First, some quick admin stuff:

• I just published an article for 972mag called “Is Israel trying to foment civil war in Lebanon?” and I think it’s pretty obvious what it’s about. Give it a read if you can.

• I still have a few spots available for the next class on modern Lebanese history and politics which will be in May (the five Saturdays of May, 4-6pm UK time). All details on the what and the how here.

• My podcast, The Fire These Times, is still not as active as I would like. I’ve had to postpone a few recordings to focus on Israel’s war on Lebanon. That being said, I’m hoping things will change in May.

• I still intend on moving this newsletter to Ghost but I don’t have a timeline yet. Same problem: time. If you wish to support me but don’t want to give your money to Substack, which I totally understand, the best way to do so is in Ko-Fi anyway. I would give you a complementary subscription here at no added costs so that your money doesn’t go to Substack.

A few days ago, Israel murdered another Lebanese journalist, Amal Khalil, in South Lebanon. She was effectively hunted by Israel alongside her colleague Zeinab Faraj, a freelancer who often went on assignments with Khalil. Faraj recounted how they were sheltering in a house after Israel had already struck their site twice, the second strike hitting Khalil's car, injuring them both. Israel waited until the two journalists were in the house, and then struck the house itself. The Red Cross managed to get to Faraj on time to save her life, but Israel then opened fire at the rescue workers before they could get to Khalil. By the time they could reach Khalil several hours later, all they found was a corpse.

I used to work as a journalist, which makes Khalil a colleague of mine. Had I stayed in Lebanon, I may have been sent on similar assignments. Very close friends of mine still take the same risks Khalil took, and any journalist in Lebanon, especially local ones, is aware that Israel has killed more journalists since 2023 than all other governments combined. Any journalist is aware that when they put on the press vest and press helmet, they are taking a risk: will this protect them today, or turn them into a target? No one knows, except the Israelis. Several times a month, with or without a “ceasefire,” which Israel never respects anyway, close friends of mine are risking their lives to report on what Israel is doing with the knowledge that their deaths is unlikely to outrage Israel's Western backers. This is why I find most films and series that deal with journalism to be hollow. They have no idea what it's actually like to risk your life as a journalist while racialised as an Arab.

But when I cover Israel today, whether as an analyst or historian, I find myself having to pretend that my life isn't as worthless as it actually is. By that I don't mean that no one would mourn me should Israel murder me one day. I have loved ones and friends, and I'm blessed to have a sizeable number of people who follow my stuff online as well. Should anything happen to me, Israeli embassies better be prepared for a few cocktails. That wouldn't be sufficient to save my life should Israel decide to end it if I ever choose to physically be in my own country.

Israel even struck my hometown of Ain Saadeh, an event so rare it led to a disproportionate amount of coverage (it was nothing compared to what Israel had done to South Lebanon that day alone).

I had to call my 89 year old grandmother to check in on her. I couldn't lie to myself that day.

There was nothing to stop the Israelis from simply killing her if they determined that it was worth it.

And if there's one thing we've learned from how the ethno-supremacist regime's armed wing acts, it's that Arab blood is cheap.

The rest of the time, I lie to and tell myself that my life is worth more than it is. It is a necessary lie. It allows me to explain to you all exactly why and how Israel will only get more violent unless someone - anyone - enacts such a heavy cost on its hypermilitarised political culture that there would be no way to avoid reality anymore. So far, Israel has been able to continue doing what it has been doing with nowhere near the consequences it deserves.

They've even expanded their territory by taking Palestinian, Syrian and Lebanese lands in less than three years. You don't embark on such reckless operations if you had any sense of consequences. The job of any person with a functioning conscience in 2026 is to do whatever we can to enact a cost on Israel. If genocide, ecocide, domicide, scholasticide, urbicide and ethnic cleansing do not come with a cost, then people who look like me aren't the only ones who are at risk. Everyone reading these words is also at risk, and that's something I must insist that you understand. Israel is a threat first and foremost to Palestinians and Lebanese (and Syrians, Iranians, and so on), but what Israel has unleashed cannot be contained within our borders.

So I lie to myself, and you get to read these words.

On the days when I am unable to lie to myself, you're unlikely to hear from me. I probably don't publish anything, whether here, the podcast or elsewhere. I probably have to disconnect entirely, or watch Star Trek or something.

That's what happened after the Israeli strike on my hometown. I found myself engaging with entirely fictional scenarios:

Did you know that in Star Trek Deep Space Nine, Cardassians are this alien species that occupied this other alien species, the Bajorans, for over 50 years? And that the Bajorans eventually succeeded in kicking the Cardassians out and are able to keep them out only because a stronger force, the Federation, accepted to help Bajor recover and prepare for Bajor's entry into the Federation? That seems easier for me to believe than to believe that any 2026 equivalent will save Palestinians from the Israelis.

Palestinians Bajorans maintained their traditions and culture despite the Israeli Cardassian genocide. Palestinians Bajorans were abandoned by the wider world. Palestinians Bajorans were described as primitive by Israeli Cardassian ethnosupremacists, their practices deemed too esoteric and irrational. Palestinians Bajorans have martyrs, loads of them. Is it any shocking revelation that someone like me, a Bajoran Palestinian-Lebanese, is able to find parallels between my history and this fictional species?

Without that escape into DS9's 24th century, the lies I have to tell myself in the 2020s would become all the more unbearable, so unbearable as to be paralysing. Without it, I would be like Captain Sisko himself in the episode Far Beyond The Stars, no longer in his post-racial present (the 24th century) but back in 1950s America. The 2020s feel the same to me, and I need to tell myself that this vision of the 24th century is, at its core, attainable, even if I won't live to see it myself. I need to escape to remind myself that all authoritarian projects have fallen, and that no matter how impossible it may seem today, Cardassian Israeli ethnosupremacy is no different.

I need to escape to then come back.

I'll leave you with this reminder for now: From Gallitep to Terok Nor, Bajor will be Free.

Please consider becoming a paid subscriber, or support me on Ko-fi with a one-off donation of any amount.

On 5 April 2026, Israel struck Ain Saadeh, my hometown. It wasn’t the worst thing they did that day. It wasn’t even in the top 10 worst things they did. But what they did worries me more than anything else they’ve done so far, and I will try here to explain why.

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I will do my best to do posts like these on a monthly basis.1 I'm putting them behind a paywall. Sorry about that folks. Need to live under capitalism and shit.

If you wish to support me without paying Substack2 - and I understand the concern - you can do so via my Ko-Fi page with any amount.3 Just email me afterwards and I'll give you access to the newsletter.

By supporting Hauntologies, you’re contributing to all my independent work including The Fire These Times.

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Hey everyone, this will be a short one. With everything going on in Lebanon, I haven't been able to write here as often as I would have liked. I have released two monologues on The Fire These Times, four interviews (The Final Straw, Crimethinc, The Breakup Theory and The Dugout) and three articles (972Mag and Good Law Project) so far on the US-Israeli war on Iran and its impact on Lebanon (links below), but I also wanted to add a few things here:

It is a mistake to view Israel's ongoing war on Lebanon as merely an extension of the war on Iran. They are certainly connected, particularly with Hezbollah's links to the Ayatollah's regime, but Israel's war on Lebanon is also the most recent manifestation of a much longer Israeli obsession.

Israel invaded Lebanon in 1978, a year before the Ayatollah came to power in Iran. Israel invaded Lebanon again in 1982, which is what led to the creation of Hezbollah in the first place. Israel bombed Lebanon in 2006, and developed its Dahieh doctrine then.

Israel's political culture, long been dominated by ultra-authoritarian tendencies that often cross into overt fascism, requires an eternal enemy, both internal and external. The internal one, obviously, is the Palestinian but as Israel's northern neighbour, it is Lebanon that has been cursed with being Israel's external enemy. Whether as part of a regional conspiracy involving Iran and Hezbollah, or as the country where Palestinian militants operated from, or as place where Israel developed its Dahieh doctrine, or as the country with Christians that Israeli politicians hope could become ally again — Lebanon has long been talked about in Israeli discourse as many places in one.

This is why, I think, that the Lebanon talked about in Israeli papers rarely intersects with reality's Lebanon. The latter is too complicated and contains grievances that have to be confronted, but that is not the Israeli way. It is inconceivable to imagine why discplacing, maiming, traumatising and killing so many people over multiple generations would create resentment. It is much easier to continue believing that Israel can defeat all its enemies through absolute dominance. They don't wish to understand why their society is constantly at war, but they do know that they got the bigger guns.

The death and destruction of my home country is what the Israelis need to avoid dealing with each other. They have killed so many people, and most of the time at a young age too, that they cannot see any way out other than through more death and destruction. Those among them who maintain some sobriety in this carnage understand that the ease with which Palestinians, Lebanese, Arabs, Iranians and/or Muslims are spoken about interchangeably in Israeli discourse could only mean that this is not about ‘them’ at all. This is about ‘us.'

That's all for now.

Updates

Career update

Happy to say that I’m now the Encyclopaedia Lead at the Decolonial Centre.

Moving to Ghost

This newsletter will be moving to Ghost. I don't have a timeline because I'm overwhelmed at the moment, but it'll happen soon. It won't change anything to subscribers.

Classes

The March-April masterclass on modern Lebanese politics and history has already started, but you can already register for the May class. They will take place on the 5 Saturdays of May 2026: May 2nd, May 9th, May 16th, May 23rd and May 30th at 4-6pm UK time. All info here.

Recent Stuff I've Written

Reach out if you want me to write for you.

