CBC Has Whitewashed Israel’s Crimes In Gaza. 

I Saw It Firsthand

By Molly Schumann

May 23, 2024

Source: Breach Media


LONG READ 

Working for five years as a producer at the public broadcaster, I witnessed the double standards and discrimination in its coverage of Palestine—and experienced directly how CBC disciplines those who speak out

The executive producer peered at me with concern. It was November 16, 2023 and I had been called into a virtual meeting at CBC. I was approaching my sixth year with the public broadcaster, where I worked as a producer in television and radio.

He said he could tell I was “passionate” about what was happening in Gaza. His job, he told me, was to ensure my passion wasn’t making me biased. He said I hadn’t “crossed the line” yet, but that I had to be careful. The conversation ended with him suggesting that I might want to go on mental health leave.

I declined. My mind was fine. I could see clearly what was happening.

Earlier that day, I had spoken out in a meeting with my team at CBC News Network—the broadcaster’s 24 hour television news channel. It was six weeks into Israel’s siege and bombardment of the Gaza Strip, which had, at the time, killed over 11,000 Palestinians, the majority of them women and children. Legal experts were already suggesting that what was taking place could be a “potential genocide,” with an Israeli Holocaust scholar calling it “a textbook case.”

I expressed concern to my team about the frequency of Palestinian guests getting cancelled, the scrutiny brought to bear on their statements, and the pattern of double standards in our coverage. After this, I pitched a reasonable and balanced interview: two genocide scholars with opposing views discussing whether Israel’s actions and rhetoric fit the legal definition of the crime.

Senior colleagues sounded panicked. My executive producer replied that we had to be ”careful not to put hosts in a difficult position.” They wanted time to consult with higher-ups before making a decision. A few hours later, I was sitting across from the same executive, being warned about “crossing the line.”

The following afternoon, I showed up for what was supposed to be a typical meeting to go over the interviews we had lined up for the coming days—but some unusual guests were present. In addition to my co-workers, the faces of my executive producer and his higher-ups appeared on Google Meet.

The managers were there to talk about my pitch. They said they weren’t vetoing it—they weren’t meant to even make editorial decisions—but suggested our show wasn’t the best venue. I pointed out that the network was deemed a suitable place for interviews with guests who characterized Russia’s war on Ukraine and China’s oppression of the Uighurs as instances of genocide. The managers looked uncomfortable. I was reassigned to work on a panel with two guests calling on the West to support regime change in Moscow and Tehran. (Ever since these unusual meetings had started, I was recording them for my protection.)


IF JOURNALISTS IN GAZA WERE SACRIFICING THEIR LIVES TO TELL THE TRUTH, I SHOULD AT LEAST BE PREPARED TO TAKE SOME RISKS.

But that wasn’t the end of the blowback. The next week, late on a Friday afternoon, I received an email from the same two managers who had poured cold water on my pitch. They needed to speak to me urgently. Over the phone, I was asked to keep the conversation secret.

They told me I had hurt the feelings of some of my co-workers. But it was more than just hurt feelings: someone was accusing me of antisemitism.

I had, it appeared, “crossed the line.”

Trying to work your way up to a permanent position at Canada’s public broadcaster requires knowing the sort of stories, angles and guests that are acceptable—and which are out of bounds. As a precarious “casual” employee—a class of worker that makes up over a quarter of CBC’s workforce—it hadn’t taken me long to realize that the subject of Israel-Palestine was to be avoided wherever possible. When it was covered, it was tacitly expected to be framed in such a way as to obscure history and sanitize contemporary reality.

After October 7, it was no longer possible for the corporation to continue avoiding it. But because CBC had never properly contextualized the world’s longest active military occupation in the lead-up to that atrocity, it was ill-equipped to report on what happened next.

The CBC would spend the following months whitewashing the horrors that Israel would visit on Palestinians in Gaza. In the days after Israel began its bombing campaign, this was already evident: while virtually no scrutiny was applied to Israeli officials and experts, an unprecedented level of suspicion was being brought to bear on the family members of those trapped in Gaza.

My job required me to vet the work of associate producers and to oversee interviews, so I was well-positioned to see the double standards up close.

At first, out of concern that it would jeopardize my chances of landing a staff job that I had recently applied for, I only voiced mild pushback. But as the death toll mounted, my career started to seem less important. If journalists in Gaza were sacrificing their lives to tell the truth, I should at least be prepared to take some risks.

Besides, I naively told myself, it would be easier for me to dissent than most of my colleagues. I am of mixed Jewish heritage, having been raised by a father who fled the Holocaust as a young child and dealt with the life-long trauma and guilt of surviving while his family members were murdered by the Nazis. It would be more challenging, I believed, for cynical actors to wield false accusations of antisemitism against me.

I turned out to be wrong.
The Palestine exception at CBC

In the run-up to Oct. 7, a senior colleague said that if we were lucky, “the news gods would shine on us” and put an end to a stretch of “slow news” days. Waking up on that fateful Saturday to multiple alerts on my phone, I knew that both the world and my professional life were about to dramatically change.

Even before Oct. 2023, trying to persuade senior CBC colleagues to report accurately on Palestinians was a struggle. Here are some of the TV interview ideas that a colleague and I pitched but had turned down: Human Rights Watch’s 2021 report designating Israel an apartheid state; the Sheikh Jarrah evictions in the same year; Israel assassinating Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in 2022; and the Israeli bombing of the Jenin refugee camp in July 2023.

The last of these ideas was initially greenlit but was later cancelled because a senior producer was concerned that the host would have too much on her plate. Around this time, I also pitched someone from the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem to talk about the potential impact of widely-protested judicial reforms on Palestinians—but this was nixed for fear of complaints. These would become familiar excuses.

After October 7, I dreaded going into work: every shift, the impact of the biases went into overdrive. Even at this early stage, Israeli officials were making genocidal statements that were ignored in our coverage. On October 9, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said, “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel; everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.” Even after this comment, my executive producer was still quibbling over uses in our scripts of the word “besieged” or references to the “plight of Palestinians.”

On October 20, I suggested having Hammam Farah, a Palestinian-Canadian psychotherapist, back on the network. In an earlier interview he had told us that his family were sheltering in Saint Porphyrius Greek Orthodox church in Gaza City. The following week, I learned from social media that his step-cousin had been killed in an Israeli airstrike on the 12th-century building. My executive producer responded to my pitch via instant message: “Yeah, if he’s willing. We also may have to potentially say we can’t verify these things though—unless we can.”

I was stunned. Never in my nearly 6 years at CBC had I ever been expected to verify the death of someone close to a guest, or to put a disclaimer in an interview that we couldn’t fact-check such claims. That’s not a standard that producers had been expected to uphold—except, apparently, for Palestinians.

Besides, even at that early stage, civil society had completely broken down in Gaza. I couldn’t just call up the health authority or courthouse to ask that they email over a death certificate. I already had Farah’s relative’s full name and had found a Facebook profile matching a commemorative photo he had posted on Instagram. This was already more verification than I had done for Israeli interviewees who had loved ones killed on October 7. A few days later, a different program on the network aired an interview with the guest using passive language in the headline: “Toronto man says relative was killed in airstrike that hit Gaza.”

