Your Crisis of Faith Is Not My Concern (There’s a Genocide Going on)

PALESTINE - ISRAEL, 30 Sep 2024

Steve Salaita - TRANSCEND Media Service

The Myth

Understanding the Zionist mentality means acknowledging a kind of logic beyond the emotional capacity of functional human beings.

25 Sep 2024 – All the cruelty livestreamed onto our electronic devices has undone the old political order.  There are no more liberal Zionists, lowkey Zionists, cultural Zionists, soft Zionists, progressive Zionists, apathetic Zionists, ambivalent Zionists, non-Zionists, or post-Zionists.  Now only two categories matter:  Zionist and anti-Zionist.

I might go so far as to argue that not identifying as anti-Zionist is itself a form of Zionism, which I suppose is another way of saying that ignorance of or indifference to Gaza is unacceptable.

Such is the mood of the Palestine solidarity community a year into the Zionist genocide.  For decades we’ve been coerced into humoring the settler’s ego in a million ways, large and small, in what felt not like interchange but unrequited gestures of charity.  Amid the current horror hundreds of memories emerge in snippets of rage:  being made to condemn “antisemitism” before anybody would consider us sentient—in fact before anybody would address Zionism’s innate racism, or the racism built into the demand to condemn antisemitism—for this supposed act of humanism, this apparent disavowal of hatred, was never not a Zionist maneuver; being shadowed and chaperoned by devotes of the Israeli state in any public setting; being locked out of professional opportunities that would normally be commensurate with our qualifications.  We’ve had to explain ourselves in other ways.

Do you condemn violence?  Do you support Hamas?  Do you believe Israel has a right to exist?  Why shouldn’t Jews have a country of their own?

(What about you, though?  Do you really believe that Zionism is innocent of violence?  Or is the violence merely entrenched in the meat of your tongue?)

Since the Nakba, Zionist angst has been the soundtrack of Palestinian life.

House demolition.  Land theft.  Travel restrictions.  I have family in Israel.  Ecocide.  Expulsion.  Imprisonment.  This space is becoming unsafe for Jews.  Air raids.  Ground incursions.  The massacre of children.  But what would happen to Israelis?  Always the fantastical as a substitute for reality.  Always a void of empathy we are asked to replenish.  Always everything for all others without anything of our own.  And we tried.  Whether it was from decorum or guilt or fatigue, we tried.  We wanted to be accepted.  We wanted to become Good People.  We tried the sympathy, the indulgence, the dialogue.  The only thing these efforts got us was a genocide.

We remember.  We have no choice, because the settler is needier than ever, demanding our validation as we agonize and mourn.  Not many are willing to offer it anymore.  Your crisis of faith is not my concern.  Those who do indulge the settler come across as weak or untrustworthy.  What the hell are you doing?  There’s a genocide going on.

There’s been too much blood.  If you don’t share in our spirit, whether it cycles through pain or longing or fury or despair, then you’re a Zionist.  It doesn’t matter how you self-identify.  We suffer the oppression and so we get to name the oppressor.  It’s the only real benefit to being oppressed.

(Besides, any half-serious person has surely noticed that Zionists can’t be trusted to define anything— “colonization”; “democracy”; “self-defense”; “antisemitism”—because those definitions exist only to project the settler’s barbarity onto the native.)

*****

I’ve been thinking about how we’ve hardened our sensibilities, and how in turn the discourse has hardened, and it finally occurred to me that despite the habits of civility into which we’ve been acclimated hardness was always our fundamental condition.  The hardness isn’t a principle of aggression, but of defense.  It’s all we have to protect ourselves.  It’s the only resource Palestinians in the West can really contribute to the national movement.  We can donate and boycott and protest, but the hardness brings the diaspora closer to the homeland.  After October 7, I could see it happening, so many diasporic Palestinians shaking off these existential burdens, these humiliating accommodations, these civic commonplaces that destroy our political imagination.  We’re each undergoing a psychic intifada.  Because we always knew that the Zionist entity didn’t finish the job in 1948.  We understand the Zionist mentality.  That’s one of our biggest problems.  Understanding that mentality means acknowledging a kind of logic beyond the emotional capacity of functional human beings, a logic that invariably leads to our own demise.  Knowing Zionism, as we’ve been made to do, is an incessant suicide mission.  They were always going to try to finish the job, with or without an October 7.  They were finishing the job all along.  Every Palestinian life, every Palestinian expression of being, was an unfinished mission.  Palestinians were being exterminated as a matter of course, like infrastructure updates or budget approvals.  There is no other option available to those who hold onto the idea of Israel.  We knew it.  Even if some of our comrades thought that we were too delusional, too zealous, too uncompromising—that deep in our hearts we were hateful and fanatical, as the Oriental is apt to be—we knew.  That’s all.  Some of us fought on behalf of softness, with voting rituals, NGO activism, critical theory, all the stuff that offers a civilized façade.  But now we have no choice:  the Zionists validated our knowledge.  Hardness is the only viable option.

