This Cannot Be The New Normal

In this special episode of The Fire These Times, Elia is joined by four members of the ⁠From The Periphery media collective⁠ to talk about the ongoing famine in Gaza, Israel’s genocide and the world’s complicity. Despite the obviously horrific nature of this topic, we insisted on not giving in to despair. The génocidaires cannot win.

The five participants are connected to the Gaza genocide through their own respective experiences: Leila Al-Shami (⁠Syria: The Inconvenient Revolution⁠) is a Syrian-British activist and writer who lived in Gaza for three years; Karena Avedissian (⁠Obscuristan⁠) is an Armenian scholar who continues to reflect on the legacy of the Armenian genocide and the role of Genocide studies today; Daniel Voskoboynik (⁠Hidah: Jewish Counter-Colonial Thoughts⁠) joined us from what used to be the Warsaw Ghetto, site of one of the most infamous episodes of the Holocaust; israa’ (⁠The Mutual Aid Podcast⁠) has been involved in Gaza mutual aid (⁠click here for the link⁠); and finally Elia is a Palestinian-Lebanese whose grandfather was a Palestinian refugee.

They spoke about pushing back against despair, and the importance of rejecting Israel’s genocide as the new normal. It got very personal at times.

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The Fire These Times

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Transcription: You can help ⁠Antidote Zine⁠ transcribe TFTT episodes here.

Credits

Elia Ayoub (host, producer, sound editor, episode design), Leila Al Shami (host), israa (host), Daniel Voskoboynik (host), Karena Avedissian (host),⁠ ⁠⁠Rap and Revenge⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (Music),⁠ ⁠⁠Wenyi Geng⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (TFTT theme design),⁠ ⁠⁠Hisham Rifai⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (FTP theme design) and⁠ ⁠⁠Molly Crabapple⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (FTP team profile pics).

Transcript via Lizartistry and Antidote Zine:

We can no longer ignore that we live in a world that’s indifferent to human life. Instead of despairing, this should be a call to build horizontal coalitions, to build mutual aid, to fill some of these important gaps in human care that are left by states.

Elia Ayoub: Hi everyone, welcome to another episode of The Fire These Times. This is a special one we decided to record recently in light of what’s happening in Gaza. Just moments before we started recording, the UN declared that famine is officially occurring in Gaza. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification initiative, which is a UN-backed system, has declared that this is the “final stage.”

Things are horrible. There’s no other way of putting it. Since the last time israa’ and I interviewed Maram in Gaza for The Fire These Times, things have gotten significantly worse—and this was just two months ago, almost to the day. A few of us in the From the Periphery gang decided to do an episode to talk about what’s happening. Most people will probably know the gist of what we’re talking about, so it’s not about telling you what you don’t know. It’s more about sharing some of our reflections.

Joining me today are Leila Al-Shami, Karena Avedissian, Daniel Voskoboynik, and israa’, all part of the From the Periphery Media Collective doing various political projects and podcasts. The first thing I’ll ask is: how have you been thinking about what’s happening? What are some of the things you’re doing, or not doing, in general?

israa’: You’ve captured the situation. It’s been beyond horrible. There’s no words. I’ve been trying to balance the fact that we’re watching this genocide and there’s no end in sight, and watching it expand day by day—not only into other areas in Palestine, but seeing replication in places like Sudan and the Congo—and the normalization of the violence, the destruction, and the deterioration of life.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this mushroom from the book The Mushroom at the End of the World, the matsutake mushroom: they’re known to grow in places where soil has completely eroded, and they help rejuvenate the soil. If the soil is rich and healthy, they can’t grow there.

I’ve been trying to pull in that energy. I know it’s going to get worse. It is getting worse. I don’t know what to do in this moment and it’s almost paralyzing. I don’t want to get caught up in that paralysis, like, There’s nothing to do so I might as well give up and just pretend. I know there is no way around the fact that life is going to continue to be destroyed in the near future. There’s no way around that. I’m holding onto: Even with those truths existing, what could I do to sow other seeds? What could I do to repair in this moment in hopes that something will come out and that there’s still going to be life at the end of this? That’s how I’ve been coping lately.

