Palestine and the point of radical non-belonging (forthcoming in The Journal of Palestinian Studies مجلة الدراسات الفلسطينية)

The radio presenter was an exceptionally nice person, and an as-liberal-as-they-come journalist. I liked what she did and she liked the way I spoke about issues of multiculturalism and anti-immigrant racism in Australia.  She interviewed me many times and considered me as a regular on her program. I felt that she liked me personally, and I liked her. So, all in all, I felt that I had a really good professional relation with her. That’s how it was, until she decided to interview me about Palestine. She clearly thought that what I was saying was unacceptable and harsh and not in the realm of what she judged to be reasonable and her reaction was to ask me: ‘But do you accept Israel’s inherent right to exist?’ I found the question/request irrelevant and repugnant, not least because for the first time she was treating me not as a professor with some expert knowledge to convey but as some kind of political representative of an essentialised Arab intransigence. Our relationship never recovered.

Meeting people with whom one gets along just fine about everything until the issue of Palestine comes to the fore is a common occurrence for many academics and activists who forefront the question of Palestine in the global struggle for justice. Such people are often thought of as not being ‘radical enough’ as if all they need is a strong push along the spectrum of radicalism. Similarly, the American pro-Palestinian left has a name for such people. They call them PEPs (Progressive Except for/on Palestine). This categorisation also makes it as if Palestine is at the extreme end of what is nonetheless a continuum, an uninterrupted line of degrees of progressivism that goes from the least to the most progressive, and along which all progressive people are positioned. Both the idea of ‘not radical enough’ and PEP makes it as if all ‘progressivism’ is of the same kind, and that it can have a single unit of measurement. Yet, this sense of continuity is belied by the abrupt nature of the experience I am describing above. There are very few accounts of people smoothly gliding along the progressive line when it comes to Palestine. Narratives of an encounter with PEP people is often of the form of ‘everything was going well until I uttered the word Palestine’, ‘I liked this politician and thought she was exactly my kind of politician and suddenly she started talking about Israel’, ‘I really identified with the group and its urban and sexual politics, for an hour I felt I was in heaven, I thought that finally I had found a group I could belong to and then the question of Palestine came up and it took a split second for me to feel all alone again’. It is this abrupt break in the sentiment of comradeship, togetherness and commonality and the sudden feeling of being alone and on the outside of what you were seconds before part of that I want to refer to as the radical point of non-belonging. 

It was not by coincidence that I began to understand the colonial and structural nature of this radical point of non-belonging while reflecting on the positioning of Indigenous people vis a vis Australian society. I had often noticed over time that a similar experience of non-belonging is expressed by indigenous Australians. An indigenous colleague explained to me explicitly how when meeting with self-declared anti-racist and supportive white people in government one feels a sense of collective belonging and a genuine shared concern by all to ‘close gaps’ and work towards better living conditions for indigenous people. “If by chance the conversation moves to colonial questions of land and reparation” my colleague said, “all but a handful of whites immediately start looking at each other in ways that makes you feel: nah, they don’t think I am part of them… and I don’t want to be part of them either’.

This colonial question came to the fore analytically in my own thinking when I was speaking at a conference on the ‘Geographies of Inequality’ organized in my own university in Melbourne. In my presentation I was reflecting on the difference between what I termed distributional inequality and extractive inequality in relation to Indigenous Australians. I began by pointing out that from a general perspective, these two orders of inequality are very different kind of realities. Extractive inequality assumes a direct relation between subjects doing the extracting and subjects from whom things are being extracted, while distributional inequality assumes no necessary relation between the unequal parts. Extractive inequality is produced by the very relation between the two unequal parts. As with Marx’s concept of exploitation, one part grows and gets more at the expense of diminishing the other. With distributional inequality the relation is of an epistemological rather than an ontological order. It comes into being through it being noted a posteriori via a process of comparative observation. There is no necessary experience of a relation between the two unequal parties. That is, an observer can declare two groups as having an unequal possession of x or y without the groups themselves noticing that they are unequal or having anything to do with each other - in the same way one can state that the amount of oxygen on the Earth’s and on Mars’s atmosphere are unequal.

