Ghassan Abu-Sittah: The Practice of Surgery as an Anti-Genocidal Struggle

I have known Ghassan Abu-Sittah since his time in Beirut as the Head of Plastic Surgery at the American University of Beirut’s Hospital. When we were first introduced, and given the number of Lebanese women that walked around with a band aid on their nose, I was a victim of a stereotype that made me think that Plastic Surgery could only mean providing ‘nose-jobs’ and the like. I began wondering how it could possibly be that a surgeon from Gaza, who immediately comes across as well-read in radical political theory, and likes to frequent social scientists, spends his time aestheticizing the noses, ears and faces of Lebanese women. Then he started talking about his work and it didn’t take me long to become introduced to the world of limb replacements and reconstructive surgery. I learnt that he spent a lot of time in Gaza operating on people maimed in awful ways by Israeli soldiers and their ‘sophisticated’ weapons and ammunitions. I also learnt that part of his work in Beirut consisted in operating on Iraqi soldiers maimed by the many of Saddam Hussein’s wars and the American invasion of their country. 

We’ve stayed in touch on social media and we always come across each other when we are both in Beirut. He and his wife are both from Gaza and he has always worked in hospitals there amidst the many violent Israelis incursions into the territory over the years. So, it didn’t surprise me that he would immediately announce that he is going to Gaza when the Israelis started their retaliatory pounding of the strip in the aftermath of Hamas’ October 7 attacks. 

As the retaliatory pounding turned into the most savage, premeditatedly indiscriminate and brutal mass murder of civilians in the first quarter of the twenty first century, and as the Israeli bombing targeted the whole social, cultural and medical infrastructure of the strip, the bombing of hospitals became a particular cause of attention and outrage. In this environment, Ghassan and his social media descriptions of working conditions inside the hospitals and the kind of surgery he had to perform, especially as hospitals ran out of anaesthetics, started to widely circulate. He was increasingly being interviewed in the mainstream media and is now preparing to be an eyewitness at the ICC in the Hague.

Recently, we caught up over a cup of coffee at Café Younes in Hamra, Beirut. He had lost a lot of weight. He told me that he was suffering psychologically and physiologically in the aftermath of his Gaza experience. He also feels a sense of guilt for having left and would have liked to go back if it didn’t involve subjecting his family to all the fears and uncertainties that going back to Gaza would involve. Already his wife’s father has disappeared in Gaza more than a week ago, so she’s dealing with enough as it is. Insensitively perhaps given the above, I tried not to let all this come too much in the way of my curiosity. I wanted to hear from him some details of his everyday life as a surgeon working in the midst of destruction and mass murder. So, I was probably unbearably inquisitive, raising way too many issues. But he indulged me, and answered my questions. 

We often argue that thanks to social media, and to some heroic journalism, Gaza’s destruction and the killing of its people have been made available for all of us to witness more than any destructive murderous war before it. While this indeed gave us an unequal proximity to the destruction and the killing, it did not give us proximity to the way this destruction and killing is lived and negotiated by those experiencing it. My questions to Ghassan were particularly directed at getting some insights into the nature of surgery as a practice in such conditions. How do the medical staff perform their tasks under such circumstances, how do they relate to their own bodies being endangered, how do they relate to the horror that surrounded them and how do they relate to each other? I also quizzed him about what kind of solidarity, but also what kind of tensions arose between the staff in such circumstances.

At one point I raised the fact that in the public imagination surgery is often associated with ‘cool hands’. How was it possible to have ‘cool hands’ amidst the falling bombs, crumbling walls, depleted medical resources and malfunctioning technology? I asked. Ghassan said this was all nerve wrecking indeed. And particularly nerve wrecking was the flow of dead and injured people one encounters at every moment; sometimes in incidents happening before one’s very eyes. He kept referring to ‘the freshness of the wounds’ and the kind of interaction with the body of the injured that such ‘freshness’ required. Paradoxically, all this, he said, gave the performance of surgery itself a therapeutic function, so there was never a problem with your hands not serving you. 

As he explained, in the chaotic conditions of mass destruction and mass murder, there is a reversal between what, in a ‘normal’ (ie, peace-time) hospital space, is considered as ‘the space of tension,’ and what is considered as ‘the space of tranquility’. In those normal conditions the world outside the surgery room is the world of calm while the tension is happening in the operating room. This is reversed in Gaza. With the world outside the surgery room being extremely dangerous and tense, the performance of the familiar practices associated with surgery transform the operation for the surgeon into a kind of relaxing ritual: the person they are operating on becomes flesh rather than the daughter of x or the brother of y, and the technicality, predictability and ordered nature of surgery stands in opposition to the chaotic outside.

The above, ordered, a-personal, and ritualistic character of the surgery itself stood out particularly in comparison with the socially far more difficult pre-surgery decisions concerning triage: choosing who to prioritise for surgery among the many injured. This created a continuous ‘Sophie’s Choice’-type reality, Ghassan said. And it was made complicated by situations where medical staff would recognise people personally, he stressed. I initially thought that he was speaking of those difficult moment which many of us had already seen on social media where medical staff recognise close kin among the dead and injured. But this was not what he was referring to.

