All the cruelty livestreamed onto our electronic devices has undone the old political order. There are no more liberal Zionists, lowkey Zionists, cultural Zionists, soft Zionists, progressive Zionists, apathetic Zionists, ambivalent Zionists, non-Zionists, or post-Zionists. Now only two categories matter: Zionist and anti-Zionist.
I might go so far as to argue that not identifying as anti-Zionist is itself a form of Zionism, which I suppose is another way of saying that ignorance of or indifference to Gaza is unacceptable.
Such is the mood of the Palestine solidarity community a year into the Zionist genocide. For decades we’ve been coerced into humoring the settler’s ego in a million ways, large and small, in what felt not like interchange but unrequited gestures of charity. Amid the current horror hundreds of memories emerge in snippets of rage: being made to condemn “antisemitism” before anybody would consider us sentient—in fact before anybody would address Zionism’s innate racism, or the racism built into the demand to condemn antisemitism—for this supposed act of humanism, this apparent disavowal of hatred, was never not a Zionist maneuver; being shadowed and chaperoned by devotes of the Israeli state in any public setting; being locked out of professional opportunities that would normally be commensurate with our qualifications. We’ve had to explain ourselves in other ways. Do you condemn violence? Do you support Hamas? Do you believe Israel has a right to exist? Why shouldn’t Jews have a country of their own?
(What about you, though? Do you really believe that Zionism is innocent of violence? Or is the violence merely entrenched in the meat of your tongue?)
Since the nakba, Zionist angst has been the soundtrack of Palestinian life.
House demolition. Land theft. Travel restrictions. I have family in Israel. Ecocide. Expulsion. Imprisonment. This space is becoming unsafe for Jews. Air raids. Ground incursions. The massacre of children. But what would happen to Israelis? Always the fantastical as a substitute for reality. Always a void of empathy we are asked to replenish. Always everything for all others without anything of our own. And we tried. Whether it was from decorum or guilt or fatigue, we tried. We wanted to be accepted. We wanted to become Good People. We tried the sympathy, the indulgence, the dialogue. The only thing these efforts got us was a genocide.
We remember. We have no choice, because the settler is needier than ever, demanding our validation as we agonize and mourn. Not many are willing to offer it anymore. Your crisis of faith is not my concern. Those who do indulge the settler come across as weak or untrustworthy. What the hell are you doing? There’s a genocide going on.
There’s been too much blood. If you don’t share in our spirit, whether it cycles through pain or longing or fury or despair, then you’re a Zionist. It doesn’t matter how you self-identify. We suffer the oppression and so we get to name the oppressor. It’s the only real benefit to being oppressed.
(Besides, any half-serious person has surely noticed that Zionists can’t be trusted to define anything— “colonization”; “democracy”; “self-defense”; “antisemitism”—because those definitions exist only to project the settler’s barbarity onto the native.)
*****
I’ve been thinking about how we’ve hardened our sensibilities, and how in turn the discourse has hardened, and it finally occurred to me that despite the habits of civility into which we’ve been acclimated hardness was always our fundamental condition. The hardness isn’t a principle of aggression, but of defense. It’s all we have to protect ourselves. It’s the only resource Palestinians in the West can really contribute to the national movement. We can donate and boycott and protest, but the hardness brings the diaspora closer to the homeland. After October 7, I could see it happening, so many diasporic Palestinians shaking off these existential burdens, these humiliating accommodations, these civic commonplaces that destroy our political imagination. We’re each undergoing a psychic intifada. Because we always knew that the Zionist entity didn’t finish the job in 1948. We understand the Zionist mentality. That’s one of our biggest problems. Understanding that mentality means acknowledging a kind of logic beyond the emotional capacity of functional human beings, a logic that invariably leads to our own demise. Knowing Zionism, as we’ve been made to do, is an incessant suicide mission. They were always going to try to finish the job, with or without an October 7. They were finishing the job all along. Every Palestinian life, every Palestinian expression of being, was an unfinished mission. Palestinians were being exterminated as a matter of course, like infrastructure updates or budget approvals. There is no other option available to those who hold onto the idea of Israel. We knew it. Even if some of our comrades thought that we were too delusional, too zealous, too uncompromising—that deep in our hearts we were hateful and fanatical, as the Oriental is apt to be—we knew. That’s all. Some of us fought on behalf of softness, with voting rituals, NGO activism, critical theory, all the stuff that offers a civilized façade. But now we have no choice: the Zionists validated our knowledge. Hardness is the only viable option.
