Seems reasonable enough though not considering the length of time it took Ireland to extend this right to migrant parents of Irish citizens whose status was changed after the 2004 Citizenship Referendum, which, I maintain, was a major turning point in contemporary Irish state racism. If you remember, that referendum and the legislation that followed, changed the 83-years old jus solis citizenship entitlement according to which all people born on the island of Ireland had a right to Irish citizenship. And their parents, according to the 1990 Fajujonu Supreme Court ruling, had a right of residency. Changing this to jus sanguinis citizenship, according to which people born in Ireland had the right to become Irish citizens only if they had least one parent with citizenship entitlement, creating a two tier citizenship right. Citizen children born before 2005 were not entitled to have their parents in Ireland (although a large percentage were granted that right, albeit temporarily, after the state won the Citizenship Referendum). Moreover, in 2005 at least 20 Irish citizens were deported together with their non-citizen parents.

Minister Shatter’s move to implement the European Court of Justice ruling is to be commended. Not so his insistence on continuing to deport people deemed ‘failed asylum seekers’. I am totally against deportations because the threat of deportation causes fear and trauma to asylum seekers in direct provision holding camps (some 5,400 as we speak). People live in limbo, many for several years, with deportation orders pending yet not carried out. Deportations are also costly. As the Minister said in the Dail, it cost the state just under €1 million to deport 280 people. Deportations require close collaboration with other EU member states and are managed by Frontex, the commercial Warsaw-based EU agency which operationalises cooperation between EU states on border security and immigration control. This came to public knowledge last July as 12 Congolese and eight Nigerians on board a deportation flight costing €337,800 remained in Ireland as Algeria did not give permission for the flight intending to deport them. According to the Minister, “€22,000 was incurred by the Department in ancillary costs relating to this flight, such as securing documentation for the returnees and sending advance parties of Garda National Immigration Bureau members to Lagos and Kinshasa to ensure that landing permits and all other requirements were obtained in advance”.

So, if deportations are traumatic (particularly for children for whom Ireland has become home) and costly – why deport? Just as asylum seekers, despite the declining number in asylum applications, assist states in redrawing racial and national boundaries, deportations reaffirm nationhood.

According migrant parents of Irish citizen children residency rights is definitely good news. Another piece of good news is that a group of antiracism activists, mostly asylum seekers and former asylum seekers and their supporters, is getting together to plan an anti-deportation campaign. I’ll keep you posted.

Catherine Cosgrave of the Immigrant Council of Ireland commented on this post:

Of course the granting of residence to 850 parents of Irish children post-Zambrano case is positive but also important to note that this is far from end of the saga. The entitlement is being extremely narrowly applied and parents of Irish children, where there are no compelling reasons for refusal, are still being refused permission to live and work in Ireland. For example, you qualify if, as a single parent, you are a non-EEA national or if both parents are non-EEA nationals and don’t have a right of residence in the EU already, whatever about Ireland. However, if you are also a non-EEA national, perhaps in an Irish partner and you had previously established residence in another EU country… An application for permission to live and work in Ireland with your Irish partner and Irish child will be refused. The apparent logic being that there is no risk that your child will have to leave the EU.  I could go on and on…

The accusation of institutional racism may have led to changes in policing practices beyond just ‘lessons learned’ as the Met insists. There are more police officers of colour in Britain (in Ireland, by comparison, there are only 46 Gardai from migrant background), and the Met insists things are different now. But crucially, the murder happened in a society which sees itself as white and sees people of colour, British born or new immigrants, as racialised others. This leads to racial profiling – black and Asian people are stopped and searched much more often than white people, particularly since 9/11, and to increasingly restrictive immigration regulations – both in Britain and here. It also leads to the demonisation of migrants and asylum seekers as ‘bogus’,  ‘scroungers’ and as ‘taking our jobs’ as British and Irish societies assume whiteness to be the hegemonic norm.

Remember that the recent London riots were sparked off after the met refused to explain the shooting to death of an unarmed black man, Mark Duggan, even though they became uncontrollable later. And remember too, that despite the achievements of black and migrant Britons in the arts, football and other sports, there are not enough black people in leadership positions.

And  what about Ireland,  where immigrants constitute just ten per cent of the population and where black and ethnic minority people are not at all represented in the arts, media, sports and politics?

