Monday Mezze: Deconstructing Genocide: "Civilized People Shouldn’t Behave So Rudely"Mezze - المزة - a wide selection of small dishes served as appetizers, including such delicacies as hummus, cheese, eggplant, brains, stuffed grape leaves, calamari, and much more
Family, Friends, Colleagues, I was gifted this week an incredible book: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, by Omar El Akkad. As you will read below I am truly touched, humbled, and enlightened by his work and I place it alongside Rashid Khalidi's The Hundred Years' War on Palestine as essential reading not just about Palestine, not just about the Other, but about ourselves. It has informed and inspired my work this week. I feel blessed and grateful. Salamaat, The main islands were thickly populated with a peaceful folk when Christ-over found them. But the orgy of blood which followed, no man has written. We are the slaughterers. It is the tortured soul of our world, William Carlos Williams wrote in 1925 in The American Grain. What have we learned? What - in the over 500 years that have passed between Christopher Columbus sailing the ocean blue in 1492 and Bibi Netanyahu’s racist and genocidal attcks on Gaza and the Palestinian people - has the West learned? Not much. To preserve the values of the civilized world, it is necessary to set fire to a library. To blow up a mosque. To incinerate olive trees. To dress up in the lingerie of women who fled and then take pictures. To level universities. To loot jewelry, art, banks, food. To arrest children for picking vegetables. To shoot children for throwing stones. To parade the captured in their underwear. To break a man’s teeth and shove a toilet brush in his mouth. To let combat dogs loose on a man with Down syndrome and then leave him to die. Otherwise, the uncivilized world might win,” Omar El Akkad wrote in One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. Not much, indeed. Are these the lessons a 'civilized world' wants to hold to be true? For two weeks I've avoided writing about 'civilized' people - some of whom I know well - who might be complicit with genocide, ethnic cleansing, apartheid and forced starvation. I read them, listen to them, talk to them: sometimes I shake hands with them. And then I don't. Only they know, truly, whether they are complicit. Listen to the words beneath the words, listen for what is true. What the "civilized world" doesn't recognize is that - by being complicit with genocide - it is denying the urgency of its soul that would otherwise be raging against injustice. Denying its fitra, that divine potential through which all of humanity has the intuitive ability to discern between right and wrong, true and false and, thus, to discern the Good. The voice that raged against the Vietnam War and South African apartheid is today silent. The voice that raged against injustice everywhere is today silent, sacrificing its soul to sustain its power and privilege, rationalizing that those being sacrificed are not like us. That's true. They’re people the color of Jesus. And I'm one of them. What is the West willing to give up to alleviate someone else’s suffering? Not much. Where have we been since March 2nd when Israel unilaterally broke the ceasefire that had been negotiated for Gaza; where today Dr. Rik Peeperkorn, a WHO representative in the occupied Palestinian territories reports "that if the situation persists, nearly 71,000 children under the age of five are expected to suffer from acute malnutrition over the next 11 months." Where today over 2,000 trucks - laden with food, medical supplies, fuel and other basic necessities of life lie idle at the Egyptian border waiting for permission to save lives. Are we watching? “The world was addicted to watching; over and over, they were reborn, made whole and silver and resplendent, only to crumple into themselves again,” Palestinian-American Hala Alyan, whose family was forcibly displaced from Jaffa during the Nakba in 1948, wrote in Salt Houses. “Each time felt like the first time, the destruction so immense it bordered on the majestic," Alyan continued. "Souad watched the dust-fogged streets, people’s panicked faces as they shrieked for those they loved. She felt her heart move with the shaking cameras. Smoke and fire spilled from the buildings like blood from a gunshot wound, and people began to jump, their little bodies unreal as they lurched from the sky, dolls in someone’s nightmare.” Amidst violence “so immense it border[s] on the majestic...” the world watches. I believe, as Paulo Freire writes in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, that "Violence is initiated by those who oppress, who exploit, who fail to recognize others as people - not by those who are oppressed, exploited, and unrecognized. It is not the unloved who initiate disaffection, but those who cannot love because they love only themselves. It is not the helpless, subject to terror, who initiate terror, but the violent, who with their power create the concrete situation which begets the "rejects of life.” How do