No, that’s not a Palestine solidarity activist or a Jewish anti-Zionist. Those words were written by Moshe Arens, former Israeli Defense Minister and mentor to Benjamin Netanyahu. Arens’ argument is, of course, far from an antiracist message, but that doesn’t mean it’s not accurate. Without naming it, Arens is supporting the ideology of Naftali Bennett and his HaBayit HaYehudi (Jewish Home) party.

Like Bennett, Arens stresses the “integration of the Arab minority,” and advocates the annexation of large parts of the West Bank and giving citizenship to the Palestinian population. And, in the tradition of political Zionism dating back to Theodor Herzl, Arens wishes to see the government engage in an expanded program of encouraging Jews around the world to immigrate to Israel.

Recognizing that, despite the histrionics of Diaspora fear-mongerer Abraham Foxman, anti-Semitism is not now or likely in the near future to be a sufficiently high threat to Jewish life to encourage mass Jewish emigration from the West, Arens says that Jews will be drawn by Israel’s economic prosperity, which offers them a standard of living as high or higher than what they enjoy abroad.

Really, Moshe? Would that be the Israel that has the highest poverty rate among OECD countries? The country that is seeing social protests, even as you pen such falsehoods, because of massive cuts to public spending? The country with growing income disparity that places it in the top five among developed countries? No. Arens’ dream of enticing Jews to Israel with promises of economic glory is even less likely to be realized than the end of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. Israel is becoming a poor country.

Instead, what Arens’ idea is likely to produce is an ongoing two-tier system of citizenship. The notion that the “Arab minority” can be truly integrated into an Israel that has cantonized their fellow Palestinians in a smattering of strangled enclaves in the West Bank is pure fantasy. Palestinian citizens of Israel will become an increasingly alienated group, despite their own citizenship. The Palestinians of the West Bank are their own family members. Does Arens really believe that Israeli citizens who are Arab can be so easily bribed into ignoring the plight of their relatives and friends? Imagine if someone suggested such a thing about Jews.

All that being said, Arens is not wrong about the views of those who wish to continue to breathe life into the rotting corpse of the Oslo Accords. The late peace process was inspired by a basic theory, elaborated by Yitzhak Rabin in his 1992 electoral campaign: us here, them there. Separation was the byword, and this evolved over the years. In more recent days, the key motivating factor for reaching a resolution with the Palestinians was the “demographic time bomb.” It all comes back to the question of how to have a Jewish state with a minimal Arab population, the same question which filled the minds of Herzl, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Chaim Weizmann, Josef Weitz, David Ben-Gurion and many other founding ideologues of various strains of Zionism.

Holocaust Remembrance Day. Turin, January 2013.

The settler movement’s thinking is more straightforward, and Arens puts it out there quite clearly. His vision remains hypocritical, depending as it does on a vision of “integrated Israeli Arabs” who sell out their fellows for citizenship in Israel. But too much of the so-called left, both in Israel and among its supporters in the Diaspora, approaches the question with their own brand of hypocrisy.

The phrase “Jewish and democratic state” has become a byword, used with equal aplomb by such disparate figures and groups as J Street, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Barack Obama. But the phrase depends on a particular ethnocentric definition of a “Jewish state,” one which is fundamentally incompatible with democracy. It continues to empower Jews all over the world to have a stake in Israel while, in the most egalitarian formulation, cutting off whatever Arabs live in Israel from the rest of their culture, even family.

It can’t work, and it isn’t necessary. The state Zionism founded is Israel, and that founding, barring a cataclysmic development, will endure. It can and should be a democracy, but it cannot be that while it tries to enforce, through artificial means, a Jewish majority. That cannot reconcile itself to political democracy, because it is inherently anti-democratic, ideologically.

As I have argued before, the solution is a constitution which defines the state as the homeland of the Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian-Arab nations. This seems to open the door to a one-state solution, and in a sense it does. It certainly makes that option more feasible. But it does not necessitate it.

It may well be that two states will still come about. If Israel can abandon its need to enforce demography and favor Jews over non-Jews in both theory and practice, it can well expect a state of Palestine to do the same. This opens the possibility of Palestinian refugees returning to one of two states and of Jewish settlers remaining in the West Bank as citizens of Palestine.

But whether the formulation is one or two states seems a rather academic discussion right now. It has always seemed to me that these sorts of debates distract from the fundamental problem. Because whatever the formulation needs to be, it needs to be based on respect for universal rights for all in the region, as well as a recognition of the strong nationalist sentiment, and deep attachment to the land that exists on both sides. Yes, Israel, as the more powerful side, bears a much heavier burden of reparation and reform. But those principles hold for all.

Whether it is the anti-Semitic views of Hamas, or the “not one more Arab” view of the Tel Aviv mainstream, or the willingness to deprive Palestinians of rights espoused openly by the settlers, until such attitudes are pushed to the margins, there’ll be no peace. The comfort Israelis live in now is likely to have a short shelf life, as Arabs across the Middle East continue to challenge their governments. Much as many Israelis and their supporters try to deny it, the ongoing oppression of Palestinians is just as intolerable as the regimes overthrown during the Arab Spring. To this end, Bibi is just another Mubarak. That he happens to be Jewish is almost secondary.

Photographs courtesy of Joel Schalit

Few neighborhoods can boast of the number of discarded televisions found in Neukolln. A constant feature of the area’s sidewalks, for the three years that I’ve resided in the borough, I’d wager I run into one or two itinerant sets a week. Being a dog owner, perhaps I’m more prone to noticing such things than others. Berlin is an especially filthy city. I find myself constantly on the lookout for items that might harm my Schnauzers. Televisions, fortunately, are easily avoidable. They’re a lot bigger than broken beer bottles, for example, or, as Berliners are all too familiar with, random piles of dog shit.

Richardstrasse, June 2011.

