A lone hero confronts tanks with refusal to submit, and bequeaths to humankind a legacy of moral vision and the unconquerable human dream of liberty; today we celebrate the anniversary of Tiananmen Square and the stand of its iconic Tank Man against tyranny and state terror.
I greet you from the belly of the beast, for Hong Kong has been swallowed whole by an abomination, a shining beacon of hope lost to despair and dehumanization among endless fathoms of darkness; yet hope and the dream of liberty endure, and a people dehumanized and disempowered by an amoral colonial occupation cry their defiance and refuse to be subjugated with a wave of resistance and revolutionary struggle through legions of figures of democracy as a goddess.
Here the people of Hong Kong and of China in solidarity of action honor the iconic Tank Man and the Tiananmen Revolt of 1989, and in refusal to submit become Unconquered and free.
Tyrannies of force and control find their limit in disobedience and disbelief; our freedom and autonomy are conferred by our refusal of consent to be governed by those who would enslave us, and like Dorothy’s magic ruby slippers cannot be taken from us, and have the power to send us home and return to us our true selves.
Under the tyranny and terror of the Chinese Communist Party’s imperial dominion, the imposed conditions of struggle have left us only symbolic acts of resistance as mass action, and our duty to the future and to our possibilities of becoming human to bring a Reckoning to those who would enslave us and steal our souls.
Resistance is always war to the knife.
Who respects no laws and no limits may hide behind none.
There will be no mass action in China today in recognition of the solidarity and courage of the democracy movement of 1989, nor of that which propagates throughout China today, for the long shadow of the Chinese Communist Party’s iron fist has cast the nation under a spell of fear, darkness, and silence like that of a fairytale wicked witch.
Such are the legacies of history and the powers of abjection from which we must awaken.
But in Hong Kong today, a people unite in subversion of their conqueror’s laws and find subtle ways to signal solidarity in revolutionary struggle. The brutal repression of the CCP’s regime has galvanized, not subjugated, the democracy movement of the Chinese peoples. Like the Rape of Nanking, the terrors of Xi Jinping’s regime have failed to drive the people of China into abject submission through learned helplessness, and like the thuggery of the British Empire’s reply to Gandhi’s Salt Tax Protest has sacrificed any pretense of legitimacy for its hegemony of power.
It is a triumph of the human spirit that the hope of freedom and democracy still lives and is an indestructible part of the Chinese national character, for the peoples of China must struggle in a vast laboratory of pervasive and endemic surveillance and thought control, like rats trapped in a maze by demented captors whose bizarre experiments and crimes against humanity, which echo those of Mengele but on an industrial scale, are designed to falsify and dehumanize their own citizens.
And this is nothing compared to the imperial conquest of Hong Kong now underway, the threat of imperial conquest and dominion of the Pacific Rim, the genocide of Islamic minorities in Xinjiang, and the horrors of their client states like Myanmar which enact a Nietzschean eternal recurrence of Pol Pot’s abattoir of Cambodia, spectacles of terror and brutal repression perpetrated with the arrogance of power of an authoritarian state bereft of all moral values, wherein only violence, force, and power have meaning.
Yet the peoples of China resist and yield not, and abandon not their fellows, as the Oath of the Resistance challenges us all to do, and we who love liberty must stand in solidarity with them.
A wave of vigils, protests, mass actions, and forlorn hopes commences this week throughout the world, as peoples of all nationalities unite as one humankind, inheritors of our universal human rights and the principles of freedom, equality, truth, and justice which democracy is designed to uphold and which none of us may deny any other.
As the lyrics of the Chinese national anthem teach us; “Arise, ye who refuse to be slaves.”
As written by Chris Lau in CNN, in an article entitled Overseas Hong Kongers carry Tiananmen’s torch as vigils to remember massacre victims are snuffed out back home; “Hong Kongers living overseas are helping to keep the flame of remembrance alive for the victims of China’s Tiananmen massacre as authorities in a city that once hosted huge annual vigils continue to stamp out dissent.
Until recently Hong Kong was the only place within China where large-scale gatherings each June 4 were tolerated to remember the moment in 1989 when the Communist Party sent tanks in to violently quell peaceful student-led democracy protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.
But the annual candlelight vigils have been silenced the last three years in the wake of pandemic restrictions and Beijing’s ongoing political crackdown in Hong Kong, which was upended by its own huge democracy protests in 2019.
This year is set to be no different.
As a result, it is overseas where the most concerted commemorations were taking place for the 34th anniversary.
Protests, vigils and exhibitions are planned in multiple cities around the world including in Australia, Japan, Taiwan, Europe, the United States and Canada bolstered by a growing cohort of Hong Kongers who have chosen to move overseas.
“I think it’s sad to say that what Beijing and Hong Kong are doing is trying to erase history and the memory,” said Kevin Yam, a former lawyer in Hong Kong, who will be attending a ceremony in Melbourne, Australia, where he now resides.
“For those who can still remember, we have the obligation to let the world know that we have not forgotten,” he told CNN.
A new museum in New York is a vivid example of how Tiananmen commemorations are going global.
On Friday, Zhou Fengsuo and Wang Dan, two former student leaders who took part in the 1989 Tiananmen protests and now live in the United States, unveiled a June 4th Memorial Exhibit on 6th Avenue
The display includes items collected from those who survived the massacre including newspapers chronicling the event, a blood-stained shirt from a former journalist and a decades-old printer used by protesters that was sneaked out of China.
Zhou said the idea to create a New York exhibition began five years ago but the closure of Hong Kong’s own June 4 museum by authorities in 2021 “added to the urgency”.
“Hong Kong has been carrying the torch for commemorating the Tiananmen massacre, keeping the legacy alive. When the museum was shut down, with the Hong Kong alliance’s leaders in prison, we knew it was a critical moment,” he said.
“We have to continue here in the United States.”
The 2,200-square-feet venue in New York can host up to 100 guests at a time, with schools and universities already reaching to request for a tour, Zhou said, adding they have raised enough funding to keep it running for “many years”.
A censored massacre
Thirty four years ago, Beijing sent in People’s Liberation Army troops armed with rifles and accompanied by tanks to forcibly clear the square where students were protesting for greater democracy.
No official death toll is available, but estimates range from several hundred to thousands, with many more injured.
Authorities in mainland China have always done their best to erase all memory of the Tiananmen massacre: Censoring news reports, scrubbing all mentions from the internet, arresting and chasing into exile the organizers of the protests, and keeping the relatives of those who died under tight surveillance.
The censorship has meant generations of mainland Chinese have grown up without knowledge of the events of June 4.
But Hong Kong was different.
Somber and defiant vigils were an annual political cornerstone, first under colonial British rule and then after the city’s 1997 handover to China. Every June 4, come rain or shine, tens of thousands of people would descend on Victoria Park with speakers demanding accountability from the Chinese Communist Party for ordering the bloody military crackdown.
But Hong Kong’s political culture has changed drastically in the aftermath in 2019’s huge and sometimes violent democracy protests.
Beijing responded with a sweeping national security law that outlawed most dissent. Leading democracy activists, including key Tiananmen vigil figures, have been jailed, critical newspapers shuttered and the political system overhauled to ensure only “patriots” are allowed.
Authorities banned the vigil in 2020 and 2021 citing coronavirus health restrictions – though many Hongkongers believe that was just an excuse to clamp down on shows of public dissent.
Last year, the park remained in darkness again, barricaded off on all sides with police stopping and searching passersby to “prevent any unauthorized assemblies which affect public safety and public order, and to prevent the risk of virus transmission due to such gatherings,” according to a government statement.
The Hong Kong Alliance, the group behind the past vigils, has disbanded with three leading figures in jail facing national security charges.
This year the park is again open after three years of coronavirus pandemic closures. But it is hosting a fair put on by patriotic pro-government associations to celebrate Hong Kong’s handover to China – an anniversary that is more than three weeks away.
In the run up to this Sunday’s anniversary, authorities made clear commemorating Tiananmen this year would not be tolerated.
Security secretary Chris Tang – a former police chief – said he expected some might use “this very special day” to advocate Hong Kong independence and subvert state power, acts banned by the new national security law.
“But I want to tell these people that if you carry out these acts, we will definitely take decisive action,” he warned, adding: “You will not be lucky.”
Hong Kong police maintained a heavy police presence around the park on the anniversary’s eve, deploying multiple police coaches and even an armored vehicle at one point.
A handful of artists and activists defied warnings and turned up either at the park or surrounding streets on Saturday evening to make private commemorations with floral tributes and banners, only to be quickly intercepted and taken away by officers.
A police spokesman said four people were arrested on suspicion of disorderly behavior in public or carrying out acts with seditious intent as of Saturday. Police said some individuals had protest props bearing allegedly “seditious” wording. Four others were brought in for further investigation, police added.
Private mourning
Richard Tsoi, former secretary for the now-defunct Hong Kong Alliance, said he planned to commemorate the event either at home or at a private location.
“Definitely there will be not be large-scale commemoration activities. Whether one can mourn in public without breaking the law is also a question,” said the ex-organizer, who used attend every vigil in the past.
Throughout Hong Kong physical reminders of the Tiananmen massacre, including a famous “Pillar of Shame” statue that used to stand in the city’s oldest university, have been dismantled in recent years.
Yet last month a replica of the “Pillar of Shame” was erected in Berlin, with the help of its original Danish artist Jens Galschiot and a prominent Hong Kong activist now living in Germany. The artist also provided more than 40 giant banners printed with an image of the pillar to 18 cities for their commemoration events, including Los Angeles and Boston.
Another pillar was unveiled in Norway last year.
“It is true that the commemorations around June 4th have expanded and become more global since it has become impossible to do anything in Hong Kong,” he told CNN.
Hong Kongers, Zhou says, are playing a key role in keeping Tiananmen remembrance alive overseas,
“Since last year, many places have seen record numbers in attendance largely because of Hong Kong immigrants,” he said.
Many Hong Kongers have left for overseas with the city’s population dropping from 7.41 million to 7.29 million last year.
In Britain – where more than 100,000 Hongkongers have since settled after London offered an easier pathway to citizenship two years ago – about a dozen marches and vigils are slated to take place throughout June 4 across the country, from Nottingham and Manchester, a popular destination for Hong Kong immigrants.
In London, marchers will gather at Trafalgar Square before marching to the Chinese embassies, where a vigil will be held.”
BBC On Tiananmen
Thousands mark Tiananmen anniversary in Hong Kong
Timeline: What Led to the Tiananmen Square Massacre | PBS FRONTLINE
April 15 2023 Pax Sinica and the Case of China’s Secret Police Station in New York: Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party Disguise Imperial Conquest, the Silencing and Repression of Dissent, and the Theft of Liberty as Peace and Prosperity
Here is a marvelous set of nested boxes of ideas regarding identity, communication and language, history and memory, psychology and transhistorical and epigenetic trauma, politics and aesthetics, the necessity of pride and self-ownership and the art of being human.
Writing in The Paris Review of the art and meaning of David Wojnarowicz, Patrick Nation interrogates the borders of self and other in an inspired meditation on the use of pronouns, the we and I, in both language and persons as self-referential systems.
His words become a labyrinth, an echo of values which are immanent in nature like the spirals of a seashell, truths written in our flesh awaiting our discovery, an evocation of a virtual third realm and interface between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves, as two essences of perfume will create together a new and prodigal scent.
It is precisely this uniqueness and surprise, and the transitory nature of experience, which confers value on the moments of our lives and on art as a motive force and a fulcrum of our passion and our vision.
Art, like one’s persona, is not an object but an experience; not a fixed quality but an adaptive process in motion and subject to change.
Gender and sexual personae are a performance, both a struggle for ownership of identity between self and other and an event occurring in the free space of play between these bounded realms.
As I wrote in my post of March 13 2021, A Year of Quarantine in Retrospect;
The quality of our humanity is not fixed, but always in motion, like the turbulent systems da Vinci studied in his fountain and which later with new mathematics came to be described as chaos theory. Identity is a process which is fluid, and our emotions are instruments with which it creates itself.
We create ourselves over time, through our history of defining moments; human being is a prochronism, a history expressed in our form of how we solved problems of adaptation. What we call our self or our soul is no different in kind from the exoskeleton of an insect or the shell of a sea creature.
And we create ourselves through our interdependence with others, our relationships, friends, families, communities, and the systems of signs thereof.
Human being has in this scheme three orders of relationships; persona, history, and interdependence, and all of it is in motion, dynamic and inherently unstable.
Impermanence is the defining quality of nature and the material universe; so also is the controlling metaphor and condition of human nature, being, and identity our ephemeral, transitory, and protean forms. Nature is a mirror which reflects itself, and like the Hobgoblin’ fragmented mirror in Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, reveals endless possibilities of becoming human; the inward and outward halves of the cosmos also create and define each other in mutual coevolution, like Escher’s Drawing Hands.
Humans are naturally polyamorous and are enculturated to be otherwise; we are shaped by sociohistorical forces in the sphere of gender identity and sexual orientation to deny our true nature. It is normality which is deviant, and from which misogyny, the system of Patriarchy, and other destructive illnesses of the spirit arise; fear weaponized in service to power, fear of otherness but also of nature and ourselves. Here is the true origin of evil as the social use of force and violence in self-hatred.
As Goethe wrote in Faust; “Let us extend our lives through our bodies in all directions possible”.
For me the origin of human evil is in unequal relationships and the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, pathologies of violence and dominion which as with the figure of Alberich the dwarf require the renunciation of love as their price; not in the violation of taboos, the transgression of the Forbidden, or the defiance of Authority, three things I count as sacred acts in pursuit of the truth of ourselves, but in the systemic and structural injustices and inequalities of hegemonic elites, their lies and illusions which falsify us and steal our souls, and the state tyranny and terror of brutal force and control which we must resist and refuse to submit to, that we may become autonomous and free as self- created and self-owned beings; for power and force are meaningless when met with disobedience, and in the moment of our refusal to submit to authority we become Unconquered and free.
I say again; human sexual orientation is not a spectrum with endpoint limits, but a Moebius Loop of infinite possibilities, and we are born and exist by nature everywhere along it at once. All else is limitation and control imposed artificially as dominion, captivity, and falsification by authorized identities, or a seizure of power and self-ownership in revolutionary struggle against such narratives, hierarchies, and divisions.
Writing of love in Letters to Milena, Franz Kafka gives us this witness; “I wish the world were ending tomorrow. Then I could take the next train, arrive at your door in Vienna, and say, Come with me, Milena. We are going to love each other without scruples or fear or restraint. Because the world is ending tomorrow.
Perhaps we don’t love unreasonably because we think we have time, or have to reckon with time. But what if we don’t have time? Or what if time, as we know it, is irrelevant? Ah, if only the world were ending tomorrow. We could help each other very much.”
Here is the true origin of Nietzsche’s idea of Eternal Return as a test and praxis of Authenticity, and it recalls to me something I once said to Jean Genet. He had sat down at my table after my friends and I made our morning race against death, crossing a sniper alley to reach a cafe in Beirut that had the best strawberry crepes in the world.
“I’m told you do this every day, steal breakfast from death.”
To which I replied, “It’s a poor man who loves nothing beyond reason, and has no pleasures worth dying for.”
He smiled and said,” I agree”; this was the beginning of our conversations at breakfast in the days of the terrible siege, which would reset the path of my life.
My wish for all of us is that we may find such friends who can reveal to us our true selves and offer figural spaces into which to grow; such is my functional definition of love.
Through love and desire we pursue a sacred calling to discover our truths, truths which are immanent in nature and written in our flesh. Herein also we escape the limits of our flesh as we become sublimed and exalted in unification with others, who free our captive images from the wilderness of mirrors which falsify us. Love is an instrument with which we may liberate and empower each other and restore to one another our autonomy and authenticity.
Love and desire are forces of liberation, uncontrollable as the tides and inherently anarchic. They are our most powerful weapons against authority and tyranny; for they can neither be taken from us nor limited.
Love like you have laughed in the face of your executioner, for this is exactly what love is.
As written by Patrick Nation in The Paris Review, in an article entitled
Participating in the American Theater of Trauma; “For David Wojnarowicz, this decade has been a renaissance. He plays a guiding spirit in Olivia Laing’s 2016 internal travelogue, The Lonely City, and haunts the 2011 music video for Justice’s “Civilization.” In last year’s retrospective, History Keeps Me Awake at Night, the Whitney Museum reminded us that Wojnarowicz “came to prominence in New York in the 1980s, a period marked by creative energy, financial precariousness, and profound cultural changes.” We recognize that decade in our own, and, with it, Wojnarowicz’s anger. Our present is magnetized to his past. His art, as Hanya Yanagihara wrote, “reminds you that there is a distinction between cynicism and anger, because the work, while angry, is rarely bitter—bitterness is the absence of hope; anger is hope’s companion.” In truth, renaissance is a cruel word to give to someone who died at thirty-seven. But we do love him. We do need him.
Some things to know about who we are:
We are trapped in a moment of political terror. We are dangerously close to cynicism, but angry enough to have hope. We are no longer interested in compromise. Men, we agree, have had their chance. White women we can no longer trust to uphold feminism, not while they cling to white supremacy. We are antiracist and antifascist and prison abolitionists; we rejoiced when Bill Cosby received his sentence. We canceled Woody Allen, Kevin Spacey, Harvey Weinstein, and Al Franken with equal fervor. We are uninterested in what they think.
Welcome to we: a disingenuous pronoun that both paid and unpaid pundits alike brandish without consent. I’m often guilty, too: my points are more convincing if I ventriloquize your voice alongside mine. Are we really doing this? Is this what we want? When did we decide this was okay? As usual, Adorno said it best: “To say ‘we’ and mean ‘I’ is one of the most recondite insults.” More often than not, we is an erasure, a linguistic illusion that you or I have endorsed some third person’s opinion, politics, or decisions. Deployed in politicized spaces, the subtext of we—i.e., I didn’t need to ask you—is a violation of political agency.
What’s dangerous in maligning we, however, is how badly I—a cisgender white man living in America—need to hear these voices. Often, the contemporary we is a backlash against centuries of a white cishet male monolith, which includes the we in the Constitution. It’s a backlash voiced by women, people of color, trans and nonbinary persons, and persons with disabilities. As Wesley Morris wrote for the New York Times last year, “Groups who have been previously marginalized can now see that they don’t have to remain marginalized. Spending time with work that insults or alienates them has never felt acceptable. Now they can do something about it.” Morris casts this moment as an inversion of the culture wars of the eighties and nineties, when artists like Wojnarowicz faced censorship and humiliation from the religious right. After pushing their work to extremes and waging costly legal and political campaigns—including, in Wojnarowicz’s case, the very right to survive as a queer artist—the oppressed are now closer to power than ever. “This territory,” Morris writes, “was so hard won that it must be defended at all times, at any costs. Wrongs have to be righted. They can’t affect social policy—not directly. They can, however, amend the culture.” It’s in this sense that we becomes linguistic action. We cosign or cancel speech, endorse or excoriate art, all the while presuming that any I can borrow any you. We amplifies our voices as one, an assumption of power.
