CC: Dr. Ursula Rao, Dr. Biao Xiang, Dr. Marie-Claire Foblets
MPI for Social Anthropology, Halle
Dear colleagues,
We write as Israeli Jewish scholars, working in Israel and worldwide, in support of Prof. Ghassan Hage and in protest of the accusations against him. Prof. Hage is an outstanding contributor to the field of anthropology, who has made a professional impact on us all. His critical analysis of ethno-nationalism – be it Australian, Israeli, or Palestinian – and his vision of an alter-politics for Israel/Palestine both invoke an alternative to nationalist political structures and the possibility of egalitarian co-living between Jews, Christians, Muslims and others.
The significance of this moral and intellectual vision to anthropologists in Israel was reflected in Prof. Hage’s invitation to deliver a keynote address to the Israeli Anthropological Association (IAA) in 2016. Though he refused the invitation, the published correspondence between Prof. Hage and Prof. Nir Avieli, then President of the IAA, demonstrates his sensitivity to the complexity of the political situation in our country. His stance is political and critical, but it is not antisemitic. Accusing Prof. Hage of antisemitism is malicious and betrays a lack of good faith.
As Jews, some of us descendants of victims of the Nazi Holocaust, and some who research the Holocaust and racist violence more generally, we take this opportunity to voice our concern over the conflation between criticism of Israel and antisemitism, which is putting Jewish life in the diaspora, and Germany in particular, at risk.
It is well-known that Prof. Hage is a proponent of the boycott of Israeli academic institutions as part of the BDS movement. While many of us disagree with the methods of this movement, we acknowledge that its guidelines do not mandate discrimination against individual Jews or Israelis, and can affirm that Prof. Hage does not practice such discrimination. Several Israeli Jewish scholars have had the privilege of consulting and debating with him, and have always been welcomed with respect, kindness, and a professional response.
In the harsh time our world is going through, a time of polarization, deep mistrust, nationalist radicalization, and the persecution of dissenting voices, we urge you not to succumb to the brutal silencing of critical voices, and to uphold the academic value of unbiased evaluation and fair dealing.
Best regards,
Alma Itzhaky, Leibniz Zentrum für Literatur und Kulturforschung
Alma Miriam Katz, University of Oxford
Amalia Sa’ar, University of Haifa
Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin Ben-Gurion, University of the Negev
Amos Goldberg, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Anat Matar, Tel Aviv University
Anat Rimon Or, Beit Berl College
Avital Barak, Nova University
Barak Kalir, University of Amsterdam
Dafna Hirsch, Open University of Israel
Daphna Westerman, Goldsmiths University of London
Eilat Maoz, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Eli Osheroff, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Erella Grassiani, University of Amsterdam
Gadi Algazi, Tel Aviv University
Gaia Dan, Anti-occupation Bloc, Haifa Guy Shalev University of Haifa
Hadas Weiss, Humboldt University of Berlin
Hedva Eyal
Hilla Dayan, NYU Remarque Center Visiting Fellow
Inna Leykin, Open University of Israel
Itamar Haritan, Cornell University
Itamar Shachar, Hasselt University
Keren Assaf, University of New Mexico
Livnat Konopny Decleve, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Matan Kaminer, Queen Mary University of London
Micah Leshem, University of Haifa
Mieka Polanco, Jefferson Consulting
Naor Ben-Yehoyada, Columbia University
Neve Gordon, Queen Mary University of London
Nira Yuval-Davis, University of East London
Nitzan Lebovic, Lehigh University
Nitzan Shoshan, El Colegio de Mexico
Niza Yanay, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
Nomi Erteschik-Shir, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
Ophira Gamliel, University of Glasgow
Pnina Motzafi Haller, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
Professor Amalia Sa’ar, University of Haifa
Professor Avner Ben-Amos, Tel Aviv University
Rafi Grosglik, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
Regev Nathansohn, Sapir College
Ronnen Ben-Arie, Technion, Open University of Israel
Shifra Kisch, Utrecht University
Sigel Ronen
Smadar Sharon, Tel Aviv University
Tal Dor, Nantes Université
Tamar Barkay, Tel Hai College
Tamar Schneider, Open University of Israel
Udi Raz, Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies
Uri Gordon, CES
Uri Hadar, Tel Aviv University
Yael Assor, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Yael Berda, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Yali Hashash, Isha L’isha Feminist Research Center
Image 1: Building in Rome occupied by the CasaPound movement in 2003, photo by Barbicone
It was 2009 when, while living in a squatted house in the Montreuil, a leftist banlieue on the East side of Paris, I was asked how it was possible that there were people occupying buildings in Rome, Italy who self-defined as fascists. The activities of the CasaPound movement were coming to be known on the other side of the Alps as well, and French Leftists were asking me for explanations. Indeed, CasaPound activists used to call themselves third millennium fascists: they have de facto been the first movement to self-claim this label and assert a direct legacy with Fascism since 1945. It is important to remember that Italian law and the country’s constitution prohibit the re-formation of the Fascist party, so a claim of this kind has a certain weight.
Since that moment, I began to focus my research on this subject, first with my PhD dissertation on CasaPound (Cammelli 2015, 2017), and later by continuing to reflect on the place and significance the concept of fascism has been gaining in contemporary European landscapes (within the ERC project F-WORD).
In some ways, the fact that the activists I first engaged were using the label “fascist” to self-identify made things easier for me: my own reproduction of this category in the research was not a choice of political labelling, but simply an act of respecting the emic perspective claimed by the activists themselves. Nonetheless, the specific nature of such a categorization required unpacking.
It is important to recall that, at that time almost 15 years ago, very few people were taking this group seriously as a danger. CasaPound activists were not generally considered new exponents of a fascist-like identity. At an analytical level, it was suggested that I use the “integralist” category proposed by Douglas Holmes (2000) so as to indicate continuity with more traditional political forms, but without the demonizing consequences the label of fascism might trigger. Alternatively, they could be referred to as neo-nationalist, as suggested by Gingrich and Banks (2006) and Kalb and Halmai (Kalb and Halmai 2011) or populist as used by Kalb in his work on Poland (2009). I engaged with this literature to analyze the way this presence was affecting Italian political life, and indeed how cultural identities and political identities seemed to be playing a primary role in absorbing the disappointment experienced by people suffering the double devaluation (Kalb 2022) produced by the social crisis of European modernity – a crisis which, far from being exclusively economic, still continues today.
Almost fifteen years later, we may be in the position to add a few new pieces to the CasaPound puzzle, as the evolution of the political situation in Italy and Europe allows us to make some more specific arguments.
It is evident, as tellingly signalled by the 2022 election of the Meloni government, that the state of affairs once known as the cultural hegemony of the (so-called) left wing in Italy has lost its “momentum”. If there is anything like a cultural hegemony today in the sense outlined by Gramsci, it aligns with the consensus established around the Meloni government and reflects many of CasaPound’s own values. These activists are no longer at the margins; they now find themselves at the centre of the political imaginary of contemporary Italian society (as in other European countries). As confirmed by Douglas Holmes (2019), this not only means that the fascists of today are no longer the violent, skinhead-like people we would have imagined in the past; they have assumed a much more common and widespread profile. It also means that the people who twenty or even ten years ago appeared to be marginal groups of stigmatized militants now play a completely different role in the political arena, having become mainstream and widely accepted. This development may trigger important changes in the way new research on the topic is delineated, and we need to contextualise the rise of right-wing claims and populist nationalist drives more generally within the development of neoliberalism and its irrepressible hegemonic consensus in Europe and the Americas.
To return to the question of how the concept and word “fascism” are being used, therefore, we may look at the enormous body of literature produced by sociologists and political scientists about political parties and formations positioned on the “right” of the political spectrum. These formations are variously characterised as far-right, extreme-right, radical right or, more recently, populist radical right (Caiani Padoan 2020, Brubaker 2020, Froio et al. 2020, Mudde 2007, 2019). Italian historian Claudio Vercelli recently wrote that, while clearly the past never repeats itself, it is valid to say that the underlying motivations and behaviours evoking an ideological and subcultural substratum with specifically fascist roots does re-emerge (Vercelli 2021: 27). Shortly before (2019), historian Emilio Gentile pointed out the perils of what he calls writing “a-historiography”, that is, the practice of comparing different historical epochs to identify similarities and continuity with the Fascist past; such scholarship, he warns, risks rendering fascism banal and empty. Nonetheless, in view of current political developments in Europe, the USA and beyond, recent literature on EU and US contexts has focused on fascism and faced the f-word head on (Stanley 2018, Traverso 2017, Zetkin Collective 2020). This is not a matter of comparing different historical epochs or making ‘a-historiography’ (Gentile 2019). On the contrary, it is high time for anthropological research to bring its insights to bear on this topic, improving our understanding of the meanings behind the concept of fascism today, its use in social cultural life, and its multiple forms of reception and incorporation.
My argument is that, by silencing the word fascism (using populism, far-right, extreme-right, etc. instead), we risk overlooking the central place historical Fascism plays today as a “mythological machine” (Jesi 2011) and meaning-producer. Silencing this word runs the risk of mis-viewing the central place that the construction of mythological spectacle played historically in the formation of Fascism itself. As Simonetta Falasca Zamponi argues, such spectacle was pursued by using symbols and myths as tools for Fascism to define itself, thus contributing to forging Fascist identity (Falasca Zamponi [1997] 2003: 181). In other words, civic rituals, monuments, and public holidays offered myths and symbols that were instrumental for the self-representation of the nation (Mosse 1975: 145). Mythologies acted to normalise and naturalise meanings, containing them in an apparently permanent space. Historical Fascism used myths and rituals to form/perform a superior spiritual community capable of delineating a cosmology based on (what was asserted as) the natural order of things. Legitimizing the superiority of the virile Fascist man over any other subject, human or non, and with the tools of violence to impose the myth on history, Fascism manifested in history in a deeply pervasive and destructive way. With its future-oriented aspects developed in opposition to the sense of decay characterising the beginning of the last century, it went beyond a simple conservative movement born in reaction to the Bolshevik revolution. Overall, we need to address how memories, rhetoric, and symbols derived from historical Fascism help to constitute new political subjects today, regardless of whether they are ultimately best described as fascists or not (Levi Rothberg 2018: 357). This process is effectively illustrated and concretised by my ethnographic encounter with CasaPound activists (Cammelli 2015, 2017): I found that music and concerts served as gathering sites forging a community of destiny united by faith in the leader and obedience to his will. The community gathered behind this leader become a homogenized collective self, finding significance and reasons for their activism in symbols and images of Mussolini and the Fascist past.
An objective of anthropological investigation should thus be to explore the mythological machine (Jesi 2011) fascism produces of itself, the manifestations that make of this machine that contradictory yet mutable, violent yet meaningful contemporary presence that calls out to be explored in its multiple and differently situated manifestations. Anthropologists should try to find meaning instead of arguing over definitions, to search out lower-case fascism as a heuristic device (Holmes 2019) and violent human reaction to present-day social crises. Nonetheless, fascism is not monstrous, inhuman, or alien in any way. It is a phenomenon wholly entangled with modernity (Bauman 1989) and the way we use reason to justify multiple forms of supremacy.
To conclude, we should consider fascism as it has variously manifested across 1945 and the turn of the millennium, and in its connection with liberalism and the neoliberal turn. And we may need to look more widely around us as well as inside ourselves, not limiting our gaze to some stigmatised militant but instead paying attention to the more general culture of domination and violence that is feeding our contemporary world.
Maddalena Gretel Cammelli is Associate professor in cultural anthropology at the Department Cultures, Politics and Society of the University of Turin, and Principal Investigator of the ERC Starting Grant project The world behind a word. An anthropological exploration of fascist practices and meanings among European youth (F-WORD) (https://fword.unito.it/).
References
Bauman, Zygmunt. [1989] 2010. Modernità e Olocausto. Bologna: Il Mulino.
Brubaker, Rogers. 2020. “Populism and nationalism” in Nation and Nationalism, 26 (1), 2020, pp. 44–66.
Caiani Manuela, Enrico Padoan. 2020. “Setting the scene: filling the gap in Populism studies” In PACOPartecipazione e conflitto 13(1) pp. 1-28.
Cammelli, Maddalena Gretel. 2014. Millenial Fascism. Contribution à une Anthropologie du Fascisme du Troisième Millénaire. PhD diss. Paris: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales.
Cammelli, Maddalena Gretel. 2015. Fascisti del Terzo Millennio. Per un’Antropologia di CasaPound. Verona: OmbreCorte.
Cammelli, Maddalena Gretel. 2017. Fascistes du Troisième Millénaire. Un Phénomène Italien? Milan: Editions Mimésis.
Falasca Zamponi, Simonetta. [1997] 2003. Lo spettacolo del fascismo. Soveria Mannelli: Rubettino.
Froio Caterina, Pietro Castelli Gattinara, Giorgia Bulli, Matteo Albanese. 2020. CasaPound Italia. Contemporary Extreme-right Politics. London, New York: Routledge.
