We want things smaller than we know.
A vessel strong enough
to lift you into tomorrow
- Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
Actually, your soul and mine are the same, we appear and disappear in each other
- Rumi
After what we have seen this October we will never be the same, we will never be the same, we will never be the same—
To witness an occupying military rain down death, debility, and dispossession upon two million people in the small enclosed space they currently have left to call home—
To witness not only this rain/reign of violence, but to see entire political and media structures manufacture consent for this rain/reign of violence—
To witness violence upon people who know genocide in their bones, then to see that pain exploited so swiftly and hurled over the wall, a humiliated burning ball, primed for ethnic cleansing—
To see the New Zealand settler government call merely for a ‘humanitarian pause’ (merely pausing genocide?); the death of international laws that have again failed to launch for those who face imperial force—
To not-see the suffering during the communication blackout, the forced silence somehow even more horrifying than the screams—
Every sentence starts up only to trail off in horror. But we feel our way through the fog. Goodness is out there. It is edifying to read good people’s words and watch their stories and stand and march next to them at the weekly rallies for Palestine, for an end to the siege and for a future of peace and freedom for everyone in that precious place between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. There are good people of every religion and non-religion, in every nation and non-nation. It is reassuring to see unshakeable ethics in so many quarters, despite chilling threats of unemployment, blacklisting, or worse. The problem is that good people and unshakeable human ethics are not in charge of our governments. Over the decades many in power have unfairly conflated expressions of concern for Palestinian people, and fair criticism of the Israeli government, with antisemitism. Such conflation has bought a lot of silence and compliance. But the spell has broken. Widespread non-compliance is here. Humanity does not comply with antisemitism and humanity does not comply with colonialism and humanity does not comply with genocide. A shared humanity is our guide. Sometimes spiky but always shared; humanity as an immensity, a remembrance, a wide attention, a woven existence, beyond domination.
Colonialism is brutal but it is brittle. It cannot quell humanity, which exists beyond the hierarchies that colonialism insists are our nature. Domination is not our nature. Occupation is not our nature. Walls and borders are not our nature. Apartheid is not our nature. Raining down destruction upon dehumanised others is not our nature. Raining down destruction upon other-than-human beings and places and archives is not our nature, either (“no human, tree, or stone as been spared,” mourns Niveen al-Barbari; “there is a mass murder to memory," says Fady Joudah). Humanity is rising up. Even in our simple strides together we are challenging what we have been told it means to be human. Being human is expansive, not hierarchical. Even as Palestinians struggle to survive this genocidal siege, they are teaching us so much about the expansiveness of humanity, freeing people around the world from so much stupor and separation.
Colonialism anoints some as more worthy of peace and property than others, but a ring-fenced peace is dependent upon moral degradation, enclosure and alienation. “Moral corruption is a mechanism that fuels and justifies itself in a cycle that can become endless without powerful and insistent intervention,” writes Michael Sfard in Haartez Israel News. Everyone, of every faith and ethnicity, deserves to be truly safe, wherever they live. And it is true that there is no true safety in occupation. If any version of safety depends upon the dispossession, containment, and oppression of other people then it was never truly safe, and never will be. It will be a case of forever watching our backs; becoming brittle, losing the elastic of that expansive humanity when we ratchet up what we are willing to do to others to maintain our idea of safety and normality.
In these past few years of pandemic abandonment and denial I have feared for human solidarity. I have been dismayed by the rush ‘back to normal’ when we are not all safe. Harassed for wearing a simple respirator, I have feared that there are few friendly places left in which to truthfully share space. I have doubted my own (in)credulity, thinking surely these powerful people couldn’t be so wrong and indifferent about the ongoing pandemic. But it is the same leaders who enabled the end of public care that enable the end of Palestinian lives. They really can get it so wrong. But we feel our way through the fog. Goodness really exists. And we really can find each other, and keep going:
Why do I keep going? Well, it’s very simple. There’s nothing difficult about it: I want to go home. I want to at least, in whatever life is left to me, be in my own homeland. And I deeply resent the fact that I can’t do that — that strikes me as a very basic, fundamental injustice, not difficult to understand. And that’s the thing that drives me, all the time.
[…]
We have a situation of one state already — there is one state! — but the problem with that state is that it is ruled by one apartheid regime, which deals with half the population in a manner that no civilised society can accept. They have no rights [including the right of return], they have no citizenship, and yet they are ruled by this apartheid regime.
- Ghada Karmi, One State: The Only Democratic Future for Palestine-Israel book launch recording by Palestine Deep Dive, June 14th, 2023.
And while what’s happening in Gaza today is a consequence of decades of settler-colonial violence and must be placed in the broader history of that violence to be understood, it has taken us to places to which the entire history of colonialism has never taken us before. At any moment, without warning, at any time of the day or night, any apartment building in the densely populated Gaza Strip can be struck by an Israeli bomb or missile.
-Saree Makdisi, No Human Being Can Exist, N+1, October 25th, 2023.
It is a sorrow lifetimes larger than words. One wide enough to acknowledge Jewish pain, both recent and historical. As a Palestinian, I refuse to mimic the oppressor by denying the humanity of the deceased. But this sadness sits inside the crater of certainty that the world will still refuse ours. It is a chasm carved by decades of discourse in which only certain bodies bleed. Inside this consensus, there is no violent dispossession of our land, no acceptable form in which we may resist our many slow and instant deaths. It refuses the fact that for decades we have buried hundreds of slain for every one Israeli killed. In this selective, Western gaze, there is only our barbarism, which must be brutally contained.
-Sarah Aziza, Doomsday Diaries, The Baffler, October 18th 2023
Primo Levi was very important for me because the pain he experienced is not something that is limited to him in a way that I think he’s the most generous to be able with your own pain, even if you’re coming from a different experience, to feel something connected.
[…]
The consequences of nationalism, where the nation state was brought about, are disastrous. So far we have not witnessed a state that is functioning in a way that we would like to replicate proudly. We are maybe doing it as a result of vengeance or anger or “Ah, you are like that so I want to be like that,” but it’s not out of this free way of thinking, “Ah, this is the way to be together as human beings.”
-Adania Shibli, Minor Detail Interview with David Naimon, Between the Covers, September 2nd 2021.
*
Perfect songs released in October 2023:
Whose Lord are you naming
When you start to break things?
It's my only life you hold
(No, I don't wanna fight at all, no, I don't wanna fight at all)
I don't wanna fight at all
(No, I don't wanna fight at all, no, I don't wanna fight at all)
I don't wanna fight at all
(No, I don't wanna fight at all, no, I don't wanna fight at all)
(I don't wanna fight at all) I don't wanna fight at all
(I don't wanna fight at all)
(No, I don't wanna fight at all, no, I don't wanna fight at all)
(I don't wanna fight at all) I don't wanna fight at all
(I don't wanna fight at all)
Until next month, somehow
Hannah x
Widespread non-compliance is here.
Will return to read again, with time, to take in the links and watch the videos.
Thank you, thank you. <3