While Morris’s essay is a sensitive, observant, and smart examination of ethics in contemporary art, and while I’m grateful to have read and reread it, my first impulse upon seeing its subheading (“Should art be a battleground for social justice?”) was to throw the magazine across the room and tweet something like, “Do we really need another man whispering ‘art for art’s sake’ as he pins us against the wall?” This is what our politics has done to me as a queer artist. I carry so much anger that even the threat of some man saying, Let’s not get carried away, triggers rage.
Or perhaps more exact: revenge.
I want to believe we need Wojnarowicz’s art, but I can only say that I need it. I burn for its juxtapositions, the shadows in his photographs, and the narrative ambition of his paintings—exuberant perversions of renaissance epics. Close to the Knives, his “memoir of disintegration,” immolates me entirely. Like many queers in the seventies, Wojnarowicz grew up neglected and abused, prostituting his body by the time he was fifteen. As an artist, he received no formal training—only critique from other queer artists, including his one-time lover, Peter Hujar, whose body became one of his subjects. Hujar’s face and hands and feet, photographed on his deathbed in 1987, found their way into one of Wojnarowicz’s collages, lacquered over with a fiery indictment of the society that let this happen to a man he loved; and then Wojnarowicz, too, died, with so much art left unmade.
Reading Wojnarowicz today—that is, in his words, “in a country where an actor becomes the only acceptable president … a man whose vocation is to persuade with words and actions an audience who wants to believe whatever he tells them”—empowers me. Art “can be reparatory,” Morris writes, “a means for the oppressed and ignored to speak,” and Wojnarowicz’s anger makes me feel as if it’s my right to demand silence from those I perceive to have oppressed queer people, or even those who just don’t have the luck of being queer. I feel as if it’s my right to shun artworks in which I don’t recognize myself or my friends. To not see oneself mirrored in culture feels like abuse, every renewed act of erasure newly unbearable.
While Morris writes about art specifically, his essay reflects a tendency in discourse overall toward separating, totally, that which we call bearable from that which we decide is not. This is the subject of Sarah Schulman’s Conflict is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair. “At many levels of human interaction,” she writes, “there is an opportunity to conflate discomfort with threat, to mistake internal anxiety for exterior danger, and in turn to escalate rather than resolve.” As social creatures, communication and negotiation are human responsibilities. Activities that work against communication—shunning, silencing, and enlisting the power of the state to punish rather than resolve—shirk this responsibility, and are unfortunately common among vulnerable persons, for whom withdrawal and refusal are often the only communication skills they possess. This leaves both parties trapped—one behind a locked door they won’t open, the other outside. Schulman describes her struggle to understand her colleagues, who, despite their liberal politics, have developed an “almost prescribed instinct to punish, using the language originated initially by a radical movement but now co-opted to deny complexity, due process, and the kind of in-person, interactive conversation that produces resolution.” This language is that of “abuse,” which has a perpetrator and a victim.
In situations of abuse (ask yourself: is this a power struggle or does this person have power over me?), victims are indeed blameless. But Schulman’s thesis outlines how what often feels like abuse is instead conflict—a point of pain in need of resolution, arrived at only through honest and open communication, which can, and often does, hurt: “the collapse of Conflict and Abuse is partly the result of a punitive standard in which people are made desperate, yet ineligible, for compassion.” The state and its systems of power withhold assistance and compassion from those who are not “eligible.” This creates a system where the identity of victim is desired, if only to ensure one is met with compassion instead of derision. “This concept,” Schulman writes, “is predicated on a need to enforce that one party is entirely righteous and without mistake, while the other is the Specter, the residual holder of all evil.” Anyone who endured the punditry after the 2016 elections will understand why labeling oneself an economic or demographic victim can be toxic. In a sociological refusal to communicate, 63 million voters escalated decades of capitalist-driven conflict by turning their pain into a sacrosanct identity, regardless of how it would, and has, hurt millions of people far more severely than any pain, however legitimate, those voters felt.
Schulman’s ideas on conflict, communication, escalation, abuse, and repair encourage us to accept individual responsibility, however small, for as many of the conflicts in one’s life as we can stand. Yet it remains necessary to distinguish these conflicts from abuse. What’s interesting about Schulman’s essay is how it intersects with urgent questions of speech, de-platforming, and “cancelation.” Her insistence upon open and respectful communication seems like an inversion of the tactics of silence, shunning, exclusion, and sometimes of violence used by antifascist groups for decades to combat authoritarian politics. The strategies of antifascism contradict everything Schulman says in her plea toward mutual understanding and conflict resolution, but only in the way that shouting over Ann Coulter, for example, seems like an infringement upon her right to incite violence through “free speech.” The error here is to call fascism a conflict.
A primary goal of Mark Bray’s Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook is to illuminate the “trans-historical terror of fascism,” which is never a “defeated” enemy but a constant reactionary threat as long as inequality and suffering are tolerated. History is not fixed or written but being written. The post-Holocaust slogan—“Never again!”—is not a fact, observation, or conclusion, but a plea for understanding. As Bray writes, “History is a complex tapestry stitched together by threads of continuity and discontinuity… [Anti-fascism] is an argument about the historical continuity between different eras of far-right violence and the many forms of collective self-defense that it has necessitated across the globe over the past century.” It could indeed happen again—maybe tomorrow—and one needs to recognize it, contain it, and drive it back out of sight. These tactics don’t seek to understand the conflict and work toward resolution because there is no understanding, nor resolution; there is, in fact, no conflict. Fascism is abuse, and its evangelists know it. As Bray says, “The point here is not tactics; it is politics.” Just as an abusive parent or partner has no right to demand that his victim sit down and hear his case (again: “power over,” not “power struggle”), a political system that is predicated on the oppression and elimination of human beings from the populace based on race, legal history, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, citizenship, or ability has no right to a national platform, and merits resistance over resolution. Fascism assumes a false mask of victimhood—one that seems like a “politics in conflict”—in order to undermine those who’d speak against it. But fascism is not a politics in conflict: it is a politics of abuse on a national and transnational scale. Antifascism seeks a way out of trauma; fascism governs with it.
At the Morgan Library in New York, I saw Peter Hujar’s portrait of David Wojnarowicz, gaunt and severely shadowed, dark-eyed, a cigarette in mid drag; and I felt it, around my neck. Love there, and admiration. Grief. Seeing how Hujar saw his ex-lover, friend, and fellow artist seized me entirely. I didn’t understand why I was trembling. It just happened as these things happen—and, for me, are happening more and more. Last year, T magazine ran a special issue on the early eighties in New York. On one page, Edmund White remembered friends, writers, and artists who’d died young: “I was just thinking of Allen Barnett, who lived to publish one book of stories … He was so angry that he had to die.” On another page, the faces of over a hundred artists, choreographers, writers, performers, designers, and cinematographers “lost” to HIV related illnesses. I had no choice: I sobbed. The same thing happened with Tom Bianchi’s Polaroids of Fire Island in the early eighties, in which young men, naked or mostly naked, smile there on the sand, playing and drinking and fucking and loving each other with no idea what awaits them. “I could not have imagined,” Bianchi writes, “that my Polaroids would so suddenly become a record of a lost world—my box of pictures a mausoleum, too painful to visit. When I reopened the box decades later, I found friends and lovers playing and smiling. Alive again.” Even this, reread so many times, is hard to transcribe.
I began having sex with men in 2006. HIV is not only a treatable illness, but, thanks to PrEP, easier to avoid contracting than ever. I’ve lost no one to AIDS. I was a child when it decimated queer communities across the world. Because of this, it’s taken me a long time to understand that there is still trauma here, that for me to look back and see what has happened, and to see the people—the Reagan administration, state and local governments, charity organizations, and “normal Americans”—who stood by and let it happen, is for me a trauma I’m allowed to feel. It’s traumatic to know how many influential figures called it punishment, called it God, and how many millions nodded along with them. It’s traumatic that I believed, long after the documented success of antiretroviral therapy, that HIV was certain death. It’s traumatic to imagine myself and my friends in that other decade, losing all the men in my life I love and have loved, all while someone laughs on television, where they are paid to say, You had it coming.
Yes, they called me faggot, bullied me and threatened me; yes, I pushed myself so deeply into the closet that I thought I was someone else, hurting a lot of people in the process; and yes, I carry scars from those years when I craved physical pain instead of pain I couldn’t articulate. But no one I love died, not like that. Nor do I understand these intense reactions as merely empathetic, because I feel them a hundredfold more strongly than when I encounter the pain of people suffering in other situations. Instead—to adapt a phrase from Bray—this feels like transhistorical queer trauma. Not long ago, people like me suffered unimaginably and died in isolation, cut off not only from civil and social apparatuses but often their families; and this happened because those people were like me. Through shunning, violence, intimidation, and legislation, a society had so othered LGBTQ individuals that their drawn out and brutal deaths seemed permissible, even desirable. And alongside those deaths, what was a few million drug users, homeless persons, and black Americans living in abject poverty? Because of white supremacist and heteropatriarchal ideologies, a virus became a weapon of the state, allowed first to proliferate and then, once activists had pushed back hard enough, to be contained, managed, and controlled by federal subsidies and corporate pharmaceutical research.
I’m not stupid enough to think “never again” calls for anything but constant vigilance. In February of 2018, the White House proposed a 20% cut in the nation’s global HIV/AIDS fund, which would lead, according to a report issued by ONE.org, to “nearly 300,000 deaths and more than 1.75 million new infections each year.” On June 1 of this year, the president logged onto Twitter and mentioned how we would “celebrate LGBT Pride Month and recognize the outstanding contributions LGBT people have made to our great Nation,” despite everything his administration and party have done to strip trans persons of their safety and their rights, to obstruct federal and state protections for queer families and workers. It’s especially tempting to ask this transphobic autocrat what he believes the T stands for when he reminds the nation to celebrate LGBT people, but that’s beside the point. It’s not ignorance that emanates from the White House. It is not a politics in conflict. No matter how many rainbow emoji the president tweets, his queer politics is death, hate, and exclusion. It is a legacy of abuse, and perhaps it’s only natural to feel it across generations, to break down sobbing when I discover another artist or writer or human being who was, not that many years ago, “so angry that he had to die.”
Those 63 million votes: was each an act of abuse? I want to say yes—I believed they were for a long time. As Bray indicates, “It is clear that ardent Trump supporters voted for their candidate either because of or despite his misogyny, racism, ableism, Islamaphobia, and many more hateful traits.” For me and the people I love, these votes felt cruel, and while I’m no longer sure about saying yes, I don’t question my choice to end every relationship I had with anyone who used their vote to inflict such irresponsible, widespread harm.
Every fascist regime has snuck into power through legal means with a relatively small majority. In the 1930 elections, shortly before Hitler was appointed chancellor of the Reichstag, the Nazis received 18.3% of the vote. When Vittorio Emanuele III appointed Mussolini as prime minister in 1922, after 30,000 blackshirts marched theatrically on Rome, the PNF only held thirty-five of more than five hundred seats. In 2016, Trump received over 2.8 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton. As I write this, there are thirty-one states—plus D.C.—with party registration. In those states, registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by 12 million; yet Republicans currently control sixty-seven of the ninety-nine state legislative bodies and hold a majority in the Senate. Supremacist ideologies don’t need that many fervent supporters; what they do need is indifference. In the case of Trump voters, Bray continues, “it is always important to distinguish between ideologues and their capricious followers, yet we cannot overlook how these popular bases of support create the foundations for fascism to manifest itself.”
Here is where the difference between conflict and abuse becomes a societal urgency. I’m not going to mince words. The Republican party, championing Islamophobia, denying and exacerbating climate change, stripping trans persons of their rights, supporting police brutality against the black community, incarcerating immigrants and separating children from their families—in short, committing crime upon crime against humanity—is a global terrorist organization rooted not only in white supremacy, but the supremacy of wealth. It’s hard to see class in America—to see poverty as an identity—because the American fabrication is that today’s poor, through obedience and hard work, will be rich tomorrow. It’s a story that hides an oppressed class in plain sight of people who serve as a ready-made voting base for the rich, as long as the rich grant them whiteness, heteronormativity, male supremacy, or some other power over those more deeply oppressed. These are those who might not champion the oppression of others, but go along with it as a price paid for a seat at the table.
It’s difficult to accept responsibility for this transaction, so enticing is its reward: state-sponsored victimhood. To take an example from Schulman, the white queer community doesn’t want to hear that today, “with gay marriage and parenthood prevalent, and the advent of gay nuclear families and normalized queer childbirth … white queer families realign with the state that held them in pervasive illegality less than a generation ago.” At the same time, this community still sees itself as unable to do harm, so entrenched is its history with victimhood. To challenge this is perceived as antiqueer ideology: of course we have the right to families, to suburbs, to lattes and plaid. But so, too, do white queers, in their newfound positions of power, have newfound responsibility to uphold the greater community, and to use their privilege to resolve conflicts with the trans community and queers of color, not to mention other oppressed and persecuted communities.
There is a similarity in action, Schulman says, in both the supremacist and the victim. This is born of refusal: “For the Supremacist, this refusal comes from a sense of entitlement; that they have an inherent ‘right’ not to question themselves. Conversely, the unrecovered traumatized person’s refusal is rooted in a panic that their fragile self cannot bear interrogation.” For the conflicted, seeing their pain mirrored in another can become a way to justify pain: at least she feels what I feel, or even at least he’s worse off than me. What this creates is an ongoing and mutually reflective theater of trauma in which everyone is a victim, exempt from responsibility, beyond repair.
We live in a misogynistic, racist, homo- and transphobic, ableist, violent, and viciously unequal country whose relatively small population (4.4% of the world) and vast wealth (25%) leave us, individual voters, responsible for the fate and future of this planet as its oceans rise and reefs die, as its air grows increasingly contaminated and water less potable. To feel so powerless and yet accountable for the future of the human race means that the sheer number of traumatized persons living in America is staggering. We are rooted in a country created by two concurrent genocides and supported by two centuries of wars, spectacular terrorism, theft, and global oppression. What’s worse, as Schulman argues, traumatized persons, through their actions, amplify and spread trauma to others by shunning, bullying, silencing, scapegoating, and threatening; they cling to what little they’re given as payment for their complicity in worldwide destruction at the profit of a small minority of white, wealthy men.
What use am I, and who is profiting from my trauma? How has my pain been weaponized and turned against others to stoke greater conflict? These are questions every American should ask themselves, particularly as we enter the nauseating theater of the 2020 elections and what lies beyond.
Conflict is profitable. Not only is this obvious in two hundred years of U.S. foreign policy, but in millennia of art and entertainment: escalation is dramatic, and drama, if it doesn’t affect us directly, is cathartic. It’s fun to say, Did you see what he said about her? and to watch a conflict get worse. There’s a reason journalists crank the apocalypse up to eleven every time the president tweets. It keeps readers coming back. Resolution is boring. Resolution is unprofitable. A played-out resolution is not a drama but an education: you too are responsible, rather than, watch this. Resisting this is not easy, fast, or efficient—three values Americans cherish. To be conflicted, to explore one’s accountability in a relationship, this is not what makes an individual spectacularly eligible for compassion. Only victimhood opens that coffer, and whoever screams loudest gets the prize.
What is needed is a queering of compassion. To move beyond the truly rare (but extant) binaries of perpetrator and victim, it’s important that every individual recognizes their existence in a continuum of conflict, and seeks to resolve and repair rather than escalate and destroy. We—and here I do mean every single one of us—must question individual guilt, which is rooted in action, rather than shame, which is entrenched in identity. Because when we insist upon the binary—that everyone is either perpetrator or victim—the cost is literal human life. One need only to look to all the Black Americans murdered by police, summoned by a white neighbor’s perceived victimhood, amplified by the aesthetics of entertainment.
The we I want to belong to is the we that recognizes our vast diversity of pain—the we that understands we’ve been assigned this pain for someone else’s profit, and that we need no longer give them want they want. To reserve compassion only for victims deemed eligible is to accept an arbitrary division, one in which the state can deem some of us worthy of aid and exclude others, meanwhile ensuring that the victims never speak to one another, competing as they must to remain in their places. Is it so revolutionary to say that every human being is eligible for compassion? That men and women of any gender or sexuality, any skin color, any ability, any legal or migratory status, any age, receive the same compassionate understanding as any other, responsible only for their actions and not the identities coerced upon them by others? To believe otherwise is to let fascism shatter our society.”
As written by Olivia Laing in Frieze, in an article entitled A Stitch in Time
The enduring symbolism of a sewn mouth, from the works of David Wojnarowicz to recent protests by refugees; “The light’s behind them. Four men, somewhere on the border between Greece and Macedonia. They can’t go forward, can’t go back. The man on the left has his eyes closed. He’s unshaven, a single freckle on his temple. The light is tangling in his hair, running down his forehead and catching on his chin. Head bowed, careful as a surgeon, the man opposite him is sewing up his mouth. The blue thread runs from lip to hand. The sewn man’s face is absolutely still, upturned to the sun. I don’t know where I first saw this photograph. Maybe it washed up on my Twitter feed. Later, I searched for it again, typing ‘refugee lip sewing’ into Google. This time, there were dozens of images, almost all of men, lips sewn shut with blue and scarlet thread. Afghan refugee, Athens. Australian immigration centre in Papua New Guinea. Stuck on the Balkan borders, a first smattering of snow.
The mouth is for speaking. But how do you speak if no one’s listening, if your voice is prohibited or no one understands your tongue? You make a migrant image, an image that can travel where you cannot. An Afghan boy who spent three years at the beginning of the millennium on Nauru – the off-shore processing camp for refugees attempting to reach Australia – told the website Solidarity.net.au: ‘My brother didn’t sew his lips but he was part of the hunger strike. He became unconscious and was sent to the hospital. Every time someone became unconscious we would send a picture to the media.’
