<Upon whose bones do you intend to build your paradise?>
Thank you for your patience, I’ve been trying to write this piece for weeks, but it keeps morphing into something else.
I want to only write information that will be useful right now, as I’m cognizantly aware that there’s an oversaturation of information, especially about Palestine, and my intent here is to educate not overwhelm. Yet even amidst not writing about Palestine, all I can think about is Palestine.
A couple of months ago I watched a video my dear friend Kai Cheng Thom posted on her IG where she read a bit from her most recent book, “Falling Back In Love With Being Human.” “I have questions about heaven,” she spoke to the camera, “I have questions about the Revolution. Those questions are the same: upon whose bones do you intend to build your paradise?”
That line took my breath away.
I think about this a lot in terms of white feminism, this tendency of whiteness to abstract, blur, and neutralize—as opposed to face, vocalize, or be blunt and belligerent about. When it comes to genocide, we are actively being told to be quiet, or “No, not here…” like being slapped on the wrist and told you’re too hysterical at a family gathering — but worse. We are being told (not asked) to put away our rage and pretend that the West has any values outside of its own delusion; its delusion of modernity, of uppity liberalism that serves nothing or no one just the fallacy of democracy masked as “progressive societies.” This is all the while actively participating in the eradication of any other democracies in its path - this is the U.S. Empire, everybody! Dirty tricks and cheap thrills, baby.
Are we really that civilized if we can accept such aggressions of violence that the West has seeped and now borne? And what does it say about us, or the large portion of society that currently would love to forget, to turn the cheek and look away? What does it say that many of us would much rather get on with our lives? Win an Emmy, or a Golden Globe, just to pretend that we won’t die in a few short years on this Earth that we are increasingly destroying, to keep the engines churning for that sweaty all consuming dollar-dollar bill.
It’s pathetic when you pull away from it, isn’t it?
All this for this?
Yet right now is exactly when we need the power of voices—all voices—to rise and, (quoting Arundhati Roy) say, “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” We need people to dream of something better, something bigger and better for all of us, where we can all coexist with one another. Zionists love telling you that Palestinians, Muslims, and Arabs hate Jews ( I argue most anti-Semitism in the Arab world was manufactured post-creation of Israel; so one could call it misplaced anti-Zionism) but the reality is what Palestinians are fighting for is a secular state where everyone is equal; a one-state solution where everyone is free. We forget that there were (and are) Palestinian Jews. They coexisted with their Muslim and Christian brethren for hundreds of years. We are not separate from one another, and we have to be suspicious of any side that keeps telling us that we must be afraid of the other. And, trust me, there’s only one side that is saying that, and has been saying that for 75 years.
Yet, Palestinian liberation has always been a pursuit in utopic envisioning, a place of all possibility. So why do we fear it so much? Why do we think it is so impossible for Palestinians to govern themselves and others? Is it because in our mind’s conception, all Arabs and Muslims are brutal overlords? If you do think that… well, then… that’s the working of propaganda my friends. Welcome, the first step here is acknowledgment.
My brain always takes me back to Section 377, a British colonial penal code that criminalized homosexuality and third genderness anywhere that was colonized by the British. That’s right - European colonizers (the French had similar laws, I would recommend reading “Sex and Lies” by Leila Slimani if you’re curious) introduced homophobia to us, via Christianity. So every time a Zionist tells me that I would die in any Muslim country for being queer, I think of how little they really know, and how much Islamophobia and anti-Arab bias have limited the imagination of what the rest of the world imagines a Muslim or Arab could be.
Just because the Muslim world is like this now doesn’t mean it always was… and it’s our due diligence to understand why and how this happened. The Muslim world is not the only example of this attack by the West to demonize it (see: Vietnam, Laos, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Mexico, El Salvador, Chile… etc, etc) please watch this video between John Pilger and Duane Clarridge, a former senior operative at the CIA, speaking about what the CIA did in Chile… he couldn’t even remember Salvador Allende’s name, but he fully believes in his right to invade and destroy democracies if it’s a threat to U.S. national security.
