The Sorcery of Genocide, the Power of Sacred Story, and How to Report on Apartheid States

Or why I haven’t written a newsletter in a while.

I want to start by being honest with you Beloved. I have been silent. Mostly I have just been overwhelmed. Personally, energetically, by family systems stuff this year, and struggling to survive. 

I am not going to pretend that I haven’t been buried by my last semester of PhD coursework,  or that I havent wanted to quit every single fucking day up until a few weeks ago. I would be lying. It’s been hard, and made even tougher by either institutional malaise, neglect, or malevolence. I have not the energy to suss out which is which.  I have been trying to finish this PhD by hook or crook. Shit has been hard. But that’s not the whole truth. 

I have also been silent in the face of the overwhelming specter of death and its  energy from so far away. I haven’t said much about the October 7th attacks by Hamas or the Israeli response, I posted  a few social media  posts here and there. But here on the newsletter, not a word. What’s the point of talking about magic, sorcery, and the weird during horror?  Although what we have been witnessing does fit my working definition of magic, although in its most broken or warped applications-

“For my purposes I say the phenomenon called “magic” is an “ontological alchemy”, where new meaning, and meaning making  can be born out of. It is a people group's often, but not always,  collective use of, movement, and  rearranging of cultural, religious, and traditional symbols, be they old or new, combined with remedies and medicines found in nature, often combined with ceremonial rites or underpinnings of rite and ritual,  used to change the meaning of reality around a people or cultural group.”-(Black Magic and Black Power: Occult Frameworks of Black Freedom and the Revolutionary Power of Esoteric Temporalities of Black Peoples of the Americas-Duncan, 3)

The cosmos, the universe, and what I define as magic, has responded with unprecedented calls worldwide for a ceasefire. What else is it other than magic when the cries of the oppressed to resist the state break out in ritual, tradition, song, and the people all come together for the oppressed  . But I haven’t publicly said much. 

It’s been incredibly hard for me to find words about Israel's declared “war” on Hamas,  and the unarmed  civilians of Palestine who are in an open air prison who seem to be either a “bump”on the road to ending Hamas, or the target themselves. Another attempt by a nation state to shoot ideology and belief.  Another example of the continued erosion of international norms in warfare,  and the very definition of “war.” This latest assault once again is highlighting the plight of the Palestinian people, Israel's continued status as an apartheid state, and the international community's continued refusal to stop  the illegal, irresponsible and dangerous precedent setting actions of a democratic nation state. 

In 1964 Halie Selassie I, the Emperor of Ethiopia addressed the U.N and after reminding them of his 1936 warnings to League of Nations about becoming an ineffectual international body in the face of growing fascist threat, he talked about the most powerful nations being the ones with the most work ahead of them in the cause for world peace. This speech given 2 years after the Cuban missile crisis, and with the specter of Nuclear armageddon on the horizon, and I want to share two excerpts, written in regards to the plight of African and Asian nations,  from his 1964  speech that ring  as true then as it does today-

“That until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned: That until there are no longer first-class and second class citizens of any nation; That until the color of a man’s skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes; That until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race; That until that day, the dream of lasting peace and world citizenship and the rule of international morality will remain but a fleeting illusion, to be pursued but never attained; ……………The great nations of the world would do well to remember that in the modern age even their own fates are not wholly in their hands. Peace demands the united efforts of us all. Who can foresee what spark might ignite the fuse? It is not only the small and the weak who must scrupulously observe their obligations to the United Nations and to each other. Unless the smaller nations are accorded their proper voice in the settlement of the world’s problems, unless the equality which Africa and Asia have struggled to attain is reflected in expanded membership in the institutions which make up the United Nations, confidence will come just that much harder. Unless the rights of the least of men are as assiduously protected as those of the greatest, the seeds of confidence will fall on barren soil. The stake of each one of us is identical – life or death. We all wish to live. We all seek a world in which men are freed of the burdens of ignorance, poverty, hunger and disease. And we shall all be hard-pressed to escape the deadly rain of nuclear fall-out should catastrophe overtake us.

 In the last few weeks our brains seem to be  nothing more than a  vacuous space of floating talking points, and I can't believe I have to say this outloud - I don't “support” the heinous terrorist attacks of Oct 7th, Hamas or acts of violence committed by the armed wing of any political group on civilian targets.  What free thinker, or revolutionary does that? Political violence of any stripe is reprehensible. I have spent most of my life trying to wage peace, practice non violent resistance, and doing that work publicly for long enough that I thought that would never be questioned. It also hasn’t escaped my attention that the first thing some people counter with when you are critical of Israel, the nation-state, is that you either support heinous violence or are anti-Semitic, racist, or anti-American. While that  might be a powerful rhetorical counter, or even true in some cases, we can't end the conversation there no matter the personal risk. 

In the same way every critic of the movement for Black lives isn't “racist” or working counter to the movement. I am not claiming to know how it feels to be Jewish in this country, nor what this time must feel like for American Jews. But I know the feeling of checking the eyes of  everyone and every place I go for signs of fascism, racism, bigotry, and any other ways  I am told  I am  “other” in this country. The mind constantly re-running everyday interactions,  the fear, the second guessing of every situation,  the feeling of cultural pain caused by the suffering of your own. I know this feeling, and so do the Palestinian people. We have forgotten the one thing that binds all of humanity, and it isn't anyone's sacred scripture. In fact from a North American perspective it is the weaponizing of sacred story, place, tradition, and long held hopes of other human tragedies that have got us to this place of suffering.  The only commonality of humanity is our shared and almost constant suffering. 