The first time I encountered lip sewing as protest was in Rosa von Praunheim’s extraordinary 1990 AIDS documentary, Silence = Death. One of the interviewees was the artist and activist David Wojnarowicz. A former street kid, a gay man who had recently been diagnosed with AIDS, he talked with great eloquence and fury about the different kinds of silence ranged against him. He spoke of what it had been like to grow up queer; the need to keep his sexuality secret because of the omnipresent threat of violence. He spoke of the silence of politicians, whose refusal to confront AIDS was hastening his own oncoming death. And, as he talked, footage he’d collaged together appeared on screen: a kaleidoscope of distress, which was later given the title A Fire in My Belly (1986–87). Ants crawl over a crucifix; a puppet dances on its strings; money pours from bandaged hands; a mouth is sewn shut, blood trickling from puncture wounds. What is the stitched mouth doing? If silence equals death, the biting slogan of AIDS activists, then part of the work of resistance is to make visible the people who are being silenced. Carefully, carefully, the needle works through skin, self-inflicted damage announcing larger harm. ‘I think what I really fear about death is the silencing of my voice,’ Wojnarowicz says. ‘I feel this incredible pressure to leave something of myself behind.’ You make an image to communicate what is unsayable in words. You make an image to go on beyond you, to speak when you no longer can. The image can survive its creator’s death, but that doesn’t mean it is immune to the same forces of silencing that it protests. In 2010, nearly two decades after Wojnarowicz died of AIDS at the age of 37, A Fire in My Belly was removed from a landmark exhibition of gay art at the Smithsonian, in Washington DC, following complaints from right-wing politicians and the Catholic League. This time, the stitched mouth became a symbol of censorship. At protests, people held up posters of Wojnarowicz’s face, lantern-jawed, implacable, five stitches locking shut his lips. Both images are in front of me now: stitches in time, reporting from the past. Wojnarowicz is dead; God knows where the man on the Greek border is. In other photos from the same protest, men sit or stand on train tracks, holding hand-lettered signs on scraps of dirty cardboard: ONLY FREEDOM and OPEN THE BORDER. They are bare-chested, wrapped in blankets, ranked against police with riot shields and bulletproof vests. The word ‘stitch’ is a double-edged prayer. It means the least bit of anything – the stigmatized, say, or the devalued. And it means to join together, mend or fasten, a hope powerful enough to drive a needle through bare flesh.”
Of the origins of sewn lips as a symbol of silenced voices and of an archetypal figure which draws us into its myth of Resistance I wrote in my post of October 9 2021, Silenced Loki: a Figure and Symbol of Poetic Vision and Creativity as Rebellion Against Authority and Revolutionary Struggle; The image of Silenced Loki, a totemic ritual statue called the Snaptun Stone which depicts the protean Trickster god and titan of fluid gender (in Old Norse, a class of beings literally termed “Devourer” and commonly translated as Giants) with his mouth sewn shut to silence his power to reorder the universe and change, subvert, manipulate, or evade its laws, has become part of our popular culture through the influence of Marvel comics and films, and a subject of discussion.
What does it mean? Why would a god whose power is imprisoned in his flesh and useless be an object of worship? Why has this part of his myth, so near a parallel to that of Prometheus, become central to Viking culture and assimilated into our own at this moment of history?
Silence equals Death, as the AIDS activist movement of decades ago constructed Elie Wiesel’s Silence is Complicity. Primarily I see this in terms of Loki’s role as what Foucault called a truthteller, parrhesia in classical terms, like the Jester of King Lear, as in the Lokasenna when he satirizes and mocks the gods. I call this the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen in a free society of equals; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority. For law serves power and there is no just authority, and our mission as Bringers of Chaos is to subvert laws and delegitimize tyrants and those who would enslave us, be they gods or men.
Secondarily this relates to Loki’s role as a source of poetic vision and inspiration, here in the context of his grand trick, the Wager of Loki, which resulted in the forging of Mjolnir as embodied lightning and other signature powers of the gods, the price of which was having his mouth sewn shut to seal his power, but of course he like Ulysses outwits the gods and escapes to reclaim his power of true speaking. This myth makes him a patron of smiths and creative arts, not a maker, but a muse.
The image of Silenced Loki, terrible though it may be, refers to his willing sacrifice to forge the truth of others, and to guide their seizure of power as liberation. As such it was probably used by smiths to avert the dangers of their profession, a lightning rod and totemic patron.
Magic, like revolutionary struggle, always has a cost; among the first things one will need is something to bear that cost for us. Such is the purpose of Silenced Loki; he goes forth into the unknown bearing our voices and our truths.
Loki is a patron of outlaws, especially those of sex and gender, who finds reflection in Virginia Woolf’s gender changing immortal time traveler Orlando, of revolutionaries and anarchists in his guise as Milton’s rebel angel in Paradise Lost, the primary text of the iconic Hells Angels Motorcycle Club, of gamblers, chance, and luck as a figure of Fortune, of lost causes and forlorn hopes and the unknown heroes who fight for them, of all those who survive not by force but by wit and guile and changing the rules of play, and of us all as the source of our idea of the devil and his fairytale version as Rumpelstiltskin. What god or devil was ever more terrible than the Maker of Deals?
Above all else, Loki is a patron of outcasts and exiles, the abandoned and the vilified, a champion and liberator who places his life in the balance with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth, of bringing a Reckoning for their oppression and solidarity in revolutionary struggle. In this aspect he resembles Frankenstein’s monster, a child abandoned because he is imperfect, bearer of a sacred wound which opens him to the pain of others, an innocent child trapped in the same flesh with a tortured and demonized thing of rage and pain, who wonders why others find him monstrous.
But he is also a god of creativity, inspiration, poetic vision, and the reimagination and transformation of ourselves and our civilization, a bringer of Chaos who disrupts order, frees us from the tyranny of authority, and bears the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Let us embrace our monstrosity, name ourselves and perform our chosen identities before the stage of history as guerilla theatre in the sacred calling to pursue the truth, disrupt order, violate normality, subvert idealizations of masculine and feminine beauty and authorized identities, refuse subjugation by authority through disobedience and disbelief, enact seizures of power, and bring the Chaos, and say with Loki; “I am burdened with glorious purpose.”
David Wojnarowicz poster image for the Rosa von Praunheim film Silence=Death, 1989, photographed by Andreas Sterzing
Silence is Complicity: of Elie Wiesel’s Millennium Lecture at the White House, on April 12 1999, hosted by President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton
Song: “Monster” – Imagine Dragons (cover by Runaground on youtube)
David Wojnarowicz: A Definitive History of Five or Six Years on the Lower East Side, by Giancarlo Ambrosino, Sylvère Lotringer (Editor), Chris Kraus (Editor), Hedi El Kholti (Editor), Justin Cavin (Editor), Jennifer Doyle (Afterword)
The question of whether an author’s historical claim to stand with Israel makes them a Zionist and a fascist was posed in an online forum, as Israel violates Biden’s Red Line and begins the assault on the refugees of Rafah, reverse face of the question of whether protest against the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians constitutes antisemitism and hate speech. Among the first objections to these questions was that an author’s ideology has nothing to do with their work rather than emerging from it, of which we in the group are all members of a fandom.
Here is my reply:
Actually a very relevant and complex question. Why must one peoples Return mean anothers Exile? Why must we be each other’s jailors, and not each other’s liberators?
Netanyahu and his settler regime and apologists would like everyone, especially their own citizens, to conflate being Israeli with being Jewish, and to use fear to centralize power to a carceral state of force and control and legitimize their authority as necessary to security. But none those things are true, and security is an illusion.
The idea of Israel as an empire of tyranny and terror is antithetical to an Israel founded to protect Jewish peoples from tyranny and terror. The Netanyahu regime and the Occupation which long precedes it are subversions of Zion as a refuge for the powerless, the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, and also a dark mirror of Judaism as the work of Tikkun Olam, repair of the world.
Marx began Das Capital with an eschatological vision of the New Jerusalem and the limitless possibilities of a humankind free from the profit motive as an analogy of Original Sin, and free from its praxis as the reduction of human relations to cash exchange. There are far more such possible futures of becoming human together through love rather than fear, more than we can now imagine.
Friends, everything the enemy says is a lie; never let them define the terms of debate or the rules of the game.
Fascisms of blood, faith, and soil now rule most of our world, and to this I say Never Again! Regardless of whose name those who wish to enslave us claim to act as a strategy of our subjugation and dehumanization.
No matter where you begin with divisions and hierarchies of being human, of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
As I wrote in my post of December 11 2023, What is Hate Speech? What is Anti-Semitism? Who Decides What Is Permitted, and How Shall We Enforce Limits On Each Other’s Freedoms? Case of the Repression of Dissent By Universities Beholden to Special Interest Money; Free speech ends where hate and violence begin; and dehumanization is criminal incitement to violence.
Yes, but what is hate speech? What is Anti-Semitism? Who decides what is permitted, and how shall we enforce limits on each other’s freedoms?
Such questions about our fundamental rules of how to be human together are now being fought out on university campuses throughout our nation and the world, which pit student mass protests against the Israeli ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in Gaza against repression of dissent by authority both within education systems and between institutions of education and those of the state, and often shaped by the special interest money which has been allowed to define the terms of the debate.
In large part the world has accepted the state of Israel’s claim that criticism of its use of force inclusive of vast war crimes in Gaza is anti-semitism. There are two problems with this; first, Palestinians and Israelis are both semites, one people divided by history as faith, ethnicity, and national identity weaponized in service to power. Second, this falsification is deployed globally by the state of Israel to both defend and subjugate the Jewish diaspora by enforcing identification of being Jewish with the state of Israel, which also deflects questioning of its brutal colonial-Apartheid settler regime.
We must beware those who claim to speak and act in our name, and most especially commit unforgiveable acts to make us complicit in their crimes, for this is a strategy of fascist tyranny.
Netanyahu’s settler regime, founded on conquest and theft of indigenous people’s lands as manifest destiny authorized by God in imitation of our own Conquest of the Native Americans, the state of Israel institutionalized as a military society designed as a refuge for and avenger of Jews, and the whole Zionist ideology of identitarian politics and a nation of one faith and one blood, remains today the world’s most extreme and dangerous fascist successor state to the Nazis.
But this need not remain so. Israel would very much like to convince her own citizens and all of us that to be a Jew is to be a member and figure of the state of Israel, and that to call out and oppose the state of Israel for crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza is to be guilty of hate crime against Jewish people, but this is a lie, and one of many.
So we come to this final question; how do we oppose state tyranny and terror without confusing and conflating a state with the people it claims to speak and act for? How answer division with solidarity?
Netanyahu has incited anti Jewish hate as well as anti Israeli horror at his atrocities and war crimes. When a state demonizes itself before the world, it is the diasporic population of those it claims to act in service of as legitimation of power who suffer first. This is a primary strategy of fascism; making those in whose name it claims to act complicit in unforgiveable crimes. But the use of force obeys Newtons Third Law of Motion and creates its own counterforce and resistance. The crimes of Israel have reawakened a slumbering monster and put every Jewish person and community at risk. We must now bring regime change, peace, and democracy to Israel or witness the return of the global Fourth Reich and its policies of Judenfrei. Save the Jews; bring down the Israeli state.
Herein we may find guidance in Jean Genet’s restatement of Nietzsche’s principle of how those who hunt monsters become monsters themselves in the use of violence to enforce authorized identities and ideas of virtue; “If we behave like those on the other side, then we are the other side. Instead of changing the world, all we’ll achieve is a reflection of the one we want to destroy.”
Yesterday we witnessed a ray of light pierce the immense darkness of our moment, in twin events of fracture on both of the primary fronts of the Gaza War; in the Israeli regime of tyranny and terror and in America’s complicity in the atrocities and crimes against humanity of our colony and proxy state. On the Israeli front, Benny Gantz threatens to leave the coalition government which would bring it down unless Netanyahu stops the genocide, and on the American front Biden for the first time in the history of the American-Israel partnership aligns us with the principle of our universal human rights inclusive of Palestinians as fellow human beings in an empathetic speech which defines goals of peace and equality in the region and reveals that he is working on solutions rather than obstructing them and abetting the atrocities of Israel, something I wish he would have communicated with us all on October 7.
To clarify, Biden personally, our government, and our nation will forever bear a measure of responsibility for how the immense arsenal we provided Israel has been used, regardless of what may happen next. For these crimes against humanity both Netanyahu and Biden among many others belong in the same court as Milosevic. Nothing in this must divert our gaze from the future and the possibilities for change which Biden and Gantz have now offered us. In both Israel and America, we now have agents of change speaking not merely of ceasefire, but also of our future and solutions which might allow us to emerge from the legacies of our history.
America and Israel have been partners in a Faustian bargain; in its wake we believed the Holocaust proved that only power is real and has meaning, embraced the seduction of power to be the arbiter of virtue, and with the centralization of power to authority forged carceral states of force and control and of imperial conquest and dominion.
But now the tide begins to turn.
As Biden said in his historic Morehouse College speech; “It’s a humanitarian crisis in Gaza. That’s why I’ve called for an immediate ceasefire to stop the fighting, bring the hostages home, and I’ve been working on a deal as we speak.”
“This is one of the hardest, most complicated problems in the world. There’s nothing easy about it. I know it angers and frustrates many of you, including my family, but most of all, I know it breaks your heart. It breaks mine as well.”
Tyranny blinks, and we must seize the moment. As Edwin Markham wrote in Preparedness;
“For all your days prepare,
And meet them ever alike:
When you are the anvil, bear—
When you are the hammer, strike. “
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power; let us use ours not to dehumanize and enslave others, but to restore our humanity and to liberate each other. As the lyrics of the beautiful elegiac song in the series Wednesday goes, nothing else matters.
With last year’s United Nations declaration of Nakba Day, the historic trauma of the Palestinians and Israel’s kleptocratic imperial conquest and dominion and wars of ethnic cleansing and genocide belong not only to both sides of a divided people, but to all humankind.
Herein we bear witness and I hope heed its warning, for fascisms of blood, faith, and soil are universal to humans as failures of solidarity and interdependence driven by fear, especially when generalized and overwhelming fear and existential threats are shaped by authority in service to power and the carceral state of force and control through division and falsification.
No matter where you begin with hierarchies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
Why recreate a hell you have escaped from?
Israel has learned the wrong lessons from the Nazis. Seizure of power as autonomy and self-determination, yes; but why not change the systems of unequal power, instead of trading places as tyrants rather than prisoners?
Why has the state of Israel reconstructed not the dream of Sepharad in which all are equal regardless of faith, race, or national identity, but the nightmare of its destroyer the Spanish Empire and its ideology of limpieza enforced by Conquest and Inquisition?
With the Inquisition and the Holocaust as the twin poles of its historical identity, and as imposed conditions of struggle, Israel has achieved a space of relative safety at the cost of becoming a wholly militarized society united by blood and faith. But security is an illusion, because state terror and fear beyond hope create their own counterforce as resistance and revolution.
Fear is not the only means of exchange, nor power the only thing which has meaning.
Palestine and Israel are one people divided by history. Of memory, history, and the struggle between the masks that others make for us as authorized identities in service to power by those who would enslave us and those we make for ourselves, of falsification versus truths written in our flesh, this I say; only the redemptive power of love can free us from the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force.
There are no Israelis, no Palestinians; only people like ourselves and the choices we make about how to be human together.
On this Nakba Day, let us mourn the collapse of moral vision and the brotherhood of all humankind which unleashed it as the Defining Moment of both Palestinian and Israeli identity, dream a better future than we have the past, and act as a United Humankind to make it real.
Let us choose love over hate and solidarity over division.
As written by Hamas last year, before the October 7 events engineered by Israel through IDF infiltration and subversion agent networks within Hamas disrupted the Israel-Palestinian peace and unification movement and provided Netanyahu and his criminal settler regime a casus belli for the genocide of the Palestinians now ongoing and the imperial conquest and dominion of the whole region in a generalized conflict with Iran; “The 75th anniversary of the al-Nakba (the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people) anniversary, which comes in the aftermath of the Israeli occupation forces’ most recent aggression against the besieged Gaza strip, brings back painful memories.
Seventy-five years have passed since the Israeli occupation of Palestine, during which the occupation forces perpetrated the most horrific crimes and massacres against the Palestinian people, who have been holding on to their land and rights.
On this anniversary, the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement Hamas salutes the Palestinian heroic martyrs, who fell in their quest for freedom, wishes the injured speedy recovery, and hails the detainees in Israeli occupation jails. The movement states the following:
First: The Joint Operations Chamber has consolidated the unity of the Palestinian people in their struggle for liberation against the Israeli occupation.
Second: The Israeli occupation will never have any legitimacy or sovereignty over historic Palestine and the occupation’s endeavours to obliterate the historic features and identity of Palestine are bound to fail.
Third: We will remain loyal to the Palestinians languishing in Israeli occupation jails and we will continue to work towards releasing them by all available means.
Fourth: The main reason behind the great suffering of the millions of Palestinian refugees is the Israeli occupation. The Palestinian refugees’ right to return to their land, from which they were forcibly evicted, is inalienable.
Fifth: The 75-year-long Israeli occupation of Palestine is a stain on those who remained silent and have not lifted a finger to expose the occupation’s crimes and put an end to its aggression against our people, land, and holy places.
Sixth: We call on the international community, Arab and Muslim Ummah, and the free peoples of the world to side with the just Palestinian cause and take swift action to end all forms of aggression against the Palestinian people until they regain their rights.”
As written by Armani Syed in Time, in an article entitled Why the U.N. Is Commemorating Palestinian Displacement This Year; “For the first time ever, the U.N. will commemorate the Nakba, or “catastrophe” in Arabic, in which at least 700,000 Palestinians fled or were forcibly expelled from their homes during the creation of Israel in 1948.
On May 15, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas will deliver a keynote speech at the U.N. General Assembly in New York, as part of a high-level special meeting to mark Nakba Day. In a statement outlining the event, the U.N. said the occasion aims to “highlight that the noble goals of justice and peace require recognizing the reality and history of the Palestinian people’s plight and ensuring the fulfillment of their inalienable rights.”
As the 75th anniversary of the Nakba approached, the 193-member General Assembly voted in November on whether to host a commemoration event; the plan was approved by a vote of 90-30 with 47 abstentions. The U.S., a longtime military and financial supporter of Israel, voted against the event and confirmed that no American diplomats would be present.
For many others, the U.N.’s decision is an acknowledgement of the central role played by the intergovernmental organization in the partition of the Mandate for Palestine.
“It’s acknowledging the responsibility of the U.N. of not being able to resolve this catastrophe for the Palestinian people for 75 years,” said Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian U.N. ambassador, according to the Associated Press.
Israel’s U.N. ambassador, Gilad Erdan, described the commemoration as “abominable” and called it a “blatant attempt to distort history.”
