Nobody Puts Palestine In The Corner
Fuck these institutions though, Dispatch 8
A few weeks ago the brilliant writers Angela Flournoy and Kathleen Alcott, who are also my comrades at WAWOG, cut ties with PEN America after they continuously refused to speak about Palestine. Strangely, given that PEN America’s ethos is supposedly the protection of truth, the only ways they’ve discussed the “conflict” is through half-assed two-state solution missions like PEN Israel (and thus PEN Palestine, welp) while many of us, like at WAWOG, are asking for cultural and artistic boycotts of Israel.
The BDS movement has been doing this for a while. Much like during apartheid in South Africa — boycotts, divestments, and sanctions apply pressure, and they work. Yet, since October 7th, it’s important to note that the bare minimum we’ve asked any organization, any government, and any individual is to speak out against Israel’s current annihilation of Gaza (now Rafah, also West Bank if not, then very soon, all Occupied territories in Palestine), and to, at the very least, say “ceasefire.” Enough is fucking enough. But that’s a bare minimum, that doesn’t even acknowledge the 76 years of occupation, and the consistent dehumanization, torture, and murder of Palestinians for the sake of an Israeli state.
The fact that PEN America, an organization that supposedly “raises awareness for the protection of free expression in the United States and worldwide through the advancement of literature and human rights,” can’t say now - hey, maybe killing 30,000 people isn’t the way to protecting people - if you can’t do this, then what can you do? What advancement of human rights are you appealing to?
I didn’t know much about Suzanne Nossel, the CEO of PEN, but in the last few weeks, I have learned a lot about her. Her Wikipedia says she “is a human rights advocate, former government official, author, and CEO of PEN America.” She is also the former Executive Director of Amnesty International USA and COO at Human Rights Watch. It also says in her Wikipedia, “She has frequently visited relatives in Israel, saying “It's a place where I feel very comfortable and at home.”
I mean you can’t make this shit up.
I guess this is why this work is so hard for so many; in essence, what it requires is unlearning entitlement and privilege - it’s unlearning whiteness.
It’s so blatant, how far-reaching Zionism is and how embedded it is in the liberal imagination of the Western world. I guess then, it makes sense how many people in power have been ingratiated in Zionist ideology without ever challenging it, and how they then espouse these beliefs whilst also maintaining that they care about human rights alongside believing that occupation is important, and thus Palestinians just have to either go or die… how they don’t see the incongruence in those two ideologies, I’ll never know. How does the Upper West Side white woman feel this sadness for herself, but can’t comprehend how a Palestinian person must feel, having no other home? The logical conclusion one comes to is this: they must not think Palestinians are people. And if this is true in 2024 - for an organization that declares otherwise, where does that leave us as societies that pretend to be civil, moral, and upright? How do we accept and negotiate this blind spot? Do we also just allow people like Nossel to live within such bypass? It should be noted, her book title is named, fittingly, “Dare to Speak.”
According to former employees, she would in private refer to the “Palestine thing,” always avoiding accountable conversations about Zionism and complicity w/r/t Israel. It’s always interesting when people who write about free speech only mean it for themselves… and, maybe, sometimes, also the perfect victim they deem worthy of rights. The perfect victim that doesn’t contradict their own geopolitical goals, I mean it’s so blatant it’s depressing.
Randa Jarrar, another comrade at WAWOG, was forcibly dragged out while she demanded why Mayim Bialik, a virulent and open Zionist, was being allowed to have an event. If free speech is allowed, then everyone should have to partake in it. If free speech is the game, then Bialik should be publically challenged about why she’s posting children’s books that normalize occupation. How does she not think there’s something sick in that? So if she does believe that, isn’t it our “free speech” to question it? To offer an alternative read? And, this is where I ask why the bounds of anti-Semitism are so sacred and Islamophobia, and other forms of racism like anti-Blackness, are not?
What they won’t tell you is not everyone gets free speech. Not because we can’t give it to them, but because people with power don’t want that. They don’t want everyone to speak, but they do want to tell you that they care about free speech. And that free speech (for them) is very important. They don’t see this as domination or even one-sided, they demand you accept their half-truths as total truth.
