From the River to the Sea to the Street to the Sky
Sounds of Sumud Pt II and the power in a boycott
In the month since the first part of the show aired, more Palestinians were murdered by occupation forces that at any time since 2006. Public assassinations are happening multiple times a week and the new minister of security applauds each killing as a job well done. The stakes could not be higher and yet the urge to indulge our ability to look away is ever present if you are consuming this reality via social media. My idea with making radio about Palestine was just to offer a digestible way to unpick ‘it’s complicated’ (spoiler, it is, but not in the way you think) and to make good on a promise. I really hope you’ll take this ride through Pt II with me now (ft. lots of wicked contemporary electronic underground sounds including some eye-wateringly hard drill) to hear from three generations of staunch women about resistance both local and international.
Going looooong here to get some sundry Sunday thoughts I didn’t go into on the show out into the ether, before I take a detour to share some new writing not about Palestine for the next few newsletters. Thank you for reading and listening!
Let me know if you listen / read. Luv u!
The Spiral Times - Sounds of Sumud Pt. II
The Spiral Times - Sounds of Sumud Pt. II
The Spiral Times - Sounds of Sumud Pt. II
We have some new voice notes from special spiral correspondent in Bethlehem, 14 year old Tia Odeh, who brings you an urgent update about how this situation feels on the ground emotionally and spiritually, and what it means to her when people outside the region take notice of what is happening.
Halfway through you’ll hear from Chicago-based Palestinian-American public health worker and organiser Feda gives us a chilling insight into the scale of censorship, surveillance and political repression of students in the US. Feda is a force of nature possessed of a Gen-Z no-care-ever vibe which frequently floored me. When threatened by armed soldiers as we walked through Hebron for wearing a shirt with ‘Palestine’ on it (they commanded her to ‘take that off or I will arrest you…’) she replied ‘Broooo in America we can wear what we want!’ (This didn’t work and it got dicier until a shopkeeper gave her one saying ‘Jerusalem’ for free.) One night over some raki she showed me her face on the well-funded doxxing database Canary Mission (do. not. Google. it! more here) where she has been blacklisted as a racist alongside hundreds of other pro-Palestine student advocates. I want to vomit. Then her huge eyes rolled into a laugh. ‘Low key tho? At least they chose a fire pic.’
Human rights defender Lubnah from BADIL, one of the founding organisations of the original BDS call, is back to help us dig into the attempts to choke out civil society through cynical use of anti-terror laws, and how this is collectively resisted. I ask all my interviewees about the boycott. By looking back at other international anti-apartheid struggles in the show, with a focus on South Africa, and a song that somehow includes Miles Davis, Joey Ramone and Motley Crüe, I’ve tried to trace how music and culture worldwide can be successfully mobilised to help end injustice.
If only we choose to.
Tracklist:
Throughout the show you’ll hear some protest noise and songs in German and Arabic which I recorded the day before, stood with a friend at small but beautiful demo to honour October’s martyrs. I wanted to tell you what that was like.
A small crowd huddles into the corner of a pavement, straddled across a busy bike lane, the cops having forbidden us from standing in the pedestrianised square at Hermannplatz. People gather to sing and make short speeches. There are maybe twenty of us… and seven full police vans parked up. A short man with a stony face seems bent on filming people’s faces despite judicious use of kuffiyeh, hoods and covid masks. As this demo is happening on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, after the speeches an action is planned to clean up the Neukölln stolpersteine or stumbling stones, ubiquitous tiny floor plaques which line streets here to name and remember the Jews pulled from their homes and exiled or murdered by the regime of Nazi terror. I’m struck by this choice as it relates to the rhetorical corner that Germany’s demented hatred of any form of pro-Palestinian expression has pushed these small movements into. It’s not that this is anything other than a righteous and correct move, of course, but there is a certain grim sadness in it, or at least my suspicion that this gesture will do less than nothing to insulate participants from the inevitable backlash.
By morning, footage of the demo we had been edited, uploaded onto at least five ‘hate watch’ type accounts and websites, complete with totally false testimony that people at the demo had also shouted disgusting slurs like ‘Sheisse-Juden’.