For media critics, seeing so many unwanted television sets, day in an day out, has a special significance. “Ideological state appliances,” to paraphrase the late philosopher Louis Althusser, TVs are the iconographic distribution points for ideology. Whether it be the state, as the pun infers, or the market, for many a Cold War era progressive,  television performed the same political function. Everything you watched was meant to influence your political prejudices. It mattered little whether it was Coronation Street, or The Brady Bunch, The X-Files, or Life on Mars. If you watched too much television, you were liable to become politically compliant, in the most Brave New World sorts of ways.

Wipperstrasse, August 2012.

Considering the purpose of television broadcasting in the former DDR (a stereotypically ideological apparatus, à la Althusser) the revenge being taken on these television sets made sense. The Cold War might be two decades behind us. However, Germans are still in the process of  exorcising the ghosts of the past, and most likely will, well into the future. Yet, I’m not so certain it’s as simple as that. Not everyone in my neighborhood is from the former East Germany. (Nearly half of the borough is estimated to be of immigrant background.) Considering the amount of home electronic stores in the neighborhood, a significant amount of its residents could simply be disposing of their CRTs in favor of LCDs. A lot of them.

Wilhelm-Busch-Strasse. August 2012.

There’s no real way of knowing. I prefer the ambiguity, frankly. The uncertainty makes it easier to conjecture.  I can, for example, look at the photograph above, of a television’s empty case, filled with refuse, and experience the best kinds of cultural studies-tutored fantasies. It’s been filled with litter because that’s what it projected, metaphorically speaking, in real life. Conversely, I’m also free to imagine that TVs are static, meaningless objects, without any real influence or authority over peoples’ lives. Certainly, the laissez-faire manner in which they are left on Neukolln’s streets, and abused, from what it appears, by passersby, suggests as much.

Personally, I like watching TV. Though I don’t do it that often, I find that the times I do,  it’s amusing, and that I’m discriminating enough to choose between the good and the bad. Still, I think, there’s something healthy about disposing of televisions this way, even if there’s nothing especially political behind it. The qualification, I think, is important. As evinced by the very first image used in this article (a faux yield sign, with a falling television set inside it) televisions have not stopped being objects of satire. This said, it’s nice to know that in Neukolln, there is no consensus on their significance. Except, that is, their shelf lives, and where they best belong, when they’re no longer considered useful.
 

Photographs and commentary courtesy of  Joel Schalit

Italians are equally critical. Not just of outside interference (particularly in the domestic fight against fascism, both during and after WWII) but of their own leftwing parties. Chalk it up to a willingness to participate in parliamentary politics, or to sit in coalition with centre-right parties. The reasons are both familiar, as well as numerous. Throughout, there is a sense of tragedy about it, as though Italy had what it took to earn the brass ring of socialism, and failed. The lament echoes.

The following flyer translation is a good example, inferring, as it does, both the necessity of anti-capitalism, and the squandering of prior revolutionary opportunity. An outgrowth of the Partito della Rifondazione Comunista (PRC), the Partito Comunista dei Lavoratori (Communist Worker’s Party, or PCL) took part in the last national election. It failed to earn enough votes to enter parliament. Still, there is relevance to much of what is said here, ideologically speaking. The criticism of Beppe Grillo is especially poignant. “Millionaire comedian,” indeed.

Anti-government flyer. Turin, May 16th.

COMMUNIST WORKER’S PARTY:

THE ONLY ALTERNATIVE 

We are facing the biggest social aggression against the labour world of the entire post war period.

We are in the most difficult capitalism crisis of the last 80 years.

Now, more than ever, there is a need for a left wing (party) totally siding with workers, based on an anti-capitalism program.

The participation of the Communist Worker’s Party in the elections meets this necessity.

ALL THE OTHERS ARE AGAINST WORK, SERVING INDUSTRIALISTS AND BANKS

Monti, Bersani and Berlusconi have together approved the worst measures against work and pensions, and a “blood and tears” program for the next years and decades ( the “fiscal compact.”) Today, they’re just competing (for) the leadership of the next government robbery. On behalf of industrialists and bankers.

The millionaire comedian Beppe Grillo shouts against the robberies of “politicians”, but does not mention the social robbery by industrialists and bankers financing them. And comes to the point of proposing, in full social crisis, the “union abolition”, even over passing Marchionne. Grillo is not an ally, but an enemy of the workers.

Nichi Vendola has subordinated himself to Bersani and to his program of anti-working class austerity, waiting for a ministerial reward. The poetry of words cannot hide this reality

Former ministers Diliberto and Ferrero  have (adopted) Ingroia’s orange color (the Rivoluzione Civile party,) under the direction of former magistrates dumped by the PD (Partito Democratico) and are anxious to be recovered, (and) on board. Starting from the liberal policeman Di Pietro, who ditched the inquiry about tortures in Genoa in 2001, and affected by the corruption in his own party. What have the workers to do with all this?

FOR AN AUTONOMOUS REPRESENTATION OF WORKERS

FOR AN ANTI-CAPITALIST ALTERNATIVE

Workers need an autonomous representation of their requests. Of a left wing that is always and only on their side. That aims to gather all their struggles in a great social uprising against (the) industrialists and bankers dictatorship. That struggles, in every conflict, for the possibility of a worker’s government and of a new order in society; in which rule social and labor needs, not exploiters and parasites.

CAPITALISM HAS FAILED.

ONLY A SOCIALIST REVOLUTION CAN CHANGE THINGS, IN ITALY AND EUROPE!

THE DEVELOPMENT IN EVERY STRUGGLE, OF THE AWARENESS ABOUT THESE TRUTHS, IS THE DAILY COMMITMENT OF PCL.

THE ONLY LEFT WING THAT HAS NEVER ABANDONED WORKERS, STUDENTS AND PENSIONERS!

Translated from the Italian, by Giulia Pace. Introduction and photographs courtesy of Joel Schalit.