Karena Avedissian: I’m going from anger to hopelessness to wondering what witnessing everything is doing to all of us on a collective level, to our own humanity, watching that level of dehumanization. I worry about us in general. I have a certain special anger as an Armenian whose peoples have also gone through genocide. I’m going to speak a bit about genocide studies and how it’s failed a bit later, but the whole concept of Never Again failing again is hard to witness.

In terms of trying to hold onto something that’s more productive and hopeful, I’m trying to see what’s happening as not an end (because it does feel like that sometimes, like an end of life) but rather transformation. I hope that through witnessing these horrors we’ll—I’m convinced it will burst something new. I don’t know what that thing will be, but I’m trying to focus on that and think about how my networks and the work I’m involved in can contribute to that somehow.

EA: I’m exactly that, especially when you said between anger and despair. There have been a few moments in the past couple of weeks where it’s been too much—feeling too much, and the hopelessness of it all—and I had to take a step back. My toddler is basically the same age as when the genocide started. I’ve been in this process of working on this book proposal that’s all about mixing the personal and the political, and there’s an elephant-in-the-room monstrosity that’s hanging over me when I’m thinking about that topic—Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, my own family lineage.

Part of what I will hopefully write is exploring what ifs—not in the sense of alternative histories, but taking them seriously for what they are and reflecting on them. And here I have this kid who is the embodiment of a very particular kind of what if. Had my grandfather, when he was exiled from Haifa in ’48, gone south instead of north, he very reasonably could have ended up in Gaza. Most Palestinians in Gaza can trace family ancestry [within] one or two generations (and in some cases the people themselves if they’re old enough) to the lands that are now part of the state of Israel. That’s why they are in that specific part of historic Palestine. All of these things could have come together.

I won’t get into it here; this is a topic for another conversation. But it’s been very difficult to prevent some of the images that I’ve seen from entering my mind when I’m supposed to just be with her. Phone’s away, and it’s still there. The good thing about a toddler is that they require a lot of attention anyway, so that’s been good—there’s no ifs and buts, there’s no negotiations. But anger is what I’m currently feeling and still feeling.

I’m not going to say I’m beyond despair, because it doesn’t mean anything, but I’m not letting it dominate too much anymore. I do let it in from time to time, but it’s not the main thing anymore, because, fuck it. The anger can be productive, or generative. But it can also be rage that can be paralyzing. When I’m filled with rage, I’m not actually doing anything; it’s just in my head.

That’s the balance I’m trying to strike. It’s not easy, because I have contacts in Gaza—acquaintances, people I follow virtually. There’s no one who’s not affected in a very direct way—if not by the absolute worst case scenario, by one or two degrees at best. There are privileges that still exist, but it’s so flattened by the sheer scale of the horrors.

Leila Al-Shami: I’ve moved beyond anger towards despair. When I’m angry, it’s usually a time of great motivation for me to engage, try and do something. But the despair brings a numbness; it’s unbearable, really. It’s been a difficult period in Syria as well, which is very close to my heart. And Gaza, where I worked for three years, is a place I know very well. I have a lot of friends there. It’s very hard to see the images and messages coming out of Gaza and reconcile that with the image of the place I used to know.

Our listeners can’t see us, but everybody on this call has exactly the same look of absolute exhaustion on their face.

EA: I definitely feel it. Even if I have an okay night’s sleep, it doesn’t really change much.

For me it’s the fact that at every step of the way in the past almost three years, with pretty much no exception, the next step was predictable. How much worse things can get has not been rocket science, has not been a mystery. There are people who didn’t think this was possible, and those who continue to claim or hang onto this notion that something as horrible as this would not happen, because they insist on the myth of respectability when it comes to Israel. I see this constantly, and that’s another source—parallel to what’s happening—of anger.

