Trappings of Warspeak
“The myths refuse to adjust their plot.
They may suffer a sudden malfunction
and some of the ships may drift to a dry
unpopulated land
where the imaginary becomes afflicted with the real …
but they don’t change their plot.
Whenever they find a reality that doesn’t suit them
they alter it with a bulldozer,
because reality is an ongoing text, lovely
white, without malady …
”
Since October 7, 2023 at least 38,000 Palestinians have been murdered by the State of Israel, with several million forcibly displaced, often repeatedly. 1200 Israelis were murdered by Hamas that day, and 251 hostages were taken. The biases of the Western press are evident in ongoing reporting of the destruction that has followed, with October 7 often reflected as the moment that starts the story, the chapters leading up to it rarely acknowledged. Headlines betray their biases as much by what they leave out as what they include, demonstrating in real time the active power of silence as a tool for manipulating public opinion. Headlines contribute to dehumanization when they use passive constructions such as “[x] people died” to describe one group’s violence, versus active constructions and highly-connotated verbs like “murder,” “massacre,” and “assault” for another group’s violence. Headlines contribute to dehumanization when they emphasize the numbers of Israeli soldiers killed in a particular military action with no mention of the number of Palestinians killed in that same action, and when they employ terms like “pure evil” and “terrorism” against Hamas while avoiding description of incidents of IDF brutality and the ongoing depravity (and illegality) of the Israeli settler movement. Social media engagements also contribute to dehumanization when they fail to differentiate between citizens and their governments, when their slogans imply erasure, when their labels and symbols encourage hate crimes, and when they celebrate violence as a necessary condition of either continued coloniality or decoloniality. In the shadow of so much dehumanization, we all risk contributing to an embedded architecture of silence when choosing what to speak to, what words and images to center in our speech, and what to leave out. (We are all leaving out a lot.)
In the months following October 7, conflict between Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces and the Sudanese Armed Forces has escalated with considerable civilian casualties; in the sixth months leading up to this escalation, civilian deaths were estimated to be over 5000 people, with an additional 12,000 injured, and 5.7 million forcibly displaced. In September 2023, an Azerbaijani offensive in Artsakh left hundreds dead in a 24-hour period and sent 100,000 Armenian refugees toward Yerevan in the week that followed, with many more since then. Separatist groups in northern Myanmar launched offensives in November 2023 that displaced more than 25,000 people in one week, adding to the more than one million Rohingya who have been displaced since the 1990s. In May 2024, another wave of violence displaced 45,000 more. Ongoing violence in DR Congo continues to escalate, forcing new displacements and further destabilizing the hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people from earlier waves of violence. Asylum seekers from South and Central America are being turned away at the US-Mexico border in record numbers. Putin’s assault on Ukraine continues. Missing and murdered indigenous women continue to be disappeared. This list, too, leaves out many stories, an inevitability in the ongoing project of deciding when and where to raise our voices against the world’s injustices, which are too numerous to grasp (let alone center to the degree that each deserves).
Social media-driven activism warns us that “silence is violence,” but inside that silence I am struggling to negotiate an underlying constellation of conflicting visions and reductive slogans, loaded symbols, and simplistic appeals to action that weaponize shame and embolden other silences. It is within this constellation that I center my own continuing call for immediate and unconditional ceasefire in Gaza. The call is unconditional, but my motivation to speak it carries a commitment to complexity that is often maligned in activist spaces that I would otherwise embrace. Reductionist language has immediate life-and-death implications in a landscape of historical patterns of retributive destruction and multiple fundamentalisms, and I do not want my call to be understood as an endorsement of any of those fundamentalisms.
