Epilogue
On Shadows
Precoccupations of Palestine and Israel in the United States have produced a vexing history of shadows. Across the cultural terrain mapped herein, shadows and their kin have produced a veritable chiaroscuro linking incommensurate but resolutely entangled histories. Their presence, function, and effects cannot be overstated. This book has offered one conjectural tracing of their mutable complexity, their turns and angles, their surfaces and depths, in order to desediment the imperial life of race in the United States. The implications of this approach warrant a further word, then, on shadows.
It is a veritable truism that when it comes to Israel and Palestine in the United States, entrenched interests, fierce passions, and ardent identifications have produced exceptionalist ideologies that crowd out or obscure alternatives for envisioning the past, present, and future of this violent entanglement. Insofar as shadows are a figure for that which obscures, veils, or otherwise shrouds the truth of an object, critical analysis is called on to dispense them with sustained scholarly illumination. Scholars dispel shadows. In one sense, that has been my aim: to shed light on a heterogeneous archive that reveals how the Israeli occupation and the presence of Palestine and Palestinians mediated Cold War articulations and anticolonial rearticulations of race for U.S. imperial culture. Illuminating this archive has revealed that what race has meant for U.S. imperial culture has been, in significant ways, constituted by and had substantive effects on knowledge about Israel and Palestine. To argue this claim, I have demonstrated how differential distributions of human value—call it a regime of racial relationality—circulated at the historical convergence of U.S. post–civil rights modalities of racial liberal inclusion and Israeli postoccupation modalities of permanently temporary exclusion.
The visual registers on which a methodology of critical illumination operates are legion, and the normative impulses that accrue to them require a dose of caution. The purportedly unseen is not just the effect of ideological mystification to be blown away by the stiff winds of investigation or critique. Historically sedimented relations of power rarely shift when new facts are brought to light. As any novice visual artist will note, shadows matter. Those that an object casts reveal the object’s multidimensionality. Shadows enable us to orient an object in the world, evidence its edges and contours, its mass and weave. Dispensing with shadows is a flattening process, and in this sense “illumination” can result in its own form of blinding obscurity. The racial regime I have investigated in this book is the product of a heterogeneous array of multidimensional culture work, the texture of which reveals a changeful complexity. My analysis has sought to render meaning from some of that texture—shadows and all—to dwell on the details of novels, poetry, essays, public statements, newspapers, letters, newsletters, and scholarly writing, all of which underscore how the field of representation was historically contested, which is to say, political, and thus demands reckoning with how heterogeneous forms of knowledge production—“commonsensical” and “subjugated” knowledges in Michel Foucault’s terms—interface with the structuring domains of geopolitics, state diplomacy, and political economy.
Islamo-Fascism’s Racial Reactionary Genealogy
In August 2006 President George W. Bush held a press conference to explain the ongoing war between Israel and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. The military wing of one of Lebanon’s democratically elected political parties had breached the southern border, captured two IDF soldiers, and launched scores of Katushya rockets into Israel’s northern region. The Israeli military responded with a six-week barrage of airstrikes, its largest and deadliest military operation in Lebanon since 1982. Bush described Israel’s strategy to unmoor Hezbollah—as they had the Palestine Liberation Organization two decades earlier—as epitomizing the larger arc of a shared global war on terror. “This is the beginning of a long struggle against an ideology that is real and profound. It’s Islamo-fascism. It comes in different forms. They share the same tactics, which is to destroy people and things in order to create chaos in the hopes that their vision of the world will become predominant in the Middle East.”1 A few days later, Bush plainly laid out the new framing: “This nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom, to hurt our nation.”2
While the Bush administration waited several weeks to entertain a diplomatic push for a cease-fire, all of southern Lebanon had become a target for Israeli munitions.3 The supposed “root cause” of the operation—Hezbollah’s paramilitary presence in the south—was dealt with using exceptional military means. Israel’s artillery and airstrikes, including the prominent use of unmanned aerial vehicles, killed upward of one thousand people, displaced nearly one million residents in the south—a quarter of Lebanon’s population—while restricting movement by destroying bridges, main roadways, and power plants, leaving medical care and foodstuffs often inaccessible. During the last few days of military operations, Israel fired thousands of cluster bombs produced and supplied by the United States, leaving unexploded munitions to litter the region. Echoes of the Sabra and Shatila massacres resonated across an unbounded geography in southern Lebanon. Here again was a war zone where the categories of civilian and combatant were not only blurred but, as the critical geographer Derek Gregory argues, where residents as such, regardless of their status under international law, were violently recast as baleful “infrahuman” existence.4
Islamo-fascism thus emerged as a newly articulated expression of race war, one whose genealogy was shaped by durable symbolic and material links between Israel, Palestine, and U.S. imperial culture. Islam, according to this logic, is figured as pathology and distilled into an overdetermined figure essentially incompatible with the exemplary life of liberal democracy expressed in the United States and Israel—“those of us,” that is, “that love freedom.” Islamo-fascism resuscitates a residual relation to globalized wars in which U.S. hegemony was secured5—first against Nazi Germany during World War II, then against the Soviet Union in the Cold War—while framing an open-ended temporality for the expression of sovereign violence. While the origins and circulation of the term were the subject of journalistic and scholarly curiosity,6 and the Bush administration, under pressure from Muslim American organizations, backed away from the term, it is worth pausing a moment more on a key text in its genealogy: Norman Podhoretz’s World War IV: The Long Struggle against Islamofascism (2007).
