We publish below a text that originally appeared on the French website Lundimatin. Not because we agree with everything its author writes: we reject in particular her biological-determinist view “that perhaps the root of the problem, and of all the violence that shakes the world, is masculinity”. But we share the nausea she so passionately expresses. Her voice must be heard.
Nausea
The Israeli government is a shameful entity, a shameless colonial and imperialist power that has been committing heinous war crimes on a daily basis for 75 years. It kills, humiliates and arbitrarily imprisons children and civilians whose only crime is to dare to be Palestinian. Nausea at every demand of the government, its army and its fanatics. Anger and grief at every Palestinian death.
The Israeli government and the massacres it has committed since 1948 are the real enemy, the criminal – and therefore the one that must be destroyed. THE ISRAELI GOVERNMENT.
Now I’m feeling sick again. The assimilation of an entire population, within which class struggle, racial discrimination and political differences exist, as they do in every country in the world, the assimilation of this entire population to its government, to its ethnic identity, is fascist, harmful and murderous thinking. It’s far-right rhetoric dripping with hate and stupidity.
To celebrate the murder and rape of young people who have barely reached puberty, and to call them settlers, as if this status justified all the horrors and turned their executioners into heroes, is unbelievably violent. The incoherence is absolute. Anyone who essentializes and defends cold-blooded murder cannot claim to be a leftist. The dehumanization of a population in the name of its nationality or ethnicity belongs to the extreme right.
Hamas’s tactics are incomprehensible; they know they are helpless in the face of the military might of the Hebrew state. The only plausible interpretation to date is that, on the eve of the normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, Hamas, in desperation, is launching a suicide mission, knowing full well that the response will be disproportionate violence (the current government is the most radical and violent the country has seen in 30 years, openly displaying a desire to wipe Palestine off the map for good). It is this violence that will enable Hamas to regain support within the Arab world, and could prevent the agreements between Israel and Saudi Arabia from coming to fruition. It’s a suicide attack, but the suicide victims are Gazan civilians. Gazans who for 16 years have been suffering under an unbearable blockade, and whose already immeasurable misery is only going to get worse (can’t the desert grow any more?). Hamas has no regard for the lives at stake, even those of its own people.
The revolution and Palestinian liberation are necessary, but not in the abstract. Yes, war is dirty, yes there is blood, injustice, “collateral damage” AKA the death of innocents.
But Hamas plays dirty. It does a disservice to the Palestinian cause, showing a face of terror and hatred to the international community. It disassociates when solidarity with the Palestinian people is more necessary than ever. The people of Gaza are facing hell this week.
The decolonial struggle is also a media struggle. The images I saw, which now haunt my memory like an ineffable nightmare, are unjustifiable. Neither in the name of Palestinian liberation, nor in the name of revolution, can I condone what I saw and continue to bear the name of human.
The sight of the bulldozed security fence is a joy, a real prison break. Police stations burned, military bases seized. Well, there’s consistency, the oppressed of all times attack the oppressor, its institutions, its army and its police.
The rest is simply unbearable. Entering homes, shooting entire families at point-blank range, raping women over the corpses of their friends only to execute them, or parading around, naked and humiliated, like a trophy of war while a cheering crowd spits on them. I feel like throwing up. Now the “freedom fighters” have stooped to the level of oppressors and are perhaps even sinking into deeper darkness.
Let those who chant: they’re settlers anyway, they shouldn’t have gone to a party on the border of the open-air prison that is Gaza ask themselves this question: do all those who go to bed at night while homeless and refugees sleep at the foot of their buildings deserve to die? Do those who whistle past the walls of our prisons, thinking of their crush, deserve death? Where does guilt begin? And aren’t we all guilty?
There’s a video I wish I’d never seen that haunts me. I’ll spare you the details, but I’ll describe it because it raises a thought for me that goes beyond current events.
In this video, shot by a Palestinian in Gaza and then gloriously broadcast on social networks, there is only one female body in the middle of a crowd of standing men. This body has no face, it’s naked, humiliated, face down in the back of a moving truck. Five men surround her, holding her by the flap of her rolled-up dress, waving their weapons in the air and shouting for joy. The frenzied crowd – all men – runs after them, euphoric. Some cling to the edge of the truck and spit on the lifeless body.
This woman’s body is a trophy. It’s a prize of war, a symbol of victory. It’s naked and face down. The female body is always a weapon of war, an object to be paraded. From ancient myths to the present day, women have been tributes. I can’t believe there’s a single woman in the world who’d rejoice at this scene. I can’t believe that the women of Gaza don’t feel their female flesh being torn apart by this torment. That’s probably why they’re completely absent from the scene. Women have no face, women are not men.
The source of all this violence is the Israeli government, and let’s not forget that Hamas is its monstrous child, their existences linked by blood – and the destruction of the father would put an end to the son’s existence. These two entities are the enemies of the Palestinian people and of all those who wish to live.
But I’ve come to think that perhaps the root of the problem, and of all the violence that shakes the world, is masculinity.
Just a few days ago, hundreds of Palestinian and Israeli women took part in the “women wage for peace” march in Jerusalem.I shuddered at the horror that followed. I shudder to think of those men brandishing their weapons in the air like an erect penises. I shudder at the heads of state, humiliated, their masculinity bruised, who will make their decisions with only one thought in mind: to prove who’s got the biggest.
I know I’m going to get my ass kicked from all sides. By the pro-Palestinians, by the pro-Israelis, by the anti-feminists, by the fragile men, by their allied women. And for the first time in my life, I don’t give a damn.
Noor Or