Lentin's Loathsome "Elegaic J'Accuse"

Born into a Christian family in Lebanon, Professor Ghassan Hage of Melbourne, whom we've met before on this blog in connection with his petition against Israel of a few years ago, co-written with Sydney academic John Docker, and his on-going pro-BDS stance, is highly critical of white colonial settlement in countries such as Australia, which appears to inform his attitude to Israel.

Sometimes his indictment of white colonial settlement can appear so harsh as to give the impression, rightly or wrongly, of reverse racism.

See, for instance, this poetic contribution of his on social media:

Born in Haifa in 1944, Associate Professor Ronit Lentin of Dublin is one of a number of Israel-hating  academics  from Eretz/Medinat Israel resident in Britain and Ireland.  Her name appears here as one of the endorsers of "The One State Declaration" of 2007 authored by Ilan Pappe and others, which if implemented would end Israel's existence, and her anti-Israel activism is well-known.

Ghassan Hage's poem (what she calls his 'elegaic J'Accuse') has inspired her to write one of her own, adapted from "white colonial Australia to Palestine," as she puts it:

We stole the lands of another people but that's not who we are we are better than this.
We expelled 800,000 of the owners of the land, renamed their villages and settled our own people in them but that's not who we are we are better than this.
We uprooted their trees and planted European conifers to cover the ruins of their depopulated villages, which they are not allowed to settle but that's not who we are we are better than this.
We massacred whole villages, tortured their men, raped their women and beat their children but that's not who we are we are better than this.
We bombed their cities, demolished their homes and built concrete walls to separate them from each other but that's not who we are we are better than this.
We installed hundreds of checkpoints preventing the owners of the land from getting to hospital to give birth or get treatment but that's not who we are we are better than this.
We started war after war outside the non-declared borders of our state, leaving hundred of thousands homeless, claiming self defence but that's not who we are we are better than this.
We put the owners of the land under military government, enlisted them as collaborators and informers, and controlled their movement and freedom of expression but that's not who we are we are better than this.
We put thousands of the owners of the land in prison and hundreds in administrative detention without trial but that's not who we are we are better than this.
We build our settlements on their lands while preventing them from tilling their fields and picking their olives but that's not who we are we are better than this.
We allowed our illegal settlers to beat their children on their way to school and to take over their homes but that's not who we are we are better than this.
We kept thousands of citizens in 'unrecognised villages' without electricity, water, roads or schools but that's not who we are we are better than this.
We extra-judicially execute the owners of the land, arrest their children in dawn raids and try them in military courts but that's not who we are we are better than this.
We lock up asylum seekers whose cases we don't process in concentration camps away from our towns, into some of which they cannot enter but that's not who we are we are better than this.
We deny the owners of the land the memory of their catastrophe but that's not who we are we are better than this.
You see we are Holocaust survivors, and their land had been promised to us by our god and those doubting our right to expropriate, kill, settle, imprison, shoot, bomb, torture are antisemites.

 Demonising, and demonic, stuff, eh?
 

Arab Australians Stage Anti-Sykes-Picot Play

Including in its cast Professor Ghassan Hage, the Lebanese-born BDSer about whom I recently blogged here ("Israel's vampiric history"), The Cartographer's Curse, written and directed by Paula Abood and performed by an Arab Australian theatre company called Third Space Productions, has debuted at the National Theatre of Parramatta, in outer Sydney.

On publicity material for the production we read, inter alia:

'In 1916, British diplomat Mark Sykes and his French equivalent François Georges-Picot, divided up the Middle East by drawing straight lines on a map.

The Cartographer’s Curse, written and directed by Paula Abood, follows the story of the Cartographer and his family, and addresses the consequences of greed and power on freedom; beyond its impacts on physical borders and boundaries. 

“As I gathered pages of sadness about famine and forced conscriptions, and notes about political double dealing by French and British diplomats wrangling to set themselves up in the region as the new colonial masters once the Ottoman Empire fell on its head, this story became something else,” Abood said.

“The postcolonial and ongoing neo-colonial mess that started with those straight red and blue lines … remains with us today as refugees flee Syria and Iraq, the catastrophe that befell Palestine remains an open wound, and the frequent sectarian eruptive bursts of fire that plague Lebanon.” 

Far from being fixed in the past, the marks of the 100 year old Sykes-Picot agreement are still visible today....

