Gezi: The Beginning (Istanbul, 8-29 September)

[Image via DEPO] [Image via DEPO]

Gezi: The Beginning (Istanbul, 8-29 September)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

Gezi: The Beginning

8-29 September 2013

Opening: 7 September Saturday, 18:30

DEPO | Tütün Deposu Lüleci Hendek Cad. No:12 Tophane 34425 İstanbul depo@depoistanbul.net +902122923956 www.depoistanbul.net

Photos by: Nar Photos, Şahan Nuhoğlu, Ahmet Şık, Nazım Serhat Fırat
Texts: Merve Erol
Videos: Videoccupy
Sound collage: Açık Radyo, Simon Art
Exhibition design: Özlem Yılmaz

As with other urban rights struggles, the level of support in solidarity for Gezi Park was unexpected. Demolishment of the park and its replacement by a shopping mall that looked like a military barracks would not have impacted anybody that significantly. But there came a moment when it was impossible to sit at home. People dove into tear gas and pressurized water. “The best weapon is humor,” a stock phrase, became more than a metaphor, maybe for the first time in the world. Walls were adorned with images, poetry, slogans, jokes, and “entries.”

Istiklal Avenue and Taksim have been at the heart of not only Istanbul’s, but also the whole country’s cultural, entertainment world, and its political memory, for decades. The poor neighborhoods that were evacuated for the sake of unfair rent, the economy of construction, and the cities that become unlivable with the neoliberal appetite became crystallized. At this point, until the overflow, the glass started to rapidly fill with drops that affected other fields of life, which were crushing.

A lot will be said of the reasons for, consequences, and meaning of the Gezi Resistance—with stories that accumulated in fifteen to twenty days. This exhibition does not do anything other than recording with a bird’s eye perspective the days between when the bulldozers entered Gezi Park and the police evacuated the park. And the reality lies in this simple, lived reality.

As the longest summer of our recent history came to an end and we prepare for a new fall/winter season, it’s time for us to review what we have been through. “Gezi: The Beginning,” by just relaying the facts, is an attempt to remind and recollect in which everyone can settle. It is also an introductory step for visitors to Istanbul who have been following Gezi from afar.

***

Gezi: Başlangıç

8 Eylül – 29 Eylül 2013

Açılış: 7 Eylül Cumartesi 2013, 18:30

DEPO | Tütün Deposu Lüleci Hendek Cad. No:12 Tophane 34425 İstanbul depo@depoistanbul.net +902122923956 www.depoistanbul.net

Fotoğraflar: Nar Photos, Şahan Nuhoğlu, Ahmet Şık, Nazım Serhat Fırat
Metinler: Merve Erol
Videolar: Videoccupy
Ses kolaj: Açık Radyo, Simon Art
Sergi tasarım: Özlem Yılmaz

Daha önceki kent hakkı mücadelelerinde olduğu gibi, Gezi Parkı için dayanışma çağrılarına da bu düzeyde bir destek beklenmiyordu. Parkın yıkılıp yerine askerî kışla görünümünde bir AVM kondurulması milyonların hayatını birinci dereceden etkilemezdi. Ama öyle bir an geldi ki, artık evde oturmak mümkün değildi. İnsanlar biber gazlarının, tazyikli suların arasına daldılar. “En iyi silah mizahtır” şeklindeki beylik deyişi modern dünyada belki ilk defa mecaz olmaktan çıkardılar. Duvarları resimler, şiirler, sloganlar, espriler, “entry”lerle donattılar.

İstiklal Caddesi ve Taksim, onyıllardan bu yana sadece İstanbul’un değil, bütün ülkenin kültürel âleminin, eğlence dünyasının, siyasal hafızasının kalbi. Rant uğruna boşaltılan yoksul mahallelerinin, inşaat ekonomisinin, neoliberal iştahın yaşanmaz kıldığı büyük şehirlerin derdi belki de burada billûrlaştı. Bu noktada taşana kadar, hayatın başka alanlarını etkileyen, ezen damlalar da hızla bardağı doldurmaya başlamıştı.

Gezi Direnişi’nin sebepleri, sonuçları, anlamı üstüne daha çok şey söylenecektir, 15-20 günde biriken milyonlarca hikâyeyle birlikte. Bu sergi, Gezi Parkı’na dozerlerin girdiği andan parktaki kitlenin polis zoruyla sürüldüğü güne kadar olup bitenleri kuş bakışı kayda geçirmekten başka bir şey yapmıyor. Ama zaten hakikat de bu basit, yaşanmış gerçeklikte yatıyor.

Yakın tarihimizin en uzun yazı bittiğine, yeni bir sonbahar / kış sezonuna hazırlandığımıza göre, yaşadıklarımızı gözden geçirmenin de zamanı. “Gezi: Başlangıç” olguları nakletmekle yetinen, herkesin kendini içine yerleştirebileceği bir hatırlatma çabası, Gezi’yi uzaktan takip eden İstanbul ziyaretçileri için de giriş niteliğinde bir denem.

 
  • ALSO BY THIS AUTHOR

    • Emergency Teach-In — Israel’s Profound Existential Crisis: No Morals or Laws Left to Violate!

      Emergency Teach-In — Israel’s Profound Existential Crisis: No Morals or Laws Left to Violate!

      The entire globe stands behind Israel as it faces its most intractable existential crisis since it started its slow-motion Genocide in 1948. People of conscience the world over are in tears as Israel has completely run out of morals and laws to violate during its current faster-paced Genocide in Gaza. Israelis, state and society, feel helpless, like sitting ducks, as they search and scramble for an inkling of hope that they might find one more human value to desecrate, but, alas, their efforts remain futile. They have covered their grounds impeccably and now have to face the music. This is an emergency call for immediate global solidarity with Israel’s quest far a lot more annihilation. Please lend a helping limb.

    • Long Form Podcast Episode 7: Think Tanks and Manufactuing Consent with Mandy Turner (4 June)

      Long Form Podcast Episode 7: Think Tanks and Manufactuing Consent with Mandy Turner (4 June)

      In this episode, Mandy Turner discusses the vital role think tanks play in the policy process, and in manufacturing consent for government policy. Turner recently published a landmark study of leading Western think tanks and their positions on Israel and Palestine, tracing pronounced pro-Israel bias, where the the key role is primarily the work of senior staff within these institutions, the so-called “gatekeepers.”

    • Long Form Podcast: Our Next Three Episodes

      Long Form Podcast: Our Next Three Episodes
      Long Form Podcast(Episodes 7, 8, & 9) Upcoming Guests:Mandy TurnerHala RharritHatem Bazian Hosts:Mouin RabbaniBassam Haddad   Watch Here:Youtube.com/JadaliyyaX.com/Jadaliyya There can be

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412