We have invited others into this sensibility, from within and beyond our community.  They can get up to speed or continue in their increasingly obscene forms of appeasement.  But we’ll no longer try to sneak a toe across the dark red trench separating anti-Zionists from everyone else.  One doesn’t need prior knowledge of Palestine or a degree in political science to conclude that Zionism has no business among the living.  All it requires is an understanding that what the people of Gaza are being made to suffer is completely inhuman, or should be, anyway, if humanity is worth a damn.

*****

According to academic convention, this return to our vital sensibilities is a bad development.  It results in nationalism, lack of nuance, binaries.  (Scary attitudes that lead impressionable people to communism and other unpleasant ideas.)  But all in all I see it as a positive.  Palestine was never going to be liberated by adhering to the bourgeois commonplaces of academe or civil society.  Liberation will necessarily upset the intellectual classes, for those classes exist only because they’re amenable to the economic order in which Zionism thrives.  Dissent is beginning to appear in those spaces, as is, in turn, increased repression.  “Free speech” is only valid until the ruling class feels threatened.  When people protest the Zionist ethostate, egghead technocrats happily drop the pretense.  Put up a tent and, bam, the police show up.  Head to the voting booth and, look out, yet another psychopath.  Say the wrong thing and, poof, here comes a passel of irate deans and vice presidents.  We have learned through decades of desecrated civil liberties to prioritize Palestine’s liberation because the system that promises us rights also produces genocide (while failing to uphold the rights).  We can no longer respect the conventions that have so dramatically failed us.  Palestine comes first and last, no matter how crude we have to be about it.  Yes, it’s a good thing.

*****

Whenever I try to make sense of what I believe in this world, the ideas that allow me to live with myself and to perhaps create the possibility of living with others, I return to a simple question:  what kind of person does my politics require me to be?  The question forces me to consider the effect of belief beyond personal gratification.  Belief has a relationship with violence and power, be it God or karma or capital or government.  Thus it should also have a relationship with peace and cooperation.  I don’t like the idea of obliging strangers into tactics I wouldn’t carry out myself.  If one of my opinions might expose others to harm, then I have to think carefully about the consequences of speaking or even of belief itself.  While I can declare without much ambiguity that I support armed resistance to colonization, I recognize it as an abstract declaration.  Am I willing to take up a gun and get shot at?  It’s impossible to say without being forced into the decision.  That’s the thing about resistance:  people are forced into it.  In the end the choice I would make doesn’t matter, because if I ever find myself with a gun and getting shot at then it’s not necessarily something I would have chosen.  I would be reacting to material circumstances, not to distant and disembodied questions of moral propriety.  People need to remember that about Palestinian fighters:  resistance is a necessity forced onto them by settler colonization.  If a people’s survival depends upon militancy, then that people will become militant.  Both North and South are littered with examples.

This way of thinking, I suspect, informs the (re)hardening of our sensibilities.  Palestinian life, these days indivisible from Palestinian death, is often used as raw material for careerism or electioneering.  Or else it is fed back into the hateful rhetoric of genocide.  Brutal violence is all over our screens and still the storytellers of Western democracy process the brutality into allegories of progress.  We can’t indulge these paeons to Western altruism, where death becomes abstract, subsumed by never-ending tales of noble violence.  The slaughter of Palestinians is immediate and undeniable and so goddamn real as to exist beyond our moral comprehension.  To know the Zionist genocide is to consign our souls to a darkness we spend our entire lives avoiding.  This condition is made worse by a vocal enemy whose main rhetorical devices are paranoia and narcissism, not to mention a political culture that asks us to patiently die until suburban liberals finally elect the right president.  I reckon we’ve had enough of the entire concept of patience, which only bought the oppressor more time to empower unrepentant maniacs and build deadlier technology, and have finally shaken off the latent assumption that we can expect any grace or decency from our enemies.

We always saw it, but now we see it written onto a powerlessness that threatens our very existence.  Material circumstance has forced us into binaristic thinking:  if Zionism survives, we die.  We’ve become more pragmatic, but not in the way that U.S. thought-leaders want us to be.  They believe that pragmatism is deferring liberation for the sake of various American political fantasies, but our pragmatism is intuitive and historical.  We see what the Zionist entity does in Gaza, the extensive rubble, the mutilation, the dead children, accompanied by incessant glee and mockery.  We know too that in the aftermath of the Nazi Holocaust nobody suggested that its victims should coexist with its perpetrators.  (Indeed, the idea of Jews and Nazis sharing a country was rightly considered outlandish, one reason why the Holocaust was, and continues to be, such an effective justification for the theft of Palestine.)  Everybody without cynical intentions understood that Nazism needed to be expunged, not accommodated.  The same is true of Zionism.  So we protect ourselves from the annoyances of bourgeois pragmatism—the half-baked Orientalism, the high-handed pontification, the snitching and scabbing, the appeals to civility, the ideological discipline—each act landing squarely on death’s side of the binary.

If you are across from us somewhere beyond that dark red trench, among the white-hot artillery, then you needn’t sermonize about the proper way to suffer a genocide.  Instead, take a moment, or a lifetime, and consider what kind of person Zionism requires you to be.

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Steve Salaita – I used to be an academic, now I do other things. This site is an archive of my writing: mostly political essays, but also some polemics and reflections. Thank you for visiting.

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