Death Panel podcast co-hosts Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Jules Gill-Peterson speak with Liat Ben-Moshe and Leah Harris about how Palestinian resistance and rebellion is pathologized and the importance of transnational disability solidarity with Palestine.

Transcript by Kendra Kline. (Kendra is currently accepting freelance transcript work — email her if you need transcripts!)

[Intro music]

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 0:32

Welcome to the Death Panel. Patrons, thank you so much for supporting the show. We couldn't do any of this without you. If you'd like to support the show, become a patron at patreon.com/deathpanelpod. Your support keeps us going, and patrons get a second weekly episode and access to the entire back catalogue of patron only episodes. And if you'd like to help us out a little bit more, share the show with your friends, post about your favorite episodes, pick up a copy of Health Communism or preorder Jules' new book that's coming out at the end of the month called A Short History of Trans Misogyny at your local bookstore, or request them both at your local library, and follow us @deathpanel_.

So first, just a quick note, I want to apologize in advance if my voice is a little off, or I sound froggy or nasally today. I'm getting over a cold. Fortunately, it's not COVID, I'm very sure about that. It's also not the flu and not RSV. It's one of the 200 odd viruses that we call the "common cold," and I'm feeling okay. But the frustrating thing, which I'm going to mention today because this is an instructive sort of object lesson of the pandemic -- the frustrating thing is that, you know, I maintain very strict COVID precautions, masking everywhere other than the inside of my home. I don't go out to eat, I'm not socializing. You know, it's just healthcare stuff and the grocery store. And the thing that really sucks and is so frustrating is that like as an immunocompromised person, I can take all of the personal precautions I want, you know, Ashish Jha is like choose it, you know, choose your level of protection, we have the tools. But it's actually not enough to keep me from getting sick, for me to put as much precaution as I can, when there are so many sick people taking no precautions who are just sick and out in public space. So one way masking is not it. As we've said for years, masking keeps us all safe and helps us all avoid sickness and the material consequences that come with it. But it's only really effective if it's a collective endeavor. It needs to be reciprocal. We mask to keep each other safe.

Anyway, on to the episode. Today, we're going to have a conversation about disability and mad theory in solidarity with Palestinian Liberation. Disability impairment, madness, debility, all of this is tied up very heavily in so many aspects of the settler colonial occupation of Palestine, as well as the discourses around it, both within the settler state of Israel and the many states of the imperial core that support the ongoing eco-genocidal colonization of Palestinians and Palestine. So we'll be touching on a lot today from the construction of civilian versus militant that is frequently debated, to the pathologization of resistance, rebellion and resilience. So let's get into it. I am joined by my co-host, Jules Gill-Peterson

Jules Gill-Peterson 3:18

Hey there.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 3:19

And we are both honored to be in conversation with two fantastic returning guests. First is Liat Ben-Moshe. Liat is Associate Professor of Criminology, Law and Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago and author of the book, Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition. Liat is also the co-editor of the book, Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada. Liat, welcome back to the Death Panel.

Liat Ben-Moshe 3:45

Thanks for having me again.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 3:47

Always so nice to have you on. And also joining us is Leah Harris. Leah is a mad and disabled writer, facilitator, educator and advocate whose work has appeared in the Progressive, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Disability Visibility Project and Mad in America, among others. Leah writes a Substack, Writing Through, and is working on their first book called Noncompliant. Leah, welcome back to the Death Panel. It's so nice to be in conversation with you again.

Leah Harris 4:12

Thank you. Always great to be with you all.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 4:14

Well, I'm just so glad that you both are back on the show. It's been really nice to be in this ongoing discussion. You know, we really got talking in the summer and planning for the Socialism Conference session that we did together in September. And you know, the conversation has continued throughout the recent escalation of the ego-genocide of Palestine. And we were actually planning a follow-up episode to the reopen the asylums conversation. And this was sort of an aside or an addendum where we said, you know, we really actually want to stop and talk about this first. And while the four of us are all people who live with these identities and impairments, or states of body and/or mind, we're people who've spent many years of our lives thinking deeply and theorizing about these ideas and concepts, but I want to make sure to emphasize that today, we're not going to be jumping straight into the deep end here. I really want us to tread some 101 territory, so that listeners, really whatever their background on disability theory, can get something from the conversation today. And to that point, I was thinking that a good place for us to start today is with a statement that came out in early December, that is a transnational feminist disability studies statement against genocide in Gaza. And Liat, I wondered if you wouldn't mind summarizing this for us. There are hundreds of disability scholars from all over the world who have taken part in this and I think it's a great place for us to start.

