Author: Ronit Lentin

Oxymorons and metaphors: Israel Studies from racialization to decolonization

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Ronit Lentin

make-israel-palestine-again-2

A paper I presented at a workshop entitled ‘Decolonizing knowledge production: The case of Israel-Palestine’, London School of Economics, 6 June 2017, 50 years since Israel’s 1967 war against its Arab neighbours and since the occupation of the West Bank, Sinai, the Gaza Strip and the Golan.


Introduction: Some thoughts about decolonizing Israel Studies

Following Eman Ghanayem (2017) who asks that pro Palestine activists stop using the term ‘Israel/Palestine’ which equates Palestine and Israel and in which Israel dominates the discourse, I propose that the decolonization of Israel Studies is an oxymoron. As argued by Tuck and Yang’s ‘Decolonization is not a metaphor’, the very language of decolonizing education and research used by the colonizers remains a metaphor that re-centres whiteness, resettles theory, extends innocence to the settler, and entertains a settler future (2012: 3). According to Steven Salaita Fanon’s description of decolonization as ‘total disorder’ is not the absence of law, but rather

an act of removing order from the structures of foreign authority. This removal of order is total because… the colonial entity must be rejected completely, subverted, dismantled, decentralized – that is, dis-ordered (2016: xii).

Tuck and Yang argue that teaching settlers to become indigenous occludes the settler colonial project itself. Likewise Israel Studies programmes collude with Israeli settler colonialism, even when attempting to be critical. Thus in 2014 the European Association of Israel Studies demanded that a lecturer from the West Bank Ariel University omit his institutional affiliation in order to participate in the EAIS annual conference – a clear case of having your colonial cake and eating it.

As is well known, Israeli universities are deeply implicated in the settler colonial project through developing weapons and security equipment for the IDF and for Israel’s international arms trade, designing phantom cities for the IDF to practice urban warfare, and training the IDF in poststructuralist theories to be used in new modes of warfare. Israeli universities provide courses for IDF and security personnel, publicly support Israel’s colonial wars, most recently the 2014 assault on Gaza, and give grants and extra exam dates for serving students-soldiers, while systematically discriminating against Palestinian faculty and students.

Until the 1980s most Israeli academics conducted uncritical research that upheld the institutions of ruling. Only in the late 1980s did ‘new historians’ and critical sociologists begin questioning state narratives in relation to the Nakba and to Israel’s permanent war against the Palestinians. Many Israeli scholars researching Palestine are graduates of ‘Oriental’ high-school streams, the IDF Intelligence corps, and university Middle East Studies departments, making them agents of settler colonialism. Even when Israeli scholars employ Palestinian informants and research assistants, the research remains the property of the colonizer scholars who purport to conduct liberatory research (which, as Mohanty [1984] argued in another context, ‘discursively colonizes’ Palestinian reality), while retaining privileged access to knowledge, research grants, publications and academic reputation.


Settler colonialism and scholarship

Decolonization is not a metaphor. Tuck and Yang (2012) argue write that ‘because settler colonialism is built on an entangled triad structure of settler-native-slave, the decolonial desires… can similarly be entangled in resettlement, reoccupation, and reinhabitation that actually further settler colonialism’. The metaphorization of decolonization, they argue, enables a problematic set of evasions that reconcile settler guilt and complicity.

The trendy call to ‘decolonize’ education and research occludes settler colonialism, Indigenous peoples’ struggles for the recognition of their sovereignty, and the contribution of Indigenous intellectuals to theories of decolonization. Tuck and Yang argue that the too-easy adoption of decolonizing discourses is part of what they describe as ‘moves to innocence’, that ‘represent settler fantasies of easier paths to reconciliation’ of what is essentially irreconcilable (Malwhinney 1988).

Israeli settler colonials work to indigenize themselves by claiming originary Biblical privilege which, they assert repeatedly, supersedes claims by the Indigenous, who, the settlers claim, are recent immigrants to the invented ‘land of Israel’. These indigenizing claims render Israeli settler law – mostly based on Ottoman and British colonial law – superior to Indigenous laws, customs and epistemologies.