I was being forced to walk a tightrope, trying to retain some journalistic integrity while keeping my career intact.

In early November, I was asked to oversee production of an interview with a former US official now working for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a pro-Israel think tank.

During the interview, he was allowed to repeat a number of verifiably false claims live on air—including that Hamas fighters had decapitated babies on October 7 and that Gazan civilians could avoid being bombed if only they listened to the Israeli military and headed south. This was after civilian convoys fleeing southward via “safe routes” had been bombed by the Israeli military before the eyes of the world.

As soon as I heard this second falsehood, I messaged my team suggesting that the host push back—but received no response. Afterwards, the host said she had let the comment slide because time was limited, even though she could have taken the time from a less consequential story later on in the program.

The majority of Palestinian guests I spoke to during the first six weeks of Israel’s assault on Gaza all said the same thing: they wanted to do live interviews to avoid the risk of their words being edited or their interview not being aired. These were well-founded concerns.

Never before in my career had so many interviews been cancelled due to fear of what guests might say. Nor had there ever been direction from senior colleagues to push a certain group of people to do pre-taped interviews. (CBC told The Breach it “categorically rejects” the claim that interviews were “routinely cancelled”.)

On another occasion in November, a Palestinian-Canadian woman in London, Ontario named Reem Sultan, who had family trapped in the Strip, was scheduled for one such pre-taped interview. Because of her frustration over previous interviews that she had given and coverage of her family’s situation being “diluted,” she asked if she could go live instead.

When I asked the senior producer, he looked uneasy and said the interview should be cancelled, citing that the guest had already been on the network that week. I agreed that it would be preferable to interview a new Palestinian voice and said I had contact information for a number of alternative guests. However, after cancelling the interview with Sultan, the senior producer informed me that he didn’t want another guest after all.
Editing out ‘genocide’

Most shows on the network seemed to avoid airing any mention of “genocide” in the context of Gaza.

On November 10, my senior producer pushed to cancel an interview I had set up with a Palestinian-Canadian entrepreneur, Khaled Al Sabawi. According to his “pre-interview”—a conversation that typically happens before the broadcastable interview—50 of his relatives had been killed by Israeli soldiers.

The part of the transcript that concerned the senior producer was Al Sabawi’s claim that Netanyahu’s government had “publicly disclosed its intent to commit genocide.” He also took issue with the guest’s references to a “documented history of racism” and “apartheid” under Israeli occupation, as well as his suggestion that the Canadian government was complicit in the murder of Gazan civilians.

The senior producer raised his concerns via email to the executive producer, who then cc’ed one of the higher-up managers. The executive producer replied that it “sound[ed] like [his statement was] beyond opinion and factually incorrect.” The executive manager’s higher up chimed in, saying she thought the interview would be “too risky as a pre-tape or live [interview].”

Despite the guest’s position aligning with many UN experts and Western human rights organizations, the interview was cancelled. (CBC told The Breach “the guest turned down our offer of a pre-taped interview,” but Al Sabawi had said to the producers from the start that he would only do a live interview.)


NEVER IN MY NEARLY 6 YEARS AT CBC HAD I EVER BEEN EXPECTED TO VERIFY THE DEATH OF SOMEONE CLOSE TO A GUEST. THAT’S NOT A STANDARD THAT PRODUCERS HAD BEEN EXPECTED TO UPHOLD—EXCEPT, APPARENTLY, FOR PALESTINIANS.

In another instance, a Palestinian-Canadian guest named Samah Al Sabbagh, whose elderly father was then trapped in Gaza, had part of her pre-taped interview edited out before it went to air. She had used the word “genocide” and talked about the deliberate starvation of Palestinians in Gaza. The senior producer told me the edit was because of time constraints. But that producer and the host were overheard agreeing that the guest’s unedited words were too controversial. (CBC told The Breach it “has not ‘cancelled’ interviews with Palestinians because they reference genocide and apartheid.”)

By November 2023, it was getting harder to ignore the brazen rhetoric coming from senior Israeli officials and the rate of civilian death, which had few precedents in the 21st century. But you wouldn’t have heard about these things on our shows, despite a number of producers’ best efforts. (By early 2024, the International Court of Justice’s hearings—and later its ruling that Israel refrain from actions that could “plausibly constitute” genocide—forcibly changed the discussion, and the word “genocide” finally made some appearances on CBC.)

But back in late October, I booked an interview with Adel Iskandar, Associate Professor of Global Communication at Simon Fraser University, to talk about language and propaganda from Israeli and Hamas officials. The host filling in that day was afraid of complaints, was concerned about the guest wanting to be interviewed live, and judged him to be biased. Yet again an interview was cancelled.
A secret blacklist?

One Saturday in mid-October, I arrived at work shortly after the airing of an interview with the prominent Palestinian-Canadian lawyer and former spokesperson for the Palestine Liberation Organization, Diana Buttu.

There had been a commotion, I was told. A producer from The National—the CBC’s flagship nightly news and current affairs program—had apparently stormed into the newsroom during the interview saying that Buttu was on a list of banned Palestinian guests and that we weren’t supposed to book her.

I heard from multiple colleagues that the alleged list of banned Palestinian guests wasn’t official. Rather, a number of pro-Israel producers were rumoured to have drawn up their own list of guests to avoid.

Later, I was told by the producer of the interview that, after the broadcast, Buttu’s details had mysteriously vanished from a shared CBC database. By then, I had also discovered that the name and contact details for the Palestinian Ambassador Mona Abuamara, who had previously been interviewed, had likewise been removed. It didn’t seem coincidental that both guests were articulate defenders of Palestinian rights.

While producers distressed by the CBC’s coverage of Gaza were speaking in whispers, pro-Israeli colleagues felt comfortable making dehumanizing comments about Palestinians in the newsroom.

In one case, I heard an associate producer speak disparagingly about a guest’s decision to wear a keffiyeh for an interview before commenting that “[the host] knows how to handle these people.” This guest had dozens of family members killed by the Israeli military in Gaza.

It seemed the only Palestinian guest CBC was interested in interviewing was the sad, docile Palestinian who talked about their suffering without offering any analysis or solutions to end it. What they did not want was an angry Palestinian full of righteous indignation towards governments complicit in their family’s displacement and murder.

At this stage, I was starting to feel nauseous at work. And then one Saturday night, that sickness turned into anger.

I had been asked to finish production on a pre-taped interview with a “constructive dialogue” researcher on incidents of campus hostilities over the war and how to bring people together—the sort of interview CBC loves, as it’s a way to be seen covering the story without actually talking about what’s happening in Gaza.

I carried out the task in good faith, writing an introduction leading with an example of antisemitism and then another of anti-Palestinian hate, taking care to be “balanced” in my approach. But my senior producer proceeded to remove the example of anti-Palestinian hate, replacing it with a wishy-washing “both sides” example, while leaving the specific serious incident of antisemitism intact. He also edited my wording to suggest that pro-Palestinian protesters on Canadian campuses were on the “side” of Hamas.

I overheard the host thank the senior producer for the edits, on the basis that incidents of antisemitism were supposedly worse. While the introduction of these biases into my script was relatively minor compared to some other double standards I witnessed, it was a tipping point.

