On Sharpening Contradictions
Palestine Dispatch Four
(tw: images of death)
It’s been hard for me to write this week.
Mainly because I’ve been so full of rage.
Every day is a new day of emotionally and mentally broaching genocide, while people still question the ferocity of the genocidal intent of the Israelis. As hospitals, schools, churches, and mosques continue be to bombed, raided, and “conquered” in Gaza, media personalities, celebrities, and politicians still question the veracity of what’s going on when there’s literal documentation on the ground every day. Unless it’s a day when Israel conveniently shuts off the internet and power, only to escalate its carnage, which it did a few days ago, again. This is why money isn’t being sent to Gaza (I mean there’s no way of it getting in anyway) but buying people e-sims on the ground is a way to anticipate a communication blockout when the Israelis (inevitably) turn off the electricity, power, and internet again.
Without the immediate documentation of Motaz Azaiza, Plestia Alaqad, Bisan Owda, Ahmed Hijazi or Hind Khoudary, or one of the many extraordinary Palestinian journalists on the ground (who haven’t been murdered since October 7th; according to the CJP, as of now 45 Palestinian journalists have been murdered) who are literally risking their lives every day to tell us the truth and show us what’s really going on, otherwise we wouldn’t know. Israel still hasn’t allowed foreign journalists on the ground, because they’re trying to control the narrative. Even with CNN, which was one of the few American networks allowed on the ground, all footage had to be shown to the Israelis before airing, and you are only allowed to see what they show you. In journalism, we call this propaganda!
So, without the documentation of the Palestinians on the ground, we might not have been on the precipice of such a revolution. It is this, the sharpening of contradictions, that is occurring, where the nature of opposing views, ideologies, and material forces is becoming clearer to everyone as the truth continues to come out, and therefore the corruption of power and capital becomes ever obvious, and therefore easier to mass mobilize against.
Yet, despite this necessitated reality, it is particularly maddening when we juxtapose Palestinian lived violence against the spread of deliberate misinformation of the forty beheaded babies and raped women (!) — which many still claim to have seen, and yet nobody still weeks later has any evidence to share of either. I think this is very damning, especially when so many have claimed to see these supposed videos or images. I mean, if people have seen them, then why is it so hard to present them to the public? Especially while the documentation of Palestinian babies being burnt alive is very much a chronicled reality that anyone can see via Eye on Palestine.
So, it’s really frustrating to absorb, in real-time, how little people care about Palestinians, Muslims, and Arabs, enough to malign them on a global scale. I can’t help but think of Emmett Till, and all the Black boys and men who throughout history, have been accused of barbarity by white women, facing death, torture, and horrifying ends just merely for existing in their Blackness, and for their presumed monstrosity projected onto them via the white colonizer’s imagination of their savagery. Sound familiar? It’s because it is, the Americas are rife with stories that mimic a similar sentiment. Stories where men of color have always been seen as thugs. There’s a specific animosity here of unchecked Islamophobia and anti-Arabness that has been lingering and festering for decades now like an open wound. If you want to exterminate a population, the last thing you do is humanize them.
Max Blumenthal of The Grayzone, in a conversation with Chris Hedges, the veteran journalist who now works at The Real News Network, recently said: “We have all these new stories about babies baked in ovens, we’ve heard stories about babies cut out of mothers’ wombs by so-called Hamas terrorists, rape, gang rape, women after being taken, gang raped in the streets in Gaza City. All of these lies were repeated and put forward in order to give Israel the latitude to carry out this genocidal assault that we’re now witnessing. And we can see Biden was so stunned by the propaganda that was being pushed on him by Netanyahu’s office and the pro-Israel media that he immediately caved.” Yet why, despite caving, the President of the “free most developed country in the world,” even after being called out for lying about seeing this supposed documentation in the first place, is not held to a higher standard of truth says so much about the U.S. I’m shocked that more people, more intellectuals aren’t damning this, but I guess I never fully realized how many of you blindly believe and support the state. Maybe, because, in some way, the state protects you and therefore you believe in its functionality. That must be nice!
