Address to a Town Hall; or, On History, Genocide & Zionism
First Read June 7th in Rochford Park to a Modest Crowd of Comrades
When I was nine years old, I discovered on one of my family's bookshelves a large book filled with black and white photographs. I do not recall the title, but I see the photos even now: men, women, and children in states of vicious despair: hollow, skeletal, and degraded. Casually, I had discovered photos taken by Allied troops following the liberation of death camps during the harrowing conclusion of World War II. I was a child, and so the photos fascinated me. They fascinated me because I could not comprehend such suffering. I struggled to integrate the reality of the images I saw—they were so removed from the worldly perceptions of my young mind. I asked my elders about the book. With a grace so little granted youth, my father sat and looked through those photos with me and explained to me—as best he could—the Holocaust.
My great-grandmother's name was Gabrielle Simon. Her mother, Hedwig Simon, had the supreme foresight to move Gabrielle and her sisters from Germany to America in 1936. From the relative safety of the United States, they watched as Germany succumbed utterly to Nazism. In November of 1938, it was Gabrielle, then 17 years old, who answered the phone call that informed her that our Uncle Theodore Plaut and his wife Eli had committed joint suicide after being brutalized by SS officers in a pogrom known to us now as The Night of Broken Glass; or, Kristallnacht. In the years following, many more relatives fled or burned. For the remainder of her days, Gabrielle maintained a staunch advocacy for downtrodden peoples and rallied against the systems of oppression that opposed them. In the mid-1960s, she was on the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy; in the 70s, a public relations officer for the National Welfare Rights Organization, and in the 1980s, she served on the D.C. Civilian Complaint Review Board of the D.C. police. She was an activist throughout the Civil Rights Movement, the Anti-Vietnam War movement, and into her autumn wrote poetry and essays that sought to educate others on systems of hypocrisy, inequity, and depravity in our world. Thus, I seek to continue her legacy and speak also of the suffering witnessed in our modern age.
World War II was a global event whose tremors we continue to grapple with to this very hour, on this Island far removed from the places where that war happened. Yesterday marked 80 years since D-Day, when Allied soldiers stormed the beaches of Normandy in a valiant and ultimately successful effort to overcome an evil so ineffable that fascism hardly seems a word capable of explaining it. Truly, never was so much owed by so many to so few. We can’t forget that it was everyday people like us who were on those front lines. The reason I say this is because I believe comprehending the humanity in history is more important than simply knowing history—because the nine-year-old who could not comprehend genocide is now a twenty-seven-year-old who cannot comprehend genocide. To me, Never Again is intended to mean Never Again to Anyone Ever Again.
However, that is not what Never Again means to some who have twisted history through the lens of a sick and silly ideology known to us as Zionism. In the West, a mythos has been built around World War II that levees the suffering of one group of people over the suffering of others, as though the war affected only the race and religion that endured the Holocaust. This myopic framing of events is intellectually dishonest, even if appropriately rooted in the real bigotry that remains in the world to this day. However, the genocide of World War II was not exclusive to the Jewish population, and that is no secret. Under the Third Reich alone were many other groups and peoples systematically murdered in great purges that sought to attain an ideal society under the premise of an ideal cultural narrative. Those who know their history are aware that this did not just happen in Europe under Nazi rule, but that it also happened in China, under the sociopathic ambition of Imperial Japan. And, though our culture is loath to admit it, the Allies also committed mass atrocity on civilians akin to genocide; though, we tend to foolishly excuse the bombing campaigns that defeated that fascism as having been ‘necessary.’ But one cannot examine the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki without a deep resentment for Allied decision-making: to vaporize cities must be viewed as an act of genocide, regardless of the context. I feel similarly about the fire-bombings of Tokyo, the bombing of Dresden, the bombing of Hamburg, and so many other horrid things the leaders of ‘the good side’ of that war chose to do.
