Stay Human

ما أجمل الحرية Palestine & Pakistan ♥ - “Because it is a just cause, a noble ideal, a moral quest for equality and human rights.” - Check my 'about' for more info & contact.

[stay-human]

"When I die, as I'm dying, my dream is to see you middle-aged, and still optimistic, and still saying our motto is 'organize! organize! organize!'"

-Eqbal Ahmed's closing words to students at the 1975 University of Michigan teach-in "Bicentennial Dilemma: Who's in Control?"

[stay-human]

This is a non-exhaustive list of brands to boycott if you would like to participate in the Palestinian call for global Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) against the Israeli occupation. I've excluded security, construction, etc. firms that cannot be boycotted in an individual capacity. However, pressuring governments & other organisations to refuse contracts to those firms is an integral part of the BDS movement. Will also try to make seperate posts on how to add your voice to the academic and cultural boycott of Israel.

On another note, Coca-Cola and Nestle belong on every boycott list. Not just because they are complicit in the Israeli occupation but also because they have committed some of the worst human rights violations the world over. Coca-Cola has gone as far as having Union leaders murdered. Both Coca-Cola and Nestle steal water supplies and create water insecurity in already marginalised regions among many, many other crimes. I did not include them in the list because I am aware of how overwhelmed people become when they see those two companies and all their endless subsidiaries and I wanted to keep the list targeted on companies that have been the specific focus of the Palestinian BDS movement.

I have also excluded some brands that are often on older BDS lists, like McDonald's, because over the years they have stopped engaging in the activity that resulted in their boycott or have simply fallen to a lower priority because their relatively lower level of involvement compared to the brands that are our focus.

That being said, I hope this list will serve as a place to start. As always, do your own research to make informed decisions. For more information, you can also visit bdsmovement.net and bdslist.org

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The fascist Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, is live tweeting his genocidal thoughts which happen to echo, word for word, the racist scientific colonizers of the 19th century in 2021.

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In this sense, whenever we are engaged in radical emancipatory politics, we should never forget, as Walter Benjamin put it almost a century ago, that every revolution, if it is an authentic revolution, is not only directed towards the future but it redeems also the past failed revolutions. All the ghosts as it were; the living dead of the past revolution, which are roaming around, unsatisfied, will finally find their home in the new freedom.

Zizek summarizing Walter Benjamin

[stay-human]

It seems to have become tradition, for families in Gaza to sleep together so that they may die together. So no one is left behind to mourn. I don't understand how much blood has to be shed for the cruel empires and the complacent citizens of the North to care.

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Israel bombed an orphanage last night. I imagine many of those children were there in the first place because of previous Israeli bombs. Israel routinely bombs schools, hospitals, UN shelters with impunity and claims self defense. At a point you stop arguing. Because you realize. They all know this is not self defense. The United States and other cowardly nations of the North do not support Israel's right to self defence. They support, with full knowledge, the extermination of the Palestinian people.

Our attempts to explain are a naive, desperate belief in the humanity of the colonizers. It's not that they don't know. They simply do not care.

[stay-human]

This is three year old Maryam and her five year old brother Zaid. Both were murdered in Gaza alongside their pregnant mother. This is where words fail.

The death toll in Gaza has already crossed 100. I have an unshakeable dread in my heart as I remember the last time. And the time before that. And the time before that. Hundreds of children murdered in their sleep and the world did not do a damn thing.

[stay-human]

