Our Weekly Discontents, 5/24/2021
The system works! I guess?
It’s still too early to draw any conclusions—circumstances might have changed even by the time you read this, for all I know—but it would appear that the ceasefire that went into effect early Friday morning in Gaza has survived its first weekend.
Hello readers! Derek from Foreign Exchanges here. During 11 days of almost non-stop Israeli bombardment that ended, at least for now, on Friday, at least 248 people were killed in Gaza along with more than 1900 wounded and over 52,000 displaced. In Israel proper, 13 people were killed along with hundreds of people either wounded by Gazan rocket fire or treated for symptoms related to panic and stress. If previous Gaza wars are any indication the coming days may see a ceasefire violation, or two, or more, but eventually the fighting will end. But not permanently. There are many uncertainties about how long Gaza might remain quiet this time around, but one thing that is completely certain is that there will be another war, and another after that, and another after that, until the Israeli government and its Western enablers stop obfuscating the root of the problem—the Israeli occupation.
The damage in Gaza is, as you might imagine, extensive, with thousands of homes and businesses damaged or destroyed and public infrastructure—everything from roads to utilities to sewage pipes to healthcare—has been pulverized. Rebuilding could take years, in no small part thanks to the Israeli blockade that’s restricted raw materials from being brought into Gaza since 2005. Further complicating the reconstruction effort will be the insistence, by the Israeli government as well as by large Western donors, that reconstruction funds be routed through the Palestinian Authority, which has no presence in Gaza and little credibility with the Palestinians living there. The blockade is the most obvious, and probably most punishing, manifestation of the occupation, but it is far from the only one.
Last week I spoke with activists Sandra Tamari and Darin Hussein, who both talked about the displays of Palestinian solidarity that have marked these past couple of weeks—in defiance, we should note, of decades of overt Israeli efforts to divide the Palestinian community both physically and politically. If there is a silver lining to these events it could be the long-term effect that solidarity might have on the Palestinian struggle. Or maybe it’s that, as the Washington Post’s Ishaan Tharoor noted, it’s that the past two weeks have seen a notable shift in The Discourse away from the long-dead “two-state solution” toward acceptance of the reality that half a century of Israeli colonization in the West Bank has made a separate Palestinian state impossible.
But if a “two-state solution” is dead, a “one-state solution” that offers the Palestinians full rights and freedoms is at best a distant hope. Without a fundamental change in Israeli politics, the kind that can only come about after sustained pressure from the international community, the status quo for the Palestinian people—apartheid—will continue. That’s why the mood in Gaza seems to be one of happiness that the bombing has stopped coupled with resignation that this isn’t going to be the last time the enclave and its people are pulverized by Israeli arms. It’s also why it’s so galling to see people like former US ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk crowing about how well The System Works:
The “‘arm around Israel’ technique” calls for a US president to express unfettered and unconditional support for Israel publicly, while privately pressuring Israeli leaders to modify their behavior. We’re told that it’s the only way to nudge those Israeli leaders into a ceasefire, because any public pressure would backfire. That the ceasefires this method generates just so happen to come about at around the same time that the Israeli military starts running out of things to bomb is, I guess, coincidental. That it took at least 248 dead Palestinians for the system to “work” in this most recent case is, apparently, an acceptable loss. Omelets, eggs, etc.
One is tempted to wonder how many Palestinians would have to die before Indyk and his peers in The Blob might begin to feel that maybe The System hadn’t worked, but the truth is there probably is no upper bound. When you don’t recognize the basic humanity of a people, what difference does it make if ten more of them die—or 100 more, or 1000 more—in service of The System? And that, ultimately, is why the occupation continues; because the occupiers, and their friends in very high places around the world, simply don’t recognize the humanity of the occupied.
It’s time to turn things over to the Discontents crew for their latest updates. But before we do, if you’re a new reader please subscribe today, absolutely free, and be sure you’ll never miss another issue:
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Welcome to Hell World
Luke O’Neil
On Friday of last week the entire staff of the popular Bull Moose record store chain in Salem, NH (whose CFO is Record Store Day founder Chris Brown) were fired abruptly. Four workers I talked to said they had recently begun pushing back against conditions in the store and were planning a work stoppage.
“We’ve talked about unionizing, but never gone through with it because of the fear of everyone getting canned,” Kam Brooksmoore, who’s worked there for two years, told me. “Recently we were planning on going on strike for the new mask mandate if they didn’t repeal it. Also to talk about our unfair wages, the customers, and how management have brushed all our concerns aside for years.”
