Adrienne Teicher

Tag: gaza

  • 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: https://www.theleftberlin.com/what-lurks-beneath-israels-right-to-defend-itself/

    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

    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.

  • What Can We Agree On?

    A social experiment conducted via sticker on the main door to an apartment building

    The sticker asked, in a gentle, handwritten script: “can we agree on… not killing CHILDREN?” It’s spread across the reinforced glass of the main door into my apartment building. It faces inward, so it’s mainly for people who live in the building, along with their friends and the steady stream of DHL and Amazon delivery drivers.

    The question implicitly addresses Israel’s war on Gaza and only makes sense in a city like Berlin, where many grasp for dubious justifications for the killings. The sticker insists that this must be due to a failure to fully locate an affective response to the violence and hopes that if we pull back the lens far enough, we will eventually arrive at something that awakens a sense of horror in those whose eyes pass over it in their daily comings and goings.

    I documented the sticker’s journey over the course of eight weeks.

    Two days after the sticker was installed, a counter-intervention replaced the words “not killing” with “kidnapping” and “children” with “babies.” These additions were written on yellow paper in block capitals. Now the sticker read, “can we agree on … [not] KIDNAPPING BABIES?” (I include the word “not” because I find it hard to believe that the person who made the changes was in favour of kidnappping babies.)

    This modification shifted the original message into something else. The killing of Palestinian children by the Israeli Occupation Forces is no longer a moral red line. Now it is justified by the October 7 Hamas attack.

    The word “children”, to my mind, includes “babies”, so why change it? Almost certainly, the writer meant to allude to the now-debunked claims that Hamas decapitated infants on October 7th. The term “babies” was repeatedly used by Israeli officials and echoed by Biden to amplify the horror of these allegations.

    All this aligns with a narrative that persists across almost all of Germany’s media and political institutions: the situation in Palestine is “complicated,” and no, we cannot simply agree that killing children is wrong. Or at least, we can, but only if you first acknowledge that Hamas is a singular evil. And in so doing, you concede that the acts of the Israeli army—the murdered children—are mere operational follies in the annihilation of this evil.

    I took the new question seriously. And I muttered to myself as I stepped out into the night, “Yes, we can agree. I will not compromise on longstanding commitments to non-violence. I do not support kidnapping nor do I fall in line with spurious demand to support any and all acts of a monolithic Resistance”.

    Pausing on the stoop, I continued:

    “However, I will not allow my commitment to non-violence to degrade into a false equivalence, where hostage-taking by a militant group, born in the desperation of a gigantic concentration camp, is held as equal to the systematic bombing of civilians in that very same concentration camp.”

    Two days later, there was a curious change. Someone moved the labels a few inches to the right, so that now we were asked whether we could agree on neither killing children nor kidnapping babies. This uneasy moral compromise persisted for ten days before “KIDNAPPING” again replaced “not killing,” while the “BABIES” label vanished entirely. A mere four hours later, the “kidnapping” label vanished as well, restoring the original plea for moral clarity on the Gaza genocide.

    At the end of April, someone tried to remove the sticker entirely but only succeeded in damaging its edges. Yesterday, they had another go at disfiguring it. This time, the word “not” was completely removed, leaving the stark and horrifying message: “we agree on… killing CHILDREN?”

    I wondered if the removal of this word was intentional. Pausing in the hallway, I thought maybe someone in my building thinks that killing children is not only justified but necessary.

    To be clear: all eyes on Rafah. This is primarily about Palestinian lives, and the genocide must stop so that not one more child dies beneath the rubble of their home.

    While the killings manifest a cruel and dehumanizing ideology that is directed at the Palestinian people, it occurs to me that they also represent a nihilistic exhibitionism whose audience is the entire world. What we have seen over the last nine months is a cycle. The more we resist, the more relentless the killings become. The more we appeal to international courts, the more brazenly they flout international law. The louder we condemn them, the louder their missiles.

    The violence is a medium, and the message is as follows:

    “We will do this unimaginable, unthinkable, gruesome thing over and over again—a thing you know is wrong, that we know is wrong. And yet we will continue doing it to show you that you have no power, and we have it all.”

    This is what the sticker spoke to me last night as I stepped out into the street, and I replied, to no one in particular, that I would not meet this horror with apathy.

