Arab Spring Carpets

This will be my last blog post for the Spring. Thank you my dear readers (all seven three of you). Stay tuned for the fall return...oh the suspense!

I'll end on a colorful note as part of my effort to insert more color to this blog. Beloved "Arab Fall" and "Arab Spring" carpets by talented and avant-garde Lebanese designers bokja.

From the designers' words to your eyes:

Bokja’s map of the “Arab Fall” interweaves imported jeans as a backdrop for the sad reality of an Arab world where imported fads and fast foods have replaced timeless traditions and native delicacies: 

That was then, this is now in the hopeful season of the Arab uprisings: 

The flying elephant serves as a reminder of all the inane slogans that have been forced upon generations of an incredulous citizenry across the region.

It is this awakening that delineates Bokja’s Arab Spring map.

The background is an old valuable carpet (representing our core values) that should be the basis of any new start.

The carpet is in a dilapidated state, like many of our discarded ideals and is in need of resurrection.

The mood is that of optimism and rejuvenation.

The symbols are many, among them a woman riding a horse on the road to a new and unknown world.

If I could say a word the Spring carpet is, of course, awesome...an artistic tapestry and momento in offering to this propitious time in the Arab world when the Arabs have staked a claim to their dignity, proud of their ancient heritage, as the wellspring for their collective future. 

What I like best is the rooster raised forth from Tunisia as the crying call to the Arabs...the home of the Arab uprisings. 

And Handala. The little Palestinian refugee symbolizing (for me, anyhow) that the Arab uprisings, the Arab fight for dignity and freedom, will not be complete until freedom for the Palestinians has be achieved...until the refugees return...until the world stops turning its back on Handala. 

Neat carpets!

Palestine Suspended Between Old & New

500 Dunam On the Moon is a short and affecting documentary (by an American) about the Palestinian village Ayn Hawd, south of Haifa, ethnically cleansed of its native Arab community by Zionist terrorist militias in the 1948 Israeli war on Palestine (Ayn Hawd is located in the territory demarcated for the Jewish state in the proposed United Nations partition plan). Ignoring a United Nations General Assembly, nearly unanimously renewed every year since, calling for the right of return of Palestinian refugees forcibly evicted or compelled to flight by the war (and direct Zionist threats) from their homes, Israel has refused to allow the original inhabits to resettle on their land.

Instead in 1953, the Israel state expropriated the land and help set up an artist colony on stolen Palestinian land - an illustrative example of the deceptive and fraudulent nature of Israel's incessant self-admiration as some sort of enlightened island in a sea of jungle Arabs. A nation that builds and markets its 'humanitarianism' on the ruins of another people.

But unlike many other Palestinians, the residents of Ayn Hawd did not end up outside the borders of Palestine. Their eviction did not throw them into, say, Lebanon but - to borrow jargon - down the block. Ayn Hawd became the Hebrew Ein Hod (a common theme in Israel is the renaming, or Arabic to Hebrew modification, of violently depopulated Arab villages) and Ayn Hawd resurfaced as a refugee suburb of its former home and its residents made into Israeli citizens.

The residents are entitled to the basics of Israeli citizenship law (to be distinguished - and this is crucial - from nationalism which is only afforded to Jewish subjects with all its commensurate privileges) but their new home isn't recognized by Israel. Placing them in legal limbo and without access to state services, such as paved roads. Housing permits are similarly denied. Palestinians may build anyway, but Israel may then cite the construction as illegal and demolish. Why doesn't Israel just recognize this new Arab community, especially as its inhabitants have effectively given up returning to their old homes? No specific reason is given and this case isn't unique. Many Arab villages remain unrecognized. Perhaps Israeli authorities do not want to provide services that would come with recognition. More likely a future eviction is in the works. The new Ayn Hawd, like the old, is located on prime real estate: the lush coast with mountain views and the Mediterranean Sea as backdrop. Israel may one day decide to build Jewish housing here and recognizing the current Arab village would make the current residents - even in Israel - harder to force out once again.

