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It'll hurt, believe me. It'll cost you friends and security. You'll lose ground and get tired and get it wrong again and again. Your convictions will falter. You'll have sleepless nights and spirals of doubt. You'll wonder if maybe the good you've been fighting for is already gone. That you're only fooling yourself...
Reject losing heart like that at all costs.
If you're still here, keep fighting. However you can.
Because if you don't, what if nobody else will?
That's what I've been telling myself lately. Maybe someone out there needs to hear it, too.
— Daniel Younger
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On November 1, 1964, just as he was gaining real traction, Reverend Martin Luther King received a vicious blackmail letter. The anonymous writer threatened to destroy him personally and professionally, and suggested he just take his own life and save somebody a bullet.
Most now believe the letter was written by deputy FBI director William Sullivan, on the orders of J. Edgar Hoover. But no one saw that letter, or even knew it existed. The government’s secret campaign to kneecap the civil-rights movement by taking out its leader only came to light after The New York Times unearthed the letter in 2014. Want to know more? You can’t. All materials surrounding the case have been ordered sealed until 2027.
One of the biggest flaws at the heart of American democracy isn’t the lack of a third political party that will do things differently, it isn’t the apathy that keeps folks from voting, or fear of arrest that keeps them from protesting.
It’s the secrecy.
After the horrors of the Holocaust, we needed a moral reckoning, some kind of universal justice, before we could move on. And we had that reckoning with the Nuremberg Trial. We did it — and we moved on.
Now we need another Nuremberg to bring Ben Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, Yuval Gallant, Benjamin Netanyahu and some members of the Israeli military to account for the war crimes committed in Gaza.
South Africa healed because they had a reckoning. Rwanda healed because they had a reckoning. And now, before we can move on, we the people of the world need some kind of moral reckoning for what Israel has done in Gaza.
Israel has owned the word "terror" for the last 30 years.
Anyone who goes against them, gets swiped with it.
Palestinians are "terrorists." Cordon them off. Jail them. Assassinate their leaders. Take their land.
Israel has convinced news organizations in the Western world to set the narrative with that word. This has allowed Israel to expand settlements, build walls, steal water, raze homes, flout laws, and now, to rip apart the bodies of over 20,000 children.
The time has come to reverse this narrative. Boomerang that savage word. Use it to describe not just the terror of Oct 7, but also the terror that Israel has perpetrated on the Palestinians for 75 years since the Nakba.
Every revolution, every authentic revolution, promises to redeem the failures of its predecessors. This is what Walter Benjamin thought — or at least, this is what Slavoj Žižek says Benjamin thought at the end of The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012). Paraphrasing Benjamin, Žižek says in the film that all the unsettled ghosts of the past will at last find rest in the new freedom born out of the true revolution to come.
Yet he warns the path to this freedom comes with no guarantees. There is no train of historical inevitability that can be ridden to the safe harbour of emancipation. Getting there all depends on a fickle crowd of free riders, a ragtag huddle of the flighty and the faithless. They should be a familiar bunch because, it turns out, they are us.
Our liberation rests on nobody’s shoulders but our own.
Lend your ear for a moment to the strain of Judgement Day that sounds through Benjamin’s thinking. What ghosts haunt our present? What injustices await deliverance from the purgatory of lost causes? Following Benjamin’s logic, if we want our fight — for a better world, for a livable world, for life itself — to be a successful fight, we had better make sure we know what undead armies stand behind us. Without setting their struggles to rights, they will remain our curse. Plus, there is always the risk that we might fail, and in failing join their ranks, dooming ourselves to wait for the next righteous heave to drag us out of the boneyard and into the future. That is, if a shred of hope for any kind of future — indeed, if the planet itself — survives us.
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Spain’s Minister of Social Rights, Pablo Bustinduy, broke ranks with the international silence and took a firm stand against complicity in Israel’s crimes:
“No company operating in Spain will be allowed to profit from the blood of the Palestinian people.”