• Good Law Project: Trump’s illegal war puts all of us at risk (March 9th, 2026) (archived here)

• +972Mag: Israel’s renewed war on Lebanon is about more than just Hezbollah (March 11th, 2026) (archived here)

  • El artículo fue traducido al español

Recent Interviews I've Done

Reach out if you want me to interview me.

• The Final Straw (audio): The US-Israeli War with Iran Spreads, Nuclear Weapons, Lebanon and Anti-Imperial Solidarity (archived here)

• Crimethinc (written): A Lebanese Perspective on the War on Palestine, Lebanon, and Iran (March 11th, 2026) (archived here)

• The Dugout (audio): Honoring Political Ghosts (archived here)

• The Breakup Theory (audio): Episode 31 – Iran and the US-Israeli Death Drive Economy (archived here)

Planned Interviews So Far:

• It Could Happen Here

Recent TFTT episodes

Available wherever you get your podcasts. Please leave a review and ratings to help me against our algorithmic overlords.

• Ep. 214: Lebanon Haunts the World (Monologue). March 16th, 2026
  I talk about how Israel’s war on Lebanon will haunt our world, and why Israeli impunity is creating monstrous realities that can engulf us all.

• Ep. 213: The War on Iran (Monologue) March 3rd, 2026

  I recorded a long monologue on the US-Israeli war on Iran and its consequences, particularly on Lebanon

• Ep. 212: Iranian Protesters Don’t Owe Us An Explanation (Monologue) February 13th, 2026

  This is a reading of my Hauntologies piece with added commentary

• Ep. 211: Organising Against ICE w/ Nicole Bedera, Aydin and Ed February 5th, 2026

  I spoke to Nicole Bedera who wrote “I’m a Minneapolis sociologist who studies violence. Here’s how ICE observers are helping.” Joining us were Minneapolis residents Ed and Aydin from Antidote Zine, which is part of the From The Periphery (FTP) media collective, to talk about how folks there were resisting the ICE gestapo.

• Ep. 209: Burnout, Grief and The Solidarity Apothecary w/ Nicole Rose January 6th, 2026

  I spoke to Nicole Rose from The Solidarity Apothecary project about her “Overcoming Burnout” series, which is also a podcast and an e-book. We talked about burnout, grief, trauma, mutual aid, herbalism, and more. Nicole also hosts the Frontline Herbalism podcast. Check it out!

Highlighted TFTT Episodes

TFTT episodes that speak to our current moment. Available wherever you get your podcasts. Review, ratings etc

• Ep. 205: Warsaw Ghetto, Gaza Ghetto w/ Daniel Voskoboynik. September 9th, 2025

  I spoke to Daniel Voskoboynik, co-host of Hidah: Jewish Counter-Colonial Thoughts (review, ratings etc. ) which is also part of FTP, about his stay near the Warsaw Ghetto at a time when it started to feel like much of the world was forgetting about the ongoing Gaza genocide.

• Ep. 201: This Cannot Be The New Normal w/ Daniel Voskoboynik, Karena Avedissian, Leila Al-Shami and israa’. July 30th 2025.

  I spoke with 4 members of the FTP media collective about the Israeli-imposed famine in Gaza and how the genocide cannot become the new normal. Check out Leila's “Syria: The Inconvenient Revolution” (STIR) and israa’s “The Mutual Aid Podcast” wherever you get your podcasts. Review, ratings etc.

Highlighted FTP-produced Episodes

Episodes from the other podcasts produced by FTP that speak to our current moment. Review ratings etc. You can support FTP on Patreon.

• From The Periphery Podcast (FTP Podcast): The Weekend that Set the Middle East on Fire. March 3rd, 2026.

  I joined israa’ and Ayman Makarem, host of Politically Depressed, to talk about the ongoing US-Israeli war on Iran, Iran's response, and the impact on Lebanon.

• STIR Ep.8: Searching for Solidarity w/Noor Ghazal Aswad. February 20th, 2026.

  Leila speaks to Noor Ghazal Aswad about her recent book ‘Searching for Solidarity: Revolutionary Dreams and Radical Social Movements’

• We're probably recording another FTP Podcast episode on Lebanon soon

The best way to support me is on Ko-Fi. If you do, please send me a message and I'll happily give you a lifetime subscription to Hauntologies at no additional cost.

1.

In the 2024 documentary Celluloid Underground, a young Ehsan Khoshbakht, the director, is screening movies at his local university in Tehran. His passion for films is palpable, moving, and often heart-wrenching. Cinephilia in post-1979 Iran can be a dangerous thing, and despite being a mere student, he was constantly followed by the secret police which was, he tells us, “the first to come to my screenings, the most attentive and most silent of my audience.”

After a screening of The Cow, the 1969 film by Dariush Mehrjui (written by Gholam-Hossein Saedi) which explores the relationship between an Iranian farmer and his cow (his sole property), an audience member yelled at Khoshbakht that “we didn’t give martyrs for you to screen Marxist films.” The martyrs here refer to the officially approved ones, those who did not challenge the Ayatollah’s absolute hegemony post-1979. They are the ‘we.’ The Marxists, leftists, nationalists and others who also paid the ultimate price to get rid of the Shah dictatorship did not make the cut, their martyrdom lacking the sort of purity that the Ayatollah declared necessary. Probably unbeknownst to this Islamist who complained about a Marxist film being screened in post-1979 Iran is the fact that he had one thing in common with the Shah regime — which, after all, banned The Cow.

The comment left the room speechless, and Khoshbakht reports being stunned. He cried. “Everyone stayed silent, and I left in silence.” The comment, it seems like, came like a splash of cold water. It ruined something hopeful that we could see in Khoshbakht’s eyes when we see him talk about his love for movies. It animated him, connected him to a world out there, the world that the Ayatollah’s men were now busy isolating the country from. The next day, the Islamic republic’s morality police shut down the film club.

To those who know anything about the Islamic republic, this is a familiar story. As Khoshbakht himself put it, “the heroes of Monday, fallen by Tuesday, executed by Wednesday.” The revolution ate its children, the Ayatollah’s men busy consolidating power at all costs to defend their vision of the revolution, a vision which left no room for anyone else to breathe. Exit the Shah, enter the Ayatollah.

One impression I often get when watching Iranian films like Celluloid Underground is how matter-of-factly the regime’s oppression is described. By that, I mean that it would be absurd, nonsensical, to deny that the regime is a deeply corrupt and brutal one. It would make no sense to watch Jafar Panahi’s films and conclude anything else. Why else would This Is Not a Film, co-directed by Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, need to be smuggled out of Iran on a flash drive while Panahi was under house arrest? Why would Panahi be banned from leaving Iran as we see in No Bears? Why would the human rights lawyer Nasrin Soutoudeh, who we see in Taxi, be repeatedly arrested along with her husband, and their son beaten up by government forces while trying to visit his dad in prison?1

2.

None of this would be breaking news to anyone with direct or indirect experience dealing with the Ayatollah’s regime, but this does not seem to have reached those outside Iran who hold on to the farcical notion that the Iranian regime is at the forefront of a global resistance against Israel. That the regime is an ultra-conservative one which shares more in common with the Christian far right, particularly when it comes to gender apartheid, than it does with even surface-level understandings of ‘the Left’ seems to have made no difference to those who call themselves anti-imperialists — and who somehow have convinced themselves that anti-imperialism could be anything other than anti-authoritarian if it does not want to reproduce the very power dynamic that it ostensibly stands against.

What is the price of ‘the cause’? When is the price too high? And who gets to decide who pays that price? The Iranian regime can murder people in their tens of thousands mere months after executing so many prisoners that UN experts described the Islamic republic as “conducting executions at an industrial scale,” and yet somehow it continues to convince so-called anti-imperialists that, no matter the scale of repression, the Islamic republic is on the right side of history.

Whenever Iranians take to the streets to protest the Ayatollah’s totalitarianism, my online feed, which evidently curates ‘left-wing’ content to me, gets filled with popular accounts taking a break from declaring their support for Palestine to make shit up in defense of the Iranian regime. One video shows people searching for loved ones in a Tehran morgue filled with corpses that have clear signs of torture, while another video features some influencer who has taken it upon themselves to tell me there is a global propaganda campaign led by the US and Israel to demonise the Iranian regime.

That both could be true does not cross their minds. There is evidently a propaganda campaign going portraying the Iranian regime as a mass-murdering criminal enterprise. This is true. What is also true is that the Iranian regime is a mass-murdering criminal enterprise. The Ayatollah could have chosen not to make the propagandists’ job easier by not being a mass-murdering lunatic. Believe or not, but you don’t have to send tens of thousands of people to an early grave to combat foreign propaganda. That's a political decision made by a state that knows it does not have popular legitimacy. If the Americans or Israelis do attempt a regime change against the Iranian state at some point, no one would have made their job easier than the Iranian state itself.

Despite all the Ayatollah’s declarations about the Israeli regime’s imminent end, two things are true: One, the Islamic republic remains the biggest killer of Iranians since Saddam Hussein and two, Palestine is nowhere near free. When the Islamic republic finally does collapse - and it absolutely will collapse - the question will remain: was this model really the best one available? Did the serial execution or exile of dissidents including Marxists make Iran a better fighter for Palestinian rights, or a worse one? Does keeping your boots on Iranians’ throats get better if you also shove “Free Palestine” down them?