From the early 1900s, a growing number of Zionist settlers escaping antisemitism in Europe arrived in the Mandate for Palestine. During the 1920s and 1930s, Palestinians resisted displacement that had been enabled by the British colonial presence. British forces eventually tasked the U.N. with finding a solution.
In 1947, the U.N. General Assembly, formed of 57 member states at the time, passed a resolution to divide the Mandate for Palestine into a Jewish state and a Palestinian one. The plan allocated more than half the country to the Jewish state at a time when Jews formed around one-third of the population. The plan would also have left around 500,000 Palestinians living in a future Jewish state with a drastic choice: remain a minority in a Jewish state or leave.
Palestinians rejected the proposal and when the British mandate expired in 1948, Israel declared its independence.
Fighting broke out and 5 Arab countries—Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria—deployed forces to stem the flow of Palestinian refugees. The aftermath of the fighting saw Israel conquer additional land that the U.N. plan had earmarked for a Palestinian state, while Egypt and Jordan each retained control over the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, respectively.
Over time, the Israel took control of more land that was formerly designated by the U.N. as part of a future Palestinian state. After the June 1967 War between Israel and a coalition of Arab states, Israel occupied the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
In recent decades, Israeli settlements in the West Bank have expanded under successive governments, with the settler population surpassing half a million people earlier this year. The settlements are considered illegal under international law, and much of the international community see them as an obstacle to peace and a future Palestinian state.
This year, Nakba Day is being observed on the heels of a round of violence between Israel and Palestinian militant groups. Israeli airstrikes which intended to target key figures from Islamic Jihad, the second-largest Palestinian armed group in Gaza, claimed at least 33 Palestinian lives. Meanwhile, Palestinian militant groups fired as many as 800 rockets toward Israel, leading to the death of two people in Israel.
“The catastrophe to the Palestinian people is still ongoing,” Mansour said, adding that Palestinians are still being “forcibly removed” from their homes.”
Arabic
15 مايو 2024 يوم النكبة
مع إعلان الأمم المتحدة يوم النكبة ، فإن الصدمة التاريخية للفلسطينيين وغزو إسرائيل للتطهير العرقي لا تخص كلا الجانبين من الشعب المنقسم فحسب ، بل للبشرية جمعاء.
هنا نشهد وآمل أن ألتفت إلى تحذيره ، لأن فاشية الدم والإيمان والتربة عالمية للبشر كفشل في التضامن والاعتماد المتبادل مدفوعًا بالخوف ، خاصةً عندما يتشكل الخوف المعمم والشامل والتهديدات الوجودية من خلال السلطة في خدمة القوة والحالة الجسدية للقوة والسيطرة من خلال الانقسام والتزوير.
بغض النظر عن المكان الذي تبدأ فيه التسلسلات الهرمية من الانتماء النخبوي والآخر الإقصائي ، ينتهي بك الأمر دائمًا عند أبواب أوشفيتز.
لماذا تعيد خلق الجحيم الذي هربت منه؟
لقد تعلمت إسرائيل الدروس الخاطئة من النازيين. نعم ، الاستيلاء على السلطة باعتباره استقلالية وتقرير مصير ؛ ولكن لماذا لا نغير أنظمة القوة غير المتكافئة ، بدلاً من تداول الأماكن على أنها طاغية لا أسرى؟
لماذا لم تعيد دولة إسرائيل بناء حلم سيفاراد الذي يتساوى فيه الجميع بغض النظر عن العقيدة أو العرق أو الهوية الوطنية ، ولكن كابوس مدمرها الإمبراطورية الإسبانية وأيديولوجية ليمبيزا التي فرضها الفتح ومحاكم التفتيش؟
مع محاكم التفتيش والهولوكوست كقطبين مزدوجين لهويتها التاريخية ، وكشروط كفاح مفروضة ، حققت إسرائيل مساحة من الأمان النسبي على حساب أن تصبح مجتمعًا عسكريًا بالكامل متحدًا بالدم والإيمان. لكن الأمن وهم ، لأن إرهاب الدولة والخوف الذي يفوق الأمل يخلقان قوتهما المضادة كمقاومة وثورة.
ليس الخوف هو الوسيلة الوحيدة للتبادل ، ولا القوة الشيء الوحيد الذي له معنى.
في يوم النكبة هذا ، دعونا نحزن على انهيار الرؤية الأخلاقية والأخوة بين البشرية جمعاء ، الأمر الذي أطلق العنان لها باعتبارها اللحظة المحددة للهوية الفلسطينية والإسرائيلية ، ونحلم بمستقبل أفضل مما كان لدينا في الماضي ، ونتصرف كإنسان موحد. لجعلها حقيقية.
Hebrew
15 במאי 2024 יום הנכבה
עם הכרזת יום הנכבה של האו”ם, הטראומה ההיסטורית של הפלסטינים וכיבוש הטיהור האתני של ישראל שייכים לא רק לשני הצדדים של עם מפולג, אלא לכל המין האנושי.
כאן אנו מעידים ואני מקווה להקשיב לאזהרתה, שכן פשיזם של דם, אמונה ואדמה הם אוניברסליים לבני אדם ככישלונות של סולידריות ותלות הדדית המונעים על ידי פחד, במיוחד כאשר פחד מוכלל ומכריע ואיומים קיומיים מעוצבים על ידי סמכות בשירות למען כוח ומצב קרסראלי של כוח ושליטה באמצעות חלוקה וזיוף.
לא משנה היכן אתה מתחיל עם היררכיות של השתייכות עילית ואחרות מדריגה, אתה תמיד מגיע בשערי אושוויץ.
למה לשחזר גיהנום שממנו נמלטת?
ישראל למדה את הלקחים הלא נכונים מהנאצים. תפיסת השלטון כאוטונומיה והגדרה עצמית, כן; אבל למה לא לשנות את מערכות הכוח הלא שוויוניות, במקום לסחור במקומות כרודן ולא שבוי?
מדוע מדינת ישראל לא שיחזרה את החלום של ספרד שבו כולם שווים ללא הבדל אמונה, גזע או זהות לאומית, אלא את הסיוט של ההורסת שלה את האימפריה הספרדית ואת האידיאולוגיה של לימפיזה שנאכפת על ידי הכיבוש והאינקוויזיציה?
עם האינקוויזיציה והשואה כצמד הקטבים התאומים לזהותה ההיסטורית, וכתנאי מאבק מוטלים, ישראל השיגה מרחב של ביטחון יחסי במחיר של הפיכתה לחברה צבאית לחלוטין המאוחדת בדם ואמונה. אבל ביטחון הוא אשליה, כי טרור המדינה ופחד מעבר לתקווה יוצרים כוח נגדי משלהם כהתנגדות ומהפכה.
פחד אינו האמצעי היחיד להחלפה, ולא כוח הדבר היחיד שיש לו משמעות.
ביום הנכבה הזה, הבה נתאבל על קריסת החזון המוסרי ואחוות האנושות כולה ששחררו אותו כרגע המכונן של הזהות הפלסטינית והישראלית כאחד, ונחלום עתיד טוב יותר ממה שהיה לנו בעבר, ונפעל כמין אנושי מאוחד. כדי שזה יהיה אמיתי.
The continuous Nakba’: Palestinians decry perpetual suffering
Farha film trailer/Netflix
Nakba Day: What happened in Palestine in 1948? | Israel-Palestine conflict News | Al Jazeera
Genocide Joe has sent his billion dollar arms gift to Israel back to congress for review, having admitted the true purpose of the two thousand pound city destroying bombs, but seems to imagine the tanks as defensive weapons, having forgotten the Blitzkrieg.
This as Israel invades Rafah in defiance of his Red Line against sending aid for the mass murders of the Palestinian refugees Israel has herded there, while in America the brutal repression of dissent on universities by student peace and divestiture protesters unfolds as state terror in recapitulation of the Vietnam War, though as yet we have no parallel with the Kent State Massacre.
If nothing else, the atrocities of the Gaza War have exposed the truths and monstrosities behind America’s historical role as patron of Israel’s imperial conquest and dominion of Palestine and its seventy years of genocide, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity, and the unchecked power of a rapacious and kleptocratic state of theocracy and racism which we have authorized.
America Falls with our failure of empathy, abandonment of our universal human rights, cowardice in confronting evil, and complicity in genocide.
As Tolstoy and Lenin asked with such very different results, What is to be done?
As written by Osita Nwanevu in The Guardian, in an article entitled US students, once again, have led the way. Now we must all stand up for Palestinians: Campus protests in solidarity with the people of Gaza have braved abuse and police raids but history will be kinder; “he student left is the most reliably correct constituency in America. Over the past 60 years, it has passed every great moral test American foreign policy has forced upon the public, including the Vietnam war, the question of relations with apartheid South Africa, and the Iraq war. Student activists were at the heart of the black civil rights movement from the very beginning. To much derision and abuse, they pushed for more rights, protections and respect for women and queer people on their campuses than the wider world was long willing to provide. And over the past 20 years in particular, policymakers have arrived belatedly to stances on economic inequality, climate change, drug policy and criminal justice that putative radicals on campus took up long before them.
They have not always been right; even when right, their prescriptions for the problems they’ve identified and their means of directing attention to them have not always been prudent. But time and time and time again, the student left in America has squarely faced and expressed truths our politicians and all the eminent and eloquent voices of moderation in the press, in all of their supposed wisdom and good sense, have been unable or unwilling to see. Straining against an ancient and immortal prejudice against youth, it has made a habit of telling the American people, in tones that discomfit, what they need to hear before they are ready to hear it.
Only later, after the teargas clears and the leering and laughter subside, do we sit puzzled, in the filth of our own entirely avoidable mistakes, and look regretfully backward. Books are written. Documentaries are made. Plaques are installed. At Kent State, a plaza overlooking the university’s commons was constructed to honor the four students the Ohio national guard killed there in 1970. It’s bounded, the university’s website says, by “a jagged, abstract border symbolic of disruptions and the conflict of ideas.” There are daffodils. “Inquire, Learn, Reflect,” an inscription reads. One thing visitors might reflect on is that a Gallup poll taken not long after the shootings found that 58% of Americans believed that anti-war activists had, perhaps in the unrest of the preceding days, brought the deaths at Kent State upon themselves. Today, more than half a century after the fact, we mourn them. We have regrets.
What will we regret the most about the last few weeks? Which responses to the Gaza protests will linger the longest in our minds? CNN’s comparison of the campus protests to the persecution of Jews “during the 1930s in Europe”, perhaps? The University of Virginia changing its policy on tents to justify the deployment of more force against its students than it called for against the actual Nazis who marched on its campus and killed a woman seven years ago? The New York police department presenting to the press, as proof that outside agitators had organized the occupation of a building at Columbia, a book about the causes of terrorism written by a historian and a bike chain Columbia had been selling to its students? The outside funding actually raised by pro-Israel counter-protesters at UCLA who beat up and threw fireworks at students and faculty as campus and LAPD officers stood by?
Whenever all of this ends – whenever we find ourselves ready to survey what’s left of Gaza and its people and ask whether we could have done more to prevent the use of our weapons and our money in their destruction – what will we have to say for ourselves? When the talking heads are assembled to offer voiceovers atop footage of police grappling and tackling students and faculty whose voices, it will be painfully obvious to most by then, should have been heeded, what words of useless contrition will be offered?
There have been real instances of antisemitism on campuses since the protests began; here and there we’ve seen real instances of malevolence and idiocy. But to believe, on the basis of anecdata, that hatred and ignorance have motivated the vast majority of students who’ve set up encampments and other pro-Palestinian protests over the last month – in their many thousands at well over 100 colleges and universities in all but four states – is to believe what can only be described as an extraordinary propaganda campaign, one pushed by critics in the press and in office who can’t seem to agree on what the protesters are like. These students, we’ve been told, are both popular and unpopular among their peers. They are both ugly and chic. They are fragile and cold-blooded, pathetically soft and remarkably violent. They hate Jews. They are Jews who hate themselves. They’ve exercised both too little message discipline and too much caution with the press at demonstrations that are both laughably chaotic and suspiciously organized. And whoever they are and whatever’s spurred them into action, the students are, clearly, in need of either a good sock to the mouth or a good lay – the better to focus their attention away from politics and on their studies, on political matters close to home rather than halfway across the world, or political matters halfway across the world more deserving of their attention, like the plight of the suffering in China, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Sudan, Iran or Azerbaijan.
No one with their eyes on Gaza denies that there are many bad things happening in the world at any given time. None of those who’ve troubled law- and opinion-makers so with their insistence that the Palestinians are people would argue that the Palestinians are the only suffering people on the globe. But they are suffering largely as a consequence of American foreign policy. On Wednesday, President Biden announced that the United States will freeze the supply of offensive weaponry to Israel if it continues with the full invasion of Rafah, an announcement that follows admissions that the campaign being waged in Gaza, with our bombs, has thus far been waged with dubious military objectives and with insufficient regard for civilian life.
The guilty parties here include not only our political leaders but our private institutions, our colleges among them
What the White House has yet to admit, though, is that the nearly 35,000 Palestinians who have been killed and the 1.9 million Palestinians who have been displaced over the last seven months are the victims not only of this particular war and the logic of collective responsibility for the massacres of 7 October being deployed by Israeli leaders, but the willingness of this country to sanction Israel’s denial of Palestinian human rights for decades. And the guilty parties here include not only our political leaders but our private institutions, our colleges among them, which, through the investments they have sustained in Israel and the arms manufacturers supplying its war, have rendered themselves complicit in wrongs that should trouble us as deeply as apartheid in South Africa now does. Nothing should surprise us about the fact that Israel now faces similar divestment campaigns; after weeks of moaning and groaning that the demands of student protesters have been unexpressed, unclear or impossible to meet, multiple colleges have, in fact, made certain concessions to them and announced plans to take further demands into consideration. Encampments at Brown, Northwestern, Rutgers and the University of Minnesota were voluntarily disbanded on that basis.
But it should also be unsurprising that far more colleges have responded to student demonstrators by calling in the authorities – an authorization of force prefigured by the remarkable crackdowns on pro-Palestinian speech we’ve seen at institutions across the country since October. One of the perversities of the situation is that despite all this, we probably haven’t heard the last about our “woke universities” – as they have for more than a hundred years, the right and centrists who share their contempt for college students will, against all available evidence, continue insisting that American campuses have been ideologically captured by the very people we’ve just witnessed campus administrators go to war against. They will do all they can to obscure it, but it should be plain now that all the shallow representation most visible to pundits – the diversity and equity teams, the minorities in high positions – hasn’t changed the fact that the majority of American universities are largely beholden to donors, trustees and, increasingly, politicians, well to the right of the most progressive voices on campus.
In the months ahead, many on the left will surely call upon universities to hold true to their commitments to open discourse and redress the censorship and harassment of Israel’s critics. They should. But we should also resist the flight to abstraction – dishwatery invocations of free speech, murky and lukewarm, that no one ever seems to really mean and that function chiefly as bulwarks against substantive debate. The dignity of the Palestinian people and their right to resist their oppression plainly aren’t chief among the dangerous and controversial ideas we’ve heard so much about protecting over the last decade; we cannot rely upon the putatively neutral authorities and institutions that have done so much to suppress them to act now in their defense on abstract grounds. So it goes. The job now, as the Israelis press into Rafah, is to change public opinion on the actual matter at hand – to make urgent arguments to the American public not about the plight of Palestine’s defenders on campus but the plight of the Palestinians. The students have done their part; they will be recognized in time. Now it’s up to the rest of us.”
US students, once again, have led the way. Now we must all stand up for Palestinians
14 مايو 2024 أمريكا تسقط بفشلنا في التعاطف، والتخلي عن حقوقنا الإنسانية العالمية، والجبن في مواجهة الشر، والتواطؤ في الإبادة الجماعية: بدء الهجوم الإسرائيلي على رفح
أرسل جو هدية الأسلحة التي تبلغ قيمتها مليار دولار إلى إسرائيل إلى الكونجرس لمراجعتها، بعد أن اعترف بالغرض الحقيقي لتدمير القنابل في المدينة التي يبلغ وزنها ألفي رطل، ولكن يبدو أنه يتخيل الدبابات كأسلحة دفاعية، بعد أن نسي الحرب الخاطفة.
يأتي هذا في الوقت الذي تغزو فيه إسرائيل رفح في تحدٍ لخطه الأحمر ضد إرسال المساعدات لعمليات القتل الجماعي للاجئين الفلسطينيين الذين تحشدهم إسرائيل هناك، بينما يتكشف في أمريكا القمع الوحشي للمعارضة في الجامعات من خلال السلام الطلابي والمتظاهرين على سحب الاستثمارات باعتباره إرهاب دولة في تلخيص لإسرائيل. حرب فيتنام، على الرغم من أنه ليس لدينا حتى الآن أي تشابه مع مذبحة ولاية كينت.
إذا لم يكن هناك شيء آخر، فقد كشفت الفظائع التي ارتكبت في حرب غزة عن الحقائق والفظائع الكامنة وراء الدور التاريخي الذي لعبته أمريكا كراعية للغزو الإمبريالي الإسرائيلي لفلسطين وهيمنتها وسبعين عامًا من الإبادة الجماعية والتطهير العرقي والجرائم ضد الإنسانية، والقوة غير المقيدة لإسرائيل. حالة الثيوقراطية والعنصرية الجشعة والكلبتوقراطية التي سمحنا بها.
إن أميركا تسقط بفشلنا في التعاطف، والتخلي عن حقوقنا الإنسانية العالمية، والجبن في مواجهة الشر، والتواطؤ في الإبادة الجماعية.
وكما تساءل تولستوي ولينين بنتائج مختلفة تمامًا، ما الذي يجب فعله؟
Hebrew
14 במאי 2024 אמריקה נופלת עם כישלוננו באמפתיה, נטישת זכויות האדם האוניברסליות שלנו, פחדנות בהתמודדות עם הרוע ושותפות ברצח עם: התקפת ישראל ברפיח מתחילה
רצח העם ג’ו שלח את מתנת הנשק שלו של מיליארד דולר לישראל בחזרה לביקורת בקונגרס, לאחר שהודה במטרה האמיתית של עיריית אלפיים לירות השמדת פצצות, אבל נראה שהוא מדמיין את הטנקים כנשק הגנתי, לאחר ששכח את הבליצקריג.
זאת כאשר ישראל פולשת לרפיח בהתרסה לקו האדום שלו נגד שליחת סיוע לרציחות ההמוניות של הפליטים הפלסטינים שישראל עדרה שם, בעוד שבאמריקה הדיכוי האכזרי של מחלוקות על האוניברסיטאות על ידי מפגיני שלום סטודנטים ומפגיני ביטול ביטול מתגלה כטרור ממלכתי בסיכום של מלחמת וייטנאם, אם כי עדיין אין לנו מקבילה לטבח במדינת קנט.