While ESPN is arguably the trailblazing force behind the mashup of live broadcasting, journalism, advertising, and punditry, the once savvy blend of highlight reels, witty reporting and Dadaist humor that came to define an emerging genre of sports infotainment has since mutated into an audio-visual monster truck rally that sprawls across cable television, satellite radio, 24-hour news cycles, social media, and the blogosphere.

For the most curious and hedonistic of sports fans, this brave new world offers unprecedented access to information, debates, sports betting, fantasy leagues, gaming, and a global network of players and their followers.

Yet despite the prospects of this putative global sports village, some things have not really changed. Indeed, much has gotten worse. Professional sportswriters are increasingly facing the same drastic cutbacks and layoffs imposed on their peers in both newspaper and magazine publishing, while mammoth media corporations have consolidated their power and influence through a combination of deregulation-fueled mergers, exclusive licensing agreements, and tremendously lucrative broadcasting contracts with specific teams, universities, conferences, and even entire leagues.

What remains is a sports media industry in which the profit imperative has led to, among other things, less diversity in both media ownership as well as sports coverage itself. For example, a recent scholarly study of 20 years of televised sports coverage found that, despite women’s participation  being at an all-time high, women’s sports received around 1.5% of all airtime in 2009, both locally and nationally, with 72% of all airtime being devoted to just three men’s sports (football, basketball and baseball—regardless of the season.)

In addition to this trend, one can chart the emergence of an army of sports ‘experts’ whose knack for inane analysis and serious-sounding platitudes is rivaled only by the inside-the-beltway punditocracy that drowns American political discourse in its verbal diarrhea. As if listening to the formulaic, repetitive post-game commentary from players and coaches wasn’t already grating enough, the practice has been elevated into a gilded craft by this new professional league of suit-clad ex-sports stars, goateed loudmouths, radio shock-jock disciples, and wanna-be coaches who dominate mainstream sports media.

While seemingly benign, this cacophony of commentary trades in statistical fetishism and serves to both cultivate and echo the kinds of shallow, conservative analyses of sport that are so commonplace they make Bryant Gumbel’s Real Sports seem as dangerous and incisive as Jeremy Scahill’s warzone reportage.

Al-Maadi, Egypt. April 2012.

The problem is not only a significant narrowing of the mass media funnel through which most Americans perceive sport itself. It’s the range of discussion and debate about the entire matrix of socioeconomic, cultural and political issues which sports are tied to. Against this backdrop, two main strands of dialogue have emerged that effectively reframe the issues and offer a direct challenge to the dominant narratives told about politics and sports. One of these ‘camps’ consists of critical scholars and a few public intellectuals who do exciting work in sociology of sport and physical cultural studies (among other fields of study,) and the other camp largely consists of…well…Dave Zirin.

If you are a Lefty sports fan living in the United States, there’s a good chance you’re already a fan of Zirin, or you’ve at least stumbled across him, whether via his column in The Nation, his satellite radio show Edge of Sports, his slew of media appearances, his Media Education Foundation film, or his books. For those unfamiliar with Dave Zirin, one could describe his body of work as a blend of sports journalism, social analysis, and accessible cultural criticism that seeks to decimate the widely accepted notion that sports and politics don’t mix.

This is a tough pitch to say the least, particularly in the US where professional athletes and the managerial class of sports professionals routinely distance themselves from political affairs, or at least in ways that fall outside the accepted ideological bounds of flag-waving and offering support for nearly every corporate venture or military endeavor.  In this context, it is hard to make the case that American sports are really that politically significant, even to someone like myself, who admired the way in which Zirin’s previous books channeled the spirits of Howard Zinn (A People’s History of Sports in the United States) Chuck D (Welcome to the Terrordome,) and the unsung communist sports writer, Lester Rodney (What’s My Name, Fool?) as a means to stitch the narrative together.

Indeed, I probably wasn’t the only reader who walked away from those texts feeling excited about the new world of sports  and politics that were opened up to me. And yet I was also left a bit skeptical: it was as if 90% of Zirin was the dynamic man on the soapbox speaking truth to power, and 10% was the old wingnut at the political protest who traps you into hearing his Negri and Hardt-esque theory of everything simply because you took one of his flyers. All joking aside, my reservation was not due to Zirin’s arguments and examples, and certainly not for his lack of enthusiasm. Rather, it was due to the way in which the ‘political’ story of US sports is a difficult yarn to spin when one gets beyond some of the key public figures that animated Zirin’s earlier work, i.e. Muhammad Ali, John Carlos and Tommie Smith, Billie Jean King, etc.

Boxing for civil rights. Muhammad Ali Center, 2010.

But in the eight years since Zirin published his first manuscript, a tidal wave of political scandals and events has washed over the seemingly autonomous world of athletics, leaving many fans of amateur, collegiate and pro sports asking the kinds of vital questions about class, gender, race and labor that, according to Zirin, the powerful “guardians of sport don’t want asked.” As a follow-up to his timely critique of the athletic- industrial complex in Bad Sports: How Owners Are Ruining the Games We Love, Zirin’s newest book, Game Over: How Politics Has Turned the Sports World Upside Down, dives headfirst into these tumultuous waters and wades through some of the best examples that show how sports can “tap into sentiments for social change.”

Game Over is split into nine chapters, sandwiched between an instructive introduction and a cleverly titled “Post-Game” conclusion that arguably provides Zirin’s most concise statement on why thinking critically about the politics of sports is so important: “Sure, we may desire for sports to be solely about play. But here’s the thing: this cheapens not only the deep relevance of sports to our society but also the courage of those athletes who do take a stand. We do an injustice to all of them—and to what’s best about sports—when we sanitize the past and rip athletics out of the political and cultural context in which it has always belonged.”

The first chapter delves into some of the labor battles that not only defined US professional sports in recent years, but also spilled into the broader political terrain in which Occupy became both a movement and battle cry in the United States. Beginning with a brief lesson on the public ownership structure of the Green Bay Packers and the team’s vocal support for public sector workers in Wisconsin, Zirin reframes the debate over labor in pro sports that is so commonly portrayed – and thus misunderstood – as a mere tiff between millionaires (players) and billionaires (owners.)

