Stanford University Press Blog

Remembering Kafr Qasim

How the 1956 massacre has shaped the Palestinian struggle for civil rights.

by TAMIR SOREK

Memorial on the mosque of Kafr Qasim marking the October 29, 1956 massacre. Public domain.

Kafr Qasim is an Arab village in territory that was annexed by Israel following the 1949 Israeli-Jordanian armistice agreement, and was under strict military rule until 1966. Fifty-nine years ago today, on October 29th, 1956, a group of peasants from Kafr Qasim returned to the village from their fields, unaware that their village was under curfew. Forty-seven of them were executed by the Israeli Border Patrol troops, in a massacre that would become a formative political myth for the Palestinian citizens of Israel. For the next two decades the anniversary of the massacre would be the most important date on their political calendar.

What shaped the memory of the Kafr Qasim massacre as an exceptional case was the political status of the victims as Israeli citizens.

The emergence of Kafr Qasim as a major political myth is not as self-evident as it appears to be, because during the same years Israel killed thousands of other Palestinians whose deaths remained outside of the canonic political memory. What shaped the memory of the Kafr Qasim massacre as an exceptional case was the political status of the victims as Israeli citizens.

In 1956 the Green Line was still in the process of becoming a socio-political border and the choice of Arab leaders in Israel to turn the event into a formative, watershed moment in the state’s political development reflected an emerging outlook, according to which it is possible to turn the nominal citizenship of the Palestinians in Israel into a tangible set of civil rights. It was exactly because the massacre in Kafr Qasim undermined this outlook by targeting Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, that it became necessary to make it a symbol of civil struggle. Paradoxically, the massacre became a milestone in the construction of Israeli civic consciousness among the Palestinians in Israel.

Human Rights Without Humanism

Why does Foucault—an avowed anti-humanist—turn to “rights” in his later works?

by BEN GOLDER

Former US First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt with the English version of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, November 1949. Public domain.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in Paris on December 10, 1948. The result of two years of drafting by a committee of the Commission on Human Rights—whose famous chair was Eleanor Roosevelt—the text of the Declaration itself stands as an enduring testament to the global and supposedly universal appeal of these (newly declared) human rights norms. After all, the Commission had been chosen to be broadly representative of the world’s diverse cultures and civilizations. Roosevelt was joined on the committee by René Cassin of France, Charles Malik of Lebanon, Peng Chung Chang of China and John Humphrey of Canada. Human rights today are admitted by their defenders and detractors to be the ‘lingua franca’ of global politics. They are the preeminent universalist discourse of our time, dissolving regional and religious differences in the universalist and morally appealing argot of human rights—and the Declaration is the Ur-Text of this universalism.

Are human rights really universal? Or are they merely the narrow inheritance of the Western Enlightenment or European modernity?

The Declaration concerns the “inherent dignity and … the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family” and it addresses itself to “everyone.” Human rights are not the rights of the citizen; they are not civil rights or civil liberties. They do not depend on one’s gender or one’s race, one’s creed or one’s class: they are the rights of the human as such. (As an aside, if you pick up a textbook on human rights almost at random, and open it to the first page, you will most likely encounter some variant on the following beguiling sentence: Human rights are the rights we have simply because we are human beings). Of course, there has been an almost interminable debate in human rights circles about the extent to which actually-existing human rights documents capture this universalist ambition. Are human rights really universal? Or are they merely the narrow inheritance of the Western Enlightenment or European modernity? Do they reflect ‘Asian Values’? Or Islamic values? Can they be derived from Confucianism or Ubuntu as readily as they can from the works of Locke or of Kant?

Confronting India’s Tribal Problem

On the politics of recognition and coloniality of India’s affirmative action system.

by TOWNSEND MIDDLETON

Anthropologists and ethnic leaders deliberating over ethnographic field notes. Photo by Townsend Middleton.

India’s affirmative action system is the largest and perhaps most fraught in the world. Currently, the Indian government provides vital protections to hundreds of millions of individuals from government-designated castes, tribes, and other disadvantaged minorities across the country. Stretching into virtually every sector of life, affirmative action has become a signature of multicultural democracy on the subcontinent. But despite its centrality, India’s affirmative action system is in crisis. Violent protests in the 1990s over proposed hikes in positive discrimination quotas fired a shot over the bow. Subsequent protests and violence have confirmed the crisis at hand. India’s affirmative action controversies have focused primarily on caste. The last decade, however, has thrust a new category to the fore of concern: that of the tribe.

India’s affirmative action system is the largest and perhaps most fraught in the world.

Arising in dialogue with a now-global discourse of indigenous rights, recent years have seen an onslaught of demands for Scheduled Tribe (ST) status. The government already serves more than 700 constitutionally recognized ST communities (a population totaling more than one hundred million individuals). On top of that daunting figure, there are upwards of a thousand additional communities vying for this suddenly coveted status. These groups have tapped anthropology and a broader network of indigenous movements to strengthen their demands. The force and sheer quantity of their claims has put the postcolonial state in a veritable bind.

Writing Africans Out Of South African History

Venerating Gandhi as the arbiter of anticolonial struggle obscures the history of Africans.

by ASHWIN DESAI & GOOLAM VAHED

Gandhi (center left) with the volunteers of the 2nd Indian Stretcher Bearer Corps during the Zulu uprising, in 1906 in South Africa. Public domain.

