Our Weekly Discontents, 5/17/21
It's not complicated
Welcome to our weekly Discontents for May 17, as bombs rain down on Gaza and Western media is finding it harder and harder to justify Israel’s actions.
Not that they aren't trying. The bombing Saturday of a building in Gaza which housed Al Jazeera, the AP, the BBC, and other news outlets—as well as a number of families—is becoming a focal point of the discourse around the war.
Debating over the bombing allows the press to direct its attention to a pedantic back and forth over whether the bombing of news media offices was justified rather than talking about the ongoing massacre of civilians, many of them children, in the territory.
I could write about how Israeli settlers from Europe and the US steal Palestinian land, how Israel has penned in a population of over 2 million in a strip of land about 25 miles long and five miles wide where the water isn't safe to drink. I could post pictures showing the effects of the land theft on Palestinian territory since 1948 or an infographic showing the genocidal, racist statements of Israeli leaders over the past decade, I could link to any number of articles, books, and papers detailing all of the above and more.
But I don't think it's necessary or particularly interesting at this point. If you can look at the death toll in Gaza, where of the 200 dead, at least 59 were children and 34 were women, and not see the asymmetrical nature of the war, you're intentionally deceiving yourself.
This is Eoin Higgins at The Flashpoint and those are some of the things I've been thinking about over the last few days.
I wrote about the conflict this weekend:
On Saturday, Middle East Eye interviewed a 10-year-old girl in Gaza who cried as she stood in front of a bombed out building—one of dozens of residential buildings flattened by Israeli airstrikes over the last few days—and described what Palestinian children are enduring right now. The girl talked about her frustration that she couldn’t do more for her people and asked, “Why do we deserve this?”
“You see all of the kids around me, they’re just kids,” the girl said, pointing to a group of younger children. “Why would you just send a missile to them?”
Yesterday, I interviewed an artist living in Gaza City about what it's like to live through war after war. A short write up should be going up tomorrow with a full version for subscribers to follow.
Also, please check out my reporting on retail workers and the Restaurant Organizing Project from last week and my column at Insider about the service industry.
Thanks for reading.
~~~~~~
Wars of Future Past
Kelsey D. Atherton
Over a long enough time span, war just becomes policing with artillery and armor. There is, of course, the history of how colonial militias were made into police forces, on how violence beyond borders seamlessly transitioned to violence within borders. It’s a kind of violence that sees a body count of declared enemies as a political end in and of itself, metrics of success that can be bandied about over brunch.
Absent work towards a political end, be it demobilization, peace talks, or retreat, wars trend towards aimlessness, hungry beasts that swallow human lives and spit out obituaries. To counteract that, governments tell stories of success, filled with little charts or heroic anecdotes, to make the whole enterprise seem worthwhile. In the latest Wars of Future Past, I talk about two forever war narratives: the timing of its end, and the way martyrs we conscripted into its story at its beginning.
Long wars need stories, because they certainly don’t have results. George W. Bush gave the Axis of Evil speech just 44 days after the end of the battle of Tora Bora, masking a clear strategic failure under the broader ambitions of an expansive new crusading ethos. And then, as time went on, deaths from the war became justification for the war itself, fighting an endless war the only way to honor the forced martyrdom of those who had already died fighting it.
Welcome to Hell World
Luke O’Neil
“I am never going back to that commute five days a week every single week again,” a friend told me recently. “I got used to the commute, but it was like Stockholm Syndrome,” he said. “I just talked myself into thinking it wasn't so bad. But it was. It was. Not doing that commute gave me 15 hours per week of my life back.”
In this piece I heard from a couple dozen people about how not having to commute to work over the past year has improved their lives (or not).
“I got hours of my life back” was a common refrain. “It’s allowed me to spend more time with my children,” many others said. People can exercise now or get an extra hour or two of sleep or actually make it home in time for dinner they said.
I also interviewed a long time and much beloved bartender about his decision to run for city council in Cambridge, MA.
“Every job has dignity,” he said.
“That’s part of the problem with the perception of this job in general. That it wasn’t given dignity by society, or by the industry, who know they can pay you $2.13 an hour and making everything else is up to you. Currently the job doesn’t give you dignity because they know they can pay you minimum wage, make you earn the rest with tips. No paid breaks. No paid time off.”
Subscribe for 33% off the normal rate here.
Air Gordon pt. 2
Jeremy Gordon
It has been a while, due to work and society and COVID and everything else. You know how it is. But I managed to somersault out of the void with some brief thoughts on “mask discourse” (spoiler: everyone could relax a little) and a short recap of what I’ve written this year.
Perspectives: Past, Present, and Future
Patrick Wyman
No new newsletter last week, but the week prior I wrote about the Indus Valley Civilization of South Asia (c. 2600 BC-1900 BC), one of the very few populous and complex ancient societies to show no obvious evidence of hierarchies or dominant elites. Whether that’s because we’re not looking in the right place for that evidence or because these highly sophisticated and urbanized ancient people didn’t actually need kings or nobles telling them what to do is still unclear, but it’s a fascinating world to dive into.
Foreign Exchanges
Derek Davison
With attention now focused on the pummeling of Gaza and all the by-now cliche condemnations of Hamas and expressions of support for Israel’s “right to self-defense,” it can be easy to lose sight of the fact that this latest crisis in Israel-Palestine began, in part, with a property dispute based on a legal double standard. Israeli settler groups have for several decades pursued a legal effort to remove Palestinians from their homes in east Jerusalem, based on property claims that date back prior to the 1948 creation of Israel. Under an Israeli law that’s been in place since 1970, Jewish Israelis whose families were displaced from their east Jerusalem properties during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War are entitled to reclaim those properties if they can provide proof of ownership.
