Still from Elia Suleiman’s 2002 film Divine Intervention
If I don’t write now I never will. Since I published this Arabic response to the horror, people—Arabs—have argued with my decision not to address the West. They tell me it is necessary to talk to those worth talking to. They tell me they want to yell and growl and weep in English, and that I should bear witness to the sounds they make while the ghosts of murdered children from all over Gaza run to the Egyptian border. But there is so much to stare at in silence—the glare on the face of a little boy, physically unharmed but totally alone, just like a shell shocked World War I soldier at the age of three—too much to voice.
Part of what I could say I said in an August 2014 article while Gaza was being bombed: “Genocide is a necessary condition if not of Zionism, then of the post-Zionist stance that best describes the current, neither-one-nor-two-state-solution status quo.” In the same article I also wrote: “Aside from restricting the lives of people in the areas it controls, the problem with Hamas is that—whether directly, for apostasy or treason, or by giving the IDF a pretext—it is killing Palestinians.”
But nearly ten years later I am not convinced the IDF ever really needs a pretext—even before the present government, Israeli excesses have been continually generating pretexts—or that it matters in the least who mounts an act of resistance against uninterrupted decades of occupation, apartheid, systematic dispossession, ethnic cleansing and land grabs, state terrorism, daily rights violations, unspeakable injustice and, yes, murder, constant murder. It doesn’t matter whether it is a freedom fighter after my own heart, or a theocratically minded “terrorist” who is standing up to this.
No one wants anyone dead, let’s get this clear—I honestly do not even want IDF soldiers dead—but I will not mince words: from where I stand the resistance is a sign of life. Contrary to the Israeli defense minister’s declaration, it is a sign of humanity—the will not just to survival but to human dignity, which is as important as water, food, electricity, and safety from apocalyptic destruction—an inspiring sacrifice.
Another part of what I could say I said in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attack, a few months later:
Charlie Hebdo is not about the senseless (or the political) killing of one party by another. It's about a Platonic evil called Islam encroaching on the peaceful, beneficent world order created and maintained by the post-Christian West.
Defending the latter against the former, commentators not only presume what will sooner or later be reduced to the racial superiority of the victim. They also misrepresent the perpetrator as an alien force independent of that order.
It's as if the Kouachi brothers are not products of French society. It's as if Arab immigration to France was not a result of French conquests in North Africa, and the rise of political Islam not a consequence of the colonial and Cold War legacies of the West.
The commentary suggests, rather, that the Kouachis are time travellers from an age when theocracy and Enlightenment fought over world dominion (never mind the historical truth of the Muslims' role in that fight, never mind the present-day Muslims' de facto inability to alter the course of civilization).
…
No response to Charlie Hebdo seems aware of the existence of Muslims to whom the idea of “avenging the Prophet” is nothing more than a jaded joke. Aside from beliefs—and this Muslim will agree that beliefs are a personal matter anyway—Muslims exist whose only possible gripe with the infidel's tendency to “insult religion” is said infidel's rabid racism…
The presumption that all Muslim-born people are automatically incensed by Charlie Hebdo—that Charlie Hebdo's avowed abhorrence for Islam is something they must fight their inherently homicidal response to, which I suspect was a significant part of the motivation behind the cartoons—is shared by both right- and left-wing responses to the incident.
It is what this Muslim finds most offensive of all—not least because it has so much in common with repeated attempts by the world order to repackage and ship its Islamist Frankenstein back to the Arab Muslim world.
Already, ten years ago, I was fatigued: demoralized as much by the fact that Egypt’s supposed democratic transformation had been reduced to Islamist vigilantes torturing anti-Muslim Brotherhood protesters on the streets as by the two sides of my identity—the secular, liberal “Westerner” who believed in such tenets of “world civilization” as law and order, objective truth, universal principles, and political freedom; and the West-hating, conspiracy theory-prone fundamentalist to whom centuries of colonial repression had reduced so many Arabs and Muslims—once again coming in conflict.
I was fatigued. But even so I would not have dreamed of what I’ve seen since October 7. I might have dreamed of the ghoulishness of the IDF: insatiable blood thirst, infanticide, impunity. I might have dreamed of the West turning a blind eye: hypocrisy and historical guilt as well as indifference to non-Western suffering. I might have dreamed of silence. But I couldn’t have dreamed of so many “free world” leaders not only giving the go-ahead, openly funding, arming and egging on genocide but also, while the killing unfolds in real time, expressing such post-truth solidarity with the killers. Even vetoing the attempt to give survivors occasional respite.
I couldn’t have imagined Westerners, out of sheer racial hatred of Arabs and Muslims—what else?—going full North Korea to punish sympathy with the victims of genocide as it happens. All the trappings of “authoritarianism” and the police state in action: surveillance, disinformation, extralegal measures, suppression of dissent, the press and media lying through their teeth…
And, beyond the grief and the rage, it makes me feel like a fool for being a secular Muslim and an anti-Arab nationalism Arab, a person who believes in racial equality and liberal values—idiotic enough to imagine that the country whose capital is Jerusalem could ever be a meaningfully democratic state where people have equal rights regardless of religion, where no settlers are brought in and armed with the express purpose of literally kicking people out of their houses, and to which those who were forced out may safely return.
The only thing I really want to say is that Ursula von der Leyen is “Hamas”. Bibi, Biden, Sunak, Zelensky—the governments of France and of Germany are all “Hamas”. If to the Western mind Hamas denotes savagery and lack of respect for human life, all those parties have demonstrated a truly, a literally incredible capacity for that. If Hamas denotes a regressive worldview in which being born into one religion makes you superior to someone born into another, giving you the right to subdue and rule over them, to visit unnecessary suffering on untold numbers of them—aha—that is precisely the logic by which Israel operates, whether or not it invokes a Jewish victim narrative in which no Arabs or Muslims had any part to play historically.
And, like the Western Jews who have been loudly opposing that logic, pointing out that nothing on earth could be more anti-Semitic than what the IDF is doing in Gaza right now, all I can really say is that, foolish and untenable as it remains, I continue to refuse to be Hamas. I am human, I am Arab, I am Muslim, I support the Palestinians’ legitimate right to resistance. But, unlike the obscenely barbarous Westerners who rule my world, I am not Hamas.
I had the honor of helping to draft the English text of this statement, which can be signed online.
First published on The Rakha on 20 October 2023
