Ethics of resistance

The ongoing debate among intellectuals as they face the savage Israeli onslaught resulted in the petition, signed by writers and academics from all over the world, which was last week sent to the UN secretary-general. French philosopher Etienne Balibar has played a prominent role in the debate. Among the points he raised in correspondence with Israeli peace supporters was the issue of "suicide bombing not being the right form of resistance". Balibar argued that such methods of resistance "pose a fundamental ethical and political problem" and are part of the process of promoting "death culture". Below, we publish an open letter by the Palestinian academic and writer Faisal Darraj discussing Balibar's ethical and political reservations and the text of the petition addressed to Kofi Annan
Dear Professor Balibar,
Having read the correspondence between you and a number of intellectuals -- Israeli and non-Israeli -- in support of Palestinians suffering at the hands of the Israeli military machine, I want to express my gratitude that you should have broken the "conspiracy of silence" that is wounding Palestinians more cruelly than even Sharon's brutality. As you said, world civil society must work towards realising the universality of human rights and duties, recognising that the Palestinian people are part and parcel of that society and not some alien community. The desire to be treated as such is but one of many unrealised Palestinian aspirations.
Another reason I would like to thank you develops from the indifference to the Palestinian plight displayed by many Arab and Islamic regimes. This indifference mirrors US policy, which punishes the Palestinians both for rejecting the Pax Americana and for their role as a focus for political mobilisation, something viewed with abhorrence, when not prohibited, in many countries. That intellectuals from around the world should take a stand alongside the Palestinian people restores some hope and confidence to Palestinians.
It is out of admiration for both your intellectual oeuvre and gesture of solidarity with the Palestinian people that I use your correspondence as the starting point for addressing two questions. The first pertains to the "objectivity of the similarity" linking Palestinian suicide bombers with the Israeli army, thus calling for the condemnation of both and attributing the daily bloodshed to the "folly" of both sides. For it is the notion of "two sides" that furnishes the ideal linguistic platform upon which Israelis and their many friends can, and do, justify murdering Palestinians in their cities, towns and villages, demolishing homes, schools, hospitals and cultural centres.
I know that you do not, unlike Sharon and his friends in the White House, believe in a "terrorist essence" that makes of every Palestinian a "potential terrorist," if not today then tomorrow. For at the heart of the issue, as you know, lies the question of "human dignity," even more so than nationhood, land, religion or human rights. No human being rejoices in the death of innocent people. Yet what better emblem could there be for that death of innocence than the Palestinian? What more eloquent manifestation could there be of the slaughter of innocence than the refugee camp that for 50 years has stood as a symbol of expulsion, hunt and "final solution". The camp has become the place where, expelled from his home, the Palestinian ends up to complete his life in conditions so wretched that rebelling, and taking up arms, eventually becomes the only understandable response. And then it is into the camps that the Israeli army charges, in pursuit of both the Palestinian rebel and the final massacre.
Palestinian refugees are distributed among 59 camps in Palestine and abroad. The most notorious massacres took place in the camps of Tal Al-Zaatar, Sabra and Shatilla and, more recently, in Jenin, from which 2,000 people remain "missing". Israel refuses to acknowledge that it has "detained" them and their families are unable to find any information about their whereabouts. In this never ending nightmare, in which the executioner prolongs the torment of his defiant victim, more than 200,000 Palestinians had been killed up to 1993 according to the sources cited by Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo.
The injustices heaped upon the Palestinians, both inside the camps and out, compelled the Palestinian leadership to accept the Oslo Accords in 1993. This agreement -- its contextual framework is well known -- failed to guarantee even minimal levels of human and national rights to the Palestinians and has been harshly criticised by, among others, Edward Said, Naom Chomsky, and Juan Goytisolo. Not surprisingly, a significant number of Palestinians reject it. Nevertheless, the Palestinian leadership welcomed it, accepted its conditions and hailed the "peace of the brave." Meanwhile Sharon, among others in Israel, saw Oslo as "the greatest catastrophe in the history of Israel." And because peace meant disaster Israel set into motion a political, cultural and economic siege to close-off the avenues to peace and, above all, to wrest from the Palestinian people even the right to hope. Their horizons diminished to a day-to-day encounter with deprivation and death with each passing day worse than the last.
What makes a Palestinian youth, no more than 17, rush eagerly to his death? The more religious might answer it is the promise of paradise. But what turns a 27-year-old professional woman, who has no connection to any religious discourse, into a suicide bomber? The answer, like so much in this catastrophe, has nothing to do with a "terrorist essence," and has everything to do with dignity, or in this case the need to avenge the abuse of dignity, degraded each and every day for half a century.
