💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › joshua-stephens-palestinian-anarchists-in-conversation.… captured on 2023-01-29 at 11:34:22. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Title: Palestinian Anarchists in Conversation
Author: Joshua Stephens
Date: February 2013
Language: en
Topics: Palestine, conversation
Source: https://anarchiststudies.org/palestinian-anarchists-in-conversation-recalibrating-anarchism-in-a-colonized-country/

Joshua Stephens

Palestinian Anarchists in Conversation

“I’m honestly still trying to kick the nationalist habit,” jokes

activist Ahmad Nimer, as we talk outside a Ramallah cafe. Our topic of

conversation seems an unlikely one: living as an anarchist in Palestine.

“In a colonized country, it’s quite difficult to convince people of

non-authoritarian, non-state solutions. You encounter, pretty much, a

strictly anticolonial – often narrowly nationalist – mentality,” laments

Nimer. Indeed, anarchists in Palestine currently have a visibility

problem. Despite high-profile international and Israeli anarchist

activity, there doesn’t seem to be a matching awareness of anarchism

among many Palestinians themselves.

“Contemporary discussion of anarchist themes shifts emphasis towards

more of an approach to power: rejecting power over, in favor of power

with. “When you talk about anarchism as a political concept, it is

defined as rejecting the state,” explains Saed Abu-Hijleh, a human

geography lecturer at An-Najah University in Nablus. “It talks about

freedom and society organizing itself without the interference of the

state.” But, how do a stateless people engage with anarchism, a term

that implies opposition to some form of state as a condition of its

existence?

In Palestine, elements of popular struggle have historically often been

self-organized. Even if not explicitly identified as “anarchism” as

such, “People have already done horizontal, or non-hierarchical,

organizing all their lives,” says Beesan Ramadan, another local

anarchist, who describes anarchism as a “tactic” yet questions the need

to attach a label. She continues, “It is already there in my culture and

in the way Palestinian activism has worked. During the First Intifada,

for instance, when someone’s home was demolished, people would organize

to rebuild it, almost spontaneously. As a Palestinian anarchist I look

forward to going back to the roots of the First Intifada. It did not

come from a political decision. It came against the will of the PLO.”

Yasser Arafat declared independence in November 1988, after the First

Intifada began in December 1987, Ramadan says “…to hijack the efforts of

the First Intifada.”

The Palestinian case has been further complicated in recent decades. The

landscape of largely horizontal self-organization in the First Intifada,

was displaced in 1993 with the signing of the Oslo Accords and the

top-down Palestinian Authority (PA) they created. “Now here in

Palestine,” Ramadan observes, “we don’t have the meaning of authority

that other people defy…We have the PA and the occupation, and our

priorities are always mixed up. The PA and the Israelis [are on] the

same level because the PA is a tool for the Israelis to oppress the

Palestinians.” Nimer also shares this view, arguing it has now spread

much more widely and that many now see the PA as a “proxy-occupation”.

“Being an anarchist doesn’t mean having the black and red flag or going

black bloc,” Ramadan points out, referring to the established anarchist

protest tactic of wearing all-black clothing and covering faces. “I

don’t want to imitate any western group in the way that they ‘do’

anarchism…it is not going to work here, because you need to create a

whole consciousness of the people. People don’t understand this

concept.” Yet Ramadan believes the low visibility of Palestinian

anarchists, and lack of awareness about anarchism among Palestinians

more broadly, does not necessarily mean that few exist. “I think there

are a good number of anarchists in Palestine,” she notes, although later

conceding, “…mostly, for now, it is an individual belief [although] we

are all active in our own way.”

This lack of a unified anarchist movement in Palestine could come as a

result of the fact Western anarchists never really focused on

colonialism. “[Western writers] didn’t have to,” argues Budour Hassan,

an activist and law student. “Their struggle was different.” Nimer also

adds: “For an anarchist in the US, decolonization might be a part of

anti-authoritarian struggle; for me, it’s simply what needs to happen.”

Importantly, Hassan extends her own understanding of anarchism beyond

positions merely against state or colonial authoritarianism. She refers

to Palestinian novelist and Arab nationalist Ghassan Kanafani, noting

that although he challenged the occupation, “…he also challenged

patriarchal relations and the bourgeois classes… This is why I think we

Arabs – anarchists from Palestine, from Egypt, from Syria, from Bahrain

– need to begin reformulating anarchism in a way that reflects our

experiences of colonialism, our experiences as women in a patriarchal

society, and so on.”

“Just being part of political opposition won’t save you,” warns Ramadan,

who adds that for many women, “When you stand against the occupation,

you also have to stand against the family.” In fact, the over-emphasized

portrayal of women at protests, she maintains, masks the fact that in

reality many women have to fight just to be there. Even attending

evening meetings requires young women to overcome social boundaries not

faced by their male counterparts.

“As Palestinians, we need to establish the connection with Arab

anarchists,” Ramadan says influenced by her reading of material from

anarchists in Egypt and Syria. “We have so much in common and, because

of the isolation, we end up meeting international anarchists who

sometimes, as good as their politics are, remain stuck within their

misconceptions and Islamophobia.”

In a short piece published on Jadaliyya entitled “Anarchist, Liberal,

and Authoritarian Enlightenments: Notes from the Arab Spring” Mohammed

Bamyeh argued that the recent Arab uprisings reflected “…a rare

combination of an anarchist method and a liberal intention,” noting that

“…the revolutionary style is anarchist, in the sense that it requires

little organization, leadership, or even coordination [and] tends to be

suspicious of parties and hierarchies even after revolutionary success.”

For Ramadan, nationalism also represents a significant problem. “People

need nationalism in times of struggle,” she concedes, “[But] it

sometimes becomes an obstacle… You know what the negative sense of

nationalism means? It means you only think as Palestinians, that

Palestinians are the only ones who are suffering in the world.” Nimer

also adds, “You’re talking about sixty years of occupation and ethnic

cleansing, and sixty years of resisting that through nationalism. That’s

too long, it’s unhealthy. People can go from nationalist to fascist,

quite quickly.”

December’s crowds in Cairo’s Tahrir square may yet offer hope to

Palestinian anarchists. As President Mohamed Morsi consolidated

executive, legislative and judicial powers under his office, anarchist

groups joined the demonstrations. These Egyptians actually call

themselves anarchists and embrace anarchism as a political tradition.

Back in Ramallah, Nimer reflects: “I’m often pessimistic, but you can’t

discount Palestinians. We could break out at any moment. The First

Intifada began with a car accident.”