The Middle East War and the hostile environment
Posted on 27/11/2023
Nira Yuval-Davis reflects on the complexities of its start and end points.
This is an edited version of a talk presented at a webinar organised by SSAHE (Social Scientists Against The Hostile Environment).1
One of the most contested issues regarding telling the story of the current war in the Middle East is about when to start it. Each narrative always has a clear starting point – if not necessarily an end point – but what is the starting point for this war? Is it the terrible massacre that Hamas fighters carried out among soldiers and civilians, Jews and non-Jews, in the South of Israel on 7 October? – the highest number of people killed in one day in the hundred years of conflict since the beginning of the Zionist settlement in Palestine – at least until that day. That’s probably where most Israelis would like to start the story.
Should I start with the ongoing massive systematic bombing, destruction, displacement and killing of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, including thousands of children, a new Palestinian Nakba? That’s where many international protesters focus their protests.
Or I could start the narrative by telling the history of the Zionist settler colonial project, before and after 1948 and the establishment of the Israeli state. A large proportion of the Palestinian population in the Gaza strip today are 1948 refugees, and most of the settlements attacked on 7 October sit on lands where previous generations of today’s Gazans used to live, before the first Nakba.
Or maybe I should start my narrative by telling how Israeli intelligence – just like the US with the Taliban – was a cultivator of Hamas in its infancy, as part of a divide and rule policy aimed at weakening the power of the PLO; and how, until 7 October, it facilitated the rule of Hamas in Gaza by enabling the transfer of money to Hamas from Qatar via Israeli banks, so it could distribute money to people in this huge open-air prison, to maintain its control and keep the population just about surviving.
Another starting point could be the convenience of the Hamas attack and the following war for Iran and its allies, as it has put in jeopardy the anti-Iran, anti-Palestinian, so called ‘normalisation’ agreement that was soon to be signed between Israel and Saudi Arabia. In many ways, this is not just a war between Israel and Gaza, but a regional war, in which various pro-Iranian groups, from Yemen to Syria and Lebanon, are taking part in an anti-American as well as anti-Israeli war, although at the moment, at least, in a contained way.
Related to that, one could start by describing the war as a result of miscalculated wishful thinking. Hamas was hoping that Hezbollah, Iran and other forces in the Arab world would join the war in a much more total way; and Israel has been hoping that Egypt and/or the PLO would take responsibility for governing the population in Gaza instead of Hamas, and, better still, would allow them to be displaced to the Sinai desert. But these organisations and governments have learned their lessons from previous history and are not co-operating.
The timing of the war has also been convenient for Netanyahu and the Israeli government. In one day it stopped the six-month long major protest movement which was demanding the ending of the judicial coup in Israel and the resignation of Netanyahu: the leader of the opposition has joined the government and war cabinet, and all the huge protest and pro-democracy posters which were plastered all over public buildings and public spaces have been replaced with others, even larger, which say – No Left, No Right, together we’ll all win the war.
A few years ago I wrote an article for Feminist Dissent (which can be downloaded free) about the effects, especially on women, of the dual neoliberalisation and ‘religionisation’ of Israel.2 As a result of these dual processes, the present Israeli government has greatly intensified the privatisation and minimisation of the state for most of its population, while massively enlarging the subsidies and other forms of state support for the religious sector, especially the settlers. This was one of the major reasons why Hamas found minimal or no resistance to its raids on 7 October: military and other forms of support had been diverted to the settlers in the West Bank; and it is also the reason why a large proportion of the existing protest movement – as well as joining the military in their reserve national military service – have also been replacing what should have been state support to the evacuated inhabitants of the South; they have been organising food, shelter and other equipment, as none has come from the state. They have been fulfilling vital civil tasks but on the way their protest has been completely coopted, at least for now.
A sector that was not coopted has been the settlers (while for the first time, there have been many Haredi Jews, ultra-orthodox, who have been resisting joining the military all these years, signing up to join the army). The settlers, with the aid of military and police units, under the leadership of the neo-fascists in the government, have been using the war to promote and execute their regime coup programme. This has been done via the intensification of ethnic cleansing, dispossession and displacement of Palestinians, especially Bedouins, in the West Bank; and through the intensified enforcement of a series of laws and regulations that discriminate against Palestinian local authorities and freedom of speech for all.