North American settlers’ fascination by indigeneity meant ‘playing Indian’: ‘Americans wanted to feel a natural affinity with the continent, and it was Indians who could teach them such aboriginal closeness. Yet, in order to control the landscape they had to destroy the original inhabitants’ (Deloria 1998: 5). Likewise, Zionist settlers were fascinated by and emulated Palestinian indigeneity. As Yuval Evry (2016: 56) argues, the Zionists saw the settlement of Palestine as a territorial and textual return to the Jews’ Biblical origins, enabling the settlers to negate both the Jewish diaspora and Palestine’s Arab history. The so-called ‘first wave’ immigrants expressed their indigenizing desire through a mixture of proximity to and rejection of the Indigenous Palestinians whose life and folklore shaped the narrative of Jewish return to the land and the Biblical text, considered foundational to the Jewish ownership of Palestine. At the same time Israeli academic research occludes the lived experiences of Palestinian citizens, occupied, besieged and diasporic subjects who Israeli academics help their state to eliminate through collusion with Israel’s permanent war against the Palestinians.

According to Tuck and Yang, the decolonization metaphor is an expression of settler anxiety as the settler attempts to escape her complicity. However, they caution, the settlers’ reconciliation desire is as relentless as their desire to disappear the Native, signifying a wish to no longer face the Indigenous or deal with the ‘Indigenous problem’. In the race to innocence, depicted in countless Israeli fictional narratives, settlers attempt to relieve their guilt without actually giving up land, power and privilege. Settler writers are rarely reflexive (Yizhar is an exception – his story Khirbet Khizeh is the emblematic first-person account of the rage and regret of a 1948 soldier against his company expelling the inhabitants of the Palestinian village they demolish). In contrast, reflexive accounts by settler scholars is a move to innocence that serves only the settlers, as they invent ancient Biblical nativist roots that Goldberg theorizes as ‘racial Palestinianization’ (2008).


Decolonization is not a metaphor

Tuck and Yang outline various moves to innocence used in settler scholarship, including the bracketing of minoritized Indigenous peoples as ‘asterisks’, the discursive move to ‘decolonize your mind’ following the Brazilian education philosopher Paolo Freire, and colonial equivocation whereby different groups are called ‘colonized’ though their relationship to settler colonialism goes unmentioned.

However, decolonization, as Fanon (1963: 36) insists, must involve the actual, rather than symbolic, repatriation of all the colonized land, which is why decolonization unsettles settler moves to innocence although it does not mean Indigenous peoples dominating white people but rather breaking the very structure of settler colonialism by returning land to sovereign Native nations and dismantling the imperial metropole.

Treating decolonization as material rather than metaphorical must also consider the workings of race in the Israeli settler colony. Only in recent years has the Israeli theoretical landscape begun to admit the reality of racism, though very few theorists focus on settler colonial state practices of racial categorization and segregation. Shenhav and Yona’s edited collection on racism in Israel evades state racism and race per se, due, they write, to regarding Israel as exceptional and to Israeli Jews’ own racialized past (2008: 17). This, and theorizing racism in Israel as signifying ‘racism without race’, leads them to disavow race, a theoretical dead end (2008: 43). The race lacuna in theorizing Israel must be addressed because, as Wolfe (2016: 5) insists, ‘race is colonialism speaking, in idioms whose diversity reflects the variety of unequal relationships into which Europeans have co-opted conquered populations’.


Conclusion: Decolonizing Israel Studies as an oxymoron

Decolonization stands in contrast to reconciliation which underpins settler moves to innocence. Instead of reconciliation Tuck and Yang propose incommensurability that insists that the question ‘what will be the consequences of decolonization for the settler?’ need not be answered for decolonization to take place. Decolonization is not accountable to settler futurity, but rather to Indigenous sovereignty and futurity.

