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Palestine

Alarum Bells

I seem to remember some years back, ACT leader, David Seymour Dancing with the Stars, which was not a pretty sight. Now he seems to be venturing into the stand up comic business, in which he has greater ability. The routine is that of a pompous little prat who can’t organise a school lunch programme trying to change our constitution and transform the regulatory routine against all advice. From a perfectly sensible framework of local food for local kids made by local providers he is now having to bring in packed lunches from Aussie. Perhaps he’d like to import a tiriti relationship as well?  Mmmm.The sight of our David as Deputy Primie Minister is sure to have the audience in stitches.

More generally ACT ministers are proving a disaster, from a Minister for Children with a personal grudge dismembering social service provision, to a Minister of Workplace relations who won’t meet with the unions, to a culturally illiterate Minister of the Arts – this from a party which preached good management. 

Like all neo-liberals (I think we have to call them neo neo-liberals by now) they are brain dead zombies chanting slogans, Unfortunately they seem to have led National into the same abyss of idiocy.

And then catching by accident, Winston Peters’ address to the nation, I was reminded of the words of the 20th century philosopher and analyst of fascism, Hannah Arendt: The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.

The Palestinian Solidarity movement, very concerned and ashamed by Foreign Minister, Peters’refusal to make a stand against the genocide in Gaza, were protesting outside the venue where theNZ First faithful had come to listen to their leader’s State of the Nation address. Winston has of course recently been to Washington and met with some of the Trump cabal and being the opportunist that he has always been, has immediately picked up on their jargon. The people outside were ‘ignorant, left wing fascists’, ‘long haired bludgers who have never done a day’s work’, ‘Communists’, ‘anti democratic’, ‘woke’, ‘Marxist whingers, encouraged by the media’.

They don’t know what they’re talking about. He’s had meetings with the Palestinian Authority, Egypt, Indonesia and the President of Turkey and he knows the reality of geopolitics (the Palestinian Authority are collaborators with Israel, Egypt is held over a barrel economically by the US, the President of Turkey is a dictator and Indonesia is a fragile democracy, committing significant human rights abuses in West Papua and cracking down on religious minorities, women, and sexually diverse people). Not a great bunch to take your cue from.

As Winston had trouble with his articulation – he is getting on – there were echoes of Trump. When some protests erupted from the hall, he led cries of ‘shame’, and ‘get them out’. In terms of foreign policy, he has decided there are big changes happening and we should keep our own counsel, not speak out, prepare for what is happening strategically and seize the opportunities to sell our country. Ethically then, he is a barrow boy.

Later in the speech, other than the traditional NZ First’s appeal to the provinces and the need forresource extraction, development and local democracy versus Wellington bureaucrats, he was big on getting rid of diversity, equity and inclusion policies, anti-trans, anti sex education, and in an appeal to the anti-vax people, anti fluoridation, Environmentally, we make no difference anyway, so why be idealistic and wear a hair shirt.

The Labour Party and the unions are both full of university-educated woke people who have never been workers so don’t know what it’s like and have betrayed their roots. Richard Seddon was the man and we need to return to our settler realities and be one people (he forgot to say that a greatdeal of Maori land was alienated under Seddon). He didn’t say the phrase, but it will come, Make New Zealand Great Again, which would be a more emphatic way of saying, NZ First.

The problem is that Winston Peters fits Hannah Arendt’s definition of the ideal subject of totalitarianrule, perfectly. As do his followers. There is no differentiation between fact and fiction, or truth and falsehood.

So, in this coalition, we have one partner who brings the chaos of neo liberal economics and the desire to capture the state for the purposes of the rich, the other who is appealing to populism in its current form, a form which , led by Trump, is very ugly indeed. Both tendencies are essentially undemocratic and potentially totalitarian. Winston is too lazy to be evil, David is too stupid to be a big-time influencer, but together, and with a confused centre-right partner they could nudge NZ down a path of half-arsed fascism.

The election can’t come soon enough.

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As Gaza burns

As Gaza burns – once again – an important essay turns up in the New York Book Review. It happens with this conflict: a piece of writing that penetrates the hopeless evil. Last time it was Rachel Corrie’s emails; this time its Nathan Thrall’s One man’s quest to find his son.

Nathan Thrall is a journalist who has been based with a human rights organisation in Jerusalem and who has gradually realised the hopelessness of monitoring abuses in the West Bank and Gaza. Instead he has written this long essay, based around the death of a kindergarten-aged boy on a school bus which suffered a head on collision with a settler-driven vehicle driving on the wrong side of the road. When the news of the accident reaches his father, Abed, a tortuous journey begins involving detours, checkpoints, confusion as to possible hospitals the boy may have been taken to, ID problems of access, until he eventually discovers the charred corpse of his son.