Walking down my street last night I came to a wall that had been plastered with these posters, part of a wider campaign supposedly aimed at Israel-related anti-semitism. I marvel at the exquisite but sadly I fear unintentional comedic perfection of using the Clementine Morrigan format for a message of … obtuse and reactionary bad faith dogma masquerading as radical progressivism. Lmao niche but my god. I choose not to get into the history of anti-Deustch and its deranged sentiment here because I might have an aneurysm but I want to share this to give an insight in to the temperature here. I also return regularly to this highly instructive published by anti-Zionist Jewish feminist Inna Michaeli last year.
Campaigns like this calculate that otherwise sensible people will fold under the weight of bad faith, worried suddenly that words have secret meanings, scared that your inherited moral compass is defective, or to white/non-Jewish Germans in particular that your society has been secretly feeding you poison since you were a child so much so that you actually can’t trust your own heart.
When the social and politicalconditions are being created which make one out to feel more and more like a crank, there is a moment to listen and reflect, and then there is a moment to reconsider and, as needed, to recommit to what you know is right.
Earlier this year I had noticed myself toning down certain words, equivocating or just allow a few more inaccurate statements (lies) to slide after accusations of cultural insensitivity on this topic as a transplant. Wild, I know. In Germany ‘imported anti-semitism’ is a common dog whistle re: Muslim migrants but I have equally heard it used to describe anti-Zionist ‘expats,’ including in reference to Jewish Israelis (!) I was ashamed of myself. Cowardice is an invasive species and it is on all of us to grab at its tendrils by their roots. Recently I wore the same shirt Feda had on in Hebron, mine paint splatted from our mural, the last time I played a gig. I’d heard the leftist collectively-run venue had even discussed a ‘compromise’ policy of not hosting any events related to ‘Israel/Palestine’ but genuinely didn’t think too hard about my outfit relating to that. What can I say it’s a breathable shirt. The experience of moving through the crowd after our set and being looked at like I had just got on stage and performed a sex act on the elephant in the room is not one I will forget in a hurry.
When the consensus call BDS emerged in 2005 I remember going to down to a meeting in Brighton that same year to learn about it as a bright-eyed nineteen year old. Noone mentioned anything about boycotting Israel being anti-semitic, as that would have seemed an odd thing to say, even in an anarchist social centre catering often to deeply odd opinions. (cf. when my housemate announced they would no longer going to the cinema because the local ALF lot said the film used in projection had animal fat in it.) Palestinians and those who support them are not and have never been the ones unable to distinguish between racism against Jews and resistance to a colonial project. That particular shut-down strategy would be supercharged as part of the strategic response to BDS going on to become the most effective form of solidarity with the struggle for freedom. The Israeli state realised this, and moved to classify BDS as the third official ‘strategic threat’ to the state. Tellingly, prior to this, the other two threats, each with their own departments, were Iran’s nukes and the status of relations with the US. New tax laws were passed to enable the arrest of prominent BDS movement co-founder Omar Barghouti on spurious charges. They tied him to a chair to ask him about his invoices. In the US, more than 30 states have passed executive orders or taken action against the right to boycott at congress level, including moves that would seek to altogether criminalise BDS. Here in Germany, a Bundestag resolution passed thanks to a coalition of right and left liberals who urged institutions and public authorities to deny funding and facilities to those who support BDS on the basis of so much as calling for a boycott, not even the actual act of boycotting, as being an anti-Jewish hate crime.
This summer in Ramallah at the headquarters of BDS I got to meet with the chair of the Palestine National Committee. What our host said, in the fast words of a man doing a speed run through a Prezi whilst clearly both frustrated to his bone marrow upended many things I thought I knew about BDS since that first meeting in 2005.
Case in point: there is no such thing as The BDS List.
I thought at first that I must have misheard.
“No, we do not do ‘lists’,” he said with a wry smile. “So if you’ve read one, we didn’t write it. We select our targets carefully based on three things: complicity level, ability to mobilise support, and strategic winnability.” He went on to explain e.g. that boycotting Intel would be ridiclous, because their chips are in literally everything, whereas Hewlett Packard, which runs the ID check system at the checkpoints, meets the criteria.
