I posted the following on my personal Facebook account yesterday, and I don’t have the patience to edit the piece so that it reads more clearly like an essay rather than a Facebook post, but I do stand by everything in it, so I hope those of you who are interested in these issues will indulge me while I make clear where I stand on this most vital of matters.
“CONTENT NOTE for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. You know how the rules go around here – I am the sole arbiter of what constitutes acceptable discourse in my internet space, and if even a single one of you says anything I consider hateful towards Jewish, Muslim, Israeli, Palestinian, Arab, or Zionist civilians, I will get you the hell out of my life as quickly as you came and force you to stay out. I don’t fuck around about this stuff. I consider myself to have the right to speak my truth as I see fit on these issues, and I’m open to civil and respectful discussion, but anyone who engages in what I subjectively consider demonization of any innocent civilians can fuck off.
And because I am a left-wing Zionist, certain types of criticism of Zionism do actually meet my threshold in terms of what I consider hate speech, so I would gently recommend that those of you who hate Zionism please try to frame your criticism and vitriol carefully and with an eye to nuance, because I don’t tolerate criticism of Zionism that I personally consider truly hateful any more than I am willing to tolerate genuinely hateful attacks on Muslims or Islam. I know some of you are driven to have conniptions every time you even hear me refer to this as a “conflict” as if there are two equally blameworthy sides (which I believe is true!), as well as those of you who believe that I myself engage in criticism of Islam that meets your threshold(s) for hate speech. There ain’t much that I can do about any of that, because the things I say about Islam that make it seem as though I don’t like it very much are things I think are true, and that I can justify based on the research I’ve done about the real contents of the Qur’án, the saheeh ahadeeth (that is, authentic traditions chronicling the words and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad, salallahu alaihi wasalaam) as recorded by Bukhari and Muslim, and Ibn Hisham’s recension of Ibn Ishaq’s seerat rasul Allah (that is, the official copy of the first-ever biography of Muhammad alaihi salaam), as well as the unbroken record of oppression, subjugation, brutalization, dehumanization, bigotry, and cruelty on the part of Muslims towards non-Muslims and heterodox Muslims of virtually every kind around the world for more than 1, 000 years, which I think is substantially worse than almost (but not quite!) every aspect of the Zionist record of mistreatment of Palestinians.
When I say those things, I always take care never to intentionally demonize any innocent individual Muslim civilians, and I also delight in lavishing praise upon the ten or so notable extant interpretations and exegeses of Muslim sacred material that I believe are humane and pluralistic and good for the world, and if any of y’all have to vent your spleen at Zionism, I would appreciate it if you would take the same care in so doing that I take when I speak about Islam, whether I get credit for doing it or not. Sometimes I don’t do enough to placate my critics (some of them would prefer that I pretend that Islam and Muslims are innocent of any and all wrongdoing across history ever), but I do generally take pains to make known that I’m a big supporter of the exegeses of Islam that I believe are noble, and I’m interested in preserving the rights and dignity of all Muslim civilians around the world, including not just those who are followers of the heterodox sects I admire and respect (the Ahmadis, Bektashis, Alevis, Rifais, Mevlevis, Qur’ániyoon, Mouridiyyah, Nizari Khoja Ismaili Shí’ahs, and followers of Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, among others), but also those who are mainstream Sunnis and Ithna’Asheri Shí’ahs. Again – I would appreciate that those of you who have to get angry at Zionism at least attempt to take the kind of care in so doing that I do when I talk about Muslims and Islam.
I’m saying all that to preface a very different set of points, but what I’m doing is establishing the ground on which I’m operating, so that no one will get the wrong impression of what I’m trying to accomplish or mistake me for someone who never swims in difficult waters when discussing material of this nature. I require of you all that you tread carefully.
AND NOW TO MY MAIN POINT.
