For Palestinians, the Local is the National

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May 1, 2023 Palestine
Photo by Joi Ito via Wikimedia Commons. Photo by Joi Ito via Wikimedia Commons.

For Palestinians, the Local is the National

By : Diana B. Greenwald

Israel’s nearly 56-year-old project to militarily occupy and demographically reengineer the West Bank has taken an increasingly violent turn. Israeli forces are killing a growing number of West Bank Palestinians – nearly 150 in 2022, the highest number in 18 years, and already 96 as of late April 2023. To target alleged militants, Israeli soldiers have fired shoulder-mounted missiles into homes in densely packed cities. Other Palestinians continue to face the threat of imminent expulsion to make way for an Israeli military firing zone in occupied territory. Predictably, there has also been a spate of Palestinian armed attacks against Israelis and Israeli targets, killing 19 so far this year. While some of this violence can be explained by the inherent logic of military rule and settler colonization, existential threats to Palestinian life in the West Bank have worsened over the past two years. They have become even more apparent since Israel’s far-right government was sworn in at the end of last year. Recently, when Israeli settlers pillaged the Palestinian town of Huwwara, setting fire to homes with families inside, they found support among coalition members in the government. 

Indeed, hard-line, annexationist figures in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet have made no secret about their desire to use military force to compel Palestinians to either submit to Israeli sovereignty or leave the country.  Bezalel Smotrich, a religious Zionist settler who is now Minister of Finance and what some are calling the occupation’s new “governor” of the West Bank, infamously called for the Israeli military to commit violent ethnic cleansing by “wiping” Huwwara off the map.

Smotrich and like-minded allies envision a return to direct, Israeli military rule over Palestinian towns and cities, obviating the need for the Palestinian Authority (PA) security apparatus. Nonetheless, even such a scorched-earth approach would still need to reckon with the Palestinians who stay, those who are neither defeated nor expelled, and those who continue to resist. Nearly all Israeli annexationists admit this would require preserving, at a minimum, Palestinian-run local governments in Palestinian towns and cities. Such a future version of the Zionist state – especially if buttressed by a de jure apartheid regime – would have neither the intention nor the ability to govern Palestinians where they live.

However, West Bank municipalities – places like Jenin, Ya’bad, Arraba, Birqin, Tammun, Nablus, Jammaein, Beita, Huwwara, Silwad, Qalqilya, Al-Bireh, Hebron, and Beit Ummar – have consistently been laboratories for Palestinian agency and political experimentation. Most recently, media coverage has drawn our attention to the “localization” of one particular form of Palestinian agency: armed struggle. Yet, under direct Israeli rule in the 1970s, we also saw that Palestinian municipal institutions incubated political resistance. Furthermore, while the creation of the PA did fragment and demobilize Palestinians in the West Bank, local politicians who oppose the Oslo regime have still, under certain conditions, found paths into municipal institutions where they have drawn on reputational legitimacy to develop local governing capacity. Overall, history teaches us that shrinking Palestinian organizations and institutions to the local level will not denationalize Palestinian politics.

The Collapse of Indirect Rule, Phase I: Coercive Institutions


Social scientists often think of the core capacities of states – the wielding of coercive force and taxing and spending on goods and services – as intimately related. In the occupied West Bank, where sovereignty is actively contested, Israel has experimented with outsourcing some of these competencies to Palestinian intermediaries. The most robust formulation of this “indirect rule” strategy came with the creation of the Palestinian Authority, an entity disproportionately dedicated to policing Palestinian communities but which also encapsulates various institutions of civil governance. Despite continued speculation about its possible future collapse, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians remain on the payroll of this sprawling organization. The PA does not only employ Palestinians in its oversized police and intelligence agencies, but also in schools, health centers, the water and sanitation sector, regulatory agencies, and municipalities. A sudden and complete collapse is both hard to imagine and something that could spell a humanitarian crisis.
Even if Israel can, and does, impose a totalizing autocracy, Palestinians will—as the prisoners who escaped from Gilboa did, with plates and pan handles—continue to dig their own tunnels to daylight.