Gentile, Emilio. 2019. Chi è Fascista. Bari-Roma: Laterza.
Gingrich, André, Marcus Banks. 2006. Neo-Nationalism in Europe and Beyond. Perspectives from Social Anthropology. New York and Oxford: Berghahn.
Holmes, Douglas R. 2000. Integral Europe. Fast-Capitalism, Multiculturalism, Neofascism. Oxford, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Holmes, Douglas R. 2019, “Fascism at eye level. The anthropological conundrum”, in Focaal—Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology. 84 pp. 62–90.
Jesi, Furio. 2011. Cultura di destra. Roma: Nottetempo.
Kalb Don, Halmai Gabor (eds). 2011. Headlines of nation, subtexts of class. Working-class populism and the return of the repressed in neoliberal Europe. New York, Oxford: Berghahn.
Kalb, Don. 2009. “Conversations with a Polish Populist: Tracing hidden histories of globalization, class, and dispossession in post-socialism (and beyond)”. American Ethnologist 36(2): 207-223.
Kalb Don. 2022. “Double devaluations: Class, value and the rise of the right in the Global North.” In Journal of Agrarian Change. 23, 1: 204-219.
Levi, Neil, Michael Rothberg. 2018. “Memory studies in a moment of danger: Fascism, post fascism, and the contemporary political imaginary”, in Memory Studies Vol. 11(3) pp. 355–367.
Mosse, George L. 1975. La nazionalizzazione delle masse. Simbolismo politico e movimenti di massa in Germania dalle guerre napoleoniche al Terzo Reich. Bologna: Il Mulino.
Mudde, Cas. 2007. Populist Radical Right in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mudde, Cas. 2019. The Far-Right today. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Stanley, Jason. 2018. How fascism works. the politics of us and them. New York: Random House.
Traverso, Enzo. 2017. I nuovi volti del fascismo. Verona: OmbreCorte.
Vercelli Claudio. 2021. Neofascismo in grigio. La destra radicale tra l’Italia e l’Europa. Torino: Einaudi.
Zetkin Collective. 2020. Fascisme Fossile. Paris : La Fabrique éditions.
Image 1: Beppe Grillo in Piazza Castello in Turin for the campaign of the 5 Stars Movement Piemonte on 14 March 2010, photo by Giorgio Brida
I do not want to focus too much on the definitions of social phenomena because I find it more interesting to look at the structures (synchronic and diachronic) and contexts (at various scales) underpinning them. It is – I believe – analytically more productive to compare those, instead of sticking to what a categorical label (which is always, to an extent, arbitrarily attributed) does or does not include. Moreover, the word “fascism”, having become so morally laden in its century old history, is almost impossible to use it without falling into excessive generalizations (both moral and historical). With this in mind, my tendency towards what might or might not be classified as “fascism”, hinges on one simple principle: I use it either when referring to the movement founded by Benito Mussolini in 1919, or when the category is used “emically” by my research participants to describe themselves.
Consistently with the above, I’d like to focus on some systemic aspects I have been concentrating on in my recent work on populism and conspiracy theory within the Italian 5 Stars Movement (5SM), and put that into relation with insights from previous research. I do not at all intend to suggest that 5SM is a phenomenon of the fascist type, albeit one might notice, historically, a few overlapping tendencies. Rather, I look at the 5SM as a political grouping that was, at its origin, populist. Fascism, too, is an historically specific form of populism. But not every populism is fascist.
My main areas of interest in political anthropology have been concerned with: 1) The ideological innovations of Spontaneismo Armato: a radical and partly clandestine neo-fascist galaxy of small armed groups, active in Italy in the late 1970’s, and deeply engaged in the political violence of those years, (Loperfido 2018, 2022). 2) The constitutive processes, and subsequent collapse, of a specific socio-economic ideology of autarchy/self-reliance in Veneto, Italy. The latter was organized around an organicist understanding of the social relations of production which had also framed the sub-nationalist discourses of Lega Nord, another populist protest party, that had seen the light in Veneto and Lombardia in the late 1960s and early 1970s (Loperfido and Pusceddu, 2019, Loperfido 2020). 3) The above mentioned 5SM, with particular reference to the articulation of its early populistic functioning, and the fantasies of conspiracy against the people, very widespread in the early stages of the party formation (2005-2016). With Victor Turner, I analyze this articulation in terms of the anti-structural logics of charisma/enthusiasm, that informed the party’s constitutive process within the complex political economy of the long crisis unleashed by the financial breakdown of 2009.
All three of these political phenomena have been associated with fascism by variously distributed detractors in the media and at times in scientific discourses. Personally, I only dealt with Spontaneismo in terms of “Neo-fascism”, for the reasons listed above. However, one can notice that the three political formations shared a few ideological features with historical fascism.
Some of these features are:
1) All three – at least in their constitutional phase – claimed to represent various expressions of a third way between left and right, socialism and liberalism.
2) They all, likewise, claim(ed) to represent some form of revolt against the bourgeois world, while leaving unchallenged the system of property, market relations, and capital accumulation more generally.
3) They all were charismatic in nature, vitalistic and transgressive. One could say enthusiastic in the Durkheimian sense, or – more appropriately – anti-structural in a Turnerian perspective.
4) They all opposed action to theory and reason, giving to the former the moral edge over the latter. This created, in all four cases, a strongly anti-intellectual orientation, with attacks on rationalism, and to bourgeois idealist notions of foundational identity.
5) They all produced forms of organicist ideologies which were, more or less explicitly, obscuring class differences, and thus attempting to deny and repress class conflict.
Reflecting on similar ideological configurations, Susana Narotzky makes an important statement when saying that:
“most ‘third-way’ attempts at producing alternative social models have been of the ‘organic’ type, from the social doctrine of the church at the turn of the twentieth century through republican solidarism and fascism, to present-day third-way and social-capital proponents. They are similar in that they all aim at maintaining capitalist market-led relations of production while solving the ‘social question’, that is, the social unrest created by the necessary differentiation those very relations produce. They differ in the means employed to reach these common objectives and therefore in the procedural structures of governance developed. However, they all stress the importance of personalized relationships between agents and the specificity of community contexts” (Narotzky 2007:406, my emphasis).
Following in her footsteps, I would like to explore how third way postulations, and the processes of personalization/naturalization of socio-economic relations that are integral to it, could be related to the macro-context of austerity measures. Can this dynamic of personalization/naturalization be interpreted as the nexus determining a mutually constitutive relationship between austerity and charisma? The above might not give us certainties on what fascism is or is not, but could perhaps illuminate social processes, structures and constraints that elicited the emergence of fascism in its historical form, and that have – at other times – produced ideological tendencies that are – to an extent – comparable with it.
If we look at the historical context, our first realization is that all of these formations were constituted at moments of deep crisis of capital accumulation (historical fascism in the late 1910s, the Liga Veneta – then Lega Nord, then Lega – in the early 1970s, Spontaneismo in the mid 1970s, 5SM in 2009). This is not to say these political formations were reacting to economic crisis per se, rather, they all seemed to embody a reaction to what Stuart Hall has termed – with Gramsci – “a passive revolution”, a sort of reaction to a non-reaction: “when none of the social forces were able to enforce their political will and things go stumbling along in an unresolved way” (Hall and Massey 2010).
Another recurrent aspect in all of these situations is the emergency of austerity as a culturally hegemonic discourse. In a recent book Clara Mattei (2022) explores the relationship between austerity and fascism in Italy, as a process of reciprocal constitution. She sheds new light on austerity presenting it as a project elaborated by British and Italian think tanks at the dawn of the last century with the goal of liberating the forces of capital from the yoke of political control. She reminds us of how in his very first discourse as Prime Minister, Mussolini spoke the idioms of austerity, and promised to de-politicize the economy and remove all meddling of the state within it (Mattei 2022:205). Obviously, the other conjunctures in which the “idioms of austerity” were enforced as culturally hegemonic, were precisely the moments, named above, where the forces of capital appeared to be under severe threat (the 1970s and the 2010s).
Now, there are of course enormous differences, and neither Lega, Spontaneismo, or 5SM, embraced austerity the way Mussolini’s regime did. But I am not interested here in the direct relationship between these movements and austerity. Rather, I’m trying to suggest that austerity became a paradigm, powerful enough to establish a new representation of the relation between the economy and the state, where the possibility and the duty of the former to intervene in the latter and regulate the markets, disappears. This implies a set of consequences that, I shall argue, can be seen as co-responsible for the emergence and social establishment of the ideological configurations listed above.
Yesterday, like today, austerity seems to have the power to de-politicize issues, where these are “removed from the level of public accountability, and designated as ‘non-political’” (Hadjimichalis 2018: 108). Integral to austerity is what Don Kalb has termed “the unstoppable rule of experts” (2011: 3), whereby economic forces are not any longer the object matter of politicians (who govern things), but of technicians, scientists and technocrats (who study and manage things). This seems to inaugurate a process whereby the necessity to govern socio-economic forces is obscured. More than that: these are divorced from their social situatedness, their rootedness in the social process, and their being integral to the unequal relationalities between power holders and the subaltern classes. We could say that – with austerity – economic processes, social facts, power relations, develop a tendency to exit the social, and enter the domain of nature. Costis Hadjimichalis (2018) has shown how the discourse of austerity seems to be endowed with the magic power of making bloody attacks on social welfare, budgetary cuts for health and education, disappear beneath the idioms of flexibility, efficiency, and modernization. The result is “a culture of fear, alongside feelings of injustice and anger” (Hadjimichalis 2018: 108).
I was grappling with similar issues when faced with the problem of populism and conspiracy theories within the 5SM in the immediate aftermath of the 2009 economic breakdown, where not only the relation between the masses and the leader had become personalized, individualized, and as it were unmediated (Calise 2016, Comby 2014), but social and political forces were seen as personified and animated. The state had become a Vampire, the politicians were Zombies, while conspiracy theories about vaccines or organ removal during Covid-19 had come to represent the penetration of the extractive logic of capital down to the intimate sphere of the body itself.
We have known at least since Weber that “the social relationships directly involved in charisma are strictly personal, based on the validity and practice based on charismatic personal qualities” (1964 [1947]: 363-364). Yet, we can perhaps enrich this idea further by exposing a relationship that might connect personalized logics of charisma, 3rd way attempts, attacks on rationalism, with the larger systemic shift to hegemonic austerity. As we have seen, austerity deliberately dis-empowers the state as an abstract mechanism of social-economic regulation: a normative centre immanent over social relations, overseeing, governing, and intermediating social, economic and political interactions between actual persons, groupings, and different orders of institutions. The power of abstraction with which we endow the state, is key to that socially regulating function, tasked with emancipating social relations from their situated imbalances of power and their hierarchical relationalities. It is via these abstracting properties that the socially equalizing function of the state can be implemented via the establishment of a normative order. Obviously, when that function is removed not only is the field open again to the re-embedment of power relations into the given social hierarchy, but also to the general essentialization of social characters and social forces. It seems to me that this is the kind of context Gramsci alluded to, precisely when talking about fascism in austerity ridden Italy, when he saw, between the old that is dying and the new that cannot be born, an interregnum where “a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”.
Giacomo Loperfido is an ERC researcher in social and political anthropology for the PACT (Populism and Conspiracy Theory) Project, at the University of Tübingen. His research deals with questions of political violence, political radicalism, cultural enclavization, social and economic disintegration, in the wider context of global systemic crisis. He edited the volume “Extremism, Society and the State” (Berghahn Books, 2022).
References
Calise, Mauro. 2016. La Democrazia del Leader. Roma, Bari: Laterza.
Comby, Jean-Baptiste. 2014. “L’individualisation des Problèmes Collectifs: une Dépolitisation Politiquement Située.” Savoir/Agir:2: 45-50.
Hadjimichalis, Costis. 2018. Crisis Spaces. Structures, Struggles, and Solidarity in Southern Europe. London, New York: Routledge.
Hall, Stuart, and Doreen Massey. 2010. “Interpreting the crisis.” Soundings 44.44: 57-71.
Kalb, Don. 2011. “Headlines of Nation, Subtexts of Class. Working-class Populism and The Return of the Repressed in Neo-liberal Europe, Introduction”, inKalb Don and Gabor Halmai, Headlines of Nation, Subtexts of Class. Working-class Populism and The Return of the Repressed in Neo-liberal Europe. New York, Oxford : Berghan Books.
Loperfido, Giacomo. 2018. “Neither Left nor RIght. Crisis, Wane of Politics, and the Struggles for Sovereignty”, in Kalb, Don and Mollona, Mao, Worldwide Mobilizations: Class Struggles and Urban Commoning, New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 118-141.
–. 2020. “The entrepreneur’s other: Small entrepreneurial identity and the collapse of life structures in the ‘Third Italy’”, in Narotzky, Susana, Grassroots Economies, Living With Austerity in Southern Europe. Pluto Press, 173-191.
