gdp's Comments

Borderline Crimes : Privileged Pessimism: On the Israeli Mainstream

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 18:42:05 +0000

this is a wonderful post, Tom. I think that if I were still in Berkeley and in KE, I would use some theatre techniques to explore the 'dinner table' conversation with family and friends a bit more, and really have the discussion out there where we can see it. I think it's only the beginning of deconstructing Israeli privilege.

Borderline Crimes : Turning Banners Into Flags: Thoughts from Palestine/Israel on Solidarity and Exclusion

Sat, 7 Nov 2009 14:25:12 +0000

This is an incredible post and I think it adds to/begins a discussion on what democratic organizing looks like. The vision is that engaging in democratic, decentralized struggle on a local, specific set of issues will develop a grassroots analysis of the causes and consequences of this specific problem and also a critical awareness of global, border-crossing linkages between this issue and others. What makes this anarchist perspective different from vanguardist or authoritarian points of view is that everything from the manner in which these linkages are realized and discussed, or even the nature of the linkages themselves, is not known by anybody or any group, including radical intellectuals with densely cross-referenced analyses of the world situation. They/we must bring what knowledge they have and whatever linkages they believe exist into a democratic and equal dialogue with other perceptions of the problem, in parallel with democratic discussions on strategies and tactics that compromise the more 'practical' component of the struggle. I want us to discuss what the difference between banners and flags are to a greater extent. What is it that you practically wish that anarchists in UCSC would have done? What were the major differences between the way that the Bil'in protests are being organized and the way that the UCSC campus protests were organized that made explain these important differences?

Borderline Crimes : Nepal: Land of the Landless, Government of Non-Governments

Fri, 6 Nov 2009 06:35:07 +0000

It has a lot of representation from the Maoists, but this representation has not yielded anything yet. From what I understand, the opposing parties have created a coalition to shut them out. But my post was not so much about the Maoists as it was about the connections between politics, economics and history in Nepal, connections that development work denies.

Borderline Crimes : Violence and the Crime of Dispossession in Israel/Palestine

Mon, 5 Oct 2009 07:33:00 +0000

Yeah, this is basically something that is missing in Israelis' knowledge about the situation,. Even those who say that such dispossession is justified (as I've recently come across) don't know exactly what it is that they are justifying. I've recently been thinking about 'defense' and 'security.' Attacks by Palestinians have been used to justify the violence of the occupation and the importance of maintaining a majority Jewish state (because otherwise they will slaughter us) but there is no awareness of instances where it is Jewish domination that is being defended rather than the lives of Jewish people. In other words, people cannot conceive of securing a Jewish majority as separate from securing people from violence, even though historically it was this latter concept that preceded the first.

Borderline Crimes : Why Talk of a One-State Solution?

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 06:35:35 +0000

I think it is a very positive thing for people to start to question nationalism as a whole after experience with Zionism, to see how American nationalism has some of the same issues in it. But I can definitely see how people can use that as a kind of deflection, to say "well, nationalism is bad but it's everywhere so I'm going to stop talking about Zionism because that's singling it out somehow." American Jews especially should understand their personal responsibility toward the problems of Israel/Palestine and Zionism, but I guess I just don't think that we will achieve the goal of spreading this sense of responsibility by suggesting that Zionism is unique in the contradictions in creates (implying that others are not). But here let me contradict myself and agree with you. I feel that there are contexts that become symbolic to the rest of the world's struggling people, and Israel/Palestine is one of them. On the one hand, I believe that there are lots of terrible things taking place, and that Zionism is as much an echo of other nationalisms as it is a departure from them. On the other, I don't want activism around Israel/Palestine to let up. I see it as a kind of privilege that other people's homes don't get. Lots of people want to fix this really fundamental problem in my part of the world! So I guess it's about drawing the connections and parallels between Israel/Palestine and other parts of the world while encouraging even more Israel/Palestine activism in the spirit of solidarity rather than say that Israel/Palestine has more problems than, say, the United States or Honduras.

Borderline Crimes : MaGav: Thoughts on race and class in Israel's border police

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 05:23:17 +0000

I hadn't thought about masks. Did they start wearing masks ever since the filming began or have they always been wearing masks?

Borderline Crimes : Why Talk of a One-State Solution?

