What is there to say, at a time like this?
What is the point of speaking, of writing, of talking amongst ourselves, when a people who have been oppressed and harried unto death for almost a century are being obliterated on a daily basis? Why bother with such powerless pleading, condemnation, pity, when it will not stop a single trigger being pulled or a single bomb from being dropped?
Here we sit, six thousand miles and an uncrossable ocean of human experience from the destruction in Gaza, daily updated with the signals of annihilation from our governments, our media, even our friends and families. Most of us cannot even conceptualize the agony and brutality being inflicted on the Palestinian people. We worry not just that they are being starved, sickened, shot, beaten, and blown to pieces; we worry, too, that our bull-headed determination to remain yoked to the engine of destruction that is the Israeli leadership will draw us even further into another, wider, bloodier, and more pointless war. We worry our sons, our brothers, ourselves will be thrown into another global conflict, all for the sake of defending an apartheid state that daily revives the same lies and libels — sometimes word for word — that preceded the genocide that led to its founding. And what can we do about it?
There are things. There are machines upon whose gory cogs we can throw ourselves. There are masses of us that can be organized to stop those machines, to thwart the blind obedience of our governing class. There are demands made of us which we can answer with a resounding, permanent, and non-negotiable no. And there is this. Whatever this is, this is a thing we can do.
What there is to say is that whatever we may think or feel about the violent resistance of members of an oppressed people, it is a historically inevitable result of that oppression, and it will recur until one of two results are achieved: the end of the occupation, or the total extinction of the occupied. What there is to say is that when we are told obvious lies by the villains in power, we have no commitment to believe them and no obligation to debate them. What there is to say is that apartheid — like slavery before it, like exploitation, like any demand that others must suffer so that we may have comfort — is always wrong and never justified, and that we either share a common humanity or humanity is nothing. What there is to say is that sowing the wind reaps the whirlwind.
Why to bother is that we are uniquely positioned — at least for the moment, though the powers are already killing journalists, imprisoning dissenters, disrupting protests, censoring media, and cutting off lines of communication — to sway a war-weary public away from a sure path to madness. In recent weeks, I have been bewildered to read liberals, turning towards fascism as they always do when blood starts to spill because it is so terrifying to think of one’s self as suffering as others do, embrace Adolph Reed’s description of their politics as one of “bearing witness to suffering” as if it is a compliment or an imperative. But our goal must not be simply to assure the Palestinian people, as our president did before going back to his office and signing papers that will authorize their continued slaughter, that we see them. We must do more than see them. We must make sure that what is happening to them is not forgotten, that we preserve the specific evidence of what is being done to them and how it is being excused, that we know the people participating in their extermination have names and addresses, and have clearly announced their plans. We must ensure that one way or another, they will never be listened to again.
It is almost trite at this point to note that those who have made grand claims about what they would have done if faced with the Holocaust, the Southern slave state, or the mass genocide of Indian tribes are being posed with that very question right now, and their answers, largely, have been either “to “do nothing” or “to “actively support the brutality”. But, for a moment that may last no longer than it takes for a ship full of fighter jets to cross the ocean, we have an opportunity to document the horror, the cruelty, the disproportionality, the collective punishment, and the unthinkable mistreatment of an entire people. For years we have said that no violence inflicted on the Israeli people for their leaders’ immoral and indefensible persecution of the Palestinian people has even come close to that perpetrated on the Palestinians by the Israelis, but it has been easy to ignore or excuse. Now, in this moment, it is different — not too different, not different enough, not with a difference that will stop death in its tracks, but different. We can now see the utter devastation wrought on one of the poorest, most deprived, most densely populated areas on this miserable, beautiful planet. We can now see residents of the Gaza Strip, innocent men and women with no connection to Hamas and no ability to change the way they are ruled, posting photographs of their dead sons and daughters and nephews and nieces — generations of promise wiped out in an instant, no different than the work of any other tyrant or tawdry, mad family annihilator, sacrifices at the grisly altar of voracious settler colonialism. Those stories and images, one way or another, will soon disappear. Now is the moment to make sure that everyone sees them, and everyone knows what we think of them.
They — the they who are the bloodthirsty generals, the ravenous bosses, the vengeful leaders — are counting on one thing: that this will all be forgotten and therefore forgiven. They, like every murderous regime before them, hope that we — the we who are the working class, the people, the powerless, the ones who have known oppression or who at least have the sense to know it when we see it — will keep quiet about it to protect our jobs, our reputations, our relationships, our respectability. It is the one thing they can count on to save them from the ignominy of history’s judgement. For those of us too far away to fight, too short of resources to report, too weak to intervene, there is just this one option: to have the courage to speak, to write, to talk, to be bothered. This is the moment we are tested, and even if we fail, we cannot fail to try. If we do, we can be assured that when the Palestinians are long gone, the guns that killed them will remain, and they will need a new target at which to be aimed.