Hey, I know I’ve caused a lot of controversy around here with my strident left-wing Zionist opinions and my exasperated unwillingness (born of many years discussing this issue online and dealing with the behaviour of appalling shitheads) to put up with any Jew-hating and/or anti-Zionist invective that I personally, subjectively deem to be toxic, but as the Israeli government and military continue a war to attempt to destroy Hamas in Gaza that has gone on for nearly five months and has resulted in the violent and horrific deaths of what must be at least 20, 000 innocent Palestinian civilians (out of a total of roughly 27, 000 Palestinian deaths – I’m making allowances for the fact that large numbers of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades and Popular Front For the Liberation of Palestine and Daesh and Lions’ Den terrorists have deservedly been sent to Jahannam and are being dealt with by Satan, so please kindly don’t give me too much shit for not quoting the numbers Hamas has been providing to the world as if I believe them!), I want to affirm that I unequivocally believe that the Israeli government and the Palestinian militants should agree to a ceasefire immediately. Now!
The reason is simple. Innocent Palestinian civilian life matters to me, and Benjamin Netanyahu and many of his allies are psychopaths who have been behaving as though they regard Palestinian life as totally expendable. Netanyahu deserves to be assassinated or imprisoned, and I feel the same way about Shimon Riklin, Amichai Eliyahu, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Michael Ben-Ari, David Amsalem, Yoav Eliassi, Benzi Gopstein, and any and all Israeli political figures or commentators or whomever else who are genuine Jewish fascists and supremacists, whether they dehumanize innocent Palestinian civilians, target the Muslim and Christian and Druze and other non-Jewish citizens of Israel, or both. I also hate the ordinary Jewish Israeli civilians who hold such supremacist attitudes, whether they are settlers in the West Bank or just regular Israeli Jews. The Lehava fascists in particular belong in hell. I so despise these people that I wish I could destroy them all, or else convert them into righteous pluralistic universalists, which is the same kind of thing I wish I could do to the Bahá’ï-hating, Zoroastrian-subjugating, Hindu-dehumanizing, Christian-murdering Khomeinists in Iran, the loathsome Muslim-slaughtering Chinese Communists, the North Korean Juche fascists (truly the worst government on the planet), the Pakistani and Turkish and Iraqi and Myanma and Nigerian and Thai and Congolese and Saudi and Sudanese and British and Maghrebin and other Muslim fascists, the governments of Venezuela and the Central African Republic and Russia and Zimbabwe and Equatorial Guinea and Eritrea, the Hindus who target innocent Muslims and Christians in India, the Buddhists who target innocent Muslims in Myanmar and Cambodia, and all the other terrible governments and terrorist movements around the globe. Those of you who have been around me when I’m recording my music know that I frequently include bars about wanting to personally murder people like Yahya Sinwar, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Donald Trump, Khaled Meshaal, and every single member of Hamas, and I mean it! I wish I could change the world to make it so that there were no fascists or religious extremists or supremacists in it anymore!
And right now, I think the right thing to do in the Middle East is to force a ceasefire. Speaking as someone who is generally in favour of civil libertarianism and is something close to an absolutist when it comes to free speech (I’ve always loved John Stuart Mill, and I consider him the greatest of all traditionally revered philosophers as far as I’m yet aware!), I want to make known that I think free speech should be sharply restricted in Israel in particular to prohibit incitement to violence against, or dehumanization of, non-Jews. The Israelis got this balance right in the late 1970s and early 1980s when they banned the evil Jewish supremacist political movement known as Kahanism, and it’s absolutely fucked up – an abomination, a disgrace! – that many Jewish fascists who are worse than any of the Kahanists of yore are currently in the government of Israel. The rights and dignity of non-Jews in Israel should be sacrosanct.
And I want to affirm my support for the idea that a stable and peaceful liberal democratic Palestinian polity should be created on roughly the lands that the United Nations gave the Arabs in 1948, plus East Jerusalem. And/or the lands that Israel won from Egypt and Jordan in 1967. Just give them a country, goddamnit! Many of them hate me and want me dead for being both a Jew and a Bahá’í (and they hate Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Ahmadi Muslims, and many other ethnic and religious people-groups too), but I don’t care! They still deserve the right of self-determination! if they get it and then they oppress the Jews and Bahá’ís and Ahmadis among them, they should be criticized and sanctioned, but in the meantime, let’s do this! It’s long past time for a Palestinian state!
