Elia and Ayman talk about Gaza, and why this genocide changes everything.
Demand a complete arms embargo on Israel immediately. Sanctions immediately. Cut off all diplomatic immediately. To hold Israel accountable for genocide means making them pay for reparations, sending its war criminals to The Hague, and conditioning going back to normal relations on the implementation of full rights to Palestinians.
Due to the time-sensitive nature of this episode, it is being released for Patreons and for the general public at the same time.
Palestine Children’s Relief Fund: https://www.pcrf.net/
Where to listen:
Wherever you get you podcasts.
Or YouTube.
We also sometimes post previews on Instagram.
The best way to support The Fire These Times is:
Through Patreon.com/fromtheperiphery. With a monthly or yearly donation, you get perks including early access, exclusive videos, monthly hangouts, access to the video and book clubs, merch and more.
Leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts. This allows us to show up on these platforms in the first place.
Tell your friends and enemies about it.
Episode Credits:
- Host(s): Ayman Makarem and Elia J. Ayoub
- Producer: Elia J. Ayoub
- Music: Rap and Revenge
- Sound editor: Elia J. Ayoub
- Episode designer: Elia J. Ayoub
- Team profile pics: Molly Crabapple
- Original TFTT design: Wenyi Geng
- TFTT Transcripts: Antidote Zine
Transcript prepared by Shirley Yin and Antidote Zine:
Is anything going to stop this? Anything, anyone? The fact that the ICC put out a warrant against Netanyahu, and that the ICJ has ordered them to stop, makes them seem to want to double down, just to prove that they can.
Elia Ayoub: This is The Fire These Times. I’m Elia and I’m joined by Ayman. We’re talking about the genocide in Gaza, especially in light of the massacre last night. We’re recording this on Monday, May 27, 2024, and we’ve been planning to record this for quite some time. Ayman is a co-host of the The Fire These Times and also the host of Politically Depressed and Keep This Between Us.
Last night was a horror show, there’s no other way of describing it. I haven’t been actively checking the news and social media compared to my past habits, mostly for mental health reasons and because I have a young baby, but the footage of last night did come up. The gory details are what they are—people can look them up if they want to, but I don’t like describing them because I don’t feel like it does anything. It’s just horrible.
What marked me were the sounds. As someone who usually scrolls through social media with no sound on, this time I wanted to hear what was happening. I mean, it’s not fucking rocket science, you know what’s been happening the past seven months, and in my case, I’m familiar with bombings in Syria and the aftermath of those. People react the way they do because everyone’s human, and in this case they speak the same language as well, so there were lots of flashbacks.
Ayman Makarem: I’ve heard a lot of people comparing the experience of witnessing last night and the siege of Aleppo in 2016. It’s the thing that we knew was going to happen, the worst-case scenario. Many of us have known from the very beginning that when the Israelis were saying, Go south, go here, go there, that it’s all pretense. For those of us saying it is a genocide, it’s the scary thing wherein we want to be proven wrong, we’re screaming it from the top of our lungs, but seeing it unfold is still horrible. This is the Rafah assault that we knew was going to happen, and seeing the gory details is difficult because you need to bear witness, but at the same time, I couldn’t really sleep last night and I feel incredibly fucked. I have friends asking, How are you coping? and I’m broken. I don’t know.
EA: My then-girlfriend (now wife) and I witnessed the fall of Aleppo live. We were highly involved in Syria-related activism. Last night I must have had that look in my eyes while scrolling through my phone, and she noticed. She asked, What’s going on? I must have said five syllables: They’re bombing Rafah and it’s bad, or something pretty vague. She put things aside and hugged me; it was pretty obvious where this was leading in my head.
We’ve seen the ICJ and the ICC saying stuff; we’ve even seen the German government being relatively, slightly more human (I emphasize relatively because they’ve been a shit show from the beginning); Macron is more direct compared to other politicians who are so careful about the words they use, but part of me keeps asking: Is anything going to stop this? Anything, anyone?
