I think it was last year at the People’s Conference for Palestine in Detroit where I picked up the book of art, essays and poems by Shukri Abu Baker, “Light From Deep Under: Writing and Art from a Palestinian Prisoner”, but I didn’t get around to reading it until last week. Since then, I have been slightly obsessed with his story.

When his daughter was born with cystic fibrosis, Shukri Abu Baker was overjoyed that she was able to get top notch medical care due to charitable organizations. As a Palestinian and a devout Muslim, this inspired him to start a charitable organization of his own to help anyone in need, but especially other Palestinians.

In 1988, just a year after the start of the First Intifada, he founded the “Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development” here in the United States to provide support for Palestinians, especially in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, who were being oppressed by Israel. In time it grew to be the largest Muslim charity in the US.

Of course despite overwhelming evidence that everything the charity was doing was above board and by the book, the US government (with of course a lot of pressure from Israel) spied on the organization for years and attempted to build a case that they were supporting terrorism. Hamas finally being designated as a terrorist organization was the chance they had been waiting for to find guilt by association.

The Holy Land Foundation was shut down by George W. Bush in 2001, and a few years and two trials later five of the officers of the organization were sentenced to long prison terms for, primarily, “material support for terrorism”.

“The ‘material support statute,’ as it is commonly referred to, was enacted in 1996 as part of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. That statute recognizes that money is fungible, and that money in the hands of a terrorist organization — even if for so called charitable purposes — supports that organization’s overall terrorist objectives.” — source

The “Holy Land 5” are Shukri Abu Baker (sentence: 65 yrs; incarcerated), Ghassan Elashi (sentence: 65 years; incarcerated), Mohammad el-Mezain (sentence: 15 years; released in 2022, held in ICE custody for nearly a year, then deported to Turkey), Mufid Abdulqader (sentence: 20 yrs; released in December, 2024), and Abdulraham Odeh (sentence: 15 years; released in 2021).

According to Ghassan Elashi’s daughter Noor, upon receiving his 65-year sentence he made the following statement to the court:

“Nothing in my life was as satisfactory as knowing that I could sign a check. It was the only evidence you have used against me, but that was the most enjoyable part of my life. Knowing that I could sign a check to assist the thousands of Palestinian families who got displaced after their homes were demolished. Nothing was more satisfactory to me than providing scholarships to hundreds of Palestinian students who had high average grades despite their circumstance.”

The Al-Jazeera documentary (linked below) and Miko Peled’s book “Injustice: The Story of the Holy Land Foundation Five” (a preview of which is available as an article in The Electronic Intifada) are both very good resources for more information. I bought and read Miko’s book as soon as I finished Shukri’s book.

I also highly recommend Dr. Ed Hasan’s interview with Shukri’s daughter Nida on the Sumud Podcast.

Mondoweiss covered the 20th anniversary of the verdict two years ago.

David A. McDonald’s Holy Land Five: Palestinian Charity in the War on Terror looks very good (he wrote the introduction to Shukri’s book as well) but I haven’t read it.

(Part I)

(Part II)

This is relevant today because I have noticed a significant decrease in the coverage Gaza is getting in the mainstream press and popular conversation ever since the so-called “ceasefire” that took effect in October, 2025. “So-called” because Israel has continued attacking and killing the Palestinians in Gaza every single day since. More than 1200 have been killed (a number reminiscent of the fatalities on 10-7-2023).

I’m sad to say this was completely predictable, as evidenced by the fact that I predicted it myself on January 23th, 2024—long before I had the historical knowledge of Palestine and political consciousness I’ve developed over the past 2.5 years. So instead of writing another post in the same spirit, I’ll just ask you to read this:

The idea of the book club is that we announce a book at the start of the month, then interview the author (and have a Q&A with the audience) at the end of the month. That gives you time to read the book and prepare questions for the author, but it’s low-intensity enough that you don’t have to feel bad if you don’t read the book, you can still watch the interview and learn from the author.

So far we’ve done the following:

The Complicit Lens: US Media Coverage of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza, by Robin Andersen
Buy the book
Watch the interview

Mapping My Return: A Palestinian Memoir, by Salman Abu Sitta
Buy the book
Watch the interview

The General’s Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine, by Miko Peled
Buy the book
Watch the interview

COMING UP NEXT:

From The Clinic To The Streets: Pyschoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures, by Lara Sheehi
Buy the book
Register for the Interview

There is also a Discord channel for discussion of each book for anyone who is interested in that, but right now it’s mostly the sound of crickets in there.

It’s interesting to note that ‘disrupt’, ‘rupture’, and ‘corrupt’ all have the same Latin root, rumpere “to break”. What these entrepreneurs repurposed was the knowledge doctors working with poorly-healed broken bones have had for ages: sometimes the only way to fix something is to break it. Sometimes this is just the price of progress.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the age old reform vs revolution debate. Most people over the age of fifteen have probably thought about this, and I’ve never met anyone who didn’t have strong opinions about it. It’s funny actually, because if you think about it we tend to lionize revolutionaries from George Washington to Martin Luther King, Jr. But we don’t call them revolutionaries, we call them patriots or civil rights leaders. We reserve the term revolutionary for the “enemies” of the United States like Che Guevara or President Lula of Brazil.

We even make sure to prepend ‘violent’ when we use the term, as in “do you believe in government reform or violent revolution?” But revolution doesn’t necessitate violence. Violence is a tactic. The state uses it to suppress dissent domestically and discipline competitors globally. But violence isn’t intrinsic to these goals. There are plenty of ways to accomplish these objectives without using violence. The same is true about revolution. So the real question to ask about reform vs revolution is whether the current system is amenable to fundamental structural change, or if it needs to be disrupted. Ruptured. Broken down and rebuilt from the ground up.

I’m almost done reading the book Socialist Reconstruction: A Better Future for the United States. It’s a really great read and I highly recommend it. If I had read it six months ago I would have said it was utopian nonsense and a waste of time. That’s because it paints a picture of a world we could have, but which seems improbable at best, if not impossible. It’s a publication of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL). I’m not a member of any party, but the PSL mostly closely aligns with my values.1

Borrowing from the flippant post I made on LinkedIn this morning (see above), if it is radical to think that the climate crisis, rising global fascism, and the US clamoring to start World War III (if it hasn’t already started) have raised the stakes on the question of reform vs revolution to the point where the answer is clearly the latter, then I have been radicalized.

Unfortunately I’m a little late to the party. The revolution has already started, and it’s being led by Donald Trump and his administration. Nearly every official act of this administration has been a disruption of the norms and standards of our form of government. They are literally tearing everything down as we speak so they can rebuild it to reflect their values, democracy be damned. This was literally personified by Elon Musk dancing around on a stage with a chainsaw.

All of this is to say that I have a deeper and more nuanced understanding of what committing to a radical, revolutionary politics consists of and what it requires of me, and first and foremost is that freedom and liberty are non-negotiable. As Lara Sheehi would say (channeling Fanon), “liberation is the precondition”. I was confused by that the first dozen times I heard it (lucky for me, Lara believes strongly in repetition) because to me it sounded like “the way to win liberation is to win liberation”. But what I have come to realize is that it means something subtly else. It means liberation isn’t a thing to be earned, won, or gifted. It is a natural right. It is to be exercised.

Whether a socialist revolution in the United States is probable (or even possible) and whether the outcome involves bloodshed or not, the system is already being disrupted and the crises are contradictions of the capitalist system, just like the planet, are overheating rapidly. A major transformation is coming, and as the six Democrats jumping ship to support the Republicans $1.5 trillion defense budget and merger of US/Israeli intelligence indicates, there is no way we’re voting our way out of this.

I need your help figuring out what to do here.