However, while the civil institutions of the PA sputter along, we can be more specific about what has already collapsed. The legitimacy of the regime of President Mahmoud Abbas – due to the interrelated phenomena of autocracy, corruption, and security cooperation with Israel – has all but evaporated. In a recent poll, an overwhelming 82 percent of West Bank and Gaza respondents attested to the PA’s corruption, and less than half reported that the continued existence of the PA was in the Palestinian national interest. Unsurprisingly, this legitimacy crisis has definitively undermined the ability of PA forces to continue policing Palestinian towns and cities while Israeli soldiers and settlers accelerate their violent attacks on Palestinians. New, localized armed militant groups and newly active brigades have sprung up in cities like Nablus, Jenin, Jericho, and Tulkarem – speaking to the effective abandonment of these communities by the PA security apparatus.

Because the PA security forces, which receive tens of millions of dollars in US assistance each year, are doing virtually nothing to keep Palestinians safe, the rearming of certain segments of Palestinian society should not be surprising. The past two years have been ground-shifting in Palestinian mobilization, from the “Unity Intifada” to the mass protests in response to the murder of Nizar Banat at the hands of PA security forces. In fall 2021, Palestinians were captivated by the escape of six Palestinian political prisoners from the maximum-security Gilboa prison in Israel. In the West Bank, as Israel’s manhunt ensued, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Fatah-affiliated militias readied themselves to shield the escapees in Jenin camp and resist Israeli forces. In a survey carried out just days before the last fugitives were rearrested, Palestinians were asked if they thought the PA would protect the remaining escapees if they managed to reach the occupied territories. Fewer than 22% of West Bank respondents said yes. Indeed, it is in the coercive apparatus where the PA’s most acute and existential legitimacy crisis resides. PA security agents are now receding into the background amidst more frequent Israeli military raids and a proliferation of local Palestinian militias. These and related events precipitated two, urgent meetings between US, Israeli, Palestinian, Egyptian and Jordanian officials, where, despite the aforementioned attitudes of the majority of Palestinians, delegates have fixated on resuscitating PA coercive institutions.

For now, PA civil institutions, despite experiencing enormous fiscal strains, are still intact. Nonetheless, hard-right figures in the current Israeli government seek to starve the PA out of existence as part of their forcible imposition of Israeli sovereignty over the entirety of the West Bank. In a 2016 interview with Haaretz, Smotrich asserted: “We don’t even have to topple the PA, it can fall by itself. We only need to stop maintaining it.” With no PA, Israel would then resume direct rule over disenfranchised Palestinians, with no central intermediary based in Ramallah. According to his vision, the reimposition of unmediated Israeli rule over Palestinian towns and cities in the West Bank will – through sheer military superiority, massive settlement, and ethnic cleansing – denationalize Palestinians and, thus, definitively puncture their struggle for survival, self-determination, and freedom.

The Collapse of Indirect Rule, Phase II? Political Institutions


Upon the flickering embers of the moribund PA, Smotrich and like-minded allies believe that Israeli military force should be used to compel Palestinians into choosing one of three paths: abandoning their homeland, resisting, or becoming loyal subjects (not yet citizens) of the Zionist state. As for those who resist, we have seen that Smotrich supports, in language laced with war crimes, the eradication of entire towns as a form of collective punishment. An additional, key mechanism in compelling loyalty among the Palestinians who remain is the atomization of Palestinian institutions into municipal bodies. Even those Palestinians in the newly conquered territory who do not take up armed resistance would not be permitted to vote for any national government. Instead, he emphasizes that Palestinians would have the opportunity to vote for their own municipal councils – institutions that are currently subsumed within the PA – under what would then be a single Zionist state. He claims that, even without the right to vote for their national government, “[t]he lion's share of [democratic] rights and freedoms will be granted…for Arabs of Judea and Samaria, including the right to vote in municipal administrations which control their daily lives.” They simply will not have “the right to an ideological vote for a sovereign parliament,” (emphasis added in both quotes).