We have invited others into this sensibility, from within and beyond our community. They can get up to speed or continue in their increasingly obscene forms of appeasement. But we’ll no longer try to sneak a toe across the dark red trench separating anti-Zionists from everyone else. One doesn’t need prior knowledge of Palestine or a degree in political science to conclude that Zionism has no business among the living. All it requires is an understanding that what the people of Gaza are being made to suffer is completely inhuman, or should be, anyway, if humanity is worth a damn.
*****
According to academic convention, this return to our vital sensibilities is a bad development. It results in nationalism, lack of nuance, binaries. (Scary attitudes that lead impressionable people to communism and other unpleasant ideas.) But all in all I see it as a positive. Palestine was never going to be liberated by adhering to the bourgeois commonplaces of academe or civil society. Liberation will necessarily upset the intellectual classes, for those classes exist only because they’re amenable to the economic order in which Zionism thrives. Dissent is beginning to appear in those spaces, as is, in turn, increased repression. “Free speech” is only valid until the ruling class feels threatened. When people protest the Zionist ethostate, egghead technocrats happily drop the pretense. Put up a tent and, bam, the police show up. Head to the voting booth and, look out, yet another psychopath. Say the wrong thing and, poof, here comes a passel of irate deans and vice presidents. We have learned through decades of desecrated civil liberties to prioritize Palestine’s liberation because the system that promises us rights also produces genocide (while failing to uphold the rights). We can no longer respect the conventions that have so dramatically failed us. Palestine comes first and last, no matter how crude we have to be about it. Yes, it’s a good thing.
*****
Whenever I try to make sense of what I believe in this world, the ideas that allow me to live with myself and to perhaps create the possibility of living with others, I return to a simple question: what kind of person does my politics require me to be? The question forces me to consider the effect of belief beyond personal gratification. Belief has a relationship with violence and power, be it God or karma or capital or government. Thus it should also have a relationship with peace and cooperation. I don’t like the idea of obliging strangers into tactics I wouldn’t carry out myself. If one of my opinions might expose others to harm, then I have to think carefully about the consequences of speaking or even of belief itself. While I can declare without much ambiguity that I support armed resistance to colonization, I recognize it as an abstract declaration. Am I willing to take up a gun and get shot at? It’s impossible to say without being forced into the decision. That’s the thing about resistance: people are forced into it. In the end the choice I would make doesn’t matter, because if I ever find myself with a gun and getting shot at then it’s not necessarily something I would have chosen. I would be reacting to material circumstances, not to distant and disembodied questions of moral propriety. People need to remember that about Palestinian fighters: resistance is a necessity forced onto them by settler colonization. If a people’s survival depends upon militancy, then that people will become militant. Both North and South are littered with examples.
This way of thinking, I suspect, informs the (re)hardening of our sensibilities. Palestinian life, these days indivisible from Palestinian death, is often used as raw material for careerism or electioneering. Or else it is fed back into the hateful rhetoric of genocide. Brutal violence is all over our screens and still the storytellers of Western democracy process the brutality into allegories of progress. We can’t indulge these paeons to Western altruism, where death becomes abstract, subsumed by never-ending tales of noble violence. The slaughter of Palestinians is immediate and undeniable and so goddamn real as to exist beyond our moral comprehension. To know the Zionist genocide is to consign our souls to a darkness we spend our entire lives avoiding. This condition is made worse by a vocal enemy whose main rhetorical devices are paranoia and narcissism, not to mention a political culture that asks us to patiently die until suburban liberals finally elect the right president. I reckon we’ve had enough of the entire concept of patience, which only bought the oppressor more time to empower unrepentant maniacs and build deadlier technology, and have finally shaken off the latent assumption that we can expect any grace or decency from our enemies.
