It is shaping up to be one of history’s most bizarre and disparate ‘monster in the mirror’ stories. Four weeks.. It took the Netanyahu regime less than four weeks to surpass the civilian death toll that Russia had compiled in twenty two months of brutal ground war, uncalculated reckless bombing campaigns in dense civilian population centers, and aggressive occupation against neighboring Ukraine. They only took two months to DOUBLE IT. The level of inhumanity Israel is flexing to the world amidst a raging swell of cacophonous call for ceasefire coming from all sides and directions, is dizzyingly growing more foul and ugly by the day. From all sides, but for one exception, from its only friend left in the world…its military benefactor – the United States. Which has also isolated itself globally and enraged and endangered every shaky alliance left to them in order to increase aid to support Israel in its game of supposed ‘shadow tag with Hamas’. But this isn’t about Hamas. Whatever transpired on October 7th, Netanyahu has surpassed within the earliest days of this campaign, and it’s all clearly written on the wall that October 7th was just the pretext the Netanyahu regime and all his fellow fascist Zionist Likud party affiliates were looking for to green light their own attempt at ethnic ‘cleansing’ and unleash it on the Palestinian civilian population of Gaza.
The flagrant atrocities, death, and war crimes committed on his watch, are multiplying at such a staggering rate and pace that it left too many of us too shocked to find our tongues or snap out of this frozen-in-place horror-struck state, as mentally crippled by the rising death count and disparate state of this nightmare crisis as we have been. How and when we return to anything close to resembling homeostasis I could never begin to try and measure or even guesstimate, but we should not have been surprised in the slightest.
It should not have taken hindsight to see it was in his far-right Likud party’s propaganda rhetoric ever since they had their rise to political domination in the Middle East apartheid colony; and he has always been a fascist cut above the rest of the fascist cunts, inspiring his Zionist death cult of a political party to chose him to be their lightning rod and public face as prime minister out of all those other Zionist PM’s that fit in to different places on the far right wing spectrum of the party, since they leapt into the driver seat of this fucking disastrous statehood after the many regional skirmishes of 1967 led to resulting Zionist land gains and a mountain of political aggression and social upheaval ever since.
Netanyahu has admitted without the slightest bit of hesitation or even trace amount of shame in his voice to bombing mosques, playgrounds, schools and multiple civilian hospitals, where infants were being treated under the horrendous conditions then were victimized by this savage campaign of mass murder under constant and merciless bombardment. Using the invisible shadow of strategic Hamas tunnels to validate attempted genocide, with such a deadpan casual-natured tone in his voice that would’ve been just as well suited for ordering a different bean paste or extra matzoh ball at mealtime instead of sticking with his usual war crime apologia. Even after the tunnels never materialized or amounted to any key findings, he seemed honestly perplexed why the press wouldn’t accept that answer. The defense “Hamas uses critically injured civilians and infants on ventilators as a shield so we have to kill the civilian babies first to kill invisible Hamas next” is just totally acceptable in his mind, and he cannot grasp why he has to keep repeating himself. There has been not even a single word of remorse for the infants who died on their ventilators from his bombs and drone strikes or from the lack of fuel to keep the generators operational and the electricity on, as a result from the aid that he denied to them and blocked at the border.
Those lives were all of a sudden expendable, the moment Hamas fired the first shots on October 7th. Anywhere in Gaza, Hamas could maybe potentially be hiding out was the zeitgeist, now making Gaza an acceptable target…and there has been no practical strategy for eliminating the militant group who is only gaining more exponentially in its recruitment with every grief-stricken young male who has lost family or loved ones. Destroying Hamas was never the goal, only the scapegoat. Mossad has been considered among the best national intelligence agencies in the world. Many experts have argued they are head and shoulders the best of the best and by far the most efficient in detecting threats and eliminating them before they even constitute being labeled as such. It’s still a wonder we are not hearing more questions about how they missed the one on October 7th, 2023.
To highlight the extent of the cruel and unusual war crimes now taking place in Gaza, we could do the comparison side by side with another war of occupation that was marked by bloody acts of violent aggression under another homicidal maniac who also bombed civilian population centers with little to no restraint for the loss of civilian life. Vladimir Putin’s Russian forces set out to invade Ukraine in February of 2022 and in the twenty two months since, their have been around 9,600 civilian deaths reported. Just about half of the death toll that fascist Zionist colonial Israel has inflicted upon the civilian population of Gaza in a time span of barely two months. This is not a war of occupation though, it is the work of a shameless butcher and a slaughter of defenseless human beings pleading for peace and mercy. While the Zionists would try and convince us all that it is kill or be killed if they don’t eradicate the ragtag militant fighting force that many claim has its leadership funded by special interest in the regional Arab nations, namely Iran, and functions as somewhat of an Iranian proxy in Hamas, the truth stands out in major contradiction to the kill or be killed narrative that Israeli propaganda so relentlessly pushes.
