 {Transcript}
Hi Baba, I’ve been driving around thinking about my Jewish studies class and trying to apply the information that I learned to my activism. I wanted to write you a letter telling you everything that I’ve learned this quarter and explain what I’m thinking about right now but I know you’re busy so I thought it’d be nice if I sent it in a voice note so you can listen to it on your way to work. And if we are being honest our best thinking is always done in the car on long drives anyways. Remember when you used to drive me to Cascade Ridge Elementary school every day? You poor single father, just driving my ass 45 minutes each way to and from school. Looking back on those times we spent talking in the car are some of my favorite memories. I remember when you used to ask me to envision what a free Palestine will look like. I don’t know if you know this but that’s actually a revolutionary tool that we learned about in my Critical Race Theory class, it’s called “decolonial imagination” and it’s a really important step towards liberation for colonized people. I’ve learned a lot by studying Jewish history this quarter and I found it really surprising to see how similar Palestinian identity was to Jewish identity. I want to acknowledge that I know I’m generalizing when I say “Jewish identity” since Jewish history is multifaceted and Mizrahi Jews have a much different history than European Jews do. Nonetheless, I’m going to assert that Palestinians have a lot that we can learn from our Jewish brothers and sisters as a whole. Which is why when I envision a free Palestine now, I look to Jewish history for examples of what we should and shouldn’t do in the future. We read a book by Hannah Arendt who’s an anti-Zionist holocaust survivor and scholar and she talked a lot about eternal anti-Semitism and how detrimental it was towards achieving true Jewish liberation. She says that, and I quote, “Jews concerned with the survival of their people would in a curious desperate misinterpretation hit on the consoling idea that anti-Semitism, after all, might be an excellent means for keeping the people together, so that the assumption of eternal anti-Semitism would even imply an eternal guarantee of Jewish existence.” This really stuck out to me because we are beginning to experience this eternal victimization as well in the Palestinian community. A lot of Muslims, including Palestinians as you already know, justify the colonization of our land and genocide by saying that it was Allah’s will. But that's a cheap copout in my opinion, for both Jews and for Palestinians, because an eternal victimhood negates any responsibility from our oppressor. It places the blame on God and external factors which will always hold us back from achieving our liberation because we cannot contest the prophecy of Allah. It also negates any responsibility on our part, or on the Jews part, for how we have come to be in this position of eternal victimhood. I feel like I’m just beginning to actually understand the multi-dimensional history of anti-Semitism in Europe and I know that I still have a long ways to go but I’m going to give you a brief rundown of some of the major concepts that I’ve learned so we can look to them as an example for our own self-preservation. So as you know, Jews are a diasporic group of people. After their exile from Israel they lived all over the world but in Europe specifically they tried to preserve their Jewish identity by relatively staying separate from mainstream society. This manifested into two different major groups of Jewish people—Arendt uses the terms Jewish elite and the Jewish masses to describe them. The Jews who made up the Jewish masses at the time, were extremely poor but nonetheless were still granted certain privileges from the state. For example they were able to remain living in Jewish ghettos, which was actually wanted because it helped to preserve the Jewish identity. On the other hand, the paradox is that even though neither the Jewish elite, nor the members of the Jewish masses, wanted to be assimilated to European identity, the Jewish elite became aligned with the nation state. The elite were very interconnected to the banking system but not in the typical anti-Semitic trope that we immediately think of when we hear that. Jews were relatively apolitical because they didn’t want to assimilate to a Christian European identity, and at the time there was a major stigma around Christians handling money. So Jews, being the versatile group of diasporic people that they were, they filled that role and did it very well. The issues began to really arise when antisemitism became internalized in upper class Jews. The “elite Jews” were against the emancipation of the Jewish masses because they knew if the masses were emancipated into this seeming equality, then their privileges would be lost. So the Jewish masses and the Jewish elite at this point were pitted against each other. Up until then the Jewish religion was an incredibly diverse population. But because of the Reich’s racialization of Jews as a whole, they became an ethno-religious group of people in Europe. When I started this class I opened up with my qualms about Judaism being considered an ethno-religion because of how diverse the Jewish population was. I think I understand this a little