The year that squatters evict landlords: 2011 wrap up.

Happy 2012. I welcomed the new Gregorian year by watching Heathers, eating vegan meat haters pizza and deep fried calzone, sitting on the couch reviewing this last year.

This blog started out one day in early January 2011 when I was dying my hair turquoise and watching Crybaby with Neon and Cho-mo. That feels like a lifetime ago.

Between then and now I’ve been a live-in caretaker at a radical social centre, edited another issue of the anarchist journal imminent rebellion, started a new band, made a new zine, collaborated on a short documentary, spoke at two zinefests, hung out at the Melbourne anarchist bookfair, went to the Doctor Who Experience in London, saw Public Enemy play, lived in three cities in two continents, ate a lot of amazing vegan food, got to know my awesome younger cousins, tried to record as much of my grandmother’s life story as I could, saw a lot of old friends I’d been missing and spent a lot of time feeling lost and depressed trying to make sense of the past and figure out a direction for the future. I’m making this list for my own benefit, to remind me that I have done a lot this year so I can stop moping about how I’m not doing anything with my life.

But enough about my life! Because 2011 was the most amazing fascinating will-go-down-in-history year I’ve lived through. It’s a funny thing about history, when you read about it in books in seems so fucking action packed and glamorous, but when you’re living through it, it moves really slowly and most of the time you’re just sitting on the couch, and it’s hard to see how epically significant events around you are. TBH, I spent a lot of this year being only vaguely aware of what was happening in the world, and that’s only from reading headlines of links people post on facebook. Oh, well, I guess I’ll read all about it in a history book ten years from now.

This morning Ace and I sat around drinking coffee and tried to recap everything that happened this year. It’s been a year of popular struggles for freedom. The Arab Spring in North Africa and the Middle East, the July 14 movement in Isra(h)ell, the Indignados in Spain, Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Everywhere Else. I know I’m incessantly critical of some of these struggles (the ones that have taken place around me), but I’m critical because these struggles are so damn important, because they affect me, and people I care about. I’m critical because I have extemely high standards for revolutionary struggles because I have an extremely high opinion of humanity. In spite of my constant complaining, it’s incredibly exciting to know that so many people believe a better world is possible and that it’s worth fighting for.

In Palestine/Israel it seems like everyone spent the year waiting for another war to break out. I mean, first there was an uprising in Egypt, which ousted a pro-Israel regime. Then the huge social protests in Israel (which sadly did a pretty crap job of linking economic issues within Israel to the occupation of Palestinian land), and let’s face it, social unrest is enough of a reason for the state to start a war. Then there was the Palestinian Authority’s attempt to get official UN recognition for the State of Palestine. Everyone was expecting a war that week.

Instead, the Israeli government found a different way to distract the population: they finally negotiated the release of Gilad Shalit. Of course, they could’ve done this five years ago and spared the poor guy but no one’s pointing that out. Never mind. I’m glad that Gilad is home with his family. I’m glad for the Palestinian prisoners who got to go home to their families. My thoughts are with all the prisoners still incarcerated in Israeli prisons and administrative detention centres. (Also, the Shalit prisoner exchange created the most hilarious meme I’ve seen all year.)

This time three years ago I was in Jerusalem, and Gaza was being bombed by the Israeli Air Force. Last night Gaza was bombed again. In Gaza City Momen Abu Daf was killed and five other people were injured. Let’s hope 2012 will bring peace and freedom for the people of Gaza, and an end to the siege.

Meanwhile in the UK, some royal person got married. I only bring it up so we have an excuse to watch this awesome clip of Fred Astaire in Royal Wedding:

Also in the UK, police murdered a man named Mark Duggan. In response, there were riots. The capitalist media tut tutted a lot about the ‘racial problems’ of modern Britain. I thought of Emma Goldman’s famous statement that, ‘it requires less mental energy to condemn than it does to think’.

Osama Bin Laden died this year. I’d totally forgotten about that til Ace reminded me. I’m not sure whether that means the War on Terror is over or still going on. That war’s been going on my whole adult life so it’s hard to imagine the world without it. Kim Jung Il also died this year. I guess it’s been a bad year for the Axis of Evil?

More importantly Amy Winehouse died. I wish I could write something about what she meant to Jewish women of my generation, but I don’t know what to say. Zichrona Le’Shalom.

Ace adds that Nicki Minaj was the best thing that happened to pop culture this year. I trust her judgement on this sort of thing.

In Aotearoa this year has been defined by the February quake in Christchurch. It made me think a lot about how natural disasters are social disasters too. No one could’ve prevented the earthquake happening, but the state response to it, the city council’s response, the impact on working class people in Christchurch, all that is a socially constructed disaster. The same can be said of the earthquake in Japan and the subsequent nuclear meltdown. We can’t control seismic events, we can only control how we plan for them, how respond to them, how we look after the survivors.