“The setting for our show has kind of been lost in the shadows of the past. This was such a traumatic time in history that there is little left but remnants of story, poetry and odes from our grandparents and great-grandparents,” Abood continued...

“After the invasions of Iraq over the last 25 years, the ongoing occupation of Palestine over the last 68 years, and the Lebanese political turmoil over the last 40 years, it would seem that that now is a perfect time to tell this story as Syria falls apart with a panoply of old world and new world imperialist and neo-colonial interests all in there with their barbarous militarism,” she said. [Emphasis added, here and below]

Creating theatre that encourages reflection, nurtures understanding and challenges a cursory narrative that discriminates and demonises, is perhaps something that needs to be spotlighted.

“Media-driven tropes about ‘ancient’ conflicts in the ‘Middle East’ – itself a colonial term – East of where? – dominate news and popular culture.” Abood said.

“The predatory Islamophobic animus that is pulsating across contemporary Australia, France, Britain and the United States draws on Orientalist tropes of the ‘primitive, violent and dangerous subject’ as a strategy to legitimise containment and negation policies.”...

“Look how we think about and treat those seeking asylum; look who is calling for a ban on Muslim immigration. This racist discourse saturates our media and popular culture and is enacted in violent ways on our local streets,” Abood said.

“If we look to the critical past and understand how colonial and imperial powers have consistently interfered, blocked and attempted to bomb these very subjects into submission, then, perhaps we may see the present, and particular subjects and communities in a different way,” she said....'

 I wonder how long it will be before the play winds up on the schools' curriculum in New South Wales and other states. 

BDSing Aussie Professor Writes of "Israel's Vampiric History" (updated)

Once upon a time, 2002 to be precise,  two Aussie academics, one of Lebanese Christian background and the other Joo-ish (see my post here) co-sponsored an online anti-Israel petition  A journalist for the Melbourne Age (from the Fairfax stable of Aussie newspapers and thus no great friend to Israel) reported inter alia on 6 June that year:

"Angered at Israel's treatment of Palestinians, the pair last month launched an online petition calling for the boycott. They have collected about 100 signatures but have also provoked a counter-petition that attacks the pair for singling out Israel and failing to request similar boycotts of academic contacts with totalitarian regimes such as China and the Arab states."

The Lebanese-born academic referred to was anthropologist Ghassan Hage, then of the University of Sydney and now of the University of Melbourne (see image at left, dating to 2015).

As I well recall, the online petition he co-sponsored soon became a laughing stock.  How the two co-authors must have exulted at seeing the number of signatures steadily rise, only to realise that swelling the numbers were such monikers as "Adolf Hitler" and "Yasser Arafat" and even, if I recall correctly,  "Ariel Sharon".  Thus adorned with signatures each more preposterous than the last, and teeming with  pro-Israel comments, the flopped petition was in effect put out of its misery when its "add signature" facility was hidden from public view so that no further sport could be had with it.

Here's Professor Hage, who began his academic career as a political scientist and holds the chair of anthropolgy and social theory at Melbourne Uni, talking about racism:

On 6 June 2010 the Electronic Intifada published the following by Professor Hage in response to the Mavi Marmara incident, reprinted here:

Ghassan Hage’s response to some of the outrageously unbelievable Israeli propaganda that spewed forth from the mouths of Israeli political leaders and their spokespersons in the days following Israel’s massacre of civilians in international waters:

I don’t write poems but, in any case, poems are not poems.

Long ago, I was made to understand that Palestine was not Palestine;

I was also informed that Palestinians were not Palestinians;

They also explained to me that ethnic cleansing was not ethnic cleansing.

And when naive old me saw freedom fighters they patiently showed me that they were not freedom fighters, and that resistance was not resistance.

And when, stupidly, I noticed arrogance, oppression and humiliation they benevolently enlightened me so I can see that arrogance was not arrogance, oppression was not oppression, and humiliation was not humiliation.

I saw misery, racism, inhumanity and a concentration camp.

But they told me that they were experts in misery, racism, inhumanity and concentration camps and I have to take their word for it: this was not misery, racism, inhumanity and a concentration camp.

Over the years they’ve taught me so many things: invasion was not invasion, occupation was not occupation, colonialism was not colonialism and apartheid was not apartheid.

They opened my simple mind to even more complex truths that my poor brain could not on its own compute like: “having nuclear weapons” was not “having nuclear weapons,” “not having weapons of mass destruction” was “having weapons of mass destruction.”

