This is very long, but it poses a number of very interesting philosophical
and political questions.
Miriam
On boycott, divestment, and sanctions
N Plus One Magazine
Politics
BRUCE ROBBINS
The Logic of the Beneficiary
On boycott, divestment, and sanctions
Published in Issue 24: New Age Publication date Winter 2016
https://nplusonemag.com/issue-24/politics/the-logic-of-the-beneficiary/acebo
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Image removed by sender.Image from the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library,
University of Toronto, via flickr.
THE PALESTINIAN CIVIL SOCIETY MOVEMENT for boycott, divestment, and
sanctions (BDS) against Israel came into existence in July 2005, partly as a
response to the International Court of Justices ruling one year earlier on
the illegality of the 430-mile security fence being constructed by Israel
partly inside Palestinian territory. BDS called on people of conscience
around the world to launch broad boycotts, implement divestment
initiatives, and to demand sanctions against Israel, until Palestinian
rights are recognized in full compliance with international law. Unlike the
two-state solution, which ignored both refugees not living in Gaza or the
West Bank and Palestinian citizens of Israel, it neatly fitted the three
planks of its platform to the three broad sections of the Palestinian
people. For Palestinians on the West Bank, there was a call to end the
occupation and dismantle the wall. For those who are currently second-class
citizens of Israel, there was a call for full and equal rights. And for
refugees living elsewhere, there was a call to respect their right to
return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN Resolution 194.
In the ten years since this nonviolent initiative began, it has chalked up
some notable victories. These include the 2013 BDS resolutions passed by the
Asian American and American Studies Associations, followed by other academic
organizations, as well as similar movements by churches and trade unions.
Negative publicity has driven down the stock price of the Israeli company
SodaStream and haunted companies like Ahava (manufactures in an illegal
settlement), Hewlett-Packard (military IT), and Caterpillar (home
demolitions). Shows have been canceled by Lauryn Hill, Coldplay, and Elvis
Costello. There have been full endorsements of the boycott by Danny Glover
and Roger Waters, among other entertainers.
BDS has also accumulated a good deal of controversy. The Palestinian
Authority opposes it: eager to remind the world that it does recognize
Israel, it supports the boycotting of products manufactured in the occupied
territories but nothing aimed at Israel itself. In the US, a number of
university presidents responded angrily to the ASAs resolution, proclaiming
that all academic boycotts violate the core values of academic freedom and
the free flow of ideas. South Carolina and Illinois legislators have passed
bills engaging their states to blacklist companies that boycott Israel. The
TransPacific Partnership bill passed by Congress in June stipulated the
rejection of anti-Israel boycotts as a core principle in any trade talks
with the European Union. The AIPAC-supported effort to make BDS illegal may
well succeed. Israel outlawed public support for BDS a couple of years ago.
The growing appeal of BDS relies on a growing sense that the founding claims
of Zionism are less and less relevant to the facts on the ground. On the
most fundamental recent issues, like the 2014 invasion of Gaza and the
ongoing theft of West Bank land for settlements, Israels conduct is
increasingly held to be indefensible.
Shavit presents the historical spectacle as sublime too immense for
ordinary categories to contain.
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A core of defensiveness about this conduct persists, even among smart and
principled people. Its worth asking where it comes from. You cant tell
from the arguments and counterarguments. As many who have suffered through
these debates will have noticed, the points raised are often unenlightening
even if you agree with them. You would think the very idea that the Israelis
have been selling bottled water extracted from the Golan Heights while
making it unlawful for Palestinians to drill wells on their own property
would shake the most die-hard Zionist. But this is rarely the level on which
we form reasons and opinions. More often, such decisions come from somewhere
deepera substratum of unarticulated, but not necessarily unprincipled,
intuition. With new movements and venues for BDS popping up almost daily and
receiving surprising amounts of mainstream attention, both positive and
negative, the time seems ripe to delve into that dark substratum, and
thereby try to understand the deeper logic that undergirds the BDS debate.