On Good Friday 2010 a fifteen years old Nigerian boy, Toyosi Shitta-Bey, was murdered by two Dublin brothers. It took the Gardai quite some time to pronounce it as a racist murder – in fact immediately after the killing, everyone, from the local Tyrrelstown community, to religious leaders and politicians, claimed it was not racially motivated. It took the Gardai even longer to bring Toyosi’s killers to justice. Had it not taken that long, justice might have been done and Toyosi’s family might have had its closure. But last November, just before the trial was to begin, one of the killers, 40 years old Frank Barry, was found dead and the trial was cancelled.

The Lawrence family had their closure, but institutional and state racism continues. It does not mean of course that all British or Irish people are racist. Far from it. But the assumption of whiteness means that these two multicultural societies keep refusing to truly recognise their racial diversity, preferring to project societal problems – such as unemployment – onto immigrants and people of colour.

This murder puts further flames onto recent racist fires. In Naas we had mayor Darren Scully who made the decision to refuse representation to black Africans based on what he described as their “aggressive” attitude when making representations to him, but who insensitively argues that he ‘abhors racism in all its forms’, adding that he had many African friends (not realising this is one of the most common ‘I am not a racist’ but ploys). And in Athlone, a 16 year old black girl was raped by a group of white boys, including one white girl, in an attacked described by the Evening Herald a ‘race rape of girl (16)’ – at least they used the R word, but one wondered whether the reason is sensationalism or accurate reporting.

It’s been only two years since Toyosi Shitta-Bey was murdered in Tirrelstown – his murderers only just brought to justice (at least it didn’t take the Gardai as long as it took the London Metropolitan Police to try black teenager Stephen Lawrence’s white murderers, murdered in 1993 and tried in 2011).

It’s necessary to point out yet again how difficult it is to speak about racism in post-race Ireland. And it’s not only because of the recession – the difficulty to mention the R word has been on the increase ever since the twilight of Celtic capitalism. Note for instance President Higgins’ inaugural speech which made not one mention to immigrants, immigration, interculturalism or integration – and that from one of Ireland’s strongest supporters of human rights causes.

At the same time Minister Alan Shatter – despite his strong support for the integration of immigrants while in opposition – is keeping away from events organised by migrants and ethnic minorities. Interestingly, despite opposing the 1989 Incitement to Hatred Act, Shatter has done nothing to review this ineffectual piece of legislation. This murder should give him a reason to do so.

And importantly, on the morning of Moses Ayanwole’s death there was yet another deportation of what the government deems ‘failed’ asylum seekers, this time to Pakistan. The issue of asylum seekers and direct provision hostels has indeed gone well under the radar – it seems no one in austerity Ireland – including Irish human rights, antiracism and immigrant support NGOs – wants to know.

I was delighted, however, by the initiative of a group of African leaders who got together to speak up against the increase of racism. While rightly demanding that the government acts against racism, it is ultimately up to them to express their seething anger and protest against racist Ireland. And they have my full support.

David Landy seems to have been curious about the construction of Jewish identity for a long time… when I first met him in 2004 he wanted to do a PhD on Ireland’s Jews… I deterred him, as this small and curious minority (‘who has ever heard of an Irish Jew?’) has been researched and written about disproportionately to its number and significance. I invited him to apply to the MPhil in Ethnic and Racial Studies, for which he wrote a dissertation on Zionism and Irish Jews.

Linking his interest in Jewish identities to his passion about Palestinian rights, it was no surprise that when he did research his PhD he focused on diaspora Jews opposed to Israel. I loved working with him as his supervisor on both dissertations; he also worked for me on a research project on Israeli memory networks – I learnt a lot from him and admire his wry sense of humour… I particularly enjoyed his thinking about the complexities of researching something he is part of – being both ethnically Jewish and a central member of the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign, a tightrope act which he performs admirably, evincing his commitment to both sociology and the social movement he studied.
His research field is English groups of Jewish people engaged in opposing Israeli policies. In the course of writing this book he expanded his theoretical understanding – as one does – particularly to examining diaspora opposition to Israel in terms of being a social movement – the focus of this well researched book.

