Save Israel from Those Leading it to Suicide! (A Touch Dramatic But Well…True)

lihishtaweel-justice-judaism-israel.pdf

 Hello!

Lihish’ta’weel (http://www.ricardolevinsmorales.com/writings.shtml and attached) is the best, most concise and important text I have read about Israel, and one that both answers and extends the understandings and experiences I gained by visiting Israel this summer as a birthrighter, a lone Jewish traveller, and an activist meeting friends of activists.

It does an incredible job of presentating the REALITY of the situation as it stands at its best and worse, nearly escapes all cliches (love vs. fear manages to be in there) by providing stunning examples and dis-examples from the history of similar situations, and provides a framework for reclaiming Israel, Judaism, and Justice…in one little 50 pages swoop.

This is done by laying out the most important and generally misrepresented historical engine of the conflict, Zionism, (and its commitment to repeat American colonial genocide) and the small, largely military elite that continues to keep this vision in the driver’s seat in Israel in Israel and their unmentined allies (dubious reactionary elements including extremely conservative Jews, the Bush adminstrative, and radically conservative evangelical christians in the US and arms dealers and arms dealing nations across the world including those ‘hostile’ to Israel).

But as I said this is a hopeful vision. By pinpointing and umasking the key engine benefiting from the cycles of violence–a genocidal and suicidal vision to eliminate non-Jews from Israel so as to start from a purity of place, people, and a ‘necessary’ obliteration of history, and its key rhetorical device, inevitable dystopia–Ricardo Levins Morales creates a crucial and imperative counternarrative to those who believe the conflict is natural, inevitable, or hopeless.

This vision of an Arab-free Palestine is killing Israel… and this vision is not realistic but suicidal. Creating everlasting war at all costs, and constantly preventing and in fact disavowing the possibility of real peace (as RLM breathtakingly demonstrates) is suicide. It is suicide for the state of Israel and as such a huge and historic contingent of the Jewish People. It is suicidal for a Judaism based on justice as opposed to war, on ethics as opposed to genocide or appartide. It is suicidal for creating a safer middle east and safer world, and is one of the key facts keeping so many Arabs in bad shape under the shitty Arab regimes that have consistently played along and continued the conflict for their own benefit. 

There is of course, more that could be said on this conflict, more perspectives to be included, more history, more…scholarship. This is not what is needed. What is needed is people to stand up and Save Israel! Save Judaism! Save justice! Save the Palenstinian and Israeli people who are being either starved in Gaza or exposed every day to the horrific logic of their own leaders and the constant war which that logic engenders.

“No war but the clown war!” (a slogan from a radical Israeli clown brigade for peace). Enough of the clowns in power, enough of them spreading suffering down to too many…especially to their own people who have suffered so much and need not suffer this horror any longer.

Spread the word. Get Israel and Judaism off this suicidal path, and this path for suicidal souls. Read this short little book, and then work with your friends and allies in Israel and around the world to make good on a Judaism worth living.

Elections

Elections are an ideal way to stop thinking and forget who we are.

Vote if you must but please don’t think too much about it. It matters very little and you matter very much.  

“Everybody I love you!”

“Everybody I love you, everybody I do…

   everybody I love you! everybody I do!”

I used to be very good at making people happy, at spreading happiness. Perhaps I will be like that again, quite soon, who knows?

Happy was even a nickname I held for a few years in the later half of grade school, becoming sappy once some section of my peers and me were old enough to feel beyond their own youth…

a compliment to all queers!

The thing I know is that to spread happiness, to channel it, to ‘glow’ with it, one must be happy, otherwise one ends up spreading hangovers—my current vocation———————Hangovers

without hangover meds! Come one come all for hangovers of all types, from head-rock to head-on-a-stick! I don’t even need the alcohol to do it! Only hangovers!

After

all, that is what we need until we get

over it. 

“Everybody I love you.             I wish I had a way of expressing how true that is,

so that people would know,             so that we could,

in whatever constellation of screaming relations, move beyond the worries of caring into its dance, no longer wondering if we will be misunderstood but

being the misunderstanding, the singularities, sliding through it, planting it, gardening it, growing over it in the soil of certain care, smelling its roses, making flags of solidarity out of it, a big white flag with one tiny black star in the center, many “yeses and one no!”

and who knows?

Maybe we’d make face prints and hand prints to mark ourselves, tattooing down two lines to spread our smiles and our tears, to the lines of our hands which touch and feel and hold strong to each other, maybe we’d forget everything and dance, and do all the things we’ve passed previously or would have passed on account of fear or shame or coping or drunkenness.

              Maybe we’d but be sure in our friendships and caring in our tending them, happily beyond the open cow eye wounds—bloody—soft unspoken…   ‘do you like me(s)?’ ‘really do, you?’ ‘I can’t believe it!’ or more often, at the end of the night or in that moment when we’ve lost since we are now haunted by acting out the             ‘I don’t believe, why don’t I believe?’               wondering into the night, full of sadness for our own

silly

emptiness. 

Everybody I do!

(I have, I guess, decided that this blog is a place to put such things.)

Contemporary Anarchist Theory and Practice: Facing Today

I am tempted to say that contemporary anarchist theory has four elements, like hip hop: a) analysis of the multitude, with the work of Paulo Virno as its most impressive and useful writer, b) anarchist anthropology as a method for learning about the possible and understanding, compiling, and experimenting with new practices, as put forward by David Graeber, c) the compilation and enacting of concrete strategies within a larger framework as modeled by James Herod in his excellent and free book Getting Free, and d) the articulating of a hip politics, and attacks putting forth abundance on the level of culture, see Crimethinc for instance.

The brilliance and importance of the above work is however only a springboard for the action that is demanded of us, given our present situation in the world, the near nonexistence of substantive organizing channels and the coming shift in the global order. Whether this shift is Virno’s ‘new 17^th century’, the collapse of the global ecosystem and a new dark ages, or at the very least the destruction of the US as the world’s sole superpower, we are entering very interesting times indeed. Times where terms like sovereignty, the central state, legitimate/legal, the social pact, and so on are losing coherence, and when the two existing options for a declining superpower seem to be expansionist war and externally enforced structural adjustment in the world bank model…

If we consider the last transition from one superpower and one model of global capitalism to another we certainly find a bleak picture ahead, dreams of WWI and WWII…is it useful to ask who are the new Germanys? Or should we rather expect a broadening and war in earnest of what some are calling the 4^th World War, the war against corporate globalization?

Regardless how are we to build the sites/practices/culture to support/enact/generate resistance and new, transnational, mobile(?) societies? How are we to rearrange/create/escape the current push/pulls of the current economic and political forces and build a new world to attract immigrants, to partake in exodus/exit and to ever grow its scope, assets and culture? Here do we use an anarchist anthropological lens? Do we grow the commons considered as a frontier as a chance not a border? How do we build the online resources, the local assets, and the culture of solidarity to escape work, to escaping the constant enemies that have plagued our humanity since the beginning of civilization: the haves vs. the have nots, intergenerational struggle, cultural and biological reproduction, and through all of this the entrenchment of the privileged?

Are we right in our idealism that the elimination of dependence means the elimination not inequality of humanity? A basis from which allows us to live in freedom? And if so is this even possible? Do we have the bear by the throat or are we diving into a concrete wall of nature?