Image by Rami Gzon.
There are very common refrains in our society. You know them: The United States and the West stand up all over the world for democracy, free speech, a free press, free markets, the rule of law, and human rights. This is what they tell us. What meaning these sentiments, which is indeed all that they are, may have once had, if ever, is lost. They have become pablum. Worse than this, they are lies repeated ad nauseum to inoculate societies from thinking for themselves. Palestine, perhaps like no other crisis before it, has exposed these common cants for what they are, mendacities of the highest order. Whether or not this truth will really take hold and stick in the society I do not know. I am not optimistic. But just as there was no going back after 9/11, our decadent party rudely interrupted by reality, so there is no going back after October 7th.
Let us briefly take each of these Western lies in turn.
Democracy
In 2006, when Hamas was democratically elected to majority seats in the Palestinian Authority (an election which none of the children of Gaza back then nor today had anything to do with), the Western world, that sole purveyor of global democracy, collectively lost its mind and shouted “No! We didn’t mean democracy like that!” Congress quickly passed a law barring any aid to the Palestinian Authority unless it demonstrated “progress toward purging from its security services individuals with ties to terrorism, dismantling all terrorist infrastructure and cooperating with Israel’s security services, halting anti-American and anti-Israel incitement, and ensuring democracy and financial transparency.” Likewise, the “Middle East Quartet” composed of the United Nations, the United States, the European Union, and the Russian Federation, issued a statement, saying, “A two-state solution to the conflict requires all participants in the democratic process to renounce violence and terror, accept Israel’s right to exist, and disarm.” Unsurprisingly, this enjoinder applied only to the Palestinians. Israel could not be expected to renounce terror, accept Palestine’s right to exist, and disarm. Netanyahu’s own party platform specifically denies support for a Palestinian state.
More than this, Israel, “the only democracy in the Middle-East” they tell us (with no regard for the fact that the worst autocracies in the Middle-East — Saudi Arabia and Egypt — receive billions of dollars from the U.S. every year), has instituted both a de facto and a de jure Jim Crowed existence upon the Palestinians. The Palestinians of Israel do not have equal rights. The Adalah organization maintains a list of over 65 discriminatory laws against Palestinians. The Nation-State Bill passed by the Israeli Knesset in 2018 expressly states that only Jews have the right to national self-determination within Israel. Palestinians in the occupied West Bank do not have freedom of movement between there and Gaza or inside Israel proper. Palestinians can be legally barred from living in Israeli villages. It is illegal for Palestinians to collect rainwater. Palestinians cannot get construction permits for their homes. They do not have the same marriage rights as Jewish Israelis. Any person who marries a Palestinian, regardless of their nationality, has their movements restricted within Israel and may even be prohibited from reentering the region. A Palestinian who marries a Jewish Israeli cannot be naturalized as Israeli. Some Palestinians who have managed to leave Israel are disallowed from ever returning. The aim of these citizenship laws are clear: maintaining Jewish supremacy at the expense of Palestinian rights. Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid admitted as such, saying, “We shouldn’t hide the essence of the Citizenship Law. It’s one of the tools aimed at ensuring a Jewish majority in the State of Israel.” Israel is, plainly, not a democratic state.
Here in the U.S., some citizens are trying to exercise their democratic right to boycott Israeli goods. Unfortunately, many U.S. states make you sign a loyalty oath to Israel if you want government contracts or government jobs, specifically barring any tactics used by the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction movement (BDS) against Israel. One recent example, the city of San Marcos, Texas, found that it was sending $4.4 million dollars to Israel every year. In response to the city council simply drafting a resolution to be voted upon which calls for shifting those funds towards domestic priorities, Texas governor Greg Abbott has threatened to remove San Marcos from all future state contracts. That’s our democracy at work — a (“conservative”) governor subverting localized control in favor of a foreign country.