I spend a of of my time doing media studies and so I can, with almost no exception, just open any channel in the UK, and even when there’s a good report, when the investigation itself is well-made, what usually gets me is the commentary that comes afterwards. In the past week or so, I’ve seen less of this, probably because it’s too horrific to even have that usual filter. But still with that—I recently published a piece on Shado Mag about the BBC [interviewing] the former leader of the IDF’s Gaza Division. This was part of a series of different interviews where everyone else was critical of Israel, even those who were “moderately” critical. No one was pro.

This need to still have a representative of the IDF, to give the “other side” of this genocide, is what really gets me. There is no way to interview someone like that and not either have him for the shock effect—yell at each other and that’s what you want to get out of this—Or, in one way or another, allow him to whitewash the genocide. There’s no other reason; he provided no concrete addition; there’s nothing of value he could say that can’t be said by a random person.

That’s what really gets me. I started to use the term “banality”—it’s not quite appropriate here, but there’s an element of it. When they were deciding who the guests would be, I don’t know whether they thought too deeply about Let’s have this guy on,or whether it’s more routine, This is just what we do; we need “two sides,” therefore we need an Israeli—not just an Israeli, but a literal ex-IDF deputy commander of the Gaza Division. That’s what got to me.

Those are the specific things that get to me, and in the context of the UK, the sheer farce around the UK government pretending that it is now concerned. We’re recording this on July 29. In the early afternoon, around this time, Keir Starmer has called an emergency cabinet meeting supposedly about the Gaza emergency. Among the things on the table is whether to recognize Palestine as a state, now or eventually, whatever that means.

This is where we’re at. We’re at the state where it’s as if the Oslo Accords of twenty-plus years ago were last year, and we’re still talking about, We’ll “recognize” the thing that doesn’t exist and hopefully this will put pressure on Israel. I understand that people campaigned for this; I’m not blaming them, it is something to do. I’m just pissed that this is still where we’re at. All of the steps that have happened since October 2023, and even before then, could have been easily prevented, in more than one way, and were not, either through direct complicity (as with Biden and then Trump, or the Germans, or the various European powers, the UK included), or through “inaction.” And we’re here.

One of the things I’m still struggling with thinking about is: we’re saying this feels like the end, the final phase, but it never is. There’s no such thing as an end. There’s no such thing as, We’ve reached famine; it’s just going to happen. No. At every step of the way, there could still be an intervention. At every step of the way, something could still be done. Lives can be saved. People can be saved from malnutrition, let alone famine. All of these things can happen. None of this is beyond the realm of what is feasible as a human community.

In fact, it’s relatively easy. The difficulty is Israel. France and Spain are going to drop food from the air—which is very dangerous, and some people have been killed with those in Gaza—but the problem remains that there is a state that is explicitly preventing food and aid from entering Gaza.

Genocide is becoming another way to do politics. This isn’t the first genocide we’ve seen in the past decade. This isn’t the first time in the past decade that we’ve seen mass starvation of a civilian population being used as a weapon of war. We’re entering a world where this has become normalized. This is a way that states deal with undesirable populations.

There was an interview on one of the breakfast shows here in the UK—one of the most viewed ones, which tells you how this has broken into the mainstream—with a doctor who recently came back from Gaza (he’s been there a bunch of times), and he said that Israeli soldiers were explicitly taking away baby formula from doctors that were going to Gaza knowing that there’s a shortage so they were bringing their own supply of baby formula. The Israelis would just take those—they would let them in with everything else, but take those.

There’s only one reason you would do that. It’s not rocket science. The policy is explicitly to target children; it’s pretty obvious. I don’t know how this isn’t on the front page or the first thing you start with every step of the way whenever you’re talking about “the crisis in the Middle East” (which is still the fucking headline on the Guardian as I’m looking at it right now: “Middle East Crisis Live,” whatever that means).

LS: It’s been the same headline for the past twenty years.

EA: Exactly. Or “that part of the world,” that other sentence that I hate.

But it’s where we’re at. This is what I mean when I say I’m tired of the social pressure that’s imposed to pretend we’re not seeing what we’re seeing, not witnessing what we’re witnessing, that we cannot name the most obvious thing ever. Even B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights – Israel yesterday declared it to be a genocide. Very late, obviously, but even they did it. Who’s left? At some point, it’s going to be everyone.

