Nina Butler, The Con
There has been a Hebrew
Facebook page circulating that demands the murder of one Palestinian every hour
that the three Israeli teenagers, who disappeared on June 12 while hitchhiking
late at night in the West Bank, are missing. The dead bodies of the three teens
were found two nights ago near Hebron. Although evidence is yet to be
publically released, the Israeli government claims that Hamas is responsible,
and it would seem as though the Israeli military is set on carrying out the
desire of the 20 000-plus facebookers who ‘liked’ this page. The social media
page is premised upon the assumption that ‘Palestinians’ (the entire populace) are
behind this, and so has been the Israeli Defence Forces’ campaign of collective
punishment – Operation Brother’s Keeper – over the past 18 days that has
resulted in the imprisonment of more than 500 Palestinians, the death of six
mostly male youths of the same age as the missing Israeli teens, and the
destruction and invasion of more than 1 000 homes, offices and buildings. Now
that the inexcusable and disgraceful crime of the abduction and killing of
three Israeli lives has come to a head, all indications are that the
‘operation’ of collective punishment will evolve into a large-scale mission in
multiple forms of vengeance – aimed at harming yet more innocent young lives.
Perhaps the sort of
explicit, socially sanctioned racial hatred seen in this and other similar
Hebrew Facebook pages is in keeping with the fervent proclamations made by
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the obsessive coverage in Israeli media.
The most widely read English daily in Israel, The Jerusalem Post, ran an opinion
piece a few days ago detailing the various political opportunities the military
operation may have held to find the teens, including the annexation of major
portions of the West Bank, collective punishment of Palestinians by cutting
electricity supply to Gaza, and the renewal of targeted assassinations. On
Monday night, Netanyahu said in a statement after the bodies were recovered
that they “were kidnapped and murdered in cold blood by beasts … Vengeance for
the blood of a small child, Satan has not yet created. Neither has vengeance
for the blood of three pure youths … Hamas will pay.”
Acclaimed Jewish-American
academic Judith Butler, in her 2004 book Precarious Life: The Powers of
Mourning and Violence, reflects that the media’s role in the ‘war on terror’
(as this instance is a fragment of) is to “provide the narrative means by which
‘the human’ in its grievability is established. Through this extensive
hyper-realisation, we also make instinctive assumptions regarding right and
wrong, evil and humane.”
Palestinian life is not
worthy of grief in mainstream and culturally dominant approximation. In
reaction to the recovery of the Israeli boys – Eyal Yifrah, Gilad Shaer and
Naftali Frenkel – on Monday night, notaries of the world released statements in
rapport with their families and in virulent condemnation of the perpetrators,
recorded minute by minute in a Haaretz online newspaper live stream: United
States President Barack Obama termed it a “senseless act of terror against
innocent youth” and offered the “full support and friendship of the United
States”; the UN through Ban Ki-moon called the crime a “heinous act by enemies
of peace”; the Vatican expressed sympathy; and British Prime Minister David
Cameron expressed his horror that “no parent should have ever to suffer such
heartache and grief”.
Nothing has been said of
the parents of the six Palestinians killed since Operation Brother’s Keeper was
launched, nor of the 1 500 children who have died at the hands of Israeli
forces since 2000, the 6 000 injured or the 10 000 imprisoned. None of the
Palestinians killed since June 12 were involved in the crime at hand, or guilty
of any particular offence other than being an unarmed Palestinian confident or
stupid enough to look a wall of the second-most powerful military in the world
directly in the eye as they militarise and illegally occupy your land and
everyday life. I cannot even access their names, as the world unites in grief
over other approximate and definitive lives. Nor will anything be said in grief
over individual lives when the next hailstorm of terror over Gaza’s skies opens
in a vengeful and deeply unfair act of ‘justice’.
Because acceptance and
engagement with a state that inflicts such crimes against humanity is
widespread, certain images and words that might conflict with our warm
familiarity towards Israel do not appear in the media. Certain names that might
confuse the logic of consensus are not audible, and the violence inflicted upon
their bodies, Butler tells us, is “derealised and diffused”. Such prohibitions
suppress the dissent and anger that would expose the concrete, human effects of
this violence.
A further case in point
is the incarceration of Dr Aafia Siddiqui, who is currently serving 86 years in
Texas based upon an extradition and trial in violation of international human
rights law. Perhaps you remember her through the media title she was given:
“Lady Al-Qaeda”. What is less well known is that her actual title is Dr
Siddiqui – mother and passionate advocate of the transformation and
modernisation of the Pakistani education system. The claims made of her ties to
terrorist organisations by the FBI have never been evidenced, and as her
sister, also an American PhD graduate in neuroscience, insists, they are
contradictory to her pursuits, affiliations and character.