I started this Substack two and a half years ago, partly because I needed an outlet for the daily horror I was ingesting and to talk about my work helping to build Tech for Palestine. But I also thought if people only knew more about the history of Palestine and the truth about Israel, support in the global north might weaken and eventually Palestine might be free. I still think that, and I’m not planning on changing it.

The open questions I have are about content, frequency, and how I promote it.

Since the beginning I have tried to focus on the genocide unfolding in the Gaza Strip, and avoided centering my feelings and worldview. At the same time, I think my untraditional upbringing, life experience, and philosophical position provides a relatively rare perspective that can’t be easily dismissed by skeptics, which is why sometimes include or center references to my positionality in my posts.

That is, my identity as a white, cisgendered, heterosexual, atheist, man without a college degree and descended from the European settlers who colonized “North America” (Canada on my Mom’s side, the United States on my Dad’s), I’m immune to critiques composed of racism, Islamophobia, pinkwashing, academic elitism, etc.

In other words I’m a good ole’ fashioned red-blooded, white-skinned, middle-aged American. Not some brown or black-skinned Islamic fundamentalist who was brainwashed at the university. Hell, I’m even an honorably discharged veteran of the US Army (never mind that I only served twenty months and hated every minute of it.)

I generally post somewhat infrequently. I think I average one and half to two posts a month. I also don’t really promote my posts. I often don’t include a header image (which probably makes posts more appealing), and I only share posts on various social media platforms sporadically and almost always only once. I have no plan to monetize.

The number of people who subscribe has consistently (but slowly) increased over time, with the number of subscribers currently at four hundred and sixty. I think that’s great but it would be awesome to have impact at a much greater scale if possible.

The conundrum I have is that I feel like what it would take to grow significantly (essentially “professionalizing” how I approach the whole process) would make it appear less authentic and heartfelt, and thus less impactful.

Anyway I’m sorry for the length of this. It was supposed to be a couple paragraphs at most in which I ask why you subscribe, what content (personal, analysis, news, or the current “all of the above” approach) and cadence you prefer, and whether you think I should keep it small and organic or try to scale it. So if you want to ignore all the above and just answer those questions that would be great.

If you don’t want to leave a public comment below you can email me. My email address is TM—my last name—99 at gmail.com.

Thanks for reading.

Western philosophy taught me not to conflate ‘is’ and ‘ought’, but learning about the cosmos revealed that the scope of what we call reality, be it a universe or multiverse, is ultimately beyond human comprehension; completely contingent on our perspective.

At a very young age, The Twilight Zone television show hinted at this in numerous ways. For example the episode where the couple wakes up in an empty city, only to realize that they are in a play model of a city, having become pets to a child in a race of giant humanoids from outer-space. Experimenting with LSD in my youth helped solidify this understanding by revealing that my senses are unreliable and by allowing me to temporarily transcend my ego and see the ‘me’ underneath the pretense.

All this has led me believe that the survival and thriving of human life and planetary ecology is simultaneously utterly insignificant and the only thing that matters.

We talk about what “matters”. We say, “the work you’re doing matters”, or “it doesn’t matter what they say about you”, or “direct action is the only thing that matters.” But of course what matters is subjective and context-dependent. If one is religious then what matters might be conforming to the beliefs and values of ones religion. If one is a narcissist then the only thing that really matters is their personal satisfaction. Etc.

They say everyone has an existential crisis at some point in their lives, usually in their teens or twenties, when they start to doubt whatever they have been taught or simply previously believed about the nature of existence. I have often said, and repeated up to the very recent past, that I had an existential crisis in my early 20’s and never shook it.

It took a few decades longer than I would have liked, but for the first time in my life I think I understand where the small, raggedy, misshapen piece that is me fits in this cosmic puzzle. A big part of this has been coming to believe that I don’t matter. Not as an atomized individual, anyway. Capitalism, especially the neoliberal variety we have had for the past 50 years, relies on us believing it’s a dog-eat-dog world, and that our top priority should be our personal success by any means necessary. That our ultimate goal should be Ayn Rand’s “enlightened self-interest”. How cynical is that?

Is it any surprise that the world seems to have acclimated to the ongoing genocide in Gaza when it has been beaten into us that it’s perfectly normal and natural, indeed moral, to prioritize our personal well-being and satisfaction above everything else?

I don’t know if any of this makes sense, and I don’t know if I’ll ever find the answer to the eternal question echoing in my head: “how should a person be?” (I doubt it). All I do know at this point in my life is that I can’t think of anything more important than using my relative comfort and security to struggle with those who don’t have it.

So, whether you want to thank me for speaking out loudly and often in support of Palestinian liberation or curse me for my failure to speak out loudly and often for the many other oppressed peoples of the world, at the end of the day I find comfort in the knowledge that I’m trying to be a good human. Sometimes I even feel successful.

There are moments when a man ceases to be a man. He becomes a wound. A gash torn open in the universe. I am that wound. I write these words not from a room, but from the grave of meaning itself. And I write them with trembling hands and a blasphemous heart because I no longer know if prayer is a virtue or a curse. Because the silence from the heavens has become so loud, I fear it will shatter my skull.

They told us to flee. They told us: ‘Go south, there you will be safe.’ So we went. Obedient. Meek. Begging life like beggars beg bread. But there is no south. There is no safety. There is only earth quaking under the weight of corpses, and children carrying the eyes of the dead in their faces.

I sit now in a room smaller than a confession booth, twenty-eight square metres of guilt. And I am ashamed to possess even that. Ashamed because my friend lies headless in the north. Ashamed because I breathe, and his mother no longer does. Ashamed because survival, here, has become a sin.

What is this? What do you call a world where innocence is a death sentence, and justice a superstition? Do not call it war. Call it ritual slaughter. Call it divine abandonment. Call it what it is: the slow crucifixion of a people in broad daylight, while the bishops of democracy sip wine and speak of ‘context’.

They bombed a tower today. Forty-eight families. Thirty minutes to escape. Then it was fire. Then it was rubble. Then it was silence. And the world, this bloated, bloodless world, watched with dry eyes and full stomachs. They wrote it down. They called it ‘a response’. They said: Hamas infrastructure.

I say: a nursery with blood still wet on the blankets. I say: a child curled around her dead sister’s shoes. I say: a father digging through bricks with his fingernails because there is no shovel left, no ambulance, no hope. And the tents, do not insult us with that word. A tent is not a shelter. A tent is the mockery of a shelter. A tent is what you give to ghosts when even the dust has forgotten their names.

And still, somehow, my heart beats. Why? What right does it have to beat? What right have I to remain while others vanish in smoke? Oh God, if You are watching, then watch this. Three more houses have fallen as I write. Three. Each with its own holy story, its own lullaby interrupted by the scream of steel. If this is not hell, then hell is redundant.

And yet I write. Because words are the only thing we have left to bury the dead with.”

The above is an excerpt from Diary of a Young Doctor: Notes from the Genocide in Gaza, by Ezzideen Shehab. Dr. Shehab was still tweeting as recently as a couple days ago, so I have reason to believe he is still alive and working in Gaza. Imagine if books were being published and daily tweets sent out from Auschwitz in real time, and the world just went about its business. Or worse, made excuses for the Nazis. As deeply angered and distressed as I have also been by films and written memoirs about the Holocaust, hearing it from the victims currently living it is on a whole other level.

Once in a while I find myself in a conversation with someone who thinks the genocide in Gaza effectively ended with the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas last October. It’s unfortunately a totally reasonable thing to believe if you’re not following news of the region very closely, but it’s not true. It’s not restricted to Gaza either. It has expanded deep into Lebanon and has been ongoing in the West Bank.

It is true that the ceasefire agreement resulted in a reduction of huge bombing campaigns and mass deaths in Gaza. It’s also true that Israel turned its sites primarily to Lebanon and Iran in the nine months since the agreement was signed, and with the US joining the fight against Iran and the disruption to the oil supply that resulted the media (and therefore most people) shifted their focus to that conflict.