He said that while triage is usually done on the basis of a purely medical assessment of the viability of the operation: who needs it most urgently, and who is likely to survive it and benefit from it. In Gaza, and because the medical staff sometimes recognised who the injured people actually were, an added criteria was people’s knowledge of how many of someone’s family had already been murdered by the Israelis. Someone would say: we must try and prioritise saving this one, three of his or her siblings have already been killed and s/he is the only one left for his/her mother.

I found this extremely important, because it is a point that transformed the practice of surgery from a relation between a surgeon and the repairing of an individual body into a relation between the surgeon and the repairing of social relations. If the aim of genocidal violence is not only the destruction of individual bodies but the destruction of networks of social relations and their capacity to reproduce themselves, surgical practices, by aiming to save or repair family and communal rather than just individual bodies in the way it is described above acquire an important anti-genocidal dimension. Ghassan said a number of times that the environment created by the Israeli bombing kept bringing Achille Mbembe’s notion of ‘death world’ to his mind. It seems that in Gaza’s crumbling environment, the hospital gives new meaning to the notion of ‘life world’, highlighting it as a form of resistance to the expanding ‘death world’.

There is a particularly special and close relation between health practices and anti-colonialism in Palestine that is not as pronounced in other anti-colonial struggles, Ghassan tells me. Perhaps this is because of the intensely genocidal disposition of Israeli colonialism towards Palestinians. In places like South Africa, Apartheid was structured by the need for a healthy labour force and hospitals performed a useful colonial function in this regard. In Palestine, while the Israelis do make use of Palestinian labour, this usage is neither important nor crucial. There is no vested interest in a healthy Palestinian population, quite the contrary. As such, the exterminatory tendencies of Israeli colonialism can more easily run amuck as it were, especially when they are well-financed and well-armed as we have seen it happening over the years, and as we continue to see it happening in Gaza today. It makes all practices of preserving health anti-colonial by definition. The insistence of Israel on demolishing hospitals acquires a different dimension when seen from this perspective.

This puts us face to face with the other therapeutic dimension of what we do in the hospitals, Ghassan says. I told you about the therapeutic function of the surgical practice as a ritualised, ordered work of relating to the flesh of the injured. It can be seen as a therapy provided by the micro dimension of our practices. The therapy I am now referring positions us on a different scale. It comes from a relation to the macro socio-political dimension of our practices. It comes from the knowledge that what we are doing is part of an anti-colonial liberation struggle. Not in the darkest of moments, when the bombs are falling at their most intense, and when the flow of the dead and injured is at its most severe and when the morale is very low, do we lose sight of the horizon of liberation.

 

We, lovers of Palestine, we are better than you

 We, lovers of Palestine, We are better than you.

 

We do not instrumentalise our holy scripture to rob people of their houses,

We are better than you.

 

We don’t pollute the noble history of victimhood of our ancestors, 

and use it to treat people like shit,

We are better than you.

 

We do not like thieving, exploiting, aggressive, fascistic, violent states,

We are better than you.

 

We who grieve the dead as human beings, not as superior ethno-national subjects, 

we are better than you.

 

We who do not feel pain at the sight of a suffering child according to where the child comes from, 

We are better than you.

 

We who have refused to master indifference in the face of injustice and genocide,

We are better than you.

 

We who do not love ourselves by hating others, 

we are better than you.

 

We who acknowledge that we can be better than we are and work on ourselves to be so,

We are better than you.

 

We who recognise that history is full of injustices that we need to acknowledge, 

and where possible rectify, 

rather than ignore, hide and deny, 

we are better than you.

 

We are

 

We are more loving, we are more caring, 

we are more sensitive, we are more receptive 

and we are more perceptive,

 

There are only two reasons why, we might die suffocating in your self-serving, hating, thieving, blind with narrow and short-sighted self-interest, world.

You are better financed and you are better armed.

 

But we are better than you.

Israel-Palestine: The Endless Dead-End That Will Not End

When the Zionists occupied Palestine and the Palestinians resisted, the Zionists decided to teach them a lesson by upgrading their occupation and make it a hard occupation, and the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists acquiesced: Israel has the right to defend itself they said.

And when the Palestinians continued to resist, the Zionists decided to teach them a lesson by upgrading their occupation and make it a hard and unyielding occupation, and the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists acquiesced: Israel has the right to defend itself they said.

And when the Palestinians continued to resist, the Zionists decided to teach them a lesson by upgrading their occupation and make it a hard, unyielding, and strict occupation, and the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists acquiesced: Israel has the right to defend itself they said.

And when the Palestinians continued to resist, the Zionists decided to teach them a lesson by upgrading their occupation and make it a hard, unyielding, strict and brutal occupation, and the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists acquiesced: Israel has the right to defend itself they said.