Gaza is a non-militarized region of working class Palestinian people who have had every last basic human right taken from them by their colonizers who consider themselves ethnic and religious superiors and are a nuclear power. A nuclear power who believes that those nukes are equal to the sword of God in their possession. And the rest of their military, complete with sea power, the most recent air and drone strike hardware and capability and iron dome ballistic missile and drone strike defense, all courtesy of the US war chest, which they are given catalog access to like we would order socks and drawers from. Without Hamas, who has many Palestinian rank fighters within their ranks, even if the everyday on the ground interests of the people of Palestine are not always aligned with or reflected by some of the extremist elements in the militant groups leadership, Israel goes completely uncontested without their presence.
That is not to show solidarity with the attacks of October 7th or any of the violence against civilian life that Hamas or other militant groups it has absorbed over the decades has been responsible for. I can never never in good conscience endorse the murder of civilian lives by the violent militant factions on either side who steal them from their loved ones and spill their blood to make gains in their own agenda. No amount of civilian life can be taken for the purposes of ends justified by the means. The only people who can answer whether human lives are forfeit for the sake of making another step towards the fulfilling of an endgame agenda, are the human lives who wrote that check themselves with their own blood or that of their loved ones. If they had the chance to choose whether to have that agenda advanced or to keep their lives and their families lives intact, I very highly doubt that anyone would choose the former. Never mistake it though, Israeli and US aggression and the crimes against humanity of the apartheid system the alliance created, is what makes Hamas a necessary presence in Gaza.
I’m not sure there could be a more effective way to speed up the hands of the global death clock then by enabling such a brutally vicious and problematic statehood like the colonial apartheid scourge that the Zionist fascists in the Likud regime have unleashed in the Middle East. The danger it has become to the world may result in more than just its own demise. The dominoes are stacked in such a hazardous alignment that when the first tips, it will fall toward a near endless line that anyone with a bit of critical thinking, a map of the world and a base surface level knowledge of recent history and the current international political climate, could see World War III as a highly-probable conclusion. With the pieces on the global chessboard right now, many in this world will not survive to see the end of or live much longer in the aftermath.
It is not in our interest to aid and abet the war crimes of colonizers and unhinged psychopathic butchers who have committed a massive amount of time and capital in the propaganda they devote to its image. It is clear that they have spent billions of dollars and decades in blaring the systematic pro-Zionist propaganda around the globe, in schools and in press and all areas available to eyes and ears of Palestinians and Jews alike, to make sure the Palestinian people who populate Gaza, stay perceived as subhuman. Their propaganda is directed toward anyone who fancies taking extreme pride in nationalist identity. They intend to keep those eyes and ears seeing and hearing the falsely spun narrative at all times that the existence of Palestinians anywhere between the Jordan River and the Black Sea constitute a ‘kill or be killed’ threat in the minds of all Israeli and all Jews everywhere according to the propaganda machines version of reality. This false narrative is used as a way to manipulate the naturally ingrained fears and evoke the trauma response from recent historical torment that many of our Jewish ancestors of living memory were forced to suffer in the Holocaust concentration camps, not just one lifetime ago. This has undoubtedly given Israel a wider berth for tolerance of any accused war crimes, as so many of our people will fight for Jewish ‘prosperity’ and that of the Jewish state from wherever Jews of different nationalities are scattered in this world.
So the dehumanization campaign continues “strip their votes away, strip their lands and homes and lively hoods away” and now it is not so hard to strip their lives away. The rhetoric resounds: “They don’t cooperate…better to not live at all than to live like that. Living for no other cause than to hate us Jews and steal our birth right…if they were smart they would leave… their foolish pride is not our fault.” The plight of just simply being born where you are born can be cruel. And none more so right now for Palestinian Gaza. They are without options or the ability to leave and gain citizenship in any of the regional neighboring countries, and with no way to obtain a passport to leave the region. War games that are decided by the deaths of everyday people trying to live their lives, played by the world’s imperial powers, religious fundamentalists and extremists of all ilk, who play for the least noble of causes.
Since the 1947 colonial merger of Palestine/Israel and in the years leading up to the current crisis in the region, the international human rights community has grown ever more angered, restless, and distressed by the actions of the US backed military colony. The brutal apartheid caste system that Israel has become with their unlimited flow of weapons and aid under the influence of American military imperialism that leaves it to its devices, feeling fat and privileged and entitled… has become far too emboldened by lack of restraints to take what it feels is owed to them by the hand of divinity itself.