There is a lot to unravel in this short, but of great depth, film. But I want to concentrate on a few notes I took while watching:

- There is the case of the Palestinian (and hereinafter all Palestinians referenced are residents of the new Ayn Hawd descendent from the original town) who spent his years renovating old houses in the old town, now occupied by Israelis, alongside building the new housing to accomodate the growing - exclusively Jewish - settlers. The renovation of homes is clearly a deeply painful experience: Here is a Palestinian appearing perhaps old enough to have been a child at the time of eviction partaking in the architectural rebirth of his former town not for its rightful inhabitants longing to return but for individuals with no attachment beyond having found land advertised as deserted by the Israeli state. He resignes, and justifies, his conduct by stating that he needed to work. Today Palestinians on the West Bank build illegal Israeli settlements on the same premise.

Our Palestinian renovator recaps how the Israelis sought to convey friendship - but it was a phony hand. He later discovered that they were not his friends, he says, and he was only courted provided he worked for the Israelis and kept silent. Bringing up your grandfather's home, he relates, would cause anxiety among town residents who fear that the Palestinians may begin to demand the returning of their property. If only they'd recognize, at a minium, that they (the Israelis) took the land by force, but even this solace is denied him. One thing that is really bothersome, and this is me speaking, about Zionists is the refusal to even recognize past injustices. Put aside the debate as to whether those wrongs should be amended through compensation for Palestinians, return of property, and right of return of refugees - but even the acknowledgement that Israel has committed a historic injustice against the indigenous population is denied. This is akin to refusing to hand back Manhattan to the Indians (that's well understood), but denying that they were ever thrown off the land. 

- One incredibly striking scene was the fire that broke out in the mountains surrounding Ayn Hawd/Ein Hod and that enveloped the town itself. The documentary slices together news clips from Israel that (unbeknownst to them) tell the Palestinian story through contemporary events: Israeli anchors speak about how the fire has 'forced people out' and how they 'cannot return to their homes' and wonders whether this was a 'natural cause or crime'. In the end, Arabs - without evidence - were suspected but the residents of new Ayn Hawd strongly denied the charge. The town, even inhabited by occupiers, is their longed for home. Why would they want to burn it? It is, as one says, "our national home". 

In an amusing anecdote, the Israeli-occupied Ayn Hawd is apparently more threatened by the fire then the Ayn Hawd reestablished by Arabs due to the former having being surrounded by a ring of trees recently laid by the state. Trees described by Palestinians as "artificial". These trees may be the product of the Jewish National Fund which plants trees on razed Palestinian villages in an act of cruel beautification meant to erase the footprints of Palestine - some may call this "greenwashing" Israeli occupation. 

- Lastly, there is the artist whose paintings of Ayn Hawd represent neither old nor new Ayn Hawd; speaking to that suspended nature of Palestinian existence between a lost home and an indistinct future neither of which can be strictly captured by the brush. 

Palestinians show their humanity in these vulnerable moments of a state of exception - not recognized as a refugee nor resettled - in the state itself constructed as a state of exception. 

The paintings cannot resemble the old Ayn Hawd for remembrance is now deeply interwoven with the present tragedy. The town is now no longer the town as previously known because it can only be seen  through a rear view mirror; so the immemorial image is amended through memory - writing history, but, rather, here memory, backwards.

The painter cannot draw the past as past because its very existence is denied by the occupying state. It is as if the artist in refusing to draw the old Ayn Hawd but still labeling it as "old" is crying out for the nostalgia for nostalgia. 

And the "new" cannot just be a realist painting since that would accept the Zionist mythology and hegemony of discourse. Instead even though the colonizers may not recognize it (although they belie it in their fear, their inner knowledge, that Palestinians will give life and claim to their past existence and aspire to one day return), the Palestinian cannot draw the artifice of Zionist architecture without weaving through the history of dispossession and displacement that breaths - as it were - throughout the land. Thus the "new" Ayn Hawd is not painted as Israel imagines it since it invariably contains the old lost village. Like the Palestinian cause, that ancient Ayn Hawd cannot be extinguished. May it rise again. 

I highly recommend this film. 

Where's The Palestinian Gandhi?

Wendy Pearlman, Crown Junior Chair in Middle East Studies and Assistant Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University, spoke at KEVO this past week on her new book: Violence, Nonviolence and the Palestinian National Movement. 

Previously the author of  Occupated Voices, it was during that book tour that she often heard the common refrain, "yes, the Palestinians are suffering, but why do they resort to suicide bombings and the like?" Why is the Palestinian national struggle allegedly violent? She decided to make that her dissertation and the result is the aforementioned text. 