Apologies to those reading these words and thinking “obviously, the regime never cared about Palestinian lives anyway.” I hear you, and I know — but as obscene as it is, this question is what is often implied in these reflexive, if heartless, defenses of the regime. Some outright deny that the regime executes and slaughters humans more effectively than it does most other activities, but others — probably a majority of such people, although I cannot tell for sure — concede that while the Islamic republic is, to put it mildly, flawed, it must nonetheless be defended for reasons. Gaza is still being annihilated and Hezbollah was brought to its knees, and there are people who still believe that the Ayatollah is going to lift a finger to do anything other than save his own regime no matter how many thousands of Iranians are killed in the process?

This is a real problem. Anti-authoritarianism cannot be optional. Internationalism cannot be reduced to when the baddies are easily identifiable within a traditional anti-imperialist mindset that limits itself to Western forms of imperialism.

3.

‘Anti-imperialism’ is today rarely anything more than an excuse for authoritarians with left-wing aesthetics to reaffirm their demand that Iranians shut the fuck up about their own dreams and aspirations. “We” don’t care about what “they” want because, surely, our projected fantasies ought to govern how millions of others live their lives.

Iranians don’t have to explain why living under clerical fascism is unbearable. They do not have to accept to live under the Ayatollah’s boots just because others have constructed a fantasy of ‘the resistance’ that is utterly disconnected from reality. Iranian leftists imprisoned, tortured, exiled by that mass murdering regime of ultra-conservative misogynist clerics should not also have to constantly explain that the regime that declared war on leftists is not a friend of the left.

It shouldn't need explaining that the patriarchal and regressive dress code imposition is regressive bullshit, or that having a morality police in the first place is Orwellian perversion. It shouldn't be complicated to understand that ethno-supremacy is not just bad when the Zionists do it against Palestinians but also when the Ayatollah's goons do it against Kurds or Ahvazis. It should also be self-evident that the regime spending billions on its wilayat al faqih disaster of an experiment while Iranians struggle to meet basic needs is downright criminal.

No one should have to explain why people taking to the streets over and over again despite brutal repression shouldn’t also have to pass a purity test for so-called anti-imperialists to support them. The fact that every other social media post by a leftist supporting the protests is met by the usual brain-dead comments painting absolutely everything as part of a global conspiracy is in itself a profound failure of internationalism.

Initially published on Shado Mag. The recording I did will also be on Shado Mag's podcast “shado in focus,” which you can find in any podcast app, soon.

The ongoing federal occupation of Minneapolis has already led to two murders by ICE agents, that of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, in the past two weeks. We have all seen videos and images of children being kidnapped, including five-year year old Liam Ramos being used as bait to get to his father before they were both sent to a “detention facility” in Texas, daycares being teargassed, schoolchildren fleeing in panic, cars broken into and the drivers disappeared. Toddlers are wetting themselves when ICE appears.

Closer to home, the state-sanctioned kidnappings are shedding new light on Reform’s own plans for the UK should they get in power, a plan they titled “Operation Restore Justice” (ORJ) [note: you can download it at the bottom of this post]. Public debater Tilly Middlehurst, who recently posted it on her Instagram page, described it as Reform’s “Project 2025,” a reference to the ultraconservative Heritage Foundation’s 2023 policy proposals that are being, in part, currently implemented by the Trump regime. At the time of writing, it is still available on Reform’s homepage as a “key policy.” Despite the ongoing horrors by ICE, we have yet to see nationwide outrage over Reform’s plans to bring those horrors to the UK.

Reform’s ORJ is nothing less than the total mobilisation of state power for the sole purpose of attacking those deemed unworthy of being in the UK. We need to be very clear about this. If you think what is happening in the US cannot happen here, you are simply not paying attention.

Here, I am going to go through the document in detail, before exploring what we can do about it.

Simply put, the plan is fascism

The document claims that the number of “people with no lawful right to remain” in the UK is over a million, and that the presence of these people is corrosive to “the rule of law, costs billions in accommodation and welfare costs, distorts low-wage labour markets, and signals to the world that Britain’s borders are open.” That each of these can be – and have been – thoroughly debunked is, of course, not the point.

Reform is telling a story, one in which an easily identifiable threat is the source of all of Britain’s problems. It is the illegals, those without papers, the refugees and asylum seekers, who are the reason why you cannot afford rent, or why you cannot get a GP appointment in time, or why your salary is shit. Not the lack of adequate social safety nets, or privatisation, or billionaires, or the fossil fuel industry.

Reform, a party almost entirely funded by millionaires, does not want you to pay too much attention to such trivial matters. Instead, look at all those foreigners with their foreign tongues and foreign ways.

Reform’s ORP proposes the following: a “five-year emergency programme intended to identify, detain and deport illegal migrants in the United Kingdom, and to deter any future build-up by demonstrating that unlawful presence now has an iron-clad consequence: swift removal. The plan combines an uncompromising legal reset with national scale enforcement through a new UK Deportation Command and a relentless foreign-policy campaign.” In other words, they plan to declare a national emergency, establish a British ICE (Deportation Command) and, in their own words, be relentless about it.

The next paragraph baselessly claims that this massive deployment of state resources, which will inevitably necessitate mass surveillance and potentially tens of thousands of British ICE agents (more on that later), would not only not cost the British taxpayer but would in fact save them a lot of money.

But how? Reform claims that “the current status quo already burns through over 7 billion per year, excluding many hidden costs such as the burden on the NHS.” This is the NHS that has been kept afloat by migrant labour since its inception, from the 1948 windrush generation up until the present day. Migrants are the reason the NHS exists, a story that is never told by those who want you kept distracted on “stop the boats” while more and more of us rely on private healthcare to compensate for the crisis in the NHS. If we stay distracted long enough, private healthcare will eventually take over the NHS, precipitating its complete dismantlement.

The central claim in any Reform statement is that ‘illegals’ cost the NHS, a claim that is often uncritically repeated in the media. At no point does anyone wonder whether we could regularise the ‘illegals,’ allow them to exit the black market to do regular work (and therefore pay taxes) including as NHS workers.

Removing all checks and balances

The bill that Farage would seek to pass as Prime Minister would include: disapplying “the 1951 Refugee Convention, the UN Convention Against Torture, the Council of Europe Anti-Trafficking Convention (ECAT)” which is “justified under the Vienna Convention doctrine of state of necessity.”

The rationale for this are two-fold: One, “Britain faces a national emergency in which uncontrolled illegal migration undermines public order, and two, “these treaties will otherwise be used by activist judges to frustrate deportations, even after the repeals of the HRA [Human Rights Act] and ECHR [European Convention on Human Rights.]”

In other words, it would not be enough for a Reform government to abandon HRA and ECHR as “activist judges” – the term used to describe judges who will not unconditionally obey Farage – would still be able to object based on the UK’s commitments to the aforementioned treaties. You read that right. By labelling “uncontrolled illegal immigration” as a “national emergency,” the UK government under Farage would seek to “disapply” – pro-refugee, anti-torture and anti-human trafficking treaties. In their stead, the UK would have a “Mass Deportation Bill” and a “British Bill of Rights,” devoid of any international obligations and responsibilities beyond those that Farage deems convenient.

What about this Vienna Convention they cite? Well, no one really knows. You see, Reform argues that “uncontrolled illegal migration” being a “national emergency” is what justifies this “state of necessity.” There’s one small problem though, the concept of “necessity” is not even used in the Vienna Convention.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that no one knows what Reform even means by that. The document was published in August 2025 and we still don’t know. We could, of course, all choose to pretend that there must be a secret reason that have evaded lawyers and anyone with the capacity to use a search engine, or we could reach the self-evident conclusion that Reform would make stuff up to justify greatly expanding state power to crackdown on “uncontrolled illegal migration.”

Reform wants to “create detention power without Hardial Singh constraints.” This is a reference to a 1983 Supreme Court decision setting “out the conditions that the Secretary of State (the Home Secretary) must meet in order lawfully to detain a migrant.” In summary, you can’t detain unless you intend to deport the person, you can only detain the person for a “reasonable” period, and if you can’t deport within the period you should not detain.

Anyone who follows the UK’s detention practices knows that the state has long had its own, convenient, definitions of what counts as “reasonable.” What Reform describes as “constraints” under the Hardial Singh principles cannot even be described as so, as the UK already detains migrants for years on end with no real justification. Even that low bar is too high for Reform though, which is why they want to get rid of it. By doing so, “activist lawyers” – it’s like “activist judges” but it describes instead lawyers who do not unconditionally obey Farage – would not be able to “secure their client’s bail.”

The idea is to get rid of all human rights-related constraints, no matter how rare they are even applied in the first place.

A British ICE, mass surveillance, and a concentration camp

Reform wants to create “an enforcement unit called UK Deportation Command, including an illegal Migrant Identification Centre – harnessing cutting edge data fusion.” To make this possible, Reform will make it possible for data to be “automatically” shared between the Home Office, NHS, HMRC [Revenue and Customs], DVLA [Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency], banks and police.”

What this means is simple: Your personal data will be made available to everyone, which necessitates mass surveillance on an industrial scale. Your GP not caring about your legal status will become impossible, and any police encounter will be an opportunity to harvest even more data. If you think we already live in a world where privacy is obsolete, it will get even worse, and we already live in a country where the ‘center-left’ Labour government is partnering with the most cartoonishly evil corporation, Palantir, paying them hundreds of millions of GBP worth of our tax money, and giving them our NHS data. What would a Farage government do with even more power?

