#nadia abu el haj

[nanshe-of-nina]

To be fair, one of Abu El-Haj’s books does mention Kaifeng Jews once, kind of... by quoting a member of the group Kulanu named Irwin Berg:

“There is a priestly class of Lemba whose DNA shows a connection with Jewish Kohanim (Priests). Other than the Lemba, these peoples [Jews from places as diverse as sub-Saharan Africa, Afghanistan, India, and China] have no ‘proof’ that they were once Jews. They have their customs and traditions, which they compare to the customs and traditions of the children of Israel as reported in the Torah. . . . Even though Jewish tradition does not report on these peoples, early Arab historians have identified some of them as Jews. Speaking as a Jew as well as a dilettante historian, I think we should be respectful of the claims of peoples whose customs and traditions bear the indices of ancient Jewish practices. As I was told in a remote village in Mali near Timbuktu, Africans remember forever the oral traditions of their ancestors, particularly those relating to their origins. (Berg 2006, 14)”

She then gives his comments the weirdly bad faith interpretation of:

But whether or not people should be respectful of indigenous claims, Berg makes clear he does not think they have “proof,” that is, evidence that would be widely recognized as credible by the Jewish world.

However, on a hunch, I went and found the actual source online and she, um… kind of seriously misrepresented what Irwin Berg actually wrote. Here’s a brief excerpt (the rest is online here):

Beginning slowly after the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in 70 CE, and more quickly after 325 CE, when gentile Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, these varied and esoteric forms of Judaism which existed since early Hellenistic times lost out to Rabbinic Judaism. Not only did their adherents assimilate into the Greco-Roman world, but their books were lost and our knowledge about them was largely lost. Among the most unusual of these groups were Jews who for several hundred years believed that the crucified Jesus was the Messiah but continued to observe Jewish law. By the year 800 CE -- except for the Karaites -- Babylonian Rabbinic Judaism was the only Judaism practicecd (sic) in the Christian and Moslem worlds. That does not mean that all other Jews disappeared from the face of the earth. These others lived in out-of-the-way places such as sub-Saharan Africa, Afghanistan, India, and China. Most of them eventually became Moslem. While visiting Songhai villages along the Niger River in Mali, I encountered many Moslems who claimed that their ancestors had once been Jews. These remote peoples followed in the footsteps of their ancestors as closely as they could while cut off from the Rabbinic Jewish world. The best known today of these "outsiders" are the Shin and Kuki peoples of northeast India, who claim to be the descendants of the tribe of Menashe. Many sub-Saharan Africans likewise claim to have Jewish ancestors. These Africans may be the descendants of Jewish colonies that settled along the Nile in Southern Egypt about 2,500 years ago; or they may be a remnant of those Jews who escaped the Romans after their defeat in North Africa in 115 CE; or they may have resulted from movements of peoples westward from Ethiopia and Yemen. Some Tutsis claim that they are descendants of Jacob who did not follow Moses into Sinai but remained in Egypt. Others include the Lemba of South Africa, the Sefwi of Ghana, and the Igbo of Nigeria. There is a priestly class of Lemba whose DNA shows a connection with Jewish Kohanim (Priests). Other than the Lemba, these peoples have no “proof” that they were once Jews except for their customs and traditions, which they compare to the customs and traditions of the children of Israel as reported in the Torah. Also, even though Jewish tradition does not report on these peoples, early Arab historians have identified some of them as Jews. Speaking as a Jew as well as a dilettante historian, I think we should be respectful of the claims of peoples whose customs and traditions bear the indices of ancient Jewish practices. As I was told in a remote village in Mali near Timbuktu, Africans remember forever the oral traditions of their ancestors, particularly those relating to their origins. The Beta-Israel of Ethiopia cannot be compared with these other groups. They have been long known to the Jews of Egypt and are the subject of a response by Rabbi David ben Solomon ibn Abi Zimra, known as the Radbaz (1479-1573), who proclaimed the Beta-Israel to be from the tribe of Dan. Since they had no Talmudic training but followed the literal word of the Scriptures, he pronounced them Jews who were to be treated sympathetically as though they had been taken captive at a young age. At different periods of time Jews isolated themselves from their neighbors and did not intermarry or accept conversion. At other times the opposite was true. I have already mentioned the "mixed multitude" that went out of Egypt with Moses, the Canaanites, Ruth, and the Maccabees.

Yeah, I think I have even less respect for her scholarship than before... The way she chose to quote Berg’s actual words comes off as rather dishonest.

[fairuzfan]

when you avoid palestinian narratives and history just know you participate in a very very long line of colonial historical reconstruction/decontexualization from before 'israel' was even created. you're directly participating in the violence that palestinians experience. if you'd like to learn more about this, read "Facts on the Ground" by Nadia Abu El-Haj.

[fiercynn]

White settler institutional support of Israel — such as that of the University of California — points to two historical contexts. The first is the history of the formation of the Israeli settler state, since 1948 and before and after, its expulsion of over 750,000 Palestinians from their lands and homes, its depopulation of over 400 Palestinian villages, and its ongoing attacks against Palestinian individuals, communities, and institutions, including, as the Palestinian poet and translator Fady Joudah has observed, Palestinian memory. All of this is ignored by political and educational leaders in the United States in the interest of the Israeli colonization of Palestine and the subjection of Palestinians to settler obliteration.   The attachment of these institutions and leaders to the Israeli state points to a second context: the racialization of social understanding among white settler individuals, institutions, and collectives, and an identification of individuals, institutions, and collectives with white settler life, self-understanding, and social sense. The affirmation of Israeli acts of genocidal violence as self-defense is not only a grotesque distortion. It points to a social truth: that the social form of the American settler state foments an identification with settler ways of being—with white settler life and social existence—through which individuals, collectives, and institutions understand themselves and in relation to which the world becomes legible for them as a space for life.  This identification suggests a third context: the ongoing attempts to domesticate the struggles for decolonization following World War II in the institution of the modern state and the modern terms for the law. These include the basic terms through which the social is understood, terms such as the “individual,” “right,” “property,” and “whiteness,” which sustain the law and which the law reinforces. It is not only that Palestinians are a non-white, non-European people struggling for liberation and freedom against a settler colonial oppressor—and this is the case—but that their struggle, in whichever form it takes, conjures a panic in white life and settler being, a fantasy, as the anti-colonial militant and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon put it in The Wretched of the Earth, in 1961, of “swarming” and “gesticulating” Black and Brown beings, against whom the settler colonial state sets its police, military, and pedagogical forces. It is in this context that we must understand the many attacks against Palestinian academics and intellectuals, such as Nadia Abu El Haj, the author of a pathbreaking book on Israeli archaeology and its relation to colonization; the attacks against psychoanalysts, such as Lara Sheehi, who has brilliantly studied the links among settler colonialism and psychoanalysis; the attacks against the Palestinian novelist, essayist, intellectual, and teacher Adania Shibli, whose receipt the LiBeraturpreis at the Frankfurt Book Fair on October 20 has been unjustly delayed; the attacks against the Palestine Writes conference, a gathering of Palestinian writers, activists, intellectuals, and artists held from September 22-24 at the University of Pennsylvania and “dedicated to celebrating and promoting cultural productions of Palestinian writers and artists.” The desire to prevent Palestinians from publicly and collectively celebrating their literary, artistic, poetic, and cultural productions is a social and psychical assertion of and an identification with a mode of being and life: a form of life that one might call “settler life” in all of its whiteness and in all of its attachment to the state and the law, and in its racialized, anti-Black and anti-Indigenous social sense and ongoing counterinsurgent and carceral practice. [x]