Liat Ben-Moshe 5:34

Yeah. Thank you. I'd be happy to. So it starts, "As a feminist collective of transnational disability studies scholars, we have been devastated and infuriated to witness the intensifying genocide against the Palestinian people. This massive violence is rooted in historical and ongoing settler colonialism perpetuated by the governments of Israel, the US and other powers." So as a statement -- or the statement itself tries to show how imperialism is intertwined with disablement. So we refuse to accept death or debilitation, debilitation meaning targeting people for impairment or disability -- we refuse to accept that as what people call collateral damage. We talk about how, in the statement, this is really -- these forces of disablement are our core warfare in imperialist wars. And that the effects of these are continuous, ongoing. This is not like a one time thing. There'll be generational effects of this, whether it's long-term disability, targeting to kill whole families, trauma on a mass level, you know, just various examples in the statement. So we try to anchor a decolonial commitment and understanding of US complicity and centrality as imperative.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 6:57

Thank you for setting that up, Liat. I just want to point to that ongoingness that you highlighted, which is so important. You know, the thing to understand is that when we're talking about disability in the United States, we have a very specific and sort of fixed understanding of what that idea is. And part of it is mediated through the way that the US state conceptualizes disability relative to citizenship, right and being a member of the body politic, or being on the periphery or the external bounds of the economy, so to speak. But part of what's important to understand is that like disability as a phenomenon goes way beyond just what the government will certify as disabled, right. It's not just people who qualify for SSDI and can be certified through an insurance style process, you know, of being visibly or demonstrably disabled through their chart or observed medical expertise. We're talking about something that touches on what can be called the social model of disability, right, which is a much broader understanding of what disablement is beyond just the mere designations that a state can give a person, or designations that entitle you to benefits or even, you know, frankly, diagnostic categories that entitle you to access to medications. You know, I know that for a lot of people, this may be very basic, but also it's not like this is a very obvious idea about disability, you know, when we're talking about the idea that also an entire place can be disabled, and not just during this current escalation of eco-genocidal violence that we've been living through, not just this year, but last year, and over and over for decades now. But this is something that happens all of the time. And that this is a totalizing state of being, not just for a body or a state of mind, but can also be a state of being for a place and be descriptive of a relationship that a place or an idea even has relative to, you know, other forces and powers. And so it's really also a way to sort of push past a lot of the understandings that I think dominate especially, you know, we're speaking from the locale of the US right now, in dominant US culture, disability is a placard, is a person, is something that's legible to the state, and we're talking about something today that actually is kind of highly illegible to the state.

Liat Ben-Moshe 9:33

Yeah, I think it's -- I think the word that's really important here, and I know we've used it in the show before, is politicized, right? So there's disability as identity, which some people have access to, some do not. Meaning you can have an impairment but never understand yourself as disabled. And there's also being politicized by your disability or madness and so, in that sense, I think the disability justice framework, or the statement from which I just read a little bit, tries to anchor, what does it mean to be disabled politically? And then, what does it mean then to be in solidarity and connection and intersection with other disabled people throughout the world? And what that means in this moment is absolutely, absolutely a resistance to colonialism, to imperialism, to wars, not as an added thing to disability but as a core of what it means to be a politicized disabled or mad person.

Jules Gill-Peterson 10:39

Yeah, that's so well said, Liat. And yeah, part of recognizing that politicization is also the places where, you know, a fantasized difference between disability in the Global North and the Global South helps obscure the operations of imperial warfare and settler colonialism. And I was just going back and looking at some of the news coverage that seems to be emerging, I guess, especially in the wake of World Health Organization warnings around starvation in particular, and around infectious disease outbreaks in Gaza. And just like, you know, the way, as plenty of people have been pointing out on social media, even just like the grammar of that coverage, you know, removing the subject from the sentence, but also the -- in some ways, the deep politicization, especially of infectious disease, like as if these are -- which actually reproduces that fantasy of collateral damage, that infectious diseases are epiphenomenal to war, or to colonialism, as opposed to part of the weapon -- weaponized warfare machine, and as opposed to inherently a part of the settler colonial apparatus. And, you know, that just feels like an urgent place, right, to think about how solidarity in part is about re-politicizing the way that debility and disablement and disease that are policy outcomes of a state are rendered as some sort of natural epiphenomenon that, you know, are tragic and sad, but just sort of seem to occur almost magically. I mean, that -- that magic is itself part of the disavowal of settler colonial warfare.

Leah Harris 12:21

You know, it makes me think about how these efforts to correct these headlines that sort of remove the cause of what is framed as a natural disaster, right, and to really continue to point the finger at the perpetrators, you know, really is a part of that resistance to push up against that erasure and that framing, and to reiterate that this is a completely unnatural disaster that is happening, and that has clear, clear political causes, and that we refuse that erasure.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 12:59

