Russell Tribunal in the East Village I

It is 10 A.M. and the first day of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine (RToP) should already have started. However, the queue outside the Cooper Union in New York’s East Village has barely moved since I joined it almost an hour ago. By now it is reputedly almost 1000 strong and there are dark rumours that it will be noon before it has been fully accommodated in the historic building’s Great Hall.

This being the USA, the problem is security. It appears that attendees are being allowed into the venue six at a time, where their bags are searched and they are screened by a metal detector. Every so often an RToP volunteer sallies forth and thanks us for our patience. I have now rounded the corner and am within sight of the main entrance, which is good, but am standing in the sun, which is bad because it forces me to don a baseball cap that makes me feel stupid.

Now a Cooper Union security man emerges and tells us to place our bags and rucksacks on the ground beside us. Another security man materialises, leading a diminutive Labrador dog on a leash. The dog, wagging its tail amiably, sniffs our bags, and its master gestures us to move towards the door. The metal detector has been abandoned, and now everything moves rapidly. Being a Luddite and a dog-lover, I feel doubly vindicated.

Inside, I meet many old friends and associates, people whom I have encountered at conferences and demonstrations on behalf of Palestinian rights in Dublin, London, Paris, Brussels, Geneva, Barcelona and previously here in New York. Although we are all conscious of the seriousness of the occasion, there is also something of the feel of a family reunion – and to enhance it, here is my sister Patricia, in harness as a translator for the Tribunal.

At last, over an hour late, we are ready to start. Pierre Galand, Belgian socialist ex-senator, veteran of innumerable solidarity campaigns but most intimately associated with the cause of Palestine through the Association Belgo-Palestinienne, the European Co-ordinating Committee of NGOs on the Question of Palestine (ECCP), and now the RToP, welcomes us to the session. He deplores that fact that neither Leila Shahid, Palestinian Authority Ambassador to the European Union, nor Raji Sourani, founder and director of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, was able to obtain a visa to come to New York. He warns us that since this is a tribunal and not a public meeting we must resist the temptation to applaud at any stage. He is warmly applauded.

We stand as the international jury enters: Dennis Banks, Angela Davis, John Dugard, Miguel Angel Estrella, Stéphane Hessel, Ronnie Kasrils, Mairead Maguire, Cynthia McKinney, Michael Mansfield QC, Alice Walker and Roger Waters.

Pierre Galand announces the first speaker, the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé. The audience spontaneously bursts into applause, and Pierre almost loses his considerable cool. “Please do not applaud! The audiences in Capetown were able to obey this simple rule – why cannot we do it in New York?” Nobody looks particularly contrite.

Ilan speaks about the history of Zionism. I have often seen and heard him speak, but today he outdoes himself: clarity, passion and humour culminate in a plea not to allow advocacy for the Palestinian cause to be limited by the parameters of an increasingly illusory “two-state solution” – all conveyed effortlessly within a 20’ time-span. This will be a hard act to follow.

He is followed by Peter Hansen, former Commissioner-General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). He does not attempt a history of the UN’s involvement in the Palestine issue, but characterises the organisation under six headings: its role as source and generator of International Law, its responsibility for implementing these laws, its role in interpreting them, its supervisory/monitoring role, its humanitarian activities (in particular UNRWA), and its institution-building capacity. The UN, he believes, cannot be reformed from within but only by civil society pressure on its constituent governments.

The British activist Ben White has been handed the daunting task of outlining “Israeli Policies Since 1948”, but is clearly determined that his audience will not be starved of its lunch for longer than necessary. The Law of Return, the Absentee Property Law, the Law of Human Dignity and Liberty, the Jewish National Fund, the World Zionist Organisation, the Jewish Agency, the Judaisation of the Negev and Galilee – they fly past at a rate that would be bewildering were it not for Ben’s calm articulacy.

At some point Frank Barat, Tribunal coordinator, shows a bald, elderly black gentleman to his seat. I experience a deep frisson as I realise that this is Harry Belafonte, legendary singer and vocal human rights activist, a hero of my distant childhood. With him in the audience and Davis, McKinney and Walker on the jury, it seems that the icons of black America – all except their president, Barack Obama – are uniting on the side of the persecuted Palestinians. This in itself could be a major factor leading to a shift in US public opinion.

After lunch, law Professor and author John Quigley speaks on The Establishment of a Palestinian State, and is unambiguous in his support for the Palestinian Authority’s attempts to achieve statehood at the UN. This, of course, is a controversial question but Quigley is quietly convincing. Indeed he claims that there has in fact been a Palestinian state since at least 1924, while conceding that not everyone would agree with him.