–. 2022. “The Empire and the Barbarians: Cosmological Laceration and the Social Establishment of Extremism”, in Loperfido, Giacomo, Extremism, Society, and the State, New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 87-108.
Loperfido, Giacomo, and Antonio Maria Pusceddu. 2019. “Unevenness and Deservingness: Regional Differentiation in Contemporary Italy.” Dialectical Anthropology 43:4, 417-436.
Mattei, Clara. The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism. University of Chicago Press, 2022.
Narotzky, Susana. 2007. “The Project in the Model. Reciprocity, Social Capital, and the Politics of Ethnographic Realism.” Cultural Anthropology, 48:3, 403-424.
Weber, Max. 1964 [1947]. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. New York: The Free Press
Cite as: Loperfido, Giacomo. 2024. “Austerity, Charisma, and the Attacks on Reason” Focaalblog, 1 February. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/02/01/giacomo-loperfido-austerity-charisma-and-the-attacks-on-reason/
Image 1: Chanting “White lives matter!” and “You will not replace us!” and “Jews will not replace us!” several hundred white nationalists and white supremacists carrying torches marched in a parade through the University of Virginia campus 11 August 2017, photo by Evelyn Hockestein for The Washington Post
This discussion paper offers two contributions to our collective discussion on the theme of fascism: (a) an integrated set of elements comprising our definition of the concept; and (b) abbreviated notes on the applicability of each element to the present moment (see also Gordon and Webber 2023)
We argue that fascism is a mass movement rooted in the radicalizing petty bourgeoisie, or middle class. Fascist movements may participate in the bourgeois electoral arena, but ultimately the source of their strength and the centre of their political action is in the streets and the exercise of extra-legal violence. While outside of existential crises the bourgeoisie is not favourably disposed to fascists (some exceptions notwithstanding) the bourgeoisie may nevertheless appeal to them in an effort to impose order in such moments if political alternatives are unavailable or insufficient. The threat of fascism is co-extensive with capitalism – and not simply one of its stages – because capitalism systematically produces crises that profoundly destabilize the social order and its class relations. The possibility of fascism deepens when such crises reach a civilizational scale and become irresolvable on the terms of capital (i.e. the restoration of profitability and capitalist hegemony) either through bourgeois democratic means or other forms of authoritarianism, such as military dictatorship. Historically, a feature of those crises and obstacle to their resolution includes partially weakened but undefeated, mass revolutionary forces. As long as there is capitalism, then, the fascist threat remains alive. The intensity of the threat obviously has its ebbs and flows, but it never disappears.
As the definition outlined above would suggest, our preferred point of departure in what follows is a critical return to – but also extension beyond – the classical Marxist theories of fascism, particularly that of Leon Trotsky. In our view, two elements common to most classical Marxist theories of fascism need to be abandoned. The first is the unjustified view that fascism is specific to the kind of inter-imperial rivalry characteristic of the early twentieth century, and the related point that fascism is limited to countries of the imperialist core. The second is the connection of fascism to a “stage” of “monopoly capital,” a theory that was incorrect at the time and is equally without value today. Finally, we also believe that the interrelated phenomena of colonialism, racism, and white supremacy need to be fully integrated into the foundational elements of fascism identified by classical Marxists and synthesized below.
This is the master logic around which the seven elements of our concept of fascism and its potential development into a movement that can contest for power are articulated. We agree with Geoff Eley’s (2021) methodological point on the necessity of “portability” in any conceptualization of fascism that is to be of continued relevance across different historical periods, even as we disagree with his substantive characterization of the present conjuncture. Hence, we intend our concept of fascism as sufficiently abstract to be portable across different times and spaces of the industrial capitalist epoch, but nonetheless sufficiently coherent so as to be able to distinguish the phenomenon of fascism from other closely related phenomena.
First, with regard to context, the rise of fascism requires a severe and sustained crisis of capitalism beyond the mere immediate “conjunctural fluctuations,” and which makes the normal process of capitalist accumulation difficult if not impossible (Mandel 1971). Fascism’s historical role is to radically alter social, political, and economic conditions in order to facilitate a renewal of stable accumulation to the benefit, especially, of big capital. This is the master element whose logic articulates the other elements into a coherent totality. Clearly, the global crisis that erupted in 2008 and the economic stagnation that followed for much of the world – the worst slump in global production and trade since the 1930s, and one compounded by the economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic – meets this contextual requirement.
Second, it is necessary that there be a foreboding sense of civilizational degeneration on the scale (but without necessarily the same content) that shaped the political zeitgeist from which classical fascism emerged. Such degeneration radicalizes the petty bourgeoisie. Most pertinent in the inter-war period was the crisis of global imperialism, culminating in the brutality and devastation of the First World War and inurement towards violence. Militarism crystallized in the European psyche generally, and especially among those who gravitated to fascism. The anxieties and traumas of postwar life, amidst economic volatility, were in turn successfully transformed by fascism into a focused hatred of Communism and alien others (Traverso 2017). Muted elements of this contextual factor exist in an incipient manner today, taking most dramatic form in the ecological crisis, the inurement to large-scale needless death and debilitation associated with the management of the COVID pandemic, the heightening of inter-imperial rivalries, the onset of major new wars, and a widespread cultural pessimism reminiscent of classically pre-fascist sentiment. Yet the sense of civilizational degeneration today is not yet comparable in scale to that of the era in which classical fascism was forged.
Third, the crisis of capitalist accumulation must develop into a crisis of bourgeois democracy. The historical context generative of the rise of fascism was one in which social classes deviated from their traditional political parties, and “the immediate situation became delicate and dangerous,” with an acute crisis of authority, “or general crisis of the state” (Thomas 2011). Today, clearly, there is a widespread international context of bourgeois democratic decline and weakening of traditional parties, but not yet the proliferation of the actual overthrow of bourgeois democratic regimes and the installation of military dictatorships – with some important exceptions, such as the counter-revolutionary wave in the Middle East – much less fascist dictatorships.
The fourth element of fascism – the inadequacy of traditional military dictatorship – flows immediately from the third. Traditional forms of police and military repression and dictatorial rule reveal themselves to be inadequate in the face of a strong working-class movement or an unreliable military. As a reactionary and militarized mass movement, with a capacity to mobilize supporters in the streets and electorally, fascism offers a solution. In the current context, by contrast, traditional forms of police and military repression within bourgeois democratic parameters, or in some cases military dictatorship (whether temporary, or longer term), have proved sufficient for the reproduction of capitalist rule.
The fifth component has to do with the petty bourgeois composition of fascism’s mass base. While inter-war European fascism drew cross-class support, at its core it was a petty-bourgeois movement of small business owners, rural landowners, managers, civil servants, professionals, and military and ex-military members. More and more, this radicalizing middle class was drawn to a revanchist politics premised on fortifying the nation, martial discipline, and order. Because of its precarious class location within the capitalist hierarchy, nestled uneasily between a globally ambitious set of large capitalists and an internationalist working-class movement, the petty bourgeoisie is disposed to conflating itself and its interests with those of the nation and to a conservative politics. The petty bourgeoisie is also a sufficiently large section of society to constitute the basis of a mass movement. The contemporary far-right draws heavily on petty-bourgeois radicalization, but the petty-bourgeoisie has not been mobilized and transformed into mass movements willing and capable of regularly engaging in organized paramilitary violence.
Sixth, before fascists are able to take power, with support from the bourgeoisie, they must first alter the balance of forces in their favor by inflicting partial setbacks on movements of the exploited and oppressed. We can call this theweakening, short of defeat, of the revolutionary threat from below.The revolutionary threat once posed by the proletariat may have dissipated, and any civil war scenario between the classes may have abated, but the organizational capacity of the workers’ movement to resist the depression of wages and increases in exploitation through normal means persists. In most of the world where the far-right has strengthened it has not done so in response to a revolutionary threat of any kind, so fascist violence has not been necessary to deliver a weakening-short-of-defeat of such a threat. In the major exception, the revolutionary wave in the Middle East, the counter-revolutions assumed traditional forms rather than fascist ones.
Seventh, and finally, there is assimilation into the bourgeois state and the restoration of capitalist stability. With its victory fascism is “to a large extent assimilated into the bourgeois state apparatus” and thus the most extreme, unassimilable elements of the movement, are of necessity liquidated (Mandel 1971: 20). Fascist rule is put to the task of restoring capitalist stability. Observing the sharp increase of capitalist profits under the Nazis, Mandel notes that while some capitalists, such as those in the arms industry, benefited more than their compatriots, “there clearly emerges a collective economic interest of the capitalist class” (Mandel 1971: 16). The winner in all of this was not a fraction of German capital but large German capital as a whole, which remained very much under the command of the German bourgeoisie, rather than the state or the fascists (Neumann 2009: 435-36, 613). Nowhere in the world have fascists captured state power, and so nowhere have they subsequently been assimilated into the bourgeois state. While some far-right parties with fascist roots have entered into government or hold the balance of power in government in parts of Europe, presently they act within the parameters of bourgeois democracy rather than seek to overthrow it (even if they wish to weaken it).
Todd Gordon is an Associate Professor at Wilfrid Laurier University and an editor of Midnight Sun. He has written on the Freedom Convoy for Midnight Sun and Studies in Political Economy.
Jeffery R. Webber is a political economist with research interests in Latin America, Marxism, social theory, the history of the Left, international development, capitalism and nature, imperialism, the politics of class and social oppression, and social movements.
References
Eley, Geoff. 2021. “What Is Fascism and Where Does It Come From?,” History Workshop Journal 91, no. 1: 1–28.
Gordon, Todd, and Jeffery R. Webber. 2023. “The Authoritarian Disposition: Capitalism, Liberalism, Fascism,” Spectre, Issue 8, Fall 2023: 42-55.
Mandel, Ernest. 1971. “Introduction,” in The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, by Leon Trotsky. New York: Pathfinder.
Neumann, Franz L. 2009. Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933-1944. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee.
Thomas, Peter D. 2011. The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism. Chicago: Haymarket Books.
Traverso, Enzo. 2017. Fire and Blood: The European Civil War, 1914-1945. London: Verso.
Cite as: Gordon, Todd & Webber Jeffery R. 2024. “The Return of Fascism?” Focaalblog, 29 January. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/01/29/todd-gordon-and-jeffery-r-webber-the-return-of-fascism/
Image 1: The United States Capitol Building stormed by Trump supporters on 6 January 2021, photo by Tyler Merbler
On November 14, 2023, at the University of Toronto, we, the conveners of the Political Economy Discussion Group, an informal transnational group of anthropologists working in political economy, brought together an in-person group of more than 25 colleagues to discuss the question of the status of contemporary fascism. As part of this process, we invited five of us to sketch out their own ideas in short “position papers” on fascism which were pre-circulated. These papers, only slightly revised, now appear as a feature on fascism on FocaalBlog. We hope these will generate and encourage research among anthropologists on contemporary extreme right-wing formations, whether these are called fascism, proto-fascism, “authoritarian populism,” (Hall 1988), “authoritarian statism” (Poulantzas (2014 [1978]), “authoritarian neoliberalism” (Bruff 2014), “illiberalism” (Rosenblatt 2021), or by some other term. Certainly no one will argue that this topic is not timely or in urgent need of discussion today.
Fascism is fundamentally anti-democratic and violent. It attacks the rights of people to criticize its governance regime or to realize their different realms of freedom and relative autonomy in everyday life. Here we wish to think about contingency and alliances as this is where people agree that they are fighting for the right to exist and exercise realms of autonomy in their lives. We are far from sure that we are confronting the same fascisms as in the past, and we believe we need to generate new tools and new analyses as we face our current disasters. In order to contribute to such a discussion, we see it necessary to draw on a wide range of theoretical analyses from both Marxist and other sources. The effort is to illuminate the present and to prepare for what we expect may be coming in whatever way seems most constructive and strategically valuable.
We begin by considering Marxist analyses of fascism, alerted by the warning posed by Alberto Toscano in his brilliant Late Fascism (2023) that drawing historical analogies between the fascisms of the past (notably in Italy and Germany) and the fascism-candidates of the present is at best unrewarding, and at its worst, given the acceleration of the global rise of the ultra-right and the imperative to respond, a waste of time. But we also need to parse out, given the many Marxist theorizations and numerous Marxist theorists of and organizers against past fascisms – who were among fascism’s first victims! – what was most rewarding from those analyses and what needs to be left behind.
The Inter-war struggles by communist and socialist parties, both before and after fascist movements took state power, provoked insightful inter-war critical Marxist theorizations of the causes of the rise of fascism by Gramsci (1971), Trotsky (1971), Clara Zetkin (1923) and others over and against the conservative and liberal formulations that marked conventional scholarship in the West. These analyses were rich in their sense of contingency and their openness to the social contradiction arising from the economic crises brought on by the uneven and combined development of capitalism.
Among Marxists not all interwar theorizations of fascism were the same. Most held that capitalists were crucial to fascist movements in attaining state power and that, once these movements came to power, the fascist state worked to the benefit of capitalists, even if they did not directly lead it, while it consistently showed extraordinary violence against the organized working class and its supporters on the left. However, here agreement among Marxist conceptualizations ended.
