Month: July 2019

After a conversation with my wife in which she encouraged me to deploy language that won’t disaffect leftists enamored of US political spectacles, but instead invite them into conversation about why I consider it troublesome to mythologize presidential candidates by whitewashing their Zionism and thus diverting hard-won energy from Palestine’s national movement into electoralism (innately anathema to decolonization), I’ve been considering how to act on the advice, for I’ve tried the soft approach many times, always with the same result—a snide and often belligerent defense of pragmatism—and I can’t imagine that result changing because ultimately the objection to recalcitrance isn’t about tone so much as outlook, ethics, ambition, and ideology, and yet I want to honor the appeal to decorum, so with an open heart I ask, “What words might I use to illustrate that Palestinian well-being is more important than networking opportunities and podcast appearances, that investment in electoral politics is both dull and provincial, that instinctively defending parties in position to proffer social capital betrays the wretched and dispossessed, that nothing in this vanishing world matters more than keeping alive the idea of freedom (real freedom, untethered to the numbing conventions of US exceptionalism), that beautiful possibilities arise when we attempt to inhabit alien sensibilities—is there anything, in other words, I can say that would convince you to stop colonizing the left on behalf of liberalism and calling it a revolution?”