Some Arab and Islamic governments, of course, have developed an addiction to condemning "extremism," by which they mean religious forces. One must remember, however, that these same governments are well-practiced in the exercise of economic, political and ideological extremism. Whatever these governments do, though, Sharon does better -- ie more systematically, more bloodily -- and is encouraged to do so by a lamentable Arab feebleness, fostered by US political pressures and weapons, and by the Americanisation of the global decision-making process.
For years Israel has imposed the very conditions guaranteed to push Palestinians into rebellion, or more dangerous still, into rebellious despair. And when Palestinians respond as their tormentor intends Israel brands that response terrorist, and then uses its own definition of the response as an excuse to employ the massive force of Tel Aviv's artillery and war planes. Israel's racist settlement policy, indeed, can only exist if this vicious cycle of oppression, rebellion and punitive response to expected rebellion is maintained. As if peace, or even the prospect of peace, constitutes a devastating threat to Israel's identity and to its overwhelming superiority in the Middle East, or as if peace can only be founded on Palestinian annihilation, or at least the annihilation of the sense of dignity of the Palestinian, Israel's version of the Native American.
To refer to "two sides" in this context is, then, patently unjust, inaccurate and cruel. To suggest that there are two warring parties -- the illusion that Israel seeks to propagate at home and abroad -- is to miss the essence of the Palestinian tragedy. Chomsky captured the nature of this deception when he described Israel as "hunting birds with machine guns."
My second question concerns your reference to the ethical problem pertaining to Palestinian suicide bombings that target innocent civilians. To clarify the issues involved it is imperative we eliminate the pernicious notion of parity, this equating of two sides that are anything but equal which provides the stepping-stone to the lethal formal detachment manifested in calls to condemn reciprocal violence, to condemn the two hostile parties, to stop violence and terrorism, to urge the two sides to exercise self-restraint. If, as I argued above, "the objectivity of similarity" leads eventually to equating the victim with his executioner, an ethical judgment based on such foundations can sometimes lead to condemning the victim, while exonerating the executioner. It is precisely this attitude that leads many Palestinians to characterise as "universally degenerate" the dominant political discourse that transforms Palestinians into terrorists and Sharon into a warrior against terrorism.
The concerns expressed above may be condensed into a single, pertinent question: Who determines the truth? The truth, in the times in which we live, is the property of the strong. It is the monopoly of the power pulling the strings in the global decision-making process. And it is the protection of this monopoly, which necessitates eliminating the actual truth, that makes Israel impose a total media blockade on the Jenin camp, where thousands "disappear" and the dead are buried in sewers or elsewhere. It is a monopoly that meanwhile allows the "objective" media -- CNN for example -- to devote hours of exclusive coverage to the gory consequences of every Palestinian martyr operation. The media, believe its monopolists, belong to those who deserve it. Perhaps the most important ethical contribution you and other intellectuals have made has been to break this monopoly on truth to render it a universal human right, to be exercised by all members of the human race, including Palestinians driven to martyrdom by their tragic conditions.
In the first days of the siege on Jenin some inhabitants of the camp let loose a donkey wrapped in the Israeli flag. When an Israeli soldier, stationed at a distance, saw the donkey he lifted up his gun to shoot it but then changed his mind.
"Why didn't you shoot it?" a journalist asked him.
"Because it has rights and associations to protect those rights," the soldier answered.
"Then why do you shoot Palestinians?"
"Because they don't have associations or rights," the soldier answered.
Please accept my gratitude for your role in defending the rights of my people, victims of an open-ended massacre in this age of the "global civil society." With my best wishes to the future success of your continued efforts to discover and publicise the truth.
Sincerely,
Faisal Darraj
Appeal by intellectuals and writers
to the Secretary General of the United Nations,
His Excellency Kofi Annan
April 23, 2002
Your Excellency,
As you have observed several times in recent declarations -- most recently on the occasion of the meeting of the Commission for Human Rights of the United Nations in Geneva on April 12, 2002 -- the murderous conflict in Palestine and Israel has reached tragic dimensions.
International Conventions on Human Rights are being violated and possibly war crimes and crimes against Humanity are being committed day after day. The Palestinian population has been subjected to conditions of absolute distress with incalculable consequences. The Israeli society has been subjected to increasing militarization, without its security being guaranteed or improved. NGOs, UN agencies are prevented from fulfilling their humanitarian function. Access to the devastated cities and refugee camps remains forbidden to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in spite of repeated demands. Several compulsory resolutions of the Security Council (including the unanimous resolution of April 4, 2002) have been ignored. Tensions are obviously growing which threaten peace in the whole region.
Now that several proposals for negotiations and tentative mediations have proved ineffective, the United Nations Organization must take the initiative again. Only the U.N. can provide the appropriate framework for an international intervention which would end the fighting and the repressive operations, grant a full protection to the civil populations on both sides, lift the obstacles to the talks, and open new perspectives for a just settlement, on the basis of its own past Resolutions.