You know what’s a threat to U.S. national security? And this is a hard one to digest… Progress is a threat to U.S. national security. Why? Because it doesn’t want other societies to be more advanced than it. This is an imperial tactic. To keep us down — they have to orchestrate different reasons to invade and destroy us. It’s so blood-boiling. Watching this video made so much sense because this is exactly what the U.S. is doing right now with Gaza and literally everywhere else around the world… the double standards of this Empire are maddening.
I always imagined that the pre-colonial worlds were majesties to spirit and pleasure, so much so that we, and our embodiment, offended European colonizers so much so that they had to banish us to hellfire on Earth, perpetuated by their monstrous design. Silvia Federici explains this far more eloquently than I, but before European colonizers were genociding Black, Indigenous, and Brown folks, and seizing our land and resources, they were doing that to their own white poor citizenry.
All this European philosophy and no one wondered to question: why this obsession with domination and superiority? Strange!
Yet it’s the very stripping of our indigenity, of our cultural layers, due to the white colonial project, a belief in whitening societies, due to an insistence that whiteness is superior, that is what got us into this mess. Israel might not be a primarily white society, but it uses tactics of white colonial aggression and white supremacy against Palestinians and its own Mizrahi, Ethiopian and sometimes Sephardic Jewish citizens. Itamar Ben Gvir, the far-right Israeli politician, is a perfect example of how hatred towards Arabs, is Islamophobia, yes, but it’s also just self-hatred… because Ben Gvir is Iraqi culturally. Yet Israel nullifies all other identities to create a “purebred” identity that’s just “Israeli” aka it’s a constructed identity, an amalgam of many things but with no real honoring of those cultural heritages people come from within Israeli society itself. Like taking hummus and slapping “Israeli” in front of it without explaining anything contextually about the land, or the region. Why would Israel have hummus if it wasn’t in the Middle East and full of Arab Jews who have cultural connections to these Arab foods? Without explaining that, and just denying this reality, you create a disconnected, detached and disassociated people who feel no responsibility to anyone or anything.
This is why you have people who spiritually bypass so much within Israeli society (like the image below… it’s very #whoiswellnessfor) because there’s no honesty in the depiction of what an Israeli is, and therefore there is no desire for accountability to that image or that being. Like the U.S., it’s built on a hodgepodge of stolen identities mixed in with an American whiteness that has no cultural touchstone. When you don’t have a culture, it’s harder for you to attain an identity; so you’re more easily manipulated to be a pawn for capital and empire. It’s no wonder so many white people in America feel dislocated, it’s because they are. And on purpose!
Israel is a culture that believes in both its victimhood and its self-importance, making accountability all the more difficult, especially in a culture that has quite clearly proliferated severe narcissistic behavior among its citizenry. This dislocation presents itself in a desire for a pristine sort of life without the remnant, the scab, that is the Palestinian. As in, the reminder they are not morally clean in this transaction of stolen land. Why else must you defend something? Why else must Israel defend itself? From whom, and what? And are you telling me, that before October 7th, many of you never wondered to question: if so, if Israel has the right to defend itself, shouldn’t we be more curious about who it’s defending itself from, and why?
I wonder if this fog, this genocidal colonial engine, that has stripped so many of us from our cultural, and spiritual compasses by taking us so far in the other direction of who we once were, is the reason so many of us have become spiritually displaced. Incapable of locating ourselves — but this, this is what healing really is. It’s finding yourself through the rubble of trauma. It’s integrating ancestral, bodily knowledge and breaking from the bind that tells you mind over gut, over intuition.
Islamophobia is now the norm and has been for the last few decades. It’s accepted, and in many cases, encouraged, because it’s seen as a no-brainer. If we want to agree on truth, we must agree on this. We are a deeply Islamophobic society and this is the norm now.
A lot of people say Islamophobic things casually, I see it all the time, as there’s this assured belief in our inherent violence or savagery or both—therefore racism is warranted. Yet, for a civilization that revolutionized relationships to the stars, philosophy, medicine, science, poetry, architecture, and art (to name a few) I believe that this image of us is a broken, colonized image that negates our entire humanity and platforms us as mere one-dimensional creatures of supreme evil. No side is all good or bad. We know this to be true. So, shouldn’t we question the people who have consistently depicted us as some backward barbaric people, without ever wondering why are these accounts of Islam’s depravity only recent… and does it then have anything to do with the ideological war the United States and UK have been deploying on these worlds for the last few decades? Perhaps two plus two equals four after all? Sooner or later the general public will have to connect the dots, too… As many are having to do now.
