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Gaza

Denouement

As the Gaza genocide reaches its denouement, the horror worsens. Now the starving Palestinians are pushed into a narrow strip of land to the south, where a game of Russian roulette is played as they are picked off when they scavenge for food. Gangs are armed by the IDF to create even more havoc. When the situation becomes equal to that of the death camps the fence which separates the area from the Sinai will be breached and the the remaining population will pour throughthe hole into the desert where presumably, aid organisations will be allowed to tend to a now homeless and stateless population; the fence will be restored and the genocide complete.

Meanwhile a global order without ethical framework watches the event as yet another spectacle. The West, China and Russia continue to trade with Israel, and the Arab nations build super yachts or are subservient to their Western masters. Only the ordinary people express outrage – to no avail – the only hope would be a conscious united working class willing to bring the sorry system down.

The puppeteers trash the puppet stage

Punch and Judy joust with bombs in their teeth

The spies screech with laughter

What a piece of work is man.

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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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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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As Gaza burns

As Gaza burns – once again – an important essay turns up in the New York Book Review. It happens with this conflict: a piece of writing that penetrates the hopeless evil. Last time it was Rachel Corrie’s emails; this time its Nathan Thrall’s One man’s quest to find his son.

Nathan Thrall is a journalist who has been based with a human rights organisation in Jerusalem and who has gradually realised the hopelessness of monitoring abuses in the West Bank and Gaza. Instead he has written this long essay, based around the death of a kindergarten-aged boy on a school bus which suffered a head on collision with a settler-driven vehicle driving on the wrong side of the road. When the news of the accident reaches his father, Abed, a tortuous journey begins involving detours, checkpoints, confusion as to possible hospitals the boy may have been taken to, ID problems of access, until he eventually discovers the charred corpse of his son.

The author uses the incident to unpack the dense bureaucracy of the apartheid regime that Israel has imposed on Palestinians. We can forget that (as in South Africa) the running of an apartheid state requires bureaucracy at every level of society: ID cards, residence permits, travel permits, work permits, building permits, school systems, health systems, policing, tax, roads, walls and borders, checkpoints, judicial and prison systems… it becomes immensely complex, absurd  and oppressive.

But as well as revealing this, the essay articulates the history of the desire behind the system: the desire to rid the land now called Israel of Palestinian Arabs, a desire, in fact, for ethnic cleansing. In 1948, four out of five Palestinian inhabitants were made refugees. In 1967 one in four of those remaining were expelled. Nevertheless, the higher Palestinian birth rate means half the population are Arab. The Israeli dilemma becomes then, ‘ On one hand the inability to erase the Palestinians; on the other, the unwillingness to give them political and civil rights.’ The compromise solution to this dilemma has been  the building of Jewish settlements, walls and roads, in order to fragment the Palestinian population, so that it lives in scattered pieces and cannot organise as a collective. And then to impose various decrees, laws and restrictions onto these Bantustans. And the contrast of wealth and infrastructure between the settlements and the Palestinian fragments is huge. Anger and despair builds. In a final irony, the task of administrating daily life in these areas of extreme oppression is given to a local Palestinian ‘authority’.

But the traditional task remains: Jews must take over the land and while that task is being achieved, international efforts to resolve the conflict must be ‘parried and delayed’. As Thrall relates, there is now a historical narrative to the attempts to realise this desire, expressed by the 19th century Zionists as follows: To take possession in due course of Palestine and to restore to the Jews the political independence of which they have been deprived for two thousand years.  This entailed firstly an infiltration of settlers and then the lobbying for a state. But how to justify a small number of Jews, mainly from the Russian Empire, taking over Palestine against the will of the majority?  Jews may have deserved a safe haven , but that does not give a right to dispossess, and even so, the original Zionist agenda was not a response to persecution but rather a resisting of the assimilation of Jewish identity.

Partition was accepted as a step toward obtaining the whole of Palestine and after the establishing of Israel the project of colonisation really began. Land and houses were confiscated, curfews imposed, political parties banned and Palestinians constantly humiliated. Because it had become an absurd contradiction, there was a change from a secular, semi- socialist vision of ‘Jewish redemption within the salvation of humanity’, to a religious nationalism based on the bible.  And this vision had to be fundamentalist for it would be undermined by any acceptance of a Palestinian right to self determination, which would also mean the acceptance of the refugees’ right to return and that a minority has not the right to impose on a majority.