And, democracy (in the Gaza Strip) was not democracy.

Having second class citizens (in Israel) was democracy.

So you’ll excuse me if I am not surprised to learn today that there were more things that I thought were evident that are not: peace activists are not peace activists, piracy is not piracy, the massacre of unarmed people is not the massacre of unarmed people.

I have such a limited brain and my ignorance is unlimited.

And they’re so fucking intelligent. Really.
 

 Now, Professor Hage has hit the headlines, so to speak, of the execrable Mondoweiss, for his response to the Anthropological Association of Israel, inviting him to be keynote speaker at its conference.

Not that this refusal should come as much of a surprise to Mondoweiss's readers, for they will have seen here that Professor Hage is a proponent of an academic boycott of Israel!

Professor Hage posted his response to the invitation on Facebook a day or two ago, and it has attracted (when last I looked) 397 likes, 47 comments, and 163 shares there.  It seems all leftist anti-Israel life is exulting, in Australia and overseas (yes, there anti-Israel Israeli-born academics among them).

Dear …

I have spent a bit of time writing this so it is a bit formal. That’s not the intention. It’s more that I want to be as clear as possible about my reasons.

I sincerely appreciate your invitation to give the keynote at the Anthropological Association of Israel. And I accept that it is an invitation made in good faith that emanates from your desire to open up the association to voices that are strongly critical of Israel as it has come to exist in the world today, and that as you say are not heard enough.

I am afraid I have to decline from accepting your invitation. I can’t say I am overjoyed to decline. As I mentioned to you before by temperament I am always inclined and disposed to dialogue, but I have thought hard about what my presence would achieve and I feel that the end result is negative not positive. But in thinking what is positive and what is negative I am thinking of how it impacts on the struggle of the Palestinian people to free themselves of colonialism, not the struggle of Israeli anthropologists to make their society more open minded and receptive. It is a mistake to equate the two even though they might occasionally overlap in terms of interest. You probably don’t want to hear me giving you a full blast of my reasons. And you might even think that you have heard it all before. But I genuinely accept that you want dialogue. And so I want to quickly say why, while I am also all for dialogue, I am not for the dialogue as you are proposing it, even though I am more than flattered about what you say about my work and thankful that you thought of me as a possible keynoter.

Israeli anthropologists face a number of situations that are similar to those we face in other settler colonial environments such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States. We are all anthropologists working in a social space that is always already vampirically sucking a native population dry and violently (legally and illegally) blocking its claims to the land. You Israelis have to face the extra situation that your vampiric history is relatively short and new, the population that has been colonised by you is still relatively strong and still making claims of national sovereignty and autonomy over the land. The dominant forces in your society aspire to get to a situation where this will stop being the case. It aims to efface the existence of Palestinians as claimants of sovereignty and it is subjecting them to horrendous inhumane violence of a scale, intensity and permanence that is so beyond acceptable. This is what your own Baruch Kimmerling has beautifully called politicide.

So to me, the beginning of any decolonial anthropology is to be anti-politicidal. It has to be concerned with how to stop this horrendous violence and how to give presence and political and social power to the colonised. It is not about making the anthropologist of the colonising society more liberal and open minded and capable of confronting difference. This I feel is all what me presenting a keynote for your organisation would achieve: some conservatives will be upset. But that’s because they are dumb. Then there will be the intelligent liberals who will leave saying "what a feeling. I have heard a genuinely and authentically anti-Zionist intellectual with really confronting views, and with an Arab background to boot. It was a really enriching experience, I must be so open minded and groovy." This does not and never did help the colonised. There will be a minority however who will fully understand these limitations and who will genuinely want to move towards the territory of decolonising anthropology. Those, I would love to work with, but I don’t believe the AAI is the best frame for this to be done.

I have many ideas of what a dialogue towards establishing a decolonial Israeli anthropology would entail. The first among them would be for Israeli anthropologists to refuse to belong to an organisation that symbolically absences Palestine from its name, or to belong to an organization that accepts anthropologists from the settlements among its ranks. If I was invited to Israel by an organisation that calls itself the Anthropological association of Israel/Palestine, that would be a good beginning. I will see it as indicating an aspiration to confront the mono-national mono-religious and eliminationist tendencies of the state. I would be happy to meet with Israeli anthropologists who aspire for such a decolonial politics. And it would be a delight for me to discuss with them possible strategies. Given that the numbers in the foreseeable future will be small perhaps we can meet in a Palestinian café and invite some local Palestinian anthropologists to participate in a dialogue about radically different non-colonial directions. I would genuinely be happy to take part in something like this.