Zirin contrasts the ground won by the NFL Players Association union during the 2011 lockout with the results of the NBA lockout that ultimately benefitted the team owners who are perpetually subsidized by millions of taxpayer dollars—a situation not unlike that of the NFL, which saddled the city of Indianapolis with $43 million in costs for the privilege of hosting the 2012 Super Bowl. The knotty relationship between players, owners and labor is a theme that comes up throughout the book, including the fourth chapter, where Zirin adeptly outlines the various ways in which team owners and executives routinely leverage their own interests against those of the public by effectively siphoning off public tax dollars in order to build their franchises new stadiums, often in cities with under-funded school districts, crumbling infrastructure and high unemployment.

Andy Warhol’s Muhammad Ali. Venice Biennale, 2007.

Chapter Seven deals with a different aspect of league dynamics by exploring the divergent responses that professional players, officials and team owners had to Arizona’s passage of the vigorously anti-immigrant bill, SB 1070; a number of Major League Baseball players raised concerns and initially threatened to boycott the All-Star game unless it was moved from Arizona to a different location, while NBA players on the Phoenix Suns joined with their team owner to proudly sport ‘Los Suns’ jerseys on their Cinco de Mayo playoff game against the San Antonio Spurs in 2010. Finally, in Chapter Nine, Zirin reflects on the racist overtones of policies enacted by NBA Commissioner David Stern, and the manner in which the institutional norms of his administration built up “reservoirs of bad will” throughout the last decade.

Game Over looks outside the US to discuss the role of both soccer and zealous soccer fan clubs (known as “ultras”) in the Arab Spring, though most of the emphasis is placed on the significant political contributions that ultras made during the Egyptian revolution, where rival clubs not only worked together to galvanize support against the Mubarak regime, they formed committees, secured neighborhoods, built barricades and actively fought state police forces in Cairo.

After briefly turning attention to clashes between ultras and authorities in Port Said, Egypt, Zirin concludes with the story of Bahraini star soccer player A’ala Hubail and his brother/teammate Mohamed Hubail, who both were kicked off the national team, arrested, tortured, and publicly condemned for their participation in protests against the ruling regime (over 150 different players, coaches and referees were also arrested, with some sentenced to significant prison terms, including Mohamed Hubail.)

Zirin further expands the scope of international analysis, with an examination of how the Olympics and World Cup competitions have become the primary mechanisms through which sporting ‘mega-events’ have come to influence the social and cultural policies in cities throughout the world. Like other public critics, including former Olympian and current professor Jules Boykoff, Zirin peels back the pleasant public façade of the games in order to show how they’re increasingly used to promote neoliberal socioeconomic interests while suppressing all forms of dissent that call attention to such practices.

College athletics enter Zirin’s radar in the last half of the book, beginning with a rightfully scathing critique of the enormous scandal at Penn State University, where the arrest and subsequent conviction of former football coach/child rapist, Jerry Sandusky, revealed how university officials and disgraced head football coach, Joe Paterno, engaged in patterns of criminal behavior by either ignoring or actively hiding evidence of Sandusky’s crimes in the name of preserving the school’s Nike-emblazoned ‘brand’ image.

Using the so-called ‘sex abuse’ (people apparently love vague euphemisms in lieu of actually saying the word RAPE) scandal at PSU as a point of departure, Zirin makes a broader as well as convincing argument about the NCAA’s systematic exploitation of college athletes. More than a mere indictment of the NCAA, Game Over frames the issue in an appropriate manner, which is to say, in terms of how large public universities are seemingly hell-bent on transforming academics into a meager adjunct of their (men’s) sports programs.

Game Over also considers gender, sexuality and race in sports, which are arguably the subjects that best showcase Zirin’s talents as a writer. In addition to a smart analysis of sexism and homophobia centered around the forced gender testing of South African runner Caster Semenya, his discussion of GLBT athletes is especially timely given that NBA basketball player Jason Collins recently became the first active male athlete on a professional US sports team to come out as gay—a declaration that has garnered tremendous media coverage, though most of it devoid of both the historical context and attention to pioneering gay athletes featured in elsewhere in the book.

Both here and in his discussion of race towards the Game Over’s close, Zirin identifies how the social norms that foster discrimination actually play out in sports, whether in obvious situations, such as the African American NHL hockey player, Joel Ward, being called “N-word” by opposing fans on Twitter; or in cases where racist attitudes and assumptions—the supposed vestigial markers of a bygone era—inform the ways in which the dog-fighting charges against NFL quarterback Michael Vick, were articulated to the public.

Those looking for detailed, nuanced explorations of the issues raised in Zirin’s work may occasionally find themselves wanting for more, as his style is fast paced and his approach to some rather large topics (for example, ‘sexuality and sports’) can, at times, be more pedagogical than comprehensive. But to be fair, one can hardly be faulted for making complex issues more palatable to readers, especially when Zirin shows how seemingly simplistic issues are also much more complicated then they actually appear.

The range of people and politics Zirin analyzes have their own significant histories and problematics that cannot be accounted for in any single text. Game Over would be a much different and, most likely, a much less accessible and engaging book had he taken that route. Notwithstanding friendly criticisms that might be lodged by sports historians or sociologists, the main critics of Game Over will undoubtedly be those who stridently support the notion that politics really do have no place in sports, and will therefore be supremely irritated by Zirin’s unabashedly progressive politics.

Of course, to many other readers, including this reviewer, this is one of Zirin’s refreshing merits as an author. Because in addition to being a sports writer who consistently trashes the false idols and corporate institutions that both buttress and animate the modern sports industry, he’s a white person who deftly tackles racism, a man who grapples with the complexities of gender discrimination, a New York-raised Jew who shows solidarity with Arab political struggles, and above all else, a historically-minded activist who is wise enough to recognize that staking out such positions is neither unique, brave, nor deserving of praise. It’s simply a matter of responsibility for any socialist worthy of the name.