I’ll end on this point. I do think we’re going to get to the point where it’s going to be widely recognized that what’s happening here is a genocide. It’s like that book, One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad, who we may have on The Fire These Times at some point, hopefully. That’s the bit that really gets to me the most. This is not a mystery. This is not, We don’t know what’s happening behind those death camps. No, we know. It’s live. It’s in 4K.

What happens next? I don’t know. I’m trying not to let my mind run into these inevitabilities, because if there’s one thing we’ve learned the hard way is that most predictions are useless. I’m trying to maintain a bit of that hope. What are the things that can be done? I’m trying to identify them as much as I can, and when I can manage, to just do them. Even if I don’t know what the impacts would be, do them anyway.

i: I start to feel a little crazy, because I look around me and I’m like, Is no one else seeing this? How are we still trying to defend this? How are we all not taking our pitchforks and storming? The hypocrisy of everything—you start to see it playing out in different ways, and I don’t understand what happens to the human psyche that it could continue to deny what is physically there in front of them. What is happening internally? What is happening in the mind? What is it doing to twist what it’s seeing into something completely different?

I’ve been doing researching on journalism and the ethics of journalism. These people really believe they’re being ethical by showing the “two sides.” We have to show the total truth! They acknowledge in some ways their own bias, but their acknowledgement of their own bias is essentially playing out the bias with these contradictory statements—they’re so proud of themselves.I don’t know. How do you undo that?

I know that there’s a lot of examples of people resisting and doing otherwise. This is part of the reason I did the Mutual Aid Podcast. I wanted to highlight more of those that do and experiment and break away from this brainwashing. But it’s the dominant existing way of being to take in this stuff, to think that everything is equal somehow, and deny what’s literally in front of you—constantly erasing the past so that every single moment is a brand new moment, which makes it so much easier to forget, to not see the patterns, to not believe what you’re seeing, and to give you a blank slate of This time is going to be different.

I start to feel a little crazy. I’m like, Am I the crazy one? What’s happening? And: How easy is it going to be for me to become something like that? How do you not become a fucking tankie when you’re seeing this shit happen, and not believe that the only way to do it is to meet their shit with the same force and the same violence? Violence yes and self-defense yes, for protecting and honoring life. But once you take a life, there’s something that happens there that you really have to contend with and hold, whatever that life is.

It gets me going into really dark spaces of human existence, and death and life and the interplay of the two. How do you not be that? but also, How do you resist someone who does not even see you as worthy of life?

EA: It won’t surprise anyone when I say that James Baldwin has helped me think this through. There is a power in the way he framed it. As a Black man he was talking about white people, and often to white people, and he did recognize at some point: I am not the N-word. I’ve never been that. No one I know who’s Black has even been that, and yet there is that category that exists out there. What has to happen is white people have to figure it out, because they’re the ones that invented that creature, that character that never actually existed.

It’s a purely fictional creation that came out of fiction, out of a need to justify the institution of slavery. There’s something powerful about that; it’s a way of reclaiming your own agency. I’m trying not to let the dehumanization make me feel dehumanized, mostly out of a “Fuck it,” and partly I understand where it comes from and there’s a power to knowing that. There’s an origin story to that; it wasn’t always the case.

It’s not about excusing it whatsoever. It’s more about recognizing there is a fundamental weakness in a society that has these projections or creations, like the N-word in the case of what Baldwin was talking about.

Having a kid who is that age, born one week after October 7 in 2023, I can see this hard, clear example of how she’s being treated, regardless of her identity (which at this age doesn’t really come into play anyway because of where she is and how she’s coded—white-passing, a name that can be a bit of anything), and how that same exact child would have been treated had she been in Gaza, had these historical what ifs happened differently.

For me that is revealing. Even though I know this intellectually, I feel and see it more concretely: every single child—every baby, every toddler, every civilian period—in Gaza is the same as her, is identical to her. Toddlers are toddlers. There is a universality to it.