PALESTINE 101: A DOCUMENTARY LIST

Most of them are available online and I've linked them below: 1. Occupation 101 - this is slightly old but it's the first thing I recommend to anyone newly learning about the Israeli occupation of Palestine because it covers a lot of history in a digestible way and provides excellent context for a viewer who has no prior knowledge. 2. Five Broken Cameras - is an incredible doc in which a Palestinian farmer documents his experience of the occupation and resistance in Bil'in through five cameras, broken one after the other (no points for guessing who broke em). 3. Budrus (the link isn't great quality, I would recommend downloading it from elsewhere) - another doc/film that centres around Palestinian resistance to the construction of the Israeli separation wall in one Palestinian village. This doc focuses particularly on Palestinian nonviolent resistance. 4. A World Not Ours - this doc takes you outside Palestine to the story of a family in a Lebanese refugee camp. While most of the attention (rightly) is on Israel, we often forget the horrific violation of rights occurring against Palestinian refugees in neighbouring Arab states, with Lebanon being arguably the worst offender. 5. Peace, Propaganda, and the Promised Land - if you're interested in the ridiculously asymmetrical way the Israeli occupation of Palestine is portrayed in the media and unwavering US support for the zionist project, this is the doc for you. 6. Promises - if I remember correctly this doc had some underlying if only both sides could just be friends issues but I think it's worth watching to hear the occupation being articulated by Israeli and Palestinian children 7. Tears of Gaza / Children of Gaza - two Documentaries that follow the destruction that Israel has wrecked in Gaza through the way it has affected children's lives. Fair warning these are incredibly difficult to watch.

Disclaimer: I don't endorse all the viewpoints presented in these documentaries, they're meant to be resources to be viewed with a healthy amount of critical thinking ability.

[stay-human]

Disclaimer: This is obviously a non-exhaustive list and reflects the books I came across and found helpful when first learning about the occupation of Palestine. PDF DOWNLOADS LINKED BELOW 1. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappe Read a review of this book here. 2. Palestine: A Personal History by Karl Sabbagh You can read a review of the book here. 3. The Question of Palestine by Edward W. Said 4. Men in the Sun by Ghassan Kanafani 5. In Search of Fatima (excerpt) by Ghada Karmi 6. One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse by Ali Abunimah

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from Global Palestine by John Collins

[stay-human]

Today I saw Riz Ahmed’s “The Long Goodbye” for the first time. 

Watching it, something I've been holding back for days, seeing the outrageous cruelty in Karachi and Jerusalem, burst forth. Something visceral about the destruction of homes. Some unwritten sacred thing that I hold dear undergoing the ugliest and most vile violation. 

I feel it physically in my body; cold and sick and feverish all at the same time. I feel as though I don't have the barrier of my own skin against the horror of the world. Something about “bare life” is echoing in my mind on repeat, an understanding of a visceral vulnerability that I have never been able to articulate.

For weeks at work we've been talking about experiential filmmaking. A film that elicits a physiological emotive response, beyond the realm of cerebral understanding and misunderstanding. I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I want to make art that unsettles. I want to make art that sits in your bones. I felt this film in my gut, in the back of my throat, at the edge of my skin.

This is what art that confronts does; it yanks you out of your skin.

And so here I am, thinking about Palestine again.

With Palestine I have never been able to wrap my head around the sheer undeniable injustice of it. The brazen, blatant, beghairati of the zionist project. How can a family of otherwise ordinary people steal a home. How can one enter a space populated with pictures, clothes that carry the scent of skin, food still warm on the table - and just occupy it? Who could live in a home with ghosts like these. I want to ask - do they not haunt you? Do you hear the singing when you try to sleep? Listen closely, it is a song of return - it is only ever the song of return.

I used to think about the zionist narrative of abandonment. As hollow as it is, that amounted to a justification through which one could delude oneself if so inclined. But what new hell is this? To look human beings in the face, to pull them out of their homes with your own hands, to see their resisting, protesting, unrelenting humanity up close - how does one face that and continue? I imagine the answer lies in a loss, the inability to recognize what one does not have. 

There are so many painful parts to this story. 

Palestinians who have to foot the bill of the demolitions of their own homes. Palestinians and humans of conscience who put their own bodies in between bulldozers and buildings to no avail. Palestinians, standing on Palestinian land, labelled "present absentees." How can a human being be both present and absent? This is the magic trick bestowed upon Palestinians by Israel. People who are and not simultaneously. People who do not exist but exist enough to be a problem, enough to need to be eradicated. How does a person, standing there in flesh and bone, in the entirety of their corporeal humanness, prove the fact of their material existence? Indignity upon absurd indignity. The facts of the occupation constitute such gross, absurd injustices that nothing written or said can contain them.