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THAT DARK SUBSTRATUM becomes visible in Ari Shavits much-acclaimed My
Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel (2013). In a long section
of the book, Shavit, an Israeli journalist for Haaretz, goes in search of
the story behind one of the most harrowing episodes of the military conquest
of Palestine: the Israeli armys massacre of Palestinians at Lydda, a
once-thriving city between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. As he recounts it, in
July 1948 the army moved through the streets tossing grenades into houses
and firing on Palestinian civilians. They came upon Palestinians taking
sanctuary in a mosque and gunned them down. Others, many of them women and
children, died on a forced march to Jordan after being permitted to leave
with the possessions they could carry. Shavit speaks with the brigade
commander and other soldiers in an attempt to reconstruct the story. He
tries manfully to explain the atrocity on its own terms: there were
misunderstandings, provocations, unfortunate improvisations by soldiers on
the ground. But ultimately, he concludes, there was a deliberate strategy of
expulsion.
He drives to Lydda, lingers in the demolished center of the old city,
reflects on the ruins and impoverished dwellings. Amid the ugly slums, the
shabby market, and the cheap stores, he writes, it is clear that there is
still an unhealed wound. Unlike other cities where Israels modernity has
overwhelmed old Palestine, here Palestine still makes itself felt.
Confronting the tragedy, he confronts the founding idea of Israel itself:
Do I wash my hands of Zionism? Do I turn my back on the Jewish national
movement that carried out the deed of Lydda? Like the brigade commander, I
am faced with something too immense to deal with. Like the military
commander, [Shmaryahu] Gutman, I see a reality I cannot contain. Like the
training group leader, I am not only sad, I am horrified. For when one opens
the black box, one understands that whereas the small mosque massacre could
have been a misunderstanding brought about by a tragic chain of accidental
events, the conquest of Lydda and the expulsion of Lydda were no accident.
They were an inevitable phase of the Zionist revolution that laid the
foundation for the Zionist state. Lydda is an integral and essential part of
our story. And when I try to be honest about it, I see that the choice is
stark: either reject Zionism because of Lydda, or accept Zionism along with
Lydda.
One thing is clear to me: the brigade commander and the military governor
were right to get angry at the bleeding heart Israeli liberals of later
years who condemn what they did in Lydda but enjoy the fruits of their deed.
. . . If need be, Ill stand by the damned. Because I know that if it wasnt
for them, the State of Israel would not have been born. If it wasnít for
them, I would not have been born. They did the dirty, filthy work that
enables my people, myself, my daughter, and my sons to live.
Shavit presents the historical spectacle as sublimetoo immense for ordinary
categories to contain. He himself deals with it only by admitting that,
horrified as he is, deep down he wants the dirty work done. (In that sense
he got what he wanted at Lydda, where participants in the slaughter included
such national heroes-to-be as Moshe Dayan and Yitzhak Rabin.) Shavit cant
say no to what they did for him. Our side is clear: we had to come into the
Lydda Valley and we had to take the Lydda Valley, he writes. There is no
other home for us, and there was no other way. But he sees why the
Palestinians who became homeless that day cannot forget Lydda either. He
admits that the massacre and expulsion were policy, not accident. He says
this truth is essential in the sense that it has to be confessed, but also
in that it had to happen to create the state of Israel. And because its
essential, it cant be damned. He is the beneficiary of that dirty, filthy
violence, enjoying the fruits of their deed. As a beneficiary, he would be
a hypocrite if he damned that on which his existence depends.
Yes, he says, Europe was founded on atrocity. And the atrocities continue.
