If Israeli Tactics in Gaza Are Legal, No One is Safe: Response to Michael N. Schmitt and John J. Merriam

[IDF`s Nahal Brigade conducting a search in the Hebron area. Image by Israeli Defense Forces.] [IDF`s Nahal Brigade conducting a search in the Hebron area. Image by Israeli Defense Forces.]

If Israeli Tactics in Gaza Are Legal, No One is Safe: Response to Michael N. Schmitt and John J. Merriam

By : Noura Erakat

In their forthcoming paper, The Tyranny of Context: Israeli Targeting Practices in Legal Perspective, Michael Schmitt and John J. Merriam examine Israel’s targeting practices against the Gaza Strip and Lebanon. Their purpose is to scrutinize the context in which these attacks take place as well as the Israeli Army’s relevant legal standards regulating them.

Their findings are based on two visits to Israel in December 2014 and February 2015. During those visits, the Israeli Army granted them:

…unprecedented access that included a “staff ride” of the Gaza area, inspection of an Israeli operations center responsible for overseeing combat operations, a visit to a Hamas infiltration tunnel, review of IDF doctrine and other targeting guidance and briefings by IDF operations and legal personnel who have participated in targeting. The authors also conducted extensive interviews of senior IDF commanders and key IDF legal advisers. (3)

The methodological approach should raise, at least, a few red flags. Schmitt and Merriam are aware of their problematic methodological approach and write:

Although the approach might be perceived as leading to a pro-Israeli bias, the sole purpose of the project was to examine Israeli targeting systems, processes and norms in the abstract; no attempt was made to assess targeting during any particular conflict or the legality of individual attacks. (3)

In essence, they acknowledge that this entire paper examines what IDF lawyers say rather than what IDF operators do. At best – we should read it as a supplementary report to the Israeli Army’s war manual: it is just theoretical. That may be acceptable, but the authors go on to say:

With respect to the resulting observations and conclusions, note that the authors combine extensive academic and operational experience vis-à-vis targeting and therefore were in a unique position to assess the credibility and viability of Israeli assertions. The result was a highly granular and exceptionally frank dialogue. (4)

So what they tell us at first, that this paper is just “in the abstract,” they also claim is “granular and exceptionally frank.” Moreover, they claim that their combined experience enables them to assess the “credibility and viability” of Israel’s claims. This is an arguably impossible task if they do not assess Israel’s assertions about their practices in comparisons to actual practice. In  fact, the next fifty-some pages read like an estimable apology on Israel’s behalf. The authors accept nearly everything their respondents say, and even what they decline to say, at face-value. The authors assert the authoritative nature of their findings although they do not interview a single Palestinian or Lebanese civilian who has been subject to Israel’s military attacks. They do not even bother to review the reports describing Israel’s operational practices. Several of those reports have alleged that Israel’s practices constitute war crimes. The words “war crimes” appear only twice in the paper: in the titles of articles they cite in their footnotes. Their exceptional reference to Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International reports are primarily to support claims regarding attacks on Israel by Hamas or Hezbollah.

As my colleague and legal scholar on laws of war explained to me, he has become accustomed to reading such reports like an anthropologist. Indeed, the value of this paper is its insightful display of the production of knowledge on national security and counter-terrorism from the US and Israeli metropolises. While this may be reason to dismiss the paper all together, it is also precisely why the paper merits response. Schmitt and Merriam are hardly insignificant. Their tremendous body of scholarship and influence means that their interventions will be taken very seriously and will inevitably bear upon the ways we come to understand, justify, and/or reject the development of the laws of armed conflict. This short piece aims to use three select examples to highlight the methodological shortcomings that give rise to insufficiently tested findings that are emblematic of the paper. For the sake of specificity and fidelity to context, I will focus just on Operation Protective Edge, Israel’s 2014, 51-day attack on the Gaza Strip.

1)      The single most important facet of warfare from Israel’s perspective is the proximity of the threat.”

In this passage beginning on page 5, Schmitt and Merriam discuss the implications of proximity of the threat emerging from the Gaza Strip. They assess that such proximity denies Israel the advantage of “expeditionary force” and, therefore, it must be prepared to fight “…within minutes, and sometimes within view, of their homes.” Conversely, this spatial reality affords Israel the benefit of interior position or, “the virtue of enabling one to concentrate forces quickly and maneuver them in any direction the situation may warrant.”