Marxist theorizations that were politically dominant within the Comintern saw the growth of fascist movements and the fascist state as no more than a teleological outcome of hypertrophied capitalism at an inevitable stage of its development, with which these other classes came to be inexorably aligned (Renton 2020 [1999]: 79-84). These approaches, when put into practice, had catastrophic effects. To put not too fine a point to it, these interwar Marxist analyses of the German and Italian cases of fascism (i.e., those coming out of the Comintern after 1928 with the ascent of Stalin) were grossly flawed because they defaulted to an economistic and rigid evolutionist account of capitalism. They failed to offer adequate theoretical accounts of German and Italian fascism’s mobilization of their bases through racism, antisemitism, ethno-nationalism, anti-Leftism, and patriarchy associated with their past bourgeois-imperial and colonial histories. These after all were histories of repression, genocide (viz. Germany’s extermination of Hereros), and ethnic cleansing whose effects continue into the present.
We suggest following Toscano (2023) that instead of assuming that liberal capitalist states, including neoliberal states, provide universal safeguards against fascism, that the practices and ideologies of fascism are far from incompatible with liberalism and the liberal state – and in fact lie within them. After all Western liberalism had indulged in colonialism, slavery, and genocide for centuries before Central European fascists began creating their violently vengeful empires. The latter did so with explicit envy and admiration for the earlier white Atlantic expansionism. This means that instead of regarding fascist movements and even the emergence of fascist states as sudden and unpredictable eruptions of political violence incidentally associated with the economic crises of capitalism, we must go beyond the economistic analyses of fascism to explore the “fascist potential” (Toscano 2023) of what appear unexceptional, even “ordinary” features of contemporary liberal capitalist states (e.g., incarceration, police violence toward Blacks in the U.S.) if we wish to more critically explore the possibilities of fascism today.
We start by pointing out that like the prehistories of German and Italian fascism, the histories of other Euro-American political formations (U.S., Britain, France, Belgium, Netherlands) are characterized by the racialized violence of colonization, enslavement, exterminism, and accumulation by violent dispossession of the non-European peoples they came to dominate politically. This has its theoretical corollary. Instead of only undertaking economic analyses of capitalism, there is the imperative of exploring the possibility that late neoliberal states already, like liberal democratic states before them, for historical reasons contain within them fascist potentials. We think, for example of the totalitarian treatment of huge numbers of incarcerated poor and racially marked populations in the United States, or the new state and popular violence against the Roma in central Europe or against North African, Turkish, and other immigrants in western Europe.
Marxist analyses of fascist potentials today must thus take into account the continuities and legacies of racialization, antisemitism, misogyny, and xenophobia that are associated with capitalism as a historical social order but are never merely reducible to its economic logics, in exploring the potential of new fascist emergences as these are occurring globally today. We must instead examine the racialized and gendered violence and ideologies encysted in neoliberal states today and think more of economic crises as the impetus and context for their emergence, instead of being their ‘cause’. In this regard, we could start by drawing on the concepts of racial capitalism, imperialist racism, and abolitionism within the Black radical intellectual tradition of Cedric Robinson, Aimé Césaire, W.E.B. Du Bois, Walter Rodney, Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and numerous others (Toscano 2023: 25-48).
This might lead us, for example, to see fascist potential in the nostalgic imaginary by the Republican base (many of whom are not economically working class) of a golden age centered on a male “white working class” privileged by industrial employment and U.S. Cold War hegemony in the 1960s and 1970s (Toscano 2023: 8-9). Believers in this white supremacist imaginary, emboldened by Trump’s January 6, 2021 insurrection, form this base that he and the Republican Freedom Party elite now pander to with their MAGA cult of “popular” grievances — that the U.S. is being “invaded” by immigrant “rapists and murderers,” and that “the election was stolen” by “illegal” Black voting in Detroit and Atlanta as well as the age old theme of “the Jews will not replace us.” Above all, Trump and his elite have successfully incited violence against people of color, Jews, women, and trans people – those shut out of the golden age.
Going forward, while continuing to benefit from the classic analyses by Trotsky, Gramsci, Zetkin, et al. of capitalist crises, historical blocs and fascist formations while going beyond them to consider racialized and gendered fascist potentials, we can also draw from non-Marxist critiques of fascism to consider the ideas and practice of democratic freedoms and the ideologies of racism that deployed historical representations politicized in a fascist context. We need to take seriously, for example, the relationship between fascist formations and patriarchal structures as well as the diverse histories and forms of racism employed – from the racial ordering of color and US racism to the images of a Jewish race controlling global power and banks.
We are also attracted to other Marxist approaches which show more strategic openness to trying to tip the balance during periods of fascist ascent by attempting to build coalitions between the organized working class and other classes (e.g., the petty bourgeoisie, peasantry, lumpenproletariat) who could be converted to opponents to fascism, and who might otherwise join fascist movements. There were also strong democratic movements against fascism in many European countries, such as the Popular Front and the French and Italian resistance. These approaches have to be taken seriously in terms of questions of democracy and their possible effectiveness in different nations of the time which did not succumb to fascist domination. Some non-Marxist theories also viewed class relations and class struggle as relevant to the emergence of classical fascisms. However, many such analyses concentrated on fascist ideology or aesthetics, and lacked economic and social context.
For our November 14 session on fascism, we attempted to bring together a broad set of discussions, not in any way limited by the traditional Marxist debates but paying attention to them as part of crucial ammunition for addressing the threatening situation we face today. Are we confronting fascist movements at present that could assume state power by ostensibly democratic means, then transform radically into violent rule? Or are quite different right-wing formations from fascism ascending with very different trajectories if they assume state power?
For the November 14 session, we asked the authors of the blog pieces that follow not so much a factual as an epistemological question to engender discussion, leading off with “How would you know contemporary fascism when you see it, in the one or two cases you know best from your ethnographic or historical knowledge?” We also asked whether the formations in these cases might better be characterized by other terms and theories.
We concluded our questions by pointedly asking our authors about interventions in struggle. If the contemporary right-wing formations now in existence pose a risk to political democracy, peace, and the capacity of large populations to engage in social reproduction – as we believe they do – we asked, “What would be the most effective preemptive responses by the Left to them?” And lastly, “What would be the disposition of social and political forces and economic conditions that would make these responses feasible?” These last two questions were what we as conveners hope that these blogs will provoke the readers of FocaalBlog to respond to, given the grave political crises and economic and ecological contradictions now before us. There is already much practically at stake in these questions: theorists and organizers on the Left are already facing repression from the rising tide of extreme rightwing forces around the globe.
Don Nonini is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His latest book is Food Activism Today: Sustainability, Climate Change and Social Justice (New York University Press, 2024). His new research project examines racial capitalism and its eco-politics.
Ida Susser is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, is currently studying urban social movements, class and commoning in France, Spain, and the United States.
References
Bruff, I. 2014. “The Rise of Authoritarian Neoliberalism.” Rethinking Marxism 26: 113-129.
Gramsci, A. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Q. Hoare and G.N. Smith, eds. New York: International Press.
Hall, S. 1988. The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left. London: Verso.
Poulantzas, N. A. 2014 [1978]. State, Power, Socialism. London: Verso.
Renton, D. 2020 [1999]. Fascism: History and Theory. London: Pluto Press.
Rosenblatt, H. 2021. “The History of Illiberalism.” The Routledge Handbook of Illiberalism. A. Sajó, R. Uitz and S. Holmes. New York: Routledge, pp. 16-32.
Toscano, A. 2023. Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis. London: Verso.
Trotsky, L. 1971. The Struggle against Fascism in Germany. London: Pathfinder.
Zetkin, C. 1923. “Facism.” Labour Monthly, August 1923, pp. 69-78.
Cite as: Nonini, Don and Susser, Ida. 2024. “Introduction: Fascism, Then and Now.” FocaalBlog, 24 January. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/01/24/don-nonini-and-ida-susser-introduction-fascism-then-and-now/
In the midst of India’s extensive urbanization, with more than 34% of the population dwelling in urban areas as of 2021, as per the World Bank, the complex relationship between urban transformation, poverty dynamics, and the impact of capitalism gains prominence. Amidst this swiftly urbanizing landscape, it is relevant to ask about the enduring significance of street shrines and the deities they embody. This blog post unravels the complex interplay between urbanization, poverty dynamics, and capitalism in shaping the evolving narrative of street shrines in Delhi. By examining specific examples, we seek to contribute to the understanding of the socio-political implications of religious transformations, shedding light on the informal mechanisms that influence the cultural and political dimensions of urban India.
As Hindu deities increasingly dominate street shrines, such as those near Jama Masjid, Red Fort, and Chandni Chowk, the very essence of these spaces undergoes an accretionary conversion over time. This transformation is not merely a happenstance but a result of a complex collusion involving diverse social and economic players who shape the city’s evolving political, religious, and cultural landscape. Old Delhi, with its labyrinthine lanes and historical significance, is undergoing a palpable cultural reshaping as Hindu dominance unfolds within its streets.
Street shrines, once reflective of the syncretic blend of Hindu and Islamic traditions, are now marked by a pronounced prevalence of Hindu deities. This is largely due to the ongoing influx of labor migrants from the neighbouring states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh into the city who are reshaping the sacred spaces in both their structure and function. The diverse backgrounds, cultures, and religious practices of the migrants contribute to a rich tapestry of beliefs that find expression in the street shrines. The choice of the deities is a reflection of their faith. Migrants, seeking a sense of community and continuity with their cultural heritage, often contribute to the embellishment and maintenance of these shrines. The shrines may adapt to serve not only as religious spaces but also as community hubs where migrants find support, share experiences, and build social networks.
Icons like Shirdi Sai Baba and Hanuman, along with other Vedic motifs, have become the visual protagonists, signifying a transformative narrative that overrides the Islamic heritage that was historically ingrained in this part of the city. In the intricate lanes of Old Delhi, the evolving narrative of cultural transformation is discernible through the gradual transition of temporary religious symbols into enduring fixtures. Local spaces, once harmoniously shared, now bear markings that define them for specific purposes, subtly alienating those who traverse them and instilling a sense of unease. This shift, woven into the fabric of the city, holds profound implications for understanding the social and ethnic conflicts that manifest within its boundaries.
The multifaceted nexus signifies that as urban centers burgeon, various economic and social forces come into play, fostering both economic opportunities and disparities. The growing number of street shrines might be interpreted as a reaction to the changing cityscape, complexly influenced by issues of poverty, capitalism, and religious practices. The chosen field sites in New Delhi were intentional selections, serving as gateways into regional politics entwined with land acquisitions, unraveling layers of influence on the transformation of public shrines and art.
Image 1: A Shrine for Hanuman right behind Connaught place in New Delhi (Photo by Smytta Yadav)
The following provides some examples of street shrines and the changes they have undergone.
Hanuman’s Ascendance: In the heart of Old Delhi, near the iconic Jama Masjid, street shrines that were once adorned with Islamic calligraphy and symbols now prominently feature the figure of Hanuman. This ascendance of Hanuman in the visual landscape signals a shift in religious and cultural prominence, eclipsing the Islamic heritage that was historically intertwined with this area.
While administrative authorities recognize that these religious shrines can be leveraged for land acquisition, the marginalized inhabitants dwelling in their vicinity perceive them as a safeguard against eviction, highlighting the intrinsic connection between religion, politics, and commerce —exemplifying the strategic integration of religious practices and turning these humble street shrines into vibrant expressions of cultural and spiritual amalgamation while at the same time legitimising the ownership of the marginalised communities residing in the slums of the capital.
Image 2: An Ancient Muslim Shrine; Hasrat Sheikh Imadudin Firdousi at Nizamuddin (photo by Smytta Yadav)
Furthermore, demolition notices have been issued by authorities to mosques located on land that the Delhi Waqf Board asserts as its own. The board has filed a challenge to two of these notices in the High Court because of the Places of Worship Act 1991 of the Indian constitution, according to which a mosque, temple, church or any place of public worship that was in existence as of 15 August 1947 will retain the same religious character that it had on that day – irrespective of its history – and cannot be changed by the courts or the government. It is worth noting that these actions targeting Muslim sites transpired simultaneously with other initiatives, such as the purported demolition of dwellings in squalor areas prior to the G-20 summit that was hosted in Delhi on September 9 and 10.
Image 3: Hanuman Statue near the famous Chandni Chowk in a heavily Muslim neighbourhood. (Photo taken by Smytta Yadav).
Some other examples of dominance of Hindu street shrines in predominantly Muslim neighbourhoods are:
Symbolic Transformation near Red Fort: Walking towards the iconic Red Fort, another bastion of Delhi’s historical legacy, one can observe a symbolic transformation in the street shrines that line the route. Hindu deities, particularly Hanuman and Shirdi Sai Baba, now take centre stage, subtly overshadowing the Islamic architectural marvels and their associated religious symbols.
