PicoBlog

One should bear witness, in this time of scapegoating, censoring and nascent McCarthyism. In this time, one is also a bare witness, one without the protections of the state, of rights, or of institutions. To witness is to say what there is to see here, against all policing. Because so many remember from 2020 that the police view of the world does not align with their own, this is a real contest, massively unequal in terms of resources and power, but real nonetheless.

I cannot say that everything will be all right if you opt to be a bare witness. There are countless examples from Artforum to 92Y and so many museums, galleries and universities. One person posted on my social media that they expected to see a consequence for their work in the art world but that it was time. Others who rely on visas or are otherwise in precarious situations may not be able to make that choice.

I can only speak for myself. It feels to me that what it means to be “Jewish” but not pro-Israel, anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian, is not the same today as it was two months ago now, on October 6, 2023. The choices aren’t different but their implications are. The shift is that it is not (only) the Jewish part of the “Jewish state” mantra that’s the problem, it’s the state. Learning from the Black radical tradition, it’s time for abolition.

At once it will seem that I have sinned because is there not a “right to self-determination”? But I want self-determination for people, not states. States don’t have rights, they have power. The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination holds that the right to self-determination involves

“the rights of all peoples to pursue freely their economic, social and cultural development without outside interference” and that “Governments are to represent the whole population without distinction as to race, color, descent or national or ethnic origin.”

In all the territory formerly known as Palestine under the Ottoman Empire, that’s not happening, to put it mildly. The only possible sovereignty that would sustain these principles would be what Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson has called a “nested sovereignty,” in the North American context. That is to say, a non-absolute, interlaced way of being.

My point is simple: states are not necessarily the means through which people(s) will find self-determination and certainly not the only way to do so. Especially if those states are carceral colonial ones.

Abolition looks, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore puts it, “to find alternatives to the despairing sense, that so much change, in retrospect, seems only ever to have been displacement and redistribution of human sacrifice.” Palestine is the classic example of this failure—the effort to undo the wrongs of the Holocaust came only at the expense of so many other wrongs.

The first alternative to think about is to undo the connection of Jewishness to the nation-state of Israel. This has become unsayable, to the extent that the US House of Representatives has endorsed the belief that anti-Zionism is antisemitism, over many of its own Jewish members.

To follow Gilmore again, let’s begin with the understanding that freedom is a place not a state. A place is not necessarily a synonym for land, certainly not for land expropriated from others and defended violently and exclusively. It can be a body, Gilmore suggests. It means putting “life over death,” with all the implications of that phrase in the present crisis.

Instead, it is the necropolitics of the Holocaust that are always deployed in defense of Israel as a “Jewish state.” Israel’s use of that unspeakable history portrays Zionism as the solution to the failure of diaspora Jews to protect ourselves. This argument was immediately apparent to many Jewish thinkers in the wake of the Holocaust—who rejected it.

Take Hannah Arendt. If she were trying to publish her 1962 classic Eichmann in Jerusalem today, it would be banned as antisemitic. Adolf Eichmann was the bureaucrat who oversaw the infrastructures by which people were delivered to extermination camps. Abducted from hiding in Argentina, he was placed on trial in Jerusalem and executed in 1961.

Arendt designated the entire proceedings a “show trial.” She cited evidence that Hitler’s rise to power was received by Zionists as “the decisive defeat of assimilationism.” Time and again, she unpicked the weaknesses of the legal process, even as she was quite comfortable with Eichmann’s execution.

She stressed how Eichmann’s prosectors returned over and again to the argument made by Israeli prime minister David ben Gurion, which drew:

The contrast between Israeli heroism and the submissive weakness with which Jews went to their death (11)

Witnesses were repeatedly asked : “why did you not resist?” The contrast was with Israeli militarism, exemplified by Eichmann’s capture. In the same year as Arendt’s book, the psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim published an essay offering “freedom from ghetto thinking.” Bettelheim’s solution was the opposite of Ben Gurion’s—complete assimilation. From these apparently contradictory versions of “Jewishness,” a spectrum of diaspora passivity took hold.

As Arendt did not hesitate to point out, the Final Solution was designed to render resistance somewhere between impossible, due to its systematic breaking of people’s sense of self; and undesirable, because of the unspeakable tortures inflicted on anyone caught resisting. And yet they did, creating all kinds of actions, from the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, to a 1944 uprising at Auschwitz, including taking photographs of the extermination process, and countless smaller acts of resistance and refusal.

Since October 7, it has been common to see the return of this earlier demonizing of non-Israeli Jewish people, as in this declaration from the English-language Jerusalem Post:

As these individuals march under banners reading, “Not in our name,” now is the time to turn that slogan right back at them.

The reference here is in part to the group If Not Now, as well as Jewish Voice for Peace and all of us who have said this.

In this view, one cannot be Jewish and for peace. That can’t be morally possible or permissible. For me, that means not just refusing to allow Israel to police what “Jewish” means, but that the attempt to create an ethnically-exclusive state at the very moment of decolonization in Africa and Asia was a catastrophic (Nakba) mistake from the start, precisely because it can only mean war. Making a “Jewish state” has not, and cannot, work in itself, let alone justify the harm that it has done to Palestinians.