And when the Palestinians continued to resist, the Zionists decided to teach them a lesson by upgrading their occupation and make it a hard, unyielding, strict, brutal and severe occupation, and the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists acquiesced: Israel has the right to defend itself they said.

And when the Palestinians continued to resist, the Zionists decided to teach them a lesson by upgrading their occupation and make it a hard, unyielding, strict, brutal, severe and unrelenting occupation, and the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists acquiesced: Israel has the right to defend itself they said.

And when the Palestinians continued to resist, the Zionists decided to teach them a lesson by upgrading their occupation and make it a hard, unyielding, strict, brutal, severe, unrelenting and ferocious occupation, and the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists acquiesced: Israel has the right to defend itself they said.

And when the Palestinians continued to resist, the Zionists decided to teach them a lesson by upgrading their occupation and make it a hard, unyielding, strict, brutal, severe, unrelenting, ferocious and callous occupation, and the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists acquiesced: Israel has the right to defend itself they said.

And when the Palestinians continued to resist, the Zionists decided to teach them a lesson by upgrading their occupation and make it a hard, unyielding, strict, brutal, severe, unrelenting, ferocious, callous and merciless occupation, and the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists acquiesced: Israel has the right to defend itself they said.

And when the Palestinians continued to resist, the Zionists decided to teach them a lesson by upgrading their occupation and make it a hard, unyielding, strict, brutal, severe, unrelenting, ferocious, callous, merciless and heartless occupation, and the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists acquiesced: Israel has the right to defend itself they said.

And when the Palestinians continued to resist, the Zionists decided to teach them a lesson by upgrading their occupation and make it a hard, unyielding, strict, brutal, severe, unrelenting, ferocious, callous, merciless, heartless and cruel occupation, and the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists acquiesced: Israel has the right to defend itself they said.

And when the Palestinians continued to resist, the Zionists decided to teach them a lesson by upgrading their occupation and make it a hard, unyielding, strict, brutal, severe, unrelenting, ferocious, callous, merciless, heartless, cruel and brutish occupation, and the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists acquiesced: Israel has the right to defend itself they said.

And when the Palestinians continued to resist, the Zionists decided to teach them a lesson by upgrading their occupation and make it a hard, unyielding, strict, brutal, severe, unrelenting, ferocious, callous, merciless, heartless, cruel, brutish and inhuman occupation, and the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists acquiesced: Israel has the right to defend itself they said.

And when the Palestinians continued to resist, the Zionists decided to teach them a lesson by upgrading their occupation and make it a hard, unyielding, strict, brutal, severe, unrelenting, ferocious, callous, merciless, heartless, cruel, brutish, inhuman and heinous occupation, and the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists acquiesced: Israel has the right to defend itself they said.

And when the Palestinians continued to resist, the Zionists decided to teach them a lesson by upgrading their occupation and make it a hard, unyielding, strict, brutal, severe, unrelenting, ferocious, callous, merciless, heartless, cruel, brutish, inhuman, heinous and hideous occupation, and the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists acquiesced: Israel has the right to defend itself they said.

And when the Palestinians continued to resist, the Zionists decided to teach them a lesson by upgrading their occupation and make it a hard, unyielding, strict, brutal, severe, unrelenting, ferocious, callous, merciless, heartless, cruel, brutish, inhuman, heinous, hideous and barbarous occupation, and the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists acquiesced: Israel has the right to defend itself they said.

And here we are today. And the Palestinians, like all colonised people, are still proving that their capacity to resist is endless. They don’t only dig tunnels. They can fly above walls.

And the Zionist response is to say: we’ll show you! No more Mr. Nice Guy! We’re going to further upgrade our occupation to at least monstrous, homicidal and diabolical.

And does anyone among the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists think of saying: Don’t you think we need to find a way out of this infernal cycle? 

No, for indeed, the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists is part of the infernal cycle, and all it has in it to do is to acquiesce and say: Israel has the right to defend itself 

 

Letter to a Lebanese Relative About The Indigenous Voice to Parliament (with Arabic translation at the end)

 

An elderly Lebanese relative asked me over a family lunch if the Voice meant that Indigenous people will have the power to kick her out of her house. She is a lovely and loving person. I have known her since I have come to Australia and I love her too. She doesn’t do social media. She watches the news on commercial channels, and she has long conversations with other people about social issues. I have not seen her read anything other than the Daily Telegraph. I tried to imagine what I would write to her.

 

 

Dear L,

 

Australia is like many parts of the modern world, a country born out of Europeans taking over regions of the earth that were the homes of other non-European people. When you arrived in Australia in the 1960s and even when I arrived in the mid-1970s, we were not encouraged to think or even know about the fact that we are living on land that was illegally occupied and taken away from its indigenous inhabitants. The people who originally occupied this land, like many occupiers around the world thought that they got away with it. They thought that the people from whom they stole the land will simply disappear and no one will remember what happened. They created beautiful stories about the achievement of the settlers and what a great adventure it all was and left out that dark part of the settlement.