Israel has, with its US ally gifted military strength, brutally abused the neighboring sovereign it was supposed to split the land with. Palestine has been so badly marginalized and oppressed that the lives of civilian Palestinians have been stripped bear of every basic civil right and now are caught in the bloody jaws and steel teeth of a brutal and horrific bombardment that we may have not seen of a comparable scale of one-sided civilian death and reckless bombing in such short a time since World War II itself. Considering this brutality, combined with the fact that the population of Gaza is one of the densest in the world, it’s not a surprise that many were already labeling this an attempted genocide in the first weeks of bombardment. Questions surrounding October 7th that are peppered with phrases like “genocidal pretext” or “invitation to Hamas” linger and remain unanswered.
It has been a massive gut punch to the international human rights movement and the sharp twist of a knife in the heart to so many who have been fighting in whatever capacity they can to create a flicker of hope for the Palestinian people who had already endured far too much brutality at the hands of an oppressor who has gone to every length to dehumanize and displace them and now they face brutal bombings and indiscriminate slaughter without a military to defend them.
One thing that Zionist Israel shrewdly depends on that can’t be debated much about Jewish culture around the world and certainly in most of the Jewish households I’ve been around or have been exposed to, for better or worse depending on the household, is the overt extra intensity and eccentric ways of self expression we can’t seem to keep a lid on and is always present in the best and worst of us. In the conservative Zionist relatives I’ve had to shun, some who took to the streets in a mass demonstration of blind rage and hate speech on November 4th. One that was triggered by a human rights solidarity march that called for an immediate cease fire only 10 days prior and was the largest turn out for a Palestinian solidarity march in US history, with tens of thousands turning out to call for an end to this horror. Somehow that provoked a nauseating reactionary mobilization of Zionist fascist collaborators, in those devoted right wing American Zionists who came out and had to do it just as big, 20,000 deep through Washington DC, on November 4th 2023. Wearing x’d out swastikas on their shirts and huge protest signs that read ‘Never Again’ in giant bold black and red letters. The hypocrisy of this was crystallized as they marched in full fascist collaboration and solidarity with an open Israeli ethnic cleansing attempt. Could anything be more hypocritical or distasteful than rabidly opposing a solidarity march pleading for a ceasefire? This, only ten days after, with each of those ten days comprised of more reports on the horrifying Israeli atrocities against defenseless families. As images of dead newborns and bombed hospitals filled every possible corner of the news cycle, printed in articles and on live television, radio, news sites and social media alike.
Why do so many Jewish people of all nationalities and Jewish Americans in general get so fired up and caught up in this ‘kill or be killed’ narrative against all better sense? Even when so many know down deep or at least have had it pointed out to them that it is not the case and so far from the truth with facts upon facts that support the reflection of reality of the many human rights abuses occurring in the colonial state of Israel and the major issues surrounding it. Have you ever had a financial advisor or the person who’s setting up your new checking account give you the sound piece of advice to ‘invest with your head and not your heart’?
There has been Jewish money that has been kept and invested generation after generation with other Jews. Mainly out of safety and for the fear of European antisemitism that would or could endanger those investments if they went out of the community, a logic which did prove to be true in the most extreme example of World war ll.
Much of that wealth now in the Jewish American and Jewish European Families that hold the largest shares of it have found those shares being invested and tied up in the many corporate interests that flow from the benefit of having colonial state of Israel and the destabilizing presence it brings to the other Arab nations that neighbor it and surround it in the Middle East. The natural resources that the US can obtain from having a military proxy in the region, especially one that has the irreplaceable impact that Israel does, play an intricate role in the defense-centric trade of US weapons for Middle Eastern oil and natural gas which get funneled to Israel itself and have for so many other countries in the region since post World War II. This geo-political position and arms-trade prosperity is heaped on top of the direct consumer goods and economic production inherent in the state itself.
A lot of old Jewish money and family fortune going back generations is now tied up in the State. There are traces of this in households within my own extended family that subscribe to Zionist idealism. Most of them remain on the East coast, but they are scattered about the country, and when they defend Israel with such bloodlust it seems to come back to the unshakable defense of their investments and to the Holocaust trauma which is still so young and is such a gaping and raw generational wound that the state of Israel pokes at and manipulates the pain of to its own ends.
One area they do not invest much in are the branches of their extended family members who haven’t subscribed to the same ideals or followed the scent of money in their families by clinging to whichever relatives represent the thread that leads to the pot of old Jewish money if it still exists. They often moved far away from the that element (usually landing on the West coast) to follow a different path which leads to a different sort of wealth and represents a far different aspect of American Jewish culture that has just as much influence over the culture itself, and also over American life in general, and in many ways much more.
