a new context for the communal production, appropriation and distribution of critical knowledge
Thursday, September 13, 2007
commercial crusades
Illegal Attacks is the new single from Ian Brown (of the Stone Roses fame) featuring Sinead O'Connor in the backing vocals. The video and the lyrics are below.
So what the fuck is this UK Gunnin with this US of A In Iraq and Iran and in Afghanistan
Does not a day go by Without the Israeli Air Force Fail to drop it’s bombs from the sky?
How many mothers to cry? How many sons have to die? How many missions left to fly over Palestine? Coz as a matter of facts It’s a fact, it’s an act These are illegal attacks So bring the soldiers back These are illegal attacks It’s contracts for contacts I’m singing concrete facts So bring the soldiers back!!!!
What mean ya that you beat my people (2x) And grind the faces of the poor
So tell me just how come were the Taliban Sat burning incense in Texas Roaming round in a Lexus Sitting on six billion oil drums Down with the Dow Jones, up on the Nasdaq Pushed into the war zones
It’s a commercial crusade ‘Coz all the oil men get paid And only so many soldiers come home It’s a commando crusade A military charade And only so many soldiers come home
Soldiers, soldiers come home Soldiers come home
Through all the blood and sweat Nobody can forget It ain’t the size of the dog in the fight It’s the size of the fight in the dog on the day or the night There’s no time to reflect On the threat, the situation, the bark nor the bite These are commercial crusades Coz all the oil men get paid These are commando crusades Commando tactical rape And from the streets of New York and Baghdad to Tehran and Tel Aviv Bring forth the prophets of the Lord From dirty bastards filling pockets With the profits of greed
These are commercial crusades Commando tactical raids Playing military charades to get paid
And who got the devils? And who got the Lords? Build yourself a mountain, drink up in the fountain
1 refugee camp, 20 kids, 11 villages, 8 of which are only remnants, or not even that. These are the stats of the Birthright Replugged trip that I helped run a few weeks ago. I’m not sure where to even begin to explain the significance of this trip.
The kids are all under the age of 16 and from the Jenin Refugee camp. The city of Jenin is in fact mostly the camp, housing refugees from the ’48 Nakba. The camp is massive, and was majorly destroyed in 2002 when Israeli forces besieged the city, entirely leveled flat huge areas, killed more than 50 people, and left more than 4,000 homeless (again). Temporary tents were set up to house victims after the siege, in the same exact place as the original tents of the camp from 1948.
Many of these children have never left the camp, and for some, sadly, it will have been the only time. When they turn 16, they will get a huwiyya, an id card, and will be subject to the travel restrictions on Palestinians, which means that they will not be able to travel into ’48 Palestine, and that their travel around the West Bank will be seriously restricted, and at times cut off at the whim of the Israeli military administration. This particular group of kids are all involved in the activities of the Freedom Theatre, and their families all come from 11 villages in the north of 1948 Palestine.
So why are these called “villages of origin?” Well, first of all, these villages continue to be identity markers for these children. They all know their villages of origin, often know so many stories of those villages, and in some cases, still carry the nuanced dialects of different areas. Their families often still have the keys or the land deeds to the original houses fled from in ’48. The elders know the land like it is their own bodies, and can tell you how many meters from the house was the well, how many steps to take to get from this tree to that.
But the children? They are 3rd generation refugees, and most of them don’t know any world besides their camps. The camps, once an amassment of UN tents, are now cities, albeit rough ones made of concrete houses tightly packed together. Some of the children have been displaced in their lives too, due to home demolitions, a favoured tactic of the Israeli forces to address “security issues” which can range from collective punishment for the family (or neighbours) of a resistance fighter, to making way for settlers or army roads to accompany the apartheid wall. But these kids do not “know” their villages of origin in ’48, they have never seen them, and as I said before, most of them are amongst the more than 400 villages destroyed in ’48. So what does it mean to take kids “back” to their villages? Indeed, the rhetoric of origins and return is loaded since Zionism has used that language to talk about Jewish “return” to its “origins.”
first trip to the sea The Replugged trip has various goals and aims. One is to just help the kids get out of the camp, to see other settings, to visit the sea, to sleep a night without the sounds of Israeli incursions. Since the adults of the camp are prohibited from traveling, this is one thing that internationals can help with. But the main goal is to creatively work towards the right of return, as it will not come just through political negotiations (this may be the last step, if it is ever possible), but through maintaining connections, and freeing those connections from the confines of the memory in the camp, to allow for the children to start developing their own dynamic relationships to their grandparents memory, and to envision what the right of return means to them, what it will look like taking into consideration the facts on the ground.