We always saw it, but now we see it written onto a powerlessness that threatens our very existence. Material circumstance has forced us into binaristic thinking: if Zionism survives, we die. We’ve become more pragmatic, but not in the way that U.S. thought-leaders want us to be. They believe that pragmatism is deferring liberation for the sake of various American political fantasies, but our pragmatism is intuitive and historical. We see what the Zionist entity does in Gaza, the extensive rubble, the mutilation, the dead children, accompanied by incessant glee and mockery. We know too that in the aftermath of the Nazi Holocaust nobody suggested that its victims should coexist with its perpetrators. (Indeed, the idea of Jews and Nazis sharing a country was rightly considered outlandish, one reason why the Holocaust was, and continues to be, such an effective justification for the theft of Palestine.) Everybody without cynical intentions understood that Nazism needed to be expunged, not accommodated. The same is true of Zionism. So we protect ourselves from the annoyances of bourgeois pragmatism—the half-baked Orientalism, the high-handed pontification, the snitching and scabbing, the appeals to civility, the ideological discipline—each act landing squarely on death’s side of the binary.
If you are across from us somewhere beyond that dark red trench, among the white-hot artillery, then you needn’t sermonize about the proper way to suffer a genocide. Instead, take a moment, or a lifetime, and consider what kind of person Zionism requires you to be.
Dear Steven,
I couldn’t agree more!
Daniel
Moomtastic
100%. Thank you for taking the time to say it so well. Zionism is terrorism. No more sugar coating the evil its done.
I am so angry and frustrated about the carnage that zionists have carried out in palestine and the subjugation of a nation by occupation and oppression with the USA supporting the zionists and you have explained it very well. I just cannot for the life of me understand the warped mentality of the people who support Israel.
Dear Steven,
You spoke what we feel and believe.
Rana
Damned right, Steven!
As always, you are writing 🔥. You have distilled the mood of this moment— its horror and awakenings—into language that is clear and definitive. I am grateful. I am thinking of you and yours.
Great to see you, Joseph. Thanks for dropping in–Steve
Brilliant and on fire, as always. Much obliged.
Everyone living in that region – Jews and Muslims alike – considered themselves “Palestinians” and coexisted until the artificial creation of “The State of Israel” after WWII. That “state” existed as an ideology (Zionism) first. It is just another example of the flawed egoic thinking that has driven human conflict throughout recorded history.
Tiptoeing around the Jewish mine fields. Zionists in Israel are Jews. They have rabbis and Torahs and Talmuds and orthodoxy and the Wailing Wall White House and billionaire Jews of the sociopathic variety. Jews believe in supremacy. In Palestine? Since their Nazi project was envisioned. Nakba a, b, c.
They are monsters in every sense of the word. Edward Bernays or Oppenheimer or Soros or Zuckerberg or Zelensky or Zyklon Blinken or Himmler Yellen or Goebbels Kagan/ Nuland. Larry’s Ellison or Fink, name your poison.
https://open.substack.com/pub/paulokirk/p/of-course-bomb-equipped-hobby-drones?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=5i319
Palestinians are great at being saliticious/accommadating settler occupied, pisses zionists off. Good on you Steven! My rage is also targetted at military contractors who make money off this.
Yes, they are, aren’t they? I can’t imagine there are that many anti-Zionist Jews in this discussion; which is to say, “I want my religion back.”
At this point the shade of Uri Avnery persistently demands attention.
oops, I meant “not” good at being settler occupied.
Expressed what many of us feel. No easy way out.
This is the best thing I’ve seen written on the whole cataclysmic shift in thought that becoming anti-zionist requires and on the situation at large. For years I’ve tried to talk with fellow natives about how every system of commerce and control on the reservation is designed around the assumption of our eventual extinction, and pointed to Palestine for examples of what happens when that eventualism is felt as being too gradual and slow by supremacists and capital.
This is such a condensed and succinct encapsulation of all of it and I’m so grateful for finding it and to you for writing it.
I mourn that it’s something I couldn’t have written or something that others wouldn’t have seen in a time of greater peace.
I worked in Al-Khalil/Hebron for nearly 20 years. My question was always, “When will Palestinian lives and livelihoods be as, if not more, important than Jewish and Israeli feelings?”