Here Podhoretz weaves together essays he had published over several years that connect strategies for what he calls World War IV to the militant anticommunist strategies of containment and rollback that he narrates as the bedrock for the U.S. victory against the Soviet Union during the Cold War—what he calls World War III. Podhoretz followed Bernard Lewis—whose “clash of civilizations” thesis had at the outset of the War on Terror shaped the Bush administration’s geopolitical imaginary—to argue for a tutelary projection of U.S. imperial power: while “Arab ways are different from our ways . . . it is possible for them—as for anyone else, anywhere in the world, with discreet help from outside and most specifically from the United States—to develop democratic institutions of a kind.”7 Podhoretz gives this orientalist logic of benevolent imperialism historical heft through a lengthy citation of an early Cold War argument for Soviet containment, George Kennan’s 1947 essay “Sources of Soviet Conduct.” This essay (which Kennan himself, as a well-positioned foreign policy adviser, later claimed was taken up mistakenly as rationale for U.S. military intervention anywhere in the world) typifies for Podhoretz the destiny of the United States to spread freedom.8 “The issue of Soviet-American relations,” Kennan wrote in 1947 and Podhoretz quotes in full,
is in essence a test of the overall worth of the United States as a nation among nations. To avoid destruction the United States need only measure up to its own best traditions and prove itself worthy of preservation as a great nation. . . . In the light of these circumstances, the thoughtful observer of Russian-American relations will experience a certain gratitude for a Providence which, by providing the American people with this implacable challenge, has made their entire security as a nation dependent on their pulling themselves together and accepting the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history plainly intended them to bear. (215–16)
Podhoretz writes: “Substitute ‘Islamofascism’ for ‘Russian-American relations,’ and every other word of this magnificent statement applies to us as a nation today.” In swift analogical argumentation, Podhoretz elicits an early Cold War iteration of globalized manifest destiny as a bulwark against totalitarianism, a divinely ordained American responsibility to maintain a world safe for freedom. In doing so, Podhoretz argues by substitution for an invigorated U.S. security state whose intensified deployment of violence links fates with the state of Israel. Such an argument has no patience for the nuances differentiating Arabs and Muslims, Sunnis and Shiites, democratically elected political parties, and the like. The United States stands with Israel alone on the precipice of another 1938, goes this narrative, with future Hitlers and Stalins on the horizon.9
If the specter of 1938 lingers in Podhoretz’s political present, so too does 1968. Indeed, while the “long struggle” of the book’s title registers an implied and open-ended futurity, its substance says less about the future than it does about the earliest iterations of U.S. strategic alliances with Israel in the 1960s and 1970s. “To examine this history,” Podhoretz asserts, “is to realize that even while World War III was still going on, World War IV had already begun, and that 9/11, far from being the first salvo fired by an enemy as implacable as any we had ever faced, actually represented the culmination of a long series of attacks” (25). Podhoretz moves quickly through narrating these attacks on U.S. interests—all of which, going back to 1970, are expressions of resistance to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and all of which were, in Podhoretz’s terms treated mistakenly in the United States as “crimes, with cops and courts,” by a national culture weakened by antiwar, anticolonial, and antiracist demands and not with the toughness and resolve of a military response akin to Israel’s (25). In recounting history in this way, the internationalization of Black freedom struggles, the political claims of counterhegemonic race consciousness and feminist movements, the ascendance of the New Left, and the transformation of the university and the knowledge produced therein become retrofitted fronts for a continuation of the Cold War.10
