The current destabilization of the political situation by Israel risks the resurgence of the post 9-11 double-bind of “autoimmunity,” in which the very system designed to make you secure undermines your viability. By setting in motion such reversible definitions, the domestic project of Occupy can be reconfigured as “insurgency.” To occupy is to place a body-that-thinks into space where it not supposed to be. If that body makes certain choices of action, some are now willing to see that body as out of control, no longer thinking but simply acting. Against such bodies there must be what the Israeli government has termed a “zone of immunity.”
Both in practice and theory this immunity is proving hard to define. It sometimes seems to refer to an “immunity zone” that Iran might acquire, allowing it to develop a nuclear weapon and thereby become in some ways immune to Western threats. It also appears to designate a “zone of immunity” that Israel feels it must have from external threat. It is very difficult to determine exactly what Ehud Barak, the Israeli defense minister, meant because the Israeli media are so full of debates about immunity insofar as it pertains to members of the Israeli Knesset, or Parliament. The recent involvement of an Arab Israeli MK in the Gaza flotilla has led to demands for the legal immunity of representatives to be lifted, even as the papers are also full of corruption and bribery scandals that result from this immunity.
In the wake of the 9-11 attacks, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida reapplied his earlier use of the term “autoimmunity” to the complexities of the situation in which U.S.-trained operatives (using a deliberately bland and neutral term) had attacked their former patrons. Derrida reminded us that
an autoimmunitary process is that strange behavior where a living being, in quasi-suicidal fashion, “itself” works to destroy its own protection, to immunize itself against its “own” immunity.
It seems that this “autoimmunity” is precisely what Israel is engaged in: by attacking it will not only lay itself open to other attacks but may lose the immunity from criticism that it currently enjoys with its own “head,” the United States. Derrida shows that the beginnings of this autoimmunity were in the Cold War, whose ending reconfigured the body politic. Autocratic leaders in countries like Egypt and Tunisia whose apparent immunity depended on their place in the Cold War, or its surrogate the war on terror, found that instead they had ultimately destroyed themselves.
W. J. T. Mitchell has called this reverse effect the “bipolar” character of the autoimmune, “a situation in which there is no literal meaning.” Interestingly, the immune system itself is now understood to be capable of “cognitive abilities,” in that it learn how to recognize specific antigens and remembers them. Autoimmunity is unable to make such distinctions. Yet the result is not simply a destabilization but the reverse of what was intended, as Derrida specifies:
repression in both its psychoanalytic sense and its political sense–whether it be through the police, the military or the economy–ends up producing, reproducing and regenerating the very thing it seeks to disarm.
The gambit of counterinsurgency was to attempt to permanently produce insurgency and yet manage it as a form of governance at the same time. As economic and police repression has escaped control from Greece to Egypt, to speak only of the Eastern Mediterranean, Israel appears to be doubling down on military repression.
Counterinsurgency has long been willing to move the boundaries between the policed zone of authority and where we the policed are to be contained. The extraordinary Israeli tactic of the mobile checkpoint, literally manifesting the border in different places from one day to the next, epitomizes this disregard for consistency. Indeed the legalizing of the Israeli occupation itself, as Eyal Press relates, worked by
adopting an Ottoman concept known as “Mawat land.” The Ottomans, who had controlled Palestine until World War I, had used the term to designate land far enough from any neighboring village that a crowing rooster perched on its edge could not be heard. Under Ottoman law, if such land was not cultivated for three years it was “mawat”—dead —and reverted to the empire.
The Israelis thus repurposed this archaic imperial law to create a cover for legal transformation of occupation into settlement.
If the “reversible” effect of this counterinsurgency now moves into the global frame proposed by its theorists, Occupy can be rendered into a target of militarization. Note the way New York Times journalist Dexter Filkins–quoted by Mitchell as the epigraph to his chapter on autoimmunity–characterizes insurgency:
American and Iraqi officials agree on the essential character of the Iraqi insurgency: it is horizontal as opposed to hierarchical, and ad hoc as opposed to unified.
As such, the insurgency was hard to defeat. However in the present context, with a little editing this could be taken for a casual description of Occupy. Perhaps Chris Hedges somehow confused the now-favored “Black Ops” of counterinsurgency with the purportedly violent black bloc anarchists of Occupy? You will say that doesn’t make sense–read his article again: it doesn’t make sense. It’s bipolar and has no literal meaning.
The militarized reversibility being put into motion by Israel risks more than an internal argument for Occupy: it risks redefining autonomy as insurgency. The problem of perceived “violence” in the movement is, then, the displaced affect caused by this return of the repressed. That does not mean that there is not a real issue here. We have to continue to claim our right to look, that is, to invent each other and consent to being invented by that other as part of our direct democracy. And we claim the right to be seen in the spaces and times of our choosing, whether that right is recognized by the current state of the force of law or not. Indeed, the worth of claiming that right is, as it was for non-violent campaigners from Mary Wollstonecraft to Gandhi and Rosa Parks, that the law forbids us from having it.