Dennis Fox’s Weblog

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.

According to the statistics my website provider supplies, I’ve suddenly had hundreds more visitors than usual to an article of mine on anarchism and psychology. They’re coming from a site called StumbleUpon, which I gather lets websurfers let other people know what they find interesting.

Given the new visitors to my 1986 article, I figured I’d re-read it. Today it seems pretty wordy, but all in all not a bad summary of why I think anarchism makes sense.

There is one point I’d probably make differently today. Toward the end of piece, talking about re-organizing society along decentralized lines, I say this:

Perhaps examples such as the Israeli kibbutz system, a federated network of small, democratically managed collective communities with a history of both successes and failures, would be relevant as we begin our work.

The kibbutz collective and communal model still makes sense, but the past two decades have seen most kibbutzim themselves move away from it. Just last month, members of Degania, Israel’s first kibbutz, voted to privatize, four years short of its 100-year anniversary. As Haaretz explains,

Degania A is currently defined as a “renewal kibbutz,” that is, one in which members are paid differential salaries, and where apartments and property are distributed among members. Such kibbutzim also feature a “security network” intended to ensure a reasonable quality of life to economically weaker segments of the kibbutz population.

As I’ve noted before, although some kibbutzim I’ve visited retain a strong collective structure, most have privatized to one degree or another. My friends on these “renewed” kibbutzim are uniformly unhappy with these changes. I guess it should be no surprise that collectivism and communalism are hard to maintain generation after generation within a capitalist society’s relentless expansion. Still, that kibbutzim managed to sustain themselves for so long and produce generations of members more or less aligned with the socialist and humanist left should not be forgotten.

On the other hand, I know more today than I did decades ago about the seamier side of the story. The creation of small-scale socialism and egalitarianism was inextricably tied to Zionist insistence on Jewish self-labor rather than forging equality and solidarity with Arab labor, often on land from which Palestinian villagers had been expelled. Kibbutz socialism became indivisible from Zionist conquest and military might. The whole thing got very messy.

In 1968, at the peak of my teenage Zionist years, I co-founded a group of Americans that planned to create a new kibbutz. After a year or two of organizing, I proposed that our future kibbutz be open to non-Jewish members, including Israeli Arabs. My proposal drew only one other vote. That group soon merged with another, and eventually, several months after I quit, they founded Kibbutz Ktura (Ketura) in 1973.

Ktura, which I visited for the first time two years ago, today remains a “classic” kibbutz, its mostly English-speaking members still committed to socialist ideals. Its environmental studies school draws Arab students from several countries (and led to a lawsuit aiming to end an Israeli ban on Palestinian students). That’s all to the good. But Arab members? Not yet.

Eleven Israeli activists, found guilty of blocking a Tel Aviv road to protest the Separation Wall. were given suspended sentences. Anarchist Against the Wall member Jonathan Pollak demanded the court send him to jail rather than suspend his sentence. Pollak’s statement to the judge:

From the first moment of this trial we took responsibility for our acts. We’ve never denied, even for an instant, that we sat on the road. Quite the opposite - we fully admitted this, and we explained why we did so. The defense was revolved around two central axes - exposing the police’s lies and their invention of fictional accusations, which the court has already addressed, and on the principals of civil resistance. In its decision, the court stated that we were attempting to drag this court into the political arena, which it should avoid like fire, lest it get burned. In fact, the state prosecution was the one doing the dragging. In every crime and in every trial, the question of motive is a central one. Our so called crime is clearly a political one, and so are its motives.

This trial, had it not taken place in a court of the occupation, in the democracy imposed on 3.5 million Palestinian subjects devoid of basic democratic liberties, would have been the trial of the Wall; that same wall that was defined as illegal by the highest legal authority in the world; that same wall that is used as a political tool in the campaign of ethnic cleansing being undertaken by Israel in the Occupied Territories; that same wall that in its previous route, that route of the relevant days, was thrown out even by Israeli courts! It was not us who should have been standing accused here, but rather the architects and enforcers of Israeli Apartheid.

To our assertion that there is a duty to violate the law at times, the court answered that in such times, one must accept the punishment as well. This response contains an obvious moral failure. The correct response would be that those who violate the law must expect punishment. Expect it, but under no circumstances accept its legitimacy.

I am not surprised that we were found guilty. But in spite of that, I cannot accept the legitimacy of the punishment. That is the reason I refused to cooperate with the parole agency, and I will refuse community service as well.

I believe that at this stage of the trial the defense tends to state that this is the defendant’s first conviction, that he is a normal human being, who is well within the bounds of civil society, that he works a steady job and so on and so forth. I will argue otherwise. I will state that while this is indeed my first conviction, it is unlikely to be my last. I still believe that what I did was necessary and morally correct, and that resistance to oppression is the duty of every human being, even at a personal price.

It is customary to ask for leniency - not to impose an active sentence, and to be satisfied with a conditional sentence. I will ask not to have a conditional sentence imposed on me, but an active one, since as things are, any demonstration taking place in the Occupied Territories is declared illegal assembly, according to the extensive and anti-democratic system of closed military zone warrants. In this state of affairs, any conditional sentence imposed upon me will quickly become an active one. If your honor believes one should be sent to prison for such acts, please take the liberty and personally send me to prison here and now.

Here’s the headline from Ha’Aretz:

IDF soldier, three Israelis lightly hurt at Bil’in anti-fence protest

Here’s the story from Anarchists Against the Wall, a primary organizer of the weekly nonviolent protests at Bil’in:

Eleven people were injured today, after the army attacked the demonstration with a volley of teargas, concussion grenades and rubber coated steel bullets. An Israeli anarchist, Kobi Snitz, was repeatedly hit in the head with metal concussion grenades, used as brass knuckles. The scene took place as Snitz tried, together with others, to prevent a provocative arrest of a Palestinian demonstrator. He was later evacuated to Tel Hashomer hospital and had three of his wounds stitched….