אם שום דבר אחר, הזוועות של מלחמת עזה חשפו את האמיתות והמפלצות שמאחורי תפקידה ההיסטורי של אמריקה כפטרונית של הכיבוש הקיסרי והשליטה של ישראל על פלסטין ושבעים שנות רצח עם, טיהור אתני, פשעים נגד האנושות והכוח הבלתי מבוקש של מצב דורס וקלפטוקרטי של תיאוקרטיה וגזענות שאישרנו.
אמריקה נופלת עם כישלון האמפתיה שלנו, נטישת זכויות האדם האוניברסליות שלנו, פחדנות בהתמודדות עם הרוע ושותפות ברצח עם. כפי ששאלו טולסטוי ולנין בתוצאות כה שונות, מה יש לעשו
Netanyahu now rides upon his black horse of famine, bringing his mad dream of the Final Solution of the Palestinian Problem with all of its attendant shadows lingering from the Holocaust.
As the passage in Ezekiel 14:21 warns us when the Infinite unleashes the “Four disastrous acts of judgement” to bring a Reckoning against the Elders of Israel for crimes of idolatry, the use of social force obeys Newton’s Third Law of Motion and creates its own Resistance.
Israelis and Palestinians are one people divided by history, divisions shaped in service to power by those who would enslave us.
Perhaps Aynn Rand saw truly in this one prediction of the collapse of our civilization from the mechanical failures of its internal contradictions, as she is often paraphrased from her novel The Fountainhead; “The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.”
If we wish to preserve our humanity, our reply must always be “All of us, in solidarity as guarantors of each other’s universal human rights and an emerging United Humankind.”
The Gaza War has as its major theme the question of human rights, and if such an idea will have a place in whatever future we may choose. Here then is a retrospective of my witness of history of this conflict, and of its consequences for human being, meaning, and value, and of the choices we make about how to become human together.
As I wrote in my post of January 25 2024, O Israel, Ask Not For Whom the Bell Tolls; We celebrate this glorious victory of solidarity over division in the Trial of Israel, with joy and dancing in the streets.
O Israel, ask not for whom the bell tolls.
Though for now it stops short of a call for ceasefire and a ruling of Israeli guilt in genocide, this judgement is a stunning and swift victory for the liberation of Palestine which finds Israel guilty of genocidal intent, war crimes, and other crimes against humanity in a way which delegitimates the state of Israel itself as a regime of tyranny and state terror and an outlaw nation of imperial dominion and colonial enslavement and theft, as well as the brutal Netanyahu settler regime which has made of the Holy Land a vast Auschwitz.
And all of this plays out on the stage of the world as exposure and truthtelling of atrocities and calculated state terror perpetrated not against criminals who committed atrocities on October 7, but against civilian populations who had nothing to do with it; seventy percent of the victims of Israeli terror are women and children. How does a child being Palestinian hurt you?
But of course to the fascists of the Netanyahu regime, only people like themselves are truly human, and this mass death and terror is what happens when you begin with such ideas of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, identitarian politics, nationalism, theocratic tyranny, and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil. No matter where you begin along this spectrum of fear and hate, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
While South Africa leads the championing of our humanity, and has ignited a global anticolonial rebellion against the dominion of Europe and America, two parallel and interdependent storylines trace across the Trial of Israel like leprosy; the attack on the hospital at Khan Younis, and the complicity of Biden the Baby Killer and America along with the UK in Israeli ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.
In balance against such forces of darkness we now have two historic victories; the success of the Red Sea Campaign in counter-blockading the Israeli blockade of humanitarian aid to Gaza, and the international solidarity of liberated colonies in calling out an emperor who has no clothes in the Trial of Israel.
As I wrote in my post of November 29 2023 International Day of Solidarity With Palestine
On this International Day of Solidarity with Palestine, I write to apply the Occam’s Razor of simplification to the complex and emotionally charged issue of Palestinian-Israeli relations and the problem of the double minority by asking a question; what best serves the joy of humankind?
So many other ways to construct such a question, especially as principles of becoming human through revolutionary struggle and seizures of power under imposed conditions of struggle which include falsification, commodification, and dehumanization as systems of oppression; of death, learned helplessness, abjection, horror, and divisions of authorized identities?
How best to create a free society of equals as a United Humankind through secular democracy and universal human rights?
How to balance our uniqueness as individuals within a diverse and inclusive society?
How to level all hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness and annihilate all systems of unequal power?
How to bring the Chaos, disruption, fracture, change, and democratization of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and escape the legacies of our history and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil?
How to reimagine and transform the limitless possibilities of human being, meaning, and value?
How to free ourselves and each other under imposed conditions of struggle which require violence and the use of social force in seizures of power, without becoming the authority we struggle against and using force and violence to enforce our own ideas of virtue?
Israeli atrocities and war crimes in the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians has confronted us all with our complicity in evil, and the world is whiplashed in horror and abjection as our leaders betray us and abandon the principle of universal human rights by which our civilization is sustained, a civilization now in processes of collapse and subversion by fascism at the dawn of the Age of Tyrants. But this also means everything is in question, power can be seized, and new futures chosen, if we act in solidarity in times of chaos as a space of free creative play.
As Guillermo del Toro teaches us in Carnival Row; “Chaos is the great hope of the powerless.”
Clearly we must have true equality if our rights and liberties are to remain universal in the shadow of state force and control. So also are freedom and equality possible only when we are free of authorized divisions of exclusionary otherness and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
What prevents us, here in America and throughout the world, from seeing this humanitarian disaster as it is? First are elite interests of wealth and power, which have created an American colony and imperialist military giant for the purposes of dominance of the Middle East and control of the strategic asset of oil, of which Traitor Trump’s diplomatic campaign on behalf of recognition of the state of Israel by her neighbors is among the most recent forms of the historic and perfidious Arab-American Alliance, another is Biden the Baby Killer’s hugging the war criminal Netanyahu and sending a Navy ship to help terrorize civilians rather than break the Israeli blockade of humanitarian aid and silence the bombs of ethnic cleansing.
That we have used the threat of Iranian influence and the ancient Sunni-Shia vendetta to divide and conquer the region, legitimize the conflicts in Yemen and Gaza as test cases of our hegemony, and destabilize democracy movements in Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran as well as perpetuate the disenfranchisement and ethnic cleansing of the people of Palestine by Israel speaks to America’s true motives; not to champion peace and freedom, but to secure wealth and power through war and tyranny.
I believe the secondary cause of our blindness to the injustices of the Palestinian-Israeli situation is a legacy of the Holocaust and how we process historical narratives of victimization. Once anointed as a victim, and crowned with a white hat of blameless innocence, that figure in our imagination becomes incapable of wrongdoing in any other way. We think in terms of Good and Evil as a cosmic struggle of dichotomous forces, and of showdowns at high noon in the Westerns which are primary narratives of imperial colonialism and the apologetics of power, not in terms of the flaws of our humanity. Absolutes are simpler.
Ambiguity and moral relativization disrupt authorized identities and systems of oppression; this is their great value in revolutionary stuggle.
We are all capable of both good and evil actions, of misunderstandings, conflicted and nuanced feelings and responses, and failures of compassion. And we tend to ignore rather than confront things like moral grey areas which make us uncomfortable; this is called cognitive dissonance reduction, and it means we tend to keep doing things we know are wrong if we have a good story to justify our actions and the belief that God is on our side. The most terrible atrocities in history have been perpetrated in this way.
Here I must say plainly that I support the creation of a secular democracy in which all human beings, Palestinian and Israeli alike, are exactly equal both in fact and under the law, that I support the Boycott, Divestiture, and Sanction of the state of Israel and the liberation of Palestine from Occupation and Blockade, and that Israel as presently constituted is a fascist tyranny of state terror which is guilty of crimes against humanity in the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.
A post has typified the bifurcated and dichotomous dialogs which have attached themselves to the war in Gaza; it says “If you have the power to turn off your enemy’s food, water, and energy, and attack them at your leisure, you are the bad guy.”
To this someone relied; “If you have the power to attack, rape and kidnap over 200 hostages, and hide them in a hospital, you are the bad guy.”
Here follows my reply, in one paragraph; Yes, we are all bad guys here. The use of social force has no justifications; but as resistance struggle against imposed conditions of unequal power, it may be necessary. The violence of the tyrant, the conqueror, the occupier, or the slave master cannot be compared to the violence used by the slave to break his chains. What has happened here is that both Hamas and the Netanyahu regime have delegitimated themselves in war crimes and unforgivable acts of terror which violate our universal rights. Both seek to subjugate the people in whose name they claim to act to make them complicit, a primary strategy of terror. And only love and solidarity of action against Hamas and the state of Israel by the people of Israel and Palestine together can overcome state tyranny and terror.
This leaves us with the question asked by Tolstoy and Lenin in very different works, one which founded the principles of nonviolent resistance used by Gandhi and Martin Luther King, the other which began the Russian Revolution; What is to be done?
For myself and my comrades, we have a clear and simple mandate of action in three parts; Unite the Israeli and Palestinian peoples as equal citizens in a democratic secular state wherein faith and ethnicity have no legal standing, defend all civilian noncombatants, their universal human rights, and their access to humanitarian aid, and bring a direct and personal Reckoning to all war criminals on both sides.
As a child in 1969 at an event with my mother that began as a protest against the Occupation of Palestine and American responsibility for its injustices by investment of the University of California and other state institutions, in People’s Park Berkeley, Bloody Thursday May 15, I was in the front line when the police opened fire on the crowd; this was my first death and rebirth, by which I mean Most Sincerely Dead and without life signs for some while, when for a moment I stood outside of time and beheld the possible futures, timelines, and alternate realities which propagated from that moment, the limitless possibilities of becoming human and the terrible chance of a coming age of fascist tyranny, war, the fall of civilization, and the extinction of humankind which may yet come to pass if we cannot reimagine and transform ourselves and our society, and find healing for the flaws of our humanity, the origins of evil in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, and the brokenness of the world.
Over fifty years later, I fought in the defense of al Aqsa and the Third Intifada; will we still be fighting for our humanity and our liberty fifty years from now, or fifty thousand?
My hope is that our successors in future generations will have forged a free society of equals and abandoned the use of social force, will have no tyranny or state terror to resist, and can live their lives in joy and love and not in struggle as have I.
We must dream better dreams, and stand together in solidarity of action to make them real.
Who do we want to become, we humans?
Let us choose one another and not the wealth, power, and privilege of hegemonic elites, equality, diversity, and inclusion and not the divisions and hierarchies of exclusionary otherness, liberty and not the centralization of power and authority to a carceral state owned by the wealthy, democracy and not tyranny, hope and not fear, love and not hate.
As I wrote in my post of May 10 2021, The Defense of al Aqsa: Liberty versus Tyranny in Jerusalem; We may have witnessed the advent of a Third Intifada this night, in the Defense of al Aqsa and the street fighting in Gaza which followed, ignited by the perfidy and imperial conquest of a xenophobic and fascist state of Israel which regards no one but their own tribe and faith as truly human, and which has perpetrated an unprovoked and deadly attack as an act of state terror and a crime against humanity on the peaceful worshippers at one of the most sacred mosques in the Islamic world, a demonstration of power and dominion which follows weeks of provocations, assaults, and acts of propagandistic dehumanization against the people of Palestine.
Like the Second or al Aqsa Intifada which lasted four years from 28 September 2000 to 8 February 2005, unresolved issues of an Occupation now in its fifty fourth year since the June 7 1967 Conquest of Old Jerusalem by Israel, which the State of Israel celebrated according to the Hebrew calendar as Jerusalem Day today by attacking al Aqsa, and a Catastrophe ongoing now for seventy three years since Nakba Day May 15 1948, have coalesced around the symbolic value of al Aqsa, which has a contested dual identity as the Temple Mount in Judaism.
Chances of de-escalation and averting a war depend now not on local factors but on the response of the international community, for history has here become a trap which collapses to ensnare us in its jaws, and outside forces must liberate us from the failures of our system’s internal contradictions.
Will America disavow and renounce its colony of Israel, Queen of her imperial policy in the Middle East and control of the strategic resource of oil? Can international unity and the pressure of Boycott, Divestiture, and Sanction free us from the tyranny and terror of an Apartheid regime as it did in South Africa?
Or is war the only reckoning humankind can offer, or will accept?
As written by Ishaan Tharoor in The Washington Post; “On Monday night, militants in the Gaza Strip and the Israeli military exchanged rocket fire and airstrikes amid a deadly escalation of violence. Hamas and Islamic Jihad, armed groups based in blockaded Gaza, launched a barrage of rockets that landed near Jerusalem and in parts of southern Israel, injuring at least one person. Israeli airstrikes in retaliation killed at least 20 people in Gaza, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, including nine children.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the “terrorist groups” in Gaza had “crossed a red line” with their rocket attacks. But the latest explosion of hostilities has a long tail, following numerous aggressive actions by both Israeli security forces and far-right Jewish supremacist groups in Jerusalem. Two weeks ago, bands of Jewish extremists, including some settlers from the West Bank, marched through Palestinian-populated areas of the holy city, chanting “Death to Arabs,” attacking bystanders and damaging Palestinian property and homes. Israeli attempts to evict a number of Palestinian families in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah — a microcosm of what Palestinians view as part of a long history of dispossession and erasure at the hands of the Israeli state — had stirred Palestinian solidarity protests in various parts of the occupied territories and Israel proper.
It also raised tensions ahead of the commemoration of Jerusalem Day on Monday, an official Israeli holiday celebrating the capture of the city during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. A planned annual march by far-right ultranationalist Israelis was called off after authorities rerouted its path at the last minute. Large numbers still made their way to the Western Wall and sang an extremist vengeance song against Palestinians.
“The Hamas rocket attacks, which included the first strikes against Jerusalem in several years, came after running clashes among Israeli police, Palestinian protesters and far-right Jewish Israelis around the Old City,” my colleagues reported. “Among the hundreds injured were seven who were hospitalized in serious condition, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent. Video footage circulated on social media of Israeli police officers brutally beating a detained Palestinian man.”
How can America support the state of Israel in tyranny and terror, conquest and plunder? It’s a question asked in tones of outrage, sorrow, and bafflement since the advent of the Nakba on May 15 1948, the Day of Catastrophe which began the Occupation of Palestine and the systematic enslavement and genocide of its people in the wake of the Israeli conquest of Jerusalem. How is this legitimized?
A friend has recently reframed this question for me; “I loved and embraced the Jewish tradition, joining a synagogue and working alongside its Rabbi. When I witness the treatment of Palestinians by the Jewish government of Israel, I am overwhelmed by feelings of confusion and anger. Unable to reconcile this immorality, I question the very foundation of my faith. Where is the good and moral uprising of international Jewish voices condemning the government’s path? I’ve lost faith in being Jewish.”
What is clear to me is that this crisis of faith is also an existential crisis of identity, a situation of utmost gravity and danger which also holds the potential for reimagination and transformative rebirth, a personal echo of a parallel civilizational crisis from which humankind and the global community of nations must find a way to emerge and free ourselves of the legacies of our history. Here is my reply:
The state of Israel is not identical with the Jewish faith, though the fascist-imperialist faction which Netanyahu represents would like everyone to think so.
A nation based on the assignment of its citizens to a tribal identity, the sectarian weaponization of faith in service to power and an authorized national identity, a military society with universal compulsory service, and a reconstructed Hebrew language of national unity has used identity politics to subjugate its citizens to the centralized power of tyranny; Israel is a fascist state of blood, faith, and soil no less than that of the Nazis.
Add to this toxic mix a kleptocratic regime which has propagandized narratives of historical victimization to legitimize massive theft and imperial conquest of other people’s nations and one thing is clear; Israel has learned the wrong lessons from the Nazis.
You may know from my many references to the incident in my writing that I am an antifascist, sworn to the Oath of the Resistance by Jean Genet in 1982 in Beirut, during our fight against the Israeli invasion and siege. In the forty years after, I have been a hunter of fascists and a revolutionary engaged in struggle for the liberation of humankind against fascisms of blood, faith, and soil and against tyranny and authoritarian regimes of force and control, for democracy and its ideals of freedom, equality, truth, and justice, and for our universal human rights. In this cause I place my life in the balance with all those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.
A Palestinian homeland, and justice for its people, has been among my goals since that summer so long ago. Like the goal of liberation of Ireland from British colonial rule, it remains to be achieved. In question is the idea of freedom and citizenship as the sovereignty and independence of peoples from foreign colonialism and authoritarian tyranny, and the primacy of a nonsectarian state free from divisions and hierarchies of faith, for who stands between each of us and the Infinite serves neither.
I also support the idea of an Israeli homeland, and see no reason these two states, Palestine and Israeli, should be mutually exclusive or antagonistic. Why must citizenship be bound by the limits of geography, or states by borders?
Why must one people’s Return mean another’s Exile?
To be clear, I am on the side of anyone threatened with hate crime regardless of any other factors; in riot and war my test for the use of force is simple; who holds power?
I am on the side of all those whom Frantz Fanon named The Wretched of the Earth; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased. This applies equally to Jews and Muslims, Israel and Palestine, and any other human beings regardless of who they are, and especially without any moral burden of merit as Shaw teaches us with the character of Alfred P. Doolittle in My Fair Lady.
Let us send no armies to enforce virtue.
Some Israelis who would disagree with me on the question of Palestine and militarism in imperial conquest and regional dominion have been allies in the cause of hunting Nazis, but are blind to their own complicity in this evil due to seeing themselves as victims and defenders of victims rather than perpetrators of crimes against humanity.
This is about fear, and the destructive cycle of abuse and violence. Not membership in any group or authorized identities of belonging, hierarchies of the elite and the elect, and divisions of exclusionary otherness. The origins of violence and the social use of force are universal, historical, and systemic, and absolutely not in any mythical evil impulse, original sin, or inherent depravity of man.
The Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force belongs to no one, but to apersonal systems of unequal power. I understand all too well how power makes us feel safe, the seductive beauty of weapons which make us arbiters of virtue, and how elite membership confers entitlement; this works the same for nations as for individuals, in the playground, prison yard, and contested public spaces like the Temple Mount which is also al Aqsa.
When faith is appropriated by authority for legitimation in identity politics, identity itself becomes confused and ambiguous. To become free, we must seize ownership of ourselves as self-created and autonomous beings.
This is why the primary duties of a citizen are to question authority, expose authority, mock authority, and challenge authority.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks others make for us and those we make for ourselves; this is the first revolution in which we all must fight.