Ms. Rachel, who’s a popular online children’s educator, has been doing a lot on Palestinians in Gaza, and with Palestinians in Gaza. This started because she was seeing videos from Gaza, like everyone has for the past couple years—but of parents in Gaza showing their kids her videos. That, for her, was a clear juxtaposition. She’s just had a kid, who’s six, seven months old now, and she recently did a video showing a baby in Gaza who’s the same age as her own but clearly doesn’t look the same, and she said, This is what a baby of this age should look like.

It cannot get clearer than this. Nothing else matters. It doesn’t matter, whatever “ism” you want to use, whatever justification, whatever “whatabout”—all of this collapses. That is very powerful. She’s not a “political actor” in the traditional sense of the term, but she is, in the other sense of the term. That fuels me. People who commit genocide want that obvious connection to be severed.

I’m thinking of Schindler’s List and the horrible scene where a grandmother is thrown off a balcony and she’s in a wheelchair. To get to that point, where the person doing it doesn’t think twice about it (or even if he does, he does it anyway), you have steps. It takes steps. You’re not born like this. No one is born like this. The anger that I have is that those steps have been clear for a long time and they would not have been possible if it was just Israel.

This is the moment where we have to get creative—and we see that creativity, we’ve seen it from day one in Gaza. It’s very clear what those above are planning; this is easing the way for what the rest of us are going to experience in one way or another in the future—and what, in many places, we are already starting to experience.

If it was just Israeli society going down that route of fascism, it’s not possible in this integrated world of ours. It’s not possible. Eurovision still has Israel. FIFA still has Israel. The EU still has normal relations with Israel. They’re now discussing partially suspending some funds. Had all this been as clear-cut as what they did with Russia (which could also be critiqued as not enough)—I have difficulties imagining Netanyahu being as brazen and confident as he’s been in the past couple years if the consequences were that high, that early.

They’re not even that high, and it’s already too late—which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t still be pushing for it. It’s going to be too little too late regardless. But there’s degrees of that, and we should still push on it.

KA: I was thinking about your point about Ms. Rachel and how special it is that she keeps her eye on the ball, she keeps her eye on what’s really important. But on the flip side of that, it’s quite shocking and horrible to see media, talking heads, and societies in general so easily fall into these bullshit debates about semantics, over what this really is.

A friend of mine had written on Instagram this quote, that it seems like when there’s a genocide underway, it’s as if everyone consents to this collective stupidity: What is genocide really? Is it even knowable? The juxtaposition of that reality, plus all of us having phones and watching what’s happening in real time—that kind of cognitive dissonance is really something to behold. As israa’ said, it’s crazy-making because it’s as if normal life is going on and you’re debating this abstract idea.

I recently read an article in +972 Magazine by Emilio Dabed where he’s critiquing the ICJ in granting provisional measures in the South Africa v. Israel. [The ICJ] granted provisional members acknowledging that Israel’s actions in Gaza could plausibly amount to genocide and that the situation was grave enough to warrant emergency measures—but despite that, [Dabed] argues, the court failed to take that one step that could have halted the atrocities: ordering an immediate and lasting ceasefire.

The argument is interesting. He saying that because of the that ruling, and because the ICJ directed Israel to take all measures within its power to prevent genocidal acts, that led everyone to this surreal space of prolonged deliberation, as if its claims to be “mitigating” the very crimes we’re all watching it do should be taken at face value. The ICJ’s failure to act in the way it really could not only enabled the violence to persist, but morphed the conversations about it into legal procedures and diplomatic ambiguities.

It’s incredible to me how easily we fall into that when we all see what’s going on.

EA: Karena, you had mentioned genocide studies, and the failures within that field. I’ll just mention briefly that I had Amos Goldberg on The Fire These Times a couple months ago; a good chunk of it was on that specific topic. He had argued over a year ago now that there is a clear failure within genocide and Holocaust studies (he’s a scholar of both: the Holocaust specifically, and genocides more broadly). The way he framed it, there is an intrusion from the legalistic world into the field of history.

For example, the question of intent is a legalistic matter, and how to determine it has to do with very specific legalistic tools. But it doesn’t mean that you can’t know and see that this is clearly genocide. Those are two separate cognitive processes, and the fact that one has come to dominate more and more the field of history, specifically when it comes to genocide, is problematic to say the least.