In much the same way, distributional inequality involves people who are individualized through their relation to the state, mainly citizens. These citizens can be individuals or collectives but, again, there is no actual relations between them (they exist in a form of what Jean-Paul Sartre referred to as seriality). Because of its essentially comparative nature, distributional inequality partakes in the order of abstract value at the same time as it involves abstract state-defined subjects (citizens). Extractive inequality, on the other hand, involves the pulling out of concrete value (labour, land, resources) out of others. As such it partakes in the order of people with concrete particularities relating to each other as such. In my presentation, I argued that we can have a better understanding of the positioning of Indigenous people vis a vis Australian society by reflecting on the way the distributional and extractive orders of inequality come to co-exist within a settler-colonial society like Australia. It was here that the question of the radical point of non-belonging came to the fore.

In his depiction of the impact of French colonialism in Algeria Pierre Bourdieu examines the way capitalist modernity, as introduced by the French, deprived the Algerian peasants of their socio-cultural reality. Bourdieu makes clear that this is not a case of the Algerian peasants becoming like French workers or the French underclass dominated within French capitalist society. Rather than being dominated within that reality they were dominated by that reality. It was a domination that undermined the world to which the peasants habitually operated. Bourdieu’s point was that colonialism does not just position the colonized peasants unfavorably in society, it actually robs them of their own reality. This differentiation between ‘being dominated within a reality’ and ‘being dominated by that reality’ offers us a paradigmatic colonial situation that articulates itself to the differentiation between the order of distributional inequality and the order of extractive inequality examined above when this extractive order is also a colonial one. This is so because, from the moment of colonization, settler colonial society and the colonial state face the colonized in an on-going colonial relation of extraction. Such a colonial relation is by definition a warring relation in which the colonized is positioned politically as an enemy outside the social order. At the same time, settler-colonial society sooner or later aims to ‘integrate’ the colonized subject as a citizen who, more often than not, becomes an underclass withinthe social order. The specificity of indigenous politics in Australia arises precisely because Indigenous society is enmeshed in both those realities. On one hand, we still have a colonial situation and an extractive order of inequality where non-indigenous Australians are still subjugating and dispossessing Indigenous Australians of land and resources, with the state being party to this subjugation and dispossession. On the other hand, we have a post-colonial society of citizens governed by a post-colonial and managerial state that relates to all the inhabitants of Australia as citizens, its Indigenous people included. Indigenous people struggle for more services, more income, more recognition, and in the process they are constructed as citizens struggling against distributional inequality. But they also struggle as colonized people to re-gain whatever it is possible to regain from what has been extracted from them, particularly in the form of demands for land return and for reparations. To be sure, what is shown here for analytical purposes as a neat division presents itself in real life as a difficult entanglement. It is nonetheless an entanglement structured around a clear polarity: In so far as they are citizens Indigenous people are part, even if the most disadvantaged part, of Australian society.  In so far as they are colonized they exist outside of, and in a warring relation/relation of enmity with, Australian society. It was as I was reflecting on this issue that it became very clear to me that I was dealing with the structural grounds behind the experience of the point of radical non-belonging. It is radical because the colonial outside in which one is positioned is not any outside. It is known by philosophers and psychoanalyst as the constitutive outside. To occupy this outside is to have a unique vantage point of radical lucidity vis a vis the inside. This is not only true of Indigenous Australians but of all those whose radicalism is grounded in an anti-colonial conception of justice. Needless to say this includes one’s positioning towards the Palestinian struggle. 

