27th November 2023. Palestine | Advertising
The utopian vision of ‘A Land for All’. // Advertising versus climate change [#519]
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1: The utopian vision of ‘A Land for All’
In the brief moment of the ‘pause’ in the war in Gaza it seems possible to write something about it, since writing about anything in the middle of violence is likely to be misunderstood. What I am writing about here is the utopian project, ‘A Land For All’.
And three things to be clear about before I start: I don’t believe that violence—whether fast violence or slow violence—resolves conflicts; if you don’t want to read more about Palestine and Israel, just skip this piece; and the reason I am writing about utopian demands is because I don’t believe that in solving a seventy-year conflict that iterative steps will have any effect.
The role of utopian thinking can be misunderstood, sometimes deliberately. In writing about it here, I’m drawing on Ruth Levitas’ framing in her book Utopia as Method:
(M)y intention is to make explicit a method that is already in use whenever and wherever people individually or collectively consider what the future might bring and how humans might choose to shape it. In naming what is involved in utopia as a method, I mean to encourage and endorse this as a legitimate and useful mode of thought and knowledge-generation... The utopian method allows preferred futures - including the survival of humanity on earth - their proper causal role in the emergent future, rather than leaving this to the potential catastrophe of projected trends... The utopian alternative is to think about where we might want to get to and what routes are open to us. (p.218-219).
This is a long way into writing about the ‘A Land for All’ project, covered in American Prospect in an article by Ariel Ron. (I see that the Israeli political scientist Dahlia Scheindlin also mentioned it in a piece in the Guardian).
(Image: A Land for All)
Its utopian nature is acknowledged in the standfirst to the American Propsect article:
An idea for a confederal system for Israel and Palestine is impossible to enact today. But it’s a vision that must be worked toward.
The article starts by observing that—in effect—the escalation of the levels of violence, first by Hamas’ attack and then by Israel’s response, has opened up new risks in the region:
The huge protests for Palestine across the world attest to that reality, no less than the Biden administration’s startlingly decisive military and diplomatic reaction to the conflict. A wider regional war is a distinct possibility, as deadly clashes along the Lebanese and Syrian borders occur daily, rattling the entire Middle East.
But, precisely because of this heightened level of risk, there are, potentially, new levels of interest in finding different routes to a long-term, stable, solution. It turns out that people in both Israel and Palestine have been working on this:
Over the past decade, a group of Palestinian and Israeli scholars, journalists, and activists have crafted a joint plan for a just and viable future . Called a “A Land for All,” it begins from the premise that the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is one land with two peoples who will always endure, because each cherishes the profound connections to their shared homeland.
At its heart, the proposal envisages creating two confederated states in the area represented by Israel and Palestine, with free movement for all within the area:
This will allow refugee Palestinians to return, if not precisely to their old lands then near to them, while Jewish settlers can remain on their land under Palestinian governance. The plan envisions Jerusalem as a capital district for both states and for the confederal institutions to manage common issues, including security and key questions pertaining to water rights, macroeconomic policy, and the like.
There would be restitution for Palestinians who can not realistically reclaim their homes, and for Jews expelled from Muslim countries and forced to leave their property. Each state would be democratic and would be committed to principles of equality under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The group’s website contains both the vision and much more detail on the statement of principles.
But when I looked at it I was struck, in particular, by this acknowledgment of shared history and shared geography:
There is a deep emotional need for partnership in this land. When Palestinians say Palestine, they refer to the entire area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean; just as when Israelis say Eretz Yisrael, they refer to the same space. The homeland is one and the same, even if it is called by different names... We live in a small geographic space. If a river in the West Bank gets contaminated, the groundwater in the coastal plain is affected. If air quality is poor on the coastal plain, it will be felt in the West Bank.
As Ariel Ron says in his article, we couldn’t be further away from this vision right now:
Is it remotely possible? Certainly not now, perhaps never. But it is nevertheless critically important to begin discussing what a just and sane future could look like. This is essential because without a plausible destination, it will be impossible to rebuild the constituencies for peace that will have to fight, tooth and nail, against the forces of Jewish and Muslim supremacy. And for this to happen, people must believe that there is a future in which living side by side will once again be possible. A Land for All is as good a starting point as any for addressing the concrete issues at stake, and for legitimizing the principles of cooperative coexistence.
You don’t, either, need to be a Middle East expert to list the many obstacles. But equally, there are leverage points here, starting with America’s role and the long-term interests of the Arab states.
In her Guardian article, Dahlia Scheindlin makes a comparison with the resolution of the conflict in the North of Ireland. It was possible; it was difficult; and it has had to resist attacks and provocations designed to destabilise it:
(P)eace agreements involve painful concessions and setbacks, and generate violence from spoilers. History has shown that people will die during peace negotiations and even after peace is signed, like the victims of the Omagh bombing after the 1998 Good Friday agreement. And it’s worrying to consider precedent that political concessions are won through intolerable violence.
