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Jadaliyya Launches DARS Page: Daily Acts of Resistance and Subversion
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DARS Page Editors
Overview
The DARS Page chronicles daily acts of resistance and subversion (DARS) in contemporary Arab societies and beyond. All forms of resistance and subversion to political, economic, social, or cultural forms of exploitation will be of interest. This includes resistance to authoritarianism, occupation, imperialism, and social norms, and the many ways these are subverted.
While acts of resistance and subversion are ubiquitous, the focus is conventionally placed on the grand and visible, even as these constitute a small portion of the daily actions of millions of people who find themselves resisting and subverting on a daily basis. We intend to cover and analyse both visible as well as invisible daily acts of resistance and subversion.
DARS aims to provide both empirical and theoretical means to capture a multitude of phenomen: personal or collective, visible or underground, nonviolent or violent. We are not locked into a political party nor into a single theoretical framework. We advocate a decidedly critical and contextualized approach.
Justification
Mainstream media coverage of the region—indigenous and global—for the most part ignores, distorts or marginalizes most acts of resistance and subversion. Therefore, these notions/acts require further interrogation and engagement both to better understand them as well as in order to increase their cumulative effects vis-à-vis forms of exploitation. Often, there is a “liberal” tendency to see resistance where none exists. Such illusion is counterproductive, both discursively and empirically, and usually serves to perpetuate the hegemony within which exploitation proceeds “legitimately.” DARS seeks to sharpen our understanding of the spectrum of resistance while considering its power operations.
DARS engages both individual and collective resistance, the relationship between them, with attention to the relationship between, and hierarchy of, local and global forms of exploitation.
The Objective and the Moment
DARS seeks to establish a critical forum where the careful observation and analysis of these acts will permit us to ask political questions differently, and to identify new problems, forces, and possible solutions. The recent uprisings confirmed the increased decentralization of power and the multiplicity of actors holding forms of power. DARS’ approach moves beyond a simple consideration of the impact of acts of resistance and/or subversion on daily political struggles by examining the aspirations, ambivalences, and the fault lines of Arab societies.
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Bassam Haddad, Noura Erakat, Jack Saba
Since its establishment, Israel has distinguished the persons under its civil and military jurisdiction based on religion. Throughout Israel Proper and the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), comprised of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, Israel applies a different set of laws to its Jewish and non-Jewish inhabitants respectively. By bifurcating Jewish nationality from Israeli citizenship, the State is able to afford demonstrable and significant privilege to Jewish persons even beyond Israel's undeclared borders (hence the reference to Israel Proper) at the expense of the political and socio-economic wellbeing of its non-Jewish citizens. Within the OPT, the brunt of Israel's policies are more severe as they are applied under a military occupation regime for which no oversight or legal redress exists. The impact of these policies is to diminish the number of Palestinians, to remove them from their original lands, and to concentrate them geographically. Within the OPT, they are concentrated into Area A; into no-man's land within the Seam Zone between the Apartheid Wall and the Green Line; and into isolated communities surrounded by Israeli settlements and their associated military apparatus. Within Israel Proper, they are concentrated in urban townships, in unrecognized villages, and other ghettoized communities.
In this series of videos featuring interviews with Palestinians facing forced displacement, we seek to show a glimpse into Israel's infrastructure of settler-colonialism.
We start with Part 1, on the Jordan Valley.
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Nada Ghandour-Demiri
This interview was conducted with Asef Bayat via electronic correspondence. In it, Bayat discusses the inside-out character of neoliberal cities in the Arab world and its influence on the recent wave of protests known collectives as the Arab uprisings. In addition, Bayat elaborates on the notion of urban subalterns, and the existence of social "non-movements" of the poor and the youth.
Nada Ghandour-Demiri (NGD): You recently published an article in City & Society entitled "Politics in the City-Inside-Out," where you discuss a number of themes related to the "neo-liberal city" and street politics in the Middle East. What are the characteristics of a “neoliberal city,” and to what extent are these found throughout the Middle East and North Africa?