The Palestinian cause has never been exclusively violent, of course. Palestinians took up violence long after Zionist militias, many headed by future premiers of Israel, pioneered their own violence and terrorism in the name of "Israeli independence"against the British and the native Palestinians. Palestinians resisted Zionism in mostly non-violent manners until the late 1960s when some factions adopted political violence. 

But this was not universal. As Pearlman notes, the First Intifada was mostly nonviolent. It consisted of boycott action, marches, local committees and maintained a nonviolent cohesive postur even in the face of a brutal Israeli violence aiming to further subordinate the Palestinians. While over 1,000 Palestinians civilians were killed by Israel during the Intifada roughly a dozen Israelis were killed by Palestinians - demonstrating the asymmetry of the conflict but also Palestinian nonviolence. 

A little more than a decade later the Second Intifada erupted and this time violence was clearly embraced by various Palestinian factions in response to continued Israeli military occupation - most infamously in the use of suicide bombings. Over 4,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israeli civilians were killed. Why the divergence of tactics? 

Why do some movements use nonviolent protest, others violent, and what is the source of this variation over time? 

A common assumption is strategic purpose (what they think will work), or culture or religion. In seeking to explain her theory, Pearlman adopts what she calls the Organizational Mediation Theory of Protest based on two principles: 

1) cohesion increases possibility for nonviolence

2) fragmentation increases possibility for violence 

So the First Intifada 1987-1993 was defined by linkage, network, activist ethic, unity, and national consensus in Palestinian civil society that established the boundaries of political conduct, nonviolent boundaries.

But the Oslo period serves as a period of fragmentation between factions - divisions arise - and the system is based on a vulnerable hold by 'Arafat. Public opinion is directionless and there is a lack of unity. Thus when negotiations fail it no longer is clear what to fight for. So that the Second Intifada does not look like the First. 

Many of the mechanisms that were maintained during the First Intifada were undermined through intra and inter factional division - class, generational and tactical. This veering away from cohesion was a result of conflict among Palestinians, but at heart due mostly to the continued occupation (more on that below). 

Thus the organization of nonviolence is no longer there - although many villages organize nonviolent cohesive protest - but at national level organizational cohesion, a source of leverage on political factions, has become diffuse. 

Thus (to be brief) Pearlman's answer to the Where's the Palestinian Gandhi? question is quite simple: 

Anyone who supports nonviolent protest should also support a depending variable, a strong and united Palestinian movement. Don't protest about the lack of a Palestinian Gandhi when Israeli occupation policies create the very atmosphere for fragmentation, violence, internal and external factional fighting that create the context where violence is then used. Protest the latter first. 

And Pearlman documents that a long history exists, beginning with the British, where Palestinian nonviolent leaders - who can exercise restrain and nonviolent direction - are arrested if not executed. It is not that the Palestinians protest violently or nonviolently in the eyes of their occupies, British and Zionist, but that they protest at all. And what is left except a disorganized population with no effective channel but the now directionless (but, in their eyes, purposive) violence? Is it any wonder that peripheral violence (most Palestinians are victims of violence and not perpetrators) takes place in this context?

The very occupation power Israel paradoxically claims there is "no partner for peace" while cementing her very policies that undermine the prospect for a strong nonviolent partner committed to concession.

A cynic (and this is not necessarily Pearlman's interpretation) would say that "peace" isn't really the goal for Israel since genuine peace would necessitate a strong Palestinian national movement, which is perceived as a threat to Zionism. Better to keep the Palestinians divided and weak, frustrated and angered, and occasionally strike at them (as in Gaza 2008-2009) in an interminable effort to sabotage Palestinian aspirations. And, where possible, outsource the occupation to willing Palestinians (the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank) while Israel maintains a matrix of control that seeks to deny to Palestinians any hope in political action. Violence, as long as it can be managed by Israel and isn't existential, may be useful: allowing the state to portray Palestinians as a pack of terrorists lacking any peaceful intentions and thus unworthy of statehood and consequently allowing Israel to maintain its grip on the West Bank and continue unabated the colonization scheme via illegal settlements under the pretext that there is no negotiating partner. "No partner for peace" becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as the very occupation creates that condition. 

But is the cause hopeless for Palestinian? Pearlman argues not. She does not see redemption in the recent Hamas-Fatah unity deal which may just allow for continued factional rivalry under new cover, but takes hope from the growing grass-roots village movements - organic, locally-coordinated and peaceful - that may be the future basis for a strong Palestinian national movement. This will require perseverance and patience.