As a US-American citizen living and working in Finland, after many years teaching in an international boarding secondary school in the USA, I find myself moving between irreconcilable perspectives, many of which I understand only peripherally. I was raised in a liberal city in the US Pacific Northwest, and I attended a public high school with a focus on international awareness that was grounded in the liberal humanist multiculturalism of the 1990s – a multiculturalism defined by hope and a sense of shared humanity, but often failing to witness the realities of privilege and institutional injustice that preclude this shared humanity in practice. My city included a thriving and civically active Jewish community, and in school we studied the Jewish Holocaust every year. We embraced Israel as the answer to 2000 years of the Jewish experience of marginalization, oppression, and attempted extermination throughout the world. I remember reading The Diary of Anne Frank at 13, the same age she was when she began writing it, relating her humanity to my own and wondering how the world could deny her this with such incomprehensible cruelty. In my early 20s, I visited the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Berlin; I froze among the jagged commemorative columns, their vertigo-inducing sensory disruption an effective artistic expression of the fundamental wrongness of our worst human tendencies. I performed Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time in college, adding my voice to a musical tradition that began with the Görlitz prisoners of war; these musicians rehearsed the piece in a camp bathroom and premiered for their fellow prisoners after having been captured in their efforts to stop the Nazis during World War II.
I did not encounter any Palestinian perspectives on the establishment of the State of Israel until my mid-20s. I read Elias Khoury’s Gate of the Sun, learned of the 1948 Nakba, and realized that the stories I had been told of Israel’s beginnings were, at best (and dangerously), partial. Much had been left out of my education. Since that moment of first exposure with Khoury, I have spent many hours reading in and around Palestinian literary traditions, embracing the passion and often-unparalleled depth of Mahmoud Darwish, Ghassan Kanafani, Mourid Barghouti, Naomi Shihab Nye, and so many others. I have poignant memories of floating in the Dead Sea on the Jordanian side, looking out across the water at Palestine, wondering how such a beautiful place could be permitted to be the site of so much historical and contemporary suffering. I have met and performed with musicians across various Arab and Israeli traditions, many of whom communicate a commitment to peace and shared humanity through their artistic practice, while acknowledging the many injustices their people face. My students, too, have taught me a great deal about the daily realities of oppression that Palestinians have experienced within and outside of Palestine in the 75 years since Israel’s first borders were drawn over them, as well as teaching me about the ongoing forces of anti-Semitism that continue to manifest throughout the world in the aftermath of the Holocaust. The radiant humanity inherent in struggle and loss that is so poignantly offered in the works of writers and artists from across these traditions, as well as in the young people inspired by them, gives me a sense of something more amidst the impossibility of peace that our war narratives entrench. Embracing that sense of “more” requires a commitment to honoring the complexity of our global entanglements.
I believe that it is accurate (and important) to describe the current Israeli state violence as genocide, according to my understanding of UN-sanctioned definitions. Certain highly placed members of the Israeli government, as well as members of coalitions who support Netanyahu’s far-right orientation, have communicated genocidal intent. The official response to these types of statements has been limited to vague claims that these speakers do not speak for the government as a whole, while many of them continue to hold positions of power and influence. Certain exterminating practices of the IDF are nearly impossible to define as anything other than intentional, although many continue to try. If the impact of Israel’s war actions includes mass displacement, famine and major health crises, mass killings of people whose primary orientation is to live their lives to their full potential, mass destruction of landscape and infrastructure that will preclude rebuilding in a manner similar to what was razed (which itself was representative of long term, ethnically-grounded injustices) and which will continue to contribute to ongoing casualties for years to come, the specter of the word “genocide” can’t be ignored. The Palestinian people are facing cultural and physical extinction if Israel’s current war approach is permitted to continue. The losses are already too profound to bear, and any focus on debating intent (an aspect of the UN definition of genocide that is notoriously difficult to prove) clouds a reality of death and destruction that at this stage is not contestable.