What really separates Zirin, however, from so many culture critics and progressive journalists is not only his ability to effectively map radical politics through the cartography of sport, but to do so with a combination of humor, compassion, and journalistic sincerity that translates as well in his writing and public talks as it does in his growing number of national media appearances. Consequently, if the only people who will be truly be disappointed by Game Over are the kinds of American sports fans who call soccer players “fags”,  Dave Zirin has done us all a favor by continuing to push dialogue about sports and politics into a new and exciting playing field.

Photographs courtesy of  vagabondblogger, aacool  and  giopuo. Published under a Creative Commons license.

Despite their nation’s revolutionary origins, Americans aren’t exactly known for their political radicalism. And although one hears endless laments about how partisan Washington has become, foreigners often have a hard time discerning meaningful differences between Democrats and Republicans. While the gap between the wealthy and the bulk of the population has widened greatly in recent decades, the fact that the vast majority of Americans still consider themselves “middle class” — and are therefore utterly lacking in traditional class-consciousness — further confuses matters.

Against the backdrop of so much bland more-or-less-the-same-ness, asserting the importance of an explicitly anti-Establishment, post-legislative populism seemed like wishful thinking in the fall of 2011 and even more so today, when the Occupy camps are long since broken down and the United States has settled back into a pattern familiar from the first Obama Administration, in which the President is simultaneously disparaged by the Right and Left , while nevertheless maintaining the strong — and, many would argue, extra-legal — Executive Branch developed under George W. Bush in the wake of September 11th, 2001.

And yet, the legacy of Occupy lives on, not only in the spate of books published about or in relation to the movement, but as a visual residue in American public spaces. You can still find the frayed remnants of posters, flyers and stickers in the places where the movement was strongest. But the most common reminder of Occupy’s conceptual reach is to be found on the streets of those cities, in the form of the many bumper stickers broadcasting its favorite slogans, like “We are the 99%” and, as in the case of this densely festooned station wagon, “Occupy the U.S.A”.

Although it’s important not to overstate the importance of Occupy’s lingering presence in the American urban landscape — or its virtual correlates on the internet — the fact that counter-arguments to the extremist rhetoric of the Tea Party set and other virulently anti-Obama groups are still encountered on a regular basis matters. To be confronted by vehicles like this one is to be reminded that resistance to the status quo in the United States need not be a reactionary impulse, abetted by the demagoguery of Fox News and its talk radio allies.

The brilliance of the Occupy strategy was its inclusiveness, the insistence that opposition to the owning class was not a partisan preoccupation, but a duty of all who truly believe in the revolutionary ideals that animated the founding of the United States. Over time, that inclusiveness was drowned out by the tired rituals of the post-1960s Left. Out on the road, though, when the core of the movement’s populist ideology can be communicated without shrill polemics and dreadlocked drum circles, its original clarity can still be conjured to powerful effect.

In the case of this particular assemblage of bumper stickers, it’s worth nothing that the slogan “Occupy the U.S.A” takes on a clever, though potentially divisive double meaning. Because several of the stickers are specific to Arizona, where illegal immigration remains a huge issue, the injunction can be interpreted as a call to cross the border. That probably wasn’t what the owner of this vehicle had in mind. But given the prominence of the region’s Native American populations, who can lay claim to having been “occupied” in the worst imperialist fashion, the term takes on added layers of depth that make such a strong reading — or misreading, as the case may be — more likely.

Commentary and photograph courtesy of the author.

Security forces were deployed en masse, highways were shut down, mobile service was suspended, schools and many businesses were closed. Even the Internet was inaccessible.

Due in part to ul-Qadri’s ties to General Musharraf, Pakistan’s leadership was not willing to take chances. The message that he broadcasted in January was not to be taken lightly:

Pakistan’s apathetic politicians have no real interest in addressing the country’s miserable economy, ongoing energy crisis, endless violence, and a relationship with the United States so subordinate that President Obama was able to order a raid into Abbotobad without anyone in Pakistan being consulted. If only the message had been taken seriously, this weekend’s election results might have been less predictable.

As predicted, Pakistan Muslim League leader Nawaz Sharif is back in the leadership position he has occupied twice before. Sharif’s brother Shabbaz Sharif, who ran the provincial government of Punjab for several years, staged an unofficial campaign by spending a great deal of public finances on infrastructure projects in Lahore. The projects were popular throughout the province, and gave the industrialist brothers a reputation for accomplishment.

Much of this was underserved, considering that Nawaz Sharif has been a politician in Pakistan since the era of General Zia ul-Haq, and is more prone to pursuing business interests than social policy. However, this surge in popularity was orchestrated to combine with widespread anger against the ruling Pakistan People’s Party. The PPP, an avowedly socialist party that has become a fiefdom for the liberal-minded Bhutto family, became so unpopular that the electorate swept the competing Sharif dynasty into power. Election violence in Karachi, allegations of fraud, and extremely vague praise for this “historic step” in Pakistan’s history are all equally predictable. They are flash points in the greater farce that is this exchange of power.

On March 24th, General Pervez Musharraf returned to Pakistan in order mount a civilian campaign. His court-declined comeback, which has now resulted in his arrest pending trial, illuminated major problems in the democratic process. Since Pakistan’s elections are dominated by intrigues such as deals with elites and seat-leveraging schemes, Musharraf had a strong opportunity to play a role in the next government. The mechanisms that made this possible formalize the fact that Pakistan’s civilian-military elite negotiates political changes among itself. The elections that do occur are more or less formalities that officialize this process.