better now because not all Jews fit into this “ethno-religious” grouping, but any attempt to discredit the real racialization and stigmatization of European Jews would be illegitimate. When the banking systems in Europe failed and an economic collapse happened, Jews were easy to scapegoat. They had already been segregated from mainstream society and were easy to vilify based on the privileges that they had possessed out of necessity for their survival. The key factor here for me, was realizing that diasporic people cannot act as a tool for the state. In a podcast by Christian Davis, titled ‘Fascism and Colonialism’ I learned that Jewish Zionists were heavily involved in colonizing Namibia before Nazi Germany gained most of its power. But after World War 1, Germany had lost virtually all of their colonized land in Africa and since White supremacy had already gained momentum in German society, this loss was extremely humiliating to the White Germans. And again this loss of control from the White elites was attributed to Jewish involvement and Jews were yet again placed as the scapegoat. Another really prominent similarity between us and Jews is that we share this relationship to diaspora. And that makes Jewish history incredibly useful for Palestinians and other refugee groups to look to as an example when settling in someone else’s territory. My professor this quarter said (quote) “rootlessness is a breeding ground for atrocities”. And that really stuck out to me because Palestinians are now a diasporic group of people as well and a lot of us are residing on stolen land. And we are not entitled to any of it, especially not that of Turtle Island, we must act as guests upon entry to these communities and while we must preserve our identity. I’m no way shape or form advocating for us to assimilate, but also we mustn’t segregate ourselves from other marginalized groups and instead work to create real solidarity between us otherwise we will just perpetuate justified acts of violence in the name of self preservation. You see that’s also something I learned, and not actually from the Jewish people themselves but instead from their oppressors. Conquer and divide is a real strategy that works. We see it with the Nazi’s pitting the elite Jews against the Jewish masses but we also see it with plenty of other Jewish historical events. In North Africa for example, the French granted the Algerian Jewish population with French citizenship and didn’t offer this opportunity to its other Arab populations. This very clearly created a dichotomized relationship between North African Jews and non-Jewish North African people. Another author we read this quarter was Ariella Aisha Azoulay, she is a Palestinian and North African Jewish person that grew up in “Israel” as an Israeli and she’s informed a lot of my thought process here. She says “I came here [United States] seven years ago and I felt that Undoing Potential History book was almost done, but then I quickly realized it’s not done. And rather than having Palestine as its focus, Palestine became a reiteration of imperial violence rather than the exception.” Which I think brings to my point beautifully. We are not the exception, we are not special, and our persecution is not eternal. We are merely, like Azoulay says, a reiteration of imperial violence, and we can look to other displaced people when we need direction towards our liberation. The oppressed are the only ones who can liberate themselves. When I decided that I wanted to write this letter to you I initially wanted to warn you about the dangers of the oppressed becoming the oppressor, and how this typically is a cyclical process, meaning it’s a cycle of the oppressed becoming the oppressor. My goal was to warn you about the dangers of a free Palestine operating as Israel does now by using the justification of self-determination and protection of the Palestinian people. Upon my further investigation and study of Jewish history though, I realized that it is much more complex than this. All oppressed people subconsciously buy into ideologies that support White supremacy and oftentimes we seek protection from the state, settler colonial states, as a last ditch effort to save ourselves. We can see clear examples of this in Jewish history starting before the creation of Israel in Namibia up until now with the atrocities we see committed against Palestinians by Zionists. But we should also recognize when this is happening within our own community.e need to call out neoliberal Palestinian politics, we need to have community discussions about defunding the police and standing in solidarity with Black folxs and other marginalized communities in the land we settle, we need to make sure we aren’t aligning ourselves with the same states who would scapegoat us in a second if they needed to like they did to the Jews, and we have to be aware of when we are being divided. Some questions that I have coming out of this is how can we hold Fatah accountable for their corruption? How can we call in Hamas for discussions about the separation of church and state? I plan to be more critical in the ways I engage with lobbying and bureaucratic bullcrap in the United States from here on out. I plan to be more militant in my beliefs and less divisive within my community. And this means when