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Shavits honestyhis acknowledgment that the very founding of Israel was
based on atrocity, if also in his eyes on tragic necessityis at odds with
most Zionist commentary, at least in the US. When it comes to the facts, for
the most part he faces them. To be sure, there are evasions. If you compare
Shavits account with that of, say, the more critical Israeli historian Ilan
Pappé, you will note that Shavit does not give the number of the Palestinian
dead, even as an estimate. He does not mention that Dr. George Habash, who
went on to found the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was
working that day as a physician in the local hospital. To mention what
Habash saw during those hours at the operating table would have suggested
good reasons for the Palestinian violence that Shavit, like almost everyone
else in Israel, wants to present as unreasoned and unreasonable. He doesnt
underline how systematically Israeli soldiers looted jewelry and other
valuables from the homes of refugees, as testified to by all observers,
Israelis included. Images of uniformed Jewish thugs robbing and humiliating
helpless civilians come too close for comfort to iconic scenes of Jewish
deportees herded and hounded by the Nazis. Still, Shavits telling is more
vivid and, where individual acts of violence are concerned, even more
accusatory than, for instance, that of the Palestinian volunteer and
paramedic Spiro Munayyer, whose firsthand account (published as a book in
Beirut, with extracts translated in the Journal of Palestine Studies in
1998) emphasized the heroism of the citys vastly outnumbered Palestinian
defenders.
When it comes to the moral case, there are obvious holes in Shavits
argument. Shavit refuses to damn an atrocity. By the same standard, any
Palestinian could refuse to damn suicide bombers, and would have at least as
good a case. How would Shavit like that? If you take his route, theres no
way out; you choose the certainty of unending vendetta over the still not
entirely hopeless project of peace-with-justice. A second response would be
that past atrocities are not the point; the point is that the ethnic
cleansing of Palestine continues. A few rockets that cause some
much-documented Israeli anxiety but dont hit anything cannot be compared to
the deliberate massacre of two thousand people, most of them civilians, in
Israels latest (2014) foray into Gaza. What Shavit is really defending,
without saying so, are ongoing, apparently limitless atrocities. Not just
amorality in the past but amorality that goes on and on. To decide the moral
case, thats perhaps all that needs to be said.
Shavit suggests that you cant question the premises on which your life
depends; all you can do is say thank you and go on your way. In a way, he is
speaking on behalf of moral consistency. I think thats why his account
exerts emotional force, even if rational objections are not hard to come by.
We may be inoculated against Shavits conclusionI hope we arebut there is
more to contemplate in the logic that gets him there.
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The problem that Shavit touches on could be called that of the
well-intentioned beneficiary: the person who knowingly profits from a system
she believes to be unjust. One conclusion that seems to flow from this
situation is that if you benefit from past atrocities, you must either
stand with those who committed those atrocities or somehow renounce the
benefits. But what if it turns out that the benefits are impossible to
renounce? The clock cannot be turned back. If you did manage to walk away
from the life you are leading, wouldnt the life with which you replaced it
make you the beneficiary of similarly reprehensible facts and deeds? In the
name of life itself, you find yourself after all denied any real choice. How
much more elegant, then, to stop sticking other peoples noses into those
essential actions and demanding that they disavow what has made their
lives possible. If Shavits refusal to condemn past atrocities has, at
least, the force of honesty, its because we agree that we are all the
beneficiaries of unspeakable actsall of us without exception.
The logic of the beneficiary, though, can lead in the opposite direction.
Take, for instance, the movement for economic redistribution at the global
scale, something that no domestic constituency or domestic politics can be
relied on to put at the top of its agenda. I borrowed the phrase all of us
without exception above from Jean-Paul Sartres preface to Frantz Fanons
The Wretched of the Earth:
You know well enough that we are exploiters. You know too that we have laid
our hands on first the gold and the metals, then the petroleum of the new
continents, and that we have brought them back to the old countries. This
was not without excellent results, as witness our palaces, our cathedrals,
and our great industrial cities; and then when there was a threat of a
slump, the colonial markets were there to soften the blow or to divert it.
Crammed with riches, Europe accorded the human status de jure to its
inhabitants. With us, to be a man is to be an accomplice of colonialism,
since all of us without exception have profited by colonial exploitation.
Sartres conclusion is more promising than Shavits: Yes, he says, Europe
was founded on atrocity. And the atrocities continue. That is precisely why
we Europeans (they are his addressees) must do everything in our power to
support anticolonial movements like Algerias. Sartre, too, is speaking the
language of the beneficiary: denouncing injustice while admitting that he
and his readers have profited from it and grown out of its soil. Why, then,
does this logic take him in so wildly different a direction? Maybe the
answer lies in how presentist the logic is, or (to coin a term) how pastist.