The author uses the incident to unpack the dense bureaucracy of the apartheid regime that Israel has imposed on Palestinians. We can forget that (as in South Africa) the running of an apartheid state requires bureaucracy at every level of society: ID cards, residence permits, travel permits, work permits, building permits, school systems, health systems, policing, tax, roads, walls and borders, checkpoints, judicial and prison systems… it becomes immensely complex, absurd  and oppressive.

But as well as revealing this, the essay articulates the history of the desire behind the system: the desire to rid the land now called Israel of Palestinian Arabs, a desire, in fact, for ethnic cleansing. In 1948, four out of five Palestinian inhabitants were made refugees. In 1967 one in four of those remaining were expelled. Nevertheless, the higher Palestinian birth rate means half the population are Arab. The Israeli dilemma becomes then, ‘ On one hand the inability to erase the Palestinians; on the other, the unwillingness to give them political and civil rights.’ The compromise solution to this dilemma has been  the building of Jewish settlements, walls and roads, in order to fragment the Palestinian population, so that it lives in scattered pieces and cannot organise as a collective. And then to impose various decrees, laws and restrictions onto these Bantustans. And the contrast of wealth and infrastructure between the settlements and the Palestinian fragments is huge. Anger and despair builds. In a final irony, the task of administrating daily life in these areas of extreme oppression is given to a local Palestinian ‘authority’.

But the traditional task remains: Jews must take over the land and while that task is being achieved, international efforts to resolve the conflict must be ‘parried and delayed’. As Thrall relates, there is now a historical narrative to the attempts to realise this desire, expressed by the 19th century Zionists as follows: To take possession in due course of Palestine and to restore to the Jews the political independence of which they have been deprived for two thousand years.  This entailed firstly an infiltration of settlers and then the lobbying for a state. But how to justify a small number of Jews, mainly from the Russian Empire, taking over Palestine against the will of the majority?  Jews may have deserved a safe haven , but that does not give a right to dispossess, and even so, the original Zionist agenda was not a response to persecution but rather a resisting of the assimilation of Jewish identity.

Partition was accepted as a step toward obtaining the whole of Palestine and after the establishing of Israel the project of colonisation really began. Land and houses were confiscated, curfews imposed, political parties banned and Palestinians constantly humiliated. Because it had become an absurd contradiction, there was a change from a secular, semi- socialist vision of ‘Jewish redemption within the salvation of humanity’, to a religious nationalism based on the bible.  And this vision had to be fundamentalist for it would be undermined by any acceptance of a Palestinian right to self determination, which would also mean the acceptance of the refugees’ right to return and that a minority has not the right to impose on a majority.

The basically fantastic claim that the bible constitutes a land deed and that a group has the right to reclaim a territory after a two thousand year absence has to be maintained at all costs. All the secular ethical arguments have to be rejected. Accordingly, the state of Israel has never recognised the existence of an Israeli nationality. Israel is, instead, the state of the Jewish people, viewed as a single nation and spread throughout the world. The children of a non Jewish mother and a Jewish father are not Jewish, are not citizens, and whoever disconnects Jewish nationality from its religious foundations is a traitor. Israel cannot therefore entertain a liberal, secular, democratic agenda. It is necessarily an apartheid state, financed by the US government

And Abed mourns for his son.

The essay can be read at: https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2021/03/19/a-day-in-the-life-of-abed-salama/

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Art and Palestine

I’ve been feeling guilty about Palestine. I have to admit that, of late, I have deleted without reading the e-mails from the International Solidarity Movement, from Gush Shalom and from the local network—what’s the point of reading daily the latest report of the hunger strike, the latest house demolition, the latest new settlement, the latest ignoring of the latest UN Resolution, the latest shipment of US weaponry to Israel, the latest boat turned back, the latest fishing boat shelled, the ongoing water crisis in Gaza, the ongoing lack of building supplies, the latest suicide attack. What can I do? I can’t divest or boycott. I felt a moment’s pride when Murray McCully put forward the UN resolution and ‘declared war on Israel’ and then, more recently, a moment of shame as Gerry Brownlee  corrected the aberration.

I still feet a moment’s anger when some dumb opinion piece appears in the newspaper or on radio. But that’s the problem with outrage. It’s hard to sustain.

I was in Christchurch for the weekend. I borrowed a friend’s car and there was a CD on the player which immediately grabbed my attention as I negotiated the traffic to the nearest mall – Christchurch shopping now seems to focus on malls. I listened with rapt attention as a young Palestinian woman chanted intense monologues with a musical backing, each one exploring a contradiction: gaining Canadian citizenship by swearing allegiance to the Queen; or preparing for the dumb press interview as Gaza is bombed, knowing that a sound bite is all that you’ll get; or rehearsing answering the dumb interview question: Why do you teach your children to be terrorists?’ This gave the CD its title: We Teach Life.

