In 1940, the Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin reflected on the crisis caused by fascism: “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.” That “rule” was specifically colonial rule.
Eight years later—seventy-five years ago this week—Palestinians underwent what they call the Nakba, the catastrophe, leading to the formation of the state of Israel. As the leader of the Palestinian National Initiative, Mustafa Barghouti, documents:
about 70% of the Palestinian population was forcibly displaced and more than 500 communities were wiped out completely, in addition to the massacres committed by Zionist militias.
If you are reading this, the Nakba is not someone else’s issue. The Nakba is now the “rule,” to use Benjamin’s term, by which visual culture can be measured, as the 2021 Palestine Portfolio in the Journal of Visual Culture attested.
This post is quite long so here are the bullet points:
First, Palestine was visualized by Jewish settlers as terra nullius, in the classic manner. Now the imperial screen is deployed to fatal effect as journalists, activists, and any person whatever who resists the expanded state is erased.
This visualizing of colonialism in Palestine was foundational for visual culture as an anti-colonial practice, from Benjamin to John Berger by way of Edward Said and many more.
Second, the checkpoint as used by the Israeli regime in Palestine is now the paradigm infrastructure of racializing surveillance capitalism, in the way that the Panopticon once was. Its methods require that it be abolished As an infrastructure of mass incarceration, the checkpoint must be abolished because it cannot be reformed.
Third, as a result, Palestine is the site where present-day settler colonialism can be mostly clearly seen operating within racializing surveillance capitalism.
Finally, the relation between being seen as Jewish and being seen as white, central to mid-twentieth century revisions of “race” now constitutes one of the fault lines within white sight.
For those of us who are not Palestinian or in the region, it is important to remember again on this anniversary that Palestine is not “exceptional,” it is exemplary. The resistance in Palestine forms a lens to make white sight “visible” because it allow us to see the contemporary as the divided, racializing, carceral time that it is. Perhaps that is why any expression of solidarity with Palestine creates such carefully orchestrated, well-funded fury.
John Berger in Palestine
Art critic and author of Ways of Seeing John Berger spent years in the latter part of his career working and thinking in and around Palestine. He was prompted to do so by working with the Swiss photographer Jean Mohr (1925-2018). Mohr’s parents were anti-fascists who had fled Nazi Germany. Mohr began working as a photographer for the International Red Cross in Palestine during the Nakba. He returned many times, leaving a substantial photographic archive.
Mohr worked with Berger on numerous projects, including A Seventh Man (1975), a study of mass migration in 1970s Europe. After Berger introduced him to Edward Said in 1983, Mohr’s photographs of Palestine were published together with a text on Palestinian life by Said as After the Last Sky (1986).
Berger later worked with Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, making translations and doing illustrations. He visited Gaza and the Occupied Territories. Berger saw in Palestine “the careful destruction of a people.” He wrote about the resulting rubble, physical and verbal. He wrote about the Nakba. Bringing these matters together, he found in Palestine “a familiarity here with every sort of rubble, including the rubble of words.” It is not possible to embrace the Berger of Ways of Seeing and reject the one who saw the Nakba for what it is.
The Imperial Screen
Add to the 75-year catastrophe of the Nakba, this one: a year ago this week, on May 11, 2022, the US journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was killed in the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank. An Israeli sniper found the vulnerable spot beneath her helmet labeled “Press” and above the similarly marked flak jacket. That shot exemplifies the targeting for which the imperial screen was imagined by John Ruskin and later put into military practice in ways he could never have imagined.
There was no Palestinian shooting going on at the time of Shireen Abu Akleh’s killing. The United Nations human rights office concluded that she had been killed by the Israeli Defense Force, backed by a detailed forensic analysis in the New York Times. An Israeli spokesperson all but admitted it, saying “they’re armed with cameras, if you’ll permit me to say so.” It should not be permitted. But it shows that what the IDF found intolerable was having a counter to their way of visualizing.
A year later, the IDF cynically owned up and “apologized” right before the anniversary, just to add to the pain. If other state actors, say Iran or China, had killed a US journalist, major retribution would have followed. Biden still says he is a non-Jewish Zionist.
Checkpoint
The paradigm infrastructure of “racializing surveillance,” as Simone Browne calls it, in our time is the checkpoint. Built since 2000, Palestinians living in the West Bank must pass through these checkpoints to enter what they call the 48, meaning the territory held by Israel in 1948, where 70,000 of them work. Checkpoints also control journeys between different areas of the occupied West Bank.
Consider the pedestrian Eyak checkpoint in Qalqilya, a town almost entirely surrounded by the Separation Wall. Palestinians with work permits must pass through here to get to their jobs inside Israel. The checkpoint opens at 6 am but the queue begins hours earlier so that people can be sure to arrive at work on time at 7am. In its combination of surveillance, separation of people’s lives, physical infrastructure, and the use of optical and digital technologies, the checkpoint epitomizes the present level of relations of force within the visible.