However Israel has not for one minute stopped attacking and blockading Gaza. Gaza’s Government Media Office has documented 3,465 Israeli violations of the agreement, and about four Palestinians have been killed (and thirteen injured) every single day since the day the agreement was signed. That might not sound like a lot, but this isn’t car accidents or heart attacks. Israel is targeting and killing these people.

Countless reports also suggest that there is not now and has not been enough aid for the millions of displaced and destitute Palestinians being allowed in to Gaza by Israel, who of course still controls every point of entry into the strip. I still see videos every day of masses of people clamoring to get a bottle of water or bowl of rice from scattered and under-resourced soup kitchens, and here stories of people dying from lack of medicine or healthcare that is being withheld by the Israeli occupation.

The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that no hospital is fully operational, and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) warns that water is a daily uncertainty for 1.1 million children. - 18JUN2026

I know it’s hard to keep eyes on Gaza with so much else going on in the world (and domestically in the US) but we can’t forget that the naked aggression Israel is demonstrating in Palestine and Lebanon is just the start of their expansionist vision. Frankly anyone who thinks that Russia, China, or even the United States is a bigger threat to world peace than Israel just isn’t paying attention.

T4P Stuff

We have started a “book club” at Tech for Palestine! Each month we announce a new book that people may or may not choose to read, and there is a channel on the T4P Discord server where anyone can discuss the book with me and others. At the end of the month I do a brief interview with the author on Zoom and then we take questions from the audience. We’re still figuring it out but I’m pretty excited about it.

Our first book was The Complicit Lens, by Robin Andersen, and our second one was Mapping My Return, by Salman Abu Sitta. Also in the queue are The General’s Son, by Miko Peled, The Hundred Years War on Palestine, by Rashid Khalidi, and From the Clinic to the Streets, by Lara Sheehi. Three really excellent books that I genuinely loved, written by amazing and inspiring people. I can’t wait to talk to them.

We also had a one-day event in Brussels in early June, and two of our featured speakers were Dyab Abou Jahjah of the Hind Rajab Foundation, and Greta Thunberg.

If you haven’t already I highly recommend watching the Adam Curtis film The Century of the Self. Among other things, this film will explain how Edward Bernays leveraged the work of his uncle, Sigmund Freud, to take mass manipulation to a new level, ultimately developing what is now known as the “Public Relations” field.

Most of us know the government and news media do this too, but usually they do it in service of manufacturing consent for unpopular policies such as war and austerity, or to disrupt and dismantle political organizations that threaten the status quo. We call these machinations PSYOPS, an abbreviation for ‘psychological operations’.

Something else most of us know by now is that there is something called the “Israel Lobby”, which is a vast, loosely connected network of organizations and people who are deeply invested in defending Israel against any criticism, and promoting it, dishonestly, as both a liberal democracy and invaluable ally to the United States and the West/Global north more broadly.

We also know by now that one of the tools Israel uses extensively is propaganda, or what they call ‘hasbara’. So extensively that Israel’s publicly acknowledged hasbara budget has been set at nearly $750 million for 2026. Hasbara is a PSYOP, consisting of what the revolutionary psychoanalyst Dr. Lara Sheehi calls ‘psychic intrusions’, and the prescription she argues for in her new book is ‘psychic militancy’.

From The Clinic To The Streets

I’m sure I’ve mentioned this in a previous post, but I first became aware of Dr. Sheehi when we were seated across from each other at the ArabCon banquet last year in Dearborn. She was sitting next to Rania Khalek of Breakthrough News (subscribe!) and although I didn’t really know either of them I enjoyed the banter greatly. (By the way, do yourself a favor and listen to this fantastic discussion they had recently.)

I had a great conversation with Dr. Sheehi about the book a couple nights ago. Well, I say it was a conversation about the book but let’s be honest, it was largely me trauma-dumping my personal history and fumbling attempts to explain how impactful her analysis had been on my own understanding of colonialism and militancy. We’re going to have a more focused conversation about the book in the near future as part of the new Tech for Palestine Book Club, so stay tuned for that!

As someone who is deathly allergic to authoritarianism, dogmatism, fundamentalism, and all related ‘ism’s, words like ‘revolutionary’ and ‘militant’ make me uneasy. I’m also quite skeptical of psychoanalysis, though I think people like Edward Bernays have made it impossible to deny the substantial impact of the psychology on belief and behavior. How deeply embedded the counterintuitively pro-Israel sentiment is among non-Jews in the West is another indication.

In other words I think it’s obvious that a major goal of people in the “pro-Israel” (Zionist) movement, whether conscious or unconscious, is to capture hearts and minds by way of psychological manipulation, or ‘psychic intrusions’. It seems equally obvious that in a war where one side is using PSYOPS, the other side needs to cultivate ways of resisting that manipulation in an uncompromising, and dare I say militant, way.

There is some lingo in the book that takes some getting used to if you aren’t really familiar with revolutionary and decolonial politics, but in my opinion she explains Franz Fanon in a way that makes it much easier to understand than his own writing. I read The Wretched of the Earth and found it very hard to follow, but possibly only because it was written for a colonized audience, which isn’t me. I do believe that the struggle for Palestinian liberation is an anti-colonial struggle though, so while I may not be directly impacted by colonization I’m definitely in the fight against it.

I’ll wrap here even though there is so much more I could say, because really you shouldn’t be spending time reading this that you should spend reading the book.

Paranoia? Maybe. But whatever it might say about my psyche, that’s the truth.

I decided to cut & paste what I wrote this morning and send it to you all because I need to get it off my chest, but as you might understand when you read it I don’t want to spend extra energy centering myself on this Substack. So what you read below is my very lightly edited (one name and one unnecessary sentence removed) entry for today.

I’m also always open to feedback, so please do tell me if you think I’m rationalizing or justifying bad behavior. Just be prepared to defend the accusation, because I argue!2

Well, I’m still stewing about <redacted> accusing me of “saviourism” yesterday. I did my interview with Robin Andersen about The Complicit Lens, which I thought went pretty well overall, but at one point Robin shouted out The Voice of Hind Rajab as being an important film.3 In that 30 seconds I had to make a choice about whether to push back and potentially start an argument that derailed the conversation, or bite my tongue. I chose the latter. Nobody who knows me would expect me to do the latter. As I told <redacted> I have been accused of being argumentative to a fault. My every instinct was to push back. That is who I am and what I wanted to do in the moment. It was a sacrifice, in my mind, to let it slide. I’m not saying that to be like “oh look how great I am” anymore than I kept my mouth shut because I think I know better than Palestinians. I kept my mouth shut because I had to assess half a dozen different concerns in one second. What will the author think? What will other authors who consider coming on think? What will Paul/T4P think? What will the audience think? Who would served by this? What impact would it have on our organization if I threw Watermelon Pictures under the bus to score a rhetorical point against an author gracing us with their presence? As I told <redacted> I would, I sent a follow-up email to the author and encouraged her to read Samantha Youssef’s piece and reconsider her support for the film. She replied that this was reasonable and that I was welcome to edit the discussion to remove her comments. I don’t know if I want to do that. I’m not sure what my responsibility is. Not because I think I’m anyone’s saviour, but the opposite. I am just a fucking human being doing his best in every situation. Sometimes you have to stand down in a battle so you have the position to win the war. Is this what I was doing? Was I preserving my platform? Was I preserving my platform for myself, or for the cause? I believe I was doing it for the cause. I think if I had started an argument about the film I would have been virtue signaling. At the very least I would have opened myself up to that critique. I didn’t want to appear to be showing off my knowledge and virtue. Like oh you wrote a whole book on media complicity but you’re sitting here promoting propagandistic Hollywood trash? Did all these things really go through my mind in that 30 seconds? I don’t remember. All I know is that I had to make a split-second decision as to how to respond and I chose to stay silent. I could say that I wish I hadn’t but I’m not sure that’s true. As I mentioned I certainly would have preferred to push back, but that doesn’t help me decide whether it would have been the right course of action. I think what annoys me most is that someone would lodge a criticism like “saviourism” when they don’t even know me. Oh you read a couple of my Substack posts and we had a couple conversations so now you feel qualified to assess whether my commitment to the cause is self-serving? I suppose one could argue that the act was an example of ‘saviourism’ without necessarily condemning my activism on the whole, but that doesn’t make a lot of sense. I always think of that guy at the People’s Conference in Detroit who asked me whether I would continue standing for Palestine if others in the movement told me I was unwelcome, and I said that of course I would because a) I’m not doing it “for them” and b) I know other Palestinians who appreciate my effort. That’s why I cringe a bit when people say “listen to Palestinians”. Listen to which Palestinians? Because I’m pretty fucking sure that Abbas and Sinwar would have given somewhat different answers to the same questions about what we should do. I’m glad I had this opportunity to vent, but I’m not sure it’s out of my system yet. I’m going to have to write a Substack post about it, probably. Ask my community for validation. (Sarcasm)