Writing about silencing Palestinian voices at a recent conference in a British university marking 50 years to the occupation, Hawari and Sleiman insist that decolonizing knowledge must begin from Palestinian knowledge production, as Western as well as Israel Studies knowledge production remains structurally colonial. This, they write, means not only including more Palestinian voices, but also rejecting false discourse of ‘balance’ of which the present conference, organized by Israeli scholars, is a culprit. Hawari and Sleiman argue that the ‘continuing process of indigenous erasure takes place both on the material and on the epistemic levels… and should no longer be considered as such in the academy. Re-centring our views around the experience of the Palestinians is the only way we can decolonize knowledge production on Palestine/Israel’.

To conclude, let me reiterate that the call by settler scholars to decolonize Israel Studies is an oxymoron because Israel Studies is itself a colonizing practice. Instead – as a member of the perpetrator collectivity, I suggest that we need ‘dangerous understandings of uncommonality that un-coalesce coalition politics’, even though this rejects false balance, dialogue, coexistence, normalization and even co-resistance projects that do not demand the total dismantling of the settler state, returning all the land to its Indigenous Palestinian owners and facilitating the return of all Palestinians refugees to their homes and lands.

As settler scholars we must relinquish settler futurity. Decolonization means removing all asterisks, quotes, and conditional clauses that underwrite settler innocence. The ethic of incommensurability will become possible only when the Israeli settler colony is dismantled. ‘Decolonization’, Tuck and Yang conclude, ‘is not an “and”. It is an elsewhere’ (2012: 35-6).


References

Deloria, P. (1998) Playing Indian. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Evry, Y. (2016) ‘Translation without origin: The question of ownership of text and territory in the transition from oral Palestinian tradition to Hebrew literature’, in

Fanon, F. (1963) The Wretched of the Earth, New York: Grove Press.

Ghanayem, E. (2017) ‘Towards better ally-ship for Palestine: A letter to the US activist community’, Mondoweiss, 23 March (accessed 28 March 2017)

Goldberg, D. T. (2008) ‘Racial Palestinianization’, in R. Lentin (ed.) Thinking Palestine, London: Zed Books.

Hawari, Y. and H. Sleiman (2017) ‘Challenging Knowledge Production in the British Academy: Who Can Speak on Palestine?’ Jaddaliya, 29 May 2017 http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/26597/challenging-knowledge-production-in-the-british-ac (accessed 29 May 2017).

Lentin, R. (2010) Co-Memory and Melancholia: Israelis Memorialise the Palestinian Nakba, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Malwhinney, J. (1998) ‘Giving up the ghost’: Disrupting the (re)production of white privilege in anti-racist pedagogy and organizational change’. Masters Thesis: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/tape15/PQDD_0008/MQ33991.pdf (accessed 28 March 2017)

Mohanty, C. T. (1984) ‘Under western eyes: Feminist scholarship and colonial discourses’, Boundary 12 (3): 333-358

Sand, S. (2014) The Invention of the Land of Israel: From Holy Land to Homeland,

Salaita, S. (2016), Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Shenhav, Y. and Y. Yona (eds.) (2008), Racism in Israel, Jerusalem: The Van Leer Institute Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishing House.

Tuck, E. and K. W. Yang (2012), ‘Decolonization is not a metaphor’, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society, 1(1): 1-40.

Wolfe, P. (1999) Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, London: Cassells.

Wolfe, P. (2016) Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race, London: Verso.

Yizhar, S. (2015 [1949]) Khirbet Khizeh, London: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Archiving silence: Remarks on Vukasin Nedeljkovic’s Asylum Archive exhibition, NCAD 6 December 2016

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Ronit Lentin

I want to I present three interlinked propositions about Vukasín Nedeljković’s Asylum Archive exhibition. Firstly, just like Irish state and society had managed to ignore the workhouses, mental asylums, mother and baby homes, Magdalene Laundries and industrial schools, they also ‘manage not to know’ about the plight of asylum seekers, precisely because direct provision isolates asylum seekers, makes them dependent and makes it difficult for them to organise on a national level. Since ‘managing not to know’, or disavowing, erases the direct provision system from the Irish collective consciousness, I propose that asylum seekers represent the return of Ireland’s repressed, confronting Irish people with their own experiences of e/migration.

