Abunimah: Justice in Palestine Is Fundamental to Global Struggle Against Racial, Economic Domination
Sunday, 13 April 2014 00:00By Rania Khalek, Truthout | Interview
(Image: Haymarket Books)"You can't predict the future based on what people are willing to accept right now," Ali Abunimah argues in this wide-ranging interview covering BDS, campus activism, Israel's existence as a Jewish state and his new book, The Battle for Justice in Palestine.
In his new book, The Battle for Justice in Palestine, Ali Abunimah, renowned author and co-founder of the Electronic Intifada, strikes a refreshingly positive and hopeful tone about a conflict that is anything but. The book is available directly from Truthout by clicking here.
For Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip, in the walled-off ghettos of the West Bank and even inside present-day Israel, the reality could not be more grim. But the battle for justice is heating up in spaces far outside Israel-Palestine. For the first time ever, Palestinians and their allies are winning the argument, most notably on college campuses, where pro-Israel forces are waging war on Palestine solidarity activism and, by extension, free speech.
He contextualizes the Palestinian struggle as inseparable from the global struggle for racial equality, economic democracy and decolonization.
Abunimah does a masterful job laying out this winning argument in his book. But more importantly, he contextualizes the Palestinian struggle as inseparable from the global struggle for racial equality, economic democracy and decolonization, making connections that are vital to the fight against racial domination and subjugation in all its forms, particularly in the United States, where mass incarceration and border militarization are taking lessons from Israel.
During a brief reprieve from his book tour, Abunimah spoke with Truthout over the phone from Chicago about Palestine activism, BDS (boycott, divest and sanction), why Israel does not have a right to exist as a Jewish state and how Palestine solidarity activism is part of the broader global struggle against economic and racial domination.
(Spoiler alert: At the very end of the interview, Abunimah describes his recent visit toThe New York Times, where he learned that, despite publicly ignoring independent media, mainstream elites are paying attention to what we have to say.)
Rania Khalek for Truthout: The first sentence of your book, "The Palestinians are winning," has probably taken many people by surprise, given the worsening reality on the ground for Palestinians. Can you explain what you mean?
"Israel's claim that it is a Jewish and democratic state is totally incompatible with universal human rights and democracy."
Ali Abunimah: What I meant is that Palestinians are winning the argument for Palestinian rights, and they're winning the argument that Israel's claim that it is a Jewish and democratic state is totally incompatible with universal human rights and democracy.
As I think the book shows, the only way Israel has to deal with this is to try to suppress the discussion, particularly through repression on campus, which we're seeing escalate in really dramatic ways all around us. But other than that, there's no way they can win. They can't win in an open discussion, and I think that that's something we've seen with the way so-called liberal Zionists have just run screaming from this debate.
I love the connections and intersections you make in your book between the subjugation and control of people of color in the United States and Palestinians and African refugees in Israel. Why do you think these connections are important to highlight?
They're important to highlight because they're real at a number of levels. One is mass incarceration. The new Jim Crow and Obama's mass deportation are products of still-very-present white supremacist and colonial mentality in the United States. These ideologies are what allow people of color to be treated essentially as a demographic threat in the United States. And that goes from Arizona, which I talk about in the book, where it's kind of ground zero. But it's also very much at the federal level and all over the country.
And these connections are real in very material ways.
In the book, I talk about this kind of conveyor belt of US police chiefs being taken on these junkets to Israel, where they're taken to places like Megiddo Prison, where Palestinian children are tortured and held in solitary confinement. And then they come out and say, "Wow, Israel is so great. We're going to take everything we learned about counterterrorism back to the United States." Our police chiefs in the US have no problem praising Israel as a paragon of human rights and good practice, and that really should set alarm bells ringing off everywhere.
So those are the connections I saw and writing this book was a process of learning about them and deepening my own understanding. But I think as a movement that something we need to do urgently is broaden and deepen our understanding of shared and joint struggle.
Israel has built an economy that benefits and grows from having a population to control. While the United States certainly doesn't need lessons in methods of racial domination, which you clearly state in your book, Israel's surveillance and weapons industry has found a big market in the United States, particularly on US-Mexico border. Why is this problematic?
It's problematic because millions of people are being victimized by this. Millions of people are having their lives destroyed by it, and there's a direct connection.
Israel uses Palestinians under occupation and under siege in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as captive guinea pigs to test these technologies of death and control on. And then they're sold to United States and other countries to perform similar tasks.
"Israel uses Palestinians under occupation and under siege in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as captive guinea pigs to test these technologies of death and control on. And then they're sold to United States."
For example, recently the Obama administration awarded a contract to Elbit Systems, one of the biggest Israeli arms companies - most notorious for weapons that have been used to commit war crimes against Palestinians. And the Obama administration gave this company a contract to set up surveillance systems on the US-Mexico border.
This is all in the context of the massive militarization of the border with Mexico and Obama's mass deportation, which has divided and caused suffering to hundreds of thousands of families in this country. And it's all being lauded as a great thing.
So if the pushback doesn't come from us, if it doesn't come from below, where is it going to come from? They're creating a really frightening dystopian future of surveillance and control, where Israel is held up as the model, where Palestinians caged in Gaza and Palestinians living in the ghettos of the West Bank are the future model that repressive states and surveillance states will use all over the world.
When Israeli apartheid ultimately is dismantled, how can we prevent another system of oppression from replacing Israel's current system the way that mass incarceration and the drug war replaced Jim Crow in the US?
Another reason why I thought it was so important to make these connections was to really sound the alarm that the end of official Jim Crow and the end of official segregation in the United States did not mean the end of racism. It did not mean the end of white supremacy.
As Michelle Alexander [author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness] and others have shown, white supremacy simply morphed into more insidious forms, even colorblind forms. That's the new Jim Crow she talks about, which manifests as mass incarceration.
"Palestine is in many ways a testing ground for ultra-neoliberal policies."
And in post-apartheid South Africa, even though it was a tremendous victory to defeat the apartheid regime and one that we still rightly celebrate, the fact is that in South Africa 20 years after apartheid, there is still incredible economic inequality and this inequality still is alarmingly along racial lines.
We need to make sure that this isn't reproduced in Palestine. And what I wanted to show in the book is that this is not a hypothetical thing that could happen in the future but it's already happening.
That's what I talk about in the chapter called "Neoliberal Palestine," which is that you already have this very tiny, wealthy Palestinian elite that is very closely tied to the Israeli occupation and that already controls much of the Palestinian economy and if there were a Palestinian state, that wouldn't change. You would have a South Africa-type situation or worse.
So people need to put the struggle for justice in Palestine back into the context of the global struggle for economic democracy and economic sovereignty and against neoliberalism. Palestine is not separate from this struggle. It's very much part of it.
Palestine is in many ways a testing ground for ultra-neoliberal policies, like for example what's going on now, which is they're building these industrial zones where Israeli companies and foreign countries will be able to exploit Palestinian labor, where there are no protections for workers' rights, no protection for the environment, where the Palestinian Authority or Palestinian state if it ever came into being would not even be able to enter these zones to inspect them.
"We can tie the issue of Palestine back into issues of economic democracy that really affect everyone and are not just specific to [the] local Palestinian situation half way around the world."
That's the future that the World Bank and the IMF and all these governments that claim to be supportive of Palestinian independence are actually setting up right now.
Do you think the BDS movement should be incorporating economic justice into its framework to counter this?
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