Read: Revealed: Palantir deals with UK state total at least £670m – including £15m contract with nuclear weapons agency | The Nerve News

We now come to Reform’s proposal to create a “Secure Immigration Removal Centres” within 18 months, which refers to “modular accommodation built in remote parts of the country” which would include “robust perimeters and internal movement controls” to “prevent escapes” and “no more bail.”

This “would allow for up to 24,000 illegal migrants to be deported per month.” In non-Orwellian terms, these would be concentration camps, supposedly temporary, with the ability to detain and deport up to 24,000 people per month.

Just sit with this for a moment, and think of what is required to make these numbers work at this frequency: little to no rights, mass surveillance and data harvesting, and a massive increase in the state’s ability to kidnap, detain and deport nearly 300,000 people a year who are kept in camps in remote parts of the country, far from the inconvenience of lawyers and journalists.

If Children of Men or Years and Years come to mind, you’re not alone. Expect toddlers kidnapped with their parents. Expect torture and ill-treatment and all sorts of abuses. Reform would give itself 18 months to build those concentration camps, by which time they would have gotten rid of all those inconvenient treaties dealing with torture, human trafficking, and any iota of human rights.

Large-scale raids

We’re almost done. Reform will implement a “six-month assisted voluntary return window” preceding “large-scale raids” and offer “illegal migrants” a “financial incentive to self-deport.” Our tax money will be spent to pay people who could instead pay taxes. They would have six months to self-deport and if they don’t, well, British ICE will knock on doors, kidnap our neighbours and destroy families. It’s worth it though because remember, “uncontrolled illegal immigration” is a “national emergency” and, therefore, Reform will “show unflinching resolve to ensure that deportations are prioritised.” Kidnapping our neighbours will be their priority. Not the climate crisis – they won’t deal with it, their fossil fuel donors have made sure of that – or the NHS crisis or the cost of living crisis.

And you haven’t kept track of the language used, here are some of the words used in the report: “unflinching,” “relentless,” “iron-clad”, “reset.” Again, this is just fascist vocabulary, one which both Tories and Labour have already used. Farage wants to make it significantly worse.

One more thing – where would these people be deported to? “Farage will ensure the Foreign Office makes its highest priority the securing of return agreements with all relevant countries to take back their illegal migrants” using a “carrot and stick approach.” The former, “aid will be offered” and the latter “cessation of visa approvals and potentially sanctions.”

The most desperate asylum seekers come from countries such as Afghanistan and Eritrea. Neither passport gets you into the UK in the first place. Securing return agreements would mean negotiating with the Taliban to force back people who fled the Taliban, negotiating with the one-party dictatorship that is the PFDJ to force back people who fled Eritrea, and negotiating with the Ayatollah regime to force back people who fled Iran, and so on. Kurds who fled Turkey or Iran, Uighurs who fled China, Rohingya who fled Myanmar – not having the right papers in the UK would effectively be the only fact that matters.

All of this is in the name of becoming “once again” a “sovereign nation with total control over its borders,” which is what Farage promised would occur if the UK cuts itself out of the EU with Brexit. I guess we’re not sovereign enough yet.

How do we resist?

In his recent radio show on LBC, James O’Brien asked “what would you do if it happened here? What would you do if Kemi Badenoch or Nigel Farage had their ICE agents marching through British streets murdering nurses?”

The good news here is that we have a good role model in how Minneapolitans have been responding to the American Gestapo: with mass, community-based, rage-filled defiance.

Friends and acquaintances I know who either live in Minneapolis or have been reporting there all report being amazed at how Minneapolitans are managing to organise an effective resistance to ICE while remaining entirely decentralised. Tens of thousands have undergone training to become so-called “ICE watchers.” ICE vehicles cannot drive through a single neighbourhood without a dozen cars following them and honking non-stop to alarm the neighbourhood that ICE is here. Parents are forming human chains in front of schools and daycares to protect their own children, especially racialised children who are being directly targeted by ICE – at the time of writing, Liam Ramos was the fourth child from his school district kidnapped by ICE agents – and the clergy are writing their wills and be prepared to put their body on the line to protect the vulnerable as they prepare for “a new era of martyrdom.”

I admit, the responses have moved me to tears more than once. I’m a racialised Arab man living in the UK and the threat of Reform looms large. The current Labour government is actively paving the way for a Reform takeover with its obsessive demonisation of asylum seekers and refugees, each week finding new ways to be cruel to people who have done nothing wrong.

All signs point to what I, as a historian who studies authoritarianism and the far right, would describe as a fascist takeover. It’s so blatantly apparent that I have to constantly remind myself that this is so, despite the British media being, for the most part, either indifferent to or actively cheering it on.

What makes it scarier is a simple question that remains unanswered: will the country’s white majority be willing to fight to stop their neighbours being kidnapped? The stakes are very high. In my case, it would mean nothing short of being forced to leave the UK before it gets ‘too bad’ because, as a non-citizen of Arab descent, I am all too aware of how little my life matters to this racist establishment.

So what about hope? There is no point, in my view, to simply sound the alarm bells, but I can’t help it. It still feels that enough people in the UK want fascism or, perhaps more importantly, that those who do not want fascism are not (yet) willing to do something about it. That’s the problem. A fascist takeover takes time. It’s a slow process at first, and then it speeds up. The difficulty is convincing enough people not to wait until it speeds up, to fight now while it’s still relatively easier to do.

In more ways than one, UK society is even less prepared to fight fascism than Americans were. This despite the fact that it was the UK, not the US, that was bombed by the Nazis at home. This country’s anti-fascist legacy, from the Battle of Cable Street onwards, seems forgotten, with the discourse often focusing instead on the latest vulnerable group to scapegoat, whether they be trans, or a ‘foreigner’ or, God forbid, both.

So yes, there are plenty of reasons to lose hope, but this would be wrong. After all, what better example of hope as a discipline than what Minneapolitans have been doing day in and day out? Not only is this white-majority city risking everything for its racialised neighbours, but a disproportionate amount of protesters – a vast majority, by all accounts – are white. That’s because people of colour are, understandably, too afraid to take part in the actions against a Gestapo that is actively targeting anyone who does not look white enough (which does not mean that peoples of colour have not been on the frontlines, just that they usually have to be more careful).

ICE can and – I am convinced of this – will be defeated. One thing to keep in mind is that those who perceive themselves to have absolute power are terrible at long-term thinking. Trump is bulldozing through in the belief that he can get away with it indefinitely. He is making a lot of enemies in the process, radicalising entire demographics of people who may have never been radicalised had Trump and his goons tried to be more subtle.

So I can tell you that even if Reform wins, they will not last forever. That is self-evidently true. Nothing lasts forever. I can remind you that the thousand year reich lasted only 12 years and that Hitler failed to achieve his goal of world domination. The problem is not whether fascism lasts forever but rather how much death and suffering it leaves in its wake. We don’t yet know how many people have died under ICE detention – at least hundreds are still “missing” to this day, with the number of dead almost certainly going to rise.

Are we in the UK going to wait and see what would happen with Reform in power? They are telling us what they want to do. We just need to believe them. We should believe them when they say that over a million people in the UK have no right to stay here. We should believe them when they say that they will use emergency measures for five years and ignore all human rights and civil liberties concerns. We should believe them when they speak of purifying the land through a “national reset.” We should believe them when they tell us that they want to establish a British ICE. We should believe them when they tell us that they want to build concentration camps and ensure their efficiency through mass surveillance.

Many Americans, in Minneapolis and elsewhere, have shown that “not in our name” and “never again” are only meaningful when accompanied with concrete actions. We in the UK have the benefit of living in a world that already includes ICE, and it is up to us to make sure that Trumpist horrors are not brought here.

What can you do?

• Join / help build an anti-raids group as part of the Anti-Raids Network (ARN). Read the Migrants’ Rights Network's Anti-Raids Resources.

• Get to know your neighbours. As Minneapolis has been showing us, getting to know your neighbours is one of the most effective ways to keep each other safe. Unless there’s a safety-related reason for not doing so, I recommend getting at least to a first name basis. Dropping a postcard during the holidays or baking something small and cute and offering it to them goes a long way too.

• Read the Reform document in detail (download it below if you want to avoid clicking on their website) and spread the word. Make sure to associate Reform to Project 2025, ICE and Trump. We need to get rid of their “outsiders to the status quo” status and associate them to a brutal and fascist project that is already playing out catastrophically in the US. Reform wants to paint itself as he most British party, and we can instead make sure they are permanently tied to Trump.

• From an electoral standpoint, we need to think of the best tactic to keep Reform out of power, permanently. Tactical voting might be needed. I’m not an expert on this, but I think a reasonable way forward would be to maximise the influence of the Green party of England and Wales (and their progressive equivalents in Scotland and Northern Ireland and Wales) while working on pressuring Labour to abandon Starmerite cowardice and appeasement of the Far Right. I don’t pretend to know how, but other people probably do, and we can’t afford to wait and find out what a prime minister Nigel Farage would do.

• Learn from Minneapolis. Read:

  • From Minneapolis: I’ve Never Seen Unity Like This (Margaret Killjoy)

  • “Dispatch, Please Advise!” (Red-Winged Blackbird collective)

  • Rapid Response Networks in the Twin Cities (Crimethinc)

  • Minneapolis Responds to the Murder of Alex Pretti (Crimethinc)

  • I’m a Minneapolis sociologist who studies violence. Here’s how ICE observers are helping (Nicole Bedera)

  • ICE vs. Everyone (Erin West)

  • Welcome to the American Winter (Robert F. Worth)

  • The Moral Right to Defend Yourself Against ICE (Michael Gregory)

  • Lies and Lawlessness (Timothy Snyder)

  • State Terror Has Arrived (Masha Gessen) and The Battle for Minneapolis (Emily Witt).