International lawyer Vera Gowlland-Debbas delivers the day’s lengthiest and most technical exposition, on the legal responsibilities of the UN. From the start she expresses her conviction that the UN has failed in those responsibilities, at least as far as the Palestinians are concerned. She concludes that the double standards of the Security Council have endangered the principle of the rule of law in international affairs.

Pakistani-American international lawyer Susan Akram speaks on Palestinian Refugees and the United Nations. She threads her way carefully through the anomalies introduced by UN General Assembly Resolution 194 which, by guaranteeing Palestinian refugees the right of return, at a stroke separated their fate from that of refugees destined for resettlement, whose interests are ably represented by the UNHCR. The creation of UNRWA catered to the material needs of Palestinian refugees while depriving them of advocacy, which does not come within UNRWA’s mandate. These refugees therefore find themselves in a legal limbo.

The absence of a Palestinian voice among today’s speakers would have been powerfully rectified by Raji Sourani. In the event, he is represented by Jeanne Mirer, president of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. While she provides numerous details and statistics about the baleful consequences of Israel’s occupation and siege of the tiny Gaza Strip, what hits home most forcefully is the evidence in her manner and tone of voice that what she has seen in Gaza has shocked and angered her profoundly.

And thus the first long day of the fourth international session of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine draws to a close. Audience and participants stand around and gossip for a time, then a bunch of us repair to a bar where I drink ginger ale while my companions enjoy $5 happy-hour cocktails.

Returning home to my refuge in the upper West Side, I change trains at Times Square. On the platform a skinny black man is playing Beethoven’s Für Elise on a steel drum. Catching my eye he interrupts himself and chirps “hi, daddy!” before resuming his startling performance. This is slightly disconcerting, but this is New York, New York…

A Hopeful Kick-off

I'm writing this in New York City. I have just returned from Barnard College, a private women's college affiliated to Columbia University, where I attended the "Kick-off Celebration" for the Russell Tribunal on Palestine.

The RToP, named after the British philosopher and humanitarian Bertrand Russell, is a people's tribunal that was first envisioned in 2004 after it became clear that the international community (including, be it said, the government of Ireland) intended to ignore the legal consequences of the International Court of Justice’s 2004 Advisory Opinion on the construction of a wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory:

All States are under an obligation not to recognize the illegal situation resulting from the construction of the wall and not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by such construction;  all States parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War of 12 August 1949 have in addition the obligation, while respecting the United Nations Charter and international law, to ensure compliance by Israel with international humanitarian law as embodied in that Convention.

The Barnard event was co-sponsored by Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine, the Black Students' Organization (BSO), LUCHA, Students Against Mass Incarceration, International Socialist Organization, Radical College Undergraduates Not Tolerating Sexism, Turath (the Arab Students' Organisation at Columbia University), and the Muslim Students Association. In keeping with this mix, the performers and the audience represented a multicultural/multiethnic/multiracial diversity that, united in support of Palestinian human rights, itself generated a heady feeling of hope and optimism. The people of the world are with the Palestinians, even if their governments are not!

This blog is not setting out to be a review of the event, which a late start combined with my jet-lag induced me to leave before the end. However, the two hours that I experienced featured a succession of highlights, ranging from The Peace Poets through American Indian Movement leader Dennis Banks (who disappointingly disavowed any Irish heritage) to the gloriously zen Alice Walker.

The New Internationalist has just published an article called Palestine is no longer a dirty word by my friend Frank Barat, who has been coordinator of the RToP since it started. I want to finish up with a quotation from this that conveys better than anything I've read recently the reasons why so many people all over the world are passionately committed to the Palestinian cause:


Palestine is not a faraway conflict between Jews and Muslims. Palestine is about us, all of us. Palestine is about human civilization and what it represents. Palestine is about the world we are living in. Its history, its present and its future. Palestine is about Greece, Spain. The names are different but the struggle is the same. It is a struggle for justice, dignity, freedom, respect, humanity, love – and it is an exhilarating one. 

And, I might add, Palestine is about Syria and Iran and Somalia - and Ireland. Over the next two days the struggle will continue in the Cooper Union, when the RToP's international jury will place the United States and the United Nations in the dock.

Alan Shatter, Tom Cooney, morality, and a correction.

The "next article" that I announced has in fact been published by the Irish Left Review. Entitled Exploiting Wallenberg, it analyses in some detail and at some length the assumptions and implications, to say nothing of the falsehoods and insinuations, that clutter up Minister Alan Shatter's speech commemorating Raoul Wallenberg.

Nonetheless, Shatter's speech was so long (some 3500 words) that there remains a great deal more to analyse. In particular, his reflections on culture and the Holocaust need to be discussed; it struck me, however, that such a comparatively recondite discussion would have been out of place in the above-mentioned article, so I'll be publishing something on the subject here over the next few days.