The fact that the ICC put out a warrant against Netanyahu, and that the ICJ ordered them to stop and so on, makes them seem to actually want to double down, as if to prove that they can. As if it is a matter of showing that you can do this thing that you’ve been doing for the past seven months, and that you can continue doing it. Because the whole Netanyahu thing is that he’s “defying the world” or whatever.
That’s something that I struggle with a lot. It’s not that the suffering doesn’t affect me anymore—it does, but it affects me in a very specific way. I have this weird compartmentalization where it’s going to hit me in six months. That comes from Syria. I know it’s going to hit me soon, but not in the moment—although the assault in Rafah yesterday did hit me, and then I compartmentalized it again.
What breaks me is the banality of the people on the “other side.” I don’t believe in “evil:” for me, that’s utterly pointless. But they’re doing evil deeds, while just being boring mediocre individuals, dancing in a party—those disgusting people we’ve seen chanting a Kahanist slogan in Hebrew, May your village burn, to techno music, and all those videos on TikTok of people mocking dead babies, and the Telegram channels. It genuinely scares me, selfishly even, because they are our fucking neighbors, even beyond my immediate fear for Gaza.
AM: There is no language to describe what’s happening. I hear people call them “evil,” “psychopaths,” “fascists.” I don’t do this comparison much—when people talk about, “this is a Holocaust” or “ZioNazis,” there are sort of literal parallels, but it is more of a rhetorical, This is the worst thing that can happen comparison, and it is happening. The way Einstein is immediately correlated when you think of “intelligence,” the Holocaust is the thing that everyone can agree is the worst thing that can happen.
EA: “Genocide” is the worst word you can say. Masha Gessen is Jewish and they compared Gaza to a ghetto, as well as a number of Holocaust survivors who have called this a genocide, and it’s like, if they are saying that, from their own personal experience, what else is needed? The whole post-war status quo, at least in the West, of “Never Again”—we are breaking that promise. If Holocaust survivors don’t even have the right to narrate the legacy of the Holocaust, who the fuck does? We are deprived of that right, as Arabs, and especially as Palestinians. At what point does it get so bad—people burnt alive? The headless baby corpse? The screams are going to be in my head forever.
AM: This is why a lot of us have been in such a weird situation. I personally have been doing very little analysis, let’s say about Europe and European complicity and that kind of ideology, in the last eight months. There’s really not any room for analysis when all of this is a language of war. Zionism has always been an incredibly violent movement and structure, and as we’re seeing now in its moment of collapse, it is becoming even more intensely violent.
Part of the problem with such violent entities and structures is that it demands of its victims a similar “language” of interaction, and that’s why there is a thing called armed struggle. When we’re talking about armed struggle against Israel, it’s become incredibly clear that Israel is not just supported by the US military—Joe Biden is not someone who doesn’t know what he’s doing and fumbling into this. He is a hardcore Zionist, and this is his genocide too. It really hits this “final boss” impossibility of, How do you confront the US war machine in its totality?
The Israelis are not interested in “kill the Indian, save the man”—they just want to kill both. They’re not interested in having them as Israeli subjects. They see Palestinians as a demographic threat, and they’ve been using those terms for decades.
It feels very futile. All I can do these days is to share, fundraise, try to do some sort of propaganda here and there, but so much of it feels useless because the space for the intellectual battle, or the cultural battle, or political discussions, feels so limited. I’ve really been struggling with this, as someone who is a writer and podcaster, an “intellectual.”
EA: You know the Soviet joke, We thought we hit rock bottom but then we heard a knock from below. By now I think it’s my default framework. It’s not that I always expect things to get worse—I’m not a cynical person, or at least I try not to be. I do genuinely take the James Baldwin line to heart: To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter, so I am forced to be an optimist. I believe that life is not something to just study theoretically, but I also know that I fail at it. That’s why hope is a discipline, and it’s one that is normal to fail at, almost by design, given the world we live in.
