Dennis Fox’s Weblog

Thanks to a Fulbright award, I’ll be teaching at York University in Toronto for the fall 2009 semester, doing some other talks, and fitting in some Ontario travel. I’ve only been to Toronto a few times for conferences, so I’m looking forward to more extensive wandering.

My seminar, for graduate students and advanced undergraduates, is called Psychology and Society in Critical Perspective. It’s interdisciplinary, so I hope non-psychology students also sign up. Limited to 15 students, it should be informal and flexible, maybe even fun. If you’re in the Toronto area or know anyone who might be interested, you can read the preliminary details

The seminar expands on various courses I’ve taught in the past and combines many of my long-time interests, some of them touched on in this blog but more often in articles on my regular website. Here’s the core of the description:

This advanced interdisciplinary seminar explores interactions among individuals, the community, and the larger society. It builds especially on challenges to basic assumptions posed by critical psychology and anarchist theory. Interpreting social psychology broadly, we examine material from anthropology, sociology, politics, law, education, philosophy, and other fields. Student input is central as we try to make sense of topics such as these:

• everyday choices about the things we take for granted;
• the tension between autonomy and community within corporatized and globalized societies, especially those whose individualistic ethos conflicts with indigenous, egalitarian, environmental, and other subcultural values;
• the influence of institutions such as schools, universities, corporations, legislatures, courts, religious bodies, and the media;
• law’s assumptions about human nature, the implications of legal thinking and the rule of law, the sources of legal and political legitimacy, and the link between law and justice;
• social scientists’ ideological and methodological assumptions, especially social psychological approaches to power, hierarchy, competition, values, justice, group dynamics, aggression, conflict resolution, and similar subjects;
• mainstream psychology’s societal role; and
• prospects for achieving mutuality and liberation.

If you do live in Toronto and know a place I could rent for four months, preferably closer to downtown than York, please let me know!

I neglected to post anything two weeks ago when Shachaf Polakow of Israel’s Anarchists Against the Wall came through Boston on a fund-raising tour. (Since Israel has started arresting rather than simply tear-gassing and shooting Israelis and Palestinians engaged in non-violent anti-Occupation efforts, legal costs have escalated beyond $100,000. If you can, help; the money will first pay for Palestinian legal defense and then for Israeli costs.)

In addition to Shachaf’s largest Boston event - a panel discussion with Noam Chomsky and Leila Farsakh - I went with him to a smaller discussion at Kavod House, a local progressive Jewish organization for twenty- and thirty-somethings. During the discussion after Shachaf’s slide-and-video presentation, I made a point I’ve made before when talking about his group: Unlike many of the more numerous Israeli liberals and left-Zionists I’ve met who know something is rotten in Israeli democracy and Israeli society but are unwilling to reach conclusions that should be obvious, anarchists engaged in direct action against the Wall seem refreshingly unconflicted. It’s been useful to meet Israelis who seem able to put aside Israel’s nationalist and religious mythology and focus on what justice demands.

I’ve just finished reading Uri Gordon’s new book Anarchy Alive! Anti-Authoritarian Politics from Practice to Theory. Uri’s an Israeli anarchist who teaches Environmental Ethics, Social Analysis of the Environment, and Environmental Politics at the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, which I’ve noted here before. We were scheduled to meet back in November during my most recent West Bank/Israel trip but I had to come home early instead. I had hoped to get his take on several topics, so am glad now to at least have the book. It’s a good clear read.

Anarchy Alive! highlights and dissects issues that divide anarchists, focusing on power and influence, violence, technology, and - most relevant here - the incongruous anarchist relationship to national struggles, as seen most directly right now in the work of Anarchists Against the Wall. Uri doesn’t try to resolve every issue, no doubt an impossible task; it’s useful enough that he addresses them head on and draws out many of the difficulties anarchists face in making their way through a long and varied terrain.

Uri has a related piece on the history of anarchism in Israel, including influences on the early kibbutz movement, a movement that served as my own teenage introduction to the notion that we don’t have to accept things as they are.

Despite the touring and writing, Israel’s anarchists continue their direct action campaign in support of Palestinian resistance. Their website has much information, including video clips. And a way to send them some money.

Technorati Tags: Anarchists Against the Wall, Anarchy Alive, Shachaf Polakow, Uri Gordon

Bill Templer’s push for thinking beyond the usual one-state/two-state framework comes at a good time for me as I begin to plan my next Israel/Palestine trip. His wide-ranging anarchist food for thought in Monthly Review is worth reading.