I was raised to be very skeptical of the media, salespeople and politicians.

Long before I was born my father was a professional con man. Among other things he was what is called a mechanic. He would be hired to deal a private poker game and then stack the deck in order to extract as much money as he could from a ‘mark’, or target. He claimed to have done this in the employ of the mafia but he was also an exceptional liar, so who knows. But on many occasions I saw him do things with playing cards that I can’t explain to this day, so it’s not unbelievable.

I think this is why he hated television commercials with a passion. He could see right through the psychological techniques they used to manipulate audiences and it enraged him. Back then the closest thing to a remote control was one of us kids, and we learned quickly about the importance of turning down the volume before the first word of a commercial came through the speaker. I’m sure I’m better off for it.

So when I was twenty years old and saw the documentary film Manufacturing Consent, which is about Noam Chomsky and Edward Hermann’s book of the same name, I was already primed to accept the main thesis of their work. In fact it really just gave me a vocabulary and evidence for suspicions I already had about the media’s role in creating and perpetuating popular support for capitalism and imperialism. Unfortunately I wasn’t equipped to do anything with that information at that time1, so instead of radicalizing me further it just helped me rationalize my depoliticization.

It would be more than thirty years before I watched the film again, but this time it came as part of a deep dive into socialist political theory so I had a lot more use for the information and I was better equipped for the resulting depression. It has also been helpful inasmuch as it has provided support for an analytical framework for understanding the massive tide of propaganda we’ve been swimming against during Israel’s genocide in Gaza (now fully extending into Lebanon). I’m halfway through a book called The Complicit Lens, by Robin Andersen that illuminates this thoroughly.2

For all these very valid criticisms of the news media, something arguably more insidious and influential is how Hollywood packages and promotes U.S. propaganda around the whole world. A friend of mine from the global south recently told me how she had grown up admiring America, even knowing all the horrific things it had done in her part of the world. I have no doubt that Hollywood gets a lot of credit for that.

I’ve spent quite a few hours over the past week watching interviews with Samantha Youssef, in which she discusses Hollywood propaganda from her insiders perspective. It has been incredibly enlightening. I’ve also done a couple careful readings of her paper, Encoding Empire: How Black Panther Manufactures Consent for Imperialism Among Oppressed Groups, in which she does a “thematic analysis”3 of the Black Panther franchise to reveal the many ways it works as pro-empire propaganda.

Most critically, Samantha, who has Palestinian-Ukrainian heritage, has come out4 very strongly against the new film The Voice of Hind Rajab. This critique was actually the first time I engaged with Samantha, in a private chat group, and it took me by surprise. I had heard nothing but good things about the film until then, and largely from other Palestinians (including Hamza and Badie Ali, the founders of the film’s distribution company Watermelon Pictures).5

I admit I wasn’t planning to watch the film to begin with because I followed the story as it unfolded in realtime and I figured the film would just depress and anger me. Not only did Samantha’s analysis reinforce my choice, it made me want very much to discourage anyone else from seeing or promoting this film. I’m not going to try to reproduce her arguments here, you can read/listen to her yourself and come to your own conclusions. But for me the undeniable conclusion is that this film ultimately does more harm than good (if any) for the cause of Palestinian liberation.

This is the important point. I am a big supporter of Watermelon Pictures. I bought a hoodie before Watermelon+ launched and subscribed the day it did. I’ve also met Hamza and Badie and I have much respect for their work. So as uncomfortable as it is to say so, especially as someone who is not Palestinian and who wants very much for Hind’s story to be told, I think supporting and promoting this film is a mistake. Now when I see movement groups hosting screenings it makes me cringe.

Unfortunately the popularity of this film in the mainstream likely means irresistible economic incentives to continue promoting and supporting it, but maybe that is the silver lining? If the popularity of this film brings new money and customers to Watermelon+, maybe that elevates the better films they have, like Palestine 36.6

So it was weird to hear Bartov, in a recent interview on Democracy Now!, deny that his position is anti-Zionist. On the contrary, in his new book Israel: What Went Wrong, he seems to be implying that the Zionist project had respectable origins but somewhere along the way it went astray.

I haven’t read the book so I’m not here to review or critique it, I just want to talk about that basic point. The same point the Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, who has been writing criticism of Israel in the Israeli paper Haaretz for 40 years, pushed back on during that same interview segment: the idea that Israel “went wrong” and that the problem with Israel is not intrinsic to Zionism.

As someone who identifies as strongly anti-Zionist I obviously sided with Gideon Levy, but on reflection I understand Bartov’s point. I still disagree with it, but I understand it. I believe he was saying that in the context of significant persecution of Jews in Europe and many other nations seeking to build ethno-states in that era, it was perfectly reasonable for the Jews to want their own ethno-state. A place where their existence wasn’t contingent on a majority group allowing them to live.

I personally believe ethno-states are incompatible with pluralism, democracy, and (somewhat tangentially) secularism, so I disagree with that goal on principle. However I do think it’s fair to distinguish between the aspiration to have a “Jewish state” and how Zionism actually manifested materially, as a settler-colonial project in Palestine. So Bartov is basically saying he’s not opposed to Zionism in principle, but in practice.

It does make me wonder whether his brand of criticism undermines the project for Palestinian liberation though. I am of the view that Israel is irredeemable, and that the Palestinians will not be free until the apartheid state of Israel is dismantled and replaced with actual democracy. Based on the aforementioned interview I think Bartov and Levy would agree with me. So why would anyone with that goal even suggest that the ideology on which Israel was built is redeemable? It makes no sense.

In fact I sometimes wonder if the hyper-focus on the definition and applicability of the word ‘genocide’ to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza is not just a way of distracting from the material impacts of the genocide and the fact that Israel has been conducting a “slow genocide” in Palestine since at least 1948. After all if it took a genocide scholar two years of careful consideration to come to the conclusion that the conditions of genocide had been met, the bar must be way higher than we thought.

That isn’t to say I think Bartov is being deliberately deceptive. Maybe his decision to wait until it was almost completely uncontroversial to identify the genocide as such was an unconscious attempt to dilute the message. But it was absolutely diluted, and his going on a media tour disavowing anti-Zionism isn’t helping solidify it.

I have written a lot about this but it’s pretty central to the oppression of Palestinians so it’s something worth spending more time on. I used to avoid using the word ‘Zionist’ because I believed it was basically a code word for ‘Jew’ used by neo-Nazis, so it made sense to me when people would argue that we shouldn’t use the word lest we turn people off or cause misunderstandings. I was wrong, it doesn’t make sense.