The charges against most of the defendents in the Operation Eight ‘terrorism raids’ case were dropped. I think that has to have been the most amazing thing that happened this year. Four defendants are still waiting to face trial in 2012. Having sat in on pre-court hearings I don’t think there’s a chance in hell of the charges standing up in court, but then again I’ve learned never to expect anything resembling logic or ethics from the courts.

There was a big rugby hullabaloo, which I thankfully missed out on. Then there was an election, which about a third of eligible voters didn’t bother voting in. I’ve heard a lot of moaning about the apathetic New Zealand public who don’t deserve democracy because they’re too lazy to vote. I think that’s bullshit, if anything it shows how much of the population don’t think voting is relevant to them and don’t think it’s an effective way of improving their lives. Then CMP Rangitikei locked out 111 workers for refusing to accept a pay cut. The amount of solidarity they got nationwide just goes to show that people in New Zealand aren’t that apathetic.

That pretty much exhausts Ace and my list. It was such a huge year it’s hard to remember it all. It’ll be a hard act for 2012 to follow. I’m hoping for more popular uprisings around the world. I’m hoping the social justice movements that took off in 2011 will keep flourishing. I hope they get better at real solidarity, at recognising colonialism, racism, patriarchy as real threats to freedom and justice, and start to prioritise struggling against them.

I’m hoping that Martín Espada’s poem comes true, that 2012 will be the year that squatters evict landlords, and shawled refugees deport judges.

‘if every rebellion begins with the idea
that conquerors on horseback
are not many-legged gods, that they too drown
if plunged in the river,
then this is the year.’

Revolutionary fables

I came across this fable by Luís Henrique on the internetz recently:

Once upon a time, people came to the home of The Revolutionary, shouting: Revolutionary! Revolutionary! O Revolutionary! Come with us! There is a revolution going on!

The Revolutionary came to his window, and asked: But will there be hippies there?

- Oh yes, there are hippies there. And all the other people, too.

- And are there religious people there?

- Oh yes, there are religious people there, Quackers and Mormons and Catholics, and even a few Buddhists and Hare Krishnas. And all the other people, too.

- And there are soldiers in there?

- Oh yes, there are soldiers in the revolution, marines and sailors and firemen. And all the other people, too.

- And are there prostitutes in the revolution? – Oh yes, there are prostitutes, and johns, and even a few pimps in there. And all the other people, too. – And are there people in ties?

- Oh yes, there are people in ties in the revolution, and in blue jeans, and in rags, and in McDonalds uniforms. And all the other people, too.

- Oh so I am sorry, but that isn’t an actual revolution, because if there are enemies of the people, like pimps and soldiers and Mormons and nuns and hippies and yuppies and whatnot, it can’t be a Pure, Pristine, Perfect Revolution as I dream of.

And so the people went away to their revolution, and The Revolutionary stayed home, explaining from his computer to the internet why the revolution was not a true revolution. And so the people had to do their revolution without The Revolutionary. But the good thing is, people didn’t actually need The Revolutionary, because a revolution is to be done by hippies and Quackers and soldiers and whores and people in ties and people in rags, and all the other people too.

I appreciate the sentiment, and there is something to the critique that Henrique is making. We don’t get very far if we wait for social movements to have perfect analysis and tactics before we join them.

But I can’t help thinking that probably the conversation went more like this:

- Are there women in the revolution?

- No, the women all left because a man in the revolution had raped some of them. But the revolution needs him. He knows how to use photoshop and how to shout slogans into a megaphone.

- Are there indigenous people in the revolution?

- We’d like to get some. But they just want to talk about how their land was colonised. It’s sectarian and divisive.

- Are there people who are disabled in the revolution?

- No. We can’t be bothered making our revolutionary spaces accessible.

- Are there trangender people in the revolution?

- No. We don’t want to alienate transphobic cis-people by having transpeople in the revolution.

- Are there migrants in the revolution? – Not yet. You know, it’s not really part of their culture to join a revolution. It will take some time for us to raise their consciousness.

- Are there gay people in the revolution?

- We had some but they left after someone made a homophobic joke. They are too sensitive and their priorities are wrong.

- Are there parents in the revolution?

- Only the ones who can afford a babysitter. We’re not going to provide childcare. If people choose to have a baby that’s their own responsibility.

Well, you get where I’m going with this… in the end the revolutionary probably decided to go join the revolution anyway to avoid being sectarian. Or maybe she just stayed home and wrote a grumpy blog post instead. I don’t know.

My point is that the reason I critique movements like Occupy Wherever (or the July 14 movement in Israel) isn’t because they’re too inclusive, it’s because they aren’t inclusive enough. Being inclusive of some people, say West Bank settlers, or men who have commited sexual abuse towards women, or cops, means excluding others, like Palestinians, or women who have been sexually abused, or people who’ve been terrorised by cops their whole lives.

