“Our western privilege is the legacy of historical violence”

This is part of a debate occurring at Mon­doweiss: part one, my response, David Bromwich’s response-to-me-that-wasn’t-a-response, Robin Yassin-Kassab’s response.

David Bromwich has responded to my comment about non-violence and violence with a strong, textual case for non-violent mobi­liza­tion. Engage­ment is welcome. There is space for tactical and con­cep­tual clar­i­fi­ca­tion and dis­cus­sion. First, though, several mistakes, mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tions, and mis-directions demand cor­rec­tion. Bromwich insists that “For Gandhi and for King non-violence was a principle,” and proceeds to lay out their ideas, appending a post-script with extended quo­ta­tions. I do not know why Bromwich brought up King, who was anyway not the dogmatic pacifist he presents, and whose non-violent activism achieved its partial successes against the specter of violence in American urban centers and the threat of rev­o­lu­tion­ary militancy from the Black Panthers and the social spirit they stood for. Anyway, I did not bring King up. Here I will stick to Gandhi:

I do believe that where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence I would advise violence. Thus when my eldest son asked me what he should have done, had he been present when I was almost fatally assaulted in 1908, whether he should have run away and seen me killed or whether he should have used his physical force which he could and wanted to use, and defended me, I told him that it was his duty to defend me even by using violence

Bromwich placed this quotation at the end of the piece in which he insists that Gandhi’s non-violence was prin­ci­pled. Similar state­ments abound in Gandhi’s work. Clearly, Gandhi was not a prin­ci­pled adherent to non-violence in the sense that I used it, or in the ver­nac­u­lar sense that most would under­stand prin­ci­pled non-violence. If I say that non-violence is my principle, and then advocate punching someone, then the rea­son­able con­clu­sion is that non-violence is not my principle. Prin­ci­ples that one deviates from are like quitting smoking between cig­a­rettes. Non-violence as a principle I adhere to except when I don’t is not a principle, it’s a tactic that I sometimes advocate and sometimes don’t, sometimes practice and sometimes don’t. Bromwich and I can banter back and forth over what the phrase “moral prin­ci­ples” or the word “prin­ci­ples” mean, but it is pretty clear that we are both using it in the sense stip­u­lated above.

Moreover, the quotation precisely points up the problems of not rec­og­niz­ing the continuum on which violence and non-violence exist. Rigid bifur­ca­tions are prob­lem­atic, both for obvious reasons—is pushing the Israeli soldier at Budrus violence or not?—but also for reasons that are less obvious. Non-violence and violence are only polar opposites in a realm of ideas which demands that they be so. Their sharp sep­a­ra­tion is in fact an ideology. Why this should be so I will get to below. I don’t under­stand why Bromwich insists that Gandhi was a prin­ci­pled prac­ti­tioner or pro­mul­ga­tor of non-violence is beyond me, although I do under­stand why he sidesteps the com­pli­ca­tions of drawing a clear, dividing line between even physical, immediate violence and non-violence. It can’t really be done. When violence and non-violence are under­stood as shading and melding not merely at the margins but through­out, the idea that non-violence is a tactic, an action, a way of imple­ment­ing something rather than its essential character, and fur­ther­more something that should be assessed con­se­quen­tially, becomes obvious.

Next, Bromwich has taken my (I thought quite) obvious normative statement on non-violence being a tactic rather than a principle and confused it for a factual statement. I do not know why he did so.

The next issue is normative. Calling for non-violence when one is not standing by the non-violent is an attempted affir­ma­tion of purity, nothing more. Gandhi and King stood on the front lines of their efforts, whether or not they were correct (Michael Neumann has shown fairly per­sua­sively that as practical matters both King and Gandhi’s efforts were failures). They were embedded organ­i­cally in the social movements they sought to influence.

The ideal of spiritual trans­for­ma­tion Bromwich discusses is one I partially agree with. In the Gandhian sense, it suggests something about our own trans­for­ma­tive potential, saying that our lives, our desire to imbue meaning and dignity to them, can take prece­dence over plain physical survival. The idea was roughly that a supra-human essence could be achieved through non-violent action. Fuzzy stuff, but not totally mis-guided. It is clear that a person, a society, a state, a world created by violence will carry the birth-scars of that fire with it for some time, and we know this neu­ro­log­i­cally as well as his­tor­i­cally. Violence has begeted violence, and wars ended by violence have not ended war. A.J. Muste pointed this out: “The problem after a war is the victor. He thinks he has just proved that war and violence will pay. Who will now teach him a lesson?” And so it goes on, soci­o­log­i­cally as well as psychologically.

