state force. While brown faces now dominate everyday life in the center of the
city, many of those faces are gaunt with hunger and desperation.
The
conversation turned, precipitously, to Israel. I suspected we’d get there soon
enough because anyone who talks about the WCAR seems to find him or herself in
this imbroglio. Besides many of the youth in the courtyard had participated in
the pro-Palestine march earlier in the week, and a few posters to indicate that
event adorned the entryway into the mosque. My new friends seemed reasonably
well informed about Israel, about the restrictions to movement of Palestinians
for work, of the routine violence by the Israeli state against political
figures, of the miserable conditions of everyday life in the Authority. Ramallah
became Soweto or Chatsworth, Abu Mustafa became Chris Hani and the Pass Laws
seemed to come alive in the roadblocks and humiliations as Palestinians tried to
get to their jobs and hospitals in the state of Israel. For these very liberal
and heterodox Muslims, the conundrum of Israel was simple: here is a state for
one people (Jews) which retains a mixed population because of historical
circumstances and for its labor needs, and for security and fiscal reasons it
does not contemplate the treatment of its fellows as equals.
This
is all well and good, I said, but why is the issue of Israel at the heart of the
conference, indeed why has the United States pinned its own participation here
based on the question of Israel? The answer that one often heard in Durban, both
at the mosque and in the conference halls, is that this has to do with the
special relationship of the US and Israel or perhaps with the Jewish lobby in
the United States. Of course the US executive is a Republican and if anything
the "Jewish vote" is mainly Democratic, so that the latter reason is specious.
Furthermore, the US does not always stand beside Israel with such ferocity. For
example, in recent months the Israeli government has been a bit frustrated with
the tendency of the US to be critical of its excesses, such as the assassination
of PFLP leader Abu Mustafa. Why should the US alienate such a vast section of
the world, and of its own citizenry, on behalf of Israel? Or did the US really
leave Durban only because of Israel?
The
issue at Durban was neither merely the question of an Israeli racism nor mainly
of definitions of race. The third WCAR built from the heritage of the two
previous meetings and from our current context of neoliberal globalization. The
first conference in 1978 trashed the biological idea of race, and suggested that
"race" was entirely a social fiction. Following this it offered a strong
condemnation of "the extreme form of institutionalized racism" in South African
apartheid, and it suggested economic measures to liberate peoples around the
world from a racism embedded in our institutions. This was a far seeing document
and it set the trend for the decades to come. Five years later, again in Geneva,
the WCAR once again condemned South Africa, noted the sharp oppression of women
of color and of "indigenous people." The third WCAR, following from the spirit
of the 1978 meeting, was all principally about the question of a remedy.
Many
African and Asian nations, and most Africans of the diaspora, put the issue of a
formal apology for slavery and colonialism, as well as concomitant reparations
at the forefront of their Durban agenda. Chattel slavery in the Americas and the
colonial extraction of materials and labor in Asia and Africa produced the
values that fueled the industrial revolution in northwest Europe and
northeastern America. Without that free labor, it is unlikely that we’d have
such a disparity of wealth across the globe: colonialism made whiteness a form
of property, and that possession was then cashed in by self-designated whites
for the resources of the world. The best justification for this is John Locke’s
Second Treatise, where he writes that only those who use god’s resources
("whites" such as himself) have title to the soil, whereas those who do not
(such as Amerindians) may be freely expropriated. The bill for unpaid back wages
was tendered at Durban.
Europe and the US of course did not want to pay that bill; indeed they did not
want to start the conversation about reparations. The former colonies asked that
slavery and colonialism must be deemed a "crime against humanity," a formulation
rejected by the European Union and the US since it might, according to
representatives of the EU, open whiteness up to lawsuits. The Zimbabwean
minister of justice, himself rather compromised by the lawless land grabs,
nevertheless was on point when he said that the EU and the USA "are more worried
about their wallets than moral issues." The EU stayed the distance of the
negotiations, eager to tender an apology for slavery and colonialism and ask
that the world community, and particularly the former colonial states,
contribute to "restore the dignity of the victims." The United States had
already left the conference by the time these negotiations came up, so that
their representative did not have to reveal that the dollar is far more
important than the dignity of its own citizens. If the EU at least came to the
table with talk of "contributions," the US government in recent years has shown
that it is averse to even such an approach (with the demise of even liberal
measures, such as welfare and other social programs, toward building the
capacity of impoverished people of color).
Israel provided the US with the high ground. Rather than deal with the mess of
history, the US could leave the WCAR on a white horse, as the champion of a
state that portrays itself as a victim. Israel bore more weight for the US State
Department than its own citizens, particularly African Americans who, poll data
indicates, overwhelmingly support some form of reparations (often as a social
investment fund rather than as individual paychecks). The US NGO delegation, a
full fourth of the total NGOs at Durban, found that they had less input into the
State Department, and indeed felt treated as interlopers in a discussion among
the powers. The issue of reparations, then, was occluded by the question of
Israel.
We’re
drinking tea outside the mosque, and I’m talking to my two new friends who
migrated from Lahore a decade ago. We keep fighting each other for land, he
tells me, when we should be aware that the ground is being taken away from under
us. Neoliberal globalization wants to retain the advantages secured by history
and to undermine the limited gains made by import-substitution style anti-racist
justice. And the wily guardians of the old order, such as the US, turn us away
from those issues, prevent a discussion of such problems, and make a tragic
situation the convenient scapegoat for their own mendacity. Durban’s failures,
then, were occasioned less by the scattered debates that taught us so much about
the different forms of oppression around the world. Culpability for the failure
must be borne by the US and the EU, both eager to protect their pocketbooks and
to avoid the appearance of callous racism rather than put the creditors at bay.
No bill goes unpaid: at least the capitalist core should know that!
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