It’s not sectarian or divisive to refuse to organise a revolution with people who’ve oppressed you, or to demand that the revolution you’re part of addresses your oppression even if it doesn’t affect everyone else in the revolution.

Is art a universal language?

The first time I saw the Roundabout exhibition was at the City Gallery in Wellington last year. I had mixed feelings about it then. The exhibition brings together work by a range of artists from different nationalities, ethnicities and religious, ideological and political stances, with an emphasis on artists from New Zealand, Australia and Asia. The premise is to create some kind of cross-cultural dialogue:

This exhibition celebrates common threads of human experience – belief, faith, challenge and hope. City Gallery Director Paula Savage says, “This exhibition provides rich and timely considerations of the current state of our world. roundabout acknowledges that the world rotates on a common axis, and many experiences are shared irrespective of geographical separation or differing traditions and languages. The exhibition provides an important platform for conversations to arise between Western and non-Western visual cultures, contemporary and customary practices.”

Promoting tolerance and understanding through the universal language of art?
I think it’s a really appealing concept on one level, but also contains all the usual problems of liberal discourse on multiculturalism and coexistence. It’s based on an assumption that the only difference between conflicting groups (the Western and the non-Western) is, well, difference. That they are two equal groups who just need to learn how to understand each other better.

But the kind of cross-cultural dialogue that is presented here, Western vs Eastern and Indigenous dialogue, isn’t just about separate groups that need to understand each others’ culture better. It’s a cultural confict that is a result of inequality, of Western colonisation and imperialism. One group holds power over the others and controls resources the others can’t access. Fluffy rhetoric about dialogue and understanding, if it doesn’t acknowlege inequality of power, is counter productive. It renders invisible that power inequality and therefore allows it to continue.

So even though I loved many of the individual pieces in Roundabout, I found the premise behind the exhibition frustrating.

Yesterday I went to see Roundabout again, this time at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

I think the piece that moved me the most was this installation by Tony Albert: a wall covered in kitchy Australian memorabilia items featuring stereotypical colonial representations of Aboriginal people. It’s a horrific display.

There were s a lot of artworks by other New Zealand and Australian artists too, like Vernon Ah Kee, Shane Cotton, Lyonel Grant, Rangi Kipa, Kelcy Taratoa and Roi Toia. Artworks which deal with issues of colonisation, racism and cultural appropriation. Neither Albert’s installation or any of the other artworks were given any context aside from the artist’s name and nationality. The audience wasn’t even told whether the artist is indigenous or not.

It made me wonder how these artworks are interpreted by an Israeli audience that isn’t familiar with New Zealand and Australian history, culture and politics.

My cousin Phoebe said that Lyonel Grant’s carving reminded her of the wooden masks my uncle has in his house. I don’t know where those masks are from — at a guess I’d say Africa or the Pacific Islands. But I don’t know enough about traditional artworks from either of those very general areas to be able to say. I don’t know anything about the people who created those masks, or why they made them, or what kind of meaning or purpose the masks have in their culture.

Probably my uncle doesn’t know either. I think he hung those masks on the wall in the way that Western people often hang objects from non-Western cultures on the wall — because they are exotic and interesting and pretty to look at and in a way they symbolise Western domination over the rest of the world, because we can take their stuff and look at it and not have to understand it or the culture that created it. Whereas people from colonised and marginalised cultures are forced to understand the dominant culture in order to survive.

Of course, the Tel Aviv museum isn’t displaying ‘traditional artefacts’ from non-Western cultures. It’s displaying contemporary art by contemporary non-Western artists who address these questions of colonisation and the Western gaze. At least, i think that’s what they’re trying to address. I can’t know for sure what each of the artists was thinking when they created each specific artwork.

But I do wonder — when these pieces are presented divorced of context – other than the ‘inter-cultural dialogue’ message of the exhibition – does the audience understand them as a political commentary on the impact of colonisation? I feel like there’s a good chance that the art ends up being interpreted the same way as my uncle’s mask collection. That it becomes an exotic artefact from an exotic far away people, Indigenous art to be collected and consumed by Western people. So that instead of challenging the colonial gaze it becomes its object.

I guess what I’m saying is that I’m not convinced that art is a universal language. I think sometimes it needs translating. Otherwise people will view it through the lense of their existing prejudices.

*

Of course there’s also the question of whether international artists should be working with Israeli institutions, when Palestinian organisations have called for a cultural boycott of Israel. I imagine the folks behind Roundabout would argue that boycotting art institutions means missing a chance to create dialogue.

