Interweaving #21 - Mark Ayyash on Ukraine and Palestine

“Thinking of Ukraine but never forgetting Palestine.” Alisdare Hickson from Woolwich, United Kingdom, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons.

In this episode of Interweaving, host John Collins talks with sociologist Mark Ayyash about how the war on Ukraine connects with the ongoing colonization of Palestine. Ayyash discusses how his experience as a Palestinian Canadian shapes his view of the Ukraine situation, the sudden liberal embrace of molotov cocktails and other methods of resisting military occupation, and the prevalence of racist and ethnocentric news coverage surrounding Ukraine.

Featured in this episode

Mark Ayyash at Mount Royal University
https://www.mtroyal.ca/ProgramsCourses/FacultiesSchoolsCentres/Arts/Departments/SociologyAnthropology/Faculty/MarkAyyash.htm 

Mark Ayyash on Twitter
@ayyashmark

CBS reporter sparks outrage with comments on Ukraine being more ‘civilised’ than Iraq, Afghanistan 
https://english.alaraby.co.uk/news/cbs-reporter-sparks-outrage-over-civilised-ukraine-comment 

‘A real opportunity’: Israel urges Ukrainian Jews to immigrate
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/3/4/israel-ukraine

Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini, Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire
https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520301849/human-shields

Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini, The Human Right to Dominate
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-human-right-to-dominate-9780199365005?cc=us&lang=en&

Transcript

John Collins: Welcome to Interweaving. I'm John Collins. As we record today, the situation on the ground in Ukraine is increasingly desperate for the ordinary people who are the primary victims of invasion, war, and big power rivalries. In such situations, it begins to seem that the war machine is in charge, serving its own interests and resisting any effort at de-escalation. Media coverage often provides a simplified narrative of good versus evil, and much like the days immediately following the 9/11 attacks in 2001, there's tremendous pressure to unify behind US actions and official interpretations.

Critical questions are met with an aggressive chorus of "now is not the time." But if the example of 9/11 has taught us anything, it's that critical questions are especially needed in the midst of the so-called "fog of war." That's why we invited a number of guests who can help us think critically about the Ukraine story. In particular, we want to explore how an understanding of white supremacy and the politics of race can help us identify some of the limitations in liberal responses to the situation in Ukraine and in liberal narratives about geopolitics more generally -things like war migration, resistance, and solidarity.

So to help us start digging into that, I'm really pleased to be joined today by Mark Ayyash. He's a sociologist, he's based at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta, and a lot of his work focuses on the sociology of violence. In addition to his scholarly research, he's written pieces for the Baffler, Middle East Eye, and Politics Today, just to name a few. He's also on Twitter @ayyashmark. So please look for him there, and we'll make sure to put that information in the show notes for this episode. Mark Ayyash, welcome to Interweaving. Thanks for taking the time to speak with me today.

Mark Ayyash: Thanks very much, John, thank you for the introduction and for inviting me today.

It's great to have you. In getting ready for this set of four interviews that we're just starting now, I've been thinking about how our reactions to a situation like the violence in Ukraine are always shaped by our identity and our own experiences. And so I just wanted to start by asking, what's it like for a Palestinian Canadian to view the international response to the Ukraine situation?

Thank you, John. My positionality is one of a Palestinian Canadian. I grew up the first 14 years of my life under Israeli occupation, before immigrating to Canada. And having that experience as my foundational experience of social and political life, I've always had a deep mistrust of nation states, and world powers, and not just in Europe and North America, but frankly, anywhere. I had no reason to place my hopes for freedom and liberation and dignity and human rights in these structures of power that have done nothing but take away all of those things, away from me and the people that I grew up with.

And even as we reached out our hands to the world, to nation states, Arab states, to European states that claim to stand for human rights and for advancing human freedom and liberty, and North American states that claim the same thing that claim the mantle of civilization and modern life and progress, even as we reached out to those states, we got nothing but empty talk and violence in return.

So why would I trust Russia? Why would I trust the US? Why would I trust Canada? Certainly why would I trust the Israeli state? Why would I trust an Egyptian state that claimed to help me but did nothing really in in material terms to do, and I'm not just picking on Egypt, it's many other states around the Arab world.