- jeffrey sacks for mondoweiss on october 18, 2023

[thevividgreenmoss]

While the editors claim the historiography of Zionism, in reality theirs is a historiography for Zionism, a Zionist historiography seeking desperate renewal. In seeming response to Raz-Krakotzkin, the editors write in their introduction that in addition to Europe, Palestine and “in many other non-European spaces Zionist movements developed as well” (13). “Moreover,” they go on, “Zionists claimed a land outside of Europe not as a colony, but as their ancestral homeland” (13). While the latter part of that sentence is certainly true, and a core part of Zionist ideology, to argue that Zionists did not claim Palestine as a colony is a lie and nothing less. As is undoubtedly well-known to the editors, Zionists regularly and repeatedly referred to their efforts as a colonial project as countless historical studies have demonstrated, most recently Areej Sabbagh-Khoury’s meticulously researched and powerfully argued Colonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba (2023). Moreover, the claim of Palestine as a homeland marked Zionism as more than simply another nationalism. In her review of The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History (2018), Nadia Abu El-Haj carefully critiques the effort therein to define “the colonial” as “excess” and frame histories of Palestine and Israel in terms of competing nationalisms, without attention to the structure of settler-nationhood. “The distinction of Zionism,” Abu El-Haj makes clear, “is that it was a settler-nation from the very start: that is, it was a colonial project of settlement that imagined itself as a project of national return. Not only was there never any ideological space between the national and the settler-colonial. In contrast to settler-nations elsewhere (the US or Australia, for example), there was never any temporal distance either.”[6]

Every chapter in Unacknowledged Kinships seeks to eclipse the settler-colonial history of Zionism. A chapter by the historian Orit Bashkin, who has otherwise contributed to modern Arab intellectual history and the social history of Iraq and Israel in a series of well researched books, provides an overview of the recent scholarship on Arab Jewry. The chapter’s value, however, is diminished by an incoherent conclusion. “Finally, Zionism,” Bashkin writes, “was not simply a foreign movement imported from Europe and Palestine, as the postcolonial school would have it, or a natural response to Arab Fascism, as the conservatives have argued. Rather it was a local option, one among many, that appealed to Jews, especially as Arab national elites let them down and the conflict in Palestine seemed to have determined the lot of Jews outside it” (208). The conscription of some Arab Jews into Zionism does not make it local. Does the presence of American nationalism among some Indigenous or Black people make the United States any less a settler-colonial or slave society? Zionism was not “imported” from Palestine to elsewhere across the Arab world. The transplantation of a racial ideology that pitted “Arab” against “Jew” was a European Zionist project. All the major leaders of the Zionist movement in Palestine were European. Of the thirty-seven signatories of the Israeli Declaration of Independence, “all but two… were from Central or Eastern Europe,” as Ussama Makdisi reminds us.[7] To name Zionism “local” is to elide again, as this volume seeks to do, its colonial function.

...Quayson however, reveals himself a fellow traveler in the editors’ campaign, readily adopting their prejudice and the logic of the Israeli security state. In his Afterword to the volume, Quayson writes that the events at the 1972 Olympics in Munich were “stomach churning” as he observed them as a child in Ghana and that unlike “the foreign policy positions being taken by African states” the Israeli raid on Entebbe Airport in 1977 “served to consolidate the Israelis as heroes in our young eyes even further” (298). Quayson is certainly welcome to recount his youthful impressions (although readers may wish to consult proper histories of African and Third World solidarity with Palestinians in the same period to read alongside such anecdotes). But Quayson’s reliability is thrown into serious doubt when he turns to the 1982 massacres of Palestinians in the Beirut refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. He characterizes them simply as a “public relations disaster” which “created a bitter taste toward Israel for many people in the postcolonial world” (299)—although apparently not for Quayson. While Israel’s complicity in the massacres is well-documented and well-known, Quayson seeks to absolve Israel by both raising doubts about these facts and justifying Israel’s actions due to the “complex geopolitical calculus” that Israel and its adjuncts in Lebanon were apparently working under, namely the perennial specter of Iran. Why? In the end Quayson makes clear his opposition to BDS, “something I personally think precipitously abandons the possibility of dialogue and collaboration with progressive Israel-based scholars” (299).

...Faisal Devji, in a piece that rehashes the arguments of some of his recent books on Pakistan and Gandhi, takes the opportunity to scold supporters of BDS with insidious comparisons. Arguing that “BDS has taken on the role that states and the international community are meant to play by imposing punitive sanctions on a criminal regime. This effort is inadvertently mitigated by the movement’s weakness and so its own vulnerability to sanctions of many kinds. Such vulnerability gives BDS its moral idealism, but this is promptly squandered by the desire to speak in the name or at least in place of the state and international order.”[12] Inexplicably, a stateless people, many of whom without even a passport to their name, endlessly abused by a state-system which restricts their movement and blocks their access to those legal mechanisms of international governance, are condemned for attempting even the smallest pragmatic use of that system. Shall we also condemn Six Nations of the Irouquis’s appeal for sovereignty to the League of Nations or the Civil Rights’ Congress historic charge of genocide against the United States presented to the United Nations in 1951?

Palestinians and their supporters, Devji goes on to argue, would do well to heed the example of the Gandhian refusals which mobilized millions against the British in India. No mention is made, of course, that Palestinians have been practicing civil disobedience in their land since before the State of Israel even existed. Or that the General Strike in Palestine in 1936 was the longest in human history (perhaps only surpassed by the hartal that consumed Kashmir in 2020). While Palestinians are daily arrested, maimed, and murdered for stepping out into the street or opening their lips, when dozens of Palestinians participate in wave after wave of hunger strike as they’re stuffed into cages, Devji, our Thomas Friedman, dares to ask where is the Palestinian Gandhi?

[angrybell]

Professor Gil Hochberg - supporter of BDS and pushes the Israel apartheid theory.

Professor Yinon Cohen - supporter of BDS movement.