Based in part on my own participation in a November Bil’in protest, I know the Israeli mainstream media routinely and seriously present a one-sided take on these protests, misrepresenting the sequence of events to make it appear hundreds of protestors attack Israeli soldiers. That’s a lie.

So I know there’s always more to the story than Ha’Aretz says. Even the background information is falsified:

The protestors claim the fence in the area is being built on land that belongs to Bil’in, and will cut off the village’s residents from their lands.

As anyone who has been to Bil’in knows, or anyone who has followed the court battles or the ruling of the World Court, the fence is indeed being built on land belonging to Bil’in and it does indeed separate village residents from their fields. The only policy question is whether Israel should build the wall on Bil’in land despite these consequences. Israel says yes. The villagers losing their land say no.

Today’s story bothers me more personally than usual because I’ve met Kobi, the injured Tel Aviv anarchist, several times. I was impressed by his commitment as well as by his level-headedness. I hope he’s okay.

Next Friday marks the two-year anniversary of these weekly Bil’in protests. It should draw a larger crowd than usual. I suspect Kobi will be among them.

The December Bil’in protest I went to was relatively quiet, unlike the one in October. In October, as happens during most of the Friday protests supporting villagers who try to reach their land on the other side of the Separation Fence, Israeli soldiers let loose plenty of tear gas and sound grenades before moving on to more serious weaponry. In mid-December, though, the soldiers were unaccountably restrained, at least near the fence.

They had already provoked kids closer to the village to throw stones, which the soldiers responded to with gunfire, but this time they didn’t extend the action to the fence. So at the main protest things were edgy but calm enough. That left time for other things to transpire, related to fence signs like this one, for example.

Protesters, including members of the village organizing committee, were taking signs off the fence.

Soldiers were running around trying to get them back.

It was all kind of comical for a few moments.

Of course, other soldiers were photographing the action. Constantly.

And then there was all that razor wire fencing, just sitting there.

I wondered what was going on.

So I was glad the day after I returned to Boston to see this: Anarchists Against the Wall block Central Tel Aviv. This photo explains just about everything. Too bad I wasn’t around to take it myself:

And this is how Haaretz described it:

About 20 activists from the Anarchists Against the Fence organization on Thursday briefly blocked Basel Street in north Tel Aviv with a piece of barbed wire fence taken from the separation fence. Signed hanging from the barbed wire, also taken from the separation fence, stated: “Mortal danger - military zone: Any person who passes or damages the fence endangers his life.”

The act of protest created a traffic jam at the site, and police forces were called to the scene, but the activists dispersed before police arrived. The activists said they wanted to bring the daily Palestinian reality to the residents of Tel Aviv to remind them of the movement restrictions and land theft taking place in their name only a few kilometers away.

Good action, it seems to me.

Here’s how the Jerusalem Post reported on yesterday’s protest march at Bil’in, titled Two border policemen wounded in Bil’in:

Two border policemen were lightly wounded on Friday during a violent protest by some 500 Palestinians, left wing Israelis and foreign activists against the construction of the security barrier in Bil’in. The protesters threw stones at security forces and attempted to damage the fence using ladders….

The International Solidarity Movement account — Peaceful Bil’in Protestors Attacked by IOF — was a lot closer to what I saw first-hand.

The, 600 protestors, comprising Palestinians, Israelis and internationals, Palestinian flags flying, marched behind political and religious leaders . Palestinian Legislative Council members Kayes Abu-Leila and Mohib Awad, Israeli MKs Mohammed Barakeh and Dov Hanin, Taysir Tamimi a Muslim religious leader and village leaders marched at the head of the protest from the Bil’in mosque to the massive razor wire fortifications that divide the village from its agricultural lands. When they arrived they were met by fully armed Israeli soldiers in battle dress and border police.

The focus of the protest was a symbolic breach of the wall created by placing two ladders across the first razor wire fence. Using the ladders as a bridge, a group of protestors moved into the next line of wall fortifications. As they crossed they were attacked by tear gas and sound bombs…..

The Jerusalem Post makes it seem as if the soldiers merely responded to 500 violent stone throwers. A short article in Ha’aretz was less one-sided but bent over backwards to make it seem as if the violence was even-handed. Both Israeli newspapers glossed over the sequence of events, which made it pretty clear how the violence began. (I’ve posted photos of the day that demonstrate some of what follows.)

The group I’m traveling with this week — Jewish Voice for Peace — arrived in Bil’in at about 10:30 am. It looked like we were the first to arrive, before soldiers later set up roadblocks. Then others started arriving — journalism students from Norway, ISM people from all over, journalists, a busload of German Pax Christi members, and more and more Israelis — Israelis from Tel Aviv and elsewhere, at least 200 or 250 of them according to organizers from Anarchists Against the Wall. The street was filled with people speaking Hebrew, surely an unusual sight in Occupied Palestine. For more than an hour the anti-Occupation activists talked in small groups, ate, took photos, were interviewed by journalists, and waited on the long bathrooom line. The weather was pleasant, the excitement contagious. There were a lot of smiles.

It wasn’t until 12:15, after the end of prayers at the mosque, that the village organizers started off the march. We walked in good spirits down the main street, toward the Separation Fence (here there is no wall, but the three-fence barrier). On the way we passed at least two groups of Israeli soldiers standing beside clumps of trees on either side of the road. We had been told that these soldiers would be there, waiting to attack demonstrators later on as they tried to make their way back to the village once the soldiers started attacking.

Unlike some other recent Friday Bil’in protests, this time the military let the march reach the fence. Those leading the march stopped at the tank blocking the way as the marchers came up behind. According to the times on my photos, this  was about 12:28 pm. Most of us stood there facing the Israeli soldiers and border police facing us. On our side were the protestors and also the TV cameras and what seemed to be dozens of news photographers with Press clearly visible. The marchers’ goal, or course, was to cross the fence to reach village land on the other side, now reserved for the growing Jewish settlements built on the site. This is olive season, after all.