Schmitt and Merriam discuss the military implications of the Gaza Strip’s proximity but fail to address its fundamental nature: Israel’s military occupation. The Gaza Strip is the western-most frontier of Mandate Palestine that Israel did not conquer in the 1948 War, which  it subsequently occupied in 1967. The coastal enclave is proximate because Israel established itself in the area already inhabited by native Arabs and who were promised self-determination under the League of Nations Mandate system. This history matters for two reasons.

Firstly, this history brings into play the right of a people under alien occupation and colonial domination to use force in pursuit of their self-determination captured in  Article 1(4) of Additional Protocol I. This provides the legal justification for Palestinians to use force against Israel. Notably, the authors mention this right much later in the paper where they muse whether Israel’s opposition to Article 1(4) mirrors the U.S.’s position, that national liberation movements lack the resources and accountability mechanisms to fulfill the duties and obligations of international law. While they do not resolve this issue, they note,

Although not directly bearing on the issue of Israeli targeting, note that the Israeli position deprives members of national liberation movements of any belligerent immunity for their attacks on Israeli targets, including those that qualify as military objectives. (31)

They do not raise the obvious conundrum that Israel’s position simultaneously incapacitates the Palestinian population from using force, even with weapons capable of precision-strikes, while fully and arbitrarily subjecting them to Israel’s military prowess. In fact, they qualify this condition by claiming that it does not bear “on the issue of Israeli targeting” at all. Schmitt and Merriam note this without irony as they discuss the “tyranny of context.”

Secondly, the status of the Gaza Strip, namely whether or not it is occupied, impacts Israel’s permissible use of force against it. The authors say that Hamas has been in control of the coastal enclave since 2007 but fail to probe whether that control is tantamount to the cessation of occupation under the Geneva Conventions. While Israel has insisted that its occupation ended upon its unilateral withdrawal in 2005, numerous scholars (see here, here, and here) as well as the Office of the Prosecutor and the Human Rights Council Fact-Finding Mission to Gaza have insisted that the occupation continues and remains consequential. In sum- if the territory is occupied, Israel has the duty to protect the civilians under occupation and in cases of unrest, it can use law enforcement authority to resume order. In contrast, if it can invoke self-defense in law (UN Charter and/or customary law) then it can resort to military force. Notably, since 2001 Israel’s High Court has insisted that it can apply both the law of occupation to govern the Occupied Territory as well as the law of armed conflict (LOAC) to quell unrest. (Can’an v. IDF Military Commander).  By 2005, they find that LOAC supersedes Occupation Law. (Public Committee Against Torture in Israel v. The Government of Israel). This means that it can deny Palestinians the right to govern themselves and simultaneously use military force to thwart their resistance to military rule. Israel’s High Court has been in lockstep with its Government in maintaining a military occupation and deeming it a war against terror.

Context here is consequential. The Gaza Strip is not proximate to Israel by random fortune- but because Israel established itself in Mandate Palestine by war and literally removed and dispossessed its native Palestinian inhabitants. This conquest remains contested by Palestinians and that is the root source of ongoing conflict. What Schmitt and Merriam swiftly disregard as proximate asymmetric violence is in fact the function of ongoing and unresolved claims over Israel’s authoritative jurisdiction. Obscuring this context risks creating a new body of law intended to protect a power’s colonial holdings as it gives the impression that Israel is using force to defend itself when, in fact, it is using force to squash Palestinian claims and militarily resolve the dispute over its control. Simultaneously, Israel criminalizes all Palestinian use of force in response, or otherwise, as terroristic. The authors in/advertently reify this false and counterproductive narrative without scrutiny.

2)       “…[C]asualty-aversion leads Israel to liberally apply force…”

In the same section on operational context, Schmitt and Merriam explain that the Israeli Army is a conscript force. The diffuse and shared nature of military service shapes Israeli values and thus how Israel engages in warfare. In particular, the public’s aversion to soldier casualties “…leads Israel to liberally apply force, particularly airstrikes and counter-battery fire, in order to ‘guarantee force protection.’” (8) This, the authors explain, also impacts Israeli sensitivity towards captured personnel and shaped the Hannibal Doctrine- the operational doctrine wherein the mission is to rescue a soldier from captivity at all costs including (fatal) injury to Israeli personnel.

