Anarchy Alive

by Jyoti Roi at Feminist Review…and she seems to like it! Great to see every ideological tag getting scent-marked in turn…See Jyoti’s own blog here

In Anarchy Alive! Israeli activist and ‘anarchademic’ Uri Gordon draws on his own activism as well as extensive researching of anti-authoritarian lifestyles, philosophies, and actions of activist communities to propose a theorem of contemporary anarchist ideology. The time at the end of the twentieth century where there was a global uprising against corporate tyranny is recalled and exemplified in mass demonstrations such as the worldwide J18 demonstrations, the Seattle WTO protest, and the Genoa protest against the G8 summit. Different activist communities were united in the fight to end oppressive systems, and it seemed a time, Gordon writes, that would “accelerate in an unstoppable crescendo until genuine social transformation was achieved.”

The change that came in late 2001 was not one people expected. The war against terror also became a war on the global activist movement, changing the way people demonstrated and engaged. Anarchy Alive! suggests the “tides are turning” again, and that “a new surge of struggle may be on the horizon.”

Offering his perspectives in a much larger conversation of contemporary political theory, he confronts issues such as ‘violence’ and ‘technology’ as areas where activists differ in perspectives, and uses historical as well as current examples to reinvigorate these debates. The chapter on power is particularly interesting for a feminist perspective, and Gordon does well of highlighting the contributions of feminist, queer, anti-racist, anti-war, and all other activists to this all-encompassing contemporary anarchist theory.

Gordon notes that what sets apart his contemporary anarchist theory from the old-school definitions of ‘capital A’ Anarchist theory is, in part, the wide variety of symbolic actions of protest against dominant culture, whether one is defined an anarchist or not. Hacking a corporate computer system, starting a community garden, and spraying paint on an advertisement are all acts of anti-authoritarian direct action. Not just celebrating these acts of culture jamming and DIY action, Gordon is proposing a common way forward, to extend past these acts and to envision an end result. He attempts to weave these anti-authoritarian threads together to re-form a solid movement under the term ‘anarchism’.

The most interesting aspect of Anarchy Alive! is the final chapter in which Gordon visits the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. He talks of his involvement with Anarchists Against the Wall – a group of Israeli activists who oppose the barriers being constructed between Israeli and Palestinian territories. From this he talks of the idea of ‘bioregions’, which is a model of co-existence not built upon nation states, or the hierarchical features of them: patriarchy, racism, consumerism, etc. It is in this idea of co-existence that the wide variety of anti-authoritarian protests and actions are called to once again unite their actions for this common goal.

A result of his doctorate on contemporary anarchist theory written at Oxford, Anarchy Alive! assumes some knowledge of contemporary activist issues, and perhaps anarchist leanings. It is written in a heavy academic style, but is engaging and dynamic, offering an intelligent, inclusive, and ideological vision of contemporary anarchist politics.

This is from On Faith, a Washington Post / Newsweek column on religion that she writes for.

Denied Entry Into Israel
By Starhawk

On the outskirts of Ben Gurion International Airport there is a jail where those who are denied entry into Israel are taken to wait. It’s not a horrible place, as jails go – the windows open, albeit with bars on the other side, admitting the dawn chorus of birdsong and a breeze that hints of rain. The food is as bad as only institutional Israeli food can be – but no one is starving, or screaming. Much worse places exist, especially for Palestinians, who can be held for months in ‘Administrative Detention’ without formal charge or trial. Yet this is a sad place, full of disappointment and shattered hopes.

That’s where I was put a few weeks ago when I was denied entry into Israel.

My companions each had their own, sad tale. A slim, Muslim American law student in a tightly wrapped headscarf had been plucked out of a human rights course she helped to organize and plan. A young Filipina, her face scarred by acne, her belly six months swollen with child, had overstayed her visa and is being sent away from her Arab lover. A Siberian gynecologist, after eight years in Israel, instructed me to drink her Orangina and shrugged her shoulders.

“Lawyers, no good,” she told me. “Shekels, shekels, shekels.” She rubbed her fingers together in the universal sign for coins. “If they want you to go, you must go.”

I had my pocket Tarot cards with me, and I read for the pert blonde from Moldova who had been there for a month while her lawyer shepherded her case through the courts. She was so radiantly cheerful that I wondered what her life must have been like outside these walls. I read for two young Filipina sisters, delicate and beautiful as birds, and saw their scared, sad eyes light up for a moment, with hope and visions of the world outside the walls.

