{"id":275854,"date":"2024-09-30T12:00:25","date_gmt":"2024-09-30T11:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=275854"},"modified":"2024-09-28T08:58:05","modified_gmt":"2024-09-28T07:58:05","slug":"your-crisis-of-faith-is-not-my-concern-theres-a-genocide-going-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/09\/your-crisis-of-faith-is-not-my-concern-theres-a-genocide-going-on\/","title":{"rendered":"Your Crisis of Faith Is Not My Concern (There\u2019s a Genocide Going on)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"\"<\/a>

The Myth<\/p><\/div>\n

Understanding the Zionist mentality means acknowledging a kind of logic beyond the emotional capacity of functional human beings.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

25 Sep 2024 <\/em>– All the cruelty livestreamed onto our electronic devices has undone the old political order.\u00a0 There are no more liberal Zionists, lowkey Zionists, cultural Zionists, soft Zionists, progressive Zionists, apathetic Zionists, ambivalent Zionists, non-Zionists, or post-Zionists.\u00a0 Now only two categories matter:\u00a0 Zionist and anti-Zionist.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Such is the mood of the Palestine solidarity community a year into the Zionist genocide.\u00a0 For decades we\u2019ve been coerced into humoring the settler\u2019s ego in a million ways, large and small, in what felt not like interchange but unrequited gestures of charity.\u00a0 Amid the current horror hundreds of memories emerge in snippets of rage:\u00a0 being made to condemn \u201cantisemitism\u201d before anybody would consider us sentient\u2014in fact before anybody would address Zionism\u2019s innate racism, or the racism built into the demand to condemn antisemitism\u2014for 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.\u00a0 We\u2019ve had to explain ourselves in other ways.<\/p>\n

Do you condemn violence?<\/em>\u00a0 Do you support Hamas?\u00a0 Do you believe Israel has a right to exist?\u00a0 Why shouldn\u2019t Jews have a country of their own?<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(What about you, though?\u00a0 Do you<\/em> really believe that Zionism is innocent of violence? \u00a0Or is the violence merely entrenched in the meat of your tongue?)<\/p>\n

Since the Nakba, Zionist angst has been the soundtrack of Palestinian life.<\/p>\n

House demolition.\u00a0 Land theft.\u00a0 Travel restrictions.\u00a0 I have family in Israel<\/em>.\u00a0 Ecocide.\u00a0 Expulsion.\u00a0 Imprisonment.\u00a0 This space is becoming unsafe for Jews<\/em>. \u00a0Air raids.\u00a0 Ground incursions. \u00a0The massacre of children.\u00a0 But what would happen to Israelis?<\/em>\u00a0 Always the fantastical as a substitute for reality.\u00a0 Always a void of empathy we are asked to replenish.\u00a0 Always everything for all others without anything of our own.\u00a0 And we tried.\u00a0 Whether it was from decorum or guilt or fatigue, we tried.\u00a0 We wanted to be accepted.\u00a0 We wanted to become Good People.\u00a0 We tried the sympathy, the indulgence, the dialogue.\u00a0 The only thing these efforts got us was a genocide.<\/p>\n

We remember. \u00a0We have no choice, because the settler is needier than ever, demanding our validation as we agonize and mourn.\u00a0 Not many are willing to offer it anymore. \u00a0Your crisis of faith is not my concern<\/em>. \u00a0Those who do indulge the settler come across as weak or untrustworthy.\u00a0 What the hell are you doing?\u00a0 There\u2019s a genocide going on.<\/em><\/p>\n

There\u2019s been too much blood.\u00a0 If you don\u2019t share in our spirit, whether it cycles through pain or longing or fury or despair, then you\u2019re a Zionist.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t matter how you self-identify.\u00a0 We suffer the oppression and so we get to name the oppressor.\u00a0 It\u2019s the only real benefit to being oppressed.<\/p>\n