Technorati Tags: critical psychology, anarchism, Israel, one-state solution, Palestine, two-state solution

Kobi Snitz from Anarchists Against the Wall and Rateb Abu Rahma from the Bil’in village organizing committee have been speaking at colleges around the northeastern US for the past couple of weeks. They stayed at my place when they were in Boston, and I went with them to talks at Brandeis and Harvard. Their tour was hosted by FFIPP, Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, the group that organized the delegation I went to Israel and Palestine with almost three years ago.

As noted in my last posting, I don’t have time now to say much, but I wanted to link to Bil’in’s struggle against the Separation Wall, or fence in this case, a topic I’ve written about many times. Bil’in’s very useful website has lots of photos, video, news releases, and more. The village has been fighting the wall for years, and the weekly non-violent demonstrations have gone on for almost three years. Rateb and Kobi’s’ slideshow did a great job showing the varied creative efforts to dramatize the Wall’s impact on Palestinian life. These photos and more are on the Bil’in village website. I was glad to saw a few of my own photos there, like this one from January 2005 showing village committee members pointing out the barrier’s route just before construction started (I have many more on my photo site):

Although the tour’s primary focus wasn’t fund-raising, the Bil’in committee and Anarchists Against the Wall have huge legal bills. The village is in constant litigation against the fence in Israeli courts. Although they recently won a partial victory, there’s much more to go.

Anarchists Against the Wall has continuing legal expenses for Israelis arrested during the weekly Bil’in protests. If you can, please donate.

Technorati Tags: Anarchists Against the Wall, Bil’in, FFIPP, Israel, Palestine

From Apio comes links to two Italian anarchist assessments of Israel/Palestine.

1. Palestine, mon amour offers a decade of short pieces by Alfred M. Bonanno. Here are excerpts from the introduction, written in 2003, with some apparently awkward translation:

…
The ‘official’ terms of the controversy are well known. The Israelis chased the Palestinians off their land, but this happened so long ago that some of the people born in huts in the camps are now fifty years old. Ridiculous arguments between States have resulted in pieces of land being returned to people who had been driven away, but it is impossible to live on them. In Israel if you don’t work you go hungry. The colons [colonists] of the second Zionist wave got rich through the exploitation of a cheap Palestinian work force and the free use of fields in territories that should now constitute the new State of Palestine. But not only does all this fail to grasp the essence of the problem, it does not even begin to describe it. Perhaps it made sense at the time of the first popular insurrection of the people of the ‘territories’, that of the stones. Now things are moving towards an increasingly ferocious ‘Lebanisation’.
…
And so they continue to attack each other in a never-ending cycle. Each side uses the weapons they have at their disposal: the Palestinians blow themselves up with their own bombs, the Israelis bomb houses in the territories from planes. There are the pacification maps, the internal agreements, the UN guarantees and Bush’s empty rhetoric.

The problem is developing at its own pace, one that can only be grasped by someone who is familiar with such situations, and it is becoming chronic. Hatred becomes acute when one lives in conditions like the Palestinians’, with prospects like theirs, i.e., none at all. There is no hope for their children or for the future of the place where they were born…. They realize that there is nothing for them but a prospect of hatred of an enemy that imprisons, bombs and tortures. On the other side, everyone lives in fear of being blown up as they go to work, dance in a disco, lie asleep in their beds. Here again, blind hatred that sees no alternative is pushing people to demand that the government apply stronger measures. …

There is no prospect of peace in sight. The ideal solution, at least as far as all those who have the freedom of peoples at heart can see, would be generalised insurrection. In other words, an intifada starting from the Israeli people, that is capable of destroying the institutions that govern them and of proposing peace based on collaboration and mutual respect with the Palestinian people directly, without intermediaries. But for the time being this perspective is only a dream. We must prepare for the worst.

2. I’m less clear about the author of Fawda (Anarchy). It begins with a quote from Martin Buber from 1929:

“Let’s remember the way other people have treated us and how they still treat us everywhere, as foreigners, as inferiors. Let’s guard against considering what is foreign and insufficiently known as inferior! Let’s guard against doing ourselves that which was done to us.”

It ends with this:

As the supreme representative of the victims of the supreme anti-democratic horror – nazism – Israel could thus administer a symbolic capital all the more powerful because the neighboring lands are in the hands of dictatorial regimes that don’t hesitate in resorting to violence against their own populations (particularly Palestinians) when necessary. And since the state of Israel cultivated a form of democracy that would like to resemble that of ancient Greece – where the “freedom” of the citizens was based on the slavery of the helots – it was consecrated as the local representative of democracy and western reason, bulwark against the shadow of Islamism. The state of Israel can therefore cause terror to reign all around itself, firm in its super-right, proud of its super-good conscience. This does not prevent it from being condemned to practice a politics of separation at its interior and aggression at its exterior in order to survive. Meanwhile the constant reminders of the misfortunes suffered in the past by the Jews only serve as moral justifications for covering up the horrors carried out in the present. 