Its the wealth of imagination that naturally flowed from within many Jewish Americans that they were able to find, actualize and cultivate in to their own form of sustainability and wealth through their works of art and writing out of some of the West coast upstart branches of American Jews that came West. And with their intense passion for their art forms and the one-two punch of somewhere in the family often having a shrewd financial mind or maybe a relative with a connection to some of that old money… and Judaica, USA came alive, manifested from within before being commercialized and becoming the unchained monstrous mainstream industry golem it is today that the Jewish American storytellers of modern film and theater lost control of. Which then sprawled across the land like a feverish plague always changing faster than could be adapted to in the eyes of both those manifesting and viewing the transformation from an artistic experiment, combining the tools of dramatic storytelling with the most recent tools of modern industry technology, to a Hollywood hell-mouth of advertising power, rampant vice and unhinged experimental lust. It could be argued well (and many traditionalists do) that nothing caused a more rapid degradation of Old World customs and beliefs than the rise of Hollywood. In the short span of barely a few decades it had become one of the pillars of mainstream American pop culture and was intricately woven in to daily life. It was yet another example of a time when Jewish artists were instrumental at the forefront of yet another contemporary breakthrough and world changing historical artistic movement.
Their is a relentless intensity on both sides of that spectrum that gives them their very different & polarized identities and I felt there was a profound and an extreme truth in the simplicity of how the UK’s most influential Jewish voice, Rabbi and radio personality, Lionel Blue summed it up the when he spoke to the eccentricity and the always extra intensity that is so apparent in Jewish culture when he said that:
“Jews are like everyone else, only more so”
If you get it you’re probably Jewish. The other common thread between East and West Coast Jews, particularly in Hollywood and LA, is the aforementioned investments that flow like an homage to both Israel and to Jewish survival in the U.S. post-Holocaust, making money a means of prayer, and prayer therefore a method of repeating, not preventing, a potential future Holocaust event.
So the dehumanization campaign continues as Israeli apartheid works its will on Palestine, subduing its people more as the years go by and subjecting them to enormous human rights abuses while far too many Jewish people look the other way or even find excuses to justify this same sort of evil that was used against their ancestors just a short time ago. In a circular illogical roundabout of genocidal thought and dehumanizing contexts..again…the rhetoric resounds: “Better to not live at all than to live like that. Not ever cooperating. Living for no other cause than to hate us Jews and steal our birth right…” Ugly right? Nazi propaganda was full of similar sentiments about us.
However most Jewish people of different nationalities and American Jews I’ve lived closely with are just everyday working class people. While I have heard and still do hear this kind of dehumanizing language from the mouths of far too many racist ideologues on social media and even shockingly in casual passing from the Zionist steadfast in my own extended family (before cutting them out) this is not how most of us talk and certainly not what most of us believe. But that emotional intensity is still just as strong in us and it finds its path to extreme expression in other ways.
So again Blue’s statement doesn’t only ring true of the overtly ultra-authoritarian rage of those American Zionists, who showed up in solidarity with the bombardment in that shameful spectacle on November 4th, but of another less vocal and far more numerous group of Jewish Americans and Jews of all nationalities as well wherever we have been scattered across the world.
To the absolute polar opposition of the Zionist stereotype that is less represented in media spectacle, but in reality are far more influential to American life are the millions of Birkenstock and bifocal-clad liberal college grads and laid back thespian type creatives that make up the overwhelming majority of Jewish households I grew up in or around. People who know nothing else but to instinctively give their entire being over to making the world one iota better by filling it to the brim with powerful and colorful radical works of individual creativity. With an unyielding will to bring boundless progress and uninhibited enthusiasm and intense emotional expression to their art forms, they are willing to go to any length of experiment to capture and to fuse and leave the impression of the exacted depth of the emotion they are connected to in that moment of blissful discovery and NEED to make present in any work of art that they find themselves immersed in. An energy culturally rare in this world and so contagious and unapologetically devoted to full immersion of artistic thought that they will transcend any level of experimentation to create the atmosphere they are tapped in to through their creative process in the moment. And for not just themselves but in the eye of those who will experience the piece as well. That’s why you see Jewish creatives at the forefront of so many key progressive and ground shattering artistic movements throughout history.
As both an Antifascist with recent applied experience in highly successful collective acts of organized civil disobedience, and also a Jewish writer intent on using her voice for peace and a ceasefire in Israel, I know there is always a way to make a stand and to make ourselves heard through art and collective direct action. And once momentum of a focused and collective group effort and a movement begins to pick up steam, it becomes near impossible to stop in its tracks. And never more so than now with the vast intelligence sharing and mutual aid networks that leftists built up from the 2020-21 civil rights and racial justice movement. Those of us within those networks are already aware that a ceasefire in Gaza has become the leading issue in this moment at time as it mirrors the urgency of need for an end to the bombardment in what is certainly looking to be an attempted genocide.