While Schmitt and Merriam do not explicitly say so, the proposition above unduly shifts the risk of warfare from soldiers to enemy civilians; an incredibly controversial position. So much so that it occupied a series of essays and responses between the authors of the proposition and other legal scholars. Proportionality in ongoing hostilities demands that a belligerent’s military advantage outweigh the harm it causes to civilians and civilian infrastructure. Under Israel’s force protection rubric, its military advantage includes heightened security afforded to its soldiers. While all armed forces consider force protection as part of its military advantage, Israel’s proposal is radical in that it considers its soldiers lives to be more valuable than those of enemy civilians. Therefore, when assessing proportionality, it tolerates greater numbers of civilian deaths and injuries so long as that spares its soldiers from harm. The outcome of this almost ensures devastating results. At the most extreme end of this proposition is that a belligerent force could carpet bomb its adversary for the sake of preserving their soldiers’ lives, thus destroying those gains achieved by anti-colonial struggles and captured in Additional Protocols I and II. Colonized and occupied peoples would thus be subject to nearly unregulated military force. Consider the testimony of sixty Israeli soldiers who fought in the 2014 Gaza Offensive testified to very lenient rules of engagement including directives to “shoot at anything that moves.” These rules of engagement may very well reflect Israel’s radical force protection proposition. Notably, Israeli forces killed approximately 2,100 Palestinians, including 504 children during Operation Protective Edge.

Schmitt and Merriam do not take serious issue with this proposition. In fact, they do not mention the implications of Israel’s force protection until some 35 pages later in their section on Proportionality.  There, they simply note their surprise and then their passive acceptance for the novel approach:

Both authors were struck by the weight of accorded in the proportionality analysis to the military advantage of protecting the civilian population and individual soldiers. Although they would not label it unwarranted in light of the unique operational context in which Israel finds itself, it was clear to them that avoidance of harm to the Israeli civilian population and the protection of individual soldiers loomed large in Israeli proportionality calculations. (45)

Among the examples they provide to demonstrate the application of this approach is Israel’s deadly operation in Rafah where its Army applied the Hannibal Doctrine. Schmitt and Merriam mention that Israel’s rules of engagement “…reportedly resulted in as many as 114 deaths in Rafah.” (46) They say nothing more about the significance of these civilian losses that may put Israel’s proposition into question. For example, they do not share that the Israeli Army admitted to sealing off a 1.5 mile radius so that no one could flee.  Nor did they say that according to an Israeli officer, they released 500 artillery shells onto the area over the next eight hours, nor the fact that they also conducted 100 airstrikes over the course of two days. They do not mention that the commander of the Givati Brigade said to the Associated Press "That`s why we used all this force…Those who kidnap need to know they will pay a price. This was not revenge. They simply messed with the wrong brigade."

Israel’s proportionality assessment has had horrifying consequences. Schmitt and Merriam discuss nothing of this and simply state that Israel factors in “rescue and survival” into its military advantage in ways that would tolerate greater collateral damage. One of the authors agrees with the Israeli Army’s approach and the other believes that this is only significant for determining “the military feasibility of precautions in attack…” (46) Neither author critically assesses the unprecedented harm this approach would impose on civilians caught in warfare especially those civilians caught in anti-colonial struggles.

3) “The civilians are hopefully frightened into dispersing.”

In their discussion on aerial targeting practices, Schmitt and Merriam discuss Israel’s “knock on the roof” policy. This is the practice of shooting a missile at a home or building in order to warn the civilians of an impending strike. The policy is highly controversial. The relatively small rocket causes damage. A rocket in and of itself, regardless of the size has the impact of causing shock and often paralysis. When used by Israel, the larger rocket usually makes impact 45 seconds to three minutes later not providing adequate time to flee. In some instances, no rocket follows and the small rocket can constitute psychological warfare upon Palestinians. The authors discuss none of these details. In fairness, they describe the technique as “controversial.” They write

The technique involves employing small sub-munitions that impact one corner of the roof and detonates as very small explosions that produce noise and concussion, several minutes ahead of the strike. The civilians are hopefully frightened into dispersing. Once they have cleared the target area, the IDF launches the attack. (17)