So that foundation is still in me. And when I view something like the war on Ukraine that is happening right now, I view it with that same mistrust of all of these states. I know many on the Left have, sort of taken a position in support of Russia almost, as some have on the Right as well. And thinking that, you know, Russia's opposition to the US is somehow indicative of a sort of anti, you know, colonial almost, politics. But I've never seen anything that Russia has done, even when it is in opposition to the US, that has actually advanced anti-colonial projects for freedom and liberation for people in Africa, in the Middle East, in Southeast Asia and so on.

So to me, I see this invasion of Ukraine as part of the same old power politics. I mean, I understand of course, as an academic, that there are differences between different eras and how these politics unfold, so I'm not trying to just create a seamless unity here over these differences in different dynamics that take place.

But it is, from my perspective, a struggle between world powers, empires, the Russian empire and the American led imperial hegemony of Euro- America. And of course it's ordinary Ukrainians that pay the price. The suffering is of course terrible. The death and the destruction is horrific. And I, of course like everyone else, I feel heartbroken to see some of the images that we've seen out of Ukraine. But it's not a clear cut situation of, like you said, good versus evil on either side, because they're both trying to paint that picture, of course. The Russians are doing their own propaganda on this being a good versus evil war. The Americans are doing their own propaganda on this being a good versus evil war. But it's not, it is empires vying for trade routes, for resources, for markets, for hegemony, as they always have done. And sadly, it's ordinary people that pay the price.

Digging a little deeper on your location in Canada, you know, I have a sense of kind of what the conversation has been like here in the US where, as I said before, there is this sort of intense pressure to get behind the US approach and the US policy here. What's it like in Canada? Is there a strong sense of, okay, we absolutely have to take a side here? And how do you respond to that?

Yes, there is. It's exactly like the United States. Canada, more or less, I think, with a few, few, few exceptions, more or less, they follow the US foreign policy line. It may not be sometimes as aggressive or as explicit in its articulation, but it more or less follows the American line, so it's very similar. There's a lot of pressure here to accept the narrative of the Western world, the quote unquote "Western world" is, is standing up for the freedom of the Ukrainians, and if you're on the side of freedom and liberation, then you have to be on that side.

But that rings hollow to me. The norms that these Western countries claim to stand for have been proven to be empty gestures. What is really at stake here is strategic national interests, or imperial interests of the Euro American imperial hegemony. That's the interest that these countries have in Ukraine. It's not a matter of upholding norms and values that protect human life and advance human liberty and freedom. Because if that was the case, then all of these countries would also stand up for Palestine. But they don't, because their interests are going in the opposite direction in that case. Their interests align with the elimination of the Palestinians. And that's why we see all sorts of discursive maneuvers that they undertake to conceal the violence that is committed against the Palestinians and the role of countries like Canada and the US in perpetuating that violence.

So from the positionality of a Palestinian Canadian, it's just hard to get me to buy the stuff that they're selling, the talking points that they're selling on this being a matter of defending human rights and the international law on one side and a naked aggression on the other. And by the way, we can still say that there is, of course, on the Russian side, it's also naked aggression. It is in fact that the Russians are simply trying to hold on to parts of the old Soviet Union that they believe should be under their hegemony, in order to advance their own strategic interests, economic interests, political interests, and so on. They're not doing it to free Russian speaking peoples in Ukraine or stop Nazism or any of those kinds of talking points that really, again, I just don't buy because of my positionality of someone who has experienced nothing but violence from these state structures. So, I see propaganda for what it is.

Yeah and of course, all of those great powers always have ways of creating justifications for doing what they want to do, right? And that's what the propaganda war is all about. It strikes me that given what you're saying about the Canadian context, when you try to articulate a position of, "okay, I'm a Palestinian Canadian, this is how this looks to me," it's gotta be pretty hard to get traction for that in your own environment there, to get people to understand what it means to look at this from the point of view of someone who grew up in Palestine.

