Thursday, I considered President Obama’s speech, informed by William Milberg’s analysis of Senator Ryan’s budget proposal. My conclusion: the terms of the political debate for the 2012 elections are being set to the President’s strong advantage.  I am pleased, but even more pleased because two serious opposing views of America and its public good will be debated. A rational discussion about this seems likely. There will be smoke and mirrors to be sure, but this is a time for grand politics in the sense of Alexis de Tocqueville and a grand political contest we will get.

This is especially important given the present state of affairs in the United States and abroad. But Presidential leadership will not solve all problems. Indeed, much of the politically significant action occurs off the central political stage, in what I refer to as “the politics of small things.” This dimension of politics has been on our minds this week in the form of three very different cases: the Tea Party in the United States, and The Freedom Theatre and the International Solidarity Committee in occupied Palestine.

The Tea Party is a looming presence in American politics. But it is in a sense “no thing”, as Gary Alan Fine puts it. It is a social movement that emerged in response to major changes associated with the election and early administration of Barack Obama, and a response to the global economic crisis. Fine and I disagree in our judgment of the “Tea Party patriots.” Indeed, I, along with Iris, am not sure how rational they are, but that is actually a political matter. As an objective observer of the human comedy, i.e. as a sociologist, I am particularly intrigued by the no thing qualities of the Tea Party which Fine considers.

A media performance occurs. An agitated announcer denounces policies said to be supporting losers, calling for a new tea party demonstration. People, who can’t take it anymore, come together in small groups all around the country, using the phrase “tea party” to identify themselves with each other and to the general public. An assortment of conservative foundations, institutes, politicians and billionaires associate themselves with this social development, seeing in it what they will, empowered by the movement. It’s certainly not a political party. It’s not one thing. But this configuration of images, gestures, actions and strategies, clearly has energized at least a branch of the Republican Party, which now has a Tea Party Caucus in the House of Representatives.  This is an example of what I call the politics of small things. Not no thing, not a big thing, but a small one that has added up. That is how I understand the Tea Party.

People meet, speak and act in each other’s presence on the basis of some common concern. They develop a capacity to act in concert and do so. This is a form of political power. In the Tea Party we see how such power can fundamentally change the configuration of political forces in a society. I think that this power is a direct response to a similar power developed in support of the election of Barack Obama, something I analyze in my forthcoming book, Reinventing Political Culture.

Juliano Mer-Khamis

I also analyze in the book the project of reinventing through the politics of small things the militarized political culture of occupation, terrorism and anti-terrorism in Israel Palestine. This week we observed and reflected on the meaning of the assassination of two heroes of this project, Juliano Mer-Khamis, an actor and theater artist, based in Jenin, and Vittorio Arrigoni, an Italian peace activist working in Gaza, engaged in non violent political protest and social action. They formed and took part in small endeavors presenting alternatives to occupation and violent resistance. They formed and acted in groups which worked in the shadows of the occupation. They were assassinated by forces of violent resistance in response to the effectiveness and importance of their actions. The limits of non violent resistance are revealed in the stories of their deaths, but the limits of militarized politics were revealed in their life’s actions.

Vittorio Arrigoni

Arrigoni took part in non violent resistance to the Israeli occupation and witnessed the daily struggle for survival and dignity in Gaza. He published a book with the poignant title We Remain Human, apparently challenging not only the Israelis, but as well Salifist radicals, his killers, who emulate the ideology and terror of Al Qaida. In Arrigoni’s life rather than his death, Benoit Challand sees political significance. This supports the democratic struggles of the Arab Spring, honoring the humane Gazan faces Arrigoni presented in his work.

Juliano Mer-Khamis was not only or primarily a victim of radical intolerance from Palestinian and Israeli sources, Irit Dekel emphasizes. The repression he faced and his violent end should not define his life. Rather, his art and the world he created for Palestinian boys and girls and their families and audience in the Freedom Theatre are of greater import. As Dekel put it, he should be remembered for “fighting for the freedom of the everyday” by non violent artistic means.

The freedom of the everyday has limited power. But the power persists thanks to creators and witnesses such as Mer-Khamis and Arrigoni.

And let’s remember, for better and for worse, this freedom of the everyday is at the root of the Tea Party movement and the movement that led to the election of Barack Hussein Obama, America’s first black President, setting the stage for the great debate about American political culture which the upcoming Presidential election will be.

Vittorio Arrigoni, an Italian peace activist, was abducted in Gaza City yesterday, and then killed, apparently by a Salafist group opposed to Hamas. The news already has shaken Italy and Europe, and it will also make for some somber headlines here in the USA.

