Abstract
At the time of the first major disability protest in Israel in 1999 and then in 2000–2001, there were already many anti-occupation and peace organizations at play in Israel/Palestine. While participating in this budding disability movement, I began reflecting on my experiences of simultaneously being an Israeli anti-occupation activist and disabled activist publically fighting for the first time for disability rights. In the summer of 2006 I conducted research in Israel, trying to assess any changes that occurred since 2000 in the connections between the movements and within the disability movement itself. And then the war on Lebanon began. My intention in writing this chapter is to highlight the connections between disability activism and anti-war and anti-occupation activism, which seem to be at war with one another but in fact intersect in important ways. I hope this narrative and analysis will be useful for material resistance as well as a reflection on our current states of exclusion in activism and scholarship.
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Notes
- 1.
These were a few of the people that were involved in the first protest, but most of the key figures had changed. The number of attendees and supporters, however, increased tenfold this time around.
- 2.
There are numerous potential descriptors that could have been assigned to describe these, such as protests (mecha’ah) or demonstration (hufganah), but strikes is what stuck in the media and public discourse.
- 3.
Israel established “state of emergency” regulations under British colonial rule, before it became as state in 1948, and had been extending them in the Knesset every 2 years since then. The military rule had been formally taken out in 1965 but continues de facto in the occupied territories of course, but also in Israel at large via the “state of emergency” regulations.
- 4.
- 5.
It may be interesting to note that Kimmerling was not only one of the premier theorists of militarization in Israel but also a symptom of the phenomenon I am describing here, being one of a few full time professors with significant disabilities, who never reflected on disability as a political identity linked to the phenomenon he studied.
- 6.
Ultra-orthodox Jews are also exempt from military service, a topic of much debate in Israel.
- 7.
There have been more recent demands to conscript Christian-Palestinians citizens of Israel. I also can’t get into the intricate conscript debates regarding the Druze and Bedouin populations in Israel.
- 8.
For queer critiques of LGBTQI military service in the US see http://www.againstequality.org/about/military/.
- 9.
“kesef lezchuyot, lo lehitnahluyot.”
- 10.
Non-citizens such as immigrant laborers who have almost no rights under current Israeli policies because they are not Jewish, but are employed mostly by disabled and elderly people and their families who are in need of attendant care.
- 11.
This is not unique but indeed a pattern of protests in Israel that can also be seen in the recent, 2011, ‘tent city’ protests across Israel (which preceded the Occupy movement in the US by a few months), in which demands for equality and economic justice had to be ‘separated’ from any discussion about the occupation in an attempt to de-politicize and ‘unify’ the movement.
- 12.
For instance, on August 11 2006, while the war on Lebanon was still raging, Limor Goldstein was shot in the head by Israeli soldiers from close range (see http://mishtara.org/blog/?p=70 and http://www.awalls.org/topics/videos).
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Editors’ Postscript
If you found Chap. 4 by Liat Ben-Moshe meaningful and you would like to read more work that takes a look at the nation state, development, and disability we suggest Chap. 3 “Minamata: Disability and the Sea of Sorrow” by Mami Aoyama, and Chap. 20 “Occupying Disability Studies in Brazi” by Anahi Guedes de Mello, Pamela Block, and Adriano Henrique Nuernberg.
In terms of the experience of political protest, Chap. 2 “Krips, Cops and Occupy: Reflections from Oscar Grant Plaza” by Sunaura Taylor with Marg Hall, Jessica Lehman, Rachel Liebert, Akemi Nishida, and Jean Stewart is relevant as is Nick Dupree’s Chap. 15 “My World, My Experiences with Occupy Wall Street and How We can go Further.” To this list add Chaps. 19 and 21, “Crab and Yoghurt” by Tobias Hecht, and “Black & Blue: Policing Disability & Poverty Beyond Occupy” by Leroy Franklin Moore Jr., Lisa ‘Tiny’ Garcia, and Emmitt Thrower.
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Ben-Moshe, L. (2016). Movements at War? Disability and Anti-occupation Activism in Israel. In: Block, P., Kasnitz, D., Nishida, A., Pollard, N. (eds) Occupying Disability: Critical Approaches to Community, Justice, and Decolonizing Disability. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9984-3_4
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