I challenged the senior on why he had made my script journalistically worse. He made up a bad excuse. I told him I couldn’t do this anymore and walked out of the newsroom, crying.
Truth-telling about CBC

That evening at home, the nausea and the anger dissolved, and for the first time in six weeks I felt a sense of peace. I knew it was untenable to stay at CBC.

At a team meeting the following week, in mid-November, I said the things I had wanted to say since the start of Israel’s assault on Gaza.

I prefaced the conversation by saying how much I loved my team and considered some coworkers friends. I said the problems weren’t unique to our team but across the CBC.

But the frequency of Palestinian guests getting cancelled, the pressure to pre-tape this one particular group, in addition to the unprecedented level of scrutiny being placed on them, demonstrated a pattern of double standards. I said there seemed to be an unspoken rule around words like “genocide.”

I pointed out that Arab and Muslim coworkers, especially those who were precariously employed, were scared of raising concerns, and that I and others had heard dehumanizing comments about Palestinians in the newsroom. (The CBC told The Breach that there “have been no specific reports of anti-Palestinian and Islamophobic comments in the newsroom for managers to respond to or follow up”.)

I said that two decades since the US-led invasion of Iraq, it was widely-acknowledged that the media had failed to do their jobs to interrogate the lies used to justify a war and occupation that killed one million Iraqis—and that as journalists we had a special responsibility to tell the truth, even if it was uncomfortable.

A couple of coworkers raised similar concerns. Others rolled their eyes. (CBC told The Breach that it doesn’t recall there was anyone else who raised concerns in the meeting, but audio recordings show otherwise.)

The question of why there was nervousness around this issue came up. I said one reason why we were adverse to allowing Palestinian guests to use the “G-word” was because of the complaint campaigns of right-wing lobby groups like HonestReporting Canada.

Indeed, in just 6 weeks, there were already 19 separate instances of HonestReporting going after CBC journalists, including a host on our team. HonestReporting had also claimed responsibility for the firing at two other outlets of two Palestinian journalists, one of whom was on maternity leave at the time.

All this had a chilling effect. Hosts and senior colleagues would frequently cite the threat of complaints as a reason not to cover Israel-Palestine. During my time there, a senior writer was even called into management meetings to discuss her supposed biases after a HonestReporting campaign targeted her. Her contract was cut short.

This policing of media workers’ output reinforced existing institutional tendencies that ensured CBC rarely deviated from the narrow spectrum of “legitimate” opinions represented by Canada’s existing political class.

Certain CBC shows seemed to be more biased than others. The National was particularly bad: the network’s primetime show featured 42 per cent more Israeli voices than Palestinian in its first month of coverage after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, according to a survey by The Breach.

Although some podcasts and radio programs seemed to cover the war on Gaza in a more nuanced way, the problem of anti-Palestinian bias in language was pervasive across all platforms.

According to an investigation in The Breach, CBC even admitted to this disparity, arguing that only the killing of Israelis merited the term “murderous” or “brutal” since the killing of Palestinians happens “remotely.” Images of children being flattened to death in between floors of an apartment building and reports of premature babies left to starve in incubators suggested otherwise.


IT SEEMED THE ONLY PALESTINIAN GUEST CBC WAS INTERESTED IN INTERVIEWING WAS THE SAD, DOCILE PALESTINIAN WHO TALKED ABOUT THEIR SUFFERING WITHOUT OFFERING ANY ANALYSIS OR SOLUTIONS TO END IT.

I spoke to many like-minded colleagues to see if there was any action we could all take to push back on the tenor of our coverage, but understandably others were reluctant to act—even collectively—out of fear doing so would endanger their jobs. Some of those colleagues would have loved to have walked out, but financial responsibilities stopped them.

There had been previous attempts at CBC to improve the public broadcaster’s coverage of Israel-Palestine. In 2021, hundreds of Canadian journalists signed an open letter calling out biases in the mainstream media’s treatment of the subject.

A number of CBC workers who signed the letter were hauled into meetings and told they either weren’t allowed to cover the subject or would have any future work on the issue vetted. A work friend later regretted signing the letter because she got the sense that she had been branded as biased, leading to her pitches on Palestine being more readily dismissed.
Smeared as antisemitic

In mid-November, after laying out my concerns to my colleagues, the regular weekly pitch meeting took place. It was then that I pitched the two genocide scholars, before having to attend that virtual meeting with my executive producer—where he suggested I go on mental health leave—and yet another meeting with two managers who raised concerns over my pitch the next day. But the most unpleasant meeting with management was about to come.

A week later, I was accused of antisemitism on the basis of something I didn’t even say. According to a manager, someone had accused me of claiming that “the elephant in the room [was] the rich Jewish lobby.” (CBC told The Breach that “employees expressed concerns” that what she said was “discriminatory”.)

The accusation was deeply painful because of my Jewish heritage and how my dad’s life—and, as a consequence, my own—was profoundly damaged by antisemitism. But I also knew I could prove that it was baseless: I had recorded what I said, anxious that someone might twist my words to use them against me.

What I had actually said, verbatim, was this:

“I just want to address the elephant in the room. The reason why we’re scared to allow Palestinian guests on to use the word ‘genocide’ is because there’s a very, very well funded [sic], there’s lots of Israel lobbies, and every time we do this sort of interview, they will complain, and it’s a headache. That’s why we’re not doing it. But that’s not a good reason not to have these conversations.”

I stand by my statement. HonestReporting Canada is billionaire-funded. In December 2023, HonestReporting bragged about having “mobilized Canadians to send 50,000 letters to news outlets.” The group has also published a litany of attacks on journalists at CBC and other publications who’ve done accurate reporting on Palestine, and created email templates to make it easier for their followers to complain to publications about specific reporters.

Other, similar pro-Israel groups like the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) and the Canary Mission employ similar tactics to try to silence journalists, academics, and activists who tell the truth about Israel-Palestine.

I told the manager it was telling that instead of following up on the racist comment I had heard from colleagues about Palestinians, I was the one being accused of antisemitism and discrimination—on the basis of words I hadn’t even uttered.
The banality of whitewashing war crimes

When I handed in my resignation notice on November 30, I felt relieved that I was no longer complicit in the manufacturing of consent for a genocidal war of revenge.

Despite my experience, I still believe in the importance of the national broadcaster to act in the public interest by reporting independently of both government and corporate interests, presenting the truth and offering a diverse range of perspectives.

However, I believe that CBC has not been fulfilling these duties when it comes to its coverage of Israel-Palestine. I believe that in the future, historians will examine the many ways that CBC, and the rest of mainstream media, have all failed to report truthfully on this unfolding genocide—and in doing so likely accelerated their delegitimization as trusted news sources.

Before resigning, I raised the issue of double standards with various levels of the CBC hierarchy. While some members of management pledged to take my concerns seriously, the overall response left me disappointed with the state of the public broadcaster.