Meanwhile Minister Shatter, that great apostle of liberal values, has been in the news again, this time reacting heatedly to the publication in the Republic of Ireland of topless photographs of Kate Middleton, who is apparently a member of the British Royal Family (yawn...). Mr Shatter wishes to limit the liberty of the Irish media to publish such things.

Given the prior involvement of Mr Shatter's crony Tom Cooney (see my blog on the latter below) in the Irish Council for Civil Liberties and the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement, there is something to be written on the question of how such worthy involvements were or are compatible with his present positions which could be defined as selective opposition to - and occasional support for - Apartheid and the dismantling of civil liberties. Another member of the present Irish government, Education Minister Ruairi Quinn, also merits study. A civil libertarian who has advocated the introduction of internment without trial for certain alleged criminals, Quinn was a former Chairman of the Holocaust Education Trust, an organisation that seeks to "combat anti-Semitism and all forms of racism and intolerance", except when these are directed against Palestinians.(Incidentally, I have written somewhere that Shatter was a former Chairman of the ICCL - on this score I was misinformed: he was never either Chairman or Director of that organisation.)

Much to be discussed, then, but it must wait for another day. Meanwhile, my colleague Conor McCarthy has published an excellent blog on Israel, Iran and the Bomb in which he discusses Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's claim that "those in the international community who refuse to put red lines before Iran, don't have a moral right to place a red light before Israel..." Once again that helpless adjective "moral" is abused to provide a pretext for outright criminality.

An Irish Dershowitz: Tom Cooney

In my next article, I'll attempt an analysis of the speech in honour of Raoul Wallenberg made on 12^th September by the Irish Minister for Justice, Equality and Defence Alan Shatter. As a preface, here is an unpublished article I wrote in 2006 in the wake of Israel's onslaught on Lebanon. This was partly a response to an article published in the Irish Times by the law lecturer Tom Cooney, one of Israel's most loyal propagandists in Ireland. This is topical, because Mr Cooney is now a special advisor to Minister Shatter. I have changed the title (originally A European Dershowitz), added a few links and made a few other adjustments.

An Irish Dershowitz

Raymond Deane

The July 16th 2006 G8 statement on the Middle East crisis was a shameful abdication of responsibility on the part of some of the world's most powerful leaders. Once again the West, with Japan and Russia in expedient if apparently reluctant tow, determined that Israel may continue to violate international law, while resistance to its criminality was demonised.

In reality, the G8 statement and that of the EU foreign ministers onMonday 17th (which, according to the Guardian newspaper, "was diluted after pressure from Britain and Germany, Israel's closest EU allies") constituted a blank cheque for Israel to attempt the destruction of both Hamas and Hizbullah. This is because the West acknowledges militant Islam as the only force capable of bringing down the Arab dictators whose bought compliance is necessary to ensure Western hegemony in the region.

In an opinion piece in the Irish Times (Terrorists and their planners are a lawful target, July 18 2006)  University College Dublin law lecturer Tom Cooney made the groundless claim that the G8 statement "has brought a shift in how international law views states which are linked to terrorism", as if a single statement by a cohort of opportunistic politicians could instantaneously transform a legal consensus elaborated over generations. Given that Cooney is a regular mouthpiece for Hasbara - Zionist propaganda - it's probable that his line of argument will crop up elsewhere, hence it's worth looking at it more closely.

A primary problem is his blanket acceptance of Israeli terminology, referring consistently as it does to Hamas and Hizbullah as "terrorists" and to their actions as "terrorism". This constitutes an illicit attempt to smuggle in conclusions without elaborating premises. While others might dub Hamas and Hizbollah "freedom fighters" or "the Islamic resistance" and call Israel "a terror state", such language, whether correct or not, similarly presupposes a specific ideological stance and would be inappropriate in a discussion of international law.

If the G8 statement is important because, in Cooney's words, "it recognises Israel's right under international law to use military force to defend itself", then its importance is negligible indeed: this right is already recognised, as is the right of all peoples - including the Palestinians or the Lebanese - to defend themselves forcefully against assault.

Mysteriously, the first conclusion Cooney draws from his hollow premise is to assert that the statement in some way rebuts "the International Court of Justice's stance", presumably when in its advisory opinion of July 9th, 2004, the ICJ condemned Israel's construction of a wall on Palestinian territory. However, the court explicitly accepted Israel's right to self-defence while condemning the route of the wall, hence it's unclear wherein the rebuttal lies.

His second conclusion is that "Israel may hold Lebanon directly responsible for the attack".

