Permission to Narrate?

What, exactly, are your “values and ethics”?

The glaring refusals of progressive types to share and draw from Palestinian media sources, witnesses, publications, social media posts, and resistance organizations reveal their self-centred and racist methodologies of discussing the genocide. Sure, they denounce all this evil, but only if Ha’aretz or some random progressive or progressive-ish Jew says it first!

A Harvard University data set submitted by the occupation army itself revealed a month ago that Israel ‘disappeared’ around 377,000 Palestinians in Gaza, close to half of them children. The set uses data-driven analysis and spatial mapping to highlight a severe decline in Gaza’s population due to Israel’s indiscriminate attacks and siege.

Taken together with the intended genocidal murder of what could be, according to the math of such esteemed and leading venues as the British medical journal The Lancet, around 500,000 Palestinians have likely been killed in Gaza alone (there are murders, land grabs, and as of June 13 for at least two days, an almost complete lockdown between West Bank villages, with extra checkpoints set up everywhere to control Palestinian movement and the usual apartheid laws and settler violence, of course); also recent shutdowns of East Jerusalem U.N. schools (at least three) and other Palestinian infrastructure.

A recent poll of Jewish Canadians, commissioned through Léger and Associates by the liberal Zionist organizations JSpace Canada and New Israel Fund Canada, found the following not surprising racism among them. Here are a few of the policy initiatives proposed, and responses:

*“Increase sanctions on Jewish settlers in the West Bank who engage in acts of vigilante violence against Palestinian civilians” - Oppose: 41.3%, Support: 38.3%

*“Place economic sanctions on far-right ministers, such as Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who have aided Jewish settlers who commit violent attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank” - Oppose: 37.4%; Support: 37%

*“Institute an embargo on the purchase of arms manufactured in Israel and the sale of Canadian-manufactured arms to Israel” - Oppose: 59%; Support: 18.8%

*“Formally recognize a Palestinian state” - Oppose: 51.7%; Support: 24%

*“Increase humanitarian aid to Gaza” - Oppose: 40.2%; Support: 38.9%

Journalist Max Blumenthal summarized a recent poll of Israelis at Pennsylvania State University, which revealed as he put it, “Israeli society is comprehensively fascist, completely irredeemable and a dire threat to humanity.”

-82% support the forced expulsion of residents of Gaza

-56% support the forced expulsion of (so-called) Arabs of Israel (Palestinians with Israeli citizenship status)

-47% believe the Israeli army should “act like the biblical Israelites under Joshua in Jericho—killing all inhabitants of a conquered city”

-65% “believe in a modern-day incarnation of Amalek, a Biblical enemy of the Jews”

-69% of secular Israelis support expelling Gaza’s population, and 31% support mimicking the Biblical destruction of Jericho

-just 9% of men under 40 oppose all genocide scenarios for Palestinians

The attitudes revealed in the surveys do not make Jewish people a monolith by any stretch but delusions of supremacy and hatred toward Palestine and Palestinians are in copious evidence. With numbers like that, it’s no wonder I feel unsafe, never mind living in Gaza, how must they feel every minute and second of the day and night? Some days the drones are deafeningly loud for 24 hours straight. I will not write out a list of atrocities here. We have all seen the daily massacres and destruction online, on our phones. This is targeted hate, underwritten with the most advanced military machines in the world, planned and ongoing for 80 years. And no mainstream Jewish organizations have denounced the genocide, among the two or three most horrific since World War II. As a friend speaking on a podcast said recently, “history unfolds across this timeline and there are moments where you're confronted with what is essentially the greatest evil to exist in our times, this monstrous evil state with no boundaries and no conscience. Pure hate as a state, and as a sort of, you know, political being, as an entity and as a culture.”

Anyone who has applauded anti-Zionist Jews while ignoring, mispresenting, or refusing to enter a dialogue with Arabs and Palestinians who have been posting especially urgently for 20 months, and the whole 77 years of Palestinian resistance before that, are telling on themselves. In centering anti-Zionist voices and/or non-Palestinians, they have hid behind people who are braver and bolder with larger audiences than they. They have not acted as moral agents, but taken a safe route or worse, remained silent. Even if they have been fully aware of the October 7 lies, and the Hannibal Directive that reveals Israel itself killed most of the people that day, they have left this fact murky in their minds because they are racist.

What about antisemitism? is a question that they are too stupid to jettison from liberatory discourse on Palestine and too bankrupt to not centre during a genocide of Palestinians that is being excused with this canard. It’s even more chilling in this age of renewed genocide of Palestinians that they would grab onto this desperate propaganda. Including the recent revival of the Oct. 7 rape lies by mainstream media, gobbled up by people like Antonia Zerbisias. When I pointed out that she needed to educate herself and stop posting the lies that enable genocidal violence, she told me to piss off and blocked me. Why are these people such transparent clowns? I also told her to start sharing Palestinian content, rather than relying on Haaretz, and I don’t think she appreciated it. Sharing the discredited Oct. 7 mass rape hoax at this time reveals her subconscious racism, as does her refusal to share Palestinian content.

While the good news is that our permission to narrate is breaking out, who knows if the narration will be admitted to the reality of the discourse. We Palestinians, and defenders of Palestinians who are not privileged Jews, are considered too uncivilized for the liberal mind, and as we know, liberalism is the quickest way to fascism. Just before I left the public service in October 2023 for a leave without pay, I experienced freshly the liberalism of maintaining the status quo dressed up as “values and ethics.” I was reprimanded for demanding, with concerned members of Arab and Jewish community groups, why anti-Palestinian racism was being brought into the public service and tied to obtaining public funding.

Good Shepherd Collective describes it this way:

A hallmark of liberal praxis is privileging the "sanctity" of process over real, actually existing people. It's not because they're stupid; they fully understand that upholding the status quo, which is maintained by process, protects their proximity to power.

Let me revise this a little to make my point about those so-called values and ethics:

A hallmark of liberal praxis is privileging the “sanctity” of non-Palestinian and non-Palestine-positive voices over real, actually existing people. It’s not because they’re stupid; they fully understand that upholding the status quo, which is maintained by non-Palestinian and non-Palestine-positive voices, protects their proximity to power.”

“I don’t think they realize how racist they are,” as Toni Morrison once said.