Perhaps this is why Palestinians, Muslims, Arabs, and the children of the colonized are at the forefront of imagining what this new world could be. A utopia for all of us, as well as the disabled folks, trans folks, queer folks, CSA survivors, survivors of war, and genocide amongst us who need extra care, how can we create a society that safeguards and protects us? In Who Is Wellness For? I posit that military budgets for these mythological wars could be completely dismantled and instead utilized effectively to create spaces of care—this is something I learned through the praxis of Degrowth, too, how to start considering the future worlds where we are all surviving together, what would we need to do for that world to be a possibility? In our revolution, everyone is and will be free! No one will be sacrificed, no one’s bones will be used against their will. Everyone is worthy of life, choice, and consideration.
We have to understand that we all deserve this.
<Every Zionist’s accusation is a confession.>
I think people’s insistence that Hamas raped Israeli women on October 7th, even though we still have no evidence, and yes, the NYT wrote an entire piece about Hamas’ alleged rape claims with largely to no concrete evidence.
Genocidal rape is a tactic of war. Yet, what is going on right now in Israel is not a war. It’s a demolition. I would say, it has never been a war— an entire military backed by the U.S versus a resistance group of teenagers and young men with shitty sometimes handmade weapons is not a war. This is important to remember, what happened on October 7th was an act of resistance. Who is David and who is Goliath?
May I remind you, Hamas has never used rape as a tactic before (none of the released Israeli hostages mentioned any mistreatment too… let alone sexual violence), and this is important to note when we talk about tactics because it’s clear October 7th was a tactical mission. This insistence to make it Israel’s 9/11 when 24,000 (and counting) Palestinians have been murdered feels crazy to me, especially as we get more and more information about how many Israelis were murdered by the IOF (abolish the military) on October 7th... up until even recently Israeli hostages were murdered by the IOF on “accident.” Honestly… weird.
Hamas knows that the approach of the Israeli state is to use unimaginable disproportionate brute force as a tool of collective punishment. We think rape is plausible because all men (especially all Muslim men) are thugs and so we assume that Hamas would intend to rape even though that’s never been a tactic and even though there’s still no substantial evidence outside of testimonies and stories that keep getting debunked… Yet, if we question this, “we don’t believe Israeli women”… even though the very idea of “believe women” is speaking to and about women who are speaking about their own experiences. This is a fundamental point here - you can’t use “believe women” when there are no women who are speaking about their own experiences coming out. And, yes, I think it’s quite suspicious to suggest that they are all dead now and sorry we can’t actually find the forensic evidence because they’ve also already been buried… but yeah we definitely saw the bodies and it’s really bad!
Like… would we believe anyone else telling us this? Ask yourself honestly.
I can’t help but think that the Israelis keep trying to make a mockery of all of us.
Do you know who rapes women and have known to? ISIS and the Taliban are both known to use rape as tactics on their populations because they do employ sadistic methods of shame and humiliation. The same thing is happening in Sudan, where there are many accounts where gang rape is being used as a tactic and weapon. What’s happening in Sudan is actually truly tragic, and sexual violence is used frequently and aggressively. It’s sick and it’s real and it’s important to speak about this. This deserves our attention, consideration and care when talking about sexual violence. Not white feminists who are demanding justice for bodies that may or may not exist.
I (and you can do this yourself) went to the NYT piece and looked up the word “evidence” and found 10 instances where “evidence” was written in the text. Here are four of those instances:
For those of you who didn’t know, you can’t make allegations out of conjecture.
What’s extra important when we talk about sexual violence, especially to be in solidarity with other survivors, is that we owe truthful accounts and storytelling for evidence. It’s deeply disturbing when people use sexual violence to their advantage… let alone a nation-state enacting genocide taking advantage of the rhetoric … and we are supposed to believe this is true.