Smotrich’s plan will fail because it depends on enforcing an impossible separation between governance of Palestinian towns and cities and ideological commitments to national liberation. Here, it is worth revisiting history to demonstrate why local autonomy under military rule will not stave off Palestinian resistance. By the mid-1970s, Israel was struggling with maintaining its occupation through the co-optation of local Palestinian elites. Municipal elections in 1972 had, for the most part, placed pro-Hashemite conservatives in positions of power in the West Bank. Yet, a number of these urban councils were nonetheless resigning in protest against Israeli repression. In a second set of local elections in 1976, members of the Palestinian national resistance – those close to the parties of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO)  – swept to victory. Newly elected mayors, carefully navigating between the quarreling factions of the PLO, developed their own local and national profiles as leaders willing to stand up to Israel. A number of them participated in the National Guidance Committee in 1978, which, according to journalist Rafik Halabi, rallied thousands in Nablus, Birzeit, and Bethlehem, behind its rejection of the Camp David process and its demands for an end to the occupation and the right of return. 

These popularly elected leaders quickly became a thorn in Israel’s side. An effort to deport Nablus’s then-mayor, Bassam Shaka’a, failed; he returned from prison to a hero’s welcome in his storied city, and the events left him more emboldened than ever. Importantly, though, Israel found that the reimposition of autocratic control over municipalities did not work, either – or, if it did, its effects were short-lived. After three of the 1976 mayors, including Shaka’a, were targeted with car bomb attacks by the Jewish Underground, Israel unceremoniously ousted them. Fahd Kawasmeh of Hebron and Mohammed Milhem of Halhul were forcibly exiled. Israeli military officials became de facto mayors. Meanwhile, in rural areas, Israel attempted to cultivate, and arm, rural collaborators through the so-called “Village Leagues,” but the experiment was short-lived. Israel’s attempt to claw back autocratic control over municipalities in the mid-1980s did the occupation no favors. With either popularly elected local leaders or appointed agents of the occupation, Palestinians rejected denationalization and fed the ranks of protesters in the ensuing Intifada. Palestinian resistance took to the streets.

The lesson that local politics cannot be divorced from national aspirations was also repeated in the waning years of the Second Intifada. This time under the Oslo-created PA, elections were held for local councils over four rounds between December 2004 and December 2005. Opponents and critics of Fatah – including Hamas, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and independent or small party candidates – performed strongly. (For example, Hamas-affiliated mayors took power in Jenin and Al-Bireh; a PFLP candidate was chosen in Bethlehem; and an independent candidate, in coalition with Hamas, became mayor of Nablus.) These politicians, in both the larger cities and smaller towns of the West Bank, were repressed by both Israel and the PA. In interviews with these former mayors and council members, I learned how some of them were arrested in coordinated sequence by Israel and the PA so that their terms would run out and they could be, with at least a suggestion of legality, replaced by an appointee. Others were threatened with the loss of their regular jobs in the PA civil service. 

Over the ensuing years, municipalities were reabsorbed into the one-party regime of Fatah. By 2012, when non-competitive local elections were held, resistance factions had lost most, but not all, of their representation in local government bodies. Still, the preceding elections permitted an organized, public, authoritative role for resistance groups and anti-Oslo politicians. Some of the staff members hired by these councils continue to work in the municipalities today. Some of the politicians themselves managed, through carefully navigating their own party affiliations, to continue to serve on local councils after 2012. Some even emerged as candidates for the national legislature, before President Abbas canceled elections planned for 2021. Others remained politically active on social media, in NGOs, and in their mosques. As a former mayor affiliated with Hamas told me in 2019: “These are lived experiences that we are discussing; it is not yet history.”

Conclusion


The lesson – from both the 1970s-80s and from the early 2000s – is that Israel cannot denationalize Palestinians by atomizing their institutions. When there are electoral openings – as there were in 1976 and 2004-2005 – Palestinian nationalists have demonstrated they know how to take advantage. When, on the other hand, the military regime imposes its will autocratically – as it did in the early- to mid-1980s, and as the PA has done since at least 2012 – Palestinians will return to urban resistance. Smotrich may delight in his reputation as a militant firebrand, but, in fact, his ideas are a tired recycling of strategies tried and failed. Palestinian resistance to military domination does not require a national institutional structure. Just as water seeks its own level, the will to resist military rule and ethnonational supremacy will flow through all channels afforded to it. This includes working through civil institutions when they are available, but it also includes, as we have seen all too clearly in recent months, the use of armed violence. Even if Israel can, and does, impose a totalizing autocracy, Palestinians will – as the prisoners who escaped from Gilboa did, with plates and pan handles – continue to dig their own tunnels to daylight.
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.]