Supporters of the boycott would probably respond that engaging with Israeli cultural institutions helps maintain Israel’s image as a tolerant, open minded cultured society, and whitewashes over the occupation.

I’m not sure where I sit on this question, but I do think it’s an important question that should be acknowleged and engaged with.

Occupy what now?

I haven’t had first hand experience of any of the Occupy Wall Street inspired public occupations that are going on around the world at the moment, because I’m currently in the 1948 territories of Palestine, aka Israel (aka israHELL) which pre-empted Occupy Wall Street with its July 14 social justice movement, and the tent occupation of Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard, in July and August.

Since people started occupying public spaces in different cities in Aotearoa I’ve been trying my best to keep updated on what’s going on through friends, facebook, and even the capitalist media. Every article I’ve read on Stuff or the Herald makes me roll my eyes, and then I have to remind myself that journalists are generally stupid, and have a knack of misrepresenting social movements even when they’re trying to be sympathetic. It wouldn’t be fair to judge Occupy New Zealand based on what the capitalist media is publishing about it.

I want to share some of my thoughts about the occupy ‘movement’ (one of my thoughts is that occupying pubic spaces isn’t a movement, it’s a tactic) but I think I need to do it with the disclaimer that for the time being I’m only a long distance observer, not a participant.

There’s a couple of things that really bug me about Occupy [wherever] and I think one of them has to do with the way it’s become a brand. It’s like activists are trying to use capitalist marketing techniques to sell the concept of opposing capitalism. Occupy Wall Street got a lot of media attention globally, so sympathetic activists around the globe decided to franchise this successful brand in their own communities, without thinking about whether it’s appropriate to their own context or paying attention to critiques of OWS. This tactic of copying what activists do in North America and Europe because it gets lots of media attention is also what happened with Climate Camp and Slutwalk and I think it was a mistake in those cases too.

I think trying to sell people a brand, or an idea, is an effective way to sell a product, but it doesn’t work if you’re trying to change the world. We’re not trying to convince everyone to like us, we’re trying to engage them in a dialogue (that means a two way conversation) about what it is we don’t like about our society, what kind of society we’d like to build instead of it, and what’s a good way to do it. It’s not about getting as many people as possible to identify with a brand or slogan (the 99%) it’s about working together with a bunch of other people to change things.

That’s why I disagree with the most common criticisms that people make of Occupy [XYZ]: that it’s ideologically incoherent, that there’s no clear leadership, that they don’t have clear demands and so on. I think that’s the whole fucking point. It’s not a political party with a party line that’s handed down by the leadership to the rank and file. It’s a space for people to engage with each other about social change and exchange ideas, opinions and skills. It’s not a group of people asking the state for something, It’s a group of people working together to build something new. It’s creating a space – actually multiple spaces around the world – for people to come together and see that they aren’t the only ones frustrated by the lack of justice in the world.

The criticism that I will make is that because it’s a very broad struggle there’s a common tendency to silence more marginalised voices. The ‘movement’ is supposed to represent the poorest 99 percent of people on Earth. But within that 99 percent there’s a lot of inequality. There are people with more and less access to resources. There are people with more and less power in the world based on their ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexuality, physical ability and other factors. Social conflict is far more complicated than just 99 percent versus 1 percent.

Over and over – and not just in the Occupy [insert place] ‘movement’ – any kind of inequality within the movement gets ignored because it’s seen as divisive. Because addressing colonisation, racism, sexual violence, transphobia, homophobia or ableism might alienate some people who benefit from those things, or at least benefit from not having to think about them. What really divides social movements isn’t indigenous people, people of colour, women, queers, transfolk or anyone else who is marginalised, what divides social movements is people who don’t want to address their own power and privilege.

I think part of the problem goes back to what I said about Occupy as a brand. Some activists act as if getting people on their side is the goal of the struggle, rather than being a strategy towards achieving the goal (the goal being building a just and equal society). So they tailor their message to make it appeal to as many people as possible. Which means ignoring issues like antisemitic conspiracy theories or the participation of men with a history of sexual violence, not to mention the fact that they’re ‘occupying’ land which is already under colonial occupation.

This is why I’m nitpicking about occupying public spaces being a tactic and not a movement. A movement should be defined by its goals not its tactics. Personally I wouldn’t be involved in a movement unless those goals include ending racism, sexual violence and colonisation.

I know this whole rant sounds like I’m just tearing Occupy [___] to shreds when I haven’t even put any work into it. But honestly I’m only going to the trouble of saying these things because I think Occupy is exciting and inspiring and has awesome potential for liberation. This is an exciting time to be alive. People around the world, me included, are realising that we don’t have to sit alone at home feeling sad and disempowered, that lots of other people are also frustrated at the world, and that when we all get together we have power to change things.