We had a conversation with Aydın and Margaret Killjoy, and at some point we questioned: is despair even allowed? Of course it is, because well, who’s going to prevent us? But also it’s natural and normal. My fear right now is what Baldwin called “moral monsters.” He was talking about white Americans especially, at the time, but honestly it’s applicable to this day. He wrote about being worried about “the death of the heart” and the hatred of the unthinking hordes: Those people have really convinced themselves that I am not human. Once you accept that this is what’s happening, that they’re not seeing Palestinians in Gaza as human (it’s not that they’re debating it behind the scenes, they’re genuinely not), then the rest starts making sense.
We may have Maya Wind on the podcast soon, and she went through the Israeli textbooks and Israeli academia and how it’s complicit in the production of knowledge that is inherently genocidal and is about erasing the Native. If that’s how it starts, what’s the natural conclusion of that? There are two conclusions as far as we know historically. One is the “kill the Indian, save the man” mindset of white settler colonialism in the Americas against Indigenous peoples, which started off as Murder, murder, murder and then at some point was converted into, Well, we can keep their bodies, but their minds are what we need to “fix.” And then you have the Israeli version: the Israelis are not interested in “kill the Indian, save the man”—they just want to kill both. They’re not interested in having them subjugated like Israeli subjects. They see Palestinians as a demographic threat and they’ve been using those terms for decades.
AM: For me, this is why the comparisons between Palestine and South Africa have always been limited. There was no point that they wanted to literally exterminate all of them; they couldn’t, but it also just wasn’t part of the project.
One thing that really upsets me is that there’s so little space to grieve. Because yesterday was the Rafah massacre, and it’s going to continue today, and tomorrow, and after tomorrow, and there’s mass starvation, and there’s structural violence, and there’s the complete destruction of the healthcare system, and people don’t have food and water. There’s so much suffering in our region in general, and it’s constantly forced onto us. There’s no space to analyze or for coping or for teaching, to have discussions like, How are we coping? or What’s the silver lining?
Something that’s been happening a lot over the last few months is people saying, Yeah, this is horrible, but the road is long and we’re on the right path. It’s so difficult to say that while there’s bodies burning. I think Lina Mounzer told me about Mahmoud Darwish’s viewpoint, of How can you write poetry next to a burning body? and he has talked about writing poetry as an act of hope and processing and resistance. The Arabic word that I’ve been using a lot to describe how I’m feeling is “midaayeq.” It doesn’t really have a corollary in English, but it’s roughly: I’m uneasy, I’m uncomfortable in my body.
I think something big happened yesterday that awoke a lot of us, even those of us who are pushing ourselves as hard as we can to bear witness and to do whatever we can. It was a bit of a wake-up call that we’re not doing enough, that we’ve all gotten a bit numb, that the suffering is still happening and it can get worse.
After the al-Ahli hospital massacre, and the al-Shifa hospital massacre, after the flour massacre, the use of starvation as a weapon of war, the TikToks of the soldiers wearing the clothes of the women who they’ve killed or displaced, playing with the kids’ toys—it really is pushing the limits of understanding of life and humanity, of what holds the world together. Because if the fucking International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice and the Security Council passed a resolution calling for a ceasefire and nothing happened, and they’ve even doubled down, what is holding things together? What are we doing? It’s a globalization of something that we as Arabs have known for a very long time: that the powerful are heartless, and they’ve got the guns.
EA: When you mentioned the ICC, I was thinking of the chief prosecutor, Karim A.A. Khan, who said that a senior official told him that the ICC is “only for Africa and thugs like Putin.” Indeed, the ICC has issued arrest warrants against fifty-four people, and forty-seven of those have been against Africans, Putin being the the most recent non-African, and if things go well, Netanyahu will be added to that list too. It’s not to say that those forty-seven did not deserve it, but there’s something weird about that number.