Today, it has become increasingly clear that the peoples whose lands were stolen have not disappeared. And they are more than willing to tell us all about that other repressed story of violence, theft and exploitation. At the same time, they are increasingly demanding various forms of economic reparations, moral acknowledgements, and various types of institutionalised political representation to make up for their stolen sovereignty. This is happening everywhere, and it is inevitable: we are not going to get away with living on stolen land without paying a price, without returning some kind of sovereignty to the Indigenous people who were the rightful owner of these lands. Please remember: this is inevitable. It is going to happen sooner or later. There will be conflictual ways in which it will happen and there will be nice ways in which it will happen. It can happen sooner or much later. But it is going to happen. It is going to happen not because the settlers have decided to be nice and give back the land. It is going to happen because Indigenous societies are witnessing a revival. Because their resistance is fierce. And because they are creating too many legal uncertainties with their demands for truth and justice. Enough uncertainties to make many businesses and institutions that are at the core of our society unable to plan for a sustainable future without some legal, moral, economic, and political settlement of the fallout from the original illegal occupation.

In Australia, we non-Indigenous people are very lucky. Indigenous Australians are one of the least resentful cultures in the world. Like all Indigenous people they have clear sense of what has happened to them and what they are owed. But they have a particularly gentle and non-vindictive way of going about getting some sense of just resolution to that matter. The Voice is one of these gentle, non-vindictive ways that the dominant leadership of the Indigenous people have proposed to deal with this situation. (There are dissenting minorities. There are always dissenting minorities).

Australian settlers on the other hand, that’s us, are largely divided into two groups (There are also dissenting minorities. There are always dissenting minorities). The first group continues to think that they will get away with doing nothing at all. They bury their head in the sand and refuse to see that there is an inevitable reckoning coming. They continue thinking that another coat of paint made from beautiful stories that simply ignore the history of land theft, murder and appropriation of sovereignty will work. That is the group made from members, or people hovering around, the Liberal Party and the No campaigners.

The second group are willing to look at the history of theft and exploitation. But they also know that what the dominant leadership of the Indigenous people are asking for in terms of political representation is less than the bare minimum of what Indigenous people ought to be offered politically and economically in atonement for the history of murder and the continuing theft of their land. This second group knows that if the Yes vote is to succeed, the non-Indigenous people who have settled this land whether as colonists or as immigrants are literally getting away with murder.

Nonetheless, and despite all this, to vote Yes is before all else to accept a gift. It is a very generous gift, some might say too generous, made to us non-Indigenous Australians by an as close as can be to representative leadership of the Indigenous Australian communities. It is the gift of a small step towards a possible new future where Indigenous people will have a voice in shaping the path that we can all take together in the making of a new Australia.

I know that you have a very high opinion of your own views and I know that you don’t like to be taken for a fool. It has been a dark century for us Lebanese as far as Lebanon is concerned. We have lost many material and immaterial things that are dear to us. But we have not lost our sense of decency: You don’t turn your back on someone who is offering you a gift from the bottom of their heart.

 

 

 

 

سألتني قريبة لبنانية مسنة أثناء مأدبة غداء عائلية عما إذا كان الصوت(the Voice) يعني أن السكان الأصليين سيكون لديهم القدرة على طردها من منزلها. إنها شخص جميل ومحب. لقد عرفتها منذ قدومي إلى أستراليا وأحبها أيضًا. إنها ليست على وسائل التواصل الاجتماعي. تشاهد الأخبار على القنوات التجارية، وتجري محادثات طويلة مع أشخاص آخرين حول القضايا الاجتماعية. لم أرها تقرأ أي شيء آخر غير الديلي تلغراف. حاولت أن أتخيل ماذا سأكتب لها.

 

 

عزيزتي إل،

 

تشبه أستراليا أجزاء كثيرة من العالم الحديث. فهي دولة ولدت  من رحم سيطرة الأوروبيين على مناطق من الأرض كانت موطنًا لأشخاص آخرين غير أوروبيين. عندما وصلتي أنتي إلى أستراليا في أوائل الستينيات، وحتى عندما وصلت أنا في منتصف السبعينيات، لم يشجعنا أحد على معرفة ألحقيقة والتفكير بأننا نعيش على أرض تم احتلالها بشكل غير قانوني وانتزعت من سكانها الأصليين. لقد اعتقد أوّل الذين احتلوا هذه الأرض، مثل العديد من المحتلين حول العالم، أنهم أفلتوا من العقاب. لقد ظنوا أن الأشخاص الذين سرقوا منهم الأرض سيختفون بكلّ بساطة، ولن يتذكر أحد ما حدث.ابتكروا قصصًا جميلة عن إنجازات المستوطنين ويا لها من مغامرة عظيمة، وتناسو ذلك الجزء القبيح من عملية ألإستيطان.