Rashid Khalidi - Former PLO spokesman under Yasser Arafat.

Professor Nadia Abu El-Haj - BDS supporter/leader. She also pushes a conspiracy theory that Israeli archaeologists falsify finds to prove existences of ancient Jewish kingdoms and destroying evidence of “Palestine”.

Professor Naor H. Ben-Yehoyada - supporter of BDS, wants to dismantle Israel as a state.

Columbia isn’t even pretending to offer both sides of the story. They’re deliberately creating an echo chamber event.

[zafar68]

Did Freud abandon his theory of childhood seduction?

According to psychoanalytic folklore, on 21 September 1897 Freud wrote a letter to Fliess which signalled the abandonment of his theory of childhood seduction:

And now I want to confide in you immediately the great secret that has been slowly dawning upon me in the last few months. I no longer believe in my neurotica [Freud’s theory of the neuroses]. This is probably not intelligible without an explanation: after all, you yourself found credible what I was able to tell you. [1]

Freud’s explanation hinged on several different factors: firstly, he refers to his ‘continual disappointments’ in bringing his analyses with his patients to a ‘real conclusion’ (although he doesn’t explain why this necessarily meant his neurotica was wrong); secondly, he simply couldn’t bring himself to believe that all his patients’ fathers must have been ‘perverts’ (paedophiles, sexual abusers) in order to account for the frequency of the hysteria he was encountering; thirdly “…the certain insight that there are no indications of reality in the unconscious, so that one cannot distinguish between truth and fiction that has been cathected with affect.”[2] This introduced the idea that unconscious fantasy had a large role to play in his patients’ ‘recollection’ of childhood trauma. And fourthly:

…in the most deep-going psychosis the unconscious memory does not break through, so that the secret of childhood experiences is not disclosed even in the most confused delirium. If one thus sees that the unconscious never overcomes the resistance of the conscious, the expectation that in treatment the opposite is bound to happen, to the point where the unconscious is completely tamed by the conscious, also diminishes.[3]

This letter has been seized upon by many of Freud’s outspoken critics and added fuel to the flames of the ‘Freud wars’ which underwent a resurgence in the 1980s.[4] For many feminists and survivors of child sexual abuse in particular, Freud’s apparent rejection of the reality of childhood sexual trauma was evidence that psychoanalysis itself was no longer helpful in tackling the problem of such abuse. For example, Nicole Sütterlin argues that: “Today, Freud is often discredited for abandoning the notion of real trauma as a pathological determinant and subsuming it into a model of intrapsychic conflicts”.[5] And Nadia Abu El-Haj makes the important point that, to be taken seriously, the ‘victims’ of trauma need traumatic events which are ‘literal’ rather than the result of psychical construction and whose ‘actuality’ could be called into question. As she notes, this applies particularly to the memory of traumatic events:

For those advocating on behalf of victims of sexual assault, rendering traumatic memory literal likewise served crucial forensic purposes. Sexual assault victims’ memories needed to be accurate, not just credible if fathers, boyfriends, acquaintances, and even strangers were going to be prosecuted for the crimes of incest and rape. This battle was waged not only against existing psychiatric practice, or even just against a particular social and political imaginary, but also against a judicial environment in which refusing to believe and/or blaming the victim was the norm.[6]

Such critics accuse psychoanalysis of being a theory and a clinical practice that denies the actuality of childhood ‘seduction’, which may include sexual abuse and the trauma that accompanies it, and that instead propagates the idea that the ‘memories’ of such events are psychical constructions. And, unfortunately, some of Freud’s own reflections on this subject only appear to reinforce this view. For example, in the opening part of his On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement Freud seems to confirm his abandonment of the theory:

If hysterical subjects trace back their symptoms to traumas that are fictitious, then the new fact which emerges is precisely that they create such scenes in phantasy, and this psychical reality requires to be taken into account alongside practical reality. This reflection was soon followed by the discovery that these phantasies were intended to cover up the auto-erotic activity of the first years of childhood, to embellish it and raise it to a higher plane. And now, from behind the phantasies, the whole range of a child’s sexual life came to light’.[7]

However, as Karin Ahbel-Rappe points out in her paper on Freud’s seduction theory, the question of whether or not he really did ‘abandon’ his belief that his patients’ neuroses were rooted in actual childhood sexual experiences is a contested one. She argues that:

Recent accounts of the seduction theory and the question of its abandonment have emphasized the continuity of Freud’s work before and after the seduction theory, claiming that Freud did not abandon his concern with the event of seduction but rather came to appreciate that an understanding of fantasy was also essential.[8]

As Laplanche and Pontalis note: “Right up to the end of his life, Freud continued to assert the existence, prevalence and pathogenic force of scenes of seduction actually experienced by children.” Furthermore, ”… Freud could never resign himself to treating phantasy as the pure and simple outgrowth of the spontaneous sexual life of the child. He is forever searching, behind the phantasy, for whatever has founded it in its reality….” [9] And even more critically they go on to argue that:

…the crucial question is to decide whether the seduction-phantasy has to be considered merely as a defensive and projective distortion of the positive component of the Oedipus complex or whether it is to be treated as the transposed expression of a fundamental datum, namely, the fact that the child’s sexuality is entirely organised by something which comes to it, as it were, from the outside: the relationship between the parents, and the parents’ wishes which pre-date and determine the form of the wishes of the subject.[10]

In other words, it is not a case of either/or: either there is an actual event in the subject’s early childhood, or such an event is constructed in phantasy at a later date. Rather, the ‘childhood trauma’ is probably best viewed as a complex interweaving of phantasy and actuality; something did happen, but not necessarily in the manner that it is recalled by the subject at a later date. Another way to express this is to argue that Freud augmented his original theory of (actual) childhood seduction by adding the dimension of psychical construction to it. And linked closely to this is his concept of Nachträglichkeit, which I have written about in a number of previous articles. Put very simply, the argument here is that ‘childhood’ trauma is a retroactive construction. Something did indeed happen earlier on in the subject’s history, but at the time of its occurrence this ‘something’ was not registered by the subject as ‘traumatic’. It is only at a later date that another event generates a retroactive associative chain ‘back’ to the ’original’ event and constructs, in the here-and-now, a trauma. It is important to emphasise that this is not denying that something actually occurred in the subject’s history, for example, sexual abuse. Rather, it is to argue that the subject was unable to register the nature of the ‘original’ event; such a registration only occurs later on. And, bearing in mind that Freud introduced the concept of Nachträglichkeit prior to his alleged ‘abandonment’ of his theory of childhood seduction, it suggests that even in his early work Freud was not positing a ‘naïve’ concept of trauma, that is, a traumatic experience occurs in the subject’s early life, the memory of which is repressed and which in turn produces a psychoneuroses in adulthood. Rather, Freud was already aware that psychical (re)construction played a key role in the development of adult psychopathology.