I suspect that I don’t agree with lots of those people about what the solution is or even what the problem is (I think the problem is capitalist economics, national borders and hierarchical governments. I think the solution is a socialist economy, horizontal direct democracy and the abolition of national borders). But it’s a chance to have a dialogue about what needs to change, what the alternatives are, why different struggles are connected. It’s really important to me not to let that chance pass me by. Not because I’m too afraid to alienate other people by being open about my political opinions, and also not because I’m so jaded and cynical that I can’t be bothered engaging with anyone who doesn’t have the same political opinions as me.

Some reccomended reading:

On decolonising Wall Street:

Indian Country Today

Tequila Sovereign

Native Appropriations

On decolonising Aotearoa:

Te Wharepora Hou

Mellow Yellow

On conspiracy theories (and it includes lol cats)

On sexual violence

Social justice and the right of return

 

Remember a few months ago when I was being all cynical about the new social justice movement in Israel, the July 14 movement (or #J14 for the twitter savvy)? I really really badly wanted to be proven wrong. I wanted to see an amazing potential for social revolution. So the other week I went along to the Social Economic Academy‘s forum on social justice in Yaffa. The forum was a report back on the findings of the ‘experts’ committees on social justice’. I guess the word ‘experts’ should’ve been enough of a warning that I wasn’t gonna find what I was looking for here.

The committees focused on education, health, employment and welfare and it was interesting to hear what issues they thought were most urgent but overall I came away feeling like we had drastically different views on what social justice means. The main thing that struck me is how much the words ‘patriotic’ and ‘citizen’ were thrown around. Sometimes I feel like politics in Israel is just one big competition to out-Zionist everyone else. The unifying theme of this forum was people wanting to make the state stronger, to give it more power – as if the state is some kind of guardian against neo-liberal capitalism rather than its lackey.

I was disappointed and not surprised that the voice of those people who are most exploited in Israel (Palestinians, migrant workers, refugees from Africa) weren’t represented at all. The one speaker (Daphni Leef) who did mention the demolition of Bedouin villages in the Naqab/Negev made sure to emphasize that these Bedouin are citizens. As though ethnic cleansing is only wrong when its victims are citizens.

It’s that narrowness, focusing only on the struggle of one group of people – a group that’s relatively privileged – that makes me so sceptical about the July 14 social justice movement.

The same week I went to an exhibition opening at Zochrot (remembering). There are countless human rights NGOs in Israel that work against the occupation and most of them accept a two state solution and a return to the 1967 border as an end to the conflict. Zochrot is one of the few NGOs that actively works to raise awareness of the Nakba and educate Israelis about the hidden history of occupation in the 1948 territories.

The exhibition was about facilitating the return of the refugees from 1948 to their homes. Most of it consisted of a series of plans drawn up by architects looking at how to integrate existing Jewish communities with Palestinians returning home to their lands, based on the understanding that it’s not possible to turn back the clock and return to 1948, but instead we need to build something new.

But the exhibit that I found the most interesting was two short documentaries about the right of return. In the first, the filmmakers took to the streets of Yaffa and interviewed Jewish Israeli locals. First, they asked them what they thought of African refugees in Israel. The responses were mixed. Some people thought refugees should be welcomed to Israel, that as a state founded by refugees Israel had a special duty to support refugees. Others argued that refugees from Africa have no place being here, because they’re not Jewish, because they increase crime and prostitution, because of all the reasons people usually give for keeping refugees out of any country.

The second question was: if these refugees want to go home, should they be able to? The answer was unanimously yes. Everyone agreed African refugees have a right to go home.

Then they were asked: what about the Palestinian refugees of 1948, do they have a right to come home? Again the responses were mixed. I was really pleasantly surprised at how many Jewish Israelis said that they welcomed the return of refugees. Then there were the ones who said that people who ‘ran away’ didn’t have any right to come home, as if to escape a warzone is to forfeit your home.

The most interesting response was the guy who said that if Palestinians were allowed to return home to Yaffa then he should also be allowed to return to the house his grandfather had left behind in Budapest. Of course, he’s completely right. Jewish people – myself included – whose ancestors escaped Europe because of anti-Semitic persecution (whether it was during the holocaust or earlier) have every right to come home. But it’s not Palestinians who are denying us that right, and they shouldn’t be paying the price for European anti-Semitism.

The second documentary interviewed Palestinian refugees from Yaffa in the West Bank. The first question was: would you return to Yaffa if you could? Everyone, from teenagers to those old enough to remember 1948, said yes.

The interviewers also asked: How would you get along with your new Jewish neighbours? This is the question I was most intrigued by. The two teenage boys interviewed both said that they didn’t want anything to do with Jews, that both people will just keep to themselves, although they did say that if they ran a restaurant they would allow Jewish customers since ‘a restaurant would flourish with Jewish customers’. On the other hand an elderly woman who was 13 years old when her family was ethnically cleansed from Yaffa said that she didn’t think Jews were a problem, that her family had always lived side by side with Jews.