The thing is, we already live in a world soaked with violence. The notion that we can remove, via spiritual trans­for­ma­tion, the scars of violence while still living in a world totally riddled with it suggests that spiritual catharsis will be easier in a world where struc­tural violence is reduced con­sid­er­ably, if not nearly elim­i­nated. And this sort of thinking can move in another direction too—not that we totally reject violence, but that we cocoon ourselves from its damages. Violence will influence the character of the world we wish to create, sure, but it already does so, and if righteous violence can reduce the scale of constant, struc­tural, morally unac­cept­able violence—the occu­pa­tion, the siege—why on earth would we on principle reject its use, or morally privilege non-violence?

Here is the problem. I agree that forms of non-violence can, in theory, use carefully, produce a better world than that produced by what Bromwich means by violence. But how to test this theory? How to con­cretize what must seem like a fantasy to people under horrible oppres­sion? The answer is actually clear. Organize with them. Believe your belief, work to share your belief with the oppressed, make it real. This is what Gandhi and King did, notwith­stand­ing their practical failures, which can be useful for our own enlightenment—we learn, and we do better. It’s important to underline the sit­u­a­tional, ethical component to this dialogue. It’s easy to juggle ideas on the internet, juxtapose elegant con­cep­tions of non-violent practice with messy blood-struck guerrilla resis­tance, and move on from intel­lec­tual play to self-serious pre­scrip­tion. A pre­scrip­tion for Pales­tin­ian pacifism amounts to saying to a people under the gun: “Oppose the violence that I pay for, and throw your body on the machine. Some of you will die, but it will be better for you. Trust me. But I will not throw my body on the war machine. I will not throw my body on the war machine of which the war machine that is oppress­ing you is a cog. I have nothing to do with that war-machine.” The affir­ma­tion that non-violence is better than violence is one of faith rather than history. As should be clear from the lofty, maybe slightly ridicu­lous tone of the para­graphs above—more the­o­log­i­cal and ethereal than analytical—what we are dealing with here is a form of atheistic religion. The core doctrine is that non-violence by itself will lead to a better world than this one. At the very least, anyone preaching such a radical creed needs to practice it first.

To that end, the notion that “we” are prac­tic­ing non-violence when “we” partake of non-violent resis­tance is unac­cept­able. Our tax dollars and our passive acqui­es­cence, our qui­es­cence, or quietude, our muted fury—all of this creates com­plic­ity in violence, and there is something hyp­o­crit­i­cal in advo­cat­ing non-violence while we do not, at least episod­i­cally, throw ourselves on the machine that churns out Pales­tin­ian and Iraqi and Afghan and African bodies. Violence suffuses our societies, and the privilege we have to write and speak about non-violence is a privilege that is the heritage of his­tor­i­cal violence. Let us look at the podium from which our voices and “values” sound out. It is made of bodies, and they are mostly brown.

Moving on from mostly abstract, normative questions, there is a serious tactical dis­cus­sion to be had on the left: how to resist an army that has abandoned its morality? There is no evidence that militant non-violence can work against a military apparatus that has regressed to bes­tial­ity, the blood-and-soil worship of classical fascism, an element of genocidal ideology, as Ben Kiernan has pointed out. There is institution-building that is being done. People work hard to create parallel media appa­ra­tuses that can seriously contend with the nar­ra­tives power produces. People work hard to use what resources they have to send ships to end this blockade, to seriously jam up the siege engines, and build up a critical mass to end the occu­pa­tion and end Zionism. We West­ern­ers, we white people, we affluent Jews, have the power and privilege to do this in a non-violent way, in our own societies, because of the legacy bequeathed to us by systems of violence and their ide­o­log­i­cal stabilizers—racism, colo­nial­ism, impe­ri­al­ism, cap­i­tal­ism. We seek state support for our goals—a Turkish naval escort, or EU putting pressure on Israel to lift the siege—and what is a state but an instru­ment created by and dis­pens­ing violence? If we want to create a new world rel­a­tively unscathed by the scar tissue left behind by violence, at the very least, we can stop inflict­ing the damage that will leave those scars. Then let’s talk about violence and non-violence, and practice non-violence when we can and violence when we must.