Free Speech
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but a lot of people have been arrested, harassed, assaulted, thrown in unmarked vans by plainclothes cops, surveilled, had their visas revoked, and deported for as little as writing editorials in favor of the Palestinian people. If you want to argue that students forcibly occupying government and university buildings is an arrestable offense, fine, but proclaiming loudly that Palestinian people should not be annihilated by a murderous ethnonationalist Zionist state is not illegal, nor should it ever be. In the U.K., which perhaps you may be surprised to learn does not have a specific free speech protection like the U.S. does, a leading activist with Palestine Action has been arrested and charged with supporting a terrorist organization for two speeches that he gave. That’s all. He gave speeches.
With these draconian state tactics, we are returning to the days of WWI, when a nationwide witch hunt was carried out by the reactionary state and its deputized paramilitaries and police forces to utterly destroy anti-war and pro-labor activism. Offices were ransacked. Publications were shut down. Private mail was spied on. Thousands were imprisoned and hundreds were deported. That’s where we are again. Funny how views which are shared by the state, such as Zionism, aren’t criminalized. I sure hope your “balanced” and “nuanced” pro-Israel stance feels worth it. All it cost was the First Amendment.
Free Press
This state repression has also been used against journalists. I’m not even talking about the insidious imperial propaganda that the mainstream liberal press has always peddled on this issue. I mean journalists are literally being detained, interrogated, having their personal effects stolen, and charged with serious crimes. Some examples: Journalist Sarah Wilkinson was arrested in the U.K. and had her devices stolen for “content that she has posted online” regarding Palestine. Asa Winstanley, an associate editor for Electronic Intifada, was arrested in the U.K. and had his devices stolen for “encouragement of terrorism.” Journalist Kit Klarenberg was arrested by counter-terrorism officers in the U.K. and interrogated about his political views. Craig Murray, a journalist and former U.K. diplomat was arrested in the U.K. and had his devices stolen for his pro-Palestine activities. Journalist Richard Medhurst has been arrested by both the U.K. and Austrian governments on separate occasions, both times having his journalistic property seized. The reasons for such state repression of journalists is obvious. In Medhurst’s interrogation by Austrian cops, the officers literally emphasized the fact that Medhurst has a sizeable following and is therefore dangerously influential.
In some quarters, these suppression tactics are having their intended effect. One personal example: after Israel’s assassination of Hezbollah’s leader Hasan Nasrallah using U.S.-made 2,000 pound bombs in Beirut in an urban attack that killed hundreds of people, I quickly wrote up an article about the attack. I argued that Israel’s longstanding technique of assassinating leaders in the resistance movement, debilitating though these decapitations may be for organizations such as Hezbollah to remain fully functional, would nevertheless not ultimately destroy the resistance but rather perpetuate it. I submitted the article to several smaller outlets that focus on Middle-Eastern affairs and the Global South. One of these outlets, based in Europe, expressed initial interest in the piece, but then sent me this: “We may not be able to publish the article unfortunately. After consulting with our editors, who reviewed your piece, it was deemed that the article can’t be published especially due to legal implications.”
They didn’t expand on “legal implications,” but I assumed they were worried about being hit with charges that they were supporting Hezbollah in some way. Given Europe’s lack of free speech protections, I wasn’t surprised, but very disappointed in this stance. I was willing to adjust the piece to get it published and sent back to them this response:
Asa Winstanley of the Electronic Intifada was just detained by the UK police and had his materials stolen by them. To me, this is a time for the alternative press to be even more courageous, more emphatic, more unapologetic, not less.
I’d be happy to work with the editors if there are specifics that could be changed or excised to get the piece published (which now could focus on the recent assassination of Yahya Sinwar). But I would nevertheless push for the main thrust and tone of the piece to remain the same.
I never heard back.
You could argue that they simply used the “legal” excuse as a way to say no to an article that they wouldn’t have run anyway. Even if that were true, it’s still very telling that they would use such an excuse as an effective way to silence certain viewpoints. Given that the article’s subject was time-sensitive, I ended up self-publishing it, and that was that.