Those of us who reside within this imperial nation, which functions as the global war engine for much of the world, and for those of us who have invested time and thought on this issue know that we are residing in a country that is not just the Israeli apartheid states last ally, but also their military benefactor and certainly is the leading source for its flow of weapons and therefore its power over Palestinian sovereignty. As what many consider to be a United States imperial military proxy state, which it will keep close, unconditionally at all costs no matter how high the atrocities stack up. It will not abandon or condemn its strong arm in the Middle East that is also such a great destabilizer to the strength of the combined Arab nations. Being in proximity to the source of this toxic brew of global imperialism and harbinger of dirty politics puts us in a unique position to push back harder than most of the rest of the world though and potentially gives us a closer chance to move the ceasefire needle.
Is their a way we can get it through genocide Joe Biden’s wax buildup through to his ringing ears and his senile myopic minded iron dome-shaped skull to have him look again at those misfiring miscellaneous thought patterns and misguided approaches to his own political survival and reassess? Within the decisions he will make in what’s coming down to the final years of his life, and how those decisions will reflect on the amount of human life that can avoid being lost? Or that of an entire culture at risk of being wiped out? Whatever his demented decision-making rationale is, it seems to be wired backwards. To shoot down more logical thoughts and commonplace sense and reason whenever the radar picks up anything resembling sound logic or even just a breeze that blows in the direction towards clarity, even in his own favor, it is shot down just as fast as Hamas rockets over Tel Aviv by that cutting-edge near-impenetrable missile defense system which we just named his skull after. Just as it enables a monarchical-minded slaughterer in lockstep with the same kind of fascistic genocidal policies that were near responsible for the genocide of his own ancestors of living memory.
The iron dome missile defense was procured by Israel and Likud warhawk Zionist talons while Genocide Joe was VP under Barack (the O’bomber) Obama, now he enables the Zionists with his presidential voice and power from the Oval Office as he and Netanyahu go on nightly forays, skipping together hand in hand into dense darkness through the salt sown dead lands and mine fields they’ve scattered through the biblical deserts of the Middle East. With torches upheld in the night, disturbing the sleep of demons and burning crosses on front lawns. Picture this genocidal Zionist and this dumb caucastic bigot getting high on death vapors, dumping more fuels on the fire of antisemitism as the hate is already flaring up internationally to a dangerous extreme and an alarming degree. Like some laugh-happy maniac. While old Joe just stands there, watching, mouth-breathing and egging him on… “Keep pouring it on there. There’s a couple little dry patches left at two and seven o’clock, maybe. It has to be real wet and good and sopping and real fumey or it won’t catch and we won’t be able to warm our hands by this fire. A friendly fire for friends to warm hands by.”
Why can I hear that numb-minded voice laboring through those feverish words with tongue thick and swollen drunk on murder so clearly? I probably don’t want to know what actually happened that night but before this is said and done the leading cause In the world of acts us who violent antisemitism will come from the acts of violent Zionist extremists and presidential enabling from the US that feeds the growth of a monstrous corpse mountain in Gaza.
This gains him nothing and will only stand to lose him the nomination. Hard right Zionist sympathizing American Jews don’t often vote Democrat and won’t vote for him anyway. Not the ones in my extended family at least. He only loses a huge chunk of his already extremely disenchanted base who are so desperate for someone they actually could buy into believing that they would only retain him as an alternative to even more hatred then they have towards him, in his likely opponent the potentially prison-bound disaster to democracy, Donald Trump. Joe has already lost much of his base over his handling of Israel and many, many centrist Democrats and the further left, have broken it off and left him for good and all, and have dumped his corpse as a Presidential hopeful. Many can’t or will not go back to cast their vote for him, in good conscience, I think. But he doesn’t really need to know that and honestly at the end of the day, he may not have any real control over the situation as it is.
Regardless, we must try still. if there may be a way to cajole an old man like him, if there’s some kind of big enough action to make him visually see the votes and support he’s hemorrhaging as a direct result of his continued unwavering public support for Israel, even through the horrific bombing campaign and an attempted genocide, then maybe we could tip the scale just enough to cause some kind of temporary stop in the bombings that ends up being the pause and opening needed to affect a permanent ceasefire. Leftist organizers and activists are now doing what we should’ve done years earlier in pushing this to a leading central issue and are not going to let up until those bombs stop falling.