After my appeal to my coworkers in mid-November, I had a phone conversation with a sympathetic senior producer. He said he didn’t think my words at the meeting would interfere with my chances of getting the permanent staff job I had long dreamed of. Despite this assurance, I was certain that I wouldn’t get it now: I knew I’d crossed the line for saying out loud what many at CBC were thinking but couldn’t say openly. Indeed, I wouldn’t have spoken out if I hadn’t already decided to resign.

As a kid, I had fantasies of shooting Hitler dead to stop the Holocaust. I couldn’t fathom how most Germans went along with it. Then, in my 20s, I was gifted a copy of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann In Jerusalem: A Report On The Banality Of Evil by anti-Zionist Israeli friends. I’ve been thinking a lot about that piece of reportage when trying to make sense of the liberal media’s complicity in obfuscating the reality of what’s happening in the Holy Land. As Arendt theorized, those who go along with genocides aren’t innately evil; they’re often just boring careerists.

To be sure, while there are a number of senior CBC journalists who are clearly committed to defending Israel no matter its actions, many journalists just follow the path of least resistance. The fact that permanent, full-time CBC jobs are in such short supply, combined with threats of looming cuts, only reinforces this problem.

I still hear from former colleagues that pitch meetings are uphill battles. Some shows are barely covering Gaza anymore.

Being a journalist is a huge privilege and responsibility, especially in a time of war. You’re curating the news for the audience; deciding which facts to include and which to omit; choosing whose perspectives to present and whose to ignore. I believe that a good journalist should be able to turn their critical eye, not just on the news, but on their own reporting of the news. If you’re unable to do this, you shouldn’t be in the profession.

I purposefully haven’t given away identifiable information about my former colleagues. Ultimately, this isn’t about them or me: it’s part of a much wider issue in newsrooms across the country and the Western world—and I believe it’s a moral duty to shed a light on it. If I didn’t, I’d never forgive myself.

Just as I’m not naming my colleagues, I’m writing this using a pseudonym. Although the spectrum of acceptable discourse continues to shift, the career consequences for whistleblowers on this issue remains formidable.

I encourage fellow journalists who refuse to participate in the whitewashing of war crimes, especially those with the security of staff jobs, to speak to like-minded coworkers about taking collective action; to approach your union steward and representative; and to document instances of double standards in your newsrooms and share them with other media workers.

It was scary, but I have no regrets about speaking out. My only regret is that I didn’t write this sooner.

Molly Schumann is a pseudonym for a former TV and radio producer who worked at CBC for 5 years.

What Is at Stake in Palestine: Radical New Stage in Ruling Class Modalities of Control

The Israeli genocide in Gaza is a response to the crisis of global capitalism where extermination becomes an option for the system. Lighting the fuse of mass disaffection with the status quo, our protests are a direct threat to the transnational capitalist class.

By William I. Robinson, Arti Gerçek 

May 24, 2024
Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Image by Roscoe Myrick/Flickr

The following is the English version of an interview that the Turkish online newspaper Artı Gerçek, conducted with William I. Robinson, Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Artı Gerçek: As you know, the genocide perpetrated by Israel in the war after October 7 has caused intense reactions all over the world. While states have mostly sided with Israel, social movements have sided with Palestine. What do you think about the contrast?

Robinson: I don’t think most states around the world have sided with Israel. The majority of governments represented in the United Nations General Assembly have voted in favor of resolutions since October 2023 calling for Palestine to have full membership in the UN, for a ceasefire in Gaza, and urging states to prevent the forcible transfer of Palestinians. Many governments around the world have condemned the genocide and at last count there were several dozen governments that have joined the South African lawsuit at the International Court of Justice charging Israel with genocide. Even Egypt, which normalized relations with Israel in 1980 and is no friend of the Palestinian freedom struggle has declared its intention to back the South African suit. But governments around the world could and must do much more. Only a few states have cut their diplomatic relations with Israel. China is not supporting the genocide but neither is it doing very much to challenge Israel and help the Palestinians. India of course supports the genocide because its government is also based on proto-fascist repression and the persecution of the Muslim minority, so for it the Israeli model is attractive.

What is entirely true is that the Western states, led by the United States, along with Germany and the UK, have provided steadfast support for Israel. They are complicit in the genocide. Really, we have to consider this an Israeli-US genocide. This is not surprising. The United States is the principal sponsor of the Israeli regime. For decades it has provided a ceaseless flood of military and economic aid to the Zionist regime along with steadfast political and diplomatic backing. The Zionist project is fully dependent on this US sponsorship.

The larger story here is that Israel was created by Western capitalism, literally. The UK colonized Palestine from 1916-1920 as the Ottoman empire crumbled and then in 1948 turned it over to the Zionists. It did this as a strategy for establishing a platform and outpost for world capitalist penetration and control over the Middle East at a time when the region was experiencing decolonization and Arab nationalism and socialism were on the rise. One part of Western strategy for the post-WWII Middle East was backing Israel and the other part was propping up conservative Arab regimes that would have a stake in, and defend, international capitalist economic and geopolitical interests in the region and maintain tight control over the Arab masses.

The Israeli genocide has shocked and outraged the world community. It has touched a raw nerve. There is a global intifada of solidarity with Palestine. This is an historic turning point. The world now sees the Zionist project for what it is, a project that can only culminate in fascism and genocide if it is not defeated. But the outrage worldwide among social movements and publics points to something bigger, an acceleration of the contradictions of a global capitalism sinking into deeper crisis. We see our own plight in the plight of the Palestinians, our own fate bound up with that of the Palestinians. Mass disaffection with the status quo around the world has been simmering and is now reaching a boiling point. The Israeli genocide lit the fuse.

In the larger picture the genocide is a response to the crisis of global capitalism. The ruling groups fear mass uprisings. They have been preparing for them. The criminalization of Palestine solidarity in the Western countries is a dress rehearsal for mass repression. Here in the United States some 300 laws have been taken up by local and state governments throughout the country that would make such protest actions as damaging property, blocking streets or occupying public lands an act of terrorism. This is an extreme level of criminalizing peaceful dissent and it is in direct response to the outpouring of solidarity with Palestine and also to mounting popular protest against a wide range of social and economic injustices and other capitalist pathologies, such as the climate emergency, racism, and the persecution of immigrants.

Artı Gerçek: On October 7, the footage recorded during Operation Aqsa Flood against Israeli settlements, organized by Palestinian groups (in particular Hamas) caused controversy. While some were horrified by the violence, others saw the Palestinian action against Israel’s apartheid walls as a legitimate act of violence by an oppressed nation. What do you say about this topic?

Robinson: In the first place, there needs to be an impartial international investigation into the events of October 7. We may never know all of the details. But what we do know is that the Israeli government launched a well-planned propaganda campaign – backed systematically by the United States and the other Western backers of Israel – almost immediately after the Hamas attack in which it put forward a torrent of lies and of claims that have not been corroborated, including the lie that 40 babies had been beheaded by Hamas. It was really disgusting to see President Biden declare before the world on October 7 that he had personally seen photos of babies with their heads chopped off. The US president lied before the cameras of the world because there were no such photos. Israel’s claim that there had been mass rapes of women has now been debunked. Israel presented the attack as an act of anti-Semitism but the attack was not carried out because the people who were the victims were Jewish but because Israel is the colonial occupation power that has imprisoned the people of Gaza in a massive open-air concentration camp.

