77 years and two years

or: On Palestine

I woke up at 3am and checked my phone, because I’m not always the person I want to be and I don’t always have the habits I want to have. I woke up, checked my phone, and saw that another ship from the aid flotilla to Palestine had been intercepted in international waters by the Israeli military. I saw that people I know and that people I could know had been kidnapped, and that by all accounts they are currently facing torture at the hands of the Israeli state.

I didn’t get back to sleep easily.

I assume all of you are already paying attention to the aid flotillas, ships full of some the bravest fuckers in this whole world, but if you’re not, please do. There are specific calls to action each time an activist is kidnapped.

I don’t write about Palestine a lot, though I’ve thought about it more days than not for the past two years. I don’t write about it because I’m not the voice that people should be listening to on the subject. I worry, maybe more than I should, about taking up space in the conversation.

But I do know some things.

I know it’s been 77 years (and longer) of genocide and resistance in Palestine, and now two years of a dramatic escalation in Gaza. All of this history and the present is worth understanding, especially if you have sympathy towards Zionism or in your head conflate Zionism with Judaism.

I’ve covered some of this history before on my podcast, including discussions of Israeli and international solidarity with Palestinians and the long history of hunger strikes. Zionism was consciously a settler-colonial project (because those weren’t dirty words to Europeans at the time that Zionism got its start in the late 19th century) and the first Zionist settlements in Palestine created a society (and importantly, economy) entirely apart from the existing people and culture of the area. I write “the first Zionist settlements” and not “the first Jewish settlements”, because Jews have been living in Palestine forever, including quite actively in the 19th century before Zionism.

While the Ottoman empire did not provide full and equal rights to religious minorities, it was substantially kinder to Jews than Europe was. In 1492 when Jews were expelled from the Iberian peninsula, it was the Ottomans who took them in. Gay men in Europe also fled to the Ottoman empire because Muslim society was substantially more welcoming to homosexuality than Christian Europe was. (The Ottoman empire is deserving of its own separate critique, which I discussed in length in my episodes about resistance to the Armenian genocide.)

I don’t think I can say it as well as the Jewish anti-zionists, and it’s something you’ve likely read about time after time already in the past few years, but we must never, never let Judaism or Jewishness be conflated with Zionism. It’s what both Zionists and the antisemites (and the not-actually-rare antisemitic right wing Christian Zionists) want you to do.

The best book I’ve read personally on the history of the Zionist project is The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, by Rashid Khalidi.

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I’ve been taking this memoir class from Raechel Anne Jolie, because in the abstract I’m trying to write some kind of memoir and Raechel knows what she’s doing. For that memoir writing, I’ve been looking at old journals and old writing, and I’ve been reading a lot about the half a year I spent living in Amsterdam.

When I lived in Amsterdam (in 2005 and 2006), I was friends with an awful lot of Israelis, because an awful lot of Israeli anarchists lived in Amsterdam because they were refusing to serve in the IDF/IOF. Because the oppression of Palestinians didn’t start two years ago.

I worry about focusing on the experiences of these Israelis, because they shouldn’t be centered in the conversation any more than white Americans should be centered in conversations about the decolonization that is just as necessary here in North America. But people don’t control how they are born, and for me, knowing those Israelis in Amsterdam made it quite easy for me to understand that Judaism and Zionism are two things that are worlds apart.

I can tell you about two young men, both named Yoni. One Yoni was a fierce anarchist activist, principled and organized. When he’d been called in to serve in the IDF, he’d marched into that office and told them there was no way he would pick up a rifle to oppress the Palestinians. He spent some time in prison for his refusal of service and then fucked off out of the country.

The other Yoni was the kid who got me into Blind Guardian. He loved chaos and magic and told me he was the drummer for every anarcho-punk band in Israel though he liked metal a whole lot more. When he’d been called up to serve, he’d gone to the IDF and said “sure, give me a gun. I want to kill people. I don’t know who I’m going to kill. Could be me, could be you, but give me a gun.” The IDF decided they didn’t want chaos magician Yoni.

You won’t be shocked to know that I made closer friends with Chaos Yoni, though the main story I have about him is that I accidentally hit him in the ear with a baton while we were playing around with riot gear our friends had stolen from the police. His whole ear turned purple and blue for about a week.

I can also tell you about Tal. Rest in peace, Tal. Tal was this Israeli anarchist living in Amsterdam, who died young of cancer. She was fairly short. She was dating a Dutch man named Sjoerd (pronounced, roughly, “short”) who was very tall. I found this hilarious. No one else found it funny. Tal lived in Amsterdam because she wanted nothing to do with the Israeli occupation of Palestine, but she went back, Sjoerd in tow, almost every month to join the protests in the West Bank. There, the two worked in solidarity—and as volunteer human shields—for the Palestinians in the West Bank who were engaged in one of the largest civil disobedience protest campaigns the world has ever seen and were met with gunfire at every turn.

Because the other thing to know, to remember, as we hit two years of this “war,” is that the Palestinians have tried fucking everything. They’ve tried international appeals, they’ve tried massive nonviolent campaigns, they’ve tried hunger strikes, they’ve tried working within the system. In the 1990s, after half a century of struggle, they were willing to make very, very substantial compromises to accept a two-state solution. But the offer they received (negotiated by Bill Clinton) was not a two-state solution, it was pure and raw oppression and subservience, and their struggle continued.

Anyway, free Palestine.