Among some of the abuse employees have gotten from customers, which only got worse during Covid, was Brooksmoore being threatened by one brandishing a gun. The customer had become irate when asked to wear a mask. Brooksmoore was given an extra $40 in his paycheck to make up for the experience he said.
Read the rest here.
Earlier in the week I published a heartbreaking and brutal dispatch from India by writer Saib Bilaval.
“There’s no longer any time to mourn people individually. Death has to be processed in groups. One can barely begin to cope with news of one loss before news of the next arrives. It doesn’t stop. Throughout all this I haven’t had the courage to reach out to those I know who lost someone yet. I still don’t have it. What could I say that they don’t already know?”
Subscribe here for $4 a month (discount good until tomorrow) to read it.
On the anniversary of his passing last week I also re-published this piece I wrote about Chris Cornell’s otherworldly talent.
The Insurgents
Jordan Uhl & Rob Rousseau
This week we’ve got Dwight Rhinosoros of the Eat the Rich podcast on becoming a true New Yorker, our dystopian Robot Police Dog future, Joe Biden’s “quiet diplomacy” on Israel/Palestine, how a ceasefire in Gaza is just a return to the daily dehumanization and colonial violence that Palestinians are subjected to every day, the slow transition over the last week from widespread unapologetic Palestinian solidarity to widespread, vague condemnations of antisemitism and a whole lot more. This is a subscriber-only episode, so if you’re a non-subscriber you are going to miss out on this really great conversation. How unfortunate for you!
The Flashpoint
Eoin Higgins
Last week I interviewed Gaza City artist Malak Mattar on living through four wars by the age of 21. Mattar told me about her experiences and how the psychological trauma of the occupation is ongoing.
“The last time I felt ‘young’ was when I was eight years old,” she said.
The Gaza War of 2008-2009 killed over 1,100 people in the Palestinian territory. Mattar was eight during the fighting. It took a long time before she got over what had happened.
“I was not able to speak a word for years,” Mattar said. “I was not able to communicate. I was not able to speak with people and even have a human interaction, because I saw human beings around me as monsters. I didn't see humans as humans.”
The piece also appeared at Discontents partner Discourse Blog.
You can also hear the full interview here by subscribing.
I'll be writing more about Palestine this week featuring more interviews with people on the ground as the "ceasefire" goes into effect as well as turning my attention to class inequality in the time of Covid. Hope to see you there.
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Cruel and Usual
Shane Ferro
This week, I wrote about the dual problem of keeping courts public and transparent in the age of Zoom court, and the major privacy violations that come along with live-streaming the criminal proceedings of the accused. I have more questions than answers about what the right way forward is This is a space where questions about government oversight meet the presumption of innocence meet the problems of vitality on the open internet.
Zoom court proceedings have gone viral several times since the pandemic started, and defendants are thrust into the spotlight without any agency over their appearance Just how public can you expect the content you put on the internet to become is a question that has always fascinated me, because I think many people create and post content intended for 100 or so friends, and it’s very easy to lose control over the narrative of your own likeness/image/content once it starts spreading beyond those you intended to see it. Zoom court, where people are participating in creating internet content not because they want to but because if they don’t they will be locked in a cage, adds another layer to this problem, to put it mildly.
The pandemic thrust us into a virtual system without much time to dwell on these issues, but a year in, it’s time to take a step back and start thinking through them.
BORDER/LINES
Gaby Del Valle & Felipe De La Hoz
While we use the catch-all term “ICE detention” to reference the enforcement agency’s nationwide network of detention centers, at any given time very few of the people in immigration detention are directly in ICE-run facilities. Rather, the agency leans on a web of private prison contractors and obliging localities to actually hold its detainees for it. Sometimes, ICE signs an intra-governmental service agreement allowing it to place its federal detainees in county jails overseen by local sheriffs or other detention personnel. Sometimes, it contracts directly with companies like CoreCivic and the GEO Group to operate wholly private facilities. Sometimes it’s both, with counties acting as pass-throughs between ICE and private providers.
In the end, it all results in detainees who are supposed to be in civil, non-punitive detention being held in conditions that very much resemble jails, or are literal jails. ICE is supposed to ensure that these facilities are following certain detention standards, but in practice violations rarely have consequences and facilities are often cited for the same gross negligence over and over without change. This past week, there seemed to finally be a federal response as Homeland Security Secretary Ali Mayorkas announced the government was terminating its relationships with two notorious facilities, including a privately-operated center in Georgia infamous for sending women to a doctor who performed nonconsensual hysterectomies and other procedures.
