Eight Days in Palestine

Matthew Hoh

 December 2, 2024
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I’m back in Jordan after eight days in Palestine. I was in Palestine as part of a delegation to be in solidarity with and learn from those engaged in Palestinian liberation. We visited and had dialogues with Palestinians and Israelis in Bethlehem, Hebron, Jerusalem, Nablus, Ramallah and Sderot. We sat, listened to and spoke with Christians, Jews, Muslims and non-believers. We went to the Gaza border.

I get paid to talk about the political, military, and economic. The questions I asked, the notes I took, and the lenses through which I viewed the last eight days in Palestine were geopolitical. Of course, human reality and experience are never removed or divorced from those subjects; they are those subjects. Many in the governments, media and think tanks in DC, London, Brussels, et. al., forget or forsake that wisdom – a good explanation for how ruinous, counter-productive and failed Western foreign policy is.

What I just wrote, so pseudo-intellectually in that previous paragraph, is pablum.

What matters is that just two days ago, I shook hands with a man, Hassan Abu Nasser, who lost 130 members of his family in one single Israeli airstrike in Gaza. You’ve never felt so helpless as shaking such a person’s hand. Unless, of course, you are the one whose bloodline was nearly wiped out. I don’t know what else to say about it.

Hassan Abu Nasser (on left). Photo: Matthew Hoh.

Representatives from civil society groups we met with believe the death toll from the genocide in Gaza is between 100,000 and 200,000. Nearly all I spoke to in Palestine spoke of Gaza with a cold and numb tenor and tone, the affect of accepting a cruel and debauched reality.

In the West Bank, according to UNRWA, since October 7th, 780 Palestinians have been killed, 174 children among them. Settlers have killed an additional 21 Palestinians. There have been more than 3,500 attacks and incidents from settlers, many of them beatings and burnings of agriculture and homes. American-supplied Israeli rifles and bombs have wounded more than 5,000 Palestinians in the last 13 ½ months. Notably, there have been more than 100 airstrikes; airstrikes had not happened in the West Bank in more than 20 years. 18 of the 168 killed by Israeli warplanes and drones have been children. Before October 7th, the Israeli military gunned down and killed, on average, more than one Palestinian a day. In the first ten months of 2023, Israeli soldiers murdered nearly 50 children in the West Bank. Yet, many in the US believe history started on October 7th, 2023.

We cannot compare to Gaza, nothing can, but the violence against Palestinians in the West Bank is at its highest levels in more than 20 years and worsening.

#UNMUTEGAZA campaign poster in Ramallah. Photo: Matthew Hoh.

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It matters that we sat with Fakhri and Amneh in a trailer next to a demolished home in Jerusalem. Their home and 15 others have been destroyed this year in their neighborhood of Silwan to make way for Israeli settlements. Their children and grandchildren had lived with them. That was the home where Fakhri was born. Now he and Amneh live defiantly in a trailer on that land, next to their home’s rubble and the desecrated trees, their children and grandchildren scattered and gone. The Israeli government served a $10,000 bill to pay the costs of their home’s destruction. If Fakhri doesn’t pay, he’ll be arrested and his bank account seized. A demolition order has been received for the trailer they live in now.

Fakhri and Amneh in the trailer that sits next to their demolished home in Silwan, Jerusalem. Photo: Matthew Hoh.

Fakhri and Amneh are attacked at night. The trailer has been raided by soldiers and settlers, their possessions destroyed, Fakhri arrested. Not once or twice, but continuously, most auspiciously, the day Trump was elected. They came at 3am. Their son was beaten. They took Fakhri. Seven homes in the neighborhood were demolished on US election day; anyone willing to wager that was a mere coincidence? More than 100 homes in Silwan have pending demolition orders. 1,500 people live in them.