It was nothing short of appalling to be on the bus with them and to arrive to their villages, of which they may have a clear picture in their mind, and then to find that it is a dog pound, a garbage dump, a military base, a JNF forest, or a Jewish only settlement. I witnessed such heartbreaking confusion when we rolled into a modern kibbutz with swimming pools and palm trees and the kids asked, is this our village? Are these our houses? Will they be our houses again one day? In another case, in the infamous town of Ayn Hawd, where the original Palestinian houses were taken over and “maintained” by Israeli artists, while some of the refugees settled only meters away on a hill, where they can see their houses and occupiers. One of our kids from Jenin went to her grandfather’s house, now occupied by a shirtless artist who told her unthinkingly that she can come back (to visit) anytime, and another child retorted “actually she will turn 16 next year, and will be prohibited from leaving the West Bank.” This exchange is typical of a liberal Israeli attitude towards Palestinian refugees, i.e. at our convenience you can visit, so long as you are otherwise caged into your ghetto.
So how can we follow up from such a trip? The kids are working on an exhibition with the photos they took on the trip, which will debut in Jenin and then travel to the U.S. to get their stories out. Outside of Palestine, we can support Palestinians working towards the right of return. This is one of the three conditions agreed upon by over 170 Palestinian civil society organizations in their call for the international community to boycott, divest from, and impose sanctions on Israel. And for the kids? They now have a new collection of images and a new set of difficult questions to guide them in their quest for return, and they
will be the new leaders of the movement to liberate Palestine armed with their experience, dreams, and their questions that will compel them forward.
Asma drums on the site of her village of origin, destroyed in 1948
(This is a very scattered posting. I am a bit fragmented, between the heat, the 6 hours of Arabic class a day, the intensity of the daily situation here, and I swear, the bumpy rides in the minibuses shake the thoughts in my brain in a way I haven’t quite adjusted to yet.)
Every Friday in the town of Bil’in residents are joined by some Israelis and other international volunteers to stand off the army. It’s a routine. The crowd marches from the mosque towards the apartheid wall chanting “laa laa l’jidar” ("No to the wall!") and waving Palestinian flags. The crowd is followed by a red crescent ambulance whose medics are equipped with water and cotton balls with vinegar to give to people overcome by tear gas. The army is waiting there outside of the town, at a point between the wall and the town. Several town leaders yell to the soldiers in Arabic and Hebrew ("Soldiers, it’s Friday, go home!"), young men and little boys gather small stones to throw towards the huge armoured jeeps, and then the tear gas starts coming, first to the sides of the road, pushing the crowd up towards the village, and then the soldiers shoot more gas into the outskirts of the village, amongst the houses. This can’t be an accident, as it is obviously in order to convince the town members, who stand steadfast every Friday with their international guests, to stop opposition to the wall. Because, they must think, if the village is gassed, maybe the villagers will start feeling like it is the activists and internationals who brought the tear gas to the village. The soldiers in jeeps and helmets advance, the crowd pushes forward, and back again, forward and back. Occasionally there is an arrest or two, and those involved are usually released several hours later--probably this is the only place in Palestine where release happens this swiftly. Eventually, the crowd disperses and there is an unspoken “see you next week” between the crowd and the soldiers.
Walking (trying not to run) towards the town, choking on the tear gas, one can’t help but wonder, why are we doing this? The back and forth, the forward and back, the advance and retreat structures that hour or so, as well as the weekly ritual. How can we understand weekly rituals like this? Is there an accumulation, besides the tear gas in peoples’ lungs, and if so, what is accumulated? It is certainly not that people expect that if they keep showing up, the soldiers just will stop.
I guess there are some easy answers; all of which are true, I think. There is some reappropriation of action, when it is the town people who are in some ways “forcing” the soldiers out, creating a confrontation when they are ready armed with words, flags, and rocks, as opposed to army incursions which occur suddenly and literally catch people with their pants down. There is a practice of making public collective resistance routine in the face of attempts to normalize the occupation, even if this is through posturing confrontation. Also, there are the relationships that are strengthened and expanded through weekly action, and that type of networking is resistance in and of itself.
