The structure of time in stories

"Whereas a film has 24 frames per second in which to tell its story, a traditional comic book only has a small number of frames, or panels, per page, usually between five and nine, across a total of 22 pages. Comparatively, a comic book is equivalent to about six seconds of film. But obviously, any comic contains more narrative than the time it takes to read this sentence. So where, then, does the content 'hide'?"
— Roy Schwartz, Is Superman Circumcised?: The Complete Jewish History of the World's Greatest Hero, McFarland & Company, 2021.

“I need a meta-time, a thing fueled by the kind of heartbeat I desire — one that is rule-breaking, empathetic, aware of its power enough to offer some kind of mercy.
In DC Comics, there is a concept called hypertime, an in-universe framework formulated as a diagram, making the timelines of stories accurate, even without continuity across existing collections of storylines. The idea postulates a kind of multiversal transit map where each line, representing its own story, runs parallel, crosses over others, and carries on, with characters hopping from one train to another across universes. A reader in the third-dimensional space can look down and make meaning of the stories between the pages, leaving room for the possibility of a fourth-dimensional, hyper-cubic reader who examines that space, a geometric vision incorporating our universe along with the comic story world."
— Kristin Keane. An Encyclopedia of Bending Time. Baltimore: Barrelhouse, 2022. p. 60.

"...pretty much all of my favorite books screw around with the order of events, or come shaped like puzzle boxes, or have seven separate 'third acts.' Like David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest or Rebecca Roanhorse's Black Sun, which jump around in time, or Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow, which intersperses two timelines that slowly converge.
Time is the one drug that absolutely everyone is hooked on. And fiction is the only place to get a really potent hit."
— Charlie Jane Anders. Never Say You Can’t Survive: How to Get Through Hard Times By Making Up Stories. Tordotcom, 2021. Chapter 24.

"Time isn’t an orderly stream. Time isn’t a placid lake recording each of our ripples. Time is viscous. Time is a massive flow. It is a self-healing substance, which is to say, almost everything will be lost."
Charles Yu. How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. Pantheon, 2010. p. 14.

"This experiencing of time, it seems to me, is what sets writing apart and makes it more than simply words, more valuable than a commodity, more pleasurable than the audio-visual product which digital culture has converted into a space of hollowed time, like the time you spend flying between two airports. Writing is time packed full. It derives its morality from its immorality; it achieves compassion, not by flattery or glib misrepresentation, but with a gaze that is concerned only with seeing what is there, uncompromisingly, avoiding all fakery. This, then, is what it means to search for the truth: the objective that attends me whenever I ask myself, in an ironic spirit, Why do you write? or, What does writing mean to you?"
— I write like a lover, I write like one dead. The opening essay of my second Mutanabbi book, translated by Robin Moger. Youssef Rakha. Language of Loss (Substack). Dec. 31, 2022.

"Linear history, Oedipal history, is our fantasy, and to perpetuate it we invented the myth of an authoritarianism arising from the preterit, even though authority can only be exercised from the present. Borges, whose work was concerned with the manipulation of time, claimed that each author invents his precursors. Or, to put it in Phillip K. Dick’s terms, the Oedipal structure is a Counter-ClockWorld, a world where, as in this Dick novel, the libraries destroy books and the dead emerge from their graves.The best-kept secret of linear oxidental time is that it is written from the future to the past."
Heriberto Yépez. The Empire of Neomemory. Translated by Jen Hofer, Christian Nagler, & Brian Whitener. ChainLinks, 2013. Originally: El Imperio de la neomemoria (Oaxaca: Almadía, 2007). Part I: America, Pseudo-Patriarchy, Pantopia.

“Any sequence of events is interesting because of its positive and negative shapes. Take a pair of scissors and cut something out. Anything. Why not a devil with horns and a tail and cloven hooves. So. There is your paper with a devil-shaped hole in it. Two devil-shapes, one positive, one negative, and both of them made at the very same moment. Was the Battle of Manzikert the shape of the paper or the shape of the hole? It’s as I’ve said before: there is always a twoness in the oneness, and for this reason it’s almost impossible to know what is happening in the space-time configuration. Not only that: as soon as an effort is made to look at any particular thing the aspect of that thing becomes other than what it was—that event that happened in full view when unlooked-at covers itself when observed, spins around itself one of those wonderful encrusted eggs with a peephole in one end of it; I the observer, receding reactively from the gaze that proceeds from my eyes, find myself shot into the distance thousands of miles away from the peephole. Inch by inch I think my way back; closer, closer, closer I come and here it is all tiny—the tiny, tiny Battle of Manzikert.”
— Russell Hoban. Pilgermann. London: Bloomsbury, 1983.

"If you have come to your planned ending and it doesn’t seem to be working, run your eye up the page and the page before that. You may see that your best ending is somewhere in there, that you were finished before you thought you were."
— John McPhee, in an essay on structure in the New Yorker (January 6, 2013), quoted by Aimee Liu in "Picture Your Structure," Legacy & Lore (Substack), February 16, 2024.

A Jewish sense of story

In a footnote to Most Famous Short Film of All Time, I wrote:

"Literary critic Frank Kermode in The Sense of an Ending (1965) said stories need satisfying endings, just as the Christian story offers an ending that provides a meaning to everything that came before. Dara Horn dissents, saying that Jewish storytelling recognizes that we 'cannot be true to the human experience while pretending to make sense of the world,' and so a story may instead serve as 'the beginning of the search for meaning.'"

I recently came across this reflection by Rachel Klein:

"Where apocalypse narratives are primarily concerned with the restructuring and healing of society writ large after tragedy, time loops focus on the personal growth of an individual by having the person relive their experiences until they learn the lessons required to move on."
— "A Case for Why Time Loops Are Inherently Jewish": These cyclical stories, from 'Russian Doll' to 'Palm Springs,' are the Jewish answer to the Christian apocalypse narrative. Rachel Klein, HeyAlma, June 13, 2022

It's likely that all cultures and religions have some sense of the life cycle, that is, of each generation as a cycle, and of each year as cyclical too. But Judaism, unlike Christianity, doesn't layer on any focus on the supposed end of history. There's just the cycle itself.

There are endings, though.

"The ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation ... likely reinforced the idea that the end times would inevitably be sudden, and total. All these years and millennia later most of us still haven’t learned the painful truth that most ends, even most apocalypses, are gradual, painful, drawn out and sometimes ongoing. If we don’t learn the truth about the end of the world, and worlds ending, the apocalypse may rest eternally on the horizon, ever-present, always informing our lives in numerous ways, but never quite occurring. And the truth is that worlds are ending as we speak. Our own world, your own world, could also end; it might already be falling apart."
— "The Apocalypse is not the End," Joshua P. Hill, New Means (Substack), December 30, 2023

Is everything fair game for science? Even niceness itself?