But what’s at stake here for psychoanalysis? Why does it matter if Freud ‘abandoned’ his belief in actual childhood sexual ‘seduction’ (abuse) or not? One answer, as I’ve already touched upon above, is that it calls into question the viability of a psychoanalytic engagement with childhood sexual abuse; which is somewhat ironic bearing in mind it is probably only thanks to Freud that the recognition of such abuse entered the public discourse in the first place. And, as I also noted above, this is precisely the charge that many critics of Freud level against him: that he came to deny the existence of actual childhood sexual abuse and instead argued that it was some elaborate psychical construction. The implication here is that psychoanalysis would have very little, if anything, to offer someone who had suffered such abuse in their childhood. The problem here is that this focus on childhood sexual encounter and its subsequent effects on the subject’s history and psychopathology would seem to be psychoanalysis’ ‘unique selling point’, its modus operandi; without such a focus what is the point of psychoanalysis? Why not just stick to psychotherapy and trauma counselling?

Although, as I hope I have already made clear, I do not believe that Freud ‘abandoned’ his theory of actual childhood ‘seduction’, let’s just imagine for a moment that he did. Furthermore, let’s just imagine for a moment that someone visits a psychoanalyst who adheres to Freud’s theory, that is, that there is no actual childhood sexual experience, but, rather, a psychical construction of such abuse, which for many subjects remains unconscious – at least until they enter psychoanalysis. If, during the course of the analysis, the analysand starts to recount certain events from their early childhood that suggest they may have been sexually abused, is the analyst then going to turn round and say to the analysand: ‘this is just an elaborate fantasy, clearly it never actually happened’? Of course not! Hopefully they will say very little at all, but instead allow the analysand the time and space to tell their story. The key point here is that for the analysand their (hi)story is real and it has real effects. And lurking in the shadows is an even more fundamental question, which is that of the ‘actuality’ of the ‘past’ itself. All history is, ultimately, a construction, a narrative; no one knows what ‘really’ happened at the time. Even people who are still alive to tell their stories still have to rely on their not-so-reliable memories, which are constantly reconstructing the past to suit the needs of the present. As I touched upon above, this is the work of Nachträglichkeit. When it comes to the question of childhood sexual experience and abuse this is not for one moment to deny it ever happened; rather, it is to acknowledge that all we ever have to go on is the retroactive reconstruction of events.

However, the difficulty here, I would argue, is that it is precisely the ‘actuality’ of past events that’s at stake for many individuals. This is especially true for people who have actually been abused in their childhood and who at the time were met with disbelief and denials when they tried to recount such experiences. In other words, for them it is critical that they are believed by their analyst or therapist, and anyone else they tell their story to. The complexities of the transference, let alone Nachträglichkeit, are simply not going to cut it with such individuals! And, as I noted earlier, if criminal proceedings are involved, it is even more critical that such events are deemed to have actually happened.

Returning now to my contention that Freud did not ‘abandon’ his theory of childhood ‘seduction’, but, instead, augmented it with the theory of psychical construction and working over,[11] what are the implications for clinical practice? In fact, does it make any difference if the analyst believes that an analysand’s account of childhood sexual abuse is based on ‘actual’ events or is a retroactive construction? As I indicated earlier, all the analyst (and the analysand) has to go on is the (re)construction of events, so in one sense their ‘actuality’ is beside the point. However, the key issue to remember here is that just because all we have to go on is the (re)construction, the representation, of events, this does not mean that such events never occurred. In fact, even if we subscribe to Freud’s theory of Nachträglichkeit (which I do), he argued that there always remains a trace of the actual event. Bistoen, Vanheule, and Craps, in their paper on Nachträglichkeit and PTSD argue that Lacan’s ideas regarding the signifier are especially instructive in terms of developing a deeper understanding of the mechanism of Nachträglichkeit. They argue that there is an ‘original’ distressing event that cannot be fully understood at the time of its occurrence because the subject is unable to symbolise it. However, the event leaves behind a ‘mnemic trace’ that is engraved in memory by a single signifier, which both signals and covers up the senselessness of the experience. Commenting on Freud’s ‘Emma’ case (one of his early uses of the theory of Nachträglichkeit), they write:

This single signifier, which is metonymically chosen by the subject, hems in or borders the hole of the nonsensical experience. In Emma’s case, this could be the linguistic element ‘clothing’ or the visual trace of the shopkeeper’s grin, something that simultaneously points to and obscures the original mystifying scene. It is crucial to grasp that this single signifier or representation remains ‘mute,’ as it does not become associated with other elements that would confer meaning upon it.[12]

Their argument here is that it is only when this single signifier can form part of a signifying chain that it can allow the subject to confer meaning and ‘sense’ on their experiences. This happens at the time of the ‘second’ event where the subject realises, for the first time, the full meaning of the ‘original’ experience, and at this point becomes traumatised by it. The crucial point here is that something has to have actually occurred for such a trace to be there in the first place. The difficulty, of course, is knowing precisely what this something is. However, for those of us who subscribe to a realist epistemology then this should be the focus of the analytic, however difficult it may be, rather than denying that there was something there in the first place.

Notes

Sigmund Freud, The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1887-1904, trans. Jeffrey M. Masson (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belkap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985), 264. ↑

Ibid., 264. ↑

Ibid., 265. ↑

See for example Jeffrey Masson’s vitriolic attack on Freud’s so-called abandonment of the seduction theory: Jeffrey M. Masson, The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1984). ↑

Nicole A. Sütterlin, “History of Trauma Theory,” in The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma, ed. Hanna Meretoja and Colin Davis (Milton: Taylor and Francis, 2020), 13. ↑

Nadia Abu El-Haj, Combat Trauma: Imaginaries of War and Citizenship in Post-9/11 America (Kindle Edition) (London: Verso, 2002), 91. ↑

Sigmund Freud, “On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XIV (London: Hogarth Press, 1914), 17-18, italics in original. ↑

Karin Ahbel-Rappe, ‘“I No Longer Believe”: Did Freud Abandon the Seduction Theory?’, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 54.1 (2006), 171, italics in original. ↑

Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac Books, 1988), 406-407. ↑

Ibid., 407, my italics. ↑

Here I am following Laplanche and Pontalis’ argument in The Language of Psychoanalysis that, “Understood very broadly, psychical working out (or over) might be said to cover all of the operations of the psychical apparatus.” (366). However, they are also clear that Freud’s specific use of the term was in reference to the transformation of energy through binding or diversion. ↑

Gregory Bistoen, Stijn Vanheule, and Stef Craps, “Nachträglichkeit: A Freudian Perspective on Delayed Traumatic Reactions,” Theory and Psychology, 2014, 9.