Just when I was feeling so alone in my callous towards every single zombie American human. Just when I thought my standards were too high. Just when I thought I should stop closing my office door to all my silent colleagues, here you are. Thank you!!!
this is spectacular. ty, steve.
Loud applause for this powerfully eloquent, step-by-step reasoning of both brain and heart, which is what makes comrades, revolutionists who hear no cant, see the pathos of gestures, and speak the inner and outer truth of liberation.
Well said. Thank you, Stephen for your steadfast clarity.
This is a brilliant article — we need to share widely. Dr. Salaita speaks for all of us who have been forced into some form of appeasement. No longer!!!
Brilliant as always, dear Steven.
Zionisn – a fancy word for colonialism: they come and we must go. Played out across the world and usually rationalized by whatever religion has the most military power. Doctrine of Discovery, Manifest Destiny, and even colonial attacks on stable, but financially challenged neighborhoods renamed gentrification. When Indigenous peoples defend their homelands it’s terrorism. When colonizers kill Indigenous peoples, it’s a victory. And meanwhile, the Earth Mother and all beings who dwell here from the rocks to the waters to every type of critter and beyond…..suffer.
Steve, I was just telling my husband yesterday that I have aged considerably this past year, and am much more steadfast and hardened, using that exact word. No compromises. Solidarity from Southern Lebanon
Steven articulates Palestine today in a way few others do. He poetically crafts what we think, and spot-on too. He’s more relevant today than Said. Said was of a different generation, which appealed to a civility, a conscience, which Steven correctly points out, doesn’t exist, except in the service of the barbaric status quo.
Uncompromising, principled and real.
Thank you Steven, for always speaking truth to power.
Steve,
Bravo! I would forward it to the Zionists I know but all are ex-friends at this point and dead to me in all respects. “Zionism has no business among the living.”
To Steven
From us from Islands
Who remember Islands
Whose own boundaries
Begin
From ocean floors
And flow up and out
As currents and waves
And waves and swells
On still upwards and outwards
To the skies
As winds
As stars
To the Heavens
But Island(er)s who also recourse, also contract (and yes, I assure you, my dear friend, also contract to “binaries,”when faced with certain death, swelled by waves that originate from afar, that continue to rain terror from above, and even now strike from beneath the ocean floor)
From such Island(er)s To You
From the River to the Sea
An ocean of tears
Vastness of Hope
And Steadfast Solidarity.
beautiful
All of humanity is less secure after a year of genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank and as Israel now unleashes its wrath on Lebanon.
Zionism is Judaism a la Talmud and Rabbi’s loving their supremacy.
Poems for Palestine?
Christ! You know not your cancer in our midst.
https://paulokirk.substack.com/p/oh-now-the-substackers-are-saying
A new Israel, greater than MAGA? Project on a New American-jewish Century?
Gaza is in ruins. Uninhabitable. Jews of Murdering Raping Starving Poisoning Maiming Occupied Palestine want Samson Option on the front and back burners.
What Partha Chatterjee recounted about Edward Said, echoes Steven’s writing for me “child of a successful anti-colonial struggle, Orientalism was a book which talked of things I felt I had known all along but had never found the language to formulate with clarity. . . . [I]t seemed to say for the first time what one had always wanted to say.”
Just wanted to send Steven a most well deserved KUDOS! for his brilliant essays here 🏆 🥇 I grew up in a predominantly Jewish area in USA, and now this whole Gaza genocide has become the elephant in the living room. I can’t express myself! I will be immediately attacked, ostracized. Hardened opinions, indeed.
Great to see something which is so painful, so insulting, so unjust, so well set out an expressed, gives some peace.