Here's a new paper:

Prosocial motives underlie scientific censorship by scientists: A perspective and research agenda
Authors: Cory J. Clark, Lee Jussim, Komi Frey, Sean T. Stevens, Musa al-Gharbi, Karl Aquino, J. Michael Bailey, Nicole Barbaro, Roy F. Baumeister, April Bleske-Rechek, David Buss, Stephen Ceci, Marco Del Giudice, Peter H. Ditto, Joseph P. Forgas, David C. Geary, Glenn Geher, Sarah Haider, Nathan Honeycutt, Hrishikesh Joshi, Anna I. Krylov, Elizabeth Loftus, Glenn Loury, Louise Lu, Michael Macy, Chris C. Martin, John McWhorter, Geoffrey Miller, Pamela Paresky, Steven Pinker, Wilfred Reilly, Catherine Salmon, Steve Stewart-Williams, Philip E. Tetlock, Wendy M. Williams, Anne E. Wilson, Bo M. Winegard, George Yancey, and William von Hippel.
November 20, 2023
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
120 (48) e2301642120

I became aware of it because Megan McArdle wrote an opinion column for the Washington Post, "The world could use more jerks." December 12, 2023.

Yes, the paper seems to be saying that there are facts, and there is niceness, and niceness is often just covering up the facts, and if we were more tolerant of jerks then the jerks would show us the truth.

The paper's abstract defines "scientific censorship" as "actions aimed at obstructing particular scientific ideas from reaching an audience for reasons other than low scientific quality." Any actions? Yes. Having a personal filter is self-censorship. Being deliberately nice is self-censorship. That's the definition.

A key problem here, for me, is that "low scientific quality" isn't defined. One scientist might say that an entire research idea is untenable for ethical reasons, which also means it's untenable for scientific reasons, and the research would be of low scientific quality if it were to proceed. The other scientist might say, no, ethics has nothing to do with scientific quality, and thus they deem the first scientist to have self-censored.

The paper's conclusion isn't really a conclusion. It says that the many co-authors disagree on "whether and where scholars should “draw the line” on inquiry." Nonetheless, they claim they "all agree" that science "would be better situated to resolve these debates, if—instead of arguing in circles based on conflicting intuitions—we spent our time collecting relevant data." I don't believe they mean relevant data on the myriad unique topics of scientific interest, but rather on the meta-topic; that is, they want "better science on scientific censorship" so they can better answer their own question. Anyway, see previous paragraph for the meta-problem here.

McArdle, for her part, in the Washington Post column, wants to expand the message to all writers. She says:

"These professions [journalism and academia] used to be sheltered workshops for those kinds of 'jerks': naturally distrustful folks who like asking uncomfortable questions and experiencing an uncontrollable urge to say whatever they’ve been told not to. These character traits don’t make people popular at parties, but they might well help them ferret out untruths, deconstruct popular pieties and dismantle conventional wisdom."

As she puts it: "Unfortunately, the universe isn’t here to please us, which means niceness and truth will sometimes be at odds."

Crucially, she adds: "Jerks were never the majority, which would be chaos. But they were a teaspoon of leavening..." In other words, some people have permission to be jerks. Not all people. Who will be in the elect few who receive social permission to be rudely contrarian and are perceived as experts simply because of their attitude, and who will be in the majority of sad amateurs who are tone-policed and shut down for expressing a difference of opinion? Ay, there's the rub. Plainly, she reserves the right to be a contrarian. It's her newspaper column, after all. She's the leavening that will transform the critics on whom her voice is overlaid. The transformation will be non-chaotic, we are to feel assured of that.

She quotes Musa al-Gharbi who, readers may discover, has a forthcoming book: We Have Never Been Woke: Social Justice Discourse, Inequality and the Rise of a New Elite.

She also plugs the new book The Canceling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott.

On which note, take a look at this Amazon review for The Canceling of the American Mind. This is what McArdle is asking for, right? Truth-telling while kind of being a jerk? The world is vastly improved now?

Related, on this blog: 2020 "Open Letter on Justice and Open Debate" in Harper's

On political disappointment and anger

Disappointment

Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents, wrote in the magazine's newsletter on December 9, 2023:

"The Marxist philosopher Michael Löwy explores doom’s constructive potential in a reflection on the German Jewish theorist Walter Benjamin’s urgent plea for the 'organization of pessimism,' in which that affect is understood not as passive defeatism, but rather as 'an active, practical and ‘organized’' stance 'that is totally dedicated to preventing, by all means possible, the advent of the worst.'"

Angel goes on, pointing out Sara Marcus's recent interview describing, in Angel's words, "the last 2,000 years of Jewish history is a lesson in the creative possibilities of loss." Marcus said in that interview:

"The whole history of Judaism after 70 CE is about having lost the structure of the Temple and ritualistically voicing a desire to get it back, while at the same time building a completely other structure that’s rhizomatic — iterative, decentered — and incredibly durable and flexible. To continue elaborating that structure while never taking our eyes off the fact of loss, and in fact keeping active a longing for the lost object, grounds Jews in a profoundly generative historical experience of disappointment."

What can we generate from this?

People are not things, and it's OK to be angry

A.R. Moxon wrote on October 29, 2023: "All people have an intrinsic and indestructible worth that cannot be measured." We assign value to things, yes, but people "are not things." And so he goes on to say of the U.S. healthcare system:

"It’s very profitable. Some people think this means it is the very best. I’m not kidding! They really think that, and will tell you so without blushing, even though we can all see that it costs us more than any other developed country, and returns worse outcomes, and wipes people out financially every single day. And if you suggest that maybe our healthcare system should not be designed to wipe people out, they ask you how you intend to pay for a system that is designed to heal people instead, which is how you know that deep down, perhaps without telling themselves, they have decided that it is sick people who should have to pay for being sick, have on some level decided that sick people deserve to be wiped out as they are.

This is a very popular belief, I’ve found. It’s one diametrically opposed to the great truth about indestructible and inherent human worth.

And so, I think the appropriate response to this belief is anger."

Resuming the theme: Every life is worthy, and it's OK to be angry

Moxon continued on November 19, 2023:

"The idea here is that all human beings’ lives carry an immeasurable and indestructible worth, but human societies seem increasingly captured by a lie that insists that human beings must be regularly measured to determine if their life is still deserved. One common yardstick used to measure the value of human life is the profit motive, which cares nothing for the good of society; it cares only for growth. Just as unregulated water seeks the most efficient path to its own level, so unregulated profit seeks the most efficient path to the most profit possible, and will run through society the same way a burst water main on the top floor will run through the walls of a house. The most efficient path to profit happens to involve monetizing basic human need — healthcare and water and shelter — which of course ties profit to the immeasurable value of life, upon which an unregulated profit motive can set whatever price it likes, and does, and thus annihilates human beings by the thousands and millions every year, every month, every week.

And so the great lie — that life must be earned — makes products of our lives. It consumes humans for the benefit of wealth, enforces a false insecurity upon us all, divides us into those who deserve life and those who don’t. In this way, the great lie forms the basis of supremacy — the idea that some people matter and the rest do not — which makes our human systems vulnerable to takeover by the most malicious types of supremacist; for example, the white conservative evangelical Christian Nationalists who now are now broadcasting their clear intent to establish a fascist authoritarian rule in my country, the United States."

Anger, he goes on, is an appropriate response — if it's observant, restorative, and expectant. In other words: pay attention to what's really being said, replace these falsehoods with truths, and be hopeful that we can and must make a better world.

Sources

Arielle Angel, Jewish Currents, email newsletter, December 9, 2023

A.R. Moxon in The Reframe (Substack):
"An Appropriate Anger," October 29, 2023
"Channels of Rage," November 19, 2023

Unexpected, unrepeatable, embraceable: 'Fluke' by Brian Klaas

Who we are and what happens: these are inextricably linked. If we care about an event, it's because it happened to someone, and that someone — we tend to believe — must have played a role in it. This is how we form narratives, including the narrative of our own agency.

Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters is about this.

---

The author is Brian Klaas, a professor of global politics at University College London.

(I received an advance review copy from NetGalley. Fluke will be published by Scribner in January.)

---

Anything can change the course of our lives. A cloud moves, and a plane doesn’t take off or changes its flight path. It matters who is or isn’t on the plane, whether the plane crashes, or where the airmen drop the bomb.

We know that chance occurrences make a difference in the outcome, yet we resist this notion, partly because it seems unfair. Some people live, others die, due to luck? We might as well say they were saved or destroyed for no reason at all.

And "no reason" isn't what we mean when we say we want "the real story" of "what happened." With no meaningful connections between who we are and what happens, we can't track a narrative. “We want a rational explanation to make sense of the chaos of life,” Klaas says.

Image: Pixabay

But these little reasons indeed seem to be the real reasons.

“Nobody tiptoes around with extreme care to make sure not to squish the wrong bug. Few panic about an irrevocably changed future after missing the bus,” Klaas observes. Yet how else, he asks, does the future get made?

If your parents hadn’t met, you wouldn’t be here. The same is true for your ancestors.

"We are the offshoots of a sometimes wonderful, sometimes deeply flawed past," and "our existence is bewilderingly fragile, built upon the shakiest of foundations." An asteroid killed the dinosaurs, which allowed all of us to be born millions of years later, and today you’ve subtly altered the future of humanity based on "whether you stopped to have coffee before you rushed out the door."

Yes, our actions are part of a chain of events. Turtles all the way down.

Could we have acted differently, though? Did we have free will then? Do we have free will, right now, to change anything at all?

When we look for a cause, we often see a fluke. The fluke isn’t nothing. It’s just not the meaning we originally hoped for. It’s something unexpected and unrepeatable, and we can embrace it.

Fluke is elegantly readable nonfiction, revolving thorny philosophical questions with ease. It poses the question: What theory makes the most sense to you?

You get to choose what you believe.

Or do you?

For more, see "Why Are We Here? Chaos Brought Us Together" (9 min read), which Books Are Our Superpower published today.

---

A couple years ago, I wrote about another book by Prof. Klaas: Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us. The article is "Why are powerful people so terrible?" (4 min read).

---

Enfield: 'I love how much I hate the word burnout'

Here are the three passages from Holy American Burnout!, a new release by Split/Lip Press, that most spoke to me.

Because I have thought about religious devotion in the context of moving my body:

"It's not that I don't believe in God; it's that I prefer bodies in motion, and I want my belief in God translated into reverential movement. God has always seemed inert, though I've been told He moves in us all." (p. 65)

Because anger is a valid response and it opens the door to change:

"Yes, to be a teacher and relatively conscious in america is to be in a rage almost all the time. Do you suffer in the mind or take up arms against the sea of troubles? You may recognize that the system is built on a one-size-fits-all curriculum that is given minor adjustments to suit the needs of your classroom. You may see how american education prepares certain individuals for the traps awaiting them outside school walls, and you may want them to understand both those traps as well as Shakespeare. You may be angry at those in power who continue to perpetuate these trappings, but you aren't faced with them on a regular basis. You're instead faced with the students who don't warrant or gain from your anger and can, in fact, be hurt by it. So you require something more like grace to navigate this system, or else the bitterness in your heart might melt and resolve you into a lifeless puddle trampled upon by the dancing feet of children." (p. 93)

Because commute leads to comm[b]u[s]t[ion]e:

"What's in a commute? When does it begin or end? Sure, the word implies an ending at either your workplace or home, but since we volley back and forth, maybe the entirety of our working lives is spent in one, prolonged commute. Such an individual exercise. We reach out occasionally and catch the attention or sympathies of a stranger or a co-worker kind enough to lend a ride, but in the end, we all have our own destinations. We can't stop moving.

I love how much I hate the word burnout. It's perfectly visceral. I can feel the burning of my muscles and the heated tension in my spine. Still, the machine grinds on, setting the transmission ablaze — burnt out. Burnout is frequently attributed to teachers, first year teachers especially, but it seems to me the greater american condition, bestowed upon anyone with a commute. * * * I see it there along the horizon too, a great american burnout. If you work the gears too hard, eventually the transmission will erupt. The car will have no choice but to idle.

* * *

Holy american Burnout, grant us the stillness of your fire this time." (p. 115)

Sean Enfield, Holy American Burnout!, Split/Lip Press, 2023

See also

Enfield mentions Baldwin.

'Antisemitism in the Gothic and Jewish Horror' with Dr Mary Going (YouTube)

Antisemitism in the Gothic and Jewish Horror with Dr Mary Going. A talk for Romancing the Gothic, 2023.

She talks about antisemitic tropes in Dracula, Nosferatu, and Paul Wegener's surviving golem film.

One observation of mine

A similarity (in my view) between Jewish and transgender identity: You feel stereotyped as someone who will do "the Jewish thing" or "the transgender thing," and you want to strike forth on your own path, but you may also be inclined to hide your identity in the process because you feel some threat or because you're imitating people who have felt that threat, and maybe that survival behavior is part of the identity."

What it looks like to interrupt a Nazi rally ('A Night at the Garden')

Marshall Curry's 7-minute documentary short, "A Night at the Garden," is on YouTube.

YouTube has age-restricted it, so you may need to go to YouTube to acknowledge the age-restriction before you can view it.

It shows a Jewish man interrupting a Nazi rally in New York's Madison Square Garden in 1939.

Learn more at anightatthegarden.com

By the way... "Who Paid For Millions of Fascist Pamphlets in the US in 1940?" Nazi Germany did, explained in ‘Prequel’ by Rachel Maddow. It's a 7-minute read on Medium. I've unpaywalled the link for you.

'Kefitzat haderech': The path is miraculously made short

From the Talmud:

"The Sages taught in a baraita with regard to land contracting to shorten a journey: For three individuals the land contracted, and each one miraculously reached his destination quickly: Eliezer, servant of Abraham, and Jacob our forefather, and Abishai, son of Zeruiah. The Gemara elaborates: The case of Abishai, son of Zeruiah, is that which we said. The case of Eliezer, servant of Abraham, is as it is written: “And I came that day to the well” (Genesis 24:42). His intention was to say to the members of Rebecca’s family that on that day he left Canaan and on the same day he arrived, to underscore the miraculous nature of his undertaking on behalf of Abraham."

— Sanhedrin 95a

People who are angry deserve a hearing: On war in Gaza

Gaza Damage Proxy Map

A visualization project by Earth Engine Apps.

People I'm reading today on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the war in Gaza.

Ori Hanan Weisberg

Job is devastated by his losses and demands a hearing with G-d. In Chapters 4–5, his friend Eliphaz eloquently explains that anyone who is truly innocent can turn their prayers to G-d and be healed. But later in the Book of Job, G-d is displeased with Eliphaz for trying to so quickly close the book on Job's complaint.

Ori Hanan Weisberg tells us (on Facebook, October 11) about G-d's reaction. G-d "doesn’t say 'yep, well done Elushkeh, you got it right my brilliant child and your benighted brother Job just needs to listen to you.' Rather, as the Rambam emphasizes, God rebukes him for being too invested in his own argument and correctness."