Since 1947, Israel has demolished 173,000 homes and structures in the West Bank. In 2023, nearly 1,400 buildings were razed. Demolition orders have increased 400% since January. In Jerusalem alone this year, 183 structures have been demolished, 33 in Fakhri and Amneh’s neighborhood. According to UNRWA, over the last 13 months, 5,000 Palestinians have been displaced from home demolitions, Israeli military operations and settler attacks in the West Bank. Coupled with the terrorism of the Israeli state through its American-financed military and settlers, the home demolitions are the means of ethnically cleansing the West Bank in preparation for eventual annexation. Most understand that October 7th gave Israel its best opportunity for ethnic cleansing, genocide and annexation in decades.

What’s left of Fakhri and Amneh’s home. Photo: Matthew Hoh.

Fakrhi speaks to us, Amneh doesn’t.

They cannot sleep. They expect the soldiers and settlers every night. Fakhri says, more than once, he is physically and mentally tired and sick.

“We live by paying fines and penalties, and spending time in jail. We have no hope, no sumud; nothing is sustaining us…only trying to keep our kids alive”, he says. It’s a hopelessness and exhaustion I heard throughout Palestine, most especially from those with children. I have witnessed the famed steadfastness of the Palestinians, and I have heard testimonies of radical acts of hope. Yet, I saw a fracturing of spirit and a fatalistic acceptance of reality I had not known before. More than one father told me what he wants is only to get his children to safety. 80 years of apartheid, annexation and annihilation will take their toll.*

Countless representatives of governments, international organizations and NGOs have visited Fakhri and Amneh. I sat in the same spot on their couch where Hans Wechsel, the US Embassy’s Chief of Palestinian Affairs, sat. [It should be noted that Wechsel’s two previous postings before taking over Palestinian Affairs in Jerusalem were advising US generals and directing Middle East counter-terrorism operations. Such a militarized and imperial view he brought into their home.]

Of their many high-ranking visitors, Fakhri says: “They are all liars.”

I didn’t hear anything more true during my nine days in Palestine.

*Israel’s strategy of breaking Palestinian resistance through terror and brutality may work on individuals and specific families, but overall their occupation and subjugation will encounter only deepening resistance. For those who want a historical example, I recommend watching The Battle of Algiers.

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Of all of the people and places of these last nine days in Palestine, what matters most to me, what makes me break down sitting on this hotel bed in Madaba, the first time I have cried this week over Palestine, is the mother’s eyes I looked into in Ramallah. I’ve previously written and spoken of such eyes, specifically in Palestine. I’ve seen it in Afghanistan, Iraq and the US as well, mothers’ eyes clouded with the betrayal of it all – humanity, life, God – and their bodies besieged with a pain whose depths cannot be comprehended until a part of it transfers to you when you hold them.

Layan Nasir is a 24-year-old Palestinian Christian woman. I note her faith because many in the US and the West are unaware that Christians endure Israel’s apartheid, annexation and annihilation equally with Muslims. A student at Beirzeit University, Layan, has been held without charge for eight months. Her family has no idea why she was arrested, no explanation has ever been given, and if there was, certainly no evidence would be offered. They have not seen or heard from her. In December, again without explanation or charge, Layan’s detention can be extended.

Layan Nasir. Photo: social media. Being held indefinitely without charge is called administrative detention. In this manner, more than 5,500 Palestinians in the West Bank are held in Israeli military prisons, including more than 350 children. Nearly 100 other women are in prison with Layan. In total, more than 12,000 Palestinians from the West Bank are in Israeli prisons, more than at any point since the First Intifada, which ended 31 years ago. Four imprisoned college students from Nablus are among those who actually have charges. As related to us by their friends at An-Najah University, the Israeli army arrested the four boys for posting about Gaza on Instagram. They have been in prison for four months now.

In Gaza, thousands upon untold thousands of Palestinians have been kidnapped, detained, tortured and executed in Israeli prisons. This week, we learned that more than 310 doctors and nurses in Gaza have been detained, tortured and executed since October 7th. 1,000 more Palestinian doctors and nurses have been murdered by American-supplied bullets, bombs, shells and missiles, many in the hospitals and healthcare facilities where they cared for the sick, wounded and dying.