But there is something else which is irksome, which begs for deeper digging. It’s that nagging feeling that there is some complacency in this action, that being arrested and released 2 hours later every week shows some sort of performance that the soldiers are a part of too. When I came back on Friday, I watched the film “Arna’s Children” about a theatre group in Jenin, from which almost all of the young actors were eventually martyred. One young actor said something quite profound about performance, or the relationship between stage performance and demonstrations. When the interviewer asked him about the role of theatre in the Intifada, at first he mistook the question and gave this answer more or less: when he is on stage he doesn’t think of the audience and that’s how he captures people’s attention, by being fully immersed. And then when the director repeated the question to him, the boy answered straight forwardly: “On stage I feel like I am throwing stones.”
In New York, we complain snarkily that protests that are “sanctioned,” end up being a handful of leftists walking around in a pen set up by the police. This protest in Bil’in, I must admit, feels, in some ways, the same. But, I think the difference is that this weekly protest is not an exceptional once a year event against the war in Iraq, but rather it punctuates another week of occupation, full of the millions of impossibilities of life under occupation. Restricted movement, violence, poverty. Stores flooded with Israeli goods. The Zionist images on the shekel, the Israeli currency, which is used in the West Bank too. The old books in the Birzeit library--since Israel doesn’t allow the book shipments into the university. There is no way to imagine all of the banal ways in which the occupation operates at every level.
It is easy for an international to get caught in the moment of the tear gas, and feel that the occupation and resistance is enacted primarily in these weekly encounters, and to get enthralled, and to lose oneself in the moment, and to imagine that these are the Sites of Resistance. One international complained to me in the servis (the shuttle, dolmuş) on the way home that the kids throw stones, and that this somehow means that Palestinian resistance is bankrupt. To begin with, the kids throw stones at armored jeeps. And second, this conversation ("Should the kids throw stones?") presumes that the moment is ground zero, that everything started today, 20 minutes ago when prayers let out, and that it is a conflict between the kids and the tanks, as if the kids didn’t throw stones, the occupation would end, as if the occupation started because kids began throwing stones. This weekly event is a point on a long history of occupation and resistance .
Why did I think of this interview in “Arna’s Children?” Throwing stones is a practice, and it does not think of its audience. Kids who throw stones are thinking of each other likely, and trying to impress and outdo each other, and they are not tailoring their project to get international support, or Israeli mercy. And they capture people that way, in ways that challenge the people for whom protest is about results. It was a great “mistaken” response because he was expected to say something about art and resistance, and he spoke instead about self-reflection, how he feels and what he thinks when he is on stage, what is performance and who is it for? And then he related it to the act of throwing stones.
This leads to the first question again. What is this practice, what is produced through it, and who is it for?
And all of this against the backdrop of cooperation between Abu Mazen, Olmert, and the other powers that be. The release of only Fatah prisoners from Israeli prisons, Palestinian money confiscated by Israel released in stages to feed Fatah. And then, today, an Israeli incursion in Gaza worse than people have seen in so long. It still amazes me that the news can speak of an “impending humanitarian crisis,” it’s like 12 life sentences, I guess.
The following is an excerpt from the interview that Amy Goodman conducted with Antonia Juhasz, the author of The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time. The interview is aired on Wednesday as the 600 pipeline workers in southern Iraq began a strike on June 5 to protest the new oil law for Iraq. You can follow the news pertaining to the Iraqi labor movement and the growing number of strikes across the country from the website of the General Federation of Iraqi Workers.
AMY GOODMAN: First, talk about this strike, Antonia.
ANTONIA JUHASZ: Well, the strike is critical. It’s been a long time building. There had been some negotiations between the strike leaders and Prime Minister al-Maliki. There are a number of demands, basic working conditions, wages, as you say, but also a seat at the table and opposition to the attempt to turn over Iraq's oil to foreign oil corporations and the -- as more knowledge has been brought to Iraq, it’s been very difficult for Iraqis to even learn what this oil law was about, just like it’s been difficult here. As more information has spread, the opposition has spread, as well, and now the workers have taken the situation into their own hands and struck.
AMY GOODMAN: And what is this US-backed proposal?
ANTONIA JUHASZ: It’s a Bush administration, US corporate, very simple attempt to figure out: if you’re going to wage a war for oil, how do you get the oil. Does Exxon come in on a tank with a flag and stick it in the ground, or do you have a more careful process? The careful process is very simply: write a law, get a new Iraqi government in place, have the Iraqis pass the law, and then turn the oil over to US oil corporations.