I think there’s a politics of language: even when everyone knows something is hypocritical, the fact that everyone is going along with it is part of that creative process, making it truer than it would be otherwise. We know this with the Russian invasion of Ukraine: when the ICC warrants were issued against Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, something happens when Russians stop pretending to give a shit about international law. We know they never did, but they played the game because they cared about diplomacy, and that’s the language that’s used at the UN. Even North Korea sits in those General Assemblies and votes, even though they obviously don’t give a shit, but that’s part of the process of reproducing that legitimacy.
There’s something that happens when that state (the obvious one being Russia, and now Israel more and more) stops pretending. An hour ago, Netanyahu issued a statement saying, It was a mistake and there’s going to be an investigation. That does not mean that he gives a shit, because we know he does not, but it tells me that he felt some kind of pressure from within, or from the Americans or the EU, to say something. Hey, we know you won’t do anything, we know the investigation is just a way of not doing anything, but just say something because we need it for our media. The BBC literally did that today: The IDF said there was a violent incident in Gaza, and that they are investigating. That’s literally the framework that they used.
In order for that framework to reproduce itself and be viable the next day, they need those official statements. I’m genuinely wondering: if this is the “restraint” being shown, actually bothering to spend five seconds after the fact to make that statement, what happens when you don’t want to make that statement anymore, when there’s really no point of even making that statement? We’re seeing what’s happening now, and I’m trying to stop telling myself that it can’t get worse, knowing what has happened in Syria, and just History in general.
Oppression doesn’t just dehumanize the victims. You have to dehumanize yourself in one way or another in order to do this.
The scariest thing about the comparison to the Holocaust and World War Two is that as the Germans were losing the war, and they knew they were losing the war, they stepped up the extermination of the Jews and Poles and Roma Sinti and disabled people and so on. They actually diverted resources away from the front in order to accelerate the genocide. My worry is that we’re seeing something like this happening, or we may see something like this happening. At some point, there is a kind of zero-sum game mentality: We’ve already been doing this for eight months, are we going to stop now? That was the Serbian logic in Sarajevo, and the only thing that stopped it in that case was outside forces. Which then brings the question, is there going to be any outside intervention here?
AM: It has been the most brazen lies since the beginning about Hamas and the hostages. When they attack a tent and say it’s against Hamas—this is the whole concept of collateral damage, especially in the context of a genocide. There is no collateral damage because there is no safe zone. The point is that they want to kill all of them, they want to push them into the desert, they want to create a “Greater Israel,” and this connects with what they’re doing in the West Bank as well.
I hate the fact that we’re still talking about Benjamin Netanyahu, but I think for Netanyahu the mask off moment is when they killed those World Central Kitchen aid workers: when he felt the need to give an apology, he was smirking. “Evil” does not begin to describe Benjamin Netanyahu, there’s just no language for it. It was a targeted strike, and it feels like some of these bits get lost in trying to convince the entire Western media of the reality of the situation. It’s like they don’t know that social media exists and that we’re seeing all this. It’s a massive gaslight.
EA: That has to be part of the power play: We know you’re seeing this with your own eyes, but we are still going to deny it and we’re going to create new facts on the ground so that it doesn’t matter.
AM: This is like, Assad-level propaganda, where it’s just pure unadulterated lies.
EA: And repeat it time and time again, while it’s happening, while we can see that it’s happening. This literally happened with Bashar al-Assad: he was shown the Caesar photos by journalists in 2014, and he said, Oh, those were Photoshopped. It’s the “alternative facts” thing—it disarms the journalist who is not equipped to deal with a situation where the person they are interviewing doesn’t feel that they’re bound to reality or facts, because they have understood the fact that power is might.
We’ve known what their aim is from the beginning. Even the fucking Egyptians have known, given that they’ve closed the border. There is a power play that happens where they know that we know this, and they can do it anyway.