Yet one of the most surprising developments since October 7 has been the realization of the extent to which many diaspora Jews feel that war Jewishness underpins their identity. The US media has been filled with Jews claiming to feel unsafe in such unlikely locations as Westchester, Cornell University or even the Upper West Side, to say nothing of the reaction in Israel itself. While the representatives of Hillel and other Zionist groups are being clearly instrumental in expressing such fragility, it is too widespread to dismiss out of hand.

For many liberal Jewish people in the US, Israel and its military power turn out to be the underpinning of that post 9/11 shibboleth “security,” even though antisemitism here has always come predominantly from the domestic far-right. Israel’s “right to exist” is the outcome of this continued sense of ghetto Jewishness and diaspora weakness in the cultural unconscious.

If that sense of diaspora weakness was formed in the 1960s, it received support from Claude Lanzmann’s 8 hour documentary Shoah (1985). As early as 1967, Lanzmann publicly declared: “Without Israel, I feel naked and vulnerable,” the very definition of diaspora weakness. For all its problems, the smallest sequence in Shoah shows how little October 7 has to do with the state-organized extermination of millions.

Lanzmann followed Shoah with a five-hour documentary Tsahal (1994), a hymn of praise to the Israeli Defense Force. No more weakness. In this film, Israeli generals claim “[o]ur army is pure… it does not kill children.” The death toll of children in Gaza as I write is now over 7,000. The statement should now read: “our army is pure war.”

If it is not possible to split “Jewish” from this war “state,” then it is not possible either to claim a secular or anti-Zionist Jewishness or to refuse Jewish identification without refusing the war state. Such is indeed the position of the notorious “The Basic Law: Israel – The Nation State of the Jewish People” that defined Israel as an exclusively “Jewish” state. Article 6 states:

b. The State shall act, in the Diaspora, to preserve the ties between the State and members of the Jewish People.

c. The State shall act to preserve the cultural, historical and religious heritage of the Jewish people among Jews in the Diaspora.

Many say I should stay “in” Jewishness to contest such politics. Others say that I cannot simply reject this external definition of myself. All I can do is profess my anarchy, my refusal of state-religion and its inevitable metamorphosis into permanent war, whereby Jewishness has become war. It’s an impossible demand, yes, but so are all the ones worth making.

Scholars from Rashid Khalidi to Angela Y. Davis have shown repeatedly that Israel is a carceral state. As such, it deploys what Nicole Fleetwood calls a “carceral visuality” that renders the incarcerated Palestinians “both visible and hypervisible but also unseeing and unseen.” The Separation Wall, checkpoints, segregated roads and license plates are just some of the techniques used in this carceral war-state.

Implied in this set of visualizing practices are the ways of seeing and unseeing among the guards. Some of those guards are police and military, others are Jewish citizens of Israel, and, like it or not, because of the Basic Law, so too are those of us in the diaspora. The first step as I have often said (“After Jewish (2014), “How to See Palestine” (2017) and “To See in the Dark” (2023) is to “see” Palestine, meaning to see Palestinians as people not “animals,” and to prioritize their life over death.

Next, it means using Palestine not as an exception but as exemplary. Following the work of Palestinian scholar Helga Tawil-Souri, I have situated the checkpoint as the paradigm institution of racializing surveillance. The checkpoint has no intention of reforming those it surveys, unlike the Panopticon. Nor is it an institution of control, as Deleuze had it, because the guards can and do override the biometric pass system at will.

Palestinian films like The Present (2020) show how it works. The Visualizing Palestine collective, whose work illustrates this piece, have taken the lead on infographics. Forensic Architecture have created the genre of spatial and visual reconstruction. Taken together, these countervisualizing tactics are doing the work of abolition in the colonial carceral state by unbuilding its visuality.

To the consternation of the pro-Israel lobby, its carceral visuality is no longer carrying all before it in the US. The widespread solidarity for Palestine among Black activists and artists has brought many of the younger people who followed Black Lives Matter to adopt their position. The compulsory Israeli nationalism that has emerged since October 7 is in turn an extension of post-2020 white nationalism and its compulsory support for ever-growing police funding.

Those that watched Darnella Frazier’s video of the murder of George Floyd, and were told by Derek Chauvin’s prosecutors to “believe what you saw,” are now looking at videos posted to Instagram by photographers like Pulitzer Prize finalist Wissam Nassar—who has always made it clear he is not affiliated with Hamas or Fatah—and are again believing it.

By contrast, Israeli generals claiming that small hospital rooms are Hamas headquarters does not convince anyone. Especially when former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak casually admitted to the astonishment of Christiane Amanpour on CNN that they were built by Israel.

The intense emotion that has accompanied all this is consistent with the long-term crisis in whiteness and its infrastructures, together with the expanded “infrastructure of feeling” that Gilmore understands as central to abolition geography.

None of this says how it will all end and none of it mitigates the staggering loss of life. The strike against (carceral) white sight and whiteness continues. Please play the video, it’s short and to the point.

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