KA: Genocide studies was built on the back of the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide—those two crimes specifically—and the field had justified its existence through its stated commitment to prevention, so it’s painful for me to watch some academics edge dangerously close to rationalizing genocide, minimizing the gravest atrocities—this undermines the seriousness with which all forms of mass violence are treated and seen.

The International Association of Genocide Scholars, IAGS, have been really vocal about Ukraine, really vocal about the Rohingya, but remained conspicuously silent on Gaza. Since October 7, it hasn’t issued a single statement on Israeli actions. I have information that they’re going to be releasing a statement in a few days, but that speaks to the fact that it’s not just IAGS, it’s other genocide studies associations, different ones in different contexts.

There’s been a lot of internal disagreements; there’s fear of speaking out, [though] there are other scholars pushing for it. But the fact that there is contention within the field is damning. It’s led a lot of scholars to wonder, Is there even going to be genocide studies after this? The form it’s in now doesn’t look tenable. It’s completely lost all the moral ground it was standing on.

LS: It feels like genocide is becoming another way to do politics. This isn’t the first genocide we’ve seen in the past decade. This isn’t the first time in the past decade that we’ve seen mass starvation of a civilian population being used as a weapon of war. What terrifies me is that we’re entering a world where this has become normalized. This is a way that states deal with undesirable populations.

Daniel Voskoboynik: I’ll try to say a few things, and I’ll lose my composure sharing some words from what used to be the Warsaw Ghetto. Just three, four meters from me is the site of what used to be the largest synagogue in the world, which today is a skyscraper holding a bank.

Warsaw and this part of the world can be a brutal place in the best of times. And in these times, without any kind of redemptive story that emerges from it, knowing that the same horrors of this place are repeating themselves even more brutally, there’s a particular insidious horror of watching people wrapping themselves in Israeli flags (often seventeen-, eighteen-year-olds, youth from Israel on trips to this part of the world, trips of indoctrination), taking pictures in front of murals saying Never Again, connecting and justifying a genocide on the back of another one. I’m in a place of the abyss of horror.

There’s something about the crime of starvation. Genocide is multi-dimensional, but there’s something about starvation in particular that touches us from the inside and makes the guilt of even being in a position of access to food on a daily basis something I’m struggling with. The only hope I have is: We need the unthinkable to stop the unthinkable.

There is so much that we can’t stop. But at this point, hearing the stories in this land where people escaped genocide using the most ingenious and imaginative types of techniques, I still have a tiny bit of hope in what might emerge in the next months and years. It might not be enough to save many, many people that should have been saved. We should have never been in this situation. There are so many mistakes, organizing strategies that weren’t done that I’m sitting with.

Fascism thrives through disorientation. Maintaining some semblance of looking at reality with groundedness is an act of resistance. The great historian of the Warsaw Ghetto, Samuel Kassow, aptly said that the catastrophe of catastrophe is that it erases everything but the catastrophe. Part of the resistance to genocide is not accepting its narrative of inevitability.

It’s not hope. Hope is way too stable of a word. If anything, indignation pushes me to make a call out to people wherever they are. I hold onto the words of Rabbi Abraham Heschel: There’s few forms of constriction that are worse than the constriction of the human heart. There’s no freedom in having your heart constrained, in not opening up to the humanity of other people. I’m calling out especially to folks in the Jewish diaspora to connect to the deepest humanity of themselves, to wake up and do what’s possible within their family circuits, to shake things up, whatever that looks like for them.

It’s so much of the memory of everyone here, and of everyone in Palestine. I don’t really have any coherence at all. Coherence almost feels absurd in the midst of the abyss. But if there’s anything to be learned, it is that we have to hold each other.

Something that makes what’s happening in Gaza even worse is the broader context, seeing a network of concentration camps being built around the world, seeing the explosion of fascisms. It would already be too much if it was just what’s happening in Palestine, but the spiral that a lot of us find ourselves in, in so many contexts, makes us feel even more horrified. We need forms of solidarity that I don’t think we can even understand or imagine right now, but will be indispensable to keep us in a position of having a world worth holding together.