Islamofascism as a keyword thus reignited a remarkably durable mode of race war in the guise of liberal democracy, framed first in relation to Black radical critiques of American racial liberalism, then to the “insecurities” revealed by the 1967 war, then to the anticolonial critiques of Zionism as racial project, and finally in its most recent iteration, as a compound justifying the providentialism of a globalized “war on terror.” Islamo-fascism assisted in garnering historical legitimacy for a coercive law and order apparatus whose racial resonances drew directly from the 1970s and early 1980s to underwrite intensified modes of securitization and militarized policing in the post-9/11 period.11 As the geographer Stephen Graham puts it, “Israel’s military and security technology, doctrine, and expertise have rapidly been mobilized and generalized as part of the US global War on Terror.”12 For instance, the leadership of U.S. municipal police departments has routinely consulted with the Israeli Defense Forces, sometimes traveling as delegations to Israel, other times hosting Israeli security experts in the United States.13 The blanket profiling and mapping of Arab and Muslim communities in New York by the NYPD’s so-called Demographics Unit drew directly from Israeli surveillance strategies in the West Bank.14 The United States has contracted out the construction of major homeland security infrastructure like the border wall between the United States and Mexico to Israeli security corporations, transiting discourses of racial policing in the process.15 The United States has drawn on legal rationales developed by Israel to circumvent International Humanitarian Law to craft doctrines for indefinite detention, targeted assassination, and torture.16
This is one set of shadows for which this book has provided a genealogy. There is another.
America’s Last Taboo
Just days prior to September 11, 2001, at the United Nations World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, a large coalition of hundreds of nongovernmental organizations resolved to work toward reinstating the UN’s 1975 Resolution 3379, stating that Zionism is a form of racism. Among the countless scholarly and activist resources circulating in Durban was a collection of essays stressing the shape and impact of racism for U.S. women of color, including a critique of Zionism delimiting the analysis of antiracist feminist movements.17 At the time, Israel was in the midst of responding to the Palestinian second intifada. Practices of collective punishment, naval and aerial blockades, sweeping detention practices, and the growth of exclusive Jewish settlements in the West Bank were the order of the day. As the Palestinian activist Omar Barghouti argues, the 1991 revocation of Resolution 3379 had paved the way for conceptualizing such state-sanctioned violence less as an expression of a “colonial and inherently exclusivist state” than as the practice of a “normal member of the international community of nations.”18 Reinvigorating 3379 had the capacity to center an analysis of Israel’s settler colonial infrastructure predicated on exclusivist racial distinctions that the so-called peace process had otherwise obfuscated. It could make legible, in the words of the NGO Forum’s declaration, “the racial domination of one group over another through the implementation of all measures designed to drive out other indigenous groups, including through colonial expansionism in the Occupied Palestinian Territories . . . and through the application of discriminatory laws of return and citizenship.”19 The statement bears striking resemblance to Fayez Sayegh’s 1975 theorization of the “pumping-out” and “pumping-in” mechanisms of Zionist settler colonialism. Recuperating a racial analytic could assist in revealing how Israel’s logics and practices of exclusion and territorial fragmentation—practices intensified all the more during the 1990s—were consistent with the United Nations’ definition of apartheid. In so doing, it was thought to provide the potential to animate a global solidarity movement akin to the one that brought down the apartheid regime in South Africa.
