Global Palestine: Contemporary Collisions

Collateral Language“Language is a terrorist organization, and we stand united against terrorism.”  So began Collateral Language, a book I co-authored with a group of my colleagues shortly after the 9/11 attacks.  We wanted to call attention to the fact that in the aftermath of such a traumatic event, language can become a battlefield in a new kind of war – a war to leverage the event itself in the service of a response that stretches well beyond specific military campaigns. 

9/11, we suspected, would become a key moment in a much longer story of political and social transformation.  Language, we suspected, would be not only a casualty of 9/11, but also the currency through which these transformations would be sold to the American people and a central mechanism through which they would be carried out. 

We didn’t know how right we were. 

Barcelona, July 2011Every day it becomes clearer and clearer that the global financial elite is leading us down a path of auto-destruction.  Long constructed as the risk-taking heroes of our age (the "job-creators," in right-wing doublespeak), the great barons of financial speculation are slowly being unmasked as the monumental swindlers that the most insightful analysts of global political economy have always known them to be.  The political class, in turn, are being unmasked not as governors but rather as cynical and sycophantic managers of a decaying, suicidal system - magicians who deflect attention from the proverbial "men behind the curtain."  And with that unmasking has come a wave of popular anger and protest that continues to astound.  While the challenges facing the "Arab Spring" seem more daunting than ever, it would be foolish to assume that popular mobilization for change in the region has been exhausted.  On the periphery of the European core, the indignados of Spain (labeled by one analyst as the "vanguard of a global nonviolent revolt") and their counterparts in Italy, Greece and elsewhere continue to experiment with alternatives to the Axis of Endocolonization that is systematically funneling resources from the poor and middle classes to the super-rich.  Even Israelis are getting into the act, recently launching their own street protests against the "wholesale collapse of the public sector." 

The next time anyone tries to tell you that “the occupation” (meaning the post-1967 Israeli military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza) is the core of the issue in Israel/Palestine, politely but firmly tell them that they’re off by twenty years. Today, May 15, is the day Palestinians commemorate al-Nakba (“the Catastrophe”), the day the state of Israel declared its independence in 1948, putting a public seal of approval on the near-destruction of Palestinian society.  Without the Nakba, the Zionist movement never could have achieved its goal of creating a majority-Jewish state in Palestine.  Equally important, on a day of clashes at numerous sites in and around Israel/Palestine, many journalists continue to collaborate in the perpetuation of a discursive framework that helps shield Israel from legal responsibility for the effect of the Nakba. (Image by SlimVirgin at en.wikipedia [Public domain], from Wikimedia Commons)

During the past couple of years I have written occasionally about the Free Gaza project, a significant international solidarity effort designed to break the Israeli siege of the Gaza Strip and, more generally, call attention to the blockade's impact on the population of Gaza.  A new flotilla of boats is now on the way to Gaza, and of course the world is wondering how the Netanyahu government will respond.  The Jerusalem Post reports that Israeli forces have been training in "crowd-dispersion techniques which it may need to use to commandeer the vessels."  Meanwhile, one al-Jazeera journalist is getting a little fed up with the attitude of the activists.  Stay tuned.  In the meantime, the activists have created a very useful site, http://www.witnessgaza.com/, which allows you to follow the progress of the boats.