Colonizer as Lender: A Statement on Palestine from Members of Occupy Wall Street and Strike Debt

[Image from tidalmag.org] [Image from tidalmag.org]

Colonizer as Lender: A Statement on Palestine from Members of Occupy Wall Street and Strike Debt

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following statement was issued by members of the Occupy Wall Street and Strike Debt movements. It was originally published in the fourth issue of Tidal magazine on 22 February 2013.] 

Right in the place where empire was scheming to do its worst, a tent went up—and then another, and then a village. A new community was born there, an act of resistance as well as a nurturing space for eating and sleeping and living. People talked and prayed together. There was an explosion of hope in the midst of hopelessness. But before long the empire had enough. It sent in its army of militarized police, and the village was destroyed.

This is the story of Occupy Wall Street`s Liberty Square in the fall of 2011, yes. But it is also what happened earlier this year in the West Bank. The village of Bab al­Shams, whose name means "Gate of the Sun," appeared early in the morning on January 11. Two days later, in the dark of night, Israeli soldiers tore it down.

Bab al­Shams was located in the area known as E1, which the Israeli government had recently designated for the expansion of the Maale Adumim settlement, effectively closing off Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank and dividing a land and a people from itself. The announcement came in retaliation for the affirmation of Palestinian representation at the United Nations. There, the vast majority of countries in the world voted to grant what Israel has for decades denied: the rights of Palestinians to sovereignty and participation in the international community.

The people who built Bab al­Shams sought to challenge the "facts on the ground" by which Israel has been gradually removing those who inhabit and cultivate Palestinian land. With the help of billions of dollars in military and economic aid from the United States government each year, and relying on a steady influx of U.S. investors and settlers, this slow creep of expansion and expulsion reenacts our own country`s bloody history. There are many ways in which the circumstances of Bab al­Shams differ from those of Liberty Square, but both encampments rose up from the ground to oppose the same imperial appetite for growth. The past, present, and future of the United States and Palestine are bound together.

Palestine today is a land and a people caught in a stranglehold. Israel controls all trade, borders, movement of people, airspace, water, electricity, and other vital resources, and it polices the occupied territories through unlawful means: military rule, arbitrary detention, land seizure, settlement­building. A critical, and much less publicized, ingredient of Israeli policy today is the Palestinian debt trap, which represents both a means of repression and a prospect for liberation.

The public debt of the Palestinian Authority is approaching $5 billion—as much as 70 percent of GDP—and more than $1 billion of that is external debt. For an economy still heavily dependent onforeign aid, this volume of public­sector indebtedness is alarming. Household debt has also skyrocketed, largely because relatively new bank lending programs are being used to finance homes, cars, marriages, computers, and educations. So, like almost everywhere else, an ever larger share of personal income and government revenue is being swallowed up by debt service. All over the globe, debts are imposed and manipulated for the sake of social control, but this is all the more true for a people under siege in a struggle for self­determination.

The Paris Protocol of 1994 dictates that Israel must collect and fairly distribute revenue from Palestinian taxes and custom duties. In violation of the agreement, it regularly withholds these funds as punishment for resistance activity—particularly when identified with Hamas—and also as a way to capture Palestinian debts owed to Israeli enterprises. The value of these debts is magnified by the charging of exorbitant Israeli prices for utilities, fuel, and other necessities, even though Palestinians` incomes and employment levels are lower by a third or more. In these ways and others, Israel not only profits lavishly from supplying Palestine but also wields direct discipline through its automatic powers of debt extraction. It can turn the spigot of fiscal pain on or off at will.

Less direct is the role of the Palestinian Authority, which, like most forms of colonial “self­rule,” has an acutely schizophrenic personality. In its most recent manifestation, under the neoliberal regime of ex­World Bank economist Salam Fayyad, the PA has encouraged the debt­financing of basic needs by relaxing the lending requirements of Palestinian banks. In Ramallah, where highly paid NGO employees compete with government officials in the marketplace for villas and luxury automobiles, locals talk of a “bubble” economy, driven by a cappuccino lifestyle that claims to fulfill the new Palestinian Dream. Material goods and luxuries that are commonplace for Israelis on the other side of the Green Line are sustained, for Palestinians, by a debt burden that stifles political dissent. Those who enjoy certain privileges from serving in the colonial administration stand to lose them if they do not assist in suppressing the insurgencies of fellow Palestinians.

The Fayyad administration has also embarked on a program of “state readiness,” grooming Palestine for sovereignty according to the template required by global capitalist institutions. To qualify for statehood in the neoliberal global order, a nation must show that it can attract investors to its government bonds. Preparing for sovereign debtworthiness involves jumping through hoops laid out by the IMF and the World Bank: public austerity, unrestricted access to foreign investors, deregulated markets. Also implied in this courtship is permitting these institutions to override elected governments and set policy directly, either to ensure that foreign bondholders are paid in full or to quell political instability. Meanwhile, Israel`s expanding settlements in the West Bank make a mockery of the ever more elusive Palestinian state, dangled still as a seductive promise before the PA bureaucrats.

So who benefits from this debt trap? In Israel, the greatest beneficiaries are the supplier firms, the brokers of colonial power, and those sectors among the population who materially benefit from the occupation. In Palestine, it is the bankers and business elites who stand to profit, either from extractive lending or from the land and commodity markets financed by the loans. International beneficiaries range from the would­be creditors of a new capitalist client state, to the geopolitical power­brokers who favor the current “stability” of the occupation, with its bantustans strategically isolated by Israeli settlements and paramilitary infrastructure.

And what of the Palestinians who are caught in the trap? For the affluent few, the possession of debt is a sign of status, one of the trappings of modernization—but it is also a self­disciplining asset, arguably more effective than any instrument of military pacification. Those in the Gaza Strip, the villages, and the refugee camps are more directly disciplined. They are ground down by austerity based in a perceived scarcity that’s as artificial as the GDP growth numbers, which are borne aloft by the contributions of international donors.

The psychology of debt impels us to think at every level about who and what Palestinians owe. But since we refuse to value fellow human beings by their relationship to capital, we should be asking the opposite question. We owe to Palestinians at least what we demand for ourselves: freedom from occupation, freedom from new forms of colonization, freedom to return to, inhabit, and live in a territory which we or our parents and grandparents called home, without annexation, without financialization, without exclusion, without pollution, and without the destruction of the common resources that nurture and sustain life.

Freedom and social justice are intrinsically collective. They require us to recognize as well as traverse the divisions that perpetuate oppression. This, however, did not appear to be the case for the 2011 protest encampments set up by Israelis in Tel Aviv in 2011. Although these “occupiers” proclaimed their solidarity with a global movement against austerity and debt, Palestinian voices and grievances were not welcomed. How are we to understand a call for social justice or solidarity when the worst forms of oppression in one’s own midst are not addressed?

Out of a desire for social justice and solidarity, we boycott, divest from, and sanction those who profit from keeping Palestinians in the limbo of debt. We express our bond with those in bondage by these acts of refusal. These acts of refusal are also acts of love. Militant love. There will be no peace or justice in Palestine until the outstanding debt to its people is recognized and paid through a mutual and collective struggle for justice, liberation, and autonomy.

[Click here to download the complete fourth issue of Tidal.] 

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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