First and foremost, the U.N. should reassert that it is necessary to set up without delay two fully sovereign States with equal rights and equal dignity for the two peoples which have to live together in the land of historic Palestine. Practically, this now implies the recognition of Palestinian sovereignty within the borders existing before June 4, 1967 (including East-Jerusalem), which should be respected and enforced by the International Community.
This recognition, for which there are no longer juridical obstacles, was planned in advance by the Oslo agreements, as a common task of the State of Israel and the Palestinian Authority. The circumstances that have destroyed this possibility and installed a logic of violence in its stead are well-known. There is now only one way of stopping the bloodshed and recreating a possibility of peace: to change the approach and start again on a clear and indisputable legal basis.
The creation of the Palestinian State can no longer appear as a reward, to be granted by the occupying power, for marks of 'good will' which are always likely to be declared insufficient. On the contrary, that creation is the first step, a minimum prerequisite which will then make it possible to engage in bilateral negotiations and offer mutual guarantees.
The Palestinians have now acknowledged the legitimate existence of the State of Israel. They have already agreed to renounce 78% of the historical territory where their parents had lived, or they were born themselves. They have an absolute right to be totally liberated from occupation and immediately enjoy their own internationally recognized sovereign State of Palestine.
Only a sovereign State can be held responsible for the actions of its citizens, within and across its borders. Only a sovereign Palestinian State, therefore, can guarantee the security of the Israeli people, which is itself their absolute right.
Only such a State can develop democratic institutions, which would allow itself and its citizens to take a new historic path, and overcome the grievances and traumas of the past.
Only such a sovereign State can legitimately enter into negotiations with its neighbours -- Israel first of all -- to settle the lasting problems of populations, natural resources, mutual safety, compensations, administration of the Holy Places.
A solution for the difficulties which prevent these two peoples from living together peacefully -- peoples separated today by deep hatred and distrust, although they are necessary to each other and to the future of our civilization -- cannot remain suspended while awaiting a 'peace process' which is constantly interrupted by the imbalance of forces, internal political calculations, the abuse of suffering and fear, double talk, and foreign pressure. It must proceed from a declared equality of rights which is binding for everybody.
And it is exactly now, when any possibility of reaching this solution may seem most out of reach, that justice and right must be reasserted and implemented. But in order to achieve this result, a political initiative is needed.
Your Excellency, this is an emergency. We know that you are fully aware of the situation. In the name of Humanity and in the vital interest of the Israeli and Palestinian peoples, we call on you to start the process of official recognition of Palestinian Statehood in actuality -- if necessary by recommending an exceptional session of the General Assembly of the United Nations. We call our Governments in each of our Countries, and the Alliances and Treatises to which they adhere, to fully support your initiative.
Signatories from 25 countries include:
GOLDSCHMIDT Werner, HIRSCH Joachim, SEITZ Dieter, WOLF Frieder Otto, and WOLF Nicola (Germany); LACLAU Ernesto and NAISHTAT Francisco (Argentina); NIMMI Ephraim (Australia); GINSBURGH Victor (Belgium); ABDO Nahla and ELIE Bernard (Canada); GALCERAN Montserrat (Spain); KANGASPURO Markku (Finland); BALIBAR Etienne, DERRIDA Jacques, LEVY André, LEVY Catherine, LICHTENSTEIN Jacqueline, MACHEREY Pierre, RANCIERE Jacques and RASHED Roshdi (France); GOODY Jack, KALDOR Mary, MOUFFE Chantal, MUNDY Martha, YUVAL-DAVIS Nira and ZUBAIDA Sami (United Kingdom); STILIANOU Aristotelis (Greece); MUKHIA Harbans (India); BEN-ARI Eyal, GRINBERG Lev, HAREL Yehudith, LAOR Yitzhak, OZ Avraham, RABINOWITZ Danny, RAZ-KRAKOTZKIN Annon, REINHART Tanya and SHABTAI Aharon (Israel); AMATI Pablo, JERVOLINO Domenico, PACIELLO Maria Luigia and SANTUCCI Antonio (Italy); ISHIGURO Hid (Japan); GONZALEZ CASANOVA Pablo (Mexico); KABANOVA Irina (Russia); PACHECO Jose (Sweden); KANDIYOTI Deniz (Turkey); BEININ Joel, BERNAL Martin, BROWN Wendy, BUCK-MORSS Susan, BUTLER Judith, RAJCHMAN John, ROFF William, SCOTT Joan and WALLERSTEIN Immanuel (USA); SALECL Renata (Yugoslavia).
It was agreed with the Palestinian intellectuals and academics who supported the idea of this appeal and gave their advice on its wording, that they would not sign it, since it is calling for solidarity with them and help to their people.
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