Colonizers, Annihilating and Civilian Armament

Rela Mazali
English translation by the author
Talk for the panel: Feminist thoughts during a war, Ben Gurion Univ., MA Graduate conference, June 9, 2024

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]wo dear friends of mine write about genocide. One of them is German, a granddaughter of Nazi Germany's Ambassador to Slovakia, who was responsible for human transports to death camps and slave camps. In 1947 he was tried in Czechoslovakia, sentenced to death and hanged.

My other friend is Turkish, granddaughter of a family one of whose sons—one of her great-grand-uncles—was likely but not conclusively a deportation clerk, who sent Armenian communities to erasure and most often to their death, a little over 100 years ago.

Each one of my friends studies and documents tangible implications of an act of annihilating. The implications of this act in their own lives are personal, familial, social, political and extremely present. The feminist tools of analysis skillfully wielded by each of them are central to their identification and documentation of connections between these varied levels, including hidden and unexpected links.

I watch them—the third generation—and can't stop thinking of my own granddaughters and grandsons. Through them, I see a possible future of confronting the responsibility, the participation, the complicity of my grandchildren's parents and grandmothers in annihilating or attempting to annihilate the Palestinian people. In the act carried out by the state of Israel.

This is an inheritance that we, the generation of grandparents and parents, are passing on: The legacy of an act of annihilation.

I'm placing this thought here because I can't get it out of my head and I want to thank you—the women who organized this panel and those of you who are listening—for the opportunity to voice it.

One piece of the inheritance that we're bequeathing is relatively unnoticed at this point. It is happening and being passed on mostly under the radar, as the expression goes. But it may—or in my view surely will—cause severe damage to the future of everyone here.

Since the last months of 2023, the government of Israel has been implementing a pre-planned program for the mass distribution of firearms among Jewish Israeli citizens, mostly men, at an unprecedented scope. The Gun Free Kitchen Tables Coalition—operating out of Isha L'Isha Feminist Center and joining 20 women's and civil society organizations—believes, we believe, that we are witnessing another catastrophe in the making.

Mass civilian armament may look secondary to the dramatic destruction surrounding us, but it bears the seeds of a violence threatening to plague existence here for generations.

This process didn't start in October. It was planned—and implemented—over years. But the total failure of the state to provide human security in the autumn of 2023 was exploited, cynically, by the very same failed state in order to rush forward a pre-existing plan. In one fell swoop, the state privatized its responsibility for providing protection and a sense of protection. It told its citizens: From here on it's on you. Get a gun—a pistol, a rifle—now it's every man for himself.

The domestication and normalization of firearms in civil spaces have accompanied Jewish society here from the beginnings of Zionism. It's a culture developed by organizations such as "HaShomer," or by the para-military bodies known as "the underground," (machtarot) that were later institutionalized into an army.

Building on these foundations state control of the license to deploy armed force has been conceded, in recent years, in an incremental process, along with the concentration of most firearms in institutional hands, hands which at least ostensibly answer to transparent rules and owe accountability. Civilian armament was accelerated, among many others, by institutions such as the right-wing Kohelet think tank and adopted with particular gusto by extremist Jewish settlers of the West Bank. The last fact highlights the deep-running connections between colonial settler societies and cultures of hyper- armament.

Reviewing Bloodbath Nation, a new book by author Paul Auster, on the stubborn horror of gun violence in the USA, historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, recently paraphrased Auster who, she says, "argues that nothing will change until there is a general understanding of the source: the history of violence in the founding of the colonies and of the United States, drenched in blood and deep divisions, including a horrific civil war." Dunbar-Ortiz recounts her own gradual process of grasping, "the horrors of gun proliferation, the lack of gun restrictions, and especially the history of the Second Amendment as a tool of white settler control over enslaved Africans and of the genocide of Native American nations and communities."[1]

Another scholar, Levy Gahman, wrote, "from the initial acts of land theft and attempted genocide of Indigenous people to the proliferation of the plantation and slave economy, gun violence has been the United States' modus operandi."[2]

Here, the Jewish public doesn't recognize the present armament drive as a problematic product of Israel's history or as the next catastrophe-in-the-making. But even before the latest inundation with guns, their expanding proliferation in recent years has concurred with a consistent rise in the number of murders documented annually and in the proportion of gun murders out of all murders committed. Data extracted and analyzed by Gun Free Kitchen Tables shows that the number of homicide victims killed in criminal acts in 2023 (231) was double the number of victims killed two years earlier, in 2021 (117). The percentage of gun murders out of all murders in 2023 was 77—up almost 10 percent since 2021, when it was 68.

