Extending Co-Resistance: An Interview with Eyal Weizman

Chapter from Assuming Boycott: Resistance, Agency, and Cultural Production (eds. Kareem Estefan, Carin Kuoni, Laura Raicovich), OR Books, 2017

Excerpt

Kareem Estefan: Like other boycotts and protest actions predicated on collective withdrawal from events and institutions, the BDS movement is generally considered to wield a negative form of agency. The cultural and academic boycott of Israel, in particular, is said to obstruct—or, its opponents would argue, censor—cultural production that is supported by the Israeli government or organizations complicit in the state’s colonial violence. While it is no doubt true that BDS has impeded certain cultural events from proceeding, such a perspective overlooks the more significant fact that a cultural boycott engenders new conversations about the political stakes of art, in and beyond the context of Palestine/Israel, which otherwise would not take place. A boycott campaign launched against an exhibition supported by the Israeli Ministry of Culture, far from shutting down all conversation, will redirect the energies of mounting an art show toward the difficult labor of thinking and talking about the connections between cultural and political policies, redirecting discourse about the symbolic politics of representation—what art depicts, and how—to debates about the political effects of representation—what art does, and in what context—in normalizing or resisting segregation and colonization. From this perspective, the cultural boycott of Israel is a demonstration of extraordinary positive agency: the power to shape conversations about culture that bring the long-repressed rights, demands, and analyses of Palestinians to the forefront.

Speaking at a panel on the meaning of BDS in the Vera List Center’s “Assuming Boycott” series last year, the architect and political theorist Eyal Weizman invoked the concept of “co-resistance,” referring to acts of civil disobedience undertaken in West Bank villages like Nabi Saleh and Bi’lin, where Israeli and international solidarity activists have joined Palestinians in weekly nonviolent protests of the occupation. Co-resistance is one way to frame adherence to the BDS guidelines that underscores the active engagement that solidarity entails, even when it means declining an invitation to speak at a university or deciding not to make art commissioned for a major exhibition. In the context of a boycott campaign, co-resistance unsettles the binary of action and non-action, instead channeling creative social energies from one field of action to another. With this in mind, I asked Weizman how more cultural platforms could become sites of co-resistance, pursuing an analogy he introduced at his “Assuming Boycott” talk: BDS as a form of withdrawal and production akin to the general strike.

Eyal Weizman: I support the BDS movement. It is a form of civil action directed at Israeli colonial practices and simultaneously at those Western governments, above all that of the United States, which support nearly all of Israel’s actions and continually reward the state with unparalleled financial, diplomatic, and cultural support. It has become popular in part because, at its most basic level, it turns non-action into a form of activism. This helps people living in the United States or Europe to avoid institutional relations with Israel; however, the demand that it poses on people closer to and more involved in the issue is different. Withdrawal needs to be complemented with other avenues for action. Wherever BDS cuts off or impedes a relation with a state institution, the movement should find—perhaps even create—new forums for solidarity and cultural production.

One of my favorite parts of the PACBI guidelines makes the distinction between cohabitation and co-resistance, explaining that in a situation of structural violence, mere cohabitation maintains the status quo. Along these lines, I think that the academic and cultural boycott needs to be seen as an intervention in the production of knowledge, rather than simply a series of obstructions. Since taking up the call of BDS, I have started lecturing locally only in association with select, committed human rights organizations, such as Zochrot, Yesh Din, Al Haq, or the Regional Council of Unrecognized Villages of Negev, and through the Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency (DAAR) studio in Beit Sahour, in which I’m a partner. These groups promote new means to understand and creatively grapple with the ongoing social, political, and spatial effects of Israeli colonization, and given the way the Israeli government persecutes them, they need support.  

Once we understand it as a movement channeling intellectual and political energy away from Israeli institutions, BDS becomes part of a wider spectrum of political actions that block non-democratic and unequal platforms and open democratic platforms for co-resistance. It is a matter of forging communities of practice, wherein action produces political constituencies and radical subjectivities among those who withdraw from the state. Of course, withdrawal is in itself action—a good example is the general strike. Consider theories of the general strike from the early 20th century, like those of Rosa Luxemburg, in which the strike is not only a form of non-action or a means to avoid work; its purpose is also to build solidarity, steal back time, and make space for other forms of living. A strike is labor directed to new ends: it opens up sites for organization and contributes to resistance, resilience, and the communal production of knowledge. It is also an important stage in the process of revolution and political transformation. The strike already has a great tradition in the Palestinian struggle. In the first intifada, for example, strikes led to the closures of schools, and informal academies popped up in the very places—garages, workshops, shops—that were shut off from the outside world, including the Israeli economy.  

The challenge for the BDS movement is to find and create platforms that are egalitarian and democratic—to provide alternatives to the forms of culture and politics that exist. So, if we consider theories of the general strike as a withdrawal and an interruption, we should also ask, where is the site of creation in BDS? How do we move from a stage of undermining Israel’s legitimacy by applying the force of withdrawal to a next step of building alternative, egalitarian spaces?