I can’t apologize for being unwilling to foreswear my belief that it’s perfectly, entirely reasonable for one (1) Jewish state to exist on land that the Muslim ummah has traditionally believed belongs to it – that land is the place where the people to whom I belong as a matter of ethnicity became a people and developed in terms of ethnogenesis, so I think it’s perfectly fine that Israel exists on the lands that the United Nations agreed to give it in 1948, and I think monetary restitution should be paid to the descendants of the 750, 000 Palestinians who were made to flee – I refuse to apologize for not being in favour of an unequivocal right of return for the people who have been considered Palestinian refugees (the internationally agreed-upon definition of the word “refugee“ having been changed to bolster their narrative, of course, as any honest observer knows) to the land that the Zionists were given to establish the Jewish homeland in 1948. Not only do I think that land legitimately belongs to the Jews now, but even with all the problems in Israel, Muslim and Christian and Druze Israelis, as well as Bahá’ís who serve at the Bahá’í holy places in Haifa and Akka, enjoy near-perfect (not flawless, but close!) equality of rights and dignity with the Jews, whereas Senegal, Mali, Tunisia, Indonesia, and Atatürk-era Turkey are the only Muslim countries that have even gestured in the direction of establishing anything resembling equality of rights and dignity for non-Muslims, and only Senegal has actually done the damn thing, as far as I know. Palestine is certainly a hellish place for any non-Muslim to be, except perhaps for that small minority of Christians who say and do whatever Hamas wants them to say and do uncritically. There’s no comparison between the likes of the Palestinian Muslim and Christian Arabs who have the freedom to scabrously criticize Zionism and Israel in the Israeli Parliament, such as Ayman Odeh and Haneen Zoabi (both of whom are hated by many in Israel, but who are given permission to speak their minds!), and the Christian and Druze toadies and lackeys of Hamas and Hezbollah. There just… ain’t. Sorry. To say nothing of Ella Waweya and George Deek and Ibrahim Bari and Ismail Khaldi and Mohammad Kabiya and Rania Fadel and Ala Wahib and Anett Haskia and Habtom Mehari and Yoseph Haddad and Gabriel Naddaf and Ayoob Kara and Yahya Mahamid and all the non-Jewish Israeli patriots – patriotism means something only when you have the option to freely choose against it, and non-Jewish Israelis do have that option!
So my principles don’t allow me to be an anti-Zionist, at least not right now. But I want badly for Netanyahu’s killing spree to end, and I very much want the Palestinians to have a homeland of their own, including East Jerusalem. It’s been the honour of my life to chop it up with many Muslims, Arabs, or Palestinians (or people whose heritage involves Islam but who are not personally practising Muslims) who refuse to demonize Zionism and are actively interested in making peace with Israel – John Aziz, Luai Ahmed, Hussain Abdul-Hussain, Tahir Aslam Gora, Yasmine Mohammed, Raheel Raza, Dalia Ziada, Zainab Al-Suwaij, Mohammad Kabiya, Salim Mansur, Ahmed Al-Khalidi, Yahya Mahamid, Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, Loay Al-Shareef, Amir Pars, and many more. I love these people passionately, and theirs is the vision I share. I want it to win the day.
But first we have to get Netanyahu’s sick sociopathic ass to stop slaughtering thousands upon thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians. I hate Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad about as much as it’s possible to imagine anyone hating anything, and I don’t want them to win, on top of which I still believe literally every word of the post I wrote in October making clear that my ultimate sympathies lie with the right of Israel to exist and against the extremist iterations of Islam that want to destroy it. But it’s clear that the price of Zionist victory in this war is a decimation of the Palestinian civilian population so extreme that, even if “genocide” is not the explicit aim of the Israeli war effort (I don’t generally refer to the military occupation of the West Bank as “apartheid”, either, because I don’t think either term is genuinely accurate), it still follows that the Israelis are responsible for a catastrophic humanitarian crisis, and they need to take action to stop it right now. They need to do this RIGHT NOW! Preserving the lives of innocent Palestinian civilians matters more than defeating PIJ and Hamas! CEASEFIRE NOW!”