It is generally accepted in the tally afterward that approximately 3% of the Earth’s human population perished in the course of World War II. This is a haunting statistic. Everyone must consider the gravity of this. It must haunt everyone. When people whose concern is largely with the Holocaust say six million, I feel they are misrepresenting the true gravity of the genocide that occurred from 1937 to 1945. What we ought to reference is the number fifty million—the rough estimate of total civilian deaths caused directly or inadvertently by World War II; a number greater than the populations of most of the countries on Earth. But we have an awkward relationship with death, and we tend to keep only to our own. Hence, bite-sized chunks of that greater quantity: six million Jews in Europe, three-hundred thousand Chinese in Nanjing, two-hundred thousand Japanese in Hiroshima & Nagasaki. These bytes of data don’t support the gravity we must understand about World War II and about war in general. War is genocide: the destruction of a people in whole or in part. I feel it’s terribly important to come to terms with this: that war is genocide and that the total casualties should be the number we hold in tragedy. Otherwise, we are excused to use our personal numbers as cause for enacting vendettas against our rivals. I feel this is what Zionism has effectively done in its efforts to destroy Palestine. Despite the great disparity between Israeli deaths and Palestinian deaths, Zionists long convinced the West that Jews were the persecuted peoples in the conflict. I reject this falsehood (as most of us since October have), believing that it is the sum of both sides that best represents what will certainly become known in our history books as the Israeli—or Zionist—genocide of the Palestinian People.
I loathe Zionism. I believe Zionism is antithetical to the Jewish faith and spirit. It is a stupid and ignorant ideology developed by fearful colonisers. The development of Zionism was a truly unfortunate result of genuine Jewish persecution throughout Europe these past two centuries. Yet, through Zionism, we see again that hatred begets hatred. I think Zionists have done more for antisemitism in the past eighty years than any other ideology could have hoped to accomplish. Worse, I think Zionism has generated a cult of propaganda and shallow intellectualism that has—since before WWII ever broke out—given much of the world an excuse to turn their eyes from the slow genocide of a people that have their roots in pre-history. Zionism tries to obfuscate or obliterate the history of Palestine and we should all be enraged by that because all history is our history. It is the lore of the human species. It is the story we share that bridges the gaps between our differences and shows us that we are all one great Story unfolding across time and being. Zionism has convinced a broad cohort of otherwise intelligent people that one group’s story is lesser and so that group does not belong where they have always belonged. But land does not belong to ideas, religions, or nations: it belongs to the animals of Earth. And so perhaps the greatest injustice Zionism has committed against God, humanity, and all of nature has been to manipulate the living Earth, to make our Earth complicit in genocide by planting the flora of foreign lands amongst the ruins of destroyed Palestinian villages so as to conceal the great sin—the great shame—of the Zionist genocide. The efforts of Zionist ‘conservation’ are an offence to the integrity of nature and to the deep history of the Levant as part of the Fertile Crescent, the early hothouse of agriculture from which all our human civilization was developed. The desert does not bloom. It weeps.
Recently, I finished Ilan Pappe’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Read it. I bought it and listened to it on Libro, and I recommend you do the same (fuck Amazon). There can be no doubt that what the state of Israel has done is genocide. It has always been genocide, methodical and slow so as not to draw too much attention. But that diversion has come undone these past eight months. Because you cannot casually commit a Dresden, Hamburg, and Britain all at once and not be seen as a mass-murderer. You cannot conduct war with the destructive might of modern weaponry and not be seen as conducting a genocide. You cannot lie to others about what you are doing when the truth is being streamed to our intimate spaces. After WWII, when we first identified genocide and generated a legal standard for it, we did not consider the diversity of violence and murder across time. We did not expect the Jewish Nation to succumb to the same twisted visions that tried to destroy them and so many other innocent peoples. We did not account for the banality of evil and the systems of apartheid that could permit stupid old men to ‘legally’ murder children. This must end. Culturally, we must reckon with our violence and overcome the shallow myths that have been sold to us about our relationships with war and history. We must become better.
It is so gravely and hopelessly upsetting to me how blind and hypocritical our world leaders continue to be, just as they were throughout the twentieth century. The same leaders who today espouse the mythic qualities of that second World War are the same who casually permit atrocities akin to those perpetrated in the prelude and aftermath of that global crisis. It is we, the people, who have aided and abetted these circumstances to arise. Our Western culture is complacent and ignorant. We do not consider our history beyond the myths that have been sung to us. We do not consider our humanity beyond the veneer of morality that our media feeds us. We cannot presume to be infallible while the system of our living permits the greatest injustices to be committed against the greatest minorities. We, the Western population, are the problem. We must become better.