“Trying to be respectful to the dead, they inadvertently destroyed evidence…” is an interesting way of saying that there is no evidence. And it’s kind of funny when it’s not so chilling, how Zionists are deciding to continue to co-opt the language of the left to defend their stories that are quite often found to be lies. Look at the whole hospital debacle! Israel’s whole strategy for the last 75 years has been, “Wasn’t me.” When it quite clearly has always been them! Palestinians have been telling us this for decades and all we call them instead are terrorists.
I was reading Eve Barlow’s Substack earlier (for research) and what I realize that Zionists do often is they use the same talking points that leftists use, but they reframe it so it’s about them. A perfect example here is that recently Eve was writing about how Hamas has intent for genocide but doesn’t say anything about how the Israeli state has continued to call for a genocide of Gaza from the Prime Minister of Israel Isaac Herzog to the President of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu, both and all in between have declared genocidal intent. That’s what was so wild watching South Africa’s testament at the ICJ last week - a day after my 34th birthday - the ludicrousness of hearing OUT LOUD the genocidal intent of Israel. Yet when Zionists tell us they’re telling us the truth they always opt out on the other perspective and always seem to exaggerate their own position. The truth of their own design. So… lies?
“A stunning example of the genocidal statements uttered by Israeli leaders is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s admonition to Israeli soldiers as they prepared their ground invasion of Gaza,” wrote Marjorie Cohn in Truthout. “He told them, “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember.”
This is a reference to the First Book of Samuel, where God commands King Saul to kill every person in Amalek (which attacked the Israelites as they fled from Egypt), declaring, “Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.”
South African lawyer Tembeka Ngcukaitobi said that Netanyahu’s “invocation of ‘Amalek’ is being used by soldiers to justify the killing of civilians, including children.” They are shown in a video repeating Netanyahu’s words as they dance, chant and sing, “May their village burn; may Gaza be erased.”
As South African political analyst Levy Ndou told Al Jazeera. “Remember, we only got out of apartheid 30 years ago, and we know what it did to us, and when we see human rights abused like what is happening in Israel, we have to act.”
With declaring that Hamas raped Israeli women that we can’t locate or when the family of the key case in the NYT story renounces the story, and “says reporters manipulated them” (and this is according to Mondoweiss, an Israeli newspaper) but live Palestinians are saying they were sexually assaulted, or raped, or sexually violated (all of this I wrote about here) by Israelis and no-one does anything then it’s important to start asking why should Israel get away with any of this, let alone, genocide? How can Eve call what happened on Oct 7th genocide but not what’s happening to the Palestinians? Make it make sense!
Here’s the tea: the more rape narratives, the more easily it is to turn people against a population. Here’s a quote from former CIA agent John Stockwell speaking about Cuba in the 70s: “We pumped [out] dozens of stories about Cuban atrocities. We ran [fake] photographs that made almost every newspaper. We didn’t know of one atrocity. It was pure, raw, false propaganda to create an illusion of communists eating babies for breakfast.” Here’s a video so you can watch him say it!
So yeah, this happens. The more you realize that the U.S. is like any other empire set on writing its historical narrative everything else also starts to make sense, especially the way that Israel is acting right now. But, I guess this is what it looks like to watch empires collapse.
I keep thinking of this passage that I read recently in Rusted Radishes entitled “Can The Palestinian Mourn?” by Abdaljawad Omar.
“However, it is important to note from the outset that when it comes to rationalizing violence, Palestinian violence has always been rendered unthinkable, profane, without “qualification” and illogical. Israel’s military is afforded analysts, institutional backing, and hundreds of think-tanks and media descriptives that debate and discuss the minute details of its military operations. The vast majority is sympathetic to Israel and its military even when it commits outright crimes, and even employs Israeli blurring of International Humanitarian law and rules of war as lessons for their future employment in other imperial wars. It is important to note that no such attention is devoted to Palestinian political violence, its history, the logic of its military actions, and the history of tactical, operational and strategic dilemmas that Palestinians face…This asymmetry is so clear that it goes unsaid. It feeds into narratives of Palestinian despair and profanity that are generally condensed in the figure of the Palestinian fighter. ”
<Palestinians don’t need propaganda when they have facts.>
It’s imperative here that we speak truthfully and when it comes to Palestine, that’s something I’ve consistently heard. The reality is, the truth doesn’t need to be exaggerated if you’re Palestinian. But, and remember this, if you’re Israeli - the truth will collapse any semblance of protection that the mythological Israeli identity affords you. So the only way for you to exist within its construct is to deny culpability, to deny the reality that to be Israeli, in the most rudimentary sense, is to live in constant separation and extermination of the Palestinian people. That you, the Israeli, by your insistence on that identity, inflate and cause “the Palestinian problem” then that you can only, through your genocidal fantasy, employing full-blown Nazism, defend why you deserve to kill.
