The Visible and the Unspeakable
It is a year now since the genocide in Gaza made me first and foremost an “anti-Zionist jew.” The “proper” Jews, the nationalists and Zionists can have the proper noun and its upper case of hierarchy. I’m a common or garden jew. You can see the difference.
How can I see or watch this genocide as an anti-Zionist? As a jew? From what place can you and me watch it as anti-Zionist jews? What does that do? Not for us but for the movement?
Here’s where I am now with this, where no words will do, but silence is worse. So bear with me.
For some time, I have followed philosopher Jacques Rancière in thinking of politics as as being formed at the intersection of the visible and the sayable. Something is seen. or not seen, where “seeing” is embodied perception.
The work is then to say what it is and is not. Whereas, the police always tell us, “move on, nothing to see here.”
After this year, I think politics is the meeting of the visible and the unspeakable. Unspeakable in that what is visible is so awful as to be beyond ordinary words.
Unspeakable in that what is visible is forbidden to be said. So it must be spoken in extraordinary ways.
What has been visible? We have held our phones close to our faces, and listened and watched things no one should ever have to hear or to see. It is not enough to say, in the manner of social media, “no words.”
Those who find ways to post this documentation want those outside Gaza to know, but even more, they want them—us—to do something.
What has been sayable about the unspeakable? It has been poets who have found ways to make language do what it should not have to do.
Gazan poet Mosab Abu Toha has a poem called “Under The Rubble” this week, in the New Yorker, of all places. Rubble is the material condition of seeing Gaza.
What if the person watching is an anti-Zionist jew? The experience is fraught, combining shame that this violence is being perpetrated in our name with powerlessness.
What fails here is not anti-Zionism as such but the effort to suture it to being a jew. And that is what makes this feel like an impossible situation.
We talk to each other, and that helps, but let’s be honest: most other Jews aren’t listening any more, let alone the ethnonationalist Jews.
At the same time, the genocide makes it feel imperative not to surrender whatever being a “jew” is to the settler-colonial state.
To borrow from Luce Irigaray, the anti-Zionist is a jew that is not one (under post-1948 conditions). Israel’s laws define the state as for Jews only. That apartheid would have to end, there would need to be a right of return—in short, a free Palestine, for it to be possible to be an anti-Zionist jew as such.
The only way I can see to do something with words as an anti-Zionist jew when watching the unspeakable is to keep calling it what it is, a genocide.
The word matters. It does not matter more when said by a jew. It puts a glitch into the loop of October 7th as the Holocaust, into the presumed unanimity of the Jews.
The word genocide was used on the first day in Lebanon when Israel said there would be no food, energy or water allowed into Gaza. Some assumed these threats were exaggerated. Not so.
By October 13, 2023, Jewish Currents had published Israeli historians Raz Seghal’s pithy essay “A Textbook Case of Genocide.” It took Human Rights Watch till June 2024. Now it’s only Western governments refusing to say the word.
Were a Western political leader to say “genocide,” things would have to change, legally. That’s why Clinton never said it about Rwanda. But it’s more than that. The genocide undoes the moral case, such as it is, for Zionism.
In her just published “Afterword: On Gaza,” British-Palestinian writer Isabella Hammad points out that
in dominant Western discourse, genocide can only be committed against the Jews because it once was, and therefore they are the only group that must be protected.1
I’ve seen this said by famous professors in European universities, it’s real.
When the charge of genocide was brought by South Africa at International Court of Justice in the Hague, Netanyahu sneered “Nobody will stop us.” He meant that South Africa is nobody.
And his “us” meant the nation-state of Israel, the Leviathan containing the “people of Israel,” all of whom are Jews. There are Israeli citizens who are Palestinian, but are not considered part of its “people.”
Perhaps to call what is genocide genocide, the anti-Zionist jew has to unbuild their own speaking position “as” a jew? Isn’t the singular speaking subject claiming prepositional authority (that “as”)—or pre-positioned power—the problem, not the solution?
It is once again time to use what the Guinea-Bissau revolutionary Amilcar Cabral called the “weapon of theory.” Not as theoretical maneuver but as a practical one. The “I” that tries to speak the unspeakable fails.
That “weapon” which is not one, following Stephano Harney and Fred Moten following Cabral, leads to “suicide as a class.” Of “anti-Zionist jews,” for example.
Being anti-Zionist means being an abolitionist. Until the ethnonationalist, segregated, carceral, militarized settler-colonial state of Israel has been abolished, it will not have been possible to be part of the class “jews.”
This decentered relation is a murmuration. Harney and Moten again:
To feel fully the aspirations of the people to which you belong would bring about a terrible and beautiful differentiation in murmuring, an harmonic irresolution of and with and in the choir, in anticipation of a shift in flock, where belonging is in flight from belonging in sharing, at rest in an unrest of constant topographical motion. The weapon of theory is a conference of the birds.2
The birds in the murmuration are common starlings and sparrows, not hawks and eagles. The weapon of theory is a commons. Rosa Luxemburg and Peter Kropotkin believed that in migration, all birds aided one another.
Migrants, fugitives, and commoners would be the “people to which you belong” if there was a “suicide-as-a-class.” No one dies. It’s a line of flight, not singularly “as,” but in relation and in motion, only as long as the murmuration holds.
The murmuration sees each other as its condition of existence. It is a temporary democracy, held together only as long as each member decides to fly toward the dark of each other’s bodies, rather than the light that is white sight.
It’s that seeing in the dark, as a commons, that I’m working toward with “undefeated despair” (John Berger).
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I’ll have more to say about this in this little book, out from Pluto in January 2025. And with that this newsletter ends.
Isabella Hammad, Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative (New York: Black Cat, 2024), 69.
Stephano Harney and Fred Moten, All Incomplete (NY: Minor Compositions, 2021), 147.