At the same time the march reached the fence, a small group of people mostly from Anarchists Against the Wall walked just south of the tank carrying a ladder, which they used to try to scale the fence. They did this calmly and openly, without weapons or violence of any kind. Several soldiers walked toward them on the other side of the fence and soon tossed a tear gas canister their way. This was the first use of violence — the first attempt to cause physical harm to another human being.

Fortunately, the wind cooperated and blew the gas further south away from everyone, and the 6 or 8 fence-breachers tried again, with the same tear gas result. The larger crowd both watched what was going on and began chanting at the soldiers on the tank, still mostly in a pretty good frame of mind. I thought at the time that the soldiers were trying not to escalate because of the heavy presence of international media. Tear-gassing elderly peace activists from Pax Christi would probably not be a good PR move. What they did do instead was constantly photograph the big crowd while other soldiers/border police (I’m not sure how to tell the difference) kept tear gassing the slowly growing number of fence-climbers, some of whom by now had crossed over the first of the three fences.

This cat-and-mouse game went on until about 12:45 — half an hour after arriving at the fence. Most protestors remained chanting in one large crowd. And by this point a couple of dozen were using ladders to make it across the first fence. The military was using more and more tear gas, some of which was wafting north to the edge of the big crowd. I think there were concussion grenades used by now, but I’m not sure.

At that point, something flew over the heads of the soldiers from the northern side of the crowd. A couple of minutes later someone toward the back of the crowd threw a stone. I saw three protestors immediately rush up to him, one of them saying that this wasn’t what the protest was about. The guy reached down, picked up another stone, and threw it toward the soldiers.

Within maybe half a minute tear gas canisters and then concussion grenades or whatever they’re called came down throughout the large crowd, and things got kind of chaotic as we tried to escape the gas. Most of us moved to the side or back toward the village, but it quickly became impossible to retreat to the village because the soldiers lobbed tear gas between us and the village we would have retreated to. And they soon started tear gassing on the sides as well, so at times it was impossible to move in any direction, and of course also impossible to just stay where we were. I moved through the grove of olive trees, trying to avoid the road where an Israeli vehicle was now making its way, lobbing tear gas (I think) into houses. According to my photos (some of which were pretty blurry at this point) this went on for maybe 25 minutes. But even as most of us reached the center of the village, stragglers came up with clouds of tear gas behind them.

It was after all this activity — the peaceful nonviolent symbolic and direct actions and the extraordinarily excessive response to a couple of thrown stones — when most of the demonstrators were back in the village hanging out in front of the grocery, that local village young people back at the fence started throwing more stones at the soldiers. Others told me that this was the weekly ritual. The soldiers know that eventually someone will throw a stone — that’s their apparent signal to respond with excessive violence — and that after the peaceful march is over there will be a further escalation between younger villagers throwing stones and soldiers now switching to rubber bullets and, according to some reports, real bullets.

What seemed to be different yesterday was only that the soldiers waited for the first stone to be thrown before extending their attack to the larger crowd. When there’s less media, as noted before, they often begin the attack before the march even reaches the fence.

I did see, back at the street in front of the grocery, the man whose face was hit with a concussion grenade. One of our own group members was right next to a concussion grenade that exploded, leaving him with a bruised toe and a lot of pain. I was lucky to just get tear gassed, which never got so thick that I couldn’t breathe at all, though it wasn’t much fun. Tastes awful.

Given the sequence of events, it seems to me the mainstream media completely distort what actually occurs. In Israel that’s not surprising, perhaps. For the Jerusalem Post to report that yesterday there was a violent 500-person protest can only be intentionally dishonest. Even Haaretz’s effort to be evenhanded feeds the dangerously inaccurate image that Palestinians and their supporters are inevitably violent.

Outside the region, back in the US, the mainstream media mostly just ignore whatever goes on here that doesn’t match preconceived notions. It’s our job to make sure some accurate information gets distributed.

We’re hoping Israeli soldiers and border guards at this Friday’s weekly Bil’in demonstration let the villagers and their international and Israeli supporters march peacefully to the Separation Wall as intended. It’s possible the IDF will try to stop the march violently, as is increasingly the case, but there’s hope things will go more smoothly this time. For one thing, this first march after the end of Ramadan should be larger than usual. The expected contingent of dignitaries may help tip the inconsistent Israeli response toward patience.

Or not.

Last night one of the organizers from Anarchists Against the Wall came to Beit Immanuel to talk to our group about his group’s experience working for the past year and half or more with the Palestinian villagers who lead the weekly nonviolent protests. It’s always been clear to people who have kept up with places like Bil’in that Palestinian resistance has always included nonviolent methods that Israeli forces seem determined to thwart and that the media almost never cover. Those who urge Palestinians simply to try nonviolence might spend a Friday at Bil’in and see what happens.

Anarchists Against the Wall is an Israeli anti-Occupation group, apparently less consistently anarchist than anti-occupation. I hope to learn more about anarchist efforts here in Israel and, if they exist at all, within Palestine, but I know the one-state, two-state debate is unlikely to be resolved by a no-state solution any time soon. At any rate, it sounds like the anarchists here are as diverse as in the US, with good representation of both black-clad young people and older activists. The group seems very aware of the intricacies raised by outsiders — especially Israeli outsiders — working on the West Bank with Palestinian activists and other villagers, not all of whom are happy to have Israelis among them.

I visited Bil’in almost two years ago, just before construction of the wall began. Villagers were trying to use Israeli courts to stop construction. Today those lawsuits remain unresolved, and Bil’in villagers have no access to their stolen land. Law is slow, even if it works. And here, courts issue orders that the military ignores.

But we’ll see how things go on Friday. Last night’s AATW visitor gave us advice on how to minimize the risk, but I know these things are unpredictable. Fortunately, he said holding a camera and standing off to the side photographing was relatively safe, and that’s about what I had in mind anyway.

