Anti-Colonialism and Anti-Semitism in Harlem

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Feb 13, 2020 United States
Image provided by author. Image provided by author.

Anti-Colonialism and Anti-Semitism in Harlem

By : Yoav Litvin

In 2016, I worked on a collaborative photography exhibit titled 2Gether – Portraits of Duos in Harlem and the Bronx with my friend and colleague Tau Battice, a photographer and lecturer at the City University of New York. Born in St. Kitts-Nevis and based in Harlem, Tau provided me an opportunity to taste the rich, thriving, and diverse peoples and cultures of Harlem and the Bronx.

The goal was to create a collaborative exhibit, which accentuated and merged our unique, complementary vantage points–Tau as a local with a history in Harlem and the Bronx, having close relationships with its people, and myself the outsider, observer and guest, a white Jew, American-Israeli academic.  

Marcelle, 47, Ph.D. (with Nelson Mandela t-shirt): "She is the sister I would pick for myself."

Denise, 42, educator and scholar: "Marcelle is such a light in my life. I met her when we were both working on a publication for students. Her voice was so unapologetically true to herself and her truths. I loved that and learned from that.”

[Photo 1 © Tau Battice; Photo 2 © Yoav Litvin]

Yahfeu, 40, holistic health trainer: "I see my reflection in him; he takes me back in time reminding me of myself at his age. I feel great because the good that I give him, in turn, he is going to pass it on to another generation."

Darius, 16, student: "He is like another father to me." 

[Photo 3 © Tau Battice; Photo 4 © Yoav Litvin]

After many months of walking its streets, I developed a profound love for Harlem. I never encountered anti-Semitism or any form of racism, though I introduced myself as an Israeli Jew.

I continuously met principled, powerful, welcoming, proud, and educated people from America, Africa, the West Indies, and Asia with a firm anti-colonial spirit often developed from harrowing personal trauma. Their anti-colonialism frequently included strong solidarity with Palestinian resistance to Israel's settler-colonial project, which never manifested in any way to me as anti-Semitism.  

Anti-Semitism or Anti-Colonialism?


Following the tragic events in Monsey and Jersey City, in which two African-Americans targeted Jews, several articles attempted to analyze the topic of Jewish / African-American relations in New York. Notably and frequently ignored by the media, the perpetrator in Jersey was an army veteran and drifter who followed a cult, whereas the attack at Monsey was carried out by a mentally ill man. 

Far-right American Zionist Jews, such as President of Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) Morton Klein, seized on the opportunity to focus on these killings as indicative of a concerning phenomenon of “anti-Semitism” within African-American communities, in spite of data showing around sixty percent of those arrested in New York City for anti-Semitic hate crimes in 2019 were white. 


Ardent Zionist and guru to white supremacists Ben Shapiro wrote that “the left ignores the "wrong" type of anti-Semitism,” i.e., the black type. Shapiro relied on a 2016 report by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which implicated African Americans as displaying higher levels of anti-Semitism than other groups. Notably, education and age were also indicators and sixty-eight percent of Americans believed Trump’s campaign rhetoric in 2016 “has decreased tolerance and respect for people of all races and religions.”

The Israeli outlet Haaretz is predominantly liberal Zionist, preaching peace on the one hand while promoting some of the worst Zionist propaganda fallacies.  

Tzach Yoked’s recent article in Haaretz Hebrew titled (translated) “For blacks (sic) in NY, ‘Jewish money’ is the source of their problems - and justification for actions against Jews,” was particularly racist. 

Yoked claimed that in place of the great solidarity between the African-American and Jewish communities in the sixties, black people now harbor animosity toward–and blame their problems on–“greedy” Jews who control many sectors and only care for their own kind. Therefore, “no wonder they blame Jews for their problems,” he concludes. 