Palestinian life in East Jerusalem and the West Bank is entirely under Israeli military control. Arrests, trials, with a 99.7% conviction rate, and prisons are all military. Palestinians live under more than 16,000 Israeli military laws and regulations – nothing else matters. The Oslo Accords’ demarcation of the West Bank into areas A, B and C is practically and ultimately meaningless. Such is occupation.

Layan’s mother, Lulu, believes her daughter is well. That’s what she said to us. I want to believe her, but I cannot. The documentation from the UN, human rights groups, including the Israeli human rights group B’T Selem, journalists, and Palestinian testimony tells us otherwise. Israel conducts mass, deliberate and systematic torture, including rape and sexual abuse against Palestinian prisoners. That didn’t start after October 7th; it has been Israeli state policy since Israel’s inception in 1948 – there’s even a Wikipedia page devoted to it.

Lulu Nasir, Layan’s mother. Photo: Matthew Hoh.

The night Layan was taken from her parents’ home, a soldier pointed his weapon at Lulu and said: “be quiet or we will shoot you.” When her father tried to protect his daughter, a rifle was put in his face. That was the last they saw Layan.

Lulu’s final words to our delegation were: “My only daughter. She is my sister, my daughter, my everything.”

If for no reason other than I met this woman and saw her pain, knowing that Layan is only one of more than 12,000 held and tortured in Israeli prisons, I ask every one of you to contact your governments and demand her release. They will most assuredly do nothing, especially if you are an American. But for a mother and to be in solidarity with all Palestinians, I ask you to speak out for Layan.

Ofer Prison in the West Bank. The sign reads “Together we will win this war”. Only Israelis will see that sign as Palestinians are forbidden. How many thousands of Palestinians are held and tortured behind those walls I do not know. Photo: Matthew Hoh.

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It is important for people to travel to Palestine to be in solidarity with the Palestinian people. I say this for two reasons.

First, it allows us to stand in defiance and dissent against our government’s policies.

The second and more important is that it seemed as if every Palestinian we met with told us how important it was for people to come to Palestine. The solidarity shown to them means everything to them. It tells them they are not alone and not forgotten. It offers some protection for the Palestinians as well, as the Israeli military and settlers may be less likely to attack and harass Palestinians if international representatives are present. However, in the last year, the restraint shown by the Israeli military, border police and settlers towards internationals has greatly diminished.

This originally appeared on Matthew Hoh’s Substack page. 

Matthew Hoh is the Associate Director of the Eisenhower Media Network. 

The Pride Paradox

Christoph Irmscher

 December 2, 2024
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Farm house, southeastern Kentucky. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Film critic Pauline Kael, the epitome of New York sophistication, is often misquoted as having said that she didn’t know anyone who had voted for Nixon. Which is pretty funny. What she in fact said was that she knew “only one person who voted for Nixon,” that the rest of them were “outside my ken,” and that she could feel their presence only sometimes “when I’m in a theater.”^[1] Which is no longer funny, just irritating. Kael’s willful ignorance cannot be maintained outside the rarified world of New York. Yet, as the Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild shows in her new book, the well-publicized contempt of the elites for those they consider “hillbillies” or “rednecks” significantly contributes to our current political malaise.

The last election confirmed what many pundits had already feared but wouldn’t admit even to themselves—that Trumpism isn’t a fringe phenomenon but drifts squarely in the often toxic American mainstream. Perhaps one of the most sobering things about the most recent election was how quietly it unfolded—with none of the violence widely expected, without riots or mass protests. Afterwards it seemed as if even some of the winners were in a state of shock over what had actually happened—that a convicted felon more interested in victory for victory’s sake and in avenging himself on his foes than concrete policy proposals had been given a second chance to be President.