Tomorrow morning, though, it’s on to Nablus.

I saw V for Vendetta the evening it opened last month, with my 12-year old daughter and 32-year old son. We all had a blast. Sure, the message is mixed, the plot sometimes silly, and V’s immobile mask and egotistical manner increasingly hard to take, but I’ve always liked movies where … well, that would spoil the plot, so I won’t finish the sentence.

An unusual piece on Infoshop today urges anarchists

to organize creative actions on Monday, April 17th, to bring the notion of anarchy to viewers of the Hollywood film, V for Vendetta, a watered-down adaptation of Alan Moore’s classic anarchist graphic novel by the same name. April 17th marks the one month anniversary of the US release of V for Vendetta, but in many countries the film is just now premiering.

Actions can include leafletting, street theater, setting up lit tables at theaters, postering campaigns–anything to bring the concept of anarchy to people who’ve never been exposed to our philosophy. In NYC for example, we will be dressing up in V costumes, and having V symbolically “assassinate” government and the state and act out “deleted scenes” acting out portions of the graphic novel where V speaks in support of anarchy. (We are also flyering in costume at theaters on Fridays and Saturdays while the film is in theaters.)

With these events we hope to educate moviegoers and draw media attention……

The organizers’ website aforanarchy.com has a useful “Deleted Scenes” explanation of how the film differs in important ways ways from its graphic novel source material (which I haven’t read, but my daughter wants me to buy it, so maybe I’ll get around  to it).  Reading this clarified for me why so many anarchists were looking forward to the movie:

It’s no surprise that a film produced by multi-millionaires at Time-Warner, the largest media conglomerate the world has ever seen (revenues last year of over $43 billion) would sell us the sizzle of violence and destruction while holding back the steak of anarchist opposition to capitalism. But it is worth taking a look at the differences between the book and the movie to see the specific ways they drain the story of its revolutionary politics….

In Alan Moore’s comic book, V is an insurrectionary anarchist of the type that gave the ruling class nightmares around the turn of the 21st century—a bomb-throwing, dagger-wielding assassin and saboteur.

Most importantly, in the comic book, Moore’s V hints at the possibilities of a society organized without coercion. V is not only fighting against something, he is fighting FOR something. The constructive side of the anarchist vision is already downplayed in the comic book, but it is totally missing from the movie. What remains are V’s thrilling adventures in assassination and demolition. The viewer is left with a vague impression, however stirring, of rebellion tinged with nihilism. No alternative is proposed. The only mention of anarchism in the entire movie is when a wild-eyed stick-up-man shouts “Anarchy in the UK!” while robbing a grocery store.

Some of the characters are changed subtly as well: ….. [Can’t explain this without giving away some plot, which I hate to do]

The movie’s presentation of fascism is watered down as well. It does draw some crucial links with the present situation in the US, making references to ‘rendition’, targeting of Muslim citizens, black hoods, detention centers, clampdown on radicals, profiteering by government cronies on mass vaccination, and fear-mongering over public catastrophes. But the comic’s clear-eyed presentation of fascism as a collusion between government and business elites to protect private capital is lost. In the movie, we are presented with an oppressive government, but its seems to be an oppression for oppression’s own sake. The real nature of fascism, which at root serves to protect private capital from the power of the people, is obscured.

The site also has links to interviews with Moore and, of course, more discussion of what anarchism is all about.

My advice is to ignore the critics who say the movie just advocates simpleminded purposeless terrorism. Think Anarchy. And bring a teenager.

Boston IMC: on The Threat Of Compulsory Insurance:

The precedent of compelling drivers to purchase private auto insurance is bad enough, but one can opt out. One doesn’t have to drive, they say. The only way to opt out of compulsory health insurance, however, would be to die.
….in Massachussets, unless one is really poor, one will be compelled by tax penalties etc to patronize private health insurance businesses! This is no one’s idea of Universal Health Insurance…and it sure isn’t Single Payer. It’s more like Universal Compulsory Customer.

Do Bay Staters realize that this also would compel them to pay for insurer advertising, CEO bonuses, redundant administrations, campaign contributions, corporate jets and headquarters maintenance, legal suits, conventions, etc? Do they realize that money spent on such non-health-related things is money taken from their health care? Do they ask what possible Public Interest justification there is for compelling such support of non-health related things?

Do they also realize that they would be compelled to simultaneously supply funds for insurers’ Wall Street investments in businesses the insurance customers may not even know about or that they may disapprove of for any number of moral, religious, political, or business reasons?

If their health insurer is Cigna, for instance, they may be inadvertently and unknowingly supplying millions of dollars in investment money for top cigarette manufacturers….if Cigna hasn’t divested since the PBHP report on this scandal. Would our “anti-smoking” friends agree to help support Big Cig in this way? (Same applies to Prudential, MetLife, Aetna, Travelers, etc.)

[Links to Physicians for a National Health Program]

That a state may compel patronage of any private industry is what Mussolini preferred to call Corporatism—at its worst. It raises serious Constitutional questions regarding Freedom of Speech by requiring speaking, with words and/or money, to insurers or any entity.

This is a serious assault on the idea of Single Payer…of getting private insurers out of the way of a Public Health System. Not much is being done to stop this because, for one reason, many like the sound of “universal insurance”. If private insurers co-opt that term, we need to change our rhetoric. The distinction must now be clearly between Corporate Insurance and Public Insurance.

On the blog Anarchia, which I confess I found because it links to mine, I found this explanation of its name:

In the USA in the 1800’s, many people who opposed a centralised federal authority and criticised the government were diagnosed with Anarchia, which was defined as having an “excess of the passion for liberty” that “constituted a form of insanity”. So thats where the name comes from.