[cridhe]

[fairuzfan]

Once again begging people to read nur masalha and Nadia Abu El-Haj for actual Palestinian archeology facts. You all just spout zionist propaganda completely seriously and I'm just here shaking my head.

[ghelgheli]

Literally every commonwealth soldier who died in Iraq "was someone's loved one" but hundreds of thousands of civilians bombed apparently weren't. and god knows noone here gave a shit about Iraqi soldiers. "they were the bad guys"

it's all western veterans with ptsd, never gulf war syndrome or famines or the collapse of economies. our soldiers get to fly home and cry about it, and cash in a check.

the amount of military bootlicking on Tumblr is insane. it's all "hate the military not the soldiers" like ppl didn't sign up on mass after 9/11. it's all "hate the system, not the pawn" until it's time to treat arab men like faceless corpses in waiting. stop acting like imperial veterans are all inherently revolutionary. a few ppl with a conscience doesn't rebuild countries or stop the next wave of willing volunteers.

[puarist]

currently reading:

- daniel hartley's the politics of style

- himani bannerji's the dark side of the nation

- rokheya sakhawat hossain's padmarag

- nadia abu el haj's combat trauma

[normal-thoughts-official]

Tourism in Service of Israeli Occupation and Annexation

Since its founders set their sights on Palestine in the late 19th century, the Zionist colonial project has professed to offer superior governance and intelligence in settling the land. Indeed, in 1944, David Ben-Gurion, a leader in the Zionist movement and Israel’s first prime minister, delivered his famous speech, “The Imperatives of the Jewish Revolution,” in which he suggests that Jewish laborers would be teachers who bring “modern cultural, scientific, and technical knowledge” to make “the wilderness bloom.” Zionist iconography from the early 20th century reflects these notions of superior Jewish development and “Hebrew Labor.” Moshe Shertok, Israel’s second prime minister, echoed this idea with pejorative views of Arabs: “We have not come to an empty land to inherit it, but we have come to conquer a country from people inhabiting it, that governs it by virtue of its language and savage culture.”

[...]

Zionists deployed archaeology in an endless pursuit to legitimize their claims to the land. As anthropologist Nadia Abu El-Haj argues in her landmark book, Facts on the Ground, Zionist organizations and early Israeli society in the 1950s and 60s emphasized archeology as a “national hobby” which was crucial to the “formation and enactment of colonial-national imagination and in the substantiation of its territorial claims.” Indeed, Edward Said noted that Zionists actively removed Palestine and Palestinians from the historical record through tourism predicated on selective archeology and orientalist depictions of Arabs and Palestinians. In other words, archeology was a tool of legitimation tied fundamentally to touristic and communal recreation, forming the basis for what have emerged as some of the most popular touristic destinations in the present.

[...]

Israel also actively denies Palestinians economic development in their own tourism sector by restricting the movement of tourists, Palestinian tourism professionals, and tourism vehicles. In the December 2017 report, the PLO documented the disparate licensing practices of the Israeli Ministry of Tourism, finding that Israeli tour guides numbered over 8,000 in approved access permits to sites throughout Israel and the West Bank, whereas approved Palestinian permits constituted 0.5%. The Palestinian Authority (PA) has also requested permits to develop over 10 touristic sites throughout the West Bank. As with similar efforts in East Jerusalem, Israel has systematically denied these.

Such obstacles to Palestinian development represent an active continuity of early Zionist narratives of superior ability to develop the land, in a self-fulfilling prophesy then utilized to represent a biblically ordained destiny.

sources are in the original post (linked in the title)

NOTE: although the beginning of the post highlights the idea of jewish supremacy, it's important to remember that they specifically meant white/ashkenazim/european jews, as israel has a long withstanding history of dramatically oppressing non-european jews, particularly black and arab jews (link to source). it is also important to note that several jewish groups and organizations dramatically oppose the israeli apartheid and zionism, such as Jewish Voice for Peace and Anarchists Against the Wall. finally, that the rethoric that zionism = jewishness directly benefits israel, and several jewish ppl have outlined that it is antisemitic and erases jewish history (link to source)

the source also goes into deep detail on how christian zionist groups have played an essential role in this process, maybe even more so than jewish zionists. i didn't include these parts in my (very, very) little snippet as it would make it too long and i wanted to highlight the historical aspect, but i want to make it clear that this is in no way a jews vs palestinians conflict, and the text does not treat it as such

[hussyknee]

Mitri Raheb (2012), Faith in the Face of Empire: The Bible Through Palestinian Eyes, Orbis Books

Nadia Abu El-Haj (2001), Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society, University of Chicago Press

"The outcome of the 1967 war gave a boost to Jewish religious nationalism and to 'messianic' extremist Jewish groups within Israel, who started settling in the West Bank, claiming it as ancient Judea and Samaria. The combination of Judea and Samaria was not so much a geographical description as a religious claim with a political agenda. A process of 'Judeaization' of the country soon began, with settlers building Jewish settlements on every tel that had a biblical connection. The occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem also greatly benefited Israeli archeologists, who shifted their focus to the West Bank, in general, and to Jerusalem and the Temple, in particular. Consequently, in the course of the last forty years, a gargantuan theft of antiquities has occurred, emptying Palestine of its archeological treasures and destroying many of those seen as 'non-Israelite.'"

Mitri Raheb, Faith in the Face of Empire: The Bible Through Palestinian Eyes (2012)

keep this in mind when zionists claim there's "no Palestinian archeology." and keep in mind that every "Israeli" artifact is Palestinian archaeology; every artifact in occupation museums is a part of Palestinian (Jewish and non-Jewish) history

[sethshead]

Since the Nebi Musa riots a century ago, the Palestinian Arab national movement has always held as a central tenet the erasure of non-Arab presence and history from the land. This was true when Jews were murdered throughout the Mandate and expelled from Hebron in 1929 for worshipping at the Western Wall, to 1948 when Palestinian Arab militias and the Jordanian and Egyptian Armies ethnically cleansed Jews from all zones under their control during Israel’s War of Independence. This is true when Palestinians spread rumors that the Haram al-Sharif and al-Aqsa are being undermined for demolition every time archaeologists investigate the Jewish Temple, since that cannot but affirm a Jewish legacy to the site. This erasure is what Nadia Abu El-Haj does every time she preaches to her Barnard and Columbia students that history and archaeology are problematic when they support narratives other than her own, and it’s what Arab “liberals” do when they deny the non-Arab ethnic, cultural, and historical distinctiveness of Jewish Mizrahim. The Palestinian Arab national movement has always and ever been a far-right, exclusionary, essentialist ethnonationalism more akin to fascism than any leftist positionality it claims on Western campuses and in Western media. Its baseline is the equivalent to the most extreme, fringe Zionisms.