I think of the problem of human evil and its cycle of fear, power, and force in the case of states which become the tyrannies they fought to liberate themselves from, and this is true of anticolonial revolutionary states generally because of the historical legacies of victimization and the imposed conditions of struggle, in this way; victims often become abusers because their identity is organized around power as the only means of escape and survival in a world wherein no one can be trusted.
When trust has been abrogated and proven empty and without meaning, when the capacity to bond with and feel the pain of others in empathy has been broken and one is without pity or remorse, when fear is overwhelming and generalized and has been shaped by authority to the service of power, victims learn that only power has meaning and is real. We must not allow our abusers to become our teachers.
While every such issue has its own unique origins and history, the problem itself is universal, and relates to what one fears, and how that fear is shaped by authority as identity. From our perspective as Americans interpreting events in the classic problem of the double minority typified by Israel and Palestine, how we perceive issues has much to do with how they are framed by our informing and motivating sources.
In the end we are defined by what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
The first question to ask of any story, and the most important, is simple; whose story is this?
We are lost in a wilderness of mirrors, of lies and illusions, falsifications of ourselves, distorted images and reflections, echoes and authorized identities which disfigure, disempower, and steal our souls.
How shall we answer those who would enslave us? Our authenticity and autonomy is realized through seizure of power, and the reimagination and transformation of ourselves and humankind as a free society of equals.
We Americans tend to see things in terms of white hats and black hats, as in the Western films which serve as origin myths and archetypes of our national character. Once victim status has been conferred, such groups and persons become white hats and good guys, incapable of evil and diametrically opposed to whomever must then be black hats. It’s a terrible way of choosing national policy.
Sadly, we humans can be good and evil at once, the flaws of our humanity echo and reflect the brokenness of the world. It is a truth proven once again tonight in al Quds or Jerusalem depending on to whom one is speaking and in what language, as Gaza burns from the onslaught of an Israeli Defense Forces run amok much the same as the night almost four decades ago in Beirut when they tried to burn Genet and I alive in our café, as a dozen human beings from whom everything but hope has been stolen swear vows to each other to hold a position covering the escape of the women and children trapped by the Israeli attack until all are safe, in a final defense not of al Aqsa Mosque, magnificent and beautiful and filled with significance, monument to the human impulse to reach beyond ourselves and to the limitless possibilities of becoming human, a stage fit for the glorious deaths of heroes, but of the disembodied screams of strangers among the nameless warrens of a derelict antiquity.
Against the chasms of emptiness and nihilistic barbarism of a world of darkness and fire, of fear and force, I have only words to offer, and I write to you what I have said to my comrades who have chosen to stand with me; I’ve lost count of Last Stands, but I’ve risked everything against impossible odds and survived more times than I can remember, and all that matters is that we abandon neither ourselves nor one another, that we refuse to submit, for this is the moment of our freedom, and it can never be taken from us.
From this night, Palestine is free, for we can be killed, but we cannot be conquered.
As I wrote in my post of November 4 2023, Stand With Humankind: On Today’s Global Rally For Palestine; Since the disruption and fracture of our ideas of universal human rights in the October 7 terror attack perpetrated by the Netanyahu regime of Israel and their partners in theocratic tyranny Hamas which delegitimized both and destabilized the world order, a great struggle between democracy and tyranny, love and hate, hope and fear has been raging in Gaza, where the fate of humankind hangs in the balance and our future possibilities of becoming human are being chosen in the great game of chance that is war.
Here, as in far too many times and places, a few unconquerable heroes and those who stand with them in solidarity as a band of brothers against the darkness of barbarian atavisms of brute fear and force and a nihilistic regime wherein only power has meaning and fear is the only means of exchange, die in the forlorn hope of buying with their lives time for civilization to awaken to the threat of fascist tyranny and imperial conquest.
How will we answer the test of our humanity in this moment of existential threat? Who do we want to become, we humans? A free society of equals or a world of masters and slaves?
For these are the stakes of this game in which we now play; liberty or tyranny.
Today the Rally For Palestine throughout the world demonstrates our solidarity as guarantors of each other’s universal human rights, a glorious defiance of fear weaponized in service to power by authority and of the fascisms of blood, faith, and soil through which they divide and subjugate us.
For this time of darkness and sectarian violence ends only when both Israelis and Palestinians, one people divided by history, unite to liberate each other from those who claim to rule in their name and as mouthpieces for a god of universal brotherhood and love of which they have made instead an idol of cruelty and death.
Who stands between each of us and the Infinite serves neither.
When those who would enslave us come for us, as they always do, let them find not a people subjugated by learned helplessness nor divided by hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness, but a United Humankind unconquerable in solidarity and refusal to submit.
To tyranny and fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again!
Why is it important to resist our dehumanization and those who would enslave us, and to reply to the terror of our nothingness with refusal to submit and solidarity with others, regardless of where or when such existential threats arise, who is under threat or any divisions of identitarian politics weaponized by conquerors to isolate their victims from help?
How much of our humanity can we claw back from the darkness in refusal to submit to those who would enslave us, and in solidarity with each other?
We must each of us face our own Gate of Fire, as did the Spartans at Thermopylae, and choose.
What are we worth, if we permit ruthless bandit kings to commit atrocities, genocides, plunder and enslave others?
What is western civilization worth, if we will not live up to our fine words? And fine words they remain, such as these written by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence in 1776, a synthesis and revisioning of ideas from Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau; “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
What is America, if not a guarantor of democracy and our universal human rights, and a beacon of hope to the world?
To paraphrase America’s Pledge of Allegiance not as an oath to a nation but as the declaration of a United Humankind; We, the People of Earth, pledge ourselves to each other, as one humankind, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Let us reply to tyranny and terror with the words written by J.R.R. Tolkien between 1937 and 1955 in his luminous reimagination of the Second World War and the conflict of dominion which immediately followed it between tyranny and democracy, first against fascism and then between the allies who defeated it as spheres of dominion and systems of economic and political organization but both for different dreams of a free society of equals, in the iconic speech of Aragorn at the Black Gate in The Return of the King which unites ethos, logos, pathos, and kairos; “A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down, but it is not this day. This day we fight.”
War transforms the question of our authorship of ourselves with existential primacy; where do we ourselves end, and others begin? How may we negotiate this boundary of the Forbidden and interface with alien realms of human being, meaning, and value, with division and hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness or with solidarity, diversity, and inclusion, with fear or with love?
This is a war of tyranny and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil against democracy and a free society of equals, for the idea that we all of us have meaning and value which is uniquely ours and against enslavement and the theft of our souls.
Within the limits of our form, of the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world, we struggle to achieve the human; ours is a revolution of Tikkun Olam, a Hebrew phrase meaning repair of the world which refers to our interdependence and duty of care for each other as equals who share a common humanity.
I’m sure all of us here know what Shlomo Bardin meant when he repurposed the phrase from the Kabbalah of Luria and the Midrash, but what do I mean by this?
There are only two kinds of actions which we human beings are able to perform; those which affirm and exalt us, and those which degrade and dehumanize us.
We live at a crossroads of history which may define the fate of our civilization and the future possibilities of becoming human, in the struggle between tyranny and liberty and between solidarity and division, and we must each of us choose who we wish to become, we humans; masters and slaves, or a free society of equals?
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
There are no Palestinians, no Israelis; only people like ourselves, and the choices they make about how to be human together.
As I wrote in my post of October 24 2023, I Stand With Humankind Against Theocratic Tyranny and Terror: the Hamas-Israel War Unfolds As the Sacrifice of Innocents to Power; When Rome was once engulfed in famine riots, the Emperor was asked if the ships in Egypt should load grain to feed the people or sand for the arena to divert them. “Load sand” was the infamous reply; and it seems it is still true today.
What can I say that has not already been said, what can I do that has not already been done, hundreds of times over across decades of Resistance to fascisms of blood, faith, and soil of every kind and description, to carceral states of force and control, to violations of our universal human rights and the idea central to democracy and our civilization that all human beings are equal and worth exactly the same, regardless of hierarchies of belonging and otherness, whether they are ours or different blood, faith, nationality?
How can I demonstrate that it is better to be a free society of equals than a prison world of masters and slaves?
Above the lands regarded as holy by three faiths a bone white moon like a dead fish eye regards us with implacable wrath in our horror and monstrosity, a rotten and poisonous holiness perverted by authorities who subjugate us by claiming to speak in the name of the Infinite and a ground of struggle not merely between them but also between humanity and dehumanization, barbarism, atavisms of instinct, and what madness and evil may together do as fear and faith are weaponized by those who would enslave us.
In reference to an article entitled Biden says West Bank settlers ‘pouring gasoline on fire’ as Israel prepares for Gaza ground invasion, I wrote; Biden the Baby Killer sputters incoherent threats at people who resist their subjugation, dehumanization, brutal repression of dissent, and genocide by the Occupation. “Who are you to fight back, you slaves, you nonwhite filth”, Biden spits in fury at the glorious defiance of those who hunger to be free. American is a shameful and squalid factory of death.
In reply to Lina Khatib’s article in The Guardian entitled Despite their rhetoric, neither Iran nor Hezbollah want an escalation of war in the Middle East. Here’s why, I wrote; I hope this has it right, but I fear our enemies wish to provoke massive death and destruction among their own peoples to forge unity and delegitimize western values. They will sacrifice anything to engineer a conflict of civilizations. And they have partners within the Israeli alt right and diaspora just as Hamas does, eager to perpetuate and secure their dominion and hegemony over their own Jewish people.
This whole ritual breaking of taboos as war crimes by Hamas is a performance designed to provoke retaliation as war crimes by Israel, to dehumanize and criminalize Israelis caught between the lies and tyranny of the state and the fear of an enemy willing to demonize itself, fear weaponized in service to power by both Hamas and her partner in terror Israel. Yet there remains an escape clause in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force; the redemptive power of love.
Let us unite to liberate each other, the Jews from the state of Israel and the Palestinians of Gaza from Hamas. For those who stand between each of us and the Infinite serve neither.
And to the words of Queen Rania of Jordan as reported by Christiane Amanpour of CNN, I replied; Shocking to me as well, though sadly unsurprising. Our ideology of human rights is an apologetics of imperial and colonial power. This disruptive event of the shocking Hamas attack is designed to delegitimize Israel, America, and the whole ideology of democracy and human rights, and if we play this game by such rules of escalation and revenge the enemy wins, and our civilization falls.
Why bomb Gaza, except to kill the children of others in trade for your own killed children? I very much doubt that the leaders of Hamas have trapped themselves in the killing box of Gaza, nor that if I were to say to Israel; I will bring you the heads of your enemies, in trade for the lives of the people of Palestine who have nothing to do with the criminals who abducted and murdered the children of Israel, that this offer would be accepted.
For the Final Solution to the Palestinian Problem so long dreamed of by Netanyahu and his settler-thief regime of theocratic imperialists reveals the true intention of the regime as genocide, and I suspect the attack was planned jointly by Hamas and Israel or by an unknown third force whose interests are opaque but clearly inimical to the peace and democracy process that was thriving across sectarian lines before the attack. The sabotage of the anti-Netanyahu democracy movement in Israel and of the peace and solidarity movement to unite Palestine and Israel is the true purpose and primary result of the Hamas attack.
Whose wealth and power is founded on selling arms to Israel? Now we see why Biden is pitching a Holocaust of the Palestinians rather than liberating Gaza from Hamas as the natural consequence of this humanitarian tragedy.
As I wrote in my post of October 17 2023, Chaos Is the Great Hope of the Powerless: Case of the Hamas-Israel War; A wise friend has questioned my valorization of Chaos as a principle of change in the context of Black Saturday, a term which describes the Hamas attack on Israel and the immense forces of terror, death, destruction, fracture, grief, rage, and revenge it unleashed, becoming a single tide of darkness.
Thank you once again for your kindness and your wisdom.
In this moment of tragedy I am thinking of Chaos as a disruptive force of fracture and change which has stripped us bare of our ideologies to reveal the fragile humanity beneath, and may be leveraged for liberty or tyranny by how we respond as a species and global civilization. As Guillermo del Toro writes in Carnival Row, Chaos is the great hope of the powerless.
What do I hope for now, for the peoples of Israel and Palestine? That both may unite to free each other, but first we will need universal humanitarian aid to any one on either side of these lines of division, and a Reckoning for the war crimes of both Hamas and Israel. For Israel took the bait, and gave Hamas the victory; they are now equal as war criminals without legitimacy.
Israel took the bait, and the world is calling them out for war crimes; this may be end of the Netanyahu alt right regime and the dawn of a new Middle East. I was absolutely expecting Biden and allies to enable Israels Final Solution to the Palestinian Problem; in this I rejoice to be wrong about human nature. Maybe the idea of human rights is not dead. As my mother used to sing to students who asked her to make authorizing statements about anything, artifact of a Shakespeare in Thirty Minutes theatrical show that toured nationally with some of her students in it, bouncing her open hands left and right; Maybe, maybe not, Maybe, maybe not.
No one seems to have noticed publicly that this means Israeli intelligence has been infiltrated. It is also possible that unknown puppetmasters have infiltrated and seized control of both Hamas and Israel, for purposes which are unclear and antithetical to the interests and well being of either. We wander lost in a Wilderness of Mirrors, friends.
What Reckoning, for crimes against humanity by an organization of terror which has long been a vanguard of anticolonial revolutionary struggle under the imposed conditions of Occupation, slavery, and a genocidal Blockade?
Not the totalization of the general population of Palestinians in a genocidal campaign of ethnic cleansing as Netanyahu wishes and Hamas intends as a strategy of delegitimation of the Israel state in the moral equivalence of terror, for if Israel, her patron America, and the international community accept the terms of struggle offered by Hamas they too become organizations of terror, and Hamas wins.
This is a decolonial revolution, and victory goes to the side who can establish the legitimacy and moral supremacy of their story. As my father taught me, Never play someone else’s game.
Hamas also wishes in this provocation to weld the peoples of Gaza to them; this is a primary strategy of fascism and tyranny, to make the people in whose name you claim to act complicit in unforgiveable crimes. Always beware those who claim to speak and act in your name as a strategy of your subjugation.
A third layer of meaning here is the ambiguity of the geopolitical and world-historical forces beyond the Holy Land; Russia, her ally Iran and the Iranian Dominion of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, especially the Assad regime of Syria which has sent forces into Israel as a client state of Russia and Iran, and Hezbollah, which offers many of the social services of a government and may be in the process of emergence as an independent state, or a true empire in the transnational sense like the Holy Roman Empire. The great question here is; has Russia opened a new front of her plan of global conquest and made this a theatre of World War Three?
How does one answer all of this? How bring a Reckoning for the terror of Hamas without authorizing and becoming complicit in the greater terror of Israel’s looming genocide of the Palestinians?
The forms that might take give me pause, for they will determine our future, and though I know what I myself must do I do not like it, and am calling out here in my journals, where I work through the consequences of my decisions before acting on them, for unknown possibilities I myself cannot envision.
Yes, my friend, Chaos has profoundly destructive forms; death among them, ruin and civilizational collapse, the negation of all we have claimed as our identity, but all are also measures of the adaptive range of systems, and can give birth to new forms from this liberated energy. And as you point out, all forces operate in opposite directions at once, creating their own opposition. These are not moral forces in balance, but ambivalent forces which contain each other in recursion.
So, while our nations try to shatter each other’s truths with overwhelming force and mass terror, I must find a path of least force to salvage what I can of our humanity, and I hope I will not fail as I did at Mariupol and Panjshir.
This may be all we have as humans lost in chasms of darkness and a Wilderness of Mirrors, this refusal to abandon each other to dehumanization, but like our refusal to submit to authority it is a power which cannot be taken from us, even in imposed conditions of struggle designed to produce abjection and learned helplessness, or rage and tribalization as identity politics and the manufacture of consent to be fed into engines of death for the wealth, power, and privilege of hegemonic elites and tyrannies.
Such ephemeral and insubstantial things, like whispered prayers to abyssal unknowns, figments of love, hope, faith, which belong to the shadows, the delusions of grandeur of beasts harnessed to systems of oppression by others who yet dream that we might become more.
Dream with me.
Embrace our absurdity as flawed things wrestling with immense forces of falsification, commodification, and dehumanization in a mad quest to become human, under imposed conditions of struggle typified by atrocities designed to produce abjection, learned helplessness, and despair, as we are consumed by the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force in service to elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege whose primary weapon is division and hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness as identity politics and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
Against all of this we have only our solidarity with each other, the redemptive power of love, our refusal to submit or to believe and trust authority which frees us as Unconquered and self created beings and Living Autonomous Zones, and our poetic vision in the reimagination and transformation of ourselves. Powers which cannot be taken from us, and which can seize the power of those who would enslave us.
This is why I practice the art of believing impossible things, but only those I myself have chosen or created. And crucially, act to make them real. And in this case we must bring a Reckoning to the perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity regardless of who they may be or in the name of what cause they act, and silence the drums of war.
Dream with me, but act in solidarity to make it real.
As the Mad Hatter says to Alice; “That is an excellent practice, but right now you might want to focus on the Jabberwock.”
Just so.
As I wrote in my post of October 11 2023, Palestine Versus Israel Round Ad Nauseum In An Endless Litany of Woes, Atrocities, and Horrors; Forward: to my comrades in the Palestinian Resistance:
Hello everyone;
I have some thoughts on the recent events in Gaza, Gaza where I have fought and lost someone I loved, and actions by Hamas whom I have fought alongside and count as my brothers in revolutionary struggle; actions which include the taking of hostages and murder of families, war crimes which have made peace impossible in the near future and have delegitimized the cause of liberation of Palestine by making it ambiguous with dehumanization and atrocities. Such is the nature of power, and of fear weaponized in service to power.
This now is my Resistance in the cause of the peoples of Palestine and Israel, a people divided by history and sectarian theocratic terror. I question the origins and motives of such actions, which trade a tactical goal of demonstrating that Netanyahu’s alt-right monsters cannot deliver the security by which they subjugate Israel, for a strategic one of legitimacy, and will not only weld American support to the tyrant but grant him permission and immunity for the Final Solution of the Palestinian problem he has long dreamed of.
How can we salvage something of our humanity from this?
Herein I invite question, and dreams of a better future than we have the past.
Thank you for hearing me.
Hamas has brought the Chaos to the American Empire and disrupted the legitimation of Israel by the Arab American Alliance versus the Imperial Dominion of Iran, and in reaction to the relentless genocide of the Palestinians by the state of Israel now captured by Netanyahu and his alt right band of thieves.