Absolutely. And I think one of the things that weirdly is stuck in my head and I've been returning to, is the indigenous activist Klee Benally just passed on at the end of December, which is a huge loss. And I've been reading Klee's book that just came out, No Spiritual Surrender. It's fantastic. It's deep. It's challenging. I really appreciate it. And I keep thinking this -- of this one point, where he's like, you know, when we're talking about, quote, unquote, the solution for homelessness, right? The fascist appeal is direct and obviously genocidal -- I'm paraphrasing here, not quoting, but -- and the liberal appeal, you know, it keeps up appearances, right. And it's really about asking, how do we make this problem go away without spending any money behind it. And it's really truly amazing to see, for example, the amount of investment that the United States puts into the securitisation and militarization of Israel, into the justifying and perpetuating media apparatus and international political apparatus that's required in order to sustain such obvious violence, right? And it gives us a chance to actually step back and sort of look at like, what does it mean to be settlers who are living in a settler state who is putting all of these resources towards that, right, in a state where also the settler colonial nation that we live in, you know, has tremendous things that are going under- and un-resourced and completely ignored, right? The kinds of ways that both the vulnerability and the disposability of Palestinians is naturalized by the US state and the vulnerability and disposability of indigenous people in this land that we're occupying here right now, while we're recording, each of us in a different place, the disabled identity, right, and like how disability relates to the state and the really important role that settler colonialism and justifying settler colonialism plays to the US's power and hegemony, it's really important, I think, as disabled people to understand the really complex milieu that we're embedded in here, because, you know, in its most base sense, settler colonialism is like never consensual for some of us, you know, in these later generations, but it's also something that's not like an absolutely historical process, right? It's ongoing, it requires continued maintenance. And a really important part of even grappling with that and grappling with the contradiction of living in a settler state, or relying on funds from that settler state for disability payments, or petitioning that government for access to medications, or for recognition as a disabled person, you know, I'm thinking specifically of folks in the Long COVID community here, it's really important to grapple with these ways that we're embedded with, benefiting from, and dependent on, for example, the US's perpetuation of colonialism. And it's important to sort of ask if any of this is all fucking necessary, you know what I mean? The ways that we've seen COVID be normalized, the Federal Emergency on COVID was ended prematurely. And it really cut off the picture of what COVID was in the United States. And we saw Biden stand up an emergency to get billions of dollars of money to Israel for weapons, like [snaps] -- I just snapped, which is bad radio -- ike it was no big deal, right? And overnight, right? It's really important to think through, like what is an emergency to the state and why, when particularly we're up against advocacy that we've been -- for example, like folks in the COVID community, right, like, what does it mean to sort of have a failed appeal or appeal for this funding in the context of really knowing how the US spends its money, resources, and where the priorities lie?

Liat Ben-Moshe 17:00

Well, and also as disability justice people, abolitionists, and so on, I mean, I think the example you brought, Leah, the kind of unnatural disaster that you were talking about, I mean, I think we can think about the -- you know, even when aid is discussed, like I'm not even talking weapons, because I think that's like low hanging fruit for activists, right, like I think we can agree on the non-weapon -- hopefully, right, hopefully. But what about the aid in terms of health, food, shelter, you know, that kind of aid. I think there's something to be said about how that's used, and kind of weaponized, and how also, at least some Palestinian activists, and also around the world, you know, in Haiti, and so onm are like, we don't want y'all's aid, because we know what you're going to do, right? It's kind of an occupation by proxy, and sometimes not by proxy, like literal occupation, right? You see the US doing that as well. And I think what people are calling for, and again, this is why it was important, the statement, to not say at the end, we call for the opening of the border with Egypt and for aid to -- because I think, again, low hanging fruit -- we call for the end of occupation.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 18:18

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's like the sort of NGO relationship that exists, and the ways that that also becomes this entire industry, and global public health in particular, you know, it's like, I guess a good pairing with this episode is the Adia Benton interview from last year, but like the idea of like, okay, so what, we're going to negotiate for like 100 aid trucks a day instead of 75, right? These kinds of thresholds and these discussions that you can get dragged into around this stuff, especially when it comes to like, oh, you know, we want to make sure that this is like treated as an international crime or whatever or under -- you know, we want to make sure that Israel is like towing the law, or these kinds of like ways of winning on technicality. I think actually like the lived experience of disability, and disability theory, give you a lot of good material reasons why, if you are at the table negotiating, you have already lost, right? I'm just thinking back to, for example, a recent disability sort of scandal in the US was when Rochelle Walensky was saying that it was encouraging that the only people who were dying of breakthrough COVID infections were people who were already unwell to begin with, and, you know, it was a bit of a scandal, a bit of an outcry. She, of course, did a listening session with a lot of disability advocates, you know, people like Matt Cortland went to the table, then they listened to her and they, I'm sure, exchanged harsh words, but, you know, at the end of the day, it's like, well, what came out of that, right? Did anything change in terms of the way that the US government was conceptualizing vulnerability or disability or immunocompromised people just existing in the world, right, after that fact? Like, did they actually listen to those activists, or was that a moment of co-optation, was that a moment where our energies were effectively neutralized by these counterinsurgent tactics that the state employs all the time. And so it's really, I think, it's key, and it's important to understand also the kind of dire circumstances put even more urgent pressure on all of us to think through these things incredibly deeply, no matter how challenging and upsetting and difficult it might be to like sit with the complicity that everyone sort of has with the violence that we've been seeing in the last 90 plus days. The 60,000 plus people who are wounded, right, like these -- these numbers, like these are all people, right? Like, every single one of those is a person who may have like a care relationship with another person who may already be disabled, right, who may be a person who's providing medical care, right? When we think about what Israel is doing through the escalation of bombing and of really kind of block by block land wars, taking territory in Gaza, it's really -- it's a terrible object lesson in how military strategy involves intentional disablement, not just in one aspect, but in a totalizing sense, right? You're going to -- you're going to attack the water, you're going to attack the healthcare infrastructure, you're going to attack the physical space, shelter, power, all of these things, but then each person who is injured, who needs care, etc., like all of these community relationships, family relationships, that are destabilized, all of the trees that are killed, right, all of those olive trees that are just bombed and are gone now. This is like an entire ecology, right, that is being disabled and like that is what war-making is.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 18:18