G-d seems to believe, Weisberg says — citing the Jewish historian Amos Funkenstein — that Job has the right "to demand a hearing" about this situation if he believes it's terribly unfair.

A hearing

Weisberg lists many things about which he's angry right now, including:

---

"I'm angry that someone next to whom I sat Shabbat after Shabbat for years in synagogue went to a music festival, had his arm blown off with a grenade, applied his own tourniquet, and now is a hostage in Gaza with no medical attention to his grave injury."

---

"I'm angry that thousands of Palestinian children will be killed and traumatized in the next days and weeks."

---

"I'm angry at myself that this is the world and childhood I’ve given my three children."

---

People shouldn't pretend they know the answer, especially, Weisberg says, if they've "never stepped foot here, haven’t read a 100th of what I've read, who don’t interact and work with Palestinians every day...There is no justice without humility."

Sahar Vardi

"'Dual loyalty' is seeing both this and that with tears in your eyes.

It's that moment when you talk to a friend who doesn’t know whether their relatives are dead or kidnapped and what they should even hope for, and to see the helplessness, the fear, the deep pain. And a moment later, it’s talking to a friend from Gaza who can only say that every night is now the scariest night of his life; that he calculates his chances, and those of his daughters, of waking up alive the next morning.

'Dual loyalty' is feeling the heartbreak of this and also of that.

It is to hold this moment between the heartbreak and pain and shock over the total destruction of Nir Oz and to think about all the people there, and at the same time, to feel the horror over the impending total destruction of Shuja’iyya and to think about all the people there."

Sahar Vardi, Dual Loyalty, Times of Israel, October 11, 2023

A.R. Moxon

A.R. Moxon today, regarding why it's hard to talk about the massacre of Israelis and Palestinians:

"To say one makes you sick means you’re taking up for the other, or vice versa. To say both make you sick risks engagement in a both-siderism that ignores important context about aggression and oppression that brought us here, ignores the reality that every struggle for liberation has involved a fight of some kind."

But massacres, he says, make him feel

"sick in a way that defies context. I don’t know what other reaction to have, nor does it seem an unhealthy reaction to massacre. We are a species defined at least in part by our ability to form ideas. It strikes me that we must have better ideas than massacre..."

Wanting neither Israelis nor Palestinians to be massacred

"seems more precarious than it should, like trying to balance on a tightrope in a stiff wind. For many, not wanting one self-evidently means you want the other, or vice versa, even though it seems axiomatic that the only way to hold either idea is to hold both. Massacre seems to be on its own side, and seems to only want more massacre."

Is it that being pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli are sides 1 and 2, and being pro-massacre and anti-massacre are sides 3 and 4? No, because "massacred citizens do not strike me as ‘both sides’ of an equation even if they sit on opposite sides of a border or a wall." It is that the real two sides here are pro-massacre and anti-massacre, and nationalities and ethnicities are, in comparison, not the sides we should be focusing on.

But he feels speechless. ("Speechlessness," I note, is a theme on which Naomi Klein recently wrote.)

"When you publish your opinions and people read them, there comes a certain expectation you’ll produce useful opinions, even if it’s only a self-aggrandizing expectation that you put upon yourself. Lately I’ve been without words. The daily news gives me that same sick feeling as I once had some twenty years ago, even makes me wonder why I’m off on vacation instead of doing something about *waves hands at everything* yet it’s not clear what I could do, and I fear that whatever opinion I might offer could not possible be useful. Perhaps by the time we get to the end I’ll have proved that fear well-founded."

Once you start to tell the story, you realize that history goes infinitely far back. But for the people to whom it's happening right now, the context shifts, and they feel that they're reacting to it rather than having participated in its causes.

"For somebody, every rocket is the first rocket; every massacre is the first massacre."

Finally, while we don't want to treat others as our "rhetorical armor," nor treat their identities as "monolithic" or "fungible" with some other position, nor demand that they "provide definitive answers for the rest of us to utilize about matters of deep complexity and grave tragedy" — still, it's important to listen to them: "I don’t see how we expect to attend to these matters without listening to Jewish voices, any more than we could do so without listening to Palestinian ones."

"Hurting The Right People": It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now. Spirits of harm and lack; spirits of solidarity and abundance. A.R. Moxon, The Reframe (Substack), October 14, 2023

"I understand why we talk about innocents in war. My heart has been crushed to dust because of non-combatant human lives reduced to collateral damage. I also know there are people— particularly men— who are uniquely culpable for others’ suffering. I still struggle, however, when we start building mental models for which human beings do or don’t deserve to die. I know where that road leads. It leads to this exact place we’re in right now. We had to burn the village to save it.'

Here’s a belief I hold deeply: There is no taxonomy of suffering. Every family’s grief is equally debilitating. An Israeli parent’s tears are no less heart wrenching than a Palestinian family’s tears.

Here’s another one: Asymmetry is real. 3.8 billion dollars in U.S. military aid a year is real. Barricades are real. Occupation is real. Every death is a tragedy, but for years now there have been more deaths on one side of the border than the other."
— I've been thinking about the people who set themselves on fire: Flawed offerings, a month into war, Garrett Bucks, November 14, 2023

Bucks recommends the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, the Quaker American Friends Service Committee, and "the Jewish/Arab peace resistance within Israel, particularly the Standing Together movement."

Talia Lavin

Lavin reflects on Naomi Klein's Doppelganger. Klein, Lavin says, explains that "the far-right 'mirror world' mocks, coopts and warps language in such a way as to render its opponents speechless." Furthermore:

"Another vector of speechlessness, and of the deconstruction of meaning, is the increasing collapse between our digital selves and our real selves, and a concomitant conflation of what we say online with what we do, and who we are. To post or not to post becomes an artificially heightened decision: Klein calls it 'the quicksand underpinning our age: the confusion between saying/clicking/posting and doing.'"

And Lavin writes:

"'The source of my speechlessness,' Klein writes, 'is a sense of near violent rupture between the world of words and the world beyond them.' The book is extraordinary, but it is Klein’s sharp description of the dual dilemmas of hollowed-out meaning rendering one speechless, and the way the necessity of constructing an ever-present digital self forces one into ceaseless and empty speech, that caught at me, in this moment in particular."

Specifically, at this time:

"the doubled self is present in its dark mirror. I feel the urge to speak meaninglessly, and the urge to stay silent, and the senseless notion that not speaking is the same as refraining from action.

It isn’t. I am not an expert on Israel or security or warfare or Hamas or Fatah or the Netanyahu government or the broader geopolitical landscape of the Middle East. What I cling to are the idea that children should not be slaughtered for the sins of their governments, and that I want the people I love to be safe; this is the sum of my opinions."

"Speech and Speechlessness": the world of words and the world beyond them. The Sword and the Sandwich (Substack). October 10, 2023

Elad Nehorai

"The sickness is authoritarianism. I do not just mean authoritarianism as a government structure, although it manifests this way very often. I mean authoritarianism as a belief system. A worldview. * * * ...the idea that humans do not have inherent worth outside of their subservience to a larger system, leader, and/or goal."

and

"antisemitism ... is actually just perhaps the most effective narrative to reinforce authoritarianism. ... antisemitism provides the existential threat and constant crisis, along with explanation of all existing problems, that authoritarian leaders and societies crave. ... it is the authoritarian impulse and belief system that is even more dangerous than antisemitism. Even antisemitism is a symptom, a method to justify authoritarianism, not authoritarianism itself."
The Enemy is Authoritarianism, Elad Nehorai, Oct 18, 2023

Part of what's happening

A former Mossad chief says Israel is enforcing an apartheid system in the West Bank, Tia Goldenberg, AP, September 6, 2023

Grave violations against Palestinian children: UN’s Children and Armed Conflict Agenda. Defense for Children International — Palestine. October 21, 2023.

