by
Salvage
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How do you keep on fighting when everything is lost? Ask a Palestinian. A Palestinian is someone who is wading knee-deep in rubble. Palestinian politics is always already post-apocalyptic: it is about surviving after the end of the world and, in the best case, salvaging something out of all that has been lost.
What is the relationship between Palestine and the rest of the world? In Global Palestine, John Collins argues that rather than an exception, a stubbornly irresolvable anomaly, a leftover from a colonial past that modernity has left behind, this particular country should be seen as a monad, in Walter Benjamin’s sense of the term. Forces operating worldwide are crystallised inside it. They come together with extreme ferocity in the land of Palestine, which works as a kind of laboratory or ‘prophetic index’, holding clues to the future others will face. ‘Are we all becoming Palestinians?’ Collins asks; a list of global tendencies – the proliferation of walls, the rise of drone warfare, generally accelerating technologies of repression – tempts him to answer in the affirmative. He also mentions the destruction of the natural environment, or ‘the war on the milieu’. But it is Naomi Klein who has looked deepest into this particular mirror of the monad. In her recent Edward Said lecture, ‘Let Them Drown: The Violence of Othering in a Warming World’, she suggests that the Palestinian experience of displacement and homesickness is poised for universalisation in a warming world:
The state of longing for a radically altered homeland – a home that may not even exist any longer – is something that is being rapidly, and tragically, globalised … If we don’t demand radical change we are headed for a whole world of people searching for a home that no longer exists.
The whole occupation exudes transience. One cannot spend time in the territories of 1967 without feeling every day, every minute that ‘things cannot go on like this’, with Benjamin. And yet there seems to be no end in sight. Checkpoints cannot ruin people’s lives forever, but they will certainly continue to do so tomorrow, and the day after that. It is this impossibility, this combination of the transitory and the inexorable, of ricketiness and absolute inertia, that makes life under the Zionist enterprise so torturous.
As for the fossil economy, we know for a certainty that it will end. Physical nature preordains it. And yet in the meantime, new coal-fired power-plants, oil rigs, pipelines, airports, highways, suburban shopping malls are erected over the green planet of ours. Things cannot go on like this: and they do. It is that experience, which can make a person want to blow herself up, that inspires the culture of sumud.
Let me tell you how things looked when this was truly a nature park. Before you came and spoiled it all. You could not see any new buildings, you did not hear any traffic. All you saw were deer leaping up the terraced hills, wild rabbits, foxes, jackals and carpets of flowers. Then it was a park. Preserved in more or less the same state it had been in for hundreds of years.
To which the settler retorts:
‘Nothing can remain untouched for hundreds of years. Progress is inevitable.’ (…)
‘You dug our hills for nothing.’
‘Building roads is progress, not destruction.’
How common it is, in our capitalist heartlands, to come across people with that settler mentality, those who believe in the inevitability of what they call progress, in the necessity of roads, in all the goods of the land being theirs as a matter of course: the entitled ones, the owners.
Anyone who does not feel the pangs of the wounded biosphere moves like a colonist within it. Naturally, such obliviousness and self-absorption correlate very closely with economic affluence. In the sacrifice zones of the capitalist world-economy, people carry the wounds in their bodies; in the most luxurious shopping malls, one needs a political-ecological education to see the deep stabs being inflicted, and chances are that one is quite alone in doing so. Only by tending closely to the wounds in the biosphere can one cultivate properly Palestinian sensibilities: before you came and spoiled it all. What will today’s settlers leave for posterity?
