In the end, they did not let him in. Maybe it was because I forgot, as we approached the door, to avoid speaking Arabic. Maybe it was because his ID betrayed his Arabness, despite his effort to offset it with a display of gayness. Maybe it was, contrary to both our suspicions, for some other reason entirely. Whatever the case, that moment cast into sharp relief the discursive framework that governs sexuality and race in Israel-Palestine: the entrance to the bar was a sort of checkpoint, like so many others queer Palestinians regularly face, in bars, saunas, parks, Web sites, and other “egalitarian” gay spaces; it was manned by a queer agent of Israeli nationalism, whose job it was to determine who belongs in this gay/Israeli space and who does not.
I read the checkpoint, then, not just as a literal site on the border where agents of the state “inspect . . . what goes in and out” of the nation but as a ubiquitous subjective process wherein citizens and noncitizens alike check themselves — and others — against “the field of signs and practices” in which the nation-state is represented. By drawing attention to, rather than eschewing, the exclusionary practices of the state and the racist discourses of the nation, the metaphor of the checkpoint more effectively captures the experiences of queer Palestinians than the more familiar metaphor of the closet. Moreover, because it so crudely inscribes the violence of the state on the bodies of its national-racial others, any critique of the checkpoint necessarily entails a critique of the state and its violence. The closet, on the other hand, is a subtler, “characteristically ‘postmodern’ [technique] of power,” and the struggle against it — and for the right to “come out” as respectable queer citizens — insulates the state from critique by representing it as a “neutral [arbiter] of injury,” to be appealed to for redress and protection, “rather than . . . [itself] invested with the power to injure.”
How do you say “come out of the closet” in Arabic: queer activism and the politics of visibility in Israel-Palestine – Jason Ritchie
GLQ 16.4, 2010.
Barack Hussein Obama adopted Yasser Arafat’s staged plan for Israel’s destruction, and he is trying to force it on our prime minister.
You see what he did there?
Filed under: Historical, Political | Tags: apartheid, bibi, israel/palestine, zionists gonna zionate
I wish I could just laugh at Obama and Netanyahu but this is so fucking infuriating. Israel is willing to make generous concessions? Like what, for example? Will it “concede” the right of Palestinians not to live under military occupation? Will it “concede” the Palestinian right to a state? A return to 1967 borders is not a concession; it’s the bare minimum for a two-state solution. Unfortunately, this is the way Israel has always conducted “negotiations.” It has been deliberate policy since 1967 (or arguably 1948) to create facts on the ground at significant detriment both to Palestinians, whose lands are then usurped, and to Palestinian negotiators who have to adjust themselves to new “realities” when they shouldn’t have to.
That’s why it should be hilarious when Netanyahu says that Israel is willing to make generous concessions. Kind of like in 1993 when in exchange for full Palestinian recognition (something Obama still maintains Israel needs apparently), Israel recognized the PLO as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. How fucking generous. Of course, the UN had recognized the PLO as just that almost 20 years earlier in fucking 1974, but who fucking cares about the UN amirite? Certainly not Israel (despite the fact that it was the UN that created the State of Israel in the first place).
Ironically, it was in the moment the PLO was recognized by Israel as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people that it ceased to be just that. Meanwhile Israel used the opportunity to build more settlements on land that did not - and does not - by any measure belong to it, insisting all the while that all it wanted was peace, and peace would totally be had if it weren’t for Arafat and those Nazi terrorists who started the Second Intifada. Poor Israel doesn’t have “a partner for peace,” you understand. Never mind the fact that Abu Mazen and the Palestinian authority are salivatingly grovelingly desperate for any bone that Israel throws their way (the Hamas-Fatah reconciliation represents the first time in years that the PA has acted on its own initiative and in accordance with the will of the Palestinian people, and Obama has the gall to condemn it).
The recent announcement of an agreement between Fatah and Hamas raises profound and legitimate questions for Israel – how can one negotiate with a party that has shown itself unwilling to recognize your right to exist.
Excuse me but what?
Never mind the unacceptable pre-conditions that Netanyahu’s government has set for “negotiations” ostensibly for “peace” and a “final settlement.” And then in 2009, Netanyahu declared his support for the two-state solution. Of course, in the 42 years between 1967 and 2009, Israel had done absolutely everything in its power (well, maybe not – I mean, they could have just shot everyone) to undermine the two-state solution and carry out a plan of unequivocal apartheid.
Which is why I laughed when Ehud Barak said this:
As long as in this territory west of the Jordan river there is only one political entity called Israel it is going to be either non-Jewish, or non-democratic,” Barak said. “If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state.
But now it’s just not very funny.
