Elfriede Jelinek, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004, has written about Palestine with great feeling on her blog (in German).

Here is the last section from the post:

The time for any pronouncements about something that doesn't exist (and whose possibility of existence is not only contradicted by language), but which should exist, is over. Now, what is right must exist. Since one cannot take the land from where it is located and transport it elsewhere, it must be returned to, or left in its current location, the people to whom it belongs. The time for complacency is also over. Or we remain in the provinces where we already are, recalling the famous question posed by the fascist philosopher to an old peasant: whether he should accept the call to Berlin or heed the call of his homeland. And when the peasant remained silent and shook his head, he knew what his blood and his soil (he was quite certain of these two; he was well insured! Others are not) demanded of him and simply stayed put where he was.

Every week I write an article in People’s Democracy (India). This week, I wrote on the shenanigans of US imperialism. You might ask, why this painting by a Sri Lankan artist from the ‘43 Group. I have always found Ivan Peries’ work to be a wonderful example of the struggles of the Third World imaginary to emerge. And here, in 1978, he seems to be painting a woman looking at the waters, wondering when a new world will be formed; or perhaps she watches a US warship enter Sri Lankan waters to discipline the country for hosting the 5th Non-Aligned Summit in 1976, fifty years later assessed by my colleague from Tricontinental Shiran Illanperuma at LeftViews.

Ivan Peries (Sri Lanka), Dehiwala, 1978

The war against Iran must not be understood as an isolated eruption of aggression by US hyper-imperialism. Nor can it be explained merely by the obsessions of Donald Trump, the expansionist ambitions of Israel, or the influence of the most reactionary sections of the US ruling class. The war belongs to a much wider crisis. The United States is lashing out because the foundations of its power are weakening, while its ruling class has neither the political imagination nor the social capacity to repair them.

The US is not powerless. It remains the world’s most dangerous military power with nine hundred foreign military bases and nearly two-thirds of global annual military spending and controls many of the institutions of international finance in a Wall Street-Dollar complex. A wounded tiger is still a tiger. But Washington is increasingly unable to convert its military, financial, and diplomatic advantages into stable political outcomes. It can destroy countries, but it cannot easily reconstruct its own productive economy or build an international order that commands consent. The violence against Iran is therefore an expression not of confidence, but of frustration.

SOURCES OF FRUSTRATION

The first source of this frustration is the long decline of US industrial capacity. During the neoliberal decades, the country’s ruling class transferred factories abroad, attacked organised labour, and transformed productive investment into financial speculation. Entire industrial regions were hollowed out and made into factory deserts so that corporations could take advantage of cheaper labour elsewhere, while Wall Street captured a growing share of the resulting profits. It is not that the US has ceased to manufacture things, since real manufacturing output has risen over the past fifty years due to, amongst other factors, productivity gains. But there has been a profound erosion of industrial depth, with fewer workers (from 25% of non-farm employment in 1970 to 8% today) in manufacturing, a small share of global manufacturing, weakened supply chains, lost productive ecosystems, persistent trade deficits, and dependence on foreign capacity in strategically vital industries.

The United States remains a major manufacturer, particularly in aerospace, armaments, pharmaceuticals, and several advanced technologies. But the direction of change is unmistakable. According to UNIDO, China produced 32 per cent of global manufacturing value added in 2024, compared with 15 per cent for the US. Northern America ran a substantial deficit in manufactured goods, while China consolidated its position as the world’s largest manufacturing economy. In December 2025, US manufacturing capacity utilisation stood at only 75.6 per cent, below its long-term average.

Washington can impose tariffs, provide subsidies, and demand that companies return production home. But industrialisation is not a switch that a president can turn on. It requires trained workers, public infrastructure, long-term investment, technological depth, and a state capable of planning. The financialised US economy has spent decades dismantling these capacities. Its ruling class wants the benefits of industrial strength without challenging the power of finance or raising the social wage of the working class.

The second source of anxiety is the dollar-Wall Street system. The dollar remains the principal reserve currency, accounting for nearly 57 per cent of allocated official foreign exchange reserves in late 2025. Dollar-denominated banking, debt, trade invoicing, and offshore dollar markets – the vast Eurodollar system – still give the US enormous structural power. Because banks and companies outside the US need dollars, Washington can use access to its financial system as a political weapon. But this weapon has been overused. The seizure of sovereign assets, unilateral sanctions, exclusion from dollar-clearing systems, and the threat of secondary sanctions have shown every government that its reserves and commercial transactions are safe only as long as Washington permits them to be safe. The freezing of Russian assets was particularly instructive. It announced that property rights, supposedly sacred to the capitalist order, could be suspended when required by US strategy.

No other currency has yet displaced the dollar, and the decline in its reserve share has been gradual. But the search for alternatives is real. Bilateral settlement in national currencies, regional payment systems, central-bank digital arrangements, and increased purchases of gold are not declarations of a new financial order. They are insurance policies against US coercion. The dollar system is not collapsing, but the confidence on which it depends is being steadily corroded by Washington itself.

The third problem is Europe. Since 1945, the US has treated Western Europe as the eastern flank of its own power. NATO institutionalised European military subordination, while the dollar system and US corporations narrowed the continent’s economic sovereignty. The war in Ukraine deepened this dependence as Europe cut itself away from relatively cheap Russian energy, expanded purchases of US energy, and increased military spending largely through weapons systems tied to US production and command structures.

The 2025 European Union–United States trade arrangement exposed the quality of this relationship. Europe accepted tariffs, promised enormous purchases of US energy, and pledged substantial investment in the US. European leaders presented submission as negotiation and their ruling classes have accepted slower growth, industrial strain, and greater energy insecurity to remain within Washington’s strategic enclosure.

Yet a satrap remains useful only while it is economically and politically stable. Europe’s stagnation, fiscal pressures, fractured political systems, and growing popular discontent weaken its usefulness to the US. Washington has tightened the yoke, but it is pulling along a continent whose productive strength is being damaged partly by that very yoke.

The fourth source of US weakness lies in the Gulf Arab world. For decades, Washington offered monarchical security in exchange for oil priced in dollars, military facilities, arms purchases, and political compliance. This arrangement was never uncontested, but it formed a central pillar of US power. The war on Iran has shaken that pillar. It has demonstrated that US bases and weapons cannot guarantee the safety of Gulf infrastructure, shipping lanes, desalination facilities, or energy exports. The interruption of traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and attacks on energy facilities have imposed enormous losses on the Gulf economies. Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia have discovered that the US can initiate a war but cannot insulate its allies from the consequences.