But as she also points out, we’ve had an endless war, and that hasn’t worked:
(P)eople are dying cruelly today; it’s hard to imagine anything worse than the present. We have lived with war for ever, while a comprehensive peace agreement has never been tried.
And that’s the point about utopia, at least in Levitas’ reading. It exists as a form of desire, a gap that—at the very least, at the level of the unconscious—we would like to be filled.
2: Advertising versus climate change
If we are serious about reducing emissions, then we ought to be serious about reducing the consumption of goods and services that create emissions. That’s been the premise of the Badvertising campaign (you can see what they did there), run over the past few years by Andrew Simms and Leo Murray.
Simms has always been a prolific writer, and so it’s no surprise to find that he and Murray have now written a book to go with the campaign, also called Badvertising. Jeremy Williams has reviewed it at his Earthbound blog:
“Why is the climate changing faster than us?” ask Andrew Simms and Leo Murray. “One reason is the mixed messages brought to us by advertising that normalises high-carbon products and lifestyles, in contradicton of climate science.”
Criticising advertising for its adverse impacts always puts the ad industry into a difficult position. Either it is effective—and since the advertising sector loves giving out prizes to each other, there are plenty of people out there who have won awards for the effectiveness of their ads. (Incidentally, you still have five months to get your entries in for the IPA’s advertising effectiveness awards.)
Alternatively, it isn’t effective, in which case that leaves the question as to why major brands spend a portion of their revenues on advertising.
Even if you don’t believe that advertising a single product is that effective, and I have former colleagues who used to make that case to me from time to time, it’s hard to argue with the notion that the sheer weight of ads that we see in a given day creates a climate that normalises consumption at the expense of spending money, or time, on other forms of relationship that aren’t necessarily mediated by the market. In a world of an ad-financed internet, that might be as many as 6000 ads a day, although I’d like to see the study that supports that number.
Indeed, one of the long-standing arguments in favour of the BBC, for all of its regressive funding mechanism, is that it remains a media space where you can engage with content without having that engagement mediated by advertising. It is a public library of the airwaves.
But I digress.
As Williams says, this is all a lot more urgent in an age of global heating as the world is—according to the United Nations—heading towards a catastrophic three degrees of warming.
The book has a couple of chapters that focus on two areas where the market is creating significant emissions: SUVs and flights. SUVs first:
Every new SUV sold will be smoking the streets for an average of 14 years, but it is only bought once. The advert that convinces the buyer has a lot to answer for.
And hardly any SUVs are driven by people who need to drive a vehicle off-road (farmers or foresters, for example). As it happens, the UK Advertising Standards Agency has just banned a Toyota SUV ad for being misleading, and made short work of Toyota’s argument that the off-road sequences were intended to attract farmers or forest workers).
(‘Subvertising Toyota earlier this year. Via @fokawolf/Twitter)
Williams reminds us that SUVs are less safe—this is even true for the people inside them, according to one study—use up an awful lot more fuel, and have been a complete focus of the car industry for some years now as a way to prop up falling margins:
SUV sales are no accident. Drivers haven’t had this unmet need for oversized cars for the last century, secretly longing to drive a 4×4 in the city. Demand has been created from scratch, in order to make more money. The book details the backstory of the SUV, how loopholes in US efficiency standards helped them along, and how car marketers targeted drivers with anti-social tendencies as a specific audience. Yes, really.
As for flying, there’s no low carbon option (although electric or hydrogen might eventually fill the short-to-medium haul gap) and the richest 1%, globally, account for 50% of flights, mostly for leisure:
It’s one of the most stark examples of how the lifestyles of the wealthiest drive the climate breakdown that destroys the lives of the poorest. And yet it’s still perfectly normal to encourage people to fly for the most trivial of reasons.
There are examples of reining in advertising that would work fine in both of these cases. Smoking is the most obvious example, even if it took decades—certainly more time than we have right now:
(T)obacco was slowly restricted in how and where it could advertise. It clung on in sports sponsorship, which is another focus of the book. Despite powerful lobby groups protecting the industry, it was gradually silenced. The fact that cigarette adverts are banned today seems common sense, but it very much wasn’t for a very long time. We’ll think of SUV and flight adverts in the same way eventually.
Williams describes the book as having practical steps for limiting advertising. The book itself points out that we hear plenty about technological solutions to climate change that are often unproven and years away—so called ‘silver bullets’.
But we aren’t doing the social and cultural things that might help stop making things worse right now. And one of those things is to reduce the scale and scope of advertising. And just think: this might even give us an answer to that irritating question about whether advertising is effective.
Other writing: Music
At Salut!Live, I have a review of the guitarist Bert Jansch’s 80th birthday commemoration concert that was held at the start of the month, An extract:
{Stewart Lee, the compere] explained that he’d only ever had one conversation with Jansch, at a Pentangle gig in the 90s at the Half Moon in Putney, in south west London. Recognising the opening bars of Sally Free and Easy, he had punched the air and said "Yes", quite loudly. Jansch stopped playing and said from the stage, "Calm down".
j2t#519
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