Saree Makdisi - Palestine and the Politics of Difference (2015)

Saree Makdisi: So this is a talk that's out of a larger project on the politics of difference. And this particular version or this particular part of the project has to do with the everyday nature of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. But actually, I don't want to begin in Palestine. I want to begin in Lebanon at the border with Israel, which is kind of an amazing place. I've been there many times. I grew up in Beirut. My family is still in Beirut, so I go back all the time. And it's a kind of magical place because... First of all, it's one of the most beautiful parts of Lebanon. And secondly, despite or with its beauty, it's also obviously been marred by years of war and a couple of decades of Israeli occupation, which ended a few years ago. But still, to this day, if you go down to the south, you can see, despite the beauty of the landscape, the proximity of Israel, which has been busy putting up It has this thing about concrete walls, Israel. I don't know why. But anyway, it's putting up this kind of concrete wall on the border with Lebanon. And elsewhere, you can see signs of fortifications and forts and just generally border markings that remind you, of course, of the proximity of Israel, even though psychologically, in a way, it seems also at the same time very distant. So the weird thing about this border space is that it's a place where proximity and distance actually seem to contact each other, to touch each other in a kind of it's weirdly kind of disconcerting. So at certain places when you look across the border, across where you can see through the fence, you can see actual settlements inside Israel itself, inside the Galilee. Which again, from a Lebanese perspective, certainly from a Palestinian perspective as well, is strange because Israel in so many ways is necessarily, politically speaking, something of an abstraction. So when you have an abstract concept in your head and you go down and you look at the physical manifestation of the abstract concept, it has a very strange effect. It's not just hard, it's impossible to explain. I'm looking for words with which to explain this strange sensation of the proximate become distant at the same time and the abstract becoming also concrete. It's a very kind of strange, really almost metaphysical situation where you're literally seeing with your bodily eyes, what would otherwise be a kind of almost metaphysical abstraction or political abstraction. So it's a kind of, as I said, it's kind of, it messes with you in a way. But the other thing that happens when you look across the border from Lebanon, and of course you see Israel, but then the other thing that happens simultaneously or interchangeably, which is also another weird thing, it's hard to describe, so I hope you bear with me, is that you also see Palestine, because of course that's what it is too, right? So there's this weird way in which look once and you see Israel with all of what that means from an Arab perspective, and then blink and look again and you see Palestine with all that that means, also from an Arab perspective, and of course, it's actually physically, it's the same space, it's the same landscape, it's the same site, it hasn't changed, or it has changed, but I mean, physically, geophysically, it's the same place. So again, it's a matter of making abstractions concrete and literally seeing abstractions. So when you see Palestine, of course, what can you think but that all of these years of war and displacement and struggle and demolition and bombing and people being moved around and expelled and massacred and so on and so forth, it all comes down to this sort of supremely banal landscape that again is almost impossible to kind of balance in your head with the massive nature of historical transformation and political transformation and movements of population and displacements and refugees and the loss of life and so on and so forth. But then, as I say, with all those things in mind, you look and you just see a beautiful landscape. And like I said, it's hard, if not impossible, to reconcile those two things again. So for example, there's a place on the border where you go down, this is the Wazandi River in the south of Lebanon, where you go down and you look at it, and it's a tiny little stream. This is in the summer, so it's even tinier than usual. And you just think it's just a little bit of water, right? And this is a place where the border itself is a very complicated space. But this is one of those places where the Israeli fence is actually further to the south from where the border between Lebanon and Palestine actually is. So in other words, standing where I took these pictures in Lebanon, you look across the stream of the Wazani. And the land on the other side of the stream, which is no bigger than from me to you, is Palestine. And the water is like this deep. So you think, well, I can wade across and I'll be in Palestine, which is also a very, very strange thought to think that all that separates me from Palestine with all that that means is this tiny little six inch deep or one foot deep body of water, which is again a kind of strange experience. It's discomforting, it's unbalancing, it's troubling, it's exciting too, but it's also disturbing in its own kinds of ways. So I want to back out now again and look at that landscape from a kind of distance. And I want to talk about the ways in which we have this kind of double encounter with the landscape. As I said, look once and you see Palestine, look again and you see Israel. And it's that doubleness that's troubling. Because to see, to look at the landscape, to see the landscape, if you read it correctly, is also of course to read the process of historical transformation that took place and is taking place. in Palestine and Israel. This is, that is looking down from the border down into the Galilee. This is one of the most thoroughly ethnically cleansed sites in all of historical Palestine. It's