Adrienne Teicher

Tag: palestine

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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?