The Reform document:

Reform Immigration

3.69MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

A few weeks ago, I went back to Lebanon for the first time in years. It was my first time back since the start of the 2024 war, itself the first time since Israel unleashed hell at this scale in nearly two decades.1

I was by my 89 year-old grandmother's bedside at the hospital when I posted this on Bluesky:

In Lebanon. Can hear the Israeli drone constantly now. I’ve only been back for a day but folks here deal with it 24/7, for months. It’s psychological torture. You can even see it, just flying around. The Israelis want to let everyone know that they can kill whoever they want whenever they want.

Kids go to school hearing the drone. You brush your teeth hearing the drone. You go out hearing the drone. You shower hearing the drone. Everything you do, all the time, it’s always there. The Israelis clearly enjoy terrorising millions.

It’s hard to describe knowing, for an absolute fact, that there is no such thing as safety, ever. You can lie to yourself long enough to get through the day, but at any point, maybe you let your guard down, and it’s still there.

I’m currently at the hospital with my 89yo grandmother and can hear the drone as clearly as I can hear her. We don’t even talk about it. It’s like talking about clouds. There’s a sense that it’s pointless to talk about it. Israel feels beyond human agency, because nothing ever stops them.

If you don’t fundamentally understand that Israel has no equivalent enemy, there there are no ’two sides’, and that this is entirely due to Western governments like the US, UK and Germany - but also the entirety of the EU - then there’s nothing I can tell you. You’re too brainwashed to get it.

It’s so much easier for so-called journalists to ‘explain’ this as if it’s remotely normal, as if Israel isn’t throwing away any rule of any books on a daily basis. If there was any honesty left in media this would be self-evident.

(I was angry)

(not my video)

I was, of course, already aware of the drone. Friends often post about it on Signal and Whatsapp groups, and on social media. Occasionally they see it, most of the time they just hear it.

What I did not and could not know were all of those days and weeks where they wouldn't bother mentioning the drone online - because what's the point? Posting about the drone on social media is driven by a sense of hope: Maybe, just maybe, if we show the rest of the world how cruel and absurd it is to have a drone flying over our heads 24/7 for days and days and days, someone, somewhere, will tell Israel to stop.

But of course, Israel does not stop. Nothing stops Israel because its allies have long benefited from having this quasi-outpost in the Middle East test out its weapons on us (and keep in mind that, whatever the Israelis do in Lebanon, they always do worse in Gaza.) So, after some time, the social media posts stop, the Signal/Whatsapp updates stop.

I'd occasionally send a message to a friend asking if they heard the drone today, and they would reply with a casual “yeah I can hear it now.” One friend told me that “it's been a while,” only to realise, when I followed up, that “a while” meant “yesterday.”

The drone destroys your sense of time. I only experienced it for a few days, and even then intermittently because my childhood home is not in Beirut. I drove to Beirut daily and I heard the Israeli drone for four or five out of the six days I was there. At my cousin's, at my other cousin's, at the hospital, at my friend's, at my other friend's, at my other friend's, at the restaurant, at the bar, at the other bar, while walking, while driving.

When it's particularly loud — can someone ask the Israelis how they decide when to make it louder? — it can be overwhelming, but I found that it is in those moments when you expect it the least that it can really fuck you up.

I first heard it at the hospital. I had just landed in Beirut. As the nurses moved my grandmother to the floor above the one she'd been staying at, I heard the drone for the first time. It took me a good 10 minutes to realise that this wasn't some other noise (hardly a rare occurrence in Beirut; think construction sites, generators etc.) No one around me was reacting to the drone. The nurses kept on working, the doctors kept on working. It makes sense, of course it does. If you hear the drone for long enough, at some point, surely, you get ‘used to it.’

But no, it's not quite that. You cannot get used to something that has already killed, that will certainly kill again. A surveillance drone is sometimes what one hears before a strike. You can't ever know, and that's the point. They could be ‘surveilling’ for days and nothing happens. For all we know, the 19 year old Israeli sitting down in front of a screen somewhere in Tel Aviv is scrolling trough TikTok or Instagram and has put the drone on automatic mode for a while. For all we know, today is the day when the drone precedes a strike.

Plan your days accordingly. You can't. Again, that's the point.

It was my niece and nephew's bedtime when I heard it again. Its sound echoed in the valley. The sun had already set, and the air was rather chilly. And the drone was there, somewhere. Strikes hadn't happened where I was, so I didn't feel in danger. Besides, it was probably further away, judging by my wholly approximate drone recognition capabilities.

The situation felt absurd, but none of that matters. There is no way to register your complaint, no international mechanism to account for the fact that kids going to bed hearing a drone is, simply put, fucked up.

It's not even in the top 100 crimes committed by the Israelis in just 2 years, so who am I to complain?

The purpose of the drone is hardly just surveillance. It is also a tool for collective punishment — a proud Israeli tradition — a natural continuation of a hyper-militarised state whose only sense of self-worth is in complete domination. In other words, we are what keeps Israel going. Without us, our bodies, our minds, Israel would have nowhere to go. If they did not have an existential boogeyman somewhere, all they'd have going for them is one another — and that's a terrifying thought. Years and decades of dominating other people has a corrosive effect on your population's morale, you will be shocked to know.

As mentioned, I was only there for a few days, so I can't quite tell you what it feels like to get ‘used’ to the near constant presence/absence of a drone above you. Do you start hoping for rain? Surely that makes drone business harder. Does a nice day out mean relaxing with friends at the beach? Or does it mean ‘let's hope we won't have to think about the drone today oh fuck it's already here'? Do you order food, call it a day?

When the drone is followed by a strike, my phone buzzes. You never know when it can happen, so I have found friends reflecting on all those moments where it feels like, maybe, probably (?), it might happen today. The drone is louder than usual, whatever usual means, so that must mean today is the day. Sometimes it is, sometimes it is not. A friend was going out, heard the drone, and decided to wait it out. It turned out that staying at home was worse, so he told himself fuck it and went out. Going out is some act of defiance now, even if you're going out to drown yourself in booze or whatever. It's not really, of course. We have no idea if this makes any difference to the drone operators, let alone the genocidaires giving them orders.

If this feels disorienting, it is intentional. I am trying to explain what it feels like to not just hear or see a drone but to experience it. I am likely doing a bad job at it. I don't think me hearing it for many more days and weeks would have made much of a difference, other than tire me even more. You can't flip off a drone, yell at it, throw rocks at it. You can't do much really, at least not against those. The Israelis kill for less. It's sort of their thing these days.

So there you go. I may write more about it one day. I might be able to tell you that, after a while, one starts feeling the drone before even really hearing it. That must surely happen. We've all had days where we've felt that something is wrong before knowing that it is. I suspect that the drone has the potential to ruin your day before it starts, if only because it serves as a reminder of how worthless your life is to this international system. Despite thousands and millions of people protesting, writing letters, doing direct actions and striking against Israeli actions, Israel continues to kill children in Gaza every single day.

At least it's not as bad as in Gaza. At least we don’t hear the drone every day. The Israelis don't even bomb that often anymore, just here and there, four or five times which ain't too bad — after all, four or five times, that's still fewer times than, say, 14 or 27. Bless. It hasn't been heard in a while now, so maybe the bombings will go down for a bit, we can take a deep breath, no sudden movements. That might do the trick. Pray, yell, ignore, sleep, use pills to sleep, shower, take drugs, smoke, everyone smokes now, go out, lose yourself. It doesn't matter. It might matter. Who knows.

Certainly not me.

I’ve been opposed to Hezbollah for the better part of my adult life. I had initially made an exception for them because they, at least, did something about the Israeli threat. I won't get into this bit as much here as I did elsewhere1 — for our purposes, it is enough to say that you have to understand how Israeli crimes created the conditions for a Hezbollah to rise in the first place. If you don't start there, you won't understand much.

The party’s strategic blunders are obvious for anyone to see. It is hard not to conclude that Hezbollah’s decision to back Hamas after October 7th was a catastrophe for the party. As much as they’d like us to believe that giving martyrs to the cause is something they’re used to, there is also such a thing as giving too many martyrs too quickly.

But how did we get here? There are a number of reasons, some more obvious than others, and the lesser ones perhaps more interesting.

The obvious one first: Hezbollah’s enemy, Israel, is just too strong. It also does not care about international law, or the rules of war in general. The Israelis have long concluded that this is an advantage they cannot give up, and the so-called international community has proven time and time again that Israel can violate international law a dozen times a day. Hezbollah has no such privileges. The party had to be more careful with its targets, even though that still led to civilian deaths.

For reasons I’ll get into, I’m not necessarily convinced that Hezbollah being less careful would have changed things that significantly, but it is still notable. Even as I write these words, Israel continues to violate the ceasefire agreement. This is so common - some 10,000 times or so already, averaging more than once an hour - that the phrase “you cease, we fire” has become, in my humble opinion, the most accurate description of the Israeli version of a ‘ceasefire.'

Having an Orwellian neighbour is not the only reason Hezbollah lost everything, though. It’s not even the main reason.