a place where dozens of Palestinian villages were demolished and their populations expelled in 1948. This is a map of the Galilee area with the red and blue dots representing villages, many of them demolished in 1948 and their populations expelled. So the place where I'm taking these pictures from, if we zoom in a little bit, is more or less on this side of the border looking down this way. So you're looking down from on high onto this landscape. And part of the task here is to be able to connect this political historical map with its marks of demolished villages with the landscape that you actually see because it's actually the same perspective. And in fact, if you were able to, And I'm not, without tremendous difficulty, able to. But if you were able to get to the land itself and go and see it and touch it and smell it and breathe it, you would go around these areas, like if you were inside the Galilee itself, you'd be able to see villages like, or the remains of Palestinian villages like this. This is the village of Abl al-Ameh. which has been reduced, as you can see, to nothing but landscape because, of course, the people were expelled and their homes were systematically bulldozed and demolished. You can see the village of Zu' al-Faw'ani, or again, the remnants of the village of Zu'. which are still there. These pictures are contemporary pictures. So it's sort of, they mark the traces of the passing of history and the passing of an entire population as well, of course. You can see the village of and they're all there. So anybody who tells you that there were no Palestinians before 1948, you can take him to that landscape and say, well, here are the ruins of people's houses. Whose houses were they? Who do you think? was living here, who built these houses, and above all, what happened to the people that used to live here? Where have they gone? Well, that, of course, is, again, the history of expulsion and transformation and cleansing that we're speaking about here. But you can locate all those villages that I just showed you the pictures of among these dots on the geopolitical map. So if you go back to this kind of overview, what you're looking at here is is a site where historical and political transformation have taken on the lineaments of everyday life, of the banality of everyday life. There's a kind of simplicity, an obviousness, I don't know how to say it, a quotidian feel to it, that is, of course, by definition, part of the basic nature of everyday life. But of course, at the same moment, in the same breath, it also speaks to this huge process of political and historical transformation and, of course, also tragedy. I want to shift now from the border and deeper into Palestine itself and to talk about the logic of the occupation, particularly for now in the West Bank, And to talk about the way in which, again, the land and the shaping of landscape has become one of the focal points of the contest between Israel and the Palestinians. The domination of the landscape by Israeli settlements, many people have remarked on this. I'm not the first one to do this. There's been a lot of excellent scholarship on the way in which Israeli architecture facilitates the domination of the landscape. visually, aesthetically, even sort of militarily as well in terms of surveillance and observation and empowerment and those kinds of logics. So if you look at the landscape of the West Bank, again, you'll see, obviously, it's a place where people live their day-to-day lives. It is a landscape of everyday life like all other landscapes. But again, marked by profoundly political processes that channel and shape the contours within which everyday life is lived. And of course, they do so as part of the planning mechanisms of the occupation. So for example, if you look at one of these maps, the UN publishes maps of obviously the whole space. This is a map of the area around the town of Qalqilya in the northwest of the West Bank. And if you look at the map, you can see how the UN has plotted where there's a Jewish population, where there's a Palestinian population, where the border is, where the wall is that the Israelis are constructing, how these things are all cheek by jowl by each other, next to each other, but at the same time, of course, systematically separated from each other. So here you see a landscape where the political logic of exclusion and separation and differentiation, the politics of difference, is systematically worked into architectural terms, into spatial terms, into terms that separate people from one another. So, of course, part of what's at stake here is Israel's ability to impose its vision of a splintered and fractured, a riven landscape and riven populations onto the landscape itself, of course. One of the big differences between Palestine and Lebanon is that there is no real military resistance in Palestine there hasn't been for decades and so Israel is much more able to impose its will on the landscape unlike Lebanon where it tried but ultimately failed to do so so it really does control down to people's everyday lives down to the minute details of everyday life the rhythms of people's quotidian existence where you can go how you can go whether you can go how you're able to go, whether you can shop or cook or take your kids to school or get to school if you're a kid or get to your farm or get to a clinic or get to your job or whatever. And so in fact, one of the aspects of everyday life that's most under Israeli control And again, this is something they have a kind of passion for, is the giant bureaucratic apparatus of the occupation, which is phenomenal and truly Kafkaesque in scale and scope. But there's a whole alphabet soup of bureaucratic permits and passes and check things and all kinds of things you need to do to live your day-to-day life, all of which, of course, are determined by the Israelis and all of which are also determined to facilitate life for Jewish settlers while immobilizing and paralyzing the conduct of everyday life