“At the top of our list is our defense of Israel,” Nossel writes in an email written to the State Department in 2011. This is the Western world. It’s a creation made to uplift whiteness and white structures, only. How is a human rights council supposed to prop up Israel’s defense? Call me crazy, but that sounds like the opposite of human rights? Also, do we do that for anyone else? Does any other nation on Earth get this pledge of defense… What about regions where actual genocide has also taken place in the last few decades, like Rwanda, Bosnia, Congo, Sudan… Palestine? What about those places, do they also get our defense, as well? What about the Rohingyas who were mass exterminated from Myanmar a few years ago… resulting in one of the largest refugee crises in the world… do they get this same defense? The answer to all these questions is no. No one else get this. Just Israel. And, according to Nossel, this is a US State Department issue.
If you look at NGOs, it’s probably why you now have the stereotype of the shitty NGO boss that quite clearly does not care about you as a worker — they just care about the liberal guise of what they say they are doing. But what they are doing is essentially posturing. Due to the advent of social media, I think we’ve become a society that postures en masse, further perpetuating this belief that some people (not all people because we’ll judge other people for doing the exact same thing) don’t have to be the thing they declare themselves to be, they just have to pretend that they are.
How many times have I heard stories like this, or seen this in real-time, where people who work for the wellbeing of other people, continue to betray those ideals by refusing to do the work required to be the person they declare themselves to be? I see this in Academia, in Wellness, and in all kinds of places, the shadow comes out. Lurking, holding onto these unhealed parts that keep perpetuating the same narrative, the same conclusion, the same victimhood — that even when it has all the power in the world, it still wants more.
Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about this as windigo, the legendary monster of the Anishinaabe people. “Windigos are not born, they are made. Its bite will transform victims into cannibals too.” She writes, further explaining the phenomena in Braiding Sweetgrass: “The consumption-driven mindset masquerades as ‘quality of life’ but eats us from within. It is as if we've been invited to a feast, but the table is laid with food that nourishes only emptiness, the black hole of the stomach that never fills. We have unleashed a monster.”
Why are people on the left harping on about liberals all of a sudden? It’s because the essence of liberalism is this, it’s Suzanne Nossel, it’s whiteness, by which I mean it lacks integrity. It picks and chooses who gets what, and who is afforded democracy and rights because the idea of liberalism inherently props up the status quo—which in the West is a white person’s opinion and perspective. People like Nossel don’t want to be challenged on their liberalism (which one could call ‘hypocrisy’ in this context as well) because it infects a certain kind of elitism and encourages a disassociation that determines these mercurial lines drawn in the sand, things that white people in power like her demand are ‘the way things are.’ That’s called privilege - and not everyone is afforded this. It’s this same ideology that props up the entire U.S. Empire, the hubris of this American nation, this notion of exceptionalism, and therefore it can do no wrong. And, even when it does wrong, it simply rewrites that truth and positions some different retelling. This is the U.S.’s creation, Israel is America’s Frankenstein. And there are too many witnesses right now, there are just too many eyes who have seen the truth, not the propaganda spliced together by the IDF.
I was recently reading about how Muslim societies before colonization used to document both good and bad realities of their societies because there was an interest in knowledge and in the expansion of said knowledge. Everything was to be pondered, even challenged, public dialogue was normalized and heralded as a beacon of democracy - the Muslims took a lot of influence from the Greeks, who were obsessed with this - and many opinions could coexist and live alongside one another. It’s not like this anymore, as most Muslim societies have squandered their roots for a similar kind of domination tactic that their oppressors invented and taught them. Not surprising, but depressing, nonetheless.
Yet, it’s important to note, that not all societies prioritize the same things. Indigenous communities lived in harmony even despite not having the riches that Europeans assume is character. Yet, we were forced to forget how we once were, what our cultures uplifted and stood for, but I think it’s in that remembrance that we begin to gain literacy and understanding of how to go about the future. I have always felt Islam was a futuristic faith, and I wonder if this is why it has always been targeted by Christian ideologues.
Western and European colonizers did such a great job erasing us through epistemicide,1 that it’s taken many, many generations under colonialism for us to even claim what we have known for a long time; we were never inferior, we were just genocided and then told that we were. I think the reason why many people have been mobilized for Palestine recently has to do with the realities of 2020 and how Black organizers led the way to teach us about abolition, white supremacy, and the nefarious foundations of the U.S. nation-state. I saw many people begin to trace the evidence of empire in 2020 and how dehumanization has always been a tool of the oppressor, and people began to mass radicalize. This primed us to witness dehumanization in real time. We see the links clearly in Palestine now because many of us have done the due diligence of looking at our ancestral pasts and understanding the levels of violence stored inside of us that have resulted in this epistemicide… but it’s also given us time and space, generations really, to know how to move toward the future and make space for utopic levels of envisioning.