It’s so sad when fucking Jeffrey Goldberg is the voice of reason:
I’m amazed at the amount of insta-commentary out there suggesting that the President has proposed something radical and new by declaring that Israel’s 1967 borders should define — with land-swaps — the borders of a Palestinian state. I’m feeling a certain Groundhog Day effect here. This has been the basic idea for at least 12 years. This is what Bill Clinton, Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat were talking about at Camp David, and later, at Taba. This is what George W. Bush was talking about with Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert. So what’s the huge deal here? Is there any non-delusional Israeli who doesn’t think that the 1967 border won’t serve as the rough outline of the new Palestinian state?
The fact of the matter is: Netanyahu sees no reason to reach a final settlement. As David Samel points out:
The status quo has served the Israelis well over the past 44 years. Sure, they’ve had to endure various rounds of “terrorism,” that is, a small fraction of the violence they have visited upon the Palestinians and Lebanese. But the land has been theirs to play with. They get to rule over millions of stateless, powerless people, making extrajudicial decisions over every facet of their lives and even whether they have lives at all, and still get to call themselves a “democracy”; only a few people, and none who count, snicker in disgust.
[...] Netanyahu doesn’t really care where the starting point is. He just wants to make sure there’s no realistic possibility of an end point.
Besides, every Israeli who is killed as a result of a suicide bombing or violence against settlers sends Likud poll numbers way up.
Filed under: Historical | Tags: episodes in middle east history, israel/palestine, zionist highlights
“Yet, as Ben-Gurion’s Palmach battalions in the winter of 1947 were poised to pounce on fields they had not tilled and orchards they had not planted and towns and villages they had not built or lived in, the Zionists, by accepting the 1947 UN partition according to their own lights, also wrapped themselves in the sanctimonious garb of moral superiority as adherents, in a posture of self-defense, to the impartial will of the international community. By the same token, the Palestinians, who since 1897 had stood in dread of occupation and displacement by an alien people, for whom partition was the negation of their elemental birthright to the territorial integrity of their ancestral homeland, and who were now at the receiving end of a more predatory partition plan than Peel’s ten years earlier, were dubbed the aggressors for not meekly submitting to the dismemberment of their country.”
Walid Khalidi – “Revisiting the UNGA Partition Resolution”
Filed under: Literary | Tags: cinematic images, israel/palestine, zionists gonna zionate
Elia Suleiman's "Chronicle of a Disappearance"
Land Day
Far too tired to make any coherent comments or even paste in some Darwish or something.
Filed under: Political | Tags: israel/palestine, non-controversy, zionist highlights, zionists gonna zionate
Israeli Apartheid Week
A lecturer at UC Santa Cruz submits a 29-page complaint to the Education Department. Yeah.
“The lecturer who brought the complaint is Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, who teaches Hebrew at the school. You can read Rossman-Benjamin’s complaint to the Education Department here. Among the events she sites as examples of anti-Semitism on campus was a screening of the film Occupation 101 and another event called “Understanding Gaza.” This event featured speakers from Jewish Voice for Peace which she characterizes as “an extreme and disreputable fringe of American Jewry.” The Chronicle quotes her letter:
The anti-Israel discourse and behavior in classrooms and at departmentally and college-sponsored events at [Santa Cruz] is tantamount to institutional discrimination against Jewish students, which has resulted in their intellectual and emotional harassment and intimidation, and has adversely affected their educational experience at the university.”
It’s amazing the extent to which the disgusting murder of five people — including three children — can be politicized to this extent. The right-wing reaction and the left-wing response have both been shocking to me. Every single day, crimes like this are committed all over the world. But, of course, because this one happened in a West Bank settlement, everyone has their two cents to pitch in; on the Palestinian “leadership,” on the settlements, on the “silence” of Israeli “radicals,” on the context of the occupation, on the cycle of violence. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that you can’t throw a stone in Israel/Palestine without touching upon some wider political implication.
From a philosophical point of view, it’s fascinating.
I, for one, am glad that I still have the capacity to be truly horrified when people are killed.
In the prevailing US political culture, supporting Washington’s policies is considered synonymous with democratic thinking and behaviour, while opposing the American outlook and Israel is judged to derive from the backwardness of ‘captive minds’. According to this perspective, a mentality of imagined victimhood feeds ‘hatred’ of and resistance towards Israel.
But, it is, in fact, this thinking that is utterly undemocratic. If we assume that democratic values are universal values and move away from a Western ethno-centric interpretation, we will find that the rejection of occupation is totally consistent with ideas of freedom and human dignity – two supposedly integral components of democratic thought.
Just as rejecting racial discrimination asserts a belief in freedom, so does the refusal to simply accept the Israeli and American occupations of Arab lands and subordination of Arab people.
Lamis Andoni — Obama does not get it