The Bush administration designed the law. Last January, President Bush announced that it was a benchmark for passage by the Iraqi government. It was the same day that he announced the surge. And in the language of the administration, the surge was meant to provide the political space so that the Iraqis could discuss the oil law and other benchmarks. The Democrats then adopted this language of the benchmarks and said in the supplemental war spending bill, again, that the Iraqis have to pass this benchmark. And it very simply turns Iraq from a nationalized oil system, essentially closed to US oil corporations, to a privatized system in which potentially two-thirds of all of Iraq’s oil could be owned by foreign oil companies, and they can control the production with as long as thirty-year contracts.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, what about the news coming out of Iraq that Raed Jarrar has reported on, talking about the significance of the vote for the US to get out of Iraq by the parliament?
ANTONIA JUHASZ: It’s very significant. The United Nations mandate for the US occupation of Iraq gives ultimate authority to the Iraqi parliament and the Iraqi cabinet to determine if the occupation can continue. So, theoretically, if the Iraqi parliament, joined by the cabinet -- and that’s critical -- say that the occupation cannot continue, theoretically it would have to end. That stands in vast opposition to the plans of the Bush administration and now, apparently, the plans of the Democratic leadership, as well.
AMY GOODMAN: Couldn't it give Bush an out?
ANTONIA JUHASZ: It could give Bush an out, if he wanted an out. I don't think he wants an out.
AMY GOODMAN: Because?
ANTONIA JUHASZ: Well, I think there’s many ways in which the war is not going all bad for the President and for the administration. The only thing that’s truly going bad is the instability. But what has worked is a government in place that is more amenable to US interests than the last ten years of the Hussein regime, a government in place that is willing to negotiate in a dramatic fashion on the nature of Iraq's oil regime, and being on the precipice of a transfer of Iraq, a fundamental transfer, in its oil policy. We have US oil corporations engaging daily in negotiations with the Iraqi oil ministry, waiting on the sidelines. If the law passes, US corporations have the potential to own a true bonanza of oil and, if the US military stays, protection to get in and get it. Now --
AMY GOODMAN: Are all now working intensively with the oil ministry.
ANTONIA JUHASZ: Yeah, they absolutely are, and have been from the beginning.
AMY GOODMAN: And if they don't pass this law?
ANTONIA JUHASZ: If they don't pass the law, it’s a big strike at the heart of the agenda. I would say that the game wouldn't be over, and the fact that the administration is talking publicly about this Korea policy, the idea that the United States would maintain some sort of military presence similar to the US presence, quote/unquote, "keeping the peace between South and North Korea," that’s a permanent military engagement, which could last as long as fifty years. The thirty-year contracts, the length, the extended length of the occupation, leads me to believe that this is the idea that the administration wants to pursue.
AMY GOODMAN: And what do you think of this comparison?
ANTONIA JUHASZ: It’s incredibly disturbing. First of all, the conditions are completely dissimilar, except for the desire of the United States to maintain a presence and to use the misunderstanding, I think, of the American public as to the role of the US military in Korea, to say, “Well, we’ve created peace for fifty years in one situation. We can create peace for fifty years in this other situation. Oh, and by the way, our military will be really well situated to move forward across the region to spread peace across the Middle East, where, oh, by the way, there also happens to be two-thirds of the world's remaining oil.” It’s a terrifying proposition.
In the sleepy west of the woody east is a valley full, full o' pioneer we're not just kids, to say the least we got ideas to us that's dear like capitalist, like communist like lots of things you've heard about and redneckers they get us pissed and stupid stuff it makes us shout oh dance with me oh don't be shy oh kiss me cunt and kiss me cock oh kiss the world oh kiss the sky oh kiss my ass oh let it rock of the april birds and the may bee oh baby university of massachusetts, please and here's the last five it's educational it's educational it's educational it's educational it's educational.
