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Six months later

‘revenge: to be satisfied with retaliation for offence’

‘vengeance: punishment inflicted, retribution exacted for wrong to oneself’. (OED)

The Israelis must be feeling satisfied. They have inflicted punishment and obtained retribution in a grandiose, biblical manner. Civil infrastructure in Gaza is destroyed. Schools, hospitals, universities, cultural centres, mosques, churches, police stations, council offices, electricity supply, sewage, water supply, roads, communication networks, commerce, media, housing – all gone. Thousands of men, women and children dead, whole families wiped out, thousands more wounded and disabled, the population traumatised. And now, starvation. As order disappears and dribbles of food arrive, gangs form. Brute survival takes over, a new vengeance.

‘Gaza, Gaza, don’t you cry, Palestine will never die!’ was a chant at initial demonstrations.. But a people and a culture have been destroyed. ‘Treat them like dogs’, ‘They are animals’ were the slogans. An army of brainwashed youths, armed with the most sophisticated weapons on earth, have run riot in a prolonged killing spree. The new technologies buzz overhead, the robots command, the algorithms rule. I look at Netanyahu and his cabinet of fellow thugs, at Biden and Sunak and the Hannah Arendt’s phrase, ‘the banality of evil’ comes to mind.

How does one react? What are the ethics of reaction, the ethics of living alongside this? To be in for the long, obsessive haul of persuading a majority of fellow citizens, many of whom are indifferent, to boycott this society and then to judge the individuals?  For the brave to choose martyrdom so that the murdering becomes internationalised and the above process is hastened? To dream of and work toward a better world? Like Sylvia Plath, to insist on the poetry of death?  To immerse oneself in the day to day before the next horror impacts viscerally? To vainly hope that there is some innate ethical necessity in human beings which leads to Israeli society itself imploding?

We live in strange and difficult times.

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Facing the crisis

I have spent the last three weeks in Sydney with my three year old moko and his whanau, going for walks and bike rides, playing ball, building things, attending bath times, throwing stones in ponds, braving waves at the beach, choosing foods to eat, bouncing balloons, learning catching and batting skills, accepting challenges, language skills growing exponentially, experiencing moments of hilarity and mischief, fascinated by pee and poo, occasionally dissolving into tears at a knock, and occasionally experiencing moments of deep pondering – you know the score and the joy of life for a three year old.

In which context, the horror of Gaza is inconceivable. Yet, what do you call them?: thugs, fascists, brutes, liars, manipulators, colonists, collaborators, are conceiving this horror on a daily basis. They are the embodiment of evil – and I don’t use the word lightly. Often there is a psycho analytic excuse for the murderer – a childhood trauma of intensity, but these people don’t have that excuse. They embody what has been called the banality of evil, the everydayness of the death camp. And as for the collaborators, the excusers, the US officials, that empty eyed UN ambassador, that tottering President… contempt is the singular badge for these people.

Occasionally the three year old would take pleasure in knocking over a sand castle or a construction, would throw the miniature baby toy out of the bath with a maniacal cackle and I would think that dictators probably operate at the level of three year olds. But the three year old is also rapidly learning empathy.

But not Israel. Israel has become a state embodying evil and thankfully more and more people and states are acknowledging this reality, bar some distressed religiously confused souls, some cultural pretenders like Bob Marley’s son; and of course the courtiers – the mouthers of platitudes and the dead-eyed Dicks of the talk shows.

But there is as well, the indifferent, too busy with their three year olds and the washing and the mortgage.

And there are the arms and oil sellers, busy with their profits. Perhaps these are the most contemptible. For, if Israel were denied arms and oil, the war would stop tomorrow.

And what are we learning from this crisis?  I would repeat the sentiments of some Canadian activists:

We have to admit the crisis and realise that all the crises are connected. Rather than put our energy and tolerance of risk into surviving individually within a decaying capitalist system, let us put our energy into and take the risk of establishing relationships of solidarity.