We can condemn the fact that civilians were targeted in the Al Aqsa Flood operation. That is a war crime in accordance with international law on the conduct of warfare. We can condemn a specific war crime and the atrocities it involved and still recognize the right of Palestinians to defend themselves, including the right to armed defense. Israel and the United States have a propaganda slogan, which is “Israel has the right to defend itself.” But this is false for two reasons. First, Israel is an illegal racist apartheid state. We would not have said that the South African apartheid state had a right to defend itself. Israel, by “defending itself,” is defending apartheid, colonialism, occupation, oppression, ethnic cleansing and massive, permanent violations of the human rights of Palestinians. Israel is an outlaw state. An outlaw state cannot claim the right to defend itself. But more importantly, international law acknowledges the right of states to defend themselves from external aggression. Yet the Palestinians are not external aggressors. They are in their own homeland! This is not a case of aggression by one state against another and so international law on the right of states to defend themselves does not apply.

Artı Gerçek: As a result of the US support for Israel, the protests that started at Columbia University spread to almost all colleges, where many protesters were detained. In your article published on Truthout, you mentioned that as an American academic you have been persecuted by Israel in the past. In the aftermath of October 7, how has the pro-Israel pressure, especially in the US and Europe, affected the right to protest and freedom of expression?

Robinson: The wave of repression against Palestine solidarity in the US and Europe is simply unprecedented, and it is a direct response to the unprecedented wave of solidarity with Palestine. The hegemony of Zionism – which, we must be very clear, is a racist, colonial, and proto-fascist political project – is beginning to crack. At this time one-third of Jewish Americans oppose the genocide and do not identify with Zionism and that percentage is growing, especially among young Jews.

Israel controls the military battlefield. It is impossible for the Palestinians to achieve an armed victory over Israel. However, Israel has already lost the global battle for political legitimacy. This is why the repression has been so fierce. Here in the US we have seen the suspension of the US constitution on our university campuses and in the larger society. We have a constitutional right to free speech and the right to peacefully assemble but those rights have been ripped up by repression. Peaceful student protesters have been met with savage state political and military repression.

But there is a larger story here. Why is the repression on and off our campuses so intense? Because our protests are a direct threat to the interests of the transnational capitalist class, to the military-industrial-security-intelligence complex, and to US foreign policy. We are seeing the rise of the capitalist university-industrial complex. Our universities are increasingly extensions of the capitalist state. The US government and military have an ever-greater presence at research universities. The universities now serve as a brain trust for transnational corporate capital. Corporations outsource their research and development to the universities. Pharmaceutical corporations finance chemistry and biology departments to do the research that is then used to produce and market drugs. The giant technology corporations do the same for computer engineering and physics departments.

The military-industrial-security-intelligence complex is tied to all of it. Many universities have simply been absorbed by agencies of the state, including the military, security, and intelligence agencies. There is a three-way fusion involving the capitalist state, the corporations, and the universities. My own campus, the University of California at Santa Barbara, receives multimillion dollar funding from Northup Grumman, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Caterpillar, and so on. These are the same corporations that work with US policy in sponsoring the genocide. They invest heavily in Israel and supply the Israeli army.

Over the past few decades of neoliberalism our public universities have been defunded. Instead of public funding the universities are funded by the tuition that students pay, which has skyrocketed and throws these students into a debt trap that lasts for decades after they graduate. But perhaps more importantly, the universities are funded by corporate and individual donors. It has now been shown that many of the multimillionaire and billionaire donors are Zionists and sympathizers of Israel. They threaten to withdraw their donations if university administrators do not crack down on the protests. So the administrators are doing the bidding of the corporations and the capitalist state.

We face the authoritarian university. We are experiencing the corporate colonization of our universities. It is no longer an autonomous space. It is now a space of capital and of the capitalist state. The student and faculty protests are demanding that our universities divest from the corporations that do business with Israel. We are calling for Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (known as the BDS movement). This demand is a direct threat to the interests of the transnational capitalist state and the US military, security and foreign policy apparatus. That is why the repression is so fierce.

To give you one example, Palantir is a multi-billion-dollar high technology corporation based in Silicon Valley, in California. In January it signed an agreement with the Israeli Ministry of Defense to supply the IDF with artificial intelligence and other digital technologies. As we know, the genocide is being waged through this technology. This company is making multimillion dollar profits off of the genocide. Its CEO, Alex Karp, explained early in May in an interview: “College campus protests are not a side show. They are the show. If we lose the intellectual battle, we will not be able to deploy any army in the West, ever.” When we understand these connections, we begin to understand why our universities are calling in the militarized police to carry out mass repression.

Artı Gerçek: There are comments that the genocide in Gaza signals a new process in terms of global politics. Do you think we have entered an era of genocide? What kind of future do you envision for the global capitalist system?

Robinson: The past half century of capitalist globalization has involved a very profound and ongoing restructuring and transformation of world capitalism. The ranks of surplus humanity, of those expelled, marginalized, and made redundant, have swelled and now number some two billion people. Capital has no use for this mass of humanity. Moreover, those among the global working classes that have employment are increasingly facing precariousness, new forms of unstable and precarious work at the same time that they face neoliberal austerity. The level of inequality worldwide is simply unprecedented. One percent of humanity now controls 52 percent of the world’s wealth and 20 percent of humanity controls 95 percent of that wealth. This means that 80 percent of humanity has to make do with just five percent of the world’s wealth.

Surplus humanity and even those who are able to find employment face a crisis of survival, of social disintegration. Whole regions and even whole countries are collapsing and people are on the move. This scares the ruling classes. They fear the actual and potential rebellion of surplus humanity. The ruling classes faces the urgent need to develop and extend new systems of mass social control and repression. The Palestinian population is surplus humanity, especially the Gaza population. Even putting aside the Zionist project of ethnic cleansing to “resolve” the problem of Palestinians that they want to get rid of, Palestinian surplus humanity is of no use to transnational capital. The Gazans stand in the way of transnational capitalist access to the natural gas and oil wealth in Gaza and the Mediterranean shoreline. Gaza is prime beachfront real estate for transnational investors. The “Gaza option” of outright genocide is a nightmarish experiment in how the ruling groups may choose to resolve the problem of surplus humanity.

We are seeing a radical new stage in ruling class modalities of control. Worldwide we are seeing the creation of what we can call super-max prison geographies. Gaza is the model. It is a giant open-air concentration camp locking up the surplus and disposable Palestinian proletariat. However, this is taking place around the world. Last year, El Salvador opened a super-max prison that holds 40,000 prisoners, virtually all of them young unemployed and impoverished surplus people. After that prison was opened, Brazil, China, Thailand and other countries announced similar plans. The one in Thailand will allegedly house 60, 000 people. So we are seeing new forms of spatial control and super-max imprisonment over the mass of dispossessed humanity and the rise of authorities, dictatorial, and even fascist systems to legitimate and develop this global police state. As the crisis of global capitalism deepens, extermination becomes an option for the system. This is what is at stake in Palestine.