Listening to her I was struck by the power of art to restore feeling. The last time this had happened for me with regard to Palestine, was reading the emails of Rachel Corrie. Both these young women embody in words the outrage with creative skill. The thought has feeling, the feeling has thought. This was Brecht’s definition of art.

The young woman I was listening to, Rafeef Ziadah, was born in a refugee camp in Lebanon. Palestinians born in Lebanon do not gain Lebanese citizenship so remain stateless. Somehow she got to Canada and eventually gained citizenship.  Corrie made the reverse journey, from the US to Gaza. If you google Rafeef Ziadah you’ll find a couple of clips of her performing her poems.

My friend in Christchurch also had a copy of a BBC drama series, The Promise, made in 2010. It cleverly plots the Palestinian tragedy. The grandchild of a dying grandfather, who had been a British soldier in Palestine, ‘peacekeeping’ prior to the UN resolution of 1947 which divided the country, discovers his diary. In the diary is a house key which he had promised to return to a Palestinian he had befriended. This sulky anti-hero granddaughter has an Israeli friend resident in the UK who has to return to Israel for her military service. She accompanies her friend and as she searches for the family to whom the house key belongs she encounters the contradictions and oppressions of the modern day conflict, ending up in the hell of Gaza.

Once again art made the issues accessible in a way political action cannot.

But of course art isn’t political action, simply a prologue to action, and, on these occasions, serves as a replenishment.

I’ll now open the emails.

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Two films

 

In the early years of the silent era, it was proposed that films, not requiring literacy and able to cross national borders with ease, would become the people’s art form. Sound and the capitalist mode of production soon put paid to that. But something of that hope still exists in the film festival, when it is not merely a boutique shopping experience for the aesthete. For films can still take revealing snapshots of the world.

I recently viewed two movies which fit this framing. Notes to Eternity thankfully made its way to Greymouth/Mawhera, probably because cinematographer, Alun Bollinger, who worked on the film, lives locally. It is a puzzle of a film, beginning with its title, which I don’t fathom, yet in its failure, tells more than most successes. In fact, in a world of well-made product, those that don’t quite make it aesthetically, let some truth in through the cracks.

The director, Sarah Cordery spent ten years making the movie and I imagine gathered a lot of material which had to be edited into some sort of shape. Starting off as a film about Palestine, it becomes a film about US Jewish intellectuals’ response to Palestine, which in turn becomes a response to being Jewish and the current contradictions of being Jewish, contradictions which reverberate back into history and the puzzling inability of a people to learn from their history, for example, to repeat the persecutor/victim/rescuer pattern, even while trying to escape it. How can a people with intimate knowledge of the Warsaw ghetto, create Gaza? How can people with intimate knowledge of fascism create a state which, if not classically fascist, acts like a fascist state? And does the role of activist intellectual assuage guilt or is it a career in itself, with the spin offs of career?

Chomsky, Finkelstein and Roy let Cordery into their homes and family lives (to an extent) and the glimpses are tantalising, as are the glimpses of young Jewish Americans with their passionate confusion. For behind the Jewish question lies the US using of Israel as a security guard to protect its oil interests in the Middle East

Palestine becomes then the ruined backdrop, a disaster tourism destination, a wall to be graffitied, with a traumatised people behind it. But the people still find gaps in the wall, and remain dignified as they ponder their own existential question: should we recognise Israel? It is a question which remains fundamentally problematic – even Chomsky fudged this one. If you recognise Israel there’s no right of return. If you don’t, Israel has the right not to negotiate. How can you negotiate if your negotiating partner doesn’t recognise your existence (even if evidentially, your possession of a large military force and nuclear arsenal and the backing of the US means you certainly do exist)?

The documentary circles these issues, searching for a form. The scene titles and animation are a valiant effort, but don’t ultimately do the job, so Cordery ends up free associating around interviews and recordings of lectures and public meetings, which are repetitious, for that is the nature of advocacy. And then the problem of how to finish, for there is no finish to this in the forseeable future. Meanwhile there is the Robert Fisk Lebanon material which doesn’t really fit, but is good material so has to be used. But it is a great failure of a documentary, one which the viewer will remember long past slicker pieces.

And then I watched Straight Outta Compton, which I had missed and intuitively wanted to see, that drama doco about the gangsta rap boys from LA who were swept up by market forces, got to say their piece, before falling apart because of naivety, greed, thuggery and police brutality. Here is the underbelly of the system played out in almost Shakespearian fashion, a lumpen proletariat, traumatised and brutalised, but still cheeky, even with occasional dignity, pondering their own existential question: niggers with attitude? Twenty years later, they have morphed into the Black Lives Matter movement.

So, two snapshots from the centre of the Empire, a filmic crossing of borders with ease.

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