This specific social movement is not unlike the anti-Apartheid or Zapatista solidarity movements, but it is also different in that it is concerned with local identity contestation. In contesting local fields – in this case broader diaspora Jewish identities – there is also a degree of co-optation, which blunts the scope and effect of the movement. However, by engaging with distant issues – in this case Israel/Palestine – the movement is also able to change the identity of Jewish communities, some of which, however, as time goes by, become even more entrenched in their support for the state of Israel and its oppressive policies, as accusations of anti-semitism and being ‘self hating Jews’ are hurled against Jewish opponents of Israel.

David argues that in contrast with a unifying Zionist identity, diaspora Jewish identity is always heterogeneous – Jews, in other words, are not all the same. If diasporic Zionism is seen as tribal and narrowly focused on Israel – and David should know this, he has after all studied Irish Jews’ responses to the football match between Ireland and Israel – then diaspora Jewish identity is much more varied (although Zionist identities, of course, are also heterogeneous, from hard right to hard left and everything in between).  The general disintegration of ‘Jewish communities’ within what Bernard Wasserstein calls ‘the vanishing diaspora’, particularly in Europe, provides the background for David’s exploration of this specific Israel-critical Jewish movement and its link with similar groupings outside Britain.

I could go on  about Jewish identities and I loved David’s nuanced examination of what he calls diasporist rather than diasporic Jewish identities.  If the term ‘exile’ is an appropriation from both Jewish history and Palestinian reality, Jews, he argues, are not now in exile and there is no symmetry between forced Palestinian existence and voluntary Jewish exile, even if their exilic lives provide Jews with claims to both universalism and justice, both seen as part of a prophetic tradition and the belief that Jews were assigned by God to act as a light unto the nations. Not surprisingly perhaps, internal debates among Jews as to the construction of their identities, do not lead to the inclusion of Palestinians in this very Jewish story: in these identity narratives the Palestinians are at best an unwanted extra intruding on the really important questions of Jewish identity…

Exploring participation in and support of the boycott movement provides interesting insights into identity construction among movement members – the more rooted in the Jewish field, the less inclined are activists, who define themselves as ‘rooted cosmopolitans’, to support the boycott.

As someone who has written critically about the involvement of Israeli Jews in co-memorating the Palestinian Nakba and who is currently exploring new potentialities of resistance among (young) Israelis, I was particularly interested in the chapters exploring the relationship between these groups and Palestinians. Israelis who do resistance often tend to valorise their actions as moral and progressive, while, as I argued in Co-Memory and Melancholia: Israelis Memorialise the Palestinian Nakba (2010), they often shift the object of concern to their own loss and grief in an act of unresolved melancholia.

David does not shirk from the difficult question as to whether movement members’ activism is about constructing a ‘better’ Jewish identity or about genuine solidarity with the Palestinians. His argument is that like other distant issue movements, members are directed by a western discourse that treats Palestinians as victims. However Palestinians, he notes, are only mildly aware of these internal Jewish debates or of the very existence of the Israel-critical groups he analyses. Interestingly, he theorises movement members as ‘translators’ who carry the distant issue of Israel/Palestine to their local communities, and argues that it is this process of translation that enables movement members to not only transform their local Jewish communities but also contribute to Palestinian struggles for justice and liberation. I am not sure that I am completely persuaded by this argument – as David himself emphasises, the object of this movement is not Palestinians as such but  a political solution of the conflict with justice to the Palestinians (though the vagueness of this term indicates the disagreements regarding both the right of return and the boycott).   Ultimately, I wonder whether critiquing Israel ‘as a Jew’ carries a somewhat heavier weight than that of ‘the usual suspects’ who criticise anything that moves… I am not so sure…

Taking the  position of ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ rather than solidarity, and the cultural obstacles to working with Palestinians not only through Israeli activists, stand in the way of regarding Palestinians as active agents rather than victims of Israeli policies. This leads David to question whether this movement can ultimately be an effective engine for change. This conundrum too is examined empirically, based not only on interviews with activists, which David cites throughout to good effect, but also on his own study of political tourism to Israel/Palestine. These tours, he argues, render participants fit for advocacy work in Europe and the US (in other words, make them good translators). However, constructing Palestine as an object of pity reeks of orientalism and, as David insists, meeting Palestinians is crucial so that their political subjectivity is not forgotten.

