Adrienne Teicher

Tag: free speech

  • What lurks beneath Israel's right to defend itself? – The Left Berlin

    What lurks beneath Israel's right to defend itself? – The Left Berlin

    It’s not what they want you to think

    First published on The Left Berlin

    The other day I heard Bernie Sanders proclaim that “Israel has a right to defend itself”, as he made the case for a Harris presidency. He spoke in his trademark gruff manner, a tone whose charm has long faded since it has been co-opted to the service of empire—of making the empire marginally more progressive.

    “…but”, he went on to deliver a call for moderation and limits to Israel’s violence. And then to insist we should still vote for politicians who enable genocide and glory in the lies that justify it. I’m not here to debate whether or not someone should vote. This is a morally and strategically complex issue that is mostly inconsequential to the mad trajectory our planet is spinning along.

    What interests me more is the construction of the oath: “Israel has a right to defend itself”, that Bernie and others feel the need to recite before delivering any critique of Israel’s war on Palestine. Curiously, it is the same line used by Biden and Harris to justify sending the weapons that are doing the killing that Sanders claims to find abhorrent. And it is used by the genocidaires themselves, Netanyahu and others, along with their cheerleaders. This should be enough to make us pause and consider what this supposedly self-evident truth says and does not say.

    So, once again: “Israel has a right to defend itself.”

    Let’s start with the “Israel” part. In what sense does the identity of being Israel constitute a set of rights? Is it that Israel, as a nation-state, has a right to defend itself, because, apparently, nation-states have a right to self-defence?

    A lot of legal minds don’t think international law supports what Israel has done to Gaza. In any case, I doubt that many people are weighing the UN charter in their heads when someone is droning on about Israel’s righteous violence. They are more likely to reach for whatever commonplace ideas of fairness they have accumulated in their everyday lives.

    For instance, the way I typically understand self-defence is that, when someone is attacking me, I have the right to use violence to repel their violence. So if someone comes into my house and strikes me with a baseball bat, I can use the counter-violence of my cast iron wok or electric fly swatter until they stop, and preferably leave. The right to self-defence does not endorse finding out where my attacker lives and blowing up their house, killing them, their families and their neighbours as well.

    This is obviously not a perfect analogy for many reasons. Individuals and nation-states are different kinds of entities, and also, the Hamas attacks on October 7 took place in the context of Israel’s long genocidal campaign against Palestine. It is not some random home invasion.

    I make the analogy to show that even if we were to agree that nation-states have a right to use violence to make themselves safe, in the case of Israel, this right applied only when Hamas was attacking the rave, kibbutzim and military bases along the borders of the Gaza concentration camp. Once Hamas left, that licence expired.

    What about the rockets? Given that they have caused very few civilian casualties, the right to self-defence does not extend to obliterating apartment buildings, schools, universities and hospitals on the faintest whiff of conjecture that someone is hiding a rocket launcher in an MRI machine.

    Perhaps Israel does understand self-defence to mean that when someone attacks you, you have an unlimited right to strike back with no consideration of proportionality. An eye for an eye doctrine, or at the latest count 250 eyes for an eye, according to the Lancet journal (and not just eyes, but arms, legs, jaws, skin–hundreds of thousands of human lives obliterated).

    If this is the case, then the right to violence extends in all directions—physical, temporal—and to all actors in the bloody drama of human existence. Israel justifies its violent war on Gaza based on the October 7 attack. Fine. But in this infinite regress, Hamas can then say the October 7 attack was justified by, for instance, Israeli snipers shooting out the knees of peaceful protesters. Or the kid you pushed around when you were 13 can show up at your work and break your legs, so you can never ever bully them again. This concept of self-defence bloats and degenerates to the point where it can justify virtually any act of violence, by anyone, committed anywhere—because there will always be some act of violence preceding it.

    I don’t think that’s what Israel or its defenders want to imply. In fact, I see the outlines of something much more ominous lurking beneath the surface.

    Let’s circle back to the question of what “Israel” signifies. Perhaps they are saying that Israel has a right to defend itself not as any old nation-state, but because it is Israel. What then is the elusive quality of “being Israel” that grants it special rights to use violence against its perceived enemies?