This is happening in a background where people feel exposed and scared, and so are applying for permits to carry personal weapons everywhere. In mixed cities like Haifa, the municipality is working with mixed groups of citizens to contain inter-communal violence and prevent private communal militias taking over public security, as happened in Beirut just before the civil war. But in other spaces, especially the West Bank, armed settlers and armed police and military are becoming almost indistinguishable from one another.
One of the frightening things I have heard of is the pressure being exerted on local authorities to pass ‘flags’ regulations that would oblige every home and abode to wave the Israeli flag so that those who object to what is happening can be ‘outed’. During the mass protests the mainstream protest movement thought that they should reclaim the Israeli flag from the right – now they are becoming indistinguishable patriots, excluding only those of us who refuse to be uncritical of the war and the war crimes which are taking place.
For such people, the hostile environment is becoming more and more unbearable. The Supreme Court refused to over-rule a decision not to allow protest demonstrations in Arab settlements, and just this week I’ve heard from a couple of left Zionist moderate critics that they were beaten up by the police when they were demonstrating for a ceasefire and the return of the 7 October kidnapped via negotiations, and some have also been arrested for a few hours. Licences for mixed Jewish-Arab meetings have been refused in many places, although often the organisers have found alternative spaces, including online, to carry them out – up until now. Quite a few Israeli Palestinian leaders, include ex-MPs, have been arrested for much longer periods. And a Jewish high-school teacher of civic studies was arrested and initially accused by the police of ‘intent to commit treason’ when he presented some anti-war images and texts in social media. Prominent academics, mostly but not only Palestinians, have been suspended, and, in the case of prominent tenured professors, been called on to resign.
There is no end, or even feasible end-plan for this war on either side; the double crisis of governability and governmentality which has been growing to dominate and undermine social and political fabrics in so many countries under neoliberal globalisation and its crises, including the UK, is overwhelmingly clear in the Middle East, with a politics of violence and fear becoming increasingly dominant.3
In our forthcoming conference in spring 2024, SSAHE aims to discuss necropolitics, the transition from a politics of discrimination and racism to a politics which does not give value to human life. This politics is becoming increasingly dominant, and is replacing human rights discourses in more and more spaces. In Israel and Palestine, necropolitics prevails not only in the terrible indiscriminate mass massacres by both sides, but also in Israel’s conscious decision not to prioritise the lives of the soldiers and civilians who have been captured by Hamas: not to exchange the kidnapped for Palestinian prisoners, as has been the custom throughout many years of conflict, but rather to use them as an excuse to obliterate Gaza.
Many of us have been taking part in protest activities against the war in Gaza and its growing human and humanitarian costs, while knowing that the issues cannot be resolved solely by an end to that war. There is a need for the end of the occupation and the de-Zionisation of Palestine/Israel into a state with equal individual and collective rights for all its residents. This seems more than ever a faraway dream, but giving up on striving for it, not keeping alive this alternative narrative, would only be much worse.
Nira Yuval-Davis is a diasporic Israeli Jew, Professor Emeritus, Honorary Director of the Research Centre on Migration, Refugees and Belonging (CMRB) at the University of East London. She is a former President of the Research Committee 05 (on Racism, Nationalism, Indigeneity and Ethnic Relations) of the International Sociological Association, founder member of Women Against Fundamentalism and of SSAHE (Social Scientists Against the Hostile Environment). Among other activities she is also a member of Soundings editorial board. Among her books are Woman-Nation-State, 1989; Racialized Boundaries, 1992; Unsettling Settler Societies, 1995; Gender and Nation, 1997; The Warning Signs of Fundamentalism, 2004; The Politics of Belonging: Intersectional Contestations, 2011; Women Against Fundamentalism, 2014; and Bordering, 2019. Her forthcoming article in Sociology is on ‘Antisemitism is a form of racism – or is it?’.
Notes
- SSAHE is a project group of the Special Interest Group (SIG) on Refugees, Migration and Settlement established by some Fellows of the UK Academy of Social Sciences: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/o/social-scientists-against-the-hostile-environment-30350009252.2. Nira Yuval-Davis, ‘In between neo-liberalism and religious fundamentalism: Some reflections on contemporary Israel and some of its women’, Feminist Dissent No 5, 2020: https://journals.warwick.ac.uk/index.php/feministdissent/article/view/760.
- For more on this, see Nira Yuval-Davis, ‘The double crisis of governability and governmentality, Soundings 52, 2021: https://journals.lwbooks.co.uk/soundings/vol-2012-issue-52/abstract-7373/. Clearly there is a strong connection between this set of issues and authoritarianism, including the idea of ‘hostile environments’.