What our oppressors don’t understand is we don’t function like imperialists, those of us who want to change the world know there’s another way to be, one where nobody’s life is a sacrifice. Where all people, of all faiths, are protected. What we have to begin to accept is that not only do some people not want this, but they are also actively working against the possibility of a peaceful world where people can share the fruits of their labor and land… by liberating each other and Palestine. So, instead of supporting liberation groups, they criminalize them. But what’s so interesting is that less and less of us care about that because more and more of us are collectively rising together. And there’s no going back. We’ve arrived and we have all the receipts.
A month ago, minister Eli Cohen of the Likud Party said “If the price of expanding peace agreements is a Palestinian state, then I’ll give up on the peace agreements.” As someone specifically committed to Palestinian liberation, I’ve known this was true because Israel has always sabotaged peace talks through the decades, yet it was always an imperative of the Palestinians to stake their claim for humanity when their oppressor won’t see them as such, and when they certainly don’t want to play fairly with them, either.
Recently someone told me that Israel is angry that it’s not just allowed to be a European colonizer and exist as brazenly as those colonizers did. This goes back to liberalism being a product of whiteness. This is why we hear liberal Zionists so often, say: “I’m liberal about everything except Palestine.” People have said this to my face! To which I’ve often replied, “So you’re a conservative?” But what I have really wanted to say is, “So you’re a narcissist?”
Zionism is a form of narcissism because it’s an obsession with victimhood that supersedes everything else. So much so that you can even accept and morally debate and justify the genocide of another people in your name.
The litmus test is Palestine. Do you agree with this war machine? Knowing, also, Israel’s role in the Congo, of the weapons it’s sold to Sudan. Israel has sold arms and weapons to every genocide in the last few decades. So this is not just about the Palestinians, it’s really about land grabbing, power grabbing, and establishing itself as a colonizer. The U.S, through its hegemonic grip and leadership, has shown countries like Israel that you can exist in unchecked duplicity because that’s the ‘imperial way.’ What they didn’t anticipate was a robust decolonization movement that’s been preparing for this bullshit for a very long time.
What the Lithub article didn’t say (explicitly) is that I was on the email chain with Angela and Kathleen, I just hadn’t responded to PEN’s email invitation yet because I didn’t even know where to begin to say what I needed to say, and I was taking my time articulating it. In many ways, Angela and Kathleen are literary darlings, and I felt that my say really wouldn’t matter, as I had never actually been invited to anything PEN-related until Angela graciously asked to invite me to this event. I had never won or been nominated for any kind of PEN award, despite having a few relatively successful books out there, I had never been seen by them before.
Before October 7th, this probably frustrated me in my darkest moments. If you’ve been following my work on this Substack especially, you know that I have struggled with my career, finding myself in an industry that fails to validate me again and again in professionally meaningful ways. Of course, these are also my shadow parts completely enmeshed in my childhood wounding that no matter what I did, I was never seen for it, I was always overlooked, never chosen. This has played out in so many close interpersonal (especially romantic) relationships that when I’m on my knees, at my lowest point, I always wonder why I’ve been forsaken to such a life like this. A child subjugated to lovelessness, constantly seeking for that validation in all manner of relationships.
Yet, now I find myself, cast loose out of my own accord, choosing a different kind of life for myself, one outside of the merit that I think I thought would offer me something that I’m now seeing it could never give me because I am in complete juxtaposition to the system... but also because, most importantly, so are my ideas? I get why I’ve wanted validation, but trying to get it from the cesspool of what I’m critiquing probably isn’t the place to get it… I honestly think I’ve found a way recently, through teaching, and writing this newsletter, and speaking more vocally about Palestine, and organizing (a lot) many and multiple direct actions has helped me understand my place in this historical moment a little bit more. I was never here to fit in or even be rewarded by the system. I’m here to collapse this shit. That, has finally, become so clear to me.
This is what I ended up writing to PEN on Jan 31st, when I finally responded.
Wed, Jan 31, 3:30 PM
Hello ____,
I needed some time to think about what I had to say, especially when my colleagues Angela and Kathleen so beautifully articulated many of my own frustrations about an organization that supposedly salutes and protects freedom of speech and freedom of expression while it remains silent during an ongoing genocide, at such a critical time in our history as a people, no less.