We have all been ensorcelled by a worldview that has infected us all with an “us against them” mentality. This is what happens when civilians become “enemy combatants” by nation states. Or the other codewords we use for death, for in a never ending “war on terror,” people and children have become “collateral damage.” We  have spent the last few decades becoming everything democracy isn’t supposed to be on the world stage even according to its most adherent believers and no longer appears to be  the panacea to all modern international ills. 

The sorcery of genocide. The broken magic that makes us all just become bystanders instead of witnesses while we watch the macabre scenes play out on the nightly news. This new vision of Babylon. An  illusion and charm cast on us makes it appear that under some special or exceptional circumstances the entity known as the  state, whether that be Israel or the United States of America, is on the people's side. It is stunning in its scope of  power since 2001, has not seemed to be slowed down, lost its hold on the body politic here in the states and has found echoes around the world. It has dominated politics, finance, and the world stage for several decades now. Strongmen at home or abroad have adopted the language, and the new anti-terrorist methodologies of fear. We have, out of fear, allowed decades of cultural “Orientalism,” and social engineering, to craft a new civil religion in which terrorism, its threat, even its mere mention,  is enough for us to sanction the most heinous acts by governments as holy.  Allowable death. Permitted murder. Central to this myth birthed in the depths of American megachurch smoke machines, the pentagon and IDF boardrooms, and nightly news personalities not delivering the news nightly, is the hope of a mostly white  or westernized nation-state in the heart of middle east, and her plucky pious friend and Christian defender,  the United States of America. 

I have been silent because my life is overwhelming, Gaza has been overwhelming, the information I receive from the Nationals Writers Union, National Union of Journalists,  from and about Palestinian journalists is overwhelming.  What can you say in a world where we may be watching a whole people group wiped from the face of the planet in real time. I have been awash in overwhelming heavy energy and the stench of death and desolation coming out of Gaza. 

 When there is not even a cursory or obligatory nod to the Geneva convention, international rules of war, the rights of civilians in a theater of war, or attempts at proportional response, it’s clear the goal isn't to just “destroy Hamas.”  Netanyahu meanwhile is a cornered political animal on his way out,  mired in corruption scandals, his supreme court has gone off the rails, and promises to release power as soon as the “war” is over. This is a leader who has nothing to lose, whose biggest ally is a nation state that spends billions on a relationship of  weird religious tourism and war machine support, all in exchange for a helpful crony in a region that has historically been a thorn in America's side. 

I don't claim to have an answer,  but I know lies when I see them. I know Hamas is not representative of the Palestinian people simply because I can do research. Over 50% of the Palestinian population is 18 or under which means most Palestianians were not alive the last time Hamas or the PLO had an election in Gaza. How can one blame a people for not being able to fend off an ideological and political foe while trapped in an open air prison? The conditions on the ground in Palestine have been abysmal for so long we treat it like the status quo. Restoring power in Gaza  means the 4 hours a day residents got in the first place. Over 70% have no access to clean running water. Gaza is constantly experiencing food apartheid in the extreme. 

 As a Black person I get the hopes of a diasporic people scorned the world over and the power of a  promise of a return to primordial and ancestral homeland. I understand  in some way the promise Israel represents to Jewish people the world over. I understand it because I ache for it. But the cost has been too high for too long to not have the international community demand a cease fire, and then immediately open negotiations for a two state solution. The Palestinian people have been pawns of powers of that region since the fall of Ottoman empire  when the first World Zionist Organization was set up in Constantinople in exchange for debt relief for the Sultan. This is also the instance and reasoning behind the first large scale tracts of land in Palestine sold to the  World Zionist Organization. A land deal made by two men thousands of miles away from Palestine. 

Locally, and particularly during the years before the fall of the Ottomans 1915-1922,  Jewish peoples, and Palestinian peoples by most reports got along. But with an ever increasing population escaping pogroms in Europe, and the desperate need in the Jewish consciousness for a homeland in time of unprecedented existential threat that eventually culminated in the Holocaust,  the Palestinian people became an afterthought then as they are now. The horrors of WWII, the systemic genocide of Jewish people, and the world’s ignoral of the Jewish plight at the time set the stage for the 1948 creation of the state of Isreal. Bedouin culture of land care, use, and share was lost in translation on many of  the new settlers, and the cultural dissonance led to enough animosity leading up to the creation of the state of Israel that it already was a major concern. 

The average American's consciousness has become inundated with so much eschatology from corners of the church where the pervasive idea that a war in Israel could mean the “end times.” Should mean the end times. That the side of “god” is Israel. But the fact that a good portion of Americans, politicians, and media professionals are using a 1st century political document to interpret complex geopolitical events today is frightening to say the least, nor should the bronze era claim of ownership of any tract of land decide how we treat the vulnerable today. We can let one people’s sacred story decide another people’s ultimate fate. 

Israel will never get back the 1200 civilians who were murdered. This is heartbreaking. Nor will the Palestinian people get back their up to date estimated 17,700 civilians killed in Israel's current assault. This is heartbreaking. The  200 Israeli kidnapping victims will never have their sense of safety truly back no matter what happens. This is heartbreaking. Nor will the overwhelmingly youthful  population of Palestine. This is heartbreaking. 

But we can’t deny what we are seeing.  Nor can we look away. And even I can't with all my personal mess and heartache, remain silent. We are witnessing an apartheid state deal with the consequences of its own misdeeds in the most inhumane way possible, and an international world that is doing nothing. 

Cease fire. Now.