But there is something else I must point out. Global capitalism faces a structural crisis of overaccumulation. The transnational capitalist class has accumulated obscene amounts of wealth and are running out of outlets to profitably reinvest their capital. They increasingly rely on what I have termed militarized accumulation and accumulation by repression. Transnational systems of mass social control, repression, and warfare becomes very profitable outlets for investing the surplus and making huge profits. The global police state is very lucrative. The Russia-Ukraine war is a tragedy for the people of Ukraine. It is a tragedy for the people of Russia. It is a tragedy for the world’s people. However, for the transnational capitalist class it is a godsend, a wonderful bonanza. This is why one consultant for the principle military corporations in the US declared after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 that “happy days are here again,” and why after Israel launched its genocide against Gaza that one executive of Goldman Sachs, a global financial conglomerate that invests heavily in Israel, declared that “this is great for our portfolio.”

Artı Gerçek: As a Middle Eastern country, Turkey is one of the countries directly affected by the post-October 7 situation. President Erdoğan has criticized Israel at the highest level, on the other hand, it has been revealed that trade between Turkey and Israel has actually continued uninterruptedly (via greatjournalistic work). How do you evaluate these contradictory positions of Turkey, which is ruled by people from the Islamist tradition?

Robinson: These contradictory positions of Turkey are also present through the other countries in the Middle East. The Turkish capitalist class and the ruling political elite share common class interests with the Israeli rulers and with the ruling classes of the Gulf and the other capitalist states. As Turkey and the Middle East globalized starting in the 1990s there was a very significant integration of capitals across the region, including between Israeli and Arab capital, and with extra-regional transnational capital. The political and the economic are out of sync here. The economic interests of the Turkish rulers, the Israeli rulers, the Gulf rulers are the same. They have common class interests that trump any political differences over Palestine. The Israeli oppression of the Palestinians is simply an embarrassment to them.

Remember, that Israel and Saudi Arabia were supposed to normalize relations this past fall. They would have done so except that the Hamas attack and now the genocide got in the way of these plans. The Israeli-Saudi normalization was supposed to have been the clincher that opened up the wider Middle Eastern region to a massive new round of investment and transnational capital accumulation – in finance and banking, tourism, energy, construction, industry, high technology, luxury consumption and so on.

The problem that the Arab regimes face is that the masses of Arab workers and poor people are also restless and see themselves in the Palestinian struggle. These states have to sustain legitimacy among their own populations so they have to pretend that they care about the Palestinians. In the particular case of Turkey, the legitimating discourse of the Erdogan regime has been a turn to Islamicism. Erdogan must walk a tight-rope between the economic and class interests that are met by expanding trade and cross-investment with Israel, and his political legitimacy at home among the masses of people. And remember, in the last elections Erdogan lost significant political capital and influence. His regime faces an erosion of its legitimacy and its grip on power. So criticizing Israel is a political necessity to retain legitimacy. This is the same with Egypt. Both those states fear that if they do not criticize Israel, the mass popular solidarity with Palestine will also contribute to a mass movement against those regimes.

Artı Gerçek: Your books, The Global Police State and Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity, have recently been translated into Turkish. Especially in the last 10 years, the Turkish state has been dominating all areas of socio-political struggle, especially the Kurdish movement, by force. What message would you like to give to your Turkish readers and those who oppose the government?

Robinson: I don’t want to get you in trouble because I know you face censorship and repression. But in Turkiye and also many other countries around the world mechanisms of consensual domination are breaking down. We are moving more and more towards coercive systems of social control, whether authoritarianism, dictatorship, and even outright fascism, although we are talking about 21st century fascism, which is different than 20th century fascism. The extension of the Turkish state into civil society and the escalation of repression, which includes also new forms of political and cultural legitimation that manipulate mass insecurity and anxiety, reflects the larger situation worldwide, as I have been discussing. The global police state is becoming consolidated in Turkiye.

But there is also the particular Turkish characteristics, including the curious contradictions between an economic program that seeks to deepen neoliberalism and the liberation of capital from restraints, including the transnationalization of Turkish-based capital, which requires the assistance of the Turkish state and its foreign policy – along with a mystifying and conservative Islamicist political and ideological program. There is also the important matter of geopolitics that I cannot get into here.

With regard to the Kurdish movement, we know that the Kurds, together with many of the Syrian and other refugees that have poured into Turkiye in recent years, occupy the lowest and most marginalized rungs of the Turkism political economy. The Kurdish struggle – objectively speaking, if not necessarily subjectively – is really a struggle of all the Turkish proletariat and popular classes. The democratization of Turkey passes through the liberation of the Kurds from the oppression that they have historically faced. Abdullah Ocalan must be freed. He ideas and his political leadership are important for all of Turkish poor and working people not just for the Kurds.


William I. Robinson is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara. His latest book is Can Global Capitalism Endure?

Why Is the Literary World Silent on Gaza?

BY ANIS SHIVANI

MAY 24, 2024
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Anis, I’m disturbed by the banner image you chose which paints Israel as a [sic] evil monolith—this is a particularly disturbing image as it draws on the antisemitic trope of blood libel. But beyond that, the image shows the Star of David with an impaled child—again, this pulls on some of the very worst anti-Semitic tropes.

– Natalie Lyalin

Me: I find the image just fine. The overwhelming majority of Israelis support Netanyahu’s genocide. The image suggests that for the sake of Zionist ideology Israel is crucifying Palestinian children. You step in only when there is the slightest chance of anything being misinterpreted as “anti-Semitic.” As a writer, have you had anything to say all these months about the genocide? Have the actual deaths and dismemberments of thousands of Palestinian children, impaled on the flag of Israeli racism, bothered you as much as this image?

You might have noticed the complete silence of any major literary figure—and until very recently, when the campus protests took off, hardly any leading mainstream intellectual or academic personality—since the present holocaust began seven months ago. What’s striking is the sudden and complete muteness of these same well-known gatekeepers of outrage about any of the issues that used to trigger them for the last many years. Their performative gestures about trivial culture war issues have utterly disappeared from the media and general discussion. I think their last big bout of outrage may have been about Barbie, a few months before the latest and most inhuman Israeli annihilation of the Palestinian people began, when the coast was still clear.

Together these two facts, the silence on the holocaust as well as the total disappearance of the liberal outrage machine for the duration that this genocide continues, tell us all we need to know about the actual place of the literary community in the wars of empire. They had been repeating the empire’s talking points on Vladimir Putin and Ukraine, but that posture too has been rendered mostly invisible in the wake of the Gaza holocaust. It suggests something about the magnitude of the horror that has been unfolding for seven months now that the usual dynamics of conversation among those in the literary community with large platforms and audiences have had to be suspended. At the same time, I know from past experience that they are quietly watching and studying, waiting to reappear at the opportune time, more empowered than ever before with their valueless virtue signaling about issues that matter to no one in real life. Had the worldwide agitation against Israel shown the least signs of actual anti-Semitism (rather than the imagined one university administrators and AIPAC-funded politicians in America rail against), or had the campus protests strayed outside the bounds of the most politically correct behavior, we would already have heard from the literary gatekeepers—and they wouldn’t have spared any of us.

