Author’s Note: To write an essay on how difficult it is to write an essay (“No Poetry After Auschwitz”) today requires its immediate publication. If words fail the Israeli War then let us not tinker with mere surfaces like language. Due to length or Total Information Awareness-Palantir sabotage, it’s time to give it over.
–Michelle R. Matisons/ Emergency Ethics
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Introduction
Imagine Israel’s future if all settlements are established. When victory is felt for those who do not remember the extreme moral suspensions of the earlier times when Palestinians were not entirely subdued but still mobilized for freedom under one of the most advanced surveillance states imaginable. This state terrorism developed a technology so brutal and invasive– so colonial-friendly that neo-colonization is now described as the new “Israeli-Arab normalization.” There’s nothing normal about occupation.
A felt identification with Palestinians (#WeAreAll Palestine) fights dehumanization, extending and encompassing global struggles from Palestine to Ireland and occupied Indian nations of the North American continent.
Israel’s occupation of Palestinian homeland territories has many in the U.S. Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement supporting Israel’s right to exist as something new in a transparent anti-colonial agreement with the mission of guaranteed Palestinian sovereignty and reparations. Military aid to Israel– especially from the U.S.– must be cancelled as part of this process. This is Emergency Ethics’ current position.
Emergency Ethics calls for an immediate Israeli ceasefire and withdrawal in all occupied territories as the most just response to recent Hamas attacks. Reinventing the violence wheel is the practice of military sociopaths feeding on populations of laborers and their laboring children. Another post-9/11 genocidal retaliation campaign will further polarize international relationships and encourage patriarchal-ethnic violence, religious fundamentalism, and more war. The whole world is watching.
When the U.S. left seeks clarity on political violence, it goes to Frantz Fanon. Fanon would not believe the asymmetrical relations structuring geopolitics and the weapons that reinforce this asymmetry. The haves and have nots meet routinely at the barrel of a gun thrust down the throat, only to be depersonalized with remote A.I. drone tech later.
Israel’s imperialist-acquiescent architecture of Iron Dome dome-ination was built by an one-sided historical victim narrative underlying its founding. So one-sided that Israel’s own postwar legitimation required the stated erasure of Palestinian people. As first Israeli Prime Minister, Golda Meir, controversially declared: “There is no such thing as a Palestinian people. It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn’t exist.”
They exist now. The whole world is watching.
This erasure founded the settler philosophy that expands Israel’s power through further conquest of land. Israel’s attainment of a high-grade, but fallible, defense dome and a nuclear arsenal is not the Israel of Fanon’s time; it’s the Israel of the future, precisely the future feared by so many.
Humanism in Wartime
Bouquets, Not Bombs. Pure Chance Productions.
Why fear? Because of Israel’s blatant genocidal agenda. Perhaps the most quoted racist comment of the week is IDF Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s statement: “We fight human animals, and we act accordingly.” The Israeli state has repeatedly called Hamas “human animals” in the last week. Author Naomi Klein pleads for a humanist response to the attack that sees no place for dehumanization and anti-semitism. To facilitate a cease-fire environment, this humanism must encompass Hamas members, affiliated organizations, and Gaza/ West Bank residents. Authoritarian organizations with undemocratic military structures are unpopular entities among both colonizers and colonized. Pleading for a humanized Hamas does not imply endorsement of all Hamas policies or actions.
The U.S. antifa left, which scarcely shares all of Hamas’ politics, supports an Israeli cease-fire. Similarly, after 9/11, people immediately called for a deescalation of U.S. war plans. People protested wars that hadn’t officially started (Afghanistan/ Iraq); there is no time to protest Israel’s planned seizure of Gaza and the West Bank.
If this was a nonreligious occupying force– an atheist army descending on your turf, seizing your property, raping and murdering your community members– you would defend yourself. That an occupying Jewish state is the aggressor is the fact in the case.
War is aggression: militarism requires construction of an enemy for possible extermination. When anti-colonial power expresses as violence, militarism requires anti-colonialism demonize the enemy. Popular left discourses can narrow concepts like “Israeli” and “Jewish” in a subordinating process. It’s war. This is not a neutral playing field between Israel and Palestine: Palestine is the “underdog.” Dare I use the expression? The War on Terror can’t halt fundamentalism and authoritarianism because it is authoritarian and fundamentalist. Wartime thinking requires some form of simple division (good/bad) to execute military actions. This thinking trains people against complexity and nuance. We see these simple constructions in popular and social media debates: “If you support an Israeli cease-fire you are anti-semitic.” Come again? “If you support a Northern Malian cease-fire you are racist?”
An imperialist military culture might rely on non-gradational thinking, but there’s no room for it in the international left anti-war/ anti-fascist movements.
