Performative recognition

 I recently came across this ‘acknowledgement of country’ on a blog I frequent:

We recognise the First Peoples of this nation and their ongoing connection to culture and country. We acknowledge First Nations Peoples as the Traditional Owners, Custodians and Lore Keepers of the world's oldest living culture and pay respects to their Elders past, present and emerging.

Similarly, the Australian Human Rights Commission’s antiracism website announces,

Racism. It Stops With Me acknowledges Traditional Custodians of Country throughout Australia and pays respect to Elders, past, present and future.

At first glance, such acknowledgements seem unexceptionable. But something is missing – a recognition that the colonists have usurped the Traditional Custodians’ possession without compensation. Isn’t it cynical to acknowledge ownership without that? Isn’t it hypocritical to do so without offering, or at least advocating, some form of material reparation for the harm colonialism has wreaked.

When we read of ‘the world's oldest living culture’, it raises a variety of issues. For one thing, it implies that Australian Indigenous culture is one thing. In reality, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples practiced a range of cultures prior to colonisation. More importantly, colonisation has required those cultures to adapt, resulting in further variety.

Ultimately, all living human cultures are exactly the same age. Indeed, they may all have originated from the same culture. They have just developed in different directions. To assert that Australian Aboriginal culture is ‘the oldest’ is really just a euphemism for the belief that it has not developed and is stuck in some ‘primitive’ form from the past. As Luke Pearson has pointed out, ‘it can also be seen to suggest that because we had a ‘continuous culture’ for over 60,000 years that there were no changes, no adaptations, no innovations, and was not influenced by individuals of great talent and skill’. I hesitate to speculate about what kind of attitudes might engender such ideas.

Finally, ‘emerging Elders’ or ‘future Elders’ is a curious concept. Although it is not obvious, in this context, an Elder is not just any old codger. According to Wiradjuri woman Yvonne Weldon, ‘An Elder is a respected holder of cultural knowledge who has lived in accordance with certain principles, values and teachings...In Wiradjuri law, recognition as an Elder is something that is conferred rather than assumed’. So an ‘emerging Elder’ must be someone whose status as an Elder their community has not recognised, which is why Weldon considers the term presumptuous. And Sydney University avers that ‘acknowledging “emerging leaders” or “Elders past, present, and emerging” is generally not accepted practice in the Indigenous community and should not be used’.

So all the protestations of recognition, acknowledgement, and respect end up unpacking as performative gestures and manifest the very colonial views they purport to distance themselves from.

Strike up the band

 On 25 June, Australian Labor Party (ALP) Senator for Western Australia (WA), Fatima Payman, crossed the floor in a historic move, to vote with the Greens for their motion:

That, in the opinion of the Senate, the following is a matter of urgency:

The need for the Senate to recognise the State of Palestine.

The ALP tried and failed to amend the motion to append the words, ‘as a part of a peace process in support of a two-state solution and a just and enduring peace’. That would have aligned the sentiment more closely with ALP policy, which:

Supports the recognition and right of Israel and Palestine to exist as two states within secure and recognised borders [and] Calls on the Australian Government to recognise Palestine as a state.

Prime Minister Albanese suspended her from caucus for violating caucus ‘solidarity’, and when she later averred that she was prepared to repeat the performance should the matter come up again, felt obliged to resign from the party and now sits on the crossbench. For what it’s worth, I favour caucus solidarity in a parliamentary ‘democracy’, provided caucus adopts positions consistent with the policies members establish at conference, as were both versions of the Greens motion.

Omission of the reference to the so-called ‘Two State Solution’ might appear to comprise a substantive difference between the amended and unamended motions. But Australia recognised Israel in January 1949 and has full diplomatic and economic relations with the Zionist state. As a matter of fact, Australia is one of the few countries that has consistently supported Israel against critical resolutions in the UN.

Under the circumstances, a call for recognition of ‘The State of Palestine’ can only mean a rump entity, comprising at most all of the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip. In any case, Payman has explicitly avowed that ‘she supported a two-state solution and that she believed Israel had a right to exist’.

Calls for the UN to recognise the State of Palestine by admitting it as a member face the same problem. The 2012 General Assembly resolution (A/RES/67/19) that decided ‘to accord to Palestine non-member observer State status’ explicitly embraced ‘the vision of two States: an independent, sovereign, democratic, contiguous and viable State of Palestine living side by side in peace and security with Israel on the basis of the pre-1967 borders’, alarmingly not only endorsing ethnic partition, but overlooking the incontiguity of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and mistaking the 1949 armistice line for a border.