Asef Bayat (AB): Broadly speaking, a “neoliberal city” is a market-driven urban reality. Here, the rationale of the market, more than the needs of the citizens, shapes the urban life, urban space, and its inhabitants. It is a city that responds more to individual or corporate interests than to public concerns. Its manifestations include an increasing deregulation and privatization of production, collective consumption, and urban space. Here, the state and public officials play a lesser role in shaping the city than before, or simply act on behalf of capital accumulation. Of course, such features are not new in the recent history of cities. However, they have been intensified in recent decades as the tide of neoliberal capitalism has been spreading like a wild fire in most parts of the world. This new restructuring has in practice led to a lot of changes in the domains of work or production, and in collective urban services, as well as peoples’ lives. This seems to be a worldwide phenomenon—even though with varied degrees—including the MENA region where cities have featured important changes. For instance, we have witnessed a partial withdrawal of public officials’ provisioning of certain traditional amenities, increasing unemployment, and an expanding informalization, casual labor, street works, and street children. At the same time, we see a more widening spatial divide between the growing “private cities” or gated communities, on the one hand, and, on the other, the expansion of informal settlements and ashwaiyyat, where the poor families encroach onto the back-street public spaces to enlarge their “private” spaces, while utilizing main streets as assets/capital to enhance their life chances.
NGD: What do you mean by the term“urban subaltern?”
AB: This is a descriptive term referring broadly to the non-elites—those women and men who remain on the margins of political and economic power, such as the urban disenfranchised, the unemployed, the working poor, and the impoverished middle classes. Yet, I think the everyday but contentious practices of these groups do have an impact on the ways in which urban life takes shape, on the urban governmentality.
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Alessandro Petti
Refugee camps have been at the center of radical historical transformations that have undermined the political existence of entire communities. Although states and non-governmental organizations have and continue to actively participate in conceiving and managing camps, we are still struggling to fully comprehend how the camp form has complicated and transformed the very idea of a city as an organized and functional political community. The birth of the camp thus has the capacity to call into question the very idea of the city as a democratic space. If the political representation of a citizen is to be found in the public space, what is found in the camp is its inverse: the place in which a citizen is stripped of his or her political rights, reduced to bare life. In this sense, the camp represents a sort of anti-city. But what effect does this anti-city produce on the public and political space of the city?
If the city has historically represented the place where the rights of citizens (seem to) be recognized—often by excluding one part of the population kept outside its walls—the invention of the camp is a new mechanism. The camp system goes beyond the inclusion-exclusion dichotomy that operated as a barrier between citizens and non-citizens, and beyond what are today the borders of nation-states. The camp marks the limit of this mechanism, the degradation of a political organization. It is a desperate attempt to preserve an out-dated political order through the construction of a space of suspension in which to confine all those who “do not belong.” These spaces in suspension are no longer inside or outside: they represent a sort of third area, in which an increasing number of individuals who are excluded from the polis are shut away. For Hannah Arendt, what is produced in the camp is the human specimen being reduced to the most elementary reactions: the model “citizen” of a totalitarian state; and such a citizen can be produced only imperfectly outside of the camps. In spaces in suspension, spatial segregation takes on new meaning, becoming a genuine confinement under armed surveillance. Once inside these spaces, your life is at stake.