Pakistani elites have always used national institutions as a platform for debating and consolidating their own interests. It should therefore be no surprise that a government based on such intrigues would result in Pakistan’s rank of 139 in the Corruption Perceptions Index, rolling power outages that can be as long as eighteen hours, and massive social inequality, in which Nawaz Sherif and the outgoing Prime Minister Asif Zardari are billionaires, but the United Nations Development Programme reports that 49% of Pakistanis live in poverty.

PPI election posters. Punjab, April 2013.

Pakistan’s shifts between civilian and military rule have occurred without any impact on this culture. It is entrenched. This is precisely why it was was targeted by cricketeer-turned-politician Imran Khan. Unsurprisingly, this is also, at least partially, to account for his party Pakistan Tehreek-Insaaf’s third-place finish in Saturday’s poll. It will take more than one election to unseat the country’s political establishment.

There have been few discussions of problems with Pakistani democracy in international media. Pakistan is mainly covered for its role in being a cross-border shelter for the insurgency against the NATO occupation of Afghanistan; though sometimes, this includes sectarian violence. The idea that such problems may be a reflection of the country’s misrule by its military-financial elites is rarely a subject of debate.

Still, foreign analysts have a frustrating tendency to localize Pakistani dysfunction to problems inherent in the country’s religious culture. Much of this is the reflection of Islamophobia, particularly since the advent of the War on Terror twelve years ago. More broadly, it is motivated by a drive to ignore that a major cause of Pakistan’s instability is the persistence of social inequality, which has mushroomed in recent decades.

Economic crises have caused Pakistanis to regard each other with suspicion, helping drive them to ties more ancestral and legitimate than rational and, as it were, political. Ethnic associations with the correct elites is crucial to maintaining access to state resources, which results in well-documented tensions between Pakistan’s minorities. They’re competitors for both resources, and national identity, in a shakily-defined Islamic Republic.

Awami National Party election poster. Rawalpindi, April 2013.

This situation is worsened by the fact that nationalism is routinely proscribed as the best palliative by Pakistani elites. The medicine tends to take two forms: one that is focused against India, and another that is specifically Sunni-Salafi nationalist.  The former legitimizes the military, which promotes a mythology of an apocalyptic showdown with India. The latter directs popular anger towards minority populations such as Christians, who are disproportionately prosecuted by the country’s divisive Blasphemy Law. It has also allowed for other placating gestures by the country’s elite, such as when the government banned YouTube in Pakistan, following the backlash against the film “Innocence of Muslims.”

Under such conditions, the seeds of bloodshed are firmly planted, even before we consider American interventionism, and CIA drone strikes.

The election results clearly resolve little. Where do we go from here? The first order of business for Prime Minister Sharif is likely to negotiate a bailout by the International Monetary Fund, which will inevitably exacerbate Pakistan’s ecomic problems. Among the various issues his government faces is the fact that separatist parties have gained control of numerous seats in the troubled province of Balochistan, which has been the site of four military conflicts with the Pakistani government. His PML-N has also had little success in the Afghan frontier province of Khyber-Pakthunwala, where the PTI has resonated with Khan’s platform that was fiercely critical of the drone strikes. Sharif could soon face revolt, or outright war in Pakistan’s outlying provinces.

What of the country’s urban centers, which mobilized against General Musharraf in 2007? The main concern about Tahir ul-Qadri four months ago was linked to a longterm fear for Pakistan’s cosmopolitan-minded elite, the 1979 Iranian Revolution. It was anxious that ul-Qadri’s arrival could usher in a similar Islamic regime as that which took root in Iran.

Officials were not prepared to risk either a similar situation or the more likely scenario that popular dissatisfaction could quickly lead to mass revolt once again. Hence the benefits of the clampdown, not only for Pakistan’s political establishment, but also the Americans.

Although some coverage of ul-Qadri’s Long March were more sympathetic, others were quick to note that a Pakistani Spring is unnecessary because of the 2007 revolution. The perspective furthered by many US analysts was that future democratic movements in the country will mainly be pushes to reform existing political structures.

This reflects a deep anxiety about liberal republican democracy in Pakistan. Worries about the Long March were never totally about ul-Qadri himself. They emerge from a deep concern that as the country’s political leadership loses its legitimacy, Pakistan’s population may begin to pursue other possibilities.

This is exactly why any mass movement in the country, such as the Faisalabad loom workers strike of July 2010, is cracked down on quickly and severely. The Pakistani government fears that its own spring may emphasize economic issues which threaten to tear the country apart if not confronted. They have been successful. But, as cities such as Karachi continue to pursue unstable fiscal policies, social turmoil seems almost inevitable. It remains to be seen how this come about, or what will come of it.

Sharif, Bhutto  and  Awami National Party  poster photos courtesy of Carol Mitchell. Published under a Creative Commons license.

Indeed, the saga of Hawking’s decision shines a very unfavorable light on those who respond to boycotts irrationally.

The news of the cancellation of Hawking’s appearance at the annual Israeli Presidential Conference: Facing Tomorrow caused quite a stir when it first appeared. But then, Tim Holt, spokesman for Cambridge University, announced that Hawking had pulled out not in protest, but due to health concerns. That would have been understandable for a 71-year old man with the physical difficulties the physicist suffers from, but Hawking clarified the matter.

The physicist surprised everyone by correcting the Cambridge spokesperson, forcing him to issue a new statement confirming that Hawking had pulled out in acknowledgment of the Palestinian call for boycotting Israel, and on the advice of his Palestinian colleagues. The response was as deplorable as it was predictable.

One extremist Israeli professor suggested that “…the people of Israel send Hawking for a free trip on the Achille Lauro!!” (This was a ship which was hijacked by terrorists from the Palestine Liberation Front in 1985, in retaliation for an Israeli attack on the PLO headquarters in Tunisia which was even criticized by the Reagan Administration. During the hijacking, the PLF terrorists killed and threw overboard an elderly Jewish-American man confined to a wheelchair.)