Yet, the reality of both white supremacy and capitalism is that nobody is truly safe from the nightmare of it. Morally, if you profit from either, well then you’re always going to live a life outside of reality or the people, which is such a sad, subdued life. This is why rich people, despite being rich, seem so fucking sad. And oftentimes are quite boring! I have been a prop to many a rich person (howdy) because I guess I bring flare and genuine je ne sais quoi to people who long to have real purpose or meaning. But what they don’t realize is that they live a half-life in that gilded tower. What is so interesting about The Kardashians, or anyone who has money or is a celebrity, like truly? What are they all doing now while Gaza, Sudan, and the Congo burn? What is so impressive about them outside of the power and weird influence we allow them to have over our lives? All of this is collapsing for me, personally. All of this social apparatus of money and fame is collapsing and I’m thoroughly uninterested in the charade of a civil democratic society. We are not civil, and at this point, nor are we very democratic.
So what this time has taught me is that I no longer need or want the validation of these limiting entities that are all a part of the imperial core’s obsession with capitalist narratives of a good modern life, but who is that for? Is it just for the West while they indiscriminately bomb, landgrab, and steal resources from every Black, brown, and Indigenous entity in the world? As if I give a shit about The New York Times anymore, and I’m sad I ever did! I’m sad that I bought into all this bullshit once. All these newspapers can’t even humanize someone like me… why have I wanted their approval and merit for all these years?
The renowned Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha was kidnapped yesterday by the IOF. David Remnick, the Editor-in-Chief of The New Yorker, even though he has a relationship with Toha, isn’t brave enough to condone or even announce who or why a Palestinian poet would be kidnapped by the army in the state of Israel. So, like how they always do, they criminalize innocent people. Instead of saying kidnapped, Remnick wrote, “arrested.” Much like how some people I know loathe the term “open-air prison” because it subliminally implies Palestinians, or Gazans, inherent criminality.
In the caption of the screenshot, WAWOG wrote, “The email characterizes this abduction as an “arrest,” despite the IOF’s lack of jurisdiction in Gaza. It does not say by whom Toha, a Palestinian poet, essayist, and librarian, was “arrested.” This evasion of Israeli responsibility is common in Western reporting on Palestine.” This is a part of the propaganda, but this is also a part of the sharpening contradictions.
According to AP News earlier this year, already before this latest arm of genocidal intent, “Experts say that although the Israeli military has frequently employed inauthentic social media accounts to gather intelligence on Arab states and on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank,” after October 7th marks the first known time that a military influence campaign targeted Israeli citizens.
Uri Kol, a digital campaign expert, said the revelation could hint that the army has employed the tactic secretively against Israelis before. “With the military’s tight censorship laws, the army always has the last word in what gets published and what doesn’t,” he said. “What we see here is a tiny facet of an online manipulation campaign that we haven’t ever seen before.” According to AP, accounts targeted right-wing Israelis, tagging popular conservative TV hosts and politicians like current National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, and posting in groups of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s supporters with the aim of spreading the message to sympathetic audiences. Popular posts with the Gaza Regrets hashtag drew comments from Israelis, like “Why are buildings still standing in Gaza?”
As Bisan points out in the video above, US and Israeli politicians write #killthemall in hashtags while Gazan children literally have to do a press conference, so you take them seriously, adding “We invite you to protect us…” it says so much about the saturated evidence of evil at play here. The beauty of sharpening contradictions is there is no doubt left in your mind. The languaging is all calculated actions of an oppressor and a colonizer.
A few days ago I saw an image of a young precious baby girl whose entire face had melted like plastic from the heat of the bomb blast. It is, potentially, one of the most horrifying images I have ever seen in my life. I share it simply because Palestinians are asking us to bear witness, and while so many are looking away, this is an invitation to face what is happening so it may radicalize you.
There’s a rage inside of me that sits there and churns because I want to show every Zionist what they’re doing, what they’re allowing, but the most frustrating thing is that they don’t care. What they don’t seem to understand, is that what they’ve lost in the bid to steal land, like other white colonizers, is their humanity. Like a West Bank settler said in an interview with The New Yorker last week when asked how she feels about Palestinian children, “I say my children are first.” What does it say about people who have an ideology like this?
To them, being a settler is justified because they don’t see Palestinians as people, they see them as animals worth conquering. Look at the way the army speaks about Palestinians, Haaretz reported, “In a performance for troops, entertainer Lior Narkis curses Gaza,” saying: “Gaza, you Black woman. You trash. Gaza, you bitch. Gaza, daughter of a huge whore, like your mother Gaza. Gaza you whore!” The anti-Blackness is so wild, it’s almost like Israelis have no desire to be in solidarity with anyone else. The layers of this dissonance are truly disconcerting.