    The way I see it, Israel’s right to self-defence is not about the October 7 attacks or the fleeting barrages of rockets that disturb the sky over Tel Aviv. Rather, it is coiled with a desire to repress the memory that Israel was created very recently on lands upon which others lived and who were violently expelled. The Nakba haunts the lands upon which the nation-state of Israel stands.

    So it is the mere existence of Palestinians at all that constitutes a psychic and existential threat to the state of Israel, against which Israel feels emboldened to unleash unending waves of slaughter until those they perceive as a threat escape into permanent exile or turn into dust. This would go a long way to explain why so many fading empires and settler-colonies are backing Israel’s genocide with moral support and military aid. Also, why Israel’s war on Palestine has no end in sight; why parents carry their children home from school as bags of meat; why Gaza sometimes looks less like a city under siege and more like the cratered surface of the moon.

    However you interpret it, none of the many implications of the dirge that “Israel has a right to defend itself” withstand scrutiny—unless you are inclined to partake in a nihilistic orgy of retributive violence, or you think that certain ethnic enclaves possess special rights to commit genocide.

    So we should just stop saying it.

  • Cinema that shatters our illusions: I am Cuba and Come and See

    Cinema that shatters our illusions: I am Cuba and Come and See

    So you know, I reveal a few plot details.

    I am Cuba

    As bombs fell on Beirut last night, I was alone in my apartment, with a cold, feeling useless and afraid of the slide slide slide into war and fascism. To distract myself, I dove into the expansive archive of the Soviet movie studio Mosfilm, restored and freely available on YouTube. I watched I am Cuba, (dir: Mikhail Kalatozov) a film that weaves together four vignettes of everyday life in a society on the brink of transformation.

    As I watched, I thought, I need to adjust how I see myself and the society that I live in. I still carry the programming of growing up in a liberal democratic society: the belief that we live in a society of rules and norms impartially applied to all, that justice exists, that power is subject to checks and balances, and that when there is overreach or abuse–say by police or politicians–it is isolated. No-one is above the law; wrongdoers will be brought to justice, even when they wear a blue uniform.

    (And also that we have a free and indepenedent media, yada yada yada, fourth estate, blah blah, I can’t even be bothered to finish that sentence, because it is so worthless).

    We don’t live in that fantasy. The zone we live in is much closer to the world of I am Cuba, a dictatorship where power is exercised through control over the police, security services, consumer goods and the media. Of course, Cuba and Germany were and are on different ends of the chain of extractive capitalism, and I am not hopeful that we have revolutionary energies just waiting to be unleashed. Nevertheless, this vision of Cuba under dictatorship help me let go of the illusion of a free society.

    The film’s third vignette resonated most with me, and challenged me deeply. Perhaps because the protagonist, Enrique, is a middle class student revolutionary, while the other vignettes deal with the struggles of the proletariat and peasant classes.
    Enrique is wrestling with his desire to enact violent revenge after Castro is falsely reported to have been killed, and a friend is captured and murdered by the police. His comrades counsel him against what might sometimes be called “adventurism”–essentially saying, take out one guy and another functionary will take his place, just as violent or worse. Better to act rationally, strategically, and wait for the right, revolutionary moment.

    Nevertheless, Enrique follows his emotions to the top of a building, picks up a sniper rifle from its hiding place and aims at a palace in the distance. In his sights he finds someone I believe is the chief of Havana’s murderous police, enjoying a breakfast of fried eggs with his family on a terrace, laughing, smiling, and kissing his children. Faced with this domestic scene, Enrique puts down his rifle and falls into despair.

    As I watched, I observed that my mind was searching for a moral. A warning against acting on one’s own, perhaps, or a cautionary tale against impulsivity and adventurism. Yet Enrique’s hesitation seem less rooted in loyalty to the Leninist revolutionary cell, than a rush of sentimentality, of not wanting to shoot the man in front of his children. Maybe it has something to do with the dominance of the pater familias, a deep conditioning that prevents us from killing our fathers, lords, teachers, rulers, oppressors, literally, or metaphorically.

