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For the New Year, 1981 - Denise Levertov

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I'm reading about how Israel, in the immediate aftermath of the 1948 Nakba, deliberately replaced olive trees and other indigenous flora with European plants. This ecological disaster, which is now proudly hailed under the banner of 'making the desert bloom,' was done to 'de-Arabize' the landscape, and to cover up - often with fast-growing European pine trees -the ruins of Palestinian villages that were destroyed by Zionists forces.

And I just need everyone to read this passage from Pappé, because the symbolism of what happened to those European pine trees in the desert speaks for itself:

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, by Ilan Pappé (2006, p. 227-228.)

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“Military occupations have always seemed irreversible, until in fact they are reversed, but it always takes the effort of the colonized to roll back what the colonizers have done. Occupations never ended voluntarily, or just because the more powerful nation wanted it, and have certainly never been the result of a one-sided negotiated settlement initiated and controlled by the dominant power.”

— Edward Said, “Bitter Truths About Gaza”, Peace and Its Discontents (1996)

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Artist: Raili Liaho - Year:  1979

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The best reminder

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yesterday morning, I had Qur'an class with my teacher who lives in Egypt (close to the Gaza border) and even through her headphones, I could hear the sound of planes flying overhead (this was just shortly before the Rafah border crossing was bombed).

and after seeing the (predictably biased) headlines yesterday, I started to think about the liberal obsession with over-intellectualizing this genocide as a "centuries-old conflict" that's "complicated" and its deliberate purpose to distract, obfuscate, and dissuade. it keeps the media wheels spinning (and many people have pointed out the egregious use of the hyphen that attempts to equalize and flatten culpability); it drains time and energy on debates deliberately designed to go nowhere; and most harrowingly, it throws a towel on any glinting suggestions of revolution, using it instead to fuel the cog that goes and goes and goes

by saying it's been "centuries", they mean to imply the futility of resistance -- as if to say, "it's always been this way and always will be"; but those of us from colonized nations know that liberation can and never will be by the colonizer's clock.

all my support to the people of Palestine as they fight back against the illegal occupation; may we all live to see this liberation in our lifetimes.

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I do not want, you may well understand, to proceed today to a critique of the colonial system. I do not intend as a colonized man, speaking to colonized people, to demonstrate that the colonial state is an abnormal, inhuman and reprehensible state. It would be grotesque on my part to want to convince you of the unacceptable nature of colonial oppression. However, I would like to focus my reflections on the violence integral to colonial oppression.

The colonial regime is a regime instituted by violence. It is always by force that the colonial regime is established. It is against the will of the people that other peoples more advanced in the techniques of destruction or numerically more powerful have prevailed. I say that such a system established by violence can logically only be faithful to itself, and its duration in time depends on the continuation of violence.

But the violence which is in question here is not an abstract violence, it is not only a violence perceived by the spirit, it is also a violence manifested in the daily behaviour of the colonizer towards the colonized: apartheid in South Africa, forced labour in Angola, racism in Algeria. Contempt, a politics of hate, these are the manifestations of a very concrete and very painful violence.

Colonialism, however, is not satisfied by this violence against the present. The colonized people are presented ideologically as a people arrested in their evolution, impervious to reason, incapable of directing their own affairs, requiring the permanent presence of an external ruling power. The history of the colonized peoples is transformed into meaningless unrest, and as a result, one has the impression that for these people humanity began with the arrival of those brave settlers.

Violence in everyday behaviour, violence against the past that is emptied of all substance, violence against the future, for the colonial regime presents itself as necessarily eternal. We see, therefore, that the colonized people, caught in a web of a three-dimensional violence, a meeting point of multiple, diverse, repeated, cumulative violences, are soon logically confronted by the problem of ending the colonial regime by any means necessary.

[...]

In certain colonies, the violence of the colonized is the last gesture of the hunted man, meaning that he is ready to defend his life. There are colonies which fight for freedom, independence, for the right to happiness. In 1954, the Algerian people took up arms because at that point the colonial prison became so oppressive that it was no longer tolerable, because the hunt was definitely on for Algerians in the streets and in the countryside and because, finally, it was no longer a question for the Algerian of giving a meaning to his life but rather of giving one to his death.

[...]

What we are saying is that we need to close our ranks. It is necessary that our voice should be powerful not only by being vigorous but also for the concrete measures that could be taken against this or that colonial state.

[...]

No, the violence of the Algerian people is neither a hatred of peace nor a rejection of human relations, nor a conviction that only war can put an end to the colonial regime in Algeria. The Algerian people have chosen the unique solution that was left to them and this choice will hold firm to us.

Frantz Fanon - Why We Use Violence, address to the Accra positive action conference, 1960 (translated by Robert J. C. Young)

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children’s dreams / al-yarmouk, palestinian refugee camp in damascus, syria 

little palestine; diary of a siege (2021) dir. abdallah al khatib 

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do not ask me to condemn retaliatory violence from a people shouldering ongoing genocide. i want the Haitian revolution to happen for shackled people everywhere. i hope every occupied colony on earth produces their very own Dessalines. i’m just silly like that.

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video

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LOUISE GLUCK

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bell hooks, All About Love

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Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris(1970) dir. Terence Dixon

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Such a hoot how capitalism has so horrifically morphed our understanding of language & meaning that we’re now at the point where anytime someone voices any sort of criticism AT ALL it’s immediately interpreted as a declaration of hatred. The truth is the only way to actually love the things you enjoy (not just depend on them) is to remain constantly, reflexively, openly critical of those things. Otherwise you are not engaging in an active & generative relationship w your passions, you are using them to cope and you’re doing it w your eyes closed. There is no way to love (nor heal) thru willful ignorance

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Bea Camacho: Enclose (2005)

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this is going to be difficult -> i am capable of doing difficult things -> i have done everything prior to this moment -> this difficulty will soon be proof of capability