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Ruba Salih
Analyses and debates on the reconfiguration of rights, democracy, social justice, and dignity in the Arab region suffer from a chronic methodological nationalism—which perpetuates the idea that people seek and fight for rights and self-determination solely in their national state and territory, seen as the natural context for achieving a full social and political personhood. When refugees and displaced persons (short or long terms alike) are discussed, they appear by and large as volatile figures or fortuitous victims, or as an indistinct mass in need of humanitarianism, living transient non-lives and awaiting compensation and return. They are hardly ever represented as political agents. This represents a curious form of obliviousness in a region that has witnessed the movement of millions of refugees and migrants across borders over its modern history, itself a result of an endless series of conflicts, colonial and civil wars, genocides, as well as foreign invasions and occupations.[1] In certain cases, like the Armenian or the Palestinian respectively, the emergence of the refugee population pre-existed the birth of the modern nation-states in the region or was concomitant to it. These displaced men, women, and children have contributed, over the decades, to shape the spatial, political, economic, cultural, and social configurations of the countries where they have fled to. Often, they have also been the “other” against which precarious national identities and the ensuing, similarly precarious, entitlements were fabricated and distributed. Yet, and notwithstanding the constitutive and endemic nature of refugeehood in the region, debates of rights, democracy, and society-state configurations tend to still be framed within a highly territorially and nationally bounded framework. The implication is that those who lie at the margins of nation-states, like Palestinian refugees, are twice ostracized and their predicament is made even more invisible. Thinking of Palestinian refugees as living temporary or suspended lives merely awaiting return to their national territory—where they will finally achieve rights and citizenship—does not give justice to the complexity of their aspirations and claims which comprise the right to have rights, alongside the right to return to their lost land and properties. In the case of Palestinian refugees, the narrative of “avoiding tawtin” to enable “return” allows the protraction of a problematic amnesia about issues of citizenship rights, social justice, and pluralism in a region where refugees’ exclusion or suspension from rights and entitlements fit into an agenda of reinforcing hierarchical confessional, tribal, class, and gender divisions.[2]
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Zainab Al-Khawaja
Great leaders are immortal, their words and deeds echo through the years, decades, and centuries. They echo across oceans and borders and become an inspiration that touches the lives of many who are willing to learn. One such leader is the remarkable Martin Luther King Jr. As I read his words, I imagine him reading out to us from another land, another time, to teach us some very important lessons. Above all, he tells us, we should never become bitter or sink to the level of our oppressors; that we should be willing to make great sacrifices for freedom.
As seeds of hope and resistance to oppression started flowering across the Arab world, the people of Bahrain saw the first signs of a new dawn. One that promised an end to a long night of dictatorship and oppression, a long winter of silence and fear, and to spread the light and warmth of a new age of freedom and democracy.
With that hope and determination, the people of Bahrain took to the streets on 14 February 2011 to peacefully demand their rights. Their songs, poetry, paintings and chants for freedom were met with bullets, tanks, toxic tear gas, and birdshot guns. The brutal Al Khalifa regime was determined to end the creative, peaceful revolution by resorting to violence and spreading fear.
Faced with the regime’s brutality, Bahrainis showed great restraint. Day after long day, protesters held up flowers to soldiers and mercenaries who would shoot at them. Protesters stood with bare chests and arms raised, shouting, "peaceful, peaceful" [silmiyya, silmiyya] before they fell onto the ground, covered with blood. Thousands of Bahrainis have since been detained and tortured for so-called crimes such as “illegal gathering” and “inciting hatred against the regime.”
Two years later, the Bahraini regime's atrocities continue. Bahrainis are still being killed, detained, injured, and tortured for demanding democracy. When I look into the eyes of Bahraini protesters today, too many times I see that bitterness has overtaken hope. The same bitterness Martin Luther King Jr. saw in the eyes of rioters in the slums of Chicago in 1966. He saw that the same people who had been leading non-violent protests, who had risked life and limb without the desire to strike back, were later convinced that violence is the only language the world understood.
I, like King, find myself saddened to find some of the same protesters who faced Bahrain’s tanks and guns with bare chests and flowers, today asking, "What's the use of non-violence? What’s the point of moral superiority, if no one is even listening?" Martin Luther King Jr. explains that this despair is only natural when people who sacrifice so much see no change in sight and feel their suffering has been worthless.
Ironically, change towards democracy has been so slow in Bahrain largely due to the support that the world’s most powerful democratic nations continue to give to the dictators here. Through selling them arms and providing economic and political support, the United States and other western governments have proven to the people of Bahrain that they stand with the Al Khalifa monarchy against the democratic movement.