(Besides, any half-serious person has surely noticed that Zionists can\u2019t be trusted to define anything\u2014 \u201ccolonization\u201d; \u201cdemocracy\u201d; \u201cself-defense\u201d; \u201cantisemitism\u201d\u2014because those definitions exist only to project the settler\u2019s barbarity onto the native.)<\/p>\n

*****<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been thinking about how we\u2019ve 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\u2019ve been acclimated hardness was always our fundamental condition.\u00a0 The hardness isn\u2019t a principle of aggression, but of defense.\u00a0 It\u2019s all we have to protect ourselves.\u00a0 It\u2019s the only resource Palestinians in the West can really contribute to the national movement.\u00a0 We can donate and boycott and protest, but the hardness brings the diaspora closer to the homeland. \u00a0After 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. \u00a0We\u2019re each undergoing a psychic intifada.\u00a0 Because we always knew that the Zionist entity didn\u2019t finish the job in 1948.\u00a0 We understand the Zionist mentality.\u00a0 That\u2019s one of our biggest problems. \u00a0Understanding 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. \u00a0Knowing Zionism, as we\u2019ve been made to do, is an incessant suicide mission. \u00a0They were always going to try to finish the job, with or without an October 7. \u00a0They were finishing the job all along.\u00a0 Every Palestinian life, every Palestinian expression of being, was an unfinished mission.\u00a0 Palestinians were being exterminated as a matter of course, like infrastructure updates or budget approvals. \u00a0There is no other option available to those who hold onto the idea of Israel.\u00a0 We knew it.\u00a0 Even if some of our comrades thought that we were too delusional, too zealous, too uncompromising\u2014that deep in our hearts we were hateful and fanatical, as the Oriental is apt to be\u2014we knew.\u00a0 That\u2019s all.\u00a0 Some of us fought on behalf of softness, with voting rituals, NGO activism, critical theory, all the stuff that offers a civilized fa\u00e7ade.\u00a0 But now we have no choice:\u00a0 the Zionists validated our knowledge.\u00a0 Hardness is the only viable option.<\/p>\n

We have invited others into this sensibility, from within and beyond our community.\u00a0 They can get up to speed or continue in their increasingly obscene forms of appeasement.\u00a0 But we\u2019ll no longer try to sneak a toe across the dark red trench separating anti-Zionists from everyone else.\u00a0 One doesn\u2019t need prior knowledge of Palestine or a degree in political science to conclude that Zionism has no business among the living.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

*****<\/p>\n

According to academic convention, this return to our vital sensibilities is a bad development.\u00a0 It results in nationalism, lack of nuance, binaries.\u00a0 (Scary attitudes that lead impressionable people to communism and other unpleasant ideas.)\u00a0 But all in all I see it as a positive.\u00a0 Palestine was never going to be liberated by adhering to the bourgeois commonplaces of academe or civil society.\u00a0 Liberation will necessarily upset the intellectual classes, for those classes exist only because they\u2019re amenable to the economic order in which Zionism thrives.\u00a0 Dissent is beginning to appear in those spaces, as is, in turn, increased repression.\u00a0 \u201cFree speech\u201d is only valid until the ruling class feels threatened.\u00a0 When people protest the Zionist ethostate, egghead technocrats happily drop the pretense. \u00a0Put up a tent and, bam, the police show up.\u00a0 Head to the voting booth and, look out, yet another psychopath.\u00a0 Say the wrong thing and, poof, here comes a passel of irate deans and vice presidents. \u00a0We have learned through decades of desecrated civil liberties to prioritize Palestine\u2019s liberation because the system that promises us rights also produces genocide (while failing to uphold the rights).\u00a0 We can no longer respect the conventions that have so dramatically failed us.\u00a0 Palestine comes first and last, no matter how crude we have to be about it.\u00a0 Yes, it\u2019s a good thing.<\/p>\n