Among the outcomes of the organizing efforts at the Durban conference was a call, first promulgated in 2004 by a coalition of Palestinian civil society groups, to demonstrate international support for Palestinian self-determination through boycotts of Israeli academic and cultural institutions. In 2005 an expanded call for solidarity included practices of economic divestment and diplomatic sanctions as part of an arsenal of nonviolence. The call received the endorsement of scores of Palestinian groups inside the West Bank and Gaza, inside 1948 Israel, and across the Palestinian diaspora. Such pressure aimed to end a political order predicated on what Barghouti calls the “relative humanity” of Palestinians by holding Israel accountable to international law.20 The call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) has focused on working toward (1) ending Israel’s occupation and colonization of lands seized in 1967; (2) dismantling the illegal Apartheid Wall constructed throughout the West Bank; (3) recognizing the equal rights of Arab Palestinians inside of Israel; and (4) respecting and protecting the right of return of Palestinian refugees.21
The BDS movement has captured the imagination of many U.S. and European institutions and organizations invested in the practices and processes of antiracism and decolonization—including those organizations involved in the production and circulation of knowledge. Student governments on a growing number of university campuses have debated and passed bills in support of divestment from U.S. companies whose products are used to maintain Israel’s illegal occupation of the West Bank and its siege of Gaza.22 In December 2013 the American Studies Association (ASA) resolved to enact an organizational boycott of Israeli academic institutions, following the precedent set by the Association of Asian American Studies earlier in the year. The International Committee of the ASA had begun exploring the possibility of supporting the boycott in the immediate aftermath of Israel’s 2006 siege of Lebanon and returned to the idea again in the wake of Israel’s 2008–9 bombardment of Gaza.23 At the organization’s annual meeting in November 2012, at a moment that coincided with another large-scale bombardment of Gaza, the Academic and Community Activism Caucus of the ASA sponsored several scholarly panels on Palestine in the United States. It hosted an open session to hear reports from a number of American studies scholars whose research on race, gender, labor, empire, and settler colonialism had taken them to Palestine as a delegation earlier in the year.24 At the 2013 meeting, along with numerous scholarly panels on the links between Israel, Palestine, and the United States, the ASA’s program committee sponsored two town hall meetings to consider a boycott resolution introduced by the Caucus.25
The ASA council adopted the resolution unanimously. In doing so, it joined with artists, scholars, students, and workers committed to studying, enacting, and refreshing practices of antiracism and decolonization in the present. It did so predicated on the recognition of lasting military, economic, and diplomatic complicity of the United States in precluding the expression of Palestinian self-determination. The council also underscored the ASA’s long-held commitment to social justice, to struggles against all forms of racism, as well as its commitments to the protected rights of students and scholars to education and intellectual freedom—both of which are severely curtailed for Palestinians.26 A few weeks later, over twelve hundred members of the ASA cast ballots on whether to endorse the resolution; 66 percent affirmed the council’s resolution.
In the weeks that followed the resolution’s adoption by the ASA, university presidents and state legislatures censured the association, mainstream newspapers and educational journalists weighed in on the debate, and Palestinian and Israeli officials gave comment on the resolution’s passage. A national organization called Jewish Voice for Peace—whose strands of antiracist solidarity work on behalf of Palestinian justice have their origins in the New Jewish Agenda—provided levers for political mobilization and avenues to legal counsel. Scholars renewed investigations of the entangled—if often obscured—relationships between academic freedom and colonial violence.27 Membership in the association grew. By the end of 2014 other scholarly organizations had passed similar resolutions, including the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, the Critical Ethnic Studies Association, and the African Literature Association.28 In short, in the domain of knowledge production and circulation, what Edward Said once called “America’s Last Taboo”—the “narrative that has no permission to appear . . . the systematic continuity of Israel’s . . . oppression and maltreatment of the Palestinians”—had been breached.29
A Shadow over Palestine has reconstructed this breach’s notable, if often obscured, historical prefigurations. Knowledge projects, cultural projects, and activist projects to elucidate the ineluctable humanity of Palestinians against their systematic exclusions developed relational analyses of racism, colonial violence, and imperial culture, analyses whose critical force registered desires for the enactment of substantive practices of decolonization in excess of the violent reproduction of U.S. and Israeli national exceptionalisms. In 1965 scholar-activists who were part of the PLO’s Palestine Research Center worked to internationalize the Palestinian struggle by theorizing the particular and connected forms of racism animating Zionist settler colonialism.30 Black Power’s Palestine envisioned Palestinian solidarity through the framework of connected anticolonial struggles for national liberation, touching down in places like the National Conference for New Politics, the Pan African Cultural Festival, and the United Front against Fascism Conference. Jewish organizations like Jews for Urban Justice conceptualized diaspora as an entrée into “multiparticularism” connecting spiritual struggles against racist state violence in the United States to shared Israeli and Palestinian liberation. At annual meetings of the Association of Arab American University Graduates, scholars of Arab descent often centered Palestine in analyses of anti-Arab racism and critiques of U.S. foreign policy. As feminist coalitions formed, broke apart, and were reconfigured while synthesizing critiques of racism and imperialism, the National Women’s Studies Association became a key site to consider the substantive connections between, Israel, Palestine, and the United States.
From James Baldwin’s ethical commitment to homelessness to June Jordan’s commitment to forging a collective home anew, the question persisted as to how to fashion heterogeneous forms of relation in a world on fire. Such necessarily fragmented visions remain unfinished. They constellate in a political present in transition, amid struggles to imagine and enact a different kind of future. Against the garrisoning logic of sui generis communities, territories, histories, and memories, envisioning noncoercive forms of relation matters all the more. Perhaps we’ll catch their fragments in the shadows of this future’s thick past.