Dr. Irene Calis
Zeina Azzam:
Good afternoon everyone, and welcome to the Jerusalem Fund and Palestine Center. We’re delighted to have you all with us today. My name is Zeina Azzam and I’m the executive director here. Before starting our program, I’d like to draw your attention to a couple of events we have coming up. No doubt many of you who are not the online audience saw our current exhibition, which is starting on Friday. We’re having the opening reception for it on Friday. Our colleague, Dagmar Painter, just put it up yesterday. It’s called “Night Raids,” and it’s about the village of Bil’in and the Israeli military night raids to arrest people in that village. Another event that I’d really like to point out to you is going to be happening on Oct 7th and that’s next Friday; and this is our Edward Said Memorial lecture and it’s featuring actually his son, Wadie Said. The title of the lecture is the “The Terrorist Label: An Examination of American Criminal prosecution: So I invite you all to join us on that day as well.
Today, we are so delighted to have with us, Dr. Irene Calis. The title of her talk is “Emancipated Palestinian Futures? Hard Lessons from the South African Dream Deferred.” It’s my pleasure to welcome you, Irene, and to introduce you. Dr. Irene Calis is a political anthropologist whose research focuses on the politics of human suffering towards meaningful transformation in people’s everyday lives. Her long term field work has involved living and working with Palestinian farming communities throughout the West Bank. She holds a PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Dr. Calis has taught in diverse university settings across the globe, including Rhodes University in South Africa, The University of Cambridge, and the University of Hawai’i. She’ll be talking for about thirty or so minutes, after which we will open the floor for discussion and questions; and those of you who are watching online can send us questions via Twitter on @PalestineCenter. So, please join me in giving a hearty welcome to Dr. Irene Calis.
Dr. Irene Calis:
Hello. Well, thank you to Zeina, and to Samirah, the Jerusalem Fund for hosting me today, and to each of you for being here despite the weather. Can you hear me? Can everybody hear me? OK, I’ll come closer. It is fitting for me to have this discussion here at the Jerusalem Fund which, along with the Institute for Palestine Studies, has been foundational, I think, in establishing a different kind of encounter with Palestine and Palestinians in DC, and in the U.S. more broadly. I also just want to take a moment to say that I appreciate that these talks are even possible today because of the trailblazing efforts of key individuals of this area who have helped to give us a voice, and those such as Ustaaz Walid Khalidi, the late Hisham Sharabi, our recently departed Clovis Maksoud, as well as individuals like Zeina and Samirah and others here with us today, George Hishmeh, others like Nadia Hijab, Rafael Calis, just to name a few. I thank you all and I hope that our emerging visionaries continue to build on your efforts in creating new pathways ahead for us.
My talk today is grounded in research that takes seriously the everyday processes of life. It builds on this to speak to broader questions about Palestinians futures from the vantage point, though, of today’s South Africa. My reflections stem from my long term research on Palestine, involvement in our struggle, and more recently, participation in national debates in South Africa on Palestinian solidarity issues. I hope this talk to be more of a dialogue together and I would therefore like to leave enough time for discussion after the talk.
There is, I believe, an oversaturation of data on the Palestinian condition, which requires us to take stock and question its substantive value without a commitment alongside it to a thriving Palestinian humanity. I think that the extraordinary task of having the Palestinian condition heard has meant that most, if not all, of our efforts have been focused on producing our visibility. This has included having to counter various and often insidious knowledge-producing outlets that either silence or distort Palestinian narratives, both historical and ongoing. The struggle for visibility might be even be at the core of a broader Palestinian struggle, and perhaps it is an unavoidable dynamic of any anti-colonial movement. Part of being heard means needing to find a way to link up the language of struggle with wider popular concerns, and this is how, in my mind, a liberation movement becomes couched in the language, for instance of human rights or statehood, which aims to appeal to wider liberal sensibilities, even while among some of these same circles have yet really to be recognized as fully human. It is undeniable to me that the way we articulate Palestinian realities matters. Not only does it allow for a more nuanced understanding, but it also humanizes the links between seemingly distant peoples in creating empathy through familiarity, for example–of our life roles as parents, as children, as sisters, etc. But also the requirement to be legible, to be heard and visible to the status quo can also keep us locked in reactive responses. In striving for visibility, our scope for finding solutions is often bound by the status quo rather than wider resources of inspiration that call for the more radical kinds of transformation that might be needed. I think the turn, the perpetual turn, to international human rights law to dismantle the conditions of Palestinian dispossession is a case in point. International law continues to operate within a state-centered system, whereby the state ultimately resides over how human rights are first interpreted and then how and if they are enforced. So what does that mean for stateless people, and what happens when the state is both the perpetrator and the judge of human rights violations?