This is not the first time Palestinians have used their autonomy to demolish Jewish cultural, historical, and religious sites. This is not “resistance” against occupation; these acts have been commonplace since Jews were a vulnerable subject minority with no self-determination. This is a petty act intended to reinforce Arab supremacy and create an imagined “fact on the ground” that posits Jews as interlopers and not indigenous. This is burning books to rewrite history. This is why Palestinian self-determination can never be allowed to come at the cost of Jewish self-determination.

[xtruss]

Christian Zionist Archaeology: A tool of Palestinian Subjugation

Archaeological projects in Palestine led by US evangelical Christians contribute to Palestinian dispossession.

Tourists visit the archaeological site of Tel Shiloh in the West Bank, March 12, 2019

About 20 kilometres (12.4 miles) north of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, just west of the Israeli settlement Shiloh, lies Tel Shiloh, an archaeological site that attracts tens of thousands of evangelical Christians every year.

There, Scott Stripling, an evangelical pastor from Texas, heads a dig in search of remnants of the biblical tabernacle - a portable dwelling containing a chest holding the two stone tablets of the Ten Commandments.

In a recent interview with the Times of Israel, Stripling says his latest find - three horns that may have adorned an altar - supports his claim that Tel Shiloh is the site of the dwelling.

The site and surrounding area already advance this perspective: The nearby settlement has a synagogue designed as a replica of the tabernacle, and while the site's artefacts show a variety of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim groups residing in the area over a 3,700-year period, its attractions scarcely acknowledge anything outside the tabernacle story.

Stripling calls Tel Shiloh Israel's "first capital", based on the idea that Shiloh was the first capital of the Israelites for close to 400 years from the 15th century BCE. It is a claim Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also made on a visit to Tel Shiloh last year. He was accompanied by former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who tweeted at the time: "Shiloh is proof from 3000 yrs ago this land was home to @Israel site of ancient Tabernacle."

Biblical Scholars Beg to Differ.

"Properly credentialed biblical scholarship does not assume the historicity of anything prior to King David [ca. 1010-970 BCE]," says Southern Methodist University Professor of Old Testament Susanne Scholz. "That Stripling projects the biblical stories into the historical record exposes him as a Christian fundamentalist. That's the origin of his drive to do archaeology at Tel Shiloh."

Scholz also points out that the claim that Shiloh was the capital of ancient Israel is "utter nonsense".

"Such statements are used to advance geopolitical goals," she says.

Indeed, as Christian Zionists, Stripling and Huckabee believe that the state of Israel is the result of biblical prophecy. The belief stems from the idea that four millennia ago God promised the land to the Jews, who will rule it until Jesus returns to Jerusalem for the rapture. While Christians will be saved upon Jesus's return, those of other religions who do not convert to Christianity will be sent to hell.

“About 80 percent of US evangelicals espouse Christian Zionist beliefs.”

As a result of such beliefs, Christian Zionists support Israel's illegal settlement enterprise in the West Bank and, indeed, any other policy - Israeli, US, or otherwise - that secures Israeli Jewish sovereignty over the land from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River and even beyond, into Jordan's East Bank. This makes Netanyahu's annexation pledges and Donald Trump's annexation-friendly "Peace to Prosperity" plan coveted moves. Christian Zionists generally ignore Israel's violations of Palestinian rights, even of Christian Palestinians, or see them as a necessary means to an end.

Despite the matter of their supposed end-of-times demise according to this view, Jewish Israeli leaders have embraced the money and influence on US foreign policy that Christian Zionists offer, particularly with adherents Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in the Trump administration and evangelicals constituting a large segment of Trump's base (81 percent of white evangelicals voted for Trump in 2016).

The influence of Christian Zionists spurred the administration's decision to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in 2018, helping to cement Israel's claim to the city.

And while expanding settlements, home demolitions, and a host of other strategies have been means by which Israel has seized Palestinian territory and dispossessed Palestinians, so too has archaeology.

For decades, the Israeli government has used archaeology to, in the words of scholar Nadia Abu El-Haj, "create the fact of an ancient Israelite/Jewish nation and nation state," shoring up the narrative of Jewish historical ties to the land while ignoring or glossing over other peoples who have inhabited the same space - and erasing Palestinian claims to and presence on the land.

Moreover, archaeological excavation in occupied territory is largely illegal under international law.

Further, while biblical archaeology, the aim of which is to prove the validity of the Bible through tangible evidence, has been around for two centuries, the recent rise of Christian Zionism as a political force in the US and the movement's cosy relationship with the Israeli government has made it all the more influential and pervasive.

Former Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat, for example, has proposed an economic plan to the Trump administration that includes the development of almost two dozen biblical sites, mainly in the Jordan Valley - an area both Netanyahu and his political rival Benny Gantz have promised to annex. Israeli Minister of Defence Naftali Bennet has similarly announced the creation of seven new nature reserves in the West Bank and the expansion of 12 existing reserves, including the archaeological site Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in the 1940s and 1950s.

Barkat names Tel Shiloh, which is managed not by Israel's Nature and Parks Authority but by the council of the nearby settlement and a private nonprofit, as a model to be replicated across the West Bank. Thus a site explicitly run by and for the benefit of Israel's settlement enterprise with the support and interest of Christian Zionists, some of whom travel thousands of miles and pay thousands of dollars to take part in Stripling's dig, is touted as Israel's ideal.

Barkat argues that the projects outlined in his plan, including the biblical sites, would provide Palestinians with jobs and higher wages than those they would make under the Palestinian Authority (PA). The opinion parallels the Trump administration's perspective that Palestinians, if given economic incentives - termed "economic peace" - will happily abandon their decades-long struggle for self-determination, freedom, and rights for a better quality of daily life, a stance that many analysts critique.

Ali Abunimah, a cofounder of the Electronic Intifada and policy analyst with Al-Shabaka, The Palestinian Policy Network, told Al Jazeera the US economic plan is "an effort to buy Palestine for peanuts and give Palestinians nothing in exchange".

It is indeed clear that such plans of so-called economic peace bolster Israel's seizure and domination of Palestinian land and the delegitimisation of Palestinian rights. They also reinforce the Israeli government's continued cynical ties with Christian Zionists. To be sure, the two ideologies - Zionism and Christian Zionism - reinforce one another and together impel a mutually beneficial, if brutal and illegal, system of Palestinian dispossession and oppression. That is, at least until the rapture.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.

— By Mimi Kirk is Managing, Director of The Palestinian Policy Network, Al-Shabaka.

[dragnews]

What Is the Gaza Fence and Why Has It Set Off Protests Against Israel?

A snaking metal fence that divides the Gaza Strip from Israel has become the latest focal point in a generations-long conflict between Arabs and Jews in the area.