I envision a free Palestine, I see it as a land where we radically love and accept anyone. Where we don’t have borders and we don’t displace others. Where we never use the excuse of self-determination to oppress someone else like the Israelis have done to us or the Nazis did to them. Jewish people are a necessity to Palestine and we will all prevail with radical love. Author: Josh Ceretti On Monday June 15th, a delegation from Whatcom Peace and Justice met with Rick Larsen, who represents the area in between Bellingham and Everett in Congress. Participants included WPJC Executive Director Aline Prata, board members Yoav Litvin and Josh Cerretti, WPJC interns Devan Gunther, Marii Herlinger, and Aisha Mansour, Alternatives to Military Service volunteer Zi Zhang, as well as Gene Marx from Veterans for Peace and three of the Congressman's staff.
After the requisite technical glitches, Aline began by explaining to Larsen some of the problems with the proposed Justice in Policing Act, which he had highlighted for our feedback. Aline pointed to the failure of existing rules and punishments to reduce police violence, suggesting that more regulations to be continuously broken are not what is needed, but a transformation in the very idea of policing and the carceral state. Josh then pressed the Congressman on the specific problem of police militarization, particularly as it is enabled through the Department of Defense's 1033 program, an issue to which we will return. Yoav provided Larsen with information on community control of police and how that model differs substantially from the community policing model for which many politicians are seeking more funding. Zi continued with a story from another volunteer about police presence in our local schools, asking the Congressman to support legislation that would remove School Resource Officers from their embedded positions within educational institutions. Last but not least, Gene placed these concerns in a global context by detailing multiple ways the Pentagon could save billions of dollars and asking Larsen to commit to a smaller Department of Defense budget in the next cycle. We appreciate the Congressman taking the time to meet with us, but those familiar with his record will not be surprised to learn that we received little support and no solid commitments from him. He promised to bring our concerns about too-little-too-late reforms in policing, community control, the school-to-prison pipeline, as well as local and global militarisms to Washington DC. At the same time, Larsen responded evasively or defensively to many of our propositions, so we're asking for your help to make sure he fulfills his obligations to the people he represents and acts to demilitarize law enforcement here in the United States. In recent weeks, many thoughtful critiques and examinations of the DoD's 1033 program have demonstrated how local police increasingly got their hands on military equipment that they are now using to brutalize Black people and other marginalized communities across the country. This program was instituted in the 1990s to help the military deal with a surplus of equipment needlessly stockpiled during the Cold War and Gulf War. In the wake of the LA Uprising and the mainstreaming of antiblack 'law and order' politics, many state, city, and county police forces sought gear that would allow them to more easily dominate and control large groups of civilians. This program deployed millions of dollars of military weapons within the borders claimed by the United States before a temporary halt in 2015 in the wake of reactions against militarized policing of Black-led uprisings in Ferguson, Baltimore, and elsewhere. The fragility of this sort of progressive reform became clear when the 1033 was reinstated in 2017 and even a cursory scan of coverage from recent protests demonstrates that responses to civil unrest have only become more militarized in recent years. Congressman Larsen responded to our initial critique of this program by pointing to the fact, flogged in many recent reports defending the program, that the 1033 program also involves transfers of office furniture and a large quantity of non-martial goods. What such a position fails to grasp is that all of these transfers, whether it's the mine-resistant vehicle owned by the Whatcom County Sherriffs or a comfy office chair used by a county health department worker, increase militarization. Militarization is the step-by-step process through which a person, institution, or idea comes to depend upon the military for its well being. The 1033 program makes local governments more dependent on the military for their functioning, drafting them to serve military ends with tricks to alleviate budget constraints. Furthermore, the program reduces the costs of decommissioning gear that often should not have been built in the first place, promoting careless spending by the Department of Defense and artificially disguising the costs of the waste they produce. That's why Whatcom Peace and Justice has supported attempts to end the program for years, even though most of the 'fixes' proposed so far only restrict the transfer of weapons and leave this militarizing program intact. An example of one of these good, but not good enough, responses to the 1033 program is the Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act introduced by Georgia Congressman Hank Johnson in March of 2019. We were pleased to see that on June 11th, 2020, Congressman Larsen became a co-sponsor of this bill that was introduced with 66 original co-sponsors, of which he was not a part, fifteen months ago. Oddly, when praised for this, Larsen questioned the accuracy of Congress.gov, told our team to 'dig a little deeper,' and claimed to have been working on the issue with Johnson since 2015. While evidence exists of the two collaborating on small business loans and other projects, the fact remains that Larsen is not an original co-sponsor of this bill and did not sign up to be one until weeks after police murdered George Floyd and then responded with military force against protestors. We would have been open to hearing the Congressman explain how recent events had pushed him to take a stronger position on this issue but he instead claimed to have always been on top of this issue and, in our estimation, took credit for the work of his Black colleague. As of July 10th, it would seem clear that the Justice in Policing Act, despite being passed by the House, will not pass the Senate and become law. This makes it even more imperative to have a focused piece of legislation that takes action on the militarization of policing instead of speaking out against it publicly while voting to fund it when Congress is in session. Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez has introduced a Demilitarizing Local Law Enforcement bill (HR 7143) that would repeal the military surplus program entirely (instead of just restricting certain transfers). The bill has 14 co-sponsors, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, and Barbara Lee, but not Larsen. In June, the bill was referred to the House Armed Services Committee on which Larsen sits, but he has made no statements in favor of this bill or taken any action to advance it. We demand more from our representatives. So, we're asking you, supporters of Whatcom Peace and Justice to reach out to Congressman Rick Larsen. Let him know you oppose the militarization of policing, the militarization of civilian governance, and the camouflaging of military spending's true costs through the Department of Defense's 1033 program. This program needs to be ended and we need to re-assess the presence of military equipment in all security forces, from local police departments up to federal agencies like ICE and Border Patrol. Here's a template for your message: [This template is designed for people in the 2nd Congressional District (Find your rep). Feel free to modify it to contact your Representative if you don’t live in the 2nd] Dear Congressman Larsen, I am writing to encourage you to take action on the militarization of policing and to support H.R. 7143, the Demilitarizing Local Law Enforcement Act of 2020. In recent weeks, many thoughtful critiques and examinations of the DoD's 1033 program have demonstrated how local police increasingly got their hands on military equipment that they are now using to brutalize Black people and other marginalized communities across the country. This program was instituted in the 1990s to help the military deal with a surplus of equipment needlessly stockpiled during the Cold War and Gulf War. In the wake of the LA Uprising and the mainstreaming of antiblack 'law and order' politics, many state, city, and county police forces sought gear that would allow them to more easily dominate and control large groups of civilians. This program deployed millions of dollars of military weapons within the borders claimed by the United States before a temporary halt in 2015 in the wake of reactions against militarized policing of Black-led uprisings in Ferguson, Baltimore, and elsewhere. The fragility of this sort of progressive reform became clear when the 1033 was reinstated in 2017 and even a cursory scan of coverage from recent protests demonstrates that responses to civil unrest have only become more militarized in recent years. I appreciate your co-sponsorship of Congressman Hank Johnson’s Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act as well as your vote in favor of the Justice in Policing Act, both of which would limit transfers of military equipment to civilian police if passed into law. Unfortunately, neither piece of legislation goes far enough and many barriers stand in the way of their adoption. So, I urge you to become a co-sponsor of House Resolution 7143, Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez’s Demilitarizing Local Law Enforcement Act of 2020, and to do everything in your ability to move this bill forward on the Armed Services Committee. Your constituents do not want tanks, rifles, and armored stormtroopers on the streets of our communities. We see the connections between the last two decades of senseless wars initiated by the US abroad and the resultant militarization of life at home, exemplified by recent waves of police violence. As my Representative, I’m asking you to take action and help demilitarize local law enforcement. Best, [Your name] Author: Mary Emmerling At times like these, with protests erupting in major cities throughout the US, while under the thumb of a viral pandemic that has ravaged communities across the globe, the words we use might seem