language shift
on forced meanings and (in)justice
Last week, like many people, I watched live as an incredible group of lawyers, on behalf of South Africa, brought a case against Israel in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at the Hague. I watched as Adila Hassim, Tembeka Ngcukaitobi and Blinne Ni Ghrálaigh outlined, in awful clarity, what has happened over the last 100 days and more, the ways that death and suffering has rained down on the Palestinian people while the rest of the world has witnessed it—and excused it, and denied it, and supported Israel despite their many genocidal statements and actions. Still, in this country, neither our government nor the main opposition party have called for a ceasefire. Still, after 100 days, there is no end in sight.
The South African lawyers, whose work was exemplary, were clear that this situation did not begin on October 7th; that the Palestinian people have been subjected to apartheid and occupation for many decades. These are facts; for many decades the Palestinian liberation movement has been resisting Palestine’s subjugation, and report after report has confirmed a system of apartheid to be in place. Listening to the several hours of evidence, it was impossible not to be overwhelmed by the horrors. I thought often of the 25,000 and more dead, and grieving and maimed and (still) surviving, but I thought too of the term moral injury; of the harm that occurs when individuals are forced to witness, and fail to prevent, actions that conflict with their moral code.
I thought of the term justice, and what that, in this context, could possibly mean. I thought about language, and how we manipulate its meanings. How we have been doing so in the last 100 days.
Roland Barthes had a lot to say on language. In his first lecture in semiotics (the study of signs, symbols and their use) at the Collège de France, he stated that language was fascist (by which he meant, I think, that a system of language is coercive, compelling particular terms of speech); the man was not afraid of being incendiary.
Within this lecture series he discussed the idea of the Neutral; that which ‘baffles’ the paradigm, which here means the binary of meaning. It’s hard to read this today without thinking of centrism, the habit of hewing to a centre point that is mischaracterised as inherently rational, or largely apolitical. But Barthes did say this:
Where there is meaning, there is paradigm, and where there is paradigm (opposition), there is meaning . . . elliptically put: meaning rests on conflict (the choice of one term against another), and all conflict is generative of meaning: to choose one and refuse the other is always a sacrifice made to meaning, to produce meaning, to offer it to be consumed.
It is this that I thought of when watching the proceedings at the ICJ, specifically when I caught some of Israel’s response to the charges brought by South Africa. At least part of Israel’s defence seemed to form an argument over the distinct meaning of the world genocide. Their lawyers argued that the term, that specific charge, could not be brought against the state of Israel, because the Jewish people had suffered the Holocaust (the Genocide Convention was formed after the term was first used in the Nuremberg trials). The current situation in Gaza, it was argued, does not meet that threshold of suffering—despite the almost 2 million displaced, the 25,000 dead, almost half of them children; despite those now starving, the entire families wiped out. The meaning of the term, as disputed at the ICJ, rests on conflict, as Barthes says; the choosing of one term and rejection of another. There is no Neutral, here.
According to the Cambridge Dictionary, genocide is:
the crime of intentionally destroying part or all of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, by killing people or by other methods
The example first given in the Cambridge Dictionary is that of the Rwandan genocide, where between 500,000 and 800,000 Tutsi people were killed by Hutu forces; there have, then, been other situations that might be accurately termed as genocide, with broad agreement. But of course, genocide has not just a generally accepted meaning, but also a legal meaning in law; specifically, in this case, it has a meaning in the UN’s Genocide Convention:
intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group […].
Part of South Africa’s evidence against Israel comprised videos of Israeli military leaders, and its Prime Minister, using inarguably genocidal language about Palestinians. This included tweets that we have all read, videos that we have all watched. There was no investigation needed, to bring up this evidence; the state of Israel and the IDF has been publishing it for all the world to see. As Tembeka Ngcukaitobi said, to the ICJ: ‘The language of systemic dehumanization is evident here… Genocidal utterances are therefore not out in the fringes. They are embodied in state policy.’
While arguments were laid out in the court, the massacre of Palestinians continued. Now, as I write this, the massacre continues. If the ICJ finds that a genocide is being committed, it holds no enforcing power to stop Israel. I ask, again, what justice means, in this context; what it can mean for the tens of thousands already dead, the thousands who will die while waiting for a verdict.
Listening to what amounts to a legal argument over language—at no point, in my viewing at least, was the fact of over 25,000 dead Palestinians contested—it was difficult not to reflect on who defines the meaning of terms, in the modern day digital and media commons.
In the UK, we (the public) have no control over our political language; its meanings are dictated, in the common understanding at least, by the right wing press. No sooner is a word or phrase applied, or invented, than the media takes it up and systematically drains it of all power. Over the last few years, it has been phrases like take the knee and woke that have been thus wrecked; in the first weeks of October, the word drained of meaning was condemn.
Writing in The Nation in December, Palestinian author and historian Isabella Hammad and Sahar Huneidi discussed the ways that language was abused amidst Israel’s assault on Palestinians; as they said, ‘all colonial projects are supported by perversions of language.’ Now, it is a particular slogan that is being perverted, one that has been a mainstay of the Palestinian freedom movement for decades: from the river to the sea. If you read certain popular newspapers, you might even believe this phrase to be genocidal—but only when used by pro-Palestinian protesters who march in their thousands calling for ceasefire. When it is used by the Israeli military, or its Prime Minister, or in the founding documents of its ruling party, it is, we are told, the opposite.
A Labour Party MP was suspended, in October, for saying ‘We won’t rest until we have justice, until all people, Israelis and Palestinians, between the river and the sea can live in peaceful liberty’. The very use of the phrase negated, apparently, the clarifying point: that this land should be free for all to live in as equals. But the Likud party’s own charter says this: ‘Between the sea and the [river] Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty’. This same phrase, we are told, means two completely different things; one is a statement of genocidal intent, and the other is not. And this is true, but not in the way that the media insists upon. For one group, it is used as a demand for freedom; a removal of the occupying forces who have taken their liberty. For another, it is a demand for the eradication of a people—a project they are, currently, engaged in. There surely can be no Neutral, here.
This past weekend, I went, once again, to the Palestinian solidarity rally in Glasgow City Centre. The second speaker (whose name I unfortunately missed), was at pains to address the phrase that has become so contentious, in the right wing and centrist media at least. He led the crowd in a short chant of from the river to the sea, and then said (as best I can remember):
What I mean when I say this, when I say from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, is that Palestine will be a free land for whoever wishes to live there. Muslim, Christian, Jewish—all will be free in a free Palestine.
Of course, the millions who have been chanting this slogan since the start of October know this; they know that this is a phrase with a long history in the Palestine freedom movement. It is obvious to the good-faith mind that it means what it says: that from the river to the sea—where all of Palestinian land is—there should be freedom. Not apartheid, not massacre, not occupation: freedom. Where it is used to specifically call for the erasure of Palestinians, their land and their society, by the very people who are undertaking that project as we speak, that is where it is genocidal.
And yet, all of this is distraction. While the ICJ proceedings go on, Gaza is bombed. While dozens of columnists argue over what phrases protesters and freedom fighters are allowed to use, more Palestinians are murdered, more universities and hospitals destroyed, more land rendered uninhabitable. The Neutral is pretty conceit here, but an untenable position. As Edward Said himself put it:
fear of speaking out about one of the greatest injustices in modern history has hobbled, blinkered, muzzled many who know the truth and are in a position to serve it. For despite the abuse and vilification that any outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights and self-determination earns for him or herself, the truth deserves to be spoken […].