One Day, Zionists Will Continue To Deny This

Edited by Sam Thielman

THIS MORNING, the Israel Defense Forces bombed Doha, the placid capital of regional negotiator Qatar, killing six people in what appears to be an unsuccessful attempt at assassinating the out-of-country leadership of Hamas. This is far beyond negotiations rejectionism. It's the wages of allowing Israel to carry out assassinations and bombing campaigns in Damascus, Beirut, Sanaa, Teheran—to say nothing of the extermination of the Palestinians of Gaza and the advancing annexation of land belonging to the Palestinians of the West Bank—without meaningful consequence. 

To bomb Qatar is to damage, if not destroy, whatever flimsy prospects there are for regional deescalation in pursuit of peace. Qatar, which hosts the U.S.' largest regional airbase, is the one Middle Eastern country that acts as an intermediary between warring powers. The Trump administration, evidently recognizing the destabilizing force of bombing Qatar, issued a denunciation, however weak and equivocal it was. It doesn't take clairvoyance to understand that Israel, absent an arms embargo from its U.S. patron, will continue and expand its regional aggression as it sees fit. [Especially since Trump warned his supposed ally of the impending attack “during the sound of the explosions,” according to Qatari officials. A jumbo jet doesn’t go as far as it used to, what with inflation.—Sam] Israel will also interpret calls for outside powers to restrain it as hostility that it must confront in one form or another. Which brings us, in a way, to today's edition. 

IN JANUARY, one of my favorite writers, Omar El Akkad, published a caustic meditation about the Palestinian genocide and the pitiful western liberal acceptance of it. At one point in his excellent book, El Akkad asks readers to consider America's "most morally diseased moments," like the police siccing dogs on civil-rights protesters or the exuberant attendees of lynchings. In photographs of those moments, "you'll see a childish little smirk," he writes. "It's the smirk of someone who has come to realize the ugliness of the enterprise they have passively aligned with but cannot muster the courage to abandon now." With appropriate bitterness, El Akkad strains against the difficulty of avoiding the conclusion "that the principal concern of the modern American liberal is, at all times, not what one does or believes or supports or opposes, but what one is seen to be." (His emphasis.) He titled his book, as you probably know, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. 

El Akkad's title, I don't think, was ever meant to be taken literally. In the context of the book, he's aiming a powerful piece of invective to indict the cowardice at the heart of western liberalism. But the title, however unintentionally, suggests that "all evil eventually becomes undeniable," my friend Sana Saaed writes in Rolling Stone, and she builds on El Akkad to explode that idea. Palestine, a latter-day victim of western settler colonialism, is the laboratory for what the west can get away with, abroad and at home, against people inconveniently in the way of civilizational supremacy and capital accumulation. And so Sana titled her piece, One Day, Not Everyone Will Be Against This. 

Sana writes: 

At the risk of sounding Huntingtonian, there is a core "civilizational" logic that sustains Zionism, beyond Israel: erasure is recast as survival, dispossession as self-defense. In this framework, the genocide in Gaza is not an aberration but it is the logical outcome; it is not unspeakable but necessary–even if sometimes tragic and "crossing a line." 

Without the dismantling of this ideological foundation, there will be no punctuated end to the evil itself—and thus no moral correction. 

There is no shame at being conceptually scooped by Sana Saaed, I tell myself to tamp down the jealousy I feel reading her piece. She found words for something I couldn't when reading Omar's book. History does not arrive at a judgment on its own. Whatever we can speak of as the judgment of history is the result of political engagement as much as it is scholarly rigor. A four-star U.S. general once told me over dinner that he expected to argue on behalf of his works forever, because that is what is necessary to prevail in arguments over narrative. I resisted that at the time because I was too naive to see the truth of it. 

So I want to try to add another layer to Sana's engagement with Omar. For as long as Zionism exists, it will never cease rejecting the truth that Israel committed genocide. Zionism ahistorically appropriated the Holocaust as a perpetual justification for the extreme violence Israel commits. It accordingly can never accept that Israel inflicted a genocide on others. It can only seek to impose consequences upon those who recognize that genocide, and especially upon those who really have always been against this. 

In the Irish Examiner yesterday, Ria Czerniak-Lebov wrote about an Israeli academic attempt at genocide "debunking." She contrasts Israel's destruction of Palestinian educational institutions and materials, whether decades ago or presently in Gaza, with its construction of well-regarded institutions of higher education that contribute to "the weaponry, robotics, surveillance and AI" that get field-tested against Palestinians before finding buyers in western markets. Then she says something I can't stop thinking about: 

For years, I misunderstood Michel Foucault’s claim that "Knowledge is power". I mistakenly thought he meant that the more a person knew, the more empowered they would become. 

I now understand those words to mean something entirely different. Those who produce knowledge are the ones who hold power. Nowhere is that more evident than in the history produced and destroyed by colonial and imperial projects.

Israel will surely produce academics in the future who recognize the genocide, like Ilan Pappé and his fellow "New Historians" recognized the Nakba in the 1980s. But it will marginalize and scandalize them like they did Pappé, or trust that those academics will retreat into the pieties of Zionism—like Benny Morris has—rather than face the continuity of the Nakba within present Israeli politics. 

What we see right now, with Israel treating the recognition of genocide as calumny, with Zionist news outlets grotesquely, absurdly asserting that someone in poor health doesn't count as a legitimate starvation victim after Israel kept food out of Gaza—that's the future. 

Sana brings up how only thirty countries recognize the Armenian genocide. (One of them is now Israel, as its relationship with Turkey has reached a nadir over Palestine.) That doesn't happen by accident—that happens by official diplomacy, and by unofficial pressure. And I doubt Israel will content itself to be outdone by Turkish genocide denial. There will not be an academic conference too marginal, no protest slogan too benign, no internet poster too obscure. Israel's goal will be no less than to ensure that one day, no one will ever have been against this.

BALTIMORE, I'll see you Saturday at noon on the 32nd Street Stage of the Baltimore Book Festival. 

MY FRIEND MATT DUSS has a killer review essay in The Nation of a Bob Woodward book about the Biden administration's treatment of Ukraine and Gaza, which sounds like it might as well have been written by AI for how uncritical it is:

Yes, “Trump is a vandal,” as Adam Tooze noted in a Financial Times article that examined both the Trump administration’s record thus far and that of the Biden years. “But in tearing down the status quo he does no more than confirm the obvious—that the elite coalition that favoured US global leadership has lost its political grip.” War is an elegy for this elite coalition, far less valuable as a record of what went down than of how the 2024 Washington foreign policy establishment wants to see itself. In its total absence of interest in any real reflection on what the Biden administration could have gotten wrong, the book serves instead as a compelling brief on why Trump was reelected.