low on our list of priorities. Maybe it’s just my shiny new English degree sitting on my bedside table, or maybe it’s the hundreds of tweets and social media graphics posted every hour by news outlets, political officials, and community members over the past weeks, but I’ve been thinking extra about the words we use in situations such as these and to describe those who are involved. The way we speak—more specifically, how the powerful speak about the oppressed—has a profound impact on the representations of the power dynamics within oppressive institutions and re-frames the dialogue to continually center and empower the powerful over the oppressed. On May 25, George Floyd, an unarmed black man, was arrested and detained by Minneapolis Police. While he was handcuffed, Officer Derek Chauvin used a method of restraint that many police officers and enforcement experts have since powerfully condemned: Chauvin kneeled on Floyd’s neck for nearly eight minutes. As a result of this deeply irresponsible and absolutely unnecessary physical restraint, George Floyd died in police custody. On May 26, a video of this incident surfaced on the internet, and communities around the United States—and later, other parts of the globe—were palpably and intensely enraged. Protests began in Minneapolis and other major US cities, and the news coverage and official statements from government officials followed shortly after. On May 28, President Trump addressed the protests directly, in a tweet so virulent that Twitter deemed it “glorifying violence” and blocked it from users unless they specifically chose to view it:  The President’s use of the phrase “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” hearkens back to 1967 when the Miami police Chief Walter Headley, notoriously bigoted against the Black community, coined the phrase in response to crime in the city. Though the President claimed to be unaware of the controversial history behind the phrase, his use of it imitates the powerful racist rhetoric of authoritative figures during the Civil Rights Era and stoked a raging fire in Black communities across the nation. The phrase, while overtly aggressive and racially charged, also employs a rhetorical strategy that has been a key factor in American responses to foreign adversaries and war-time declarations for decades: personifying the enemy to motivate democratic retribution. First, let’s dissect the phrase itself: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” The cause-and-effect structure of the phrase initially places the active blame on whoever starts looting and not whoever starts shooting; as the phrase suggests, the shooting will not start before the looting does, and so the shooting must be a direct response to the looting. Furthermore, the analogous silhouette of the phrase itself (i.e. A is to B as C is to D) implies that the “looting” and the “shooting” are, if not fully equivalent to each other, at least comparable to each other. Therefore, the violence enforced by the shooting must be in equal or comparative nature to the violence of the looting, and thus, the shooting cannot be deemed more violent than the looting. Finally, there are no agents in the phrase. Who begins the looting? Who begins the shooting? Although the subtext implies who Trump refers to when he mentions the “looters” (the protestors) and the “shooters” (the police/military), the clause itself mentions no agents who are directly responsible for the actions of looting and shooting. If Headley and Trump had been more lyrically talented, they might have chosen a phrase that rhymed, instead, like “When they loot, we shoot.” But, this potential other phrase, though much catchier (if I do say so myself) would be much less rhetorically effective. Incorporating agents as subjects—“they” and “we”—allows blame on both groups for their actions. If they loot, we can blame them for looting. If we shoot, they can blame us for shooting. In the original phrase, however, no agent is available upon which to pin direct blame, and so while the looters can’t be held responsible for their actions, it is even more noteworthy that the shooters can’t, either. By passively describing both parties as aggressive and causal, this phrase protects the oppressive party (in this case, the shooters) from public blame. President Trump continued to emphasize this passive protection of the oppressors in a subsequent tweet sent on May 29:  Here, Trump reiterates the causal and analogous heart of the original phrase—“Looting leads to shooting”—and continues to speak in the passive voice about those shooting—“…a man was shot and killed…”. The main difference in this tweet though, and the difference that inches closer to the typical American personification of enemies in war-time, is that Trump names the ones who were shot, but not the ones who shot them. Given Trump’s emphasis on the causal relationship between looting and shooting, we can assume that the man who “was shot and killed” and the other “7 people shot” in Louisville were one and the same as those who looted. This personification does two things: first, it blames those who were shot for getting shot in the first place. Second, it villainizes the looters far more powerfully than it does the shooters, and thus drives the American public toward condemning the