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Salvage
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Not since the exuberant early days of the first intifada has the Palestinian resistance harboured illusions about an imminent victory. Optimism is not its point of view. It operates in full consciousness of the enormity of the forces stacked against it and – under the current balance of power – the slim to non-existing chances of liberating the land. So what is the point of resisting? ‘To keep the embers of the conflict burning’, in the words of Hamas, until broader historical processes have turned the tables on the enemy, at some future point, however faraway it might be – or, to keep ‘the issue alive until such time as the requirements for victory materialize’. In an interview published in Journal of Palestine Studies, Ramadan Shallah, leader of Islamic Jihad, the second most important armed force of the resistance, spells out the same strategic doctrine: the purpose is to maintain ‘the military pressure on Israel’ until ‘new parameters’ emerge. No one knows how long that will take. (Anyone who feels unease at the Islamism of these two groups should ponder, among other things, their – particularly Hamas’s – extraordinary efficiency in stamping out every attempt by Daesh to rear its head in Gaza.)
There is a point where total pessimism reverts into its opposite. ‘I’m an optimist because we have a mammoth task in front of us that has to be completed’, says Wadi. ‘The task? It’s everything. Palestine. The future. Freedom.’ Following the Christian existentialist Gabriel Marcel, Terry Eagleton theorises this as ‘fundamental hope’. It is a form of hope that acknowledges the immensity of the defeats and the desolation and still refuses to capitulate, wagering on the possibility of some unspecified future opening. A short remove from despair, it is all that remains when the slate has been swept clean of specific aspirations and concrete assets: it is, says Eagleton, ‘what survives the general ruin.’ Thus Palestinian writers are fond of lines such as ‘in the rubble I rummage for light and new poetry’ (Darwish); ‘to be able to say “no” is a right that I will cling to with my very fingernails, my very teeth, even if it makes me bleed’ (Jabra); ‘things won’t always be like this, I thought, there’s still some fresh air left in the world’ (Badr); ‘perhaps one day / the river will cry / “arise and breathe again”’ (Zayyad); ‘I don’t know why we continue to hope for a future for these hills; one friend even clings to the long view of geological time’ (Shehadeh). Call it fundamental hope, or thinking like a mountain, or even the geological ethos of the Palestinian resistance. Surely, even axiomatically, if there is any way we can survive inside the tank of a warming world and get out of it alive, it is by learning to fight – not to die – and to nourish some climate sumud along these lines.
To those who – saturated with hypocritical moralism, an ethical smugness only the victors can afford – demand that we condemn the resistance, one should respond: what do you want the Palestinians to do? You want them to learn to drop down and die in silence. The resistance is not something to be condoned – for, you see, it’s about more than Palestine. It is something to plug oneself into. It is the last tube of oxygen when there is no other air to breathe.
For Palestinians, nostalgia is a first premise. Some exhort them to get over it, forget the old villages, move on. ‘The ability to forget’, Bonnett quotes Herbert Marcuse, ‘is the mental faculty which sustains submissiveness’. It is the voice of the triumphant master, in this case the Zionist settler-colonialist: don’t get bogged down in the past. To this, the Palestinian response is militant nostalgia.
To deny that the Palestinian people was better off before 1948, you need to be a Zionist; to deny that when it comes to climate, this planet was in a better shape before the cumulative effects of the fossil economy began to bite in the late twentieth century, you need to be a climate-change denialist. The corollary of Klein’s projection is that nostalgia, Palestinian-style, will be universalised, and for good reason: some fairly valuable things actually, objectively were better before the rivers dried up, the land disappeared beneath the sea, the breadbasket turned into a dustbowl, the snow ceased to fall on our Arctic homes. More videos will be watched and re-watched compulsively. Critics who have sneered at Palestinian literature for its surfeit of nostalgia have judged it prematurely. ‘All Palestinians are poets by nature’, writes Jabra in The Ship, ‘because they have experienced two basic things: the beauty of nature, and tragedy.’ That is more a prophetic index than a pillar of salt.
Moreover, if we hold the view that Palestine and climate change are not some minor deviations from an otherwise healthy trajectory of progress, but that late capitalism is rather a fundamentally destructive force in society as well as in nature, then we must accept that loss is a major predicament of our time, and that many struggles will have to start from baselines strewed with rubble. We ‘plunge headlong towards the inevitable pit. This is progress, rather like the progress of a disease’, with Wadi: so pick up the hand grenade and plant the tree
The acute capitalist crisis of 2008 has in the years since developed into a chronic complaint, to be managed but not overcome. In wealthy countries, ultra-low interest rates prop up consumer spending and, for investors, inflate the value of stocks, bonds, and other paper or digital assets. Swollen private portfolios induce luxury spending, and the size of the resulting wealth effect, as Alan Greenspan liked to call it, does a lot to determine what volume of crumbs spills from the banquet table in the form of worker’s wages. Because the rich spend a smaller proportion of their income than others, asset-price Keynesianism, as it has been called, is an inefficient way to inject demand into an economy. But the method has its allure: what could suit the rich better than rapidly rising prices for what they have to sell – namely, financial assets – while prices of the ordinary goods and services that they buy fall short of even the 2 per cent annual increase sought by central bankers as a minimum rate of inflation? To purchase the results of toil with the weightless gyrations of fictitious capital is a good bargain.
