Where is the left
This is an inchoate note but I wanted to send love and care in every direction—including, I guess, through the tool of Substack. This moment is a nightmare: witnessing the genocide of Gaza. Reading, watching unthinkable news of death and destruction. And 1 million of the world’s children are in Gaza, under those bombs. Right now, in the US, there is more support for the liberation of Palestine, among everyday people, than I’ve ever seen in my lifetime—the demonstrations are so much bigger than you might know from the (reluctant) media coverage, so much bigger than you might expect. Yet our leadership does not hear us. The US could stop this killing, but our government shows no sign of morality.
Like you I’ve been contacting my senators & representatives to urge them to call for a ceasefire—but what if your representatives were, like mine, elected through the specific strategic intervention of right-wing pro-Israel PACs? What if they owe their seat to these violent right-wing donors, not their working-class constituents?
I recommend my friend Youssef’s short essay, “Human Intervention.” He has clearer words than I can find right now.
Though here I am writing. And like you I’ve been talking to people, at public events, in private conversations. I’ve been chanting. One question is: where is the antiwar left? What happened to the millions of beautiful voices 20 years ago calling out “Occupation is a crime / From Iraq to Palestine”?
I keep asking myself, though I know the answer. I know how we on the US left failed to stop the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, how we lost hope as we failed, how we dissipated. I don’t really actually know how much destruction resulted (though I have tried to know). I have some sense of its unthinkability. I know that we failed to stop the assaults on Gaza in 2014, 2021, and before that too… I know how much energy, fire in the belly, I felt campaigning for Bernie and Nina Turner (who could have been my representative, and who I hope would now be calling for ceasefire) in 2020 and 2021, and then how the Democrats suppressed and disdained and dismissed and backstabbed the left, told us to shut up and vote the party line and get nothing, nothing except for not-Trump. I know how, as a friend just said wisely to me, the huge grassroots movement for Bernie, result of millions of people organizing together, has been more or less abandoned by him. Why won’t you call for ceasefire, Bernie? Where is the antiwar left? Did the cause of Ukraine somehow win everyone over to war and violence, or drain whatever resistance remained in their everyday lives?
Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar were key to Biden’s victory in 2020. See how he is treating them now. I have voted for so many warmongers in my life. Architects of the war in Iraq, running smugly a decade later, showing no responsibility, no simple human regret. I hated voting for them, the physical act of that pen on the ballot, but it seemed like the right thing to do. You have to stop Trump. I lived in swing states in 2016 and 2020. I live in one now. I am not voting for Biden after watching him arm this genocide. No more. Biden, if you want our vote, ceasefire now. Sherrod Brown, if you want our vote, ceasefire now.
Last weekend I attended a protest calling for ceasefire in Gaza and a free Palestine. It was much much bigger than the last one I went to, in May 2021 (which I wrote about in my book Hole Studies I guess I could say, it’s toward the end). The rally had a series of speeches from leaders of Palestinian and Arab American civic and cultural organizations, leftwing socialist parties, Jewish Voice for Peace. Mostly women spoke. Their speeches were short, evidence-driven, on-point, very powerful, framing the current violence and the occupation in history, drawing on their impressive professional backgrounds as doctors, organizers, comedians… Afterward talking with my husband and a friend who had joined we were like: what an intellectually, ethically engaged, feminist public event that was. No college or university where I’ve ever worked has presented itself and its mission with such intellectual and ethical rigor and charge, such public feminism. Are universities even on the left? Of course they aren’t, though everyone caricatures them thus. They don’t even pay their teachers. Where is the left?