Even were such a conclusion justified in strict legality, in geo-political reality Lebanon's chaotic multi-sectarian and impotent government is "directly responsible" for very little. To suggest that it can disarm Hizbollah in accordance with UN SecurityCouncil resolution 1559 - while Israel is encouraged to disregard scores of UN resolutions - is entirely disingenuous.

Whatever the pretext for its recent actions, Israel has no right to target civilians or civilian infrastructure, whether in Lebanon or the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Article 6(b) of the NurembergCharter prohibits the "wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity . . .", the latter being defined by the laws of war. The 1907 HagueConvention prohibits the penalisation of "the population on account of the acts of individuals for which they cannot be regarded as jointly and severally responsible," a prohibition repeated by Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949. Hence Israel's wanton proceedings in both Gaza and Lebanon are war-crimes, and no rhetoric from the G8 or the EU can alter that fact.

Cooney further concludes that "Since 9/11, the threat of international terrorism has forced states to recognise that a state that culpably fails to prevent terrorist attacks or facilitates terrorist groups is directly responsible for the attacks. The underlying principle is that states must counter international terrorism." As a result, Lebanon is deemed not to have lived up to its obligations and hence to be, in effect, a legitimate target.

While 9/11 may well have changed perceptions of the dangers of international terrorism, it has not effected significant changes in international law. The "underlying principle... that states must counter international terrorism" already existed. Undoubtedly many states were and are remiss in countering it, but their negligence breached and still breaches no international laws. As with his conclusions from the G8 statement, Cooney is again pretending that international law has changed when this is not in fact the case.

Cooney again illicitly adopts Israeli language when he refers to Israeli soldiers having been "kidnapped" rather than "captured". He fails to mention the hostages Israel tookwith it when it withdrew from Lebanon in 2000 after its long, bloody, and illegal occupation of that country. He fails to mention the vexed question of the Sheba'a Farms, which Israel still occupies. Nor does he mention Israel's failure, despite repeated requests, to provide the Lebanese authorities with maps of where it had laid landmines. Nor does he mention the regular kidnapping of Palestinian civilians by the Israeli army, nor the thousands of Palestinian civilians rotting without trial - and often subject to atrocious torture - in Israeli prisons.

If "an Israeli rescue mission is an act of self-defence under article 51 of the UN Charter" as Cooney maintained, then the Palestinians and Lebanese would be within their rights to invoke the same article. Of course in the eyes of such "experts in legitimation" (Gramsci's useful phrase), only Israel has rights.

Mr Cooney claims that because "neither the Palestinian Authority nor the Lebanese government has tried to rescue" the soldiers, "diplomatic means have failed", hence Israel's military onslaught was some kind of final resort. But Israel invariably eschews diplomatic means if there is any possibility of their pre-empting military action, and has pointedly avoided diplomacy in Gaza and Lebanon. Similarly, the US, G8 and EU have been quite content to let Israel do its worst prior to any call for a ceasefire with concomitant diplomacy.

Cooney has the chutzpah, or perhaps black humour, to claim that Israel could not attempt to arrest the captured soldier Gilad Shalit's captors in Gaza as it "would cause many civilian casualties". In reality, of course, Israel wreaked destruction and slaughter in Gaza from the very outset, without in the process retrieving its soldier. One suspects that finding him was the last thing on Ehud Olmert's mind, as it would have deprived him - and his Defence Minister, the "Peace Now" veteran Amir Peretz - of a plausible excuse for further butchery.

Cooney truly oversteps the boundaries when he describes Palestinian and Hizbollah fighters as "unlawful combatants" who could justifiably be denied "the benefits of prisoner-of-war status", thus once again removing any taint of illegality from Israel's actions, however outrageous.

The term "unlawful combatant" has no existence in international law. According to US legal expert Nathaniel Berman, its use seems "designed to put detainees beyond the reach of any law", something that Cooney apparently wishes upon Israel's victims in symmetry with his conviction that Israel should itself be blessed with impunity.

What is being espoused here is the Bush/Rumsfeld stance concerning the alleged al-Qaeda prisoners held without trial in Guantánamo. Unfortunately for this argument, in June 2006 the US Supreme Court ruled by a 5-3 majority that, contrary to the US government's view, Article 3 of that pesky 1949 Geneva Convention "relative to the treatment of prisoners of war" applies to the prisoners in Guantánamo and other US-run concentration camps such as Bagram. Perversely, Cooney wishes to withhold from Palestinians and Lebanese the rights that the US Supreme Court has judged inalienable and universal.

According to his byline, "Tom Cooney teaches law at University College Dublin's law school." This description significantly fails to mention that his field is medical law, not international law as the unwary reader might be led to assume. Here, his twofold thesis can be easily summarised: all who resist Israel's assaults and illegal policies are criminals under a new legal dispensation stemming from 9/11 and the recent G8 statement, and everything that Israel does is, by definition, legal. Neither contention stands up either legally or logically, so it is clear that Cooney is using, if not abusing, his academic status to promote Israel's policies and actions right or wrong. Clearly his role-model is Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, author of a continuous stream of turgid and sophistical best-sellers defending Israel's sacred impunity.