The authors go to great lengths to downplay the size and scope of the rocket. They implicitly suggest that the Israeli Army waits for the civilians to leave before launching the second and larger missile, and explicitly say so in their footnote. This has hardly been the case as indicated by the numbers of Palestinians killed in their homes. The most troubling part of this passage, however, is their comment that the “civilians are hopefully frightened into dispersing” indicating an ambivalence about the efficacy of the warning technique while simultaneously acknowledging its psychological impact of creating fear. The authors characterize this practice as legal because it is incidental to a legitimate military objective. In contrast, they concur with Israeli legal advisers that the fear wrought by Palestinian rockets is illegal, even if they do not pose a deathly threat, because they intend to cause fear. (45) Reference to empirical evidence undermines these findings. Based on their investigation, for example, the FIDH concluded that “rather than minimising loss of civilian life, Israel’s warning policy fomented massive forced displacement and spread confusion and fear among the population.” (23) OCHA reported

Throughout the conflict there was a real fear among the population that no person or place was safe, as evidenced by attacks on hospitals, residential buildings and schools designated as shelters. Psychosocial distress levels, already high among the population of Gaza, have worsened significantly as a result of the conflict.

Later Schmitt and Merriam claim that the technique is used exceptionally when other warnings have proven futile- this based solely on what their Israeli interlocutors have told them. They then claim, as a matter-of-fact, that “the technique is only used when the building has been converted into a military objective through use (such as weapons storage)” again based solely on Israeli intelligence. (49) A cursory reading of any of the reports and commentary conducted on Israel’s warning system, or lack thereof, would provide a completely different assessment. (See e.g., United Nations, Amnesty International, B’tselem, Al Mezan, Human Rights Watch, FIDH).

The authors defend the fact that Israel does not always afford adequate time to flee. They explain this situation typically arises

…when the enemy is using the warnings to either know when and where to use human shields or take measures to prevent the civilians there from leaving. Such practices may leave only a narrow window of opportunity to strike before the number of individuals likely to be harmed in the attack rises. Therefore, a strike soon after a warning may in certain circumstances be the best means for minimizing civilian injury even when it does not afford civilians a great deal of time to leave or take shelter. (49)

Schmitt and Merriam are making an absolute proposition: when Israel forces believe necessary to achieve their military objective, they must strike immediately even if civilians do not have time to flee or a place to shelter.  They implicitly suggest that in such a case, Israel is relieved of its duty to assess whether such harm is proportional because it issued a warning, essentially giving its forces free reign to use force. Had the authors considered operational practice it may have included a discussion of the United Nations’ Board of Inquiry findings. That investigation concluded that Israel indeed struck seven UNRWA schools, several providing shelter to civilians, and none were storing weapons or militants. Israel responded that it was investigating these claims. How does this operational practice recalibrate the authors’ analysis? How can we take their findings seriously if they are not even considered?

The paper is rife with similar examples: explanation/apology for Israel’s rules of engagement without examining their application in operational practice. Schmitt and Merriam’s omissions merit much deeper scrutiny and engagement. Just scratching the surface reveals their flawed methodological approach and the inadequate engagement with the implications of their findings. In the best-case scenario, readers will approach their essay like a supplement to Israel’s Army Manual and read it with leisurely interest. In the worst, and more likely scenario, this work will significantly bear upon the production of knowledge regarding national security and humanitarian law and have fatal and devastating consequences. This does not only bear upon Israel’s wars but especially those waged by the United States against both state and non-state actors.  For this reason, we should treat this essay with the alarm it merits.  

 

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Jun 9, 2015 Lebanon

The Art of Posing

Zones of Contention: After The Green Line. 8 February – 3 May 2015. The Bob & Lissa Shelley McDowell Gallery, Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

In March2015, I delivered an invited “Point of View Talk” at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro’s Weatherspoon Art Museum on Zones of Contention: After the Green Line, an exhibit of works by Palestinian and Israeli artists, including a piece by Belgian Francis Alÿs, from which the exhibit draws its title. The museum’s Point of View Talks are intended to “amplify aspects of an exhibition through the perspectives of scholars from diverse fields.” My own particular point of view was shaped by two important factors: my identity as a Palestinian and my vocation as a teacher and writer. To me, these two elements are inseparable—they complement each other, inform each other, feed and bleed into each other; many times, they grate against each other, conflict, do bloody battle. I am at my personal best, however, when these two selves hold each other accountable.