Shavits Ill stand by the damned makes it clear that for him, the moral
responsibility that counts is moral responsibility to the past, which made
his present life possible. But the same logic applies in the presentfor
example, when considering the political-economic link between my prosperity
here and someone elses deprivation in a distant there. Under the
capitalist system, George Orwell wrote in 1936, in order that England may
live in comparative comfort, a hundred million Indians must live on the
verge of starvationan evil state of affairs, but you acquiesce in it every
time you step into a taxi or eat a plate of strawberries and cream. A
quarter of a century before Sartre, Orwell was already showing how useful
the logic of the beneficiary would still seem in the 21st century, as the
target of progressive efforts has shifted from colonialism to global
inequality.
Like admitting dependence on atrocities that occurred in a more or less
distant past, this present-tense instance of the logic of the beneficiary
works in the mode of the sublime: the system is too big and too complexly
interconnected to take in all at once or to grasp with our usual moral
categories. Thus it, too, has the potential to be paralyzing politically.
Orwells you acquiesce in it seems intended to make you stand up and stop
acquiescing, but it also makes such a disruption sound improbable. The tone
is a bit like that of all of us without exception, which tries to generate
a movement in favor of global justice, but in so doing erases the
differences by which political conflict has traditionally been defined, and
therefore makes political action require a heroic selfovercomingthe
overcoming not of politcal enemies, but of human nature itself. Thats an
overstatement, but it has a kernel of truth. From the perspective of the
beneficiary, a politics of global redistribution demands disinterestedness.
Disinterestedness is usually thought of as antithetical to politics. A
disinterested politics would mean that you, the beneficiary, would have to
break with yourselfto be inconsistent.
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MORAL INCONSISTENCY is not the only fault Noam Chomsky, an unexpected
opponent, finds in BDS, but it is by far the most compelling part of his
indictment. Writing in the Nation in July 2014, he argues that calling for
the recognition of the rights of Palestinian Israelis to full equality, as
BDS does, at once opens the door to the standard glass house reaction:
for example, if we boycott Tel Aviv University because Israel violates human
rights at home, then why not boycott Harvard because of far greater
violations by the United States? Chomsky adds a pragmatic consideration:
initiatives vulnerable to this tu quoque reaction have predictably been
failures. They will continue to be failures, he goes on, unless educational
efforts reach the point of laying much more groundwork in the public
understanding for them, as was done in the case of South Africa. Leaving
aside the interesting pragmatic qualification (which is almost an
about-face, encouraging us to keep working for BDS after all), Chomsky seems
to take the people in glass houses point as the final word. Chomsky finds
BDS so vulnerable to that argument because, down and dirty, he agrees with
that argument. Who are we Americans, with our shameful, genocidal history,
to boycott anyone? Shouldnt we just boycott ourselves?
Time eats away at the rights of even the most violently victimized of
victims.
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Todd Gitlin, writing in Tablet, sounds more plausible than most critics of
BDS, in part because so many academics declare themselves against boycotts
as such while Gitlin gives examples of boycotts he has supported, like
Montgomery, apartheid, and grapes. But he fritters away that plausibility by
making a rhetorical move that is all too familiar in Middle East debates:
Exaggerating the Evil of the Enemy. BDS, he pretends, expresses one groups
desire that another disappear. This is because, he says, BDS aims at the
return of all lands colonized by Israel, meaning everything since 1948.
Never mind that this statement is untrue (the movement explicitly restricts
the demand to lands colonized since 1967, in other words to the West Bank).
As in South Africa, what it asks is not anyones disappearance, but
everyones agreement to abide by the same legal framework. Gitlins
exaggerated fear stems from the logic of the beneficiary: built on a series
of injustices, Israel is surely being asked to surrender all the benefits of
those injustices, and just as surely would disappear if it did so. Gitlin,
whether he realizes it or not, seeks to reconcile himself to past atrocities
in order to defend the state of Israel as it exists, to suggest that what it
achieved must not and cannot be given away.