Even Gulf rulers hostile to Iran must now calculate their security differently. Their economic plans require peace, investment, predictable shipping routes, and stable relations across Asia. China is their largest commercial partner, while India and other Asian economies are indispensable energy markets. They cannot indefinitely subordinate these material interests to a US-Israeli project of permanent war. Washington may still sell them weapons, but it can no longer promise them order. The war has turned US protection into a source of insecurity.

The fifth failure concerns China. For more than a decade, Washington has tried to slow China’s development through tariffs, sanctions, technology restrictions, military alliances, and naval pressure. The purpose is not merely to correct a trade imbalance, but it is to prevent China from moving upward through the most advanced sectors of production. Yet China’s manufacturing scale cannot be undone by a list of prohibited technologies. Its strength rests upon an integrated industrial system: infrastructure, scientific education, public finance, vast supply chains, and the capacity to coordinate investment. US restrictions have inflicted costs, but they have also accelerated China’s efforts to develop domestic technologies. Meanwhile, Washington’s tariff policies have unsettled its own companies, raised costs, and encouraged the reorganisation rather than the destruction of Asian supply chains.

The US can encircle China militarily, but it cannot bomb its way back to industrial primacy. Aircraft carriers do not produce machine tools, and sanctions do not educate engineers. The central contradiction of US strategy is that it is attempting to solve an economic and industrial problem through financial pressure and military encirclement. Slowly Japan and South Korea will learn the lessons being absorbed in the Gulf Arab states: US military bases are a target, not a shield, and – after the Mecca Agreement – perhaps the East Asian states need a regional security agreement and not imposed imperial security.

There is, however, one region where Washington has recently registered political gains: Latin America. The second progressive cycle has receded, and an Angry Tide has risen. The far right of a special type has advanced through elections, judicial warfare, media manipulation, capital strikes, and the exploitation of real public anxieties about crime, inflation, and institutional weakness. From Argentina and Ecuador to Bolivia, Chile, Peru, and Colombia, reactionary governments have promised order while preparing privatisation, austerity, closer military cooperation with Washington and Tel Aviv, and renewed submission to international finance. This is a victory for the US, but it is an unstable one. The Angry Tide has no answer to the structural problems of the continent. It cannot overcome dependency, create sovereign industrial capacity, conduct meaningful land reform, or satisfy the needs of workers and peasants. Its programme is anger without emancipation: police violence for the poor, freedom for finance, and submission to Washington. If the social and political movements in the hemisphere organise themselves effectively, they will be able to turn the tide rapidly.

The war on Iran emerges from this total picture. The US cannot easily rebuild its industry, restore unquestioned authority to the dollar, stabilise Europe, guarantee the Gulf monarchies, or halt China’s advance. It therefore reaches for the instruments in which it retains an overwhelming advantage: bombs, sanctions, blockades, and threats. For that reason, Trump is the most adequate president for the US at this period. Dull liberalism cannot do this job. It requires the hatchet of ugly imperialism.

But violence cannot resolve the crisis that produces it; it can only distribute that crisis across the world. The danger is immense precisely because the US ruling class remains heavily armed while increasingly unable to achieve its objectives by other means. The task before the world’s peoples is not to celebrate imperialist decline as an automatic process, but it is to organise the political forces and build the historical bloc capable of preventing a desperate empire from setting the world on fire.

[Ayer publiqué un poema. Mi amigo y compañero Jorge Coulon (fundador de Inti-Illimani) lo tradujo al español. Eso en sí mismo es un gran honor para mí. Aquí lo comparto con inmensa gratitud y humildad]

La cometa no tiene pasaporte
Vijay Prashad
Traducido por Jorge Coulon

I.

El niño de El Cairo con un carrete,

descalzo sobre el techo ardiente,
aprendiendo la difícil gramática del viento:
cómo no tirar cuando el cielo decía cede,
cómo no ceder cuando el cielo decía sostén.

La cometa costaba menos que un libro:
dos varillas, papel fino, engrudo y un hilo;
pero cuando se elevaba sobre los cables,
los estanques de agua y la ropa tendida,
el niño poseía, por una vez, un pedazo de aire.

Abajo, la ciudad sudaba.
Los autobuses tosían por la avenida.
Los cuervos reñían en los pretiles.
Las madres los llamaban a comer.
Ellos negociaban con el cielo.

Cometas girando, cayendo, remontando,
hilos que se cruzaban como argumentos.
A veces una se soltaba
y todos gritaban mientras se alejaba navegando,
y luego corrían tras ella por callejones y mercados,
entre bicicletas y hombres dormidos junto a sus tiendas,
porque una cometa sin hilo
pertenecía a quien lograra atrapar primero la libertad.

II

El cielo de Gaza tiene otra gramática:
dron, misil, helicóptero, humo;
donde hasta un trozo de papel llevado por el viento
puede entrar en el vocabulario de la guerra.

Israel teme a las cometas.

Imaginemos el poder que esto confiesa:
un Estado con aviones, tanques, satélites,
muros, torres de vigilancia, armas y algoritmos,
mirando hacia arriba el papel tembloroso de un niño
y viendo un enemigo.

La cometa no tiene pasaporte.
No reconoce puestos de control.
El muro le ordena detenerse
y la cometa, que no sabe leer, continúa.
La cometa cruza sobre los escombros,
sobre la tierra cercada y medida,
sobre las matemáticas de la vida permitida,
sin llevar nada que pueda ser registrado
salvo el antiguo contrabando del aire.

Los generales clasifican las nubes.
Los coroneles ponen al viento bajo arresto.
Los capitanes interrogan al hilo.

Un niño palestino sostiene el carrete.
Mientras la mano no vacile,
mientras el papel se vuelva ala,
mientras los asfixiados miren hacia arriba,
el cielo no podrá ser ocupado
por completo.

Forceful actions will be taken to put an end to this phenomenon [namely, the flying of kites]. A balloon is treated like a kite, and a kite is treated like a drone, with or without explosives.
(Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz, 24 August 2026).

I.

Cairo’s child with a spool,
barefoot upon the burning roof,
learning the difficult grammar of wind,
how not to pull when the sky said give,
how not to give when the sky said hold.