Yoked continued by stating black people blame their financial and social problems on Jews: social inequality, high incarceration rates, gaps in pay and education, and high rent prices. He painted an extremely unattractive portrait of 125th Street in Harlem as a dangerous and dirty place with ignorant people who live in a reality of insecurity and aimless street wandering. The rest of the article is saturated with anti-black stigmatization, and presents no hard data, only several anecdotes. 

Notably, Klein, Shapiro, Yoked, and their Zionist ilk completely ignore the virulent anti-black racism by far-right Zionists such as former New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind and the documented and ongoing links between Zionism and white supremacist forces, since the very beginnings of the Zionist enterprise. Further, they side-step Zionism’s inherent Islamophobia as well as the ongoing efforts by Zionist organizations, including the ADL, to conflate Judaism and Zionism, anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. 

Image of Tau Battice and Yoav Litvin. Credit: Photo by Karen Haberberg.

A Zionist/White-Supremacist Campaign
Intersectional alliances between oppressed groups are scapegoated and targeted, as these have become a particular threat to Zionist interests.

Animosity between African-Americans and Jews has a history and continues to exist. However, the present focus of Zionist groups and the ensuing media attention are a tactical part of a campaign with two major aims. 

First, it is meant to distract from the swelling of white supremacist and neo-Nazi anti-Semitism encouraged by key elements within the Trump administration, including the president himself, as evidenced in a 2018 report by the ADL. 

Crucially, Trump has received unprecedented support from a host of Christian and Jewish Zionist organizations as well as from Prime Minister Netanyahu and his government. In fact, Israel has become a model for the global far-right, collaborating with a range of reactionary governments worldwide.

Since Trump assumed the presidency, there has been a dramatic rise in anti-Semitic and other white supremacist incidents, which involve harassment, vandalism, and assault. In fact, 2017 and 2018 saw the second and third-highest number of recorded anti-Semitic incidents in four decades. Yet, there has been little or no condemnation of Trump's blatant incitement of anti-Semitism by leading Zionist organizations. 

Second, intersectional alliances between oppressed groups are scapegoated and targeted, as these have become a particular threat to Zionist interests, both in the United States and the United Kingdom. Intersectional alliances are a central feature of Bernie Sanders’ progressive campaign for president, which has made him the target of a Zionist smear campaign. This is similar to the well-documented effort focused on Jeremy Corbyn of the UK Labour Party. Thus, it is unsurprising Sanders’ intersectional allies Representatives Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, all women of color, have been the focus of the smear campaign for many months. 

For black people–including those in Harlem–oppression manifests itself in white supremacy and structural racism, which subjugates all groups constructed as non-white, in imperialism that has stoked war and occupation targeting black and brown bodies, and in Islamophobia which demonizes and marginalizes Muslims. 

Therefore, the strong anti-colonial, anti-Zionist sentiment within the African-American community renders it impossible for organizations such as the ADL to assess its anti-Semitism accurately, as they conflate Judaism with Zionism and Israel, and anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.  

Jews and African-Americans can be natural allies who combat all forms of racism if and only if Jews also reject Zionism as a white supremacist, settler-colonialist project, as are other manifest destiny ideologies and practices underpinning Western settler-colonial ventures, including the United States. The popular, principled organization Jewish Voice for Peace has adopted precisely this approach.
Jul 9, 2013 Lebanon
Zeynep Gambetti By :
Zeynep Gambetti

Occupy Gezi as Politics of the Body

Since the Gezi resistance started with bloodshed on 31 May, it has had an “anti-depressant” effect, as a friend of mine puts it, as much as it has been nerve-racking. During this period where each day has been prone to new crises and normalcy was completely disrupted, we simultaneously experienced the peaks of ecstasy and the depths of sorrow.

Analyzing such an intense event naturally requires taking some distance. Pending systematization, however, the vivid memory of each day impels one to put on paper multifarious ideas that resonate well with the resistance. Each morning, many bodies with sleep deprived eyes wake up in Istanbul, Ankara, Antakya, Urfa, and Denizli to take to the streets once again, after having quickly checked the latest news in the social media. They are astonished and impressed that they can still walk, run, stand up, and carry provisions for those in the parks. Exhausted bodies rejuvenate with every new threat that the government utters, and with thousands, tens of thousands of others they begin flowing to Taksim, Kızılay, Kuğulu Park, Gündoğdu, Abbasoğlu, and Yeniköy Park carrying home-made gas masks, swimmer goggles, anti-acid solutions, and whistles.