It is an open secret that Israel had planned its reoccupation of Gaza long before the capture of Corporal Shalit, and equally well known that the army had long been yearning for another crack at Lebanon. The actions of Hamas and Hizbullah merely provided the necessary pretext. Uri Avnery, veteran founder of the Israeli peace bloc Gush Shalom, maintains bluntly that "The real aim is to change the regime in Lebanon and to install a puppet government . . . Everything else is noise and propaganda." Unfortunately, particularly when it emanates from professional lawyers with an axe to grind on Israel's behalf, such noise often drowns out the truth.

Raymond Deane is a founding member of the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

Art and Exploitation - Reflections on the cultural boycott of Israel

This is a very slightly revised version of an essay published by the website Cannons @ Muses (www.cannonsandmuses.org) in February 2011.

ART AND EXPLOITATION – Reflections on the Cultural Boycott of Israel.

By Raymond Deane

Against whom must one defend the cultural boycott of the state of Israel? Clearly those who believe in "Israel right or wrong" will reject all tactics opposing Israeli policies and actions, including all forms of boycott. Similarly those who criticise the Israeli state and believe that all tactics against it are justifiable except for boycotts, will make no exception for culture. The cultural boycott, therefore, must be defended against those who support boycotts but specifically exclude culture as an object of boycott.

In what follows, I shall omit discussion of the "legitimacy" or otherwise of the state of Israel, or of the boycott tactic in general. Furthermore, I shall take culture in this context as being synonymous with art, although in other contexts this equation is dubious.

Dismissal of the cultural boycott tends to take two forms: art is "above politics", and it "breaks down barriers and brings people together." Interestingly, opponents of the sporting boycott use the same arguments. Apparently culture and sport are both activities deemed to transcend political categories while uniting people of diverse backgrounds. Indeed it may be implied that the transcendence enables the unity.

The statement "art is above politics" seems to me - as an artist and activist – to be as incoherent as all statements beginning with the words "art is..." Perhaps the very essence of art is its absence of any definable essence, so that it "can be" many different things while remaining art. Attempts to pin down its definition are both misleading and exclusive. (Of course this also applies to other essences than aesthetic ones.)

Furthermore, all discussions of art are necessarily aspectual, concentrating on diverse ways in which the artistic object or process may be viewed. A work of art created without political intention may be analysed from a political perspective without (necessarily) being thereby distorted. It may equally be analysed from historical, structural, sociological, erotic, or any number of perspectives without losing its identity, which is multidimensional.

The idea that art is “above politics” seems to imply a concept of art as autonomous, an autonomy linked to its anti-utilitarianism, its lack of obvious practical usefulness. It further reads such autonomy as excluding any possible political perspective on aesthetics, although the philosopher Adorno, for example, famously thought the opposite. Thus for artists to engage in a cultural boycott supposedly violates the autonomy of art by enlisting it for a political cause.

My own involvement in the politics of cultural boycott culminated (so far) in August 2010 with the launch of the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign's "cultural boycott pledge", whereby creative and performing artists undertake not to accept invitations to Israel (two years later, the pledge has some 233 signatories).

At the time, I wrote: "Whether or not art is 'above politics', its presentation and representation in the real world can all too easily be hijacked by oppressive states". In the initial letter that I sent artists, I cited Nissim Ben-Sheetrit of Israel's Foreign Ministry: “We see culture as a propaganda tool of the first rank, and I do not differentiate between propaganda and culture.” This was taken from About Face, an article by Yuval Ben-Ami that appeared in the Israeli paper Ha'aretz on 20 September 2005, concerning the Foreign Ministry's belated recognition of "the importance of culture as a public relations device."

While one surely cannot deny that this represents a serious “violation of the autonomy of art”, is it not

inconsistent for artists to respond with a violation of their own? Should artists not display a purer and more moral concern for their work than an amoral state? Phrased thus, the argument might remind us of the question whether it is acceptable to resist state violence with acts of violence (automatically dubbed “terrorism”)? A negative answer would appear to demand more moral behaviour from the oppressed than from the oppressor, a position that has a certain logic, since oppression is inherently immoral.

However, one of the most positive aspects of all boycott campaigns is precisely that they are non-violent. Furthermore, the autonomy of the artist and of the art-work, like all forms of autonomy, is never absolute. Artists who auction paintings to raise money for the homeless, composers who allow their music to be used as music therapy, are voluntarily surrendering a degree of their work's autonomy.