The neoconservative American magazine Commentary implied that President Obama should strip Hawking of his Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded to the physicist in 2009 due to Hawking’s “…affinity with political movements that are antithetical to the very idea of freedom.”  And, of course, there was cruder stuff on Twitter and Facebook, too. Hawking was getting the Jimmy Carter treatment.

What underlies this apoplectic response? From Israel’s rightwing supporters, it’s just business as usual. Bullying and crude language are their favorite tools, and they have a lot of experience using them against liberal public figures in the Anglo world. But what about more moderate voices, like Ha’aretz’s Carlo Strenger?

The case Strenger makes rests on several very common points: 1. There are worse human rights violations than Israel’s, so they must be boycotted first. 2. Villains in Hamas and Hezbollah are anti-Semitic and, in Strenger’s words, “…call … (and) threaten to obliterate Israel.”  And 3. Academics in Israel are largely liberal and therefore boycotting them and their institutions is counter-productive.

Aside from these points, the one that is made with overwhelming shrillness and frequency is that since the call for boycotting Israel includes a demand to recognize the Palestinian Right of Return, it is really an attempt to destroy Israel by non-violent means. Let’s look at each of these points.

It is true, of course, that, for example, the human rights violations in Syria these days dwarf the occupation. At any given time, you can find something somewhere that fits that description, be it in Sri Lanka, Rwanda, Somalia, Bosnia… a depressingly long list. But one has nothing to do with the other. One could have made the same argument against the United Farm Workers’ boycott of grapes in the 1960s. More to the point, it would have had equal validity in arguing against the boycott against South Africa. From 1948-1994, apartheid was the legal structure of South Africa, and any number of atrocities were going on during that period. Was it inappropriate to boycott South Africa on that basis? Few would argue that.

Gaza is everwhere. Milan, April 6th.

But most of all, this argument minimizes the crimes of the occupation. That’s easily done with the reports we get from Syria every day, but it is an immoral case to make. It is no different from minimizing beating someone to within an inch of his life by comparing the act to those of a serial killer. The specific human rights violations of the Israeli occupation that shows no sign of ending are well-documented and grim. They certainly merit a boycott.

It is true, of course, that Hamas and Hezbollah have undertaken violence against Israeli civilians, which is a war crime. While neither organization, nor any combination of those groups constitute a credible threat to Israel’s existence, they have caused significant bloodshed and are anti-Semitic. But does that justify Israel’s occupation, and its concomitant denial of civil and human rights to millions of innocent Palestinians? If the answer is no, as Carlo Strenger seems to think, doesn’t Israel’s 46 years of denying those rights merit a response beyond pleading a case for justice, which has proven ineffective?

Strenger’s last and best argument applies only to an academic boycott. It’s worth pointing out that the event at which Hawking was slated to speak was not an academic one. 972’s Noam Sheizaf explains:  “The Presidential Conference is not an academic event: it’s an annual celebration of the Israeli business, political and military elites, whose purpose is unclear at best, and which has little importance in Israeli life (it didn’t exist until five years ago). The pro-occupation Right has a heavy presence at the conference – or at least it felt that way last year, when I attended.”

While I find some merit to the idea that an academic boycott is counter-productive, it is also true that universities are not merely repositories of teachers and thinkers, but are intrinsic parts of their society, frequently working closely with the government and the military. One may argue the merits of an academic boycott, but the notion that the academy is somehow isolated from the government and military around it is naïve to say the least. And Strenger might want to consider the value of academic freedom in Israel in light of an incident last December when Prime Minister Netanyahu barred an Israeli professor from participating in a science symposium in Germany because Rivka Feldhay, who is also a human rights activist, “tarnishes the name of Israeli soldiers and pilots”. It’s pretty hard to argue that a boycott must exclude academia in a country which does this to its own citizens, and this is only one example.

What of the call for return of refugees? If anyone wants to see this conflict resolved, they must understand that, just as Israeli Jews are not going to abandon Zionism, neither will the Palestinians ever abandon the refugees. It is inconceivable that a Palestinian call will not include the refugees. And this call does not demand implementation of the right of return; it says that Israel “…refus(es) to accept the inalienable rights of the refugees and displaced stipulated in and protected by international law.” That is a demand for a resolution of the issue, not an endorsement of any specific resolution.

I understand very well how afraid Israeli Jews are of this point. However, those Israelis who want to end the occupation, and those of us abroad, who want to see peace, need to recognize that this must be on the table and that the Palestinians are going to demand the right of return. Whatever resolution is reached to end the occupation will not hold unless the refugees are given some measure of justice. There are ways to do this, consistent with international law, that maintains a Jewish homeland (as opposed to an ethnocratic Jewish state that reduces non-Jews to second class status,) as I have explored in the past. But it can’t be ignored and it is unreasonable to expect a unified Palestinian movement to exist without this plank.

Ultimately, one can support or oppose a boycott. But the BDS movement was conceived as a way to advance the Palestinian cause without physical violence. There are good reasons, not based in a lack of understanding of the conflict, much less in anti-Semitism, why people support the boycott. Do pundits like Strenger really want to send the message that a non-violent method is unacceptable? What options does that leave for the Palestinians, now that they have irrefutable proof that the Israeli government is farther away than ever from a willingness to end the occupation and the United States is more feeble and feckless than ever? Oppose the boycott if you wish, but trying to make it illegitimate is self-defeating and inspires more violence.

Photographs courtesy of Joel Schalit.

Not this crowd, however. In between the Islamic chants, anti-capitalists were manning the barricades in unison. “Nazis raus,” they screamed in German. “Antifascista!” yelled a couple of Italian anarchists standing next to me. Their leftist slogans mingled with the Arabic being used, creating a readymade montage that epitomized the multicultural spirit of the demo. The mix was intoxicating. If these Palestinians had been German Jews, seventy years earlier, taunting their tormentors in Yiddish, the effect would have been exactly the same. It was that transparent. I was elated by the parallels.