At the height of former
Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf’s herding of ‘terrorists’ in 2003 in order
to gain favour from the US in its endless global scouring for bodies upon which
to inflict retributive justice, Siddiqui and her three children under the age
of six were abducted under mysterious circumstances. The youngest of her
children has never been seen again, and the other two were found, isolated from
each other and their mother in 2008 after a tireless search by her
Karachi-based family. The FBI denies any knowledge of her whereabouts before
2008, but the US military was directly involved in her arrest in Ghazni
soon after her reappearance at the time.
Siddiqui emerged out of a void, drugged, weakened, and with scars of abuse near
the notorious US-run prison in Bagram, Afghanistan, where former detainees have
testified to have seen her. It doesn’t leave much to the imagination to connect
the dots.
The charges laid against
Siddiqui were not terrorism – a charge that would have been based upon the
anti-terrorism legislation and specific associated courts intended to allow for
conviction on little evidence. Instead, she was tried for the attempted murder
of her six captors at the time of her arrest in Bagram. The most outrageously
flawed and partial evidence was presented to the judge, Richard Berman, who
admitted that the prosecution stood on unconvincing ground, yet nevertheless
proclaimed that Siddiqui, guilty of attempted murder or not, was a danger to
the nation for her ideology. Her sentence of 86 years is grossly excessive for
her supposed crime, and she is now in solitary confinement for the remainder of
her life in Carswell Prison, where the abuse of female prisoners has been known
to be rampant. As US officials have repeatedly told her sister, “the normal
rules don’t apply to Siddiqui”.
There are markedly
different ways in which physical human vulnerability is distributed across the
globe. The three young missing Israelis sanctify the effective mobilisation of
the forces of war, yet other lives, such as Siddiqui’s children for instance,
or the six young Palestinians murdered these past weeks, according to Butler,
will “not find such fast and furious support and will not even qualify as
grievable”.
Indeed, should we care
about the invisible ghostly terrorists held in prisons beyond their national
borders, without fair trial and subject to a limited interpretation of rights?
Who speaks for them? Certainly not the international courts and institutions
set up to protect ‘humanity’. Perhaps we no longer see them as human through
the incessant derealisation in media, political rhetoric and on Facebook. But
these negated individuals have a strange way of remaining animated and
resisting in abrupt and frightening ruptures within our ‘normal’ arrangement of
civilized time and space.
So, Butler tells us, they
must be negated again, and again, and as they never really ‘were’, and thence
they seem to “live on, stubbornly, in this state of deadness”. The US
blockbuster World War Z, which posited the civilized world against zombies,
unabashedly located in the Middle East and South Asia, reflects this
unwittingly in its endeavour to characterise the ‘war on terror’ as one of the
living against the neither alive nor dead, “but interminably spectral”.
A visibly drained and
emotional Dr Fowzia Siddiqui addressed a small community gathering in Durban
this past weekend, pleading for South Africans to assist her sister in finding
justice in whatever way possible. I asked her why she would ask South Africans
for help. The Harvard graduate reasoned that South Africans have a good
standing in human rights issues on a global stage, and that certain
internationally recognisable and influential persons dedicated to human rights
are based here.
The sad reality is that
SA newspapers are littered with instances to indicate that within the national
framework we have demarcated zones of grievability. Asking questions about the
inequalities of human life, suffering, vulnerability and protection is a global
conversation.
This in part because of
how internationalised media play upon these inequalities to authorise and
heighten racial hysteria, allowing for an amorphous, transboundary racism to
proliferate. This in turn allows for ‘self-defence’ and ‘states of emergency’
that sanction any number of human rights violations and ‘extra-legal’ activity.
We should care because all civil liberties for everyone are rendered fragile in
the process, not just those of the spectral. So the extra-legal activity of the
US and Israel in the endlessly renewing ‘war on terror’ are our concern. And
they beg us to ask ourselves what kind of extra-legal activity we may sanction
through indifference to shack dwellers’ house demolitions and state violence on
citizens, and to what extent this is a habitual perpetuation of the extra-legal
activity conducted in states of emergency under an apartheid government that
weeded out terrorists at will.
The interminably spectral
are an indication that the utility of an internationalised morality, and the
mourning of life, is malleable and exclusive, as is the contemporary conception
of human rights. We still have to learn how to include in this concept those
whose values may well test the limits of our own.