The kite was cheaper than a book,
two sticks, thin paper, paste and string,
but when it rose above the wires
and the water tanks and washing lines
the child owned, for once, a piece of air.

Below the city sweated.
Buses coughed along the avenue.
Crows quarrelled on the parapets.
Mothers called them home to eat.
They were negotiating with heaven.

Kites circling, diving, climbing,
strings crossing like arguments.
Sometimes one broke free
and everyone shouted as it sailed away,
then chased it through the lanes and markets,
past bicycles and men asleep beside their shops,
because a kite without a string
belonged to whoever could catch freedom first.

II

Gaza’s sky has another grammar:
drone, missile, helicopter, smoke;
where even a scrap of paper in the wind
can enter the vocabulary of war.

Israel is afraid of kites.

Imagine the power that confesses this:
a state with aircraft, tanks, satellites,
walls, watchtowers, guns and algorithms
looking upward at a child’s trembling paper
and seeing an enemy.

The kite has no passport.
It recognises no checkpoint.
The wall instructs it to stop
and the kite, being illiterate, continues.
The kite crosses above the rubble,
above the fenced and measured earth,
above the mathematics of permitted life,
carrying nothing that can be searched
except the ancient contraband of air.

The generals classify the clouds.
The colonels place the wind under arrest.
The captains interrogate the string.

A Palestinian child holds the spool.
as long as the hand does not waver,
as long as the paper becomes a wing,
as long as the suffocated look upward,
the sky cannot be occupied
entirely.

For Ruth First (1925-1982)

El riesgo inminente de morir en cualquier momento generó altos niveles de angustia.
(The imminent risk of death at any moment generated high levels of anxiety).
Informe de la comisión nacional de prisión política y tortura, Chile, 2005, p. 503.

The garden had been beautiful before:
a villa, fountains, avenues of rose,
the ordinary luxuries of shade.
Then beauty was enlisted by Dictatorship,
and every path led inward to a door
whose purpose was too ghastly for words.

They brought the young here,
comunistas, socialistas, miristas;
names hurried through the corridors of power,
then crossed out in the ledgers of the world.
Ordinary names, Rosa Elena, Marta, but then,
Stalin, Lenin, Victor Hugo.

Five bodies in a square metre of wood
learned how the living take each other’s breath.
The wood remembers what the walls deny:
the tower and the voltage and the blows,
the little cages fastened in the dark
where one by one they waited without time.
No window brought them morning.
Only birds with their own affairs.
Perhaps the worst was not the pain itself
but that long neighbourhood of coming death:
the footstep stopping somewhere on the stair,
the name called out, the engine in the yard.
To know the body soon would leave no grave,
no earth where grief could place its faithful stone.

Helicopters travelled towards the sea.
Below them, Chile narrowed to a shore;
beyond, the cold Pacific opened wide,
contemplando el estallido.

Ignacio was planting a tree, hands in mud.
He had been fifteen when the terror started.
Communist, he stood there in his boots,
beside the mural raised by his own hands
for comrades dead, for comrades disappeared –
the faces colour had returned to sight.
His name recalled the saint fed to the lions,
though history never needs the ancient beasts:
a uniform, a wire, a careful file
will serve the appetite of any age.

Yet there he stood, his boots firm in the soil,
pressing the young tree’s roots into the earth.
He said the place was beautiful as well –
as well: not healed, not innocent, not whole.
The dead require no ugliness from us.
The disappeared are not restored by weeds.

Now every plank bears witness in its grain.
The tower’s wood, the cabins, and the cages,
the tree that Ignacio settles in the ground:
one substance entered differently by time,
one made to hold men in, one made to grow,
one keeping what the executioner forgot.
For nothing is destroyed completely here.
The sea gives back no bodies, but their names
return in paint, in footsteps, roots, and rain.

The garden darkens. Ignacio’s boots
leave two deep memories in the watered earth.
The wood remembers.

Villa Grimaldi, Santiago, Chile.
17 August 2026.

——————————

The line contemplando el estallido (contemplating the explosion) comes from the 1986 poem Helicóptero by the Chilean poet Eduardo Llanos Meluss,

Campanas, cacerolas, el zumbido
de un helicóptero revoloteando
sobre nuestras cabezas, vigilando
las calles, contemplando el estallido.

Bells, saucepans, the hum
of a helicopter hovering
above our heads, patrolling
the streets, watching the explosion.

Rosa, my daughter, and I at Villa Grimaldi, 17 August 2026.

First draft

By dawn the masons left the walls
to dry beside the sea.
A nurse unlocked the clinic doors;
schoolchildren crossed the quay.

The planners’ map, beneath its glass,
showed drains in lines of blue.
The clerk stamped every building safe.
The monsoon bulletin withdrew.

Along the seawall, screens displayed
new towers, white and dry.
Behind them, women cleared the silt
while helicopters crossed the sky.

At noon the river entered rooms
the survey marked as high.
It lifted ledgers from the court
and beds where patients lie.

The clinic lamps went out at three.
The school bell struck below.
A child watched alphabets dissolve
where blackboard waters rose.

Upstairs, the council met by phone.
Its seal remained in view.
They read the regulations twice
and found them sound and true.

By evening, roofs moved through the streets.
The maps stayed under glass.
The rules remained in force all night.

The city did not last.

Fidel in Calcutta, India, 17 September 1973.

At one hundred, Fidel sits where evening
Lowers its red flag over the bay;
A remembered cigar, no longer burning,
Lets one frail continent of ash give way.

Ash falls to the floor without proclamation –
Grey province, ruined tower, weightless state –
While prosperous clerks of the embargo
Add another lock to the iron gate.

Along the Malecón, the young assemble
Where waves interrogate the wounded stone;
The sea climbs higher, and the houses tremble,
Each balcony defending what it’s known.

The mercury rises. Bread is rationed thinner.
A fan dies turning in a fevered room.
The walls around the island rise together,
Built out of statutes, signatures, and doom.

Across the water, towers shine like answers;
Here, paint abandons walls in turquoise scales.
A doctor walks beneath exhausted windows;
A fisherman repairs inherited sails.

Freedom is a word the full pronounce
When necessity is safely out of sight;
Here freedom counts the crops, repairs the clinic,
And studies by the failing evening light.

