Hey, we're going to meet in about an hour and I wanted to remind you about it, and also send along some quotes that I thought about while reading "Sharpening the Spear" (chapter 1 of Tip of the Spear). With the US and Israel launching air strikes on Iran, and the news of a school having been hit and more than 50 children killed, if you want to join us to just have a community to be with for an hour, that's totally okay.

quotes & reflections

One idea involved taking their case before the United Nations, where the captives would argue their conditions violated the Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, the Statement on the Treatment of Criminal Offenders, and the provisions related to the crime of genocide. (page 29)

As a result of their militant action, human beings were released from the teeth of the state, exposing the violence of judicial discretion and affirming the rebels’ claims that they were being subjected to a genocidal conspiracy. (page 37)

Upon cutting their way into the fourth floor of QHD, a guard captain reportedly announced, “The war is over . . . You have lost, this is now a concentration camp.” (page 45)

While employing militant rhetoric, most of these outside supporters studiously abided the law and remained corralled behind police barricades. The jail rebellion’s “warriors” saw this as a missed opportunity. (page 47) ... The jail rebels, the Panthers, and other radical groups viewed law as an instrument of race and class war. Liberals viewed it as an instrument of justice, albeit one that was vulnerable to corruption. (page 48)

When I came into reading this chapter, I think I assumed that the argument that Black people are in a state of war was a framework that needed to break outside of status quo laws and judicial order in order for people to subscribe to, so I was surprised to read throughout the chapter about the jail rebels doing things like contemplating taking a case to the United Nations to argue that they were prisoners of war.

It's not that I disagree; maybe what I mean to do is draw contrast to Mohammed El-Kurd's writing, which doesn't try to make a legalistic argument and doesn't concern itself with the interpretation of current law - instead rejecting whatever status quo fails to meet this current moment and recognize the injustice of the ongoing annihilation of Palestine. By any plain reading of what genocide and apartheid are, Israel is committing those and other crimes against Palestinians, and if international courts and the United Nations refuses to recognize that (for instance, because the party members have a vested interest in the perpetuation of that injustice), then El-Kurd doesn't seem fazed. Nor should he be.

But, again, that's why I'm surprised to see these uprisings invest in and subscribe to the idea that there is a framework of justice that is worth leaning on - that the United Nations doesn't exist to launder the colonial project while continuing to allow the "major" powers to run roughshod over the rest of the world.

I don't mean to retrospectively criticize the uprisings, informed by cynicism acquired by passing awareness of the international community's actions between the 70s through the 2020s that we're now living through (which the rebels didn't have). But we can turn to Fanon's writing (we actually have read A Dying Colonialism, which was first published in 1959); my recollection was that Fanon was hopeful for the future of the Algerian project, but not exactly naive about the European's interest in such emancipatory projects.

Maybe what Dr. Burton is getting at in this chapter is that the rebels were trying to demonstrate that - even by the jurisprudential rationalizations of white people (who had been waging a genocidal war against Black people for centuries) - even by that criteria, a slate of 460 prisoners currently incarcerated would be categorically recognized as unjustly imprisoned, and that this project would be laid bare (that does, after all, seem to be the point of the quote from page 37).

That's also the conclusion we're supposed to draw and understand from the quote on page 45, where a guard captain announces that "this is now a concentration camp".

Reading this, I found myself thinking about a Haaretz report that came out recently, relaying how zionists in 1948 gave instructions, varyingly, to "kill every 10th man" or "every Arab among the Zabahim is to be killed", etc... and the decades of testimonies from Palestinians about what Israelis announced and perpetrated for the past 75+ years. What effect it has on a population's consciousness to exist in this state of apartheid and - for the past several years, if not decades, what amounts to an open-air prison.

video chat details

In about an hour (at 12pm ET) let's get together¹ and chat about whatever we've read this week. The link to join is here (if that doesn't work, the url is below)

https://al2.in/ReadingGroupRoom

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supporting The Sameer Project

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