It may be my imagination but for the past month and a half or so, it seems to me that everything I'm reading is about Israel and Gaza. Three books in particular that had been in my queue for weeks before October 7 had eerie consonance with current events. In early October I was reading Naomi Klein's Doppelganger, her rather epic new meditation on The Double, particularly as observed through her personal troubling experience of being chronically confused with the recently anti-vax and conspiracy obsessed Steve Bannon crony, Naomi Wolf. As Israel began its campaign of vengeance on Gaza in response to Hamas' October 7th breach of Israel's "Iron Dome" defense which resulted in the killing of 1200 (nearly half of whom were civilians), I had reached the conclusion of Klein's book, which centers on the complicated contrast between the notion of the Old Jew as the bookish perpetually stateless victim of the Nazi holocaust and the New Jew personified by the robustly aggressive settler colonialism of the Zionist government of Israel. Klein's reflections are profound; perhaps, the highlight of what for me is the best book of 2023 so far. (Klein has since spoken at the Jewish Voice for Peace rally for ceasefire in Gaza in Washington October 18 at which Representatives Rashida Tlaib and Cori Bush also spoke and 300 were arrested.).
Astrotopia, by Mary-Jane Rubenstein is ostensibly about the danger of the religious rationalizations behind capitalism's designs-- through the auspices of unilateral governmental support-- on space; and yet as the author explicitly states in her introduction, it bears a strong kinship to the settler colonialism of the West, and to Israel's version of it in Palestine.
Tip of the Spear by Orisanmi Burton is not at all about Israel-Palestine, but about Attica and related prison riots in New York State in 1970-1971. But the parallels between Attica and Gaza are impossible to miss. The Attica uprising was of a subjected population -- in this case a heavily oppressed prison population -- against a supremely dominant colonial power that viewed the Attica prisoners as less than human. As it was the brutal carceral state itself that created the explosive conditions that erupted in Attica, so the conditions in Gaza that fomented the Hamas attack against Israel were engendered by Israel's subhuman treatment of Gazans. Attica was heralded as a riot-proof prison , a claim that turned out to be easily belied (much like Israel's failed "Iron Dome") by a spontaneous turnaround of an incident of brutality against prisoners on the part of Attica guards. A guard's killing in the siege escalated and intensified the state's brutal response. Hostages were taken, and as hostages were released in return for the granting of some demands-- not unlike reports from Hamas held hostages on their release-- they reported their treatment by their captors to be humane, even kind. In the action that ended the siege, nearly 40 were killed by state forces, among them 9 hostages whose safety had been exploited for PR purposes by the state as a justification for the its aggressive response but was apparently secondary to vengeance in its carrying out of the operation.
Israel it seems to me in this truly unprecedented time is losing the story. To be sure it still has the ears of many in the media and in the governing class, including Joe Biden and the US State Department who continue to enable Israel's aggressions against the Palestinians (over 11,000 killed in Gaza since the October 7th attack as of this writing, including more than 5000 children and who knows yet how many of the 250 hostages taken into Gaza that day; low estimates place civilian casualties at 75% of the total but some estimates suggest as many as 90% are civilian deaths; 1.6 million in a population of just over 2.0 million have been displaced from their homes) under an increasingly indefensible pretense of "self-defense." But among the people, including myself but especially the young of all ethnicities and religions, not least among them Jews, it has lost any semblance of justice in the pretext of its murderous response to the tragedy of October 7.
Several kinks in the chain of the narrative that Israel and its intolerant-of-debate champions would like to force you to believe have snapped. My yielding to the special pleading of Israeli on the topic of its behavior in the world has broken with it.*
Israel has a right to defend itself, they say. Perhaps, but the opportunity to defend itself was October 7 and it failed. Its actions since October 7, in which along with the cutting off of supplies including food, water, electricity. and the destruction of thousands of homes, businesses and hospitals, so far, ten Palestinians (nearly half of them children) have been killed by strategically deployed Israeli bombs for every victim of Hamas' attack, have revealed themselves to be not defense, but a part of the Netanyahu government's long criminal strategy to eradicate Palestinians from Israel after all. Opting to indiscriminately kill the so-called "civilian shields" you'd like us to believe are pawns in your enemy's game (rather than calling your victims what they are-- civilians!) is not defense, and there is no longer any defense for it.
Palestinians engage in terror against their imprisoners because life is cheap for them, I've heard. For Palestinians? For a people whose autonomy has been taken from them; for a people forced into a refugee life from birth; who have been living in an open air prison for decades; whose food, water, housing, electricity, movement are strictly controlled from without? Life is cheap for me and for you who subsist here in America and in the America like suburbs of Israel with an effort of struggle that is laughable compared to what is forced upon those in Gaza. Life is dear for Palestinians. Its dearness has been thrust upon them.
Never again means never again, I've heard. And of course it does because never again should we stand by while a subject people are systematically scrubbed from the face of the earth out of the hatred stoked by the fascists in power. But it's clear that never again for the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu-- who keep Palestinians in an open air concentration camp and drop bombs out of all proportion to the tragedy that rationalizes this response, killing innocent children and their families like shooting fish in a barrel in order to bring their people closer to extinction and out of the way of Israeli settlement-- means never again only to Jews.
I must not criticize Israel or Zionism because that is Anti-Semitic, they say. How convenient! And single payer healthcare costs too much, and peace is not serious, and freedom is not free. Criticism of Israel and Zionism is criticism of Israel and Zionism-- and it is sometimes done only out of love for the Jews who take no part --and especially the pervasively large number who resist-- in the sanctifying of the crimes that Israel commits in their name, and not least of all for those who love Israel so much for the best of reasons that they must blind themselves to its atrocities-- atrocities they would not forgive if they were committed (and not merely enabled) by the US This why the anti-BDS laws that no one asked for sprang up unbidden across the United States thanks to the stealth machinations of moneyed groups supportive of Benjamin Netanyahu's ultra-conservative anti-Palestinian government in Israel; laws that punish those caught expressing views not to the Israel lobbies' liking. In the United States!
What the government of Israel is doing is playing with fire. The edifice of sacreds it has stacked up to protect itself from exposure of the rot at the core of its mission-- a rot that is very familiar to an American or a European from our own settler colonial heritage-- is falling apart. And the violence that it has wielded to protect its rot from showing could very possibly come back on itself. And let me be clear, that is not good. Shame on us for enabling it.
If my tolerance of the accepted version of Israel's mission in Palestine is broken by the genocide being committed in Gaza, what else is broken? I don't know how this will end. I can voice my pain but I can't control the impact of my words. For the most part I can only watch in horror. But I very much hope for an outcome that will quickly with as little blood as possible put an end to this brutal era, and mark the beginning of an era of true peace and autonomy and literal co-existence in the sense of existing together in the middle east and around the world. Amein.
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* Then 22 House Democrats who voted with Republicans to censure Rashida Tlaib for civilly exercising free speech broke me again.
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