Similarly, just this past May, the General Assembly (ES-10/23), in calling on the Security Council to reconsider admitting the State of Palestine to UN membership, reaffirmed ‘its unwavering support...for the two-State solution of Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and security within recognized borders, based on the pre-1967 borders’.

So all the relevant calls for recognition of the State of Palestine explicitly recognise Israel, as well. But even if they didn’t, it is implicit, either in prior recognition of Israel or in accepting ethnic partition.

And there lies the crux of the issue. As a human being, I stand for human solidarity; as a socialist, I stand for class solidarity. So of course I oppose divisive ideologies like racism and nationalism. The conceit that Jews can’t make common cause with everyone else to fight the scourge of racism together is racist. The idea that Jews need to corral ourselves off in a ghetto where Jews are in charge is racist. Partitioning territory to create ethnically homogeneous countries is racist – it’s actually apartheid. Establishing a state where ‘The right to exercise national self-determination...is unique to the Jewish people’ is racist, all the moreso when it entails dispossession of the indigenous inhabitants. That leads me, as a Jew, to reject the legitimacy of a Jewish state anywhere and I try to eschew any expression that might imply recognition of anything beyond the actual existence of Israel.

It’s important to note that it is possible to envisage a situation where partition of Palestine could result in two democratic, secular states, in some imaginary universe. Ali Abunimah makes this point as a rhetorical device to illustrate that the whole point of The Two State Solution™, has always been to ensure that one of the two states was to be a Jewish ethnocracy, from the Peel Commission of 1937, through the UN General Assembly’s 1947 partition plan, to the Quartet’s ‘Performance-based Road Map to a Permanent Two-State Solution to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict’ and the Geneva Accord in 2003.

So any two state ‘solution’ anybody is talking about is racist and I can’t see any room for agnosticism or silence on the issue. As I’ve argued before, recognition of a State of Palestine entails partition and therefore recognition of Israel, unless it’s explicitly ‘from the river to the sea’, which still raises issues about representation, etc. So calls for such recognition implicitly endorse the Zionist state, which is racist.

Another problem with calls for recognition of ‘Palestine’ or ‘The State of Palestine’ is identifying where it is, who is going to represent ‘Palestine’, and which Palestinians they are going to represent. Palestinian citizens of Israel, now numbering over 2 million, have the franchise, so if you believe in the myth of democracy, the Israeli government can represent their interests with as much credibility as any other colonial government purporting to represent the interests of the colonised. Calls for recognition are not talking about them.

A 2013 estimate placed the number of Palestinian refugees in the diaspora, many of them stateless, at 6 million, a number that has certainly increased since then. There is nobody who can make a plausible claim to represent their interests. Nor is anyone calling for their recognition as The State of Palestine.

What all calls for recognition of the State of Palestine really mean is recognition of the quisling Palestinian Authority, which poses as representative of the stateless residents of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Although Hamas won the last election to the Palestinian Legislative Council in 2006, it is Fatah that managed to wrest control in the West Bank, while failing to do so in Gaza. Mahmoud Abbas, commonly denominated ‘President’, and whose term expired in January 2009, boasted an approval rating of 16% in March, and 84% of those polled want him to resign.

Among the reasons the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network (APAN) has adduced in its call for recognition is, ‘The 1947 United Nations Partition Plan resolution, which Australia had a strong hand in drafting, stipulated there would be two-states established: Israel and Palestine’. So their position is explicitly and unequivocally in favour of ethnic partition. Some have justified supporting calls for recognition on the grounds that they are following APAN’s lead, as if they had no responsibility to think for themselves and some Palestinian voices were incapable of error. Desperate people resort to desperate measures, and the PLO, you will recall, accordingly embraced the Oslo Accords in 1993, even though Palestinians like Edward Said recognised it as a grave error at the time. And so it has proven to be.

In the here and now, other Palestinian voices are articulating strong opposition to recognition.

Last year, Fahad Ali opined,

Palestinians already recognize our territorial sovereignty over all of historic Palestine...It is not legitimized nor jeopardized by foreign recognition or lack thereof...diplomatic recognition is a distraction...and it makes invisible Zionist state violence...Recognition of Palestinian statehood is much less of a threat to the Zionist regime than even the Zionists are making it out to be.

Columbia University’s Joseph Massad, for example, writes,

the outright racists are those who recognise Israel's right to exist as a Jewish supremacist state...When UN member states recognise a phantasmic Palestinian state, all they are doing is buttressing Israel's illegality as an institutionally racist state. What they need to do is not recognise a Palestinian state but withdraw their recognition of Israel.