In addition, police data doesn't support the supposed distinction between good guns, ostensibly there to defend, and bad guns, there to commit crimes. Hundreds of thefts of civilian guns are reported every year, most of them out of private homes and apartments.

Most of the murders committed in recent years involve Israel's Palestinian citizens, a community which, for years now, has called out the discriminatory, selective enforcement allowing the rise and reign of armed crime. Meanwhile, though, among Jewish Israelis too, the number of gun murders has risen.

Beyond the—very painful—count of murder victims, suicides, and permanently disabled and scarred shooting victims, both women and men, proliferating guns in civil society do severe damage to democratic processes. Here, the media-headlined push for civilian armament is accompanied by a parallel push for anti-democratic legislation and by implementation of anti-democratic policies. It's no coincidence that the minister leading the civilian armament campaign has been taking steps of which the Chair of the State Control Committee has said, "The government is overriding parliament, running roughshod over it and draining it of its powers."[3]

Blocher and Siegel wrote of the USA, "expanding gun rights … risks … interfering with others’ freedom to speak, assemble, worship, and vote without fear. … [T]here are many ways in which gun use has come to shape lawmaking. … Understanding that influence is an essential part of accounting for the role of guns in democratic life."[4]

Far from there, in another post-colony, Brazil, a 2022 report described a climate of, "an anti-democratic discourse encouraging citizens to use firearms to claim rights or oppose politicians they disagreed with."[5]

Here, in a position paper that I co-authored last November with my friend Smadar Ben Natan, we wrote that multiplying firearms, "directly imperil … Israel's Palestinian citizens—who were already threatened and targeted in May 2021 and are currently subject to mass detention by police and unprecedented levels of persecution by both citizen groups and institutions." Moreover, we emphasized that, "in the current situation, proliferating small arms could conceivably arm a civil war."[6]

Radical privatization and a state shedding responsibility for personal and human security amount to a recipe for disaster. Civic existence requires truly civil spaces, that is, free of guns. It is therefore vital to set an expiration date for the current armament campaign. The move is being carried out on the pretext of an emergency, supposedly as an emergency measure. Making good on the time limit implied in the emergency claim, a return to relative calm must include disarmament.

We, the citizens, men and women, can and should demand an orderly, transparent, public plan for collecting and warehousing the firearms distributed. This is imperative upon any government leading a return to routine. Today, we can still prevent this society from turning into "America." We can still prevent a plague of gun violence of the type which South Africa, for example, is witnessing.

We can still make sure that this particular inheritance isn't passed on.

Notes:

[1] Dunbar-Ortiz, R. (2023). Review: A Nation of Guns, October (Volume 75, Number 6).

[2] Gahman, L. (2024). Alienation flows through the barrel of a gun: Despair, mass shootings, and suicide in an American settler colony. Human Geography, 17(1), 67-75. https://doi.org/10.1177/19427786231215743.

[3] Ron, I. (2024). A loss for democracy: Ben Gvir's boycott has crushed parliamentary control of the government. The Hottest Place in Hell. 18.3 (Hebrew).

[4] Blocher, J. & Siegel, R.B. (2021). Guns and Democracy: Protests, Insurrection and the Second Amendment. Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. 29.6.

[5] Marques, I. & dos Ramos, M. (2022). Brazil's Gun Control Challenge: Ending the firearms boom. Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. September.

[6] Mazali, R. & Ben Natan, S. (2023). Fact sheet: The Guns of October: The mass armament of civil spaces in Israel. Isha L'Isha Feminist Center & Gun Free Kitchen Tables. 9.11.