Fidel asks for moringa, not for monuments –
A twisted pod, green medicine, plain bread;
Small leaves persist where grand designs have withered
And feed the living and tease the dead.

The century loosens softly in the salt air.
The hand that held an age begins to shake.
A pulse is but a rumour in a body.
An island is a breath the sea may take.

The heat will rise. The guarded walls will rise.
The markets will perfect their careful no.
The body fails; the stone gives way; the shoreline
Forgets the names we carved long ago.

And yet a nurse still crosses town at midnight;
A teacher prises open the school door;
And hands from which the world has taken plenty
Divide the little, making it seem more.

Twilight withdraws along the Malecón.
The clock performs its little act of harm.
Ash falls; before the dawn, a hand rebuilds;
The sea lifts Cuba in its darkened arm.

Malak Mattar, Gaza is a Phoenix, 2025.

I. Please make it stop.

There is no need to argue the case that there is an Israeli-US genocide ongoing in Gaza, now not as fierce as in the months of late 2023 but no less destructive to Palestinian society and life. The most recent newsletter from Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research reflects on why the world is silent on Gaza as the genocide grinds on. The intensities and forms of execution vary, but the genocide indisputably continues. To entertain doubts about the status of this ferocity as a ‘genocide’ is to fall into an argument with Zionism that is a distraction from the more fundamental issue: how to stop this genocide and how to assist Palestinian politics to end the occupation?

Across the world, from Malaysia to the United States, ordinary people are heartsick about the catastrophe against the Palestinians but take refuge in the immense fortitude of the Palestinian people to resist the occupation and war. Wherever I go, I see people trying to indicate their solidarity (the ubiquitous kufiya and the stickers and posters) as well as trying to find ways to assist the Palestinian struggle (raising money for relief and building campaigns to release political prisoners). An 8-year-old child comes to an event I did in Jakarta (Indonesia) and hands me a note that says she is doing everything that she can to end the genocide; in Johannesburg, an elderly man tells me that he has decided to dedicate the rest of his life to ending the war against the Palestinians: these are two of the thousands of interactions that I have had since 2023, when the sense of anxiousness and anger for the Palestinians has increased manyfold amongst ordinary people across the world, but particularly in the Global South.

Corporate media systems, however, fail this public sentiment, unable or unwilling to report the genocide with honesty and courage. They are held back by an international campaign that seeks to demonise the Palestinian struggle and to dehumanise Palestinians, while making the false argument that any criticism of Israel is tantamount to anti-Semitism. When corporate journalists make some noises for the truth, they find themselves on the street (the New York Times forced the resignation of Jazmine Hughes, Australian Broadcasting Corporation removed Antoinette Lattouf, MSNBC removed Mehdi Hasan, and the BBC sidelined six Arab journalists, including Nada Abdel Samad, Sally Nabil, and Mahmoud Shalib). In fact, the BBC explicitly told its journalists not to use the word ‘genocide’ in its coverage of the Israeli violence in Gaza. Corporate media around the world rely upon these outfits for news coverage from West Asia because they do not have their own reporters on the ground, and therefore this genocidal bias carried into the narrative of media in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Malak Mattar, To Lose a Mother, To Lose a Child, 2025.

II. Blockade on the Truth

I am anti-Zionist. I don’t believe [Jews] have the right, after 3,000 years, to reclaim the land with western bombs and guns on biblical injunction. When I was in Israel it was as though I was in the middle of The Fire Next Time.

James Baldwin to Ida Lewis, Essence, 1970.

James Baldwin said those words in Turkey. He was attacked for them but insulated by distance. These were brave words for a US citizen in 1970. Baldwin references his 1963 book The Fire Next Time, which has two strong essays on the centrality of a racist structure in the United States that acts with violence against people of African descent. The way people of African descent are treated in the United States, Baldwin suggested, mirrored the way that the Palestinians are treated by the Zionist project.

Not sure that these words could easily be said by a writer of his eminence in our time. At least, no writer of his celebrity based in the West (apart from the Irish writer Sally Rooney) has been as vocal during the genocide in our time. Other writers in the West have said this or that, but mostly only after they have condemned the Palestinians for violence, even though international law permits those under occupation to use any and every means to fight for their emancipation. The demonisation of the Palestinians using the word ‘Hamas’ – now made into a myth rather than a genuine political movement and a military phalanx – is central to these writers, who believe that making that gesture immunises them from criticism. By doing this, they walk directly into Zionist ideology to affirm their own humanity and to condemn the Palestinians to the grave.

The impact of social media posts, however, undid the blockade on the truth. Palestinian journalists – whether working for Arabic language media outlets or working for small Palestinian media or for just posting content using their professional judgment – did get stories before the global public of the awful tragedies. It was thanks to this reporting by brave Palestinians that we got to have documented evidence that Israel had wiped out over 2700 family bloodlines in Gaza and had – in many of its strikes on civilian homes – killed four generations of a family in one sweep. Israel began to target these Palestinian journalists because they began to have a major impact on world opinion. On 10 October 2023, the Palestinian Press Union announced that Israel had killed four journalists. If there was any doubt about the targeting of journalists, this was dispelled by November 2023, when Israeli forces began to attack the homes of journalists and kill them and their families. Reporters without Borders filed their first complaint with the International Criminal Court on 1 November 2023. Since then, the Israel targeting of Palestinian journalists escalated with about 270 Palestinian journalists killed by Israel between October 2023 and May 2026. This was precisely to silence the voices of the Palestinians and to strengthen the embargo of news from Gaza (no foreign journalist has been permitted into the occupied territory, in contravention of the custom of modern war).

Large rallies flooded the streets of the Global North, with sizable sections of young people on the streets newly radicalised not only into the agenda of peace or of solidarity with the Palestinians but with an escalated understanding of the nature of imperialism. These rallies were huge, and they terrified the ruling classes of their countries – who began a crackdown against those who opposed the genocide. In the North Atlantic states, the countries began to forbid criticism of Israel through anti-terrorism laws (such as the UK’s Terrorism Act of 2006), anti-BDS laws (such as the Texas House Bill no. 89 of 2017), anti-hate speech laws (such as Chapter 7, Paragraph 130 of the German penal code of 1871 – amended in 1960 – that forbids volksverhetzung or incitement to hatred), and other employer and public order rules. Arrests of anyone posting things on social media critical of Israel and use of the immigration laws to threaten people had a mild chilling effect, although it did not silence the dissent. Establishment institutions such as museums and universities began to target curators and faculty members who spoke out against the genocide, and against the complicity of their governments in the genocide. The accusation of anti-Semitism was wielded freely, trying to chill any amplification of the terrorism inflicted by Israel on the Palestinians. In many cases, administrators known to have pro-Palestinians ideas faced pseudo-accusations of corruption and incompetence. Lobby groups and the local media highlight these accusations, which then went to the large media groups to pillory people and force resignations. This chills the entire environment for dissent of any kind. It became difficult for people who had some information from Gaza to even report this on social media, because their posts began to be screened either manually or through artificial intelligence. Careers sat on the line. Silences began to come into effect.