I am also not entirely sure that the division between cosmopolitanism (Jewish) and solidarity (attributed to the general Palestinian Solidarity movement) is entirely viable; indeed  the activists he interviewed were aware of the issues involved in both standpoints. It is only conceptualising Palestinians as ‘people like us’ (in the spirit of Alain Badiou’s ‘there is only one world’) that renders solidarity critical, and David’s sophisticated analysis of the issues involved sheds new light on both the problematique of the solidarity gaze and the challenges facing members of this movement, particularly in the context of the local Jewish fields in which they operate and contend.

One thing this book demonstrates is that, Indeed, as the late Irish Jewish writer David Marcus once told me, ‘Jews are like other people, only more so’.  What I particularly admire about this book is not only its theoretical and empirical sophistication, but also David’s commitment to the movement he researches. He meets admirably the challenge of making his book relevant to the movement, enabling it to use his insights as tools for discussion and development. And if movement members critique and debate his insights, so much the better because, as he often tells me, the unique thing about social movement is that they… yes… keep moving…

David Landy. 2011.  Jewish Identity and Palestinian Rights: Diaspora Jewish Opposition to Isrsael. London: Zed Books.

On Friday 30 September, Jewish settlers at the West Bank settlement of Anatot brutally attacked a group of young Jewish Israeli activists who demonstrated in support Palestinian farmer Yassin Rifawi, whose privately owned lands in the village of Anata were illegally fenced by residents of Anatot, limiting his access. In the past few months Rifawi suffered continuous harassment by the settlers, including threats, uprooting of trees and dismantling his property. Despite recurrent appeals by the Israeli legal human rights organisation Yesh Din to the Israeli police, nothing was done to protect Mr Rifawi.

There were two attacks on that day. The settlers’ violence resulted in Rifawi being taken to hospital with an open head wound, together with his wife over whose head the settlers broke a broom handle, after which they abused her sexually. 26 activists were injured, most needing medical treatment, and some with broken limbs and head injuries.
According to the activists, (who videoed the attacks – the films are available on You Tube), police officers present during the two attacks, stood by and looked on instead of defending the attacked activists. None of the attackers was charged or arrested. One reason may be that a large number of the attackers were themselves police officers, who reside in the settlement. Anatot is not religious or extremist but rather a ‘lifestyle’ settlement, whose inhabitants are well educated people, artists, police and army officers.

Activists write about the event in pain and shock. ‘We were surrounded by police officers… they didn’t protect me, they participated. They saw them break bones, threaten to murder and rape, break up cars and cameras; they allowed the settlers to use the police PA system to shout their threats… They saw them drag me by the hair to the fields, and did nothing. Some even looked rather amused. Why am I surprised? They do this to Palestinians all the time…’ (Alma)
‘Outside [the vehicle], settlers are banging on the windows making a sign with their fingers drawn across their throats to show that they would slash my throat.  They shriek: ‘Bring her outside [the vehicle].  We’ll deal with her.  Give her what she has coming to her, the whore!’ (Hagai)

‘The settlers actually stripped me naked.  I tried to calm myself.  History will bury them and their evil apartheid in blood’ (Stavit)

Idan Landau writes in his blog: ‘Activists were threatened with rape, sodomy and other physical and verbal acts…  It’s primitive, brutal, bestial, but alas all too human. We think we are Jews, that we don’t do such things, that we are civilized, that we have our sacred books and traditions that raise us above such brutality.  Alas, violence like this reminds us that we are only those things in our best moments.  In our worst, we are no different.  And when we are no different, we have betrayed those traditions which we like to think set us apart or above the worst humanity has to offer’.

Quite apart from the injustice done to Rifawi, and from the violence meted to Palestinians on a regular basis, these violent incidents demonstrate that when a state racialises its ‘others’, in this instance Palestinian citizens and occupied subjects, only a thin line separates between them and the state’s ‘own’ people, in this instance Israeli Jewish citizens who dare to challenge the racial state and protest against its unjust acts.

BNP's Nick Griffin gets pelted by eggs

As of now, the leader of the British National Party Nick Griffin is scheduled to debate the question of whether multiculturalism has gone ‘too far’ in Trinity College’s Philosophical Society on October 20.