Or are they? Because whatever use is made of it, in a certain sense the work remains unscathed. The choral finale of Beethoven's 9th Symphony remains a revolutionary plea for universal brotherhood even though it was appropriated in turn by Bismarck, by the Nazis, by (most bizarrely!) Japanese kamikaze pilots during World War II, and most recently by the European Union. While Beethoven had no control over these posthumous perversions of his work, Bruce Springsteen could and did fight against the distortion by Ronald Reagan of his protest song Born in the USA into an anthem of right-wing patriotism. The artists who refuse to perform or be performed or exhibited in Israel are withholding their work from exploitation by a racist, colonial state. The work itself retains whatever autonomy an art-work possesses. Indeed one might even argue that it remains “above politics” without concluding that the artist should be similarly aloof in seeking to influence the conditions of its dissemination.

Furthermore, artists from states that are actively complicit in Israel's crimes – particularly the USA and the EU – are saying to their governments: You claim that you oppose all forms of boycott of the state of Israel – although most of you imposed sanctions on South Africa in the 1980s, thus hastening the fall of Apartheid – and we also dislike boycotts because we wish our work to achieve maximum dissemination. So if you wish to make our boycotts redundant, then avail of the means at your disposal to bring Israel's crimes to an end: insist on the total cessation of colonial settlement-building, an end to the occupation of Palestinian territories, a genuine process of negotiation leading to a just peace that recognises inalienable Palestinian rights including the Right of Return; in the meantime, stop funding the occupation and arming the Israeli rogue state, and stop conceding Israel trading privileges to which it has long since forfeited the right.

The other contention – that art “breaks down barriers and brings people together” – also implies an

essentialist definition of art's capabilities. Just as we may replace the formula “art is...” with “art can be...”, we may similarly rephrase the above assertion as follows: “art can break down barriers and can bring people together”. It can also do the opposite, when those who control its dissemination exploit it to such an end.

In the case of Israel, musicians (e.g.) who perform in Tel Aviv can take it for granted that their audiences are unlikely to include fans from the West Bank and certainly will exclude Gazans – not because such people don't wish to hear their music, but because they are prevented from travelling by the armed forces of the Israeli state. Should these musicians seek to “balance” their performance in Tel Aviv by playing Ramallah, Israelis will be prevented from attending – not by Palestinians, but by the same occupying forces. Should they seek to play Gaza, they will themselves be prevented – and not by Hamas. Given that any such performance in Tel Aviv will be exploited by Israeli propaganda as testimony to the “normality” of the Zionist state, it is difficult to see how our hypothetical musicians will have “broken down barriers and brought people together” – rather, they will have provided living proof that Israel is an apartheid state and will indeed have reinforced it by their presence, regardless of whether the content of their music extols love and peace.

But does the cultural boycott not hurt individual Israelis, many of whom may reject their government's

policies towards the Palestinians? The non-violent cultural boycott may well “hurt” individuals, but not in the way that (e.g.) US sanctions “hurt” (i.e. starved to death) hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children in Saddam's day. Strikes “hurt” ordinary people, yet if those people support the aims of the strikers they grit their teeth and endure the pain. Those Israelis who genuinely oppose government policy also support the boycott, as demonstrated by the steady growth of the internal boycott movement – including the cultural boycott – within Israel.

Boycott, as Mandela said, is a tactic, not a principle. Its ultimate aim is to help – however modestly – to remove the conditions that brought about its imposition. Culture exists in the real world, not somewhere above the clouds. For this reason it cannot lay claim to any exemption from the obligation laid upon all of us to strive for a more just world.

Raymond Deane is a composer and a member of the National Committee of the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

My Road to Palestinian Solidarity

Today I am posting an essay I wrote in 2009, and that was published in German translation in the book Denk ich an Palästina, edited by Guenter Schenk. In this book 26 activists, mostly German, described how they came to Palestine rights activism. Alas, its publisher went bust, but the book may still be sourced online or directly through Guenter (indirectly, through myself) for €18, free postage worldwide included. You will find a review of it here.

                                      My road to Palestinian solidarity.

                                                            Raymond Deane

When I was 10 years old I decided that I would become a classical composer, and have lived with the consequences of that decision ever since. A little later on, I began to read fiction, poetry, and even philosophy as if print were soon to become obsolete (as perhaps it will!). From my mid teens I added theatre, cinema, and painting to my interests. In short, I was and have remained a "culture vulture".

Of course the culture that I absorbed and that absorbed me was entirely western, and predominantly European. It comes naturally to classical musicians to feel that their "roots" are in countries other than (even if including) their place of birth, so from an early age I had little sense of nationalism and a kind of extraterritorial loyalty to countries like Germany, Austria, France, Italy, Russia, Czechoslovakia - the great centres of the European classical tradition.