Absolutely. And I should say not just for Palestinian Canadians, but also for indigenous peoples across Canada, what is the Canadian settler colony, who also know very well, probably better than anyone else, that Canada does not in fact stand up for all those wonderful ideals that they always tell us that they stand for, precisely because they have violated all of those ideals in their settler colonial project of elimination against indigenous peoples. So there are others that for sure can see right through this sort of facade that Canada puts on on the world stage. But you're right, it's hard to present that counter narrative in this mainstream space. In fact, it's almost impossible. That doesn't mean that we stop saying what we know to be true, but it is very difficult to gain traction in Canadian public spaces in terms of trying to communicate what our positionality reveals about the nature of the Canadian state, the positions that it takes on various foreign policy issues, and so on.

These are dangerous questions to ask in a settler colonial context. And one of the tools that we have available to us is social media, right? Using the platforms that are, that are out there. I know that you're active on Twitter, and there's certainly a slice of that platform that we might call Palestinian Twitter. And I'm just curious to know, as someone who kind of hangs out in that space sometimes, what have you been seeing there in the last couple of weeks as people react to the news from Ukraine?

There's a lot of pain and there's a lot of anger, a lot of disappointment. Look, it's not like it was a huge shock to Palestinians that the so-called civilized world of western Europe and North America proclaims to stand up for human rights and dignity and freedom on the one hand and then actively suppresses the human dignity and freedom and liberty of Palestinians on the other. But it still hurts to see it so explicitly in your face when we see the kinds of reactions that the so-called West has, I hate that term but I'll use it just for simplicity's sake, the West has in terms of how they're reacting to the Ukrainians and how they react to the Palestinians.

I mean, if someone had put up a Molotov cocktail instructional video for Palestinians in Palestine, I'm convinced they would be in prison right now. They would be in an FBI space where they're being interrogated and possibly charged with terrorism.

Meanwhile, everything is painted as heroic for the Ukrainians. The use of any and all tactics of violent resistance and armed struggle is not just celebrated, but heroized, I mean, is being put on a pedestal. There's active support to it, full economic sanctions are being levied against the Russians, all sorts of diplomatic pressure. Militaries aside, the full force of the Western hemisphere is being directed towards Russia for this.

And when we ask for a fraction of that, we're told no, no, no, you can't join the civilized world until you put down your arms. We don't even have the same arms as the Ukrainians. But we're told that we're uncivilized and barbaric and undeserving of Western support, precisely because we insist on the path of violence and the path of violence is an outdated, antiquated path that we should renounce altogether.

We're also told, oh, you know, your political ideology has to be the most progressive political ideology in the history of humankind, one that has never been reached anywhere by the way, in order to get our support. But here we see Ukrainians, some of their dominant political parties and military units proclaiming openly white supremacist, anti-civic nationalism, ideologies and they're getting full support. So we're seeing all of these lies, basically that we're being told as to why we're not getting support. We're seeing them so clearly for what they are, which were lies. And again, most Palestinians already understood that on some level or knew that on some level, but it still hurts to see it.

So that's what I'm seeing a lot of on Palestinian Twitter is a lot of pain and anger and a calling out of the hypocrisy. And to me, the critical point here is this. It has never been about who Palestinians are in terms of their culture, in terms of ideology, in terms of their practice. It was always about the colonizer/colonized divide. And I know that scholarly speaking that that's an oversimplification a little bit, and it is, but you know what? We oversimplify in a lot of our public discussions, so I think it's okay to simplify on this a little bit as well. And it is a division between colonizer and colonized. And the Palestinians are the colonized. We're not in on the project of Euro-American imperial hegemony.

We can't be in on that because it's precisely us that they want to practice that hegemony over. And because we're not in on that, because we can't be part of that, we're always going to be on the outside looking in. We're always going to be told this or that stupid reason as to why we're not human enough to deserve freedom, why we're not human enough to deserve liberty, while we're not human enough to deserve our own sovereignty. It's incidents like this that show how these reasons are not substantive in and of themselves. They're always a cover for these larger strategic interests that are the real driver behind why states act the way they do and say the things that they say.

There's a lot to dig into there. We're going to take a short break right now, but when we come back, we'll have more with our guest from Mount Royal University, Mark Ayyash. Please stay with us.

