interrupting Genocide: real Cacophony
Palestinian futures inscribed by justice and anti-apartheid
They describe the Palestinians—all of them—with the brand “terrorist,” but to know the history of the word is to know there is is no such thing—it is a historiographic lie. To brandish the word “terrorist” is as politically confessional as it is ludicrous. Like the word “totalitarian” it is a word that selectively draws from chronologies to suggest immutable trans-historical truths, when in fact there are none.
To use words like that requires a suspension of disbelief, a skepticism of a central truth: that power is historically- and economically-contingent. One doesn't need to invoke language signifying and circumscribing “terror” to protest the killing of civilians anywhere—just as one doesn't need to rely on “reason” alone and in a vacuum to justify self-defense.
As some readers may know, I spent most of my upbringing in the Greater Mideast (specifically the Persian Gulf and Horn of Africa). I don't feel as though that alone gives me the authority to claim authority, as it were. I do not have roots in, or hail from, the region. That said, I can say that living within broadly “Third World” imaginaries has deeply inscribed in me not just a contingent worldview and sense of memory but also an afflicted and specific sense of justice.
That sense has always been flagged with regard to the war of exclusion and attrition long waged against the Palestinian people—a war that is now clearly entering its final and most openly genocidal phase. To submit an entire population of people to the stochastic, everyday violence that characterizes the open-air prison that is Gaza is a crime of such vacuous enormity it leaves little room for anything other than the situation in which Israel-Palestine finds itself.
In the end, there is no argument with apartheid apologists; they have not tolerated dissent. The total “shock” by which the Western liberal order supportive of the Israeli state has been taken reflects a turgid failure to imagine Palestinian futures beyond extinguishment and ethnic cleansing. Zelensky, the scion of the West if there was one, made that point clear when he rather pathetically drew a moral equivalence between the Russian war of aggression in the Donbass and the Hamas-led militant excursion into Israel's de jure territory.
As a heuristic it should bear repeating that none of this was inevitable; it was and remains a choice—on the part of the Western world—to enshrine “peace” within its own narrow view of the status quo, one written on the wall with settler colonial terms of difference. That is what it knows best.
Palestine’s future could have been self-determined, democratically, within a framework enshrined by commitments to restorative justice, the right of return, and self-government. Over the past half-century and longer, people have fought for this and died trying. It may have been a tall order, and to others a pipe dream of nebulous ethno-nationalist cosmogony. To dignify these analytical errors in scholarly judgment would be beside the point. Like many have long said, Palestinian liberation could have been achieved within the framework of a two-state solution.
But Israel never wanted two states, certainly not its current generation of leadership. As a result, the Israeli state is eating the fruit of its labor.
History need not be conceived of as a zero-sum game—with winners and losers, as many so conceive. But Israel has essentially guaranteed that if solidarity and justice are to mean anything at all, then the blood of Palestinians should not be spilled in vain: that survivors of apartheid can, will, and must prevail.