Hochschild has long warned us that we ignore, at our own peril, the way people think and feel outside the nation’s urban centers. Stolen Pride is the powerful sequel to her Strangers in Their Own Land (2018), which was a finalist for the National Book Award, a record of conversations she had conducted, over a period of five years, with Louisianans living in the Tea Party stronghold of Lake Charles.^[2] In Strangers she inaugurated the concept of the “deep story,” the nexus of feelings and perceptions underlying the way people see the political landscape and their own place within it. For the sequel, Hochschild traveled to Pike County, Kentucky, the “whitest and second-poorest congressional district in the country” (p. 271), not even a blip on the horizon of the national consciousness. Here a lethal combination of factors—the demise of the coal industry, the attendant loss of jobs, the mounting contempt for rural life that residents feel coming from the urban centers—has wreaked havoc on people’s lives. Thirty of the 1,265 people charged in the January 6 attack on the Capitol came from Kentucky.

Hochschild is an unfailingly kind interviewer and adept storyteller, and her gallery of arresting characters, from both sides of the political divide, sticks with the reader. Managing to be both self-effacing and authoritative, she is remarkably successful in eliciting honest self-assessments from even the most reticent interlocutors. Evoking a landscape scarred by loss, with mountaintops sawed off in the quest for more coal, stores shuttered on Main Street, and trailers rusting across from well-kept homes, she also paints, with a novelist’s light touch, vivid portraits of the people who make their home here: the retired college administrator and ex-Governor of Kentucky, a praiser of his own past, ensconced in his wood-paneled office at the University of Pikeville; the half-Cherokee convict and KKK acolyte, who, delighting in his own “badness,” endorses white supremacy; the pony-tailed designer of scary online art who didn’t finish school and considers himself “antiracist” even as he wonders where exactly in the hierarchy of national grievances poor whites like him might fit.

Strangers in Their Own Land came out when the first Trump presidency was already underway; the appearance of Stolen Pride coincides with the advent of—still hard to believe—Trump’s second term in office. The narrative thread holding the book’s various chapters together is a march of Neo-Nazis through Pikeville planned for April 2017. The leader of the parade: Matthew Heimbach, America’s most recognizable homegrown fascist, a strange bespectacled, round-faced, and jack-booted creature clad in black, his body covered with tattoos, a “virtual United Nations of the extreme right,” in Hochschild’s words (p. 49). None of the residents of Pike County, the Trumpists as well as the remaining handful of progressives, wants anything to do with Heimbach. Yet, when pushed to disclose the reasons for their disdain, they inevitably reveal their own disgruntlements. Drawing on concepts familiar from political science,[3] to which she adds a new psychosocial dimension, Hochschild demonstrates that Pikeville—and other communities like it—lingers in the grip of a “pride paradox”: “low opportunity coupled with the belief that the blame is on you if you fail” (p. 77). In Hochschild’s economy of pride, self-blame, somewhat contradictorily, goes hand in hand with righteous anger directed at others, mostly the affluent folks living in the cities, from Lexington, Kentucky to Washington, DC, who, undeservedly, seem to have it better than you.

Alex Hughes, a resident of Prestonsburg, half an hour north of Pikeville, is a case in point. In his view, the stores he launched—a tattoo parlor and a computer store—failed not because of the economic downturn affecting the area but because he failed to read the writing on the wall. And while Hughes was eventually able to pull himself up by his bootstraps, attending a computer training program and learning how to code, the shame of his years of poverty still stings and manifests itself in visceral hatred of anything that smacks of governmental overreach. Hochschild’s interviewees want to be sure, as one of them disarmingly puts it, that when they die, people will say “nice things” about them (p. 158). But, as they don’t or can’t see, the odds are already against them: the “invisible hand” of capitalism (Adam Smith’s term) has an inclination to hit hardest the ones who most fervently believe in it (p. 33).

An unsettling subplot in Hochschild’s book is the fate of Heimbach, a Maryland-born college graduate with parent issues, whose story of stolen pride is a narrative he consciously crafted. After being arrested for domestic abuse in Paoli, Indiana, Heimbach was expelled from his Traditional Workers Party, had to find a job, and thus became, in his own assessment, a transformed man. How deep that transformation went is anyone’s guess: “A lot of Jews were skilled,” the self-absorbed former Holocaust denier tells Hochschild over dinner. “But I am not sure about the gas chambers” (p.187). While Hochschild is careful not to reveal her personal preferences, the reader senses that she is more drawn to those Pike County residents who have turned genuine feelings of wounded pride into ways of helping their community—James Browning, for example, whose painful history of addiction makes him an effective healer at a local recovery center.