UN emergency relief chief Martin Griffiths said: "Gaza has simply become uninhabitable."
Famine in Gaza ‘around the corner,’ as people face ‘highest levels of food insecurity ever recorded,’ UN relief chief says, Heather Chen and Eve Brennan, CNN, January 6, 2024

About 1 in 100 people in Gaza has been killed since October 7, Palestinian statistics show. Kareem Khadder, Richard Allen Greene and Ivana Kottasova. CNN. January 8, 2024.

‘We are dying slowly:’ Palestinians are eating grass and drinking polluted water as famine looms across Gaza Sana Noor Haq and Rosa Rahimi, CNN, January 30, 2024

16 children have died of malnutrition in aid-starved Gaza, health officials say, Steve Hendrix and Hajar Harb, Washington Post, March 6, 2024

More Children Have Died In Gaza War Than Have Been Killed By Conflict Worldwide In 4 Years “This war is a war on children," UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini said of Israel's months-long offensive in the Palestinian territory. Sanjana Karanth, HuffPost, Mar 13, 2024

A.R. Moxon, April 6, 2024: "the far-right Israeli government killing Palestinian civilians in Gaza in response to terrorist acts and the threat of terrorist acts is part of the way things are, is part of the way things have been for a very long time. It's not The Thing That's Coming. It's the thing that's already here."

Rabbi Elliot Kukla

Kukla said in the LA Times on November 17:

"Nearly 82 years ago, my father was born in Nazi-occupied Belgium. When he was only 3 weeks old, his own father, Max, was captured and murdered by Nazis; my dad survived because he was hidden by a series of Christian foster homes. I was born in a peaceful time and place — Victoria, Canada, in 1974 — but my own life was shaped by those events that happened decades before my birth.

* * *

Growing up, this was what Judaism meant to me: intellectual dissent and peace activism. In rabbinical school, I learned that according to ancient Jewish holy texts, saving a single life is the same as saving a whole world, because each of us contains distinctive cities of relationships, irreplaceable geographies of passions, and deep oceans of memories.

That is one reason more than 140 of my colleagues and I are calling for peace as a part of Rabbis for Ceasefire, along with a swelling Jewish peace movement. However, most major American Jewish organizations support this invasion. It is a profound moral injury for me that the community that taught me to value resistance, peace and the sanctity of each human life is supporting violence and silencing dissent. Many rabbis and other Jewish professionals I know are afraid to speak out for peace and risk being ostracized from family or synagogues or lose funding for their nonprofit organizations."

Israeli expectations

Israeli President Suggests That Civilians In Gaza Are Legitimate Targets “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible,” Isaac Herzog said as Israel ordered 1.1 million Palestinians to evacuate their homes. Paul Blumenthal, HuffPost, Oct 13, 2023

"Israeli defense minister outlines plan for new phase in Gaza war ," Niamh Kennedy in Dublin and Lauren Izso in Tel Aviv, CNN, January 5, 2024

Other understandings of Zionism

If you've grown up hearing about early Zionism that was meant to address antisemitic persecution in Russia and Europe, then it may be "inconceivable that this ideology of liberation and self-determination could have anything in common with colonialism," but over the last century, "Zionism became something fundamentally different." Read: "False Messiahs: How Zionism’s dreams of liberation became entangled with colonialism" by Barnett R. Rubin, Boston Review, January 4, 2024.

Far-right ministers call to ‘resettle’ Gaza’s Palestinians, build settlements in Strip Arab lawmaker compares statements by party leaders Smotrich and Ben Gvir to Nazi calls for ‘Lebensraum’; Liberman says Israel must reoccupy southern Lebanon to ensure security. Sam Sokol. Times of Israel. 1 January 2024

"Back then—in the recent, unreachable past—it was possible [for Westerners] to think that acts so egregious would condemn themselves. Even Israel initially nodded to the idea of red lines, sprinkling flimsy denials over still-smoldering debris—we didn’t strike a hospital, we only kill terrorists, we aren’t using white phosphorus . . . But soon even the thinnest pretense was dropped. Let them watch, the regime seems to say, disseminating its own footage of razed neighborhoods, Palestinians blindfolded and stripped. It has proved to itself that the red line does not exist."

It is gutting to watch this realization dawn on Gazans’ faces, too.

— “The Work of the Witness”: Three months into a livestreamed genocide, we must ask—what does all this looking do? Sarah Aziza, Jewish Currents.

Benjamin Netanyahu Says He Opposes Palestinian State In Any Postwar Scenario: The U.S. has called on Israel to scale back its offensive and said that the establishment of a Palestinian state should be part of the “day after.” Najib Jobain, Jack Jeffery, Melanie Lidman. AP, HuffPost, January 18, 2024.

"Undercover Israeli troops dressed as medical staff kill three militants in West Bank hospital raid, officials say." Abeer Salman, CNN, January 30, 2024
"Israeli forces kill 3 Palestinian militants in raid on West Bank hospital," Raneen Sawafta, Reuters, January 30, 2024.

‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza The Israeli army has marked tens of thousands of Gazans as suspects for assassination, using an AI targeting system with little human oversight and a permissive policy for casualties, +972 and Local Call reveal. Yuval Abraham, +972, April 3, 2024

Political expectations in the US

'I Couldn't Shift Anything': Senior State Department Official Resigns Over Biden's Gaza Policy Josh Paul, who spent a decade in State's bureau overseeing arms sales, exclusively spoke with HuffPost after quitting over the U.S. approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Akbar Shahid Ahmed, HuffPost, Oct 18, 2023

‘On Thin Ice’: Some Biden Administration Staffers Feel Stifled Discussing Horrors In Gaza Several officials spoke to HuffPost about what one called the United States’ “monstrous disregard for innocent Palestinian lives” ― and the challenge of questioning Israel internally. Akbar Shahid Ahmed, HuffPost, Oct 18, 2023

Exclusive: ‘Mutiny Brewing’ Inside State Department Over Israel-Palestine Policy Morale is low, and some staffers are preparing to formally express their opposition to President Joe Biden's approach, officials told HuffPost. Akbar Shahid Ahmed, HuffPost, Oct 19, 2023

Biden's Israel-Gaza Approach Sidelines State Department, And Officials Fear The Worst A task force on preventing atrocities did not meet until two weeks into the war, and officials say department leaders are telling them their expertise won't affect policy. Akbar Shahid Ahmed, HuffPost, Nov 2, 2023

Biden Wants Arms Deals With Israel to Be Done in Complete Secrecy. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Josh Paul, a former top State Department official. Sharon Zhang, Truthout, November 2, 2023

Exclusive: Antony Blinken Held Private Meeting With Officials Who Formally Protested U.S. Gaza Policy The previously unreported meeting took place on Oct. 26, a former official told HuffPost. Akbar Shahid Ahmed, HuffPost, Nov 3, 2023

There are infinite stories about how we got here. Everything is connected. From 2018:
Jared Kushner pushed to inflate Saudi arms deal to $110 billion: Sources
Kushner, Trump's son-in-law and adviser, pushed the inflated number.
Tara Palmeri
November 26, 2018

The film Israelism can be streamed worldwide:

"When two young American Jews raised to unconditionally love Israel witness the brutal way Israel treats Palestinians, their lives take sharp left turns.