Academics in the North Atlantic states faced cancelled talks, investigations, suspensions, harassment campaigns, tenure threats – much of it due to donor pressure and political interference. There was mention of ‘institutional chilling’, ‘disciplinary pressure’, ‘soft censorship’, and less frequently outright expurgation of any free speech. Brave intellectuals, often with student and community support, fought these restrictions, but the question of employment loss hung in the air and began to squelch public criticism of Israel. It was acceptable to publish articles in minor academic journals with language relatively impenetrable to the vast masses – but much less safe to stand up in a public meeting and directly call Israel a genocidal country. The few who did that faced severe consequences. The rest had to satisfy their frustration with esoterica.

In many parts of the Global South, with some exceptions (such as Argentina and India), open criticism of Israel was not controlled by the governments (many of whom had supported the South African claim to the International Court of Justice in one way or another). But here, the intellectual climate had already been damaged by privatisation of colleges and universities, by a culture of overwork for underpaid teachers in public institutions, and by the destruction of the apparatus of intellectual culture (including of academic and intellectual journals, public spaces for discussion and debate, and the relationship between academic intellectuals and the media). Intellectuals in large parts of the Global South expressed their frustration on social media, in their own letters to the editor, and in whatever webinars they could hold for relatively small audiences. The public square in the Global South had already been shrunk into a neoliberal commodity.

But in many parts of the Global South, there is considerable space to openly speak and write about the outrage of the genocide. There is no army of compliant mercenary bureaucrats, as there are in the culture industries in the Global North. During my travels in Indonesia, Kenya, Burkina Faso, Ghana, and South Africa – over the course of the past two months – I was struck by the acceptable space created to speak with bluntness of the outrages against the Palestinians. There was no hammer that hung over the head of people, no police at the door, no anti-Semitism laws at the edge of the room, no eyebrows rising when you say basic factual things (such as that Gaza has the largest number of child amputees in the world). In the ruins of the neoliberal public space, there are new libraries and reading rooms opening that hold these discussions – from Pelagia Bookstore (Bandung, Indonesia) to the Ukombozi Library (Nairobi, Kenya) – where hundreds of people come to events, some wearing kufiyas, others with radical t-shirts, middle class and working class, anti-fascist football clubs and anti-imperialist reading groups. It is here that we can sniff the bold breaking of the blockade on the truth.

Malak Mattar, Seeking Peace, Wanting Freedom, 2025.

III. Breaking the Blockade on the Truth.

You, standing at the doorsteps, come in
And drink with us our Arabic coffee
For you may feel that you are human like us.

Mahmoud Darwish, A State of Siege, 2002.

But these restrictions of one kind or another produced immense frustration amongst people who had begun to accumulate information about the devastation but found it difficult to amplify the genocide for reasons of employment or reputation or lack of an outlet. What compelled them to want to speak despite the limitations of ideology and the repressive atmosphere inflicted by US-Israeli power on the global stage was their humanity and their frustration at their own inability to speak with clarity. It would be impossible to disagree with the formulation that intellectuals have a moral responsibility to speak loudly during moments of human suffering. After the Holocaust and during the age of decolonisation, many intellectuals concluded that silence in the face of atrocity was itself a form of complicity. The founding charter of the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) in 1945 captured this postwar reckoning with the statement, ‘Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed’. The idea was that fascism, genocide, and colonial violence had been enabled not only by armies, but also by propaganda, racism, obedient institutions, and the failure of intellectual resistance.

In 1947, Jean Paul Sartre published What is Literature in which he distinguished between the bourgeois idea of the ‘freedom’ of the writer and the ‘commitment’ of the writer; the former idea suggested licence and irresponsibility, while the latter enforced a moral obligation on writers. ‘The function of the writer’, Sartre wrote, ‘is to act in such a way that nobody can be ignorant of the world and that nobody may say that he is innocent of what it’s all about’. Three years later, in his Discourse on Colonialism (1950), Aimé Césaire argued that colonial violence and fascist violence had emerged out of European civilisation, and, in a challenge to European intellectuals, he wrote, ‘a civilisation that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilisation’. These postwar debates helped establish a modern expectation that scholars, writers, and journalists have a duty to speak clearly about mass violence. For many contemporary intellectuals, therefore, the genocide in Gaza has become a test of whether those lessons still carry moral force today.

There are millions of scholars, writers, and journalists who have been active in a range of ways to highlight the genocide – but their efforts have been minuscule and many of them have become demoralised. What is the point of articulating in detail the moments of mass human suffering in Gaza – by major multilateral agencies (including the United Nations) and by intellectuals in the smallest of outlets – if these statements of documented outrage have come to nothing? It is not only the institutions that have tried to silence scholars, writers, and journalists who have created this failure, but it is the entire set of industries that have deformed culture and that have created a sensibility of indifference in the modern population – creating doubt about the genocide itself, creating a sense of futility about the violence, and creating a normality that allows everyday life to continue in its habitual incarnation while the brutality continues.