Listening to my recordings of the event nearly a year’s hence, I feel no less excited by what I witnessed. One can hear a genuine solidarity being expressed by the protestors, which they give voice to in a musical, practically call and response fashion. Considering the rise in animus towards Muslims in Germany, (a recently published study reported that 51% of Germans surveyed consider Islam a “threat”) the leftists at this demonstration were displaying an entirely different kind of politics. And they were doing so in a context in which minorities were once again being threatened by rightists.

One of the most curious aspects of the aformentioned poll was the distinction respondents drew between Jews and Muslims. The former were acceptable, whereas the latter were increasingly not. Though not necessarily a new insight to this survey, the idea that the two are separable conflicts with the generalized racism espoused by German extremists, particularly the sort that was being confronted at the Berlin demo. Certainly, there were anti-Semites in their mix. More important, I think, it points to the persistent of the figure of the European outsider, which, it seems, everyone still needs. Neo-Nazis, perhaps, are a bit more self-conscious of the issue, and how it plays out ethnically, than others.

Anti-racist protestors. Berlin, August 2012.

Still, if their more radical, leftwing counterparts display opposite impulses, depressing poll results aside, that’s where the hope lies. Particularly at a time when the entirety of Europe is once again finding a need for scapegoats. In Britain, it’s immigrants from southeastern Europe. In France, it’s Roma. In Germany, it’s Muslims. And in Hungary, it’s Jews. It’s all too easy to regress. Certainly, fellow Jews, particularly on the right, will reproach me for praising the European left, as persons within its ranks can, at times, dispense with distressingly anti-Semitic ideas, when it comes to Israel. And they’re right. It can be a problem.

Still, if I had the opportunity to drag a conservative co-religionist to an event like this, I’m  certain they’d get it: That there are resources for solidarity and tolerance on today’s European left, which defy the pettiness and the provinciality which continue to plague European civilization. It just depends upon your willingness to recognize the universal in such gestures, and understand how they express it. They’re not just demonstations of solidarity with Muslims, or Palestinians, for example, but with minorities. Not just any minorities, surely, but people targeted by racist prejudices, who occupy the same kinds of social spaces that we once did.

Media and commentary courtesy of Joel Schalit

But what the video really tells us is that anyone using this will miss a lot. The advertisement centres on a couple visiting a museum. A tour guide’s explanation of a painting fades into the background as a bored woman checks her smartphone, finding a photograph of her friends waiting. She looks back up and the painting now features those friends—those troubling earlier figures now gone. A similar phenomenon repeats when passing a sculpture, soon replaced by a friend taking a ‘selfie’. Even a museum docent is subjugated to her personal world as he recites a text awaiting her on her screen.

In effect, the site where people go to encounter new worlds and other visions becomes the place where one encounters the self alone.  It is the height of narcissism, and the advert actively hails this characteristic of the consumer. Find the world boring? Don’t worry, it promises, soon it will be all about you! Sure the ‘i’s of Apple and the ‘You’s’ of YouTube play to this narcissism, but this video depicts the erasure of the world—people included!— to conform to the self.

I don’t mean to come off as one of those educated elites. I appreciate that encountering new things can be difficult, and that there can be something alienating when culture is divided and hierarchised along a high/low bias. But this doesn’t preclude the value of the encounter, and the willingness to engage something challenging. However, this kind of multitasking may do just that. Or rather, the active distraction of checking one’s phone has some very unfortunate results. It leads to increased mistakes, a decreased ability to actually multitask, and an impairment of memory and knowledge acquisition. So now we can add wilfully ignorant to self-centred in the characterisation of our advertisement’s heroine, the ideal consumer.

From the perspective of Facebook, HTC, and AT&T (the telco) this might all be for the best. A person who is even moderately aware of the world around her may catch on to the vertical integration taking place right in the palm of her hand. She might also catch on to the way Facebook is actively working, through these partnerships and other means, to become our primary portal to the world. Now, I enjoy this social utility network for just that—its social utility—but I am not keen on its becoming my primary interface through which I can speak with others, purchase items, and share information. While we can still act outside of Facebook, Facebook would prefer that we don’t. Consider when we suddenly find our ‘likes’ and activities on another site reported on Facebook. One has to actively opt out of this saturation of our media worlds. And as this battle takes place, an advert delights in the saturation of our physical worlds as well.

This HTC advertisement boasts something so sinister, it is difficult to articulate: It delights in an integration of platforms, corporations, the world and the self. And it sells this truly dystopic vision in a horrifying, solipsistic fantasy that is barely dressed as anything else. In effect, it is selling a nightmare, and it doesn’t even seek to hide that fact.

Photograph courtesy of  HTC. All rights reserved.

A frequent subject of these flyers tends to be women. Soviet female soldiers, to be precise, many of whom took part in the Russian army’s push westwards, culminating in the decisive battle for the German capital. The theme of gender equality is pronounced, as is its obvious relationship to the triumph over fascism.

German Communist Party flyer. Görlitzer Park, April 2010.

The idea of celebrating the Soviet victory gives many Westerners pause. Particularly foreign visitors to Berlin, considering the negative image of the former USSR that they were raised with, as a consequence of the Cold War. Not all Germans feel that way, particularly easterners, for whom the results of reunification have frequently proven mixed. Unemployment continues to run high, for example, and rightwing political organizations, nostalgic for the Nazi era, are surging in popularity.

Concentration camp-themed flyer. Kreuzberg, May 2010.

Still, there are some good things to remember. Such as the liberation of Nazi death camps, like Auschwitz, by Russian forces. Despite its appalling record of human rights abuses, and its discrimination against domestic Jewry, Stalin’s regime earned some mighty big credits, which both obscure, as well as complicate, the Communist legacy. Hence posters like this one, which have a multicultural hue to them. It’d be nice to remember the Soviet Union this way. One can understand why, considering the darkness which once reigned in Berlin.

Photographs and captions courtesy of Joel Schalit.