The way in which Israel defines the nation, therefore, is key to understanding who falls within the protection of human rights law, but also it tells us why international law and its various unimplemented UN resolutions have categorically failed Palestinians. If we stand back for a moment it becomes clear that before we can appeal to the notion of rights, Palestinians must first be recognized and included in the human. And, I think a claim to humanity is the heart of any emancipatory struggle; and it is here that we can draw some meaningful assessments of the overlaps between apartheid South Africa and Israel today. As you know, the scale of Palestinian dehumanization is being compared to conditions under apartheid South Africa. The subject of Israeli apartheid also serves as a poignant example in my mind of this reactionary dynamic that we seem to be caught in. While the political currency of this link is clear between Israeli policies and apartheid South Africa, a lot of collective energy has once again been mired in producing our visibility within this analogy rather than innovating ideas that work towards the substantive emancipation of Palestinians and their collective renewal. In other words, the case of South Africa forces us to ask “Ok, what then?” and to focus on strategic vision making as to what kind of reality we want to create– substantively, I mean beyond the talk of peace and statehood. On both sides of the divide of this subject, this heated subject, the preoccupation has become to either prove or disprove why Israel is or is not the new apartheid and even more troubling perhaps is some of the analysis that reduces an apartheid system to particular features that can be checked off a list: this does or does not qualify. But an apartheid system is framed by a broader world view which fundamentally at its core removes certain groups from a shared humanity.
In South Africa, as you well know, apartheid was preceded by settler colonialism–a form of colonialism in which white settlement and supremacy relied upon the mass displacement of native Black populations from their land and their ongoing exploitation as a cheap labor force. Displaced Black native populations were incorporated into the settler colonial economy. The legal system of apartheid, which came much later, formalized settler colonialism, but both rested on the dehumanization of the subjugated population.
Under Israeli rule, as an apartheid South Africa, there is a bureaucracy that routinizes this dehumanization of an entire social group and stigmatizes them as potential and likely criminals, so that they are criminalized essentially for simply existing, for continuing to be present in the coveted land. This means that resistance, in any form, to the status quo is treated as a criminal offense. They must produce the required “official” documents, permits, identity cards, and paperwork to go about their basic daily lives. Bureaucracy here is the everyday form and mechanism through which Palestinians are removed from their land, denied freedom of movement, and control over their time. Does it matter if we call this apartheid? After all, apartheid was one attempt to formalize settler colonialism, and there’s ample knowledge of what settler colonialism looks like.
In fact, I think there are some key limits between apartheid South Africa and Israel. The Zionist movement’s intentions were and remain fundamentally different. As is clear in the words of early Zionist leaders like Herzl, and current Israeli officials like Netanyahu, the Zionist movement’s aim has always been land without the inconvenient natives and not their incorporation into the settler economy, as in apartheid South Africa.
So rather than getting sidelined in a debate about what does and does not qualify as apartheid, from a vantage point in today’s South Africa, it seems necessary to adjust our focus to one that is more substantively beneficial for Palestinians. And this concerns not the nature of the apartheid state, but instead the nature of our preferred future. What we need is not to prove whether Israel is the new apartheid, but instead to draw lessons from the post-apartheid human condition in South Africa. I believe reframing the link between South Africa and Palestinians underlines that the heart of this shared struggle is in people rather than in the bureaucratic details of an oppressive system. It is found in their ongoing dispossession from their land, their exclusion from that nationhood, in the terms of everyday life for Black South Africans today, most of whom remain second-class citizens.
South Africa’s praised constitution may affirm the value of all lives in principle, but as Achille Mbembe noted in a recent public lecture, people who are poor and Black in South Africa continue to be treated as waste. They continue to be policed as an external threat to society, not as part of society. The achievement of a democratic South Africa, in principle, has not translated into substantive emancipatory victory in practice. Apartheid social and economic legacies have yet to be reckoned with, where whiteness still lives on the back of blackness.
