i don’t get how you can be a writer and think your words don’t do anything. why did you become a writer? just to be published? if you know how to use words in powerful ways, do that. speak out. get other writers involved. hold lit orgs to account. amplify others’ words. write.
tweet from writer Chen Chen
This use of the war on terror as a broad designation of the project of twenty-first-century Western democracy has served as a justification of anti-Muslim racism; it has further legitimized the Israeli occupation of Palestine; it has redefined the repression of immigrants; and has indirectly led to the militarization of local police departments throughout the country.
activist and scholar Angela Davis, writing in Freedom Is a Constant Struggle
The cycle never ends. A Western power funds a terrorist cell (or creates one)–then hollers when the cell goes rogue. Uses the organization as a scapegoat for why it is now allowed to bomb X, Y, Z area to Kingdom Come. Why it is now allowed to move into or occupy a territory (of course, always in places where the power has interest) and people wring their hands and lap up the rotten milk of their bad faith leaders again and again. It never ends.
At this point, when people say things like both sides and look it’s a complicated issue, I just look for who the US is backing. Anyone the US is backing–is the one stirring the shit. I hate to make it this simplistic, but out of all the bad faith Western powers, the US has superseded and Kaneda’d itself into something truly beyond. Bad faith? No, it’s been for so long, so far beyond that.
It is a Wicked Faith Country.
I wish I had the idealism of Chen Chen and I admire it. I DON’T believe words have the power to stop people from profiting off the war machine. Certainly not mine. I look at this issue too and want to fall back into the comforting simplicity of it’s so complicated. But it’s not complicated (not any more than any other systemic issue of long-term abuse certain groups feel entitled to inflict upon others is). It’s a simple matter of one group saying: I feel entitled to something you have. And I am stronger than you. And I have friends in high places. And I will make this happen. And I will support (or even outright create) groups to destabilize your lands–I will point at the chaos they (through me) created and say, LOOK AT WHAT THE TERRORISTS DID! Surely, you need a Good, Strong Power to come in and clean up!
It’s a story as old and as cynical as Time. I too in the past sometimes thought to myself on this issue of Palestinian freedom: talking is silver but silence is gold. Just shut up. You have nothing to contribute.
Then I hear the most outrageous claims online and my blood boils up and vomits out. Am I talking words? Maybe I’m just vomiting anger. Just so fucking sick of the US having their dick in every pie, daring to breathe words like democracy and freedom while they fund genocide.
This is a genocide and humanitarian crisis, brought on the Palestinian people by Israel, through the complicity of the West. Let’s break down the talking points.
Hamas is a terrorist organization! When you support a free Palestine, you support terrorism!
Surely these people have noticed that anybody who goes against US interests gets labelled a terrorist organization really fast. Let’s not even start with how, as with all these convenient terrorist scapegoats, they were created and nursed by those who now denounce them the loudest.
Even if I am to wholesale accept that Hamas is a terrorist organization in no way raised and/or supported by Israel (and indirectly, the US) as a convenient pawn to stoke profitable chaos, the average Palestinian is not associated with the group.
Also, if people simply come into your house and try to take it from you–you are allowed to try to push them back out.
You should go over there and see what they do to people like you. ; )
Top brain-dead argument.
A. I don’t believe people should die for being homophobic.
B. But speaking of homophobia, the US tried to pass THREE-HUNDRED AND FIFTEEN anti-LGBTQ laws in 2022. If it’s still illegal to kill people for being queer in the US, it’s not for lack of many trying. : )
C. There are queer Palestinians as well?? Do those making such arguments think that because a country’s religion is anti-queer, that type of person now ceases to exist there?