It is true that the word means different things to different people, and that like any other word that embodies a broad set of ideas it can be misunderstood. As the author rightly points out, some other words that have this issue are capitalism, colonialism, communism, progressivism and socialism, implying they are also obsolete.

Of course those words aren’t all useless. Most people have a least a sense of what you’re talking about when you use them, you just might have to be a little more careful to situate them when making an argument. For example I don’t expect people to know exactly what I mean when I say colonialism and I’m not exactly sure what people mean when they use it. So like most people if I want to be precise I will usually provide context, like a reference to specific pattern of foreign policy or military action.

Cognitive dissonance gets thrown around a lot these days but it’s often misused. The term was coined by social psychologist Leon Festinger back in the ‘50’s to describe the psychological distress people experience when new information contradicts their strongly held beliefs, and the defenses that emerge to rationalize the new info away. What could more aptly describe responding to the global awakening to the evils of Zionism with a long-form article arguing for the abolition of the term?

Instead of identifying as Zionist or anti-Zionist, the author argues, ⁠”one should say: I am for Israel’s right to exist—or against Israel’s right to exist. I am pro-settler or anti-settler. I support the current government of Israel’s policies or I do not. I support Israel as a Jewish state or I do not.”

So just to make sure you’re keeping up, ‘colonialism’ is a “muddy companion word” to Zionism, but it’s okay to refer to the colonizers as ‘settlers’ and it’s a matter of opinion on which reasonable people can disagree whether the settlers terroristic violations of international law and basic tenets of humanity is right or wrong. The phrase “Israel has a right to exist” is clear and unimpeachable, but if you add the implied “as an apartheid state” you’re not making any sense at all. Stop using big confusing words. You can criticize the current Israeli government or its policies, but if you suggest that “Jewish democratic state” is an oxymoron you’re an antisemite.

The author is right about one thing, though. I really doesn’t matter what you call it. The settler-colonial project that has occupied Palestine and committed genocide against the Palestinians for the past 75+ years should be dismantled and all of Palestine should be free from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean sea.

I’ll close by pasting a copy of a post I made on LinkedIn last week when I was less interested in addressing this topic seriously. In retrospect it’s not a great piece of satire because the definition of ‘duck’ seems to switch between ‘Zionist’ and ‘Jew’, but I left it because the Zionist’s deliberate conflation of terms is part of the problem.

That being said, I feel it’s important for readers to understand who I am and how I came to be this way. Given that all of us are brought up surrounded by different values and belief systems and with different economic positions and cultural contexts, I think it’s useful to know the frame in which someone’s worldview has evolved.

So with that in mind, here is what I think you should know about me:

The Material Conditions

My father was an ex-convict with little formal education and my mother is a former Catholic nun. I am the youngest of 10 children. My mom took us kids away and divorced my abusive father when I was 7 years old. I was arrested at 13 for threatening my brother with a kitchen knife, and spent 2.5 years drinking and drugging (as they say)1, committing petty crimes and skipping school a lot. As a result of all this I was on probation and in and out of juvenile detention until age 16, when I quit school and my mom offered me the option of paying rent or moving out, resulting in the latter.

I got my G.E.D. and joined the US Army at 18, stationed in West Germany during the Cold War. I was invited to leave the Army at 20 (early but “honorably”) and worked various odd jobs between Michigan and California for a few years, until in 1993 I stole a Park Ranger truck (while drunk) at 24 and spent 90 days, including my 25th birthday, in the county jail, followed by 6 months in rehab. Not long after I got out of rehab I developed an obsession with an online game (Genesis MUD), which drew me in to the world of tech, where I have worked (more or less consistently) for 30 years.

The Philosophical Conditions

My parents were what I would describe as radical Catholics (see ‘Focolare’, ‘Cursillo’, and ‘Charismatic Renewal’), but with some awareness of and appreciation for Judaism as well. Some of my earliest memories are of the menorah on the fireplace mantle and watching The Sound of Music and The Fiddler on the Roof when I was very young.

When my parents divorced my mom brought us into the Word of God community in Ann Arbor, Michigan, an organization I variously describe as fundamentalist, fanatical, and a cult. Not that the community was without good people and in some ways a strong, loyal collective sensibility that I can appreciate. But when I started asking hard questions and got “just have faith” as an answer, I was unimpressed.

Living on my own in a college town, almost all my friends between the ages of 16 and 25 (except for a few who I knew from the Word of God) were students at the University of Michigan. It was probably some of those students who recommended authors like Sartre, Camus, Dostoevsky, and other existentialists to me, and it’s safe to say that reading those books instigated an existential crisis that persists over 35 years later.

How Should a Person Be?

I’ve always envied (and somewhat resented, if I’m being honest) people who are able to just live their lives without overthinking the ‘why’ of it all. I contemplate the meaning of life, the universe and everything literally every single day, and the worst part of it is that I don’t believe anyone (living or dead) has (or had) the answer.

As far as I know, reason is the only reliable skill humans have to determine facts about the universe, and reason alone cannot explain why anything exists. It’s great at explaining how things exist. The big bang. Evolution. Dark matter. Quantum Entanglement. These are all reasonable (if difficult) explanations for how things are. But once we start talking about why things are the way they are we are in the territory of faith, and in my view faith is not at all useful for evaluating competing claims.

One result of rejecting the beliefs imposed on me in my youth and not wanting to sign up for another pre-packaged set, was that I was forced to think extremely critically about my opinions and values and to try as hard as I could to determine my own. As I already mentioned this meant reading a fair number of books in my early 20’s, the most influential of which were by Hermann Hesse, Richard Bach, and Tom Robbins2. I believe all were recommended by my Jewish-American girlfriend3 at the time.

Who Have I Become?

In the early 2000’s, coincidentally the same year Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook, a friend and I launched an online discussion forum called The Freethought Forum. The idea was to make a forum for discussion of life, the universe and everything without heavy-handed content moderation, and it was reasonably successful. We had engaged with hundreds of likeminded people across several other forums, so we had a substantial user base from the jump.

Over the 20+ years that forum has been online I’ve had countless discussions and debates about philosophy and politics, among all the other things people like to think and talk about, with a lot of really smart people (most of whom had far more formal education than me.) During that time I developed a worldview that works for me, but until 2020 I still struggled with how I should “show up” in the world.

I spent almost 20 years just existing, rationalizing my lack of engagement with the world4 as perfectly justifiable as long as I was paying my taxes and not hurting anyone. Nevertheless, my parents (for all their faults) had instilled in me a tremendous sense of responsibility to society that I couldn’t shake and didn’t know how to fulfill. At the same time I wasn’t just apolitical, I was downright anti-political.

Political Awakening

It goes without saying that 2020 was a monumentally significant year in the US and around the world, but the particular way that year impacted me, informing my response to the George Floyd protests and Covid-19, was the death of Michael J. Brooks.5 The first time I ever heard that name was when Cornel West tweeted an R.I.P., and suddenly I started noticing people from all walks of life lamenting the loss.

Nobody seemed to have a bad word to say about him6, and everyone was in awe of how passionate and driven he was to make a difference. He was a political analyst with a YouTube show who wasn’t just pontificating to hear the sound of his own voice or being snarky to entertain himself. He was genuinely concerned with sharing his knowledge and analysis with the world and working to make it a better one. From there I came under an avalanche of shows, books, and a crash course in political science, philosophy, electoral politics, geopolitics, etc. but no idea what to do about it.

