Stabbed in The Back

Iraqi-born Jewish novelist Sami Michael comes on TV to explain to a disinterested presenter that the reason he likes the Palestinian Wadi Nisnas neighbourhood of Haifa is because, unlike other such places, “you don’t have to worry all the time that someone’s going to stab you in the back”. This is the same Sami Michael that has elsewhere questioned the powers that be for their automatic labelling of Hizbullah and Hamas as “terrorist” organisations; the same Sami Michael who has written passionately about the pressures and violences attending his personal journey from a communist Arabic home to a nationalist Hebrew culture; the same Sami Michael that has declared himself unwilling to obey the vulgar zionist logic which produces Arab and Jew as irreconcilably oppositional categories of identification. So what’s he up to? A momentary lapse of reason? Or has he finally reconciled himself in old age to the essential murderous violence of that devious Arab creeping up behind him and in doing so fully joined the zionist consensus?

Michael’s writing and public intellectual output has been critical of the zionist project of colonial nation-forming in Palestine. At times he has sought to assert and celebrate his own Arab identity against the monolithic de-Arabising mechanisms established in the absorption and subordination of other Jews of Arab origin. He has pointed accusingly at the engineered efforts to “de-socialise and re-socialise” Arab Jews as Israel’s Oriental Jewish ethno-working class, and has gone so far as to declare his ultimate cultural affinity for and identification with wider Arabic and Arab culture. But his is a “loyal opposition” limited by its adherence to (and endorsement of) the parameters of permissible dissent; rock the boat – but don’t take an axe to the hull. So far as this zionist dissent does not extend to any macro-level challenge to the domain structures of racist ideology and colonial practice, but instead limits itself to vocal outrage and indignity at certain features emanating from these structures (such as land-use discrimination or unequal access to state resources), it is not only tolerated by more conservative actors and institutions, but encouraged. It emerges as an indispensable ingredient in the generation of the fraud of Israeli democratic dynamism and political diversity, displacing more radical critiques in proudly and obediently occupying the space reserved for dissent; a space which comes therefore to determine and constrain the very limits of dissent.

"Cafe Tamar" - Tel Aviv. Gaza, Bomb: isolated for dissent, Independence Day poster: permission to dissent

The “loyal opposition” is fundamentally, passionately, vocally, and only opposed to features of the regimes, ideologies, and processes which generate Jewish supremacism and demand Palestinian oppression. As such, it remains enthusiastically involved in the perpetuation and reinforcement of the structures which demand, govern, calibrate, and command those self same features. The “loyal opposition” opposes certain isolated symptoms of contemporary zionism, such as the procedures governing the passage of medical emergency cases through checkpoints. It opposes the killing of civilians, not least minors, killed while posing no threat to Israel’s national security. It comes out in strength against the indiscriminate torture of Palestinian detainees. It tours the world, feted by activists and scholars, to declare its principled opposition to the settlement programmes and state policy of “targeted killings”. In short, this proud opposition declares itself opposed to infanticide, murder, population transfer, and torture; it does not advocate infanticide, nor murder, nor population transfer, and not torture. It has generated out of these noble commitments a popular canon of songs, poems, literature and art which express or symbolise this brave stance; it is studded with glittering celebrity scholars, novelists, poets, sculptors and – of course – ex-officers.

So since when was it a political act to oppose infanticide and torture? Since when did these small chips buy you a place at the table of progressive dissent? Symptoms are easy things to rail against. So long as you enjoy a form of self-inflicted myopia which allows you to separate and isolate symptoms from causes. So long as “tragedies” and “excesses” are all that gets your goat, you can surely protect yourself from the levels and types of contextual understanding that might point to your own implication, and to the core determinants of oppression. It gets worse though, as the “loyal opposition” goes yet further in flagging its allegiance to the zionist project. Not content with simply ignoring the wider structural processes and ideologies which underpin the selected instances of violence they elect to oppose, members of the “loyal opposition” appear compelled beyond all reason to conform to a cowardly and embarrassing logic tying their “permission to dissent” to a tribute at the altar of conformity. Thus, Sami Michael can like an “Arab” neighbourhood, and express his own “Arabic” identity, but feels compelled in expressing such a “disruptive” sentiment to signal his allegiance to the demonising Arab-hatred that marks his commitment to the rules of the game. Likewise, Israel’s Amnesty International representative prefaces a TV slot questioning the conveniently distant Guantanamo Bay by declaring – I believe in a departure from Amnesty’s mission statement – that the organisation is “first and foremost here to help in the war on terror”.

"Co-Existence" fayre, Haifa: A 2-D "Arab" construction labourer offers traditional coffee...

The “loyal opposition” is at its finest when demonstrating its “love” of “Arabs.” No opportunity is missed here. The lengths that these few brave men and women will go to in order to publicly associate with members of another nation, religion and even political persuasion is truly staggering. These remarkable souls who, as noted (and lets not forget), oppose infanticide and murder, now fill newspaper columns, galleries, and speaking tours with tales of the “Arabs” with whom, they announce like born-again evangelicals, they discover “common ground.” But here again, it is apparently not sufficient – or not sufficiently loyal – for the “loyal opposition” to merely announce their co-humanity with members of another nation. This might imply some sort of wavering vis-à-vis the hallowed nation-state purity project after all, and no one wants that. So the “loyal opposition” finds itself burdened with a task to which creative efforts have been directed – reducing the “Arab” to a 2-dimensional passive object… a form of currency exchanged internationally in return for “progressive” credentials, but constantly policed and subordinated lest it speak independently of the meagre task it is recognised as fulfilling. No algorithm need be designed to gauge how many Palestinians, after a century of oppression, impoverishment, marginalisation, and demonisation will be prepared to fill the odious post of wingman in this dynamic. At its most effective, the “loyal opposition” is able to reduce the Palestinian quite literally to two dimensions; visual backdrops for celebrations of “tolerance” broadcast around the world.

The world inhabited by academics, staffed as it is by so many of the “loyal opposition,” is meanwhile fast becoming the effective avant garde in the ongoing colonisation and eradication of Palestine and its people. Its “new historians” and “critical social scientists” package treatments of Israeli society which, a full century after the zionist organisation formed its Palestine Colonisation Association, over 75 years since the Palestinian national leadership protested colonisation in Palestine, and many decades after Palestinian and international scholarship surveyed the colonial process and ideology, today announces its “discovery” of the origins of the Palestinian refugee problem, its “discovery” of colonialism… etc. Knowledge, narrative and “truth” is in this way captured to the safe confines of the “loyal opposition” and Palestinian and international dissent of a more fundamental and principled stripe is silenced, consigned to a fictive non-history. The “loyal opposition” by virtue of its loyalty to the nation-state project constitutes here a biopolitical weapon, occupying, reinscribing, containing, and finally disseminating a current and fashionable treatment of another people’s oppression.

No danger of being stabbed in the back: 2-D image replaces Palestinian vendors at this Wadi Nisnas grocers

And what are the epistemological tools employed in this creative enterprise? European advances in theory and methodology; these give purchase to the “loyal opposition” in its – successful – struggle to claim the right to speak about (and hence for) Palestinian suffering and resistance. The application of French and German theory to the colonisation of the Palestinian experience is of course, not new. It was French and German technical knowledge and expertise which guided the agro-economy of the initial colonisation and displacement processes.