Hezbollah lost because it never bothered to get the rest of the Lebanese population on board. The priorities of the Iranian state were almost always more important to Hezbollah than what the rest of Lebanon wanted or did not want. Nasrallah made it very explicit in 2006 when he said “we, willing or not, whether the Lebanese are willing or not, Lebanon now and the resistance in Lebanon are engaged in the battle of the Umma.”2 Putting aside the fact that most of the population is either not in the Umma or has never signed on to Hezbollah's interpretation of the Umma, the key phrase here is ‘willing or not.’ That was one of the many mistakes made by the party.

The self-evidently authoritarian tendencies of Hezbollah trace their roots to the 1980s as one of the groups formed to fight the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon. Being part of a cross-sectarian coalition opposing Israel was not part of Hezbollah's vision, however, not unless it meant dominating everyone else through sheer force of arms. Following the Iranian Islamist playbook post-1979, Hezbollah proceeded to assassinate prominent Lebanese Marxist thinkers. I covered this in an older piece so I won't repeat the details here.

This was always a fundamental weakness at the core of Hezbollah as the so-called resistance: the enemy was not just Israel, but other Lebanese, Palestinians, Syrians and others who had divergent views over how to oppose Israel, and what a post-Zionist future should look like. From the aforementioned assassinations to Nasrallah sending his thugs to beat us up during the 2019 uprising, passing by even more assassinations after 2005 by Hezbollah and/or their ally Assad and, of course, Hezbollah's military intervention in Syria, the party has often turned its guns against the rest of us at the expense of actually resisting. Killing prominent anti-Zionist voices such as Hussein Mroué and Mehdi Amel (1987) and Samir Kassir and George Hawi (2005) and Lokman Slim (2021) harmed an actual resistance to such an extent that it may never recover — certainly not in this form.

And here we are. As a friend put it, “Hezbollah co-opted resistance and now no one is allowed to resist.” There are now no forces on the ground that can withstand the Israelis, who are more confident than they’ve ever been.3 The resistance has been decimated, by the Israelis, by Assad (see article above), by Hezbollah. That multiple factors led to this decline - and not just Israel - is a reality that many on the Left have simply refused to engage with. Under the banner of anti-Zionism and/or anti-Imperialism, apparently, little critical thinking is allowed.

An effective resistance needs to be inclusive, principled, strategic — qualities that Hezbollah has rarely proven itself to have. Authoritarianism, extreme religious conservatism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia and an ideological commitment to opposing left-wing ideology are not, it turns out, great ingredients for a long-term resistance opposing a hyper-militaristic state with a long history of violating all rules, and which happens to be backed by a world superpower. You need more people to believe not just in the cause - which many already do - but that you, and specifically you, are best placed to fight for it.

Hezbollah did not give a shit about any of that. They instead sunk further and further into authoritarianism while sending their own men to die for or on behalf of even more authoritarian states like Assad's Syria and Iran.

Hezbollah invading Syria to prop up a brutal dictator did not weaken Israeli settler colonialism. All it did was lead many Syrians to cheer on when Israel bombed Hezbollah, even as Syrian attitudes towards Israel-Palestine remain generally pro-Palestine. Hezbollah invading Syria also required the party to share intel with a notoriously corrupt regime, a fact which evidently made Israeli intelligence's job much easier. (And Hezbollah using War on Terror language to smear any anti-Assad Syrian a ‘Takfiri’ did not make them popular in Syria.4)

Hezbollah unconditionally backing the Islamic republic of Iran and the clerical fascists that run it did not weaken Israeli Apartheid. All it did was lead many Iranians to associate Palestine with their mass murdering regime, who forced Palestine down their throat alongside regressive gender apartheid and ethno-sectarian dispshittery. Nasrallah repeatedly declaring his allegiance to the Ayatollah or Hezbollah hanging posters of Soleimani and Khomenei and Khamenei everywhere never resonated with most Lebanese, as most of us couldn't give less of a fuck about the Ayatollah's hopes and dreams and would rather he fucks off.

Hezbollah killing left-wing anti-Zionist Lebanese intellectuals did not weaken Zionism. All it did was turn anti-Zionism into, at best, an empty slogan and, at worse, an excuse to crush dissent — quite often crushing other anti-Zionists. Essentially, Hezbollah depoliticised anti-Zionism. One had to oppose Zionism without even knowing why — beyond ‘Israel bad.’ Even I had to constantly justify myself to Hezbollah fanboys because it was never enough to be anti-Zionist. You had to accept their specific brand of anti-Zionism and if you disagreed, well, congrats, you are now a Zionist. We make the rules here.

Nasrallah calling for the death of LGBTQ people did not, shockingly, free Palestine. All that did was make it easier for Israeli Hasbara to tell part of its audience “hey, we're nice to gay people — as long as they're not Palestinians, wink wink — unlike those barbarians.” One thing Hezbollah has been remarkably good at is give free Hasbara content.

Hezbollah allying itself with the rabidly anti-Palestinian ‘Free Patriotic Movement’ led by the nepo baby Gebran Bassil or them propping up the corrupt and Saudi-backed prime minister Hariri5 or them attacking protesters in 2019 or them cracking down on journalists, photographers, activists and others when convenient did not, also shockingly, quiet accusations of hypocrisy.

Hezbollah could have tried to understand why actors such as Assad and the Ayatollah are unpopular instead of accusing everyone of being part of a Zionist conspiracy. Hezbollah could have tried to compromise on its commitment to the Lebanese sectarian system, and especially its impact on women, instead of committing itself to arguably the most conservative and misogynistic platform in years, if not decades.

I could go on. Hezbollah has been a right-wing project from the start, a fact which many a communist or leftist has pointed out time and time again. This did not seem to have made a difference to many other leftists, who are usually outside of the region (although don't get me started on Arab tankies) and who seem content with believing that just because an armed group opposes Zionism it makes them immune to real criticism. It's a luxury that Hezbollah's victims could never afford, as they were mostly exiled or killed.

The Israelis did not force Nasrallah to smear and exile and kill Syrians, Lebanese and Palestinians. It is not normal that I, a left-wing grandson of a Palestinian refugee, was smeared as a Zionist by Hezbollah fanboys who also sent me lovely death threats for my opposition to the Assad regime and Hezbollah’s criminal intervention in Syria. It’s not normal that left-wing Lebanese Shias I know are always aware of what they can or cannot say or do lest someone from the party comes knocking at the door. This shit ain't normal.

Hezbollah rarely engaged in movement building beyond the strictly necessary. Dissent, especially coming from other Shias, was rarely tolerated (Lokman Slim and the aforementioned Marxist intellectuals were all Shias). Hezbollah supporters calling anti-Hezbollah Lebanese Shias, whether left-wing or right-wing, “embassy Shias” while repeatedly telling the rest of us that we're not even worth Nasrallah’s shoes created a lot of resentment. How can we liberate Palestine if we're worthless, exactly? Doesn't matter. Lower your head. Keep quiet. El Sayyed6 knows everything.

The problem goes beyond a “it's complicated” situation. Yes, it is complicated, and yes it is still primarily the fault of the Israelis as the superior military power violating international law while committing genocide in Palestine and ecocide and urbicide in Lebanon. This does not change the fact that Hezbollah appointed itself the sole representative of ‘the resistance” — to the point that anyone in Lebanon saying “the resistance” in Arabic (Al Moqawameh) is specifically and exclusively referring to Hezbollah. Not to the broader concept of resisting a genocidal state. To Hezbollah. There could be no resistance beyond Hezbollah's hegemonic dominance. This fucked us over.

The aforementioned are among the many decisions taken by Hezbollah over its four or so decades in existence. When the party appealed beyond its constituency, it gained them supporters. When they demonised, attacked or killed everyone else, it gained them enemies. It was Hezbollah's decision to choose the latter most of the time.

And they had a lot of leeway for a while. There was even a time when those aware of Hezbollah's criminal past could still concede that the party is different than the other sectarian parties. I was one of them. After all, having a criminal part is hardly a rare occurrence among the Lebanese elites, most of whom were/are essentially either warlords or oligarchs or both. Hezbollah once distinguished itself through its temporary successes against the Israelis, particularly given that the Lebanese state has long abandoned south Lebanon to fend for itself. But Hezbollah has also made its way to the levers of power and became so dominant that Nasrallah became the de-facto kingmaker in Lebanese politics for years despite no one ever electing him speaker of parliament.7

And yet, for years and years, Hezbollah's most fanatic supporters insisted on having it both ways. Some criticism is allowed, sometimes, but do not talk about our weapons. Do not talk about ‘the resistance.' Do not talk about El Sayyed. We got this. We're the only ones who got this.

This was always a lie. Hezbollah killed their way to a position of power and demanded to remain there by using and abusing the legacy of a popular resistance. They helped destroy that popular resistance and became ‘the resistance.’ They then weaponised legitimate grievances vis-a-vis the Israeli occupation as well as the Lebanese state's abandonment of the South to maintain that dominance, occasionally unleashing their men and guns against other Lebanese to make sure that lines aren't crossed. They then used their experience against Israel to kill anti-Assad Syrians and Syrian-Palestinians in the name of ‘the resistance.’ All the while, they told everyone that they are playing 4D chess with the Israelis, which turned out to also be a lie.

This piece won't have a satisfactory ending. I don't know what comes next. This is something I'm still struggling with and will explore some other time. All I do know right now is that Lebanon is very vulnerable, and that this was both predictable and avoidable. While this is hardly exclusively Hezbollah's fault — as I said, the Lebanese ruling class is still mostly composed of warlords or oligarchs or both — they still ought to bear responsibility as the self-appointed, unelected kingmakers for so many years.

But they won't.