for ordinary Palestinians. But if you look at identity cards, for example, it's possible to see when you compare the identity cards of individual people with the nature of their ability to conduct their everyday lives. So if you look at these people that I'm about to flash on the screen you probably can't tell at a glance which one is Palestinian and which one is Israeli. And you might even confuse each for the other in some way. But in fact, these particular people, each person's ID card determines where he or she can go, how, or whether he or she can get there, by what means, where he or she can work, where he or she can live, where he or she can travel, if again, if they can travel, whom he or she can marry, et cetera, et cetera. All these things are determined by these ID cards. So you carry your ID card like the way we do our driver's licenses in your pocket. It's connected to you physically, but of course, it's the way in which, or one of the ways in which this giant apparatus of occupation and segregation, kind of literally grips your body and grips the ability you have to live or not live to conduct your everyday life. The ID card is the site, it's the place, it's the focal point where the political let's say the political logic of occupation and of separation and segregation and differentiation manifests itself at the ultimate level of the everyday and of the banal in some point. So six human beings, six totally different arrays of possibility and rights and privileges or lack of rights and lack of privileges according to as defined by the state of Israel. Some people can cross this landscape for example based on their ID card freely If you're Jewish, you can cross the landscape quite freely in the West Bank. They've built roads that are specifically meant to keep the native population away, so you can come and go as you wish. And of course, if you are a member of the indigenous population, then of course, there's a very different fate that awaits you in terms of your ability or inability to traverse what is, after all, your own landscape. So this is a shot of one of the many Israeli checkpoints. And indeed, people are restricted, faced with this kind of nightmare, people are restricted to other and indeed often older forms of transport. which suddenly in our postmodern age have become actually much more efficient because it's easier to get around on the back of a donkey over the hills than to traverse the network of checkpoints and roadblocks and so on and so forth. There's a really weird way in which pre-modernity becomes more advanced than modernity for Palestinians. living under these circumstances. And if not, certainly your everyday movement, your every movement really, is blocked, circumvented, obstructed, shut down in one way or another. So if you go to any of the Israeli checkpoints in the West Bank, these are the kinds of scenes you see on a daily basis, people being channeled, their lives being corralled, disrupted. It looks like a prison. This is how Palestinians get from point A to point B, when they're able to get. This is as good as it gets, when they're able to get from point A to point B, when there isn't. a curfew or some other general prohibition on movement, this is what they have to go through to get from point A to point B. So again, the checkpoint becomes a site where the politics of occupation, the politics of difference, take on and manifest and shape the contours of everyday life for ordinary people. As of September last year, which is the last published set of statistics that I've seen, the UN documented 490 closures interrupting Palestinian but not Jewish movement throughout the West Bank. That includes checkpoints like the ones I'm just showing you, roadblocks, gates, earth mounds, walls, trenches, other kinds of barriers and obstructions. and so forth. So literally, the occupation structures everyday life from the inside out, from your ID card to your ability or inability to traverse the landscape, get to jobs, farm, school, your kids, et cetera. But it does other things as well. Look, for example, at this number, 2279, 2279. Some of you may recognize this as a number that Israeli planners came up with. And eventually, they moved away from it because it made really, really bad press. But they came up with this number. after calculating in Gaza the number of men, women, and children in Gaza, and the number of, Gaza's ability, this is a few years ago, before the last round of bombing, but Gaza's ability to produce food sustenance for the people living in Gaza. And then they calculated, what they came up with was the exact number of calories, 2,279, that literally on a per capita basis that the population of Gaza needs in order to hover exactly at the brink of humanitarian catastrophe. In other words, the Israelis calculated the number of calories so that not to be too few that they actually plunge into malnutrition and starvation. But on the other hand, not too many that they're living a happy and normal life either. And so they spent, I don't know how long it took them to do this. Math is not my forte anyway. But somebody spent many nights, or many people, committees of people, spent many nights calculating literally down to the individual truckload of chickens or eggs or whatever, pasta. How many calories do these people... What comes in and what goes out, and how can we refine what we allow to enter Gaza down to the exact calorie, literally the exact calorie? If you think about what that speaks... I mean, what that says about the logic of the Israeli occupation and... the forms, again, by which large political abstractions, like we want to control a population, think about that's an abstraction, that's an abstract idea, but it comes down to the level of what we take for granted in North America as the most banal thing. You go into a grocery store and you look at the nutrition facts on the back of a packet of cereal or whatever, and it gives you the calorie breakdown, right? But in Israel and Palestine, this is part of