  • A word that starts with "G" and ends with "enocide"

    It must have been the summer of 2022 that I learned that the annual Nakba Day demonstration had been officially forbidden in Berlin. The global march commemorates the events of 1948 when Israeli forces drove at least 750,000 Palestinians into exile and killed more than 15,000, seizing control of 78% of historical Palestine. This genocidal war continues not only through physical violence, but also through an insidious manipulation of the very categories of thought in Palestine and around the world: that war is peace, that aggression is self-defence, that there were no people here when we arrived, but if there were then they deserved what they got.

    Shocked by how just how blatantly fascistic the Berlin authorities were behaving, I shared the news with a couple of close friends. We shook our heads, muttered our disbelief – and moved on. There were projects to complete, applications for funding that would not write themselves, and, after all, we were burnt out. And afraid. The 2019 anti-BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) law in Berlin had sent a clear message: solidarity with Palestinians could jeopardize any chance of receiving state funding or resources. In corona times, I had my first (and perhaps only) taste of arts funding. I had overblown fears that if I stuck my neck out for Palestine they would snatch this away. To my anxiety-ridden brain, this would mean not having enough income, which would in turn annihilate my dreams of obtaining permanent residence in Germany. I would be condemned to the Sisophysian grind of bi-annual visits to the immigration office to prove that I am a loyal, timid and self-sufficient worker-consumer in the glorious fatherland.

    There was also pushback from outside. A friend invited me to contribute a few minutes to a video about the challenges facing freelance artists in Berlin, that would ultimately be shown to representatives of arts funding organs in Berlin. I said I wanted to talk about the anti-BDS law and its chilling effect on the entire ecosystem of free expression.

    We sat in a park on the canal, and I remember the gentle sun on our faces as my friend turned to me with resignation and said “no, we tried already, we made so many representations, we’ve told them over and over again, they won’t listen.”

    “But this is the only chance I will ever have to talk right to their faces.”

    “My love, find something else that’s important. Say that instead.”

    I twisted like a leaf. In my mind, these kinds of clashes get reduced to a simple question: “either they are the crazy ones, or I am crazy.” I become a child again faced with the authority vested in a parent of a teacher; seeing something unjust and being told to sit down and shut up unless I really want to find out what injustice means.

    So when my friend held a phone up to my face and pressed record, I talked about something else. What it was, now, I have no idea. Because it was not something that needed to be said. Because the words have been buried in shame.

    Which brings me to my drag character, Trish.

    Trish arrived like a deranged thought in my mind a year and a half ago. Deranged, yet crystal clear: I would become a late 80s/early 90s Australian weatherwoman. The how and the why would come later – the aching necessity of Trish was beyond question.

    Over the winter I developed Trish as a lucky member of the König drag scholarship which provided a crucial space to birth new personas through workshops in movement, voice, character development, props and costumes.

    When it came time for my debut performance, I decided I would speak about the genocide in Gaza. I got push back from some colleagues, who looked at me aghast. “It won’t work,” they insisted. “What if someone freaks out? Then the whole show is over.”

    The acquiescent child in me curled up in a corner.

    “Okay, I will do something else.”

    I felt sick inside. I felt like my guts were turning rotten. I could not imagine how I could possibly do a performance and not say the words burning in my mouth

    I told the story to two dear ones, both of whom up-ended the “who is the crazy one” equation I had grown used to. Their arguments were sophisticated but can be summarized, simply, as “that’s bullshit.”

    Later that night, as I washed dishes: a revelation. This was the show. The silencing itself. The silencing we do to ourselves and to others and how it hollows us out from the inside.

    For those of you who missed it, the performance begins with Trish grinding through another weather forecast, before realizing that the emergent hole in the Ozone Layer (this being the late ’80s) is a metaphor for a vast absence that she is covering over: “that Australia (wink wink) is carrying out an act of….” Trish approaches the breach again and again but can’t make the leap, can’t say it, and is instead condemned to the brutalizing effects of her self-censorship “an abscess-like absence in the sky that will suck you up and destroy you because you can’t say a word that starts with G and ends with enocide.”

    I suppose one useful thing about art, and drag in particular, is that its a kind of alchemy where you take the shit in your life – your failures, the blows you inflict on others, the blows you inflict on yourself – and transform it into something else: in my case, an awakening.

    For two nights, in front of 300 people at Delphi Theatre, I made a solemn oath – via the psychic parasite of Trish – to forego silence as Israel’s 70+ years of violence takes an even more accelerated and monstrous form, while the German state punishes anyone seeking to stop this slaughter. And I asked that audience to look at their own silence, their own complicity, and say: No more. Never again. Together we discovered that we have to let go of the one illusion that holds us in place: that if you curl up into a ball, the storm will pass.

  • 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.