Repression only strengthens the repressed
Repression only strengthens the repressed
Thoughts on the war in Israel and Palestine.
For the last several days, I’ve tried to find the words that precisely capture how I feel about Israel and Palestine. But I think the right place to start with is on killing, massacres, and the whole idea of war.
I happen to be against war. I’m against it in principle, but also in practice. Killing is awful, and is always awful, and I also happen to believe that it generally doesn’t work. I believe in the cliche that ‘violence begets violence’. That must be a remnant of my Catholic upbringing.
In the Gospel of Matthew, for example, when Jesus is approached by Judas and a crowd carrying clubs and weapons, one of Jesus’ companions reaches for his sword and strikes a servant of the high priest, severing his ear. But then Jesus, in his familiar way, says:
“Put your sword back in its place… for all who draw the sword will die by the sword.”
Fundamentally, I think that Jesus was right. Violence is an act, a moment, a thing thrust onto others. But it’s also a mindset, a proverbial tool in the toolbox, and once people begin to use violence as a way of solving political or moral questions, it’s often the case that they use violence (overt and not) to solve most if not all problems that they face.
That’s the trap of violence: In the proverbial toolbox it’s a hammer, but not all issues require a hammer. Most moral issues, I would argue, require something much more: a radical reimagining of what is possible, and a complete upending of the prevailing moral sentiment.
This is why, in my heart of hearts, I drift toward the words and acts of people like Emma Goldman, Leo Tolstoy, Henry David Thoreau, Mahatma Gandhi, and Dorothy Day. These are a few of a great mass of people who have believed, over countless centuries, that the way out of violence and oppression is through radical nonviolence and civil disobedience. There’s a tendency to view this worldview as flimsy, and soft, but it’s anything but that: it’s militant, fierce, and unbending in its convictions that violence is not a tool for liberation, but rather a fundamental aspect of tyranny and oppression.
But still, because we live in a world stuck in the cycle of violence, I believe in self-defense. It’s unreasonable and unfair to expect that people, when threatened and cornered, will simply turn the other cheek, or that peaceful protest will somehow deflect bombing raids. We have to be grounded in the real world — in the world of history, struggle, and the push and pull between oppressors and the oppressed. That occasionally requires resistance.
And still, even with that shard of practicality, I still believe that violence is a dead end. War and killing is the ultimate Ouroboros: the snake eating its own tail. Once you start, the process never ends, and violence and retribution become its own means and ends.
What is there really to say about a tragedy? I struggle with this. There’s been a lot of handwringing and searching for the ‘perfect words’, from journalists, pundits, and politicians trying to thread the needle when it comes to this war. Some of this is public relations, and politicians following the drift of the wind. But much of it is genuine, too, from people trying to unpack the history and the nuance while also being resolute in standing with the innocent and powerless.
Still, I think that the writer Kurt Vonnegut was right: there’s nothing really good to say about a tragedy like this.
In his famous novel Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut wrote about the Allied firebombing of Dresden during the last months of the Second World War, a bombing that was by all accounts useless to the war effort and a loss of more than 25,000 innocent civilians. In the preface to his book, he grapples with his struggle to write the book, and make sense of his own time as an American prisoner of war during the firebombing of the city:
“It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds. And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like “Poo-tee-weet?”
He was right, of course. But in our case, by all accounts, the massacre is only beginning, and shifting. There is going to be no quiet in Gaza or the West Bank any time soon. The people there do not know when they will hear the birds again. To paraphrase what Sir Edward Grey said in August 1914, on the eve of the First World War: The lamps are going out all over Gaza. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.
The massacre that is about to occur, and is already occurring, is avoidable. There is nothing that says that an attack by Hamas has to be met by a complete leveling of the Gaza Strip. The international response is partially to blame for this escalation. In a rush to provide sympathy and material support for Israel, the governments of the West have essentially given Netanyahu’s government carte blanche to annihilate Palestine.