Yeah. I don't know if you heard this, and this is, you know, just one statement, but that an aide in the government, you know, this comes from a think tank in Tel Aviv University, he said that Gaza should be flattened, you know, they love to use that word, and they should build an eco park on it. So there you go. Greenwashing galore. But you know, but your point also about able-washing I think is very -- you know, very well taken. I mean, I think that there's something, that again, people here can recognize through COVID, and I just wanted to put this word out, because I know it's on all our minds, which is eugenics.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 22:58

Yes.

Jules Gill-Peterson 22:59

Mhm.

Liat Ben-Moshe 23:00

But I do think it's at the core of what's going on. So part of what's going on, like you just said, in terms of land, is absolutely about ethnic cleansing. It's about very kind of basic settler colonialism, but intertwined with that is this eugenicist impetus, and I think that that's really kind of core. Eugenics, as a practice, is undergirding a lot of these kind of colonial strategies of incarceration, of -- again, connecting our kind of abolitionist sensibilities to the question of Palestine, it's about the violence, again, of colonialism itself, of settler colonialism itself, of Zionism itself, which is, of course, connected to white supremacy, you know, and so on. So I don't know if you all want to kind of jump on the eugenicist thing, but I would be interested to kind of hearing some thoughts.

Jules Gill-Peterson 23:57

No, I think that's so spot on. I mean, it makes me think about the mechanics of eugenics, right? Because like, there's eugenic ideology, which [unclear] are a set of wild fantasies about racial superiority, you know, but those don't exist. And so it's like the mechanics of eugenics have to produce that fiction. And it just makes me think that, you know, the 19th century notion that was very popular, both for US settler colonial science, but also in the British Empire, the fantasy of so called quote unquote like dying races, groups of people that colonial states selected for eradication, but part of their justification for state policies that led to mass dispossession of land and kinship structures, theft of property, mass starvation, disease, and then sometimes also, outright killing, but more often than not, a lot of incarceration and dispossession and just sort of waiting out for -- for genocide to be accomplished over a certain timescale, right? Like the justification from kind of state science was like, well, this "race" was doomed to die out because it's not fit enough. And it's like, okay, that's actually just an alibi for producing conditions under which people die, as this kind of self serving loop. And it just like -- part of what I'm hearing all of us talking about that I find really helpful is like starting from the premise of disability and a demand of transnational either disability solidarity, which is for the end of the occupation, is that it understands the event that's ongoing right now. And genocide is transpiring over a much longer timescale than just, you know, a particular military action, which is like killing so many more people and causing so much more damage, is moving so quickly, and in such an extreme way, but it serves like the state narratives, it serves imperial narratives of war, to imagine more as this like exceptional event that's taking place right now, where you get to then quibble over those details or negotiate over those -- like this many, this -- you know, aid trucks and da da da. And like part of how that serves the ends of the colonial state is by disappearing this long-term eugenic practice, about how do you produce the lie that an entire population of people are in some way doomedm, right? How do you hide your own culpability for that production? I think part of it is through generations of mass disablement and incarceration. There's just like only centuries of historical examples here, right? But we don't even -- yeah, I mean, it's just so -- it's just like, oh, okay, yeah, there's that transnational solidarity moment. Like, obviously, what's going on in Gaza is deeply informed at the like level of practice by the history of the United States and the extermination and genocidal practices visited upon indigenous peoples over centuries. I mean, just like, absolutely, right. I mean, I think that's -- yeah, there's just something really clarifying about where -- where this -- if we start here, where is our attention drawn, right? And how big do we understand the scale of the violence, but also then, how large does the demand, right, for justice have to be, to actually address the enormity of what's going on?

