Irreverence as Political Resistance
The Palestinian writer and professor Refaat Alareer was assassinated last week in an Israeli airstrike. He combined irreverence with conviction to expose the brutalities of the Israeli occupation.
Most people are familiar with the George W. Bush shoeing incident. In December 2008, the outgoing U.S. president was in Baghdad on a surprise visit. In the middle of a news conference with the Iraqi Prime Minister, an angry journalist stood up. “This is a farewell kiss from the Iraqi people, you dog!” the man shouted in Arabic, before hurling his shoes at the American president. Bush successfully ducked both throws and tried to laugh the whole thing off in his characteristically buffoonish way. Nonetheless, the incident became a hugely publicized scandal, and came to symbolize not just the shortcomings of America's military efforts in the Middle East, but also the justified resentment harbored by many Iraqis toward the American government.
We are often told that rudeness and incivility have no place in political discourse, especially as tools of radical resistance. If you want to engage the powerful, you should do so politely and tactfully or risk being perceived as rude, which would undermine the willingness of your audience to work with you. After all, no one likes to be attacked and yelled at. When your opponents feel attacked, especially if these attacks are carried out in public, they will dig in their heels to defend themselves instead of seeking common ground. Rudeness is simply counterproductive, the politically privileged claim. As President Obama, the poster boy for political civility, once put the point in a commencement speech:
You can disagree with a certain policy without demonizing the person who espouses it. You can question somebody’s views and their judgment without questioning their motives or their patriotism. Throwing around phrases like “socialists” and “Soviet-style takeover” and “fascist” and “right-wing nut” that may grab headlines, but it also has the effect of comparing our government, our political opponents, to authoritarian, even murderous regimes…The problem is that this kind of vilification and over-the-top rhetoric closes the door to the possibility of compromise.
Being polite, according to Obama, is an essential lubricant for resolving political disagreements. If you can’t reach common ground on intransigent issues, then you just have to politely agree to disagree. But you don’t rock the boat when you disagree with someone. Doing so will capsize your argument.
Personally, I think this is all a crock of shit.
Political discourse is embedded in relations of power, and who can say what is a function of these processes. If you are powerful, you can say many things and get away with it. Conversely, if you are powerless, your words and actions are always subject to heightened scrutiny. Thus, you are perpetually urged to comport yourselves in manners that conform to mainstream expectations of propriety. Don’t be rancorous and bitter. Don’t be loud. Don’t boo and disrupt. Don’t rely on profanity to express yourself. And certainly don’t throw shoes at anyone, even if such actions are morally warranted. Always remember the Michelle Obama maxim: When they go low, you should go high.
But herein precisely lies the problem. Invocations to civility are a highly effective way of neutralizing and recasting legitimate grievances. When you say “be civil” to someone expressing legitimate grievances, you transform the conversation. You shift the burden of moral accountability from yourself onto the angry person. The uncivil now have to abide by your conversational norms or be chastised.
Rude radicals, on the other hand, don’t really give a shit about these norms. This category of speakers refuse to be constrained by expectations of custom and civility, because they understand that power is encoded in manners and conventional rituals of sociability. They are defiant in their attitudes and actions, insurgent in their critique of existing power relations. They are interested in unseating established norms, and recognize that civil discourse and both-sideism are tools that the powerful employ to preserve the status quo. Rude radicals understand that taking a principled stance is more important than maintaining pointless relationships with unprincipled oppressors. They don’t care about being polite, because politeness doesn’t have any strategic utility if your opponents are rigidly committed to the goal of destroying you.
The likes of Refaat Alareer—the Palestinian writer and professor who was last week assassinated in an Israeli airstrike—belong to this group. First and foremost, Refaat was an educator and a scholar; a man whose legacy will live forever through his writings and pedagogy. But many of us also knew Refaat through his online presence and his irreverent style of posting, wherein he combined wit and conviction to expose the brutalities of the Israeli occupation. Refaat held no punches, took no prisoners. From Wahajat Ali to Naomi Klein, he said what many of us would never have the courage and effrontery to say. He challenged the hypocrisy of the international community in its dogged refusal to extend to Palestinians the compassion they bountifully offer Israelis. He was no armed fighter, as one writer recently put it, but he was no spectator either. Instead, he fought against the monstrosities of the Israeli apartheid, and their western apologists, with his words and his pen. In part, this is because Refaat believed that “Palestine was first and foremost occupied in Zionist literature and Zionist poetry,” thus making words an important resource in the toolkit of resisting the occupation.
This conviction was expressed powerfully in one of his final interviews, where he vowed that he would defend his people with nothing but a pen:
I’m an academic. Probably the toughest thing I have at home is an Expo marker. But if the Israelis invade, if the paratroopers charge at us, going from door to door, to massacre us, I am going to use that marker to throw it at the Israeli soldiers, even if that is the last thing that I do.
Refaat did throw the pen, boldly and defiantly, and is now among the more than 17,000 civilians killed by Israel in Gaza. While we will never hear Refaat speak again, an intellectual void that will forever remain unfilled, his voice will reverberate through the work of students and writers whom he trained and inspired.
Refaat was a model of struggle and resistance, the type of staunch and rude fighter that Israel dreads the most. A narrator whose pen is far mightier than his opponents’ swords. A radical whose bitter and irreverent irony exposes the absurd logic of settler-colonial violence. A solider whose spirit is unconquerable, because he knows history will judge him as the moral victor.
“Do not die before you become a worthy adversary,” the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani once said. Refaat was a worthy adversary, beyond any doubt, and his martyrdom is a testament to the spirit of his resistance, one that will live on to be told as a tale.