Inability to speak about Palestine
I'm sure I've written this post before, touching another world event. I wonder if I can find that post.
I've been finding myself unable to speak about what is happening in Israel & Palestine.
My inability to speak is both uninteresting and disgusting, alternately one more than the other.
I could go to a protest against what Israel is doing, easily enough, and if this continues I'm sure I will. But I've been finding myself unable to speak in what has become the "normal" way of political people speaking, posting lots of stuff on Facebook. Which isn't a form of speechlessness that strikes me often.
I don't do anger very well or easily. I find myself feeling sick and deactivated, and then find that deactivation disgusting. And then find this whole mental process to be such an example of first-world, chattering class privilege. Of course LJ is a site for myopia these days. Nothing to see here but us tumbleweeds. And lots of Russian stuff.
Maybe other people in the US are suffering from this acedia, with or without realizing it. I keep seeing people posting things that are like FUCK YEAH Anonymous shut down some Israeli websites. A world in which that is all solidarity activists have anything to say FUCK YEAH to is a world in which we've really let the people down we're supposed to be solidarizing with. When Anonymous figures out a way to shut down bomber software, I will be all FUCK YEAH.
That is alternating with people posting pictures of bloody bodies of Palestinian children. In one particularly gruesome juxtaposition, Facebook published these two pictures one after the other: a picture of a Palestinian child whose body appeared to be crushed, and a picture posted by a friend of mine in Santa Cruz of her daughter, around the same age, who was recovering from surgery for a broken arm. It was no one's fault that these pictures appeared side by side, unless there is a ghost in the network. One ten year old girl, her life treasured, recovering, loved. One ten year old girl, her life thrown away, this photo of her body a mute, faceless, yelling martyrdom.
O white antiwar activist, do you know what you are doing to be posting this photo of these dead children's bodies? Are you drawing attention to an atrocity, or reenacting their violent death? What is the intended effect of posting photos of war victims on Facebook, amidst the pictures of dinners and cats? Or what is the effect of continuing to post the dinners and cats? All I know is that I will be sick, and I can't eat, or mourn, or laugh. And yet I'm so hungry. Am I supposed to get really angry and call my Congressman? Or am I supposed to crawl in a hole and hide?
Somehow I've never quite figured out how to feel about Israel being so shitty. When I feel perfectly comfortable with how I need to feel about the US being so shitty. I mean, I can get angry about US foreign policy. Israel's treatment of the Palestinians leaves me feeling rotgut empty and cowardly. Probably I fear what my nice Jewish friends would think or feel if I posted critical things about Israel, and I flinch. Even though probably half of my nice Jewish friends are anti-Zionist or at least highly critical of Israel. I wouldn't flinch if my asshole pro-US friends took umbrage to my criticisms of US foreign policy. I suppose it's hard to completely divest from of the feelings attached to the idea of Israel as the state which was supposed to protect an oppressed people who had been victims of a genocide, a genocide most of the world blithely overlooked until it was over. The fact that that same state can now turn into its opposite, even mobilizing the threat of shoah against Palestinians, shouldn't be in the least bit surprising to someone who knows even elementary dialectics.
The vicissitudes of even simple dialectical reversals can leave you woozy.
See you in the streets about this.
I've been finding myself unable to speak about what is happening in Israel & Palestine.
My inability to speak is both uninteresting and disgusting, alternately one more than the other.
I could go to a protest against what Israel is doing, easily enough, and if this continues I'm sure I will. But I've been finding myself unable to speak in what has become the "normal" way of political people speaking, posting lots of stuff on Facebook. Which isn't a form of speechlessness that strikes me often.
I don't do anger very well or easily. I find myself feeling sick and deactivated, and then find that deactivation disgusting. And then find this whole mental process to be such an example of first-world, chattering class privilege. Of course LJ is a site for myopia these days. Nothing to see here but us tumbleweeds. And lots of Russian stuff.
Maybe other people in the US are suffering from this acedia, with or without realizing it. I keep seeing people posting things that are like FUCK YEAH Anonymous shut down some Israeli websites. A world in which that is all solidarity activists have anything to say FUCK YEAH to is a world in which we've really let the people down we're supposed to be solidarizing with. When Anonymous figures out a way to shut down bomber software, I will be all FUCK YEAH.
That is alternating with people posting pictures of bloody bodies of Palestinian children. In one particularly gruesome juxtaposition, Facebook published these two pictures one after the other: a picture of a Palestinian child whose body appeared to be crushed, and a picture posted by a friend of mine in Santa Cruz of her daughter, around the same age, who was recovering from surgery for a broken arm. It was no one's fault that these pictures appeared side by side, unless there is a ghost in the network. One ten year old girl, her life treasured, recovering, loved. One ten year old girl, her life thrown away, this photo of her body a mute, faceless, yelling martyrdom.
O white antiwar activist, do you know what you are doing to be posting this photo of these dead children's bodies? Are you drawing attention to an atrocity, or reenacting their violent death? What is the intended effect of posting photos of war victims on Facebook, amidst the pictures of dinners and cats? Or what is the effect of continuing to post the dinners and cats? All I know is that I will be sick, and I can't eat, or mourn, or laugh. And yet I'm so hungry. Am I supposed to get really angry and call my Congressman? Or am I supposed to crawl in a hole and hide?
Somehow I've never quite figured out how to feel about Israel being so shitty. When I feel perfectly comfortable with how I need to feel about the US being so shitty. I mean, I can get angry about US foreign policy. Israel's treatment of the Palestinians leaves me feeling rotgut empty and cowardly. Probably I fear what my nice Jewish friends would think or feel if I posted critical things about Israel, and I flinch. Even though probably half of my nice Jewish friends are anti-Zionist or at least highly critical of Israel. I wouldn't flinch if my asshole pro-US friends took umbrage to my criticisms of US foreign policy. I suppose it's hard to completely divest from of the feelings attached to the idea of Israel as the state which was supposed to protect an oppressed people who had been victims of a genocide, a genocide most of the world blithely overlooked until it was over. The fact that that same state can now turn into its opposite, even mobilizing the threat of shoah against Palestinians, shouldn't be in the least bit surprising to someone who knows even elementary dialectics.
The vicissitudes of even simple dialectical reversals can leave you woozy.
See you in the streets about this.