Dennis Fox’s Weblog

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.