Israel was supposed to come back after a month and present evidence to the International Court of Justice (the closest thing we have, at least in this idealistic sense, to “accountability,” although in practice that’s obviously not the case most of the time) to prove that they have been preventing acts of genocide. We know for a fact that in the month that followed, they just continued doing the same things, and so in my head I was like, What’s in that fucking report? (I’ve seen extracts of it; it’s basically: Hamas, terrorism, human shields, whatever. I don’t want to spend too much time playing their game because it doesn’t matter.)
AM: I still don’t understand why Bashar al-Assad holds elections. Who is that for?
EA: I know from the literature on authoritarianism that it’s a different type of dictatorship, where you’re still trying to appeal to so-called “popular appeal,” even if it doesn’t exist. You’re appealing to that political affect, because you don’t want to call yourself dictator-for-life. Putin and Sisi do the same thing. Every few years, I want the people who know that they don’t have a choice to tell me that they don’t have a choice, to reaffirm their choicelessness.
There’s a Syrian joke from the eighties or nineties, where the Shabiha comes to the door of this woman, whose son was supposed to vote but forgot or something. They say, Your son didn’t vote, and she says, freaking out, Oh, I’m sorry! I’m sorry!—and the joke is that the pro-government thug just replied,Don’t worry, we voted for him.
Ultimately we need some kind of number. We can play around with them, and they can be a ridiculous number like in Russia, but it’s very important that there is a number. It’s like a ritual—Every few years, we are reaffirming our power by letting you vote, knowing that it doesn’t matter.
AM: It’s also a good excuse to do extra propaganda: Remember that I’m still around and why you love me?
Last night, as part of the Palestine watch party, we watched an incredible film called Souha: Surviving Hell, about Lebanese resistance icon Souha Bechara, her attempted assassination of Antoine Lahad, and her time in the Khiam prison (a notorious prison run by a Zionist Lebanese militia at the time when the Israelis controlled and occupied southern Lebanon). She spent ten years in there, and the film is incredible: it’s filmed as the liberation of the south is happening, and was released in 2001.
Souha was released from prison in 1998, and a lot of the film takes place in Khiam prison because after liberation, the prison was opened up as a museum: Come look at what the Zionists did! Come look at what the Lebanese collaborators did! There was a really specific story that she was telling, while standing in the interrogation room with the documentarian and another prisoner who was fourteen when she was captured.
They were talking about the torture they’d experienced, where they would receive electrocution as a form of torture. There were different types (on the fingers, on the breasts, and on the genitals), and when the male torturers would come and do their torture, and especially to veiled women, they would give them the wires and say, Put this on your breasts, and turn around while they did it. Souha was recounting the story with sarcasm, like, Yeah, they wanted to protect our sharaf [honor], and so it’s like, I’m going to torture you but I’m not going to remove your bra.
We analyzed this afterwards: a person is going to torture this other human, but there’s some sort of affirmation like, I’m doing what I have to but I am not overstepping it, I’m not a barbarian. It’s so bizarre, and in a situation that requires such dehumanization in order to do this to another person. It recalls for me one of the key lessons that I learned while studying screenwriting and storytelling, which is that when you have well-written villains, nobody thinks they are evil. It’s not like the shitty ones who cackle, I want to destroy the world!
That person has a logic to why they’re doing it. They’re going to do this horrible thing, but to them there’s a logic to it at least. Speaking in terms of Israeli soldiers doing a genocide, that really pushes the limit of this thought exercise, and I don’t think it’s on us at all to humanize them. Some of the things we see them filming themselves do, like dressing up in the clothes of dead or displaced Palestinian women, it’s fascistic, morbid, disgusting behavior—it’s so difficult to place that within a framework of humanity.
I want to see something that can stop this, for all of our sakes. If something like this is allowed to create a logic of its own, there are consequences to this beyond Israel and Palestine.