Syncretism Eroded in Chandni Chowk: Chandni Chowk, renowned for its historical syncretism, is experiencing a erosion of this syncretic cultural tapestry. Street shrines in this area, once a testament to the harmonious coexistence of Hindu and Islamic traditions, now showcase a pronounced prevalence of Hindu deities. The visual language is evolving, rewriting the narrative and erasing some of the syncretic elements that defined Chandni Chowk.
Influence in Kinari Bazaar: Kinari Bazaar, a market known for its traditional charm, reflects the broader influence of Hindu dominance in Old Delhi. Street shrines along the narrow lanes prominently feature symbols associated with Hinduism, subtly reshaping the cultural and religious landscape of this historic market.
The evolution of Hindu street shrines in New Delhi is intricate and multi-layered, intertwining individuals and households based on factors such as caste, religion, regional origin, language, or ideology. This complexity is vividly illustrated by the diverse ways in which these communities engage in political strategies, aligning themselves with various political parties. This involvement emerges as a pivotal dimension in the larger quest for social mobility and empowerment in the city.
For instance, certain street shrines may become focal points for followers supporting different political parties, reflecting the dynamic nature of political affiliations within these communities. The cultural movements and societal struggles that unfold within these religious spaces seamlessly transition into political conflicts, with tangible manifestations in territorial disputes over physical space in New Delhi. For instance, recently in Jan 2021, an idol of Shirdi Sai Baba was demolished by a BJP supporter and a realtor because a Jat Hindu Guru had claimed Shirdi Sai Baba was born a Muslim, and the realtor did not want that to be placed in a Hindu neighbourhood.
In essence, the nuanced dynamics of Hindu street shrines not only mirror the cultural diversity within the communities but also serve as arenas where political ideologies and affiliations converge, shaping the broader narrative of social dynamics and empowerment in the dynamic context of New Delhi.
It is essential to have a clear understanding of the fact that political and religious imbrications are connected to rural-urban flows, transitions, and networks, as well as the caste and regional conflicts that are involved in these transitions and connections. Furthermore, it is important to note that these imbrications are not simply the result of government action or inaction on urban and spatial planning: caste and regional conflicts are also involved.
At the same time, publicly addressing the contentious issues that arise from these conflicts and struggles cannot be addressed purely through formal state or urban planning mechanisms, as these play out primarily through informal channels, in spatial patterns that are informal, and in public spaces that through long term practice and local sanction have been earmarked for informal uses. Because politics, religion, and culture are much more closely linked in the Asian context to issues of dominance, inequality, and hierarchy – all of which operate through informal mechanisms – it is not surprising that battles around these take place in informal spaces, and perhaps even achieve a greater degree of success than formal or institutionalised attempts to democratise Indian society.
The ethnographic observations about these shrines offer a glimpse into the ongoing negotiations between tradition and modernity, the sacred and the secular, thus contributing to the broader scholarly debate on the cultural and political dimensions of urban India. The enduring legacy of these shrines, amidst the dynamic changes of urbanization, reflects not only a rich cultural heritage but also a resilient adaptation to the evolving socio-political landscape.
In conclusion, this exploration into the realms of street shrines offers insights into their evolving cultural and political significance. The dynamic mosaic of street shrines in urban India serves as a vivid representation of the intricate interplay among diverse cultural dimensions. Amid conflicting perspectives on land utilization and decision-making authority, the delineation of sacred boundaries becomes increasingly intricate, particularly in a country like India where finite land resources pose challenges. This ethnographic journey seeks to unravel how these sacred spaces engage with the dynamic geography of the city, thereby reshaping the ancient Islamic architecture in Delhi’s urban landscape.
Dr. Smytta Yadav is an Anthropologist and currently a Leverhulme Research Fellow at the University of Sussex. The above article is an output of her AHRC grant number AH/T000864/1 which she held at the Queen’s University of Belfast. The title of the grant was Ancient Vedic Gods in Early Urban and Pre-Mughal India.
References:
Kennerly, R. M. (2005). Roadside Shrine Cultural Performance: Poststructural Postmodern Ethnography. Agricultural and Mechanical College, LSU.
Mayaram, S., Pandian, M. S. S., & Skaria, A. (Eds.). (2005). Muslims, Dalits, and Historical Fabrications (Vol. 12). Oriental Blackswan.
Cite as: Yadav, Smytta 2024 “Shifting Landscapes: Urbanization, Religious Transformations, and Cultural Resilience in Delhi” Focaalblog 16 January. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/01/16/smytta-yadav-shifting-landscapes-urbanization-religious-transformations-and-cultural-resilience-in-delhi/
Far-right political leader Geert Wilders was convicted of inciting hatred against Moroccans when he called them “scum” at an election rally in 2016. [GETTY]
Last week, Geert Wilders’ far-right Freedom Party (PVV) won the largest number of parliamentary seats in the Dutch national elections. The political figure is known internationally for his Islamophobia, and demands for, among other thing, the closing of all mosques in The Netherlands.
Crucial to his victory is the radicalisation of former supporters of the mainstream conservative-liberal People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) of the incumbent prime minister, Mark Rutte. As Dutch news satire website De Speld explained, VVD’s new leader Dilan Yesilgöz had run an excellent campaign…for Wilders.
Rutte had triggered the fall of his own coalition-government by demanding further restrictions on refugee rights that were unacceptable for part of his coalition. The VVD hoped the elections would be dominated by migration, and not other urgent issues such as the country’s housing crisis and the rising cost of living.
During the campaign, Yesilgöz exaggerated the supposed ease with which refugees enter the Netherlands. The main beneficiary of this tactic ended up being the PVV, the political force that for a decade-and-half built its political profile on hostility towards migrants.
The VVD lost 10 seats, leaving them with 24. Of the new PVV voters, one out of four previously voted for VVD.
Like many of his voters, Wilders is a product of the right-wing establishment. In the early nineties he worked for the VVD and in 1998 he represented the party in parliament. He also wrote speeches for the future European Commissioner, Frits Bolkestein, a pioneer in the ‘clash of civilisations’ rhetoric regarding the West and Muslim societies in Dutch politics.
Wilders eventually left the VVD in 2004, partly because they would not categorically oppose Turkey joining the European Union.
Since founding the PVV in 2006, Wilders gathered a loyal base; almost 80% of those who voted for him in the previous national elections, did so again last month. Whilst the PVV largely rallied support as an opposition to Rutte, it is important to highlight that Wilders is not a political newcomer. Voters showed up for a seasoned politician who for years has remained consistent in his main policies. His popularity therefore shows how mainstream Islamophobia has become in The Netherlands.
Indeed, the PVV’s manifesto presented the racist and authoritarian positions that characterise the party. Pledges ranged from the petty revoking of the government’s apologies for the role played by the Dutch state in slavery, to the deportation of criminals with double nationality, to the deployment of the army against ‘street scum’, and the closing of borders for refugees and preventive arrests of ‘jihadist sympathisers’. Particularly drastic was Wilders’ long-standing insistence on ‘no Islamic schools, Qurans and mosques’.
However, it is not only racist and xenophobic politics that has attracted voters to the PVV. Wilders was originally an explicit supporter of neoliberal economic policies but for the past decade, his party increasingly posed as defenders of the welfare state. The PVV programme contained seemingly progressive positions, such as raising the minimum wage, lowering healthcare costs, and returning the retirement age from 67 to 65.
Though such rhetoric is contradicted by the party’s actions.
In his book Marked for Death: Islam’s War Against the West and Me (2012), Wilders described the role of the PVV as supporting the austerity plans of Rutte’s first cabinet in return for measures to ‘restrict immigration, roll back crime, counter cultural relativism, and insist on the integration of immigrants’. In parliament, the PVV introduced a proposal to make collective bargaining agreements no longer binding, and supported further restrictions to access to social security.
Not to mention, today the PVV seeks to form a government with the VVD – the party that for the last decade headed the government’s implementation of neoliberal measures that they claim to oppose.
Whilst a substantial number of Wilders’ voters are certainly committed to far-right politics, part of his appeal is that he has been able to pose as an opposition force to an establishment that included the left-wing parties like the Labour Party.
In an attempt to present itself as a legitimate party that could govern, Labour entered a coalition headed by Rutte back in 2012 after they had won close to 25% of votes. They remained despite the deeply unpopular harsh austerity measures that were implemented, and even ran a former minister in the government as the candidate on a joint Labour/Greens ticket.
The result was a modest advance mostly through votes coming from the centre and other left-wing parties, but it hardly attracted new voters. In the elections last month Labour/Greens won 25 seats, and became the second largest party, but finished far behind Wilders.
Another error made by parts of the Dutch left is that anti-racism and migrants rights are considered secondary to social-economic issues. However, as the recent election dramatically showed, these are incredibly decisive issues in Dutch politics.
When Wilders’ electoral victory was announced, hastily organised protests took place in some cities. A coalition of progressive groups called a national demonstration in defence of civil liberties, freedom of religion and human rights. Such protests are of course not only important, but urgent because they make visible the opposition to Wilders’ agenda and show solidarity with groups that are threatened, especially Muslims.
After all, the case of Giorgia Meloni’s Italy shows what can happen when the far-right is in power; it may moderate some of its rhetoric, but it will not abandon its authoritarian and nativist project.
But protests alone are not enough. For years, Wilders pushed the mainstream to the right, pulling voters to his side. The Dutch left can learn something from this; instead of pandering the right, it needs to pressure them. As for rebuilding a left that can effectively pressure the centre and win new supporters, this will need to be a long term project.
What is needed now more than ever is a left that sees itself not as a government-in-waiting but as an opposition force.
Originally published in The New Arab. https://www.newarab.com/opinion/geert-wilders-left-needs-be-real-opposition
Alex de Jong is co-director of the International Institute for Research and Education (IIRE) in Amsterdam, Netherlands and editor of the Dutch socialist website Grenzeloos.org.
Cite as: de Jong, Alex 2023 “Geert Wilders’ election victory: The left must concern itself with being a real opposition” Focaalblog 18 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/12/18/alex-de-jong-geert-wilders-election-victory-the-left-must-concern-itself-with-being-a-real-opposition/
By taking control of 22 Israeli military bases and localities, sequestering over 200 hostages, and killing more than 1,000 civilians and soldiers (although many details remain ambiguous), Hamas accomplished militarily on October 7, 2023 what no other Palestinian faction has ever accomplished. Early on during the operation, Hamas declared that its goal was to liberate the 5,200 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons by means of a hostage exchange;[1] meaning that the uprising was a spectacular show of force by which to negotiate on better terms with the enemy. In this crux between military success and negotiated exchange, Hamas burst open old-new debates regarding the role of armed struggle in Palestinian movements. The predictable Israeli response is the currently unfolding psychotic war of revenge and accompanying propaganda campaign. As of the time of writing, there are some 20,000 dead Palestinians, tens of thousands more injured, over a million displaced, critical infrastructure irreversibly damaged, one of the oldest cities in the world all but razed to the ground, and 3,000 newly arrested prisoners. More horror likely awaits in the very near future. Was the uprising worth all the death and destruction?Will any good come out of this? Away from the media frenzy of political talking heads and party pundits, these are the kinds of questions that have emerged on the streets of Ramallah, Jerusalem, Amman, and elsewhere, where misery and despair fuse headily with pride and possibility. Misery and despair, that is, because a genocide of Palestinians not only in Gaza but also Jerusalem and the West Bank seems frighteningly plausible; and pride and possibility because for some it has become conceivable for the first time—unlikely perhaps, but somehow still conceivable—that Israel can be defeated militarily.
The nature of Palestinian resistance has had historical ebbs and flows (see Qumsiyeh 2011). Tracing Palestinian uprisings from their first instances in the 1920s (four decades after the establishment of the first Zionist settlements) to October 7, one can observe clearly identifiable Zeitgeists, from periods of political petitioning, times of boycotts and other grassroots satyagraha, other times kamikaze attacks, and seasons of war. In recent decades, the pax americana that was supposed to have been the Oslo Accords ushered in an era of liberal politics in the 1990s (see Haddad 2018, Rabie 2021), which then exploded into the Second Intifada in the early 2000s. After this, the nature of Palestinian movements changed; fragmented, the Palestine Liberation Organization[2] placated by an end-of-history worldlessness,and a Palestinian public was left disenchanted with the failure of liberal politics but without knowing where else to turn. Hamas, during this period, became the unlikely vanguard of Palestinian resistance; a national liberation movement without the nation mentioned anywhere in its name.[3]
In contextualizing the place of armed resistance in the current chapter of the Palestinian story, I present below translations of three short texts by Bassel al-Araj (1984-2017), a Palestinian pharmacist by day and blogger by night who was assassinated in his apartment by Israeli forces in 2017. Al-Araj left behind a body of writing, often blog posts, that has greatly inspired the current generation of leftist Palestinian activists. Al-Araj advocated that the intellectual in Palestine not be a passive commentator but actively “engaged” in resistance, and he coined the term al-muthaqaf al-mushtabak “engaged intellectual;” a nod to the New Man of Guevara-esque romance, in a play of words that is more poetic in Arabic than in English. Some erroneously confuse the epithet with the even more irresistible al-muthaqaf al-musalah “armed intellectual,” a slip that Al-Araj would not have protested. His agitating against the security coordination between the Palestinian Authority and Israel landed him in a Palestinian prison in 2016. He was released following a hunger strike. Six months later, he was killed by Israel. He was thirty-three years old.