The past decade has yielded a number of works by Indian authors on the South African Gandhi—the Gandhi who spent twenty-one formative years living and working in the racially riven country that was home to native Africans, Hindu and Muslim, indentured and trader class Indians, Dutch settlers, and British colonizers. What stands out in some of these works is the persistent attempt to portray Gandhi’s relationship with Africans as one of cooperation and collaboration toward a common political goal, a goal born from shared aspirations for social and political equality. This narrative, however, obscures particular nuances about Gandhi’s early political project, sanitizing aspects of his biography and—by dint of placing Gandhi at the forefront of struggles against white minority rule—virtually erasing Africans from this history.

By emphasizing the seminal role of Gandhi and the vanguard role of Indians in the South African liberation struggle, history ends up serving a racist narrative.

Following on from earlier works by Anil Nauriya, Rajmohan Gandhi, and an edited collection by Shanti Sadiq Ali, Ramachandra Guha’s Gandhi Before India perpetuates this narrative; though a comprehensive study, it underscores how the story of the South African Gandhi remains—ironically—incomplete. For Guha, it is on African soil that Gandhi honed his sense of empathy, anti-racism, anti-colonialism and quest for equality, a view that has garnered enough social currency to make Gandhi as much a celebrated figure in South African history, as in Indian history. In the Prologue, Guha holds that “because they [Indians] were better educated and better organized [than Africans], some Indians could more actively challenge the facts of white domination.” In one bold sweep, the century-long resistance of Africans to the colonial wars of dispossession is written out of history.

Sanitizing the Tunisian Revolution

How the Nobel committee's pick for the Peace Prize obscures the country's struggle.

by JOEL BEININ

Photo by Khaled Abdelmoumen. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has awarded the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize to Tunisia’s National Dialogue Quartet “for its decisive contribution to the building of a pluralistic democracy in Tunisia in the wake of the Jasmine Revolution of 2011.” The Quartet formed in August-September 2013 and functioned until January 2014. It was comprised of the Tunisian General Labor Union (UGTT, the main trade union federation), the Confederation of Industry, Trade and Handicrafts (UTICA, similar to a chamber of commerce), the Tunisian Human Rights League (LTDH), and the Bar Association (Ordre des Avocats). The Nobel Committee awarded the Peace Prize to the entire Quartet, “not to the four individual organizations as such.”

The committee announcement’s emphasis on the peaceful dialogue and mediation led by the Quartet obscures much of what actually transpired in Tunisia.

There is much to applaud about this award. It highlights that the Arab popular uprisings of 2011 were not for naught. There is a social base and a deep desire for democracy in at least some Arab countries. The future of Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Yemen, whose uprisings followed Tunisia’s in 2011, looks dismal today. But popular movements for democracy and social justice in the Arab world are no longer simply a utopian hope.

Nonetheless, the committee announcement’s emphasis on the peaceful dialogue and mediation led by the Quartet obscures much of what actually transpired in Tunisia.

In October 2011, nine months after the ouster of former president Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali, the Islamist Ennahda won a plurality of the seats in the democratically elected National Constituent Assembly. The assembly’s task was to draft a constitution and form an interim government to assume executive power. Ennahda led the interim government in partnership with the much smaller social democratic Ettakattol and the Congress for the Republic, whose political orientation is a vague blend of human rights advocacy with an Islamic sensibility and a dash of populism.

Politicizing the Ultrasound

On ultrasounds, “good mothers”, and women’s reproductive rights.

by RENÉE ANN CRAMER

Public domain image via Pixabay.

Supporters of women’s reproductive rights and autonomy have cried foul at Carly Fiorina’s cynical use of ultrasound as a backdrop to her fact-challenged takedown of Planned Parenthood. In a recent video filmed in a private clinic in South Carolina, Fiorina stands at the side of Lacey Thomas, seventeen weeks pregnant with her second child. With more than a dozen reporters in the room, Ms Fiorina gripped Ms. Thomas’ elbow, laughed with her about baby names and the joys of pregnancy, and marveled at the visible spinal cord—then left to address reporters, using the moment as an opportunity to denounce public funding for Planned Parenthood clinics.

While much media attention has focused on the expansive range of reproductive health care offered to women at Planned Parenthood clinics across the nation, and the inaccuracies of Fiorina’s statements regarding the videos alleged to have been made at a Planned Parenthood clinic, it serves us well to focus more closely on the ultrasound itself. My work on our cultural obsession with celebrity pregnancy brings to light the important ways that ultrasound technology is put to work for cultural and political purposes.

Plants Are The New Animals

In an era of humanist biopower it’s not animality that gets left behind, but plants.

by JEFFREY T. NEALON

"Even insectivorous plants have a heart." Photo by Umberto Salvagnin. CC-BY 2.0 via Flickr.

A few years ago at the annual Modern Language Association conference, it seemed to me that an inordinate number of panels were dedicated to discussions of animal life in literature, culture, and theory. In 2009 a special cluster in the MLA’s flagship journal, PMLA, heralded the official arrival of animal studies in the literary humanities, and a torrent of books and articles has ensued. Going forward, it looks as if strong interest in animals among humanities scholars will continue, as there are a number of established book series and journals now dedicated to the topic. And while I like animals as much as the next person, the Foucauldian in me became preoccupied with trying to figure out how animality had somehow become the “next big thing” in the world of humanities theory and criticism.

The theoretical discourse surrounding animal lives emerged on the scaffolding of the Big Theory era’s master thinkers—Jacques Derrida; Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari; and, most obviously, Foucault, whose work has been key in coming to grips with biopower (how various practices and concepts of “life”—gender, race, etc.—became central for power and knowledge in the modern and postmodern era).