#july war

[phobic-human]

A Lebanese man walks across the remains of destroyed buildings carrying a Lebanese flag in the Bir al-Abed suburbs in southern Beirut, August 12, 2006.

(Photo credit: Lynsey Addario)

[socialismwithasmile]

@deathistardy

Kinda at a loss for words here, you claim to be a leftist and yet somehow you don’t understand national liberation struggle. Every leftist party in the region is on the right side of this one (Including the LCP which fucking fought against the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006) What a joke. 

Here is what we should consider: Why are there rockets being fired on Israel in the first place? I think Fanon answers it beautifully (and with 56 years of foresight) when he says:

The  violence which governed the ordering of the colonial world which tirelessly punctuated the destruction of the indigenous  social fabric, and demolished unchecked the systems of reference of the country's economy, lifestyles, and modes of dress, this same violence will be vindicated and appropriated when, taking history into their own hands, the colonized swarm into the forbidden cities. To blow the colonial world to smithereens is henceforth a clear image within the grasp and imagination of every colonized subject. To dislocate the colonial world does not mean that once the borders have been eliminated there will be a right of way between the two sectors. To destroy the colonial world means nothing less than demolishing the colonist's sector, burying it deep within the earth or banishing it from the territory.

In other words, the violence and hatred on display by people like Nasrallah is not something that “would have existed” it is an import by the Israeli colonist.  Colonialism and the violence it entails naturally breeds violence by the colonised against the coloniser. (Also there is that pesky little bit where Israel is still occupying part of Lebanon in 2017, provoking the shit out of Hezbollah but I digress). But, you might ask, how is Israel colonising Lebanon?  Surely Hezbollah and Nasrallah are Islamic fanatics with no real connection to the Palestinian Liberation struggle, and yes, that would be true if it weren't for the sheer number of Palestinian refugees that Israel dumped into Lebanon in 1948. So for better or for worse, (It is for worse) Hezbollah has come to represent for many struggle against the colonial oppressor what with their  “victory” in 2006 and all. 

Also I got all tangled up in theory/History and shit and forgot to point out. In the 2006 invasion of Lebanon, Israel killed 1,191 CIVILIANS! they were literally bombing southern Beirut, the capital of a country whose government refused to enter the war! So fuck you and your “retaliation” nonsense. This is 2017 that shit shouldn't fly anymore, and yet Haaretz manages to run one article a week gloating about how much damage they are going to do to Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure in the “next war”. It's time for everyone to wake up and acknowledge the aggressor in this scenario: is Isreal. 

[hallowsound-blog]

Call or Response?

Mismar, Omar. “Sing for Me a Little.” (2015)

Mismar asks people living in Palestine to imitate the ubiquitous sound of drones. 

Kerbaj, Mazen. “Starry Night.” (2006)

Kerbaj and his trumpet take on the Israeli military during the 2006 July War in a performance that is both a stand-off and a collaboration.

Mismar, Omar. “A Trumpet Blows Speech.” n.d.

“What effectiveness does this work have? Is it a heroic act of resistance? A futile act? An aestheticization of violence?”

What is the significance of Kerbaj’s various modifications of his trumpet? Can we read these as resilience/survival/adaptation, or as accomodation/assimilation?

Participants in Mismar’s “Sing for Me a Little” are both adults and children. The children’s voices are distinct: they lack the gravity and earnestness of the adult imitations. They are playful, almost lilting—gleeful, even. The enthusiastic “vuv-vuv, zzzzz” of one child’s performance might easily be mistaken for the sound of an American child playing with a miniature Hot Wheels car. I realize that it is impossible for me, a Western listener, to divorce my interpretation from this schema for American childhood, which may or may not exist for the child in Mismar’s piece. But regardless of my own expectations, the difference in affect between the child and adult participants is unmistakeable. While the adult imitations convey feelings of frustration, terror, and anxiety, the child imitations suggest habituation due to lifelong repetitive exposure to the stimulus. What other daily sounds might be more foreboding to adults than to children who have grown up with them? In what other ways are violence and surveillance normalized in the collective imagination?