The political use of psychiatric diagnosis won’t surprise anyone familiar with critical psychology, but I don’t remember hearing about anarchia before. So reading this sent me searching, and soon I found a ZMag article from last year by clinical psychologist Bruce Levine, author of Commonsense Rebellion: Taking Back Your Life from Drugs, Shrinks, Corporations, and a World Gone Crazy:

Two ways of subduing anti-authoritarianism are criminalizing it and pathologizing it and U.S. history is replete with examples of both. In the same era of John Adams’s Sedition Act, which criminalized criticism of U.S. governmental policy, Dr. Benjamin Rush, “the father of American psychiatry” (his image adorns the APA seal), pathologized anti-authoritarianism. Rush diagnosed those rebelling against a centralized federal authority as having an “excess of the passion for liberty” that “constituted a form of insanity.” He labeled this illness anarchia.

Historically, both direct and indirect resistance to authority have been medicalized and diseased. In an 1851 article in the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal, Louisiana physician Samuel Cartwright reported his discovery of drapetomania, the disease that caused slaves to flee captivity, and dysaesthesia aethiopis, the disease that caused slaves to pay insufficient attention to the master’s needs. As with anarchia, few took drapetomania and dysaesthesia aethiopis seriously—but this was before the diseasing of anti-authoritarianism was accompanied by Big Pharma drugs and marketing blitzes.

While drapetomania has given way to ODD [Oppositional Defiance Disorder] and CD [Conduct Disorder], dysaesthesia aethiopis has given way to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The vast majority of kids  “with ADHD” are capable of paying attention and being cooperative in environments that they are comfortable in. Studies show that they will pay attention to activities that they have chosen, that they find stimulating, or for which they are getting paid. They routinely pay attention to what interests them but tend to blow off school, especially homework. In 1992 the then APA medical director proudly described the relationship between the APA and pharmaceutical corporations as a “responsible, ethical partnership,” and, in 2001, the Journal of the American Medical Association estimated that four to six million ADHD-labeled U.S. kids were taking Ritalin and Ritalin-like drugs.

The rest of Levine’s article is worth reading. So is Anarchia.

Here’s a short review of Levine’s book by Mel Starkman in Radical Psychology Journal (published by RadPsyNet) and a 2001 interview with Levine in LiP Magazine.

CrimethInc. Ten Year Report (posted on Infoshop.org) offers an honest reflection of Crimethink’s achievements and failures. It begins:

Today, April Fool’s Day, 2006, we announce the third printing of our free anarchist primer, Fighting For Our Lives, which is once again available from us in bulk throughout North America. This printing of 150,000 brings the total print run of this pamphlet to 500,000 copies, the target we set for this project three and a half years ago. Here follows a critical analysis of the activity that has taken place over the past decade under the CrimethInc. moniker.An Incomplete Report on and Critical Analysis of the Past Decade of Activity

A half million copies of a paper is a lot in some circles, but in our eyes, this is the very least we can do to help keep the anarchist alternative accessible. We would like to see a similar level of activity from all other anarchist groups, whether that takes the form of outreach, artistic expression, community infrastructure, labor organizing, mass mobilizations, sabotage, or other means of struggle. We challenge our colleagues not to stop at calling for a world without hierarchies, but to do what it takes to live and act outside them today—to perform the miracles it’s going to take to get us all out of here.

In that spirit, to inspire or outrage others into action of their own, this seems as good a time as any to review the activity that has taken place over the past decade under the CrimethInc. moniker. This accounting will necessarily be incomplete; it only covers the most obvious and quantifiable activities we could discern from the vantage point of this particular CWC nucleus, the CrimethInc. Far East distribution hub. All the same, it may help to establish the scope of what has been accomplished and of what yet remains to be done.

And adds this near the end:

We still have some tricks up our sleeve—perhaps we’ve lost the element of surprise, but we never thought we’d live to see the opportunities we have now. Even so, we won’t be the ones to win this struggle. The weapons we’re fighting with cannot win it. 500,000 unique anarchist projects could pose a real threat; the fact that we have to make 500,000 identical copies of a single one is an admission of defeat, albeit an optimistic one. The only real value CrimethInc. can have is as a challenge to provoke others into more ambitious revolutionary action. This is our plea to you, if you care one whit for liberation, whether or not you’ve ever been fond of any of our projects: put everything we’ve done to shame. Don’t waste your breath criticizing our efforts—there’s work to be done. Demonstrate approaches that work better than the ones we’ve employed, and we’ll gladly take them up.

Also from Eliot Gelwan today is a link to a 2004 item on Dave Pollard’s weblog that lists 56 books and articles Pollard says ” forever changed my worldview, and my purpose for living.” It’s a good list. I’ve even read some of the books.

What I’m most glad to see is Pollard’s short first section: What Life was Really Like Before Civilization: Revisionist History. Modern misconceptions about what “human nature” is all about and what human society was like before civilization’s agriculture, cities, governments, law, organized religion, corporate personhood, and other so-called necessities affect what we think we need today and what we’re willing to put up with to get it.

Of the six authors in this section, I’m glad to see anthropologist Marshall Sahlins. His article on The Original Affluent Society is basic. As Pollard says about it, “If you wanted to defend a new society that featured rigid hierarchy, agonizingly hard work, suffering, frequent starvation and slavery, wouldn’t you try to portray the alternative life as ’short, nasty and brutish’?” (Sahlins’ related book Stone Age Economics is listed on my own old long list of “Reading Suggestions for the Curious Social Psychology Student (and others)” in the section on Human Nature, Human Origins, & Personality. Someday I’ll update that list, maybe…).

Further down Pollard’s  list is the category Radical Analyses, Radical Solutions. Pollard says these three books “are the most important readings, but you probably won’t ‘buy’ their arguments unless you’ve first read much of the material above. One of these books is A Language Older Than Words, by Derrick Jensen. I haven’t read it, but Pollard says this is “a profound and disturbing argument for why moderate answers to our current predicament won’t work.” That suits my own long-standing view that moderation and compromise are often exactly the wrong approach. No doubt Jensen’s book is more developed than my own short article on the subject.