I can’t help but think of the one million Iraqis who were murdered after the U.S. invaded Iraq to save them and get all these dangerous weapons of mass destruction out… weapons that were weirdly never found!
Yet, here we are, twenty years later, about to justify another war (genocide) against yet another group of people who are majority Muslim and Arab. I find it interesting that as Zionists act like this (or the above) what I continue to witness is the love, sweetness, consideration, and care of the Palestinian people toward each other. If you watch Plestia’s videos you’ll know how she often checks in on her aunties and neighbors, or how Bisan only a few days ago documented people in the community finding ingredients to manually makeshift and cook falafel, or how Ahmed captured the communal joy in the delicacy of an auntie making pizza from scratch with nothing, this ingenuity of a people facing extermination moves me beyond. All while Palestinian men day in and day out continue to take bodies out of the rubble; how they keep going I don’t know. With the internet, electricity, and water cut off, look how far the Palestinians have survived. Witness how miraculous this is!
Yet it’s the West’s lack of care that fills me with rage. How an entire nation, built on the memory of the very thing they are doing in real-time, while they capitalize off of the sentiment “Never forget,” can lie and manipulate the public, again and again, bothers me greatly. Yet, this is also a tactic of attrition, just as we hear of protestors being bought for $250 to incentivize college students to march for Israel or how influencers are being offered money to post about Israel (like YourFavoriteGuy on TikTok) as they buy bots to post propaganda and as they try to buy pro-Palestinians into changing their stance and stand with Israel it says a lot about the dire realities of the collapsing of the Israeli identity, and thereby the state’s stronghold on the narrative. Yet, will they ever understand, that as they literally flatten Gaza they’ve only just flattened themselves; in an attempt to dehumanize Palestinians, they’ve only dehumanized themselves. As this Israeli hostage’s family member asks, “If there’s an ounce of humanity left in you, please, please, care for our resilience.”
En masse, what Zionists don’t seem to get, is that we are finally witnessing everything without fear that we’ll be dismissed, because this time, we know the rest of the world is watching, too. Sharpening contradictions!
Then, there’s the entire investigation over how the IOF opened fire on Israelis at the rave, on October 7th. Blumenthal recounts in his conversation with Hedges, “According to Yasmin Porat, who had fled the electronic music festival - (she) went into a home with her partner, and then they were taken captive momentarily by gunmen. She recounted to Israeli National Radio that when the Israeli special forces arrived, they started shooting everyone and that most of the captives, along with the Hamas gunmen, were caught in the crossfire, and that everyone was killed except for her and her captor, who used her as a human shield in order to guarantee his own safety when he surrendered. She saw her own partner, whose hands had been bound by her captors, get shot by Israeli special forces, and then they lobbed two tank shells into the home that she had been in.” Interesting plot twist. It almost feels like Israel doesn’t really care about its citizens!
If you didn’t know, Hamas took the hostages because they were trying to initiate a prisoner swap/exchange. Right now, Israel has about 10,000 Palestinian prisoners illegally, most of them without trial, in Israeli prisons. Roughly 1,000 of them are children, yes you read that correctly. Since October 7th, they’ve doubled the previous number (which was roughly ~$5,000), maybe out of retaliation. So why did Hamas think it could negotiate a prisoner swap?
Well, in 2006 an Israeli soldier named Gilad Shalit was taken, and because of this, they were able to release 1,027 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for just one soldier. Hamas has said it themselves, but they took the hostages in hopes of a similar deal. Yet what they weren’t anticipating was that the Israeli government does not care about the livelihood of the hostages as Netanyahu consistently refused a ceasefire in exchange for the hostages. Despite many of them appealing to the government for support and action. This sounds a lot like how Israel uses the Holocaust as a narrative device to garner empathy for the violence it commits against the Palestinians, the whole image of Israel is predicated on the brutality of the Holocaust, yet literally one in three survivors lives in poverty, according to PBS. Both The Jerusalem Post and Tablet Magazine have also reported on the abuse, mistreatment, and lack of governmental support of Holocaust survivors in Israel, in particular, so none of this should come as a surprise, it’s all documented by the Israelis themselves. Holocaust survivors are props to people like Netanyahu who clearly does not care about his people, he cares about power, domination and flattening the Palestinians.