What really struck me was that he identified as a socialist (Socialist? Not sure if he would have said big ‘s’ or small ‘s’, but definitely socialist!) I swear this was the first time in my adult life that I heard someone relatively young, very smart, well-educated, and apparently not some ranting conspiracy theorist identified as a socialist.7

Once I started taking politics seriously I also started taking history, economics, sociology and geopolitics more seriously. I started watching The Majority Report and many satellite shows8 regularly, buying every book they mentioned, and even dipped my toes into the electoral process9 and joined the DSA10. None of these experiences really made me feel like I was “doing something”, though, even though my political consciousness was expanding rapidly and my desire to act was growing alongside it.

Discovering Palestine

Looking at my journal entries, on October 7th, 2023 I was in the middle of reading Frances Fitzgerald’s seminal work on the Vietnam War, Fire In The Lake, and I was impatient to start reading If We Burn, by Vincent Bevins, an analysis of what went wrong in the largest of the mass protest movements in the 2010’s. For some reason I didn’t mention the Hamas attacks on Israel until October 10th, at which time I wrote:

I’ve been listening to American Prestige podcast daily since Hamas attacked Israel, and yesterday they had a really good guest who is a professor of, I think, Middle East studies.11 He made the really good and tragic point that Gaza was a powder keg waiting to explode, as all settler-colonial projects are, and that Hamas’ actions were wholly predictable under the circumstances. There are 17 yr olds in Gaza who have lived their entire life in one of the poorest, most desolate landscapes on earth as a result of an Israeli blockade that has lasted since they were born, and they live right next to one of the richest societies... at least in the region, maybe in the world. At some point something’s gotta give. That is just physics. The professor said historically the only time a colonized population HASN’T eventually reacted violently are circumstances like North America, where the colonizers killed enough of the native population to render it impotent. I’m paraphrasing, but that was the gist of his argument. Anyway that professor and several others have also made the argument that this situation represents a paradigm shift in Israel. The Netanyahu government has been trying to pretend that the situation was under control and that in the worst case they didn’t have much to fear from the Palestinians, but now that veil has been ripped off and their vulnerability exposed. It seems likely that the Israeli people are going to change their opinion for better or worse. I’m not making a lot of sense, but this is what’s on my mind this morning so this is what I’m writing about.

Back then I had a friend I used to chat with almost every day, yet for some reason the topic of the Hamas attacks didn’t come up until October 14th, when I shared links to a couple TikTok videos with her. The first was a user named notyourlawyermd and talked about Israel’s control of Gaza’s water, the second was Sim Kern questioning why Jews believe they need a “homeland” (what Sim called a “theocratic ethno-state”).12

In those days TikTok really was my primary source of information about the history of Palestine, just as Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton warned. Of course I was also reading books, watching YouTube “explainers”, and consuming lots of overseas media like Britain’s Channel 4 and Al Jazeera to follow the genocide as it developed. That I was watching a live-streamed genocide was obvious13, but what could I do about it?

On or about January 3rd, 2024 I saw Paul Biggar interviewed on Counter Points, and that’s how I learned about his brand new initiative called Tech for Palestine. I wasn’t sure what I could add to the group but I joined immediately, hungry for the chance to do anything to put everything I had been learning to some use. The rest as they say is history, and most of that is documented in the virtual pages of this Substack.

The Struggle is the Point

As I have been learning about the history of Palestine and watching current events unfold around the world—especially the rising fascism and mask-off imperialism being demonstrated (predominantly) by the United States and Israel—it has become very clear to me that the struggle for liberation of Palestine reflects, to one degree or another, just about every other struggle for freedom and liberty. It has also become clear that the ordinary people of the world are at an extraordinary disadvantage.

I’m not going to lie, I am not optimistic about the future. All signs point to things getting quite a lot worse before (and if) they start to get better. But in a very real sense the better world I want to live in is already here—it’s the work in progress that I and everyone else who is actively engaging with the world is trying to build. I’m not in the movement because I expect a miraculous outcome (though that’s not impossible!) but because this is who I want to be and what I want to be doing. And the fact that there are many others getting up every day and doing the same is what keeps me going.

The first time I read it was a “red pill” moment for me (in the original sense of the term1, not the bastardized pro-Trump right-winger sense). Someone had finally articulated a critique of capitalism that I had intuited at a young age but could never adequately express, at the same time explaining why I could never express it. Because it had so thoroughly permeated humanity it had become simply how the world works.

I had a similar epiphany when I started learning about the history of Palestine and the origins of Zionism, the political ideology that (in practice) demands the existence of a “Jewish state” in historic Palestine. A tremendous amount of ink has been spilled over describing, defining, attacking and defending this ideology, but don’t let that confuse you. It really is as simple as that. The entire “conflict” that has been roiling the region since the mid- to late 19th century (though rapidly accelerated in 1948) is the result of one ethnic/religious group demanding exclusive ownership of historic Palestine.

During an event titled Imperial Continuity: Palestine, Iraq, and US Policy at the University of Washington, the late Edward Said was asked whether the Jewish people had a claim to historic Palestine. His response is worth quoting verbatim:

One difference between Capitalist Realism and Zionist Realism is that the former developed and spread more organically throughout the world. I mean sure, there were committed propagandists such as the OG neoliberals like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek who worked tirelessly to promote their “free market” ideology, but once their ideas started catching on they really seem to have spread naturally.

Zionism, on the other hand, has required hundreds of millions of dollars, tens of thousands of professional propagandists, and a vast network of “pro-Israel” organizations to keep it going for as long as it has. This is because once you know even the most basic facts about the history (and present) it is obviously unjust.

The question isn’t “Does Israel have a right to exist?” it is “Does Israel (or any other country) have a right to maintain an apartheid state and commit genocide against the indigenous people of the land?” The answer is obviously “no”, and that judgement has been confirmed ad nauseam by the United Nations and international legal precedent.

At this point all of this is so obvious as to be trivial to state, so why is there still anyone, in fact many people, who still support Israel? Fisher wrote:

“Capitalist realism as I understand it [...] is more like a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action.

I think this is key. The “pro-Israel” narrative has been so pervasive for so long, for many people it has become simply how the world works. Israeli Jews (a necessary distinction because approximately 25% of Israelis are not Jewish) are believed to be the natural citizens of Palestine who in their great benevolence allow non-Jews to live there (with significant limitations) but despite their great generosity the ungrateful non-Jewish barbarians periodically and randomly attack them. What else can they do but build walls, fill their prisons and slaughter Palestinians in the name of “security”?

The tide is shifting. I have only been awake for a couple years at this point, but I have heard many people who have been deeply involved in the movement for Palestinian liberation for decades say they have never seen such a seismic shift in public opinion in the “western” world. I’m quite sympathetic to those who say “who gives a shit what Americans think?” but I think it matters a lot. Support for Israel has been bipartisan in this country for decades, but the more public opinion shifts the less likely that is remain true. The government is still far behind the people, but they will come around.

All that being said, now is not the time to be complacent. Many people have turned away from the region since the “ceasefire”,2 and the joint US-Israel war on Iran have completely distracted people from Israel’s ongoing occupation and terror in Gaza and its war of aggression and occupation of Southern Lebanon. If you read articles following previous Israeli hostilities (operations “Cast Lead” and “Protective Edge”, for example) you’ll find that these events often lead to increased awareness in the US, but only temporarily. As soon as the heat dies down the media (and thus the population) look away, and the propagandists regroup and double their efforts.

It remains difficult to imagine a world without Zionism, but it’s a world we need.

It’s hard for me to understand the attachment many Palestinians have to their homeland because I can’t really relate. We left the house (and city) where I was born when I was only seven years old, then moved again and again after that. By the time I was eighteen years old I had lived in 10 different houses in three cities.

Of course I was in the United States the whole time, the state of Michigan in particular, so I have a certain affinity to this area of the world. But much of that is just because it’s easy to get around. I know the language and the culture, I don’t much care about the place. The “land” has never meant anything to me.

