From lundi matin #402 (06/11/2023) …
Profanations and barbarisms
The Israeli government, by fanatically bombing Gaza, is profaning the deaths of October 7. And it is profaning those who died long before, under the bullets of the Nazis and in the gas chambers, since it dares to invoke their memory to massacre without restraint. I feel a deep shame as a Jew and I state, not in my name, nor in that of so many of my people who perished 80 years ago.
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It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past. No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
We want to thank +972 Magazine for the generous permission to publish a significant article on the abuse of references and comparisons to the Holocaust by the Israeli government, in their justification of the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
+972 Magazine is unquestionably one of the most important sources of news from Palestine-Israel for English language readers, to which we are much indebted.
In an Israeli war that has been retrofitted onto a Holocaust template, it is obscene that a plea to stop further killing is now read as moral failure.
Natasha Roth-Rowland, October 28, 2023
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Angela Davis recently described “Palestine as a moral litmus test for the world”. (Al Jazeera English-Up Front, 27/10/2023) And however much we may sympathise with the statement, it also begs reflection, for what is the test evaluating precisely? What morality is under scrutiny and what is the “proper” moral position to assume?
Such questions may seem academic at the moment – even obscene for some -, but without them, and others, our moral reactions risk being just that: reactive.
In an equally recent interview, the poet-essayist-philosopher Fred Moten, takes us some way beyond unthinking accusation and condemnation, as we endeavour to think and re-think, and to act, with justice.
For those unfamiliar with Moten’s work, and, in a way, to help clarify and situate the video interview, we also share below selections from an interview given by him for the Kunstkritikk/Nordic Art Review of Norway.
And for an older intervention by Moten, in defence of a boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions, we also share a video recording of a lecture given at the American Studies Association Meeting, November 7, 2009, along with a parallel, revised text on the same theme.
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On the occasion of Italo Calvino’s birthday …
Novelists tell that piece of truth hidden at the bottom of every lie. To a psychoanalyst it is not so important whether you tell the truth or a lie because lies are as interesting, eloquent, and revealing as any claimed truth.
I feel suspicious about writers who claim to tell the whole truth about themselves, about life, or about the world. I prefer to stay with the truths I find in writers who present themselves as the most bold-faced liars.
Italo Calvino, “The Art of Fiction No. 130” (Interview), The Paris Review, Issue 124, Fall 1992
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What defines political consciousness today? A subtle conjugation of renunciation and hope. When God ordered Abraham to sacrifice Isaac on Mount Moriah, he gave up his son without hesitation and yet – at least this is what Kierkegaard suggests in Fear and Trembling – in a corner of his heart he continued to believe (faith, we know, is only a form of hope) that God would not take Isaac from him, although he had renounced him once and for all. So in the extreme situation in which we find ourselves, a lucid mind can only leave aside projects, plans and even the idea of a possible happy political community between men, and yet, at the very moment when we renounces, there we are infallibly hoping in what we had to abandon.
Renunciation and hope, idea and disenchantment, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza converge in a single person, they mutually provide each other with denial and confirmation. Only a hope, which deserting the field of false certainties of dogmas and ideologies, of churches and parties, turns with all its strength towards what it has just declared impossible, will be able to escape from the confinement of facts and strike power at its weak points, to possibly bring back the unexpected. Both in the city and the public sphere and in the darkness of private existence, it is only possible to believe and hope in this joy which we have been able to renounce.
Giorgrio Agamben, Quodlibet, 10/10/2023
From lundi matin #400, (24/10/2023) …
It could be a question of characterising the collapses that we are experiencing; the collapse of living environments, of the social world and its prisons: its institutions; the collapse of the idea of a social subject at the foundation of the political; finally, the collapse of canonised revolutionary legacies.
But what’s the point if we refuse to live them so that other worlds resurface? Because the proposition is another: it is the experience from which we must start.
Josep Rafanell i Orra, whom we regularly welcome in our pages, has just published a luminous Short Treatise on Cosmo-anarchism, published by Divergences. We publish here a short presentation of the work, followed by the book’s epilogue.
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From the Verso Books Blog (19/10/2023) …
Western critics of Israel’s apartheid policies and far-right government are frequently accused of antisemitism, but leftist and left-liberal Israelis have been decrying the country’s descent into fascism for years. In this article, Alberto Toscano argues that fascism is embedded in the logic of Israel’s colonial project.