What this reveals is not the futility of intellectual work or the courage of the intellectuals themselves, but the depth of the structures against which intellectual work and intellectuals struggle. The issue is not merely that governments ignore evidence or that media corporations distort reality. It is that contemporary capitalism has produced an entire architecture of distraction, exhaustion, spectacle, and managed feeling that absorbs even the most horrifying images into the ordinary circulation of daily life. Atrocity is transformed into content. Outrage becomes episodic. Suffering appears briefly before disappearing into the endless stream of commodities, entertainment, and anxious survival that structures modern existence. In such a condition, the responsibility of intellectuals cannot simply be to provide more information, since information itself is no longer sufficient to generate moral action. The task becomes larger and more difficult: to break the habits of indifference, to restore the human meaning of suffering, to defend historical truth against organised falsification, and to insist that Palestinian life cannot be treated as disposable within the moral order of the world. Is this easier said than done? Not really. We stay informed through serious journalism, historical scholarship, eyewitness testimony, literature, and human rights documentation rather than relying on the sensational coverage of the corporate media. This requires us to build institutions that transmit people-centred journalism, not only about people but for people (which means media done in languages understandable by people). It is important to remember that our media must be captivating and transformative of consciousnesses not only a transmission of information. This is what we see in media such as Breakthrough News, Pan-African TV, Brasil de Fato, and others. We resist indifference by refusing to treat Palestinian suffering as routine, distant, or inevitable. We restore the human meaning of suffering by focusing on lived experience, including the destruction of ordinary life and the fight for existence. Our media for each other must not reduce people to statistics, symbols, or geopolitical abstractions. Even when these interventions appear ineffective in the immediate sense, they remain essential because they preserve the possibility that humanity itself might still resist normalisation of barbarism. We must break the blockade on reality.

To break this blockade on reality requires more than the circulation of facts. It requires forms of political and cultural work capable of overcoming isolation, fragmentation, and learned helplessness. Solidarity with Palestine remains a mere gesture unless it is directly linked with domestic struggles of the local working classes. Solidarity is not a one-way street, where the privileged express solidarity with those seen to be without power. Solidarity with Palestine must be seen as critical to the success of domestic struggles. Can we use solidarity with Palestine as a weapon to hurt our ruling classes? The immense task before us is to reconnect suffering to structures of power, to transform private horror into collective consciousness, and to rebuild institutions that can sustain moral attention beyond brief cycles of spectacle. Intellectuals, artists, educators, and movements must therefore struggle not only against censorship, but against the habits of passivity that allow atrocity to appear distant, inevitable, or unreal. The defence of truth becomes inseparable from the defence of human collectiveness itself.

The modern order isolates people into competitive and anxious individual existence while dissolving the capacities required for collective moral and political action. Against this decomposition, the project of rescuing collective life means rebuilding popular organisations, public culture, trade unions, peasant movements, study circles, and political education capable of restoring a shared commitment to human dignity. It is only through such collective structures that societies can resist the normalisation of cruelty and overcome the paralysis produced by spectacle and despair. In this sense, solidarity with Palestine is not merely an act of sympathy with distant suffering; it is part of a broader struggle to defend the very possibility of a humane and collective future.

Malak Mattar, The Mother and Child, 2019.

(Thanks to dear Malak Mattar for the use of the images - please visit her website. Support her work by buying a copy of No Words…(For Gaza), in which I have an essay on her work, and get the new book by Wesam Afifa called Survivors of the Darkness, for which she did the cover).

It was among us and before we could gather our wits,
it had done its deadly work and had disappeared.
Dr. Dinshaw Mehta, physician of M. K. Gandhi, 1 August 1919.

**

The thermometer fought the fever,
the mercury rising and falling, mostly rising.
The ceiling rehearsed migrations of white fish,
and the wallpaper quietly cultivated moss.
My name was lent to a chair beside the bed,
while sparrows audited the fever’s books;
Each minute wore a wet and tarnished halo,
and noon arrived disguised as midnight’s clerk.

In sleep, an eminent economist summoned me
and, with the practised kindness of a knife,
advised me to abandon economics;
the market, he implied, had priced me out.
Then all at once I found myself restoring
a relative’s goblin house, by toilet-light,
scrubbing a porcelain moon to dull perfection
before the walls remembered they were damp.
At last, a supermarket without water,
its bottles fluent only in their labels;
and there the Zionist professor, who had vowed
to have me disappear, compared the prices
as though revenge were merely another aisle.

Outside, the ordinary trees stayed faithful,
but every leaf translated into bells.
The pulse, that civil servant of the body,
misfiled the weather somewhere in the bones.
I woke to find the pillow holding rain,
its damp remembering countries I had missed;
Then morning, with its modest bureaucratic mercy,
stamped me ‘returned’, though not entirely home.

1 August 2026.

(Images from the Aburi Botanical Gardens, Ghana - with the picture above taken outside the old sanatorium, now a restaurant).

I wore Palestino upon my chest,
its map embroidered where the heart should beat;
a stranger stopped me, smilingly confessed
he wanted it and might steal it in the street.

Then steal it, I replied, but steal it well;
observe the courtesies, excuse the crime.
We laughed, as civil people do, while hell
killed two more children somewhere at that time.

Their names arrived too late to reach the news;
Their shoes lay listening beside the stone.
The dead, of course, are not allowed to choose
which flag survives, which grief must stand alone.

A satellite, immaculate and bright,
looked down and gathered everything as proof:
the little bodies cooling in the night,
the shirt, the thief, the dust, the broken roof.

Some clerk will file the images by noon;
some statesmen mourn with phrases duly weighed.
The earth turns patiently beneath the moon;
the debt is named, regretted, never paid.

What are we to do but breathe as always done,
while death performs its duties out of sight?
I kept the shirt. He vanished in the sun.
Two children entered Gaza’s endless night.

At Barefoot Cafe, Colombo.
26 July 2026.

(At the Hands Off Asia meeting of the International Peoples Assembly and Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Dr. Ahilan Kadirgamar of the University of Jaffna said that the forts of the Portuguese, the Dutch, and the English should not be converted into tourist attractions but be left to rot and become ruins. The comment inspired the first half of the poem, but the poem itself was written over the three days of the meeting as I listened to leaders from political parties and social movements speak of the several reasons for US-led hyper-imperialism to depart from Asia taking all its instruments from IMF policy to war to militarisation with it).

The sea owes no allegiance; each new wave
arrives unarmed, performs its little task;
the fishermen pull morning from their nets,
the monks release their silence to the crows.
Only the charts arrive already armed,
their rulers sharpened on another coast.

Now Washington insists that peace requires
a larger fleet than any storm has known;
each harbour enters someone else’s plan,
each reef acquires a military name.
The ocean takes no notice. Under moon,
it makes its ancient argument with stone.

What language teaches war to call itself
the necessary labour of the free,
while liberty flies bright upon the mast
and missiles sleep beneath the painted deck?
The waves applaud no empire. Patiently
they grind the guns of empire back to sand.