I do not want to speak or write, I want to grab you and shake you because look, look - there is nothing here that requires explaining. Do you not have eyes that see? Do you not feel, in your very bones, right from wrong?

This is why words fail me now. 

I was twelve (?) thirteen (?) when I started to learn the history of Palestine. It was inconceivable to me that such blatant injustice could go on. Inconceivable to a child that any human being with a beating heart would not just see the naked truth of what was happening. But as the years go by, the abuses continue. They grow, mutate, into new unrecognizable horrors. The magnitude of it shrinks one into silence, into hopelessness. 

And yet. That is not an option. Even now, when we all know what is happening, corporate overlords that govern the entire domain of online life delete Palestinian after Palestinian--delete Palestine--off the Internet. One must speak. This is a project of disappearance. Since the very beginning, it has always been a project of disappearance. 

"They do not exist.”  “A land without a people for a people without a land.”  “The old will die and the young will forget.” 

That last one comes from the first Israeli prime minister, consolidator of zionist terrorist forces, architect of ethnic cleansing, Ben-Gurion, in 1948. 

And yet, over 70 years later, they exist. They remember.

The same rubble that is the destroyed Palestinian home is both memory and resistance when flung in the face of the colonizer, the occupier. What is the name for the one who commits genocide? We have named the acts: massacre, ethnic cleansing, genocide - what is the name of the one who commits them? I want to name them for what they are. To name a thing for what it is, so that it cannot be obfuscated, so that it may be confronted, seems to me incredibly important in a narrative full of cowardly lies. The act does not occur without the actors - why don't we have a name for the perpetrators of the worst horrors that humanity has ever seen? I could not find a word in English but, apparently, the French have one. To name those responsible for massacres in Rwanda: génocidaire. Telling in some ways, the English refuse to name what they do, the French, in their tradition of delusion, believe they are not involved.

There are other zionist delusions as well. They forget about us. The other wretched of the earth, the other colonized peoples of the world. They forget that we remember too. As long as the memory of colonization persists, zionism will not win. As long as the colonized resist, zionism can not win. The settler colonial state of Israel operates under the impression that the enemy is Palestine, they fail to understand the enemy is every last person with a zinda zameer still breathing on the face of this earth.

I have a lot of anger today. I have a lot of pain. How dare you look into a Palestinian mother’s face, after you've dragged her out of her home, and raise a single, miserable finger against her. How dare you step one filthy boot inside al-Aqsa. The wretched of the earth do not disappear this easy. There will always be a reckoning. Whether God's or Benjamin's, whether karma or the peoples’ righteous revolutionary anger, there will always be judgement day -- it will be a mirror, and you will tremble when you see your face in it.

[stay-human]

As the late Gilles Deleuze once put it, the cry of the Zionists to justify their racist violence has always been “we are not a people like any other,” while the Palestinian cry of resistance has always been “we are a people like all others.” European intellectuals must choose which cry to heed when addressing the question of Palestine.

Joseph Massad (via stay-human)

[justuju]

from Balqis by Nizar Qabbani

[justuju]

If they blew you up, It’s because all funerals start in Karbala And end in Karbala. No more history to read, I’m warned. My fingers got burned And my clothes are blood-covered. Here we are in the Stone Age Everyday gets us back a thousand years. In Beirut the sea Ceases to be, after you did go. Poetry asks about its poem, With incomplete words, And none gives answers. Sadness, Balqis, makes my heart bleed As if it were an orange squeezed. Now; I know the distress of words, The plight of impossible language. I, who have coined letters, Don’t know how to start this one.

from Balqis by Nizar Qabbani (via justuju)

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I hate the word “ally” so much. I don’t want white/male/insert-any-privileged-group-here “allies”. I want accomplices and co-conspirators, feminists, activists, organizers, and comrades. I want unapologetic solidarity and active participation. 

[stay-human]

In Defense of Looting

For most of America’s history, one of the most righteous anti-white supremacist tactics available was looting.

