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News from Naomi
It’s a very difficult day and I have been working for weeks on an essay that I hope might be some sort of help. Help in seeing one another’s narratives better. Help in getting out of what increasingly feels like a recurrent genocide loop. The Guardian was kind and courageous enough to publish it. Please read below for an excerpt and a link to read the entire piece in The Guardian. Share it if you are so moved. I’ve also included the link to download the free excerpt of two chapters from Doppelganger, called Israel, Palestine, and the Doppelganger Effect. Finally, I’ve linked to last week’s unpaywalled episode of Unshocked: The Case for BDS where Mehdi and I debunk the myths around the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) Movement – a nonviolent Palestinian-led movement that works to pressure Israel into complying with international law using some of the tactics of the South African anti-Apartheid Movement. Thank you for reading.
New writing
A year later, memorials to the 7 October attacks use art, virtual reality and dark tourism to stir support for limitless violence. But there is a different way to remember
By Naomi Klein
A slick, high-priced television production. Speeches from top officials. A live audience of thousands. A unified show of collective sorrow and military resolve.
That is how the Israeli government hoped to mark the passing of one year since Hamas’s surprise and bloody attacks last 7 October. But little has gone according to plan.
Many of the families of people killed or taken hostage on that day have come out forcefully against the state-sponsored event, saying pageantry can wait until after the government secures a hostage deal and faces an independent investigation of its own failures before, after and on that day. Some parents have forbidden the government of Benjamin Netanyahu from using their children’s names and images.
Several of the kibbutzim that suffered the greatest losses have said they will boycott. Instead, they will gather in their communities to collectively grieve their loved ones, and remember their hostages, in “intimate, sensitive” rituals. In response, the minister responsible for the ceremony has nixed the live audience while seeming to dismiss the families’ objections as “background noise”. This has led to even fiercer denunciations on social media, with some of Israel’s top celebrities pledging their support to a rival commemoration.
For the government, “everything is a show”, said Danny Rahamim, a member of Kibbutz Nahal Oz.
That may be, but it seems certain that on 7 October, the official show will go on. Indeed it is nearly impossible to imagine a world in which the Netanyahu government – and the legacy Jewish organizations that echo its messaging around the world – would resist the chance to use the potent date as a megaphone to broadcast the same story about the attacks that we have all heard many times before.
It’s a simple fable of good and evil, in which Israel is unblemished in its innocence, deserving unquestioning support, while its enemies are all monsters, deserving of violence unbounded by laws or borders, whether in Gaza, Jenin, Beirut, Damascus or Tehran. It’s a story in which Israel’s very identity as a nation is forever fused with the terror it suffered on 7 October, an event that, in Netanyahu’s telling, will be seamlessly merged both with the Nazi Holocaust and a battle for the soul of western civilization.
In Germany, they speak of a Staatsraison, or reason of state – and in recent decades, its leaders have said that reason is protecting Israel. Israel has a Staatsraison too, related but different. Officially, it is Jewish safety. But integral to the state’s conception of safety is Jewish trauma. Building shrines to it. Erecting walls around it. Waging wars in its name.
And so, as sure as the sun will rise over Jerusalem, Netanyahu will tell his avenging story to the world on 7 October – and no meddlesome, grief-struck families can stop him.
These clashes over commemoration tap into deep underlying debates about the uses and abuses of Jewish suffering, conflicts that date back to before Israel’s founding, and that stretch well beyond its notoriously undefined borders. They are over a series of unresolved but increasingly high-stakes questions.
What is the line between commemorating trauma and cynically exploiting it? Between memorialization and weaponization? What does it mean to perform collective grief when the collective is not universal, but rather tightly bound by ethnicity? And what does it mean to do so while Israel actively produces more grief on an unfathomable scale, detonating entire apartment blocks in Beirut, inventing new methods of remote-controlled maiming, and sending more than a million Lebanese people fleeing for their lives, even as its pummeling of Gaza continues unabated?
With a full-scale regional conflagration looking more possible by the hour, focus on the mechanics of how Israel heightens and manipulates Jewish trauma may seem irrelevant, even insensitive. Yet these forces are profoundly interconnected, with the particular stories that Israel tells about Jewish victimhood providing the rationale and cover story for the shattering violence and colonial land annexation now on such stark display. And nothing makes these connections clearer than the ways that Israel chooses to tell the story of its own people’s trauma on 7 October – an event that has been memorialized continuously since nearly the moment that it occurred.
Please go here to continue the full original article: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2024/oct/05/israel-gaza-october-7-memorials
Please go here for Naomi's website: https://naomiklein.org/
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