the bureaucratic apparatus of occupation. and separation, and, of course, differentiation. So there's a way in which even we can speak of an alimentary occupation, occupying people's stomachs, their digestive tracts, their ability to gain or their lack of nutrition. It depends, of course. And, of course, along with that, there are other forms of... The abstract makes contact with the concrete, literally, and the real. For example, Israel's long-standing policy of home demolition. It is, as far as I know, the only state in the world that, as a matter of routine, established procedure, no other state does this, systematically, methodically bulldozes family homes. on a routine basis pretty much day in, day out, or every other day, or certainly every week. It's something that Israel does methodically and systematically. It's been doing it since 1967, since 1948, really. But in the West Bank and Gaza, more methodically since 1967. Uprooting and burning not just people's homes, but of course also their trees, their farms, their belongings, and so on and so forth. And sometimes this is done by the Israeli army. Sometimes it's done by Jewish settlers living in the West Bank that are kind of unleashed by the army, and the army kind of watches them do what they do without taking any kind of... intervention. According to the UN, in the past year alone, 600 structures have been demolished so far by the Israelis in the West Bank, displacing around 1,000 people and, of course, making life impossible for Palestinians in the West Bank, never mind, of course, Gaza, which is subject to not just this kind of one-by-one home demolition, but large-scale destruction of entire neighborhoods and bombings. The same thing goes, of course, for East Jerusalem, where Even while Israel concentrates on building new housing for new Jewish residents of the city and the occupied areas around it, it systematically demolishes Palestinian houses at the same time. In the past few years, according to the UN, the Israelis have demolished over 2,000 Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem alone. So if you just think about the way in which people are moved around, their homes demolished, permits are not granted to them to build, they're disconnected from electricity networks often and sewage networks and water networks and so forth and so on. It's extraordinary to see how, as I said, an abstraction That is to say, we will take this land. This land must be our land. We will colonize. We will settle the land. These are all forms of linguistic abstraction. But they take concrete form when it comes to literally cutting up this woman's olive trees or groves or destroying her house or bulldozing her husband's house or whatever. In the past... In the past decades since the occupation of 1967, the United Nations estimates that the Israelis have uprooted or demolished 800,000 olive trees in the West Bank, which is a huge proportion of one of the major agricultural modes of life for Palestinians in the West Bank. I want to shift now away from the occupied territories and two, within Israel itself. Because often, if you know anything about the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, some people make a differentiation between the events of 1948, that is the forcible expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in 1948, and then the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem in 1967. And a lot of people say, If we can resolve somehow through a two-state solution or whatever, if we can resolve the occupation of 1967 and establish a Palestinian state and the territories occupied as of 1967, then everything will be okay. We can find a peace settlement, et cetera. But that, of course, ignores what happened in 1948 and what continues to happen to Palestinians who survived the ethnic cleansing of 1948 and who remain a minority inside their own homeland. Palestinians constitute about 20%. of the population of the state of Israel. They're citizens, nominally anyway, but they definitely live a kind of second-class life, juridically, institutionally, and otherwise. But what I want to talk about in this particular juncture isn't those kinds of abstraction. It's rather, again, the way in which abstraction takes concrete material form. Again, if you know anything about this conflict, you will have heard about the way in which Israel prides itself on making the desert green and on greening the landscape, which, of course, in our era of environmental disaster, catastrophe, global warming, et cetera, greening sounds like a great thing, especially these days. But the interesting thing about the way in which the Israelis green is that it's woven directly into their policy of ethnically cleansing, not just the people, but kind of the landscape itself, if you will. So if you go to the website of the Jewish National Fund, pretty much on the front of the website, you'll find all this stuff about give, I don't know how much money to plant a tree in Israel. And they take pride, and you often go, people talk about they gave money to have a tree planted in Israel because Israel makes the desert green, etc., etc. And they make a big deal about forestation, afforestation, sort of planting forests inside Israel. And they look pretty, et cetera, from a distance, as long as you don't scratch too deep beneath the surface. Because the interesting thing about the forests that the Israelis, and in particular the Jewish National Fund, have been planting is that they have been used systematically to cover up the traces of demolished Palestinian villages. So actually, what looks like a greening project is actually, in fact, you know, is inseparably, seamlessly, also part of the project of ethnic cleansing that the Israelis are all about. So you can see many places, especially in the Galilee, but elsewhere too, where this is the ruins, these are the ruins of a Palestinian village, and you can see trees have been planted around the village and in the village, between the houses and in the houses, the