Re: <nettime> silence on Palestine?

[Brian Holmes via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

I think the celebrations of the Hamas attack that have cropped up here and
there are pathetically wrong. What's happening in Israel-Palestine right
now is the worst outcome in every respect. And it holds up a mirror to
global civilization. We should all take a long hard look.

Israel, under the influence of its war party, has become an apartheid
state. There is no way that an apartheid state can avoid bloody revolt. And
all the Western societies harbor aspects of the apartheid state.

Apartheid is a set of bureaucratic and police procedures to separate one
segment of a population, to subjugate all the people who comprise it, and
then to effectively forget them, considering that the procedures of
exclusion and subjugation are necessary and just. In the contemporary
period, when unskilled labor is not required for the production of vast
wealth, this results in unbearable juxtapositions of opulent luxury and
rank misery. The most horrible image to come out of Israel is what happened
at the music festival - both what Hamas did, and the fact that this
carefree festival could be held within a few miles of an open-air prison.

Such an image comes very close to US reality. The obscenely wealthy US is a
carceral state with racist police forces that target Black people in
particular. Ghetto conditions, without viable schooling or employment, lead
to criminality and then to prison. Once you're in prison you are subject to
extremely dehumanizing bureaucratic control, enforced by violence, often in
crumbling and overcrowded facilities whose very existence is unknown to
most people. The rage and despair this generates came into view, not
through any official channels but through cell phone videos, culminating in
the single, unequivocal scene of George Floyd's cold-blooded murder on a
city street. The uprising that ensued opened up a brief period during which
Americans came to envisage what civil war might look like.

Well, I reckon we can still envisage what that looks like, but the exercise
of democracy - through the vote, through public expression of grievances
and through institutional change - seems to have pulled us back from the
brink, for the moment anyway.

I have no illusions about how long the peace will last. What we are
experiencing in the world right now is the simultaneous breakdown of the
neoliberal world order, and the intensification of climate change. Both of
these are occurring in societies with undiminished capacities for the
production of wealth - but with radically diminished capacities for the
expression of solidarity, whether through material redistribution or
through cultural transformation in recognition of past harms. The war party
in Israel has brought this situation to its extreme. But look at what is
happening right now at the borders around the US and EU. Remember the
hang-gliders. Imagine what those borders could become in the near future.

The idea that you could be pro-Hamas is crazy. 1,500 individuals just went
on a killing rampage culminating in their own deaths, with the near certain
promise of involuntary martyrdom for their own civilians. The idea that you
could be pro-Israel is equally crazy. Israel has fallen under the
leadership of a war party that pursues colonization and accepts continuous
counter-insurgency as a norm, with the consequent dehumanization of the
killers called upon to enforce it - and of the entire society, called upon
to forget what they permit and desire. In all likelihood, the IDF will now
commit war crimes on an historic scale, hardening the murderous resentment
of Muslims across the Middle East and beyond.

The United States is already delivering more weapons to Israel. That is
wrong. They have all the weapons they need. The threat to Israel comes from
their own apartheid policies, and from the support they receive for those
policies.

The contemporary state of Israel results from a process of forced
colonization in the wake of Nazi genocide. All the Western countries have
an historical responsibility for the tragic situation that has taken form
there. The urgency now is to call a halt to hostilities, and progress
rapidly to a viable two-state solution. The $3.8 billion per year currently
transferred from the US to the IDF could go a long way to creating real
global security, through solidarity rather than violence.

Otherwise the not-so-distant image of ourselves will come out of the
Israelo-Palestinian mirror and settle on everyone's future.
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