[Break]

We're back with Mark Ayyash. He's a sociologist at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta. And we've been talking about his perspective on the events in Ukraine as a Palestinian Canadian who, through his own experience and analysis, has a very critical perspective on claims about civilization and human rights that are often made on behalf of Western powers. You mentioned earlier some of the forms of violence and resistance that are being celebrated in Ukraine. Also wanted to mention here the emergence of, or the entrance of the idea of foreign fighters, which we're seeing now as part of the discourse on Ukraine. And that of course has a lot of resonance for people who have been paying attention to global politics over the last few decades, the idea of foreign fighters being celebrated going into Ukraine. So Mark, could you talk a little bit about some of the ways that Russia's military tactics and other techniques of repression connect with Israeli tactics.

Yeah. So there are a lot of interconnections between Israel and Russia. Israel has, of course its closest ally is the United States, but it also has relations with Russia. There is exchange of military know how and tactics and strategies, and all militaries today learn from each other in one way or another.

I'm not a military analyst per se. It's probably the case that the Russian military has learned some things from watching the Israeli military, because they're not the only ones, a lot of militaries around the world do watch what Israeli military attacks look like, and they copy things from them. The weapons industry in Israel is huge, and they do sell a lot of their weapons and their tactics and what have you, based on the fact that they can say to buyers that "Hey, we've used this in combat zones, quote unquote, against the Palestinians, so these are tried and tested and you should buy them. So there is some of that happening.

Now it is honestly too early to tell general approaches are similar, precisely because Israel is a settler colonial project that seeks to, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, eliminate the presence of indigenous Palestinians and replacing them with settlers, Israeli Jewish settlers. I'm not so sure how much of that is happening by the Russians in the Ukraine. It might be happening in some of the Eastern regions, but it's just, it's too difficult to tell how much of that is happening right now. So I'm a little hesitant to make a direct parallel here just because it's still early on in the Russian case.

But the critical point is to understand that in terms of weaponry and tactics and surveillance techniques and all of that, Israel is viewed around the world as sort of a war machine that is to be copied. And they sell themselves that way, and, and they generate a lot of wealth doing it. So, some of that might be happening in this case as well.

And of course we've seen some of the rhetorical mechanisms being used in the same way. So Russia claims, for example, that "oh well, you know, the Ukrainians are using civilians as human shields," and this has always been Israel's justification for its indiscriminate killing of Palestinian civilians. So we see some of that being replicated by the Russian military for sure.

Looking at the work of Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini who've written a lot about human shields and the way that the Israeli state uses the idea of human rights to justify its own brutal repression of Palestinian resistance and really just Palestinian existence. And the discourse of human shields is a common element, definitely, across these two situations. The other thing, of course, is that there are efforts by Israel to bring people out of Ukraine and bring them to Israel where they would, of course, in effect, become settlers.

Yes. And that's a critical point. There was an article in Al Jazeera about this not long ago. And it is horrifying what's happening to ordinary Ukrainians and my heart breaks, seeing those images, and these are refugees. There's no denying that, right? They should be welcomed everywhere. And I wish that Palestine was free and able to welcome all of these refugees and give them a new home. But the unfortunate reality here is that these refugees are going to be used as settlers in Israel's, settler colonial project. And that's going to mean that some Palestinians are going to lose more of their lands and their homes. Israel, because it is a settler colonial state, is not resolving a refugee problem here. It is simply passing it on to other people. It is creating other refugees by settling these refugees. And what we need to do is an entirely new way of thinking and an entire new project that settles the problem of people's forced displacement, from their lands and homes through a state structure that does not continuously create that for racialized people like the Palestinians.

I think that's a fundamental observation, right? And I appreciate you for making it because as speaking for myself, as someone who teaches global studies, we're always trying to help our students understand relationality, right? How what's happening in one place is closely connected with what's happening in other places. And seeing those connections, how the creation of refugees often leads to the creation of other refugees is a great example of that.

So you mentioned the issue of Palestinians being racialized. And this is something that, in part, motivated my decision to set up these interviews that we're doing now for the podcast, is to understand how the way we think about geopolitics, and the way geopolitics is practiced in the real world, is always connected with structures of white supremacy and racialization.

