by Brendan O’Neill
At a time when the mass
struggle for Palestinian national liberation is a distant memory, and when the
Palestinian political movement has splintered into various opportunistic
outfits, what does ‘Palestinian solidarity’ mean? Who are Western activists solidarising
with, and to what end? A clue was provided at Saturday’s demonstration against
Israel’s bombing of Gaza, which took place outside the Israeli Embassy in
Kensington in west London. What was striking was that there was very little to
distinguish this loud demo from an anti-fur stall that some sad-eyed
animal-rights activists had set up outside west London’s most famous shopping
landmark, Harrods. Both were about drawing attention to the ‘cruel treatment’
meted out by powerful forces to defenceless creatures, whether it’s men in
white coats skinning rabbits or men in Jerusalem firing bombs at Palestinians.
‘Cruelty’ was the big concern of the pro-Palestinian
marchers. Not political repression or frustrated national rights, but the
‘cruel treatment’ suffered by Palestinians, as Baroness Jenny Tonge described
it from the podium. Some protesters held up placards with the names of children
‘murdered by Israel’. Palestinian solidarity groups often upfront the ‘cruel
treatment’ suffered by Palestinian children in particular. Israel practises
‘unrivalled cruelty’ against the inhabitants of Gaza, we are told. Even a
clearly political, repressive act such as making Palestinians who travel into
Israel go through various checkpoints is now discussed in terms of cruelty -
campaigners refer to it as ‘checkpoint cruelty’. In order that privileged
activists might get a taste of this cruel treatment, the London School of
Economics’ Palestine Society recently set up a mock Israeli checkpoint on
campus to ‘raise awareness of the dire conditions’ Palestinians live in, at
which the students playing IDF soldiers were told to ‘be as rude as you can.
Beat, kick, swear, humiliate. That’s what will make you an Israeli soldier.’
Students at the LSE lined up to get a thrill from vicariously experiencing the
cruelty suffered by Palestinians.
Palestinian solidarity activists’ obsessive focus on
Israel’s cruel treatment of Palestinians shows the extent to which they have
plucked this issue from the world of politics, from the world of interests and
arguments, and plonked it instead in a world of shallow, black-and-white,
childish moralism. So Israel doesn’t build border walls and erect checkpoints
out of a sense of political desperation or in pursuit of narrow territorial
interests, but rather as an act of cruelty, in order to ‘beat, kick, humiliate’
Palestinians. And Palestinians’ experience of checkpoints or simply living in
very poor, closed-off areas is not unjust, but ‘cruel’, not oppressive, but
‘humiliating’. The terminology now most frequently used by Palestinian
solidarity activists is indistinguishable from that used by animal-rights
campaigners - it is peppered with words like cruel, caged, battered,
humiliated, desperate, all designed to appeal to Western observers’ sense of moral
revulsion and pity for the underdog rather to any political aspiration to
achieve greater liberty around the world.
In our post-national liberation era, the motivation of
Palestinian solidarity campaigns has shifted dramatically. The main motor to
these campaigns is now pity rather than solidarity, a desire to demonstrate
one’s morally superior concern for less fortunate creatures rather than any
determination to help secure full democratic rights for a foreign people. This
is why campaigners focus so much on suffering Palestinian children - because
they are seen as the clearest embodiment of the patheticness of the Palestinian
people as a whole.
Look at the Palestinian child shown on the fairly typical
solidarity leaflet on the top: seemingly caged, all alone, vulnerable
looking, eyes wide with expectation… it is creepily reminiscent of the
animal-concern leaflets you used to see in your local library years ago, which
would feature some downtrodden dog or bunny staring expectantly from inside a
horrible cage. Those leaflets were designed to arouse, not any political
sensation or even meaningful fury, but rather a mothering instinct, a desire to
hug and stroke the benighted beast. And so it is with much of the Palestinian
solidarity campaign literature on children, which, with its images of kids
wrenched from any political or even adult context, is aimed at making us feel
avuncular rather than angry.
The reduction of Palestinians from political subjects
who deserve our political support to hapless creatures who require our pity was
best summed up by the American author and noted Israel critic, Alice Walker. In
an interview last year, she flitted with remarkable ease between discussing
‘cruel and inhuman’ treatment meted out to Palestinians, who are ‘frazzled and
suffering everyday’, and talking about the living conditions of chickens in
factory farms, which are ‘horrible, torturous’. Just as we ‘must help those
suffering in Gaza’, so we must also ‘change the way chickens are thought about
and raised’, she said.
This is the essence of so-called Palestinian
solidarity today - it’s about getting one’s moral rocks off by experiencing and
expressing an elevated feeling of informed pity towards the people of
Palestine. Or towards chickens in factory farms. Either one will do. The aim of
Palestinian solidarity campaigning is not really to improve the political lives
of Palestinians but rather to boost the sense of moral purpose felt by Western
observers. In a 1992 essay on Western media photographs of children in
warzones, Patricia Holland said some viewers secretly found the images
pleasurable: ‘As the children in the image reveal their vulnerability, we
long to protect them and provide for their needs. Paradoxically, while we are
moved by the image of the sorrowful child, we also welcome it, for it can
arouse pleasurable emotions of tenderness, which in themselves confirm adult
power.’ So it is with those who stare pityingly at leaflets or magazine
articles featuring damaged or injured Palestinian children.
This is the opposite of solidarity. Solidarity doesn’t
mean pitying people; it doesn’t even simply mean offering people support.
Rather, solidarity is about recognising that your interests and another group
of people’s interests are intertwined, and therefore you should strive to
bolster one another’s campaigning, in pursuit of your own interests and theirs.
As the OED says, solidarity is ‘the fact or quality, on the
part of communities, of being perfectly united or at one in some respect, esp.
in interests, sympathies, or aspirations’. In contrast to that, modern-day
so-called Palestinian solidarity is about selfishly satisfying the inner moral
needs of certain sections of the Western middle classes at the expense
of promoting the interests of Palestinians to become free, and
properly adult, and the equal of other grown-up nations. Indeed, in order for
this warped brand of Palestinian solidarity to stagger on, it is necessary for
the Palestinian people to remain ‘beaten, kicked, humiliated’, so that they can
continue playing their walk-on part in a moral drama created by Western
observers looking for some meaning in their lives.
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