That’s what the situational need dictates: In order to push that gravity and pressure down on the streets, in our schools, our places of work, and especially on the press to find a way to break through this calculated and at times what has been an absurdly ridiculous effort by our national and local corporate news outlet’s attempt to pull the wool over the nations eyes with a concerted media blackout of countless Palestine solidarity marches and direct action demonstrations. Exemplified by my home city Portland, Oregon when it’s annual December tree lighting ceremony was covered by local media… from 17 floors up looking down from the helicopter landing-pad of the nearest skyscraper. What the TV audience would’ve seen from the ground level is not hypocrisy but the clear and courageous intent of Indigenous activists who freely share the words LandBack, drawing comparisons in genocides of Indigenous tribes in the US to those in Palestine, and all over the world as they work to unite people everywhere victimized by US aggression. On the land where they stood, Indigenous Land, in a piece of a city now called Portland, with an abnormally high turnout of people in attendance that weren’t decked out in red and green to represent Christmas cheer on a piece of cold concrete named for their colonizers.
It was the green and red of Palestine’s flag waving in direct action solidarity that dominated the event and their chants drowned out the caroling bells and the jingle horse giddy ups as demonstrators made up close to a 2 to 1 ratio of the human bodies gathered in downtown. On a piece of land that sits squarely between two giant department stores, a major city bank branch headquarters and a county courthouse that is literally in sight of the river that once sustained its native people but is now just a squared, sectioned off slab of concrete that the cities residents call ‘Pioneer’ square and is referred to as Portland’s living room.
These kinds of actions are occurring almost daily in Portland and around the country and are receiving an extreme amount of dedication from Americans all across the country who are taking advantage of this unique position to apply pressure and are pushing our hardest to break through against an opposing tide of strong resistance from the dual symbiotic propaganda machines of US-Israel film projectors. In alliance cutting us out of the imagery and drowning out the energy from the contagious chants of voices banded together in disobedience, crying out in unison to stop the spread before its too late.
The malevolence of such a contemptuous force that is so full of malice and driven by spite, the emptiness of a stone heart, and a soul void in its intentions, that would be so boldly false and have a heart that beats so flatly and a spirit so devoid of substance that it could have the outrageous coldness of a motive, built with such a profound audacity as to use such a mild hand in an attempt at killing the swelling wall of such a passionate sound driven by so much pain and sadness, guided by such inventive techniques coursing over land, lakes, rivers, and mountain ranges in a desperate vibrant tumult of escalating collective vibration from 100 million mouths that are taking up the cries of “Ceasefire!!!”. To battle and break through a wall of authoritarian psych warfare, ambient noise assaults that throw sensory perception into disarray and brainwashes and compels the masses where they dwell in their homes and in their factories, in front of TVs and radios with earbuds on, to just simply hit the mute button and keep a nose to the grindstone, head low, eyes downcast, legs in goosestep, and just keep working hard because there are no cacophonous calls for anything being made by anyone. As if we could be beaten back so easily with a cheap neon sign blinking from broken glass shards, where blown out bulbs used to pulse on and off and now only suggest the mere intermittently broken curvature of lines from an irregular shape that lend the possibility to imagination that a sensical word with actual real life meaning once ever even existed there.
Maybe 4 years ago these smoke and mirrors tricks would’ve been more convincing.Through the storm of 2020-21 direct action demonstrations and nightly marches in Portland and cities all across the country we saw our local and national corporate news outlets bend over so far backwards to avoid giving protestors any positive spotlight or publicity and even farther backwards to avoid local police getting any negative publicity for their brutality committed against those protesting police brutality. Or for their rampant targeting of BIPOC, Women, and houseless people. Or their solidarity with white supremacist organizations and militias. How many times our cameras or live feeds caught them throwing up the 3-percenter hand signs with ugly sneers on their faces as they drove by on duty with the same black baseball caps and the yellow ‘P’ that became infamous that year as a symbol of white supremacist solidarity. Those clips that highlighted a national problem of police departments like Portland’s and all across the country that had been co-opted deeply by white supremacist hate groups with genocidal agendas, in which hate speech towards Black Americans and rampant antisemitism ran wild on their social media accounts and discord servers. The FBI itself was conducting and publishing regular investigative findings every other year acknowledging how deep this problem ran, so why was the news avoiding showing them for what they were?