EA: Fanon’s big thing is that oppression doesn’t just dehumanize the victims. You have to dehumanize yourself in one way or another in order to do this. We mentioned that the IDF says it’s going to investigate. There is a reason why they have to repeat this, and for me it’s logically similar to why Bashar al-Assad (and Sisi, Putin, the Iranian regime, and so on) has to have elections every few years, and it’s because it’s a way of them affirming that they’re going to continue doing this thing.
I also think there is a logic to it, like in the case of the Caesar files, where the Assad regime itself was documenting all of this—thousands of corpses of tortured-to-death prisoners in Syria. They would write numbers on the corpses, as if they are filing a person who died and they have to register it. This is part of necropolitics, where the state has to have the final word on who gets to live and who gets to die, by virtue of deciding what kind of document you have to present to register your child to legally exist, and how that person is officially recorded as dying. Of course, they’re not officially recorded as dying under torture. They’re officially recorded as dying of heart attacks or old age or illness or accident.
That is how that power is reproduced. They’re not following a logic of, Don’t people know that they’re lying? It doesn’t matter, because ultimately they’re just doing their job. The whole Eichmann in Jerusalem banality of evil framework is that he was just a “functionary.” It doesn’t mean that he was a good person, it means that even if he was, it was irrelevant because he continued doing that job, and that job was being a cog in a death machine.
Within the IDF, you have levels of this. You have the people who are on the ground filming themselves bombing or looting an apartment, destroying a Quran, or burning al-Aqsa library with background music on Tiktok—and then you have most people, who are behind the scenes, pressing a button. They are part of that bureaucracy, and without that bureaucracy you cannot have genocide. That’s one of Hannah Arendt’s big contributions: it’s not an incidental part of a genocide. The bureaucracy in Germany is not an incidental part of the Holocaust; without it you cannot have the Holocaust.
I’m using that comparison here again because it’s one of the most studied events in history. What’s happening in Gaza for the past seven months is objectively the single most documented genocide in history already, just by virtue of the fact that it’s been practically livestreamed throughout, with some interruptions here and there due to the Israelis trying to block off the internet, or murdering a journalist, or preventing foreign journalists from entering.
If the ICJ lawyers want to go through the entirety of the evidence, they have decades’ worth of files and images and videos archiving this (there’s also an entire political discussion of what counts as “valid” evidence), but that is an advantage that the Israelis have. Ultimately, what South Africa asked is that this needs to be stopped now because if it’s not, we know where it’s going to lead. They were using the Israelis’ own videos of themselves talking, and presenting an argument of what’s going to happen.
I attended a UN-related panel here in Geneva a few months ago, and one of the people on the panel was Michael Fakhri, who is the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food. He presented on the topic of starvation as a weapon of war, and he said, One of the reasons I have no difficulties calling this a genocide is that they basically told us. The defense minister announced at the beginning that they were going to cut off food, electricity, and water, and that “we are dealing with human animals and we are going to act like it.” Is it rocket science to then wonder what’s going to happen next? I mean, he said it.
This is where the gaslighting comes in. It’s been seven months of us telling each other, This is happening. We know it’s happening because they’re telling us it’s happening! And yet, if we open various media outlets like the Atlantic, the New York Times, BBC, and so on, they are debating things. There was an article in the Atlantic by Graeme Wood that talked about ways you can legally kill a child. Just think about that sentence!
This is where the violence of language and the politics of language comes in. Without it, I don’t think such a project as genocide (because it is a project, with an end goal) would be possible. Otherwise, every single day, waking up as the génocidaire, you would have to justify to yourself and the world, and do it all over again, and you just can’t. It has to be bureaucratized and systematized. It has to be like you’ve outsourced genocide—which they have literally done with AI, as we’ve found out from the +972 investigation on “Lavender.”