And then they pose a set of questions:

  • Given unstable incomes, unstable housing and an unknown future how do we organise?
  • Can we organise without money, space, stability and experts?
  • Do we trust ourselves?
  • In the dark age of data collection, control by algorithm and the neuro-hacking of social media, can we disentangle our nervous systems from the habits of capitalism ?
  • Have we the courage to be disobedient in terms of energy and time?
  • Can we look at wishes not problems?
  • Can we understand that difference and change are our greatest powers?
  • Can we understand that reciprocity is complex and that post capitalist reciprocation looks different? (By this they mean that relationships of gift and reception, work and payment are not simply binary.)
  • Let us understand that what we are doing and making is done and made by workers, for the community.
  • Whatever we do has to be such that it cannot be colonised by google, has to outlast capitalism and doesn’t replace the government’s work.
  • Radical change is no longer about a singular confrontation or revolution, but rather a complex integration of multiple responses operating in a precarious manner – indigenous, gender, worker, hunter and gatherer, sexual orientation, national, ability, age, environmental, with often the conflict being between this diversity and the imposers of regularity. 
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Taking a break from Gaza

The totally brutal destruction of Gaza continues. The knowledge that there is a large natural gas deposit off the Coast which would come under the jurisdiction of any Palestinian state which included Gaza lends a Job-like cynicism as the body count grows. There are global murmurs of discontent but only the South Africans and the Irish are blunt in their condemnation. New Zealand hiccups apologetically.

But it is play week, a week each year when we resurrect and perform a classic within seven days. This year it is Bruce Mason’s The End of the Golden Weather, so it is back to the 1930s and the coming of age of a lad with artistic urges. It is an age of seeming innocence, despite the Depression, with the only blot the lunatics who need to be locked away. Netanyahu? Biden?

Story telling is a complex task, to include description and to play the myriad characters – curiously Cubist in nature – even though it is the most ancient of art forms. So, the world faded away as a singular intent took over.

Of course there is the fallacy of art – those orchestras in the death camps. Will, one day, people make theatre out of what’s happening in Gaza? If so, why? And then the diplomacy. One could make theatre out of the diplomacy. Those daily phone calls between Netanyahu and Biden, perhaps becoming sterner, each with their scripts concocted by advisors. What a task for a scribe.

Before the performances are over and life returns to normal. Except in Gaza there is no normality, nor likely to be, for the gas exploration leases have been let and the aim is to supply Europe so that it is no longer reliant on Russia. Politics is, as Machiavelli wrote, a despicable practice.

At least theatre has the grace to disappear, leaving only a memory.

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The fragmentation of the working class

Once, political and union knowledge was passed on within working class families. That is no longer the case. As a result, there is an uphill battle for unions to prove their effectiveness in the workplace. It is made even more difficult bby the fact that many of the gains made by unions have become workplace law administered by the Labour department. And then there is the free loading by non-union members, with gains made by union members  automatically being passed on to all staff.

But as well, there is the fragmentation of community, especially in urban areas.  Recently I proposed to a labour history group I belong to, that the new history curriculum in schools, which emphasises local content, presented an opportunity for unionists and labour historians to provide local working class stories to schools in an area. There was something of a stunned silence. How do you make contact with schools? How would you write up the material? Who’s got the time? Doesn’t take long I reassured them. But the making contact proved insurmountable. Yet community unionism is a buzz word?

Generally, the urban left is divorced from the working class communities who have often been pushed into the outer suburbs in order to leave the urban centres to professionals. The gap becomes even wider as the urban left becomes engrossed in identity issues. And of course the academy and the community are rare bedfellows.

The fragmentation therefore continues.

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Out of control

The tragedy of Gaza assumes biblical proportions: an angry Jehovah, destruction, plague… unthinkable in a period of supposed rules-based global order. The pain is visceral. A sermon is preached in Jerusalem which resurrects Christianity as a spiritual force, but the genocide will continue. The aim is clear: to expel the Palestinians from the territory claimed by Israel. Those remaining will be exterminated. The gods of war hope the conflict escalates so that they can bomb Damascus – if only Iran would give them an excuse as well – I’m sure the AI logarithm has identified the targets for the dumb bombs to fall. Meanwhile, Uncle Joe prissily studies his fingernails.