Those advo­cat­ing non-violence write at a con­sid­er­able remove from this history.

There’s a kind of psy­chotropic quality to that sort of writing, as though the conflict plays out in the realm of ideas and not in the realm of history, as though we can will history into being dis­cur­sively, as though the memory of trauma is irrel­e­vant to the prospects for popular mobi­liza­tion, although James Scott calls the memory of oppres­sion the central factor pre­vent­ing further mobi­liza­tion. The Pales­tin­ian 1^st Intifada produced a thousand dead, over 100,000 injured and jailed. Over­whelm­ingly non-violent, Pales­tini­ans paid a remark­able price for their pacific resis­tance. Those who write on Pales­tin­ian non-violence, who write on Pales­tini­ans generally, generally ignore that uprising. The world ignored that uprising while it was going on. If Pales­tin­ian non-violence could “work” in an abstract trans-historical sense, where is the Pales­tin­ian state? Was it Pales­tin­ian laziness for not per­se­ver­ing in Intifada for another couple years to really thor­oughly gum up the machinery of occu­pa­tion? Nearly every Gazan I speak to thinks the buffer zone marches are amazing (on the basis of no successes what­so­ever, I should add). They are terrified of par­tic­i­pat­ing. They don’t want to die. His­tor­i­cal soci­ol­o­gists acknowl­edge that you can’t simply re-write or postulate the course of history according to fan­tas­ti­cal what-ifs except as an impotent—and in this context, delirious—mind-puzzle, that there are struc­tural con­straints to agency.

Bromwich, writing as though he is innocent of a lit­er­a­ture dis­cussing the occu­pa­tion, the blockade, the way they are ide­o­log­i­cally sta­bi­lized in the West, rep­re­sen­ta­tions of Palestine and of Muslims, of Pales­tin­ian resis­tance, and of non-state violence, goes on to assert: “In Israel today, the story is that the blockade and the occu­pa­tion are necessary because without them the Pales­tini­ans would subject Israel to an ungoverned series of terrorist attacks. Does terrorism or non-violent resis­tance seem a likelier method for dis­prov­ing that assumption?”

But who assumes this? Israeli leaders? No, they know the truth: that the blockade is meant to unseat the elected Hamas gov­ern­ment and that the occu­pa­tion is meant to destroy Pales­tin­ian nation­al­ism. The Israeli populace? It generally accepts the moral soundness of Zionism, an ide­o­log­i­cal con­di­tion­ing that overrides or readily accom­mo­dates the real reasons behind the blockade and the occu­pa­tion, and will itself not shatter easily. The American public? Since when do we con­tribute to pol­i­cy­mak­ing, and since when is Pales­tin­ian non-violent resis­tance ade­quately reported here?

Bromwich proceeds to create a set, “terrorism” vs. “non-violent resis­tance,” that erases the right—the tran­scen­den­tal right—to armed resis­tance. If there is no right to armed resis­tance, the Pales­tini­ans may not ethically use violence. But what it is that Pales­tini­ans may not use is likewise obscure, because Bromwich dodges the prob­lem­atic of con­cep­tu­al­iz­ing or defining “violence.” Under­stand­ably. He will find doing so quite hard. Do Pales­tini­ans have the international-law-sanctioned right to resist? If not, why not? And what is a sound tactical and mediatic strategy for high­light­ing Pales­tin­ian non-violence so as to recode the symbolic structure of the conflict? Those advo­cat­ing non-violence don’t have much of an answer for that. It’s a problem. Probably most writing on Pales­tin­ian issues, even from a sym­pa­thetic per­spec­tive, don’t know that huge numbers of Gazans engage in non-violent marches, or that someone named Ahmed Salem Deeb died in one. This is not their fault. The US press doesn’t report non-violent resis­tance in Gaza. The main­stream presses in fact refuse to report that non-violence, since we inform them of that resis­tance every time it occurs.