Not since the exuberant early days of the first intifada has the Palestinian resistance harboured illusions about an imminent victory. Optimism is not its point of view. It operates in full consciousness of the enormity of the forces stacked against it and – under the current balance of power – the slim to non-existing chances of liberating the land. So what is the point of resisting? ‘To keep the embers of the conflict burning’, in the words of Hamas, until broader historical processes have turned the tables on the enemy, at some future point, however faraway it might be – or, to keep ‘the issue alive until such time as the requirements for victory materialize’. In an interview published in Journal of Palestine Studies, Ramadan Shallah, leader of Islamic Jihad, the second most important armed force of the resistance, spells out the same strategic doctrine: the purpose is to maintain ‘the military pressure on Israel’ until ‘new parameters’ emerge. No one knows how long that will take. (Anyone who feels unease at the Islamism of these two groups should ponder, among other things, their – particularly Hamas’s – extraordinary efficiency in stamping out every attempt by Daesh to rear its head in Gaza.)
There is a point where total pessimism reverts into its opposite. ‘I’m an optimist because we have a mammoth task in front of us that has to be completed’, says Wadi. ‘The task? It’s everything. Palestine. The future. Freedom.’ Following the Christian existentialist Gabriel Marcel, Terry Eagleton theorises this as ‘fundamental hope’. It is a form of hope that acknowledges the immensity of the defeats and the desolation and still refuses to capitulate, wagering on the possibility of some unspecified future opening. A short remove from despair, it is all that remains when the slate has been swept clean of specific aspirations and concrete assets: it is, says Eagleton, ‘what survives the general ruin.’ Thus Palestinian writers are fond of lines such as ‘in the rubble I rummage for light and new poetry’ (Darwish); ‘to be able to say “no” is a right that I will cling to with my very fingernails, my very teeth, even if it makes me bleed’ (Jabra); ‘things won’t always be like this, I thought, there’s still some fresh air left in the world’ (Badr); ‘perhaps one day / the river will cry / “arise and breathe again”’ (Zayyad); ‘I don’t know why we continue to hope for a future for these hills; one friend even clings to the long view of geological time’ (Shehadeh). Call it fundamental hope, or thinking like a mountain, or even the geological ethos of the Palestinian resistance. Surely, even axiomatically, if there is any way we can survive inside the tank of a warming world and get out of it alive, it is by learning to fight – not to die – and to nourish some climate sumud along these lines.
To those who – saturated with hypocritical moralism, an ethical smugness only the victors can afford – demand that we condemn the resistance, one should respond: what do you want the Palestinians to do? You want them to learn to drop down and die in silence. The resistance is not something to be condoned – for, you see, it’s about more than Palestine. It is something to plug oneself into. It is the last tube of oxygen when there is no other air to breathe.
For Palestinians, nostalgia is a first premise. Some exhort them to get over it, forget the old villages, move on. ‘The ability to forget’, Bonnett quotes Herbert Marcuse, ‘is the mental faculty which sustains submissiveness’. It is the voice of the triumphant master, in this case the Zionist settler-colonialist: don’t get bogged down in the past. To this, the Palestinian response is militant nostalgia.
To deny that the Palestinian people was better off before 1948, you need to be a Zionist; to deny that when it comes to climate, this planet was in a better shape before the cumulative effects of the fossil economy began to bite in the late twentieth century, you need to be a climate-change denialist. The corollary of Klein’s projection is that nostalgia, Palestinian-style, will be universalised, and for good reason: some fairly valuable things actually, objectively were better before the rivers dried up, the land disappeared beneath the sea, the breadbasket turned into a dustbowl, the snow ceased to fall on our Arctic homes. More videos will be watched and re-watched compulsively. Critics who have sneered at Palestinian literature for its surfeit of nostalgia have judged it prematurely. ‘All Palestinians are poets by nature’, writes Jabra in The Ship, ‘because they have experienced two basic things: the beauty of nature, and tragedy.’ That is more a prophetic index than a pillar of salt.
Moreover, if we hold the view that Palestine and climate change are not some minor deviations from an otherwise healthy trajectory of progress, but that late capitalism is rather a fundamentally destructive force in society as well as in nature, then we must accept that loss is a major predicament of our time, and that many struggles will have to start from baselines strewed with rubble. We ‘plunge headlong towards the inevitable pit. This is progress, rather like the progress of a disease’, with Wadi: so pick up the hand grenade and plant the tree