Incarceration, disavowal and Ireland’s prison industrial complex

Paper presented at the ‘Irish Prisons: incarceration, repression and control’ conference, Crumlin Road Gaol, Belfast 26-27 October 2017.

Introduction

In September 2014 residents of several asylum centres in Ireland staged protests against their incarceration. Since April 2000 asylum seekers have been dispersed to ‘Direct Provision’ centres, managed by private for-profit companies under the supervision of the Reception and Integration Agency (RIA), an arm of the Department of Justice and Equality, costing the state around 50 million euro per annum. Residents, who get bed and board, are not allowed to work or access third level education, and until August 2017 were given a small weekly ‘residual income maintenance payment to cover personal requisites’ of €19.10 per adult and €9.60 per child, increased to €21.60 per adult and first to €15.60 and then to €21.60 per child per week (Bardon 2017). Steven Loyal (2011) describes the Direct Provision centres as Goffman’s (1991[1961]) ‘total institutions’, where residents are controlled as to what and when they eat, who they share rooms with, who can visit them, and what access they have to crèches, laundries, kitchen facilities and appliances, and argues that ‘the negatively socially valued category of “asylum-seeker” becomes their master status.’

Although the Direct Provision system was originally intended for no more than a six months stay, 19.5 per cent have stayed for over three years. The average length of stay was 38 months while 450 people had been living in Direct Provision for more than seven years, leading to people becoming de-skilled, bored, depressed, destitute, and institutionalised. By September 2017, there were 5,063 people in Direct Provision centres. Seven of the centres are State-owned, the others are operated by for profit companies (Gartland, 2016) – making the Direct Provision system part of what Angela Davis term the ‘prison industrial complex’.

Many asylum seekers live with deportation orders in a state of deportability (Lentin and Moreo 2015), arguably making them what the Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agamben (1995) calls ‘bare life’, at the mercy of the laws of the sovereign state, which exempts itself from these very laws. And as Eithne Luibhéid (2013: 91) argues, ‘Direct Provision institutionalized the construct of the “asylum-seeker” as a distinct, undesirable type of person who must be subjected to relations of governance that were intended to deter, control, and incapacitate’.

The Direct Provision protesters demanded that all asylum centres be closed, that all residents be given the right to remain and work in Ireland, and that all deportations end. These demands are articulated by MASI, the Movement of Asylum Seekers in Ireland, a platform for asylum seekers to join together in unity and purpose.

In October 2014, apparently in response to these protests, the government appointed a working group ‘to report to Government on improvements to the protection process, including Direct Provision and supports to asylum seekers.’ The Working Group was made up of representatives of migrant-support NGOs but had no significant representation of asylum seekers themselves. While the then deputy Justice Minister Aodhán Ó Ríordáin admitted that the Direct Provision system is ‘inhumane’, and that ‘the way we treat asylum seekers and people in the (Direct Provision) system says a lot about us as a country’, the Working Group was charged with reforming rather than closing the Direct Provision system (The Journal 2014).

The Working Group’s recommendations were largely not adopted by the government (although the Minister for Justice said in October at the Senead that 98 per cent were adopted), and the Direct Provision system remains in place. However, in 2016 the government increased the ‘comfort allowance’ paid to asylum seekers in Direct Provision centres by an insulting amount. In 2016 the government introduced the International Protection Act based on a Single Application Procedure. The new act raises serious concerns in relation to firstly, the erosion of refugee families’ reunification rights; secondly, the impact on the applicants already in the asylum process in relation to the availability of appropriate legal advice and sufficient time and resources to shorten the waiting time; and thirdly, the ease with which deportations could be effected. In May 2017 the Supreme Court unanimously agreed that the absolute ban on asylum seekers working was unconstitutional (Carolan 2017), and in October 2017 the Minister for Justice announced the intention to give asylum seekers in Ireland the right to work after six months in Direct Provision, a problematic announcement as very few details have been worked out. Lucky Khambule will elaborate on these developments.

Against this background, this paper makes three interlinked propositions. Firstly, I propose that as Irish state and society managed to ignore Ireland’s system of ‘coercive confinement’: workhouses, mental health asylums, mother and baby homes, Magdalene Laundries and industrial schools (O’Sullivan and O’Donnell 2012), they also ‘manage not to know’ about the plight of asylum seekers in Direct Provision. The Direct Provision system isolates asylum applicants, makes them dependent on state handouts and carceral rules, and makes it difficult for them to organize on a national level. ‘Managing not to know,’ or disavowing, erases the Direct Provision system from Ireland’s collective consciousness, but I suggest that asylum seekers signify the return of Ireland’s repressed, confronting Irish people, themselves e/migrants par excellence.