After October 7th, I had several people close to me ask if I was okay, referencing my Jewish heritage and identity. This astonished me, and often I would respond to them that I was fine but that I felt deep sorrow for what was about to happen. At that time, I think it was—of all people—Eric Weinstein who put my feelings into appropriate words when he said: "What is about to happen in Gaza is a tragedy." This is what I told people, much to their surprise, leading me often to give them a crash course in a complex history they really ought to have been taught by the institutions that failed them.
Today, eight months on, we are still in the midst of the tragedy devastating Gaza. It is a genocide. We know it is a genocide because we know what a genocide looks like. We have seen photos in black and white and now we see them in colour, daily in our social media spaces. I wake up and I open Instagram and there haunting me are the same faces I saw in those black and white photos from my youth. For, there is no difference between those images the Allied forces captured and the images shared with us by the journalists and civilians documenting their own slaughter. There is no difference in the violence perpetrated by the Third Reich and the violence perpetrated by the Western Imperial Hegemony. It is banal, evil and inhuman. It must be stopped: for the species, for the Earth, the cycle must end. We gather tonight to ask ourselves an ancient question: What can we do against such reckless hatred? I cannot give a definitive answer to this, but I do have morsels—ideas and offerings—for consideration to support us tonight:
Civil disobedience is a civic duty. Henry David Thoreau argued in his essay titled Civil Disobedience that civilians should not permit their governments to dissuade their personal moral foundations, and that civilians have a duty to prevent their government from using them to uphold systems of injustice. I think this is a powerful idea, worth deep consideration. To paraphrase Alan Moore: “People should not be afraid of their governments, but governments should be afraid of their people.”
Self-education is a revolutionary act. I have long identified as an autodidact, a self-directed scholar. I am insatiable, a data-dragon, inquisitive and hopelessly curious. I want to learn as much as I can about as much as I can and cultivate within myself an openness to ideas, expression, and humanity. I recognize there is some privilege in this as not everyone is naturally inclined toward scholarly sensibility. However, I would urge everyone to facilitate within themselves the passion and focus to educate themselves, to seek what you don’t even know you don’t know. Talk to your fellow humans about heavy things, intelligent things, horrible things, and beautiful things. There is deep meaning and movement in education. Propaganda is everywhere and the only way to overcome it is by developing a great media literacy and a deep reverence for the stories, histories, and ideas that make our species so unique among the animal kingdoms.
Fear is the mind-killer. We are so accustomed to shrinking from our discomfort. Our consumer culture has softened our integrity and posterity. Our capitalist systems have raped our values and replaced them with hyper-individualist egoism. Our media has manipulated our perceptions and compromised our philosophies. We must make peace with our fear and actualize our discomfort. We must welcome difference and integrate openness while forsaking other’s intolerance. Each one of us is a garden unto ourselves; united, we can be an Eden to all the world.
Become ungovernable. Assess your lifestyle and your preconceived notions of living and align them with your values. Weaponize your lifestyle. Understand financial systems. Build our community. Start a garden. Give to charity. Support mutual aid. Buy used (including tech). Decentralize your perception. Read literature, philosophy, and poetry. Fall in love with humanity. Talk to your neighbours. Visit your friends. Listen to children—and care for the child within you. Become ungovernable. You are more than the system you occupy. You are not helpless. You are a sacred animal. You are one with all living things. Understand this.
Love is all there is. I know that sounds trite and unhelpful, but I believe it to be an unassailable truth. To quote a great Jewish Palestinian revolutionary: Love thy neighbour. Do unto others as you would have done unto your loved ones. Our love is not a singular entity or an emotion that comes and goes. It is a force we call on in times of great need. Love is a field we all occupy together. It binds all life on Earth and is sustained by that life. Call on love to guide you in these difficult and uncertain times. For: Love is the Truth. I love you all.
In conclusion, I offer a poem from Gabrielle Simon Edgcomb published in 1976:
MARTINETS ARE MOSTLY MARIONETTES the strings will break the marionettes fall Who pulls the strings? Bread strings not the bakers gold strings not the miners god strings not the faithful flag strings not the soldiers who pulls the strings? bakers — take your bread miners — take your gold faithful — take your church soldiers — take your guns
Amen. Thank you. Free Palestine.