I’m writing this on my way home. It’s more than two weeks since I left Minneapolis, following the mis-named Dialogue on the Wall, for what’s becoming my annual visit to British Columbia’s Denman Island. Last week, anarchist writer and activist Ron Sakolsky interviewed me on his weekly Tree Frog Radio show, mostly about Israel’s Anarchists Against the Wall. Last Wednesday I gave a slideshow and presentation to a group of interested islanders, mostly about the weekly Bil’in protests.

By coincidence, on Tuesday and Wednesday Israel’s Supreme Court issued two decisions about the Separation Wall’s route through Bil’in’s land. The first decision — to re-route the barrier slightly and make it easier for villagers to reach their land — is being celebrated by villagers as a victory, and in many ways it is. The second decision, though — to allow Israeli settlers to remain in buildings the court had already declared illegally constructed — seems to me more typical of Israeli policy. I’ll be surprised if the first decision is fully implemented; in any case, the barrier’s incursion into the West Bank to take in Modiin Ilit and related settlements remains undisturbed.

Israel/Palestine also came up at this weekend’s Anarchist Bookfair in Victoria. Talk of occupation seemed especially natural in connection with Vancouver Island’s own indigenous occupied nations. Local anarchists took close to a hundred visiting anarchists on an anti-colonial walking tour of downtown Victoria. It was a fascinating, and heart-breaking, look at the continuing consequences of occupation in this very British-toned city.

In talking about Anarchists Against the Wall, I noted two things in particular. One was the group’s sensitivity to the needs of the Bil’in village organizers and residents who invite them to participate in the weekly protests. The other was the refreshing lack of ambivalence about Israel’s oppressive policies. Many Israelis I met during my recent visits — students, professors, friends, taxi drivers, many others, mostly on the liberal-to-left Zionist mainstream –  were fully aware of Israel’s failure to live up to its democratic pretensions but seemed incapable of moving further. Anarchists Against the Wall, on the other hand, freed of allegiance to state or religion, had a clearer awareness that injustice is something to try to eradicate rather than endure. I liked that.

The anarchists I met at the Victoria bookfair also departed in many ways from the public image of anarchy as violent chaos. Sure, there’s plenty of young tattooed people wearing black. But It’s worth getting past the image to learn what anarchists have to say about a issues central to life in society. Or at least read some of the immensely diverse literature an anarchist bookfair, or online bookseller, displays.

More another time. My plane is about to board. Time to go..

Neve Gordon, an Israeli activist/professor I met just before leaving Ben Gurion University last December, has written a fund-raising appeal for Israel’s Anarchists Against the Wall. Appearing in The Nation Online and elsewhere, Gordon’s appeal puts the anarchist effort in context. Some excerpts:

Over the past five years the Israeli peace camp has dwindled….

Among the most committed … are Israel’s Anarchists Against the Wall. Yet, over the past two years they have been under an ongoing attack, and it is becoming more and more difficult for them to continue their struggle….

…Day in and day out, they travel in small groups through the West Bank, supporting nonviolent direct action that helps Palestinian farmers gain access to their fields and crops, while opposing the construction of the separation barrier and the confiscation of occupied land.

One of the most remarkable qualities of these young Israelis is their subversive use of their own privilege, employing it not for self-interested social, economic or political gain–as most people do–but rather in order to stand up to power. The anarchists, in other words, exploit the privilege that comes with their Jewish identity and use it as a strategic asset against the brutal policies of the Jewish state. As Jewish activists they are well aware that the Israeli military behaves very differently when Israeli Jews are present during a protest in the West Bank and that the level of violence, while still severe, is much less intense. ….

—
When the Israeli police began to realize that beating and detaining them would not stop their stubborn resistance, a different strategy was adopted. Scores of legal indictments were issued by the state prosecutor. ….

Unlike the struggle inside the occupied territories, the legal battle to protect civil liberties requires financial resources, which the anarchists do not have. The state knows this is the anarchists’ Achilles’ heel and has been trying to undermine their peace-building activities by making them pay hefty legal fees. Although [their lawyer, Gaby] Lasky is working for little more than minimum wage, the anarchists’ struggle cannot be sustained without help from concerned individuals around the world.

I’ve mentioned Anarchists Against the Wall several times on this blog, in connection to the weekly Bil’in protests and other issues. I met several of the members in Tel Aviv as well as Bil’in. I’ll second Gordon’s call to send whatever support you can.