The double standard, if you haven’t already guessed, is that no similar right exists for Palestinians. The hundreds of thousands who were displaced during what is known among Palestinians as the nakba, or “disaster,” could not return to the homes they lost. Their descendants, millions of Palestinians still living in squalid refugee camps throughout the Occupied Territories and in surrounding Arab countries, cannot reclaim what was taken from their families, whether they can prove their ownership or not.
The Israel-Palestine conflict is replete with double standards. It’s impossible to maintain an apartheid system without maintaining different legal standards for different populations. We can see those double standards manifest on a grand scale in the Israeli settlements and highways—the use of which is denied to Palestinians—that carve up the West Bank and have made the idea of a “two state solution” a laughable pipe dream. We can see them manifest on an international scale when the spokespeople for a US administration that claims it wants to “put human rights at the center” of its foreign policy cannot say whether they believe Palestinians are entitled to exercise the most basic human rights. What we don’t necessarily see are the ways in which those double standards are manifest on ordinary, everyday levels, in the countless injustices and indignities that are inherent to occupation. Sheikh Jarrah is one example.
Kim Kelly
It seems gauche to come in here and post about a completely unrelated piece of U.S. labor legislation when Palestine is in flames, so I will be brief. My most Patreon update linked out to my latest Teen Vogue column, which breaks down the PRO Act in what is hopefully an accessible way. There’s been so much hopeful discussion of this potential law in labor circles, and such weirdly aggressive opposition to it from a handful of extremely specific entities (mostly business creeps and wealthy freelancers) that I wanted to lay it all out plainly, and explain why it’s so important to get the damn thing passed.
Check it out if you like; my next crop of updates there will concern the ongoing Alabama coal miners’ strike, which I’m headed South to continue covering later this week. Free Palestine.
BORDER/LINES
Gaby Del Valle & Felipe De La Hoz
The unofficial BORDER/LINES theme for the last few months has been “Biden said he’d do this good thing, and instead he’s doing a bad thing.” That’s probably an oversimplification, but it’s a decent general rule to operate under. Last week’s edition of the newsletter was about the rising number of people in ICE detention—which is happening even after Biden said his administration would stop relying on private immigrant detention contractors—and a commensurate rise in the number of COVID cases among detained immigrants.
About a month after Biden took office, the number of people in ICE detention had reached a historic low. Thanks to federal lawsuits filed after the onset of the pandemic, hundreds of immigrants with medical conditions that made them particularly vulnerable to COVID complications had been ordered released from detention. The near-total shutdown of the border and a decline in interior arrests was probably the biggest factor in reducing overall detention numbers. But the number of detainees is once again on the rise, probably due to a combination of continued interior enforcement—i.e., arrests of immigrants already living in the country—and a slight increase in asylum seekers being allowed to enter via the U.S.-Mexico border. As of May 7, there were 16,721 people in ICE custody, though that number fluctuates daily.
The current number of immigrants in ICE detention is far below what it was at its peak during the Trump administration; at one point in 2019, around 52,000 people were in ICE custody. But given Biden’s repeated statements that his administration would handle immigration more humanely than Trump, the rise in detentions is worrying—especially since ICE isn’t administering COVID vaccines to the people it detains. The agency claims that local and state governments are responsible for vaccinating immigrant detainees; state and local governments say vaccinations are the federal government’s responsibility, since people in ICE detention are in federal custody. Meanwhile, 2,043 people in ICE detention have COVID as of May 12—a sixfold increase in cases since early March—though the real number of infections is probably much higher.
Discourse Blog
Hi everyone, Cros from Discourse Blog here. This week was dominated by the ongoing Israeli bombardment of Gaza.
Bari Weiss, of course, was consistent, openly justifying the death of children in a strange, rambling essay that effectively took away any last shred of a mask over her bloodlust. The White House, meanwhile, said what we expected them to: little better than nothing. One slightly surprising turn was Andrew Yang’s full-throated endorsement of the violence, which makes sense due to the lane he’s carved out for himself in the NYC Mayoral race.
The rest of our week was devoted largely to labor issues. I covered the union-busting campaign at the New York Times, with leaked audio of Times’ CEO disparaging the prospective Tech Guild there. Sam covered Ellen DeGeneres’s apology tour, and Paul wove together narratives from nursing home caretakers and fast-food workers into a picture of what the least-appreciated labor in our society is feeling right now.
Sam also talked to Odessa Kelly, a leftist trying to unseat Nashville’s Blue Dog Congressman, and Paul eulogized Liz Cheney’s career of nepotism. As far as fun stuff went, well, maybe Vanessa Trump slept with a Secret Service agent! Who knows. We’ll see you next week.
The Insurgents
Jordan Uhl & Rob Rousseau
We’re back from week off for a cleansing, rejuvenating retreat, which we desperately needed after the reaction to our Woke CIA ad campaign that we had worked tirelessly on didn’t turn out like we had planned. We’ve got Nashwa Khan joining us to discuss the escalating aggression toward Palestinians from Israel, and how the unshakeable control over the narrative that Israel and its allies have had for decades feels like it has finally started to slip.