means for the purpose of mass murder. The build-up to Germany's expansionist military and comprehensive campaign of dehumanization is strikingly parallel to the build-up in the U.S. prior to the invasion of Iraq, and alarmingly similar to the rhetoric now laying the groundwork for bombing Iran.
Young conscripts for the Isreali Army also happened to be touring the museum at the same time. My spine chilled to witness this part of their indoctrination as much as my heart sank at the documentation of sheer brutality. We humans can yet do no better?

Remember only that I was innocent
and, just like you,
mortal on that day,
I, too, had had a face
marked by rage,
by pity and joy,
quite simpy, a human face!

~ Benjamin Fondane, Exodus (1944)

I was inspired by the Jewish Youth Organizations: Almanac of the Defiant Ones - Ha'-Ma'apilim (1944), Irgun Brit Zion, Akiva(h) Youth Movement, the Hahulutz Halohem - "The Fighting Jewish Pioneer Youth Organization, and Drov. Will it remain the burden of youth to save us from adult folly? The Righteous Among the Nations are also a source of optimism. Despite their relative small numbers, that they existed then allows the possibility that more of this breed of human being could exist today. Bulgaria (did you know?) saved most of the their Jewish community, as did Denmark, the LeChambon-sur-LIgnon region of France, Italy saved 80% of their Jewish community, and an organization in Poland, Zegota, also saved Jews.
The Nuremberg Trials, which I've studied somewhat for their use of live interpretation, decreed three particular and distinctive types of crimes:

1) crimes against humanity
2) war crimes
3) crimes against peace.





Despite all the musuems, remembrances, memorials, and daily current events, few of us seem willing to do the work necessary to make peace. Are we all so satisfied with "the breaks between pain.....[that somewhat resemble] happiness"? (Imre Keresz, Fateless).

We will see who - if any - of the students in my classes are ready to converse....I am trying to facilitate a dialogue without leading them too much by the nose. I know full well that it could be that the reality of their lives, like most of us, are dictated by what they have the time for instead of what they wish to do.

“we are all researching to fight for something”
~ redsoxfan218