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 27:20

Well, I mean, actually, I'll bring in a quote from Alice Wong here, who wrote a piece in December for her blog, for Disability Visibility Project, called “Why Palestinian Liberation is Disability Justice.” And I appreciated the way that Alice sort of directly, you know, was addressing the disability community here. But this is also really like I think instructive, even for people who don't really know anything about like disability culture in the US. So Alice writes, "Solidarity isn't transactional or conditional. While it's clear that approximately 50,000 disabled Gazans face great danger, disabled people shouldn't care just because they can relate to what's happening. Cross-movement solidarity is another disability justice principle that I deeply believe in. We need to build relationships and show up for other movements because it's a way to build power and it's just the right thing to do." So, you know, part of what is important to understand here, right, is that there are so many different ways that we're going to talk about how different concepts of disability can help sort of understand what's going on in terms of the pathologization of resistance to this eugenic eco-genocide that's going on, that's not just concentrating in Palestine, but right now, you know, is something that is happening all over the world. There's even talk of well, what if -- there's like discussion of a displacement project of like Israel shipping people from Palestine to Congo, like literally doing I think the exact same plan that Germany had in the 30s, to do that. And so there's -- it's just -- like what we're trying to do here is actually just sort of say like part of what is important to disability justice, and is part of disability theory, is about building these relationships, showing up for other movements, taking what we have to offer, and trying to help others build power with it, right, in their movements where they are, and ways that we can be in solidarity with them. And so a great way of thinking through, in particular, both the eugenic logics that are applying directly within Palestine and against Palestinians, but also the eugenic logics that are applied against folks who are resisting this from within the imperial core is really key. And this is actually something that it's great to have Leah and Liat on for, in particular, right, because the pathologization of resistance to genocide is that, you know, folks are irrational, they are crazy, that they are violent, right? The phrase "from the river to the sea" has been called an incitement of violence or antisemitic in its like target, right? And so obviously, you know, we have the kind of frameworks within disability theory and communities and mad communities of really understanding like what is rationality, right, in the face of extreme displacement, genocidal pressure? Can you really sort of look at somebody saying in the imperial core, fuck this, not ever, ever, should we be sending $14 billion to support genocide? Like to say that that's crazy?

Leah Harris 30:32

Yeah, absolutely. You know, it just makes me -- all this makes me think about the ways in which eugenics and genocide are so intertwined, right, in the sense of needing to lay that groundwork, you know, by the colonial powers of who is and is not worthy of life, who is and is not worthy of being able to dissent, right? And kind of, I think, part of our solidarity as disabled folks, is to be continually making these connections and integrating them into our own resistance. And I really just want to highlight an article that appeared a couple of months ago by Nu’man Abd al-Wahid, "Pathologizing Palestinians to revive eugenic genocide," which gives a really, really good historical way of understanding what -- the mechanisms that are operating now and he says, "The British and Western media framed the Resistance's advance in terms which elided the colonial roots of the Resistance’s raison d’être, which is freedom from occupation and colonialism. Instead, the Palestinian Resistance was in effect pathologized; depicted as beholden to a mental sickness, rather than as a commitment to a noble political cause that's rooted in centuries-long resistance to Western colonialism and imperialism," right. And so how this groundwork has been laid for so long that paints Palestinians as having this irrational, you know, bloodthirsty hatred of Jews, which really belies the fact that, right, Palestinians themselves said they would resist their oppressors, whatever their religion or identity. This has been pointed out by many, but I'll point listeners especially to an essay by Mohammed El-Kurd in Mondoweiss that's titled, "Jewish settlers stole my house. It’s not my fault they’re Jewish." And so -- right?

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 32:31

Such a good title.

Leah Harris 32:32

It's such a great title. So it's like seeing that, right, how that pathologizing is operating, right, towards Palestinians as a justification for the genocide that's happening right now. We can see how those same dynamics, certainly not expressed in precisely the same way, but in that same intensity and scale, but you know, thinking about even here in the US, how we pathologize resistance, right, in a whole number of ways. Thinking about specifically the term anosognosia -- do you want to get into that now?

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 33:09

Hell yes, please.

Jules Gill-Peterson 33:11

Yeahhh.

Leah Harris 33:11

Right, as part of the overall sort of eugenics project, right, that it's this diagnosis that's, you know, started really looking more at brain injury, but over the last 30 years has been extended to the "mental health" realm, really as a way to justify the punishment, the discipline, the incarceration, of those deemed "severely mentally ill and lacking insight into their condition," right. And, you know, the people who are sort of pushing this anosognosia framework are highlighting a very, very small number of violence and murders that are committed by people diagnosed with mental illness, as this justification, right, for the expansion of state intervention, forced treatment, institutionalization, right? So you have the "violent" people on one side, and then on the other side, this framework is also extended to those who are unhoused, right? Why are they unhoused -- that question is never asked. Where, you know, for the reasons that we can all talk about, and listeners know, right, it's been extended to those folks who are unhoused and unable to secure housing and/or health care, even health care for themselves, right? Who, in America in this day and age, are largely Black and brown. So you have both those who are considered "dangerous," the violent ones, and the innocent sort of victims of a nameless houselessness, both being pathologized by the state in this very white supremacist kind of paternalism. And I just will add a few more things. A central characteristic of so-called anosognosia is the refusal to accept one's diagnosis or destiny, right, and it is precisely this resistance which is pathologized, where compliance, right, literally that's the term that's used, seen to be the cure, or the way to [audio cuts out] person has been treated, right? So this tendency, you know, talking just to the US -- settler colonial US context, right, this has a long history. This isn't something that emerged in the last 30 years. But for example, the ways in which the pseudoscience diagnosis of drapetomania was organized against enslaved people for their wish to be free, right, and how in the 60s and 70s, Black Power activists were pathologized en masse for their resistance to white supremacy, right. And we can see how these kind of colonial concepts, the sorting of human beings, applies when we think about how resistance movements generally are pathologized, right, how Hamas is pathologized, and resistance movements overall. And this demonization that is ongoing, you know, expressed by pundits and politicians, right, for a refusal of an individual or a movement to accept or comply with the status quo.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 36:01