It made me think about how the longer the occupation (of both the 67 and the 48 territories) continues the more we take it for granted that it will always exist. The older generations, the ones who can still remember a time before all this, are dying. The younger generations have lived with the occupation our whole lives. It’s easy for us to see this conflict as something inevitable, that can never be resolved. The generations that come after us won’t even have parents or grandparents who can remember a Palestine that wasn’t under Zionist occupation. The longer the occupation continues the harder it’s gonna be to end it.

The radical left needs to be a safe space for women

The Hand Mirror, Anarchia and Capitalism Bad Tree Pretty have all published a statement about Omar Hamed and his repeated sexually predatory behaviour.

I know that lots of people are going to complain that making this information public is unfair to Omar, and that it damages the radical left. So first of all I want to respond to those criticisms. Making it public knowledge that Omar has a habit of ignoring (lack of) sexual consent and preying on women who are drunk is not about persecuting Omar, it’s about keeping other people safe. It’s about making sure that people can make their own decisions about what their boundaries are around Omar, whether or not they want to work with him, socialise with him, get drunk with him.

Making it public knowledge that a man who plays a prominent role in the radical left movement has a habit of ignoring (lack of) sexual consent and preying on women who are drunk doesn’t damage that movement. What damages the radical left is when sexual assault isn’t taken seriously, when survivors of abuse are blamed or discredited, and when people keep quiet about sexual assault because they think it will damage the ‘movement’ to talk about it.

So I want to say thank you to Maia and Asher for publishing the statement, I think it was a really brave thing to do.

And I want to reccommend some reading material too:

Asher has written a lot about people’s responses to the statement.

Grumblings and gravity writes about her own experience dealing with a close friend who was abusive to his partner, and about Omar as well.

Kim has also written about Omar, and about community based justice in He Hōaka, and her article on supporting survivors of abuse in imminent rebellion 9 should be compulsory reading for leftists.

Bamboo writes about the way the left has failed to deal with gendered abuse in both mellow yellow and imminent rebellion 11.

Finally, what I wrote about abusive relationships earlier this year is equally relevant to Omar’s behaviour and the way various left activists have responded.

Shana tova

It seems portentous that the new year coincides with the Palestinian Authority’s doomed attempt to gain UN recognition for a Palestinian state. I assume it’s G-d’s way of letting us know the new year will contain the same bullshit as the old year. It seems like nothing ever changes around here, or rather, the more things change the worse off Palestinians are.

I want to write more later about the response within Israel to the possibility of a UN recognised Palestinian state, especially Netanyahu’s speech.

But since it’s nice to start the new year off on a happy note, here’s the Unternationale singing Oy ir narishe tsienistn:

Justice

I’ve been out of Aotearoa for a month now, and pretty much disconnected from the world. The other night I finally had a chance to read my emails. There was a cryptic one from my mum: ‘Just heard the news about dropping the 15 October charges! Tzedek Tzedek tirdof!’

I assumed my mother had somwhow got her wires crossed, or else I’d misunderstood her. No way that the charges against the Operation Eight defendants have really been dropped. That kind of justice just doesn’t happen in real life. I checked Indymedia. I checked Stuff. I checked October 15 Solidarity’s facebook page.

It’s true. Thirteen of the seventeen people who were facing charges relating to Operation Eight, the New Zealand police’s big scary ‘terrorism’ investigation, have had the charges against them dropped.

***

I have this ridiculously detailed memory of the day it all started. Monday the 15th of October 2007 was my first proper weekday of being unemployed and I was celebrating by keeping my phone turned off. I slept in til 11. I was standing in the kitchen cooking myself scrambled tofu for breakfast when the phone rang. It was my flatmate. He’d phoned to tell me that 128, Wellington’s radical social centre, had been raided by the cops and that its inhabitants were being held.

I ran to the Freedom Shop, the anarchist bookshop, which was already full of people compulsively checking the internet for updates and trying to work out what the fuck was going on. The capitalist media was reporting that the police had uncovered a terrorist plot. As well as 128, they’d raided and arrested four people in Wellington and more across the North Island. Back then the whole thing seemed so surreal. At some point I decided to go the police station to wait for the arrestees to be released. I walked up Cuba St, it was an incredibly sunny day, and I thought it was bizarre that everyone was walking around like it was a totally ordinary day.

For the next few weeks, 16 people were held on remand, and told that they were gonna be charged under the terrorism suppression act, that they would never get bail, that they would be in prison for the next fifteen years or longer. I’ve never felt as scared or powerless as I did during that time. My life at that point revolved around supporting my friends and comrades: raising money, organising political support,visiting prison. The same goes for so many other people: all of the arestees had whanau, friends and political supporters who’d put their life on hold after October 15.