That being said, it’s starting to become clear to me how and why the “right of return” is so important to so many Palestinians, and what a tragedy it was that Yasser Arafat’s PLO found it necessary to effectively forfeit that right in the Oslo Accords in the 90’s.

I just finished reading the great memoir Mapping My Return, by Salman Abu Sitta, recommended by . Long story short, Salman Abu Sitta was born in Palestine in 1937 and his family was exiled from their land during the Nakba in 1948. After traveling the world working as an engineer and raising a family, he decided to dedicate the remainder of his life to building the Palestine Land Society (PLS).

In addition to reading the book, I highly recommend you watch this video in which he works with Forensic Architecture to reconstruct a 3D model of his family’s land and this one from the 25th anniversary of the founding of the PLS (in the year 2000) where he explains the extensive mapping work he’s done. It’s really awe-inspiring. This isn’t a hobby for him, it’s a meticulously engineered plan for eventual return.

The United Nations has long endorsed the right of people to leave and return to their country at will, codified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) (which itself was heavily influenced and promoted by Eleanor Roosevelt). Article 13(2) of the UDHR states: “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country”.

One of the earliest resolutions passed by the United Nations General Assembly, Resolution 194, declared “… that the [Palestinian] refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their nieghbours [sic] should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good.” Annex II – (Text of Resolution 194 (III) at Annex II).

The UN weighed in again after the Six-Day War: “In 1967, Security Council resolutions [Res 237 & Res 242], considered binding on all member states, required Israel to undertake obligations to cooperate in the return of the second wave of Palestinian refugees to their homes.”

A study of the Palestinian Right of Return conducted by the United Nations in 1978, includes the statements “The right of a person to return to his home in his native country traditionally has been included among an individual’s fundamental rights”, and “in 1974 the United Nations General Assembly explicitly recognized that the Palestinian people were entitled to self-determination in accordance with the United Nations Charter, and to reaffirm their inalienable right of return” .

I could go on and on, but suffice it to say there have been countless resolutions by many bodies of the United Nations that have reaffirmed the Palestinian’s right of return, despite Israel’s ongoing refusal of that right. That’s what makes it all the more infuriating when Israel not only refuses to grant that right but continues to steal more and more land from the Palestinians every day, in Gaza and the West Bank, and is now moving to occupy Southern Lebanon too.

In closely related news, every year on March 30th the Palestinian people commemorate Land Day to honor the six Palestinian citizens of Israel1 who were killed while protesting Israel’s appropriation of even more Palestinian land in 1976.

This year, Israel chose to celebrate Land Day by passing one of the most barbaric capital punishment laws in the history of the “civilized” world, which allows for the execution of Palestinian prisoners after simple majority of judges (in military courts) convicts. To quote Amnesty International, “while the law does not explicitly reference ethnicity or nationality, it is effectively designed to target Palestinians exclusively. It also introduces an exceptional execution regime by hanging, characterised by secrecy, and limited access to legal counsel and external oversight.”

People argue that it is unreasonable, impractical, and thus impossible that the Palestinian people will ever be allowed to return, but none of these are true. The land is very far from “full”, the land where a large majority of the villages stood that were destroyed in 1948 is still vacant, and the vast majority of Israelis live clustered in a few cities such as Haifa, Jaffa, and Tel Aviv. Yes, it does seem improbable that the current wildly racist generations of Israeli Jews would ever allow it, but populations change.

As I said in the beginning for me it’s easy to understand people who might decide to just live somewhere else and go on with their lives, accepting the unjust cards they were dealt. But at the same time I’m increasingly sympathetic to those who refuse to give up their right to return; who are willing to die trying.

She wasn’t disparaging boycotts or getting suggestions about people and topics to showcase on her platform, but the aggressive and entitled way some people do it.

I have a platform just large enough that it comes off as false modesty to deny it, but small enough that it feels completely ridiculous to use the term to describe it. Even so I feel the pressure sometimes from people who aggressively push a particular event, news item, charity, or boycott target and frame it as a moral failing if I don’t adopt their priorities as my own. I boycott. I donate. I write. I write, share, and collaborate with others on several social media platforms. I work full-time for an advocacy organization. Pretty soon I’ll be allowing embarrassing videos of myself struggling to articulate my thoughts about what I’m reading and why into the world. In other words I am doing more than my part to make the world a better place.

The irony is that this kind of social pressure only really affects people who care in the first place. People who don’t care or who think it’s not their problem just dismiss the demands as yet another reason they don’t get involved. It’s the people who care, who already feel as if they’re not doing enough, who are demoralized by these demands.

This is what some people mean when they talk about “virtue signaling”. Not people who use “social justice warrior” as an insult, fuck those people. But people trying to illuminate the difference between real advocates/activists doing the grinding, thankless work on the ground day after day, and poseurs who prioritize appearing virtuous over being virtuous. Who pretend that anyone who isn’t doing everything possible for every possible cause at all times is an enemy of progress.

I know that sometimes people who do this are agents of chaos, deliberately demoralizing and dividing people to keep them scattered and ineffective. But I think most of the time it’s just naive and overzealous people, often young people, whose ideas about activism and advocacy are more impulsive than strategic.

Last night I read (and then listened to) the speech made by the outgoing UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini at the Geneva Graduate Institute. It’s an excellent encapsulation of the current state of affairs even if I would push back on some of the framing in the statement (e.g. Israel and Palestine are not “neighbors”, the former is illegally and immorally occupying the latter).

What really strikes me, though, is that UNRWA, along with many other organizations and people, have been in this struggle for over 75 years and in some ways things have only gotten worse. In my view this doesn’t reflect a lack of virtuous intent or action, but a flawed or nonexistent long-term strategy. This is strongly reinforced by the book I am currently reading, Mapping My Return, by Salman Abu Sitta1. A memoir of a man who was a boy during the Nakba in 1948 and not only saw, but lived the catastrophe.

People, especially here in the US, think the struggle in Palestine is some ancient animosity or religious conflict wherein “both sides” are equally to blame. They do not comprehend that this is a straightforward case of settler-colonialism2, even as literal “settlers”, described as such even in mainstream (and especially Israeli) media, are in the news every day for terrorizing, displacing, and killing indigenous Palestinians.

I realized shortly after I pulled my head out of the sand and decided to educate myself on this issue and start pursuing advocacy full-time that this would be a long and difficult fight. So for me the pressure of unreasonable expectations is relatively easy to brush off. The fact is I don’t have to do anything at all, so if what I am doing is perceived as ineffective or insufficient by some, oh well. The only thing that does keep me up at night (figuratively) is when I worry that something I am doing or some org I support is actually working against the movement or the people of Palestine. So that’s something I try to stay vigilant about and constantly reevaluate.

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I just finished reading Terms of Servitude, by Omar Zahzah. I met Omar a few weeks ago and when I told him I help run Tech for Palestine we got to talking about the recent explosive growth of UpScrolled. This of course morphed into a good conversation about the suppression of pro-Palestinian content on social media more broadly, and then he mentioned that he had written a book on the topic.

I was immediately intrigued but especially so when he said the subtitle was “zionism, silicon valley, and digital settler colonialism in the palestinian liberation struggle”. I couldn’t have come up with a more accurate summary of my interests on my own, so of course I knew I had to get it. Fortunately I didn’t have to go far, he gave me a copy.

I don’t like writing book reviews because it feels like trying to describe an oil painting on canvas by producing a facsimile with watercolors on scrap paper, but I have learned to swallow my embarrassment and do it anyway. I suppose if it encourages one other person to read the book or engage with the author’s other writing it will have been worth it, even if the best I can do is poorly summarize some takeaways.

