Uneven & Combined Resistance
Empathy and reasons for resistance with Palestine is always context-specific
One of the main principles of a Marxist worldview is that of ‘uneven and combined development’. It is one of those expressions that is eloquent precisely because it says something simple simply, and in doing so reminds us of something very useful.
The expression asserts that we are all connected in the processes of a global economy, but that we are at difference stages of the process, and so at different places on a continuum. Marxism is an economic, functionalist theory of relations, but the underlying principle holds no less true whether we are talking about economics and growth, love and society, or hegemony and resistance.
I was thinking of the words last week as I watched discord between different parts of the global online network of Palestinian resistance. A couple of small feuds — and I should stress they were only small — seemed to demonstrate the problem of different people at different places on the same spectrum, and potential problems arising. The below, faithful to the name of this blog, was an effort to bridge.
Uneven
Palestinian-American writer, Ali Abunimah, suggested that British journalist, Owen Jones, owing to past acquiescence to talking-points established by the Israeli lobby in British politics, has previously functioned — for all intents and purposes— as a supporter of the Israeli state. The charge was that if it takes a full genocide in Gaza to have someone get as urgently and effectively outspoken as Jones has become in recent weeks, what good is that to Palestine?
Separately, the Palestine-based group, Good Shepherd Collective, who offer valuable documentation of Palestinian resistance in the West Bank, particularly in rural communities, responded with frustration at some US-based Jewish Voice For Peace actions in the US, including bringing New York traffic to the Manhattan Bridge to a standstill. JVP clearly do amazing work but where—it didn’t seem unreasonable to ask— were the mentions of Palestinians, or Palestinian-led groups risking everything in Palestine to bring the Israeli aggression to the attention of the world, and the Israeli war machine to a standstill?
The BBC was the final and possibly most revealing cause of controversy that caught my attention. The BBC — it seemed deliberately — mistranslated the words of a Palestinian hostage released by the Israelis in a prisoner exchange. The freed hostage explained how the Israelis had assaulted them with pepper spray, left them in squalid cells, beat them. The BBC translated that as the hostage saying of her release, “only Hamas cared and we love them very much”. The interviewee did apparently say this later in the same interview, but not the translated segment, so that — to repeat — the mistranslation seemed deliberate.
The source of discord here was twofold and revealing. Palestine support groups in the West took issue with the mistranslation on principle, but also quite likely wanted to preemptively fight-off anything that might feed-in to the Israeli and Western-media conflation that all Palestinians are Hamas, Hamas are bad, and so therefore all Palestinians are bad. Given that this propagandistic conflation certainly is used in the West to serve the Zionist war machine, it is forgivable that Westerners in support of Palestine are sensitive to it and feel some need to push-back against it.
The initial Arab-world reaction I saw to the quote — a world which does not exist in the same propaganda environment as the West — was initially more defensive of it precisely because Hamas —as the only group to show meaningful resistance to Israeli aggressions across three decades — does as a result obviously enjoy popularity among some Palestinians. This fact should not be altogether erased simply to accommodate the racist grooming that has been attached in Western ears to the very sound of the word “Hamas”.
A different version of the same dilemma presented itself in the first month of the conflict, when Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah, leader of the Lebanese militant group, Hezbollah, expressed on behalf of Palestinians and Lebanese a gratitude for the support of Western protests. Some I spoke to at a protest in London shared their regret at this public thanks, because, they felt, it linked Western protests to Hezbollah, a name that — as with Hamas — has only pejorative connotations in Western ears. The disapproval of Biden, Sunak and Starmer carried more weight to protesters I spoke with than the gratitude of Sayyid Nasrallah. This is an interesting dynamic to be aware of, precisely because of the respect Nasrallah enjoys across Palestine for having successfully led the Lebanese liberation to Israeli occupation.
Combined
While the difference of perspective is obvious, less talked-about is that everyone on this continuum — for all the unity — faces different threats, but also holds a different immediate objective alongside the overarching objective of a free Palestine. I also believe everyone is pushing towards the same goal, and I do believe that all the gripes or failings expressed above are largely forgivable.
