January & February & March &...

Hello,

Well, it's almost April. Earlier today, there was a bird, some bird, making its two-toned call as it bopped around somewhere out there in the sunny, Jasmine-y streets (I stopped to stick my nose amongst the jasmine vine yesterday, and felt so happy for one second), and I realized that it has been almost three months since my last newsletter.

The first thing is that there is still a genocide, and it goes on and on and seems to reach backwards and outwards as well as forwards and inwards. It has been hard—hard is a stupid word, all words feel like stupid words—to confront all that is being articulated through this current and specific genocide, that is, the historic and ongoing crisis of western civilization and its requirements, the sorting through of human from inhuman, the massive consolidation of global capital at the expense of all but the very, very few (and in the end, at the expense of them, too), the soul and mind and heart deadening (because of its transparency) rhetoric still somehow upholding the brutal execution (through bombing, shooting starvation, etc.) of civilians...and still write a little newsletter about what I am reading.

Second, I have been reading so much that is so relevant, its relevance adding layers of both hope and despair to ::waves vaguely:: all this. A lot of Edward Said. A lot of Stuart Hall. All of Capital, Volume I. Fanon. And on and on. It is a lot, too much to figure out how to narrow down and share. But I suppose in the name of spring, birds, jasmine, and one second of happiness, I will share a few:

On the current crisis:

Franklin Foer published an essay, The Golden Age of American Jews is Ending. Foer's essay follows what has become a pattern in essays like this, focusing on "increasing" antisemitism on the left. Which is a sort of leap-frogging through history, landing only on those hegemonic lily-pads that ultimately blockade any critique of the state of Israel. That is, Foer provides a history of antisemitism, a history of Jewish life in the U.S., a weird and truncated history of black and Jewish solidarity (spoiled, he seems to suggest, by a move towards radical black power and decolonization movements by that darker contingent of the american hyphenate whom liberalism did not and would not elevate or liberate). Without offering a similar history of the founding of Israel, of Orientalism and imperalism, of Palestinian oppression and resistance, of the anti-Arab and anti-Muslim violence and rhetoric of the 1940s, the 1960s, the 1990s, and today, or of de-colonial and anti-colonial movements, he concludes that the left's critique of the state of Israel can only or most likely be explained by a historical hatred of Jewish people. Those on the left have, it seem, no viable way to critique Israel's genocidal action, for all critiques are tinged with the possibility—no, probability—of being rooted in the hatred of a people. One is left with the question of how, or if, Israel could ever be critiqued?

This is problematic for two reasons. First, it presumes—so that it can dismiss as antisemitic—that there can only be negative opposition to Israel, and not positive support for Palestine, and it does this through erasing the history of Palestine, the colonial founding of Israel, and the historic and intellectual realities of decolonization movements. Second, it does not address in a meaningful way how institutions—universities come to my mind, but also of course every other institution, media, government, jobs, states—can support Jewish people, who cannot be conflated with a state, and yet, who are, and this is the dangerous slippage that articles like this enforce, rather than challenge. This is the real moral question Foer might have answered. For what we have seen is that accusations of antisemitism on the left are met largely with the kneejerk (and reprehensible, and unintelligble) suppression and repression of positive protest in support of Palestine and Palestinians, which suppression of course reinscribes this fundamentally racist and colonialist ideology, that in no rational world can Palestine be anything other than a lacunae into which some response to Jewishness either flows from or disappears into.

In other words, nowhere does Foer address the emotional, physical, and spiritual toll being paid by, for example, Jewish students who feel threatened by students—Jewish and non-Jewish—calling for a free-Palestine, and how they might navigate that real toll, though it is in fact different from the moral and ethical harm of being attacked for being Jewish. To fail to distinguish the two, again, renders Palestine the non-entity, the empty space, that it has been made to be for over a century. To fail to offer solace for the former fails to take up the moral question of how to support a traumatized people—which answer might, of course, be dangerous in its applicability to both Jewish and Arab students.

The second piece is Edward Said's 1978 Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims. It's much less, ahem, dense than a lot of Said's writings, and very worthwhile. It is a wonderful response, albeit an antecedent one (and one wonders if Foer has read anything Said wrote) to Foer, but time is a spiral as we well know. From the essay:

...the Palestinian Arab was ignored nonetheless. That is what needs emphasis: the extent to which the roots of Jewish and Gentile Zionism are in the culture of high liberal capitalism, and how the work of its vanguard liberals like George Eliot reinforced, perhaps also completed, that culture's less attractive tendencies. None of what I have so far said applies adequately to what Zionism meant for Jews or what it represented as an advanced idea for enthusiastic non-Jews; it applies exclusively to those less fortunate beings who happened to be living on the land, people of whom no notice was taken.

What has too long been forgotten is that while important European thinkers considered the desirable and later the probable fate of Palestine, the land was being tilled, villages and towns built and lived in by thousands of natives who believed that it was their homeland. In the meantime their actual physical being was ignored; later it became a troublesome detail.

Read it if you haven't, if you have time.

For pleasure:

Finally, I decided to read all of Ursula K. LeGuin's novels in chronological order. I have so-far read Rocannon's World and Planet of Exile and I'm in the middle of City of Illusions and honestly what is blowing my mind is how much LeGuin's writing improved between Rocannon's World and City of Illusions. It's actually really cool to see! I also rewatched The Birds for the first time since I was about ten, and it is a truly weird and great movie. And finally, season three of Young Royals dropped this month!!

That's probably more than enough for now. Until next time,

Endria

PS

>> Friends have organized a wonderful climbing event to raise funds for Palestine. Join, support, climb! Climb the Wall

>> I signed up to run a 50k in Marin on June 29! I'll also be running a 25k in April at Canyons Endurance Races in Auburn, CA. Want to support me? Donate to one of these rotating fundraisers for Palestine: Funds for Gaza

>> You can read my column, The Human Animal in both the Winter and Spring (out in print now, online soon) issues of Bay Nature.

>> I have a bunch of new stories out soon in Transition Magazine, Lightspeed, and Fusion Fragment. I'll share links when I have them!