I can go on with examples like these. It’s not just arrests. Everything that CNN and BBC reporters in Israel ran had to be screened by Israeli censors and those outlets complied. They complied. So much for a free press.
Free Markets
The suppression of the BDS movement has already been mentioned. But what about Palestine itself? Gaza is totally blockaded from the outside world. Gazans themselves cannot fish in the Mediterranean Sea or else their boats will be bombed and shot. Their fertile land has been stolen or destroyed. Aid has been totally cut off. Those who try to organize aid ships to Gaza themselves are always attacked. In 2010, ten aid workers with the Freedom Flotilla, including a U.S. citizen, were attacked and killed by Israeli forces for trying to deliver aid to Gaza. Just last night, on May 2nd, another Freedom Flotilla boat with 30 aid workers was bombed by two suicide drones, likely launched by Israel.
In the West Bank, local shops and grocers are constantly raided and shut down by Israeli Defense Forces. People are forced to rely on international charity and aid workers. Of these, many are paranoid about donating for fear of being caught up in Western anti-terrorism laws which forbay giving material support to any organization linked to “terrorism” as deemed by the West, a squishy definition. Free markets do not exist for Palestine and its supporters.
Moreover, global markets have been disrupted by Yemen’s Houthis attacking trading vessels in the Red Sea in response to Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians. Yemen’s demands are clear. They will not cease attacks on vessels until Israel ends its murderous campaign against Gaza. Israel has refused, and the West is bombing Yemeni civilians in retaliation. Evidently, international free trade takes a backseat to an internationally-run genocide.
The Rule of Law
The United States — by continuing to fund and arm the Israelis even after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordered Israel to prevent the genocide of Palestinians — is a full partner in Israel’s genocide, and thus criminally responsible. We have vetoed multiple resolutions at the U.N. Security Council for a ceasefire. Even though U.S. law forbays us from giving military support to countries which impede humanitarian aid, we have continued to give weapons to Israel despite it preventing food and other necessary aid supplies from entering Gaza. More than this, every single dollar that the U.S. sends to Israel violates the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) because Israel is a nuclear-armed nation. A law passed by Congress in 1976 bars any aid to be given to nuclear-armed countries which have not signed the NPT. Israel has not signed the NPT. The U.S. does not even officially acknowledge Israel’s nuclear weapons because to do so would mean to admit that the billions of dollars that is given to Israel every year is illegal.
As Palestinian-American writer Rami Khouri points out, the West consistently demonstrates its lawless capriciousness in regards to Middle Eastern affairs:
The difficulty with the Israelis and the American government, especially the State Department…is they don’t really have any ethical or legal point of moral reference. … Whatever they say goes. … International law, UN resolutions, treaties, genocide conventions, these things don’t mean anything to the American government or to the Israeli government in this situation in the Middle East. They might mean something to them with the Rohingya or with somebody else, but here in our situation these rules of law are not applicable.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and other high-level Israeli politicians and military leaders for their crimes against the Palestinians. Despite this, not a single government which has hosted visits of these Israeli officials since the warrants have issued have followed their legal duty to arrest these criminals as signatories to the treaty that created the ICC. Instead, officials with the ICC and the ICJ, along with their family members, have been sanctioned by the U.S. and barred from travel.
The Hind Rijab Foundation, a watchdog group, has been alerting governments when Israeli soldiers that have clearly documented their war crimes on social media are visiting their countries. None of these soldiers have faced criminal punishment despite ample (self-reported) evidence. None of the Israeli’s flights over Western airspace have been grounded. Here I remind you that the U.S. grounded the flight of the president of Bolivia, Evo Morales, when it expected that Edward Snowden was on board. Snowden, a whistleblower against criminal worldwide U.S. surveillance is certainly not a genocidaire, yet the U.S. revoked his passport and tried to extradite him from Hong Kong using legal documents that “did not fully comply” with the law, Hong Kong said. In the same statement, apropos of nothing of course, Hong Kong also reminded the U.S. that it had been illegally hacking Hong Kong’s computer systems for years. Similarly, Julian Assange was forced to live in captivity for 14 years between his time at the cramped Ecuadorian embassy in London and the high-security Belmarsh prison simply for reporting on leaked documents given to him by Chelsea Manning that showed widespread war crimes and international fuckery beyond what was thought previously possible. This is our rule of law. Whistleblowers and journalists are jailed and hounded to the ends of the earth. Mass-murderers walk around scot-free.