Yara Hawari of the Palestinian Policy Network, agrees,

...it is difficult to envision how recognition of a state that does not exist would change the reality on the ground for Palestinians facing systematic erasure...the crux of the recognition argument is that it will revive the “two-state solution”...premised on the partition of the land of historic Palestine...and effectively accepts Israeli apartheid. Indeed the two-state solution demands that Palestinians world over forgo their rights to their lands and properties in historic Palestine and accept a truncated state in the 1967 occupied lands instead. Further, it demands that Palestinians accept Zionism as a legitimate ideology rather than one of settler-colonial domination...partition will never be a sustainable or long-term solution and the international community needs to come to terms with this.

‘Recognition is meant’, writes Lana Tatour of the University of New South Wales,

among other things, to rehabilitate Israel’s legitimacy and overturn the demise of the two-state solution by preventing the possibilities for new political formations and narrowing (yet again) the question of Palestine to the 1967 occupied territories...What these powers are planning for the Palestinians is the further solidification of the Palestinian Authority—a corrupt, authoritarian, and oppressive ruling power and a de facto subcontractor of Israeli occupation, which has no legitimacy among Palestinians. Core issues remain unaddressed, such as the status of East Jerusalem; questions of land, territory, and sovereignty; the control of borders, sea, and air; a population registry; the right of return; and more. The proposal thus offers a façade of progress, when in practice Palestinians will remain under Israeli colonization and occupation and the oppressive rule of the Palestinian Authority.

With Palestinian opinion apparently divided on the issue, it is curious, to say the least, that even those who explicitly claim to reject Jewish colonisation would choose to side with those who ‘recognise Israel's right to exist as a Jewish supremacist state’.

To sum up then, to call for recognition of The State of Palestine, either bilaterally or by the UN, ends up:

• endorsing the racist ethnic partition of Palestine,

• accepting Israel’s existence as an apartheid Jewish ethnocracy on at least 78% of the territory of historic Palestine, and

• legitimising the quisling Palestinian Authority.

The Greens’s motion, with or without the ALP amendment, buys into these noxious implications, as does the New South Wales Labor conference just this past weekend (27-28 July 2024). Senator Payman’s gesture, however courageous and wellmeaning, was therefore essentially empty.

Those who support decolonisation of Palestine on a principled, antiracist basis need to call for severing relations with apartheid Israel. We keep reading that 145 governments have recognised The State of Palestine, but it’s a mistake to clamber aboard every passing bandwagon whatever tune they play.

Counting the dead

 According to Joe Lauria, writing on the 24 July, Netanyahu ‘has already officially killed more than 39,000 Palestinians [nearly 200,000 according to The Lancet]’. In an otherwise insightful article on the 19^th, Randa Abdel-Fattah, wrote of, ‘a genocide that has so far, on a recent conservative [sic] by the Lancet,...caused an estimated 186,000 deaths and counting’. Similarly, on 16 July, Michael Arria said, ‘A recent report from The Lancet estimates that the actual death toll in Gaza could be more than 186,000. So far.’ [my emphasis]

By the 24^th, he revised his approach, writing, ‘The British medical journal The Lancet estimates that the death toll of Israel’s genocidal onslaught on Gaza will reach at least an estimated 186,000 Palestinians.’ The next day, he toned his allegations down further, ‘The Lancet recently published a study estimating that the death toll in Gaza will reach at least 186,000.’

In reality, the document at issue is not the Lancet’s work, but a letter from three researchers, Rasha Khatib, Martin McKee, and Salim Yusuf. The central claim in the six paragraph letter, was,

In recent conflicts, such indirect deaths range from three to 15 times the number of direct deaths. Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death to the 37 396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186 000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza. [my emphasis]

An assertion that something is ‘not implausible’ inspires little confidence. It’s important to note that in the Lancet ‘letters are not normally externally peer reviewed’ and the letter does not report a study, per se, but merely a calculation based on the Ministry of Health’s report of total direct fatalities as at 19 June. The authors multiplied that number, 37 396, by a factor of four to arrive at a number of indirect fatalities. The source of the multiplier is a 2008 report on the Global Burden of Armed Violence, which actually reports the ratio between direct and indirect deaths in 13 specific conflicts as ranging from 0 (Kosovo 1998-99) to 15.7 (Sierra Leone 1991-2002) (Table 2.3, p. 40). Khatib et al. do not specify how they decided to select a factor of four other than that it seemed conservative to them.

