Suppression
The Israel-Hamas War exhumes America’s penchant for censorship and suspicion. What is missing.
And this, we are told, is just the beginning.
Instead of playing out a role for which there is neither sufficient evidence nor intelligence to support an acceptable outcome, we have an opportunity to reflect on inequality.
Reflecting on inequality is different than reflexively taking sides. Suppression is trafficked where there is ignorance and distrust. ‘What we don’t know’ becomes newsworthy, which opens the door to doubt and suspicion.
Most of the world’s nations decry the Israel-Hamas War and urge an immediate ceasefire. In America not only is this view repeatedly ignored as unpatriotic but is branded as anti-Semitic. Certainly “anti-Israel.” How quickly we take sides and defend our dumbing down of a conflict into military positions — militant, not vigilant of long-term consequences for the region and for the globe.
We suspend assessing opportunity for peace to predicting failure of peace.
Do we hear the term ‘anti-Palestine?’ No, because Palestine has not been conferred statehood; rather “Palestine” has been assigned to a “camp,” a “zone,” a “sentence.” What the rest of the world sees is what western interests have created for their indigenous peoples — a “camp,” a “zone,” a “sentence.”
There are borders, but weaponry, guns and rockets penetrate camps, either surreptitiously or deterrence displayed. To help create a quasi-militaristic state in the West Bank, President Benjamin Netanyahu has enabled the deployment of Hamas terrorists in Gaza. (1)
So too, does Iran enable Hezbollah in Lebanon. To accept “Bibi’s War” is to dismiss a future of Israel and Palestine coexisting. As recently as Monday, October 30, Netanyahu claimed that to urge a cessation of hostilities between Hamas and Israel is to surrender to Hamas.
The logic is breathtaking, sad and horrifying all at once.
Advocates for peace are victims of jingoism.
To help the besieged as one Jewish doctor described his medical teams’ efforts in caring for residents on the West Bank is to be branded a terrorist: “to help the Palestinian people is to be identified as a terrorist.” (2)
Language — what identifies our collective identity — fails to suspend the terror inflicted by attacking one’s own.
The political structures created by language — the nation state — like the camp borders — are penetrated by bringing violence into the street — bombs in the market place, going house to house, looking for “un-friendlies.” Survivors of violence speak of a lost opportunity, “you’d better know what you are getting yourselves into,” spoke Rep. Elissa Slotkin, recently, a former active service member who was deployed during the US siege of Al-Fallujah, Iraq (3).
I have a friend, who ends the discussion about anti-this and anti-that by sharing that every attempt at reconciliation between Israel and Palestine has ended in an assassination, an untimely death, a vote of no confidence, as if fate has played a cruel trick on our better angels.
I comment that there are things of which we are unaware and see as if through a glass darkly.
Ours is not to presume there is no light.
“As I noted earlier, Bannon pounds relentlessly at what he calls the Big Steal — the claim that Biden stole the 2020 election — while the Democrats call that the Big Lie. And it is a big lie, a dangerous one. But is it the Big Lie? Bigger, say, than trickle-down economics? Bigger than “tax cuts create jobs?” Bigger than infinite growth on a finite planet? Bigger than Thatcher’s double whammy of “There is no alternative” and “There is no such thing as society?” Bigger, for that matter, than Manifest Destiny, Terra Nullius, and the Doctrine of Discovery — the lies that form the basis of the United States, Canada, Australia, and every other settler-colonial state? If we can stand to look at the Shadow Lands even for a moment (to reflect on inequality, Ed.), it becomes clear that we are ensnared in a life of self-annihilating lies and that whatever the Mirror World is on about this week is neither the biggest lie nor the one with the highest stakes. It’s entirely possible that Bannon and Wolf’s (and Bibi’s, Ed.) war on reality is just what happens when so many of the big lies that built the modern world visibly crumble. As the house collapses, some people choose to take flight into full-blown fantasy, sure — but that doesn’t mean that the rest of us who were also born and raised in that house are guardians of the truth.”
— Naomi Klein (4)
And this, we are told, is just the beginning.
October 31
Notes
1-Raja Shehadeh, “The Uprooting of Life in Gaza and the West Bank,” The New Yorker, daily comment, newyorker.com, October 26.
2-ibid.
3-https://fb.watch/o0h53WTpW-/?mibextid=cr9u03
4- “Doppelgänger: A Trip Into the Mirror World” (2023), p. 266
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