    Whatever the reason, this hesitation proves costly. In the very next scene, the police raid the apartment where his comrades are printing pamphlets confirming that Castro is alive. One of his friends is shot as he sends papers cascading from the balcony, his body landing in the street. Another is shot in the back after he dares to mouth a revolutionary slogan at the police. His killer? The same man Enrique had in his crosshairs.

    That afternoon, Enrique delivers a speech at a demonstration before the police forcibly clear the square. A dove is killed by a police bullet and falls near where Enrique stands. With the dove in one hand and a rock in the other, Enrique leads the demonstrators forward against the massive violent force of the state, manifest as water bursting fourth from cannons. Enrique spots the Chief of Police leaning on a car and he edges relentlessly forward. The Chief of Police sees Enrique approach and fires. But Enrique staggers on as bullet after bullet strike his body until he collapses on the ground.

    The vignette concludes with Enrique’s funeral, which becomes a sombre rally through Havana’s streets. It seems as if the whole city is observing his death, is galvanised by it. From balconies, endless streams of petals fall, and a vast Cuban flag is unfurled by cigar rollers from the top floor of their factory. Enrique’s pointless, irrational death–walking into bullets–in the end serves a strategic purpose: he becomes a martyr whose death galvanises the movement he died for.

    What does this say about our situation? That acts of symbolic sacrifice have their place in a revolutionary struggle. Decisions made in the heat of violence can resonate in ways that cannot be predicted or mapped out through rational analysis alone.

    I salute all the comrades right now, putting their soft, vulnerable bodies up against the armoured, weaponised bodies of the police—strangled, kicked, punched, insulted, pepper sprayed. When you see these sneering bipedal tanks in action, it is hard not to think that a crypto-Nazi movement has integrated itself within the ranks of the police.

    Yet Enrique’s death resonated among the population of Havana because the population were willing and able to allow their bodies to resonate with his sacrifice. I do not see anything like this from where I sit in Berlin. In this way, our situation and that of I am Cuba could not be more different.

    It is justified to feel angry at people who refuse to feel outrage after 12 months of killing in Gaza and now Lebanon supported, funded and legitimised by the German government. I understand—and I experience—the anger at a populace who justify, or by and large simply ignore mass rape in Israeli detention camps and city blocks in Beirut flattened by bombs.

    As people who desire revolution, we can feel these things in our bodies, but resentment cannot guide our politics. The task of changing society is changing society. And we don’t get to choose the material that we work with. Our task is to find the best way to work with we’re given.

    I’m not convinced that walking into gunfire from the Berlin police will spark a revolution, should it to come to that, because we are dealing with a very different time and place: a decadent Western empire, with just enough treats and fear to keep the population more or less invested in the status quo (whether that status quo be a coalition of social democrats, greens and liberals, or the far-right and ultra right–there’s not a lot of sunlight between them). The death of a demonstrator will be written over by the media and largely ignored.

    There is a role for strategy and a role for symbolic sacrifice. The question is timing. And the time may come when enough of our fellow humans become disenchanted with the status quo, and we can present an alternative that is worth fighting and dying for.

    The task now is to become ready to take on that role. I am not ready, but I want to be.

    Come and See

    I also watched Come and See (dir: Elem Klimov), the Soviet anti-war film, for the first time—alone. It’s a film best watched with someone else so you can process afterwards. But it is definitely worth seeing, especially if you need to be shocked out of apathy.

    Briefly, its about a young teenager named Flyora who joins the Belarussian partisans and is physically and psychologically transformed by the German and Nazi atrocities that he witnesses. I keep wondering how many children are living a similar nightmare in Gaza and Lebanon and other lands turned into hellscapes by war.

    The film is also a useful reminder that German violence in the Second World War was not limited to Jewish victims, nor even to the Sinti and Roma. Millions of Slavs, were murdered in violent, slightly less systematic ways, because they were also considered sub-human. And it was not only the SS carrying out the violence, but the regular German army.