Truthfully, I found your email response, ____, regrettably weak. It is not enough to say you're hearing us, it is time now for action. When Palestinians en masse are asking to call for a ceasefire there is no excusable reason not to. And yes, I do find it quite damning that an organization that prides itself on advocating against educational censorship and promoting safety of journalists wouldn't even remark on how Israel is censoring foreign media and journalists to document what's happening on the ground in Gaza, as well as has murdered an upwards of 100 journalists (mainly Palestinian journalists) in targetted attacks since October 7th. To not speak on that... well I find that quite indefensible and amoral.
Wanting to remain impartial about the current genocide in Gaza, while upholding virulent voices like Mayim Bialik, only proves how you prioritize some voices and not others—an interesting way to remain impartial! Given the ethos of PEN, does this behavior not seem very hypocritical to you, _____? Does it feel fair that you get to pick and choose whose humanity matters to you? How can you deem to protect "human rights" when you only serve to protect some? These are questions I have been asking myself for a very long time.
It's really quite shocking to realize how socially and politically stagnant people still are. As an organization, I remain steadfast, meditating on the words of the great Audre Lorde, “Your silence will not protect you.”
Fariha.
*
I recently got my chart read by Isa Nakazawa on her new top-secret astrology podcast I was lucky to guest on. As in many times in my life, maybe out of deep isolation, but in a deep need to be understood, I’ve gone to my own astrological chart to understand myself. I rarely talk about this, but this is why I first turned to astrology. I was so confused by people and was so hurt by my life circumstances, that I needed to understand why my life was the way it was. It was only until I started getting familiar with my placements that I began to feel some ease come over me - so much of what I had experienced was already written. All I had to do was to understand, as all of us have to, how to best use my placements in beneficial ways, the expansiveness of astrology is such.
Recently, I noticed a placement I’d never explored before - my Pluto in Scorpio squares my North Node in Aquarius. I looked up what that meant and found this gem, “Major circumstances in your past life or early childhood may have caused you to become resourceful, self-reliant, and distrustful of authority. You likely question prevailing societal values and remain unaffected by trends. This may ignite much opposition in others and resentment within you. Your desire for transformations, deep thinking, and intensity clashes with current social mores. Stop letting opposition to your ideas isolate you.”
I think this is where I am right now, resolved.
I think back to what Audre wrote in 1985, “We are citizens of the most powerful country in the world, a country which stands upon the wrong side of every liberation struggle on earth.”
I cannot pretend for anyone anymore. It’s not that I ever did, but maybe some part of me did, hoping for approval, wanting to be seen by people who can’t even see me. I keep thinking about a dinner I was invited to where Ester Perel was seated next to me but moved away from me and never looked at me through the night, it was like I was a pariah, and because we were in such close proximity, it was quite obvious to me. I was with two friends and at the time and I believed that they were more interesting than I was and therefore Perel was more intrigued by them. These days, when I look at that memory again, I remember something different. I see her discomfort with me clearly, and I understand why. I also know it has nothing to do with me. Another certain kind of resolution.
What I want other public writers, thinkers, academics, and artists to do right now is to question the people they are relation in with, especially celebrities or people in power, but also their own art and what their responsibility is to truth and the pursuit of fairness, justice, goodness. We need more people invested in truth but also people who are breaking away from the systems that refuse to change or be challenged. What would it mean to stand up for freedom, for all, not just yourself and your family? Not just freedom of speech for you and your friends…
It took me a long time to untether, I don’t think these things happen overnight. I am a Capricorn with 5 placements in the 7th house - so yeah, sadly other people’s opinions of me matter, or have deeply mattered to me. I understand how hostile this system is to folks that don’t check the boxes, and knowing how liberalism not only runs through PEN, but also so many American institutions, like, you know, the CIA funded The Paris Review, Iowa Writer’s Workshop… when we begin to see how much liberal media needs and wants the status quo, it gets easier to navigate.
It’s also important to know that as we move forward toward liberating Palestine we get to create fair systems that don’t propagandize. People should be allowed to know the truths of their societies, not be fed lies by the commercials that are in bed with the politicians and members of the government. It’s not Church & State in America, it’s State & Capital. But it doesn’t have to be this way. There is another way.
And on a quiet day, I can her breathe. Can’t you? What would it take for you to commit? To divest and walk towards the new world? Are you willing to forgo some of your privilege and power for the sake of others? For a fairer world? Things to think about as we work toward revolution.
Liberation for All, Free Palestine,
February 20, 2023
Epistemicide refers to the killing of knowledge systems. The concept of knowledge democracy acknowledges the importance of multiple knowledge systems, such as organic, spiritual and land-based systems, frameworks arising from social movements and the knowledge of the marginalized or excluded.