Both the advantages and the disadvantages of the logic of the beneficiary
become clearer when critics of BDS turn to the third plank in its platform:
the right of return. Gitlin treats as a dealbreaker the right of Palestinian
refugees to return to their homes, which he understands as a disguised
demand for the one-state solution. Chomsky argues that the right of return
has no meaningful international support and is not dictated by international
law; to insist on it, he concludes, is a virtual guarantee of failure.
Many other two-staters see the right of return as largely symbolic, though
not lacking in urgency, and (like many of the demands made by Native
Americans) open to being dealt with by monetary and other, more creative
forms of compensation. Gitlin prefers not to acknowledge the possibility of
pragmatic compromises. For him, as for Shavit, this is an all-or-nothing,
love-it-or-leave-it proposition.
On the other hand, Gitlin is on to something more substantive when he brings
up the question of who, exactly, is a refugee. And this point brings us
back to the question of how the logic of the beneficiary works differently
as applied to the past and to the present.
To ask who can count as a refugee is to assert that the passage of time has
ethical consequences. Palestinians who were driven out in 1948 are certainly
refugees. Does the same hold for their descendants who have never lived
within the 1948 borders? And the descendants of the descendants? Whatever
the horror, it becomes less and less actionable with the years. Time eats
away at the rights of even the most violently victimized of victims. This is
the point that Walter Benn Michaels raised in his pungently absolutist way
when he suggested that for Americans today to apologize to the Native
American victims of genocide or the African-American victims of slavery
would mean apologizing for something you didnt do to people to whom you
didnt do it (in fact, to people to whom it wasnt done). Faced with
blatant injustice, it is profoundly disturbing to think that the mere
passing of years should make any ethical difference at all. And yet there is
no denying that to some degree it does, and must. It must, even if you know
that the Israelis have been cynically playing out the clock, waiting for
refugees to die off and calculating that the issue will die with them.
For Shavit, what is given is the past. For Gitlin (at least when he talks
about the right of return), the past is leaking away by the minute, and must
be allowed to do so. Presumably this holds as much for the victims of the
Holocaust as for the victims of the Nakba, though it would be helpful if he
would say so. Thus Gitlin, too, nods to the logic of the beneficiary. Most
of those now living in what were once Palestinian homes in Palestine, he
suggests, will not be evictedand presumably the same holds for those
non-Jews living in what were once Jewish villages in Eastern Europe. Most of
those who have benefitted from these mass murders and expulsions cannot be
asked to forfeit their undeserved privileges. Historical continuity between
past and present may be real, but it is unsustainable. If you tried to hold
in your mind a full, unfading picture of every injustice, its pain and
horror as fresh as the instant it was perpetrated and sufferedif every day
the whole school made a mandatory daylong visit to the atrocity museumyou
know in advance what would be the result. There would be no forgiving or
forgetting. Without those, it is hard to imagine how life as we know it
could continue. To borrow from George Eliot: we should die of that roar that
lies on the other side of silence.
BDS is not aimed at repairing the original injustice of the Nakba. Its much
too late for that.
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There is thus a certain sad wisdom in the pragmatic presentism that is
Americas default setting where its own sins are concerned. Confronted with
an atrocity-filled history, people will say: I wasnt there, its not my
fault, and anyway, it was so long ago. Bygones really should be bygones.
When I asked my Russian-immigrant barber what he thought about Tom Bradys
responsibility for the deflated footballs in last years NFL playoffs, he
replied: Whats done is done. This sounds somewhat lacking in moral
sensitivity. It will certainly not encourage those promoting reparations for
Native Americans or African Americans. But it is something the promoters of
reparations will have to reckon with.
Rather than simple amorality, it is better understood as the obscure,
imperfect fragment of another morality. It assumes something like the
following: Moral consistency is unobtainable. Injustice is what you should
expect. Its how the world is. Whether I suffer or benefit from the current
dispensation, I was not put on earth to redeem it. I have to work with what
I have been given. As long as you dont try to grab what I have, I will
leave you in peace to deflate your footballs.