This situation actually reminds me a bit of the politics of positive discrimination. When you are aiming for structural change, your politics can be incommensurate with individual interests and unfair to genuinely nice people. That is, you can be aiming for more women in management and you end up discriminating against a genuinely charming feminist guy. Likewise, I want to participate in dialogues that open up the space for more Palestinian anthropologists to be as subjects and participants in shaping the future of anthropology in Israel/Palestine, even if I have to forgo interacting with excellent, open-minded and charming Israeli anthropologists. [Emphasis added]

 The question might be asked: since Professor Hage's antipathy to Israel is a matter of public record, why did the Anthropological Association of Israel extend their invitation to him in the first place?

Update: 
Ghassan Hage on Facebook (20 Sept.)
 I had initially asked the president of the Israeli Anthropological Association who invited me, Nir Avieli, if he wanted his invitation published. As I didn't get an initial response i assumed he didn't. But he has sent me his considered response to my reply. So here they are both for the records. As you can see both my response and Nir's are polite and even cordial despite the differences, and if people want to comment, I'd rather if people keep the same tone of exchange.

Response to the president of the Israeli Anthropological Association’s invitation to give a keynote at their annual conference and the president’s reply

Dear Nir
I have spent a bit of time writing this so it is a bit formal. That’s not the intention. It’s more that I want to be as clear as possible about my reasons.
I sincerely appreciate your invitation to give the keynote at the Anthropological Association of Israel. And I accept that it is an invitation made in good faith that emanates from your desire to open up the association to voices that are strongly critical of Israel as it has come to exist in the world today, and that as you say are not heard enough.
I am afraid I have to decline from accepting your invitation. I can’t say I am overjoyed to decline. As I mentioned to you before by temperament I am always inclined and disposed to dialogue, but I have thought hard about what my presence would achieve and I feel that the end result is negative not positive. But in thinking what is positive and what is negative I am thinking of how it impacts on the struggle of the Palestinian people to free themselves of colonialism, not the struggle of Israeli anthropologists to make their society more open minded and receptive. It is a mistake to equate the two even though they might occasionally overlap in terms of interest. You probably don’t want to hear me giving you a full blast of my reasons. And you might even think that you have heard it all before. But I genuinely accept that you want dialogue. And so I want to quickly say why, while I am also all for dialogue, I am not for the dialogue as you are proposing it, even though I am more than flattered about what you say about my work and thankful that you thought of me as a possible keynoter.
Israeli anthropologists face a number of situations that are similar to those we face in other settler colonial environments such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States. We are all anthropologists working in a social space that is always already vampirically sucking a native population dry and violently (legally and illegally) blocking its claims to the land. You Israelis have to face the extra situation that your vampiric history is relatively short and new, the population that has been colonised by you is still relatively strong and still making claims of national sovereignty and autonomy over the land. The dominant forces in your society aspire to get to a situation where this will stop being the case. It aims to efface the existence of Palestinians as claimants of sovereignty and it is subjecting them to horrendous inhumane violence of a scale, intensity and permanence that is so beyond acceptable. This is what your own Baruch Kimmerling has beautifully called politicide.
So to me, the beginning of any decolonial anthropology is to be anti-politicidal. It has to be concerned with how to stop this horrendous violence and how to give presence and political and social power to the colonised. It is not about making the anthropologist of the colonising society more liberal and open minded and capable of confronting difference. This I feel is all what me presenting a keynote for your organisation would achieve: some conservatives will be upset. But that’s because they are dumb. Then there will be the intelligent liberals who will leave saying "what a feeling. I have heard a genuinely and authentically anti-Zionist intellectual with really confronting views, and with an Arab background to boot. It was a really enriching experience, I must be so open minded and groovy." This does not and never did help the colonised. There will be a minority however who will fully understand these limitations and who will genuinely want to move towards the territory of decolonising anthropology. Those, I would love to work with, but I don’t believe the AAI is the best frame for this to be done.