Human Rights
Where to begin and end? The atrocities have never let up in Gaza. The U.S. is sending bombs unimpeded to Israel to vaporize children. The U.K. is regularly sending spy planes over Gaza to provide Israel with military intelligence, making it complicit in Israel’s crimes as well. I can’t believe I’m writing this next sentence: The U.S. recently bombed Yemeni civilians, killing 8 of them, after a random Twitter user posted pictures and coordinates of what she thought was a Houthi weapons storage facility. The intelligence used in our drone wars and bombing campaigns has always been full of shit, with some stretches of time where most of the people killed were not the intended targets, but this is next-level laziness and depravity.
The ongoing atrocities in Palestine are litany. No single person or group can keep track of them all. They are daily. They are constant. But what hit me most recently was this interview with Dr. Feroze Sidhwa about his two recent times volunteering as a trauma surgeon in what remains of Gaza’s hospital system. Please, please, please watch the interview. Dr. Sidhwa is incredibly grounded, articulate, and convincing. What he shares is harrowing beyond belief. Here are some main takeaways from what he says: There is no functioning hospital system in Gaza anymore. If a hospital hasn’t already been bombed to oblivion then it’s been starved for supplies, overrun by patients and refugees, and raided and ransacked multiple times by Israeli forces. Hospital buildings have become refugee camps. People are targeted by Israeli snipers and bombing when moving in and out of the hospital grounds, so medical staff remain fulltime in the building, working and sleeping, working and sleeping, working and sleeping. The care that is being done is little more than what can be done in your own kitchen with a scalpel and some gauze. Individual volunteer doctors are bringing over as much medical supplies as they can personally carry because Israel is not allowing supply trucks to enter. There is no sterility. There are no blood banks. People are dying left and right from survivable wounds simply because they are getting infections or bleeding out. There are multiple mass graves outside the hospitals. Doctors in every remaining hospital are seeing dozens of children with gunshot wounds to the head and chest. Dozens of children. With gunshot wounds. To the head and chest. Not shrapnel. Gunshots. Targeted. Children. Shortly after one Israeli attack, Dr. Sidhwa says, “Honestly, for the first ten or fifteen minutes all we did was pronounce small children dead.”
As I see what we wreak upon the Palestinians every day, contrasted with the contagion of moral apathy in our society, our unthinking retreat into the frivolous and the trivial, our happy opiates, our spectacle, our deathly American trance — I want to scream. I want to overthrow the tables. I want to wake the children sleeping. No more can this go on. This, all of it, is unbearable. And yet it is borne. “Death has been thick, lately,” writes Dr. Farah El-Sharif, scholar of Islamic intellectual history.
If you stick your tongue out anywhere in America these days, the invisible particles of Gaza’s almost quarter million dead will precipitate on your lips and you can taste the bitter tonic of mass murder as you guzzle down your X-Large Frappuccino.
***
Luminescent particles of the souls of the dearly genocided haunt the air. It cannot be escaped. The monsters are in charge. Terror reigns but an eery “normalcy” abounds. A pervasive banality of evil. The air is heavy with machine-like decadence, spiritual death, moral decay, mass strangulation.
Welcome to America: Imperial core. Festival of insanity.
This is who we are. You cannot take the good, what remains of it, without the bad. There is no going back from this I’m afraid. Want an actionable item for all of this? Get upon the gears.