As a Palestinian, I want to be an activist. I want to be blunt and forceful. I want what I say, how I say it, and what I mean to brook no confusion, suffer no interpretation, excuse no ambiguity. As a teacher and writer, however, I want to dwell, and make others dwell, in ambiguity, hand over agency to my students and to my readers, offer my craft at the altar of their vision, their experience. I want to facilitate, not dictate, to show you so that you can tell me. But as a Palestinian, I want to tell you how it is and what you need to do about it. Both of these impulses effect, hopefully, a kind of transformation. So when I experienced this exhibit, it was both as a Palestinian and as a teacher and artist.

There were times, at this exhibit, when these two selves concurred. For example, Yael Bartana’s A Declaration didn’t sit easily with either one. Clearly, A Declaration is, among other things, critical of the violence of the Israeli state. After all, it makes a point of, indeed dramatizes, replacing the symbol of the nation, the Israeli flag, with an olive tree, a powerful symbol for peace and the uprooted Palestine, both literally and figuratively. But I struggled with the film’s lack of awareness of the freedom with which an Israeli can get on a boat, paddle out to Andromeda’s Rock, and remove the Israeli flag with such ease, such self-assurance, such security. (Do note, however, how very gingerly he handles it, rolling it with excruciating care to be placed in the boat). A Palestinian would not have been allowed to perform such an act. He or she would have been most likely killed on the spot. The deep imbalance of power that is at the root of the Palestinian condition vexes me as a Palestinian. The film’s failure to acknowledge it vexes me as an artist. The piece seemed to be blissfully unaware of this asymmetry; there was not the necessary self-reflectiveness and self-consciousness that a piece funded and sanctioned by state agencies—the same state whose flag was being replaced—ought to have.

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[Still image from Yael Bartana, "A Declaration" (2006). Courtesy of Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam and
Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv. Image provided by the Weatherspoon Art Museum.]

As a Palestinian, I frequently think about bodies being prohibited, admonished, imprisoned, bordered, rejected, victimized, vilified, dehumanized—all the injustices that happen to Palestinian bodies in the zones of contention. Hence, I am especially fascinated by the idea of posing and sneaking, by how the proscribed body, in negotiating these injustices, pretends to be other things, masquerades as other things—intentionally, forcefully, forcibly, unknowingly.

In the exhibit, the most obvious examples of this are Dor Guez’s filmed interview “Sa(Mira)” and Sharif Waked’s film “Bath Time.” Samira, the young Arab woman waitress interviewed in Guez’s film, is struggling with being asked by the restaurant’s manager to “pose” as a Jewish Israeli after customers complain about her being an Arab. The giveaway is her name, so she is asked to change it from the very obviously Arab “Samira” to the more Jewish “Sima,” though they finally settle on the compromise of “Mira.” Ironically, Samira has already been “posing,” or rather has been “posed,” by her inevitable condition. The way she looks, the way she speaks, allow her to “pass” as a European Jew, but only for so long. She recounts how angry the boys interested in dating her become when they find out who she really is: “How come you are an Arab? You deceived us!” “If you weren’t Arab I would have gone out with you.” Of course, Samira is not trying to deceive anybody. She is so humiliated by the request to change her name that she ultimately decides to quit her job. But while Samira doesn’t want to sneak or pose and wants to be accepted on her own terms (“I don’t want to change my name. It’s part of who I am”), she is clearly a creature of the in-between in a way that most Diaspora Palestinians cannot even fathom, let alone relate to. Identifying both as Arab and as Israeli, proud of her Arab name but wanting so desperately to be accepted by Israeli society, she is caught in the middle.

