To Save Our Collective Soul(s): thoughts on Palestine-Israel

It has been a while since I posted. I have so much to share, and I wanted to write a more proper piece for this genre about the present moment— a moment that has brought me to my knees in grief and despair, but lately with a glimmer of hope. Things will get much worse before they get better, I fear, but I believe we can see this as part of the long and painful labor of birthing a new world. In the meantime I gave this talk on October 26 at a panel at UNC Chapel Hill on Gaza, and people asked me to post, so I thought I would put it here for now. I understand there are a lot of strong feelings on this topic, and as I say at the end, I am happy to talk with folks who feel confused — especially Jews and Israelis, so if you feel triggered/baffled please, please, please reach out. Also one of the most important lessons I have gained from this horrible period is the importance of accepting that we can’t have all conversations with all people right now. This is ok. Before you forward this, think about whether the person you are sending to is in a place where they can hear this.

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First, I just want to say thank you to for inviting me, and to all the speakers for being here—for sharing your knowledge, wisdom and passion. And thank you all for being here, for trying to learn and grow and hopefully help our world become freer. The main point I want to make today is that everyone’s liberation is bound up with the liberation of Palestine; not only Palestinians, not only Israelis, but all of us who live in and with the ongoing and genocidal illness of white supremacy & settler colonialism. An illness that has ravaged much of the world and from which we must heal if we have any chance of surviving as a species because this liberation is inextricably linked to Climate change as well.  

I want to invite you to let that sink in.  Take a moment to breathe. Feel your feet on the floor, your butt in your chair, your perhaps broken-heart resting on its throne in the middle of your chest, Let that be where your mind rests, on your heart.  (If your mind is yelling things at you—or at me, hold them like you would a hurt baby, the mind of Western dualism and white supremacy is fighting to maintain its hegemony and relevance as its limits are becoming more and more clear.) If you are having a lot of feelings that’s ok, they are welcome, but let us not be hijacked by them. To Jews and Israelis, in particular, I believe there is a lot of shame blinding us and hijacking our discussions.

My name is Michal Osterweil, I teach here in the Department of Global Studies, and my research focuses on theories and practices of liberation in times of Crisis—in particular theories of justice emerging from a recognition of the fundamental interdependence of all things, what we call Relationality. Some of my most important teachers are black feminist prison abolitionists and indigenous movements, whose awareness of the complexity of finding justice and liberation in a harm-filled world full of hurt people hurting people offer beautiful, realistic, and hopeful—but in process—visions of justice and liberation. I am also an Israeli born Jew who derives a great deal of sustenance from that tradition—a tradition that I love and that has informed my critique of and absolute despair about the ongoing and modern project of Zionism. (Zionism has nothing to do with the Jewish religion, it was a 19th century political project.) A project that from its inception was based on the tragic and misguided survival instinct of a persecuted people trying to fit in with whiteness and with white supremacist imperial patriarchal capitalism, which was and continues to be a tragic, yet sadly not uncommon tendency of people—to become that which they opposed or has oppressed them.

I hope to be able to speak from both these sources of expertise/studentship—as much as time permits. But I want to just start by saying that I am heartbroken as I sit here trying to wrap my head around how it is possible that some people, Jews and Israelis in particular, but also many others, who think that calling for a ceasefire is controversial or worse, antisemitic. Just this week the “progressive” town of Carrboro down the road could not even agree to make a statement calling for a ceasefire in fear of offending its Jewish constituents. My mind, and perhaps more my heart, cannot really wrap my head around how anyone can be so cut off from their humanity that calling for an end to murder and killing and genocide feels controversial. But then I remember this is what the illness of white supremacist settler colonialism does to people and depends on—it separates people from their innate humanity.  As Civil Rights leader Ruby Sales asserts, “racism is not a privilege but is spiritual malformation and social pathology.” I want to underscore this spiritual dimension, and the recognition of white supremacist settler colonialism as a spiritual illness because I believe that not only is calling for a cease-fire essential, calling for an end to the occupation and to the ongoing genocide of Palestinians is one of the most important chances, Israel particularly, but all of the West more broadly, have to save our collective soul(s).

 It is tricky to speak at this register, because the most important thing at this moment is to center Palestinian life—and yet it is important for me that you understand what I am saying not as woowoo or metaphorical, but quite literally, the lives and souls of us all depend on stopping this cycle of endless asymmetrical violence once and for all. And to reiterate: I believe that climate change and the culture of separation and dehumanization it too is based on is itself inextricably linked. And to those who will dismiss me as being pro-Palestinian, and so anti-Israeli, I plead with you to believe me when I say that my concern for Palestinians is inseparable from my concern and love for Israelis.