I suspect that, for better or worse, these sentiments help explain the
rhetorical force of the anti-BDS position on the left. What is so compelling
about Chomskys argument? Is it the warning to would-be stone throwers with
breakable windows that they are hypocrites? (Or merely vulnerable to other
stone throwers? The ambiguity is there in the proverb.) Yes, many of us feel
more comfortable blaming ourselves than blaming others. But here Chomsky
merely echoes a sentiment the Israeli street has been muttering for years.
As Amos Oz puts it in The Slopes of Lebanon (1989), Nobodys any better
than we are, so they should all shut up. The flaw in the glass-house
argument seems transparent. You cant criticize except from a position of
moral purity. You dont occupy a position of moral purity. Therefore you
cant criticize.
The inference is wrong because the major premise is wrong. You dont have to
occupy a position of moral purity in order to criticize. The position you
occupy ought to be irrelevant.
Ought to be. But is it? Chomsky assumes that the position you occupy is not
irrelevant. And it is this assumption, despite the vast political
differences between him and Shavit, that gives their arguments a similar
character. Chomsky builds his argument on Americas bloodsoaked history. For
him, too, the blood we have shed remains definitive of who we are. Shavit
and Chomsky are at one in taking collective violence as essential,
unendingly constitutive and morally decisive, and they echo much recent
political theory on the left. All Nation-States are born and found
themselves in violence, Jacques Derrida writes in his essay Forgiveness:
the moment of foundation, the instituting moment, is anterior to the law or
legitimacy which it founds. It is thus outside the law, and violent by that
very fact. This is not something you will hear from the Netanyahus and
other joyously uninhibited racists. But by now it is not alien to educated
common sense. Who has not nodded sagely at the idea that the state of
exception reveals the truth of the norm, and that every liberal democracy
has its origins in bloody atrocities that it then has to cover up? It should
come as no surprise that we now hear it from the more sophisticated
apologists for Israel, those like Shavit who are willing to name the Nakba
and admit how badly Israel behaved to the Palestinians in 1948. After all,
they will say, founding a nation is no dinner party. Its aim is not
universal justice. Look at what the US did as it was forming itself into a
nation-state.
Critics have suggested that Chomsky is lapsing from his ostensible
universalism when he blames the US, and only the US, for most of the worlds
injustice, thereby leaving other factors invisible and letting other guilty
parties off the hook. In what looks like a preemptive strike against this
criticism, Chomsky has written, The most elementary moral principles would
lead to playing up the crimes of domestic origin in comparison to those of
official enemies, that is, playing up the crimes that one can do something
about. The what one can do something about criterion rehabilitates the
seemingly discredited notion of a proper or natural sphere of influence. It
permits Chomsky to embrace an upside-down version of Shavits patriotism. If
Shavit finds that the nation, by necessity, requires acts of transgressive
violence, Chomsky in turn feels that those acts of transgressive violence
necessarily limit our actions to the sphere of the nation. America First:
first as an object of critique, and first as a field of action. The nation
is founded in violence. Therefore what you say and how you act cannot be
determined by laws or universal principles alone. Your politics is not
serious unless its priorities are dictated by where and when you happen to
live, what nation you happen to belong to. If everyone were responsible for
everything, no one would really be responsible for anything. We have a
greater responsibility to speak up about those things that are at hand, and
therefore subject to our power to affect them.
In order to be actionable, then, principles must always be put through the
filter of proximity. What really matters is what is close at hand. This
would be a rather forceful challenge to cosmopolitanisms old-fashioned call
for a primary concern with the welfare of humanity at the expense of local
loyalties. It can go in scary directions. Stand your groundfight for what
happens to be yours without pausing to ask how you happened to acquire it.
Yet it can also generate a cosmopolitanism of its own: technological
advances and new transnational networks and organizations have vastly
increased the portion of social reality that must now be considered knowable
and actionable. The line separating near and far isnt where it used to be.
The fact that Israel is so afraid of boycotts gives them a very intimate
feel.