In literature and philosophy, I soon found that many of the writers who most excited me were Jewish. If Joyce was a hero, Kafka was a God. In poetry, Paul Celan made every other poet seem irrelevant. In philosophy, Jacques Derrida magisterially swept away the metaphysics of presence. In music, too, although the classical mainstream was gentile, Alkan, Mahler, Schoenberg and Ligeti were all Jewish. Like the Europeanised American poet Sylvia Plath, I used to declaim "I think I'm a bit of a Jew..."

In 1990 I moved part-time to Paris. I witnessed huge demonstrations against the imminent Gulf War. I read Chomsky's Deterring Democracy, and became friendly with Arabs – including Palestinians – who denounced the hypocrisy of ejecting Saddam Hussein from Kuweit while allowing Israel to remain in the Occupied Territories.

My previous political involvement had been on the fringes of the Anti-Apartheid Movement and the Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign, and I was beginning to take an interest in East Timor. I had always felt uneasy about Palestine, believing that terrible things had happened there but that the Jews "were an exception" because of what they had suffered. My sense of cultural affinity with Jews made it easy for me to think this way, but also contributed to my uneasiness – because not all Jews supported Israel.

I paid my first visit to the Middle East in 1993, witnessing the startling contrast between Jewish and Arab Israel, the still greater contrast between Israel and "the territories", and the turbulent misery of the refugee camps. I witnessed the results of Israeli bombing in Lebanon, and read Robert Fisk's Pity the Nation while I was in that country.

Later that same year, I was Ireland's delegate at the World Music Days of the International Society for Contemporary Music in Mexico City. I was one of those who spearheaded a revolt of smaller countries, angry that their composers were almost never represented at ISCM festivals while those of Britain, France, and Germany were over-represented. One of my allies was the Israeli composer Menachem Zur, a liberal Zionist, with whom I became – and have remained – warm friends. Subsequently I even worked together with the Israeli Embassy in Dublin to organise an exchange between Irish and Israeli composers, one of whom, Hagar Khadima, came to Ireland and stayed in my flat in Dublin, while I travelled to perform at a music festival in Kishinev, Moldova (unaware that this had been the site of a horrible pogrom against the Jews in 1903, commemorated in the great poem City of Slaughter by the Zionist poet Chaim Bialik).

So I still had inhibitions about getting involved in a campaign against Israel. Until, in 2001, Ariel Sharon became Prime Minister, and it was no longer possible to sit on the sidelines. East Timor was moving towards independence, and the chairman of the East Timor Ireland Solidarity Campaign, the legendary Tom Hyland, was already looking for new territories to liberate. Together with a number of activists including myself, Tom founded the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign (IPSC) in November 2001, shortly after the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa Intifada.

For a time, the IPSC didn't do much except organise itself. With "Operation Defensive Shield", the brutal re-invasion by Sharon of West Bank towns and refugee camps, all that changed. A massive propaganda war broke out, in Ireland and elsewhere, and I suddenly found myself obliged to write several letters daily to different publications, including some quite obscure provincial newspapers – Zionists, as Edward Said repeatedly insisted, pay great attention to detail. I had to acquire some basic knowledge of international law and humanitarian law, as well as of history, and I read voraciously. Meanwhile, Tom Hyland had resigned the chair of the IPSC for health reasons, and I took over the organisation, remaining its Chairperson for 3 years.

Slowly but surely all my doubts vanished and a new realisation took their place: with all my liberalism and concern for human rights worldwide, I myself had represented everything that I was now fighting against. I had failed to look either at myself or at the culture which had produced me and of which I was a producer, and to recognise the seeds of discrimination planted alongside those of emancipation. I began to understand that "making an exception" of the Jews was what anti-Semites did, that philo-Semitism is only the other face of anti-Semitism. And yet it is this exceptionalism that allows Israel to continue breaching every law known to humanity, and to be defended unconditionally by politicians and commentators who salve their guilt about Europe's past crimes against the Jews by facilitating Israel's present crimes against the Palestinians.

None of this has turned me against my cultural background, or changed my admiration for Kafka or Celan or Mahler! However, I have come to understand the truth of the Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin's words: "every document of culture is at the same time a document of barbarism". I have begun to learn about the wealth of Arab and Islamic culture. I have come to see the struggle for the liberation of Palestine as simultaneously a struggle for the liberation of Europe from its worst and most atavistic imperialist and racist impulses.

For me, this has also been a liberation.