There’s a perfect storm of technology, impunity, far-right racism, supremacy, historical trauma, and the conclusion you get from all of this is that obviously no one is going to stop them from within. We’ve spoken to some of the Israelis who have tried to do this, and they just can’t. Hamas obviously isn’t going to stop this—they don’t have the power, and they have different politics anyway. So who can? Obviously it has to be sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and so on because quite literally nothing else can stop it.
Short of Iran deciding to invade for some weird reason (and even then I’m not even sure that would actually stop it, and would probably make things much worse, and for the record, fuck Iran), what else would stop it? The Egyptians haven’t stopped it and it’s by their border. This is where I start losing my mind. I feel broken. Where is this going? I prevent myself from mentally reaching that point, because I feel like I’ve given up if I do that. If I tell myself, In one month they’re going to kill everyone, it’s almost like I’ve given myself the excuse to stop paying attention for a month, and I don’t want that.
AM: We’re constantly trying to formulate a possible better outcome in our analysis and language. As a Lebanese person surrounded by Syrians who’ve been bludgeoned, some more literally than others, by the “resistance”—in the last few months with this genocide my thinking has shifted. When we have these conversations of What can stop this, there is armed resistance. Hamas is the biggest one, but there are eighteen armed groups in Gaza, and it’s a ragtag group. All of them are using makeshift things to attack tanks and the most well-funded nuclear power in the world.
Even if we imagine this escalating and there being more global support for the resistance, it still hits a terrifying point. If we accept fascism as a framework of what has taken hold in the Israeli state, society, and military, the only way that we understand how fascism is defeated (and if we use the Second World War as an example) is through military intervention, because they will accept no other language. This is an analysis that I’ve hated for twenty years because it is an endless cycle of violence, but this is something that I feel has become painfully and brutally evident, that they are refusing any other language.
I hate this, and this is so opposed to any of my politics, but my politics mean nothing when we’re faced with a genocidal fascist army that has gone rampant. As someone from the region, I have thought about this for a very long time: the idea that power never commits suicide, especially fascists.
There’s almost no point in calling them fascists, because the idea of, if you say someone is committing a genocide or a racist act, then that should become a pausing moment of, Whoa, it’s bad to be racist. But they are openly saying what they’re doing, and getting all the support to do it. Like, if you say, You are doing a genocide, and they respond, Yes, we are, you are taken aback. I’ve seen this rhetoric a thousand times: Yes we are doing this, and they deserve it.
EA: I refuse to accept that anything is inevitable. We just don’t know what might happen—Ben-Gvir almost died in a car accident, and Raisi did actually die in a helicopter accident, which was objectively funny. Things happen that are impossible to predict. I refuse to just accept the inevitability of the thing that Netanyahu and the others want. It’s almost inevitable, because might is right and they have such overwhelming firepower, but I refuse. The Americans used the “Mother of all Bombs” about a year before they were forced to fuck off, because they lost (and fuck the Taliban, for the record). The logic of those bombs, and of yesterday’s massacre, is a way for them to say, We are inevitable (to paraphrase Thanos here). We are doing it because we can.
I want to see something that can stop this, for all of our sakes. If something like this is allowed to create a logic of its own, there are consequences to this beyond Israel and Palestine—obviously the priority right now is Gaza and the West Bank, but these things have a tendency of spilling over. As a simple example, the AI technology that they’re using is not going stop in Gaza.
There is a theorized “point of no return,” and we need to identify it in order to avoid it. Even if we get close to that point or even cross it, we can be wrong that that it is the point of no return—and we should still try to stop it. There is no law of nature here. This is not fucking gravity—gravity is what killed Raisi in the helicopter. Gravity is not international law or human rights, these are social constructs. We have agency here to do something about it.
AM: There’s a really clear parallel with ecological and climate collapse, where it’s like, What’s the worst that could happen if we do a massive green transition and it turns out climate change is flawed? Oh shit, we just spent all this money making a really good technology that’s good for everybody?
EA: What if we spent all of this time and improved the world for nothing?
