VI

We might feel that Palestine represents something of our past; that in Palestine we see the history of vicious European colonisation repeated in the media era. This is not untrue, but Macdara has been unsettled by the idea that in Palestine we see our future: an overwhelmingly asymmetrical relation between elites and the people. In this instance, the racial difference means that Palestinians, in revolting against their degradation, are always-already guilty of hate crimes (the worst possible crime; worse by far than Genocide). The violence of the settler state involves such a high degree of instrumentalisation—it so obviously partakes in what we understand to be Civilisation: the highest technical capacity; the highest degree of sensitivity (we used to hear of the settlers’ exquisite sorrow at what they are being made to do before the pleasure of genocide erupted, disturbing this disgusting performance)—as to be familiar. Settler violence is as natural as anything else in Late Capitalism. There is a Law here; there is the iron presence of the Rational. Alongside which any lie, any obvious absurdity, can be used without a problem. The settlers are defending themselves, they act cautiously, they have the standing to investigate themselves; they invented hummus, the keffiyeh, yalla; the watermelon is a settler symbol!

When the settler mind hears of Palestine being free, a projected future genocide of settlers—a genocide that exists only in the settler imagination—is used to justify the current genocide. For being made to imagine a future in which they might be unsafe, the settlers declare themselves unsafe now and even outside of Palestine, for example on university campuses in the US. It hardly need be pointed out that this is the attitude of a child. The crime here is in having made the supremacists feel vulnerable, to remind them of the limitations to their power, to remind them of their mortality. Crimes of feelings—being essentially unprovable—are the indispensable tool of the Late Capitalist regime.

The statement about Palestine being free from the river to the sea is taken as necessarily genocidal, not only in order to anathematise anti-zionists but also to exclude any consideration that a one-state solution might be found that would include settler colonists as equal citizens: there is nothing in the statement to say that settlers could not participate in this Free Palestine, in the manner of Unionists in the Twenty-Six County Irish State, it is just that they cannot consent to the idea.

A people convicted of being against those who are slaughtering them indiscriminately; of not recognising the rights of their murderers. This is our future. It is of the highest importance to free Palestine for the sake of Palestinians, of course, but also to stop what will otherwise happen next, particularly when the War Party fulfils its phantasy of visiting destruction upon us all, exercising control over all remaining life. One thinks of settler farmers clearing Palestinian land for their miserable crops, depositing water drop by drop right into the roots, forcing a little life into land they have rendered dead. Bare life. This will be all of us.

VII

Your correspondent finds he must conclude this piece by reminding readers that the UN Security Council veto-holders—leaders of the War Party, of course—are slavers, invaders, imperialists, purveyors of chaos in the world, over almost the entire world, in fact, between them all. 

In Berlin Brandenburg airport, Macdara was struck by a picture of Merkel with the heads of the G8 countries—another permutation of the War Party. He first walked past, disgusted, then returned, curious, struck by the question of how Putin would be presented.

A shadow tyrant! Unlike the fleshly ghouls around him. What a predictably idiotic move: they are too proud of Germany’s role in world oppression to remove the photo—though surely they could just have replaced it with a family photo from the ten-year period following Russia’s disinvitation to these criminal summits? The message is unmistakable: the countries that got rich from slavery, settler colonialism and imperialism are completely different to Russia, which got rich from serfdom, settler colonialism and imperialism—though Russia at least had a several decades long experiment in equality, for which its punishment was the connivance of the other states in its descent into tyranny. Present in the photo are known war criminals, but only one of them is blacked out, a ghost at the feast.
Our choice is the same as it ever was; same as it was for Luxemburg as she watched the depredations of the War Party of her day: Socialism or Barbarism. Perhaps after the war, those remaining will have had enough of Barbarism and will permit themselves an exploration of the alternative instead. A brave new world to have such people in it, who knows how many will be left, who knows what they will have—almost nothing perhaps, but held in common.