The second proposition explores the notion of ‘archive’, defined by Foucault as ‘a storehouse that catalogues the traces of what has been said, to consign them to future memory’, rather than as a ‘library that gathers the dust of statements and allows for their resurrection under the historian’s gaze’ (Agamben 1999: 143).

Thirdly, since residents of the direct provision system have been taking action, protesting and representing themselves, they can no longer be theorised merely as Agamben’s ‘bare life’, at the mercy of sovereign power, and must be regarded as active agents of resistance in their own right.

Managing not to know

Denial, according to Stanley Cohen, is always a paradox. In using the term ‘denial’ to describe a person’s statement ‘I didn’t know’, we have to assume she does know what she claims not to know. The public shock about the revelations since the mid-1990s about the incarceration of unmarried women in ‘mother and baby homes’ and ‘Magdalene laundries’ and about the abuse of thousands of children in Irish ‘industrial schools’ represents a disavowal of something Irish people knew but were repressing.

Ireland has an appalling history of incarceration, having locked up 31,000 people at any given time between 1926 and 1951, or one in every 100 citizens, in mental hospitals, Magdalene laundries, ‘mother and baby’ homes and industrial schools, continuing the legacy of the 1838 Irish Poor Law and the 130 workhouses catering for the destitute poor. This also applied to children – one child in every hundred was enslaved in an industrial school.

Irish institutions of incarceration were located in towns and cities throughout the country which meant that claiming ‘not to know’ was disingenuous. According to Fintan O’Toole, the system served to warn the disobedient: it was family members who forced pregnant daughters into Magdalene Laundries or ‘mother and baby homes’ and the hapless children of ‘bad’ or poor mothers into industrial schools where many were abused. The harm done to the incarcerated also taught ‘a whole society very deep habits of collusion, evasion and adaptation’.

The denial – of what we actually know – can be illuminated by Freud’s work on the unfamiliar or ‘uncanny’: ‘that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar’ which can become uncanny and frightening’. And, he writes, we often repress that which we are afraid of, which is familiar and known to us yet becomes estranged in the process of repression. And the repressed always returns to haunt.

I propose that the 1990s revelations about the Magdalene Laundries and the industrial schools that Irish society was forced to acknowledge was the return of Ireland’s repressed and preceded the choice not to know about asylum seekers dispersed to direct provision centres and living in intolerable conditions, due to their racialization and dehumanisation, removal from sight, and construction as a (financial) ‘burden’.

Like its history of incarceration, Ireland’s refugee reception history is also shocking. Having refused to admit more than 60 Jewish refugees during the Nazi era between 1933 and 1946, Ireland accepted small groups of ‘Programme Refugees’ since 1956. Asylum seekers (‘Convention Refugees’) began arriving in Ireland in the early 1990s and in July 2016 4,208 people, including 1,100 children, were housed in 35 direct provision centres. Many centres are run by for-profit companies costing the state more than 50 million euro per annum.

I propose that Irish people are adopting an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ attitude to asylum seekers in direct provision. The disavowal of asylum seekers’ living conditions makes direct provision centres ‘zones of exception’ which, according to Agamben, positions residents outside the law, between inside and outside. Direct provision centres, like similar ‘state-sponsored enclaves of non-existent rights’, ‘signal a sort of surplus of “bare life” that can no longer be contained within the political order of nation-states’ yet cannot be entirely disposed of, and is thus trapped in between spaces and statuses’. Thus isolated, asylum seekers, like residents of Ireland’s workhouses, mental hospitals, industrial schools, Magdalene laundries and ‘mother and baby homes’, are perched at the edge of Irish life, and disavowed as Irish society ‘manages not to know’ of their existence.

In 2002 I argued that asylum seekers, refugees and migrants represented the return of the repressed for an Ireland reluctant to confront the pain of e/migration. In 2016, with 16 years of direct provision, very low refugee acceptance rates, and with emigration again becoming a major social force – disavowal is again apparent. The familiar of forced emigration is returning to haunt Ireland’s collective consciousness, making Irish people disavow, yet again, the plight of people seeking refuge in their midst. In the process Freud’s familiar becomes unfamiliar, uncanny and frightening, enabling the denial not of what ‘we’ do not know, but of what ‘we’ know only too well.