November 8 was a very happy day for a lot of people. It was the day the attorney general announced the state wouldn’t charge them under the terrorism suppression act. It was the day everyone got out on bail.

***

Since then I’ve fantasised so much about the charges being dropped. I never thought it would actually happen. I don’t expect anything resembling logic or ethics from the courts. I thought the defendants were wasting their time.

That the charges were dropped for 13 of the defendants is a really huge victory. But I have to keep reminding myself not to mistake it for justice. During the last 47 months the state has done its damned best to punish the defendants before the case even went to trial. Val wrote about about how the justice process is punishment in itself in imminent rebellion 10. Maia has also written about the cost of the arrests and court case.

One of the defendants didn’t live to see the charges against him dropped. Tuhoe Lambert died earlier this year. It’s heartbreaking and infuriating that he spent the last years of his life worrying about going to prison. I can’t even imagine the impact that must have had on his health.

***

Four of the defendants are still facing charges. Emily Baily, Rangi Kemara, Tāme Iti and Urs Signer are accused of belonging to an organised criminal group. I have no doubt that they will be acquitted, unless their charges are also dropped before it goes to trial. But like I said, the process is punishment in itself. Laying ridiculous charges and dropping them at the last minute before they go to trial is a common tactic the police use to punish and harass political activists.

Regardless of what happens, when all of the defendants in the operation eight case are no longer facing charges, this still won’t be over.

We can’t forget what this whole case is about, which is that New Zealand is a colonial state. Operation eight is an attack on Tūhoe, and by extension an attack on all tangata whenua. It’s about tino rangatiratanga, it’s about sovereignty.

When my family first immigrated from Palestine/Israel to Aotearoa/New Zealand, my parents thought they were immigrating from a colonial state founded on racism, to a state founded on mutual agreement and cooperation between the indigenous population and migrants. The more I learn about New Zealand history, the more I think it’s not different from Israel at all. Everything the Israeli state is inflcting on Palestinians today, the New Zealand state did to Māori 200-100 years ago. The technology for colonisation has developed since then. The crown didn’t have helicopter gunships and caterpillar bulldozers in the 19th century. But the impact was similar.

The colonisation of Aotearoa is not just historical, it’s ongoing. Operation Eight exemplifies that. If we’re serious about pursuing justice then we need to fight colonialism everywhere. We need to fight racism and imperialism everywhere. In far away places, and also on the land we stand on.

Night out

I went to Melbourne. Mostly my trip was great. I ate lots of amazing vegan food (Lord of the Fries! Vegie Bar! Trippy Taco! Fuck yeah!). I went to the anarchist bookfair. I went to food not bombs at Loophole community centre, I went to a barbecue at the Melbourne Anarchist Resource Centre, I went to a film night at Barricade Infoshop. I spent quality time with lots of nice revolutionary people I haven’t seen in a very long time.

Then this other thing happened. We went to a party. I had a bottle of red wine. Usually I’m a beer drinker, but I’d just been reading The Dharma Bums, so it was red wine. To be precise it was a Shiraz and I’d picked it out because it had a cute picture of a guy in a black bandit mask driving away with a giant bottle of wine tied to the roof of his car. So it was bandit wine. That’s the kind of wine connosieur I am. But I digress.

We went to the party and I drank cheap bandit Shiraz and talked shit about anarchism and insurrection and typography and at some point somebody got a phone call from his friend who was nearby and there were guys with shaved heads wearing braces and he was feeling a bit nervous but he didn’t want us to come get him.

I missed everything that happened after that (mostly thanks to bandit wine) but it sounds like it went something like this: a neo Nazi went up to a guy who was unlocking his bike around the corner. He asked the guy if he was ‘some kind of commie’. The guy replied ‘yeah’. At which point the Nazi punched him.

After that there was some kind of confrontation between Nazis and party-goers which culminated in a Nazi picking up broken glass off the street and slicing his own throat and then yelling and screaming about how he’d been cut. Apparently this was some kind of bizarre attempt to start a fight.

Someone called the ambos and the cops showed up and the party dispersed pretty quick after that.

The whole confrontation with the Nazis was pretty fucking terrifying and nauseating because I’d like to think that people can walk the streets safely at night and not be assaulted by White supremacist dickheads, but the incident I really wanted to talk about happened after the cops had already left and the party had more or less dissipated and I was standing on the footpath trying to work out how to get back to the house where I was staying.

Two anarchists who’d been involved in the confrontation with the Nazis were explaining what happened to a group of very inebriated hipster types. The hipsters thought the whole thing was hilarious. The very distressed anarchists tried to explain that it wasn’t a joke, that Nazi attacks are very scary, that they were talking about physical violence… One of the hipsters rolled his eyes and replied that they were ‘missing the point’.