I would add that the reason the mock state of “Israel” exists is the same one that still makes the genocide of palestinians an absolute need, not for the zionnists -more than a need for them that is their reason of being-, I mean a need for those same that created that state and still continue to want it an use it. Palestinians must die because the Imperials (anglosaxon power and adherents) need them to disappear. They still want the same as they wanted two centuries ago, rule and overpower without hindrance. Jews and their past or what was made of their past were the ideal instrument to appropriate that part of he world. And if and when palestinians were eliminated, others would follow as long as they were a hindrance for the Imperials, and that is perfectly visible and obvious now as it goes on. So clearly, the enemy is not “Israel”, Israel is the weapon. No imperial will “influence” “Israel” to stop genocide, no their orders are for “Israel” to carry it out come what may. Therefore the task is not to do away with “Israel”, which must be done as part of it, but the task is to overpower the imperials and that today, may be, can be done. They have lost ground, and evilness is not a synonime of intelligence. Of course a lot of suffering and death will be gone through before they are done with.
yes sir, 100% agree. Your excellent commentary brought me thought that the first Zionists came ashore at Kizkeya and immediately began doing what Zionists do to the Taino who greeted them. Our armed (such as it was – for many of the non warlike tribes the genocides came too quickly for our natures to adapt) resistance largely ended hundreds of years ago, although we continue to resist, existir es resistir. Palestine still battles on – may your resistance bring your people freedom. Love and respect from another indigenous people. #delrioalmar #quevivapalestinalibre.
Dear Prof. Salaita: you write
“We know too that in the aftermath of the Nazi Holocaust nobody suggested that its victims should coexist with its perpetrators.”
This isn’t quite true. Ibn Saud, the King of Saudi Arabia, suggested just that. Here’s the relevant passage in William Eddy’s “FDR Meets Ibn Saud”:
“After discussing the progress of the war, and expressing his confidence that Germany would be defeated, F.D.R. stated that he had a serious problem in which he desired the King’s advice and help; namely, the rescue and rehabilitation of the remnant of Jews in Central Europe who had suffered indescribable horrors at the hands of rhe Nazis: eviction, destruction of their homes, torture and mass-murder. He, F.D.R., felt a personal responsibility and indeed had committed himself to help solve this problem. What could the King suggest?
“Ibn Saud’s reply was prompt and laconic: “Give them and their descendants the choicest lands and homes of the Germans who had oppressed them.”
“F.D.R. replied that the Jewish survivors have a sentimental desire to settle in Palestine and, quite understandably, would dread remaining in Germany where they might suffer again.
“The King said that he had no doubt the Jews have good reason not to trust the Germans, but surely the Allies will destroy Nazi power forever and in their victory will be strong enough to protect Nazi victims. If the Allies do not expect firmly to control future German policy, why fight this costly war? He, Ibn Saud, could not conceive of leaving an enemy in a position to strike back after defeat.”
Eddy’s work is easily retrievable on the Web. Because he was at the time US Minister Plenipotentiary to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, I don’t think we can dismiss that conversation as fiction.
Myself, I think the King’s argument was eminently sensible. I’ll also observe that the quality of Saudi leadership has declined preciptiously since then.
I do think we need to seriously step back and examine the basic precepts.
Religion might be soul food for the tough times, but it makes a poor reality check.
The logical flaw in monotheism is that ideals are not absolutes.
Truth, beauty, platonic forms are ideals. The core codes, creeds, heroes, narratives at the gravitational center of every culture are ideals.
The universal, on the other hand, is the elemental. So a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell
The light shining through the film, than the stories playing out on it.
Morality is not absolute, as it couldn’t be transgressed, if it were. Like a temperature below absolute zero.
Morals are the habits, beliefs, behaviors that enable a healthy society.
Traditionally that one’s status would be a function of what one adds, not what one can extract.
It is just this last 3000 years of cultural evolution, from tribal communities to nations of many millions of people has been a fitful process.
https://medium.com/@johnbrodixmerrymanjr/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-western-mind-906dc73cffe2?sk=5574bcff72d45fdabbcbf4506cbfa062
Non humans…..
https://open.substack.com/pub/paulokirk/p/they-are-not-human-never-humane-and?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=5i319
Zionism is Jewish Supremacism. It isn’t colonialism in the classic sense. It didn’t begin with Christians or ‘the west’ or anything else.
It is a modern continuation of the Hebrew/Jewish canons that refer to all non-Jews as ‘Amalek’ and command that they should be wantonly destroyed.
Marxism/political communism were created and spread as a tool to mask this and to supersede all of a person’s underlying cultural, religious, ethnic identities – basically anything substantive underlying the ideology of marxism/political communism are overtaken by it.
This is all by design.