That’s as much as I can say from here. Bless the memory of everyone.

EA: Thanks, Daniel.

I’m very grateful to all of you. I’m struck right now as I have the five of us on the screen. The connections are quite something. Daniel is calling us from what used to be the Warsaw Ghetto—Gaza has been compared to the Warsaw Ghetto pretty explicitly for the past couple years. Leila with your experience as a Syrian, but also as someone who’s been in Gaza, who worked there for three years. Karena with your Armenian heritage and connection, and how genocide continues to impact your life. And israa’, someone directly involved with Gaza-related mutual aid.

Echoing a bit of what Daniel said, I’m grateful that we’re able to hold this space, because it’s not easy. I’m grateful for that, for whatever it’s worth, even if it’s for posterity.

Feel free to share final thoughts. I think we’ll do more of these when the time is right for them. We may do another episode with Maram; it may not be possible. I’m still in touch with her—she is not okay, to put it mildly. But I’m grateful that she is with us and still able to write. She published on Al Jazeera the other day. I’m grateful for that.

There’s been this sense of Can this happen? This shock reaction. Can it really get there? Are we really going there? People immediately think of the images they have from mass culture of what the death camps were, the Nazis and goose-stepping and all the authoritarianism. There is something important in the fact that even that conversation has been happening. With all the caveats this comes with—not enough, not enough people—I’m trying to say it’s not nothing.

I’m thinking of Primo Levi, who I’ve read a lot, talking about how there was a sense—up until he was arrested/kidnapped and sent to concentration camps (which he thankfully survived and wrote about), there was part of him that was always in denial of it happening, as it was happening. He couldn’t quite wrap his head around that it could be this barbaric, brutal. In his case it was because there was a sense that this could not happen in “enlightened Europe,” that there are still “rules of war” and so on.

He had to forcibly dispel that illusion and that myth. The faster we do, the better it is. Not to sink into cynicism and despair—on the contrary, to recognize that there are things that have been achieved, and that’s a good thing, and they were never guaranteed. The rights that were won, the progress that was made—none of this has ever been guaranteed. It’s difficult to put my finger on it—it feels more ghostly; it’s not as concrete as I would like it to be, but it’s there. It’s important to bring it back: to recognize it for what it is.

This is not the 1940s; this is not just a repetition. There are multiple things that could be done today that will still be too little too late—but it doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be done. It’s not satisfying. It’s not going to be enough, but we should still be thinking along the lines, because we can.

I’m not hungry. But I can think of people who are, because “Fuck it, I’m accepting this as the new normal.” There was a video of a man coming back home in Gaza with a big bag of flour and then collapses when he arrives—out of fatigue, out of joy, out of both. Everyone else in the family—the kids, the elders, his wife, sister—is celebrating. I had this moment of both relief and also What the fuck?

I’m relieved that they got some fucking flour. I’m relieved that this is not a new baseline—it cannot be. It’s not something that can ever be normalized. That’s what I mean about pushing against this despair—as understandable as it is, and as much as I feel it a lot of the time. Because concretely, this is what it could mean to people who are actually on the ground. Not to say that what we feel is what’s going to happen, but it’s part of this process, it’s part of what we can be doing. We need to be in a certain mindset in order to do certain things.

i: This is the moment where, like Daniel said, we have to get creative. Both people in Gaza—and we’ve seen that creativity, we’ve seen it from day one—and those of us outside who are hitting all the walls. It’s very clear that those above, this is what they’re planning. This is easing the way for what the rest of us are going to be experiencing in the future and, in many places, are already starting to experience.

Engaging in mutual aid work in Gaza, people are not giving as much. Maybe it’s associated with despair, maybe it’s fatigue, maybe it’s the fact the economy’s crashing and people are scared, so they have less to spend. Whatever it is, I want to remind people: this is just as important. Even with the prices skyrocketing, give to community kitchens, give to individuals. This is it; this is the only lifeline to be able to get by another day, or a few more hours, or stave off the bodily devastating effects of hunger—part of famine and starvation is what happens to your body. If they have enough money to purchase something to help stave off those effects, that buys more time. We’ll put in a link to the kitchen that I’ve been supporting.