There’s a place beyond pro-Hamas/Fatah anti-semitism and pro-Israeli/racism. Anti-Israeli/ anti-fascism/ anti-racism is the framework Emergency Ethics endorses to undermine anti-semitism– with anti-semitism included as a form of oppression with similarities to racism. This is the humanist position from which to develop emergency ethics in the Israel-Hamas War.
It is a human quality to want to survive; violence is part of human survival. To expect Palestinian families to watch real Israeli tanks encroach on more disputed territory– the land that holds the promises and dreams of their own children’s survival– is dehumanization. One needs to value Palestinian ethnic/ spiritual survival to understand where Hamas’ violence comes from. That Hamas or Fatah are not perfect is not the first concern when people see, time and again, Palestinian bodies littering the landscape of the past, present and future in this twisted living.
Guess what’s more imperfect? Palestinian obedience and capitulation to Israeli state terror. Why? There would be no Palestinian survival.
Netanyahu’s Downfall?
During crises, general Palestinian survival is prioritized over political divisions. Note here how Palestinian National Initiative Leader, Mustafa Barghouti, responds to the conflict by focusing on Israeli aggression. No divide and conquer is always a recommended strategy for the oppressed. It’s usually a story about annexation and anti-Arab/anti-Muslim ethnic/ religious cleansing.
Against a cynical tone, some are condemning specific Israeli actions for the attacks– and opposing Netanyahu’s failed government. This will produce concrete activism.
Israeli Orly Noy, Editor of Local Call, is featured on October 9, 2023 DemocracyNow! blaming a “long list of Israeli failures” for attacks. She suggests, just as people did after 9/11, that specific security failures caused the attack. She describes: “…very dark days…We are talking about an intelligence operation that basically surveills every breath a Palestinian takes both in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip…” Orly makes a strong case for an investigation into Netanyahu’s failures in leading a renowned security apparatus delegitimated by Hamas’ military penetration. Here a concrete action plan of state exposure might guide demands following this historic battle. Hearings, like 9/11, will determine the guilty and innocent in the days prior to, during and after the Hamas offensive. Palestinians will be misrepresented and underrepresented if they survive to be represented at all. Survival under heavy surveillance of “every breath a Palestinian takes” is an excruciating condition.
“Every breath” can be monitored by new and improved biometric spyware tech. If the innerware surveillance future has not yet arrived for Palestinian communities living under Israel’s jackboot– it is coming. How can recent Hamas attacks even occur under hyper-surveillance state Israel, as Noy asks? The Palestinian population won’t serve as meat for Israel tech weaponry experimentation and military commodity development.
Israeli defense contracting follows the same path as Ukraine in some ways because of technological monopolization. The link is Peter Thiel (PayPal, Twitter, Palantir, Anduril, ClearviewAI) who is involved in Ukraine as a contractor:
“…Thiel-backed groups’ involvement in war serves to develop not only problematic and unpredictable weapons technologies and systems, but also apparently to advance and further interconnect a larger surveillance apparatus formed by Thiel and his elite allies’ collective efforts across the public and private sectors, which arguably amount to the entrenchment of a growing technocratic panopticon aimed at capturing public and private life.”
Entrenchment.
In Israel, Thiel and the deceased sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s money funds Carbyne911, which shares Palantir’s eerie pre-policing mission. Thiel’s venture capital firm is Founder’s Fund. Palantir’s “Ontology-Powered Operating System for the Modern Enterprise,” Foundry, boasts of housing 100,000 Ukrainian refugees. (If Palantir approaches refugee support like UNESCO’s ID 2020 program, microchips could be involved.) When researching the word Foundry– possible connections include Foundry.ai and even the Finders cult— a legendary technology and sex trafficking cult.
Anything predictive of human behavior will include innerware options, however understated the capture of people’s insides becomes. Spyware companies like Israel’s Toka, U.K.’s DarkTrace and U.S.’s Cybereason, Amdocs, and AlfaTech work directly with IDF forces alongside M15, Mossad/ Israel’s Unit 8200, and CIA agents on “unsupervised AI” contracts. This includes COVID tracking and tracing. Stavroula Pabst explains:
“Darktrace, Cybereason and Carbyne911 aren’t simply pioneers in a fast moving tech sector. Rather, they are intrinsically linked to the same old intelligence agencies who are attempting to reinvent themselves under a different, more acceptable guise. They are creating the infrastructure designed to subvert our current systems. An unsupervised A.I. behemoth that will require as much data as possible to power and our governments have already agreed to give away everything they can.”