looters and not the shooters. According to Dr. Jeffrey Engel’s paper “The Personification of Evil,” 1 when American policymakers attempt to justify war and motivate the American public to support war-time efforts, they have historically used a specific rhetoric in which “[they] almost always describe their enemies as unrepresentative tyrants while claiming affiliation with their oppressed peoples.” For example, in 2003, George Bush stated, “The danger posed by Saddam Hussein and his weapons cannot be ignored or wished away. The danger must be confronted.” Later in this speech, Bush claimed, “The first to benefit from a free Iraq would be the Iraqi people, themselves.” Bush’s linguistic tactics in these statements strictly villainize Saddam Hussein while establishing the US as the “protector” of the Iraqi people. By naming Hussein specifically, Bush absolves the US from any responsibility for the war by asserting its “necessity.” Additionally, the separation of Hussein from his people allows Americans to posit that such war efforts will be beneficial to both the American people and the Iraqi people. While these examples exist firmly in a foreign war context, Trump’s personification of the “man [who] was shot” in his follow-up tweet functions in a similar way: singles out the looters and, as a result, blames them for the shooting, thus attempting to justify the use of police force. The tweet suggests that shooting is beneficial for both the police force and the other protesters because it is enforcing a standard that protects all American citizens from the violent looting at these protests. The domestic use of this rhetorical form, then, mirrors American policymakers’ tendencies to villainize foreign individuals in wartime and places the protests occurring on American soil in a much more contentious context. Protestors protest because the system is not serving them and/or actively harming them, and when police assert physical force, they attempt to aggressively control and suppress the protestors. These aggressive suppression tactics emerge directly from systemic forms of racism that view Black and Brown pain as illegitimate and damaging to the American reputation as a “free country.” Therefore, when governmental officials rhetorically treat American protestors as if they are of a similar caliber as foreign aggressors, they optically subvert the power dynamics that fuel the protests and present the oppressed groups as direct threats to the systems that cradle the privileged American public. Ultimately, this personified war rhetoric, when used in domestic contexts, is actively dangerous and incendiary towards the oppressed peoples rioting against the oppressive systems. President Trump’s use of this kind of rhetorical pattern to blame police aggression on the protestors’ behavior was used by prominent news sources covering the protests, as well. On May 30, The New York Times tweeted an article about a reporter who was shot by police during the protests with a caption that strictly followed the passive-active-passive structure of President Trump’s tweets:  First, the Times mentions that in Minneapolis, a photographer “was shot” in the eye. The passive grammatical structure of this claim obscures whoever shot the photographer, and thus protects the shooter from public blame. Next, in Washington D.C., “protesters struck a journalist...”. The structure of this statement is distinctly active—the protesters actively struck the journalist, and thus can be overtly blamed. Lastly, in Louisville, “A reporter was hit by a pepper ball…by an officer who appeared to be aiming at her.” This final statement returns to their initial passive voice, absolving the officer of blame by not making the officer the active subject of the sentence, although the officer seemed to be deliberately perpetrating an act of violence on this reporter. Even though the Times ultimately identified the officer as the source of the pepper ball, their initial reporting and headlining of the event in such a way perpetuates the passive treatment of aggressive police officers in the context of domestic revolution. In the time of rebellion, the President of the United States invokes a violently racist phrase to villainize the protesters and absolve the police force and The New York Times, a reputable news source, does the same. So, why should we care? In these cases, and in all cases of systemic oppression and revolt, the way we speak matters. Presenting protestors as active aggressors and police forces and militarized institutions as passive responders re-centralizes the oppressors as the protagonists (and ultimately, the victors) and dangerously villainizes the oppressed. These protests are fiery expressions of rebellion and impending change, and they are the strategic and powerful responses of communities that have been actively silenced. These protests are powered by the agency and autonomy of communities that have been oppressed for centuries. Speak about them as such. 1 Jeffrey Engel, "The Personification of Evil." (unpublished manuscript, 2003), typescript.
Below is the press release regarding WPJC's nomination for the U.S. Peace Prize. The link to find WPJC's listing in the US Peace Memorial Foundation's Peace Registry can be found here.  |
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