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Zainab Al-Khawaja
القادة العظماء خالدون. لوقع أقوالهم وأعمالهم صدى عبر السنوات والعقود والقرون، وعبر المحيطات والحدود. وهم إلهام يمس حياة الناس الراغبين بالتعلم. مارتن لوثر كينغ قائد استثنائي. عندما أقرأ كلماته، أتخيله يقرأ لنا من أرض أخرى ومن عصر آخر، ليعلمنا بعض الدروس المهمة جداً. وفوق ذلك، هو يحدثنا عن تفادي فخ المرارة أو النزول إلى مستوى مضطهدينا، وعن الإرادة لبذل تضحيات كبيرة من أجل الحرية.
ومع بذور الأمل ومقاومة الاضطهاد التي أورقت في العالم العربي، رأى الشعب البحريني بصيص فجر جديد. فجر واعد بنهاية ليل الاضطهاد والدكتاتورية الطويل، بنهاية خريف الخوف والصمت الطويل، وبحلول دفء وضوء عهد جديد من الحرية والديمقراطية.
ومع ذلك الأمل والتصميم، نزل الشعب البحريني إلى الشارع في 14 فبراير 2011 ليطالب بحقوقه بطرق سلمية. وقوبلت أغانيه وشعره ورسومه وأناشيده بالرصاص والدبابات والغاز المسيل للدموع والبنادق. فقد عزم نظام آل خليفة الوحشي على قتل الثورة الخلاقة والسلمية باللجوء إلى العنف ونشر الخوف.
وفي مواجهة وحشية النظام، أبدى البحرينيون ضبط نفس كبير. ويوم بعد يوم، رفع المحتجون الورود للجنود والمرتزقة الذين أطلقوا النار عليهم. وقف المحتجون بصدور عارية وأيادي مرفوعة منشدين "سلمية، سلمية" قبل ان يقعوا على الأرض مضرجين بالدم. ومنذ ذلك اليوم، تم اعتقال وتعذيب آلاف البحرينيين لارتكاب جرائم مثل "تجمع غير قانوني" و"التحريض على كره النظام."
وبعد مرور أكثر من عامين، لا تزال فظائع النظام البحريني مستمرة. فلا يزال البحرينيون يقتلون ويعتقلون ويجرحون ويعذبون للمطالبة بالديمقراطية. وعندما أنظر في عيون المحتجين البحرينيين اليوم، أرى، لمرات عديدة، تغلب المرارة على الأمل. وهي المرارة نفسها التي رآها مارتن لوثر كينغ في عيون مثيري الشغب في الأحياء الفقيرة في ولاية شيكاغو عام 1966. فهو رأى أن الناس أنفسهم الذين قادوا احتجاجات لا عنفية والذين خاطروا بحياتهم وأطرافهم من دون أي رغبة في الانتقام صاروا على قناعة، فيما بعد، ان العنف هو اللغة الوحيدة التي يفهمها العالم.
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Charles Tripp
In October 2012, Haytham Manna of the Syrian National Coordination Body for Democratic Change gave a talk at the London School of Economics. Therein, he argued for the importance of continuing nonviolent resistance in Syria, warning against the dangerous logic of both armed resistance and foreign intervention. For this, many in the audience roundly and vocally attacked him, accusing him of being irrelevant to the Syrian struggle, of being a capitulationist, or even a collaborator. The vehemence of some of the reactions echoed those that had greeted the advocate of nonviolence and negotiation, Louay Hussein of the movement Building the Syrian State, earlier in the year., Combined, these reactions indicated that something had shifted in understandings of resistance in the Middle East. By contrast with the high hopes generated by the examples of the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings in 2011, it seemed that open, violent, and uncompromising resistance was now considered the only way of dealing with the regime that still clung to power in Damascus.
In the circumstance of extreme violence inflicted by the regime’s forces on communities the length and breadth of Syria, this was perhaps not surprising, either strategically or ethically. However, it does draw attention to a particular feature of the politics of resistance that has been troubling in other contexts as well. This is the emergence of dominant narratives within resistance movements, and the diminishing space allowed to those who might think of resistance differently and seek to act accordingly. It also underlines the ways in which that dominant narrative itself becomes hegemonic, appropriating not simply the means of resistance but colonizing its imagination as well. For some, such as the advocates of nonviolence in Syria, it may seem as if they have been doubly marginalized, even oppressed: once by the ruling regime that provoked their resistance in the first place; and then again by forces of resistance determined to pursue the armed struggle as a token not simply of their courage, but of their dedication to the resistance project itself.