Hochschild recreates these conversations without judgment or bias, keeping her editorial interventions to a minimum (in a rare moment of disagreement, she charges Wyatt Blair, the mixed-race convict, with having made a “confusing point,” p. 108). But she doesn’t mince words when explaining how Trump, with a real estate investor’s predatory instinct, has learned to exploit ordinary people’s “deep stories” for his own gain. In his four-step shame ritual (Hochschild’s terminology), he blithely violates the rules of political decorum by making an outrageous statement (“Mexicans… they’re rapists”; step 1), for which he promptly gets publicly shamed (step  2), which in turn allows him to pose as a victim (“Look what they are doing to me,” step 3), which then, in step 4, leads him to restate, without contrition or modification, the original provocation. Trump performs, and turns to his own benefit, what others have suffered. The lethal logic of Hochschild’s pride economy, in which self-blame and shame and anger alternate, prevents those caught up in it from realizing when someone who appears to speak their language merely imitates it. Like his occasional model Hitler (alternately embraced and then disavowed), Trump has a knack for condensing raw emotions—especially those he has never felt himself—into handy slogans, such as “Stop the Steal.” And he has coasted back into office on the idea that whatever has been stolen (your vote, the wages you deserve, the appreciation you need) will be magically restored, by him only, and maybe even on his first day in office.

Hochschild’s own proposed solution for our current political predicament is to tout the benefits of the “empathy bridge,” an invitation to seek dialogue and understanding rather than confrontation and contempt. James Browning, the addict turned community healer, or Robert Musick, the optimistic chaplain of Pikeville University, have, in Hochschild’s opinion, shown the way. (Faced with the potential disruption of the 2017 march, Musick wanted to invite Heimbach to campus, a request denied by the university’s president). Stolen Pride in itself is such an empathy bridge, a remarkable testimony of Hochschild’s patience with views radically opposed to her own. She doesn’t fault her interviewees for thinking the way they do; for her, the source of the problems they experience lie in the persistent hold the “American Dream” has over so many low-income Americans, the “More Is Better” ideology that has already caused so much collateral damage.

But Stolen Pride, for me one of the year’s most important books, also illuminates another path, increasingly endangered, to a better America. Note, for example, that James Browning’s turn from drug addict to healer came after attending classes at a community college. The “pride paradox” will lose its power over those who have learned to step outside of their personal bubbles to take a good long look at themselves and their country—the essence of civic education. Which is why the GOP, for much longer than most of us have realized, has striven to diminish and dismantle our educational system, from interfering with grade school curricula to sanitizing textbooks to restricting the freedom of expression for teachers and university professors.^[4]

When, at my own university, well over 90% of faculty declared their loss of confidence in our leadership, appointed by a Republican-leaning Board of Trustees, Indiana University President Pamela Whitten declared herself “stunned” and responded tartly that the views of her faculty on higher education differed “wildly from how we are viewed … by much of the general public.”^[5] But public education shouldn’t simply reproduce and reaffirm the social consensus; if this were true, we’d still think that the sun revolves around the Earth and that humans, along with all other animals, were created by divine decree exactly the way they look today. “Thirst for learning,” the American essayist John Jay Chapman wrote more than a century ago, “is a passion that comes, as it were, out of the ground; now in an age of wealth, now in an age of poverty.”^[6] As Arlie Hochschild’s Stolen Pride makes clear, we owe it to the residents of the Pikevilles everywhere, as well as to ourselves, to continue to nourish that passion and, by teaching the hell out of our classes, to resist, every single day, those who move to quash it. Lest we forget: every library book zealously removed from our classrooms and libraries is a further nail in the coffin of the “land tolerating all, accepting all” the poet Walt Whitman once envisioned.^[7]

Notes.

