For Palestine

This will not be a particularly well written essay. At the best of times I’m not the most aesthetically-minded writer. I’m not an exceptional prose stylist and I don’t write very beautiful sentences. This is not the best of times. 

What is there left to say? This week I saw a photo of the body of a child, dismembered by explosions, hanging from a wall. I saw this photo ten times or more throughout the day, while at my job teaching history to kids. We spent a week on the Boston Massacre, an incident from two and a half centuries ago where five people were killed. Someone stood trial there, at least. In the time it took us to pick through these old bones for clues, thousands of people, many their age or younger, were murdered by an army funded in some small part through the taxes levied on my own wages. Men in powdered wigs speak through time to complain of the intolerable situation in Massachusetts. How could anyone stand it? 

Since October, thirty thousands Palestinians - at least - have died, been killed, murdered, assassinated, blown to pieces, had buildings collapsed on top of them, been shot by remote drones and now starved. Yes, the gnawing whispers tell you, starved to death in the abyss that is Gaza. And who dies of starvation? The young, the old, the sick, the weak. Newborns and toddlers. The world for a few days expected a pause, a humanitarian pause as the parlance goes, but no such luck. This shattering horror we have witnessed these months now looks for all the world like a prelude. The IDF masses for an attack on Rafah, the so-called “safe zone” that they crowded a million and a half people into. Settler extremists blockade the trickle of aid coming into Gaza, chanting death death death. Bulldozers work inside and outside the strip, clearing land for buffer zones, for walls, for camps, for pens to hold humans. The Israeli hostages inside Gaza are used by the governments of Israel and the US as something like symbols. Just a gong to bang whenever anyone questions the latest atrocity. 

I have written about it, once, for an op-ed in the paper. The subject was limited to the effect that such slaughter will have on Joe Biden’s electoral prospects. Do I have anything else interesting to say on the topic? Does anyone? I’ve written notes, journal pages, even poetry. All of it is terrible, inadequate to the situation. Such awful times blunt the edge of your mind, make it almost impossible to articulate anything except a blank horror, a demand that it stop. 

So why am I writing now? No reason other than that horror. The horror that follows you from waking to sleep and waking again. The horror you carry around in your pocket and read on the couch, see on the train in and out of the city. Images so obscenely violent they feel as if they should be illegal to disseminate, and at the same time should be broadcast on every screen in Times Square. I have posted virtually nothing on social media that isn’t related to the slaughter in months. Not out of any moral high-mindedness, but because nothing else online feels in any way real. Real life is not without joy. I live a life of relative comfort, relative ease. In the real world you can forget, however briefly. 

This essay is as predicted: not very good. Barely an essay at all. I have said nothing, can say nothing, except no, no, no. Nothing except, this is murder, this is ethnic cleansing, this is genocide. No moral person can accept this. No moral world would allow this. We must bring it to an end. We must have a ceasefire. The only way to keep your sanity is to keep saying it. Keep saying it as long as you are allowed and in as many ways you can. Every march, legal challenge, every denunciation and petition, every diplomat expelled and symbolic vote, every boycott feels simultaneously urgent and inadequate. Like one of these things has to make a difference, and we search desperately for the one that will be enough. 

Because what we are witnessing feels like a defining moment of our young, awful century. At no time since the nineteen-forties has human life felt so cheap, so disposable. The tools and techniques of dehumanisation, occupation, torture and murder that states of the 20th century trialed, traded around and modified, have been perfected. Our leaders, our media, my own terrible mayor and worse president, are in the business of stalling us for long enough to let this all happen. For the people of Gaza to be systematically reduced, through aerial bombing, summary execution, arbitrary arrest and most of all, expulsion from their homes. Because if we can be convinced to let this happen then it will be the blueprint for every state that wants to liquidate a troublesome population. Ghettoize, make life unlivable, and when the inevitable backlash comes, use it as a pretext for total destruction. 

Some will cheer this development. Every fanatical nationalist in every fanatical nation will rejoice to be able to finally fix those awkward dotted lines on the map, remove that difficult ten or twenty percent of the population to somewhere else. Last year saw over a hundred thousand Armenians were ethnically cleansed from Nagorno-Karabakh by the army of Azerbaijan. The fragile, disputed statelet, an anomaly of the collapse of the USSR, ended not in a negotiated settlement, not with compromise or reconciliation, but with men in tanks driving a civilian population over the border. Right wing regimes learn from each other. They share techniques, justifications, means of obfuscation, and weapons, of course. The Azeri conquest was accomplished in no small part with arms provided by, who else, the Israeli state. It seems likely there will be many such moments in the next few years, each one making us feel more and more powerless. We, without tanks or armies or the power of sanctions. With nothing more than the ability to march, to strike, to protest, to write. 

Writing is always embarrassing. Why in all the world should anyone listen to what you have to say, or what I have to say? There is always a nagging voice that says you are not the right person, this is not the right time. That you don’t know enough, that this situation is complicated, that you should shut up and listen instead. That people are tired of hearing it. That it’s the same old story. That you’ve become boring, or preachy, or humourless, or didactic, or shrill, or a thousand other things. All mass murderers rely on this to wear down those who would speak out against them. On the growing sense of hopelessness and despair that gradually becomes embarrassment at having said anything in the first place.

Frequently this voice telling you to shut up isn’t inside your head, it’s online and on the TV, from political, media and other figures in support of this Israeli state campaign of destruction. The tone varies from day to day, as does the emphasis, from apoplectic to conciliatory, from intellectual to crude. History is deployed cynically and instrumentally, to end discussion rather than to start it. Authority is invoked, outrage is drummed up, tears are shed not in opposition, but in defence of killing. There are threats both explicit and implicit. To your career, your voice, your seriousness. If you want to be taken seriously, they say, if you don’t want to lose your job, you must keep your opinions within the narrow confines that we tell you to. Perhaps you can advocate for more aid to enter Gaza, but not for IDF troops to leave. Perhaps you can argue for a pause in fighting, but not for a ceasefire. Perhaps you can make a case for an ephemeral, defenceless Palestinian statelet, but never, never full and equal rights. You go against these rules, they say, at your own considerable risk. 

But – and this is so freeing to realise – none of it matters. None. The whole scope of your writing career, your artistic career, your journalistic integrity, every aesthetic concern you have ever had matters infinitely less than the life of one single human being. The most embarrassing person giving 1% of their effort to the cause of stopping this killing is better than the coolest person you know doing nothing. The approval of your peers or bylines in a magazine mean nothing at all compared to the brute suffering that it is our responsibility to end.

If we can slow this terrible thing, then we can stop it. Don’t lose hope. Leave behind your embarrassment. Forget your ego. Save your own sanity by continuing to say no. Keep your shoulder to the wheel, even if you doubt that it will ever move. You have to keep believing that it might make a difference.