Archiving silence

In the light of Ireland’s disavowal and of ‘managing not to know’ about the direct provision system, I propose that Vukasín Nedeljković’s Asylum Archive is an archive of silence and secrets, challenging Irish society to confront the return of its repressed pain of incarceration and e/migration. Deliberately not representing the humans warehoused by the state in the direct provision centres, this archive of silence nonetheless makes visible these humans, which one might be tempted to theorize as Agamben’s ‘bare life’ – s/he who lives at the mercy of the sovereign state and who can be killed, deported or transferred with impunity, yet whose life is banned from the sacred realm of Irishness.

If Foucault’s archive aims to consign the items archived to future memory rather than simply serve the historians’ gaze, then Asylum Archive does much more. In representing the detritus of the poorhouses of Ireland’s present, the traces of robbed humanity, and the glimpses of the skies of hope and flight, Asylum Archive helps us remember that the humans incarcerated in varying states of deportability, cannot be merely thought of as ‘bare life’ and – in view of their resistance – must be regarded as active agents in their own right.

Beyond ‘bare life’

During 2014 asylum seekers staged a series of protests. Among other things, protesters spoke of inadequate food, of being unable to cook for their families, about management providing out of date, insufficient food served at specific hours and not available out of hours, leaving many children hungry.

Though I initially wanted to theorise asylum seekers as Agamben’s ‘bare life’, inmates in what he calls the ‘camp’ system, a pure space of exception, which ‘distinguishes and separates what is inside from what is outside’, their lives controlled by RIA and its agents – management and staff of the direct provision centres, this theorization was ultimately inadequate, particularly since Agamben’s ‘bare life’ is deeply Eurocentric and ignores race, while the direct provision system is deeply racialized. The disavowal of race ignores the everyday lived experiences of racial discrimination experienced by people seeking refuge from persecution, war, conflict and oppression, at the hands of white Irish state and society.

Furthermore, Agamben’s ‘bare life’ theory posits asylum seekers as passive subjects to whom everything is done, often in arbitrary and violent ways, rather than as active agents of resistance. Indeed, the 2014 protests by asylum seekers, and let me remind you there were also asylum seekers’ protests during the 1990s by ARASI – the Association of Refugees and Asylum Seekers in Ireland, who were taken over by the white Irish SPIRASI – led to the establishment of MASI – Movement for Asylum Seekers in Ireland. The protests demonstrate that theorising asylum seekers in direct provision merely as ‘bare life’ subject to sovereign rule is Eurocentric and that the protests are ‘acts of resistance’ in the best sense of the word.

Together with these protests and the campaigns by a variety of supporters, Asylum Archive, in archiving and making visible the silences and disavowed experiences of asylum seekers in Ireland, means that the repressed is returning to haunt and we can no longer ignore the clear demands made by asylum seekers: end the direct provision system, regularise all residents, and end all deportations.

The unspoken whiteness of Brexit

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Ronit Lentin

A couple of days after British referendum on exiting the EU I witnessed a disturbing altercation between two hard working Indian sub-continent migrant owners of a Dublin city centre Spar shop and a bunch of white Irish drunks who were kicking the shop’s door and harassing the owners in an attempt to steal booze. Without being there I was sure that the confrontation had racist undertones (as confirmed to me by the shop owners the following day). It lasted some twenty minutes and was only resolved when the gardai arrived, but it left me wondering whether the racism of the white marauders – like the Nazi graffiti sprayed in the last few days in Northern Ireland – had anything to do with the Brexit vote.

Social media have been abuzz with posts on the Brexit repercussions with much written about David Cameron’s resignation, Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn failure to prevent the exit vote, UKIP leader Nigel Farage and his fascist followers and the implications for Ireland. However, much more significant is the permission the vote has given to racists in Britain and elsewhere in Europe to express their anti-immigrant and anti-minorities toxic views. Continue reading “The unspoken whiteness of Brexit”