So well said. And see, this is -- and I really appreciate the way that you laid it out in terms of it's a process of sorting, and this is really key to understand, because it's not -- it's not really -- it's not building power to say, you know, against an accusation of crazy that you're not crazy, right? It's -- that doesn't help. That's participating in the sorting, right? What's important is to understand, you know, how does this accusation function materially, structurally, within this specific context? And what does that accusation do? You know, the point is not to assert the sanity of one group over another and the rationality of one group at the expense of another, right, and that's why this is, again, you know, a moment where it's important to distinguish between disability rights and disability justice, because disability justice explicitly is working against the fact that older disability movements sometimes built their power off each other and off claiming, you know, I deserve freedom because I am not sick or I am not crazy. I am not disabled, I'm just crazy. You know, all of these different ways. It's important to really think through like, okay, so what is actually trying to be accomplished in the designation of one group being deserving and one group being undeserving, right? What is the kind of political rationality and calculus of designating one group as eugenic and one group as dysgenic, right, as good breeding, good stock, good body politic, and bad, noncompliant body politic, right, those that need to be culled and weeded out. And that power to sort of lay, you know, down the kind of line, the prudence of what's good, and what's bad, that is like very much where the violence and the power of the state lies, right. And it's also like a moment where the state is perceived as like benevolent, and sparing, and caring, and maybe giving of grace or justice in some way, right? These sort of ways that we think about, for example, state officials who might speak out against this, right, they might feel that their speech needs to be constrained, and that they need to say, well, this genocide in Gaza is genocide because civilians are being killed, because women and children are being killed, because disabled and sick people are being killed, because the already injured are being killed. And what does that say about the other, right? You know, like, in every sort of designation of a worthy subject, you're drawing a line for sorting and for designating, like who shall be saved, and who doesn't deserve the state's resources or attention? Who is dysgenic?

Jules Gill-Peterson 39:05

Yeah, I'm so glad we're breaking down this part of it because I feel like the way that the like basically role of psychiatry has just been baked into the state, to depoliticize entire movements. I mean, just the foundational fraudulence of claiming that people who are acting politically in defense of the interests of themselves and their people, are in fact not only not acting politically, but are psychotic for doing so, right, that they are unaware of what they are doing. They're not in control of their own actions. They're, you know, acting irrationally or out of some sort of base, inhuman motivation. I mean, it's such a powerful rationale. It's hard for me to think of a more dehumanizing, disqualifying rationale. And I feel like, you know, there are these long histories of actual clinicians participating in that. Leah, you named a bunch of them. And I was also thinking of like French psychiatry's role in pathologizing Algerian anti-colonial resistance. Like there's so many examples of clinicians doing it. But now it's just sort of baked into the rhetoric of the state. And I feel like it's been lurking underneath, especially like earlier, especially in October, I feel like just in the like extreme disavowal of the idea that there even could be anti-colonial resistance going on. That that was just like an impermissible statement, in and of itself, just felt like so loaded with this ginned up like old psychiatric dehumanization of political resistance as a form of psychosis in and of itself, where yeah, the only cure is for you to admit that -- well, is actually just for you to become compliant, right? You don't have to admit anything, you just have to completely submit to wrongful power over you. I mean, it's just so -- it's just so macabre. Sorry, it gets me so, so worked up. But yeah, I'm glad we're taking the time to talk about that part, because I feel like that aspect of it often is de-linked from conversations around physical disabilities or physiologically manifesting disabilities or disease. And we don't often get to sort of point out how they work in lockstep with one another.

Liat Ben-Moshe 41:23

Well, another thing to connect what you were both saying is maybe to think about the construction of terrorism.

Jules Gill-Peterson 41:33

Yeah, exactly.

Liat Ben-Moshe 41:33

Right, I mean, yeah, Jules, what you were just referring to. The kind of construction of Palestinians as animals and so on. The way that psychiatry intervenes in the construction of terrorism, I'm sure you've had shows about this. This is not something that started, you know, now, but particularly, I think folks should pay attention to what's going on now, in terms of this program of "countering violent extremism," the work of Nicole Nguyen, just released a report called a Political Psychiatry, it's freely available online. And the way that, first of all, individuals are constructed as terrorists versus like groups, right, the way that white supremacy really seeps in to how we construct dangerousness. You know, those of us who are abolitionists, who understand police as terror -- not just police terror, but police as terror, always -- understand how white supremacy is caked in there, right, whoi is considered to be violent with just their bodies, or for just being noncompliant, the way that Leah was just talking about. So I think the construction of danger, the construction of terrorism, as taken away from the kind of political spectrum of resistance, I think is also related to the function of psychiatry, amongst others. I mean, it's also in education for example. Can I say -- can I say one more thing about carceral --

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 41:33

Yeah, of course.