All in all, a good list.

My previous posting of links to Wikipedia’s entries on cognitive bias led me to think about Wikipedia more generally.

For those who don’t know it, Wikipedia is an effort to create a comprehensive encyclopedia through continual creation and editing of entries by anyone in the world. If you know something about frogs, you can see what Wikipedia has to say and add details, identify errors, suggest alternative phrasings, and make the changes yourself. It’s an interesting idea that can lead to potentially richer presentations of topics than those found in a more standard encyclopedia entry written by a single, supposedly objective expert hired by a corporate publisher.
In recent months there’s been criticism of Wikipedia because of insertion of false information into, or removal of accurate information from, a variety of entries. But what’s most fascinating to me is not so much intentional efforts to mislead but the discussions among people trying to get an entry right.  Instead of just reading any article by itself, click on the Discussion tab at the top. That’s where you can read, and participate in, a conversation among participants about what to include, what to take out, what to change. Sometimes this is polite, sometimes nasty. It’s often fun, but more important, it’s instructive to see people try to figure out how to describe a topic they care about accurately and comprehensively.

This is true even for noncontroversial issues — say, Frogs — where participants suggest alternative wording, ask what others think should be included and how best to describe it, request sources for specific information, and so on. It turns out it’s not always easy to describe even something that seems straightforward.

The effort to be accurate gets especially heated when the topic is more controversial — anarchism, Israel-Palestinian Conflict, psychology, law, etc. Some participants try to figure out what’s “objectively true” and thus supposedly acceptable to those on both sides of the issue, but this often becomes impossible, partly because every complex topic begins with underlying assumptions that often turn out to be not universally shared. Others more consciously try to use facts to prove their own point of view, but that can lead to the same problem. What counts as a “fact”? What is, as Wikipedia puts it, POV (point of view)?

The Wikipedia project appeals to the anarchist in me, and Wikipedia itself discusses the tension between its anarchist underpinnings and its interest in accuracy and efficiency. Anarchists don’t always like how Wikipedia operates (see Chuck Munson’s Wikipedia Hall of Shame blog entry), partly because of perceived individualist/capitalist bias in Wikipedia’s anarchism entries.

There’s also this anti-Wikipedia site, Wikipedia Review, which I just found and glanced at.

From Anarkismo comes this appeal to help fund Tel Aviv-based Anarchists Against the Wall in their ongoing participation with Palestinian nonviolent opposition:

The construction of the separation barrier has been going on for over three years. Its route runs through Palestinian territory, confiscates lands, uproots olive trees and separates families. Under the pretext of security, the fence strengthens the illegal settlements and creates a condition which will prevent the establishment of a viable Palestinian state and ensure an endless conflict.

As the wall was being built, a popular protest rose to oppose it. In dozens of villages women, men, children and old folks went to confront the bulldozers and were met by the hard violence of the Israeli state forces - army, border police and special police units. To this day, thousands have been injured and 11 were murdered in the non-violent protests against the separation fence.

In spite of the army and police objection, every week, we - Israeli activists, go to demonstrations against the separation fence to stand in solidarity with Palestinians and try to decrease the level of violence employed by the state forces.

The ties which we create with our Palestinian comrades are the real bridge to peace and equality. A peace with no fences and with recognition of the rights of the Palestinian people.

We are not supported by any big organizations. The expenses involved with our activities are high, mostly covered by the pockets of the activists participating in the the various actions. We need your help to continue the joint struggle against the occupation and for a better future for all of us.

The fund raising event will take place at the Minshar Gallery on Saturday, April 1st at  20:00 The gallery is currently showing an exhibit of political art which was used in the struggle in Bil’in.

Mishar - Art School
David Hachmi Street 18.
Tel Aviv

**Initiated by anarchists against the wall**

You can donate online by following the link ..  and click at the bottom on DONATE

On the AATW website there’s also this note about the need for legal funds:

Thanks to the legal repression by the Israeli authorities donations for the legal defense fund are also urgently needed. AATW is faced with mounting legal expenses and is raising money to defend people who face indictments as a result of their political activities. There are currently over 40 indictments, a summery of a few of them can be found here.

Liz Seymour’s essay on her anarchist commune, which I quoted in a previous posting, included this:

If there is a historical model for the way we live, it is not the communes of the 60’s or the utopian experiments of the 19th century, but the two-million-year prehistory of our hunting-and-gathering ancestors. Looked at through that lens, the life of our miniature tribe feels a lot like the way people were meant to live.

How we were “meant to live” is important in the context of how humans have adapted, or not adapted, to modern society. Seymour’s reference to the “miniature tribe” is also key. Tribes have both advantages and disadvantages. As portions of the globe struggle with clashes between what are typically described as tribal identities on the one hand and universalism on the other, it’s easy to point to tribalism as dangerous, narrow-minded, and better off extinct than explored.

It’s not clear to me, though, that this outcome is inevitable, and in any case Seymour had in mind not the distorted tribal systems surviving today but, as she says, our hunter-gatherer ancestors. I’m not fully up to speed on recent debates about the primitivism-anarchism connection or lack of connection, but I do think the size at which a community become something else, something worse, is worth exploring.

I recently discovered that my 1985 article on anarchism, psychology, and the tragedy of the commons is cited in Wikipedia as suggesting an ideal community size of about 150 people. I was actually citing Julian Edney’s use of the number, but trying to figure out how best to structure communities made sense to me then and makes sense now.

Aside: I just searched for Edney, found this recent book Greed. Sounds like it’s worth looking at.

An email from someone in the Czech Republic asking for materials about anarchism and psychology reminds me I don’t have many to point to. When I’ve used an anarchist perspective in exploring social psychology and the psychology/law connection, I’ve cited anarchists and psychologists, both modern and classic, but I haven’t found many book-length treatments, nor even lengthy articles directly on topic that don’t seem to be written for already persuaded audiences (such as Raoul Vaneigem’s 1967 The Revolution of Everyday Life, which addresses a wide range of topics social psychologists should, but generally don’t, find interesting.) At any rate, if you know of material on anarchism and psychology please let me know and I’ll link to it on my website.