    This is something that German zionism conveniently sweeps away. It may even be one of the key psychological pillars for the morbid philosemitism of the German media, political and cultural elite.

  • The symmetries of “legitimate” and “illegitimate” violence

    The symmetries of “legitimate” and “illegitimate” violence

    Last Tuesday, Spring finally broke through the winter gloom. I was with my kindred lover, friend, collaborator Kate, locking our bikes beside a small playground to get ice cream. I pulled Kate towards me and kissed them and they kissed me back.

    Three honks from a nearby car shred our intimacy. Our mouths pulled away and we glanced through the tinted windows at the vague globulous outline of the driver within.

    “Is that about us?” Kate asked me. “Are we being hate-crimed?”

    Maybe he was just waiting for a friend and was irritable, I wondered. Maybe it had nothing to do with us.

    Our defiant mouths closed in on one another. The driver honked again. And again. This time we ignored him, though, now I felt myself as achingly visible to the world and I made inventory of what we were wearing.

    I was wearing a long, bright blue butterfly dress, its little antennas poked out from the space between my breasts. Kate was wearing fishnets over marine blue stockings and red leather shorts, suspenders and a t-shirt. This always happens in times of danger. I suppose it’s an evolutionary safety mechanism, something little mammals evolved in cruel and indifferent jungles to blend into their surroundings and disappear..

    We moved to to the line of people snaking from the ice cream parlour and took up space behind a young girl, around eight years old, standing alone. After a few moments, a woman introduced herself as the girl’s mother and apologetically cut in front of us. To her apology I said:

    “That’s why we have kids, isn’t it? So they can hold places for us in the line.”

    “I was born in the Soviet Union, so I’m a professional when it comes to lining up.”

    I laughed a little too loudly, revealing the taut vigilance that tightened my body. I noticed a man emerging from the car, a large man, swollen to an extent that I suppose is only possible through the use of steroids. His hair was clipped, and he wore a muscle t-shirt. He walked towards us with slow menace; it was clear he wasn’t after a cone.

    “You should be ashamed to do that in front of children.”

    “I’m sorry, but we don’t feel ashamed.” I said.

    “I have kids,” Kate added, “there is nothing wrong with expressing love.”

    “You should be ashamed.” He repeated. Again and again. He spoke a lot about children but I suspected his focus on their supposed innocence was just a screen to hide his disgust at the very fact of our existence–that we would flaunt it so. That we, freaks in his eyes, should have the gall to feel safe to show affection in a public space.

    “That’s enough. You can go now,” said the mother. He edged closer to her.

    “What has this got to do with you?”

    “You’re threatening people.”

    “I’m not threatening anyone. You’re threatening me.”

    I noticed his hands were curled into fists and I told him so.

    The eight-year-old, very courageously, joined the chorus of people pleading with him to go away.

    He looked down at her, “Is that what you do? Is that how you act when adults are talking? You think its okay to talk to adults like that?”

    The child looked at the ground.

    The push-pull continued for some more minutes. Two of his friends joined him. Another man tried to intervene on our behalf. I did my best to ignore him for his own safety.

    “I’m not doing anything,” said the muscleman. “I am just standing here on the street and you are yelling at me.” He said. “All I want is peace.”

    “So do we.” I said, trying to speak with sincerity. “You want peace, we want peace, so let’s just end this conversation.”

    A friend of the muscleman, shorter, pudgy, with a slightly queer edge, began to plead ironically for the three of them to leave. “Can we go now? Please! I’m afraid of these people,” he said, waving his hand at us.

    The muscleman paused, muttered something, before hulking back to his car.

    ***

    The police wore body armour and looked ready for combat. They carried pepper spray and batons and moved in long lines on our periphery. They were waiting for a pretence to strike, for instance: a forbidden chant like “From the River To The Sea – Palestine Will Be Free”, which to my mind, is akin to hauling someone away from a Greensboro lunch counter.

    As we crossed an intersection, the police struck. Three or four demonstrators got churned up in this man-machine of gruesomely hard bodies acting in violent concert. They were pushed to the ground and trampled beneath toe-capped boots. A sucker punch was thrown, the target reeled, and was then gripped from every limb and hauled from the crowd, hands covering his mouth and nose so that he could not breathe.