Saying Free Palestine is anti-Semitic. : /
Let’s be clear. Judaism is a religion and culture–Israel is a state. In Germany today, it is illegal to attend pro-Palestine rallies or peaceful protests, on the grounds that they are ”anti-Semitic.” Here we see criticizing the injustices committed by the US-backed state of Israel grossly and conveniently conflated with basic anti-Jewish neo-Nazi sentiment. (Let’s not even touch the mess of ”Semitic people” technically means Jews–but also Arabs. )
When I think ”anti-Semitic,” I think of Holocaust deniers and Neo-Nazis and anyone who says that Jewish people deserve ill brought upon them simply for being Jewish. However, right now the term ”anti-Semitic” is getting thrown at any however possibly valid criticism leveled at the state of Israel. This is a touchy subject especially here in Germany where (rightfully so) Holocaust denial and hate-speech against Jews is banned. Unlike in the US, Neo-Nazis (again, rightfully) DO NOT have the ”right” to spread their poisonous message. But conflating garden variety hate-speech with calling for Israeli accountability for the treatment of Palestinians is some top-shelf apologia politics from Germany.
A thinker, scholar and Holocaust survivor (and Hungarian!) Dr. Gabor Mate speaks eloquently on this:
In my teenage years in Canada, I became a Zionist. That this dream of the Jewish people; resurrected in their historical homeland, and the barbed wire of Auschwitz being replaced by the boundaries of a Jewish state with a powerful army. And then I found out that it wasn’t exactly like that. That in order to make this Jewish dream a reality, we had to visit a nightmare on the local population.
He goes on to say, that there was no way to create a Jewish state without expelling the local population–and that this was a systemic, cruel and absolutely deliberate process. You can see the longer video here (and in general, he has many videos where he speaks beautifully on many topics. I have recently discovered this man and he’s a gem.)
I have no doubts that the US’s interest in the Israeli state is completely self-serving and has nothing to do with caring about Jewish people anywhere, but wanting to preserve their holdings in that spot. My heart goes out to any Jewish friends who may have lost family in the events that have unfolded in the last two weeks. But I cannot ignore that even if I go into this issue knowing absolutely nothing and look at the sheer number of deaths–Palestinian deaths greatly outnumber Israeli deaths, and have for years and years, despite the population being much smaller. Graphs taken from OCHA.
What hugely different death tolls, despite Israel having a 9.5M population and Palestinians being almost half of that, at just over 5M people. (Taken from Worlddata dot info.)
Even if I take the broadly naive “this is too complicated” and ”goes too far back” for outsiders to make judgement upon position–even if I ignore the eye-witness Palestinian accounts, the racist tweets by the official Israeli account (by now, deleted) that calls this a fight between the ”children of light” and the ”children of darkness,” how am I supposed to look at these numbers and come to any conclusion other than that one group of people is trying to erode another?
I cannot.
And to try to silence valid criticism by shouts of anti-Semite simply collapses all Jewish people, including the many who are critical of this, into Israeli Zionists.
If you’ve been to my Couch before, you know I’ve been screaming for so long. I scream about queer issues, feminism, civil rights–they’re all interconnected. They’re all a matter of one group saying, I believe you are weak enough for me to take advantage of you.
I believe enough people can profit off of me oppressing you, for me to never have to take accountability.
It’s as simple as that.
I know this will keep happening over and over–and when someone becomes strong enough to finally beat off their oppressor, all too often, they become the strong one. In the words of MAUS creator Art Spiegelman, suffering doesn’t make people good, it just makes them suffer. If some of the descendants from one of the greatest atrocities of mankind are able to look at the suffering wrought here and say, but here is why IN OUR CASE, this is justified–what hope does that leave for this cycle to ever stop? Thinking anything you say can change this cycle is its own form of naive hubris.
But the alternative, to turn away and say nothing, is even worse. So I hope that everyone will fight this, will continue to fight this, in whatever capacity they can.
I can’t do much. But I can witness, share, and hope that people realize that oppressing another group of people cannot absolve the evil done back then by Germany and all complicit. And hope for a free Palestine.
From Palestinian-American author Nadia Shammas: (@Nadia_Shammas_ )
It’s not just about condemnation (which is EXTREMELY IMPORTANT) for non-Palestinian allies but I want hope from y’all too. I want belief, unshakeable, that the subjugation will end, the apartheid will end, it is inevitable.
A petition to sign for Writers In Solidarity with Palestine
Donate or join a local protest if you can. Note that I have seen online talk of how humanitarian aid is not getting through right now, and more than donations, making noise by joining protests/spreading awareness is what helps.
Boycott McDonald’s, Starbucks, and Disney +–all loud supporters of Israeli policy.
He Waited on the Couch to Die 