 

اليوم، أصبح من الواضح بشكل متزايد أن الشعوب التي سُرقت أراضيها منها لم تختف. وهي على استعداد تام لإخبارنا بكل شيء عن قصة العنف والسرقة والاستغلال المكبوتة. وفي الوقت نفسه، تطالب هذه الشعوب بشكل متزايد بتعويضات الاقتصادية، وأنواع مختلفة من التمثيل السياسي للتعويض عن سيادتهم المسروقة. يحدث هذا في كل مكان وهو أمر لا مفر منه: لن نفلت من العيش على أرض مسروقة دون دفع الثمن، دون إعادة نوع من السيادة إلى السكان الأصليين الذين كانوا المالك الشرعي لهذه الأراضي. يرجى تذكر: هذا أمر لا مفر منه. سوف يحدث ذلك عاجلاً أم آجلاً. ستكون هناك طرق عنيفة سيحدث بها، وستكون هناك طرق لطيفة سيحدث بها. يمكن أن يحدث عاجلا أو آجلا. ولكن ما لا مفرّ منه هو أنّه سيحدث. لن يحدث ذلك لأن المستوطنين قرروا أن يكونوا لطفاء ويعيدوا الأرض. سيحدث ذلك لأن مجتمعات السكان الأصليين تشهد انتعاشًا. لأن مقاومتهم شرسة. ولأنهم يخلقون الكثير من الشكوك القانونية بمطالبتهم بالحقيقة والعدالة. هناك ما يكفي من عدم اليقين لجعل العديد من الشركات والمؤسسات التي تقع في قلب مجتمعنا غير قادرة على التخطيط لمستقبل مستدام دون بعض التسوية القانونية والأخلاقية والاقتصادية والسياسية لتداعيات الاحتلال الأصلي غير القانوني.

في أستراليا، نحن ألسكّان الغير أصليين من مستعمرين ومستوطنين ومهاجرين محظوظون  جدًا. يعدّ السكان الأصليون الأستراليون من أقل الثقافات  المشاكسة في العالم،قلما تكن بالبغض نحو من أذاهم في الماضي. مثل جميع السكان الأصليين، لديهم إحساس واضح بما حدث لهم وما يستحقونه. لكن لديهم طريقة لطيفة وغير انتقامية في الحصول على نوع من الحل العادل لهذه المسألة. يعد الصوت (the voice)من هذه الطرق اللطيفة وغير الانتقامية التي اقترحتها قياداة السكان الأصليين للتعامل مع هذا الموقف. (هناك أقليات معارضة. هناك دائما أقليات معارضة).

 

من ناحية أخرى، ينقسم المستوطنون الأستراليون، و نحن منهم، إلى مجموعتين إلى حد كبير (هناك أيضًا أقليات معارضة. هناك دائمًا أقليات معارضة). تستمر المجموعة الأولى في الاعتقاد بأنهم سوف يفلتون من عدم القيام بأي شيء على الإطلاق. إنهم يدفنون رؤوسهم في الرمال ويرفضون أن يروا أن هناك حسابًا قادمًا لا مفر منه. ويواصلون التفكير في أن طبقة أخرى من الطلاء مصنوعة من قصص جميلة تتجاهل ببساطة تاريخ سرقة الأراضي والقتل والاستيلاء على السيادة ستنجح. هذه هي المجموعة المكونة من أعضاء، أو أشخاص يحومون حول حزب الليبرلز ونشطاء حملة "لا".

المجموعة الثانية على استعداد للنظر في تاريخ السرقة والاستغلال. لكنهم يعلمون أيضًا أن ما تطلبه قياداة السكان الأصليين من حيث التمثيل السياسي هو أقل من الحد الأدنى مما يجب تقديمه للسكان الأصليين سياسيًا واقتصاديًا للتكفير عن تاريخ القتل والسرقة المستمرة للممتلكات. كما تعرف هذه المجموعة الثانية أنه إذا كان للتصويت بنعم أن ينجح، فنحن السكان الغير الأصليين الذين استوطنوا هذه الأرض، سواء كمستعمرين أو كمهاجرين، سوف نتجنّب دفع الثمن الذي علينا حقّاً أن ندفعه.

ومع ذلك، ورغم كل هذا، فإن التصويت بنعم هو قبل كل شيء قبول هِبَة سخية للغاية، وقد يقول البعض أنها سخية قدمت لنا نحن الأستراليين الغير أصليين المجتمعات الأسترالية الأصلية. إنها هبة تتمثل في خطوة صغيرة نحو مستقبل جديد محتمل حيث سيكون للسكان الأصليين صوت في تشكيل المسار الذي يمكننا جميعًا أن نسلكه معًا في صنع أستراليا الجديدة.