Related stuff that I've written:

• Israel left Lebanon 20 years ago. We’re still fighting for our liberation (972Mag, May 2020)

• Hezbollah couldn’t ask for a better enemy than Israel (972Mag, January 2022)

• With pager blasts and airstrikes, Israel unleashes its terror on Lebanon (972Mag, September 2024)

• Killing Hezbollah leaders failed 30 years ago. It won’t work now (972Mag, October 2024)

• Understanding Hezbollah, Israel’s ‘Best Enemy’ (interview - Novara Media, October 2024)

• Notes on Assadism, Zionism, Fascism and Hope (Hauntologies, August 2025)

1.

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My grandfather was from Haifa, Palestine, exiled to Lebanon in 1948.

My grandfather died in his 80s.

My grandfather was older than Israel, the state that made Haifa Israeli.

This story has been told a million times over.

Somehow it does not break me anymore when I think about it.

#

When I go to south Lebanon by the Israeli border, I am physically closer to Haifa than to where my grandfather raised his kids – near Beirut, in Mount Lebanon, where I also grew up. Without the Israeli border, my grandfather would have been able to just go home. Beirut to Haifa would have been a simple matter of taking the road south, with the sea always to his right, and this would have been a very different story.

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There is a reason why the term ‘Gazan’ can be an uncomfortable one for Palestinians in Gaza. It erases so much. Most Palestinians in Gaza are not from Gaza – they are refugees from the lands that are now the state of Israel. 1948 again. You know the story.

#

Time has passed and it remains as hard a fact as the olive trees that the Israelis love to hurt.

#

There are many ‘Gazans’ that have lived barely a few kilometers away from their actual homeland for decades and decades, prevented by Israeli law from returning home. Their homes given over to the Israeli state. Golda Meir, the Israeli prime minister, lived in Hanna Ibrahim Bisharat’s villa. Zionist militias took the house in 1948 and Israel turned it into several flats. Meir lived in the upper one. Hanna Bisharat’s son, George Bisharat, an American citizen, went to visit his grandfather’s house in 1977. George was met by an old woman, a Jewish woman from Eastern Europe. She told him that his family ‘never lived here.’

Just like that, she decided that George’s grandfather never existed. My grandfather also never existed.

I am also the grandson of non-existence.

#

Golda Meir once declared that there is no such thing as a Palestinian. Golda Meir also once said ‘I am a Palestinian’ as she carried a Palestinian passport during the British mandate.

She lived in a house that was Palestinian and then not Palestinian. Just like her. Just like my grandfather.

#

Another man then came to the door. It was retired Justice Zvi Berenson of the Israeli Supreme Court. Berenson was born in Safed, Ottoman-era Palestine. He was one of the drafters of Israel’s Declaration of Independence. He was also one of the judges who upheld laws facilitating the theft of Palestinian lands. An Israeli Supreme Court judge agreed to legalise the theft of Palestinian homes – and then moved in. He witnessed his Palestinian neighbours getting forced out of their homes, legislated to make sure they stay out, and then moved in.

Berenson did let George in – but only to the foyer. No further. “There was no need to see any more of the house as it had all been changed anyway,” he told George.

Just like Palestine. Just like my grandfather.

#

I’ve been to the border with that state that declared independence from God knows what many times. A friend lived in one of the southern Lebanese villages, another friend lived in another village, and another friend lived in another village. Israel destroyed them all, not in 1948, but in 2024, because the Israelis have been declaring independence from God knows what for a very long time.

The Israelis sent entire villages back to non-existence.

They have declared olive trees independent from their inconvenient roots. So many olive trees, inconvenient olive trees with inconvenient roots in an inconvenient land that was cared for by our inconvenient, non-existent grandparents.

Why do they hurt olive trees?

#

Power is getting to decide who lives, who dies, who gets to come, who gets to leave, who gets that villa, who doesn’t, which olive trees are good/Jewish, and which are bad/Arab.

Israel said that some Palestinians could go back, that my grandfather could not. It’s that simple, and yet decades of talking heads have been explaining why olive trees are being uprooted and how it's because of a very complicated conflict where History with a capital H meets Politics with a capital P and also Jews and Muslims and sometimes Christians and it’s the most crisis-y crisis of the many crises of the crisis-ridden Middle East and it’s all so, so complicated

Why do the Israelis hurt olive trees?

Throughout the occupied West Bank, Gaza and south Lebanon, the olive harvest is often stopped by the Israelis. They set the trees on fire, let them rot, or just bulldoze them. They’re doing it again as I write these very words. An olive tree doesn’t speak Arabic. It’s not Christian or Muslim, or pan-Arabist or socialist or Islamist. An olive tree doesn’t know who the Nazis are, and what the Europeans did to European Jews over there. The Israelis even call it zayit in Hebrew which isn’t that different from zaytoon as we call it.

The natives of this ancient land are made to watch as the land is torched by those who desperately want to be its natives. The land must be punished for settler colonialism to work. Displacing or killing the people on that land – that’s not enough. Traces remain. Traces have to be destroyed. If there never was such a thing as a Palestinian then anything or anyone with such a name cannot be. The only safe dwelling for a Palestinian is in non-existence. Israel might keep what it wants of land and people. There is no need to see any more of Palestine as it had all been changed anyway. Keep the food, keep the olive trees, or some of them anyway, and get rid of the rest.

#

When I go to southern Lebanon, I make it a point to stand as close to the border that was carved in 1948 as possible. I never liked borders. Can you blame me? Look at Lebanon on a map. Pause reading this and look at where I grew up. Open Maps, use that little yellow figure on the bottom right, and drop it as close to the Israeli border as possible. I do that a lot. I drop that figure on the point of the map that represents me, and I thank the heavens that an Israeli drone isn’t currently around to drop something else on the point of the map that represents me.

#

The land wasn’t informed of the decision to carve it. People in the West made that decision. People with very short-term memories used force to enclose History – that's with a capital H – itself and they have been spending decades erasing those with longer memories – like people and olive trees and the inconvenient uprooted grandson of non-existence writing these words.

I imagine trees communicating with those on ‘the other side’ through their roots before 1948. Something about mycellium. I barely understand it, but it feels like a smart way to go about things. Some trees probably kept these roots going for longer than our grandparents were able to. Maybe some of them saw my grandfather crossing the land above them before people equipped with History with a capital H decided that to the south of this point on the land shall be a state called Israel. That’s why the Israelis keep on punishing olive trees, and why my grandfather could never go back.

#

I started this story with the land because it doesn’t have to ask anyone for permission to just be and I envy that. My parents and grandparents and their parents and grandparents have all been forcibly displaced once or twice or ten times for longer than the age of many olive trees. No one asked them for permission to no longer be.

2

What breaks me to this day is not that Israelis are capable of genocide, or that they know how to bomb, or torture or exile or maim or humiliate or rape or bomb and bomb and bomb. I expect nothing less of them anymore. They treat us like they treat those olive trees, like they treat the land. It makes a lot of sense to me. They want to keep our non-existence as far away as possible, keep us from getting some of that History with a capital H. If we get some of it, they fear, they get less of it.

We are the untermenschen to their lebensraum and those who desperately want to belong to this raum don’t want us ruining their leben. But what they don’t understand is that keeping us unter for so long puts us in conversation with roots like those zayit/zaytoon/olive trees that they keep on hurting because roots also live unter it all and they are also crossed by borders that uproot them again and again and are also sent to non-existence alongside Palestine and my grandfather and his grandson writing those words. It gets easier to understand these fellow dwellers of the subhuman realm, and through these conversations I get to better understand those who fear us dwellers of the shadows, the hauntings haunting History with a capital H.

#

What breaks me is that there used to be a train from Haifa to Beirut, and Beirut to Haifa.

I don’t know if my grandfather ever boarded one of those. Maybe his parents did. People traveled between Haifa and Beirut all the time. That alone breaks me. I’ve never been, I can’t go. Wrong passport. There are no more trains anyway.

Boarding a train, sitting on a train. That’s it. Being able to see the Mediterranean sea – to my right of course as I’m going south to Haifa.

#

Trains, especially the nice ones, allow me to lose myself.

Maybe the train my grandfather took was one of those trains, like the one in that scene in Spirited Away. The little girl Chichiro and her spirit friend No-Face are sitting on a train going somewhere. As the ghostly passengers progressively leave the train, they end up alone. Chihiro is pensive, taking in the scenery and reflecting – I imagine – on her life so far. She was told it was a one-way ticket, but somehow she knew that she could go back. I envy the part of her that knew and I like to imagine one of those what if-s of history that would have allowed my great-grandparents and the boy that became my grandfather to just do that. Board a train, sit on a train. Wait, enjoy the view, get up, get off the train.

#

I never got used to trains. I’ve been taking them for a decade since moving to Europe. I did London-Edinburgh-London a dozen times. No one ever stopped me. Why would they stop the boy that became my grandfather? He was just a boy. Sure, he spoke Arabic (unlike the olive tree) and was a Christian (unlike the olive tree) but he wasn’t pan-Arabist or socialist or Islamist. He didn’t know who the Nazis are, and what the Europeans did to European Jews over there. He was just a boy, like those kids in Gaza forced into hunger for the crime of haunting History with a capital H.

#

I was always terrible at positioning myself on the map, but growing up in Lebanon was not a problem. If I get lost, I just have to locate the sea, make my way to Beirut, and then from Beirut make my way up to my village. If I am north, the sea has to be on my right to return to Beirut. If I am south, the sea has to be on my left. That’s why even today, in exile/diaspora, I have to know where the sea is at all times lest I fall into non-existence.