As it happens, what one can do something about is really an argument for
BDS, not against it. Chomsky seems to feel that our leverage as Americans
should be used only against the United States. But why? The demand that the
US cut its aid to Israel unless Israel obeys international law in no way
contradicts or excludes BDS. And which after all is more proximate to you,
the US government or the churches, universities, professional associations,
and other institutions where BDS has taken root? Those dedicated to the
Palestinian cause, Chomsky warns in his subtitle, should think carefully
about the tactics they choose. Cutting off US aid to Israel, the tactic
Chomsky says he prefers, is not actually a tactic at all. Its not a means
to an end; it is the end. Pull that off, and its game over. A tactic, on
the other hand, is precisely what BDS is. It deploys immediately available
means, a wide variety of existing institutions, memberships, pressure
points. America First? Its these institutions and memberships that you will
encounter first, well before you get anywhere near the levers of national
power. In that sense BDS better satisfies Chomskys moral imperative: to
work with what is at hand, what one can do something about.
Any debt to the living takes precedence over any debt to the dead.
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There is a simpler way to say this. BDS is not aimed at repairing the
original injustice of the Nakba. Its much too late for that. Nor is it
about achieving moral consistency. That it is always too late for. Its
about having maximum impact on the policies toward the Palestinians that the
state of Israel is currently pursuing, policies that even the cleverest of
Israels supporters have trouble defending. BDS offers solidarity to
Palestinians now, solidarity in a form that Palestinian civil society has
said it wants. If there is an inconsistency in thisa failure publicly to
recognize or appreciate the extent to which Americans ignore their own
bloody historyit is one that must be embraced in order to achieve the goals
that we want.
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IN A WORLD erected on atrocity, the desire for moral consistency will often
look counter productive, a goad to the wrong sorts of actions (militarism in
the guise of selfdefense) or a paralyzing inhibition of other actions that
might be useful, like consumer boycotts or BDS. It deserves some measure of
respect, if only because we need it so badly when we contemplate, say,
injustice at the global scale. In his play The Fever, Wallace Shawn tries to
look through commodities to see the social relations that lie on the other
side. And as soon as he does, he finds the act of looking unbearable. It
delivers a sense of the world that the human eye or heart was simply not
constructed to sustaina truth, but one we are not equipped to handle.
A naked woman leans over a fence. A man buys a magazine and stares at her
picture. The destinies of these two are linked. The man has paid the woman
to take off her clothes, to lean over the fence. The photograph contains its
history the moment the woman unbuttoned her shirt, how she felt, what the
photographer said. The price of the magazine is a code that describes the
relationships between all these people the woman, the man, the publisher,
the photographer who commanded, who obeyed. The cup of coffee contains the
history of the peasants who picked the beans, how some of them fainted in
the heat of the sun, some were beaten, some were kicked.
For two days I could see the fetishism of commodities everywhere around me.
It was a strange feeling. Then on the third day I lost it, it was gone, I
couldnt see it anymore.
As it happens, he does get it back. On the one hand, the logic of the
beneficiary leads Shawn no further than self-recrimination: The life I live
is irredeemably corrupt. It has no justification. This is not the stuff of
politics as traditionally conceived. Imagine founding a political party by
denouncing an injustice and then trying to recruit your entire membership
among those who profit from that injustice. On the other hand, its too soon
to give the logic of the beneficiary either a thumbs-down or a thumbs-up.
Where would the movement for global justice be if it could not find some
political use for such epiphanies?
In this respect the past is different. Any debt to the living takes
precedence over any debt to the dead. The recognition that we inhabit the
site of violent injustices committed long ago matters if there is something
to be done by or for those now alive whose lives have been visibly shaped by
those injustices. The most eloquent champions of reparations to African
Americans, like Ta-Nehisi Coates, insist on how a racism that is now illegal
continues to push its dirty fingers into the present, choking off black
lives by such palpable, measurable means as redlining. This is the obvious
answer to Walter Benn Michaelss argument that apologies or reparations
offered many decades later would not be addressed to those who actually
suffered the wrongs in question. By the criterion of continuity between past
injustice and present suffering, the same holds for the Native Americans and
the Palestinians. Those who are still on the fence about BDS may be
encouraged by the thought that it is not first and foremost about the past,
but the response to an active call for solidarity from Palestinians whose
rights are not respected today.