    It was Wednesday the first of May. We were demonstrating for Palestine and our path almost crossed the ice cream parlour. I thought of the muscleman. If he had thrown a punch at me, would I have called for the police? Would I have begged the state to ride in with its monopoly on violence to save me from his malice?

    Both the muscleman and the bureaucrats with truncheons and toe-capped boots worship power over others, despite the justifications they spit your way, whether that be “save the children” or “regulation transgressed”. Relying on these forces for protection is self-defeating, like using a bullet to heal a wound.

    It’s never the right time for this conversation as there are always more important battles to be fought. So now as good a time as any to ask: how can we avoid planting the seeds of the old power in the earth of the new?

  • Arts funding was always a form of control – the Gaza genocide makes this abundantly clear

    Arts funding was always a form of control – the Gaza genocide makes this abundantly clear

    There was a time, almost 8 or 9 years ago, when my duo HYENAZ was invited to perform at a festival in the Baltics. On the phone with the organizer we discussed the logistics of our travel to the festival until the conversation took on a conspiratorial tone.

    “You know,” their voice lowered to a whisper “this is rather last minute because we were trying to get [a more successful queer artist] and in the end we couldn’t afford them. So we asked you.”

    “Oh… that’s… nice of you to tell us.”

    “Yes, but that’s not the point. What I want to say is. We are sponsored by [a German cultural funding organisation], but they didn’t want to support you. They only agreed to pay because there was no time to find anyone else. I thought you should know.”

    This was my first experience of the state ideological apparatus known as ‘arts funding’. Hegemony through the purse strings. The effect it has on you is subtle. You get a bit of money from a grant and you want a bit more. You start to see yourself as a player, as an insider, as successful – until the day time comes when you want to say something, but you can’t, because your new patrons wouldn’t like it.

    The festival organiser wouldn’t say the exact reason we were queers non grata, but we surmised it had something to do with the fact that we were pro-porn at a time when that wasn’t fashionable.

    I thought of this moment when I learned that, in the wake of Israel’s genocide against Gaza1 we hear that organisations in Berlin are being threatened with funding cuts if they make statements in support of the Palestinians. It even emerged that the Neukölln cultural organisation Oyoun was pressured by the Berlin Senate to drop an event by the group Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East because, in supporting both peace and justice in Palestine, the group’s Jewish and Israeli membership are considered anti-Semitic by the white German anti/philo-semites who police free speech in Germany.

    As an artist, opposing Israeli genocide places you in direct opposition with the German state. Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS), which seeks to replicate strategies that helped end apartheid in South Africa, is for all intents and purposes, officially banned in Germany. In 2019, the German parliament passed a non-binding anti-BDS resolution calling the movement and its supporters ‘antisemitic’. The resolution also prohibits state organisations from supporting individuals, events and institutions that support BDS or question Israel’s right to exist as a homeland for only some of its citizens, those classified as Jews.

    This not only impacts public supporters of BDS, rather it has a chilling effect on the arts scene as a whole. Artists ask themselves, if BDS is beyond the pale, does a Palestinian flag emoji on your Instagram bio make you unfundable? Or attending a demonstration? Or writing this article?

    No one really knows, and when no one knows, the urge to censor yourself “just in case” is strong. What if curator X at gallery Y sees my activism and pulls the show because they are afraid of the consequences on them – then my show is toast and I can’t pay my rent.2 The very act of thinking these anxious thoughts means that the strategy of sowing uncertainty places powerful limits on freedom of expression.

    In low-pressure moments, it’s easy to feel that taking money from the state won’t compromise you, that you’ll always be brave enough to act outside state influence. But in extraordinary moments like the ones we are living now, our state patrons can pull the strings to ensure that we artists think, speak and act as we are told.

    Or at least they can try. Oyoun has so far resisted the heat and the event is still scheduled to take place. And as more and more of us realise that silence is no longer and never was a viable strategy, we have a unique opportunity to take back the freedom to call out injustice in the world where we see it.