In that way, this moment doesn’t feel so different than the immediate aftermath of 9/11. In both instances, countless lives have been lost, families ripped apart, and people killed who should still be alive. Both moments should have spurred a mass inflection of what violence is, and how it should be met. But in America, post 9/11, the rhetoric of the Western media and the public at large was frenzied, delusional, bloodthirsty, and completely incapable of turning a look inward, or contextualizing history. And we know now the horrors that led to: the invasion of Afghanistan, the occupation of Iraq, the horrors of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. At least 400,000 civilians were killed due to the American ‘War on Terror’. Which prompts the question: who are the terrorists?
But there were people, even Americans, who in the wake of 9/11 urged restraint and reason. Of all the voices post 9/11, Susan Sontag understood this the most. In the week after the September 11th attacks, Sontag took to the New Yorker to share her thoughts, writing in Tuesday And After;
“The disconnect between last Tuesday’s monstrous dose of reality and the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators is startling, depressing. The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public… A wide spectrum of public figures, in and out of office, who are strongly opposed to the policies being pursued abroad by this Administration apparently feel free to say nothing more than that they stand united behind President Bush. A lot of thinking needs to be done, and perhaps is being done in Washington and elsewhere, about the ineptitude of American intelligence and counter-intelligence, about options available to American foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, and about what constitutes a smart program of military defense. But the public is not being asked to bear much of the burden of reality….The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy….
Those in public office have let us know that they consider their task to be a manipulative one: confidence-building and grief management. Politics, the politics of a democracy—which entails disagreement, which promotes candor—has been replaced by psychotherapy. Let’s by all means grieve together. But let’s not be stupid together.”
Words, of course, will not fix this issue, nor bring back the innocent dead, nor protect the residents of Gaza from the bombings ahead. But the very least we can do is not feed into the bloodthirstiness and need for revenge. We have to defuse the tone of violence and demand better. Or else we may never see the lights return in our lifetime.
There is one last thought that I have. There is nuance, sure, in the Israel-Palestine conflict. But then, there is not.
Most of the world powers truly responsible for this crisis now get to quietly avoid the brunt of accountability. Germany, for one, is not brought up enough. They are the ones who wrought the terrors on the Jews of Europe, yet now they get to plaster the image of the Israeli flag on the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, the gate under which the Nazis marched, as if the goosestepping never happened, as if all is forgotten.
Britain and France get to release their statements and play the responsible peaceniks, yet they have never truly paid for how they carved up the Middle East and most of the world in their plays at Empire, nor the horrors they brought upon colonized people all across the world.
And America is still the global hegemon, and the country responsible for the entire world order, but the world order specifically that allows this crisis in Israel and Palestine to persist. They supply the guns and missiles that will be dropped on Gaza. This next massacre will be enabled, and abetted, by the United States.
As complicated as we want to pretend that this conflict is, it’s in some ways glaringly simple: it’s about oppressor and oppressed. An Apartheid state exists in Israel. Palestinians do not reap the benefits of fully-fledged citizens. Over generations, Palestinians have been forced from their homes, displaced from their land, pushed into a tiny strip behind walls and constant military threat. A whole people has been shoved into a corner, deprived of their humanity, and abandoned by the world at large. The oppression of the Palestinians is one of the great tragedies of our time. And there is no end in sight: it is only getting worse.
We should all want peace. We should all want human flourishing. But peace is impossible when a people are denied their essential humanity. We should ask ourselves, then: what can we do? We should begin by asking what peace is: is it just a temporary stop to the bombing, and a preservation of the status quo? Or is it something bigger, and something challenging to grasp: a complete upending of the current order, a world where oppression can’t exist, and violence cannot be the answer?
Until that point, I’m left thinking of a long passage that I love, from a book that is powerful in its righteous indignation. I’m quoting from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, in a scene where people are being evicted and forced to migrate from the land they have worked and loved for generations;
“And the great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact: when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed…
Three hundred thousand, hungry and miserable; if they ever know themselves, the land will be theirs and all the gas, all the rifles in the world won’t stop them.”