Michael Spagat, a University of London economist, analysed their approach and pointed out that the 13 conflicts may not be representative, that the ratios reported may not be robust, and in any case, factors like Gaza’s population density and the level of attention it has attracted make the situation there unique.

Spagat expresses doubt whether the figure of 186 000 is a projection. But Khatib et al. write, ‘Even if the conflict ends immediately, there will continue to be many indirect deaths in the coming months and years from causes such as reproductive, communicable, and non-communicable diseases. The total death toll is expected to be large…’ [my emphasis], strongly suggesting that it is.

So it’s a distortion to write of ‘186,000 deaths and counting’ or ‘so far’, apart from the other exaggerations. Media Lens reports more accurately, ‘A recent study...points out that there will be many additional indirect deaths...the total death toll in Gaza may even exceed 186,000’. Even the New York Times manages a more cautious approach.

Back in February, Zeina Jamaluddine, et al. published a series of ‘Scenario-based health impact projections’, disaggregating fatalities into five categories: traumatic injuries, infections, maternal and neonatal deaths and stillbirths, non-communicable diseases (NCDs), and those attributable to malnutrition. They project deaths from these causes as of 6 August 2024 under three scenarios: an immediate ceasefire, the status quo, and escalation of military operations, arriving at estimates of up to 85 750, in the worst case, with very broad 95% uncertainty intervals. Ironically, Khatib, et al. cite the report, raising the questions of why they even bothered with their more hamfisted approach and why everyone has now latched onto Khatib, et al. when more plausible projections were already on the record.

The point is that misrepresenting the authorship and nature of the source, exaggerating the robustness of the data, and confusing a projection with a current estimate all invite scepticism of anything else one might have to say.

The real issue is that, for one thing, whatever may have transpired on 7 October can never justify any harm to even one uninvolved person, much less demolition of entire cities. For another, the dead are far from the only victims. Recent reports indicate 90,403 people injured, including children, some of whom may be disabled for life. Furthermore, as Khatib et al. and all other sources point out, Israel’s systematic demolition of Gaza’s medical infrastructure has made it increasingly difficult to keep track of both fatalities and injuries. And it’s worth noting that those treating life threatening injuries are likely to prioritise that work over recording accurate statistics.

As the Israeli military continue to wreak death and injury, increasing the number of direct casualties daily, the ‘destroyed health-care infrastructure; severe shortages of food, water, and shelter; the population's inability to flee to safe places; and the loss of funding to UNRWA, one of the very few humanitarian organisations still active in the Gaza Strip’ (Khatib, et al.) will go on multiplying the number of indirect victims by an unknown factor. The US, which had provided UNRWA with some 30% of its funding, has enacted legislation barring further contributions until next March.

The actual death toll from direct and indirect causes could end up exceeding Khatib, et al.’s guesstimate. Indeed, on 25 July, Feroze Sidhwa, et al. released their estimates, based on analysis of a wide range of publicly available sources.

With the known violent deaths [39,145], the estimated ten thousand people buried under the rubble and certainly dead, a conservative estimate of 38,000 deaths from malnutrition and disease, and a conservative estimate of 5,000 deaths in patients with chronic diseases, we estimate that the current death toll is likely upwards of 92,000...These are the most conservative estimates of the death toll that can be made with the given available data as of July 24, 2024. It is highly likely that the real number of deaths in Gaza from this conflict is far higher, and without an immediate ceasefire the death toll will only continue to mount.

And that will just be the tip of the iceberg. If Israel should fail to achieve the stated goal of forcing the population of Gaza into Egypt in a second Nakba, life among the ruins promises little but misery for the survivors, even the uninjured.

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Update:

According to a report on 25 July, Euro-Med Monitor estimates 

based on data and statistics gathered by its field teams in neighbourhoods and camps located within the Gaza Strip, as well as from information received from relevant authorities and institutions, including several hospitals and medical teams. These indicate that at least 51,000 people have died as a result of the Israeli blockade of the entire Strip; denial of medical care; collapse of the health sector due to Israel’s targeting and blockade; insufficient ambulance services due to said targeting and blockade, as well as a severe shortage of basic medicines, particularly for patients with chronic illnesses and cancer; prevention of the ability to travel abroad for treatment; and the spread of infectious diseases and epidemics. Accordingly, the natural death rate increased from an estimated 3.5 per 1,000 people prior to the start of the genocide to 22 per 1,000 people during the genocide.