ruins, basically to kind of cover it up through greenification. And there are many, many such places In fact, many of the forests that the Jewish National Fund has planted have been planted exactly in and among the ruins of villages in order to make them go away. This is the most stunning one, I think. It's a picture of... the ruins of the Palestinian village of Safuri, as it was before its people were expelled in the 1940s. Sorry, the picture's from the 1930s, but this is before, obviously, the explosions in 1948, and as it was about 10 years ago or so. And you can see what's happened is by planting all the trees, the village kind of magically goes away. So we have this beautiful green landscape, but of course, Don't mention the people who used to be there and their homes and what happened to them and what their fate is and how all of this works and how, in fact, even a forest can be thought of as a device for ethnic cleansing. It's kind of an astonishing fact. So if we go back to that shot with which I began the talk, taken from the border of Lebanon across into Galilee, when you look at all those forests... Forests don't actually belong, I mean, not like this anyway. They don't belong in this landscape in the galley. The trees that they're planting are not indigenous trees by any means. They plant trees that need a lot of water and grow really fast precisely because that's the work that they're supposed to do. But if you go to the villages that I was pointing out, you'll see systematically, not coincidentally, trees growing. all over them again to make them, to disappear them, to make them go away as much as possible. But the point is that we can talk about this in terms of what happened in 1948. And like I said, several hundred Palestinian villages were thus demolished in 1948 by the Israelis and in the early 1950s more systematically wiped out. And then trees were planted in their midst to make them go away by greening them. But it's also something that's happening literally to this very day to Palestinian citizens of the state of Israel, that is, within the state itself. I'm not talking about the West Bank or East Jerusalem or Gaza. I'm talking about citizens of the state within the state. And I want to tell you about the village of Arakib. which is a village of about 300 Palestinian Bedouin in the Naqab Desert in the south of the country. They're all Israeli citizens. They belong in one of what is many, there are many of these villages. They're thought of as unrecognized villages. These are villages that, for the most part, predate the establishment of the State of Israel. but don't appear in any of the state's official planning documents because the state post-dates them and then conveniently didn't include them in maps and documents and so forth for zoning and this kind of thing. So as far as the state is concerned, the villages don't exist. So they're called unrecognized villages, which means they're also not connected to the water grid, electricity, phones, schools, the mail system, and so on and so forth. So what's interesting about al-Aqib, it's not unique by any means, is that it's become kind of a focal point for the obsessive Israeli calculation about home demolition, and Palestinian resistance to that same process. So it's a site, again, where political abstractions are being contested at the level of the everyday, in this one tiny, I mean, a village of 300 people, as you can imagine, is a very, very small place. It's not a big place, and it's, as you'll see in a second, even smaller than it used to be. So it's this village in the south. The Jewish National Fund was allotted a forest to be built, to be implanted in where the village is now. So in 2010, in the summer of 2010, About 1,300 Israeli police officers descended on the village with bulldozers, and they oversaw the demolition of the village. And so Arachi was demolished in 2010. But the strange thing about this story, as I said, is that the Palestinians resisted. And they resisted in this particular case by rebuilding the village after it was demolished. So the Israelis demolished it in July, I think it was. So yeah, July 2010. And then the Palestinians rebuilt it. And then the Israelis redemolished it, and the Palestinians rebuilt it. And the Israelis redemolished it, and the Palestinians rebuilt it. And the Israelis redemolished it, and the Palestinians rebuilt it. I can go on saying that, as of the last time I checked, which was a couple of weeks ago, 83 times since 2010. So if you think about what it means for a village to be demolished and rebuilt 83 times in, what, five years, coming up in five years, That's a pretty astonishing statistic, I think. Of course, when I say rebuilt, I mean, you know, these are very, very poor people. And, you know, they're herdsmen and stuff like that. They don't have much money. And so rebuilding means, you know, they put together two by fours and they put something over this. This is our village again. And then these ladies come with a bulldozer and wipe it out, which is much easier to do, of course. And then... People put their two-by-fours and their lean-tos and their tents and whatever to say, no, this is our village and it's here again and the Israelis come, etc. But 83 times in the past five years. I want to show you a little clip of one of the demolitions. I think it's the first demolition of the village of Al-Aqib for you to get a sense of, again, what happens when a political abstraction, like, for example, the slogan, this is Jewish land, which is a slogan that one hears, or this is our land, or we claim this land, or this is Jewish National Fund land, or this is Israel Land Authority Fund, or whatever, choose your abstraction. But when it comes down to the actual concrete world of people's everyday lives, and this is what that looks like. I'm telling you, I'm telling you, the streets are smaller than me. I mean, if I were you, I wouldn't talk to you. I'm telling you, I'm telling you,

Speaker 2: Yeah, it's not the first demolition.