In Palestine the order of distributional inequality and the order of extractive inequality are mapped into different geographies. For instance, the Palestinians outside Israel in the West Bank and the Gaza strip are almost exclusively subjected to an extractive inequality, while the Palestinians inside Israel have to negotiate both. The Palestinians inside Israel can struggle for colonial and for distributive justice. The Palestinians in the Occupied Territories can only struggle for colonial justice. But for all of us who identify with the Palestinian struggle but are living outside of Palestine, we experience Palestine primarily as a global extractive colonial phenomenon in which the whole of the Western world is implicated. Zionists might well be the direct colonisers, but we all know from the way this has been historically facilitated and from the way it continues to be facilitated that Palestine is a Western colonial project. Indeed Palestine is one of the few places where ‘the West’ can still come into being as a collective colonizing force in history today. It is because of this that those of us whose opposition to Israel is an opposition to an extractive colonial order will always be on the outside of the West as a whole when it comes to this point.For, to be clear, the point of radical non-belonging is precisely the point where belonging to the inside of society turns suddenly into a belonging to its outside. It is where one stops experiencing oneself, and where one stops being experienced by others, as a citizen-insider and become instead a colonial enemy-outsider. This is why identification with the Palestinian struggle is not merely a question of being ‘more progressive’. Such an identification requires not just ‘more’ of the same but a move from distributional citizen-inspired progressivism to an anti-colonial progressivism. It is not a path that any Western progressive person can smoothly move along by being a little bit more radical. It requires a fundamental shift in one’s political outlook and positioning. It requires of the progressive person to become an ‘enemy’-outsider, a variety of what radical Americans rightly and positively call ‘race traitor’. It is because not many Westerners are willing to make that leap that those of us who identify with Palestine as a colonial space of struggle end up being on our own with a sense of being besieged by the very reality to which we otherwise feel to fully belong to. And like all besieged people, we dig tunnels. Even as besieged intellectuals our writing takes the form of tunnel digging, aiming to reach an outside of the space of besiegement.

“The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace the criticism of the weapons, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses.”So have we been taught by Marx. The sentence is often used to highlight Marx’s materialist concerns: he is after a theory that has an effect in the material world not a theory that floats around in the ideological realm changing minds while leaving the social world intact. While this dimension is often commented, it is less often noted how foundational the sentence is in staging the fantasy of viability, to use a psychoanalytic concept, of the politically committed intellectual theorist. Along with the equally famous ‘Philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it’ it has drawn the structure of what a radical theorist should aspire for if their intellectual life is to be considered viable, that is, worthy of being lived. And it has indeed been the case that, for those of us intellectuals/theoreticians who aspire to have a political impact on reality, nothing is more important than finding a collective subject who will be ‘gripped’ by our ideas, and, in the process, is transformed into a material force. As besieged intellectuals located in the West at the radical point of non-belonging this becomes the aim of tunnelling.

Throughout the modern era radical intellectuals had two potential material-force-to-come: ‘the working-class’ and ‘the colonised’. They fused or oscillated between the two, western intellectuals leaning more towards connecting with their working classes and non-western intellectuals leaning more towards the colonised. In many ways, one of the features of post-modernity is a crisis of this fantasy of viability as radical intellectuals witnessed a gradual disappearance of their relation not only to ‘the working class’ and ‘the colonised’ but to any potential collective subject. A material-force-to-come became increasingly hard to define and while there has been occasional social forces that have emerged here and there, they were fleeting short-term events. None proved to be a structural and enduring feature of society in the way ‘the working-class’ and ‘the colonised’ were. In the west, the ecological movements are perhaps the only exception as far as endurance is concerned. But ecologists are hardly uni-directional in their political aspirations. They included an entanglement of conservative, reformist and radical social forces within them. 

This global crisis of intellectual relevance certainly affected similarly-minded Arab intellectuals who are also having, indeed who have always had, difficulty finding the Arab ‘working-class’. Furthermore, like many non-westerners around the world, and perhaps with a specifically bitter twist, Arab radical intellectuals have seen the hopes of Arab anti-colonial struggles turned into post-colonial militarist and/or authoritarian nightmares. There is however one reality that has made things particularly different for Arab intellectuals: it is the reality of settler-colonialism in Palestine. If colonialism in the rest of the world is turning post-modernist and post-colonial, Arab intellectuals are among the very few who are still faced with what largely remains, at least in many of its core dimensions, a very modern and very straightforwardly colonial phenomenon. It is what marks the anachronistic peculiarities of Israel: it is a violent settler society based on forms of outright land-theft that are more characteristic of eighteenth and nineteenth-century European colonialism. And yet it is a reality that is unfolding today before our very eyes. Perhaps it is because of this that, despite also featuring forms of political decay characteristic of the post-colonial era, the Palestinian struggles against Israeli colonialism continue to embody and inspire a certain modernist form of anti-colonial hope. It is particularly so for us besieged intellectuals located in our western radical point of non-belonging as we ferociously tunnel in search of a sustainable and sustaining attachment: There is always a feature of Palestinian resistance to colonialism that we can always latch onto, if nothing other than the defiant gaze of Palestinian children facing the weapons of the army of occupation.