Hi dears, a one-off, short-notice edition in this hideous time, offered as an attempt to think clearly, mourn deeply, act rightly, and keep my humanity.
Sam Kriss, “But Not Like This,” Oct 10. Kriss, a lefty Jewish Brit committed to the Palestinian solidarity movement, writes of the “scummy,” “cretinous” conflation of atrocity with resistance, and the applause for (or minimization of) Hamas’s Oct 7 massacres by some members of an ostensibly antiracist and antifascist left. On the attempt to dress up the Simchat Torah slaughter as a natural, inevitable consequence of oppression, Kriss writes, “I’d suggest that any argument in defence of Palestinians that could also be used in defence of Israel is not fit for [the] purpose”; denying ethical subjecthood to Palestinians is another way to dehumanize them. This point is taken up by Naomi Klein in her Oct 11 column in The Guardian: to implicitly equate Palestinian liberation with the slaughter of Jewish elders, families, and children is precisely the IDF’s logic, and precisely the justification for what Klein calls a “militant Zionism” of brutality, violent displacement, and force.
Tareq Baconi, interviewed by Isaac Chotiner, Oct 11. A conversation with the president of the board of Al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Project. Baconi speaks both of the sadism of Hamas’s attacks and of the strike as a deliberate weakening of the Israeli government’s confidence that it can maintain apartheid without cost. We grieve and condemn sadistic violence and still affirm the justice of a struggle for Palestinian dignity, humanity, security, and self-determination. “[W]hen we really want to think about what this driver of violence is—and the pictures that have been coming out are sickening—we need to understand that colonial violence instills dehumanization both in the oppressor and in the oppressed. And it’s completely out of mind. It’s mind-boggling to me that Israeli protesters go out to protest for democracy in an apartheid regime. The only way they can hold that contradiction is if they accept that Palestinian lives are absent or expendable. And so we have to understand this violence, which, again, is heart-wrenching, in that context.” Baconi is a scholar of Hamas; he’s just one of many writers to note that Israel at first supported, and even funded, the Islamist organizations that would become Hamas, believing them to be a useful counterweight to the secular leftist revolutionaries of Fatah: too extreme to advance the cause of Palestinian statehood, useful as a wedge between Gaza and the West Bank, useful as an enemy to justify the 17-year-long strangulation of Gaza.
Hilary Plum, “Where Is the Left,” Oct 29. The IDF is engaged in genocide in Gaza; a million of the world’s children are under Israeli bombs; Palestinians and Palestinian solidarity are being erased by cultural and political powerbrokers across the Western world. Where is America’s national anti-war movement? Hilary writes about the “daily and difficult and dull and absolutely necessary” years-long work of building on the part of organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace in order to now summon a gathering big enough to shut down Grand Central Station; JVP committed to it, our anti-war left organizations haven’t. She talks about the demoralizing failures to stop war in Afghanistan and Iraq, about the backstabbing and contempt from mainstram Democrats to their anti-war progressive constituents. She reminds us that “there is no American left, but we are it.”
Shlomzion Kenan, a letter to Ariana Reines from Tel Aviv, Oct 12. On the “evil and feckless” cadre of men Nethanyahu has gathered around him, on the horrid irony of some of his government’s fiercest Israeli opponents being the targets of Hamas’s massacre, on the IDF’s “ethnic cleansing rampage” then just in its beginning stages.
Fady Joudah, “Say It: I’m Arab and Beautiful,” first published 2017. On refusing American necropolitics in the Arab world: refusing the normalization of Arab suffering; refusing the consignment to pre-modernity of Arab people; affirming the Arab’s beauty.
Youssef Rakha, “Human Intervention,” Oct 19. Rakha, an Egyptian writer, writes of the ghoulish, unbelievable Western “respectable” response—as “the ghosts of murdered children from all over Gaza run to the Egyptian border”—to Israel’s intensifying murderous violence in Gaza. “I might have dreamed of the West turning a blind eye: hypocrisy and historical guilt as well as indifference to non-Western suffering. I might have dreamed of silence. But I couldn’t have dreamed of so many ‘free world’ leaders not only giving the go-ahead, openly funding, arming and egging on genocide but also, while the killing unfolds in real time, expressing such post-truth solidarity with the killers. Even vetoing the attempt to give survivors occasional respite. I couldn’t have imagined Westerners, out of sheer racial hatred of Arabs and Muslims—what else?—going full North Korea to punish sympathy with the victims of genocide as it happens.” Across Europe and the United States, there has never been a more repressive, threatening, and censorious environment for the expression of solidarity with Palestine; there’s also never been, in my lifetime, more or louder expression of exactly that solidarity. We are speaking up for the sake of our shared humanity. “All I can really say,” Rakha, writes, “is that, foolish and untenable as it remains, I continue to refuse to be Hamas. I am human, I am Arab, I am Muslim, I support the Palestinians’ legitimate right to resistance. But, unlike the obscenely barbarous Westerners who rule my world, I am not Hamas.”
April Rosenblum, “The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere,” first published 2007. Offering this to my fellow gentiles on the left engaged in Palestinian solidarity work. Rosenblum, a Jewish anti-war activist, writes to her comrades that, while anti-Semitism has a long and brutal history in American white nationalism, it can seep as well into left spaces. Zionism, Rosenblum writes, is a form of nationalism; like all nationalisms, “it has not fully liberated its people and has oppressed others in the process,” and has had “racist and oppressive results for the Palestinian people.” She traces its history and its interrelationship of European anti-Semitism and European colonial policy. We can condemn genocide, we can demand an end to the Occupation, without equating either the Occupation or the current fascistic government of Israel with the “will” of Jewish people writ large. We can condemn the implicit and very old anti-Semitic poison that Jews bear some kind of collective responsibility for which collective Jewish bloodletting will be the expiation and necessary balance. Rejecting this, and fighting for freedom for Palestinains, makes possible a common vision—never more remote perhaps than right now, but worth loving, worth defending—of freedom, peace, homeland, fellowship, and dignity for Israelis and Palestinians.
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For real-time news from Gaza, the Institute for Middle East Understanding and Al-Jazeera. With some occasional exceptions, the New York Times has been a vehicle for triumphalism, willful historical ignorance, inhuman indifference, and complicity in genocide as the IDF bombs and invades an already-immiserated Gaza with US diplomatic and military support. I’ve instead been getting updates—as much as my heart and nervous system can bear—from the IMEU and Al-Jazeera. Or from those in Gaza who happen to have international SIM cards, as the internet is cut, darkness falls, and death rains from the sky.
Peace to you. The terrible apocalyptic violence in Gaza is being aided by our tax dollars and with our government’s vital assistance. We can stop it. Educate yourselves, grieve, march, call, demand, gather, care for your loved ones.