I recently found out that Netanyahu’s psychiatrist, Moshe Yatom, apparently killed himself thirteen years ago. Author and dissident historian Michael K. Smith headlined a Legalienation News Bureau article, “Psychiatrist of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Commits Suicide,” and shared that the suicide note wrote: “I can’t take it anymore. Robbery is redemption, apartheid is freedom, peace activists are terrorists, murder is self-defense, piracy is legality, Palestinians are Jordanians, annexation is liberation, there’s no end to his contradictions. Freud promised rationality would reign in the instinctual passions, but he never met Bibi Netanyahu. This guy would say Gandhi invented brass knuckles.” Though I can’t seem to verify if this is real, I thought it was worth sharing for the symmetry of what we are witnessing today.
I think of the over one thousand children in jail, and remember how Aotearoa Liberation League reported how many children are held without trial, and how many of them face all kinds of abuse, including sexual torture. Since learning about this, I can’t help but think of the fact that according to Haaretz, “Foreign Sex Offenders Find Refuge in Israel” even The Jerusalem Post has reported, “Israel needs to stop being a haven for sex criminals.” Just days before October 7th, on the 4th, The Cradle reported, “Disgraced Hollywood director Brett Ratner, who stands accused by multiple women of rape and sexual harassment, revealed last week he relocated to Israel just days after being a special guest of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the UN General Assembly in New York. Ratner has followed in the footsteps of other sexual predators who have fled to Israel in recent years, including another Hollywood director, Bryan Singer, who moved to Israel several years ago after being accused of rape and sexual assault of several minors.”
Where all the Times Up people at? Come and get your boys!!! It should be noted here, and my childhood bestie Manna could verify, that I never ever fucked with Natalie Portman because she, despite being into human rights, has never called Israel out on its DOZENS of war crimes over the years. Let’s also not gloss over the Alan Dershowitz debacle either… the fact that while at Harvard, Portman served as a research assistant to Dershowitz, and worked on his book The Case for Israel… the Zionism, even amongst folks that claim liberal ideals, is quite frightening. How does one have such cognitive dissonance? I guess that is the work of whiteness, or proximity to white ideologies, like capitalism. It’s wild to me that literally two of the most notorious cases during #MeToo (Rattner and Singer) are both people who were allowed entry, safety, and refuge in Israel. This is while millions of Palestinians whose ancestors lived in Palestine for generations are refused safe return to their home countries. What does it say about a nation’s principles when they protect sexual predators, and that’s a part of their mandate? I mean Rattner being Netanyahu’s special guest at the UN says… so much of who this man is.
As a child sexual abuse survivor, I cannot stop thinking about these Palestinian children in jail. As Portman and other celebrities post propaganda about the hostages, without leveling critique at a state that refuses to negotiate a ceasefire to allow safe passage for these very hostages that they are so concerned about, is also the glaring resolve of sharpening contradictions. We are really clearly seeing who actually stands behind their ideals. The very hostages whose families are demanding safety for their families while nothing is being done is the evidence that perhaps many needed. They said there’d be tunnels showing all these Hamas networks— yet none can be found, and every video of the IOF touring these hospitals feels like an SNL parody, or this.
Yet, as I watch them take Palestinian children away from their families, knowing that Israel is a haven for sexual predators, I can’t help but feel in my bones that they are deeply harming these children. As the saying goes, “Every Zionist accusation is actually a confession.” As old IOF soldiers talk about raping Palestinian women, it gets clearer and clearer who Israelis are, and what they are willing to defend.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how the colonizer has a habit of creating an image of the sexual perversity of those they colonize. It’s about humiliation, and again it’s about power. Muslim and Arab men must be depicted as savages and therefore the imagination that portrays them as such must dominate the conversation. Our own interpretation of our men and our people cannot coexist with your simultaneous dehumanization of us. Yet, now, with the democratization of social media, we are forced to bear witness to another story, another perspective. Vice says that younger generations are more pro-Palestine, and I imagine that has something to do with the fact that younger people are more invested in liberation, period. Whether queer, trans, Black, Muslim, Indigenous, or disabled liberation — our struggles are united. Look at March for Israel last week, a sea of majority white people.