I have written many times about the problems with policies of multiculturalism – which, let us remember (though called ‘intercultualism’ in this country), is the state’s knee jerk response to what it perceives as the problem of difference, brought about by immigrants. Multiculturalism, I have argued, is not about fostering and upholding ethnic pluralism, but rather about racial states legislating for national homogeneity and supremacy, accepting only what Alana Lentin and Gavan Titley call in their new book ‘good diversity’, one that does not challenge (white, Christian, settled) privilege.  Euro-multiculturalism is rife with contradictions. It speaks of integration yet limits immigration, legislates against veiled women and Muslims praying in public, outlaws what it considers harmful practices such as forced marriages, without providing protection to trafficked women or offering asylum to women whose children are in danger of female genital mutilation.

According to European politicians  such as Cameron, Sarkozy and Merkel, European multiculturalism has reached a crisis point. Yet states supported immigrants (and their ‘cultures’) only as long as they filled much needed labour shortages during the economic boom and invested in capitalist European economies, so that ‘we’ can maintain ‘our’ way of life. Despite token ‘plans against racism’, race and racism were not mentioned in the rush to ‘good diversity’, which leaves in its wake all those carriers of ‘bad diversity’ – black Africans, veiled Muslim women, poor asylum seekers, undocumented migrants.

The critique of the politics of multiculturalism notwithstanding, when racists like Nick Griffin attack multiculturalism, I reach for my intellectual and political guns. What Griffin is really about is naked racism, which he cleverly masks in attacking multiculturalism. Indeed, in February of this year he argued that the British government is simply reiterating the BNP’s arguments: ‘In acknowledging that the multi-cult theory has encouraged racial and cultural divisions that have in turn fuelled the flames of Islamic extremism and contributed to the growth of home-grown Muslim terrorism, Mr. Cameron is stating an obvious truth – and one that my colleagues and I have been viciously attacked for daring to speak out about these problems before it became ‘respectable’ to do so.’

There may indeed not be a huge difference between the BNP and European governments, but the BNP has a record of inciting racial hatred, bluntly insisting that ‘To make vague pledges to tackle multiculturalism without making a firm commitment to stop immigration is as absurd as complaining about Islamic extremism without recognising that it has its roots in the fundamental extremism of Islam itself.’

Despite what the proponents of ‘free speech’ would say (and remember free speech is rarely accorded to immigrants, worried about their immigration status, family reunification, finding employment and accommodation and many other issues), I am definitely against allowing Griffin to debate multiculturalism in Trinity. For starters, he is hardly an expert on the topic and ultimately attacks only Islam and Muslims. Secondly, in the current recession racism is on the increase and Griffin’s anti-Islam and anti-immigrant rants can only support those who believe that job losses and the recession are the fault of new immigrants. Thirdly, we are in real danger that many a young Irish person would be swayed by Griffin’s demagogic powers. Finally, and more specific to Trinity – in a university which casts itself as a multicultural, welcoming environment for international students, having Griffin speak freely at a debate staged by a student society intent mostly on attracting attention and notoriety, damages the image Trinity is aiming to project.

According to Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilisation, madness is not a natural, unchanging thing, but rather depends on the society in which it exists. Various cultural, intellectual and economic structures determine how madness is known and experienced within a given society. In this way, society constructs its experience of madness. Thus by the nineteenth century madness had become known as a moral and mental disease. Ultimately, Foucault sees madness as being located in a certain cultural “space” within society; the shape of this space, and its effects on the madman, depend on society itself.

Accordingly, the series argued that containing people who were thought of in Ireland as ‘abnormalities’ – Famine dropouts, former emigrants and the families of emigrants, farmers experiencing smaller and smaller farms which did not provide adequate livelihoods, leaving many farmers isolated and unable to marry and start families – had to be forcibly controlled. One sure way was committing them to psychiatric asylums, where a Foucauldian biopolitics meant absolute control over inmates’ bodies and minds – sedated, institutionalised and unwanted by their families. The documentary revealed damning evidence of appalling conditions within the hospitals, information which was kept secret by the State and by the inmates’ families who did not want to know what was going on behind the walls.

Encouragingly, in recent years many of these inhumane asylums have been closed and patients are mostly held in ‘community’ mental hospitals, though, according to leading psychiatrist Ivor Browne, the approach has not changed much – patients are still over- medicated, and control and containment by psychiatric nurses and doctors are still the order of the day.

While in the past, people could be committed by their families without a possibility of release, since November 2006, under Section 33(3) of the Mental Health Act, 2001, mental health tribunals have been established for patients admitted on an involuntary basis to consider their cases on a periodic basis. Patients involuntarily admitted have the right to attend their mental health tribunal if they so wish or be legally represented.