Arrigoni arrived in Gaza three years ago as part of the International Solidarity Movement, a network of foreign activists who deliberately choose to live in the heart of the occupied territories to bear witness to the continuing harassment of the Palestinian population at the hands of the Israeli occupier (be they military or of the radical settler movements). Some of these activists live in remote villages, some accompany ambulances through checkpoints. Often IDF soldiers let the vehicles through simply because there is a ‘white’ person onboard. Others organize protests around Israel’s Separation Wall or in Palestinian villages, such as Budrus, Ni’lin, non-violently protesting. All confront the apartheid nature of the occupation. For this reason, Israel tries to prevent them from entering its territories, attempting to silence these annoying witnesses.

Arrigoni was such a witness-activist. Choosing Gaza as the place of his activism, he was one of the very few non-diplomat foreigners present during the Operation Cast Lead (Dec. 2008-January 2009). His blogs and reports were published on the Italian leftist daily Il Manifesto for which he kept sending reports.

Gaza has been off limits to most foreigners and at times fully inaccessible to journalists and even ambassadors. Israel controls all of the borders around the Palestinian territories. Based on his experience in the 2008-2009 war, Arrigoni published a poignant book entitled Restiamo Umani, which can be translated in the affirmative as “We Remain Human” or in the imperative form as “Let Us Stay Human.” Giving a human face to the Palestinian civilian population in Gaza was Arrigoni’s mission. His was an urgent sense of witnessing the ordeal of ordinary Palestinians.

But why would a Palestinian group execute him? The official line is that a radical Salafist group, opposed to Hamas, had captured him hoping to exchange his release for the release of one of their leaders arrested by Hamas. It could well be that a small group of Palestinian extremists carried out the operation and lost control, leading to this tragic ending. Yet, the motives and timing of this killing remain unclear and pose many further questions.

Paola Caridi, an Italian journalist-scholar questions the motive of this killing in her latest blog posting. She provides excellent coverage of the Arab Middle East and has written a very detailed book on Hamas (in Italian and now available in English), based on serious fieldwork, which included direct contact with the Islamist movement. Here are some of her questions, coupled with my concerns, as to cui prodest, who profits from the crime.

The fact that Vittorio Arrigoni’s murder comes just a few days after the execution by masked gunmen of another peace activist, Juliano Mer-Khamis, in Jenin, is in itself very disturbing. This strongly contrasts with the pattern of peaceful popular revolts throughout the Arab world (except for what has become a civil war in Libya). Moreover, the name of the Salafist group involved in Arrigoni’s killing (Tawhid and Jihad), though known in the Iraqi context, is literally unheard of in the Gaza Strip, colleagues there tell me. And when previous radical Islamist groups have taken hostages (remember BBC correspondent Alan Johnston abducted for four months back in 2007), the ultimatum has always been respected. Finally, when these peace activists were seen to become too critical of their peers, they received other types of warnings, not death threats. (I cited an episode of intimidation that Juliano Mer-Khamis and his theater faced in 2009 in the introduction of a working paper on civil society and conflict transformation). The hasty execution of Arrigoni, again, does not fit the rather rare pattern of abduction-negotiation that has taken place in the Gaza Strip.

Unfortunately raising such questions will not bring Vittorio back to life. But they must be posed, especially in the light of an ongoing escalation of violence around Gaza. Hamas must investigate why nothing could be done to prevent this tragedy, and why the response to Arrigoni’s abduction was so slow. Certainly, there will be commentators and political actors in the region who will argue that the opponents to Arab autocracy are bloodthirsty and violent murderers and that stability, opposed to democratic change, is in the interest of all influential actors in the region. But this would not do justice to the nature of the Arab revolts nor to Arrigoni’s efforts to show the Gazans under a more humane face. Restiamo umani.

“As I came to Jenin in 2003, I found a swamp, a jungle, steaming with struggles to survive. Here they need hospitals, not a theatre, I thought.” Mr. Juliano Mer-Khamis, in an interview to the Berlin Newspaper Tagesspiegel in early 2010 in Jenin, re-published after his assassination on April 6, 2011.

Mr. Mer-Khamis (53), an Israeli and Palestinian actor, was shot dead on April 4 by masked militants at the entrance to the theatre he built in 2006 in the west bank city of Jenin, “The Freedom Theatre.” He started the theater in Jenin in 2006 following a call from his friend Zakaria Zubeidi, an Al-Aqsa-Brigades fighter, or what we Israelis usually think of as a terrorist. Moving with his wife and children to live in the refugee camp of Jenin, Mr. Mer-Khamis said in several interviews, was a choice he made between being on the side of the soldier and the checkpoint, or on that of the little girl who has no future and no hope.