In 1977 a group of brilliant black feminist activists and intellectuals wrote the Combahee River Collective Statement in which they said “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression”. I believe a similar thing can be said about the liberation of Palestine. “If Palestine were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free.”* I feel privileged to have spent the last few years immersed in the wisdom of black feminist activists and scholars who are the foremost theorist-practitioners of transformative justice based prison-abolition which I believe is one of the richest sources of visions of justice and liberation, particularly in a world in which most everyone has been so horribly victimized by the violence of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy—including, importantly,  those that are so-called privileged. Transformative Justice is based on the recognition that “where life is precious, life is precious;”[1] that no-one is disposable,[2] and importantly it acknowledges that what freedom and justice look like have yet to be fully co-created, but that they must be led by those who have suffered the brunt of the oppressive structures of the modernist colonial nightmare. Not because their lives matter more, but because they are our only chance of leading with awareness of the pitfalls of the dominant versions of justice that are themselves inextricably linked to white supremacist colonialism—And because they still have a foothold in other sources of justice/liberation that have not been fully colonized.[3]

This is no easy job, the pull of the dominant version of reality, politics and justice are very powerful —as history has shown us many, many times, through liberation struggles becoming like the systems they opposed, just with different leaders, or as in the tragic case of my ancestors, blindly repeating horrific acts of genocide.

We have a lot of brilliant activists and thinkers really grappling with whether justice itself can be salvaged from the repertoire of modernist politics—and there is more to this than I will have time for here. But, for now, I just want us to underscore that this takes us back to the register I started to point to—spirit. This is the register so many of the most important historical movements and thinkers appeal to—and get killed for. MLK Jr., Gandhi, even Fanon.[4]

As Reverend Lucas Johnson, a black Baptist minister in the US and thought leader puts it:

“frankly, when I think about the generations of dehumanization and suffering that my people have endured — how can there be justice for what’s happened, in the sense that we tend to look for it? And so that’s where my spiritual practice comes in, where I have to find another way [of accepting and dealing with that grief].”[5]

  Now, I wish we had more time to talk about this, and I plan to in future writing. But for now we must stay focused on the immediate register—ending the war and genocide in Gaza, ending the occupation, blockade and apartheid against Palestinians—so that we even have a chance to save our collective soul(s).

**I have struggled to know exactly what I can add/say that would be generative, given that I didn’t know who would be in the room, and where people are ….and because of time. So, I want to just say with all my love, I am happy to talk to you about this even if you disagreed with me. One of my closest friendships started after another panel about Israel/antisemitism, with a Jewish student who disagreed fiercely with me, but wanted to continue the conversation.

[1] Repeatedly stated by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, abolitionist geographer and amazing activist

[2] See adrienne marie brown: https://www.kqed.org/arts/13893734/a-roadmap-away-from-cancel-culture-and-towards-transformative-justice

[3] To hold on to these sources is a beautiful capacity reached by some people who, as Howard Thurman puts it, have their backs against the wall, victims of oppression. Howard Thurman, Jesus and The Disinherited. 1949.

[4] For an excellent description of Fanon’s often misunderstood understanding of both violence and revolution, see: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n21/adam-shatz/vengeful-pathologies :

“It is, of course, true that Fanon advocated armed struggle against colonialism, but he referred to the use of violence by the colonised as ‘disintoxicating’, not ‘cleansing’, a widely circulated mistranslation….

But Fanon also wrote hauntingly of the effects of war trauma – including the trauma suffered by anti-colonial rebels who killed civilians. And in a passage that few of his latter-day admirers have cited, he warned that

‘racism, hatred, resentment and the ‘legitimate desire for revenge’ alone cannot nurture a war of liberation. These flashes of consciousness which fling the body into a zone of turbulence, which plunge it into a virtually pathological dreamlike state where the sight of the other induces vertigo, where my blood calls for the blood of the other, this passionate outburst in the opening phase, disintegrates if it is left to feed on itself. Of course the countless abuses by the colonialist forces reintroduce emotional factors into the struggle, give the militant further cause to hate and new reasons to set off in search of a ‘colonist to kill’. But, day by day, leaders will come to realise that hatred is not an agenda.’

To organise an effective movement, Fanon believed, anti-colonial fighters would have to overcome the temptations of primordial revenge, and develop what Martin Luther King, citing Reinhold Niebuhr, called a ‘spiritual discipline against resentment’. In line with this commitment, Fanon’s vision of decolonisation embraced not only colonised Muslims, freeing themselves from the yoke of colonial oppression, but members of the European minority and Jews”

[5] Lucas goes on: “One of the biggest, I think, challenges with King’s notion of nonviolence is this idea that unmerited suffering can be redemptive. And I think that’s a very, very difficult thing.” https://onbeing.org/programs/rami-nashashibi-lucas-johnson-community-organizing-as-a-spiritual-practice/

*I received a comment/question about this so I want to be clear: Liberation-- a free Palestine-- is not the same as an Independent Palestine. The point is precisely that a Hamas led Palestine would not be free, just like the US-keeping its same basic economic and governance structure, but led by women of color (like a black female president) wouldn't  be the kind of freedom that the Combahee River Collective meant.