A week ago, I saw videos of people in Egypt putting lentils and rice in bottles and throwing it in the ocean in hopes that maybe it’ll get there. And a few days later, those bottles did start to wash up. So get creative, figure it out in any other way—we’ve got to figure out ways to push back. These little things are ways that erode the powers.

KA: We can no longer ignore that we live in a world that’s indifferent to human life. Instead of despairing, this should be a call to build horizontal coalitions, to build mutual aid, to fill some of these important gaps in human care that are left by states. I’m glad for this collective because we operate in that spirit.

DV: I’ll say very briefly: first, fascism thrives through disorientation. Maintaining at lease some semblance of looking at the reality with groundedness is an act of resistance.

Second, the great historian of the Warsaw Ghetto, Samuel Kassow, really aptly said that The catastrophe of catastrophe is that it erases everything but the catastrophe. Part of the resistance to genocide is not accepting its own narrative of inevitability. We don’t know what the future is going to look like. We have the choice of either succumbing to despair (which is understandable) or attempting something and trying to alter the reality, resisting what genocide tries to impose: a catastrophe, and to only let you see that.

Finally (this is a more personal call), the Palestinian artist Ahmed Tobasi called for a Jewish Intifada. I think it’s underway already. It’s much smaller and less powerful than we’d want, but this is a call for organizers from all backgrounds to get connected with diasporic movements. There’s real strength there that we can build, and enormous things that we can achieve together. Let’s make it happen.

LS: To end on a positive note, we should take some strength from the amazing solidarity work that’s being done all around the world, and the different initiatives. People in every continent have been mobilizing and doing things for Gaza, and we may feel very powerless in the face of the fact that states are not moving to prevent this atrocity from happening, but everything that’s being done is contributing to a broader movement.

I suggest we do an episode another time in the near future looking at some of those initiatives that are happening around the world so we can have something a bit more positive to talk about.

EA: Absolutely.

The example I would give is not a positive example, but it drives home the main argument that all of us have said in different ways: that it’s not true that nothing can be done. Walter Benjamin, the Jewish German intellectual, died by suicide trying to escape Nazi Germany. He died on the French-Spanish border. He killed himself because Franco had cancelled all transit visas. It’s a very concrete thing that happened: what it meant is that as he was crossing into Spain, the border police forced him back into France. Fearing that he would be captured by the collaborationist regime in France, sent back to the Nazis, and killed (his brother died in a concentration camp later on), he took a lot of morphine—that’s how he died, in a hotel by the Spanish-French border.

Had the decision by Franco to cancel the transit visas happened a week later, Walter Benjamin would not have died at the border. This one, single event put pressure on Franco at the time, and is not even as feasible as what most Brits today can do in terms of putting pressure on Keir Starmer. There’s a different level of difficulty; it depends where you are, and is not applicable everywhere, but we’re not in that world, that situation.

We shouldn’t forget that, we shouldn’t underestimate that. We should always act as though we can actually do it. It won’t necessarily get us what we need, but every single life that can be saved in any concrete way right now is my motivation. We can actually stop this process, specifically the famine, from getting worse and worse—the famine has begun; it doesn’t mean we have to allow it to continue forever. This is horrible to think about, but it’s the difficulty of the moment; it’s what I’m trying to wrap my head around.

This somewhat positive note, a hopeful note, even though the context does not offer hope—that’s my motivating factor. I’ll end on this. I’m very grateful to the four of you for joining us on this special episode of The Fire These Times. Thanks a lot, guys.

2 responses to “This Cannot Be The New Normal”

James

August 31, 2025 at 3:50 am

… liked this!

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Notes on Assadism, Zionism, Fascism and Hope – Elia Ayoub

March 13, 2026 at 4:20 pm

[…] thrives on disorientation, as my co-conspirator Daniel Voskoboynik put it in a recent episode, and the good news is that we already have the tools to help one another not go mad with the false […]

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