Sharif Waked’s “Bath Time” is shown, appropriately, on a screen just on the other side of the wall where Samira continually tells us her story. Like her, the creature of “Bath Time,” a donkey painted as zebra (like those purportedly painted for the Gaza zoo when it lost its zebras to Israeli shelling) is also perpetually stuck in a liminal state, a state of in-betweenness. Waked’s video is on a loop of a portion of the donkey’s bath time; we never see the donkey as a fully realized zebra, nor the zebra fully unmasked as a donkey. This donkey, too, is posing—or rather, like Samira, is “posed” by others (for what does a donkey know about posing, and what does Samira have to do with the decades of history that have forced her into this critical moment of having to choose between posing and not posing?). They are both caught in the middle of deeply racist systems and structures. The Arab body, like the donkey of “Bath Time,” is forced to pretend, to become something else, something “better,” to be able to survive. “What’s the worst that can happen to me?” asks Samira, seemingly thinking that not getting a job or an apartment could be the worst. Neither she nor the donkey seems to realize the fatal weight of the “othered” body.

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[Still image from Sharif Waked, "Bath Time" (2012). Courtesy of the artist. Image provided by the Weatherspoon Art Museum.]

Yael Bartana’s other exhibited work, “The Missing Negatives of the Sonnenfeld Collection,” also epitomizes this sneaking and blurring of identity. German Jewish photojournalists Herbert and Leni Sonnenfeld documented the settlement of Jewish youth in 1930 and 1940s Palestine. Bartana re-stages select images from their vast collection “using young Arabs and Arab Jews, who are currently residing in Israel.” The caption at the exhibit also tells us that the “youths whose religious or ethnic affiliations are not identified…express a shared hope for a better future.” To me, however, the inability to distinguish one from the other, the “Arab” from the “Jew,” illustrates starkly the problematic ways in which “racial lines” have been politically and artificially drawn, thus opening up the possibility of one sneaking, posing, as the other.

Yet while Palestinians and Israelis, Jews, Muslims, Christians, and Arabs might be so intimately connected that we can, on the face of it, confuse them with each other, we must always remember that right now, even though they might be “copies” of each other, one is still a “negative” copy of the other. These copies, these mirror images, are highly asymmetrical since the Palestinian is often powerless, without privilege. This is blatantly, but unconsciously, illustrated in Bartana’s “A Declaration.” The man in the boat does not need to sneak, to lie low in his vessel. He can row it proudly, in plain view and highly visible, get up on that rock in his masculine bulkiness, take off his shirt, and remove the Israeli flag. For the Palestinian, in-betweenness is a mode of survival. Only the privileged and powerful can afford to pose, like those in the “Sonnenfeld Collection,” as an emotional gesture, highly important though it may be, of solidarity.

Nira Pereg’s “Sabbath,” which “documents the closing down of the ultra-orthodox neighborhoods in and around Jerusalem on the eve of the Sabbath” by neighborhood residents who use metal street dividers, leaves us with the possibility of “sneaking” across the rickety barriers. Though we never see this sneaking, it seems to be a distinct, almost inevitable, possibility. The film hints at it in the shots of cars approaching the easily moveable roadblocks. The desire to be on this side and not that side could easily motivate someone to get out of his or her car, when no one is watching, move the barrier, drive the car through, and then move the divider back.

All of the exhibit’s references to sneaking and posing suggest two important things. The first is that these highly dangerous, volatile, and asymmetrical borders, barriers, and dividers are not impenetrable to the powerless. The second is that the nature of the conflict imposes on the powerless certain ways in which they can deal with such borders, negotiate them, survive them—for example, by sneaking through or posing as somebody or something else. These methods include great risk to the Palestinian body, where the mask is an incredibly fragile thing.


[Nina Pereg, Sabbath (2008) from Nira Pereg on Vimeo.]

Sneaking and posing come through powerfully in one of the strongest pieces of the exhibit, Francis Alÿs’ “The Green Line: Sometimes Doing Something Poetic Can Become Political and Sometimes Doing Something Political Can Become Poetic.” The seventeen-minute film, in which Alÿs walks the path of the Green Line with a dribbling can of green paint, is accompanied by eleven distinct commentaries; there is also one silent, commentary-free version. In Rima Hamami’s commentary, for example, she says that Alÿs looks like a Palestinian man walking because he appears to be “sneaking.” She adds: “Your pose here is exactly like a Palestinian….When you cross over there, you always feel like a sneak…you can’t just be relaxed and natural…because as a Palestinian here now you are always a criminal…illegal…you have to be undercover....Young Palestinian men have to be so buried deep in themselves to walk across that line, to go west, they have to pull their whole being deep down into themselves.”

