I've held off posting on the unfolding nightmare in Gaza because the horror show has filled me with great mourning. While the event of Al-Aqsa Flood and Israel's genocidal response provoked me to tweet and doom scroll at a feverish pace, my feelings about what was unfolding were too complex to write about in a sustained manner. (Also the level of mental exhaustion I've been feeling for the past few months have made it difficult for me to write anything substantial.) Besides, others did a better job of writing what needed to be written. This complexity of feelings was due to the fact that my political awakening was in the crucible of activist work around Palestinian solidarity. That is, Palestinian solidarity activism is what politicized me. And this politicization was personal because it was connected to the Palestinian activist I was dating at the time, who became the love of my life and my wife. And her family, like all Palestinian families, bears the weight of this long nightmare of Israeli colonialism. Right when this current phase of resistance to colonialism and the vicious response to this resistance happened was when her family was celebrating a wedding. The joy of this communal moment, and their very wedding ceremonies, was undermined by what everyone attending was made to feel by the anti-Palestinian discourse that accompanied Israel's violent response to a justified resistance. A fear that their ceremonies in the diaspora would be seen as licentious; the weight of displacement.
These moments of anti-colonial resistance are always litmus tests. The fact that militants in Gaza attacked their oppressors, pushed out of their concentration camp in a way they had not pushed out for a long time, should be celebrated by anyone who cares about struggles against oppression, "decolonialism", or anything that has to do with the oppressed standing up for themselves. Anyone who understands how settler-colonialism functions should be able to recognize that settlements in a bantustan are colonial garrisons––but we were not allowed to think that. Instead everyone was asked to denounce this resistance to colonial violence: denounce Hamas, denounce the imagined atrocities! Stories of beheaded babies and sexual violence were circulated, all of which were admitted to be made up later on but still these imagined atrocities circulate. So yes the litmus test: who among the so-called left chose to accept these stories as real, why did they not question colonial propaganda––the litmus test. Lewis Gordon didn't pass it, for example, which was such a disappointment for me: how could this academic who has written about the violence of the oppressed against their oppressor capitulate to Israeli propaganda about Hamas? (I still hold out hope he will reverse the hasty statements he tweeted.) Litmus tests: so many academics claiming to care about racial equality and decolonialism are failing.
What is particularly nauseating about this current eruption of colonial violence is how, despite what should be the most patently obvious evidence of a genocide, the white-washing, victim reversal, and most cartoonish propaganda claims are absurdly normative. The mainstream media of the global metropoles has been aiding and abetting the decimation of Gaza with its reports and opinion articles––nothing new, but this time these reports and articles have veered into the realm of delirium. Initially publishing the claims about sexual violence and beheaded babies and other hearsay spread by Zionist ideologues, without even investigation whether these claims were true, they were responsible for creating disinformation that is still repeated by everyone from politicians to concerned citizens. Although these claims were retracted, as ever such retractions cannot match the spectacle of the original headlines. The repeated questioning of whether the al-Ahli hospital was actually bombed by Israel, the suggestion (following Israel state propaganda) that it was possibly bombed by a misfired Hamas rocket, was akin to the worst embedded reporting during the early days of the War on Terror: this despite the fact that many of these same mainstream media outlets have, in the past, noted that Israel has a pattern of bombing hospitals. The consistent use of false neutrality, where the reports would at first seem to be objective but would contain massive slanting: Hamas-run x, y, or z (with Hamas already been vilified on October 7), when referring to claims made by Palestinian institutions.
The continued conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-semitism is an old canard, but the media and politicians and Israel-supporting individuals and groups ramped it up to a point where it risks breaking because it is so ludicrous. Stories about how Jews now feel unsafe with all this protest against Israel, that protesting for the right for Palestinians to even exist and not be slaughtered is something that should frighten every Jew outside of Israel despite the fact that anti-Arab violence has increased. Israeli politicians putting on Stars of David like they are concentration camp victims when they are dropping white phosphorous on the Palestinians within the large concentration camp of Gaza they have maintained for decades… A bizarre projection when the burning out of Gaza, and the rhetoric they spew about cleansing the land of Palestinians, constitutes a holocaust in its own right––they are turning Gaza into an oven. The ADL backed lies about how even the most mediocre sympathy for Palestinians constitutes anti-semitism: if you say "ceasefire" just because you don't like the death of any civilian, even if you have some simplistic (and erroneous) "both sides" are wrong understanding and naively believe in liberal myths about diplomacy, you are also an anti-semite. The original fraudulent identification of anti-zionism with anti-semitism has become utterly irrational: you cannot criticize anything this state does or you are an anti-semite. Anyone not subjected to years of imperialist propaganda about Israel––propaganda that opportunistically used the horror of the holocaust to defend the last settler-colonial venture of Europe into Asia––would have to find the claim that Israel is the real victim (and worse, that every Jewish person the world over is at risk if Israel is not allowed to massacre an entire population in its supposed defense) thoroughly and mind-bogglingly bizarre. But we are living in the days when Netanyahu can talk about the light of civilization and the darkness of non-white barbarism, or when his ministers can speak about annihilating and driving Palestinians out of Gaza, and this kind of old school colonial language can be repeated by the media and first world populations with a straight face.
And so in this space of colonial genocide justification, where politicians and ideologues and journalists are exhorting us to be on the side of genocide and also deny it is a genocide, it is also encouraging that so many people are finally breaking from this bullshit. Because it is clear that we are witnessing colonial ethnic cleansing, just as it is clear that Israel is being open about this ethnic cleansing with its unequivocal proclamations and actions. For the first time in a long time we are witnessing international solidarity wit Palestinian existence at a level that has not, to this date, ever existed. While it is paired with the worst immiseration of Palestinian life we have seen since the Nakbah––we are indeed witnessing the overt pursuit of genocide––which is painful and upsetting to watch, and which is being carried out in the West Bank and the Palestinians within "Israel proper" as well, we are also witnessing resistance. And this is what the imperialist camp demands we denounce: when we are being asked to denounce Hamas' actions on October 7, what we are being actually asked to denounce is the Al-Aqsa Flood which in fact goes beyond Hamas because it was a spontaneous and united front of revolt from all aspects of oppressed Gazan Palestinian life against settler violence.
We cannot denounce this. Rather we should hope, in this space where Israeli fantasies of settler genocide are reaching a fever pitch, that the colonized forces are carving out a space for a future beyond colonial time. "As for we who have decided to break the back of colonialism," Fanon wrote in Wretched of the Earth, "our historic mission is to sanction all revolts, all desperate actions, all those abortive attempts drowned in rivers of blood." This ought to be the last word when it comes to the deployment of violence in colonial situations: we must sanction all these revolts.
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