أعلم أن لديك رأيًا عاليًا جدًا في آرائك وأعلم أنك لا تحب أن يُنظر إليك على أنك أحمق.لقد كان القرن الحادي و العشرين حتى اليوم قرناً مظلماً بالنسبة لنا كلبنانيين بما يخصّ لبنان. لقد فقدنا أشياء كثيرة عزيزة علينا، أشياء مادية وغير مادية. لكننا لم و لا يجب ان نفقد إحساسنا باللياقة: نحن لا ندير ظهرنا لشخص يقدم لنا هدية من أعماق من أعماق قلبه

 

 

Some similarities between the history of the rise of multiculturalism and the politics around the indigenous Voice to Parliament:

Despite the obvious differences between the far more post-colonial nature of the politics of multiculturalism and the still way more colonially enmeshed nature of the politics around the Indigenous Voice to Parliament (VtP) proposal, there are some interesting structural similarities between the various political struggles that did (in the case of multiculturalism) or are now (in the case of the VtP) materialising around the two issues.

a) Just as multicultural policy on the migrants' side was advocated and supported largely by state-recognised establishment figures (ie. 'ethnic leaders'), VtP is also, on the indigenous side, advocated and supported largely by state-recognised 'establishment' indigenous figures.

b) In the history of multiculturalism, there was nonetheless a divide between the White governmental supporters of multiculturalism who saw multiculturalism as  a kind of nice donation by a now enlightened white state, and the ethnic leaders who saw multiculturalism as the result of a hard struggle by ethnic people that wrested ethnic recognition from the jaws of a white state. Likewise with VtP, there is a divide between those in government who are making VtP as some kind of white donation and a signal of white goodness, and those indigenous leaders that see it, if successfully implemented, as the end line of a long indigenous struggle against the White state.

c) The conservative White opposition to multiculturalism did not see multiculturalism as an attempt to bring to an end a long history of marginalisation and racism towards immigrants/ethnics. This conservative opposition saw multiculturalism itself as introducing differentiation on the basis of ethnicity into a supposedly colour blind Australian institution (go figure). In their eyes it was multiculturalism itself that was racist.  Likewise, the conservative white opposition to VtP do not see VtP as an attempt to bring to an end a long history of colonial racism and lack of recognition of First Nation's rights. This conservative opposition sees VtP as itself introducing a differentiation on the basis of race into a supposedly a-racial Australian constitution (again: go figure). It is VtP itself that is racist.

d) The politics of multicultural policy also brought to the fore a sharp divide between the institutionalised ethnic leaderships and organisations and the more militant ethnic/immigrant groups of activists who saw that multiculturalism was more a route for an integration of ethnic leaders into a White mainstream political life and less of a tool that can right any structural racism towards immigrants in a satisfactory and permanent manner. Likewise the politics of VtP has brought to the fore a sharp divide between the established indigenous leadership that supports VtP and those indigenous activists and academics who see VtP as unable to bring about any change to the colonial structure that underlies the social, cultural, economic, environmental and legal injustices that are still perpetrated against indigenous people in Australia (in the way a treaty would for example).

e) Those opposed to multiculturalism were themselves divided between one group that saw multiculturalism as 'not enough', but who nonetheless saw it as a gain as far as the struggle for justice and equity was concerned, and another group that saw multiculturalism as not simply providing insufficient justice but as a strategy to avoid ever taking a path towards justice. A similar divide exists between those indigenous militants who see VtP as a 'step,' even if an incomplete and insufficient step, towards justice, that should be accepted despite its problems, and those who see VtP as a strategy to avoid ever engaging in a genuine righting of colonial injustice.

f) What followed from the above as far as multiculturalism was concerned is that the first group that saw multiculturalism as insufficient, saw some common ground between themselves and the ethnic leaders and groups that advocated it. For the groups that saw multiculturalism as a total waste of time, those who advocated it were simply conservatives and traitors to the struggle against racism.  A similar pattern is also emerging in relation to VtP with the group that sees VtP as 'not enough but a step' seeing some commonality between them and the leadership advocating it, while those who see VtP as a waste of time seeing the leadership advocating it as a bunch of misguided and/or corrupted people that have been co-opted by the state.

Some problems that prevent anti-racist consolidation and transmission and some suggestions on how to avoid them

It is common for both conservative and anti-racists in Australia to say something like ‘every newly arrived wave of immigrants will be subjected to racism in the same way as the immigrants of earlier waves have been subjected to racism’. This is not entirely true, of course, since every Racism towards Asian immigrants, towards Arab/Muslims, towards Indians and towards Africans is not the same. Each wave of immigrants generates forms of racism that are specific it. Each wave brings forth, so to speak, a local Australian version of a long history of Western racism born out of the history of slavery and colonialism. Nonetheless there are similarities in what each wave is subjected to. And as I read about the various forms of racism that African immigrants are subjected to and that are the centre of our attention this afternoon, I cannot help but wonder: to what extent are Africans able to benefit from the experience of those who have been racialised before them and from the various anti-racist struggles that countered this racialisation? 

