As difficult as it is to imagine lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians, it is also difficult to figure out how to talk about the current conflict and lack of peace. This diary is not about the I/P situation as much as it is about how we talk about oppression among groups of oppressed people.
The same problem we are seeing around the discussion of the I/P conflict we also saw around the Proposition 8 fall out. How do we talk about oppression, within groups of oppressed people, without reifying the very models of language and thinking we seek to contest?
Part of the problem here is that we are Westerners (well, most of us). And even if we are not Westerners, if we are writing and thinking in English, we have inherited the Hegelian dialectic, which always sets up a dialectic of "thesis" and "antithesis" in order to create subjectivity. In other words, as Westerners we always need an "other" in order to assert ourselves.
Tactical and territorial conflicts lend themselves very well to the dialectic way of creating one's self, because if we are "fighting against" someone, it is easy to create them as our enemy and construct them as the antithesis of ourselves. Western colonial and patriarchal power systems have long relied upon this dialectic model to cement power and control people. The model is firmly in place.
The problem we face, in our postmodern, postcolonial moment, (although, the postcolonial is debatable) is that though many of us do not want to create an other or BE an other, when we get ready to contest narratives, governments, and ideas that we think of as oppressive, it is very easy to seize the tools of the historical dialectic which has operated for so long to oppress us.
It was Audre Lorde, who rightly said, "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."
Let me shift gears a moment. In graduate school, my roommate was Jewish. I was doing postcolonial theory, which she refused to take a class in, because one of the major figures of PoCo was Edward Said, a strong pro-Palestinian voice. Not a single anti-semitic word was ever uttered in one of my postcolonial classes and in fact, it took me some years after the fact to understand where her objection was coming from. (I thought of Said mostly just as the author of "Orientalism" back then.)
She would often try to draw me into conversations about the I/P conflict. I would never participate in them. I believed then, and still do, that the rights of Palestinians have been, and continue to be trampled on. I don't support terrorism in any form, not even from people who are being oppressed. I think history has shown us, and as an African American my particular history has shown me, that there are other ways of achieving one's political goals.
And my roommate certainly didn't think Palestinians have no grievances at all. But I knew that my analysis of the situation, as a postcolonial scholar, would "read" to her as anti-semitism. It is very hard for an oppressed person to hear criticism of their group and not trend it with the other problematic speech against them. This is why when you point out to a person who is part of an oppressed group that their group might be oppressing others, the immediate reaction is one of defense.
When people have been beat down for centuries, counter-attacking becomes a instinctual reflex. This is the same thing that happened around Proposition 8 and African Americans. Let's face it--African Americans have some work to do around their progressive politics. Yes, I read the many diaries showing that the black vote didn't significantly impact the outcome. But let's be real. In a year when the first person of color is elected to the highest office of the land, it is disappointing to see that egalitarianism and progressive politics has a fault line and that it stops at GLBT rights, and that many African Americans, for various historical and social reasons, have come out on the wrong side of the issue.
Rather than own homophobia and say "alright, we have work to do," the response of many African Americans was pure defense. This defensive reaction was aided by the implementation of a racial dialectic by many (rightfully) outraged gay and lesbian folks, who in countering their "enemy" used established and problematic racial paradigms to express their outrage. That can only serve to further alienate the two communities, which have so much to gain by working together, from one another.
Likewise, with the I/P conflict, one must always be sensitive to and willing to navigate the history of violent antisemitism which is irremovable from contemporary Jewish identity. To minimize or ignore the impact of not only the Holocaust, but the centuries of pogroms which preceded it, is to lose the rhetorical battle before it has even begun. We will never move forward if we refuse to see all subjects involved, Israelis and Palestinians, and diaporic Jewish people, as complicated subjects, operating on both sides of the line that separates "oppressor" and "oppressed."
This is the double bind of representation that writers face. In our complicated world, where power is not stable and located only in one place, it will not do to think of this person "X" as the oppressor, and only the oppressor, and to think of this person "Y" as the oppressed, and only the oppressed. The challenge for us is to recognize that the same subject of history can be on several sides of this line, at the same time.
We must be careful not to invoke the problematic language of the dialectic when we discuss impassioned conflicts. There is anti-semitic language and there is also anti-Muslim and racist language against Palestinians. In the Prop 8 discussions, there was homophobic (thinly veiled, perhaps) response and there was racist response.
If we want to move things forward, we must resist the dialectic. That means giving up on the notion that if we simply defeated a group of people, we'd "win." We have to defeat the dialectic itself, which enables us to use shorthand terms like this acronym: I/P. The day such a locution no longer makes sense, and yes the index of this will happen on the page, there will no longer be a conflict.
If there is any place we can begin to think creatively about how to undo the oppositions we've inherited to understand ourselves, it is in a place like this, in writing. We are a community of thinkers and writers. We can (and arguably have) change the world. Let us discard the old language, the old contestable paradigms which always put us into stale polarities that only end in death and pain.