Here now is the fulcrum of change and reckoning for seventy years of Israeli state terror and imperial conquest in an amoral and loathsome apartheid regime which inverts the values of its founding by becoming the death camps its citizens escaped, and betrays the hope and ideal of a refuge from hate and sectarian division as a reflection of the nazis from whom they have internalized oppression as fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
Hamas has shattered all of this, potentially, with the myth of state surveillance and control as useful and effective means of subjugation of the slave castes of any state, and the myth of the invincibility and supremacy of Israeli intelligence and military hegemony of which it is a figure of the might of carceral states, tyrannies, and empires, and the calculated reprisals by Israel which will follow are designed by Hamas in this provocation to delegitimize Israel and fracture the solidarity of her allies and collaborators in terror, of which America remains the principal sponsor and villain.
So many of the reactions to this tragedy both here among my friends and in the news media seem baffled, caught in the forks of a classic dilemma in which our heroes and our villains trade places, for in this stunning slave rebellion wherein the victims of genocide and erasure have attacked their masters, the Wretched of the Earth with whom we might normally empathize have violated two of our most cherished moral values and rules of conduct; they are not defending but attacking, which makes justifications for war and the use of social force irrelevant though this ahistorical interpretation of events ignores seventy years of oppression and authorizes the conqueror by classifying the liberation struggle of their victims as terrorism, an argument we can therefore nullify as pro Israeli misdirection and the apologetics of power, and a second and far more serious point; Hamas has taken hostages and killed civilians, war crimes which violate our universal human rights and place the perpetrators beyond all laws and all limits.
A friend has written an apology for statements born of compassion which might be confused with support of Israel as a state rather than as a people, a distinction which makes all the difference; and to this I have written the following reply:
There are no good guys in this story, just a people divided by history brutalizing each other with a savagery that threatens our humanity itself. I have fought in Gaza and lost someone there, and from my witness of history I say there is only one kind of truth which does not become a Rashomon Gate when faith is weaponized in service to power by those who would enslave us, and this is true of both sides in this or any war; Who is bleeding? Who is suffering? Who requires acts of grace and mercy?
Not who merits compassion, for often there are no innocent, and as Shaw teaches us in Pygmalion with the iconic speech of Alfred Doolittle this places a moral burden on victims which is unjust; merely who is suffering and needs our help, in this moment, always the only time we have.
Solidarity of action, resistance, and liberation struggle all come after this; Tikkun Olam, a Jewish concept of reparative justice and praxis or the action of values, which I often describe as healing the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
You have nothing to apologize for; states work very hard to confuse and conflate legitimation of the state with narratives of victimization, for who wears the white hat is a hero and beyond question. All states do this, for it is the nature of power to become centralized as force and control. Among the true horrors of identity politics is awakening to realize that one is the beneficiary of a genocide, of slavery, of patriarchy, of unequal power in any form.
So we are lost in Atherton’s Wilderness of Mirrors; lies, illusions, rewritten histories, falsification. But it is my fate to question all things, and many of them do not bear the test of unbelief.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
In this case I question the origins and motives of a blitzkreig which demonstrates the vulnerability of Israel, a tactical objective, at the cost of strategic goals; the immediate results include unifying global support of Israel and dividing the crucial solidarity between the anti-Netanyahu democracy and peace movements within Israel from the liberation struggle of their slave caste, the Palestinians.
Cui Bono? Neither Palestinians nor Israelis, though in the imperial totalitarian state of Israel and its fascisms of blood, faith, and soil they share a common enemy. Netanyahu and his regime benefit, though his promise of security for the people of Israel has been proven illusory and the feared Israeli intelligence and military a paper tiger as Hamas intended; whether this weakens or strengthens his hand is yet to be seen.
Security is an illusion, one convenient for tyrants in the manufacture of consent to be subjugated. In this area of liberation struggle the victory of Hamas in breaching the Wall has been an unambiguous good.
Bring down the Wall, all the walls. Not only the walls of our borders and prisons, but the walls of ideas between peoples most of all. In the long run, only this will bring us peace and a United Humankind.
To make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence.
No matter where you begin with divisions of belonging and exclusionary otherness, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
Why, O Israel, reproduce the conditions of your historic trauma as the prison guards, with others cast in your former role? Why, when we could be guarantors of each other’s universal human rights in a free society of equals?
Let us emerge from the legacies of our history, and create ourselves anew.
What happens next?
Disruptive and polarizing events often confront us with a choice; who is your white hat and who your black hat in this story? Whose play will you back when they enter the arena at high noon? We will begin to become human when we free ourselves of this tyranny of good and evil, so vulnerable to the lies and misdirection of those who would enslave us and who claim to speak and act in our name, especially in theocracies. For as Voltaire wrote; “Those who can make us believe absurdities can make us commit atrocities”. Gott Mitt Uns; it is the most terrible battlecry, for it authorizes anything.
Today the empire begins to strike back, as Biden declares that America will stand with Israel, with the state and not her people mind you, in the abominable reprisals Netanyahu promises, having been handed by his enemies immunity and sanction for the Final Solution to the Palestinian Problem he has so long dreamed of. Both this immediate trigger event of total war and the conditions which created it are consequences of American complicity, for we as a nation have failed to enact the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction policies against Israeli state terror and tyranny which might have prevented it, and if we are to be liberators and not conquerors we must at minimum now pressure Israel to lift the Blockade of Gaza and recognize Hamas as its legitimate government. Let us send humanitarian aid, not armies.
Netanyahu and Biden have declared intentions to answer force and fear with greater force and fear, as Israel accepts the offer of the moral equivalence of terror by her partner in this dance, Hamas. This will bring not lesser but greater terror, not democracy and a free society of equals but the centralization of power to totalitarian states of force and control. From the perspective of Israel and America or of any state, this is the true purpose of external threats.
As my father once said; “Politics is the art of fear, and fear is the basis of human exchange. Fear is an untrustworthy servant and a terrible master; so, whose instrument will it be?”
Of the recursive forces of fear, power, and force which are the true origin of evil and of its forms as violence, war, police states, I say to you this one true thing; fear and force cannot answer fear and force. Only love can do this, and the redemptive power of love can free us from the Wagnerian Ring of Power, from falsification, commodification, and dehumanization.
Why are we each others jailors, and not each others liberators?
Here is the memorial I wrote for my friend, assassinated in Gaza by an Israeli sniper during the fighting over two years ago; June 21 2022, We Balance the Terror of Our Nothingness With the Joy of Total Freedom, the Flaws of Our Humanity With the Redemptive Power of Love, and the Brokenness of the World With Our Absurd Hope For the Limitless Possibilities of Becoming Human; Death is the ultimate life disruptive event, the mirror image of Chaos as creative force and the adaptive potential of a system.
This day I have re-enacted the stages of grief process as I relive an event of a year ago, caught in the labyrinth of its story, and as always with such complexes of memory, history, and identity I emerge through its passage with changed perspective.
Some stories can shatter our lives, but also free us from the legacies of history and the limits of our former selves.
This is a story which has become interwoven with my annual reading of Sartre’s works in celebration of his birthday, a juxtaposition which I find wholly appropriate, illuminating, and strangely hopeful.
Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others?
We choose our friends and lovers from among those reflections which embody qualities we wish to assimilate to ourselves or fully integrate into our consciousness and personality; and it is the interface between these two bounded realms, the Ideal and the Real, which I am driven to interrogate today.
Here is where the art of questioning lives, at the intersection of Socratic method and classical rhetoric, the dialectics of history, and the problematization of our motives, feelings, and processes of ideation through the methods of psychotherapy.
We speak of the juxtaposition of imaginal and actual realms of being as a form of Dadaist collage as pioneered by Tristan Tzara and instrumentalized as methodology by William S. Burroughs which creates the universe of our experience, of the discontiguous, relative, ambiguous, and ephemeral nature of truth described by Akutagawa in Rashomon Gate and the methods of fiction exemplified by Raymond Queneau as applied to identity and self construal, and idealizations of masculine and feminine beauty as dyadic forces of the psyche which work themselves out through our relationships with ourselves and with others. These three parallel and interdependent processes shape who we become, and how we instrumentalize others in our self creation.
We must first own the fact that dealing with our memories of someone is not the same as the lived experience of our history; it is all one sided and has been moved into an interior space of performance, and in which reimagination and transformation is ongoing. The map is not the territory, as Alfred Korzybski teaches us, nor is our idea of a person equal to the actual person themselves.
What parts of myself do I embody as a figural space into which to grow in the character whom I have thought of as Cleopatra, with all of the ambivalence, power, legacies of cultural history, and liminality such an identification implies, how do I imagine her now, and what kind of story have I cast us in?
I think of her now in terms of Rachel McAdams’ wily, sophisticated, and transgressive Irene Adler in Sherlock Holmes, as she became throughout the twelve years of our work in liberation struggle for the independence of Palestine, with elements of Millie Bobby Brown’s fearless, brilliant, and utterly without boundaries Enola Holmes as she began, bearing onward the colours of a beloved and presumed martyred family member in the course of investigating his disappearance. I am reasonably certain that this is not how she saw herself.
For illumination as to how a Palestinian woman might imagine herself, the characters she may choose to play as role models and the stories she may embody as ritual enactments, even a highly unusual one such as she, we may look to the wonderfully rich culture of Palestine’s female film directors and authors; of auteurs Annemarie Jacir, Maysaloun Hamoud, Mai Masri, and Farah Nabulsi, and of novelists Susan Abulhawa, Liana Badr, Ghada Karmi, Sahar Khalifeh, Hala Alyan, and Sahar Mustafah.
Bearing in mind that all such reading lists are nothing less than a set of authorized identities. As Margaret Atwood so splendidly demonstrates in her works, our intertexts are primary in the construction of our identities, including those of sex and gender, as mimesis and as dialectical processes of history.
And this is where it never ceases to be fascinating, the study of human being, meaning, and value and the limitless possibilities of becoming human. For in the sphere of our relationships with others, parallel and interdependent with our relationships between the masculine and feminine halves of our psyche, each co-evolves with the other in recursive processes of growth and adaptation to change in the construction of identity.
I say again; we interpret the actions of others and form relationships on the basis of our self-construal and ideas of ourselves, and we use our relations with real people to shape who we wish to become.
How does this work out in real life? As a personal example of the discontiguous gaps of meaning in the interfaces between bounded realms of masculine and feminine personae, a free space of creative play, I offer the artifacts of memory of a figure which may or may not align with the martyr I know only by her Code Name: Cleopatra.
Of the Last Stand in which we met and forged an alliance, betrayed and caught in a trap which we turned against our enemies who had trapped themselves in with us, which I think of as the final battle scene in the film Mr & Mrs Smith, this operatic quest was set in motion by the conflict of dominion between Hamas and al Qaeda in Gaza during August of 2009, during which the forces of light prevailed over those of darkness in the victory of Hamas, with Israel playing each against the other through infiltration agents, spies, deniable assets, and use of a special Recon team masquerading as various Arab factions to commit atrocities against presumed rival Arab groups in a classic policy of divide and conquer. This space of play was complicated by clan vendettas such as hers, and the usual political and religious fragmentation, crime syndicates, mercenary forces, tribalism, corruption, and the shadow wars of foreign states.
Our paths crossed several times over the next twelve years, always in memorable circumstances, sometimes as allies and others as rivals, often as both. Which of these is the real and true version of her, or of myself? Such iterations of our images are without number, like the captured and distorted selves in funhouse mirrors aligned to reflect into infinity.
Wilderness of Mirrors, a phrase from T.S. Eliot’s Gerontin, is one I use to describe the pathology of falsification of ourselves through propaganda, lies and illusions, rewritten histories, state secrets, alternate realities, authoritarian faith which devours truths. This I contrast with its opposite, journalism and the witness of history as the sacred quest to pursue the truth. We are made counterfeits of ourselves by systems of elite hegemonic power such as patriarchy, and by those who would enslave us, through capture of our stories as theft of the soul.
James Angleton, evil genius of the C.I.A.’s Counterintelligence Service on whom John Le Carre based his character of George Smiley, infamously used the phrase in this sense as well, and it has become universalized throughout the intelligence community he shaped and influenced during the Second World War and its aftermath the Cold War. Writing in reference to David Martin’s biography of himself entitled Wilderness of Mirrors, Angleton described it as a “myriad of stratagems, deceptions, artifices, and all the other devices of disinformation which the Soviet bloc and its coordinated intelligence services use to confuse and split the West … an ever fluid landscape where fact and illusion merge.” And of course, everything he ascribed to the Soviets was true of himself, his own agency, and America as well, and of all states, for all are houses of illusion.
The Netflix telenovela Operation Mincemeat uses the phrase, in a story about the creation of a fictitious officer bearing documents designed to trick the Nazis into preparing for the invasion of Europe somewhere other than Sicily, a series I watched with rapt attention because each of us is created by our stories exactly like this false identity attached to the body of a derelict. Within each of us, a team of authors, archetypes and transpersonal figures like the anima which concerns us here, create our personae through stories, a network of memories, histories, and identity; and they do so for their own purposes, which we do not always understand.
As T. S. Eliot has written in Gerontin, “After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities”
We are such stuff as dreams are made on, as Shakespeare teaches us in Act IV, Scene 1 of The Tempest, a line spoken by Ariel. For if we are ephemeral and insubstantial beings, constructions of our stories, this also means that the ontological nature of human being is a ground of struggle which can be claimed by seizures of power.
The first question to ask of a story is, whose story is this?
Always there remains the struggle between the stories we tell about ourselves and those told about us by others; the masks we make for ourselves and those made for us by others.
This is the first revolution in which we all must fight, the struggle for ownership of ourselves.
Who then shall we become? Asks our self of surfaces, images, and masks which each moment negotiates our boundaries with others.
To which our secret self, the self of darkness and of passion, the self that lives beyond the mirror and knows no limits, unbound by time and space and infinite in possibilities, replies; Who do you want to become?
As I wrote in my post of June 21 2021, The Hope of Humankind: On Becoming Autonomous Zones as Agents of Chaos and Transformative Change; A friend has written in despair of our significance and hope for the liberation of humankind, of the impactfulness of our lives and our struggles which balance the flaws of our humanity against the monstrous and vast forces of a system of dehumanization, falsification, and commodification; for to be human is to live in a state of existential crisis and struggle for the ownership of ourselves.
Today is the birthday of Jean Paul Sartre, and so this event finds me reading once again his magnificent reimagination of Jean Genet in Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr; Genet who set me on my life’s path with the Oath of the Resistance in Beirut during the summer of 1982.
Israeli soldiers had set fire to the houses on my street, and called for people to come out and surrender. They were blindfolding the children of those who did and using them as human shields.
We had no other weapon than the empty bottle of champagne we had just finished with our breakfast of strawberry crepes; I asked “Any ideas?”, at which he shrugged and said “Fix bayonets?”
And then he gave me a principle of action by which I have lived for thirty nine years now; “When there is no hope, one is free to do impossible things, glorious things.”
He asked me if I was going to surrender, and I said no; he smiled and replied, “Nor will I.” And so he swore me to the Oath he devised in 1940 in Paris at the beginning of the Occupation for such friends as he could gather, reworded from the oath he had taken as a Legionnaire. He said it was the finest thing he ever stole; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.” So it was that I became the bearer of a tradition now over eighty years old and forged in the most fearsome and terrible conflict the world has ever known, shortly before I expected to be burned alive in the first of many Last Stands.
This was the moment of my forging, this decision to choose death over subjugation, and ever since being struck by it I have been a bell, ringing. And like the Liberty Bell with its iconic crack, I am broken open to the suffering of others and the flaws of our humanity. This has been the greatest gift I have ever been given, this empathy borne of a sacred wound, and I shall never cease the call to liberty, nor hesitate to answer as I am able the call for solidarity with others.
This morning I awoke to a call to identify the body of a friend missing and believed killed in Gaza by Israeli terrorists in the savage street fighting which followed the rocket attacks of last week, which I was unable to do; I searched for my friend in this sad and ruined form, like the skin of a wild thing which has sung itself utterly away, and could recognize nothing.
Where is my friend, agile, lithe, mercurial, fearless, insightful and quick witted, who always had four scenarios running and three escape routes, who survived against impossible odds through improvisation and leveraging chaos, whose vision could discern true motives within the secret chambers of the human heart and play them like an instrument as songs of rapture and terror, who chameleon-like and protean could shift identities as needed and behind their masks move among her enemies unseen?
I never knew her true name; perhaps she no longer had one, as is true for so many of us who play the Great Game of futures and the possibilities of becoming human, a term popularized by Rudyard Kipling in the novel Kim. My own names are numberless as the stars, like those of an actor who has played multitudes of roles in films and theatres of many kinds.
She first entered my orbit during the victorious struggle of Hamas against al Qaeda for dominion of Gaza in August of 2009 in Rafah, an Egyptian Palestinian drawn into the maelstrom of war like countless others by family duty and vendetta.
Yet she said no to authority at great peril when she could have said yes and become a slave, stood in solidarity with others when she could have run; this was a choice, one which confers agency, autonomy, and self-ownership as a seizure of power in a limited and deterministic context. Refusal to submit is the primary human act, one which cannot be taken from us, wherein we become Unconquered and free, and able to liberate others.
So it is that we may escape the wilderness of mirrors in which we wander, a realm of lies and illusions, captured and distorted images, falsification and the theft of the soul. For the authentic self, the image which we seize and claim as our own, flies free of its mad circus of seductions and traps. Hence we achieve our true selves and form, in rapture and exaltation as beings of our own uniqueness.
Impossible that such grandeur could be reduced to its material form, like the abandoned shell of a fantastic sea creature which has grown beyond its limits and moved on, to realms unknown.
The lines spoken by Hamlet while holding the skull of his friend Yorick came unbidden to my thoughts; “Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning?”
For twelve years you danced with death, and danced away laughing, until today.
Farewell, my friend; I’ll see you in the eyes of the defiant ones, who bear your fire onward into the unknown, and with it I hope your laughter. Our successors will need both fire and laughter, if the future we win for them is to be equal to its price, and worth living in.
Our lives are like the dragon’s teeth sown in the earth by the Phoenician prince Cadmus from which warriors arise; from each, multitudes. For we live on as echoes and reflections in the lives of others, in the consequences and effects of our actions, in the good we can do for others which gathers force over time, and in the meaning, value, and possibilities we create.
How can choosing death and freedom be better than submission to authority and its weaponization of fear and force?
My experience of accepting death in confronting force and violence finds parallels in the mock executions of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Maurice Blanchot, and I’m not done challenging state terror and tyranny and forces of repression. I’m going to stand between people with guns and their victims in future, as I have many times in past, and here I find resilience among my motivating and informing sources; Sartre’s total freedom won by refusal to submit, and Camus’ rebellion against authority which renders force meaningless when met by disobedience, give me the ability to claw my way out of the ruins and make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival.
