Palestine’s realities are not different from our own. They are just starker, denser, more defined.

rather than [as] an exception, we can see Palestine and the struggles of Palestinians as exemplary.

That is to say, Palestine is an actually existing possibility for the general condition of social life in the twenty-first century. In the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, columnist Gideon Levy pithily called the regime one of 'real estate and messianism.' Not unlike a certain candidate for the US presidency.

The Palestinian situation has become exemplary for a new form of settlement and occupation in the era of real-estate driven capitalism. It is marked by a combination of old forms of domination with new modalities of deprivation. The regime uses spectacular punishment, typical of settler colonies, like the destruction of houses belonging to people designated as terrorists. By its walls and fences it creates physical segregation, typical of the divided cities of both the Cold War and global counterinsurgency post-9/11, as we can see in places like Baghdad. It also practices service deprivation, meaning cutting off water, electricity and other services, which has become typical of segregated global cities from Detroit to Johannesburg. One of these conditions makes for difficult living--all of them together creates a new paradigm. Putting together the old and the new, as happens in Palestine every day, everyday life under occupation becomes exemplary not exceptional. In these conditions, to have an everyday life and to live every day, is a revolutionary act.

Everyday life, every day

Because this is new, we need to be grounded. To understand what it means to live in this global paradigm, in other words, look at how life is lived every day. For some, the mention of the everyday will seem old hat. Like the conditions I am analyzing, this condition is a hybrid of the new and the old. There are four key aspects to the new global society, as I set out in How To See The World. It is comprised of a majority young (under 30), mostly urban, and networked society, undercut and challenged by the effects of climate change. It does so, moreover, in conditions of intensified colonialism. In my earlier work, I’ve demonstrated that visuality is a colonial technology that renders ground into space for battle or for enclosure. In Palestine, those spaces are indistinguishable. The political question that arises is whether Palestine becomes exemplary for the a security society, as advocated by politicians on both sides of the Atlantic and in Australia. Or, just possibly, it becomes the paradigm for a new decolonization.

Mapping the new global everyday is consistent with how the concept came into critical focus. Inspired by his involvement with Surrealist anti-colonialism, Henri Lefebvre published his ground-breaking Critique of Everyday Life in 1947, at height of the decolonial transformation following World War II. India had just become independent. The Nakba was just months away. For Lefebvre,

the revolution...can only be defined concretely, at the level of everyday life.

Working within the Marxist tradition, Lefebvre was more confident as to what the form of that revolution might be than we are today. It seems closer to Grace Lee Boggs' concept of {r}evolution, meaning 

a two-fold transformation of ourselves and our institutions.

This {r}evolution would require structural changes to eliminate poverty, racism and war, accompanied by what Dr. King called 'a mental and spiritual re-evaluation.' We need to be oriented towards people, not things, so as, said Boggs, 

to live more simply so that others can simply live.

The questions that arise from this interface of revolution and the everyday are those that motivate this project:

• What does it mean to have a life that matters?
• How can we see others, and who counts as human?
• How can we live with non-human life?