The existence of what do you doubt most?
This is a question I pose before my students at Birzeit University in Palestine. Over the past few years, I have spent almost every summer in Palestine teaching a course on modern philosophy. Throughout this course, divisions between the philosophers we are reading and ourselves are steadily abandoned, as we turn to how each personal life is key to the instigation and development of thought. Ideas that arise from our lived experiences, our knowledges, our imaginations, and not least, from conversations between us inside and outside the classroom always lead us in unforeseen directions.
My question on doubt comes as we read Descartes’ The Meditations on First Philosophy, in response to his call in ‘First Meditation’ that we should doubt everything at least once in our lifetime. After some moments of silence the first answer emerges from the back of the classroom: ‘What I doubt most is the existence of good, and that we should act according to it. So far in my life, I have only witnessed those who are acting in an evil manner to be winning.’ Upon hearing that student, the rest of the students in the classroom crack out laughing. It is a laughter of relief, that someone finally dared to say what they feel, and subscribe to their own life experience and the world around them, rather than any moralistic principle they have been taught since childhood.
In general, most of my one hundred or so students have made, and continue to make, an enormous effort to attend university in a decades-long occupation with all the dire state of political, and subsequently, economic hardship this enforces. They come from different parts of Palestine, which have become very difficult to move between. With all the roadblocks, the Wall, Palestinian vehicles banned from driving on certain roads, and unexpected closure of certain areas, distances between places have grown bigger. Jerusalem, which used to be half an hour’s distance from the university, is now two hours away. And Hebron, once a one-hour drive, now requires three hours.
In the aftermath of the 1993 Oslo negotiations, framed as peace negotiations, the Palestinian landscape has become subject to additional spatial divisions, into different zones and areas, which since have been used to implement new methods of segregation, isolation, and oppression. In effect, these divisions have also destroyed the idea of a Palestinian society with coherent connections. There is a whole generation of Palestinians, the age of my students, who not only rarely encountered an Israeli who is not a soldier or a settler, but also hardly encountered fellow Palestinians from other areas, like Gaza for example. The students, like many others, associate this condition with a process—the peace process—that was supposed to bring an end to their subjugation and that of their parents and grandparents. Instead, this process has resulted with several huge regional prisons, as the students call them, with the Israeli authorities shutting and opening them whenever they want. Under such conditions, universities have become almost the only places where young Palestinians can gather and meet for the first time, and even shelter, for a few years at least, from the desperation of a reality that only promises to deplete their minds, their aspirations, passions, and above all, their humanity.
But even if they wanted to ignore it, their life experience outside the university more than often invades the classes, as some of them miss lectures because they are delayed at a checkpoint, detained by the Israeli army, called for interrogation by the Israeli intelligence services, or even lying on a hospital bed for weeks after being shot during a demonstration.
But even if they wanted to ignore it, their life experience outside the university more than often invades the classes, as some of them miss lectures because they are delayed at a checkpoint, detained by the Israeli army, called for interrogation by the Israeli intelligence services, or even lying on a hospital bed for weeks after being shot during a demonstration. As the course continues, with each and every text we proceed to read, be it by Locke, Kant, Marx, Freud, Foucault or Said, we are faced by challenges arising from actual events or the general conditions of life in Palestine. For instance, Kant argues that a society would fail the process of enlightenment should its members, out of laziness or cowardice, not set themselves and their reason free from the harness they have been tethered to, or be able to share their own thoughts and knowledge with the rest of the society or community. To the students, under the present circumstances, Palestinian society is doomed to fail any process of enlightenment, given that its members are actually fastened to real harness, rather than only metaphorical ones, which prohibit and often punishes free thought, let alone consider the community’s interests. The students also note that the occupation as it destroyed the spatial links between the community, the social links also got destroyed. When a Palestinian crosses a checkpoint, she or he has to wait for their turn in a crammed queue before they can go through a revolving gate that allows only one individual to go through at a time, that is, if they are not ‘lucky’ enough to have to sit isolated in a car and wait in yet another long queue. ‘Naturally, you cannot waste more time waiting; you want to cross the checkpoint quickly and before everyone else’, explains one student who has to cross the Qalandia checkpoint every day. ‘So you start to feel that the other Palestinians standing in the queue are delaying you and you wish you could jump over them; there are many who may even try to jump the queue, because like you, they need to get somewhere quickly.’ The enmity that arises in these situations, is then often directed towards Palestinian passer-by, not at the Israeli soldiers who are thereion charge. A few years ago, in fact, a Palestinian killed another man with a knife when the latter tried to overpass him at the Qalandia checkpoint.