Meanwhile in the US and around the world, cultural organizations are erasing Palestinians. They are saying to Palestinian artists and writers, we don’t want to see your faces, we don’t want to hear from you right now, they are cancelling events unilaterally and calling it “postponement,” they are giving fake reasons. (ArabLit has good coverage.) You may have seen this letter—and many thanks to its organizers—protesting how the Frankfurt Book Fair decided not to award the Palestinian writer Adania Shibli a prize in public, as they had previously scheduled to do, as is completely normal for the prize, to have a public ceremony. The novel for which she was receiving this prize, Minor Detail, is about a true historical incident of horrific violence committed by Israeli forces during the Nakba. The details of the incident are drawn from an article in Haaretz. In fact if you read the article and the novel you will see that Shibli elaborates very little on the facts as reported. She strikingly declines to add almost any interiority for the perpetrators. The first half of the novel is more or less a retelling of the article, but with Shibli’s estranging, utterly distinctive sense of narrative distance, one of her great tools as a writer. But there was no room for history anymore. History is inconvenient. How inconvenient it has always been for American and European narratives that Palestinians exist. How swiftly and monstrously in the last few weeks they have said to them: Can you please agree that right now you shouldn’t exist.
And you can see this racism even in the smallest wording choices of the New York Times and other media, who keep saying “Hamas-run” like this: “The death toll in Gaza since Oct. 7 has risen to 8,005 people, a spokesman for the Hamas-run health ministry… said. The figure includes 3,342 children.” (Hamas is the governing party in Gaza, so it does run state-run entities. Is every public school in the US “Trump-run” or “Biden-run” or “DeWine-run”…? The media keeps emphasizing that it can’t “independently verify” these casualty figures, without noting that this inability is because of the Israeli military’s siege, which has included cutting off communications.) It is so clear what the media is doing in these phrases. They are helping American readers doubt and disbelieve the death tolls. They are helping American readers think of all Palestinians as “terrorists.” They are saying, you don’t have to believe that the Israeli military has actually killed people. You don’t have to believe that Palestinian children are children. This is complicity in genocide.
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It’s one of the great honors of my working life that I got to help publish the English translations of Shibli’s first two novels, Touch and We Are All Equally Far from Love. And during the events of this past month I was finishing the final edits on an essay on small press publishing and I was as ever working on the podcast I co-host, also on small press publishing. We were editing a really good episode that is a conversation with two book publicists, it’ll go up soon. And the publicists were talking about, for example, how in 2020 after the George Floyd protests suddenly a few of their indie and small-press books broke through, as the industry was looking for new writers and work that spoke to the political moment more than the system knew how to do. And I thought, in those moments, when suddenly some bigger entity, some powerful thing, wants to see something or learn something, for whatever reason or with whatever depth of sincerity, or suddenly a gap opens, something big enough to dive into or shout through, we have to be ready. The work of many many people has to be ready, it has to have already existed. Someone has to have published Adania’s books, for decades before this moment, so that her work can exist and then survive and transcend its invisibilization. Jewish Voice for Peace has to have done their work persistently for decades, for most of which time many people considered them way too far outside the mainstream, they suffered a lot of criticism, in order to step forward as moral leaders in this moment, as they have been, in order to shut down Grand Central Station and make opposition to genocide so loud, so vivid, so visible, so unignorable. The work that precedes this is daily and difficult and dull and absolutely necessary. I know that this is known. I just have to repeat it right now.
I have often said to friends in moments when they or I were struggling that key to our struggles is the fact that we just don’t have a left. We try to live our values, we try to connect with each other and approach our work in certain terms, but sometimes it doesn’t work because there is no left there, even if we are trying to be it. There is no American left, but we are it. A few days ago to some younger people—doing math with my dumb brain as I talked, realizing they were probably toddlers in 2003—I talked about the opposition to the war in Iraq. I was trying to connect it to the opposition to the siege on Gaza today. But I had to admit as a member of my generation that we failed. I think I said something like “so the task is upon us, those who are lucky enough to still be alive, to continue doing the work.” I may have said something different. My words don’t particularly matter. Thank you everyone for being the left with me and thank you for teaching me everyday what it could mean and how we might begin to keep doing the tasks before us. Thank you for the everyday. Though the everyday is not enough, it is everything and it is exactly what the nihilistic apocalyptic violence we are witnessing takes from people, it is the unthinkable loss. Let Gaza live.