The basically fantastic claim that the bible constitutes a land deed and that a group has the right to reclaim a territory after a two thousand year absence has to be maintained at all costs. All the secular ethical arguments have to be rejected. Accordingly, the state of Israel has never recognised the existence of an Israeli nationality. Israel is, instead, the state of the Jewish people, viewed as a single nation and spread throughout the world. The children of a non Jewish mother and a Jewish father are not Jewish, are not citizens, and whoever disconnects Jewish nationality from its religious foundations is a traitor. Israel cannot therefore entertain a liberal, secular, democratic agenda. It is necessarily an apartheid state, financed by the US government

And Abed mourns for his son.

The essay can be read at: https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2021/03/19/a-day-in-the-life-of-abed-salama/

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Gaza

Gaza bites, Gaza hurts. It’s everywhere and nowhere, in the air, in the land, yell it, shout it: No, Stop, Please, Stop.

So the supermarkets have got facial recognition. It’ll never be quite the same going in there. Aware. Bloody hell. Aware. The sniper’s scope with a cross in it. They don’t need a wooden cross on a hill today. A sniper will do.

Two million imprisoned, kept alive by aid and at the mercy of the jailers – for whom they are animals. I remember while researching a film on madness in the 1970s, spending time at the old Kingseat Hospital in South Auckland. One day, hearing strange cries from the back of the large grounds and investigating, I came across a unit devoted to elderly ‘handicapped’ – the mongoloid, the brain damaged… They were literally confined in a cage. I was told that they were people who had never been socialised, could scarcely feed themselves. It was a shocking image,

Who are the unsocialised ones in Gaza? The Trump ‘mob?’ ‘clan’ – neither of those words will do – mafioso is better. They assume more and more the model of the Hunger Games (perhaps the most political book in a decade). Netanyahu and his henchmen? It is one of those appalling situations to which we assume indifference, forget about for months. The US, Israel, Saudi Arabia, an axis of evil to which we bow for reasons of trade. No, best forget it, focus on rugby or the garden, or local shenanigans. There are no drones dispensing tear gas or rockets in the middle of the night, no sniper towers, no occupying army, no border crossings to negotiate. We’re okay, All we have to put up with are some homeless, some kids in poverty and facial recognition cameras in the supermarket. We’re sweet. Except for a conscience that won’t quieten. In frustration. In despair.

What was it like for the townspeople near the death camps? Did they know? Were they aware? Or were they simply minding their own business and watching the grass grow?

Isn’t it time to boycott the US. I’m tired of paying attention to the dysfunctional empire. We are overwhelmed by its culture, its ridiculous foreign policy, its inane leadership, its control of knowledge and information and pharmaceuticals, its media… Time to divest. Time to boycott. Time to seek other friends. We’ll be poorer but we’ll be able to confront the mirror.

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Incoherence

On the one hand I want to write about spring, the transformation as the willow trees clothe their branches, as daffodils push into the light, as new growth appears on seemingly dead sticks of blackberry, as myriad blossoms decorate the apple tree, as ducklings play in the pond, bopping one another like unruly kids, as lambs appear and grow ridiculously fast, as people load their cars with plants at the garden shop, as each day brings confusion as to what to wear.

But on the other side of the planet, a hurricane drops three feet of rain on Haiti overnight, before swatting the coast of Cuba before heading for the southern US state. As I ponder the Ministry of Business and Innovation report on economic development for the Coast, I find it alarming that climate change is not mentioned. How can educated experts write about future development without considering the greatest threat facing us, or mention precarious work, or inequality, or the region-city divide that is growing in alarming proportions… Midweek, Grant Robertson gave his talk on the future of work and its relevance to the Coast. A good talk, a nice man, but the local leaders were absent, apart from a token presence by Development West Coast – too busy beavering away at the MBI recommendations, which have immediately become Holy Grail.

In Albert Mall, I watched a group of Chinese tourists take excited photos of a Camelia bush and the Chinese restaurant. Is the tourist experience largely nonsensical? If it becomes the main driver of an economy does the sense of nonsense pervade?

Marama Davidson and some other prominent women headed across the sea to Gaza. The Israeli Defence Force seized the boat, detained the occupants temporarily before deporting them – a ritual of recent times. At least they’ve learned that it is better not to beat them or kill them. A stunt, sneered Judith Collins. Potentially embarrassing, said the PM. Climate change shouldn’t be mentioned, nor should Gaza – both unpleasant topics, like child poverty. Aaron Smith is much better news: a bit of scandal, a penitent All Black.

But it is spring. Down on the field there are now three hares cheekily tormenting the dogs. Can’t catch me.

After a passing rain storm, the drops of water falling from the willow tree create a mosaic of small eruptions in the puddle below. Mesmerising – as the starling chicks in the roof tap and scratch a new life for themselves.

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