NEVER AGAIN IS
NOW –
-
Emily Critchley (U.K.)
How to turn all the charred bodies, all the
broken genitals and bits of glass, and all the bullet holes and soiled
underwear and the thick thick blood stains on the floors and beds, in the
children’s rooms, in the safe houses;
How to gather all these bloody, real remains –
the shards of arms and legs and severed heads and breasts; all the films of
spitting, cheering, pulling, jeering, the cutting of Achilles tendons, the
selling of limbs as trophies;
How to take all this and turn it on its head
into a Cause and put a mask on the cause and make it Cool: call it “Resistance”,
call it“Occupation”, call it “Oppression”, call it “Colonization”;
To put a keffiyehon the Cause and march around; to put a blindfold on the
Cause and grab a phoney map; to make more Cause friends and rant and shout into
a megaphone;
To rile it up until Cause wants more broken
bodies, hearts and minds, wants more violence, wants more racism, wants to
mirror what it sees on TV, wants to be part of the action!
Cause wants to barricade Jews from schools and
surround synagogues; Cause wants to glorify rapists and celebrate warmongers;
Cause wants to ignore what Cause does to its own people; wants to avoid the actual
colonization at Cause’s heart; wants to pretend it has no international power;
Cause wants to globalise the Intifada and not
free the tortured hostages, but definitely still chant for the concept of
freedom –
“From the river to the sea!”
Cause isn’t clear on which river or which sea;
Cause doesn’t know Cause’s father was a paid-up
Nazi*;
Cause is certain Cause is on the right side of
History;
Cause isn’t clear about the brutal conquests
of surrounding countries; the crucifixions or the category errors; the slavery
and the sexual trafficking; the misogyny and paedophilia; the stolen aid and
the starvation; the stonings and the mutilations; the public hangings and the
bigger mission;
Cause has tunnel-vision.
Cause not great at History or Geography (or
Logic or Rationality);
Cause and effect; action and reaction.
Cause can’t tell the difference between
resistance and terrorism; indigeneity and colonization; democracy and
dictatorship; humanitarianism and collusion;
Good and Evil.
But Cause sure feels good about itself
‘causeCause was teacher’s pet! And teacher say
Jews bad!
Cause not running cover for Evil! Cause just
want to show solidarity
and stand for:
Freedom!
From what?
To do what?
*Nazi
ally and‘father’ of the Palestinian Liberation Movement, the Grand Mufti
Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, met with Hitler on 28 November 1941,to ask for help
opposing the establishment of a Jewish national home at the height of the
Holocaust. According to eye-witness reports Hitler told him that, after Germany
had ‘solved its Jewish problem’ within Europe, ‘Germany’s objective would then
be solely the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere
under the protection of British power’. Browning,
Christopher R. (2007). The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish
Policy, September 1939 – March 1942.There areseveral photos of Husseini meeting
with Hitler and touring Nazi concentration camps before Israel’s founding: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2017-06-15/ty-article-magazine/revealed-photos-of-palestinian-mufti-visiting-nazi-germany/0000017f-ef6e-d0f7-a9ff-efefa25a0000
****