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Visualizing Palestine and EWASH
This Friday is World Water Day and an opportune time to highlight the gross misallocation of water resources between Israel and the Palestinians. Water is one of the five permanent status issues in the Oslo Peace Accords, twenty years old this year. Accordingly, its accesss and consumption is relegated to political negotiations and beyond the purview of international law on water. As a result, the Palestinian Authority has had little basis upon which to challenge Israel’s confiscation of water for the past twenty years.
Sixty percent of one of Israel’s most significant water sources, the Western Aquifer, is located in the occupied West Bank. Israel derives eighty percent of the Acquifer’s annual yield and Palestinians receive the rest. Prime Ministers Menachim Begin, Ariel Sharon, and Ehud Barak consider control and use of Palestinian water use as a precondition to any Palestinian state. Were it subject to international law, at most Israel would receive only fifty percent of shared water resources.
Failure to abide by these terms of reference has devastated the Palestinian economy. Consider that a little more than one-third of the irrigable land in OPT is actually irrigated, which costs the economy 110,000 jobs per year and ten percent of its annual GDP.
While the security sector remains robust, the agricultural sector has shrunk from 28.5% of the economy in 1993 to 5.8% today.
In contrast, the Jordan Valley has become the site of Israel’s multi-million dollar settler agricultural industry. Its 9,400-settler population receives several times more water than does each Palestinian- the figures are more severe in the Jordan Valley itself. While Palestinian farmers have lost their lands and livelihoods in the Jordan Valley, Israeli settlers have been able to flourish due to this inequitable and inhumane distribution of water. European markets continue to absorb these settler commodities. Each settlement peach consumed by British citizens, for example, contains 140 liters of virtual water appropriated from Palestinians. Compare this to the meager twenty liters some Palestinians in the Jordan Valley have access to daily.
Water policy has led to the forced population transfer of Palestinians. Due to the restriction on access to water in the Jordan Valley, or thirty percent of the West Bank, the Palestinian population there, mostly Bedouin, has been diminished from 400,000 in 1967 to 56, 000 today.
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DARS Page Editors
[This is a bi-weekly roundup of news articles and other materials circulating on Resistance and Subversion in the Arab world, and reflects a wide variety of opinions. It does not reflect the views of the DARS Page Editors or of Jadaliyya. You may send your own recommendations for inclusion in each bi-weekly roundup to DA...@jadaliyya.com by Sunday night of every second week.]
News & Commentary
Is This Where the Third Intifada Will Start? by Ben Ehrenreich
Gaza fishermen protest as Israel breaks pledge to stop attacks, by Joe Catron
Revolutionary Art Rises from Downtown Cairo Streets, by Marie-Jeanne Berger
Can Palestinian non-violent resistance make it into Israel’s education system?, by Mairav Zonszein
Egypt’s rebels without a pause, by Khaled Diab
How Syrian Women Are Fueling the Resistance, by Fotini Christia
Arab Revolutions Have Made Women Worse Off, by Moha Ennaji
One young Tunisian asks what’s really changed since revolution, by Akrem Kaabi
Tunisia’s Post-Revolution Blues, by Aaron Y. Zelin
Egypt’s rebels without a pause, by Khaled Diab
Debate flares on the revolutionary role of Facebook and Twitter, by Rob Lever
Syria: When Nonviolent revolutions Spread into Bloodshed, by Janine di Giovanni
End the Arab Boycott of Israel, by Ed Husain
Egypt: From Uprising to Revolution? by Andrea Teti
The Art of Palestinian Resistance, Khaled Diab
Decades of Oppression Foment Bahrain Revolution, by Shahira Salloum
Listen to the Women, Morsi, by Wafaa Wali
Nonviolent Resistance Key to Middle East Breakthrough, by Ibrahim Sharqieh
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