"One of the difficulties in discussing violence in the 1948 war is that “Palestine,” the site of violence, both persists and has ceased to exist. Its simultaneous presence and erasure occurs in part through the survival of Palestinians from the 1948 war in what has ceased to be Palestine. Their scattered yet persistent presence constitutes a thread with which one can return to that moment when Palestine was ruined. They embody the survival of Palestine, yet also stand for its death. This death continues both to impede their memory of what has happened in 1948 and to structure it. The memories of the Palestinian survivors constitute a challenge to another kind of thread (mis)leading us back to 1948. The war also resulted in a birth—of a new Jewish state attempting to deny the simultaneous death that gave rise to its creation." "1948: Law, History, Memory" by Samera Esmeir I cannot help but make the connection here between Azmi and Hrant Dink, as survivors who pose a challenge by naming this connection, and really the necessity of the connection, between the death and birth. They do so in such a way that exposes as ridiculous those who try to blur the connection in order to maintain current (dis)order.
I was brought to this by c-blok’s writings, and by reading through pages and pages of writings on the Armenian genocide, some of them replete with so many forms of denial that resonate intensely with the Zionist denials of the Nakba. In his The Ottoman Empire, 1700-1922, economic historian Donald Quataert writes that one of the main reasons why this is said to be genocide is that Armenians “died because of their identity, not because of their actions and beliefs” (185). He says this by way of introducing why he does not think it can be called genocide, why it was different than the Nazi genocide of Jews. I wonder, in what ways? How is it possible to divorce identity from actions and beliefs?
He locates the beginning of the problems, where “the story begins,” in 1914 with Russian Armenians who come along with other Russian invaders through the eastern Anatolian front. This follows an entire book which actually quite carefully and thoroughly maps the various ways in which Ottoman identities were formed over centuries, and changed and disrupted suddenly with the Tanzimat. In this way, we can see how the story begins much earlier in fact, in the way that Armenian identity, not just as a national identity but as an identity of the second largest millet in the Ottoman Empire, made them the exact targets for actions focused on cleansing and consolidating, incidental only insofar as the people killed were bodies that incidentally belonged to that identity. This is the same with Jews in the Nazi holocaust and Hannah Arendt does a very nice job showing this in The Origins of Totalitarianism by looking at how the Jew (rather than the Jews) played a very specific and very complex role in commerce and in social relations in Europe, and that it is not a coincidence that the “liberation” of the Jew ultimately led to the destruction of the Jew.
Quataert reports that in Istanbul and Izmir the Armenian communities “remained intact and in place, going about their business” (186) while the massacres were conducted in the East, i.e. that the absence of large-scale massacres in Istanbul and Izmir cancel out the massacres in the East. This is a position also taken by Zionist denialists, saying that some Arabs (Palestinians) did not leave (weren’t expelled from) their homes in 1948, and that some were even saved by Jews! This ugly rhetoric asserts that the exceptions prove the rule, and that if there was no killing of bodies, or rather, if all bodies were not killed, then a genocide did not take place.
What is similar in both situations, and why the term genocide is apt, is that the mass killing was not just the murder of people, but an effort to eradicate Armenian or Palestinian identity as such, so that those who remained would not be Armenian or Palestinian. The presence of Armenians in Turkey or the presence of Palestinians in Israel highlights this: as identities which experienced the genocide through survival, that is, a survival which became an extension of the genocide, their presence becomes a testimony. But a testimony to what?
The presence and the testimony of Hrant Dink and of Azmi Bishara stand both for survival and death, and this is precisely how genocide functions. It is not just the killing of people, as though that would not be enough, but more so, the structuring of that killing, not because it is premeditated or it uses modern technology, but because it is designed to kill an identity in order to make way for another. We are supposed to believe in the compassion of Zionism and/or Kemalism because it “allowed” for some Palestinians or Armenians to live, and even to stay in their home territories, but even those few who got to stay in the same house, were de-territorialized in a way that was just as violent. The process was to expel some out of their homes, and for the others, to expel their homes out of them, to make them strangers in themselves(as Azmi writes in his recent LA Times editorial: “When Israel was established in 1948, more than 700,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled in fear. My family was among the minority that escaped that fate, remaining instead on the land where we had long lived. The Israeli state, established exclusively for Jews, embarked immediately on transforming us into foreigners in our own country.”), to disorient them in such a way that it is not clear what home or identity even mean, and then to have them serve as the proof that genocide did not occur.
The power and the threat of Hrant Dink and of Azmi Bishara, and of all of the Armenians in Turkey and Palestinians in Israel, is that they refuse to be that proof, that they transform that survival from an individual bodily survival to a collective resistance.