It should always be remembered that the ultimate threat lived today is by Palestinians in Palestine; for this reason everyone should to some extent defer to their needs, logic, methods, requests and appraisals. While it is essential to assert that “in our thousands, in our millions we are all Palestinians”, it is simultaneously essential to remember that we are not necessarily all Palestinians, and not all in Palestine.
Most fundamentally, this means that we will all have different and context-specific motivations for our determination, and also demands that are rooted in that context.
To address the point by example: I am a UK citizen and taxpayer, and so I am enraged by the words of support from British ministers and for the Israelis in their genocide. Just as British politicians speaking words of comfort for Palestinians mean nothing to me without action, however, these words of support for Israelis mean less to me than the immediate dispatch of a British aircraft carrier to the shores of Palestine, providing a military guarantee to Israeli aggression. That is my aircraft carrier, paid for by my taxes, and I want it turned back towards the UK. US citizens in support of Palestine will — along similar lines — likely have an even greater shame and rage at the US state and military backing of the Israelis.
My second, more personal and therefore possibly more powerful, motivation for anger is that I am expected to watch Palestinians —including friends and colleagues— brave a UK-sponsored genocide, while I am left to ask why those with connections to Israeli society — mostly white, many British-Israelis, or Jewish Brits — have had all the resources of British military and media marshalled to their side in a moment of need. To me it is clear that this is the basis of a second-class citizenship every bit as potent as the one the Israelis want in Palestine, and my refusal of this expectation may yet prove a motivating factor more burning than my desire (also strong) for the return of Palestinian’s homes in Haifa.
Some of these concerns might be familiar to anti-Zionist Jews protesting around the world, particularly the Western world, in support of Palestinian rights. The motivating factor here is a sense that Zionism is clearly encroaching — and painfully so — on their own relationship to their Jewish faith, denying them a core part of their existence, and potentially handing their very spirituality into the custody of a foreign nationalism, while by the same token eroding their rights at home.
Resistance
These concerns are of course immediately less-pressing, and less-violent, than the Israelis massacring families and stealing or destroying homes in Palestine, but this does not invalidate the concern altogether. While there is a guilt attached to trying to detach and think strategically in a situation that denies Palestine space to do much of either, it seems helpful to assert that people in different spaces will act and interact differently according to different concerns and incentives.
This is not to say that sacrifices made in Palestine (and increasingly Lebanon) should not galvanise us. Likewise basic questions — What have I sacrificed? What have others sacrificed? What am I willing to do? — can spur us to do more. But this does not alter the fact that we all engage Palestine from our local context. South Africans have a support of Palestinians rooted in a shared experience of apartheid; Muslims and Arabs (or those perceived as either) by a shared a experience of Islamophobia or racism; Irish come to Palestine through British military occupation; Bolivia from an indigenous rights movement; Black America by a shared experience of apartheid and state violence.
Empathy is arguably at its strongest where it does not endeavour, and knows that it cannot, subsume altogether the experience of the oppressed. (“The Banality of Empathy” is an invaluable NYRB essay of recent years, on what presently seems a lot like the ersatz empathy (Never Again (apparently)) attached to the Nazi Holocaust).
For all that might be so, the natural limitations of empathy aren’t something we need to shy from. A clear-eyed appraisal of what is at stake for us personally is not necessarily going to produce a weaker motivation than deep empathy with Palestinians. For many, to act against the prospect that they or their children will always be made second-class citizens in the country of their birth might well prove more motivating than an experience with which they (hopefully) will never be intimately acquainted.
But nor is it a question of either/or; we can have both empathy and self-interest. Given that Zionism is a globally networked lobbying structure, it is useful to think similarly in a fashion that is region-specific. It is also important to maintain dialogue in order to fine-tune strategy into an optimal form, which by necessity includes learning from past errors, current urgencies, and different starting-points.
There is a useful parallel here to the Resistance battlefield doctrine of Unity of the Fields, which recognises that Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iran and others have different grievances, perspectives, and opportunities from which to seek the throwing-off of US-Israeli domination. It is not a singular field but rather fields, though this does not prevent there being unity. Revolution and liberation will always by necessity be context-specific; it must —as Peruvian radical José Mariátegui once argued— be indigenous, and can be neither imported nor synthetic. Palestinian liberation is already a global movement of many places. We may be uneven, but we are combined. Knowing both parts of this equation is no weakness, and potentially a source of greater strength.