This is why continuously Western media sources are following the orders of the Israeli state, “If you’re neutral you support Hamas.” So what does that mean… I guess, simply, propaganda? I write about this in Who Is Wellness For? as well, but if your freedom impedes upon the freedom of somebody else’s then that’s not freedom, that’s privilege. You can’t be neutral under the guise of such tyranny.
What has defined the West is an uneven playing field and antiquated, discretionary rules that can be applied without reason. Why a denial of genocide when the sheer numbers of the dead or injured or those under the rubble are whole populations of people, a whole constellation of people that are no more? How can this even be challenged as a genocide? Where is our humanity?
I keep thinking of the number of the injured, and how Israel uses this as a tactic of “war,” by mass injuring a population — whilst also murdering it — as well as targeting children, it’s part of the same genocidal plan: you kill people to eradicate them, you maim people to demoralize them. You rape them to show your power. The oppressor uses rape tactics, it uses tactics to humiliate. These are what the dominant powers do. The rest of us just try to liberate ourselves from under this very big shoe. Palestinians have been tasked with this and much more; a tall, divine order.
Hala Alyan writes beautifully and poignantly in the NYT, “To earn compassion for their dead, Palestinians must first prove their innocence. The real problem with condemnation is the quiet, sly tenor of the questions that accompany it: Palestinians are presumed violent — and deserving of violence — until proved otherwise. Their deaths are presumed defensible until proved otherwise. What is the word of a Palestinian against a machinery that investigates itself, that absolves itself of accused crimes? What is it against a government whose representatives have referred to Palestinians as “human animals” and “wild beasts”?”
Recently, in Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes, I read: “The answer to these obscene questions? Return the bones. Return the photographs. Repatriate the statues. Empty the museums.”
In paradise, we are all allowed. We are invited. The only thing that is required is for us to want the same for one another. It’s so simple. We are so simple.
Superiority is a disease.
Now, more than ever before, because I think we are close, the empire is on its way out, every day you can feel the collision coming closer. So what does this mean for us? It means we get to re-envision what kind of societies we get to live in.
I think we need more and more people dedicated to truth, fact, morality and humanity outside of one’s religion, these things shouldn’t be tied to the faith you practice, these things should just be your moral compass. Your compass should be to spirit, yes, God, yes - but the people and this Earth, too, as a means of devotion to all. May we create a global community of people that upholds justice and truth for all people, outside of one’s religion, sexuality, gender, ability etc, I believe that’s what Palestinian liberation is asking us to do. To dream father than we have before. Outside of the monopoly of greed or fear. What could we be if we were all equally abundant?
I leave you with these breathtaking words I read in Anam Raheem’s Substack recently:
“I have been wondering what is the catalyst that converts fear-based living to love-based living. I think it is courage. Courage to not look away from Gaza in the height of its pain. Courage to dream beyond our cruel and seemingly endless circumstances. Courage to continue practicing hope when the world is violently shoving us towards hopelessness. But it’s more than exercising courage for “the cause” as some intangible, monolith. It includes exercising courage personally and intimately— courage to not look away from our own pain and the pain we inflict on others. Courage to dream about what fulfillment looks like in our lives. Courage to be hopeful for our little and big dreams. Courage to move through the discomfort of shedding the parts of ourselves that hinder. Courage to step onto an uncertain, uncharted path, driven by nothing more than a radiant vision for the world we want to inhabit.”