News broke last week that the High Court had rejected the final appeal by Palestinian residents of Masafer Yatta (occupied West Bank) to stay in their homes and continue their indigenous, agricultural way of life. On the eve of Israeli Independence Day, the judges provided the army with domestic legal cover to forcibly transfer 2,400 Palestinians and upend the centuries-old presence of these traditional communities—a war crime under the Fourth Geneva Convention. Meanwhile, I am typing on my MacBook from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, and somehow I am the one who feels helpless.
Readers of this blog will already be familiar with the case of Masafer Yatta/so-called Firing Zone 918. I dedicated a recent post to what my fellow solidarity activists and I had documented on the ground there over the past few months. I argued that the present maneuvers by the Israeli army may amount to the preparatory stages of an imminent ethnic cleansing operation.
Folks know where to go if they wish to join the campaign to #SaveMasaferYatta.
But right now I am reclining in my leather armchair in my new apartment in Asheville, North Carolina. I just finished a big mug of black coffee. The mockingbirds are singing outside my window. The branches of the oak and elm and maple trees are bursting with leaves, signifying spring and new beginnings. The high-altitude air floating through my office feels cool and kind. So why can’t I relax?
I flew out of Israel/Palestine early Friday morning, two days after the much-anticipated High Court ruling. I flew out knowing that the Israeli army can move immediately to herd Palestinian families onto trucks and raze their villages.
I am now thousands of miles away from the people that I’ve been supporting in the fight to remain on their land despite the overwhelming onslaught of settler-state violence. I feel powerless to directly intervene in the hideous crime that Israel has pledged to commit. I am, in fact, powerless to directly intervene.
I was assembling a bookshelf yesterday with my fiancee when I received a message on my phone saying that journalist Basel Al-Adraa (my friend) had just been badly beaten by Israeli soldiers. During the past three months, if an attack like this happened, I’d get a call or a text about it right away, and then rush to the scene in order to provide protective presence, negotiate with the army, or else simply document. Now all I could do is text Basel and ask if he was ok, post about it on social media, and then continue putting together the bookshelf.
The alarm bells are going to keep ringing like this, and I’m going to have to get comfortable with simply turning them off without responding. It feels like a betrayal, but I know—at least abstractly—that it’s not.
Having entered the situation of an oppressed community and felt a fraction of their struggle as my own, I am now free. We were not able to end the occupation in three months—who would’ve guessed?—but within 48 hours I liberated myself from this brutal military occupation and swiftly relocated to my Carolina mountain home with my beloved and our dog. It’s unfair, but it’s not my fault. I need to keep reminding myself that it’s not my fault.
If only I could bring my new friends from Masafer Yatta with me to America! I had many conversations with the guys from Umm al Khair, Tuwani, and Tuba about coming to visit me. We could meet up in New York City and I’d tour them around my uncle’s restaurants—the grand cafe! the burger joint! sushi??—and show them the infinite subway system. What would they make of Williamsburg with its mix of decadent hipsterdom and ultra-Orthodox Jews? Or they could come to North Carolina and we could go on hikes together in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Maybe the ubiquitous bacon fat wouldn’t suit their diets, but we could find some fine halal foods and beverages here nonetheless.
Of course, a vacation in the United States would only do so much to ease my friends’ pain. Obviously, the point of the Palestinian struggle is to stay on the land, not escape to greener pastures in Europe or the Americas. If I’m being honest, my personal fantasy of facilitating my friends’ freedom from Israeli apartheid aims to serve me more than it does them. Anything to relieve the survivor’s guilt.
In his book, War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, journalist Chris Hedges wrestles with his incessant compulsion to return to the war zones from which he has reported. I too know what it’s like to feel the high-adrenaline focus that the threat of military violence provokes. Over time, it makes you feel alive in a perverse way. And the work of responding directly to said violence helps you experience a certain amount of agency in the face of a massive, deadly force that could snuff out your soul in a second if it wished.
However, Hedges knows that this dark drive to go back again and again to sites of carnage defeats the higher moral purpose of reporting on and documenting war. It is an instance of what Freud called, “the death drive.”
Hedges reminds us that we intervene in the machinations of these nationalist death machines—in Iraq, in Palestine, in Salvador, in the former Yugoslavia, etc.—because we love life. We cherish the indelible sanctity inherent to all human beings. We feel that we must put our own bodies on the line for the sake of defending humanity itself. Therefore, the privileged few who can choose to do embodied solidarity must affirm their own humanity by practicing self-preservation. We owe it to the cause and to ourselves. To endlessly expose ourselves to harm in order to “save” another cannot be the destiny of people who seek to build this world with loving kindness. So this is my prayer that, in this next period, love will be the force that gives me meaning; that love will be the force that gives us all meaning.