Philip Zimbardo’s response to critics of his new book, The Lucifer Effect, includes a useful paragraph relevant to a wide variety of situations, ranging from the prison abuses Zimbardo addresses here to a wide variety of contexts, including the actions of Israelis and Palestinians that outsiders often find so incomprehensible.

Zimbardo says this:

Before turning to the criticism that is most personally distressing regarding understanding of the Abu Ghraib abuses, it is important to mention that while personality and social psychologists spar about the relative contributions of dispositions and situations, we have ignored the most significant factor in the behavioral equation–the System. “The System consists of those agents and agencies whose ideology, values, and power create situations and dictate the roles and expectations for approved behaviors of actors within its spheres of influence. “Bad Systems” create “Bad Situations” create “Bad Apples” create “Bad Behaviors,” even in good people. (Lucifer, p. 445-6) It is not possible to really understand what happened at Abu Ghraib without a comprehensive appreciation of the influences of the Military and Civilian chain of command operating top-down in that prison and other detention centers that were created as part of the “war on terror.” When understanding complex behavior in the real world, beyond our laboratories or classroom surveys and personality scale data collection, it is essential to begin with a systems level top-down analysis because that is where the real power lies. Such understanding gives us the necessity leverage to develop public health paradigms designed to change unacceptable situations as well as the perpetrators of evil functioning in those situations (See Haney & Zimbardo, In press).

This is a touchy issue on many accounts, but I think Zimbardo is right to remind us that we all operate within systems we had no part in creating. Part of the touchiness has to do with blame within the criminal justice context. If bad acts are caused by circumstances rather than by choice, then what justification is there for legal-system judgments of guilt and punishment?

Within the Israeli/Palestinian context that has concerned me most directly in recent years, it is common to hear people on both sides ascribe purely personality-related attributions for the destructive actions of those on the other side. Even within the recent Fatah-Hamas warfare in Gaza, supporters of one faction often jumped to personality attributions to explain the actions of those on the other.

A couple of years ago I noted a meeting in Tel Aviv with members of Breaking the Silence, a group of former Israeli soldiers who amassed photographs and testimonies documenting the abuses they and their peers had perpetrated on ordinary Palestinians living in Hebron. They generally blamed themselves for having failed to live up to their own sense of morality — a dispositional account — but they also described the situational pressures leading them and so many others to commit what they considered to be evil acts.

This is the System Zimbardo emphasizes. In teaching social psychology, the tendency is to focus on the immediate situation (if not, increasingly and unfortunately, simply on the individual’s own inner perceptions). That’s often how Zimbardo’s classic work on the Stanford Prison Experiment is presented. Here, though, Zimbardo emphasizes the larger system and looks for accountability higher up the chain. That may not be the only place to look within a criminal law context, but it’s the first place to look if the goal is to end evil-producing systems.

One of the thing that attracts me to anarchism is its opposition to hierarchical systems of authority. Most anarchists have a somewhat rosier view of human nature than do people who think strong authority is the only thing that keeps evil in check. But I’ve always liked this quote from Paul Goodman’s Humanizing our Future, which I used in an article I wrote more than twenty years ago when I was a graduate student at Michigan State University. Coincidentally, that’s where many of the signers of the criticism Zimbardo is responding to are situated:

[T]he beauty of the decentralist, anarchist position is that nobody can do much harm….[If] people are corrupt as hell, therefore don’t give anybody any power…because the people who have power are not going to be any better.

This still makes sense.

I’ve never considered in any detail whether Israel has a “right to exist.” I don’t see the phrase anywhere in this blog, either pro or con, and my website uses it  just once in reference to Israel. In connection with another project, though, I’ve been asked to clarify my views. So although it’s not an issue that interests me particularly, and although I’m not fully versed in everything that’s relevant, and although as usual I don’t have time to go into a lot of detail, here’s how I would begin answering the question.

At a general level, since my leanings are more anarchist than nationalist, I don’t believe any state has a right to exist. States are structural mechanisms allowing groups of elites to control a larger population by establishing a monopoly on the use of force within specified borders. What makes states “legitimate” is that they establish this structure according to internationally recognized rules created by other states that have already done the same thing and have agreed among themselves that statehood is the desired level of manageable political organization. Once a group becomes a legitimate state, it has the right to use force to prevent internal groups from establishing their own smaller states, in a process that legitimizes the rights of some groups and disadvantages others.