we love? How do we watch while Israel targets and assassinates American-Palestinian Shireen Abu Akleh and over 200 other Palestinian journalists - many with their families - including five journalists within the last 24 hours alone. Silence. Have we noticed how reports of Palestinian suffering are delivered in silence; how Western news reports - who should challenge privilege and wrongdoing - align their stories and sources of deception and power? Notice too silent starving children, too weak to cry out in hunger. Silence. The past couple of weeks have not been without their cathartic moments and pleasures. One evening I sat and listened in awe to a loved one tell a magical story - funny and scary - of love and loss in lands unknown to me. The next day, in a space filled with light, another loved one courageously shared forgotten stories of love, loss, and identity that moved much of the audience to tears. I too was in tears - for their story, their courage, for the fact that I cannot share a story of such beauty with you. That makes me really sad. Then, just a few days later, at a local gathering, I met some remarkable young people committed to working for social justice, for diversity and inclusion - for the weak, vulnerable and marginalized - including for freedom for Palestinians from the river to the sea. I fear for them all. I fear that the beacon of light on the hill has gone dark. America has embraced a theology of hypocrisy, cruelty, racism, and white Christian supremacy, and I believe it cannot, having provided billions of dollars in weapons to Israeli occupiers while persecuting - and deporting - those who protest the genocide, make moral claims against anyone, anywhere, that will be taken seriously. That too makes me sad. America and Israel's language is that of death, deception, genocide, and ethnic cleansing. Our language must be that of resistance and disruption. Our language must be that of Frantz Fanon, who wrote, in 1961, The Wretched of the Earth: For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity. Stop being so fucking polite - it's about the land: it's about dignity. Hamas killed 1,200 people in its 2023 attack. Israel’s ongoing and disproportionate response to that attack has killed over 52,800 Palestinians, many of them women and children. Israel has deliberately leveled Gaza’s landscape - mostly using American-supplied weapons of mass destruction - while deliberately targeting its institutions and displacing over 90% of its population, often multiple times. Today - with America's help - Israel hopes to ship the survivors of its brutality to Libya. I don't write all this to invite sympathy or empathy for the Palestinian people; I don't care if you like or love me. It hurts to write it. Just read me. Just accept the beauty, the humanity of all peoples, not just of those who look like you - or believe as you do. “Let the beauty we love be what we do,” Rumi writes … ”Let the beauty we love be what we do.” Read. It is instead the middle, the liberal, well-meaning, easily upset middle, that desperately needs the protection this kind of language provides," El Akkad writes. Because it is the middle of the empire that must look upon this and say: Yes, this is tragic, but necessary, because the alternative is barbarism. The alternative to the countless killed and maimed and orphaned and left without home without school without hospital and the screaming from under the rubble and the corpses disposed of by vultures and dogs and the days-old babies left to scream and starve, is barbarism. Who are the barbarians? The genocide and ethnic cleansing throughout Palestine is part of a colonialist pattern that has persisted for centuries: Submit of we'll kill you. What is barbaric is that in Gaza, men, women and children are being slaughtered either by force of arms, disease or starvation. Submit or we'll kill you - cleanse you - cripple your children - deport you. The United States of America and Israel have decided that annihilation of the Palestinian people is a political necessity, a necessity greater than any adherence to the self-evident truths of America's foundational documents. I don't recognize what we've become. Why have we forsaken the search for beauty? Which self-evident truths will we continue to deny? More people will starve to death because of [these decisions], taken in the halls of power far away from where the starvation will happen, taken by people who will never be held responsible for any of it, who will live out the rest of their lives in total comfort, El Akkad writes. And should some activist interrupt their night out at a restaurant to show them pictures of the children they’ve helped kill, they will be deeply offended. Civilized people shouldn’t behave so rudely. Civilized people shouldn’t behave so rudely. Stay Strong my Loved Ones. Robert Azzi / The Other is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. You're currently a free subscriber to Robert Azzi / The Other . For the full experience, upgrade your subscription. © 2025 Robert Azzi / The Other |