I was surprised, therefore, to be told by a member of one of these tribunals, that ‘while in the mid-20th century the prisons were empty and the asylums full, now the psychiatric hospitals are empty and the prisons full’. Was he implying that inmates are dangerous to ‘normal society’, ‘wasted lives’ as Zygmunt Bauman would have it, needing to be controlled and contained. He went on to claim that there is not much that the system can do to help, as ‘there are only very few medications that can be given; there is no capacity for psychotherapy, which anyway would not help most of them’. Control and stigmatisation still seems the order of the day.

But on reflection he may be right. Perhaps reason cannot contain madness (and perhaps also badness). What we need is a new way of approaching those we call ‘mad’ because we can no longer understand them or reason with them, as Foucault reminds us in the preface to the 1961 edition of Madness and Civilisation:

‘…modern man no longer communicates with the madman [...] There is no common language: or rather, it no longer exists; the constitution of madness as mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, bears witness to a rupture in a dialogue, gives the separation as already enacted, and expels from the memory all those imperfect words, of no fixed syntax, spoken falteringly, in which the exchange between madness and reason was carried out. The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue by reason about madness, could only have come into existence in such a silence’.

Ironically, BGU is home to several radical Israeli (Jewish) scholars, including Neve Gordon, Uri Ram, and Kassem’s supervisor Lev Grinberg. It is also home to the  ‘new historian’ Benny Morris, whose  studies of the 1948 Nakba exposed the atrocities (though not the deliberate Zionist Plan D, detailed later by scholars such as Ilan Pappe, to ethnically cleanse Palestine). The anti-Zionist Pappe was forced out of Haifa University into exile in Exeter, where he continues to produce politically-committed scholarship about Israel-Palestine. However, the Zionist Morris, despite his important revelations, refutes ethnic cleansing or the existence of a Zionist plan to evict the Arab population, and has repeatedly said that he regrets the Nakba was not more complete; had Ben Gurion, he wrote in 2008, ‘carried out a full expulsion - rather than a partial one - he would have stabilized the State of Israel for generations’.

Into the thick of this heated debate, steps Fatma Kassem, one of a handful of Palestinian academics in Israeli universities. Despite Ronen’s instructions, Kassem did not give up, but she found herself doing exactly what the women whose life stories form the basis for her in-depth analysis of the gendered narratives of the 1948 Nakba did: ‘they made a commitment to self-enforced silence as a result of their disastrous experiences in 1948 in order to survive and rebuild their families and homes’ (79). However, though seemingly agreeing to the terms set by her university, Kassem used her research as a subversive act, charting the women’s knife-edge position between oppression and resistance to both ongoing Israeli colonisation and patriarchal Palestinian society, where women, while fulfilling their assigned gendered roles, stage acts of potent everyday resistance.

Kassem’s perceptive and ground breaking book can be read in several ways. On one level I want to read it as a triumph of the feminist life story methodology, aiming not to reproduce gendered power relations in Palstinian society but rather to dismantle these structures (63), enabling both researcher and researched to embody the tensions between acquiescence and resistance, living as they do as colonised subjects in a patriarchal society. Although Kassem tells her family story, this is not really an auto-ethnography, but rather a perfect example of what feminist writers call ‘situated knowledge’. The end result is also what Foucault calls the ‘insurrection of subjugated knowledges’ – ‘insufficiently elaborated knowledges: naive knowledges, hierarchically inferior knowledges, knowledges that are below the required level of erudition or scientificity…’ (Foucault, 2003: 7-8). As active agents, the quoted narratives of the women Kassem interviewed make a valuable contribution to knowledge, ‘specifically in terms of the ways in which they remember and seek to commemorate historical events’, despite their absence from most Nakba histories (239). But it is not only the women, but also Kassem herself who makes a crucial contribution to knowledge not only through steeping her own family in Nakba memories, and through straddling between citizenship and outsiderness, but also through her commitment to what Les Back calls ‘sociology as the art of listening’ (2007), assisting her in excavating the women’s life stories for a multiplicity of meanings.