I have many ideas of what a dialogue towards establishing a decolonial Israeli anthropology would entail. The first among them would be for Israeli anthropologists to refuse to belong to an organisation that symbolically absences Palestine from its name, or to belong to an organization that accepts anthropologists from the settlements among its ranks. If I was invited to Israel by an organisation that calls itself the Anthropological association of Israel/Palestine, that would be a good beginning. I will see it as indicating an aspiration to confront the mono-national mono-religious and eliminationist tendencies of the state. I would be happy to meet with Israeli anthropologists who aspire for such a decolonial politics. And it would be a delight for me to discuss with them possible strategies. Given that the numbers in the foreseeable future will be small perhaps we can meet in a Palestinian café and invite some local Palestinian anthropologists to participate in a dialogue about radically different non-colonial directions. I would genuinely be happy to take part in something like this.
This situation actually reminds me a bit of the politics of positive discrimination. When you are aiming for structural change, your politics can be incommensurate with individual interests and unfair to genuinely nice people. That is, you can be aiming for more women in management and you end up discriminating against a genuinely charming feminist guy. Likewise, I want to participate in dialogues that open up the space for more Palestinian anthropologists to be as subjects and participants in shaping the future of anthropology in Israel/Palestine, even if I have to forgo interacting with excellent, open-minded and charming Israeli anthropologists.
Best wishes,
Ghassan
----------------------------------------------------------
Dear Ghassan
Thank you for your frank mail.
I am disappointed but I am certainly not surprised by your decision to decline my invitation.
Colleagues I consulted in Israel and abroad told me that inviting a Palestinian and/or Middle Eastern anthropologist as a keynote for the Israeli Anthropological Association (IAA) annual meeting would be futile if not foolish: “no self-respecting Palestinian or Arab intellectual would accept such invitation”, they said. “Yes”, they added, “Edward Said came. But that was Said and the visit took place in a very different time”. Previous IAA presidents also confided in me that they made genuine efforts to invite prominent Arab anthropologists in the past: invitations that were declined.
As I wrote in my original email, I do hope my invitation was not too bold, or indeed, insensitive. But because we intend to hold the annual meeting in Kfar Qasim, an Arab town known for its tragic history – I thought this might indicate our serious intentions to create genuine dialogue, rather than simply feature you as a fig-leaf for liberal minded pious anthropologists.
I also felt that not even trying to invite you would be yet another indication of how we in the academic community have succumbed to the ruling regime. Giving up without even trying seems to plague the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This is especially the case when we consider the death of the “the Israeli left” over the past decades, whose members once struggled for peace and reconciliation, but have now lost all political power and hope. We now make an invisible, silent few – the academia is perhaps the last bastion.
In this sense, I hope our email exchange was a forgone conclusion, though I respect and understand your decision. To be honest, I don’t think we really disagree on the fundamentals: The IAA has officially condemned the occupation of Palestine and called upon the Israeli government to stop the military control and human and civil rights abuse and engage in peace talks.
And as you convincingly argue:
“Israeli anthropologists face a number of situations that are similar to those we face in other settler colonial environments such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States. We are all anthropologists working in a social space that is always already vampirically sucking a native population dry and violently (legally and illegally) blocking its claims to the land”.
Indeed, you and I face similar difficulties and dilemmas (for instance, working in public universities in Israel or Australia). The way I understand it, our privileged position demands that we critically engage in discussing sociopolitical problems, however intractable. I also feel that this is our only way of influencing others (our students or, at least, some of them) and, perhaps, having an impact.
I also agree with you that the main question at hand is what would be the most effective way of assisting the Palestinians in their struggle for freedom and independence. In a week in which the US administration committed 37 BILLION DOLLARS of the US tax payers money in military assistance to Israel, the largest ever sum of money given by the US to any foreign country, it is clear that the occupation of Palestine is an American interest and that the occupation is fueled by American tax payers. It is, of course, also maintained politically by the US and its allies, not least ‘Fortress Australia’: perhaps the most loyal of US allies.
The way I understand it, the most effective way of assisting the Palestinians in their struggle is by demanding that the US and its allies stop supporting the occupation. I realize that anthropologists anywhere have very little political power, but this is probably the only way to help the Palestinians.
Talking to Israeli anthropologists might not be very effective, but I do believe it can generate a productive discussion, to the chagrin of the ruling power.
I could have written now that “I look forward for better times”, but this would be just another self-righteous and meaningless phrase. For lack of better words I’ll just say that I’ll keep on trying…
Sincerely
Nir Avieli
President, The Israeli Anthropological Association