The expansive politics of Azmi Bishara and Emily Jacir
In his recent book-manifesto, Hatred of Democracy, Jacques Rancière refers to citizen's rights as the "rights of those who have not the rights that they have and have the rights that they have not." Politics is sparked within the interval of this contradiction as the 'have nots' defy, through political practice, the arbitrary deprivation of the rights that they have. This is at least how I understand Rancière's attempt to politicize the citizenship discourse and recover its radical dimension that is lost in the hands of both its critics and advocates.
The critics' apathy emanates from a certain circular deadlock that they think to inhere in the rights discourse: by its very definition, human rights are the rights of those (or for those) who have no rights. Conceived this way, rights discourse delivers nothing but a mere tautology. On the other hand, the advocates, in regarding the universality of the rights discourse as self-evident, remain oblivious to the internal exclusions that particularize the latter within the citizenship practices.
For Rancière, then, both advocates and critics would obfuscate the site of the political by sidestepping the divisibility of rights. That is, they would overlook the ways in which a new subjectivity could be established through countering the internal exclusions of the rights discourse via holding it accountable to its very pronouncements. Perhaps, it is the bringing into existence of this political site in the context of Israel that gives Azmi Bishara's position its profound uniqueness. (Thanks to entropy, the destroyer and viola swamp for acquainting me with Bishara and the wonderful documentary, I Also Dwell Among Your Own People: Conversations with Azmi Bishara by Ariella Azoulay.)
From 1996 until his recent resignation, Bishara has been a member of the Israeli parliament (Knesset) and the key founder of the political party, the National Democratic Assembly (NDA-Balad), represented by 3 (now 2) seats in the 120 member Knesset. Bishara's controversial position stems from his persistence in pointing out the divorcement of the Israeli citizenship from its declaration, an exercise that violently figures in the denial of citizenship rights to the Israeli Arabs and Palestinians who have them. Rather than advocating for a separate nation-state for the Palestinians, Bishara and his party have insisted on reclaiming what they already have, Israeli citizenship.
In this sense, Bishara's position not only compels the Israeli state to face up to its disavowal of the principles of citizenship, and, hence, the intimate self-annihilation that resides at the core of its identity. It also restores the universalizing aspiration to the principle of citizenship against the process of the latter's privatization and particularization through the formation of ever newer nation-states. It is dire, and, unfortunately, not so surprising, that Zionism's anxious reaction to Bishara's position has been to clamp down on the Arab minority, the "enemy within." His recent resignation and exile come as a result of this increasing assault.
***
The photograph below by the diaspora/Palestinian artist Emily Jacir is entitled Bank Mirror, Ramallah. I do not know what makes this image so intriguing to me. I cannot but keep looking at it. Maybe, because I have grown so accustomed to associating Palestine with images of beige streets that look like war trenches, a wall-torn stony landscape punctuated with naked dwellings. Does this image remind me that there are actually banks in Palestine, which somehow 'function', that there is a modern urban life in shambles? Or is this art work captivating because of the way in which it positions itself? That is, the way in which it does not forefront, frame, or try to carve out a space for itself, a separate realm for art, but rather merges with the social field of Palestine, letting itself "disappear" within what it offers: in Susan Buck-Moss' description of public art, "a protective exposure," "a safe place in the public sphere" for the unspeakable truths. In a sense, there is a certain innocence to the image that, in its refusal to deliver the familiar representation of 'the enemy', snatches the enjoyment of the reactionary common sense. After all, the image does not portray an easily identifiable Subject of resistance in revolt, but rather a shattering effect of the occupation that remains ineffable.
But what is this effect, the unspeakable truth within which this art work dissolves? Is the shattered mirror a witness to, an almost perfect reflection of the fact that there is nothing left anymore in Palestine to represent (or representable in some meaningful way), say, apart from its completely destroyed public life and its mutilated past? I want to suggest that what the image disseminates exceeds this realist and desolate insinuation. The image embodies a dimension of desacralizaton, destablization, a process of emptying out fantasies (how would the 'holy lands' of Israel reflect in this mirror? how would a Zionist appear in this mirror?) even though such a desacralizing aspect emerges as an effect of a violence imposed on a population.
Yes, the image does not offer a resolution; it does not guide a way out of the apartheid violence. Yet, the image does not quite close off onto itself; its cracks render palpable the impossibility of making essentializing identity claims on this geography. Maybe, it is the void and the cracks of the Palestine-Israeli social formation that this image moves toward. Elaboration of the politics of void, which, in part, is inspired by xurban collective's reconceptualization of art as archeology, is left for other surplus thoughts.