Thus on another, perhaps more crucial level, the book must be read for the astute analysis of the narratives of these elderly women, first generation to the Nakba, living in what Kassem calls the ‘contested’ rather than ‘mixed’ cities of Lyd and Ramleh.  Carefully mining her narrative data, Kassem excavates the women’s stories around three main themes. The first focuses on the use of language, which, in its quotidian use (the women are mostly illiterate or of low levels of education), provides gendered meanings, spanning the private, the political, and the subversive. The second theme is the focus on the body. Here women speak of the vulnerable, victimized male body, hanged, expelled, imprisoned, killed, and ultimately signifying failure in the public sphere, not being able to protect families and gain access to the political arena. The female body, on the other hand, is spoken about as a site of memory and resistance, a strong body of survival, even though none of the women spoke explicitly about rapes during the 1948 Nakba, also silenced by the Israeli side, though for different reasons. This is a particularly fascinating chapter – as the women memorise historical events through ‘body times’ – maidenhood, pregnancy, childbirth – charting feminine patterns of memory and denoting both suffering and strength. The third theme is home, which the women speak of in complex and sophisticated ways, linking home and homeland, loss and at time re-gaining. To me Kassem;s analysis of her data is always compelling, perpetually surprising, evoking multilayered meanings which illuminate the gendered experiences of the Naka.

Through providing both a detailed and painful account of the ‘migration’ of 1948 – the women resist using terms such as expulsion, refugees, or Nakba, more commonly used by the men – and an explicit analysis of these first generation women’s strategies of resistance to Israeli governmentality, Kassem enacts her own resistance, providing more than an adequate response to her university’s attempt to silence her.

Finally, I read this book as a potent illustration of the paradoxical gendered positioning of Palestinian women citizens of the state of Israel. Nahla Abdo (2011) rejects claims by Israeli scholars that Palestinian women are oppressed mostly by (Palestinian) culture, religion and patriarchy, arguing that their subordination emanates from living in a settler-colonial state, where they not only experience repression through house demolitions and land confiscations, but also become boundary markers as Israel’s ‘demographic anxieties’ target Palestinian women in gender-specific ways. Kassem, however, does not shirk discussing Palestinian patriarchy, particularly, but not exclusively, in discussing ‘honour killings’, more prevalent since the loss of the vatan in 1948. While Palestinian patriarchy seeks to control women’s bodies, the Israeli state often forgives the perpetrators, exposing the women to two types of violence, from Palestinian men and from the state of Israel.

Kassem’s book is extremely readable, relying mostly on the women’s words rather than on complex theorisations. I learnt a lot, not only about gender and the Nakba, but, more importantly, about resistance and about what Abdo calls ‘these strong, opinionated and committed women, who, through understanding their society and its traditional/patriarchal limits, are nonetheless able to challenge these through their political involvement’ (Abdo, 2008: 186).

References:
Abdo, N. (2008) ‘Palestinian munadelat : Between western representations and lived reality’, in R. Lentin (ed.) Thinking Palestine, London: Zed Books.
Abdo, N. (2011) Women in Israel: Gender, Race and Citizenship, London: Zed Books.
Back, L. (2007) The Art of Listening, Oxford: Berg.
Foucault, M. (2003), Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the College de France 1975-6, London: Allen Lane.

To be published in Holy Land Studies, November 2011

In Britain, in response to the police killing an unarmed young black man, and when peaceful protests did not receive a satisfactory answer as to the why of this murder, widespread riots were the expression of both the disenfranchisement of large swathes of disadvantaged youths and – it has to be said – also of unchecked greed. Whatever the reason, the result was devastating.

Meanwhile in backwater Ireland, there is a quiet debate about equality. A good thing, you might think, but not when the discussants are right wing apologist John Waters – an Irish Times columnist with an anti-gay and anti-feminist agenda – and the departing chairperson of the Equality Authority Angela Kerins. Both write about equality in the Irish Times on August 12.

Kerins makes a case for a robust equality agenda, in the wake of the emasculation of the Equality Authority in 2009, leading to the resignation of its effective CEO Niall Crowley. Her equality agenda, however, is called ‘diversity’ - not exactly the same.  Unsurprisingly she supports government plans to amalgamate the EA with the Irish Human Rights Commission, and advocates the amalgamation of the various statutory bodies and NGOs working on equality issues. She does not mention the closure of Combat Poverty and the demise of the National Consultative Committee on Racism and Interculturalism (NCCRI), nor former Minister for Justice Michael McDowell who in 2004 said in an interview with The Irish Catholic that ‘inequality is an incentive in the Irish economy’.  I have little doubt that if Kerins had it her way, most migrant-led and migrant-support associations would be disbanded, or at least not given any funding. Luckily, it is not up to her, migrant-led associations are stronger than ever, even in the current miserly economic climate.