No one does or can govern these bodies. The masses that gather in public spaces are not formed by virtue of transferring tax money into the wallets of partisans. No one provides shuttle buses for them; no one gives them flags, or feeds them with sandwiches. No one assigns them the slogans they shout out during the demonstrations. Bodies that take heart from knowing that they are not alone do not count, or count on, numbers to meet with others in communal or virtual spaces. One standing man suffices for thousands of others to take to the streets. After all, “one” is also a number…

The government, whose tactlessness prompts these resisting and standing bodies to convene again and again every single day, could not have missed the significance of this body politics. These bodies naturally do have a language, even a few languages that are at times congruent and at others incongruent; however, as a whole, they constitute a politics of the body. The rage and dreams that have been embodied in tweets and graffiti since 31 May turn into material realities through the physical existence, visibility, and endurance of the bodies. If history is being rewritten, then its subject is the body.

Four of these bodies lost their lives during this war that the government has waged on society. Thousands of bodies have been beaten up: some lost their eyes, some received irretrievable injuries. Skins were burnt under the water from the cannons, “laced” with chemicals for maximum harm; lungs were choked with tear gas. Pounded arms, legs, and heads got crushed and broken. The long-term effects of the tons of chemicals dumped on bodies are still unknown. What is known, however, is that these chemicals killed hundreds of cats, dogs, and birds, and that they did harm to countless insects, butterflies, and other smaller organisms.

The apparatuses of the state, and the vehicles of death that responded to Gezi’s politics of the body, attempted to imitate the life force that they failed to extort. In response to the huge numbers that filled the parks and squares and astonished everyone without exception, they hoped to gather partisans together in scripted rallies. They began comparing head counts; they calculated representative percentages. When the calculations did not match, they increased the number of police in body armor and helmets and moved them from protest to protest. They built walls of flesh and steel against the wave of resisting flesh. When that did not work, they offered these bodies—which have been in contact with each other physically and virtually through meetings, banners, and tweets—a mise en scène of dialogue, the conditions of which were more or less already determined. They could not even wait for this attempt to yield fruit; two warnings and a command were enough to launch an assault to remove the bodies that produced an alternative sociability from the park, from the space in which physical resistance could be transformed into a life style. They freed the public space of the public. They collected all the banners, pictures, and colors one by one to erase them from social memory. They stripped all the trees, each dedicated to victims of state violence; they appropriated the barricades that were named after tens of people who had undergone physical and psychological torture, and they tore them to tatters. They destroyed the efforts to keep alive the memories of Fikret Encü, who was a victim of Roboski; Metin Göktepe, who was tortured and killed in detention; Dicle Koğacoğlu, who could not take all the sorrow inherent in this society any more; and the Surp Hagop Armenian Cemetery, which was destroyed by Turkish racism.

The only thing that remains is a politics of the body—but the bodies that produce this politics differ from what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life.” They are not “mere” bodies that the arbitrary will of a sovereign can isolate from society, oppress unceremoniously, or push to the margins of the symbolic world. Rather, they evoke what Ernst Bloch calls “the upright man,” the collective Prometheus. Bloch writes:

Nothing is more fortifying than the call to begin from the beginning. It is youthful as long as it is; to it there belongs a young and aspiring class. It is innocent of the bad things that have happened, for it has never had a real opportunity to be guilty. When this happens, justice has the effect of a morning; it opposes itself to that eternal sickness which was handed down before it. Beginning anew is freshness through and through; it is a first if it appears completely ahistorical, and if it seems to lead back to the beginning of history….It carries the image of the pastoral mood, of the shepherd, of the simple and upright man; one can play with it even in the dark.[1]

Gezi is the struggle of disorderly bodies, those who do not have any dispositif other than their own bodies, against the death machines. If the machines are regulatory instances that follow commands and extort public spaces of mobility with force and violence, then the force they face is the resistance of life itself. Life flourishes at the most unexpected moments and places, just like weeds that crack the concrete and spring out of it. No apparatus of the state can succeed in dominating life absolutely.