As a matter of political philosophy, I don’t believe any group has a “right” to do this, even in alleged democracies where elite-dominated electorates formally approve what is done in their name.  The mechanisms used to enforce this system, from international military alliances to international law to a globalized economy, become dominant through a combination of force, threats, and increasingly sophisticated ideological measures rather than through any truly democratic process. Since I am opposed to this system whether it benefits Israel or Palestine or Saudi Arabia or the United States, arguments about the right to exist as a state seem to me beside the point. I don’t care what flag flies overhead, anywhere. We would be better off without them.

I know this doesn’t really answer the usual question about Israel’s right to exist. As typically posed, it assumes the legitimacy of the international framework in which statehood is the norm. If this is accepted for the sake of discussion, the question of Israel’s right to exist becomes a legal one. And as I understand it, Israel does have that right under international law, stemming from the 1947 United Nations partition plan establishing the states of Israel and Palestine in the old British Mandate.

That Palestine never became a state would not, it seems to me, eliminate Israel’s legal status, and so far as I know legitimate international bodies accept Israel’s statehood despite arguments that the UN plan was itself illegitimate. Even if that plan was an unjust political compromise forced on the Arab world by the colonial powers, it does not become illegitimate any more than countless other injustices that have become institutionalized over time. As I’ve written about extensively in other contexts, law has less to do with justice than with rules and power.

Still, defenders of Israel’s right to exist are inconsistent and dishonest when they point to the UN partition plan but endorse Israel’s refusal to abide by international law since 1948. Israel’s refusal to allow the return of Palestinian refugees, required under international law, is just the longest-standing example. More recently is international law relating to the post-1967 occupation. A few years ago the World Court ruled that the Separation Wall is illegal where it’s built on Palestinian land instead of along the border, but construction continues as more Palestinian land is stolen. Using scarcely credible legal justifications accepted by almost no one else, including in many cases the US, Israel shrugs off as irrelevant International law related to water access, home demolitions, settlement construction, and on and on. But even though Israel’s continuing occupation of Palestinian territory is probably fully illegal under international law, I don’t think a case can be made under ordinary standards that Israel itself has no legal right to exist.

This question ordinarily comes up in connection with whether Israel should allow a Palestinian state whose government does not formally recognize Israel’s right to exist. That debate seems to me a red herring, especially given Israel’s refusal to allow a viable Palestinian state more than two decades after the Palestinian Liberation Organization accepted a two-state solution and when even Hamas has been willing to go along with a long-term truce. National states exist when their power over their territory is endorsed by international law. It doesn’t matter whether neighboring states “recognize” them. All that should matter is whether neighboring states agree to halt hostilities once basic requirements of justice are met.

As readers of this blog know, I don’t believe Israel has come close to meeting what justice requires. Increasingly, I don’t believe it can ever do so without altering its fundamental underlying assumptions. So what interests me most is not whether Israel has a right to exist but whether Israel should continue to subordinate democracy , equality, and human rights to its formal character as a Jewish state. Do states have the right to prefer one group over another, or do they only have the power? Can a state that refuses to constitutionalize full equality be considered a democracy? Can a Jewish state that occupies Palestinian land decade after decade retain much that is recognizably Jewish to anyone other than right-wing nationalists and ultra-orthodox sectarians? These questions, more existential than legal, are what’s on my mind.

Here’s the sentence from the article I mentioned in the first paragraph where I once used the phrase “right to exist.” It makes as much sense to me now as it did when I wrote it in 1983: “Support for Israel’s right to exist does not mean knee-jerk support for every policy enforced by a government bent on committing national suicide by refusing to face reality.”

This latest posting from an Anarchist Against the Wall organizer about yesterday’s 110th Friday demo in Bil’in points out that “still surprises occur.” The apparent return of a former Israeli commander brings with it a return to more confrontational tactics against the nonviolent protesters.

As readers of this blog know, I continue to follow Bil’in’s struggle against the separation barrier that prevents villagers from reaching their land, now controlled by the large Jewish settlement of Modi’in Ilit which is expanding in violation of the Israeli Supreme Court determination that new construction is illegal. I first visited Bil’in  shortly before construction of the fence began more than two years ago, when villagers still hoped Israeli courts would prevent the illegal land grab. I returned twice during my most recent visit. The villagers’ determination after all this time remains inspiring; their continued invitation to Israeli anti-occupation activists to join them remains a prime example of political cooperation across the Green Line. 

Bil’in’s tale of persistent nonviolent protest while religious Jews move into new apartment buildings constructed illegally even under Israeli law symbolizes many of the frustrations facing anyone who’d like to see Jews and Muslims live harmoniously in the region. The power imbalance is stark, though, making harmony increasingly difficult to envision.