Joe Biden’s presidency is four months old, and although it has enjoyed an extended honeymoon period in the US — Trumpist conspiracy theories and Republican hardliners notwithstanding — when viewed from the outside, the gloss is starting to wear off.
While the country’s allies in the Global North embrace a return to Obama-era diplomacy, those of us in the Global South have reason to be ambivalent. Hoarding of vaccines (an alternative version of “America first”) is one thing; the escalation of interventionist foreign policy (“America is back”) is another thing altogether.
Biden finishes almost every speech with “May God protect our troops”, a rote line that might be the benevolent gesture of a father whose son died in combat but also expresses a firm conviction: America can only be a force for good in the world if it has enough firepower to obliterate anyone who gets in the way.
The war being waged by Israel against Palestine (there is no other way to put it) has been described as Biden’s first major foreign policy test. But America’s position is entirely predictable. We support a two-state solution, they will say. Israel must be allowed to defend itself, they will say.
A few things will be left unsaid. Like: we will continue to sell arms to Israel (a US$735m deal was approved a week before the latest escalation of violence). Like: our relationship with Israel is a legacy of the Cold War and has remained crucial to our meddling in the Middle East over the past three decades. Like: we know that a two-state solution is a joke because Israel has systematically denuded Palestinians of both rights and land since 1948.
Another thing that no-one wants to talk about is how America simply picked up in the second half of the twentieth century where Britain left off. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has, for over a century, been a function of imperial ambitions. The colonial character of the Israeli occupation and appropriation of Palestinian territory is a natural extension of an externally generated conflict.
This is not, fundamentally, a Jewish-Muslim or Jewish-Arab or otherwise “ethnic” conflict. It has become one through the canny exploitation of casual bigotry, a hardening into hatred that has served successive (and increasingly right-wing) Israeli governments no less than it has groups such as Hamas.
Rather, it is a human rights issue. Recognising that millennia of anti-Semitism culminated in the Shoah should lead us to recognise the treatment of Palestinians as a form of ethnic cleansing. Opposing anti-Semitism, which retains a vicious potency today, can and must go together with an opposition to other forms of persecution — including that of the Palestinian people.
This is not the moral philosophical equivalent of rocket science. It’s pretty straightforward, unless you have been blinkered by indoctrination. If one of the tasks of artists is to see through and beyond ideology, then it is not surprising that artists around the world have expressed sympathy for and solidarity with the Palestinian cause. In many cases, they see in the Palestinians’ struggle something of their own.
This is what drove Kashmiri artist Mudasir Gul to paint a mural under a Srinagar bridge earlier this week, the text declaring “We are Palestine” alongside an image of a crying woman wearing the Palestinian flag as a headscarf — an act for which Gul was arrested by the police (which, in Kashmir, is really an extension of the occupying Indian army) under the euphemistically named Public Safety Act.
We in SA know all about such laws. In Israel-Palestine, as in Kashmir, and as was the case under apartheid, intricate legal frameworks are used to justify both daily humiliation and violent reprisal under the guise of “the rule of law”.
This grim sense of familiarity — although even the cruellest apartheid crackdowns never extended to aerial bombing — lay at the heart of a recent online event hosted by writers’ organisation PEN SA. After South African and Palestinian poets read from their work, some participants found themselves without words. What can be said in the face of such overwhelming loss, fear and suffering? And yet, as the poems affirmed, it is also the task of writers and artists to imagine the horizon that lies beyond war and oppression.
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