 

The above question is partly rhetorical since it is clear to me that they don’t, or, at least, that they don’t as much as they should. Nonetheless, it is a question that is worth asking since it leads to reflect on the more substantial question which is: why is this so? Why is racist culture able to reproduce itself and ensure its inheritance by younger generations while anti-racist culture isn’t? After all, anti-racist struggles mark Australian history just as much as racism itself. Generation after generation of racialised people, with many committed, sincere and courageous allies from among the white population, have fought Australian racism in its various forms. But there seem to be very few social institutions and mechanisms that are able to condense and transmit this history. There is of course a quick answer as to why this is so: while racism is structural, and can benefit from existing institutions to give it continuity and power, anti-racism is marginal, with no structural back up: its history remains a series of events. The only anti-racism that finds itself into White institutions is of a benevolent type. White Australians are inordinately in love with the ‘helper position’. They rightly see it as better than the ‘hater position’ but cannot see how the ‘helper-helped’ relation when not seen as transitional, can become a relation of power and dependency, and often ends up being a form of racism in itself. The history of ‘helped’ immigrants and Indigenous people who become the target of animosity when they signal that they do not need help but need to be left alone to thrive remains to be written. Even institutions that were won through struggle are transformed into benevolent institutions and their history is written as if they are the product of white benevolence. Many multicultural institutions, and multicultural histories as they are taught at schools, are a prime example of this. A newly arrived migrant how looks at this history as it is presented to the by state institutions will not find a genealogy of struggle by people who have been in similar position to them. Instead of struggles for power, they’ll find a history of idealised White governmentality. As I write this we are, this very week, in the midst of trite celebrations of ‘harmony’ we are witnessing the Labour Party is once again harmoniously parachuting a White candidate into a multicultural electorate to ‘represent it’.

 

Some forms of anti-racist education contribute to this by highlighting the importance of ‘educating’ white racists. This emanates from a false belief that racists are so because of their ‘ignorance’. While there are often cases of racism that are due to ignorance, it is a mistake to see ignorance as a prime force in the reproduction of the racist structures of society. Racists are primarily moved by a desire to hurt and it is this desire to hurt that circulates in the culture and the structure and give it its lethal power. Racists don’t need to be educated they need to be disempowered. I believe that concentrating less on educating White Australians about the ills of racism and concentrating more on educating racialised people about the struggles of those who preceded them is more important in creating a transmittable anti-racist tradition. Furthermore, White racists, among many problems they have, often suffer from a desire to be centred. An educational anti-racism that tells them: yes you are the centre is not necessarily the best way to approach things.

 

Despite the common circulation of the idea that ‘racism is a structure’ in wide anti-racist circles many people fail to understand the significance of the utterance. It is very routinely accompanied with a still an ongoing belief that racism is something that Australia needs to rid itself of. There is not understanding that ‘racism is a structure’ means that racism is foundational both historically and structurally, that Australia can only be what it is thanks to racism, and if you get rid of racism Australia will stop being what it is. Instead, people utter this sentence and engage in practices and say things that are structured by a deep myth that is very hard to shake: Australia is lovely and racism is an aberration, a blot on the landscape that can be dealt with by educating the racists among the population.

 

Another feature of anti-racism among immigrant populations and their helpers that militates against a transmittable anti-racist culture is that many immigrants are very particularist about their anti-racism. In the best of cases, they just want to protect themselves from racism and they don’t care about what is happening to others around them. In the worst of cases, they are themselves racist and happy to join with other racists to racialise others. It is what I have often referred to as racist anti-racism. The need to highlight what Angela Davis refers to as the indivisibility of the struggle for freedom from racial domination is important. One cannot be anti-racist when it comes to Vietnamese or Lebanese but not care what is happening to African or indigenous people. It is clear that particularist anti-racism is non-communicable by its very nature. One way to deal with this that we have here in Australia is to articulate and subordinate (which is itself an anti-racist gesture) all anti-racist practices around the anti-racist struggles of the Indigenous population. If Australia has a structuring racist core, its racism towards Indigenous population is the core of the core. No anti-racist culture can be enduring without a centring of the indigenous population.

 

 

I have this fantasy that one of these days, as the government subjects those who want to migrate to Australia to all kind of suitability tests, we will be able to provide the prospective immigrants, at the same time, with an ‘Racism survival kit’, ‘essential to assimilate into a country that does not want you’ which has a brief history of Australian history, examples of the things newly arrived immigrants will be subjected to, the overt racism of the scoundrels who have nothing much but their racism, the more covert but more lethal racism of the institutions, how to deal with ‘the Australians who like to help’, how to deal with middle class people who translate the relaxed attitude they have towards immigrants and that is based on their condition of material ease into a higher morality to feel even more superior to the rest of the population, a list of places where people can go etc… all in one package. I think that there are already many anti-racist practices that are moving in the directions I have indicated above. Perhaps the greatest effort is one of aggregation, co-ordination and condensation as a preliminary to dissemination.

The Tyranny of the Geopolitical

Last week, at the Adelaide Festival, we went to this thing called ‘Breakfast with Papers’. It is an open-air amphitheatre-like space where you go relatively early in the morning, have a croissant and coffee and listen to journos discussing political issues. 

