Loosening grip on reality

“you must live to tell my story"

Last week, I was privileged to see Palestinian author and researcher Yousef M. Aljamal speak at two public events and a protest against US attacks on Iran. Aljamal was in Pōneke to talk about his book, a compilation of work written by his dear friend and mentor Refaat Alareer, If I Must Die: Poetry and Prose. The title of the book comes from Alareer’s 2011 poem which gained tragic resonance when he was martyred in December 2023. It has been viewed 33 million times on Twitter and translated into over 250 languages including Te Reo Māori1. Poet Ken Chen describes it as “the most famous poem written in my lifetime.”

Aljamal spoke at length about what Alareer was like in life, his love of literature and film and his unyielding dedication to his Palestinian students. Both events were completely packed out. I’ve never seen so many people at a Unity Books lunchtime session and copies of the book were sold out before I could get my hands on one.

Alareer was assassinated in December 2023 by Israeli Airstrike, one of tens of thousands of people killed in Gaza since October 2023. In the weeks prior to his murder, he had actively documented the genocide on social media. Alareer didn’t live to see the 2024 Presidential election, his executioners were armed by America’s Democratic Party. He knew that he was being targeted by Israel and America and that his death was being cheered on by former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss.

I bring this up to reiterate points that I have made before, namely:

1. Palestinian liberation has widespread popular support;
2. This support is not shared by institutions (including ‘liberal’ institutions like the Democrats, media and academia); and
3. The disconnect between 1. and 2. demonstrates that those institutions are increasingly divorced from reality.

The death of liberal Zionism

In my recent piece on DocEdge Festival, I called it ‘The last bastion of liberal Zionism in Aotearoa’. I’d like to elaborate a bit on what I meant by this.

Prior to October 2023, it used to be more common for people who saw themselves as on the left of the political spectrum to hold pro-Israel views. People would unthinkingly repeat talking points they’d heard like ‘Israel has a right to defend itself’2, or ‘Jeremy Corbyn is antisemitic’. For most people, the events of the past 21 months have laid bare the violence underlying those lies. If you’re still pro-Israel now, it’s because you have made an active decision to support genocide. There is no longer such a thing as ‘progressive except for Palestine’.

An area where this is most apparent is in the tactic of ‘pinkwashing’. According to Queer Cinema for Palestine:

Through pinkwashing, Israel instrumentalizes queer and trans identities to try to justify its genocide against Palestinians, including the murder, extortion, and imprisonment of queer and trans Palestinians. In November 2023, Israel's official social media accounts posted a picture of an Israeli soldier participating in the genocide in Gaza holding a rainbow flag with "In the name of love" written in English, Arabic, and Hebrew. Such acts of gross pinkwashing and colonial racism seek to erase queer and trans Palestinians, and to suggest that the genocide of Indigenous Palestinians is somehow a pathway to queer liberation.

Before October 2023, pinkwashing meant trying to convince queer people and their allies to support Israel. Now that people have stopped falling for it, it has become a cudgel with which to hurt queer people. Look at the gleeful way that Zionists fantasise about violence against queer people in their justification of Israel’s actions. For the record, the solidarity between the queer and Palestinian liberation movements has always been overwhelming in Aotearoa.

Within this context, DocEdge comes across as an anachronism. Its ‘Values and Principles’ page moves between a tokenistic use of Te Reo (“…we take our responsibility as kaitiaki (guardians) of storytelling seriously…”) and a pre-emptive defensiveness about its programming (“we will not allow anyone to exert undue influence or intimidate our community”). That programming includes documentaries about queer subjects (one category focuses on “the quiet courage it takes to be yourself”3) alongside A Letter to David, a film that uses its Israeli subject to justify the Gaza genocide. DocEdge is also hosting a dubiously-timed retro screening of Irish film Gaza that tries to muddy to waters of a straightforward moral catastrophe by claiming “the complexities of the Middle East are often oversimplified.”

It’s a shame that so many in the industry feel that they have no option but to work with DocEdge, especially Indigenous filmmakers like those behind the West Papuan film The Promise.

The new, meaner face of Zionism

DocEdge is unusual because Zionist institutions are increasingly relieving themselves of socially liberal talking points. This can be seen in the Democratic Party’s response to Zohran Mamdani winning the Democratic primary of the New York mayoral election.

The presumptive victory of a Democratic Socialist Muslim has broken the brains of a number of his fellow Democrats, especially because he has signalled that he does not intend to travel to Israel if victorious4. New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand5 accused Mamdani of condoning ‘global jihad’. Congresswoman Laura Gillen6 falsely claimed that Mamdani had called for violence against Jewish people. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries7 used these lies as a justification for not endorsing Mamdani.

It is important to note that these allusions to antisemitism are completely baseless. The New York that will likely elect Mamdani is the same New York where anti-genocide protestors were brutalised by cops at Columbia University. In The Encampments, the documentary about those protests (watch it here), an anonymous former university administrator talks about their frustration at being ordered to edit comms to include allegations of antisemitism without evidence. This technique was used to smear Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, another politician who spoke up against Israel.

Once again, popular opinion is completely at odds with the rhetoric of those in power. Mamdani is a wildly popular figure in New York and his supporters include significant numbers of Jewish voters and his Jewish primary opponent Brad Lander. Jewish protestors showed up in great numbers to support the Columbia encampments just like Alternative Jewish Voices and Dayenu have stood alongside Palestinian protestors in Aotearoa (for what it’s worth, Gillibrand, Gillen and Jeffries are all gentiles). As long as Zionism has existed, members of the Jewish community have rejected it and continue to do so in increasing numbers.

Our Jewish allies, much like our queer allies, are being used as a cudgel to promote genocide and they are understandably pissed off about it.

The disconnect

As our institutions embrace a crueller form of power, disconnected from public opinion, they become more brazen in their disregard for the people they should be serving. The contradictions of liberal Zionism were never going to hold. It’s much more difficult to put a ‘woke’ face on genocide than it is to just admit you hate Palestinians, Muslims, Arabs and other vulnerable groups like queer people, Jews, migrants and women. That’s the path taken by establishment Democrats in the US, Labour under Keir Starmer in the UK and their allies in the media, law enforcement and academia.

But if recent events like Mamdani’s win have shown us anything, it’s that humanity has numbers on its side.

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