They join a movement of young American Jews battling the old guard to redefine Judaism’s relationship with Israel, revealing a deepening generational divide over modern Jewish identity."

U.S. And U.K. To Launch Airstrikes On Yemen The Biden administration shared the plan with leaders in Congress on Thursday, a U.S. official told HuffPost. Akbar Shahid Ahmed, HuffPost, Jan 11, 2024

US and UK carry out strikes against Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen, Oren Liebermann, Haley Britzky, Natasha Bertrand, Kevin Liptak, Alex Marquardt, MJ Lee and Jennifer Hansler, CNN, January 11, 2024

A Top Biden Official Is Pushing An Urgent Post-Gaza Plan That’s Alarming Some Insiders Brett McGurk is pursuing a proposal to rebuild the Palestinian territory that focuses on a deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia, U.S. officials told HuffPost. Many say that plan would sow seeds of future instability in the region. Akbar Shahid Ahmed, HuffPost, Jan 12, 2024

In First Vote On Gaza War, Senate Shields Israel From Human Rights Scrutiny: Though his bill failed, Bernie Sanders put senators on the record on the U.S.-backed military campaign in Gaza. Israeli envoy Michael Herzog visited the Senate before the vote. Akbar Shahid Ahmed & Igor Bobic, HuffPost, Jan 16, 2024

"...while Gaza is razed to the ground, another social media video stops me in my tracks. In it, a gray-haired douchebag has stopped to address some specter off-screen in the middle of the street. “If we killed four thousand Palestinian children,” he says, “you know what? It wasn’t enough!” The only reason you worry about them, the gray-haired douchebag goes on to tell the specter, is because you’re a Hamas-supporting terrorist. Your prophet raped his own daughter, the gray-haired douchebag says. I can take you in — deport you — because you don’t belong here. But even if you manage to stay, he adds, I can get the Mukhabarat back in Egypt to take in your father and pull out his fingernails. And all that can be heard in response, barely audibly, is “Please go.” This is New York City. It turns out that the specter being spoken to is a random hot-dog vendor; the gray-haired douchebag, a former national security adviser — in the Obama administration."
— "I, Ghost: The West doesn’t give a shit about me." Youssef Rakha. Guernica. January 16, 2024.

“You haven’t seen the pictures of all the babies being killed?” one activist asked Mast.
“These are not innocent Palestinian civilians across the world,” Mast replied.
“What about the half-a-million people starving to death?” another asked.
“[They] are people that should go out there and put a government in place that doesn’t go out there and attack Israel on a daily basis,” Mast said.
— Babies Killed In Gaza Are ‘Not Innocent Palestinian Civilians,’ House Republican Says It isn’t the first time Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.) has questioned the existence of innocent Palestinians. Matt Shuham, HuffPost, Feb 1, 2024

There may be no "scale of mass death - certainly elsewhere in the world, and likely at home too - that US society won’t metabolize into business as usual". (Pat Blanchfield, Bluesky, Feb 12, 2024)

"The Biden Administration Is Investigating Israel's Possible War Crimes — Despite Public Claims To The Contrary": White House spokesman John Kirby said last month such probes are not occurring, but sources tell HuffPost U.S. officials have been assessing Israel's possible international law violations for months. Akbar Shahid Ahmed, HuffPost, Feb 13, 2024

Opinion: I’m an American doctor who went to Gaza. What I saw wasn’t war — it was annihilation. Irfan Galaria. Los Angeles Times. Feb 16, 2024.

Trump Says Israel Has To ‘Finish The Problem’ In Gaza After Months Of Silence The GOP front-runner repeatedly told "Fox & Friends" that the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas and Israel's retaliation would not have happened had he been president. Sanjana Karanth, HuffPost, Mar 5, 2024

Journalists' language

The media navigates a war of words for reporting on Gaza and Israel (my subscriber gift link) News outlets, and readers, debate terms such as ‘terrorists’ vs. ‘militants,’ ‘invasion’ vs. ‘incursion’. Paul Farhi. Washington Post. October 20, 2023.

Some of us don't know very much

None of us has all the facts. Most of us haven't developed a relevant standpoint from which to examine some of the facts.

"I know about the Palestine-Israel conflict the way I know about every other news story, through my social media feeds. ...most of the people whose opinions I trust believe that Palestine has a right to sovereignty and that Israel is an occupying force and that the actions taken against Gaza are genocidal. ... I don’t think I’m going to come up with a social-media zinger or a quick-hit blog post that successfully resolves generations of conflict. ... The actual, serious coverage should be done by experts. I’m just witnessing the war the same way everyone is, because it’s happening on the planet, and I live here." — Jude Ellison Doyle, Reading Poetry Through the War, October 27, 2023 (on Medium, paywalled)

Some of us know a lot

However, some of us have already done lots of work.

"Earlier this year, we received an invitation from the Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin to deliver a lecture about Yugoslavia and participate in a debate on the relevance of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) today as part of a programme called Lost – You Go Slavia.

* * *

The NAM emerged as a response to the bipolarisation of the world during the Cold War and included countries that refused to side with either of the world’s two main power blocs at the time. The movement united countries and struggles against imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, racism, occupation and foreign aggression of all kinds. Its founding principles included the doctrines of peaceful co-existence and self-determination.

* * *

Regrettably, the Gorki Theatre has also decided to take action to silence Palestinian voices in response to the Israel-Palestine war. It said it would 'postpone' a performance of the Yael Ronen play The Situation that was scheduled for October 23. In its published statement on how it reached this decision, the theatre admitted its powerlessness in the face of the current 'situation' but added that 'the attack by the terrorist organisation Hamas on Israel puts us on Israel’s side'. The theatre stated that 'war is a great simplifier' that 'demands a simple division into friend and foe' and concluded that 'our arguments with the old wars do not help us with this new one'.

* * *

Our withdrawal from the event at the Gorki Theatre is not in any way aimed at withdrawing ourselves from this important and urgent conversation. Instead, it is an effort to point the mirror back at German institutions and communicate to them the shortsightedness of their position on the current situation in Israel-Palestine.