As Israel attacks Palestine today, we witness the results of this “unsupervised A.I. behemoth”– the genocidal fruits of Israel’s tech sector labor. Technology certainly accelerated the speed and force of Israel’s response time. The following description is from an October 14, 2023 Guardian update on the war:
“Whole neighbourhoods, such as Rimal in Gaza City, have been razed. Іsrael’s air force said it had dropped 6,000 bombs on Hamas targets by Thursday, and it hit 750 more targets the following morning. A former UN war crimes investigator, Marc Galasco, noted that was nearly equivalent to the most bombs dropped in a year by Nato forces in Afghanistan: 7,423.”
Add to the reported bomb numbers hidden technologies and newly employed spyware-innerware system’s to detect subterranean Hamas movements.
The conjoined spyware campaigns impacting anti-occupation activists in the Middle East and stateside have built solidarity among victims. Now there is a popular identification with “the underdog” in war; there is a new awareness about Palestine’s history as well as its tech-enslaved future. The Palestinian struggle popularized in the U.S. context of Black Lives Matter. There are many pro-Palestinian people who understand current Palestinian leadership limitations. But they do not want to reinvent the wheel and acquiesce to Israeli aggression. This is not anti-semitism.
What is anti-semitism? Going to social media to Jew-bash and ignore pogram-programming in your community; engaging in anti-Jewish attacks on synagogues, homes, and people; attacking Jewish people who dare publicly mourn the loss of Jewish life. That said, hystericizing Hamas sympathies as anti-semitism (remember sympathy exercises a contextual understanding of people’s past and current conditions) is deceptive and shuts down alternative discourses rejecting Israeli aggression and anti-semitism in the same breath.
The technological exacerbation of genocidal conditions, that creates and multiplies new forms of human suffering, have many against the Israeli War clamoring for solutions. Here’s Naomi Klein:
“What could lessen its power, drain it of some of that fuel? True solidarity. Humanism that unites people across ethnic and religious lines. Fierce opposition to all forms of identity-based hatred, including antisemitism. An international left rooted in values that side with the child over the gun every single time, no matter whose gun and no matter whose child. A left that is unshakably morally consistent, and does not mistake that consistency with moral equivalency between occupier and occupied. Love.”
What happens when parents hold the guns?
Remember, humanism goes both ways. It encompasses those qualities which are more popular and desirable in functioning societies: mutuality; cooperation; compassion; and thoughtfulness. It also encompasses qualities less popular and desirable for functioning societies: antagonism; hatred; manipulation; deceit; and willed ignorance.
Anti-occupation politics can lead to anti-semitic knee jerk support for retaliatory attacks against non-military residents. As The Jacobin recently argued, you can condemn Hamas attacks and Israeli retaliation. (Žižek would call this a “pacifist” position with no self-defense concept.) Gradational inclusion of historic context is crucial since a new generation views occupation as the progenitor of fundamentalist violence. The old tool of binary thought — condemn or accept– is now in history’s dustbin. Hearts and minds are not as easy to win when people see the evidence. A condemnation of Hamas holds no weight because the binary of “condemnation/acceptance” is thrown out with the new combination of BLM and Palestine Solidarity movement/ BDS movement. They are influenced by intersectionality– a gradational feminist form of thinking. Far cry from war!
History, approached from a dialectical materialist/ Marxist perspective, yields the lessons of bourgeois thought’s foundationalist entrenchments. Condemnation/ Acceptance has no room in war from a critical-civilian perspective. Things change. They are not as they appear. We’ll never know the truth. Are we all virtualized by Thiel’s companies?
Post-foundational thought has conceptual placeholders. But placeholders shift and change– changing concepts. Understanding captures experience and makes concepts with language. Since both understanding and experience are rooted in non-parallel histories, language of all useless tools, exists to negotiate the gap. Ideological abstractions grow to become sediment in this gap. “Hamas” remains an ideological abstraction because lack of public information about key issues such as internal politics, divisions, recruitment strategies, abuses, locations, funding… none of this is available.
U.S. media and politics approaches the crisis as a personal assertion issue, whereby clashing identity positions and political monikers quickly polarize debates, revealing hegemony’s empty brute force. There’s only the identitarian reinforcement of the not-Hamas available in the U.S. context, and this becomes the ideological preoccupation of political class debates– leading to more violence.
Support for or neutrality towards the attacks, a surprising development in the ongoing conflict, is understandable in the anti-colonial context– the new politics of the U.S. post- Occupy/ Black Lives Matter (#FergusontoPalestine) era. Hamas may not be everyone’s favorite leadership structure to express military sovereignty for a nascent Palestinian state. It is an anti-colonial organization with fundamentalist views, and yes, very much a byproduct of a notorious military conflict. War breeds fundamentalism. More people understand this now and oppose Israel’s war.