How is Pales­tin­ian non-violence in Gaza supposed to proceed when the foreign press ignores it and the IDF has no inter­ac­tion with the pro­test­ers? Even were the foreign press to pay attention, inevitably some boys would throw stones, and the Israeli and American press would assert that such stone-chucking was “violent,” thereby con­t­a­m­i­nat­ing Pales­tin­ian satyagraha-or-whatever. The problem isn’t the Pales­tini­ans. It’s our press. It’s us. Pales­tini­ans have conceded the anti-colonial struggle that the Algerians undertook 50 years ago. They conceded 78 percent of their land in 1988, and coura­geously conceded terror even as Israel reserved the right to destroy their pop­u­la­tion centers. Who are we to demand more and more and more con­ces­sions? We are no one. They will determine their goals and strate­gies, not us.

Maybe I will try another example. Pre­sum­ably those who might advocate non-violence for Pales­tini­ans also cherish the heroism of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Those Polish Jews fought des­per­ately, bereft of much sol­i­dar­ity except a bit from the external resis­tance, which didn’t dare to offer its counsel. Through their resis­tance, little happened to the mindsets of the sur­round­ing Polish pop­u­la­tion. Survival rates for the partisans in the ghetto were, however, amazing. Would King or Gandhi have suggested non-violence? How appro­pri­ate is it, anyway, to excise the texts of King and Gandhi from their his­tor­i­cal contexts and treat their works as scripture? Was it violence when in Warsaw those who knew death was imminent committed suicide? Is “violence” the use of force to kill, the use of force in self-defense, the use of force against an enemy? Is the violence of those incin­er­at­ing Nazi soldiers—or fending off an occupying army—condemnable on principle? Is it “non-violent” to refuse to use violence when that refusal’s immediate effect will be someone’s death? Is it possible that “violent” and “non-violent” aren’t much more than mercurial proxies for value judgments, that per­pet­u­ally end up working to the detriment of the global South, to the purpose of securing the privilege of the global North?

The Pales­tin­ian plight is not academic. Israel has the moral and physical capacity to destroy the ter­ri­to­r­ial basis of Pales­tin­ian nation­al­ism. Pales­tini­ans are fighting for their lives, and to those who assert the fee­ble­ness of non-violence or the impotence of violence, there is a simple response: the Pales­tini­ans are still there; they have not won, and they have not lost. As far as I know no one has tried to write out the tally showing which increment of their current status is due to the gun, and which to sumoud. Now may be a moment to focus on non-violence, a non-violence in part meant to appeal to a violent world. Anyway, I am not sure at all, and they shouldn’t and don’t listen to me—correctly. Most impor­tantly: the notion of imple­ment­ing “transfer” is per­pet­u­ally prepared for deploy­ment from the Zionist armory. If what it takes to stave off politi­cide are Hamas rockets capable of incin­er­at­ing Merkavas, yallah. And if what it takes to stave off politi­cide are Hamas rockets capable of attacking Israeli pop­u­la­tion centers, then before clamoring to join the Western lynch mob of moral judgment, we should acknowl­edge that when you put a people in hell, they will learn from their sur­round­ings. And then we should acknowl­edge that we have put them in hell.

That is if we are feeling sen­ten­tious or self-pitying. There are other options. Western writers live amidst the center of this world’s power. Bromwich and I inhabit the center of that center. We non-violently could stop the Israeli war machine dead, and our non-violence in Western societies would I suspect be met with far less violence than the militant pacifism of those on the outskirts of the empire—especially because all we would be chal­leng­ing would be a satrap of the empire, and not its core. Instead of seeking to direct the Pales­tin­ian struggle, here’s something to make it easier: make the costs of Zionism intol­er­a­ble to our thug gov­ern­ment. Most of us are not up for it. We have more important things to do. We take breaks from our work secure in the safety of struc­tural barriers created and main­tained by violence to lecture a strug­gling people on the immoral­ity of their resis­tance to the violence we produce that permeates their lives. We refuse to seriously look at the horrible efficacy of some—not all—of the counter-violence, the tragic and inevitable result of a people being backed into a corner (Yes, Hezbollah and Hamas rocketry have bought Lebanese and Pales­tini­ans breathing space, and uttering this truth does not neces­si­tate moral or ethical judgment). Gandhi would have reluc­tantly approved. We accede to terror daily, but reserve the epithet “terror” for the desperate acts of those we put through hell. How dare we.

[Cross­posted from Mon­doweiss]

Tech­no­rati Tags: Gandhi, Gaza, Israel, Martin Luther King, Mavi Marmara, Mon­doweiss, non-violence, Palestine, resis­tance movements, struc­tural violence, Zionism

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