On Getting to Heaven: An Adolescent Account of the Holy Land
By: Abigail Mccall
Tags: Opportunity, Jerusalem, Palestine, Political Theory, Solidarity

Looking out on ‘Area C’

Jerusalem is the only city to exist twice in history. In heaven and here on earth; as a promise and as a reality. It’s a crossroads of the highest stakes where upon some path we may get to heaven and all its connotations.

This time last year, I was walking its streets as they are now. I’d start my morning in the East: cardamom, morning prayer and with a deliberate attempt not to look like a Jewish settler. To end, the tourist camera would be out in the West capturing Mahane Yehuda turning from market to bar and careful not to tell the wrong person I was working in a journal with ‘Palestine’ in the title. As an ideas-charged, crisis-searching student of political science I was confronted by the simplicity of the sadness I felt for those lives intertwined in this kind of tension.

The promise of Jerusalem still remains a promise. Rather than heaven though, give the people a future.

The following piece responds to recent developments in the context of Palestine-Israel. By blending personal reflection with emerging theory, the hope is to do this is in a way that encourages innovative ideas at a time when innovation is desperately needed.

Losing Palestine

As of September this year, two powerhouse Arab states will now have official relations with the state of Israel. Signed in what was deemed the ‘Abraham Accords’, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain abandoned their historic position on Israel which required it to secure the national rights of Palestinians.

Tallying the reactions of several world leaders, these accords come off looking like a success. Generally, it’s been hailed as a breakthrough for the dangerously slow scene of peace talks in the region. I won’t deny that this situation in the context of Israel-Palestine is at a precipice and purposive action is needed. Praise for momentum, in this unique stalemate, is warranted. But it’s here, at this edge, that we should not choose the path of normalisation that these accords represent. Globally, we’ve come to a moment whereby the remaking of global life is both possible and necessary.

There will be moves made and we all have a stake. An alliance of this nature is a move. Unfortunately, it’s the wrong one.

Crucially, these relations represent another linkage in the kinds of infrastructure that have been responsible for the destruction of popular freedom struggles in the Middle East. The agreement between Israel and Bahrain is particularly dangerous when you consider the human rights abuses that both states sustain. Look at Bahrain’s militarised response to pro-democracy protests during the Arab spring and, perhaps more poignantly, the humanitarian impact that its support of the war against Yemen has had. As for the supposed safeguard it provides to the little that is left of a Palestinian homeland, the reality is that official or not, Israel already de facto runs a military occupation in the majority of the Palestinian territories.

Officiating this relation between repressive regimes confirms a reality whereby the prospect of a Palestinian state is effectively foreclosed. This is important in the context of a struggle that has stretched on as long as this one has. It essentially ‘rubs in’ a failure that will, on many fronts, instigate resistance and necessarily affect all those that live on the land. Thus, by confirming the decline of the Palestinian state, although framed as a peace agreement these accords will arguably only continue to bind the contested land to new heights of struggle.

Beyond the state: salvaging a cause

And so, with these accords showing up the inability to pursue Palestinian sovereignty, the question now becomes: what does the cause look like in excess of a state-centred approach? This is where we are trying to get to in this article. We are trying to find where those overlooked and subsequently, underdeveloped paths outside the state are and further, whether there is real value to walking them.

06/09/19: I drove from beach to desert, club to church, through homes and checkpoints, saw concerts and sacrifices. And in between all of this were the people, cutting and living through all this time, searching for a future and a history of their own. Sagas of salvation and of regular grocery store shops.

I felt the loss of Palestine and its dream for statehood whilst in Jerusalem. Despite desperately wanting to fight for the worthiness of this dream, the closer I got, the further away it all seemed. Injustice is never clear cut on contested land but it’s certainly felt. It’s why I came home with passion and connections rather than solutions. So, where does this belong and how does it become more than just passion without committing some prejudiced offences?

‘Revenge’ graffitied in the town of El Rafiya following the murder of Israeli teen

It’s certainly a fanciful idea that people and their passions can band together and achieve a positive change without navigating some kind of political process. Although this banding together, often framed in terms of ‘solidarity’, is uncontroversial in the world of school textbooks and value sets, its capacity to go beyond this is questionable. Perhaps however, there is something here; inside a display of solidarity; inside this passion and the connection I now have that is capable of feeding into a feasible practice.

This is what I wish to pick up on.

Mapping a movement: the concept of solidarity and its practicable categories

As a meta concept, solidarity finds beginnings in French biology where it was first used to describe ‘bonds’ of commonality. At this abstract level, we can see that the focus is on connection itself rather than the individual or the whole. Founded in connection, the concept of solidarity implies some kind of moral activation of duties. This is what distinguishes it from references of comradery and charity — it is a deliberate focus on the linkage and its moral obligations.

02/08/19: Too many real people with too many real stories for me to start theorising a solution. Do I go to the edge, find solitude and a hut, or do I come to the centre and try to work it out.