The following pieces are translations from Arabic taken from a collection of Al-Araj’s writings, letters, and Facebook posts, published by the Beirut-based leftist publisher Bisan in 2018. In the first piece, written after the 2014 Israeli campaign in Gaza, Al-Araj offers a very original analysis in the aftermath of this event, observing that Hamas’s strategy of armed struggle does not break from the overall arc of armed struggle in Palestinian history. Al-Araj insists that Hamas’s strategy in the conflict was not to defeat Israel militarily, but to arrive at better conditions for negotiations. In the second piece, Al-Araj examines the gains and losses of the Second Intifada, challenging the position that the lesson from Israel’s brutal quelling of the uprising is that such uprisings are not to be repeated. Rather, Al-Araj speculates on what lessons can be learned from the intifada’s defeat so as to be able to succeed in a future iteration. In the third piece, more literary in flavor, he asks whether Palestine, as a national-territorial concept, is worth all the blood that is shed in its name. In this brief communique, he employs a revolutionary-poetic minimalism reminiscent of leftist writers of the twentieth century like, for instance, Eduardo Galeano.
Reading Al-Araj in the context of the current bloodshed, hopelessness, and despair, we might ask again: Was the uprising worth all the death and destruction? Whatever the answer may be, Al-Araj invites us to recognize the complexity of this question, and to remain faithful to rational analysis even in times of an unbearable irrationality of being.
Yezid Sayigh says in his book on the Palestine Liberation Organization that the Fatah movement never took the military conflict seriously, and never viewed the armed struggle as an end in itself or the only path to liberation. Rather, the armed struggle was a means by which to negotiate a diplomatic solution.
I believe that Hamas’s experience in Gaza follows the same approach. Their political leadership views armed struggle exactly as Arafat [4] viewed it.
This is an essential difference between Hezbollah’s experience, for example, and our experience. It is also the difference between the Algerian, Chechen, Vietnamese, and Cuban experiences, and our experience.
In these other experiences, they believed that they could defeat the great powers that were their enemies. We came to the conviction that it was impossible to defeat Israel, and we never believed that returning to Palestine would involve changing the reality on the ground, but rather by appeasing the capitals of influence in the world.
2.
On the allegation: “The Intifada ruined us” [5]
2013/26/09
At the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s, the Black Hand uprising began in Palestine. It was completely crushed and its participants were eliminated within 4 months. They were either martyred, imprisoned, or exiled. During the same period, the Communist Party attempted to launch an uprising in Vietnam, which was also suppressed and the Communist Party was almost extinguished.
The important thing is that these two uprisings were two of the most excellent uprisings that humanity has ever seen: The Black Hand uprising, which was one of the most important factors leading to the 1936 Revolt [6], and the Communist Party uprising, which was one of the most important factor leading to the Vietnamese rebellion against France. The leaders learned from their mistakes, dealt with them, and corrected them.
People at that time did not renounce the option of armed struggle, nor did they brood over the colonial discourse regarding the usefulness or uselessness of armed struggle. Rather, they reviewed their experience, analyzed it, and launched subsequent uprisings that avoided the same mistakes. In contrast, Palestinians brood over the destruction the Second Intifada brought, and are reluctant to engage in any future uprising for fear of the same results.
I do not know whether Palestinians have sat down to evaluate the results of the Second Intifada in a scientific manner, especially the results of the Intifada’s military experience. Usually, when you hear a person talk about the destruction, the tragedies, the losses, and the setbacks, he is reproducing Zionist propaganda, but in his own language. This propaganda is constituted by multiple mechanisms and begins altering the Palestinian discursive space in a way that does not end only with the official line of the Palestinian Authority (the line of Mahmoud Abbas). The war against us has still not ceased, nor has the symbolic violence and hidden oppression that are the real masters of the situation. Usually when any experiment fails, the criticism focuses on the execution of the experiment, and not on the theory or ideology behind it. The results were not what we could have imagined. Was Gaza not completely emptied of settlers? And is Gaza not reaching a stage of fortification and hybrid warfare as a result of the Second Intifada? Were Tel Aviv and Jerusalem not hit hard by the early iterations of rockets that resembled cans of bug spray? Were settlements in the West Bank (in Jenin and Nablus) not dismantled because the occupation was no longer able to protect them and could no longer afford the cost of their continued existence? Did the Intifada not cost the enemy billions of shekels? And do we not realize what the Intifada did to delay the tragedy awaiting our people? Personally, I believe that the Intifada temporarily delayed a new expulsion process that was being prepared.
Evaluating the military experience of the Intifada, it appears that the armed experience of the Intifada was not actually the reason for its setbacks. Rather, there are other factors that led to this. The leadership was not able to deal with the responsibility of organizing society and preparing it for a sustained popular war. Some also had a naive understanding of armed struggle, and they flattened its essence to the extent that it did not affect the surface tensions. Recall the expression: “Carry a rifle and shoot, who will stop you?”
In addition to a lack of consciousness, as well as a lack of psychological and social readiness, there was no proper organization of the fighting forces. This led to incompetent leadership after the elimination of the first rank. As this social base was completely absent, there emerged a rift between the masses and those carrying out military action.
In addition to this, there was the counterrevolution against Yasser Arafat, and secret contacts and treasonous agreements were made under the table with the enemy. There was also an absence of preparations, equipment, strategy and combat tactics. The objective was the Oslo Accords (the homeland reduced to Gaza and the West Bank). And let us not forget here the Palestinian Authority’s dependence on the occupation for its financial, employment, and administrative system. Finally, there was a lack of conviction by some that armed struggle can change the reality on the ground. Rather, they were convinced of its use in improving the terms of negotiation, and nothing more.
In conclusion, the first thing that colonialism does is establish what is possible and impossible for oppressed peoples. Some elements of the oppressed people usually assist in this. This is done through direct and indirect brainwashing techniques, so do not trust this discourse that is transmitted and planted into our minds. Judge instead the testimonies of our people based on trusting logic and the power of liberation.
3.
Is Palestine beautiful?
I am frequently asked this question. As easy as the question seems, it is one of the most difficult questions. It is more difficult than the question “How are you?” It is difficult to answer once you realize that the real meaning of the question is: “Is this narrow coastal strip worth all this blood?” We all know that beauty is relative and that one’s environment shapes one’s aesthetic sensibilities, and that this differs from person to person. Here you have to resort to comparison to arrive at an easy answer.
But Palestine, in my opinion, is actually the most beautiful place; not because of her greenness, blueness, yellowness, redness, crops, bounty, or nature. Her beauty is that she is the one who answered my search for meaning, and she is the one who answered my existential questions, and who justifies my existence and cures my chronic anxieties.
Endnotes
[1] This number has risen to approximately 8,000 after mass arrests made by Israel since October 7.
[2] The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), founded in 1964, was for much of its history a revolutionary guerrilla movement that eventually became Israel’s political partners with the Oslo Accords of 1993.
[3] Hamas, in Arabic, is a kind of acronym for harakat al-muqawama al-islamiyya “Movement of Islamic Resistance,” but hamas also means “excitement.”
[4] Yasser Arafat (1929-2004) was the co-founder of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and was a guerrilla-turned-politician. He signed the Oslo Accords with Israel in 1993 and became President of the Palestinian Authority.
[5] Al-Araj is referring here to the Second Intifada, the Palestinian uprising against Israel that lasted roughly between 2000-2005. Its outcome, on the one hand, was the evacuation of Israeli settlements from Gaza, but also the loss of thousands of lives and the expansion of the Israeli security infrastructure.
[6] The Great Arab Revolt in 1936 was the first large-scale Palestinian mobilization against British rule and the Zionist settlement project in Palestine.
The author would like to thank Abeer Juan for assistance in the translations.
Arpan Roy is an anthropologist researching in Palestine and currently based in Berlin. His book Relative Strangers: Romani Kinship and Palestinian Difference will be published by University of Toronto Press in 2024.
Haddad, Toufic. 2018. Palestine Ltd.: Neoliberalism and Nationalism in the Occupied Territory. London: Bloomsbury.
Qumsiyeh, Mazin. 2011. Popular Resistance in Palestine: A History of Hope and Empowerment. London: Pluto Press.
Rabie, Kareem. 2021. Palestine Is Throwing a Party and the Whole World Is Invited: Capital and State Building in the West Bank. Durham. Duke University Press.
Cite as: Roy, Arpan 2023 “Is this Narrow Coastal Strip Worth All this Blood? Bassel Al-Araj on Armed Struggle in Palestine” Focaalblog 12 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/12/12/arpan-roy-is-this-narrow-coastal-strip-worth-all-this-blood-bassel-al-araj-on-armed-struggle-in-palestine/
The unfolding genocide in Palestine today is a continuation of Israel’s 75-year-old occupation and ethnic cleansing. This article provides a perspective on the ongoing tragedy from the vantage point of the Golan Heights – often referred to as Israel’s ‘forgotten occupation.’ How are the stateless Syrians experiencing this war? And why do ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘genocide’ reverberate as strongly here as in the rest of Palestine and Israel? By threading the current genocide to the story of occupation and ethnic cleansing in the Golan Heights, this article discusses the underlying settler-colonial assumptions about religious purity and war that have fuelled imperialist projects in occupied Syria and Palestine, and in the wider region.[1]
Fear and messages on WhatsApp
On Sunday, 8th of October, my friend Kamel[2] wrote on WhatsApp: ‘the kids are worried so much… I bought food and water for them… we are preparing ourselves for a big war in the area…’ With his wife and three young children, Kamel’s family have been staying inside for the past month, working and going to school on Zoom.
We became friends in Damascus in 2009. Kamel had just finished his degree in English Literature at Damascus University, while I was doing fieldwork for my PhD. We’ve kept in touch and I’ve visited him and his family in the Golan Heights. Last time this May, I promised Salam, his wife, that I’ll bring my own young children to Majdal Shams, the biggest of the occupied villages in the Golan, next time I visit in February 2024. Our kids are of similar ages, our families in similar stages. If we lived closer, we’d have playdates and family dinners.
Image 1: The border fence between occupied Majdal Shams and Syria, Druze flag [Photo taken by the author, 2015]
People, Kamel tells me, are really afraid to go outside their houses. Out of fear of arrests and, even more, out of fear of pogroms against Arabs, most dare not leave their villages to travel into Israel. For friends from the Golan Heights that live and work in Israel and in the West Bank, the situation is sheer terror. ‘We are afraid to go to work, we are afraid to speak Arabic in public,’ Kamel adds. People have been arrested by Israeli police for writing pro-Palestinian posts on social media. Throughout Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories people get arrested and held without charges, university students and workers, Arab and Jewish Israelis. Sara, one of the stateless Syrians in the Golan Heights, has stopped going to work in the Israeli eco-project that she was working with before the war on Gaza: ‘Israeli society has become, overnight, so extreme, so racist,’ she tells me.
Others, especially from the older generation, are not surprised by the state of Israel’s genocidal attack on Palestinians. ‘The tree of occupation never bears good fruit,’ Salman tells me on the phone. The ‘tree of occupation’ is the 75 years of occupation, killing, dispossession, and apartheid that Palestinians have endured in the hands of the state of Israel. This is the ‘root cause’ of violence.
Salman is one of the community’s leaders and revolutionaries, also a former political prisoner in Israel. He is a friend and a co-author, whose field research and hospitality have shaped my own field visits in the Golan over the past years. We speak on the phone often, he is worried about the ‘total siege on Gaza,’ and emphasises that Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant ordered a ‘complete siege on Gaza’ saying that they are fighting ‘human animals.’ In his speech, and throughout the past month, Palestinians have constantly been dehumanised in the Israeli press. ‘They don’t show any pictures from Gaza, nothing!’ Salman exclaims.’ In a state of war, Israeli public media focus on Hamas’ massacre and Israel’s ‘right of self-defence,’ egging on the ‘flattening of Gaza.’ Like many others, Salman is afraid because Netanyahu, Gallant and others sense that their time is up, and they want to cause as much destruction as possible. From academics to the UN, the word genocide is used to describe the collective punishment of Palestinians unleashed by Israel.
Back to Kamel, we send each other video messages and funny things that the kids do. I keep thinking: how do you keep young kids busy amidst a war? In what stories do you translate your fears? Do you speak to them about the killing of so many children? How do you contextualise the sound of rockets across the border, and the constant humming of drones over your head? Do you tell them that the Israeli soldiers in their streets use them as human shields when they fire from the military bases within the Golan, to Syria and Lebanon? Can you make the rockets that get intercepted by the Iron Dome seem like fireworks or early Christmas lights?
