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The Mad Activist Conjures for Palestine

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Dear Peace Diary,

It’s been too long since I wrote in you. Don’t take that personal. I’m still an activist, I still cry out for peace, I’m still slightly insane. But what’s totally insane is, I’m not sure how to cry out for peace these days without Western liberal democracy accusing me of antisemitism.

It’s soul-gutting, Peace Diary, being pressured to keep quiet about the ongoing extermination of Palestinians, out of fear of being strung up as a neo-Nazi (which would, PS, delight today’s actual neo-Nazis no end). The ironies continue, Peace Diary – I mean, you could be an award-winning anthropologist and still be considered an antisemite if you were to observe that, scientifically speaking, Palestinians are identifiable as human.

Yet I stay strong, Peace Diary! I raise my FIST! I wear my keffiyeh OUTSIDE the house; I go to Palestine PROTESTS: take THAT, Reality! But outside of the left-leaning pro-Palestine movement, I keep losing liberal friends. One by one…

So I try to reconnect with Western liberal democracy. I listen to NPR; I go to cultural events mentioned in the New Yorker; I have a Joan Didion tote bag. I also try to keep up with old writer friends I first met decades ago in the movement. WOOOPS – I’m late to see one of them on a panel at the annual Borough Book Fair – gotta run!

* * *

Dear Peace Diary,

Hold me. I am so sad. I went to this Book Fair to see my old friend speak on a panel. Since I last saw them, my friend has become nonbinary – also hugely successful and famous, partly by writing about activists. So I wanted to hear them talk about their latest book, Polycule This! – and how it deals with the amoral narcissism of today’s post-hippie counterculture. I also wanted to find out how they manage to keep writing for Penguin Random House when it’s part of a conglomerate that culturally normalizes Israel’s genocide.

To this end, I wore my best black-and-white keffiyeh, tastefully draped over my Handala t-shirt. I know that my friend saw me, since this was an SRO event, with me standing prominently in the back, waving.

The moderator began, “We’re depressed and worried about the monstrous state of this world … so scary.” Every panelist talked somehow about how awful the world is, yet not one person on that panel or in the Q&A following uttered the word Palestine. My old friend actually came closest: “I wanted things to get better, but over the last two years, things have gotten worse and worse.”

“Two years,” old friend? What happened two years ago? The unspeakable has happened every hour over the last two years.

So many ghosts were hanging in the air, Peace Diary. Over 66,000 of them now, according to NPR; maybe ten times that number, according to actual Gazans, who literally cannot count their dead. Since ghosts don’t need oxygen, we were all able to keep breathing. But I knew they were there – I think my friend knew that, too. All we have is words to call out the monsters, but you, old friend, with your connections to Western liberal democracy – you might have used your words to speak of Gaza and make people listen.

After the applause and ovation, as people were packing up to leave, I walked over to congratulate my friend the author, whom I hadn’t seen in years. I came forward with my hand outstretched. They saw me, but they just walked away. Went off with other famous authors allowed by Western liberal democracy to be trend-setting. It hurt me so bad. But I am fighting back, Peace Diary! Here is my nonviolent reframe of what happened:

I saw an old friend today. They thought they ran away from me. Turns out it was I who ran from them – because I saw that they, in order to survive, refuse to see Palestinians. So I asked myself, What do you do when those you’ve loved become monsters? Then came the answer:

You find yourself a better class of monster.

* * *

Dear Peace Diary,

WHOA! Just back from the multiplex, where I saw the fourth and final Conjuring movie, Last Rites. So cool, Peace Diary! These movies are based on the true story of Ed and Lorraine Warren, real-life psychics and demonologists who lived in Connecticut during the 1970s and 80s. Good, lower-middle-class Catholic hetero-Ed-and-Lorraine. The couple whose contribution to humanity was neither art nor literature; it was to save ordinary nimrods like themselves who get possessed by Satan.

Those Conjuring flicks remind you that, outside Western liberal democracy, FORCES are at work. The film shows Ed and Lorraine using special sensory-overload-woo-woo effects to conquer Evil: ghastly witches, demons of all kinds – like Valak, a fiend from Eastern European Hell who morphs into a hideous nun. I felt like the Universe was cheering me up! Because, unlike peace activism – which is often trite and feckless – you can actually SEE the results here! Still, nobody mentioned Palestine. Which reminds me…

The Warrens are descendants of settler colonialism. Ed, Lorraine, and all their friends are living on stolen land. The fact that they can’t help it, makes them good people. You can tell they’re good because it isn’t the formerly enslaved or the ancient Indigenous who return to pillage their souls – it’s only Satan – whew! The Warrens, though a tad conservative and probably not interested in book fairs, are happy to live in Western liberal democracy.

* * *

Dear Peace Diary,

I think I get monsters. I know what it’s like to be reviled. To be shamed, blamed, tamed into normalcy, and still feel left out. Sensitive beings can’t take that. Consider Lucifer – definitely a better class of monster. He tried to bring light to the world.

But, instead of divine kudos for original, altruistic thinking – or even a book contract from Penguin Random House – Lucifer was cast into a pit of eternal fire, which he came to accept as Home Sweet Home. Yet the resentment remained, that agony of hate for those happy, successful idiots who fit in. Lucifer cries out for justice – but his idea of justice is the Warrens’ name for evil.

I identify with Lucifer, Peace Diary. We’re both furious we can’t bring light. And now, beyond peace, I want to terrify the world with JUSTICE. To make Western liberal democracy bow down before Gaza, as Palestinians rise up from destruction, gloriously FREE.

But though I may have my little spark, Peace Diary, it’s nothing compared to the journalists of Palestine, those light-bringers. How many gone now, 200? 300? Still counting…

The conjuring Warrens may have made their last movie, but the Gaza livestreams continue. Meanwhile, Western democracy is being swallowed alive by something way worse than mere monsters. And the prospect of JUSTICE – to those who murder Palestine, and to those like my old friend, who refuses to share their light – has become way  more terrifying than Satan.

The post The Mad Activist Conjures for Palestine appeared first on CounterPunch.org.















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