Saree Makdisi: You can tell they put together these lean tools, so it's one of the later demolitions. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. So 83 times that's happened so far. You have to ask, of course, as I move to a conclusion, well, what kind of resistance is appropriate to this kind of to this kind of life, to this kind of struggle that's waged at the level of the everyday. And of course, we don't hear that much about the everyday usually in media coverage of Israel and Palestine. We usually hear about, you know, rockets or the Israelis bombing Gaza, large scale things like large scale violence that makes, that grabs media attention, but small, relatively small scale like this village, that doesn't really register. And these, you know, what's happening here, as I said, is not a unique case. It's just, it happens to be particularly paradigmatic, but it's not unique by any means. So the question is what sort of resistance is appropriate to a struggle being fought at the level of the everyday? Well, one form of resistance is of course, to stay put. to refuse to be moved around like so many sheep, which is what the Israelis would prefer. And that, of course, is lived necessarily at the level of everyday life, because you're saying, I'm not going. I'm staying put. I don't care what you say. I don't care how many times you demolish my shack. I'm not going. I'm staying. That's an act of resistance, of course, that needs to be recognized as such and as important as any other kind of act. of resistance. But the act of rebuilding, as they're doing, the act of rebuilding is also an act of resistance. If you think about it, a bunch of guys putting together two-by-fours and saying, this is our village, it seems so small. It's almost pathetic how small it is. But it's a very, very important gesture in terms of the larger politically abstract struggle between people claiming land and resisting that claim. The act of farming, is immense, especially of olive trees, is also immensely, it's an immensely important act of resistance, because the Israelis are trying to demolish and uproot and burn down olive trees well, tending to the trees, watering the trees, fertilizing the trees, taking care of the trees, pruning the trees, those things which are so, you know, farmers here in Ontario do that every day, but they're, maybe not olive trees, but whatever people grow in Ontario, it's a very small act, but here it takes on massive, political implications, because that's where the struggle is taking place, at the level of the olive branch, literally. Or the act of walking, the act of saying, well, you can put up roadblocks and checkpoints, and you can mobilize me, take away my ability to get a permit to drive on your roads, but I'm still going to walk. So the act of walking itself becomes a politically laden gesture, I think. The act of raising children despite all of the difficulties, the act of teaching those children all these things become hugely significant political acts because even though they're taking place at the level of the everyday and the banal, the quotidian, But nevertheless, they assume great importance in a situation where people are being denied that education or access to education or the right to have an education and so forth. So insisting on educating children despite all the obstacles that are placed in the way of that education is itself, that's one of the vectors of Palestinian resistance. And of course, the Israelis are perfectly aware of this. They're completely aware of this. And you could see this particularly in terms of the way in which they deal with schools, both in the West Bank and in Gaza. In the last round of bombing of Gaza, The Israelis damaged 118 schools, according to the UN, of which 22 schools were completely destroyed. These are schools where there were people, at most, people hiding there. There was certainly no, as the UN has manifestly documented, no arms caches and this kind of thing. There's nothing there other than the school itself. But the school, a school, becomes subject to military interdiction because of what it represents at some other level, I think. as far as the Israelis are concerned. This is a school in Gaza, which at the time was housing refugees, subject to phosphorus bombardment. This is not this last time. This is 2008, 2009, this image. And these schools here are after the latest round of bombing in Gaza. So if the classroom for Palestinians is a site of resistance, because educating our children is an important part of our lives as a people and as a community, well then, of course, the classroom then becomes a site for the Israelis to interdict and suspend and cut off and destroy, to the extent that they can, that education and all of that it means. So in all of these circumstances, as I said, the mere fact of steadfastness, or as we say in Arabic, takes on a whole new meaning. And everyday occupation in that sense demands an everyday resistance, not extraordinary resistance, but everyday resistance. And in fact, the strange thing about it is that the everyday kind of resistance actually has a kind of power and appeal and reach that the more extraordinary, like let's go to the President of the United States or let's talk to the UN or those kinds of diplomatic initiatives actually fail. Palestinians have no power. in terms of diplomacy and prestige and so forth at a large-scale diplomatic