Once we reach Locke’s ideas on the natural rights of all humans; the right to life, liberty, equality and property, gloominess disappears and laughter fills the classroom again. We imagine a scenario where one of the students goes to an Israeli officer at a checkpoint and tells him the occupation is undermining his or her natural rights, then we start guessing the reaction of the officer. He might laugh like us now, though probably he will humiliate, arrest or simply beat up that student, if the latter was not shot at already from a distance. But when the news about O., a fellow student in the course, reaches us, the laughter stops for a long while. O. would get shot during a demonstration near Beit El settlement. Soon after, his condition starts to dramatically worsen since doctors in Ramallah Hospital fail to operate on him successfully. The entire class then heads to the Deputy Dean for Student Affairs at the university, demanding that the management exerts pressure on the Ramallah Hospital, to find a way to transfer O. for treatment in another hospital in Jordan instead of keeping him in their badly equipped hospital, with limited specialised staff. If he continues to be treated there, there is fear that O.’s bleeding from the two bullet holes in his lower abdomen will not stop, leading to one of his legs having to be amputated or that he will become eternally paralysed.
So we hold our first outdoor lecture of the semester in the hallway in front of the Deputy Dean’s office, waiting to meet with him. We read and discuss excerpts from Marx’s Capital. Violence, in Marx’s thought, operates as an economic force, which is most patent in the process of colonialism. The confiscation of lands, property, and resources, and the exploitation of labor and the oppression of people during colonialism, have all been vital in the accumulation of capital. This experience similarly remains part of the daily life of many Palestinians, not a Marxist analysis of a past history. But later on, as we read Freud, we are proposed that ‘private property’ is not to blame for human misery and suffering, but human’s private nature itself.
By the end of the course, we realise that no matter which perspective these thinkers took on, they did not accept suffering obediently, rather resisted it.
By the end of the course, we realise that no matter which perspective these thinkers took on, they did not accept suffering obediently, rather resisted it. As Locke witnessed the injustices of monarchical regimes, he came to present his set of ideas on constitutional governance and even took part in the 1680s revolution in the UK to establish that; Kant, on the other hand, who saw how the French Revolution failed to create the shift hoped for, came to suggest that any political shifts can be obtained only by changing people’s minds, not merely the people in power. Then Marx, who followed the exploitation of workers at the height of the Industrial Revolution, proposed the most important critique thus far on capitalism, calling for the abolition of private property, himself giving up substantial part of his inheritance to support the workers’ revolution in Belgium. Freud, a Jewish Austrian, had given us the most comprehensive study of the human psyche, in times where he not only witnessed the rise of nazism, but also became a victim of it, and was eventually forced into exile. Finally Said, who unveiled the prejudices and racisms of orientalism and imperialism, inspires us with his vocation to speak truth to power. Getting to know the lives of these thinkers, and to read and discuss the influential thoughts they came to represent, the students are left to ponder on the types of ideas, thoughts and knowledges they may reach based on their own life experiences, to counter their oppression and dehumanization and that of others.
O., who has finally left hospital, walking with a limping leg, and relying on crutches, is considering the creation of a domain where such discussions and connections between young Palestinians can take place, despite the reality of spatial and social divisions, and where they are able to resist any feelings of helplessness and paralysis, waiting for others to direct us on what to do. A little step, but one has to start somewhere to create a change, he explains in a mellow voice.
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Adania Shibli, born in Palestine in 1974, is a celebrated author, essayist and cultural critic. Her acclaimed works include Touch (2010) and Minor Detail (2017),which was longlisted for the International Booker Prize. Shibli’s writing is known for its poetic prose and exploration of memory, identity, and the limits of narration. Shibli holds a Ph.D. from the University of East London in Media and Cultural Studies. Her dissertation is titled Visual Terror: A Study of the Visual Compositions of the 9/11 Attacks and Major Attacks in the ‘War on Terror’ by British and French Television Networks. Adania Shibli continues to be a vital voice in contemporary literature, bridging personal and political realities through her work.
Photo copyright : ICRC
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