I first read about the assassination in the Israeli press, linked on friends’ Facebook pages. I was surprised to discover how many of “their friends” reacted directly to the question of whether Mer-Khamis’s actions were just (many users expressed their loathing of his activism, much like replies to the same articles in Israeli news sites).

Journalists and bloggers also asked themselves whether this terrible murder stands as a warning sign to not mix art and politics as Mer-Khamis did in his acting in Israeli theaters, and to not openly criticize both Israeli militarism and the occupation and Palestinian society for its religious narrow mindedness.

There were two camps mourning the murder. On the one hand, there were those who concluded that it was the result of  the inhuman, dark and theocratic Palestinian society. It could not tolerate boys and girls acting and playing together and rejected the secular content of the Freedom Theatre’s plays. The other camp lamented the tear in the very identity of Mer-Khamis himself.  He tried to be a bridge between the “impossible worlds” in his own biography, of being a Jew and a Palestinian, but, the bloody region’s circumstances, together with the evil of Zionist colonialism, could not tolerate his efforts.

I see an alternative way to commemorate Mr. Mer-Khamis’s legacy, the one he clearly presented in interviews. I celebrate his fight for the everyday of young adults through art and theater. First, by the decision to take the “little girl’s” side, and second, by creating art, and offering other possible “role models” for young Palestinians in the refugee camp. The Freedom Theatre’s mission reads: “While emphasizing professionalism and innovation, the aim of the theatre is also to empower youth and women in the community and to explore the potential of arts as an important catalyst for social change.” The theater, registered as a Palestinian NGO, offers psychodrama classes alongside acting and filmmaking classes. Since 2009, it has been headed by Mer-Khamis and his friend Zakaria Zubeidi. Eighteen thousand guests, actors and students came to performances in the only theater in the northern part or the West Bank in 2009. This is a world in which they have made a difference.

Mer-Khamis was the son of a Jewish Israeli mother, the communist political activist, Arna Mer-Khamis, and a Palestinian intellectual and communist activist father, Saliba Khamis, from Nazareth. His mother separated herself from Israeli society in protest against Zionism, militarism and the occupation. She moved with the family to Jenin during the first Intifada and started an alternative education project called “The Stone Theatre.” For her dedication to alternative education in Jenin, she was awarded the “Alternative Nobel Prize” in Stockholm. In 2002, after the battle of Jenin (what Israel called “Operation Defense Shield”), Juliano Mer-Khamis directed a documentary with co-director Daniel Daniel, which follows the work of his mother in the Stone Theatre. The stories of the children who participated in it are told. Some became freedom fighters and died in the battle of Jenin. Others died during the El Aksa Intifada or in suicide attacks against Israelis. The film, Arna’s Children, won several prizes, among which the best documentary of the 2004 Hot Docs Film Festival.

Mer-Khamis was well aware of the immediate threats to his theater and life. In an interview given to the Israeli Yediot Ahronot daily (Y-net; 21/4/2010), he said “I was never so Jewish as I am here in Jenin. After all this work, it will be very sad to die from a Palestinian bullet.”

He decided not to leave, not even after the doors of the theater were burned down in 2009, and life threats were sent to him and to the parents whose children participated in the “Zionist theatre which sways children to rebel against their parents and which compares liberation from the occupation to liberation from our religion.”

The Freedom Theatre presented a production of Orwell’s Animal Farm as an allegory to current political affairs in the Palestinian society. In the production “Alice,” the Palestinian Alice needs to undergo various ordeals in order to be able to say “no” to her arranged marriage. Udi Aloni, an artist, left wing activist, director and Mer’s friend, who participated in the “Alice” production, wrote that it, and the Freedom Theatre, could be part of a ‘Jasmine revolution’ in Jenin. As an actor in the play stated, “the anti-colonial revolution of the Arab world has to first go through the de-colonization of the oriental image of the Arab himself.” Another actor, recently released from an Israeli jail, and who was presented in the Yediot Ahronot article as a former terrorist who decided to “stop fighting and start acting,” argued, “the theatre taught me that art can be part of the fight against the occupation.”

We should not, on the basis of the schism in Mer-Khamis’s identity, condemn the mix of politics and art that he promoted, nor should we be satisfied by blaming his death on the state-evil of the Palestinian and Israeli sides, as the source of the unchangeable condition of hatred and bloodshed. The possibility of the everyday action, with art as a form of resistance and as life, is the legacy of Mer-Khamis.