And I wanted to go a little bit deeper into that because earlier you were talking about the discourse of civilization too, right, and who is allowed to claim that they're civilized, and how is that claim used against particular populations. So I just was wondering if you could say a little bit more about how the current situation, and the way we talk about it, is connected with white supremacy.

Absolutely, and it's an excellent point. Because it is connected to what supremacy. And one cannot understand the colonial modernity, the project of colonial modernity broadly defined, which includes from the 1500s onwards settler colonialism, indirect and direct colonialism, the slave trade, chattel slavery, it includes all of these violences, these colonial and racialized violences. White supremacy has been a key element of that all along, and it still is. It's a form of racialization that basically sets white European and North American populations as above everyone else and as the representatives of the advanced stage of human civilization versus the backwardness and barbarity of all the rest.

And scholars of race and racism and racialization have been pointing out the prevalence and the prominence of white supremacy for decades. And they're always told, oh, you're either misreading the situation or you're trying to create a problem of racism where it doesn't exist, et cetera, et cetera. We hear this all the time. The point of that discourse wasn't always to just point out white supremacy in its explicit, radical form and articulation in, let's say, you know, white nationalist groups and movements, but to argue that white supremacy exists across the political spectrum. And it appears in different ways across the political spectrum. And people thought that that was crazy. But you see it, it's on CBS, it was on Al Jazeera where white journalists who seemed quite liberal and progressive are saying things like, "But these are not just your regular refugees. These are white refugees. These are European refugees."

Those clips were all over Twitter, and a lot of people were jumping on those for good reason, right?

Yes. absolutely. But they're indicative of what scholars have been saying for decades and activists have been saying for decades. This white supremacist way of thinking worldview is prevalent. It's not just in the fringe groups. It's present everywhere, and it just appears differently in some of these mainstream spaces that appear liberal, that appear progressive. And this was a case where that came to the surface, and it came to the surface so bluntly that people, you know, it went viral on social media, like you said, because it was just so shocking to so many people, but it wasn't that shocking to people who studied racialization and white supremacy. It is a predominant worldview that assumes that there is this uber advanced group of people called the white people of Europe and North America, and then there's everyone else that's trying to catch up. Which is an absolutely delusional way of thinking, just to be clear. It cannot withstand any serious academic scrutiny. In addition to being violent and hateful, it's also stupid.

It has been heartening to see the pushback against, you know, some of those viral clips. We have a little bit more time left, not too much, but I wanted to make sure to ask you before we finish, Mark, about media coverage. Obviously at Weave News we're an independent media organization, we're always keeping an eye on how things are being covered and so forth. And you mentioned the CBS news clip and even some problematic coverage, you know, from Al Jazeera. What would better media coverage of geopolitics look like? I know that's a huge question, but I'd really love to get your take on it.

That is a big question. First of all, it would tell the stories of the oppressed from their own perspective. We don't do that, that does not exist in mainstream media that the oppressed tell their story from their own lived experience of oppression. And I can tell you this, because it is so clear in the coverage of the Palestinian suffering, especially in Canada. It's worse than Canada than it is in the United States, by the way. It's not that the CBC never covers Palestinians talking about their suffering. But when it does, it makes sure that the narrative in which that story is told is not that of the Palestinians. The narrative is that of a, you know, this poor individual lost their home in in a military attack and it's such a tragic outcome, but we don't know who's to blame and we don't know what's happening in this conflict and it's so complex, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There's no presence of the Palestinian narrative of how Palestinians understand why it is that they're suffering. None of that reaches into the coverage of the story.

So this is what I mean about the oppressed need to be able to tell their story from their own perspective, because the oppressed don't just tell you "I suffered A and B and C." The oppressed have always told you "I've suffered A, B and C because of X, Y and Z." It's the "because X, Y, and Z" part, those parts always challenge mainstream Euro American imperial hegemony. That's why they get cut out. That's why they get edited out. So until those narratives are brought to the surface and allowed to speak freely, then the media coverage will continue to fall well short.

Mark Ayyash, thank you so much for joining us on Interweaving. This has been a great conversation. I hope we can continue it another time. We really just scratched the surface here of a lot of these issues, but appreciate your perspective so much. Thanks for being our guest today.

Thank you very much for having me. I really enjoyed it as well.