This whole interaction was very revealing. It made me think about how to someone who’s always led a privileged existence – who has class privilege, and White privilege, who has no direct family history of not having that privilege – violence and oppression are completely theoretical. Being beaten up by Nazis is just an interesting anthropological experience. It’s easy to see the irony in violence when it’s not being targeted at you. It’s easy to intellectualise oppression when it’s not being perpetrated towards you. To these kids racist violence is something you see in movies and read about in books, so it’s no wonder they couldn’t take it seriously when it actually happened in front of them.

The whole thing made me angry and depressed, because if you can’t get people to stand up against something as blatant and obvious as neo Nazis beating people up on the street, how can you get them to stand up against more subtle, less visible forms of oppression, like the ones perpetrated by the state? How the hell do you make people see that violence and oppression aren’t fairy tales or interesting plot devices. It’s a real thing that people live with, it impacts people’s freedom to live their lives as they like. Minimising it is a fucked up thing to do because it’s not glamorous and novel, it’s scary and the trauma of living with that fear is something too many people carry with them.

It was quite a lot to absorb in one wine addled night. It’s scary enough being faced with the reality of neo Nazi violence, but on top of it having it dismissed by other people, that’s the thing that really terrifies me.

Uphold rape culture: become a cop

If you walk down K Rd in Auckland, towards Ponsonby Rd, you will see a mural depicting a man running away from two women police officers and the caption ‘do something extraordinary, become a cop’. The mural is part of a stencil art advertising campaign by M&C Saatchi, and it was painted by the street artist Otis Frizzell.

You may think it’s a little strange for the police to use street art to recruit new employees considering part of the job description is to arrest street artists. Apparently that’s the point. They are trying to appeal to ‘culturally aware and savvy young people’.

There’s also another sub-text here that isn’t mentioned by the Herald. Both the K Rd mural and the mural in Left Bank in Wellington show women cops. The message is very clear: if you are a woman then becoming a police officer is a way you can be strong and empowered. You can chase bad guys. You can protect children.

In the last decade the New Zealand police has been exposed as an institution that upholds rape culture. Cops have raped women in New Zealand. Other cops have protected their cop rapist mates. The police have a reputation for being a sexist institution and it’s not surprising they’re trying to address it with a fancy PR campaign.

But a fancy PR campaign doesn’t actually change an entrenched culture of sexism. Having women cops doesn’t equate to having feminist cops. It doesn’t mean those women cops aren’t upholding rape culture too.

A few weeks before the cop recruitment murals went up around the country, a few of my friends (for the purpose of anonymity we’ll call them Ms. Kaos, Ms. Calamity and Ms. Cannonball) were hanging out in an alleyway off K Rd drinking cider.

It wasn’t long before some cops showed up. In fact five whole units showed up to deal with three young women drinking quietly in a liquor ban area which makes you think those better work stories you get by joining the police force probably aren’t all that interesting.

One of the cops approached my friends. As chance would have it, she was one of the very same woman cops immortalised in Mr. Frizzell’s artwork. From Ms. Kaos’s account of events I gather the conversation went something like this:

Cop: What are you doing hanging out in this alleyway?

Kaos: What do you mean? Why shouldn’t I hang out in this alleyway?

Cop: Are you stupid? Do you know what could happen to you here?

Kaos: Tell me what you mean? What is it that could happen to me here?

Cop: You could be raped.

Now anyone who pays any attention to how sexual violence happens in our culture would be able to tell this cop that statistically Kaos is not very likely to be raped in the street with two of her friends around. She’s far more likely to be raped at home by her partner.

Which is beside the point, because I’m not about to say to a woman, ‘what are you doing being in a relationship with a man? Are you stupid? Don’t you know he might rape you?’ any more than I would say the same to a woman who is standing alone in a dark alleyway. Anyone with any feminist analysis of sexual violence understands that rape is always the rapist’s fault, not the survivor’s. Telling young women how to not get raped will not protect them from being raped. It just reinforces rape culture, it reinforces a culture where perpetrators of rape aren’t held accountable, because we think the person they raped is irresponsible for getting herself into a situation where she could be raped.

This reminds me of Michael Sanguinetti, the Canadian cop who famously told a group of students that women can avoid rape by not dressing like sluts, and unwittingly gave birth to Slutwalk.

It would be disingenuous of me to say that police officers should know better than to spout rape myths, because I don’t think that the police is an institution that can be reformed. I don’t think that feminists can work within the police to achieve feminist goals. I think giving any group of people the kind of power that cops have is bound to end with that power being abused. I’m an anarchist; I want to abolish the cops along with the state whose laws they uphold.

A hip new advertising campaign isn’t going to change that.