As human beings and anthropologists, how can we make sense of this brutality? We watch live the purposeful and vengeful collective punishment of the Palestinian people, the indiscriminate bombing of refugee camps, hospitals, schools, residential buildings, mosques and churches. We (mis)measure again the different value of being a human, where Palestinian children are cast ‘outside of humanity’ (Fernandez 2023). We bear witness to state terrorism and murder (De Lauri 2023), to starvation and siege, to war crimes, and to the genocide of a people by the machinery of one of the most highly armed nuclear states in the world. These techniques of extermination are a continuation of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that started with the al-Nakba, furthered through the wars of 1967 and 1973, and has continued unabated until today (Pappé 2007).
Although I don’t have answers to the above questions, this piece is a way to make sense of the pain, war, and defiant hope that come out of years of ethnographic fieldwork, and of the most recent genocidal war and the reign of fear. For, although the Israeli occupation in the Golan has been the least violent in comparison to the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), we can see that from ethnic cleansing to the religious engineering of a compliant minority, the sectarianism of the occupation is part of a larger arsenal, one of the means towards the same ends.
The weaponization of religious difference, or, how the Israeli occupation in the Golan was from the start ethnic cleansing and religious engineering
“If you live, live free. If you die, die standing like a tree.” These lines are carved onto the tombstone of Hayel Abu Zeid (1968-2005), who died, the epitaph continues, ‘for the resistance and hope.’ Hayel is one of the martyrs and revolutionaries from the Israeli occupied Syrian Golan Heights who dedicated their lives to the cause of liberation from Israeli occupation. Next to his tomb is a commemorative plaque for Amir Abu Jobal, a boy of 5 years who was killed by an Israeli mine near his home. In the cemetery in Majdal Shams, the largest remaining occupied village, there are many other tombstones commemorating resistance, heroism, and the unjust loss of life as a result of war and occupation.
Occupation, ethnic cleansing and resistance have deep roots among the indigenous stateless Syrian people. From the very start of Israel’s invasion during the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, ethnic cleansing was an important strategy of war and occupation. 95% of the Syrian indigenous population was forcibly displaced and only five villages, out of 340 villages and farms, remained. These villages were predominantly Druze (the villages are Majdal Shams, Mas’ada, Buq’atha and Ein Qiniya. The village of Sahita was later destroyed by Israel, Ghajar is an Alawi village). Israeli army officials believed that the Druze, a religious community with historical links to Isma’ili Islam, would inflict a ‘stab in the back’ to Arabism. The sectarian logic of the Israeli occupation from the start, thus, was clear: displace the indigenous population, render them prostrate, or engineer them so that they cannot unite with Palestinian resistance and no longer pose a threat. Sectarianism is the more insidious continuation of ethnic cleansing outside of war.
Image 2: Much of the occupied territory is designated by Israel as military zones [Photo taken by the author, 2015]
The belief that the ‘Druze’ would be compliant peons in maintaining a state founded upon religious and ethnic difference was not unfounded. Israel had already by 1949 achieved an alliance with the religious Druze elites in the regions of Carmel and Galilee, in what became Northern Israel (Firro 1999). This alliance with the state of Israel isolated the Druze community in Israel from their co-religionists in Syria and Lebanon. In exchange for becoming political representatives of a new religious ethnicity (not unlike the created roles of tribal chiefs in other colonial settings), the sectarianisation of political identity in the greater context of Israeli ethnocracy (Yiftachel 2006) was moulded, and the ‘Israeli Druze,’ thus, created. The creation of the ‘Israeli Druze identity’ became henceforth an ongoing project between local Druze elites and the Israeli state, a project of producing ‘ethnic difference’ in the process of ‘inventing religious traditions’ (Firro 2005).
And so, the ‘Israeli Druze’ were the first Arabs ‘to be trusted’ to serve in the Israeli Defence Forces, and until recently, they were the only Arabs to be conscripted to do so (Kanaaneh 2008). Their so-called loyalty to the state of Israel turned ‘Druze identity’ into a laboratory for the manufacturing of sectarian difference, as the Israeli state and military worked hand-in-hand with local elites to produce and fund new ‘Druze traditions,’ as well as a comprehensive and specifically ‘Druze’ educational curriculum to educate the new generations. While this project was successful in funding the architecture of religious politics, it has not done much to address the chronic poverty and impoverishment of this region. Indeed, the Druze in Israel continue to be second-class citizens living under a settler colonial apartheid state. As such, all state policies are essentially discriminatory on the basis of religion, as shown during the 2018 Druze protests against the Jewish Nation-State Law.
The Druze in the occupied villages of the Golan Heights are Syrians and different from their ‘Israeli Druze’ counterparts described above. As the tombs in the cemetery proclaim, the heroes and martyrs of this mountain community have fought Israeli occupation, sacrificing their lives to either Israeli bullets or inside Israeli jails. Although individuals can be killed, memories of such resistance, here as in Palestine (see Swedenburg 2003), are not easy to kill.
What is being Golani? The complexity of citizenship, belonging and resistance
‘Israel wants us to be Druze,’ explained Fahed, the president of a local autonomous organisation, during an interview in May 2023, ‘Israeli Druze.’ Here, being ‘Israeli Druze’ means being compliant to Israeli authority. For deeply pious shaykhly families in the Golan, being somehow connected, or dependent upon the worldly authority of an occupying power is a religious anathema, and the most religious among them, have abided by strict regimes of independence and autonomy (see Kastrinou et al 2020).
Nevertheless, Israeli propaganda posits that the Druze of the Golan do not take Israeli citizenship because they are afraid of repercussions from the Syrian regime, should the Golan return to Syria. Yet none of my interlocutors has ever mentioned this reason. Instead, during the height of the Syrian war in 2015 I heard that ‘We will still be Syrians, even if Syria ceases to exist!’ Like inside Syria, the stateless Syrians in the Golan Heights underwent a similar process of anti- and pro-regime protests, while more recently from this August, some have been protesting in solidarity to the Druze protests ongoing in the Syrian province of Sweida.
Image 3: Barbed wire at a UN post on the border [Photo taken by the author, 2015]
On the basis of estimates from local representatives and academics, between 10 and 25% of the stateless population has accepted Israeli citizenship. The vast majority of Syrians in the Golan Heights remain stateless. Getting Israeli citizenship is a contentious subject for a community that is known for its resistance to Israeli occupation (Mason et al. 2022). When I asked Nidaa, a member of the women’s committee in the Golan, whether she’d still want to be part of Syria while there is a war, she adamantly said: ‘I’m part of the Syrian body, I’ll go through what the people go through.’ Yet, taking Israeli citizenship has increased after the Syrian war, but it happens for complex, and sometimes contradictory reasons – out of losing hope at the aftermath of the Syrian revolution (Al-Khalili 2023), or to be able to work within the Israeli job market and advance one’s career, rather than because people ‘feel Israeli.’ Rabiah, a young man in his late 20s, for example, took Israeli citizenship so that he would not lose his land after living outside the country for three years – ‘I did it so that Israel does not confiscate my land,’ he told me.
In the 1980s and 90s it was the norm that people who took Israeli citizenship suffered social ‘death.’ Branded as being ‘traitors’ and ‘collaborators,’ they were excommunicated from social and religious affairs. Jawad’s father was one of the first people in Majdal Shams to publicly declare his support for Israel and also one of the first to get Israeli citizenship. He lost most of his business and social capital in doing so. Jawad mentioned bitterly that, when his father died, the local religious shaykhs refused to carry out the mortuary prayers and rituals; the family had to bring in Israeli Druze shaykhs from the Galilee. Yet, when I asked him where he feels his identity lies, to my surprise he replied that he feels ‘Syrian’ even though he has Israeli citizenship. And, like most people who have acquired Israeli citizenship from the Golan Heights, Jawad was exempt from serving in the IDF: ‘I don’t like the army,’ he says. ‘I’m a pacifist.’
Underpinning the process of ethnically cleansing the Golan and the sectarianisation of political identities that Israel undertook lies a simple colonial logic, namely that religious groups are, basically, homogeneous. This logic assumes that there is one homogenous Druze community running through the occupied Golan Heights and the Druze villages in Northern Israel. This assumption is simplistic, filled with colonial connotations (i.e. same religion = same everything else), and simply not correct. We can see this assumption supported by Israeli policy and propaganda which has historically tried to imprint a sectarian logic and ‘Druzification’ on the occupied Syrians in the Golan Heights. The same colonial logic underpinned USA’s ‘tribal’ policies during the invasion of Iraq (González 2009).
It is the same logic, extended, that we see used by Israel to explain the large-scale genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. In the words of Israeli President, Isaac Herzog, “it is an entire nation out there that is responsible,” The Israeli ex-defence minister Avigdor Liberman said that “there are no innocents in Gaza.” Indeed, this is the logic that was used from the very start of the Zionist project, with ethnic cleansing ongoing since its inception (Pape 2007). The murder in Gaza is blatantly obvious whilst the occupation of the Golan is, in comparison, less bloody. But the underlying assumption of homogeneity within religious and ethnic groups is the same. The settler colonial state, then, either engineers homogeneity or works to expel or exterminate it.
Image 4: Inside a civil building in the deserted town of Quneitra, now used as an Israeli military training ground [Photo taken by the author, 2015]
But “religion is precisely the recognition of man in a roundabout way,” wrote Marx whilst exploring how capitalist states, in general, pretend but essentially fail to keep their secular, emancipatory promises. And creating a homogenous, religiously pure social entity is a risky, unstable business.
The French had already tried it. During their colonial mandate, they divided Syria into territorial chunks on the basis of the colonial assumption of obedience in exchange for religious homogeneity. It was at the end of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of Western colonialism and imperialism in the Middle East that what Ussama Makdisi (2005) calls the ‘culture of sectarianism’ was born, as a thoroughly new and modern phenomenon. And, as it was born it was also resisted: the Syrian revolt against the French colonial rule was started in the Druze province by a Druze, Sultan Basha Al-Atrash, one of the greatest Syrian national heroes. The French collectively punished the Druze for their disobedience by burning down the village of Majdal Shams and collectively punishing its inhabitants. Indeed, it was this memory that was cited as a deterrent for villagers in leaving their village during the 1967 invasion (Kastrinou et al 2020). No one wants to be uprooted twice. The Israeli plan to move more than a million Palestinians from North Gaza to the south, along with the possibility of a further displacement in Egypt’s Sinai, could be a history repeated thrice: as tragedy, farce and genocide.
As with French colonialism and USA imperialism, the Israeli operation to ethnically cleanse the Golan Heights and to homogenise Druze identity in exchange for obedience, did not go to plan. When Israel decided to unilaterally and illegally annex the Golan Heights in 1981, the occupied people responded by going on a six-month strike. In their vast majority, the Syrian people of the four occupied villages, some 25,000 people, are stateless because they have not accepted Israeli citizenship. Their status is legally the same as that of Palestinians in East Jerusalem (see al-Marsad 2011, and Delforno 2019): they are ‘permanent residents’ in Israel and as such they do not serve in the IDF. Legally stateless, they don’t have passports but laissez-passer documents where their nationality is ‘undefined’. They have trouble travelling inside and outside of Israel, trouble getting jobs, accessing basic services, and they are constantly under the threat of the military occupation that steals their land (the ongoing conflict with the wind turbines is a point in green colonialism), and creates a host of other problems.
This experience of colonial taxonomical imposition, violence and ethnic cleansing resonates from French colonialism in Syria to Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank today.
Sowing resistance, sowing hope
A different heritage, that of resistance, is knitted into the town’s urban landscape, the most emblematic of which is Hassan Khater’s statue ‘The March’ (1987), which depicts Sultan Basha al-Atrash, the Druze leader of the Syrian revolt against the French in 1925, surrounded by contemporary figures such as a man of letters, next to a traditionally dressed man, a mother holding her dying son – a new martyr of the resistance. On the back of the statue there are three kids, the future, holding books and wheat. Instead of religious homogeneity, the threading theme is resistance to outside occupiers. The French missed that, and so did the Israelis.
Image 5: ‘The March’, statue by Hassan Khater (1987) at the central square of Majdal Shams [Photo taken by the author, 2023]
History teaches that colonial assumptions of religious purity lead to imperialist projects of ethnic cleansing and genocide, like the televised genocide in Gaza and the occupation of the Golan Heights. Look closer, though, in the continuities of everyday practices and the threads of another history become visible: the history of ordinary resistance, what the Palestinians have exemplified and gifted to struggles far and wide: ‘sumud’ – steadfastness. In combating the ‘bad fruit’ of occupation, the occupied people of the Golan Heights, and the occupied Palestinians, continue to sow resistance and hope, what the poet Mahmoud Darwish described in his poem ‘A state of siege’:
Here, where the hills slope before the sunset and the chasm of time
near gardens whose shades have been cast aside
we do what prisoners do
we do what the jobless do
we sow hope
Maria Kastrinou is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at Brunel University London. Her research interrogates the politics of sectarianism, statelessness and resistance through the lives and stories of her ethnographic interlocutors from Syria and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Author of Power, Sect and State in Syria (I.B. Tauris 2016), she is currently working on the project ‘Lives across divides: Ethnographic stories from the Golan Heights.’