For BORDER/LINES, we broke down what this means in practice, and the questions of whether this is a symbolic move — the facilities were holding relatively few people after detention numbers came down during the pandemic — and what it might mean for detention oversight going forward.
Wars of Future Past
Kelsey D. Atherton
Missile Defense is a difficult technology sold as a political solution. When it comes to nuclear wargaming, the consequences for failure are measured in kilotons and megadeaths, while the prospect of even a perfectly successful system (so far a technological impossibility) risks provoking a nuclear first strike before the defense is fully operational. I’m not a fan, I think it’s safe to say.
I think building a strategy around missile defense leads to bad policy, expects too much of the tech, and is mostly a boondoggle bet on engineering a way around an apocalypse instead of negotiating a reduction in apocalyptic arsenals
When it comes to warheads less potent than nukes, we see missile defense in miniature. The failures are deaths in the single or sometimes double digits. The success is measured in tens and often thousands of dollars detonated in the sky. In an upcoming Wars of Future Past, I look at how, exactly, the existence of Iron Dome shapes strategy, how it manages to mask a straightforward story of settler colonialism and provocation under a spectacle of light and tech.
There is also one other, important overlap between Iron Dome and the bigger, anti-ICBM missile defenses. Even when an interceptor can be designed, fielded with sensors and positioned just right to make the interception work, its success is time limited. Intercepting is a hard task. Overwhelming an interceptor, with more missiles, rockets, or warheads, is cheaper, and has remained cheaper for decades. Adding even minimal maneuvering ability to a cheaper projectile vastly complicates interception. Missile defense is temporary, at best. The solution, in missile-armed standoffs, can never be purely technological. Any story about the tech that leaves out how that tech must build to a political end or become irrelevant is at most telling half the story.
Discourse Blog
It was a busy news week and a busy blog week over at Discourse Blog. Here’s what we got up to.
I blogged about South Carolina’s attempts to reinstate the firing squad, in order to get around current shortages of lethal injection drugs. There’s no way around it: all capital punishment is wrong, but in the GOP’s bloodlust they may have come to a more honest way of death -- and my personal hope is that it shows people what the death penalty really is.
Meanwhile, Caitlin Schneider ranked every single state motto. Yeah. Every single one. I won’t spoil who came first but I can tell you that Florida’s extremely boring “In God We Trust” came last. Sorry Florida. On that note, we also put out our Worst Politicians in Florida list, if you want to give the Sunshine state a double dose of scorn today.
Paul Blest spoke to a McDonalds’ worker preparing to strike for the fight for 15, who’s been working 15 hour shifts because the company refuses to pay workers a living wage, meaning those who can’t afford to leave the job have to work themselves to the bone.
We also covered the dual media crises this week -- Chris Cuomo’s continued corruption on behalf of his ghoulish brother Andrew, and the AP’s shameful, disgusting concession to a right-wing smear campaign against one of their junior associates.
And to round things off, Sam wrote about putting her cats on a diet. It uh… isn’t going great.
Perspectives: Past, Present, and Future
Patrick Wyman
Around 5,000 years ago, the grasslands between the Black and Caspian Seas were home to a group of people who kept vast herds of cattle and sheep, rode from pasture to pasture in wagons, and probably rode horses to keep track of their livestock and find fresh grass. There probably weren’t even very many of them, numbering in the thousands rather than tens or hundreds of thousands, but they’ve left an outsized impact on the millennia since: These pastoralists were probably the original speakers of Proto-Indo-European, the language ancestral to all of those spoken by billions of people around the world today.
Foreign Exchanges
Derek Davison
Foreign Exchanges contributor Alex Thurston stopped by last week with a very well-received (at least judging from the comments on Twitter) deep dive into some of the most popular ways that “experts” in the study of war produce flawed and misleading conflict analysis. I’ll leave you with his opening paragraph as a teaser but please read the whole thing:
Analyzing war is a crucial task for anyone interested in peace. Analysis is a particularly crucial task for the left, given that war and war-making have been central to imperialist foreign policy, the rise of the national security state, and the securitization of everyday life in the United States and many other countries around the world. Bad analysis of war abounds, with destructive consequences. This piece discusses five influential yet fundamentally flawed methods of analysis.