* * *

When it comes to Israel-Palestine, Germany and, indeed, the rest of the West appear to be suffering from what the Germans themselves aptly brand as 'Denkverbot', which means the prohibition to think."
— "Against the ‘Denkverbot’: If you cancel Palestine, cancel us," Srecko Horvat, Paul Stubbs, and Dubravka Sekulić, Al Jazeera, November 1, 2023

Pankaj Mishra writes: "Solidarity with the Jewish state has burnished Germany’s proud self-image as the only country that makes public remembrance of its criminal past the foundation of its collective identity. ... West Germany moved fast after 1960, becoming the most important supplier of military hardware to Israel in addition to being the main enabler of its economic modernisation. ... Such was the ‘unprincipled political gamesmanship’, as Primo Levi called it, that expedited the rehabilitation of Germany only a few years after the full extent of its genocidal antisemitism became known. A strategic philosemitism, parasitic on old antisemitic stereotypes but now combined with sentimental images of Jews, flourished in postwar Germany." And then, German antisemitism gets projected onto Muslims:

"what Marwecki describes as the ‘exchange structure specific to German-Israeli relations’: moral absolution of an insufficiently de-Nazified and still profoundly antisemitic Germany in return for cash and weapons. It also suited both countries to portray Arab adversaries of Israel, including Nasser (‘Hitler on the Nile’), as the true embodiments of Nazism. The Eichmann trial underplayed the persistence of Nazi support in Germany while exaggerating the Nazi presence in Arab countries, to the exasperation of at least one observer: Hannah Arendt wrote that Globke ‘had more right than the ex-Mufti of Jerusalem to figure in the history of what the Jews had actually suffered from the Nazis’. She noted, too, that Ben-Gurion, while exonerating Germans as ‘decent’, made no ‘mention of decent Arabs."

— Memory Failure Pankaj Mishra, London Review of Books, Vol. 46 No. 1 · 4 January 2024

Multiple things can be true

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg describes her children's preschool and first-grade classes in Jerusalem in 2015-2016, which were bilingual Hebrew–Arabic. "Each class has an equal number of Jewish and Palestinian kids, and even the principal’s job is held by two people, who divide responsibilities by grade level." The kids were kids together, learned "easy and sweet" holiday celebrations, but also talked about "the hard stuff" about national identity. Here's how it's done: "They didn't hide from the fact of multiple realities. They simply named it. Honored it. Allowed true things to be true."

Why some people change their opinion

People may abandon political a worldview for material reasons: rich people, when they no longer directly profit from it, and poor people, when they no longer see it as a source of security. Do you have a decent job, an affordable home, the promise of healthcare? If yes, your political myth serves you: you see it as the source of your prosperity (or just your comfort, or at least your survival) as well as the moral justification for you having that material standard of living. But if you aren't getting those benefits, you start to see the political myth as a lie.

"Since Oct. 7, at least 64 journalists and media workers have been killed in Israel and Occupied Palestine, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), making it the deadliest two months for journalists since the nonprofit began collecting data in 1992.

The number of journalists killed in the past two months in the war in Gaza has surpassed the amount killed in the Vietnam War, which lasted two decades, according to the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ). As of December 14, their count of journalists killed is up to 71."

— "Chicago journalists hold vigil for colleagues killed in Gaza and Israel," Mikayla Price, CBS Chicago, December 14, 2023

"What we know for sure though is that the destruction of Gaza is nearly total. The vast majority of its 2.2 million residents displaced. Half are at risk of starvation. Nearly all hospitals destroyed.... (4:23–36) A fifth of Gaza's buildings are estimated to have been destroyed. (4:50–53) ...if you spend any time at all reading the Israeli press, listening to what Israeli leaders and commentators are actually saying, it is very clear that for a lot of people in government, the mass destruction of Gaza — razing it like Putin razed Grozny, or Assad razed Aleppo – is the point, the goal. Many prominent members of the Israeli governing class don’t think there is such a thing as an innocent civilian in Gaza, have said that everyone in Gaza deserves their fate.” (6:41–7:10) ... Now, I’ll be the first to confess, the first to confess: I have no idea what to do about Hamas or about what comes next. But the Amalek method [that is, destroying everyone and everything indiscriminately without mercy] cannot be the solution.” (8:28–40) ... [The war’s] animating moral logic looks to most of the world, and, frankly, to me, to be that every single last person in Gaza is guilty and deserves their lot. And that is the moral logic of Hamas. It is the moral logic that drove the atrocity of October 7. And an atrocity like October 7 does not, cannot justify whatever comes after it, whatever the response. There is no terrorist attack, no matter how horrific — and truly Oct 7 was horrific — that can wash clean what we are seeing in Gaza and what we as Americans and our government are abetting. It must end. We must stop it. (9:07–end)" — Chris Hayes: The war in Gaza must end, MSNBC, December 19, 2023

British surgeon says Gaza ‘beyond worst thing’ he’s seen, as Jordan’s king warns Israel creating a ‘generation of orphans’, Martin Goillandeau, Isa Soares, Catherine Nicholls, Caroline Faraj and Kathleen Magramo, CNN, January 9, 2024

Hamas no longer controlling large parts of Gaza, Israel says, Lauren Izso, CNN, January 10, 2024

War on Gaza: How critics are twisting Frantz Fanon's legacy: No amount of verbal gymnastics can escape the simple truth that indigenous resistance is crucial to ending colonial atrocities. Hamid Dabashi, Middle East Eye, 5 March 2024

Some Jews oppose Israeli military action

In Grief And Under Pressure, A Growing Number Of American Jews Protest Israeli Military Action
As the death toll rises in Gaza, many American Jews are speaking out — often in conflict with friends and family. Matt Shuham, HuffPost, Nov 2, 2023

"'As the battle lines between the Palestine solidarity movement and the organized Jewish community become more starkly demarcated, there’s going to be a lot more scrutiny,' said [UCLA professor David] Myers. 'It’s going to take time to sort out what [Jewish organizations’] policies look like. In all likelihood they’re not going to be more open-ended—they’re going to be more closed.' Marjorie N. Feld, a historian at Babson College who has studied the history of American Jewish criticism of Zionism, said that such policies could result in a 'self-imposed' marginalization of American Jewish organizations. 'It's really a loss for us when we can’t join in coalitions,” she said, saying moves like this “put American Jews in isolation.'" — "Crisis at the 92nd Street Y," Mari Cohen, Jewish Currents, November 8, 2023

Rabbis Stage Protest, Call For Cease-Fire Inside United Nations The protesting rabbis appealed to the global community to stop Israeli military operations in Gaza, despite the United States’ ongoing support for Israel’s invasion. Matt Shuham, HuffPost, Jan 9, 2024

What we need to do

If you're a paying Medium member, I recommend this paywalled article, "The difficulty of talking with students about Gaza," Matt T., Medium, November 10, 2023 (12-min read)

"It will take more. It will take much more. It’ll take unlearning deeply embedded ideas and learning new ones. It’ll take much less individualism, and much more understanding of how we inherently rely upon one another, and how we should rely on one another even more. It’ll take unlearning the idea that you or I are the main character in the story of humanity, and learning that mass movements, mass shifts of millions and billions of people are the main characters. It’ll take militant organizing on a massive scale, with the aim of transforming society. It’ll take radical thinking and unprecedented creativity, but I believe that we can do all of this and then some. Even more so I believe we must, and therefore I choose to believe that we will."
— Joshua P. Hill, "When Hope is Hard," New Means (Substack), Oct 26, 2023

"It is easy to denounce every antisemitic attack that has come in the wake of Israel’s relentless and genocidal attack on Gaza. I condemn them all. I want my family and friends to be safe – I want to be safe. And so I also condemn the decades-long Zionist effort to claim my entire religion and claim my entire people. Judaism is a religion, a culture, and in many ways an ethnicity. Zionism is a political and colonial project. In equating them, the state of Israel and Zionist propagandists tie my people to their violence.
* * *
Jews everywhere must be clear that we are not Zionists, and we refuse to have our identity tied to the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians. We must cut off support and force our governments to do the same. Never Again means Never Again for anyone. And Never Again is now."
— Joshua P. Hill, "Equating Zionism and Judaism hurts the Jewish people," New Means (Substack), Oct 26, 2023

This happened

The Harvard Law Review Refused to Run This Piece About Genocide in Gaza The piece was nearing publication when the journal decided against publishing it. You can read the article here. Rabea Eghbariah. The Nation. November 21, 2023.