*****<\/p>\n

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:\u00a0 what kind of person does my politics require me to be? \u00a0The question forces me to consider the effect of belief beyond personal gratification.\u00a0 Belief has a relationship with violence and power, be it God or karma or capital or government.\u00a0 Thus it should also have a relationship with peace and cooperation.\u00a0 I don\u2019t like the idea of obliging strangers into tactics I wouldn\u2019t carry out myself.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 While I can declare without much ambiguity that I support armed resistance to colonization, I recognize it as an abstract declaration.\u00a0 Am I willing to take up a gun and get shot at?\u00a0 It\u2019s impossible to say without being forced into the decision.\u00a0 That\u2019s the thing about resistance:\u00a0 people are forced into it.\u00a0 In the end the choice I would make doesn\u2019t matter, because if I ever find myself with a gun and getting shot at then it\u2019s not necessarily something I would have chosen.\u00a0 I would be reacting to material circumstances, not to distant and disembodied questions of moral propriety.\u00a0 People need to remember that about Palestinian fighters:\u00a0 resistance is a necessity forced onto them by settler colonization.\u00a0 If a people\u2019s survival depends upon militancy, then that people will become militant.\u00a0 Both North and South are littered with examples.<\/p>\n

This way of thinking, I suspect, informs the (re)hardening of our sensibilities.\u00a0 Palestinian life, these days indivisible from Palestinian death, is often used as raw material for careerism or electioneering. \u00a0Or else it is fed back into the hateful rhetoric of genocide.\u00a0 Brutal violence is all over our screens and still the storytellers of Western democracy process the brutality into allegories of progress. \u00a0We can\u2019t indulge these paeons to Western altruism, where death becomes abstract, subsumed by never-ending tales of noble violence.\u00a0 The slaughter of Palestinians is immediate and undeniable and so goddamn real as to exist beyond our moral comprehension.\u00a0 To know the Zionist genocide is to consign our souls to a darkness we spend our entire lives avoiding.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I reckon we\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n

We always saw it, but now we see it written onto a powerlessness that threatens our very existence.\u00a0 Material circumstance has forced us into binaristic thinking:\u00a0 if Zionism survives, we die.\u00a0 We\u2019ve become more pragmatic, but not in the way that U.S. thought-leaders want us to be.\u00a0 They believe that pragmatism is deferring liberation for the sake of various American political fantasies, but our pragmatism is intuitive and historical.\u00a0 We see what the Zionist entity does in Gaza, the extensive rubble, the mutilation, the dead children, accompanied by incessant glee and mockery.\u00a0 We know too that in the aftermath of the Nazi Holocaust nobody suggested that its victims should coexist with its perpetrators.\u00a0 (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.)\u00a0 Everybody without cynical intentions understood that Nazism needed to be expunged, not accommodated.\u00a0 The same is true of Zionism. \u00a0So we protect ourselves from the annoyances of bourgeois pragmatism\u2014the half-baked Orientalism, the high-handed pontification, the snitching and scabbing, the appeals to civility, the ideological discipline\u2014each act landing squarely on death\u2019s side of the binary.<\/p>\n

If you are across from us somewhere beyond that dark red trench, among the white-hot artillery, then you needn\u2019t sermonize about the proper way to suffer a genocide.\u00a0 Instead, take a moment, or a lifetime, and consider what kind of person Zionism requires you to be.<\/p>\n

________________________________________________<\/p>\n

Steve Salaita<\/a> – 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.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original – stevesalaita.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

25 Sep 2024 – Zionist mentality displays a logic beyond the emotional capacity of functional human beings. House demolition. Land theft. Travel restrictions. Ecocide. Expulsion. Imprisonment. Air raids. Ground incursions. The massacre of children\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":261160,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[3287,87,865,1643,3264,88,2552,2097,771,427,2497,1025,886],"class_list":["post-275854","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-palestine-israel-gaza-genocide","tag-anti-zionism","tag-gaza","tag-genocide","tag-genocide-convention","tag-idf","tag-israel","tag-jews","tag-lebanon","tag-nakba","tag-palestine","tag-palestinians","tag-west-bank","tag-zionism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275854","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275854"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275854\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":275856,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275854\/revisions\/275856"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/261160"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275854"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275854"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275854"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}