Green-lit by Western governments and described by myriad human rights law experts as demonstrating clear ‘genocidal intent’, the State of Israel’s retaliation against Hamas’s Al Aqsa Flood October 7 attack has also elicited talk of fascism in multiple quarters. In a collective statement, the Birzeit University Union of Professors and Employees has spoken of ‘colonial fascism’ and of the ‘pornographic call to death of Arabs by settler Zionist politicians across the political lines’; in their own declaration, the Communist Party of Israel (Maki) and the left-wing coalition Hadash ‘put the full responsibility on the fascist right-wing government for the sharp and dangerous escalation’; meanwhile, Colombia’s president Gustavo Petro described the onslaught on Gaza as the ‘first experiment to deem all of us disposable’ in a ‘global 1933’ marked by climate catastrophe and capitalist entrenchment. Even quoting these lines probably falls foul of the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, which has served as an important instrument in efforts to curtail peaceful international solidarity activism against Israeli apartheid, especially in the guise of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.
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Stretching our imaginaries, our desires, for a different Palestine-Israel.
We share an essay originally published with Ill Will (18/10/2023).
Across Gaza’s fragmented collage of architectures and ruins, the abstraction of life rivals life itself. Subsumed by social technologies that densely blanket and code the territory without pause, lives are so exhaustively represented and recognized as this or that kind of life that it is the easiest thing in the world to forget that anything actually remains living beneath the thick waves of identification and classification. Refugee, militant, civilian, hostage, prisoner, soldier, and victim — these are the abstract coordinates that position lives within various military stratagems, political maneuvers, and economic programs, the particular forms of identity that are each coupled with their own particular shades and intensities of violence, the circulating codes that establish what a life is in ever higher detail, only to further establish what can be done to it. To live and die as an abstraction: this is the fate imposed on all who inhabit the space between the sea and the security fence.
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From the CrimethInc. collective, 17/10/2023 …
Right now, the Israeli military is raining bombs onto people trapped in Gaza. They have already killed almost 3000 people and displaced over a million more. This is just the latest chapter in over a century of colonial violence targeting Palestinians.
We grieve for everyone throughout the region killed, injured, or displaced on October 7 and in the days before and since. But as in any struggle, those who have the most power have the most leverage when it comes to determining what form the conflict will take. We are concerned about the lives of Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere around the world, not despite the deaths of Israelis, but because the only way to make anyone safe in the region will be to bring an end to the oppression of Palestinians.
Corporate media outlets in Europe and North America have spent the past ten days focusing attention on Israeli suffering rather than exploring the series of events that led to this situation. The vast majority of all perspectives on the situation are coming from outside Palestine. It is important to hear directly from Palestinians, who understand better than anyone else how the situation reached this point.
It has been very difficult to communicate with people in Gaza, owing to challenges including Israeli airstrikes targeting communications infrastructure. For now, we present the perspective of a Palestinian living in the north of Palestine, who speaks about different aspects of life under colonization and about the struggle for liberation through grassroots organizing and solidarity.
For more background on the situation, you can read this interview with an anarchist from Jaffa.
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Strategizing for Palestinian Solidarity: Expanding the Toolkit
“US weapons ship to Israel blocked by peace activists at port of Tacoma. Peace activists have staged a standstill at the Port of Tacoma, blocking the departure of a US ship believed to be carrying weapons destined for the state of Israel. This follows a similar action days earlier in Oakland.” (Middle East Monitor/Al Jazeera)
From the CrimethInc. collective (03/11/2023) …
From Demands to Direct Action
In Atlanta, Georgia, abolitionists and environmentalists have fought for three and a half years to stop the construction of a police militarization facility known as Cop City. The same police that are attempting to crush that movement have trained for decades with Israeli police, exchanging lethal counterinsurgency strategies. In the following text, a Jewish collective that has participated in the struggle to Stop Cop City explains why they are committed to solidarity with Palestinians and what it will take to halt the assault of the Israeli military on Gaza.
The Fayer Collective, a collective of Jewish anarchists, has participated in the fight against Cop City from the beginning as well as confronting fascists throughout the region.
Now, they are attempting to stop the bloodbath in Gaza. In their own words,
Here, the Fayer Collective explores the protests calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, arguing that solidarity movements must shift from presenting demands to taking direct action and proposing some models for how to proceed.
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