The only hope is for the Arabs and the Chinese and other Brix nations to hastily install a new world order; the French and the Irish (who have been wonderfully staunch – shame on NZ and Australia) might join. Only a massive boycotting, sanctioning and divesting will stop this terrorist state.

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The banality of evil

I visited a friend who lives on a lifestyle block; a good person, even a virtuous person, but when I commented on the horror of what is happening in Gaza, the friend looked away and talked of the garden. I repeated the statement and our eyes met, then we looked away. When faced with evil one ends up looking away. Some resort to the rally, chanting the slogans to passers by who are looking away. And beneath the evil is the banality of a leader who has been humiliated, whose reputation is at stake, who has been made a laughing stock of and is now on a revenge rampage. Age old, these raping, looting, wreckers trampling on the enemy, the act dreadfully magnified by modern weaponry.

Add the disgusting games of diplomacy, the evil buried in carefully chosen language. One looks away. And we can. We’re not faced with the bombing, the death, the cell, the torturer… we can look away from the banality of evil. One day it may change.

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The bureaucracy of genocide

Primo Levi’s astonishing account of a year in Auschwitz, If this is a man, reveals a mad bureaucracy at work as the Nazis administered this concentration/death camp: the giving out and tattooing of numbers, the incessant roll calls, the requirement for neat bed making and uniform wearing, the constant selections of those fit enough to work and those for the gas chamber, the detailed hierarchy with standard of food, clothing and accommodation attached to each role. Children were expendable, being useless mouths to feed; ditto pregnant women.  Those seeing out each day as slave labour had to learn complex and dehumanising  skills of survival without any hope in a future. And at the end, as the Russians advanced, the total disintegration into a macabre, corpse-ridden world.

There is a similarly mad bureaucracy of genocide beginning to operate in Gaza, with the IDF bureaucrats, having obliterated Northern Gaza and world opinion tut tutting, spending the ceasefire period designing a more intricate map of destruction for Southern Gaza, presumably having realised that not all the world is unconditionally supporting their final solution to the colonial state’s ‘Arab problem’. Accordingly, they will warn a district’s inhabitants before reducing the district to rubble. They will then move to the next district. It’s not painting by numbers, rather destruction by numbers.

 A ridiculous logic is operating. Hamas is hanging out in tunnels, so don’t go into the tunnels to sort it out, bomb that which is above the tunnels. I get the impression of a defence force of cowards, hiding in planes (Hamas have no air force or air defence system), or tanks or drone command centres. Person to person combat is too dangerous.

It seems they’re using AI to generate the list of targets. Presumably data is inputted: name of presumed militant, sympathetic facebook posts, overheard conversations, seen at a demo or two,  address, movement patterns, family connections; the algorithm spits out a target and boom, there goes an apartment block, the bigger the better, for those suffering the collateral damage will be losing sympathy with Hamas.

Further craziness is revealed. The IDF knew of the October 7th Hamas plan a year ago, but dismissed it as aspirational. They were further warned by their ‘spotters’ (those who keep an eye on the strip) during the week leading up to it but told them to be quiet. Did they actually want it to happen so they could then have an excuse to begin the final solution: to expel all the remaining Arabs into tents in the Egyptian desert and that’s been the plan for a while? Nothing is impossible.

The whole world’s watching. This is all over the news. So what? Those who count have given unconditional support. The Israeli intelligence system is intertwined with the CIA and MI5 and the Europeans, as is the Israeli military with the other militaries. And the politicians. The media connections are sound. And always the Israelis have the excuse of being privileged religious/ethnic victims who are eternally deserving of compensation. As for ‘the Arabs’ in the West Bank, they put them in prison for as long as they want, without trial, they torture them, destroy their houses and kill them regularly, the settlers assisting.

There is rumour that before any such operation as the Gaza invasion, a death figure is proposed. Forty thousand seems to be the current figure, mainly women and children. That’ll help  the demographic problem.