I enjoy listening to political journalists. The proximity they have to politicians translates into a unique form of cynicism that marks journalistic culture. At the same time, I dislike the way some journalists, like many academics in this regard, discuss politicians with a hardly repressed belief that they are better at politics than the politicians they are discussing.  A totally unwarranted belief if you ask me. One that always minimises the nature of the acrobatic act that politicians must engage in as they struggle to make decisions while juggling with an inordinate number of issues and negotiating an equally excessive number of interests. More productive time can be spent reflecting on the presuppositions and trends that mark journalism at a specific time in history and the reasons behind it.

These were the thoughts that came to me when hearing the ‘Breakfast with Papers’ the morning we showed up. That day, the host, Tom Wright had Katrina Sedgwick, Colin James and David Marr who all had many perceptive things to say about the many issues affecting us these days, Scott Morrison and the forthcoming federal elections. What made me want to hop on the stage and show my critical incisors was when Tom Wright interrupted the discussion happening between them to read out a select number of news items which included the Russian army closing in on Kyiv and the Saudi government executing a record number of people (around ninety) in one go.

When Tom Wright read out the Saudi news, one of the journalists on the stage asked: ‘why were they executed for?’. Tom Wright replied something like: ‘I don’t know some religious transgression or another’. Then he explained that there is a choice of being executed by beheading or by hanging but all those executed were hung.

To me what happened at that moment was a quintessential demonstration of one of the most serious problems that plagues the print and the televisual news media today: its reliance on freak show happenings, and on making a freak show out of what is happening.

Firstly, Tom Wright was wrong. The people who were executed in Saudi Arabia were not mainly executed for religious transgression. Some were convicted of serious crime such as rape and murder but most of the executed were in fact classified as political extremists by Saudi regime in connection with their politics regarding Syria, Iraq and Yemen. By failing to deal with this and highlighting instead an orientalised freak-show dimension of the execution where the macabre and the religious meet, it was a missed opportunity to discuss something of great importance for us in Australia, something that also connected these executions to the news regarding the invasion of the Ukraine. This has to do with the way local national political aspirations become entangled with international geo-political imperatives. This is important to talk about because the current government has an unprecedented desire to entangle us with geo-political manoeuvres. While, as is well-known, many Australian governments have involved us in Western wars in the past, this government has a propensity to insert political spats with international political actors right in the midst of national politics like no other government before it. This has been very clear whether in the way it has recently reacted to the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, or the way it has almost enthusiastically fostered a climate of international duelling with China. 

Let me make it clear that I am not interested here in questioning who we should be allied to in international politics. It is more the way we do so that interests me.

I was born and raised in a country which has seen the national political aspirations and desires of its citizens crashing many times over on the rocks of geopolitical interests and manoeuvrings. This is what I have termed the tyranny of the geopolitical. This is not the tyranny of one international political actor or another but the tyranny of the geopolitical order as a whole: its capacity to make geopolitical imperatives over-ride the local imperatives of a national population. In Lebanon the way geopolitical imperatives articulate themselves to local antagonisms plays an important role in producing both the social and economic crisis the country finds itself regularly in and the sclerotic governmentality that is unable to deal with it.

A similar tyranny of the geopolitical contributed to the impasse Syria finds itself in today. The democratic desire of the population clashed with the imperatives of the dominant forces of the international order who acted to protect a dictator and a dictatorship because it was in their interest to do so and at the expense of the democratically inclined forces of the country.

Likewise in Egypt where the local revolution deposed an old dictator and managed to bring to power a democratically elected government. The new government was allowed to make changes to the internal structure of Egyptian society but not to touch its position and politics within the geopolitical order. In particular, in relation to Palestine and the siege of Gaza. The new government remained under the watch of the Egyptian army whose interests remained aligned with existing geo-political order. No sooner had the elected government start dabbling with international politics that it found itself deposed. The geo-political order of things imposed its primacy in the figure of Sisi.

Saudi Arabia today, like Israel before it, has become indirectly, in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Egypt, and directly in Yemen one of the main shapers and protectors of the existing geo-political order. This is why it was important to highlight the geo-political dimension of its mass assassination /execution ‘program’ rather than its ‘freak-show value’ by the journalists meeting that morning. Especially as we are witnessing one of the most violent expressions of the tyranny of the geo-political in Ukraine today. The aspirations of a whole nation for democracy and for the freedom to align itself with whomever it wishes frustrated by Russia as it feels entitled to prioritise its geo-political interests over the Ukrainian national interest.

How does playing geo-political games ends up affecting local politics is a conversation that is important to have here in Australia. Some would say that the tyranny of the geo-political over the national democratic process has already manifested itself here with the dismissal of the Whitlam government and the subsequent continued subservience of national governments to American geopolitical interests and our participation in its warring ventures. But it remains a fact that, as noted above, no Australian government has made itself an active participant in the antagonistic geo-political games that oppose the United States to China and Russia the way this current government has. As an elected government, it has every right to do so, but we have every right to discuss the ramifications of making the tyranny of the geo-political hover explicitly over our political culture and how it ends up affecting us.