The state seeks order; it can control only those whom it orders. It cannot cope with the demand of "freedom"; it has to ask questions such as “freedom for whom,” “freedom for what,” or “freedom under what circumstances” in order to tuck freedom into neat boxes. Order draws borders, fixes identities, and defines. It attempts to establish a hierarchy. By telling parents to take their daughters and sons home from the park, it both brands the resisting bodies as "children" and tries to trigger into action the nucleus of society: family. Through its rhetoric of security, it attributes the risks of its own making to the resisting bodies. It hangs its own flag or banner on the bodies that it prefers knocking down rather than protecting. It punishes those who do not obey; it uses punishment as retaliation. It operates through censorship, threats, and propaganda.

Life, on the other hand, is a constant flux. It challenges borders and moves beyond them. It opens up to circulation those spaces that are closed off due to construction; it paints such destructive vehicles as bulldozers pink; it transforms steps into tribunes, pieces of iron into wish trees, and trees destined to be cut down into monuments. It walks on highways and bridges that are closed to pedestrians. It does not like the empty and the sterile; it covers them up with banners, slogans, tents. It leaves its mark on every surface. It disrupts silence at times with pots and pans, and at other times with a tune from a piano. It plays with identities and definitions; it makes them fluid; it renders them indistinguishable. It can make fun of both itself and the established order thanks to its humor. By changing one single letter in a word, it can ridicule the heaviest of symbolisms. When the state apparatus sends a riot-intervention vehicle to pour tear gas on it, life stops to catch its breath for a while and goes right back to resisting. When a body grows tired, it gets replaced by a reinvigorated one. Life turns into thousands of fingers that tweet and take photographs when the state apparatus sends down vehicles of propaganda. It stops its wheelchair to grab the flag that fell on the ground while escaping from tear gas. It apologizes when it steps on someone`s foot while running; it calms down those who panic.

It is obvious that these bodies that fascism wants to militarize will not assume any ideological identity. When they do not drink alcohol, they ridicule conservatism; when they lie under a TOMA, they make fun of liberalism, which claims that life is the most valuable good. Orthodox Marxism cannot decide under which class struggle these "çapulcu" bodies are to be subsumed. As long as they stay in physical contact, as long as they remain as collective Prometheuses, as long as they—have to—continue the resistance, they grow accustomed to each other`s colors, languages, and genders. They disrupt the behavioral rules that ideologies and institutions expect from them. The natural or moral instinct of protection that has been attributed to mothers loses ground when female bodies participate in the resistance alongside their children. The nationalist and the Kurd exchange anti-acid solutions in gas-filled hotel lobbies. The upper-class college kid drinks the water handed over by the kid with an Anonymous mask without needing to ask what neighborhood he’s from. Soccer fans save their curses for the police rather than for their rivals.

What comes out of all this is trust, not chaos. That`s why the bodies multiply with every gush of tear gas, spaces expand with every police attack, and the quality of contact among the bodies increases with every propaganda speech. The life woven together by bodies born in Gezi is so tenacious that the government is right in fearing it. The power of these bodies stems from their capacity to mutualize endurance, rather than vulnerability (as Judith Butler envisioned they would). One would need to look into the extensive interstices of this politics of the body, rather than into macro-level discourses, to begin deciphering it.

NOTES

[1] Ernst Bloch, Natural Right and Human Dignity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 61.

[An earlier version of this article was published on 26 June 2013 on BIA ("Independent Communication Network"). The link to that version can be found here. This article was translated from Turkish by Gülfer Göze.]