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 05:16:30 +0000

As usual an excellent post with a strong moral commitment to living on the land and in full equality with Palestinians. I have one concern that I will hopefully have the time to expand on in another post. It resides in this passage: "A lot of people simply make Zionism a private case of nationalism, and then continue to debate whether nationalism itself is a good idea. I think this is unnecessary, because Zionism is an unusual and a-typical kind of nationalism. When the French, or even the Palestinians, began talking of themselves as a nation, this meant a transition from local or religious identities into a more comprehensive one (in the late eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, respectively)." Though I believe that Zionism is 'atypical' for the reasons you mentioned, I think that the problems of Zionist statehood, nonetheless, are classic problems of any implementation of the nationalist idea. Turning Zionism into an aberrant nationalism in this way has the potential to preserve other nationalisms and sideline the powerful critiques of nation-statehood. And even the idea of a social phenomenon being 'atypical' brings up the question of what IS typical. For example, one of these critiques posits that all nationalisms are deeply concerned with territorial borders and with Others that may be found both within and without these borders. I don't need to tell you that American nationalism has a lot in common with Zionism as a settler, ethnicity based national movement which racialized non-nationals in the name of territorial expansion and capital accumulation. But perhaps this nationalism is also atypical? Let's go to the example of France and Germany, the two examples of 'normal nations' that Israeli leaders sometimes reference to justify their aspirations for ethnically-pure statehood (i.e. France for the French, Germany for the Germans, Israeli for the Jews, Afghanistan for the Afghans). In fact, I've read about the process by which these nation-states were formed, and it doesn't seem to have been an obvious transition to a "more comprehensive identity." On the contrary, the creation of the French state and French national identity required the cultural and political subjugation of what are now France's provinces, and I imagine that similar (yet historically specific) things happened in Germany. Certainly, there is a difference between a project of assimilation and centralization and a nationalist project that by definition excludes an indigenous group of people from full membership within it, and I think this is the point that you are making. But are there nationalisms that don't create outsiders? Is there one national movement today or in history that has not excluded others by definition, formally or informally? So to sum it up, I believe that it's harmful to artificially separate the problems of Zionism from the problems of nationalism since they are totally bound up in each other. It strikes me as similar to trying to separate colonialism from nationalism, a belief that allowed people to ignore more 'domestic' forms of colonialism.

Borderline Crimes : MaGav: Thoughts on race and class in Israel's border police

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 22:58:33 +0000

Thank you very much for the kinds words and the support. As an update to my post, it has also come to my attention that Russian immigrants and women also comprise a portion of MaGav, and that the woman soldiers are rumored to more aggressive in order to, as I speculated in the post, prove their membership either in MaGav as a military unit or in society in general.

Borderline Crimes : Changing what we can believe in: the ballot box isn't good enough

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 22:49:18 +0000

http://www.recreate68.com/direct_action.pdf

Borderline Crimes : Changing what we can believe in: the ballot box isn't good enough

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 22:46:44 +0000

Really great post. If the reelection rates are so high, why do you think that reps are still so concerned about their seats and constantly running for re-election? When politicians say they can't pursue certain things because they will not be re-elected, what are they really talking about if the rates are so high?

Borderline Crimes : Ma'asara 7/24/2009

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 04:01:39 +0000

I read your post a week or so ago,and I want to thank you for writing it. I am really interested in your point of view on all this talk of economic peace, of "hopes for change" in the territories and what your impression of these statements is. I feel incredibly disconnected here in the US, and disappointed by almost every major coverage of the situation.

Borderline Crimes : "Economic Peace" in the New York Times?

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 00:53:14 +0000

This is a great question. Looking back at it, I think I was motivated to put that down as part of her identification because the way the NY times and many other people frame the issue, the Palestinians are under the grip of something "ancestral," familial, racialized, recently Islamicized, while the Israelis are much more modern, rational, and freed from calculations according to any narrow ethnic, national or familial group. The Ashkenazi Jew is the normative Israeli. What I think I was suggesting is that if a Palestinian Muslim were to say the same thing that Livni said except referring to the need for an exclusively Muslim state as a matter of values, of what 'someone feels inside,' then this would be seen as an example of ancestral values blinding the natives to the universal humanity of all people. What I was suggesting with the comparison is the idea that it is at best simplistic and at worst colonialist to dismiss anything that stands in the way of the IMF's vision for economic growth in the West Bank as ancestral resistance to modernity, and to justify more military forces in order to bring them up to speed. What people are feeling and doing now in the West Bank probably has much more to do with the political, economic and social situation now than with 'ancient hatreds.'