Jules Gill-Peterson 41:37

Of course.

Liat Ben-Moshe 41:40

Carceral sanism has been kind of bothering me and you know, there's something going on now, for people who don't understand how stuff works in 48, like in Israel, Israel, in addition to being what we call here, settler colonial, people in Israel talk about Zionism as a more kind of specific framework. I think -- I'm using settler colonialism, because I think that's also what connects it to US settler colonialism and also something that maybe the listeners understand a little bit more. But Zionism as an ideology is very racist, including towards Jews. It's very sanist. It talks about, you know, an ideology of, in addition to inhabiting this land, it's an ideology of overcoming like the weak Jew, right, like so to have this like healthy, new -- that it really is ideology of, at its root, eugenics. But also, again, this kind of like overcoming the -- this Jew that just sits and studies or whatever. So some of it is also kind of just anti-intellectualism, which is also something that's used now -- I'm just gonna say -- I'll give two examples, and you can respond or wrap up. But the two examples are, Israel has been very good at targeting medical people, journalists, scientists, in Gaza, and more generally, like into territories, but particularly now in Gaza. And I think part of it is also to kind of show like, look, Palestine is so backwards, it doesn't have infrastructure, you know, all of that, when Israel did that, right. But it's all this kind of idea of like Leah was saying at the beginning of our conversation, of not understanding who the perpetrator is, right.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 45:01

Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, the sort of characteristic kind of like most, I think, cartoonish, ironic use of the word, I guess, cartoonish representation of the kind of Zionist attitude about the "diasporas," like Eli Valley's Diaspora Boy comic. Just like a -- it's a good introduction to understanding eugenics and Zionism, if you're not familiar. But I think the point that, you know, you were speaking to, Liat, in some ways is like almost how these realities that are claimed in the global sphere and politically, like that Israel is, as a unified bloc, like all in on Zionism, or that Palestine is like backwards, or, you know, lacks infrastructure or is in the kind of -- like, again, I'm thinking of Klee Benally's work, you know, the kind of pre-modern period is -- are all, you know, also conditions that are directly being created by the settler occupation, and by the direct aggression, and the ecocide, and the trade policies, and the law, and the international law, and the rest of the laws of the global core of imperial countries that support and fund this, right. So when we're looking to understand disability, right, we have to look to these larger structures that mitigate and sort of apply those downward pressures that put us in that position of being, you know, designated as vulnerable, right? We have to understand like the context of that vulnerability, and how the state in some sense prefigures the burden and the disposability and the disallocation of resources, the organized and disorganized abandonment of targeted populations, to the benefit of really just the continuation of the settler project writ large, which is what capitalism is. You can't like extract the settler colonialism and capitalism. These are structures that make each other possible. And it's important to understand that -- that I think that these realities, much like the concepts that we're up against when it comes to carceral sanist mental health care reforms in the United States, you know, the ideas of more humane treatment, jails, forced treatment, things being unnecessary, things like that, these kind of frameworks are, again, like we're up against things that require active maintenance to be constructed, right, that are not in and of themselves, realities. And how that's accomplished is through, you know, state eugenics, which is always talked about in terms of breeding, but importantly, should also always be understood as a process of the state sorting and marking which populations are going to get advantages and which populations are going to get disadvantages. And the only way that that really actually plays out is in terms of provisioning and distribution and extraction. And that's all mitigated in terms of law and policy. And so in some ways, you know, these kinds of ways of looking at these things structurally can feel, I don't know, nihilistic or destabilizing, but at the same time, it's like, we all know these structures so well, we are all deeply embedded in them. And I think that, you know, to call back to the words of Rasha Abdulhadi, who we had on the show back in October, October 16th, you know, Rasha said, you need to do anything and everything to throw even the sand under your fingernails into the gears of the settler colonial project. And that requires a tremendous amount of thinking and also willingness to refuse, and to act, and to also be curious about why something might be deemed antisocial or targeted or called dangerous or called terrorism, when perhaps like that -- what that sort of object that is actually like terrorizing the state is, is something that is like counter to the objective of continuing the settler project. I mean, I think back to the conversation I had with Jessica Phoenix Sylvia about censorship in prison and books being censored for the cause and reason that the book itself is a threat to the perpetuation of the carceral institution and therefore cannot be allowed within the walls, right, and how that censorship isn't just towards one person but then, you know, when Jess's book is banned, that shuts down Jess as a node of information that disseminates to her entire community within the institution. And then you think, you know, I'm not trying to say like books break walls, but you know what I mean? Like, it's just that it's everything. And that the sort of powers that we are up against are powers that require constant maintenance and we are all part of that, and recognizing our roles in that, and the sort of ways that our lives and our participation in the body politic and our resources and the ways that we contribute willingly and unwillingly to these projects are part of where we can also find moments and points of resistance, and theory that we can offer to struggles that we are in solidarity with, in the hopes that the things that we learn here, inside the machine that we are in, can help someone inside a different machine build power for themselves.