The issue is that, as a practice, solidarity has many faces. As I found, just mentioning the word solidarity in the Holy Land will see you being accused of plotting normalisation (and with good reason). Traditionally, solidarity is a social practice that animates actions based on the connection and ‘likeness’ of identities, beliefs or values. However, typified by the work of Klaus Peter Rippe, solidarity must be principally divided into at least two groups: social and political. These groups work in contrary ways; a political connection is deliberately (artificially) forged in response to a situation of perceived injustice. This political or ‘project-based’ solidarity takes on the familiar activist form of ‘witness, recognition and struggle,’ and pairs it with a distinct focus on connection and its non-political nature.

In practice, this translates to a force of cohesive oppositional nature that, based on the fact it can operate outside of political institutions, makes real demands on the need to change those institutions. Thus, the power of political solidarity is found in the sense that it is a transformative, creative process with measurable output. Nevertheless, whilst prominent literature has circulated the topic of solidarity, in terms of deliberately dealing with and consolidating a practice of this category, the work is still in its infancy.

Political solidarity in practice: finding a starting point in Black-Palestinian movements

We have seen the practice of political solidarity across numerous rights-based movements, however loosely and informally. Most recently, the eruption of Black Lives Matters (BLM) protests are a testament to its power, especially in the case of George Floyd whereby the ‘witness’ of his death triggered a ‘response’ and subsequent ‘struggle’ of a non-political form with a result that was political in nature.

09/08/19: That’s what I saw out there. A simple kind of sadness. Nassar stood amongst tents and dead playgrounds on land that was running away from him.

Likewise, the situation in Palestine-Israel has long been instrumental in the mobilising of ideas surrounding solidarity. Just three weeks ago, I was in a zoom call hosted by black liberatory scholar Angela Davis and prominent Palestinian figure Jamal Juma. We spoke of Palestinians sharing advice with Blacks in America about how to protect themselves from tear gas and of how Nelson Mandela, in the context of overcoming apartheid, demanded freedom for the Palestinians. Since the early 1990s, connections have been forged between black communities in America and Palestinians. Often however, there is a tendency to frame solidarity simply in terms of shared experiences. This is a powerful resource but arguably not an exhaustive category for the kind of institutional change that is being sought. Although we recognise particular moments of political solidarity — such as the official ‘commitment’ BLM made to endorse Palestine’s most cohesive movement for liberation: Boycott, Divestments and Sanctions — such linkages have floated in and out of activation.

As a result, although this context is clearly capable of sustaining a practice of political solidarity, it is yet to be performed purposely.

Finding Palestine

Palestine is perhaps one of the greatest unresolved issues in modern history. I’ll echo Edward Said who recognised that the question of Palestine is assigned incredible allegorical value in that it is a symbol of the struggle against occupation and its colonial effects in a supposed ‘post-colonial’ world. Hence, its resolution has the capacity to provide not only hope but practical scaffoldings for emerging movements against systemic oppression. For me, Jerusalem has become a point of reference for the direction of my life; a symbol of the human experience as I’ve come to know it: fear, love, revenge, hummus. It’s all the things I wish to fight for and against.

Now, more than ever, with the faltering of state-centred support for the Palestinian cause and a global moment of rebuilding, it’s time to regenerate the practice of political solidarity. This should be pursued by empowering specific instruments of information, ideas and strategies that will help to structure the ‘witness, recognition, struggle’ process. This will mean that, as a concept, political solidarity is viewed through a sincerer academic lens that considers the political weight and real output of its practice. The deployment of political solidarity for the Palestinian cause can be a catalyst for the creation of an opportunity structure that goes beyond traditional equations. This would be a meaningful breakthrough not only for the Palestinian people but for the globe.

I will end this by saying that this is not the delineation of a theory but merely the unfolding of an idea. Regardless of how grand these calls get at each corner of the globe it has become clear that the demands and practices of this specific solidarity provides a sturdy platform for a future with new power relations. We must come to know this and navigate accordingly.

References

Erakat, Noura. “Geographies of Intimacy: Contemporary Renewals of Black–Palestinian Solidarity.” American Quarterly 72(2) (2020): 471–496. doi:10.1353/aq.2020.0027.

Alex Lubin. Geographies of Liberation: The Making of an Afro-Arab Political Imaginary (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).

Fishere, Ezzedine C. “The UAE-Bahrain-Israel Accords Are a Big Step — in the Wrong Direction.” The Washington Post, 21 September, 2020. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/09/21/uae-bahrain-israel-accords-are-big-step-wrong-direction/.

Davies, Thomas, Holly Eva Ryan, and Alejandro Milciades Penaades. Protest, Social Movements, and Global Democracy Since 2011: New Perspectives, Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change, Vol. 39. Bingley: Emerald, 2016.

Scholz, Sally J. Political Solidarity. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2008.

Rippe, Klaus Peter. “Diminishing Solidarity.” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 1(3)(1998): 355–74.

Zajak, Sabrina. “Rethinking Pathways of Transnational Activism.” Global Society : Journal of Interdisciplinary International Relations 31(1) (2017): 125–43.