From a Palestinian vantage point, the post-apartheid human condition in South Africa prompted me to ask qualitatively different kinds of questions, which a focus on visibility has perhaps distracted from. What would our emancipated future look like in Palestine? And what must be in that framework now to realize that future? How would emancipation incorporate a vision of Palestine beyond geography, as three-quarters of Palestinians live in the diaspora?
When the South African transition from apartheid is held up as a model for Palestinians, it is worth heeding the warning offered by the current state of the ANC. Like many Palestinian leaders after the creation of the Palestinian authority in 1994, the ANC leaders, as part of the political elite, have long left the struggle, although they claim to be speaking as part of it. The PA has not only become incorporated into the colonial status quo, but it is an important mechanism in sustaining it. So one lesson that Palestinians have to draw from the fate of the ANC is that the anti-colonial revolutionaries have an essential role to play, but that their leadership and their pre-revolutionary structures may need to be dispensed with in the postcolonial moment, especially when elitist power perverts commitment to the demands of ordinary life. Further, there must always be readiness to give way to new visionaries.
And so, for Palestinians and Black South Africans, what of our dream deferred? We know too well that dreams are a double edged sword. When they fail to be realized time and again, they become corrosive to the struggling human spirit. And yet, the same dream is pivotal for any emancipatory struggle in its basic form–the dream to be free. But I think after more than 60 years of struggle, the Palestinian dream of emancipation must find a new face. The freedom and future we imagine must redefine our path forward. Whether we call the form of this imagined resolution the One-State, Two-State, or Rainbow Nation solution is irrelevant. Statehood without radical structural and social changes will simply formalize the current social hierarchy within a so-called “open” neoliberal system. It will ensure that those privileged in the previous order of things are simply free to continue to live on the backs of those historically subordinated. We see in South Africa that the structural privilege of whiteness continues, and in fact, that white privilege has not had to give up much for the postcolonial moment. This is perhaps the most important lesson Palestinians can take from South Africa. It cautions us to qualify the nature of our freedom imagined.
The term “survivance,” which comes from Native American Studies, speaks to the active presence and continued dignity of Native peoples, despite the ethnocidal policies of a settler colonial state. The term survivance involves an active renewal beyond mere survival. In spite of the immense measures to contain and remove Palestinians from their land, Palestinians stubbornly persist. But, what also demands attention here is the nature of Palestinian existence. The survivance of Palestinians, like other native peoples, within a settler colonial state, is not a given by any means. On the contrary, it continues to be subverted on the most fundamental levels, as Palestinians have, in the 21st century, yet to be recognized and treated as fully human.
So while we continue to persist, Palestinians certainly deserve more than a debased humanity–which requires us to ask, what kind of existence will we collectively accept? And how will we build what is needed to support our preferred futures?
We may wish to approach our future selves and what came before us–but not in a memorialized kind of past–more as an anchor for collective renewal as our dreams transform. To do so, we can re-remember the rich heritage that exists in all of us–in our intellectuals, our poets and writers, in our musical and artisanal traditions, in the vibrant social spaces of our pre-1948 urban centers, such as Jerusalem, in the season knowledge of our agriculturalists, and in the people-land bond. We see that this heritage has been largely lost to our use, even forgotten in the day-to-day workings of a settler colonial order that keeps Palestinians locked in a very narrow present. It’s a vicious system that attempts to splinter identities and beat self-esteem to a pulp. But this heritage might be a resource that can help our future “born-free” generations, as those born after 1994 are referred to in South Africa, to stand tall, connected to the deep roots that support them. This is true of those children today who are part of the Palestinian folk music groups in Palestine that I see. Their eyes visibly carry pride and strength, rather than the otherwise ever-present sense of emptiness and feeling lost. It is this living heritage that we must cultivate–not in some nationalist effort to excavate and restore an imagined past, but rather to re-inscribe the terms of our future, especially for our future generations. For this to bear fruit, it is essential in my mind that our youth experience their identity beyond oppression and beyond political slogans.
So if I can close here with a lesson that we must keep in mind from the South African experience, it is that the denial of the full and equal humanity of the majority of Black people preceded apartheid and has continued after apartheid, and victories on paper are not the same as victories in practice.
I think I’ll leave it there. Thank you.