Leah Harris 50:56

Yeah, it makes me -- everything was so right on, Beatrice, and some of what you were saying made me think about, you know, really making the connections with yes, the way people with disabilities are pathologized and punished and disciplined, you know, by the imperial core, and the settler colonial framework and regimes, but also the pathologizing of protesters here and how we have responded to it, right, and like how to kind of avoid those dichotomizing traps of you know, victims and perpetrators. And it just made me think about November 15th, when folks were mobilizing against the Democratic National Committee, there was a big meeting in DC. And, you know, the way lawmakers sort of spun out this rhetoric of being victimized by these blood-thirsty protesters, right, kind of that same sort of pathologizing, like they're irrationally blocking doors, you know, and the message -- messaging in response, which a lot of us vehemently rejected this framing, kept repeating, like we were peaceful and nonviolent protesters. And like, when you're making that argument, I think, Beatrice, you made that point, is like, you've already sort of lost when you're kind of trying to, you know, just put yourself in one or other of those -- of that dichotomy, right. And there was like this defensiveness that came about, you know, much in the same way that I've seen and recognized mad people being on the defensive against efforts to paint them as dangerous, citing that kind of research, right, that, you know, we're more likely to be victims than perpetrators of violence. It's kind of like falling into that same trap, right? And of course, moreover, it's all ignored, right, because of the carceral sanism and the settler colonial instinct to always conflate madness and resistance as dangerous, right. And then you can also see this operating in how, you know, what are deemed as non-violent forms of protest, like the Great March of Return in 2018 in Gaza, and BDS, and how other movements that didn't involve armed resistance still kind of face that same punishment, weaponization, it's criminalized here in something like, what, 32 states here in the US to be involved with BDS, you know, people have to sign oaths and whatnot. So it's just this huge, kind of like mass gaslighting operation. And I think it's so important to be thinking in terms of how we're talking about resistance to avoid sort of falling into these dichotomizing traps.

Jules Gill-Peterson 53:38

Mm. Now, I mean, I'm just sitting with what you were just saying. I mean, it's like that -- that perennial question about if you've already -- like, if your political solidarities have already been prefigured by the state as irrational, what real benefit is there in trying to pass yourself off as reasonable after like, well -- you know, like? I understand the impulse. I don't mean like why do people do that? It's just sort of like ehhh, to what end, right? I mean, any sort of victories on the other side, which there will probably be very few of, will be Pyrrhic, will be hollow. And I just keep, yeah, you know, thinking that there's -- there's something more, I don't know, it just feels different to start from a place of solidarity that rejects the sort of -- the ridiculousness of being framed out in advance as irrational and incapable of doing anything meaningful. It's like, eh, just fuck that. Fuck that. I just feel like we've been having a conversation about, you know, a different starting place, that already exists, that so many people around the world are a part of, and one that just feels so much more immediate and tangible and meaningful than trying to chase the showdown with a totally fraudulent set of premises that are, you know, allowing for state sponsored settler violence and genocide. Like, yeah. It feels -- I mean, it both feels -- like I was gonna say, it feels easy to let go of all that nonsense except like, it's not easy, it's very hard. But just in terms of like emotional satisfaction, there's just something -- I don't know, there's just a certain kind of relief about giving up the most outrageous fictions to which you -- to which we are all subjected, differently, but nevertheless subjected every day. There is something actually empowering about doing that, in concert with other people, right, in actual relationships of solidarity. That's how you build strength.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 55:47

Hear, hear. Well put. Liat, any final points, no pressure to make a final point, though.

Liat Ben-Moshe 55:53

I think my only point is, our hearts are with the people of Gaza right now. But also, you know, I think it's important to say for the people who are listening to the Death Panel, in Gaza and the territories and in Palestine, that, you know, we're more than thinking about you, you know. I think every day, all of us are engaged in various ways against these machines, processes, and murderous apparatuses, as we discussed, you know, for the last hour. so I just wanted to put it out there really, you know, for my heart.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 56:37

Well, now that I'm crying, I think that's a great place to leave it for today. Thank you both, Leah, Liat, for coming back on the show. Thank you so much for all of the generous time that you've given to our listeners this year and really appreciate every chance to talk. And patrons, thank you so much for supporting the show. We couldn't do any of this without you. If you'd like to support the show, become a patron at patreon.com/deathpanelpod. And of course, if you'd like to help us out a little bit more, just do whatever you can in solidarity with Palestine. As always, Medicare for All now, solidarity forever. Stay alive another week.

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Transcript by Kendra Kline. (Kendra is currently accepting freelance transcript work — email her if you need transcripts!)