From the New York Times Home and Gardening section, no less, comes Liz Seymour’s account of life in an anarchist commune in Greensboro, North Carolina. Worth reading.

Inviting Anarchy Into My Home

On Aug. 1, 2002, I left behind the comfortably roomy semicircle marked “married-couple household” on the Census Bureau pie chart and slipped into an inconspicuous wedge labeled “two or more people, nonfamily.” Having separated from my husband of 28 years the day before, I opened our three-bedroom 1927 Colonial Revival house to a group of men and women less than half my age. Overnight, the home I had lived in for 12 years became a seven-person anarchist collective, run by consensus and fueled by punk music, curse-studded conversation and food scavenged from Dumpsters.
…
After [daughter] Isabell came home from college an anarchist herself, I began to put aside my preconceptions about these people — as disorderly, violent and destructive — and to see them as a community dedicated to replacing hierarchy with consensus and cooperation. (Isabell once described them as Quakers who swear a lot.) Over time I found myself drawn to their hopeful view that people know best what is best for them and to their determination, naïve or not, to build a better world right away. Anarchism, at least as practiced here, seemed to be more about building community gardens and making your own fun than about black bandannas and confrontations with the riot police (although it was about those things, too).
…
So Justin and I entered a microeconomy in which it is possible to live not just comfortably, but well, on $500 a month. When we pooled our skills in our new household, we found that we had what we needed to design a Web page, paint a ceiling or install a car stereo. Sharing services and tools with people outside the house saved us thousands of dollars a year. If there is a historical model for the way we live, it is not the communes of the 60’s or the utopian experiments of the 19th century, but the two-million-year prehistory of our hunting-and-gathering ancestors. Looked at through that lens, the life of our miniature tribe feels a lot like the way people were meant to live.
…
In spite of the stigma attached to the word “anarchist” and the scrutiny openly anarchist households receive, the number of such houses is growing. Anarchists are no longer just in college towns and big cities; there are now thriving anarchist communities and houses like ours in places like Lake Worth, Fla.; Machias, Me.; and Springfield, Mo. The online directory maintained by the Fellowship for Intentional Community lists more than 1,000 collective houses, ecovillages and co-ops in the United States, compared with about 400 in the 1990 directory. Although not all of them identify themselves as anarchist, more than half make their decisions by consensus. Even that number is clearly low: none of the five collective houses I know of in Greensboro, for example, are listed in the directory….

From a 1992 article:

Students often complain that social psychology, instead of presenting a coherent framework for understanding and improving social life, typically confronts students with a hodge-podge of seemingly unrelated, contradictory, and overly detailed research findings. Topic follows disconnected topic. Multiple choice tests rarely ask students to consider the interrelationships among subject areas, partly because such questions are difficult to put into machine-gradable format, but also because most social psychologists have themselves learned to view the field in the same disconnected way. The common belief that increments in factual knowledge will lead to slow but steady theoretical and social progress stands in the way of perceiving connections between topics, connections that, if examined more holistically, might make the isolated segments of the field more understandable.

One connection between many of social psychology’s disconnected topics is the degree to which they reflect the tension between the individual and the group. This tension is often remarked upon but rarely developed, especially as the field focuses less on groups at all. That individuals belong to groups is a commonplace observation of every social psychology course, but the narrowing of the field’s mainstream gaze from the group to the individual is obvious. In any case, merely identifying the consequences of individual-group interaction doesn’t go far enough. Instead, an introductory social psychology course would benefit from emphasizing the importance of maximizing both individuality and community within the society we have now and within possible alternatives.

The textbook I’m using in my introductory class, Elliot Aronson’s The Social Animal, doesn’t even have a chapter on group dynamics — how groups operate, the different roles of group actors, what makes groups effective, satisfying, competitive, or cooperative. Some of this finds its way into other chapters, such as the one on conformity, but what was once a basic core concern has been moved to the edges or tossed out completely. Longer texts often do include more, but the tendency there too is to emphasize group influence on the individual rather than the group as a whole. And those influences are typically seen as mostly negative. Even in a book that generally does a good job trying to get students to raise their sights, David Myers’ Social Psychology, the author feels the need to add a postscript listing the positive benefits groups can have. His conclusion, though — “we had better choose our group influences wisely and intentionally” — reinforces the dangers rather than the benefits. His later discussion of cooperation in a chapter on conflict and peacemaking is useful, but a chapter explicitly on groups would better reflect the importance of groups in our lives.

I should say here that my thinking about the balance between individuality and community developed in the context of anarchist political theory. I doubt mainstream social psychologists will spend much time trying to do the same, but hear me out.

As I’ve discussed in more detail elsewhere, anarchists traditionally seek not simply a do-your-own-thing autonomy but a society that takes both individuality and community seriously. That’s part of the reason Paul Goodman identified what he called the “anarchist principle” that “valuable behavior occurs only by the free and direct response of individuals or voluntary groups to the conditions presented by the historical environment.” Goodman called this principle “a social-psychological hypothesis with obvious political implications,” but social psychologists who take that hypothesis seriously are hard to find.

In that 1992 article I quoted at the beginning of this blog entry I also cited Alan Ritter, whose “analysis of classical anarchist thought makes it clear that the ultimate anarchist goal is not simply unlimited freedom but, instead, a form of ‘communal individuality’ in which individuality flourishes in a supportive communal environment.” I continued:

Anarchist theory is related to work on trust and cooperation, the tragedy of the commons, personal values and belief systems, false consensus and attribution theory, the self-fulfilling prophecy, interpersonal relationships, group dynamics, environmental effects on behavior, hierarchy and conformity, and many other topics. Reading between the lines, there is support within the standard social psychology textbook for the view that a society organized along decentralist anarchist lines, where communal mutuality is emphasized, would be one in which trust, friendship, equality, autonomy, and empathy would be increased, and competition, materialism, overconsumption, energy waste, hierarchy, and exploitation would be decreased.