AM: The spillover is already happening. I think what we’re seeing in Sudan lately in al-Fashir and Darfur, embodies the same sort of tactics—the use of starvation as a weapon of war, and the complete razing. It is a genocide by the Janjaweed. The Sudanese army is not much better, but regardless, it’s a genocide and it’s overshadowed by Gaza. That sounds very strange, but the very fact that there is this massive thing happening that has drawn so much attention to it allows and enables other genocides to take place concurrently.
Souha was really important for me because it’s filmed in 2000, and you see scenes of liberation that really moved me. Two days ago was Liberation Day in Lebanon, marking the withdrawal of the Israeli occupation, and in the documentary there were scenes of people reuniting, holding hands, hugging each other, and seeing each other for the first time, especially Palestinians who had this huge buffer zone. It was beautiful and moving and it really forced me to think of the tangibility of liberation and freedom, of the possibility that none of this is inevitable.
There were also scenes in 2000 of the liberated Khiam prison plastered with flags of Hezbollah and Harakat Amal, as well as the Communist Party, and it was very difficult to see those images and be like, Yes Amal, yes Hezbollah, you did it. In that moment, they did, and for fifteen years afterwards we’ve been hit over the head with, We are the liberator, we are the resistance, and they’ve taken over the fucking country.
I remember being in my apartment in Lebanon on December 25, 2020 and feeling the ground shake and hearing this massive noise. I looked outside and saw five dots in the distance, and they were Israeli jets and missiles that were ultimately going to northern Syria but shot over our airspace, but that moment fucked me up so fundamentally because when I saw those dots and heard the noise, I thought it was coming right for me and I thought they were nukes. In that moment, I thought, It’s over, they’re nuking Lebanon.
Immediately jumping to that conclusion is indicative of how traumatized I am, and now I think a lot of us are experiencing that, seeing what the Israelis are doing, and then there’s a conflicting thought of, Am I crazy for thinking that? Now, seeing everything they’ve done, I am constantly thinking, what if they just drop a nuke? There’s the common sense refrain of, No they wouldn’t do that, that would be too far, but then, everything they’ve done so far…
EA: Why is it that they wouldn’t do that? By what logic?
AM: Exactly. Here in Europe most people still have a liberal sense or imagination of world order, where they think, No, they wouldn’t do that, even if it’s a cynical thing of, They would get pushback if they did that.
EA: Not only could they do that (but instead of using the nuclear bomb they use the MOAB for example), but there will be people in positions of power in the West and in the media—you can write about legal ways to kill a child and still keep your job and followers. What’s the argument for Hiroshima and Nagasaki? The argument is that If we didn’t do this it would have dragged on for months and years afterwards, and therefore instead of a hundred thousand people dead there could have been a million, so by dropping the bomb on Nagasaki and Hiroshima we did a good thing!
If you understand that the logic is, from their perspective, to “end this,” then it’s a zero-sum game. If you’re doing this, there is a very convenient weapon that already exists. Someone might decide they’re crazy enough to do this and deal with the political consequences afterwards. They’re already dealing with the political consequences—how much worse can they get?
MBS butchered and hacked Khashoggi to death in an embassy, and there was blowback for a year, but now Messi is chilling in Saudi Arabia. At some point, these folks who are in power believe that they are untouchable. We have to understand them from that logic in order to try and understand what might come next. I’m not saying it’s going to happen, but let’s stop the idea that it’s a discursive impossibility for that to happen. It can, and there’s objectively there’s no reason why it can’t.
When I say hope is a discipline, referencing back to Baldwin, it’s because I understand that things are not inevitable. Things can always get worse, but on the flip side, they can actually get better. There’s no law of nature saying that they can’t get better. Netanyahu wants us to believe that they can’t, but that’s just not a fact.
Ayman, thanks for joining me for this hopefully coherent rant. Thanks for listening, everyone.
AM: Thank you for having me.
Leave a Reply