And all who are mortal share these burdens with me. In this all who resist subjugation by authority are alike as Living Autonomous Zones, bearing seeds of change; we can say with the figure of Loki; “I am burdened with glorious purpose.”
We are all Nikolai Gogol’s hero in Diary of a Madman, caught in the wheels of a great machine he services, like Charlie Chaplin in his film Modern Times. But we know that we are trapped and enslaved, and we know how and why; we know the secrets of our condition which our masters would keep silent, and in refusing to be silent we can free ourselves and our fellows. This Michel Foucault called truth telling; a poetic vision of reimagination and sacred calling to pursue the truth which bears transformative power.
So here I offer all of you words of hope for moments of despair, the horror of meaninglessness, the grief of loss, and the guilt of survivorship.
Your voice has defied our nothingness, and resounds throughout the chasms of a hostile and dehumanizing world; gathering force and transformative power as it finds a thousand echoes, and begins to awaken refusal to submit to authority and to heal the pathology of our falsification and disconnectedness.
The voice of even one human being who bears a wound of humanity which opens him to the pain of others and who places his life in the balance with those whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth, the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, who in resistance to tyranny and terror, force and control, becomes unconquered and free, such a voice of liberation is unstoppable as the tides, an agent of reimagination and transformation which seizes the gates of our prisons and frees the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Despair not and be joyful, for we who are living Autonomous Zones help others break the chains of their enslavement simply by condition of being as well as action; for we violate norms, transgress boundaries of the Forbidden, expose the lies and illusions of authority, and render the forces of repression powerless to compel obedience.
This is the primary revolutionary struggle which precedes and underlies all else; the seizure of ownership of ourselves from those who would enslave us.
Such is the hope of humankind.
Tear Down the Wall, by Pink Floyd
Middle East crisis: famine ‘imminent’ in northern Gaza, UN report says, as EU foreign policy chief calls area ‘open air graveyard’ – as it happened
In a mass protest of electoral political action, the people of Michigan have in their Democratic Party primary issued a signal rebuke and vote of no confidence to Biden, for his sponsorship of Israeli genocide and crimes against humanity against the Palestinians and war crimes in the Gaza War in which the refugees in Rafah now await Netanyahu’s Final Solution of the Palestinians.
This is not the first genocide authorized, orchestrated, and funded by an American President to whom no war crimes charges have been brought before the Hague; the Mayan Genocide of the 1980’s enacted by Ronald Reagan and his puppet tyrant Rios Montt is an example of the performative nature of our use of the idea of human rights.
Nor will it be the last, unless we the people begin to hold our leaders and the systems and institutions of our nation to moral standards of action applied equally and to all human beings everywhere as declared in the founding documents of our democracy and our civilization, the parallel and interdependent sets of rights in the American Bill of Rights of citizens and the 1789 universal Rights of Man of the French Revolution.
Until we begin to live as we have together sworn as citizens, and until our President ends the rain of death and terror in Gaza which makes us all complicit in genocide and other crimes, I must concur with the delightful and wickedly transgressive dance theatre of the Cheerleaders For Change flash mob ensembles now bringing chaos to school games and streets throughout our nation; “Hey hey, ho ho, Genocide Joe Has Got To Go.”
Let us perform the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
If you commit genocide or crimes against humanity, I cannot vote for you, and I will fight you. This I say to President Biden and the Democratic Party, and also to all masters, lords, and tyrants in all lands and throughout all of time.
To refuse to submit is to become Unconquered and victorious in seizure of power over our own liberty and autonomy. This and more has been demonstrated to us once again in the glorious protest vote of the Michigan primary; the power of our voice and witness, the change potential of solidarity, the necessity of confronting evil and resisting those who would divide, dehumanize, and enslave us.
Because fascism and strategies of the centralization of power to a carceral state of force and control, of imperial conquest and dominion, and of the weaponization of fear in service to power which has been employed in Gaza by Israel and America are rooted in, instrumental to, and symptomatic of a far greater tidal force of history; the erosion of empathy and the degradation of our humanity which is essential to war and crimes of violence and control, and to this we have as Wagner teaches us one defining and inherent human capacity which can free us from the Ring of fear, power, and force; only love triumphs over fear, and solidarity triumphs over division. Such is the natural law beneath the surfaces of our universal human rights, and the driving force of revolutionary struggle as an inevitable principle of history.
In the long game democracy and the universalizing solidarity of our humanity will triumph over tyranny, and in the protest vote of Michigan we can see the future toward which we are moving, regardless of the horrors which lay directly in our path.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
Our 2024 elections; our hungry ghosts whisper from the darkness; “Set me free, and I’ll make you powerful.”
Biden wins Michigan primary but sheds support over Gaza
Nihal Abu Ayash became the one hundredth Palestinian child murdered by the state of Israel in this war of ethnic cleansing, genocide, and crimes against humanity.
How have these children harmed anyone by simply living? By what concept of justice can they be held responsible for the actions of strangers who claim to act in their name as a strategy of the subjugation of Palestine to theocratic tyranny? How does living in a different skin give Israel the right to erase the Palestini
ans, or any state the right to annihilate its minorities and others marginalized and excluded beyond the boundaries of belonging and elite membership, defined by authority in service to power as fascisms of blood, faith, and soil?
Israel learned the wrong lessons from the Nazis. What has America learned?
By providing the arms with which to commit crimes against humanity and ethnic cleaning to Israel, America historically and our President Genocide Joe personally by his orders and actions has not only enabled and sponsored these crimes, but also made all of us who are American citizens complicit as our taxes fund them.
This is a vast evil which has delegitimated our nation in its historic role as a guarantor of democracy and our universal human rights throughout the world, but also made all of us targets of war.
Biden and his puppet tyrant Netanyahu have made our world far less safe for both our enemies and ourselves, and far less stable.
What is to be done?
For myself, if you commit atrocities, genocides, crimes against humanity, state terror and tyranny, I cannot vote for you, and I must fight you.
But other possibilities exist, for change, reimagination, and transformation of our choices about how to be human together.
As written by Emine Sinmaz and Sufian Taha in The Guardian , in an article entitled ‘It was an execution’: family mourns boy shot dead by Israeli forces
Nihal Abu Ayash, 16, was reportedly the 100th Palestinian child to be killed in the West Bank since Hamas’s 7 October attack; “Nihal Abu Ayash was wearing his football kit and carrying his school bag when he was shot in the head and killed after Israeli forces opened fire in the West Bank town of Beit Ummar.
The first bullet reportedly hit the 16-year-old in the leg. He collapsed, and as he tried to stand up, he was shot for a second time in the head, according to the schoolboy’s family.
“It was an execution,” said Ziad Abu Ayash, Nihal’s father. “There was no need to kill him. He didn’t have a gun, he didn’t have a tank. There is no excuse. It is a crime.”
Surrounded by mourners at the family home in Beit Ummar, the 62-year-old added: “I cannot heal. This pain will not leave me. The shock and the devastation will not leave me.”
Nihal was the 100th Palestinian child to be killed in the occupied West Bank since Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel, according to the human rights group Defense for Children International – Palestine (DCIP).
Nihal was a bright student who dreamed of studying sports at university and becoming a professional football player. The talented goalkeeper was already playing for Beit Ummar football club.
His parents have struggled to come terms with the loss of their first-born son. His mother, Hanan, 47, has been unable to speak or eat and his father has refused to leave the family home, where he spends hours clutching his son’s football boots. The youngest of Nihal’s four siblings, Mahmoud, 13, has developed a stammer since witnessing his brother’s killing last week.
The family said the tragedy unfolded when Israeli forces entered downtown Beit Ummar in armoured vehicles at about 12.30pm on 14 February. They blocked roads in the town, preventing some people from reaching their homes.
Nihal Abu Ayash dreamed of studying sports at university and becoming a professional football player. Photograph: Supplied
Abu Ayash said he called his son to tell him to wait at a nearby family member’s house until the soldiers retreated. Nihal and Mahmoud, who had just left school, went to an aunt’s house.
“Minutes later, I received a call from my daughter saying that she had been told that Nihal was injured. Before I reached the hospital where my son was taken, the mosque declared that he was martyred.”
Ayed Abu Eqtaish, a programme director at DCIP, which documented the shooting, said “confrontations” erupted between Palestinians and Israeli soldiers, who had also taken up positions on the rooftops of buildings. The Israeli forces reportedly responded to the tensions by opening fire.
Mahmoud said he saw his brother being killed by a sniper. The teenager said: “We thought that the army had left, so Nihal went to see what was going on. I followed him. But the moment we were in the street, the army was in our face. We wanted to run away but the army was close.
“They shot Nihal in the leg and he fell down. I went to pick him up, to rescue him, but other people pulled me back. Another person tried to help him and he was shot in the leg. Nihal tried to stand up but they shot him in the head while he was still on the floor.”
Nihal was taken to a medical centre in the town before being transferred to al-Ahli hospital in Hebron. A medical report seen by the Guardian confirmed that a bullet entered the right side of his head and that he was pronounced dead at 4pm.
Fighting back tears, Abu Ayash said: “If only the person who shot my son could be in my shoes. I would ask them: ‘How does it feel to lose your son?’”
The DCIP said that more than 10 Palestinians were injured that day. Abu Eqtaish said the DCIP had been unable to confirm whether Nihal had been involved in the confrontations, which reportedly included stone-throwing, but emphasised: “Whether he was participating or not, he did not constitute any threat to the lives of the Israeli soldiers who were inside their tanks.” Nihal’s family insisted that he had not been involved in the protests.
Violence in the occupied West Bank reached record levels in 2023, according to the UN office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs. It said that 394 Palestinians, including 100 children, had been killed since 7 October
The Israeli offensive in Gaza has killed 29,410 people. The war, now in its fifth month, was sparked by Hamas’s unprecedented attack on 7 October in which 1,200 people were killed and another 250 abducted.
Abu Ayash said he wanted the people who killed his son to be held accountable. “I’m so angry with the army for killing my son,” he said. “I want those responsible to be put on trial, I want them to be held accountable, like anybody else who commits a crime. Nihal was 16 years old; what did he do for them to shoot him, to execute him?”
What is to be done? I have spent some time fighting in liberation struggle throughout the region, including the Red Sea Campaign, the counter blockade against the Israeli blockade of humanitarian aid, a victorious bit of commerce raiding though Genocide Joe sent drones to destroy some of our positions with no effect other than consolidating support for our actions, unless you count the blown up shed where we stored the paint with which local kids have been decorating the urinals of Yemen with images of the American President and his puppet tyrant Netanyahu.
We know who our enemy is; but among the things that can change by our actions is American support of crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing in this war and in the Occupation.
As written by Mehdi Hasan in The Guardian, in an article entitled Biden can end the bombing of Gaza right now. Here’s how.: “ Picture the scene. An Israeli prime minister launches airstrikes on an Arab population. Civilians are killed in their thousands. An American president, stunned and shocked by the scenes of carnage on his TV screen, makes a call to his Israeli counterpart. And … within minutes … the bombing is over.
Sound crazy? Or maybe simplistic? Perhaps naive, even?
Yet, the year was 1982. What was supposed to have been a limited incursion into southern Lebanon by the Israeli military over the summer, under the leadership of Ariel Sharon, then defense minister (remember him?), morphed into a months-long siege of Beirut and an all-out assault on the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Between June and August, the Israelis cut off food, water and power to the Lebanese capital in a brutal attempt to destroy the PLO, whose fighters were holed up inside a tunnel network below Beirut. (Sound familiar?)
On 12 August, in what would later be dubbed “Black Thursday”, Israeli jets bombed Beirut for 11 consecutive hours, killing more than 100 people. That same day, a horrified Ronald Reagan placed a phone call to Menachem Begin, then Israeli prime minister, to “express his outrage” and condemn the “needless destruction and bloodshed”.
“Menachem, this is a holocaust,” Reagan told Begin.
Yes, an American leader used the H-word in conversation with an Israeli leader. Begin responded with sarcasm, telling the US president that “I think I know what a holocaust is.” Reagan, however, didn’t budge, insisting on the “imperative” for a ceasefire in Beirut.
Twenty minutes. That’s all the time it took for Begin to call back and tell the president he had ordered Sharon to stop the bombing. It was over. “I didn’t know I had that kind of power,” a surprised Reagan told an aide, upon putting down the phone.
Flash forward 42 years and the Israeli assault on Gaza has now gone on for twice as long as the siege of Beirut. In 1982, Reagan was said to have been moved by the image of a single wounded Lebanese child. As of last week, more than 12,300 Palestinian children had been killed in Gaza, and tens of thousands maimed and injured, in just four months.
Then, it was the nightly news. Now, we all have Instagram. “The international community continues to fail the Palestinian people,” the Irish lawyer Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh told the international court of justice (ICJ) at the Hague last month, “despite the horror of the genocide against the Palestinian people being livestreamed from Gaza to our mobile phones, computers and television screens. The first genocide in history where its victims are broadcasting their own destruction in real time in the desperate, so far vain, hope that the world might do something.”
Forget the world. Joe Biden, like Reagan before him, could end the current carnage with a single phone call to Benjamin Netanyahu. He too has “that kind of power”.
Don’t believe anyone who tells you otherwise. Those in the media who say that “America is discovering the limits of its leverage on Israel.” Those in Congress who argue that US presidents “don’t have as much leverage over Israel as they thought”. Those in the White House who claim “they are unable to exert significant influence on America’s closest ally in the Middle East to change its course”.
This is all disingenuous nonsense. It is, to quote the media critic Adam Johnson, a “feigned powerlessness” that has been buttressed, he notes, by a series of “self-serving leaks” from the Biden White House that insist the president “may or not be kind of annoyed over” Israel’s actions.
The truth is that the commander-in-chief of the richest country in the history of the world is far from powerless and, like every commander-in-chief before him, possesses plenty of leverage.
How do we know? First, because members of the US defense establishment say so. Take Bruce Riedel, who spent three decades in the CIA and at the national security council, advising four different presidents. “The US has immense leverage,” Riedel pointed out in a recent interview. “Everyday we provide Israel with the missiles, with the drones, with the ammunition, that it needs to sustain a major military campaign like the campaign in Gaza.”
And yet, Riedel admitted, “American presidents have been notably shy about using that leverage for domestic political reasons.”
Second, we know Biden has major leverage because members of the Israeli defense establishment – as plenty of observers have pointed out – say so, too. In late October 2023, Israeli lawmakers challenged Yoav Gallant, the defense minister, over the decision to allow (a little) humanitarian aid into Gaza, before the release of any hostages. How did Gallant respond? “The Americans insisted and we are not in a place where we can refuse them. We rely on them for planes and military equipment. What are we supposed to do? Tell them no?”
The following month, retired Israeli Maj Gen Yitzhak Brick went even further than Gallant. “All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the US,” Brick said in an interview in November. “The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability … Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”
Got that? The Israelis cannot “refuse” the Americans. In fact, the president of the US could “turn off the tap” – ammunition, bombs, intel – and thereby end what the ICJ has deemed to be a plausible genocide in Gaza.
Third, we know Biden has the power to stop Netanyahu from killing Palestinians en masse in Gaza because … he has done it before. In May 2021, Israel bombed the strip for 11 straight days, killing more than 100 Palestinians, including 66 children. Over that same period, Hamas and other armed Palestinian groups in Gaza fired more than 4,000 rockets at Israel, killing 14 civilians. Then as now, Netanyahu rejected calls for a ceasefire – from Hamas, as well as from France, Egypt and Jordan.
But guess who he couldn’t reject? Yes, the president of the United States. “We need to accomplish more,” pleaded Netanyahu when Biden called him on 19 May, according to the journalist Franklin Foer. The president’s response? “Hey, man, we are out of runway here. It’s over.”
Two days later, a ceasefire was announced. And, less than a month later, the Israeli prime minister had been ejected from office.
So why then, but not now? Perhaps because Biden, like millions of Americans and others around the world, was understandably horrified by the terror endured by Israelis on 7 October. But where is his horror over the ongoing terror in Gaza? Over the two Palestinian mothers being killed there every hour or the 10 Palestinian kids having one or both of their legs amputated every day or the one in four Palestinians literally starving in Gaza right now?
Could it be that Biden places less value on Arab lives than … Reagan? “The president does not seem to acknowledge the humanity of all parties affected by this conflict,” a former Biden administration official told Mother Jones in December. “He has described Israeli suffering in great detail, while Palestinian suffering is left vague, if mentioned at all.”
The president’s admirers like to refer to him as the “comforter-in-chief”. His aides call him a “devout Catholic”. He himself has talked, movingly and at length, about grief, loss and pain. So how does that same Biden sleep at night, as US-made bombs continue to fall on innocents in Gaza? How does he justify his inaction and complicity? Here is a man who has experienced devastating personal tragedies, losing his 29-year-old wife and one-year-old daughter in a car crash and then, decades later, losing a son to brain cancer. Yet he now possesses the power, unique among the 8 billion people who live on this planet, to pick up the phone, dial a number beginning +972, and halt the daily killing of hundreds of wives and children.
It really is that simple.
So Mr President, there’s no point “venting” your frustration in private and telling only your aides that the war “has to stop”.
Tell that to Netanyahu. Make the call. End this genocide.”
‘It was an execution’: family mourns boy shot dead by Israeli forces
Nihal Abu Ayash, 16, was reportedly the 100th Palestinian child to be killed in the West Bank since Hamas’s 7 October attack
How shall we answer the suffering of
others and the brokenness of the world?
By refusing to answer cries for help,
Trump and the party of misogyny authorize the use of sexual terror in war and
enlist its perpetrators as deniable forces of patriarchal repression.
I’d like to share with you the thoughts
of human rights activist Noor Sheikh, wherein she cites specific examples of a
general condition, as quoted by Huffpost today:
“The possibility that the U.S. could veto
the resolution is all the more shocking when you consider the contexts
described in the report — widespread and systematic gang rapes of Rohingya
women and girls in Burma; institutionalized sexual slavery of Yazidi and other
minority communities by ISIS in Syria and Iraq; and the rape of young girls in
the Democratic Republic of the Congo and South Sudan by state armed forces and
militia groups alike.”
“Any country denying abortion to women who
have become pregnant after rape would be subjecting them to cruel, inhuman and
degrading treatment. By forcing victims of rape to carry the pregnancy caused
by their sexual abuse, the U.S. will also be directly contributing to more
suffering of countless victims of such violence.”
Torch of Liberty 