It is to the present moment what Michel Foucault claimed the Panopticon was to the modern period (1789-1973), the architectural means of
“exercising power over people, of controlling their relations, of separating out their dangerous mixtures…to see constantly and to recognize immediately.”
Architecture here, as the founder of Forensic Architecture Eyal Weizman points out, is about relations between people, not buildings.
The checkpoint is an assemblage of pre-modern security, like iron bars and massive walls, connected to 21st century CCTV, ID scanners, and databases. The panoptic desire to reform and remake the offender by being seen is entirely absent, as if it never happened. Nor is this the swipe card entry of Deleuze’s “society of control” that still pertains in institutions of the advanced economies like universities. Palestinians must have a barcoded permit to pass through, which itself costs between $500 and $700 a month. But having the pass does not guarantee access.
Unlike the Panopticon, the checkpoint does not function “automatically” because it relies on the guards. Nor are the guards invisible, as in the Panopticon. The checkpoint operatives are both capricious and operate with impunity, as Israeli human rights group B’Tselem have long reported.
Checkpoints as White Sight
What is being checked? The checkpoint creates two types of person: those who must be checked and those entitled to do so. This divide is absolute—Manichean as Fanon would say—and creates a colonial racial hierarchy. Those checking deploy the colonizing technology I have called “white sight” in the name of “security.” There never is enough security to generate peace of mind for the colonizers.
In 2018, Israel amended its Basic Law—equivalent to the Constitution—to say that national rights in Israel belong only to Jewish people. Ironically, there is no legal definition of who is or is not Jewish. Officially, there is a process of self-declaration, depending on having a Jewish mother or having converted. Unofficially, the visible distinction of Jewishness first formed in relation to whiteness in the diaspora is now applied in relation to Palestinians in the settler colony. More exactly, it is in the eye of the checkpoint guard.
Jews in the diaspora were made visible by what historian Matthew Jacobson calls a “complex process of social value become perception.” That is to say, Jews were first thought to be different and then that difference was made visible. After the Second World War, Jews were belatedly included in full whiteness by becoming “Caucasian.” In Palestine, Jewishness is now operating as whiteness in what the scholar Ronit Lentin calls “the racial colony.” US white supremacy exalts Israel as its own mirror image, even as it returns to atavistic Jew hatred because (in their minds) all Jews should go to Israel and become “white” there.
The Checkpoint Is The Present
Farah Nabulsi’s short film The Present (2020) dramatized and visualized the checkpoint encounter, where cameras are forbidden. The title conveys both the subject matter of the film—the obtaining of a gift—and its conceptual framework as a metonym for the present time.
In the opening sequence, Yusef (Saleh Bakri) is seen crossing at the notorious Checkpoint 300 into Israel from Bethlehem into Jerusalem. The film shows the crowded conditions as Palestinians throng in the early morning dark to cross into Israel for work. Some climb along the barricades to jump the queue. No one speaks.
In the main part of the film, Yusef must cross another checkpoint, because he wants to buy his wife an anniversary present of a new fridge, even though he is traveling within the West Bank to the town of Beitunia, about 20 km. from Bethlehem. This is a wholly arbitrary division, as is the decision of the guard to humiliate him when he returns with the fridge. Only an intervention by his daughter Yasmine (Maryam Kanj) ends the standoff.
Abolish the Checkpoint
The checkpoint operates as the interface of police, state, technology, and surveillance with those it considers disposable bodies. The checkpoint condenses all these issues into a dangerous material infrastructure, the present infrastructure of white sight. It evokes Nicole Fleetwood’s “carceral aesthetics” to enable us to think about how prison is a key institution in Palestine.
As Fleetwood and others argue in relation to US mass incarceration, the checkpoint regime of white sight cannot be reformed but only abolished. Its internal contradictions will not be resolved but only repressed by means of its own violence, as in any other colony. Because it is a colonial regime, it will end. Notably, the new Palestinian resistance is arguing for a single democratic state in the territory of the former Palestine—making up what is now Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza—as Edward Said had declared was inevitable. Just as in South Africa, one person-one vote will eventually abolish the colony. Until then, you know what you have to do.
Thank you for writing such a thorough and thoughtful piece about this horrific situation. As a secular Jew who has been anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian since I was sent to Israel in 1969 (by grandparents who wanted me to "get Jewish"), I wish that more American Jews would wake up to these issues. I started making art about this topic in the early 1990s, and was accused by other Jews of being anti-Semitic. I responded to them by saying that I was following the ethic of "tikkun olam" - to repair the world.