I also believe that it is important to acknowledge that the 1988 Hamas charter suggested genocide of Jews as a primary and ongoing goal (see Article 7). This language was removed and the charter revised in 2017, although the actions of October 7 raise questions as to to what degree genocidal intent remains in contemporary Hamas values. My call for ceasefire is not an endorsement of the violence of October 7, or of the expressed totalizing vision of Hamas in this context; I am not willing to justify that violence on any terms. I am discouraged by how often individuals distant from these conflicts are comfortable writing off the Israeli hostage experience as a casualty of a larger struggle for Palestinian self-determination, just as I am discouraged by how often individuals distant from these conflicts are comfortable writing off the Palestinian experience of ongoing oppression and violence as a necessity of Israeli state security. My call for ceasefire comes with the belief that continued retaliatory cruelty and polarizing rhetoric hurts everyone, and that, at a minimum, the people of Palestine deserve to participate in a full and shared humanity alongside the people of Israel, with equal and internationally-legitimated sovereignty, while those most impacted lead the difficult work of untangling their futures. For any of us the rest of us to accept the presence of genocidal ideologies, active or implied, as a necessary part of our participation in the ongoing struggle for self-determination and survival for Palestinians or Israelis does violence to their humanity, as well as to the lives at risk in and between the lines of the charters of their governments.
Along these lines, to describe this genocide within the frame of settler colonialism suggests a metaphor that requires considerable attention to nuance if it is to be employed in the service of broader decolonial justice. It is in the nuances of coloniality that this struggle takes on its unique pain, and it is in these nuances that it deserves to be seen. Elements of colonialism are clearly evident in the current Israeli settler movement, a particularly destructive form of contemporary violence that has expressed itself as state-sanctioned. Elements of colonialism are especially evident in the 1948 Nakba, the 1967 border theft, and throughout the complex history of US and European nations defining new boundaries and practical limits of sovereignty of a people twice colonized in the several centuries leading up to the Second World War (by the Ottomans and then the British). Elements of colonialism are evident in the largely unconditional military support offered to Israel by the United States and European nations, and the unchecked freedom with which the IDF continues to operate, despite global claims of war crimes. These are noteworthy expressions of an ongoing global colonial framework that continues to structurally enable this genocide and others. But it also matters that the Jewish population of Israel includes many Jews of more recent Middle Eastern histories, often unwelcome in their previous countries of origin and discriminated against across two thousand years of their history in the Middle East. It matters that the origins of the Israeli state are grounded in the aftermath of the Jewish Holocaust, as well as in the Palestinian erasure that accompanies Zionist narratives that predate the Third Reich. It matters that multiple contemporary populations understand themselves to hold ethnic and religious origins in the same landscape. It matters that several generations of Israelis have been born to that landscape and know it as their only home after their ancestors survived attempted extermination, while at the same time generations of displaced Palestinians continue to live in forced exile, both within and beyond the Israeli state borders. While I do not believe that any of these specificities justify in any way the ongoing actions of state-sponsored genocide and ongoing land theft (perpetrated by Israel, the United States, and complicit European nations) against the people of Gaza, I do believe that these nuances matter in trying to understand how the world got here, and in attempting to understand the forces of our conflicting values as those of us living outside of this long-contested land observe and respond.
I believe that all humans deserve self-determination and collective solidarity, in tandem with community responsibility to the whole (rather than merely the group). As the planet warms to the brink of destruction, our cultural and emotional ties to land will be, quite literally, underwater or up in flames. This is not far in the future; it is already happening, and involuntary migration will increase exponentially over the next few decades. While a sovereign and internationally-recognized Palestinian state is critical first step towards remedial justice, I also believe that the borders of anyone’s self-determination shouldn’t be defined by any government in the current geopolitical configuration, especially as those governments are often sustained by neoliberal, ethnonationalist or other forms of in-group-out-group structures that necessarily deny our shared humanity and shared struggle for survival. Our ongoing work is to embrace the possibility that our narratives of inevitability can be transcended if we allow ourselves to imagine new languages for love and justice, and more respectful relationships with the land that sustains us. Within this work, I hope to retain the choice to keep questioning what I think I know, to keep pushing the boundaries of my inherited narratives, and to keep challenging my deeply felt values and beliefs in the service of a lasting peace and existential integrity for which we have no charter.
“Life.
Life in its entirety,
life with its shortcomings,
hosts neighboring stars
that are timeless …
and immigrant clouds
that are placeless.
And life here
wonders:
How do we bring it back to life!”