level. They have no cards to play in terms of, well, if you do this for us, we'll do this for you, because there's nothing they can do politically. It's not like they can then pass some vote through the UN or do whatever countries normally do when they're negotiating. But they do have enormous resources of symbolic power. And those, of course, function not at the level of the extraordinary, but rather, on the contrary, at the level of the everyday and the quotidian. And so everyday marches and protests, the ways in which Palestinians have adapted to the language of international culture, in this case, painting themselves like the indigenous creatures, I've forgotten their names from that movie, Avatar, a few years ago, to talk about their connection to the land. using those symbols to be able to reach a global audience has become more and more politically effective, much more effective, I would say, in the long run than waiting for the right kind of extraordinary political intervention to take place, because that doesn't seem to be happening. And there are cases in point that one can think about here. The French company Veolia has become one of the main, the primary targets of the international BDS Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions project. Veolia is constructing a light rail train service inside the occupied West Bank. or inside occupied East Jerusalem. And because of its participation in this project, it's been targeted for BDS action. So Veolia is losing contracts all over the world as a response to what it's doing inside the occupied territory. So there's a giant global... but of course always operating in local communities, protest against Veolia. It's all over the world, from England and France and all over Europe to the US, I know in LA, for example, to Australia and other places as well. And the larger, BDS movement, Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions, has become another way in which the political struggle and the kind of Palestinian resistance against Israel is now operating at a global scale. I think, again, for the future of the struggle, much more powerfully than trying to seal some kind of deal behind closed doors in the White House or Camp David or whatever. And the project to raise global consciousness through the BDS movement has taken on massive form. Not so much in America, although it's beginning to, especially on college campuses. I think to a certain extent in Canada as well, certainly around the world, especially in Europe, where there's a very, very vivid... boycott movement. For example, European supermarkets, I know this is the case in England certainly, have to take special precautions to deal with the consumer boycott of goods coming from Israel that are available in supermarkets in England. H&M, the clothing store, has to deal with the boycott directed against it because it manufactures stuff in the West Bank and so forth. There's a cultural boycott that's going on as well. Very long established major musicians like Elvis Costello and Brian Eno and Roger Waters and many others have been extremely vocal in their articulation of opposition to playing in Israel. I can't even remember the list. Countless musicians have decided not to play in Israel. As they similarly refused to play in apartheid South Africa. There's a sporting... a sporting boycott is quickly developing. You may be aware that next week, FIFA, the World Football Organization, is going to vote to suspend, hopefully, to suspend Israeli membership in FIFA, which would be a massive, truly extraordinary undertaking because again it's the kind of thing that you know you can talk all you want but when you start cutting a country off from international circulation that's when people suddenly sit up and just go oh really this is real now we can't play football by the way did you know that this is off the topic but Israel plays in the European League did you know it's part of UEFA it's part of the European Football Federation not the Asian So if Israel suspended from FIFA, that would be a titanic, I think, accomplishment. My favorite example of the sporting boycotts remains, I've talked about this in other places, I've said this elsewhere, but I'll say it again, because it still remains my favorite example, is the Davis Cup tennis match, which took place in Sweden in 2010. It was supposed to be played between an Israeli and a Swedish player in Stockholm, and there was a massive mobilization to protest the presence of an Israeli player playing tennis in Sweden, because it's obviously in contravention of the call to boycott cultural activity, including sports. So at the last minute, the authorities moved the match from Stockholm to Malmo. kind of without telling anybody so that they could quickly get the match going, and the protesters hopefully won't show up. The thing is, the protesters did show up, even though it was literally the day before that they'd moved the venue. And so outside there was a massive protest, and inside the stadium, as you can see, these two guys are playing tennis, but nobody's watching because of the protest outside. It's as though they have leprosy or something like that. And that kind of stigmatization, You know, what does it do? It doesn't hurt anybody. It is the ultimate form of nonviolent protest. But it's very, very, very powerful, as the case of South Africa showed. And I think that resonates here as well.