It was along this fence that at least 60 Palestinians were killed and many hundreds wounded on Monday as thousands converged to protest what they call an arbitrarily enforced demarcation line by an occupier. As protesters rushed toward the fence, some throwing rocks or homemade fire bombs, Israeli soldiers fired live bullets, which the Israeli military said was done as a last resort.

What are the fence’s origins and purpose in separating Gaza, a 25-mile-long, five-mile-wide Mediterranean coastal enclave where nearly two million Palestinians live? Is the fence recognized as an international border? And how has Israel justified deadly force to stop mostly unarmed Palestinians from breaching it? Here are the basics:

What is the fence?

The fence is actually two parallel barriers built by the Israelis: a formidable one of barbed-wire within Gaza and a 10-foot-high metal “smart fence” packed with surveillance sensors along the Israel demarcation line. A restricted buffer zone as wide as 300 yards is between them. Israel has warned that people in the zone without authorization risk being subjected to deadly force.

What is the history?

Like other parts of the Holy Land, Gaza’s history stretches back to ancient times. It was originally a Canaanite settlement and was variously ruled later by the Israelites, Egyptians, Romans and Ottomans, among others. The British seized the territory during World War I.

Gaza’s boundaries were established in a 1949 armistice agreement between Egypt and Israel, halting the conflict after the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. During the Arab-Israeli war of that period, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced from their homes or fled, many to Gaza, and they and their descendants have been classified as refugees by the United Nations.

Egypt occupied Gaza until the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, when Israel seized the territory.

The first Gaza-Israel fence went up in 1994 as a way to control Palestinian movement after the Oslo Accords — the agreement aimed at ending the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians and establishing a Palestinian state.

Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, vacating all Israeli settlements and removing its soldiers. But Israel maintains control of the northern and eastern land boundaries — Egypt controls the southern crossing, known as Rafah — and Israel controls the air and sea approaches. Most Gaza-bound food, fuel and other aid flows through Israeli-controlled crossings.

Like the Israelis, the Egyptians have in recent years restricted the movement of people and goods in and out of Gaza. Both Israel and Egypt imposed a blockade on Gaza after Hamas, the Palestinian militant organization that denies Israel’s right to exist, took control there more than a decade ago.

The deprivations in Gaza have continually worsened. Most of its people rely on aid from the United Nations and other outside groups, and the inability of residents to freely leave has created what human rights advocates call an open-air prison.

Why is the conflict flaring up now?

The “March of Return,” as Palestinians are calling the protest campaign that began in March, was intended by its creators to publicize global awareness that about two-thirds of Gaza residents are considered Palestinian refugees.

The Israelis have accused Hamas, which Israel, the United States and several other countries consider a terrorist organization, of exploiting the “March of Return” to physically attack Israel.

“Hamas has used ‘nonviolent protests’ to attempt to overrun Israel’s border and kill its civilians, and it is Hamas that bears responsibility for the recent bloodshed,” the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, an influential lobby group in the United States, said Wednesday in countering critics of Israel’s behavior.

So is the fence a legal border?

It is not recognized as a border like that between two sovereign nations. While Israel has created what it regards as a defensive buffer zone inside Gaza for security, Israel has not altered the original 1949 armistice line that delineated the territory.

Supporters of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict foresee Gaza as part of a future Palestinian state. But for now, Gaza’s status is complicated.

“Gaza is not a Palestinian state,” said David Makovsky, an expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “Part of the problem is that nobody wants Gaza.”

While Egypt could theoretically do more to ease the travails of Gaza’s population, Mr. Makovsky said, “Egypt sees it as political quicksand.”

The Palestinians and United Nations human rights officials say Israel remains an occupying power in Gaza, making it subject to certain obligations to protect civilians under international law, because the Israelis exert effective control over most of Gaza’s land, air and sea borders.

Israel has rejected that argument, asserting that it voluntarily departed Gaza 13 years ago.

“The political point is that each side of this conflict has their own narrative about the status of the Gaza Strip and Israel’s role,” said Tamara Cofman Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Middle East Policy. “The argument is not whether this is a border. The argument is whether Israel is occupying Gaza.”

Do border protests violate Israel’s sovereignty?

Israel considers attempts by Palestinian protesters to approach the fence a threat to its sovereignty, and has framed its responses to these protests as a lawful defense of the Israeli border. The Israeli authorities have dropped leaflets over Gaza warning Palestinians to not approach the fence.

“The Israel Defense Forces is determined to defend Israel’s citizens and sovereignty against Hamas’s attempts at terrorism under cover of violent riots,” the leaflets read, a position reiterated by Ronen Manelis, a spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces. “A sovereign nation cannot allow this,” he said.

The question of whether the protesters threaten Israeli sovereignty is part of the broader dispute, Middle East scholars say.

Nadia Abu El-Haj, co-director of the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University, argued that Israel’s own actions across the fence meant that it was not a border.

“A border implies a place where one state’s authority ends and another’s begins,” Dr. Abu El-Haj said. “Israel has never recognized the fence as a limit to its authority. Through closure and military incursions, Israel sustains its sovereign authority over the territory.”

Is deadly force at the fence defensible?

While Israeli authorities have justified the military’s use of deadly force, many international monitoring groups, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, have condemned it. A number of countries at the United Nations have asked for an independent inquiry into the deaths.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said that defending the border fence with lethal force was necessary.

“I don’t know of any army that would do anything differently if you had to protect your border against people who say, ‘We’re going to destroy you, and we’re going to flood into your country,’” Mr. Netanyahu told CBS News.

Other Israelis have said that if thousands of angry Palestinians breached the Gaza fence, the outcome would be far bloodier.

The Israeli military maintains it is only targeting those instigating violence, and has sought to use nonlethal deterrents — including drones that drop tear gas — to counter the protests.

American officials have backed Israel’s actions. Heather Nauert, the State Department spokeswoman, said “Israel has a right to defend itself,” while Nikki R. Haley, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, said Israel had responded with “restraint.”

United Nations human rights officials have disputed that view. Michael Lynk, the special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory, said the killings on Monday reflected a “blatant excessive use of force by Israel” and likened them to “an eye for an eyelash.”

Mr. Lynk said that protesters appeared to pose no credible threat to Israeli military forces on the Israeli side. Under humanitarian law, he said, the killing of unarmed demonstrators could amount to a war crime, and he added that “impunity for these actions is not an option.”

Jodi Rudoren contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A8 of the New York edition with the headline: On the Israel-Gaza Line, a Fence With a Tangled History. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

The post What Is the Gaza Fence and Why Has It Set Off Protests Against Israel? appeared first on World The News.

from World The News https://ift.tt/2GoZXHj via Today News

[newestbalance]

What Is the Gaza Fence and Why Has It Set Off Protests Against Israel?