Not surprisingly (for an EA chair who has made no intervention since her appointment), Kerins’s main point is economic: ‘human capital, diverse skills, talents and experience [not equality, mind] are essential components of economic recovery’. Furthermore, she argues that  diversity is ‘a significant component to attracting inward investment’. , According to Kerins, the Republic of Ireland is emerging from the doldrums (tell that to the thousands of people in debt and on the live register), justifying her ideas about amalgamation and an economically driven ‘diversity’ agenda.

If Kerins’s ideas about equality are based on economics and rationality, John Waters is altogether opposed to the very notion of equality which, to him, together with ‘failed multiculturalism’, is the root cause of the riots in Britain and all other social ills.  However, while Kerins advocates equality as an engine for economic growth, he advocates, like McDowell before him, inequality as the main force of wealth generation. And underneath his carefully crafted argument that the pursuit of equality leads to a greedy search for wealth, lies naked racism. When describing the British riots he writes: ‘we observed looting of a kind of shopping without money, a defiant act of participation followed, inevitably, by a destructive one. Having stripped the Mosque of Mammon, the looters burned it down’. How interesting that it is now Muslims, rather than Jews, who are seen as the controllers of the world’s wealth. And all that in the name of what Waters considers the mistaken idea that ‘all human beings should be equal’.

I want to make a three key points about the lessons of this atrocity which cost the lives of 76 people. Firstly, European states and societies need to get over their post 9/11 automatic assumptions that ‘terrorist’ acts are always perpetrated only by Islamists. Such assumptions lead to the racialization of Muslim and Arab-looking people, and to tighter immigration, asylum and travel controls throughout Europe, and, as in this case, miss the point entirely, at a heavy cost of innocent lives.

My second point relates to the Norwegian-ness of the assassin. I agree with what a Norwegian writer has written, that ‘the heart of darkness lies buried deep within ourselves’.  Throughout Europe, it is European extremists – Dutch, Danish, Swedish, and others – who are acting against the much maligned politics of multiculturalism.  However, as Gavan Titley and Alana Lentin write,  (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/26/anders-behring-breivik-multicultural-failure) , it is the success of multiculturalism, rather than its alleged ‘failure’ that spurs white racists like Anders Behring Breivik to act so violently against what they see as the danger to ‘the nation’ from foreigners, and particularly Muslim foreigners. ‘Racism’, they write, ‘is often justified as an aberrant reaction to understandable provocation; the focus on “multiculturalism” in the aftermath of the Oslo tragedy draws attention to contemporary racism’s most  elastic alibi. The “failure of multiculturalism” is an article of faith in European politics and, like all acts of faith, it depends on the acceptance of an underlying mystery’.

Their main argument is that the heart of darkness lies not merely in the extreme right, but within ‘our’ white, Christian, European selves,  who construct ‘Islam’ as the enemy, close up Fortress Europe to immigrants, ban burqas and hijabs, and blame ‘them’ for all of society’s own social ills. Mainstream politicians are happy to go on about the excesses of multiculturalism and the dangers of Islam, but they cannot be exonerated from blame. Breivik’s online rants against  multiculturalism and immigration to justify his crime were available for all to see – he was an inveterate blogger who made no secret of his intentions.

My third point is that Breivik, apart from his anti feminist rants (he has blogged as ‘fjordman’ saying that ‘feminism leads to the oppression of women’) and his insistence that anti-white sentiments (‘Caucasophobia’) is racism, is also, wait for it, a staunch Zionist.  In The Brussell Journal: The Voice of Conservatism in Europe (http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/1965), he explained that  ‘Europe should support Israel’, not to defend real Israeli Jews (many of whom, as things stand at present, are perpetrators rather than victims), but rather to heal European’s own ‘self inflicted civilizational wounds’.

My argument, then,is  that Breivik’s deadly insistence that ‘it’s multiculturalism who dunnit’ and that Europeans need to heal their ‘civilizational wounds’ by supporting the militant state of Israel and by punishing immigrants, Muslims and their European supporters,  is ultimately nothing less than the true reflection of Europe’s own racist face in the mirror.