Back in 2002, First published this interview with Mubarak Awad who’s long made the case to Palestinians for nonviolent resistance to Israeli oppression. He remains committed to his ethic and his NGO, “Nonviolence International,” is still engaged (though the Israelis exiled him to America in the course of the first intifada). Awad may not be an ace prophet – his prescriptions for elections in Gaza seem almost quaint now but his moral imagination is undeniable. Let’s hope he and his kind help write the future of Palestine…
World
The Revenging Angels of Our Nature
I have difficulties with Sherman, Wm. Tecumseh Sherman. Despite his clear-sighted warnings that a war with the Northern states would be “folly, madness, a crime against civilization!” Despite his soft affinities for southern culture, having spent time in Charleston, the cradle of rebellion, it was Sherman who materialized his prophecy that the south would be “drenched in blood.” His march from Atlanta to the sea, brought the Civil War’s terrors to the home front, a wide swath of pillage and fire, a wild escapade intended to blind the ante bellum and “make Georgia howl.”
Perhaps Arthur Harris — Sir Arthur Harris, 1st Baronet — was a more successful angel of the apocalypse. As the architect of Britian’s bombing campaign of German cities, Harris sought a righteous revenge against the aggression, actually the existence, of the Nazi regime. “They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.”
Table Music (Kierra Sheard; The Band; Lillie Mae; Tony Joe White; Smokey Robinson; JB, Bobby Bland & BB King; Ben Webster & Coleman Hawkins; Sugar Blue; Playboi Carti; JUL; St. Etienne; Obrafour)
I’ve been stuck on Kierra Sheard’s duets lately. There are wonderful ones with Jekalyn Carr (on Sheard’s last album), with Tasha Cobb, and a couple with Sheard’s mother Karen Clark (of the Clark Sisters). One of those Mother-and-Daughter ones has an indelible moment where Karen gently induces her pregnant daughter not to go full-on. (The tale of what once happened to “Gimme Shelter’s” Merry Clayton shadows her maternal attentiveness.) What comes next here is great from the jump (catch the guy who starts hopping on one leg pretty early on) but it gets transcendent when Ms. Sheard and her chorus lock on their truth: “He’s holding me up!!!”
Betrayal
When the Jew-hate starts, rely
on no one. Not neighbors who shared your table,
groups you fought for, friends you stayed up late
consoling. You’re alone. Bear
this because you must. Later
you can cry, now reinforce your door, rate
hiding places – cellar, attic, underneath a hay bale
or mask. Try ignorance, denial, catatonia. Bleat
prayers in a made-up tongue when they beat
the ones they’ve caught. Relay
this to others – Bonds you’ve trusted aren’t real.
The Tropes (Slight Return)
A slightly revised version of the author’s commentary in today’s First Respondents’ email…
Narcissus in Gaza
A view from one of London’s wisest …
The other day, arriving early to do some filming in the London Library, I sat in the small park in St James’s Square by the statue of William III. A tall, lugubrious looking white man in his fifties walked past talking on his phone. He had, he said, been on the Palestine demonstration at the weekend. I didn’t hear the rest. ‘Ah”, I thought, “he must be one of those failures of multiculturalism I keep reading about on Twitter”.
In the aftermath of the October 7th massacres of Israelis by Hamas the vociferous New Right in Britain took to retweeting pictures of demonstrators with Palestinian flags and decrying this as a failure of multiculturalism and a vindication of their demands for reduced immigration. In the Green Room after my recent debate with Matthew Goodwin he characterised North London to me as a kind of sink of support for terrorism and told me – contemptuously – that because I didn’t see it that way I was not “living in reality”. When later it turned out that he had not been invited to dinner with the organisers I reflected on what we were all missing. We could have enjoyed another 90 minutes of that.
The Witnesses (Formerly “Black Dialectics”)
This post originally had a second half, which I’ve now restored since I got a “hard yes” from my final witness who agreed to join the conversation (anonymously)…
Ta-Nehisi Coates opened this Q&A by denouncing what he regards as cant about the complexity of the conflict between Israelis and Arabs. His argument had force. How can Americans — particularly those who identify with black people’s struggles for civil rights — support a country that’s waging war to sustain a status quo founded on “segregation”? There’s something fine and (small d) democratic in Coates’ determination to dump the idea that only PhDs in Middle Eastern Studies have the wit to comment on the horrors Over There. His will to keep it simple seemed admirable. Yet there was an odd avoidant turn in Coates’ testimony when he addressed Martin Luther King’s legacy.
Skies Over Israel
Maybe if they stopped bombing us, we’d stop bombing them…If they have a million displaced persons, we have 150,000 families looking for places to stay because of the rockets.
The Day After (Who Rules Gaza If Israel “Wins”?)
“We can’t have a reversion to the status quo with Hamas running Gaza,” Blinken…told the Senate Appropriations Committee. “We also can’t have — and the Israelis start with this proposition themselves — Israel running or controlling Gaza.”
The following piece, published last week in Foreign Affairs magazine, speaks to the future of Gaza. Its author once served as the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority and as finance minister. Before his dismissal by the P.A.’s President Abbas in 2013, Salam Fayyad was known for being a modernizer committed to reforming the political economy and security structures of the West Bank.
Come and See*
From Thomas Hardy’s “Departure”
“How long…
Must your wrath reasonings trade on lives like these,
That are as puppets in a playing hand?–
When shall the saner softer polities
Whereof we dream, have sway in each proud land
And patriotism, grown Godlike, scorn to stand
Bondslave to realms, but circle earth and seas?”
***
***
Hatikvah
Yuval Noah Harari has been on tv and the web often since Oct. 7th. He sometimes seems too smooth for this moment. (He’s come across as glib to more than one sharp observer.) Yet and still, I hope he’s a voice for the “saner softer polities” that Hardy once invoked way way back at the beginning of the 20th C. Harari has allowed in his brief talk below that most Israelis and Palestinians are too immersed in their own pain right now to care about the suffering of anyone outside their own tribes, but “outsiders” have no excuses: “Don’t be intellectually lazy. Don’t be emotionally lazy. Don’t just see part of this terrible reality…Keep a space for future peace, because we can’t keep that space now…”
Here’s Harari’s recent essay in The Guardian.
Around Midnight (A Day After Mass Terror)
Maybe the most crucial news is that there’s no reason to be confident that we know much about what’s happening.
In Country
There are three new buildings being raised right around our co-op, primarily by workers who come in every day from the West Bank or Gaza. A few days ago I spoke to one of them in the little grocery store. Tall, shy, a teenager, he could speak only Arabic and comes over the border every day. From Gaza, he comes through the Erez crossing.
But I won’t be seeing him for a while. The crossing was destroyed yesterday when hundreds of nearby residents were slaughtered in their shelters.
The demonstrations were cancelled last night – most of the pilots, the soldiers, the navy, the doctors – were in the sites of the catastrophe, trying to clean up the remains of the slaughter, to treat survivors, to find some of the terrorists who may still be around.
Upside Down
Thinking of Mikhail Bakhtin
Saint Peter has grown horns,
and Dionysius, wears Italian moccasins.
Peasant are crowned, and kings revel
in shovelling manure.
Roots & Stem
Sparing you the seconds of time speeding by as the Pentagon’s unauditable bloated budget speeds us toward dead oceans, dead corals and a million species lost…