Although Israel’s slow genocide of the Palestinian people has been a matter of record for eighty years, including the same type of violence inflicted on the people of Gaza and the West Bank after Israel decided to end the hoax of the Oslo “peace process” once and for all and chose to destroy any remnant of Palestinian civil authority and medical and educational capacity in the early to mid-2000s, the scale and intensity of the current violence against innocent Palestinian men, women, and children is something none of us has ever witnessed before. It is not a good idea to compare the intensity of one genocide against another, but reporters who were present at the scene in the former Yugoslavia describe the quantitative scale of the present holocaust as fifty to one hundred times greater than in the savage Balkans of that era. All of this, unlike the genocides of the nineties, has been live-streamed every moment of every hour for seven months, and yet we haven’t heard a word of substance from the kind of literary figures who would have been outspoken in matters involving identity politics in the past.

Which is all the more interesting because identity politics has been the bread and butter of literary activism for more than two decades now, and the Palestinian situation would seem to check off every single one of the triggers on the activist menu: racism, settler-colonialism, abuse of women and children, inhuman policing, in short outright annihilation of a colonized people. But of course Arabs, Palestinians, and Muslims, particularly outside the U.S., have generally not been the focus of American activism, as is true about brown people in general, although the tendency toward blindness is infinitely more manifest in the Palestinian case. Consider the amount of anger the video of George Floyd being choked to death generated—at least in the initial stages, when protest looked like it would be contained to parameters deemed acceptable by middle-class homebodies—against the infinitude of violence in Gaza on public display in every form of media for seven straight months. Clearly, the lack of visibility isn’t the problem, and in fact, the visibility of this oppression is the problem for the gatekeepers.

Intersectionality, as I wrote in an essay many years ago, carves out a special dispensation for Zionism, which is not racism according to leading intersectionalist theorists; in that respect, the present holocaust is a threat to these theorists, and camp followers like Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, and others who have made it their lucrative business to advocate racial tone-policing in the professions. Confronted with actual genocide, they have had nothing to say, just as they have never had anything to say about anything genocidal, or even a lower order of crimes, the empire might commit against the outcast and irredeemable.

I’ve searched long and hard for some flicker of life among the dormant observers of this genocide who continue to behave, so many months into the annihilation, as if nothing whatsoever is happening. You can look at your own favorite writers and you will probably notice the same pattern. It’s becoming hard to even remember who the vocal ones used to be before the Gaza holocaust happened, but check up on them one after the other and assess their record.

I scrutinized Margaret Atwood’s Twitter account going back to October, only to learn that she has continually been rehearsing all the Democrats’ hysterical cliches about Putin and Russia and Ukraine and Trump, meaning  that she is only repeating the empire’s rationales for the other forever war we’ve got going on at the same moment. You will not find a single tweet on Atwood’s account about Gaza.

Roxane Gay was one of the more regularly featured writers on the New York Times’s op-ed page for the past several years. I had heard nothing from her about Gaza, and her Twitter account is now accessible only if she lets you in; however she did write, after six months of silence, a very strangely worded op-ed about Gaza, and then shut up again on the op-ed page. The article she wrote was an argument against the efficacy of open letters, which is to be interpreted in the context of the open letter to PEN addressed by discontented writers, in the news at the time. That letter has now been signed by more than 1,300 writers, although one notes the distinct absence of major writers, and the disproportionate presence of Arab, Muslim, and Asian writers, in addition to a large number of younger, emerging writers, many publishing with small presses, rather than the big guns. Gay’s op-ed repeated many of the genocide-justifying stereotypes routinely offered by U.S. State Department spokespeople, making sure not to omit blaming Hamas, and indulging in the familiar litany defenders of the outlaw Israeli state have always offered: both sides are at fault, the situation is too complicated, partners must be found for dialogue on each side, nobody has the right to exert moral certainty. That, in fact, is the big lie, and I challenge her followers to see through the deception. Gay is laying the groundwork for her own future past the holocaust, in effect canceling whatever her signature to the PEN open letter might have represented—already getting on the right side of those with power.

Prominent, semi-prominent, obscure writer, you’ll find the same pattern. Claudia Rankine, of Citizen fame, has had nothing to say about the genocide, even as she has been conducting herself publicly on the anti-racial platform. Jennifer Egan registered her nod on behalf of the literary establishment by defending PEN, the only organization according to her that will stand up for the freedom of writers (except for actual Palestinian writers being killed). J. K. Rowling, although she is no literary writer, has been obsessed with the trans issue for a while; she found time to register her hatred of the Islamic regime in Iran, while saying nothing about the genocide. Joyce Carol Oates loves to get involved in all kinds of controversies, and is as logorrheic on Twitter as she has been for sixty years of novel-writing, but all I could find was the “both sides have a point” (no, not in genocide) and “let’s have a debate without preconceptions” verbal blather Gay rehearsed for her fans. Ayad Akhtar made a splash with Homeland Elegies, a novel about American racial inequity, but I have found no public utterance of his with regard to the genocide.

These are just some random examples, but if any writer at the top of the leagues—and we know who they are—had taken a stance on Gaza, we would have known about it. We need to realize that these heartless people, who are carrying on with their narcissistic personal celebrations and milestones as if nothing of note were going on in the world, are the decision-makers, the authorities, the alleged moral exemplars, who are going to determine your fate if you are trying to get established in the profession, or your colleagues and friends if you have already established yourself. The moral stink is unbearable. These demons are your publishers, your editors, and your teachers, blessed with the morals of the IDF. Do you really want to be close to them in the future? At what personal cost, now that you know better than ever who they are, realizing that they won’t lift a finger in the face of an indisputable genocide?

The best we can say is that the campus protests have at last given license to a few literary writers to make the mildest of statements, as if to go on record for the sake of future reference, providing them plausible deniability. Many others, however, have taken the surge of university encampments as a cue to signal to their presumed Zionist overseers that they’re on their side. You may have noticed them doing so, in conversations or on social media, by uttering such vague sentiments as “It’s all very disturbing,” signifying that they’re not on board with the campus rebellion, without, of course, going so far as to reject the existence of the holocaust outright (although that, I suspect, cannot be too far in the future, once the present Israeli onslaught reaches its conclusion).

Some writers I know took the brief lull, before the final stage of the assault in Rafah would compel writers to shut up again for a while, to lambast those insisting that people take sides in what is supposed to be a conflict driven by ancient hatreds (a lie that is obvious to anyone who knows the history of Jews in medieval and even modern Islam). Commencement time provided an occasion for some writers to express how disturbing the situation was, without needing to specify exactly what they found disturbing; they are just going on record for the sake of those who are monitoring their allegiance. A more explicit denunciation of protest (just as happened in the aftermath of the George Floyd uprising), of any suggestion of cutting off the U.S.’s special ties of patronage toward the Israeli apartheid state, can be expected to occur in the next stage of dealing with the remnants of the Palestinian people, which is coming soon. Colson Whitehead was one of the few who stepped away from his role as commencement speaker at UMass Amherst, but only gave the rationale of police excess against student protestors. These narrow bounds will get much narrower soon.