One requires a general analysis of Islamism as a phenomenon of late late capitalism. At the end of the 1980s Chris Harman, then pre-eminent theorist of the International Socialist Tendency, sought to elucidate such a Marxist position on Islamism, which came to be politically relevant, especially in Egypt (the country in which he was to die suddenly, by cardiac arrest, in 2009). His starting point – that analysis should start from the political economy of capitalist imperialism, and the relations between dominant and dominated classes rather than an opposition in thought between belief and un-belief – holds true. However, the argument that follows from that starting point must necessarily change as the external world does.
More than the expression of the politics of a particular class, ISIS are the noxious by-product of the ‘common ruin of the contending classes’. The political project of disaster.
It is unfortunate that the myth of ISIS as US creation has spread so widely, since it forces serious discussion of the topic to begin with a lengthy rebuttal. More fruitful is to understand the organisation through the political theology it practices, its relationship to the state and exploiting classes in the countries in which it operates, and the lineage of Islamism from which it both derives and departs. But to begin with the necessary myth debunking.
[...] into a very large long room, in the middle of which was a gleaming oval table of the size which makes one think at once of the factory there must be somewhere whose whole business it is to create immense tables, long or oval or round, for the use of international conferences.
lol
Well of course it was ridiculous to expect her, Kate, to turn herself into an old woman just because … Soon she discovered that if she wanted to be alone, she should sit badly, in a huddled or discouraged posture, and allow her legs to angle themselves unbecomingly. If she did this men did not see her. She could swear they did not. Sitting neatly, alertly, with her legs sleekly disposed, she made a signal. Sagging and slumped, it was only when all the seats in the coffee room were taken that someone came to sit near her. At which time it was enough to let her face droop to gain her privacy again, and very soon.
It was really extraordinary! There she sat, Kate Brown, just as she had always been, her self, her mind, her awareness, watching the world from behind a façade only very slightly different from the one she had maintained since she was sixteen. It was a matter only of a bad posture, breasts allowed to droop, and a look of “Yes, if you have to …” and people did not see her. It gave her a dislocated feeling, as if something had slipped out of alignment. For she was conscious, very conscious, as alert to it as if this was the most important fact of her life, that the person who sat there watching, shunned or ignored by men who otherwise would have been attracted to her, was not in the slightest degree different from the person who could bring them all on again towards her by adjusting the picture of herself—lips, a set of facial muscles, eye movements, angle of back and shoulders. This is what it must feel to be an actor, an actress—how very taxing that must be, a sense of self kept burning behind so many different phantasms.
[...] The pain was more what some part of her which she felt she ought not to approve of believed was owed to the situation. But the marriage continued quite well. To the surprise of them both, since they were surrounded by divorcing couples, marriages which had not been able to withstand an infidelity … at this point, the pattern of Kate’s thought, or memories, quite simply dissolved. Some of it was true: they had been right in making sure they did not expect too much from each other, or from marriage. But for the rest—the truth was, she had lost respect for her husband. Why, when he was doing no more than “everyone” did, men in his situation? But she was feeling about him, had felt for some time, rather as if he had a weakness for eating sweets and would not restrain it. He was diminished; there was no doubt about that. She felt maternal about her husband; she had not done so once. To have fallen in love, and painfully—that she could understand, she had done the same herself. But to arrange his life, consciously and purposefully, as he had done, “clearing it” with her, of course, while he did it, so that he might have an infinite series of casual friendly sexual encounters with any young woman who went by—that made him seem trivial to her. And the way he had been dressing and doing his hair—when he came back from abroad somewhere, the first time, having tried to turn the clock back by at least fifteen years—she had suffered a fit of trembling anger and disgust. Soon, of course, she had been persuaded—not least by what Michael was not saying so much as indicating—that she was envious: it was petty of her.
But from the time she understood that this was what he was doing, and that this was what she could expect until old age did for him—unless, like a granny who dyed her hair and wore short skirts so that people could admire her legs, still unchanged, he would keep on till he died—she felt that her own worth, even her substance, had been assaulted. There was no explaining this, but it was a fact. Because her husband—who was in every possible way a good and responsible husband—had decided to experience an indefinite number of “affairs” that were by definition irresponsible, and would have no point to them but sex, she, Kate, felt diminished. She would have preferred him to confess—no, insist, as his right, on a real emotion—a real bond with some woman, even two or three women, which would deepen and last and demand loyalty—from herself as well. That would not have made her feel as if a wound had been opened in her from which substance and strength drained from her as she sat in her house in South London, knowing him to be (only in the intervals of his real work, his real interests, of course) pursuing this or that sexual titillation. She felt about him—against all reason and what her carefully constructed blueprints told her she could feel—as if he had lost his way, had lost purpose.
honestly relatable
On the way to the exit, they pass the barn where the impregnated females are kept. Some are in cages, others lie on tables. They have no arms or legs.
aghhh this image