It wasn’t a conspiracy or coincidental occurrence that suddenly our national police majority fell in love with the Pittsburgh Pirates. It was adopted as a symbol of solidarity by a known national white supremacist hate group who was constantly on the news and on social media, threatening violence against Black Lives, Indigenous Bloc, and Anti-Fascist protestors and lumping us all together as white antifa rioters who needed to be put down for the rampant property destruction and mayhem we were supposedly causing. The ‘P’ stood for Proud Boys, in this context, who’s top national leadership, and a massive amount of their following was made up of mostly off duty cops and ex-military, would all be in federal prison by the end of 2022, after all the faces in the social media footage from their own live feeds were matched with names and identities by the FBI, and they all got their chance to stand trial for inciting their own riot and insurrection in the name of Donald Trump the year before in the inaugural lame duck period in January, 2021. In which they killed many of their own people by the trampling boots of their own disorganized mob chaos as well as a handful of the same police officers that they waved blue line flags for and had claimed to defend from antifa and BLM activists, the entire year before. And it went towards accomplishing much of nothing other than creating a spectacle of national shame and causing a one day delay in the electoral process.
But while the news was busy ignoring the rot in the police bureau, they were also putting a constant camera angle on any broken window and making sure to invalidate any of our community defense actions, disaster relief, and mutual aid work in a concerted effort to continue the narrative that we were all white 20-something anarchist males who only wanted to burn and break shit. It was infuriating the way we were marginalized even as we stood up as the only shield for marginalized people in our community and exposed a massive problem in our city and nations police.
I’m now noticing a similar situation playing out with the Palestine solidarity movement, which is seeing a huge amount of energy and participation, but is getting blacked out or spun out of the narrative in news media, just as the takeover of the tree lighting ceremony in Portland was. As a direct action event tactfully thought out to force our way on to the evening news since the local news has to cover the tree lighting every year, but wouldn’t cover any of our mass protests, it stood to reason in its own little stroke of brilliance to take over the ceremony and force the issue. The news cameras and broadcasting teams went 17 stories up in to the teeth of those freezing cold & blustery heights above the city to show how literally far out of their way they are willing to go to avoid showing their audience the massive amount of solidarity and support exists for Palestine in the American public’s, hearts, minds and actions.
There is also the sharp rise of Arab dehumanization in mainstream media that has existed and has been so prevalent since 9/11 for the news to build off of and brand Palestinian solidarity as not an agenda of anti-genocide and a plea for a ceasefire but of course one that they attempt to marginalize as sponsorship of Islamist extremism. Just as any human rights movement or campaign that advocates against abuses to any Arab people’s rights or any protests over the deaths of Arab civilians regardless of nationality, is spun as solidarity or sponsorship of violent Jihadist Islam. This is pretty much across the board for any and all major US news outlets as even suppose left leaning sources still brand Hamas as a terrorist group with a language slant that frames Israeli aggression as justifiable or the lesser of violent human rights offenders rather than the aggressor. It’s a tactic used all throughout the Western nations of the world because it works to the benefit and profits of their economies and is aligned with the advancement of the agendas of Western nations to dehumanize Arab countries and governments in the name of violently stratifying their economies.
Maybe we have already waited far too long and done too little. I have opposed and condemned Zionist Israel since my teens and still was ignorant enough to be shocked and blindsided by the transparent haste and savagery of this barrage, which there is no reasonable excuse for. The policy of apartheid is always one rooted in genocidal idealism. And the Zionist warhawks of the Likud party and settlers movement have been leading up to this moment ever since they emerged to grab a hold of Israeli politics and government power with an iron grip, in the cloud of dust and smoke that was left to linger after the battles and skirmishes of regional powers led up to the decisive military campaign that was the six-day war of 1967. Which left Israel and the militant fringe of a far right political faction victorious on the battlefield and in the electoral cycle, never letting go of the steering wheel or relinquishing even a droplet of control since.
The dominance of far-right Zionist extremism over Israeli policy for the past 56 years has normalized anti-Arab hate speech and enabled a mainstream that is filled to the brim as a glass of deep dark purple wine at Passover table, with dehumanizing sentiment and language towards Palestinian Gaza that has bled down from the status quo political rhetoric and mercilessly ever-present state propaganda in to the minds of not just the Israeli populace but has worked its way deep in to the unconscious mind of the American Jewish identity as well. Having a party that is so far-right on the spectrum of international political contemporaries during its 56-year dominance has pulled the center further and further to the right, until settler Zionism, which represents the furthest right political fringe in colonial Israel, has become mainstream form political ideology. That far-right wing victory in fulfilling a major component of its agenda coupled with Islamaphobia post 9/11 has set the stage for the American public to be more accepting of a genocide when fighting against a ‘terrorist organization’ like Hamas, even when the scale of atrocities being committed against human life is by and far tipped in the direction of Israeli and US aggression. It shows how powerful of a tool the slanted language use of propaganda in our daily news can be and how it can dehumanize an entire culture in the public’s mind that has little to no experience with its people and is exposed to the massive disparity in the death count daily.