Harvard Law Review Editors Vote to Kill Article About Genocide in Gaza. The article on the Gaza war and the Nakba was commissioned, edited, fact checked, and prepared for publication — but was then blocked amid a climate of fear., Natasha Lennard, The Intercept, November 21, 2023.

Amid U.N. Security Council Intrigue, U.S. Privately Moves To Block Another Option For International Accountability For Gaza The Biden administration is finalizing plans to urge Switzerland to reject a request from Palestine and its supporters to hold a conference on violations of the Geneva Conventions. Akbar Shahid Ahmed, HuffPost, Dec 20, 2023

"...Gaza, where over 500,000 people are now starving. Of the human beings on Earth experiencing the most acute level of starvation, 80% are Palestinians in Gaza right now. It may take a minute to wrap your mind around that. Approximately 700,000 people on the planet at this moment are experiencing phase 5 hunger, or catastrophic starvation. 4 out of 5 of them are in Gaza. In other words Israel is starving Gaza to death."
— "Don't let Bad Actors set the Terms." Joshua P. Hill. New Means. January 4, 2024.

"The International Court of Justice has begun its hearing in the proceedings brought by South Africa accusing Israel of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

The judges representing Israel and South Africa have been sworn in.

Aharon Bharak, an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor and retired Supreme Court Justice, is representing Israel.

Dikgang Moseneke, a former deputy chief justice, is representing South Africa."

— Happening now: The International Court of Justice hearing has begun, CNN, January 11, 2024

What qualifies as genocide? Breaking down the ICJ case against Israel. (subscriber gift link) Claire Parker, Annabelle Timsit and Adam Taylor, Washington Post, January 11, 2024

South Africa's Genocide Case Against Israel Is Serious. Israel denounces it. The U.S. dismisses it. The International Court of Justice is hearing it. The rest of us can't flinch from reading it. Spencer Ackerman. Forever Wars. Jan 11, 2024

Israel's Dehumanizing Rhetoric Of Palestinians Becomes Central To Genocide Case: South Africa says the language used by political leaders, soldiers and entertainers is proof of Israel's intent to commit genocide against Palestinians. Tia Goldenberg, AP, HuffPost, Jan 18, 2024

"More than half of the estimated 2.2 million people in Gaza are seeking refugee in the Rafah area, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA)."
"Tent city holding more than 1 million Palestinians is rapidly expanding, satellite images show." Paul P. Murphy and Gianluca Mezzofiore. CNN. February 5, 2024.

"More than 1.3 million people are believed to be in Rafah, the majority displaced from other parts of Gaza, according to the United Nations...Rafah is the last major population center in Gaza not occupied by the IDF."
— "Netanyahu directs military to draw up plan for "evacuation of the population" from Rafah: Amir Tal in Jerusalem, Mick Krever in London. CNN, Feb 9, 2024.

"UNRWA staff accused by Israel sacked without evidence, chief admits": Philippe Lazzarini says summary dismissal of nine employees was ‘reverse due process’ after Israel’s claims they aided Hamas attack, Emine Sinmaz, 9 Feb 2024

"Satellite Images Point to Indiscriminate Israeli Attacks on Gaza’s Health Care Facilities": New research finds that Israel’s attacks on Gaza damaged hospitals and other medical facilities at the same rate as other buildings, potentially in violation of international law. Vittoria Elliott, Wired, Feb 12, 2024

Israeli Forces Storm Main Hospital In Southern Gaza After Partial Evacuation: Israeli forces have stormed the main hospital in southern Gaza in what the army says is a limited operation seeking the remains of hostages taken by Hamas. Wafaa Shurafa and Basem Mroue, AP, Feb 15, 2024

Due to the power loss at Nasser hospital, five patients died, as reported on Feb 16.

Resources

Solidarity with Palestine: Free Resources and Further Reading
Free ebooks including Ilan Pappe's Ten Myths About Israel and Gideon Levy's The Punishment of Gaza.
Verso Books reading list, 24 October 2023

Strange Horizons' 2021 Palestinian speculative fiction issue, free online

And "a work in progress to create a list of all available Palestinian speculative fiction": #ReadPalestinianSpecFic Reading List by Sonia Sulaiman

Putri Prihatini (@BlogTolkien on X), author of Blog Tolkien Indonesia, recommends these books. I don't want to link to X so here are the titles:
My First and Only Love (2021) by Shahar Khalifeh
Salt Houses (2017) by Hala Alyan
Minor Detail (2017) by Adania Shibli
The Parisian (2019) by Isabella Hammad
"The stories of Ghassan Kanafani, who was assassinated in 1972, were among the must-read from Palestinian literature. These two books have his notable stories and novellas, including Men in the Sun (1962) and Returning to Haifa (1970), in convenient collections."
Haifa Fragments (2015) by Khulud Khamis
The Blue between Sky and Water (2015) by Susan Abulhawa
Velvet (1993) by Huzama Habayeb
Enter Ghost (2023) by Isabella Hammad
Gate of the Sun (2005) by Elias Khoury
The Sea Cloak (2019) by Nayrouz Qarmout
Out of Time (2022) by Samira Azzam
Wild Thorns (1976) by Sahar Khalifeh
Hunters in a Narrow Street (1960) by Jabra Ibrahim Jabra
Against the Loveless World (2019) by Susan Abulhawa
Her First Palestinian (2022) by Saeed Teebi
Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands (2020) by Sonia Nimr
Speak, Bird, Speak Again (1989) by Ibrahim Muhawi
Jokes for the Gunmen (2019) by Mazen Maarouf

This should not be happening

There are a lot of anti-Arab racist articles. Newspapers should not be publishing this.

Nor this.

"If you read carefully, you'll note that Hamas is both insect eggs *and* a spider. He's capturing the nuance there." — Osita Nwanevu, Bsky

"I'm not sure it's possible to truly loathe Friedman with the proper intensity unless you've grown up with him as the Pulitzer-winning foreign correspondent, held up as the institutional voice of reason, and then for a year he writes increasingly deranged columns about an alternate-universe Iraq." He wrote an "unending series of columns saying if only we'd gone into Iraq for better reasons and the right way things would be great now, maybe by six months we'll have somehow jumped to that reality." — Warren Terra, Bsky

Islamophobia "kills," "has been normalized," and "conservatives and liberals both engage in it." On that last point:

"...each of their dehumanizations feeds on the other. The liberal says there are monsters abroad and the Lion, as king of the jungle, must hunt them. The conservative, nodding, adds that the monsters have already made it into the Lion's den, and so the Lion must hunt them down as well. Perhaps, even, the Lion should prioritize those monsters closer at hand.

I've written an entire literal book about the symbiotic and iterative nature of these two propositions."

— Spencer Ackerman, Two Varieties of Media Dehumanization, February 5, 2024

Why archaeologists must speak up for Gaza: Archaeology is often a mechanism of power. As such, its scholars have an obligation to speak up against oppression. Hilary Morgan Leathem, 25 Mar 2024