Their transgressions are economic. Having closed her borders to the Palestinians, the closest pool of chap labor, Israel now attracts the poor and ambitious from around the globe. They work as domestics or sex workers or field hands, or earn more money in skilled professions than they can possibly make back home. Until they stay too long.

I found myself in their company for other reasons. I am now a member of a small, exclusive club – the ranks of Jews not welcome in Israel.

As a Jew, there are many things I can be faulted for. Reviving the Old Religion of the Goddess may be my worst theological transgression, although in the eyes of my family it barely counts against my far worse failures: to marry a Jewish man and produce a Jewish child. Yet none of these were at issue on the day I was denied entry.

The reason I was given was that my past work with the International Solidarity Movement, a group that supports Palestinian nonviolence. The ISM brings internationals to support demonstrations and civil resistance, for their presence adds a slim margin of safety that makes this method of protest possible. Founded by Palestinians, Israelis and Americans, it is one of many groups that has helped nurture a nonviolent movement that daily grows stronger in spite of its near invisibility in the media and on the international scene.

Members of the ISM have stood witness in refugee camps under siege by the Israeli military. They have camped beside Palestinians and Israeli allies in the path of the bulldozers clearing land for the ‘security’ wall which confiscates Palestinian farmland without compensation. They have marched in demonstrations, organized activities for children confined and frustrated by months-long curfews, negotiated with soldiers at checkpoints, and reported on a side of the occupation rarely seen by outsiders. Two have been killed in the course of their actions: Rachel Corrie, crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer when she attempted to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian home, and Tom Hurndall, shot by an Israeli sniper in Rafah as he ran to the aid of a group of children under fire.

The wall which Israel has been building for more than four years wanders deep into the territory once reserved for a Palestinian state, protecting Jewish settlements which themselves grab crucial territory and sit atop vital aquifers. As it has progressed, a nonviolent movement has grown as village after village in its path has resisted with peace camps, demonstrations and civil disobedience instead of rockets and suicide bombs. They invite Israelis to join them, and many do, crossing the lines of division and cracking the entrenched belief that Israelis and Palestinians can never get along.

“We are not Israeli or Palestinian,” one young protester said to me. “We are people working together against injustice.” I see this movement as a tiny ray of hope in the entrenched bitterness and despair of an intractable situation. I’m proud to have had some small part in it, though the journey to get there was not easy.

For someone born and raised in the post-war Jewish community of the Fifties – even for a flagrant Pagan – the existence of Israel, of a refuge, a safe haven in a potentially hostile world, has always been a deep, unconscious ground of security. To consider that Israel might be doing wrong, might herself be oppressing another people, is excruciatingly, emotionally painful. And yet it is the values of my Jewish upbringing that pushed me toward involvement. I am Jewish and Pagan, and both sets of values are in me, inextricably intertwined. They deeply make me who I am.

“Justice, Justice, You shall pursue” is one of the Biblical verses that stays with me, always. To me, that means an obligation to go where truth and justice lead – even into places that are painful and hard to face.

Ironically, I had come to Israel this time not to work with the ISM, but with the intention of teaching and learning from Green organizations. I had been invited by three Israeli groups to present my work in Permaculture and ecological design, and to learn from the innovative work they are doing.

For On Faith, I had hoped to talk to people about their faith and its role in the struggle. I wanted to ask a spectrum of people three questions: What do you believe in? How does that belief affect your choice of how to fight? And how does it affect your relationship to the land? Lying in jail, unable to sleep through the long, tense, night, I ask myself those questions. What do I believe?

I believe the sacred is present in the world, in nature and in every human being, moving through us as love, creativity, and the thirst for justice: powers ultimately greater than the gun and the bomb. Because of that belief, I choose nonviolence as my method of struggle, for it allows me to honor the sacred even in those who oppose me. And I believe that nonviolence is a powerful strategy for breaking the vicious cycles of attack and revenge that trap us. Nonviolence is unexpected.

What is my relationship to this land, which I have now been banned from, and where I can no longer seek refuge? It is the land of my ancestors. I love it, but I do not wish to own it or claim it or exclude others from it. Those who truly love the land will build soil, not walls, and plant trees, not bulldoze them down. And they will take the risk to love all the peoples of the land, to dare to bridge the divisions and together pursue justice.