Hamami’s commentary echoes the ways in which Palestinians have to sneak, to carry a certain pose. One can argue, of course, that Alÿs is the ultimate poser. He is an outsider to the conflict, and another commentator, Michel Warschawski, believes that Alÿs’ gesture is even more powerful because he is an outsider. What interests me about Hamami’s comment, however, is that it is so patently untrue about Alÿs in the film. In fact, he walks with a swagger, a sense of ease and comfort. Most of the time, he is walking in the streets. Only a secure person can claim space like that. And of course, he isn’t actually sneaking. He doesn’t need to. People make way for him as he walks. He owns the Green Line on which he strides, so that it actually becomes a part of him—his pants and shoes are covered in green paint. A small part of me initially read this as an act of littering, and hence destructive, as a signifier of “I can so I will” that replicates the actual green line. Several Palestinian men in the film, especially one Palestinian boy, seem dismayed at his actions, his being in the street, being in their way and dribbling paint. It is a proprietary gesture that initially irked me.

This kind of power, the power not to need to pretend, the power to be oneself completely, is replicated in the words of another commentator, Yael Dayan, who refuses to talk about her father’s experience of drawing the Green Line. In the film, Rachel Jones asks Dayan whether she remembers her father, Moshe Dayan, talking about the process of drawing the green line. Yael says: “No, no, I really don’t want to. I really don’t. I was not there present and it….and he did not give it importance in the sense of a future agreement.” This absolute authority to refuse to engage, to refuse to remember, to refuse to even discuss is the kind of authority that we see in A Declaration. It is confident. The Palestinians cannot do anything but remember. It is this kind of authority that permeates much of the work in this exhibit. It is self-confident, it is assured, it owns the space it inhabits.

However, sometimes the powerful sneak as the powerless as a political gesture. Commentator Yael Lerer says: “Always when I pass a checkpoint, in one sense, I feel Palestinian because I try to hide my Israeliness. Otherwise I cannot pass the checkpoint. Because as an Israeli I`m not allowed to enter Ramallah or Jenin. But I do go. I can make myself part of the crowd enough. But at the same time, I feel that I`m the soldier. I`m the Israeli. I`m responsible for this checkpoint, and for this occupation.” And sometimes, the powerless also pose as the powerful as a political gesture. Commentator Nazmi Jobeh recounts a time when he confronted a soldier at the checkpoint who was separating the waiting people, based simply on looking at them, into a line for the Palestinians and one for the Israelis. Jobeh asks him: “‘Why did you send me to the left side? How did you recognize that I`m a Palestinian? Do I smell like a Palestinian? How can you differentiate between me and a Moroccan Jew?’ The soldier was shocked. He didn`t recognize that what he was doing was pure racism. How could you recognize identities just looking at people driving a car, you know, from far away?” But again, these two striking examples of posing at checkpoints are not symmetrical. Jobeh poses for survival, even if that means generously illuminating the powerful’s errant perceptions. Lerer does it out of a deep sense of accountability and guilt. In both cases, the Israeli body is safe, the one whose wellbeing, whose emotional, moral, and psychological state, is being attended to.

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[Still image from Dor Guez, "(Sa)Mira" (2009). Courtesy of the artist and Dvir Gallery, Tel Aviv.
Image provided by the Weatherspoon Art Museum.]

As a teacher and as a writer, I was especially attuned to the moments in the exhibition where the artist struggled with the “usefulness of art” in situations of deep despair. As the Moroccan writer Khannata Bannouna has said: “I have questioned many times what the sense of literature is within a world that suffers from so much destruction—where there are tortures and rivers of blood? Will literature have a purpose?” I think about this question all the time as a teacher, especially when teaching politically charged material during politically charged times. So it went with this exhibit, especially after the bloody summer of 2014 where over two thousand Palestinians, many of them small children, were brutally slaughtered by Israeli aggression.