In working to correct the white-supremacist media narrative we can end up reproducing police tactics of isolating the individuals who attack property at protests. Despite the fact that if it were not for those individuals the media might pay no attention at all. If protesters hadn’t looted and burnt down that QuikTrip on the second day of protests, would Ferguson be a point of worldwide attention? It’s impossible to know, but all the non-violent protests against police killings across the country that go unreported seem to indicate the answer is no. It was the looting of a Duane Reade after a vigil that brought widespread attention to the murder of Kimani Gray in New York City. The media’s own warped procedure instructs that riots and looting are more effective at attracting attention to a cause.

(...) anti-black racism remains the foundational organizing principle of this country. That is because this country is built on the right to property, and there is no property, no wealth in the USA without the exploitation, appropriation, murder, and enslavement of black people.

(...) The distinction between white and black was thus eventually forged as a way of distinguishing between who could be enslaved and who could not. The earliest working definition of blackness may well have been “those who could be property”. Someone who organized a mob to violently free slaves, then, would surely be considered a looter (had the word come into common usage by then, John Brown and Nat Turner would have been slandered with it). This is not to draw some absurd ethical equivalence between freeing a slave and grabbing a flat screen in a riot. The point, rather, is that for most of America’s history, one of the most righteous anti-white supremacist tactics available was looting. The specter of slaves freeing themselves could be seen as American history’s first image of black looters.

(...) The mystifying ideological claim that looting is violent and non-political is one that has been carefully produced by the ruling class because it is precisely the violent maintenance of property which is both the basis and end of their power. Looting is extremely dangerous to the rich (and most white people) because it reveals, with an immediacy that has to be moralized away, that the idea of private property is just that: an idea, a tenuous and contingent structure of consent, backed up by the lethal force of the state. When rioters take territory and loot, they are revealing precisely how, in a space without cops, property relations can be destroyed and things can be had for free.

(...) Modern American police forces evolved out of fugitive slave patrols, working to literally keep property from escaping its owners. The history of the police in America is the history of black people being violently prevented from threatening white people’s property rights. When, in the midst of an anti-police protest movement, people loot, they aren’t acting non-politically, they aren’t distracting from the issue of police violence and domination, nor are they fanning the flames of an always-already racist media discourse. Instead, they are getting straight to the heart of the problem of the police, property, and white supremacy.

[stay-human]

It’s so important to remember that mass movements like this don’t appear out of thin air. They are the result of decades of work by activists and community organizers who kept at it when no one was listening, who kept at it when no one cared. These are the people that build the community networks that allow for mass mobilization to be possible. These are the people that give us the language to articulate the injustice of the times and our protest against them. These are the people who educated and protested and organized and painstakingly shifted the narrative inch by inch to get the conversation to where it is today.  

There are times when a political moment is lost because the groundwork that is required to mobilize the necessary public mass is just not present. It is no easy feat to get this many people out on the streets armed with an understanding of the issue and the vocabulary to speak truth to power. Communities of care and solidarity take years to build and black activists in America have set an example for the world in doing that. We also see the strongest level of solidarity coming from the most well organized political communities such as those present in the Palestinian resistance. 

Remember that it was three black women who gave you the words “BlackLivesMatter” that are now splashed across every news channel and celebrity instagram story. It was activists in online and offline spaces who did the intellectual labour of unveiling how systemic racism and the police state operate and made that understanding accessible to broader audiences. They had already done the work on how you mobilize your own community, how you mobilize solidarity, how you speak to allies and how you speak to enemies. We already had an incredible amount of resources available, drawing from a rich history of black resistance and resistance movements across the world, that helped shape our response to this political moment.  

The reason this is all so important to reiterate is because you don’t sit around waiting for revolution to “happen” to you. You create it. You work at it day in and day out, even when it feels like nothing is changing because that is the revolutionary work that makes effective collective responses to moments like this possible. Without that work, it’s just another day of injustice and despair where we scramble to figure out how to respond. Revolution is not a singular day of riot, though those are part of it, it is a conscientious way of living your life where you must do the work required for your circumstances, wherever you are, so when push comes to shove, you and your comrades are ready.