Endnotes
[1] Acknowledgement: Many thanks to colleagues and friends in the Golan Heights who despite the war read through and made suggestions; to colleagues at Brunel University, especially Isak Niehaus, Gareth Dale and Mark Neocleous; to Vera Sajrawi, and to Steven Emery. Kastrinou’s current research about the Golan Heights is supported by the Druze Heritage Foundation, London.
[2] All names are pseudonyms and some details have been altered in order to ensure my interlocutors’ anonymity.
References
Al-Khalili, Charlotte, 2023. Waiting for the Revolution to End: Syrian displacement, time and subjectivity. London: UCL Press.
Al-Marsad, 2011. ‘Suggested issues for Consideration Regarding Israel’s third Periodic Report to the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) To Be Held On November 14-December 2, 2011.’ NGO Report. (https://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/cescr/docs/ngos/Al-Marsad_ISRAEL_CESCR47.doc) Accessed: Nov. 13, 2023.
Firro, Kais. 1999. The Druzes in the Jewish state: A brief history. Vol. 64. Brill.
Firro, Kais M. 2005. “Druze maqāmāt (shrines) in Israel: From ancient to newly-invented tradition.” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 32, no. 2: 217-239.
González, Roberto J. 2009. “On “tribes” and bribes: “Iraq tribal study,” al-Anbar’s awakening, and social science.” Focaal 2009, no. 53: 105-116.
Kanaaneh, Rhoda Ann. 2008. Surrounded: Palestinian soldiers in the Israeli military. Stanford University Press.
Kastrinou, A. Maria A., Salman Fakher El-Deen, and Steven B. Emery. 2020. “The stateless (ad) vantage? Resistance, land and rootedness in the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights.” Territory, Politics, Governance 9, no. 5: 636-655.
Makdisi, Ussama. The culture of sectarianism: community, history, and violence in nineteenth-century Ottoman Lebanon. Univ of California Press, 2000.
Mason, Michael, Munir Fakher Eldin, and Muna Dajani, eds. The Untold Story of the Golan Heights:: Occupation, Colonization and Jawlani Resistance. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022.
Pappé, Ilan. 2007. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Simon and Schuster.
Swedenburg, Ted. 2003. Memories of revolt: The 1936–1939 rebellion and the Palestinian national past. University of Arkansas Press.
Watenpaugh, Keith David. 2022. “Kill the Armenian/Indian; Save the Turk/Man: Carceral Humanitarianism, the Transfer of Children and a Comparative History of Indigenous Genocide.” Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies 29, no. 1: 35-67.
Yiftachel, Oren. 2006. Ethnocracy: Land and identity politics in Israel/Palestine. University of Pennsylvania Press.
Cite as: Kastrinou, Maria 2023 “Looking at ethnic cleansing in Palestine from the occupied Syrian Golan” Focaalblog 16 November. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/11/16/maria-kastrinou-looking-at-ethnic-cleansing-in-palestine-from-the-occupied-syrian-golan/
The algorithm swiftly gets it –yes, I am sucked in by news about Gaza- and collapses my social media platforms’ feeds into a monothematic thread that mirrors my recently (re)ignited preoccupation with the genocide of the Palestinian people. A Middle Eastern, female illustrator’s art work I started following on Tuesday shows up at the top of the screen. Her drawing of Wadie Al Fayoume – white eyeballs, embraced in an arch of red flowers, the same gesture and the same happy birthday hat he wears in the pictures that have circulated online after his killing – precedes the onset of my scrolling through the tawdry spectacle of death with an uncanny allusion to what it might have looked like to be alive.
Image 1: A mural artwork in a town in West Bank features a person wearing a keffiyeh and holding a Palestinian flag. The words ‘Resist to Exist’ can be read in English. Photo by Júlia Fernandez, August 2017.
After him, startled faces of terrified children, blood-dripping foreheads, cheeks covered in trails of tears and dust unfurl a grotesque witnessing of suffering; I am not immune to their affective power. ‘You Muslims must die’, the news says Wadie Al Fayoume’s murderer said before stabbing him to death in his house in Chicago. The pungent rawness of blurry video footages from Gazan hospitals revolts me, as they become, like Wadie, animated traces of lives that might soon be, if they are not yet, lost.
The narrative and visual dimensions of social media portraits of ‘what is going on in Gaza’ invert the effacing of the traces of the living that numbers on the news do, but they do so through a grammar of compassion for ‘all souls lost’ – the recognition of those as (former) living beings, and thus, Judit Butler would argue, the assertion of their grievability – with which a staggering surge of posts unreflectively registers a moral inflection toward neutrality. What I find more disturbing is not the invocation of a denial of what is in fact the very real differential distribution of grievability that is at work in such sites of violence, but how the ‘both-sides’ -or ‘no sides’- rhetoric, articulated by people who bestow themselves with the title of ambassadors of a common humanity, is oblivious to the fact that Palestinian children are not really apprehended as living until they are dead.
When the suffering of some is rendered accessible only when it can be equalized to that of others, the presumably uncomplicated language of a universal value of lives carries in fact the implicit recognition, by virtue of its omission, of what the battlefield makes evident: not all lives are counted as livable. Representations of common suffering elicit in fact interrogations of what counts as humanity, for they mobilise the term as if it were an empty signifier, sliding into ethically unfixed questions of what –and when this what– is a livable and grievable life, and what -and when- it is not. In positing a fantasy of equivalences, they omit the fact that in denying them the social conditions that enable the persistence, sustainment and thriving of life, Israel deprives Palestinians of life even before they are killed, inevitably tapping from a moral economy of suffering in which Palestinian deathis historically normalized and socially reified.
In a sort of collective aphasia (Stoler, 2011), accounts of suffering and pain are measured against each other through a grammar of false equality between what the colonizer’s absolute right to kill differentiates in terms of valuable and non-valuable lives. The long-standing pervasiveness of colonialism, dispossession and killing power becomes muffled; its monopolization of an unlimited right to self-defense denied in historically illiterate proposals of peacebuilding rooted in Solomonic repartitions of the territory and allocations of quasi sovereignties. Framings of the violence that often accompany such accounts as a ‘war’, or a ‘conflict’, often uncritically registering the tensions at stake through the performative solidarity of posting two flags together, raise unsettling questions about how the equation of the suffering of ones to the suffering of others – or the recognition of their shared humanity – seems so often to acquire meaning alongside a conceptual erasure of the long-standing power imbalances between the sides. To talk of suffering in order to speak about domination, Didier Fassin argues, is to do morals and politics with new words (2008: 532); but what kind of morals and politics are done by the omission of colonial domination that the articulation of frameworks of universal suffering seem to convey?
At the forefront of many calls for action, reflections on grief and loss, and denunciations of the ongoing violence ‘in and around’ the Gaza Strip are children whose suffering bodies, like those of Wadi or the children in hospitals in Gaza, seem to convey a sort of humanitarian discourse of ‘antipolitical moralism’ (Ticktin, 2011: 64). Children occupy, of course, a key place in dominant imaginations of the human and of the ‘world community’ (Malkii 2011), and they do so, in the case that concerns us here, by condensing very particular forms of violence into a moral problematization.
‘It is not a political view but a human response’ declares a dance school in London in their Instagram stories, now gone, imbuing the devastation felt for ‘the loss of innocent lives, especially children’, with a sort of affective affordance that attempts to justify a denial of the politics that are layered in the attribution of differential value to the lives of ones and the lives of the others. A pretension of depoliticisation that invokes in fact a very particular politics, one that reproduces the effacing of the precise context in which violence takes place. In those posts, the continued allegiance to the alleviation of suffering and the condemnation of violence emerges through a language of crisis and urgency that reproduces a particular genealogy of violence and reparation in abstract terms: victims are dispossessed of perpetrators; suffering bodies imagined outside of history and politics; they require help only out of a moral obligation (see Ticktin, 2011).
‘Let these poor innocent children be’ a Bristol based printmaker writes as a concluding demand, posting from the same city where I am. To be what? I wonder; what were Palestinian children being targeted by Israel’s last offensive? What kind of lives, if lives at all, were they living?
The idea of a morally legitimate suffering body collapses again in the figure of children in the words of Arab Israeli politician and journalist Aida Touma-Sliman: ‘a child is a child’; for which she is reprimanded by Knesset member Meirav Ben-Ari with invocations of a lack of symmetry that goes in fact the other way around. Toulam-Sliman is right, but she is also not; a child might be a child within the frames of humanitarian values, but in the rationality of occupation, a Palestinian child is not the same child.
Image 2: Two young girls in a pro-Palestine protest hold banners that read ‘Bombing kids is not self defense’ and what appears as ‘To stand with Palestine is to stand with humanity’. Photo from Dania Shaeeb in Unsplash
In a public endorsement of the ongoing collective punishment against the Palestinian population, Meirav Ben-Ari declares that ‘the children of Gaza have brought this upon themselves’. In this rhetorical unravelling of a selective production and undoing of victims, Hamas’ attacks prove Gazan children’s culpability for their own victimization. Participants of war, children are a ‘category mistake’, Malkki (2010) would say, used in this case to deny the pretension of our shared humanity. Children are, in the colonizer’s rhetoric, perpetrators; they are Hamas’ human shields. They are, as Butler has argued, no children at all, ‘but rather bits of armament, military instruments and materiel’ (2016). The grammar of compassion with which the morally legitimate bodyof the child – and the fantasy of the equal grievability of its life in comparison to Israeli lives – is upheld fails to acknowledge that in the occupied territories, Palestinian children are not really alive as such. They are nothing but a threat against which an absolute power defends the lives of some and destroys the lives of others as it formulates itself. They are like rocks and steel, darkness in human form, a haunting specter of the pervasive threat of terrorism in its developing potentiality.
As highly politically charged sites, Palestinian children embody indeed the racial politics of reproduction that underpin Israel’s colonial settlement project. Perhaps because in the colonizer’s war on demographics Palestinian reproduction stands in the way of the continued success of colonization (Kanaaneh, 2002; Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2015), Palestinian children are produced through the inscription of colonial power in their mothers’ bodies not as made of flesh and bones, but as traces of an unruly destructive power.
On October the 17th, the Israeli Prime Minister posts on Twitter: ‘this is a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle’. In the now deleted post, a divide operates through a narrative of impossible dichotomies between light and darkness, between humanity and savageness, mirroring the ubiquitous distortion of Palestinian people that articulates the same discourses that reproduce the frames of recognition in which their lives are considered nothing else but a threat to the survival of others. Perhaps in his post Benjamin Netanyahu uses Niebuhr’s novel’s title to refer to such an existential battle, yet the mention of children reinforces its emergence as a powerful signifier that seams together, even if in complicated ways, universalist understandings of humanity and the precise denials of it.
In what terms can this ‘poetics of our common humanity’ (Malkki, 2011) that permeates social media feeds not lose sight of the context in which such disturbing category mistakes – the, literally, ‘children’ of darkness – are produced? In what ways can such calls for compassion – which reify the moral authority with which children, presumably holders of an innocent, unadulterated, presociality (Malkki, 2011; see also Butler, 2016), are often indexed – be attentive to the everyday forms of criminal brutality that deny their mere existence as humans?
That there is no justification for the targeting of children, or any civilian of any age, is unquestionable. Yet, the way such claims for equidistance seem so often to compress the history of racialized and settler colonial domination into a ‘war against humanity’, obscure the frames in which Palestinian children’s lives are lives that are not only constrained and cut short, but that are ontologically already lost, placed ‘outside of humanity’, ‘dark matter’.
Júlia Fernandez is a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. She specializes in reproduction, care and forced migration. She has conducted research in the West Bank before, focusing on gender and political resistance.
References
Butler, J. (2016): Frames of war: When is life grievable? Verso, London.
Fassin, D. (2008): The Humanitarian Politics of Testimony: Subjectification through Trauma in the Israeli: Palestinian Conflict. Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 23, No. 3, pp. 531-558
Kanaaneh, R. (2002): Birthing the nation: Strategies of Palestinian women in Israel. University of California Press.
Malkki, L. (2010): ‘Children, Humanity, and the Infantilization of Peace’, in Ticktin and Feldman (eds): In the name of humanity: the government of threat and care. Durham, Duke University Press.
Stoler, A. (2011): Colonial Aphasia: Race and Disabled Histories in France. Public Culture, Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 121-156
Ticktin, M. (2011): Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitaranism in France. Berkeley, University California Press.
Cite as: Fernandez, Júlia 2023 “Outside of Humanity: Palestinian Children and the Value of Life” Focaalblog 31 October. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/10/31/julia-fernandez-outside-of-humanity-palestinian-children-and-the-value-of-life/
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