Out of curiosity I tracked the social media postings of one Yerra Sugarman, a creative writing PhD, whose example I believe is representative of what I’ve observed. Seven months ago came the proclamation of horror at the babies allegedly beheaded by Hamas, a lie repeated by many to this day. Then the denial that Israel had targeted and destroyed the first of the major hospitals (of course, this became run of the mill soon enough, so there were no further comments on the systematic destruction of hospitals). In the early stage of the genocide, Sugarman uttered declarations about savage Muslim terrorists, and then the lie about Hamas using humans as shields (in fact, IDF soldiers have frequently made it a practice, such as during the subjugation of West Bank towns, to use innocent civilians as shields as they go about their house-to-house military aggressions—yet another instance of Zionist projection). Then Sugarman complained about the alleged cowardice of Guernica magazine editors in pulling a Zionist apologia, an essay I personally found sickening for its settler-colonial arrogance and patronization (I thought the Guernica editors were absolutely correct in resigning to protest the publication of the essay, although writer Meghan Daum defends the essay for its “moral ambiguity”—all the certainties of identity politics go out the door when it comes to Palestinians ). Then you heard from her about PEN America being on the wrong side of history for letting some writers get away with boycotting the awards ceremony and calling out its non-existent stance toward the genocide as moral depravity. As I have seen with others like her, Sugarman now constantly reminds you about Jewish writers being harassed and blacklisted and their writing in danger of being disappeared, when anyone who has been part of the publishing world knows how ludicrous this proposition is. She nauseatingly doubles down on promoting Jewish writing at this particular juncture as though it were in danger of going extinct, as though it were an act of heroic resistance. By this point in the genocide, writers like Sugarman make no mention of Gaza, because it simply isn’t possible to talk about it anymore. Note that during this litany of narcissistic complaints, there hasn’t been one word of compassion or remorse, during seven months of a live-streamed genocide, about any innocent Palestinian blasted to death. This signifies a psychotic disassociation from awareness of the kinds of images none of us has seen before in our lives.

A bit of context about literary writers, now nearly one hundred percent ensconced in the academy, and their engagement with politics. Once we stopped having writers who found nourishment in life and activity outside academia—i.e., real writers—writers in the eighties and nineties generally advocated removal from politics. Theodor Adorno’s misinterpreted dictum that there was no writing after Auschwitz was often used to justify disengagement from politics and restriction to domestic affairs in novels and literary writing in general. Even in the early George W. Bush years, it was rare to find a writer who engaged in any way with the wholesale destruction of civil liberties in pursuit of a chimeric war on terror, including such abominations as torture and the mass annihilation of the people of Iraq and Afghanistan. Later in the aughts, academic identity politics merged enough with literary writing that writers at last had a ready-made politics, which was generally the empire-supporting politics of the Democratic party, making out the equally neoliberal Republican party to be the enemy. This trend reached a culmination during the Trump years as academic identity politics and literary writing merged completely, so that writers, in order to be popular, generally wrote texts to buttress one or another theoretical proposition of identity politics, being very careful never to engage in any kind of class analysis. To this day, any understanding of neoliberalism, our actual reigning political economy for the last forty years, is beyond the grasp of most literary writers.

Enter Gaza, and all writers can do is look for clues to their masters as to what they are supposed to say. In a sense, Bill Ackman and others who came down heavily against the mildest defense of social critique, as represented by Claudine Gay of Harvard, were threateningly dictating the terms for how literary writers should behave in this matter. Months before the campus protests took off, students had already been warned that they could say goodbye to lucrative jobs with employers who were watching those taking a stand. The recent campus protests have provided the tiniest of windows to a few brown writers to call for a ceasefire, but they have not gone out of their way to make themselves heard, and have refrained from any critique of Zionism per se, or the American sponsorship of the holocaust. Note that it was ordinary students, not intellectual leaders on campus, who took the lead, although by now many among the faculty, particularly those outside the social sciences and humanities, are visible supporters of the campus divestment movement.

It is the literary guardians above all who have shown that they have no heart and soul when confronted by the most devastating images of death and dismemberment any of us have ever known or will know. Having been to several book festivals, academic conferences, and even the main literary writers’ conference during the period of the genocide, I have noted that participants are often interested in expressing horror at the genocide, but they will do so privately, as though there were great risk in voicing such opinions. We should ask ourselves, who are we afraid of, and what is this terror? At the Texas Book Festival in November, when the holocaust was still in its early stages, no leading writer who took the stage made a fuss about it, even if a rare few brown writers might have said a word or two during their own events. A massive demonstration occurred at the Texas State Capitol in Austin, which was joined by many members of the public attending the festival. At a border studies conference in San Antonio in the spring, there was much more sentiment against the genocide expressed privately, although again public mentions were rare. Earlier, at the AWP conference in Kansas City in the winter, young writers held a large protest rally in the heart of the conference, but hardly any established writers joined in; the AWP organizers quickly sent a wishy-washy email assuring the participants that AWP had nothing to do with the pro-Palestinian protest and expressing concern for the mental well-being of those who had had to witness the spontaneous outburst.

As writing has become completely assimilated in academia, and more specifically in its neoliberal identity politics theoretical apparatus, it has ceased being of relevance to politics. Literary writing—except for the rare dissenting Arab or Muslim or Latin American voice willing to stand up, although, again, hardly anybody prominent—has had nothing to say about the greatest crime against humanity we will witness in our lifetime. Once Israel finishes the job by destroying all the infrastructure of Rafah in southern Gaza, which would mean that it would have succeeded in turning the entire Gaza Strip, from north to south and the middle, into the parking lot Zionist agitators in America promised at the beginning, then we will face the future, the aftermath following the acute phase of the genocide.

It is then, during the middle of another election where we will be promised that Trump will be worse (how could he possibly be worse than sponsoring and funding a genocide?) and Biden must be elected at any cost to preserve democracy, character, and decency, that at last the writers will be heard from again. They will perform their usual shtick, resorting to tried and tested cliches favored by the empire, while coming down hard on all those who have stepped out of line. The moments of interregnum, when we writers of color who have the moral high ground find our ideas resoundingly correlating with history (as during the brief George Floyd moment), don’t last, so that when I am able to speak freely about the genocide, as do others outside the literary field, it represents a rare opportunity when we have a break, which won’t, however, last beyond the crisis. Indeed, the Floyd protests led ultimately to more funding for police, not less, and a vicious speech crackdown.

Interestingly, if the genocide had been timed differently, and the election were occurring now, there would be silence among literary writers even with regard to that, because there is very little space to utter rehashed political opinions as long as the genocide goes on. But they will search for relevance as soon as the opportunity presents itself, and will try to go back to their performative gestures, which were always hollow, as those among us who understand these things have known. Only their vocal gestures testifying to forms of exceptionalism will appear as greater absurdities than they ever did before.

I put nothing past them, and wouldn’t be surprised if they quickly rewrote the narrative of what just happened in these most intense months of the genocide, converting it into an exclusive tale of anti-Semitism among dissenters and protestors, which they will then seek to punish at unbearable costs. That does seem to be the likeliest outcome we can expect from this dehumanized lot.

Anis Shivani is the author of many critically-acclaimed books of fiction, poetry, and literary criticism. His recent political books include Why Did Trump Win?, A Radical Human Rights Approach to Immigration, and Confronting American Fascism.