Secondly, I propose that we must not theorize residents of the Direct Provision system as passive victims at the mercy of sovereign power, to whom everything is done, but rather as active agents of resistance.

Thirdly, and more broadly, the incarceration of asylum seekers must be seen as continuing the tradition of administrative detention of political prisoners in the north of Ireland and of the widespread Irish practice of incarceration. I therefore theorize the Direct Provision system as the current embodiment of the island of Ireland as two parallel carceral states, where the prison industrial complex has historically incarcerated one in every hundred people in the Republic and administratively detained political prisoners in the north. I conclude, following Angela Davis, by calling for the total abolition of imprisonment and incarceration. Continue reading “Incarceration, disavowal and Ireland’s prison industrial complex”

Why Taoiseach Varadkar is bad for equality in Ireland

Ireland

Ronit LentinJune 11, 2017August 23, 2020

When Larry Gordon, a member of the progressive Dublin Food Co Op recently told a niqab-wearing Muslim woman that she has no right to come to shop for organic produce at the Co Op and refused to apologise for his racist and Islamophobic outburst, a white Co Op member told me, after I intervened, that ‘veiled women put all of us women in Europe in grave danger’ and protested when I told her Islamophobia comes in all shades. This racist incident, still to be resolved by the Co Op board, is an omen of the ‘I am not a racist but’ Ireland, particularly as we are facing an ethnic minority gay Taoiseach who however disavows racism and denigrates migrants, poor people and disabled people.

On the face of it, having supported immigration into Ireland and having been actively involved in resisting racism and discrimination of LGBT and disabled people for many years, why am I less that delighted that Ireland’s next Taoiseach is the son of an Indian migrant and an openly gay man? After all, Ireland’s record of electing ethnic minority politicians is very poor: apart from three Jewish TDs, a single Muslim TD and a couple of African and Traveller local politicians, Ireland has consistently upheld white supremacy, while protesting its non-racialism and continuing to incarcerate asylum seekers in direct provision hell holes and to treat migrants as mere economic commodities who must emulate ‘our culture’.

Examining Varadkar’s record of focusing on welfare fraud, calling to send home migrants who have become unemployed, not allowing gay parents to adopt children, calling to make mentally disabled people pay for their incarceration in the Central Mental Hospital, and calling upon migrants and refugees to accept ‘Irish culture’ explains why I am so opposed to this (unelected, remember) gay son of an Indian doctor becoming Taoiseach, well beyond my general distaste for Fine Gael’s reactionary conservatism.

Although for many migrants Varadkar’s rise sounds like the immigrant’s dream come true, according to Dublin born half-Asian Dean van Nguyen writing in the Irish Times, there is no reason to get excited by Varadkar, who has shown little interest in migrants or in Ireland’s racial issues. Indeed, while saying ‘I’m somebody who thinks immigration is beneficial. I’m in charge of a health service that is heavily influenced and dependent on migrants, doctors and nurses form overseas. So I’m somebody who believes it is good for our economy and society,’ he called for the deportation of unemployed ‘foreign nationals’ who should be offered three or four months benefits if they agree to go home and forego benefits beyond that. The suggestions, Van Nguyen argues, ‘fed into the trite typecasting that people come to Ireland only to claim benefits, while also undermining all immigrants’ hopes of being accepted in their new homes’. While Varadkar did support accepting a small number of refugees from Syria (in fact only 760 out of the promised 4,000 Syrian and other refugees arrived in Ireland in 2016), he see immigration merely as ‘beneficial’ to Irish state and society and has warned about cultural differences, claiming that ‘people will come to Ireland to work but will actually look down on our culture and look down on our freedoms and liberalisms and think they are wrong’.

For me, Leo Varadkar’s insistence that being the son of a migrant is meaningless signifies what Alana Lentin calls ‘post racialism’: ‘declarations of the end of race ignores the continuing impact of racism upon socio-economic inequality in racial states.’ Post-racialism, closely linked to culturalist solutions to problems seen as originating from excessive cultural diversity, she argues, is firmly set within the history of modern racism, even though most people in Ireland prefer to ignore it, insisting, despite evidence to the contrary, that they are not racist, but that ‘Irish culture’ is endangered by all those immigrants and foreigners.

Varadkar will thus be the first post-racial Taoiseach, whose ‘drawbridge’ mentality insists that while his own migrant father had worked so hard during the ‘tough’ 1980s, today’s migrants should work just as hard and emulate ‘our’ culture, and when becoming unemployed should go back home, because, as he proudly stated in his election campaign video: ‘It’s all about hard work and ambition…’

Oxymorons and metaphors: Israel Studies from racialization to decolonization

Decolonization, israel, Palestine, war

Ronit LentinJune 8, 2017June 8, 2017

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