Postcolonial Disorders

9. To Live with What Would Otherwise Be Unendurable, II: Caught in the Borderlands of Palestine/Israel

TO LIVE WITH WHAT WOULD OTHERWISE BE UNENDURABLE, II Caught in the Borderlands of Palestine/Israel Michael M. J. Fischer 9 I From the Balkan frontline trenches in Bosnian writer-director Danis Tanovic’s  film Nic a ija Zemlja (No Man’s Land, in which three incapacitated Serbian and Bosnian soldier-enemies are trapped together in a no-man’s-land in a situation that the United Nations is incapable of mediating)1 to the International Red Cross helicopter drops of prostheses toAfghans crippled by land mines, running on crutches to catch the humanitarian aid in Iranian writer-director Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s  film Safar-e Qandahar (Journey to Qandahar)—somewhere in the space between theseWestern and Eastern poles of the Middle Eastern theater sits the Maus cartoonist Art Spiegelman slumped over his drawing table, threatened on one side by a man with drawn curved sabre and on the other by a man with drawn gun, equally terrorized by al-Qaeda and by his own government (Spiegelman ). Such is the space in which we now (again) must find a way to live. Gilles Deleuze provides a nicely enigmatic harmonic for this modality of existence and a temporary fold from which the anthropologist might speak: “We have to manage to fold the line and establish an endurable zone in which to install ourselves, confront things, take hold, breathe—in short, think . . . to live with what would otherwise be unendurable” (Deleuze : , ). . . . Borderlands are folded over and crossed again, and recrossed. Membranes of the border are of varying porosities, closures and openings, subversions and 260 states of exception, checkpoints and circumventions, surveillances and (in)securities, orders and disorders, fears and displacements, with the Real gazing back from holes in the defenses. Communicative and linguistic in- and recursions come through Arabic and Hebrew—distinctively differing Palestinian dialects and sociolects of Ramallah and Hebron, the Arabics of Algerianreturned PLO Kastel forces and Israeli Druze commanders, the Hebrew idioms of Mizrahi Israelis, and the Hebrew of “Insider Palestinians” who have learned their Hebrew in Israeli prisons and schools—but also occasionally through Cuban Spanish, GDR German, and the Russian of Palestinians trained in the former Soviet bloc, the Russian and Amharic of recent immigrants to Israel, Ladino, Judeo-Arabic,Yiddish, Polish, German, English, and American of other waves of immigrants to Israel, as well as the Arabic of Israeli Muslims, Christians , and Circassians, the literary Hebrew of Anton Shammas, and the literary Arabic of Sami Michael and Samir Naqqash.Where in these borderlands are the tent posts, the orientations, for humanitarian and human rights interventions? II We live (again) in an age in which the very institutions of humanitarian intervention are suspected of complicity, when the humanitarian industry all too often follows military intervention, like brigades of prostitutes and merchants in the wake of the armies of History, providing jobs and succor, but destroying local initiative, creating new vortices of power and intrigue, before moving on to the next urgent call, the next crisis, the next firestorm of emotion and outrage fanned by a restless telemedia machine that turns its theater lights and thundering and weeping program music from the elections in Poland to Tiananmen Square in Beijing, from Bosnia to Gaza, Rwanda to Chechnya, Colombia to Kashmir. I want to turn the mirror back upon three of these theater lights: the sovereign subject (or political order, transnational infrastructures, stuttering religious revivalisms, and global civil societies or moral orders); the returns to subjectivities (the emotional and personal order of selves and ethical actions); and the constraints on a politics of democratic pluralism in a world of telemedia frenzy phantasmagoria, traumatic memory, psychological displacements, and repetitions of ideological scripts. For purposes of this volume, I will focus attention primarily on the second of these: the returns to subjectivity, returns in both senses of returns, to the unstable grounds of certitude or witnessing, and returns as in payoffs, or second-order rhetorics, the performativities of rhetorics of subjectivities. I want to ask what the method of ethnography of social contexts can do, using a series of sites as crucibles. But at least a word To Live with What Would Otherwise Be Unendurable 261 first on the two other theater lights, in the context of the s and early twenty-first century, is in order, given that the Palestinian-Israeli borderland is also part of shifts in a larger world reordering. Palestine joins Kosovo,Albania,Afghanistan, Sudan, and...