Confinement Under an Open Sky: Following the Speed Trap from Guernica to Gaza and Beyond
2008; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 5; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/14747730802500315
ISSN1474-774X
Autores Tópico(s)Political Theology and Sovereignty
ResumoAbstract This article explores the global significance of Palestine through a focus on the politics of confinement. Using the work of Paul Virilio and others, I examine the processes of colonization, incarceration, and acceleration that have combined to produce the confining realities of contemporary Palestine. The rhetoric of 'disengagement' associated with the dismantling of Israeli settlement colonies in Gaza represents the discursive face of a process through which the Israeli state has cemented its domination of Palestine while rebranding itself as a world leader in the technologies of permanent warfare. Palestine, in this sense, is diagnostic of a larger global system of dromocracy (the rule of speed) that articulates in complex ways with neoliberal capitalism. Within such a system, everyone is subject to the tyranny of speed and to the psychological and moral disorientation it produces. Este artículo explora la importancia global de Palestina a través de un enfoque en la política del confinamiento. A partir del trabajo de Paul Virilio y otros, analizo los procesos de colonización, encarcelamiento y la aceleración que se han combinado para producir las realidades confinantes de la Palestina contemporánea. La retórica de 'la separación' asociada con el desmantelamiento de las colonias de asentamientos israelitas en Gaza representa la faz divagadora de un proceso a través del cual, el estado israelita ha cimentado su autoridad sobre Palestina mientras se presenta a sí mismo como un líder mundial en las tecnologías del conflicto armado permanente. Palestina, en este sentido, es el diagnóstico de un sistema global mayor de dromocracia (la regla de la velocidad) que se integra de manera compleja con el capitalismo neoliberal. Dentro de tal sistema, todo el mundo está sujeto a la tiranía de la velocidad y a la desorientación sicológica y moral que éste produce. Notes This article draws on an earlier publication by the author (Collins, 2007 Collins, J. 2007. Global Palestine: A collision for our time. Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies, 16(1): 3–18. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]). For useful comments during the writing process, I would like to thank Tarak Barkawi, Kenneth Church, Andy Clarno, Ross Glover, Lisa Hajjar, students in my Global Palestine seminar at St. Lawrence University, and an anonymous reviewer for Globalizations. Like Harry Fisher, author of a fascinating memoir of this period, many of the brigadistas who came from the United States were committed labor activists for whom solidarity was not an abstract concept. In Fisher's case, the practice of solidarity was deeply rooted in his experience of living through the Great Depression and building formal and informal coalitions around issues of social justice. In one memorable passage, he describes the spirit of solidarity that prevailed during a hunger march from Milwaukee to Madison, Wisconsin, a spirit that continued once the group reached its destination. 'The first night we camped out along a lake, not far from the University of Wisconsin,' he recalls. 'Many students joined us, as did a large group of American Indians from the northern part of Wisconsin. We stayed up all night going from one group to another, listening to discussions and singing songs. Food was plentiful. The trade unions, churches, Communist Party, Socialist Party, and American Legion supplied us with food, coffee, and beer' (Fisher, 1998 Fisher, H. 1998. Comrades: Tales of a Brigadista in the Spanish Civil War, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. [Google Scholar], p. 9). At least one-third of American brigadistas, including a majority of the women volunteers, were Jews who clearly had multiple reasons for opposing the spread of fascism (Carroll, 1994 Carroll, P. 1994. The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, Stanford: Stanford University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], pp. 17–18). The ISM in Palestine was co-founded by an Israeli Jewish activist (Neta Golan), while CheckpointWatch, set up to monitor the human rights of Palestinians at the hundreds of military checkpoints set up throughout the West Bank and Gaza, is made up exclusively of Israeli Jewish women (Keshet, 2006 Keshet, Y. K. 2006. Checkpoint Watch: Testimonies from Occupied Palestine, London: Zed Books. [Google Scholar]). Those who favor separate Israeli and Palestinian states often deride the 'one-state solution' as naïve and unworkable. Binationalism, however, has a long history in Palestine/Israel; Martin Buber was an early proponent, and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) held to its goal of a 'secular, democratic state' for Jews and Arabs until the mid-1970s. In recent years, as Israeli colonization has increasingly taken on an aura of irreversibility, we have seen a resurgence in discussions of the binationalist ideal and the 'one-state solution' (Abunimah, 2006 Abunimah, A. 2006. One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse, New York: Metropolitan Books. [Google Scholar]; Judt, 2003 Judt, T. 2003. Israel: The alternative. New York Review of Books, 50(16) [Google Scholar]; Makdisi, 2007 Makdisi, S. 2007. For a secular democratic state. The Nation, 31 May 2007 [Google Scholar]; Sussman, 2004 Sussman, G. 2004. The challenge to the two-state solution. Middle East Report, 231 [Google Scholar]; Tilley, 2005 Tilley, V. 2005. The One-State Solution, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). One of the most provocative interventions in recent discussions of power and violence, Giorgio Agamben's concept of homo sacer, has direct implications for our understanding of this process. Agamben (2005 Agamben, G. 2005. State of Exception, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. translated by K. Attell[Crossref] , [Google Scholar], p. 14) identifies the camp as an 'absolute space of the exception' and elsewhere argues that the normalization of the 'state of exception' has gone hand in hand with an 'unprecedented generalization of the paradigm of security as the normal technique of government'. For a useful reading of Agamben's work as it applies to Palestine, see Gregory (2004, pp. 117–138). On the growth of 'technoculture' and its role in shaping recent US military action in Afghanistan and Iraq, see Gregory (2004 , pp. 49–56 and 196–214). Were he still alive today, Deleuze surely would appreciate the irony. More than 30 years ago, he commented on the forward-looking nature of Israeli policy. 'The Israeli-Palestine model is determinant in current problems of terrorism…. The worldwide understanding among states and the organization of a world police force with worldwide jurisdiction, currently underway, necessarily leads to an expansion in which more and more people are classified as virtual "terrorists",' he wrote. 'We find ourselves in a situation analogous to that of the Spanish Civil War, when Spain served as laboratory and experimentation for a still more terrible future. Today the state of Israel leads the experimentation. It is establishing a model of repression that will be converted for other countries' (quoted in Surin, 2003 Surin, K. 2003. 'The Night Can Sweat With Terror As Before': Afterthoughts. South Atlantic Quarterly, 102(4): 895–913. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], pp. 896–897). The authors of the RAND study acknowledge that their purpose was not to explore how a Palestinian state might be created, but rather to explore the mechanisms necessary to ensure that such a state, if created, would be viable. The study also leaves aside the question of the Israeli settlement colonies, currently home to 400,000 Israeli Jews who have been systematically integrated into the militarized world of their government's settler-colonial project (Weizman, 2002 Weizman, E. 2002. The politics of verticality. openDemocracy, [online]. Available from: http://www.opendemocracy.net/conflict-politicsverticality/article_801.jsp [accessed 28 Dec 2006] [Google Scholar]). I refer here to the classic formulation of Karl von Clausewitz, who describes the process by which wars that begin as limited undertakings tend to move in the direction of total war. For a useful explication of these issues, see Barkawi (2005) Barkawi, T. 2005. Globalization and War, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. [Google Scholar]. See Collins (2007) Collins, J. 2007. Global Palestine: A collision for our time. Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies, 16(1): 3–18. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar] for a discussion of how the state's decision to wage a 'war on the milieu'—Virilio's phrase for a war waged directly on civilians and on the natural and built environment that ensures their survival—pushes subaltern groups to wage their own war on the metropolitan 'milieu' (shopping malls, buses, restaurants, etc.).
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