  

Book review: Magic Realism with Footnotes

http://electronicintifada.net/content/magic-realism-footnotes-novelist-nasrallah-creates-genre-his-own/11537

Magic realism with footnotes: novelist Nasrallah creates a genre of his own

Raymond Deane 

The Electronic Intifada 

28 July 2012

In an article for The Electronic Intifada some years ago I lamented that the Jordan-based Palestinian poet Ibrahim Nasrallah was only known to English-speakers as a novelist for two “nightmarish, anti-realistic essays in poetic prose.” I added that “Nasrallah has written realistic historical novels that have not as yet been translated. Until this happens … our view of this humane modernist will remain severely restricted.”

This restriction has diminished with the appearance in English of the 600-page Time of White Horses, published in Arabic in 2007 after a 20-year gestation period. Indeed the first assumption to collapse is that the term “realistic historical novel” is at all applicable. Time of White Horses is less a Palestinian War and Peace than a work of historical magic realism with footnotes — that is to say, it belongs in a genre entirely of its own invention.

Nasrallah chronicles three generations of a fictitious Palestinian family in a village called Hadiya (meaning, among other things, “peaceful”). Although Hadiya is fictitious, the author tells us in his preface that this “is the story of my village.” Such teasing ambiguities are typical of the book, and might well be described as “postmodern.”

The way in which realism and symbolism are linked throughout is best illustrated by reference to the white mare Hamama (meaning “dove”), whose arrival in Hadiya at the start is described as a kind of apparition: “A perfect miracle had taken on flesh” (3). The thief who is riding her cannot “control the mass of light … offering him such stubborn resistance,” but dismounts and flees when she comes to a halt before the village elder and his son Khaled, the novel’s central character.

Khaled “knew that if he had lost a mare like her, he’d go on looking for her for the rest of his life” (5). One night he strips and rides her “until he felt as though Hamama had sprouted wings and that they were soaring through the sky … And when he started walking alongside her, he realized that he had turned into a horse” (26).

In 1948, the word “Hamama” is used by the villagers as a password or shibboleth because the guttural Arabic “ha” cannot be pronounced by the Jews and the British (610). When Hadiya is finally abandoned, Khaled’s widow has a vision of the long-dead Hamama standing by her late husband’s grave (623). Between the mare’s first appearance and her final apparition, Palestine has descended from the Ottoman Empire to the British Mandateto the Israeli occupation, and perdition.

True villains

The Ottomans leave the Palestinians in (very) relative peace as long as they pay their taxes. With the collapse of their empire, their exercise of power becomes ever more brutal and arbitrary. Taxes are imposed on everything imaginable including “a ‘hat tax,’ which was levied on everyone who wore a cloth head covering” (55).

The British, who take over Palestine from the Turks in the wake of the infamous Balfour Declaration (“His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people …”), are the true villains of the piece — even more so than the Israelis. Perhaps the most vivid character is the fictional English officer Edward Peterson, a sadist who hates Arabs but loves their horses, and writes ethereal surrealist poetry by night (321). His assassination is narrated with a relish that is almost infantile: “The shot that pierced Peterson’s head left part of his brain clinging to the restaurant’s front window” (499).

A footnote tells us that “the number of executions that took place over the course of six years under the British in Palestine alone was greater than the number that took place in the entire Ottoman Empire under the rule of Sultan Abd al-Hamed, which lasted for more than 30 years” (325). Another footnote relates that during the 1936-9 Arab uprising “Britain stormed all of Palestine once more, killing more than 5,000 Palestinians and wounding more than 15,000 others. It exiled and executed the Palestinian leadership. In addition, it organized death squads made up of British soldiers and Zionist forces … which attacked Palestinian villages by night” (448).

Bewildering labyrinth

These footnotes, which increase in number and length as the book proceeds, are essentially historical yet sometimes bear on fictional characters (like Peterson). In addition, numerous italicized passages are directly taken from interviews conducted by the author during the years of its composition — yet some also refer to characters from the fictional narrative. Despite, or because of, this sporadically scholarly apparatus, it is imperative that the reader should know in advance something about the history of the region. Nasrallah has a habit of omitting transitions: in particular, the Arab revolt seems to segue abruptly into the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, and no account is given of the foundation of the Israeli state.

This is a bewildering labyrinth of a book, yet its very untidiness conveys a powerful sense of the textures of place, time and custom that eludes a more conventional narrative likeSusan Abulhawa’s otherwise admirable and in many respects comparable Mornings in Jenin. With the publication of Time of White Horses, lovingly translated by Nancy Roberts (who should, however, have resisted the temptation to attempt rhyming translations of the verse interpolations), our understanding of the history of modern Arabic literature has taken a giant leap forward.

Raymond Deane is an Irish composer and political activist.

Time of White Horses (Modern Arabic Literature)

Manufacturer: The American University in Cairo Press

Part Number:

Price: $27.95