It is all obscene and insane, and the worst thing is that Auschwitz was kept secret. This is being universally witnessed and no-one in authority is saying no apart from demonstrators and wimps at the UN and NGOs who don’t really count. This situation is as psychotic as any final solution. And there begin to be the photos now that remind one of the death camps – the texture of hopelessness is the same.

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A red at the Warehouse

Being pro-Palestinian on the Coast (and perhaps in other places) is a little like being a Communist Party member in the old days, existing on the margins of mainstream society, something akin to a nutter or a religious extremist believing in a narrative which challenges the mainstream narrative – or the lack of one.  In fact, the latter is the case, for there is no mainstream narrative other than the story of the accumulation of private capital (house, boat etc) and the personal dramas of relationship. There’s no idea of how the power structure works, of colonialism, imperialism, power blocs, racism, monetary system and controls, military alliances, media hegemony, the distraction of the spectacle, the resource battles, North versus South… None of this is known except as a form of fragmented gossip and the threats of local disasters, gangs, scams and bankruptcy – producing a generalised paranoia that it is the duty of government to alleviate.

Because genocide so thorough and blatant as what is happening in Gaza is so horrifying one is compelled to try to tell the story and in doing so, in the same way as the mask of the global system has been ripped off,  the local one is lowered: the horrified frozen stare of the bank teller when the Palestinian flag flutters and Gaza in the form of a petition, walks through the door; the neatly dressed petit bourgeois New World shoppers in the spacious car park which allows no gathering or intimacy; and then to the Warehouse where the lumpy working class are more welcoming and interested in our story of oppression, until the manager, a brisk, broad shouldered blonde who obviously tolerates no nonsense comes out and sends us on our way: This is private property and you guys don’t have permission.

How long would the seller of the People’s Voice last outside the Warehouse, a corporation which has taken over the colour red? The question is extraordinary. But actually, until the paper is being sold at the Warehouse entrance there is little hope. What I mean by this perhaps absurdly nostalgic thought, is that until a coherent version of the world order is being articulated to the working class, even if that coherence is largely ignored, ‘There is no alternative’ will rule the day.

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Gaza and Satire

Bertold Brecht wrote The Resistable Rise of Arturo Uri, a play which satirised Adolf Hitler as a Chicago mobster, in 1941. Hitler was easy meat, for he satirised himself with his narcissistic performances. But lurking in the wings is the human result of those performances.

The far right Israeli leadership, the Israeli Defence Force and its US backers (with applause from European leaders) – if their acts were not so appalling – are also great material for satire: Joe Biden with a walker and a shopping list pinned to his jacket; Netanyahu running a 10 pin bowling alley as a front for a cocaine dealership with a sideline in arms sales (provided by Joe), the Israeli president in skull cap selling sexy underwear to fundamentalist Arab leaders, radical evangelical Christians wearing angel wings waiting for the rapture in an Arizona desert; Sulla Braverman making a curry from drowned refugees; a frightened teenage Israeli soldier in all the gear entering a children’s hospital hysterically screaming, All men between sixteen and forty put your hands up and take off your clothes and the Palestinian surgeon saying, I am afraid the two acts are contradictory; meanwhile an Israeli actress is being filmed in her role of fake Palestinian nurse pleading with Hamas to stop using hospitals as command centres, the sound technician saying, we’ll dub in explosions later and the director shouting, Cry louder, we need something authentic, as the IDF colonel displays three rusty rifles; the IDF soldier standing in front of a mountain of rubble with a rainbow flag on which is written the word, Freedom – identity politics gone mad.

Unfortunately, while it might seem impossible to take these people seriously, satire does not destroy them. It should but doesn’t. For it won’t stop bombs falling and children dying. But then tragedy wouldn’t stop this horror either. Art is powerless. Even Bansky is silent. For the shopping list pinned to Biden’s jacket is for 15 billion dollars worth of arms for the fascists, to be forwarded without democratic scrutiny.

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