^[1] Quoted in Richard Brody, “My Oscar Picks.” The New Yorker, February 24, 2011, November 27, 2024.

^[2] Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (New York: The New Press, 2018).

[3] See David Keen, Shame: The Politics and Power of an Emotion, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023.

^[4] Jonathan Chait, “Indoctrination Nation,” New York, May 8, 2023, November 26, 2024.

^[5] Jack Forrest, “Shared governance, Expressive Activity Policy and More Discussed at IU Trustees Meeting,” Indiana Daily Student, June 16, 2024, https://www.idsnews.com/article/2024/06/iu-trustees-discuss-expressive-activity-policy-approve-budget-more-summer-meeting, accessed November 24, 2024; Pamela Whitten, “Reflections on Moving Forward Together,” email sent to Indiana University faculty, April 16, 2024; Marissa Meador, “Updated: Whitten Rebuked: IU Faculty Vote No Confidence in Whitten, Shrivastav, Docherty,” The Indiana Daily Student, April 17, 2024, https://www.idsnews.com/article/2024/04/whitten-rebuked-iu-faculty-vote-no-confidence-in-whitten-shrivastav-docherty, accessed November 26, 2024.

^[6] John Jay Chapman, “Learning” (1910), in An Introduction to John Jay Chapman’s Philosophy of Higher Education, ed. Alan L. Contreras (Eugene, Oregon: Cranedance, 2013) p. 62.

^[7] Walt Whitman, “Thou Mother With Thy Equal Brood” (1891), November 26, 2024.

 

Christoph Irmscher is the editor of the Library of America edition of Audubon’s Writings and Drawings and the co-editor, with Richard King, of Audubon at Sea, forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.

Around 100 killed in violent clashes during football match in Guinea: Report

Refereeing decisions that saw two players of one football team receive red cards followed by a penalty against same team reportedly triggered violence

Alperen Aktas and James Tasamba |02.12.2024 - TRT/AA

ISTANBUL

Around 100 people were killed in violent clashes during a football match in Guinea on Sunday, local media reported.

The violence broke out during a match between the Labe and Nzerekore football teams in Nzerekore, the second-largest city in the West African country.

While the exact death toll remains unclear, local hospital sources reported "dozens of fatalities." One doctor at the scene estimated that the number of dead could be "around 100."

Guinea's Prime Minister Bah Oury condemned the violence in a statement on X.

“The government regrets the incidents that marred the football match between the teams of Labe and Nzerekore this afternoon in Nzerekore," he said.

"The government is closely monitoring the situation and reiterates its call for calm so that hospital services are not hindered in providing first aid to the injured.”

More information will be released as it becomes available, he added.

According to the report, refereeing decisions that saw two Labe players receive red cards followed by a penalty against the same team triggered the violence.

The match was part of a tournament organized to honor Colonel Mamady Doumbouya, Guinea’s military leader who took power in 2021.

Nzerekore, with a population of around 200,000, is located 570 kilometers (354 miles) southeast of the capital Conakry.

Desertion cases in Ukraine hit 60,000 in 2024, nearly double the previous two years combined — The Financial Times

MEDUZA

 December 2, 2024
Source: The Financial Times


From January to October 2024, Ukrainian prosecutors opened 60,000 criminal cases against military personnel for unauthorized abandonment of positions and military units, nearly double the combined total of similar cases opened in 2022 and 2023, reports The Financial Times. If found guilty, service members face up to 12 years in prison.

As an example, the article mentions an incident where hundreds of soldiers from the 123rd Brigade abandoned their posts in Vuhledar in late October. They returned to Mykolaiv, calling for more weapons and rotations. Some have reportedly gone back to the front, while others are in hiding or custody.

FT also notes that some Ukrainian military personnel exploit opportunities to attend training camps in allied countries as a means to desert. According to an anonymous Polish security official, an average of 12 Ukrainian soldiers desert each month during military training in Poland.more on mobilization


The U.S. wants Kyiv to lower its draft age to 18 — risking dire demographic consequences. Can Ukraine’s army manage without it?