Logic becomes weaker in the face extreme idealism and we know based on generational trauma from only one lifetime ago how these same tools were used to level the same kinds of atrocities against us. It nearly worked as upwards of 8 million Jewish Europeans of all different nationalities perished under cruel and unusual torment and mass extermination in Nazi death camps on the heels of a massive propaganda and disinformation campaign. A cycle of genocide with that quick of a historical turnaround is as perplexing as it is bleak. We need to first find a way to deliver a ceasefire and next start really using our minds and critical thought to figure out how we’re going to break these cycles of genocide that are far too prevalent in our divisive hierarchical systems of bureaucracy that champions the hoarding of land and natural resources and comes coupled with imperial settler colonialism, functionally rooted in genocidal culture and policy. But hate speech is hate speech and it begets hate crimes when left unchecked. Holocaust trauma or no, Jewish people are not immune to the social cost that comes with preaching hatred. If they have gotten a pass before it has to stop here and cannot be allowed to go on any longer.
We haven’t moved with enough haste and have been quiet for too long as it is: had we challenged each other and the fascist collaborators in our Jewish families and organized relentlessly enough to have kept this issue at the forefront of domestic politics, then it might’ve been less possible for our politicians to aid and abet Zionist fascism in the Middle East. It may have delayed their power play for another 5 years. But what is done or what wasn’t done is done and now we have to live with the guilt of enabling a genocide attempt by our own silence, but that only makes it that much more critical to see the game board two steps ahead of the idiots who run the gamut of international politics whom we are smarter and more resourceful than.
It starts here with us seeing the monster in the mirror right fucking now and opposing our own blood relatives if we have to. Jewish people know the cause and effect of genocidal policy. We were educated thoroughly on the up close evils of fascism so they were not repeated. When we say “Never Again” it needs to be understood that “Never” is not a word that comes with the exception or caveat of only for us, or any exceptions at all for that matter. For those of us who have the gift of a moral compass that is stronger than our tendency to get swept up in what we are force fed by agenda driven entities that preach of a black vs white, Jewish vs. Palestinian, kill or be killed world that doesn’t exist anywhere outside of their weaponized narrative, which is as deadly as it is false.
Those of us that value human life over idealism and pride in nationalism. Those of us who know that any belief system that claims ethnic or religious supremacy and god given land rights is a system of genocide and fascism in itself. Those of us who use our voices to speak out against atrocities and war crimes committed by other Jews or anyone, anywhere. And those of us who use our intensity to create radical works of Judaica and don’t allow ourselves to get caught up in the throes of irrational emotions or thoughts that lead us back into becoming the image of what we grew up learning was the universe’s ultimate evil. It’s on those of us who are courageous enough to take the inner personal journey to heal our generational trauma by whatever individual means that looks like, instead of allowing those who would manipulate it to so we can help them use that universal ultimate evil of fascism and genocide, that was used against us and meant to wipe us out, to inflict it on to Palestine or attempt to use against any others. Those of us Jews who are against genocide need to lead in taking up the cry to atone for those of us who have too easily endorsed the spilling of blood and looked away and sponsored genocidal policies that are now coming back full circle on the children of Palestine.
The most valuable thing I’ve learned from my years of street level resistance and organizing in acts of civil disobedience and mutual aid is something I always expected was sure to be true, but I hadn’t quite been able to fully convince myself or validate by my own range of experiences. It was the diligence and relentlessness of my comrades and the efficacy of our movement when we put our strength together behind Black and Indigenous organizers and mutual aid network collectives in our community that finally convinced me of our collective power.
The reality I had always intuitively known was correct in my gut and finally untangled to put to rest all that self doubt and skepticism in order to actualize and affirm my faith in a strong community of everyday working class people and our ability to provide relief or collective defense and reach marginalized people in need at vulnerable times or places. I have faith in our ability to manage and distribute resources or labor in times of great need or disaster, our skill sets are hands down so much greater, more efficient and more effective than the band of thieves and ultra privileged double talking pussyfooters that end up as our elected public officials. Who we pay to do a job that we don’t need them for, one that as a community, we are far better at and better suited for.
I can’t think of a more marginalized or vulnerable community of people right now than the people of Palestinian Gaza. There is a certain power that cuts a little sharper when Jewish people denounce Israel and it’s brutal policies in the outright strongest words, and nothing throws American Zionist fascist collaborators more off balance. It’s go time and it’s now or never, and it starts with us as Jews and especially American Jews loudly and clearly denouncing Zionism in our own families, the news, by Israel, whenever or wherever it is found. When Jews against genocide are willing to stand up to resist and denounce other Jews, peddling Zionism, xenophobia and mass murder, our words will cut deeper than their hatred. It starts right here with Jews against genocide being the most vocal and visible Americans on the front lines of the Ceasefire movement.
