Last spring, I was invited to give a handful of talks in Athens and Thessaloniki on the Occupy movement. Not long after I returned to New York City, it was revealed that the Greek neo-Nazi party, Golden Dawn – now the country’s third-largest, with the electoral backing of half the country’s police force – had established something of a diplomatic mission, setting up offices in Montreal, Sydney and smack in my backyard in the Queens neighborhood of Astoria. A swift organizing effort kicked off in response, and Golden Dawn backers were promptly stripped of their office space in a local Greek community center, but not before they managed to solicit donations of money and clothing from local businesses “for struggling Greek families.” So I returned to Athens to check in with anti-fascist organizers about the work happening in Astoria, and to get feedback about how to better synchronize our efforts.
Even more cartoonish than Golden Dawn’s well-publicized, thuggish petulance (both in and outside of parliament) are its attempts to position itself as a salve to Greece’s austerity woes at the grassroots level. Free food distribution has been set up in parks à la Food Not Bombs, with the caveat of being “for Greeks only.” Despite little evidence of support or participation from medical practitioners (indeed, doctors have collectively refused to withhold treatment from immigrants), the party recently announced its own health project: the laughably titled Doctors With Borders. However little substance there may be to these projects, and however cynical, the public relations effect is real. Golden Dawn markets the notion that its opposition to austerity extends beyond merely scapegoating immigrants, homosexuals and others; the party presents itself as a tangible antidote to the country’s suffering and the government’s seeming determination to worsen it at the behest of international lenders.
Borders. It’s easy enough to harbor a certain hostility toward them, simply out of contempt for how they serve as the contours against which the disparities of global capitalism unfold. The zone of indistinction, wherein the era of war constrained by neither geography nor temporality expresses itself most acutely in the suspension of civil liberties; where the force of the State is delegated to and performed with all the arbitrary pettiness of the border agent; where we are all rendered foreigners, and the foundations of liberal democracy are laid (cynically) bare. It’s easy enough to despise them, even at a distance. Without so much as breaking the surface, they leave one with the sense one is being lied to.
Leaving Palestine always feels akin to mainlining that insidiousness. For a host of reasons.
There are, of course, the obvious ones. Palestinian friends usually can’t even travel to Jerusalem, drawing into relief just how small a measure of mobility can be a privilege. There’s an algebra of movement to the colonial arrangement so tedious, and yet so woven into life on the ground as to be virtually invisible. It’s obscene, if only for its banality. There’s also the distance Israel seems willing to go, and the enthusiastic Rusty Trombone performed by neighboring States, to ensure no one gets close enough to Palestinians to give witness. The evident spite is enough to make one want to burn whatever clothes one showed up in, for good measure. …Read More
Much in the way of media coverage has highlighted the appearance of a Western-style Black Bloc on the streets of Cairo during the protests marking the second anniversary of the Egyptian uprising that toppled Hosni Mubarak. The Egyptian state, having perceived the formation as a distinct political organization, promptly outlawed it, and just as promptly accused its members of comically unlikely collusion with Zionist saboteurs. Islamist groups such as Al-Gama’a Al-Islamiyya called for anyone engaged in Black Bloc actions to be treated to the punishments enumerated for “hooliganism” in the Quran–chief among them, execution. If one takes the reception of Black Blocs in the United States since the tactic’s initial coming out in the late 1990s as reference, the narrative unfolding in and out of Cairo is nothing if not regionally and culturally specific.
Spontaneity, largely horizontal organization, and a suspicion toward explicit political leadership have all been signature components of what’s referred to as the Arab Spring. This has been the case since the outbreak of the Tunisian revolution – regardless of the regimes that have resulted from the power vacuums left in their wake. Yet very little of the particularities or the historical forces driving these uprisings captured the imagination of or spoke to left anti-authoritarians in the west, until the appearance of a western-style black bloc in Cairo on the two year anniversary of the Egyptian revolution. That contradiction, and a sudden gaze cast –particularly on Egypt – pose rather unsettling questions about representation, and a slouch toward Orientalism.
The romantic accounts of Arab struggle constructed in the US (most recently, in an “open letter” to the Black Bloc, from Crimethinc), commit a signature sin of omission. Namely, the Arabs present in these accounts (published largely for an English-speaking audience) don’t speak, and are not heard. The features we’re treated to are filtered through a process of selection in which Arabs did not participate. Consequently, what these accounts convey –well-meaning, or no –has more to do with what their authors see of themselves in their subject matter, and less to do with anything happening on the ground in Arab struggles.
Mohammed Bamyeh is a sociologist of social movements at the University of Pittsburgh, who has written critically about the intersection of anarchism and the dynamics of the Arab uprisings. I encountered him through an article published on the website Jadaliyya several years ago, and sought him out on the topic of anarchism in the Arab world. This conversation resulted.
not (yet) an intifada2.27.13 Ammunition fired on Palestinians, outside Ofer prison (West Bank)
RAMALLAH – Since news broke Saturday night that 30-year-old Arafat Jaradat had died while under Israeli interrogation, clashes between Palestinians and Israeli soldiers have been escalating at a breakneck pace, pitting Palestinian rocks, fireworks, and the occasional Molotov cocktail against Israeli teargas, rubber bullets, and even live ammunition. Murmurs of a possible Third Intifada are ubiquitous, from the pages of Haaretz, to a rallying cry made by imprisoned Palestinians, to the casual conversations of middle-class landlords in Ramallah.
But before we can speculate about the emergence of a new Intifada, we must look for clear evidence of a coagulation of the outrage on the ground into determined organization.
