Category: activism

I appreciate all calls to end the horrific genocide we are watching in Gaza, but some of the logic people formulate is extremely troubling.

For example, a ‘senior Israel-Palestine analyst’ on Twitter (who’s skirted around Zionism in the past) posted this:

“You don’t need to be a military expert to know that killing thousands of people with nowhere to go will leave entire generations scarred, will harden hearts and will breed more hate and violence.”

What a twisted, racist rationale for stopping a genocide. Any genocide.

It reminds me of an oft-used talking point during the War on Terror, which killed millions, that droning people of color will only create more terrorists. Well-meaning liberals recycled this argument with endless fervor as a reason to end drone strikes.

This is a racist argument.

The reason for not committing genocide is not that “they will hate us more for killing them,” but rather the fact that genocide is morally repugnant and inhumane. Genocide is mass murder, it’s the destruction of an ethnic, racial or religious group of people. It causes “serious bodily or mental harm and deliberately inflicts on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction.” This is why genocide is considered the “crime of crimes” under international law.

Why are brown and black bodies only viewed as either recipients or perpetrators of violence? Meaning that they can either be droned/genocided or they will drone/genocide themselves if subjected to “heart-hardening” suffering.

I find this unimaginative racist framing to be a narcissistic projection of the West’s own criminal tendencies onto the other.

End the genocide in Gaza because it is immoral, criminal, and vicious. It is the murder of families and communities. It is violently deranged and anti-life, and it also turns the perpetrator into a grotesque caricature of what it means to be human.

cannot sleep. using twitter to stay informed. apparently egyptians in arish which is 80 kilometers (50 mi) away from gaza are reporting that their houses are shaking from the bombing. israel has intensified bombing, while cutting off all means of communication. absolutely no news from gaza. there is no fuel or electricity either. it’s a complete blackout. israel has also initiated a ground invasion. i use this word carefully and deliberately, but what we are witnessing right now, with the gleeful support and encouragement of the west, is nothing less than evil. i don’t mean evil in a religious sense. i mean complete human depravity. i mean a well-planned genocide that will finish the job of settler colonialism. i mean shameless racism and islamophobia and a perverted supremacy that’s ugly to behold. i mean israeli influencers mocking palestinians by daubing their faces with fake blood, painting their teeth black and showing off their water bottles (there has been a blockade on food and water in gaza). these videos have gone viral. i mean that in the west bank, israeli settlers and soldiers tortured and humiliated three palestinians men for 6 hours, stripping them naked, taking their pictures, beating them, urinating on them, burning them with cigarettes. this is the thingification aime cesaire wrote about. this is the dehumanization that comes with colonialism. it did not start on october 7th.

In Scorsese’s film ‘Killers of the Flower Moon,’ a strong connection is made between the terror and murder faced by indigenous Osage people (with access to oil money since the early 1900s) and the Tulsa race massacre in 1921 which annihilated Black Wall Street and its wealth.

I want to take these connections further and compare Tulsa to Gaza. Images of the violence enacted on both cities speak for themselves (the first three are from the Tulsa massacre and the last three from the ongoing genocide in Gaza).

There is immense, unbearable loss of life in Gaza right now (more than 5,000 dead, half of them children). There is also an imperial destruction of all fundamental aspects of human life – social, political and cultural structures, housing, commerce, employment, transportation, familial and community networks, etc. This razing of the infrastructure of life, as we understand it, also happened in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and in countless Native villages all across America.

The destruction of human (and non-human) habitats and ecology seems central to capitalism. Large swathes of humanity must be forcefully locked in ghettos of precarity and poverty in order for a small percentage of white elite (and their stooges) to enjoy unseemly wealth and privilege.

Black poet and activist Pat Parker understood this. In ‘Revolution – It’s Not Neat or Pretty or Quick,’ she wrote:

“The rest of the world is being exploited in order to maintain our standard of living. We who are five percent of the world’s population use 40 percent of the world’s oil. As anti-imperialists we must be prepared to destroy all imperialist governments; and we must realize that by doing this we will drastically alter the standard of living that we now enjoy.

…The equation is being laid out in front of us. Good American equals Support Imperialism and war. To this, I must declare—I am not a good American. I do not wish to have the world colonized, bombarded and plundered in order to eat steak.”