I asked for our hosts’ take on the grotesque intellectual architecture of inherited ‘special responsibility’ constructed by the German Left to justify sitting this particular genocide out, even while claiming they wish they could do something but their hands are tied by the sad bind of their own nationality. “Ah… Germany,” he said with a sense of something a bit like pity. “They act like this because what we are doing is working.”
Over and over again during the meeting, it became clear that the various smears levelled at BDS globally are often made worse by non-Palestinians electing to overlook just how high the stakes are for message discipline, usually hand in hand with being unwilling to let those most affected take the lead. I wondered if the changes that have taken place since 2005 around how nuanced political messaging gets disseminated might have something to do with all this. The fact that the fundamental issue taken with the campaign in the US so often comes down to ‘tone’ seems at best a liberal veil for ‘if only these Arabs would be more like Gandhi while they’re getting shot.’ “Before you even get to solidarity,” our host reminded us, “you must end your complicity. No government has ever sanctioned Israel, if anything they reward them. Look at what your taxes fund. You will need a basic moral foundation first before you can act in solidarity.”
The boycott requires active dynamic engagement with a tactical project of applying pressure and creating success, one that is responsive to change, tracks and cares about wins, and is committed to listening to those actually under the gun. Campaigning 101. It is in a sense unsurprising, then, that the Western left, the marginal section that listens at all, often incorrectly surmises BDS into footnotes for a shopping list, or loose murmurs about good and bad brands. The net result of the world consistently talking over Palestinians, often includes those who of us clamber to be, or be seen to be, on their side, particularly whilst being unable to fathom that, shockingly, not everyone from one place will have the exact same politics. This dynamic even played out in our meeting, when untangling from a terse back and forth with an american academic in our party about a recent US campaign’s imprecise language which he felt had left an open goal for Zionist backlash, our host sighed for a second and then blinked, and smiled again.
“We have a union of one million farm workers in India who support the boycott. I am always happy to remind Americans that they are not the centre of the universe.”
Huddled in the Berlin bike lane last week, we are momentarily distracted as an undercover police officer breaks cover from the back of our crowd to arrest a shoplifter who runs past, his gun visible against his jeans. We sing, of course, about those forbidden bodies of water and the only possible future. I think about the Mediterranean and something Nidal said to us in his hot office in Bethlehem…
An intellectual giant of Palestine, co-founder of BADIL and owner of the worlds most expressive moustache, we had spent a morning listening rapt as he swivelled around on a office chair, riffing through lessons from many decades of political struggle of every possible shade, expounding on everything from the PLO/PFLP split in ‘74 to the the still-reverberating tremors of the unilaterally disasterous Oslo Accords on women’s role in the struggle. He took us through his long view of the nation’s deep political fissures party-wise, and Hamas, Fatah and PIJ’s current attempts to demobilise emergent waves of revolutionary youth who want to organise beyond party factionalism. He also surveyed for us many actually existing precedents for peacebuilding that have come to pass in the world, their practicality and creative imagination, and which make most sense for his country. At one point Alex, an English guy and the youngest in our crew possessed of a gentle/lairy wisdom, raised skepticism about the role of neo-liberal economics in securing prosperity for all in any eventual post-colonial state. Nidal agreed: Capitalism will never create a truly free Palestine.
So many other men and women like him that we met knew the inside of the military jails and lived under an ever growing weight of grief so unrelenting that it could by all rights have calcified their world view into bitterness. Yet to a man they were still often at their most animated setting out a vision a future of equality and coexistence for Christian, Muslim and Jewish citizens of a decolonised Palestine. You could have heard a pin drop as he turned to the Right of Return, the fundamental right of all refugees, denied Palestinians since ‘48, and what it’s going to look like in practice.
I thought, at the demo, about Nidal telling us the story of Al Sheik Muwannis, the Palestinian village demolished after residents had been run off their land by militias a year before the state of Israel was established. Atop its ruins now lies Tel Aviv University.
“So. Are we saying that once we get our freedom we must demolish that university?” his eyes widening. “Of course not!” Gently folding the top of his tiny paper cup of coffee grounds into a flower shape, he elaborated: the only requirement for peaceful coexistence will be the future presence of that simple and most basic grounds for forgiveness: justice.
Listen to: The Spiral Times - Sounds of Sumud Pt. II