Here cinnamon drifts through the evening streets,
three-wheelers bargain loudly with the rain.
Beyond the harbour an American fleet
keeps watch upon a sea it cannot own.
The sailors measure distance from the sky;
the terns read only wind, and fish, and tide.

They say the Indian Ocean must be safe:
safe for the tankers, cables, drones and trade,
safe for the profits crossing every wave,
safe for the flag that travels without roots.
Yet every port remembers other cargo:
the spice, the chain, the ledger, and the gun.

Diego Garcia: the runways burn
across the island emptied for their use;
here, on the Green, the tents have disappeared,
but grass remembers feet, and feet return.
The sea outlives the fleet; that is not freedom.
Freedom begins when those ashore refuse.

Old Ceylon, named and numbered by the flags
that made dependence look like nature’s law:
your truest map is neither base nor dock
but every hand that casts a net at dawn,
each market tongue that bargains through the rain,
every child who gives the shore new names.

Water is patient. History must learn.
Steel may command an anchorage by night,
yet never teach a current where to run
nor persuade the monsoon whom to serve.
The deepest water answers to no fleet;
it keeps its ancient promise to the moon.

And when the speeches rust like anchored hulls,
when one more doctrine founders in the surf,
the waves will still repeat what they have known
longer than admirals remember maps:

No ocean was created for an empire.
At dawn, the nets go out beneath its guns.

Colombo, Sri Lanka.
20 July 2026.

For Soni Prashad, 1929-2020

The dead retain a punctual courtesy.
They write when headlines fail to make much sense.
This morning yours arrived with tea-stained edges,
the envelope addressed in careful tense.

Hi son, can you tell me why the Israelis
are planning to take over such a large part of...
what is it again... the paper’s rather smudged...
East Jerusalem?

The rain had blurred the proper nouns, not history.
Names disappear more quickly than the stones.
Maps are revised by rulers at their desks;
the olive tree still memorises bones.

It’s the occupation, Ma.
They simply won’t relent.

I wrote the words as one reports the weather,
ashamed that habit made them sound so plain,
as though endurance were a natural season,
like Calcutta’s heat or monsoon’s patient rain.

Your answer crossed the silence without postage.

Well, it is outrageous.
What are you going to do about it?

The living are ingenious in delay.
We polish arguments, revise the facts,
mistake our measured conscience for a movement,
our sentences for necessary acts.

I suspect I’ll write something.

The room grew still. The windows faced the evening.
Beyond them, blackbirds rehearsed their ancient art,
stitching brief freedoms through the darkening air,
while somewhere soldiers measured out a heart.

Then came your final line, almost domestic,
the sort of thing you always used to say
before the kettle sang, before the dishes,
before another ordinary day:

Send it to me as soon as you do.

So here it is.
Not because poems halt a bulldozer,
or shame a minister from borrowed land,
but because silence signs too many papers
and calls its folded helplessness ‘the plan’.

If there is any postal route to heaven,
it cannot run by hafrada’s checkpoint gate.
Still, mothers have a way of getting letters
long after every clerk has stamped them Late.

Read this, then, where no borders need defending.
Read slowly, as you always read my lines.
And if the dead still keep the living honest,
return it with your margin full of signs.

London,
13 July 2026.

Ken Domon, Hiroshima, 1957.

The skin all over the body, which already had looked like that of a person in the last stages of tuberculosis, began to change to an even more hopeless, opaque colour, like that of a roasted eggplant.
Ōta Yōko, 1983.

Outside the summit hall, the flags perform
their ancient office, fluttering above mistakes.
The delegates adjust their borrowed smiles
while satellites rehearse the evening’s takes.

A bomber lifts because a signature
travels quicker now than any prayer.
Another city learns the grammar taught,
whenever empires conjugate the air.

Then comes the verdict:
‘The Islamic Republic of Japan’.
As though geography were merely noise.
Tokyo replies with cartoons, cats, and memes,
a people rescuing themselves with poise.

Yet laughter knows the map beneath the joke.
Phone screens glow beside the guarded fence.
Seventy-six enclaves where another flag
commands occupied ground.
The bomb remembers
its white handwriting on the stone.

The mushrooms rose, the runways lengthened,
children wave where bloom outlives the wire.
History laughs because it cannot weep enough,
while memes bloom beneath the bomb’s long weather.

London, UK.
9 July 2026

Vahid Salemi, Tehran, 2026

It was wonderful to walk around the home of Sigmund Freud in Vienna, a home that was also his clinic and office until the seizure of power by the Nazis and the attack on the Freud family alongside that of Austria’s Jewish population. In the home, there was a couch (a piece of furniture that has been very important to my own life), and there were photographs (the picture with his dogs precious to me), and there were books of his work (including this paper on his own experimentation with cocaine, about which I did not know).

There was a note from 22 December 1884 that stopped me so I want to share it. Freud noted that a 28-year-old shoemaker had committed suicide. Then he wrote, ‘The patient climbed on a cabinet and jumped into the courtyard through a closed window’.

Freud began to think about the rise of fascism, but it was in fact Wilhelm Reich - whose work I find so very useful - who took on the need to analyse the ‘progressive character of fascism’ - meaning the way in which fascism gripped working-class consciousness. For Reich, from Freud, the point was not to try and eliminate the ugliness of trauma and neurosis but to transform it.

A very moving morning in the centre of a very important place.

(A cedar tree, symbol of Lebanon, planted in Vienna in 1815 for the Congress of Vienna, in the home of Bruno Kreisky, former Chancellor of Austria and friend of the Global South. Thanks to the Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue for hosting our conversation about the world order today)

Wer will, dass die Welt so bleibt, wie sie ist, der will nicht, dass sie bleibt
Whoever wants the world to remain as it is, does not want it to remain
(Erich Fried, 1921-1988).

The café spoons still ring as though no century had passed,
Though windows once applauded when the swastika went past.
The boulevards remember more than marble dares confess;
Their elegance is tailored from catastrophe and dress.

Yet Graz has raised a Communist where others preached despair,
A red vote through the mountains, clean as unexpected air.
History never marches to the drum that victors choose;
It keeps its rhymes for those who know how often powers lose.