A snaking metal fence that divides the Gaza Strip from Israel has become the latest focal point in a generations-long conflict between Arabs and Jews in the area.

It was along this fence that at least 60 Palestinians were killed and many hundreds wounded on Monday as thousands converged to protest what they call an arbitrarily enforced demarcation line by an occupier. As protesters rushed toward the fence, some throwing rocks or homemade fire bombs, Israeli soldiers fired live bullets, which the Israeli military said was done as a last resort.

What are the fence’s origins and purpose in separating Gaza, a 25-mile-long, five-mile-wide Mediterranean coastal enclave where nearly two million Palestinians live? Is the fence recognized as an international border? And how has Israel justified deadly force to stop mostly unarmed Palestinians from breaching it? Here are the basics:

What is the fence?

The fence is actually two parallel barriers built by the Israelis: a formidable one of barbed-wire within Gaza and a 10-foot-high metal “smart fence” packed with surveillance sensors along the Israel demarcation line. A restricted buffer zone as wide as 300 yards is between them. Israel has warned that people in the zone without authorization risk being subjected to deadly force.

What is the history?

Like other parts of the Holy Land, Gaza’s history stretches back to ancient times. It was originally a Canaanite settlement and was variously ruled later by the Israelites, Egyptians, Romans and Ottomans, among others. The British seized the territory during World War I.

Gaza’s boundaries were established in a 1949 armistice agreement between Egypt and Israel, halting the conflict after the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. During the Arab-Israeli war of that period, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced from their homes or fled, many to Gaza, and they and their descendants have been classified as refugees by the United Nations.

Egypt occupied Gaza until the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, when Israel seized the territory.

The first Gaza-Israel fence went up in 1994 as a way to control Palestinian movement after the Oslo Accords — the agreement aimed at ending the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians and establishing a Palestinian state.

Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, vacating all Israeli settlements and removing its soldiers. But Israel maintains control of the northern and eastern land boundaries — Egypt controls the southern crossing, known as Rafah — and Israel controls the air and sea approaches. Most Gaza-bound food, fuel and other aid flows through Israeli-controlled crossings.

Like the Israelis, the Egyptians have in recent years restricted the movement of people and goods in and out of Gaza. Both Israel and Egypt imposed a blockade on Gaza after Hamas, the Palestinian militant organization that denies Israel’s right to exist, took control there more than a decade ago.

The deprivations in Gaza have continually worsened. Most of its people rely on aid from the United Nations and other outside groups, and the inability of residents to freely leave has created what human rights advocates call an open-air prison.

Why is the conflict flaring up now?

The “March of Return,” as Palestinians are calling the protest campaign that began in March, was intended by its creators to publicize global awareness that about two-thirds of Gaza residents are considered Palestinian refugees.

The Israelis have accused Hamas, which Israel, the United States and several other countries consider a terrorist organization, of exploiting the “March of Return” to physically attack Israel.

“Hamas has used ‘nonviolent protests’ to attempt to overrun Israel’s border and kill its civilians, and it is Hamas that bears responsibility for the recent bloodshed,” the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, an influential lobby group in the United States, said Wednesday in countering critics of Israel’s behavior.

So is the fence a legal border?

It is not recognized as a border like that between two sovereign nations. While Israel has created what it regards as a defensive buffer zone inside Gaza for security, Israel has not altered the original 1949 armistice line that delineated the territory.

Supporters of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict foresee Gaza as part of a future Palestinian state. But for now, Gaza’s status is complicated.

“Gaza is not a Palestinian state,” said David Makovsky, an expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “Part of the problem is that nobody wants Gaza.”

While Egypt could theoretically do more to ease the travails of Gaza’s population, Mr. Makovsky said, “Egypt sees it as political quicksand.”

The Palestinians and United Nations human rights officials say Israel remains an occupying power in Gaza, making it subject to certain obligations to protect civilians under international law, because the Israelis exert effective control over most of Gaza’s land, air and sea borders.

Israel has rejected that argument, asserting that it voluntarily departed Gaza 13 years ago.

“The political point is that each side of this conflict has their own narrative about the status of the Gaza Strip and Israel’s role,” said Tamara Cofman Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Middle East Policy. “The argument is not whether this is a border. The argument is whether Israel is occupying Gaza.”

Do border protests violate Israel’s sovereignty?

Israel considers attempts by Palestinian protesters to approach the fence a threat to its sovereignty, and has framed its responses to these protests as a lawful defense of the Israeli border. The Israeli authorities have dropped leaflets over Gaza warning Palestinians to not approach the fence.

“The Israel Defense Forces is determined to defend Israel’s citizens and sovereignty against Hamas’s attempts at terrorism under cover of violent riots,” the leaflets read, a position reiterated by Ronen Manelis, a spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces. “A sovereign nation cannot allow this,” he said.

The question of whether the protesters threaten Israeli sovereignty is part of the broader dispute, Middle East scholars say.

Nadia Abu El-Haj, co-director of the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University, argued that Israel’s own actions across the fence meant that it was not a border.

“A border implies a place where one state’s authority ends and another’s begins,” Dr. Abu El-Haj said. “Israel has never recognized the fence as a limit to its authority. Through closure and military incursions, Israel sustains its sovereign authority over the territory.”

Is deadly force at the fence defensible?

While Israeli authorities have justified the military’s use of deadly force, many international monitoring groups, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, have condemned it. A number of countries at the United Nations have asked for an independent inquiry into the deaths.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said that defending the border fence with lethal force was necessary.

“I don’t know of any army that would do anything differently if you had to protect your border against people who say, ‘We’re going to destroy you, and we’re going to flood into your country,’” Mr. Netanyahu told CBS News.

Other Israelis have said that if thousands of angry Palestinians breached the Gaza fence, the outcome would be far bloodier.

The Israeli military maintains it is only targeting those instigating violence, and has sought to use nonlethal deterrents — including drones that drop tear gas — to counter the protests.

American officials have backed Israel’s actions. Heather Nauert, the State Department spokeswoman, said “Israel has a right to defend itself,” while Nikki R. Haley, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, said Israel had responded with “restraint.”

United Nations human rights officials have disputed that view. Michael Lynk, the special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory, said the killings on Monday reflected a “blatant excessive use of force by Israel” and likened them to “an eye for an eyelash.”

Mr. Lynk said that protesters appeared to pose no credible threat to Israeli military forces on the Israeli side. Under humanitarian law, he said, the killing of unarmed demonstrators could amount to a war crime, and he added that “impunity for these actions is not an option.”

Jodi Rudoren contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A8 of the New York edition with the headline: On the Israel-Gaza Line, a Fence With a Tangled History. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

The post What Is the Gaza Fence and Why Has It Set Off Protests Against Israel? appeared first on World The News.

from World The News https://ift.tt/2GoZXHj via Everyday News