Comparisons to 9/11 abound. What many anti-imperialists viewed as a “roosting chickens” situation in the 9/11 context is a “teeth-sucking” situation in the Israel- Hamas context. The U.S. left is placed in a bizarre catch-22: favoring one side or the other about aggressions and atrocities has us either racist or anti-semitic! So why speak that way? Intelligence (CIA-Palantir?) exploits this situation.
Those who want to express solidarity with Palestine should avoid unnecessary division as a rule without fetishization.
Anti-colonialism as fetish enshrines all anti-colonial action as already approved resistance. That fetishistic left can sound anti-semitic when Israel is the topic. This “attack celebration” mode reflects the naive epistemic privilege view arguing oppressed people know best their own needs and act accordingly. This view would accept any anti-colonial action because of who did it, not what’s done.
Surely those condemning Hamas violence do not support Israel taking Gaza and the West Bank.
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Ten Point Emergency Ethics Plan
That nonmilitarized humanity’s quick identification with the underdog translates into geopolitics is not ideal. The emotional impact of imagined resistance dwells someplace quite different from the messy real war. Real destabilizing violence always causes new conflicts. Imperial retaliation is always salt in occupation’s wounds.
The anti-fascist/ anti-racist U.S. left needs Emergency Ethics during times like these.
1. Acknowledge events/actions’ transparent causes and seek debate and concurrence.
2. Mourn loss of life.
3. Acknowledge distinctions between governments and residents, soldiers and civilians.
4. Align sympathies with any existing tendency if possible.
5. Acknowledge political ideologies governing your position.
6. Agree not to employ hate speech or violent action when debating strategies and ideologies.
7. Make a concerted effort to avoid anti-colonial fetishism while contextualizing action’s moment.
8. Avoid bourgeois subjectivism that distracts debate with personal/lifestyle attacks, identitarian demands, violence fetishism, and pacifism.
9. Find popular language that clearly communicates ethics.
10. Respond clearly to developments applying above ethics in a timely and serious manner.
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It is correct that Israel exploits anti-semitism to justify military authoritarianism. But when the North American antifa left develops strong anti-semitic language and practices, the Israeli right would also be infuriated. This is because an anti-fascist left fighting anti-semitism would oppose Netanyahu’s agenda. If Israel will exploit both anti-semitism and anti-fascism: what dead end have we arrived at?
The brute force principle?
Just as you blinked, an explosion occurred and another. Gunfire. Bullets slashing the daylight– blood and bodies, cries and sobbing. Children wandering alone in the streets, breathing poison. Then the evacuation orders. What to do?
War suspends security: its aftermath enacts insecurity’s sharpest razor edge. Minds are alive and spinning. No one can sleep. Piles of the dead are not simply buried. They are mobilized through social media and communication’s symbolic/ block chains of financial game meaning. Hamas attacked a music festival and peaceful kibbutz communities? Israel is attacking back? Same old story? Not quite.
In Condemnation of Israeli Settler Wars. Anti-Zionists are not heartless sociopaths. This is a historic conflict that will change the way people negotiate future occupations. Just due. De facto rights. Reparations. When violence erupts, it opens vulnerabilities leading to more violence. Complex non-fetishistic responses are ideal, but vulnerabilities usually close minds off to bigger picture issues like ideals. Pain, anger, fear, and a sense of misrepresentation invade our more reasonable minds. We become entrenched in genocidal minutiae.
One of humanity’s tragic paradoxes? When sound decision-making is needed most we are in the least position to do so.
Whether you protest or favor a more subtle grieving as you respond to the Israel-Hamas war, please note genocidal conditions inevitably restrict human cooperation to favor the barbaric reality of more division and war. Dystopia.
What’s more dystopian than today’s Gaza? U.S. jails and prisons?
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Afterward
Imagine dystopia. Imagine a virtualized citizenry above a sprawl of carceral urbanity, mediated neighborhoods of self-monitoring citizens of the future. The new Palestine. Dystopian urban city-prisons where residents are dome-inated inside and outside by the Israeli master group. AI soldiers blur new legal debates, supplying drama for politically active progressives secure in the shadow of Israeli dome-inion. Virtual cells inside real cell-homes inside open air prisons: collective punishment of the newborn’s unborn siblings. The colonial reach to the furthest place of sovereign Palestinian existence and expression. The crushing force of control over occupied bodies, the trafficking of spirit itself. The destruction of humanity and nature in an end times play of military authoritarian panic. Alternatives embarrass the penetrable master, who’s fortress bears marks of past and present revolts. Revolts against the AI future; unsupervised simulations; the crypto markets; the drying desert of earth. The open air prison data farms of the present-future. The captive populations of slaves.
© Michelle Renée Matisons, Ph.D.
Emergency Ethics 