Vienna,
3 July 2026

In memory of Saleem Khader al-Ashgar, goalkeeper of the Khan Younis Services Club, assassinated on 29 June 2026.
(Israel’s genocide has killed 1,009 members of Palestine’s sports movement, including 567 from the Palestinian football community - al-Ashgar, who was expecting his first child, during the World Cup)

Morning rehearses its old obedience.
Tablets.
Toothpaste.
The kettle beginning, reluctantly,
to believe in another day.

Coffee darkens the cup.
A cousin cannot find a shoe.
Another remembers the schoolbook
left beneath yesterday’s chair.
His new wife wonders about the football.

Where is your sweater?

Windows admit the same light
that has entered houses for centuries,
as though the sun
had never signed
its separate peace with history.

From room to room
the household conducts
its ordinary republic,
its brief parliament of errands.

A cup waits beside the sink.
A photograph leans
slightly forward on the shelf.
Bread remains uncut.
A football lies untended.

Somewhere else,
a decision has already been made.
Not by the morning.

Not by the people
who are tying shoelaces,
searching for keys,
or reminding a child
not to forget lunch.

The sky keeps its own appointments.

Then—

the cup,
the photograph,
the unfinished sentence,
the hand that reaches
almost far enough.

Silence arrives
before the dust.

Later,
someone will count walls,
someone remembers a name,
someone fragments of names.

Morning,
fails to arrive.

Vienna,
2 July 2026.

Kagiso Patrick Mautloa (South Africa), Untitled, Undated.

[written before a presentation for the Jack Simon School of the South African Communist Party]

The paan dissolves slowly into cardamom and lime,
its sweetness bargaining with the afternoon.
Fordsburg keeps the old republic of small shops:
tailors, butchers, telephones to distant grief.

In the windows the kufiyas wait without impatience,
folded like maps no border has defeated.
A child runs past carrying warm bread,
while Gaza arrives again on every screen.

One grows ashamed of becoming accustomed.
The century has perfected that habit.

Even sorrow learns to queue for service.
The men behind the counters lower their voices.
Not because hope has vanished,
but because hope now pays rent by the week.

Outside, another argument blames Africa for hunger,
as though the wound had turned against the hand.
A nation disappointed with its broken promises
searches too often for strangers to inherit the blame.

The wind gathers dust along Albertina Sisulu Road.
I finish the paan and taste both sugar and iron.

The world appears to be rehearsing another catastrophe,
yet somewhere beneath these pavements, stubborn as seed,
the people are preparing an answer not yet ready to flower.

Johannesburg
28 June 2026.

Written while watching the results of the election in Colombia, with the far right of a special type growing with vehemence in Latin America

Fernando Botero (Colombia), La Masacre de Mejor Esquina, 1997.

*****

The plazas fill with anger at the falling rate of pay,
While men in tailored jackets teach resentment how to pray;
La patria está en peligro, the evening papers cry,
And every wounded certainty demands a culprit by and by.

The bankers toast the markets; the crowds salute the drum,
The old ghosts cross the pampas and whisper, ya volvieron;
Each ballot bears a thundercloud, each slogan wears a smile,
And history, dressed as novelty, walks with us a little while.

23 June 2026

Tesfaye Urgessa (Ethiopia), Same Old Shit 2, 2020.

The bar is full of the usual consolations:
Whisky and soda. Flirtation,
the tactful glow of light reflected from polished wood.

Outside, Santiago conducts its evening lessons:
how to cross against traffic,
how to ignore a beggar without cruelty,
how to be late without apology.
Tranquilo, no pasa nada.

The waiter carries three glasses
with the concentration of a surgeon.
A woman at the next table
explains a failed love affair.
The mountains beyond the city,
indifferent masters of perspective,
have already disappeared into haze.

I read a report on children.
Not children exactly:
statistics, annexes, verified incidents,
the bureaucratic afterlife of pain.
Children translated into language
acceptable to committees.

The report is careful.
The report is precise.
The report possesses excellent manners.
It does not scream.
It says violations.

A remarkable word.
One imagines a regulation misplaced,
an infraction of parking rules,
a procedural irregularity.

Meanwhile, somewhere,
a child learns the weight of a soldier’s hand.
Somewhere,
a body discovers that the world
contains forms of knowledge
for which no vocabulary was intended.

At the next table someone laughs.
The laughter is genuine,
and therefore unbearable.

Suffering takes place while someone else
is opening a window,
feeding pigeons,
shopping for shoes,
admiring a painting,
ordering another drink.

Cruelty is rarely interrupted
by the awareness of cruelty.

The buses continue.
The market opens.
The invoice is approved.
The shipment proceeds.
The newspaper arrives.
The coffee is served.

Far away, a child disappears.
Near at hand, a credit card is tapped
against a machine.
The machine approves.
¡Que le vaya bien!

Anger offers certain comforts.
It permits the fantasy
that monsters are responsible.

The report accumulates evidence
against a more ordinary suspect.
Not monsters,
but ordinary habits of power.

This shipment must move,
this border must close,
this village must be cleared,
this budget cannot be altered,
this intelligence is regrettable but useful,
this death is unfortunate.

Every age develops
its preferred euphemisms.

The old empires had civilisation.
The twentieth century had security.
We have management.

The child, however,
remains stubbornly literal.
A bruise is literal.
Hunger is literal.
Fear is literal.
Violation is literal.
Only the report speaks metaphorically.
A dog sleeps beneath a bench.
A delivery rider waits for a light to change.
A couple kiss in a doorway.
Nothing is wrong with any of this.
That is the difficulty.
The evening is beautiful.
The city is beautiful.
Human tenderness appears everywhere,
like grass forcing itself through concrete.

And yet the same species
which invents tenderness
also invents organised indifference,
the filing cabinet,
the checkpoint,
the detention centre,
the profitable war.

The same hand.
The same mind.
The report lies open before me.
Its pages do not accuse any person
sitting in this room.

Outside the windows
the ordinary world continues its performance:
the taxis pass,
the conversations rise and fall,
the small economies of desire and disappointment.

No thunderbolt descends.
No chorus enters.
The glasses shine.
The bills are paid.
Night settles over Santiago.

And somewhere beyond the reach
of these comfortable lights,
children are learning,
much earlier than they should,
what adults have done with the world.

On my flight from São Paulo to Johannesburg
18 June 2026.
After reading the United Nations report on Children and Armed Conflict.

Please watch the new video by Roger Waters and Mona Miari, Comfortably Numb Re-Imagined (2026):