When we stand in solidarity with Palestine and other peoples and places being crushed by imperial greed and its technologies of extermination and containment, this is something we must consider.

Thank you Clarissa Brooks for reminding me of these powerful lines during a discussion on ‘Black Feminist Writers and Palestine’ organized by Black Women Radicals.

Longlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize and shortlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for Translated Literature, Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail is an absolute masterpiece.

Palestine-born novelist and essayist Adania Shibli was due to be awarded the 2023 LiBeraturpreis, an annual prize given to female writers from Africa, Asia, Latin America or the Arab world on Oct 20th.

However, on Oct 13th, the LitProm association (which is sponsored partly by the German government and the Frankfurt Book Fair) that hands out the prize announced it would postpone the award ceremony “due to the war started by Hamas, under which millions of people in Israel and Palestine are suffering”.

Prominent authors and publishers from around the world have accused the Frankfurt Book Fair of “shutting down” Palestinian voices.

I met Adania in Lahore earlier this year, at the Lahore Literature Festival. She is as brilliant and uncompromising as one would expect. Minor Detail is a slim book (about 100 pages) but it “slices through one’s heart” and is unlike any book I’ve read.

Resist censorship and read the book. More about Minor Detail below:

“A haunting meditation on war, violence and memory, Minor Detail cuts to the heart of the Palestinian experience of dispossession, life under occupation, and the persistent difficulty of piecing together a narrative in the face of ongoing erasure and disempowerment.”

more than 500 people have been killed in the bombing of a hospital in gaza, where thousands were taking shelter or being treated. this is a nauseating war crime. people describe apocalyptic scenes: headless bodies, charred remains, human fragments everywhere. in a hospital full of children, women, men. old and young. sick people, the wounded, doctors and hospital staff. their collective murder is incomprehensible. heinous.

so is israel’s arrogance. the hubris of committing genocide in full view of the world, with the powerful justifying and aiding their bloodlust.

then there is the vertiginous inversion of reality. the frightful corruption of language. the orwellian dictums that we are hearing are surreal: ethnic cleansing is self defense, genocide is some kind of justice, the killers are victims whose feelings take precedence.

after whining about free speech and ‘je suis charlie’ for a lifetime, france has banned pro-palestinian protests. so has germany. the UK says palestinian flags & slogans are illegal, msnbc has suspended all three of its muslim anchors, and US immigration is harassing palestinians in the diaspora.

in rochester, the palestinian film festival, which had been going on for more than a decade, has been postponed due to pressure from the jewish federation and security concerns.

it’s morally repugnant, violent, unreal.

we can only understand what’s happening around us if we look at it thru the lens of racism and colonialism.

think india’s independence war in 1857 and how spectacular the punishment. a common punishment was to tie so-called mutineers to the mouth of a cannon and then fire the cannon.

think the mau mau rebellion (1952-1960) in kenya and its aftermath. the british colonizers used concentration camps, unspeakable torture, and rape as punishment.

think the algerian war of independence (1954-1962) which lasted 8 years, and in which the french butchered 1.5 million algerians, because how dare they.

closer to home, think of all the indian wars (as they were called) and how indigenous people were subjected to campaigns of terror while their land was being stolen.

as the hampton institute said:

oppressed people who fight back against their sadistic oppressors are ALWAYS demonized, dehumanized & labeled “terrorists/animals” by the oppressor nation. nat turner, mandela, assata shakur & the black liberation army, george jackson & the black guerilla family… the list is endless.

good old colonialism never left us. it’s always been in our face.

enough is enough.

what’s happening in gaza is the first real-time, live, in full-view-of-the-world genocide in human history. if u are praying for israel, the settler colony perpetrating this genocide, and harping on hamas attacks, then u are not human (as one of my palestinian friends wrote). it’s physically painful for us (the non-white/non-western people of the world) to see your callous posts and inane bothsidism. u don’t know that much about palestine? that’s not an excuse. if u are an adult, educate yourself. i see social media as a place to create community, not to butt heads with people. the real world is ugly enough. i will say goodbye to any form of colonialism or racism i encounter.