Although he started writing before October, 2023, the book wasn’t published until last year, so he was able to make important additions about events that developed during the past two years of genocide in Gaza. ‘Additions’ being the key word here because he didn’t have to make many (if any) changes. The same suppression has been going on for a very long time, and no doubt plays a significant role in why some in Gaza felt there was no hope for a so-called “peaceful” resolution to their plight.

The quote above is from the “Notes on Process” section at the beginning of the book, and it resonated strongly with me. I have been writing this Substack for a couple years now and it hasn’t gotten any easier to figure out what to write about from day to day, much less week to week. Every day the news, my social media feeds, and every personal interaction consists of one new horror story after the other. Every time I sit down and try to decide on the most important or pertinent thing to write about today, I am literally “overwhelmed by relevance”.

From state-sponsored militias kidnapping and killing people in my country to non-stop aggression in Palestine and the broader region, reflected most recently in Israel and the US carpet-bombing Tehran and the forced expulsion of hundreds of thousands from Southern Lebanon while continuously bombing Beirut. It seems like an empty truism to say “it’s all connected”, but it really is. But that means it’s impossible to start anywhere and write about anything without leaving out a whole lot of context, and as Chomsky and Herman pointed out decades ago in Manufacturing Consent, you run the risk of sounding like a “raving lunatic”.

Every time I read a book that is in any way about Palestinian liberation, I learn about people, organizations, and publications that I have never heard of but have been doing good work for decades. This won’t surprise anyone who knows that I’ve only been on this path since October, 2023, but it surprises me because I have been literally immersed in this project nearly every single minute of the past two and a half years.

One name that came up several times in the book is the author of the foreword, Steven Salaita1. It turns out Salaita is a former tenured professor who lost his position because of his public criticisms of Israel and Zionism over ten years ago, yet for some reason I hadn’t heard of him until now. I’m looking forward to learning more. (Side note: In transcribing my notes this morning from another recent book I read, Selling Israel, I came across a reference to Salaita as one of a number of scholars who views the “history and struggle of the Palestinians” through the lens of “a transnational indigenous studies framework”. Now I’m even more intrigued.

During another side quest I went on in the process of transcribing my notes from Terms of Servitude, I came across the NY Times obituary for Edward Said2. It was by and large a fairly neutral piece, but I did notice something interesting. Although the author states that “Dr. Said was born in Jerusalem during the British Mandate in Palestine”, at no point in the rest of the obituary, where “Palestinian(s)” is used 13 times, does he refer to Said as Palestinian.

This might not be odd in itself—I can imagine that my obituary won’t describe me as an American—but when the piece is replete with descriptions like “most prominent advocate in the United States of the cause of Palestinian independence”, “fierce proponent of the Palestinian cause”, “an outspoken advocate of a Palestinian homeland”, and “a spokesman for the Palestinian cause”, it seems odd not to plainly state that he was Palestinian himself. Especially since the Times never hesitates to describe figures such as Yasser Arafat and Leila Khaled as Palestinian.

Anyway as per usual I have no idea how to wrap this up so I’ll just give the final word to Omar. If I haven’t made it clear enough, don’t stop here. Buy the book, read it, share it, and let’s try to liberate the digital town square for the good of all humanity.

The internet is a medium with the potential to link all Palestinians together--indeed, already has linked all Palestinians together--despite the fragmentation and ghettoization of colonialism, occupation, apartheid, and exile. It is a medium with the potential to galvanize the Palestinian elaboration and pursuit of an ideal, decolonized homeland--a virtual Palestine. Virtual Palestine represents the digital analogue of the ideal of a storied, familiar, and free homeland recounted, envisioned, and anticipated in Palestinian narrative and storytelling as elaborated by Refaat Alareer. In this sense, Virtual Palestine reflects longstanding pre- and anti-colonial ideals that undergird Palestinian utilizations and repurposing of contemporary technologies and media throughout history. Virtual Palestine is what digital settler colonialism mobilizes to inhibit. But Virtual Palestine’s rootedness in Indigenous history and resistance practices ensures digital settler colonialism’s futility, as Palestinian resistance in all of its forms will only continue to utilize alternative forms of creative opposition to imperial and colonial hegemony. (p165)

If you’re reading this you probably know that Zionism is a political ideology that sprung up in the mid-19th century, became codified (and popularized) by Theodore Hertzl in the late 19th century (via his book “Der Judenstaat”) and found its ultimate expression in the Nakba, the mass killing and expulsion of Palestinian Arabs in 1948, and the Naksa, aka the “Six Day War” in 1967, during which Israel occupied (and still occupies) the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and the Syrian Golan Heights.

What you may not know is that there are many very outspoken and harsh critics of the apartheid system in the occupied territories who are nevertheless still Zionists, they just think the occupation in ‘67 and subsequent acts of oppression and dispossession have crossed the line. Some even going as far as to blame the Netanyahu government for all that is wrong with Israel, while implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) continuing to support the idea of Israel as a state that should give preferential treatment to Jews.

That’s why an article titled “Evil in the West Bank”, which unflinchingly describes “a highly effective campaign of ethnic cleansing backed by the Israeli government”, refers to the Israeli police force in the West Bank as “a vicious ultranationalist militia”, and decries the actions of “brainwashed, hate-driven, sadistic settlers”, might lead some to believe it is a critique of Zionism.

“If you’d like to witness human evil at its worst, come with me any day to the West Bank.” — David Shulman

Unfortunately, things start to fall apart as the article continues. Not long after the quote above, the author writes “The army in the territories, like the police, like the civil service, indeed like most of the institutions of Israeli democracy, has been corrupted by Netanyahu’s government.” I’m sorry, what? Are we to believe that the occupation used to be a perfectly decent expression of democracy before Netanyahu?

It did occur to me that I might be reading too much into that statement and maybe I shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. A lot of the stuff in that article is true and accurate and important to share with the readership of the New York Review, for sure. Maybe I shouldn’t let perfect be the enemy of good.

But then he writes, “Is democracy, in some imperfect form, still an intrinsic part of the Israeli worldview, as it was in the Scroll of Independence, the foundational text of the State of Israel? It is, I would guess, for approximately half the body politic.” Okay now he’s just talking crazy, right? I mean he can’t really believe that as many as half of the “body politic” believes in democracy. The same body politic of which a large majority support apartheid and genocide of Palestinians in exile, and about half of whom supported expelling Arab citizens of Israel as far back as 2016?

A few sentences later he makes the claim explicit: “But as long as the occupation, with its daily horrors, continues apace, and as long as the extreme Israeli right is in power, democracy in Israel will be sick at the core.” Who’s going to tell him that democracy in Israel has been nonexistent since 1948? Sick at the core is accurate, but it’s exceedingly generous to suggest that it was ever anything else.

“Some people think that the present crisis was inevitable because of the flaws inherent in the Zionist program from the start. I don’t accept that deterministic teleology, though the settler colonial enterprise in the occupied territories and the failure to come to terms with the Palestinian national movement were and are cardinal sins.” You see what he did there? The Zionist project isn’t (and wasn’t ever) inherently a settler-colonial project, it was deformed and misappropriated.

He seems to have a glimmer of understanding in the final paragraph when he writes “In any case the ethno-nation-state is prone to racism and cruelty, as Hannah Arendt saw clearly in 1947 (and she was a Zionist.)” but it is an odd thing to concede after making so many passes at portraying Israel as a once-upon-a-time “real democracy”.

Anyway I’m sure he means well, and like I said it seems like an objectively good thing to have any strong critique of Israel in a fairly mainstream publication, but if I have learned anything in the past two-plus years it’s that the very existence of the Zionist state of Israel is, to quote Miko Peled, the biggest obstacle to Palestinian liberation. Of course the Netanyahu government is poison and the evil occupation must end, but the future I want to see is one where all Palestinians who choose to can live as free and equal citizens in all of historic Palestine. Anything less is not justice.