I’ll leave you with this from The Cradle: “Awareness of Israel's safe haven status for sex offenders received a boost in recent years due to the case of Israeli-Australian citizen Malka Leifer, the headmistress of an ultra-Orthodox girls’ school in Australia, who fled to Israel in 2008 after allegations surfaced of her sexually abusing female students. She was finally extradited in 2021 and faces trial in Victoria on 70 charges of child sex abuse.” Funnily enough, this year, in 2023, she was charged 15 years for sexually abusing two former students. It seems that everything is slowly coming out. Abusive patterns always replicate themselves until they are plucked out and ended.
On Nov 18th, Israel bombed Al-Fakhoura School in Jabalia, a UN-affiliated school. According to Noura Erakat, 200 Palestinians were murdered, “Palestinian medical and local sources told Anadolu that "the bodies of the martyrs cover school's corridors," noting the difficulty of evacuating the injured and killed from the building, in which thousands of displaced civilians found shelter.” According to writer and activist Nicki Kattoura, 1000 Palestinians were martyred on Nov 18th alone.
I still remember being ten or eleven and seeing the newspaper clippings of dead macheted bodies of Bangladeshis during the civil war that my father had kept safe in a briefcase with other important things. It was by accident, he didn’t want me to see the images, but I saw them nonetheless because as a child I was always seeking an explanation for myself, for us, and for our tantamount grief that spilled over everything in my family. This is the lasting legacy of war, as well as genocide, the ways in which families are forever destabilized by the trauma.
At least 13,000 have been murdered (almost half of them children) and 30,000 Palestinians have been injured since October 7th, according to the latest figures, and if you didn’t know according to Al Shifa Hospital’s director, Muhammad Abu Salmiya, and Hamas health authorities in Gaza claimed in an interview with Al Jazeera that the IOF removed many bodies from the hospital morgue. Apparently, 145 dead bodies, which is a part of the necropolitics of Israel. “The history of withholding Palestinian bodies spans several decades. Since 1967, Israel has withheld hundreds of Palestinian corpses, which it has primarily used as “bargaining chips” in negotiations or potential prisoner swap deals. While the exact numbers are obfuscated by a lack of state transparency, between 1991 to 2008, Israel intermittently returned over 400 dead Palestinian bodies. Today, the number of Palestinian corpses Israel continues to withhold is estimated to be over 370: more than 115 bodies are withheld in morgues, in addition to 256 corpses buried in numbered graves without identification known as the “cemeteries for enemy combatants” or the “Cemetery of Numbers.”
This is a part of the larger state-sanctioned terror that Israelis impose on the predominantly Muslim majority Palestinians. In Islam, you must bury the body immediately, so that the decomposing can begin. It’s deemed more respectful, returning the body to Earth, and thereby God. Delaying the burial process is an act of torture for the families, and a concerted effort to always overpower and oppress the Palestinians, by targeting their faith in a prolonged campaign to dehumanize them.
Yet all I can think of is the dignity of the Palestinians… and that has been one of the most significant things that has kept me going these past few weeks. The faith and resolve that the Palestinians have in Allah, in the afterlife, and in justice is beyond comprehension. It brings me to my knees again and again to witness their humanity, and their divinity, amidst such total annihilation. I have never seen a people so steadfast, and I realize this is what 75 years of occupation will do to you. Instead of making them hateful and bitter, Palestinians have found a way to transcend this mortal, Earthly plane. They are the litmus test for our survival, they are the example of our collective humanity.
I also want to thank the many Jewish voices that have been leading this worldwide unity that we are witnessing. We can’t do it without you. I am angry at Zionists every day, but the care I am experiencing and witnessing from anti-Zionist Jews is next level. It’s because in that connection there is no supremacy. We are all equal, we are all one, and we are all worthy of life, sovereignty, and peace. That is the world worth fighting for. As the contradictions continue to sharpen, we are again and again faced with the option to choose an existence that upholds and protects all of us, I pray we continue to strengthen our moral certainty together to push and collapse these systems to an inevitable end. We are all that we have. Freeing Palestine is believing in liberation for all. And the reality is, we all deserve to be free.
From the river to the sea,
November 21st, 2023.
Sending you so much love Fariha ❤️🤍💚🖤
Thank you.