Francis Alÿs is motivated by this question. We see it, of course, in the title of his work, but it also comes up many times in the course of the various commentaries. When Albert Agazarian asks him: “What is the purpose of this [walking the green line with the green can of paint]?” Alÿs responds, “As an artist, I am questioning the relevance of a poetic act within a situation of a sustained political religious military crisis.” Alÿs also asks Michel Warschawski: “Do you think a poetic language could open up some other kind of perception or that an artistic action could have some kind of relevance in a situation like this?” An important and related question is articulated by Jean Fisher, who asks: “How can one think of art as political without falling into the trap of propagandist/activist kind of strategies? I mean where does the poetic intersect with the political, in a way that is not banal?” Her response to her own question is that it is “when the art illuminates, provides an insight of a situation, allows you to see something rather differently such that it has the potential to open onto a political thought.” For Warschawski, “For those who are oppressed, those whose territory has been occupied...the artistic creation is a form of resistance. Art affirms an existence which is an act of resistance.”

Such art (I mean art produced about, within, and against deep political despair) is also useful when it lays itself bare—when the art opens itself and its creator up to scrutiny and critique. Alÿs succeeds at this. He crucifies himself as an artist, for on a very basic level the commentaries are not there simply to inform. These commentaries hold Alÿs accountable. They dissect the artistic act as well as its relevance and the relevance of the artist. I believe this to be the point of his film. These commentaries show us the artist questioning himself; they do not allow Alÿs to get away with anything. Indeed, he reproduces criticism of himself as an artist and of his work (which he could have easily edited out) so that, most pivotally, the viewer can see, not only Alÿs’s shortcomings, but also the artistic mechanism and process, and as a result not fetishize or romanticize or dehumanize the real people, places, history, and injustices with which this art engages. Another commentator, Ruben Aberjil, says: “Seeing you make this line with a can of paint puts me in a playful mood. Let’s draw a line and have some fun with it. Of course, the line would be funny were it not for the walls in people’s hearts. Were it free of the traces of the longing for an unending occupation….Because in my mind, the line needs to be erased; erased from the Israeli collective consciousness. When I see Francis playing with these lines, I see him as a child playing with a reality that is not local to him. If he understood Israeli reality and the Israeli soul and politics, he would understand that such a reality is impossible.” Eyal Weizman declares: “The problem, the ease with which you make the line, no resistance, that a line could be created, reified, that is inadvertently accepts manipulated, highly unnatural borders of the city of Jerusalem….And I think that the facility and the ease within which you have seemingly offered to repartition Jerusalem—according to a very arbitrary line (line of cease fire and exhaustion), is rendering somehow little service in the understanding of urban geography as well as the geography of the conflict.”

To me, art is useful when it leads us to deeply question the role of the artist; by this I do not simply mean to doubt, but quite literally to interrogate, to tease out, to figure out, to dive into. This is especially true for the outsider artist (like Alÿs) or the politically powerful artist (like many in this exhibit). Alÿs does this consciously. In including the eleven commentaries and the one silent version, and juxtaposing them with the images in the film and with each other, he does so openly, powerfully, usefully, and artistically.

For example, in one scene, as Alÿs is walking with his can of green paint, two Palestinian women make way for him to pass. It is a pivotal moment, shot from below, as we see the women concede space to the European white male. In Weizman’s commentary, this is the exact moment when he begins to say: “Walking being a form of design, there is no neutral walk. And especially when you walk with the paint, you`re designing, you`re making a gesture, you`re drawing a line and this implies, for me at least, that you request two kinds of spaces on two sides. You request a difference between the right and left side of the line. You project a difference. And it`s a legal difference.” In Amira Hass’s commentary, this is also the exact moment where she critiques Alÿs’ project as too unsatisfactory to be called “resistance”; at best, it is “resilience”—“art that dwells in the privileged places, [that] does not reach the lower strata, the refugee camps for example.” It is “asymmetrical.” As she is speaking about lack of symmetry, the women make space for Alÿs so he can walk with his littering can of paint.

That moment thus becomes totally different in those two commentaries. It is a visual representation of asymmetry, an imbalance that is represented, but unquestioned, in this exhibit as a whole. Hass goes on to say: “The only bridge between Israelis and Palestinians now, is rejecting the occupation. This is the only bridge possible. All the other gatherings of Israelis and Palestinians, are for me sort of collaboration with occupation, if they look at both sides as symmetrical…so if you bring Israeli artists and Palestinian artists when it’s clear that the Israeli artists are working against occupation, and not only in one exhibition per year, but on a more regular basis, this is what I call a bridge.”

I am not sure this exhibit is that kind of bridge; however, including Alÿs’ work is an important gesture that allows us to recognize that and to hold this exhibition and its artists accountable.