How to maximize both individuality and community is a social psychological question that students should ponder. Anarchism might be too much for most to take seriously, but that’s not the main point. More relevant right now is that an anarchist perspective can help fit the different pieces of the course together in a way that students are more likely to remember. If they finish the course thinking that individuality and community are both important enough to enhance, so much the better.

My previous posting, Social Psychology’s Essence I, proposed that an essential outcome of an introductory social psychology course should be the habit of identifying and questioning empirical assumptions about human behavior built into social discourse. Social psychology should also help students take the next step: imagining and exploring alternatives. The structure and purpose of the standard college classroom, the nature of work and family life, the design of cities, the forces that maintain national and global political and economic power — everything is up for grabs once we stop assuming that what we have is either optimal or inevitable.

In a 1985 article I said social psychologists should expand their horizons beyond the kind of liberal reforms they typically suggest in their work (if they address system issues at all). I’ve addressed this issue since then, but in 1985 I noted this:

Maslow, for example, taught a course in “Utopian Social Psychology” that was concerned with “the empirical and realistic questions: How good a society does human nature permit? How good a human nature does society permit? What is possible and feasible? What is not?” (1971, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature.)

That still seems to me a good idea for a course that examines what social psychology’s existing knowledge base might have to say about existing societal arrangements and how that knowledge base might be expanded to make alternatives more feasible. Even an introductory social psychology course should have this discussion, which might teach students to be a little more skeptical about justifications for an imperfect status quo.

Debates about what “human nature” consists of range across disciplines, with evidence coming from biology, psychology, anthropology, and many more. Equally important, maybe more important, is what people think human nature is like. Differing assumptions about the extent to which people are “naturally” selfish, cooperative, nasty, helpful, social, hierarchical, malleable, and so on lead to differing interpretations of individual and  interpersonal behavior  and to different assumptions about which social, political, and economic systems are natural, inevitable, or possible.

This BBC News story reports research relevant to the development of altruism and cooperation. In one study,

Infants as young as 18 months show altruistic behaviour, suggesting humans have a natural tendency to be helpful, German researchers have discovered. In experiments reported in the journal Science, toddlers helped strangers complete tasks such as stacking books.

Young chimps did the same, providing the first evidence of altruism in non human primates….

Dr Warneken and colleague Professor Michael Tomasello wanted to see whether very young children who had not yet learned social skills were willing to help strangers. The experimenters performed simple tasks like dropping a clothes peg out of reach while hanging clothes on a line, or mis-stacking a pile of books.

Nearly all of the group of 24 18-month-olds helped by picking up the peg or the book, usually in the first 10 seconds of the experiment. They only did this if they believed the researcher needed the object to complete the task - if it was thrown on the ground deliberately, they didn’t pick it up.

The implication:

Altruism may have evolved six million years ago in the common ancestor of chimps and humans….

In another study,

Alicia Melis at the Ngamba Island Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Uganda found that chimps recognised when collaboration was necessary and chose the best partner to work with. The chimps had to cooperate in reaching a food tray by pulling two ends of a rope at the same time. “We’ve never seen this level of understanding during cooperation in any other animals except humans,” she said.

But she said there was still no evidence that chimpanzees communicate with each other about a common goal like children do from an early age.

It’s more than a century since Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid reported on the importance of cooperation in human and animal survival. Still makes sense to me.

I just came across DIVergence ACCOrd:

The Divergence Accord site provides a context of information, articles, commentary and reference resources. The assemblage is directed toward comprehending constraints and opportunities to engage in a collective relational shift in opposition to hierarchical presiding governments. This includes those that are communicated as construed in freedom of thought and activity, declared sacrosanct, accede to authoritativeness, secrecy, mistrust, exclusion, and division to perpetuate a tightly regulated society.

And:

Divergence Accord commentary and articles on this page address relation and interaction dimensions within the realm of political/social/cultural advocacy. Additional information will be added periodically. Topics included are about violence/nonviolence, pacifism, cooptation, infiltration, coalition, confrontation, NGOism, grassroots, strategy making, media communications, mass mobilization, reform/revolutionary thought and action, funding, historic perspectives, self-interests, power, professionalism, careerism, creativity, idealogies, “ism” clashes, theories, et al. The multifaceted methods and responses toward oppositional social forces by the agents of political power will be included in material presented in this section.

Some awkward writing, but a great collection of articles and links.

I’ve written before about protests against the Separation Wall Israel is building at Bil’in in the West Bank. Ilan Shalif of Anarchists Against the Wall offers a perspective on West Bank organizing not ordinarily presented. An excerpt:

Over the past two days, we held an international conference in Bil’in about and in solidarity with the struggle against the fence. It was organized by the Bil’in joint project of struggle against the fence, which for the last 12 months has been carried on by the local popular committee together with the Anarchist Against The Wall initiative. The ruling Fatah leadership has not promoted popular non-violent direct action and struggle against the fence, even with the upsurge in it since Israeli anarchists became involved. They had many obvious reasons for not doing so. However, little by little, they have got involved in it, even to the extent of trying to co-opt it. Indeed, just before the shift of power within the Palestinian capitalist elite, several dignitaries participated in certain ways, for example by joining in some of the weekly Friday demonstrations.

The efforts of the Palestinian elite to profit from the popular struggle against the separation fence in general, and more so in Bil’in, have gradually been mounting. They have sent dignitaries to the large demonstrations and once even held a session of their “government” in Bil’in, even though it was not their initiative and in spite of the well-known fact that it is a joint project by local committees and Israeli anarchists. In one case, a high ranking official went so far as to issue a formal letter of support to the AATW… and surprise surprise, even the local Hamas people and their regional leadership failed to keep their distance and joined in the Friday demos.