I am told those who live in Haifa today have the same relationship to getting lost. If you get lost, you just have to locate the sea. If you are north, the sea has to be on your right to return to Haifa. If you are south, the sea has to be on your left.

To me, the sea seemed reliable – or perhaps reliable enough that I never felt the need to question it. The other two borders, the only other two borders that Lebanon has, are Syria and Israel. It won’t shock you to know that they were not reliable.

When I did Edinburgh-London, the sea, the Atlantic one, the channel, the same sea as my Mediterranean sea as all seas as part of the sea called the ocean anyway, was on the left. When I did London-Edinburgh, it was on the right. I would orient myself like I would in Lebanon. I didn’t have to. I could just sit and the train would do the rest. But I did. Old habits.

#

I don’t know how to explain always knowing, whatever happens in my life, whatever dreams or aspirations or insecurities or quirkiness I may or may not develop one day, that there is a hard limit to driving with the sea on my right as that took me to the Israeli border, and, until Assad’s downfall in 2024, a more or less hard limit to driving with the sea on my left as that took me to the Syrian border.

The Edinburgh-London trips had no rigid land border, no wall of machine guns and drones and other civilised tech that I’d inevitably hit if I forgot to stop driving for too long with the sea on my right.

#

Once, I was driving with a friend with the sea on our left. We drove for too long. We almost reached Syria. We turned back. We saw Assad’s bombs in the distance. It’s really that easy to reach the hard limits. I never even tried to drive too close to the southern border and I have a feeling you know why.

Lebanon is one of the smallest countries in the world. I’ve never experienced a place called Lebanon without hard limits. I’ve never experienced a place called Palestine, but I can tell you what non-existence feels like.

#

It's a decade ago. I’m with friends in my village in Mount Lebanon. I didn’t get lost that day, didn’t need Beirut or the sea to find my way home. We want to order pizza. I zoom out on Google maps for like two seconds and I’m already in not-Lebanon. There is nowhere else to go. Even the sea betrays me in the end, that false friend. I order food and my slippery fingers zoom out for too long on that map and I’m reminded that this spot on the planet, the one where I’m hanging out with friends, ordering seven pizzas, watching a movie or playing some game or something, is just that, a spot.

Don’t venture too far from that spot. Remember where the sea is. Remember to stop.

I had to stop. When I zoomed out I saw that place down there, Israel, where the bombs come from, where my grandfather came from, Palestine. The road is so easy to build from Beirut to Haifa, most of it is still there, it just stops you know where and drones drop big things on me if I try, and the worst of it all is that drones also need to locate the sea. To bomb Gaza from Israel, the sea has to be on your right or in front of you. To bomb Lebanon, the sea has to be on your left. They don’t have to stop at you know where because it isn’t for them – the border is for the rest of us.

#

See Gaza on that map? They don’t even get full lines. It’s a porous border, as long as you’re an Israeli soldiers/tank/jet/drone. The map is from that perspective. That’s the default map on Google.

If you based it on the experience of Palestinians, those lines would be the thickest lines imaginable. But we don't get to draw those lines. We get to endure them.

#

What the map cannot show is what it feels like to be a ‘Gazan.’ Maps are shit at telling you what it feels like to be on one side and not the other.

The bombs keep on falling. Palestinians in Gaza go further and further south, further and further from the land that was their land. It’s never that far though. The whole territory is so small. All of it. Where the Israelis are, and where the Palestinians are. The entire thing is a bit bigger than two Lebanons, and I already told you how small Lebanon is.

#

The Israelis could just let Palestinians go home. They just don’t want to.

Palestinians would ruin this raum with all this leben they keep on doing. They keep on living, and that is very inconvenient. Meanwhile, the rest of us get to pretend that this is a very complicated conflict where History with a capital H meets Politics with a capital P and also Jews and Muslims and sometimes Christians and it’s the most crisis-y crisis of the many crises of the troubled Middle East and it’s all so, so complicated — when in fact it was always about letting the boy that was my grandfather on the train and telling him to make sure the sea was to his right.

3

I grow up a little bit. I’m 34 years/centuries old now. I’m already older than many olive trees because Israel never stopped cutting those down.

That makes me an elder. An elder is someone who is older than olive trees.

#

I’m on a train now, but not the one I want to be one, the one that I dream of taking one day and if I never manage, who knows, maybe my child will one day. She's two years old now. I will teach her to look for her roots amongst the olive trees.

I am watching Spirited Away. I don’t want to be Palestinian or Lebanese or Arab or Brown guy right now.

Leave me alone for a bit.

At least for that train scene.

#

In Spirited Away they present their tickets, and then just sit down. I can’t even tell if they’re going north or south or east or west or if these things matter over there. The magical train is entirely surrounded by the sea. It's neither left nor right. The passengers don't worry about such trivial things. Save me a seat. Please.

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Hey everyone. I haven’t been as active lately as I’ve been dealing with some stuff that I’ll eventually write about, including grief. I just came back from Lebanon for the first time in a while, largely to visit my grandmother, who is quite sick, only to find upon my return that my kid got pneumonia.

I’m typing these words on my phone on a hospital bed (God bless the NHS) so apologies for typos or potentially weird formatting issues. I’ll fix those later.

These past couple of weeks have been rough. My old puppy, Flip, died in my arms after nearly 14 years of companionship, and I am grieving him. Hard. My 89 year old teta (grandma) is not doing too well, and she finally started telling me stories from Palestine. Being in Lebanon was surreal, as it was my first time back since Israel unleashed armageddon on large parts of an already tiny country. Shortly after, as I mentioned, my partner and I are dealing with our kid having pneumonia and us returning to 24/7 hospital stays less than two years after spending over 100 days at the NICU.

So yeah, it has not been fun. I’m preparing a couple of essays: first on grieving m buddy and forcing myself to let him go, and the second on hearing the incessant noise of Israeli drones over Beirut. Perhaps a piece on my teta too.

Coming soon, stay tuned etc.

For now, I wish to talk to y’all about an upcoming class on modern Lebanese history and politics that I’m giving, and about which I’m very excited. You can also check out the most recent episode of The Fire These Times as I talk about it over there as well.

I’ll be giving an online class on modern Lebanese history and politics. It will be entitled "Beware of Small States: Lebanon from 1975 to 2025" and will take place over a period of 5 weeks, one session per week, starting in mid-January. They are 2 hours on average, but they can go on for longer as needed. They are structured but informal, and I encourage you to feel free to ask me questions outside of class as well. Participation is encouraged but of course not mandatory.

Details are all below. If you’re interested, please book your spot asap as the class is almost at capacity.

What?

In this 5-parts class, you will get an overview of Lebanese history and politics from 1975, with a focus on the so-called ‘postwar’ from 1990 onward (I’ll also explain why I refer to it as ‘so-called’)

We will go beyond sensationalist headlines and shallow coverage, and beyond simplistic, top-down explanations for the country. Instead of a linear timeline of events, which you can get from Wikipedia anyway, you will get a messy one. After all, politics is not linear. Political actors evoke events from the recent or not-so-recent past as part of their politics in the present. In addition to the below, I will use personal stories as someone who grew up in Lebanon in a very conservative, at times even Far Right, Christian environment, to explain how my own personal journey away from right-wing and towards left-wing, quasi-anarchist, politics helped me understand Lebanon better.

When?

Saturdays, 4-6pm UK time: Jan 17, Jan 24, Jan 31, Feb 7, Feb 14. They may go beyond 2 hours if we feel like it.

Outline

(Participants will get the extended syllabus with the readings)

• Week 1 | The stories we tell ourselves about this painfully ordinary country | Sat Jan 17 (2+ hours)

• Week 2 | Five academic-y concepts that are easier to understand than they seem | Sat Jan 24 (2+ hours)

• Week 3 | We are the children of the children of war | Sat Jan 31 (2+ hours)

• Week 4 | From life in the midst of history to the collapse | Sat Feb 7 (2+ hours)

• Week 5 | Lebanon yesterday, today, tomorrow | Sat Feb 14 (3+ hours)

Fees

This class costs $300, unless you get a discount.

If you cannot afford it at all: there will be a few free / discounted spots reserved per class. In that case, you will be asked to pay what you can. All I ask is that should your financial situation change one day to please pay the rest, whenever that may be. I genuinely want to make this as accessible as possible.

Discounts

For previous participants

• 30% if you’ve taken another class with me before

• 50% if you are retaking the same class

For Hauntologies subscribers (past or present)

• 50% off for paid subscribers

• 100% off for Founding Members

What you’ll get

• Access to all 5 sessions of course

• Lifetime access to the Google Drive with links and resources, continuously updated. These will include texts with my commentary, my dissertation, audio files and video files.

• Lifetime access to the Hauntologies newsletter without paying extra, if you want

• Discounts on future classes

• An invitation to join a Signal group, if you want

How to Pay

Please pay as soon as you can to book your spot. The easiest way to pay is:

• Through my Ko-Fi account as it allows Debit/Credit Card, Stripe and Paypal.

• Bank transfer.

  (Let me know if you prefer this option on ayoub@thefirethesetimes.com or Signal @ ayoub.02)

Let me know when you’ve paid / if you encounter any issues please!

If for whatever reason you can no longer attend the class, just let me know in advance so that I can book your spot for the next one (estimated in March/April or April/May).

You can of course request a refund if you change your mind. I only ask that you do so reasonably in advance.

What’s Next?

I'm planning on doing more of these in 2026, inshallah. If you'd like to be contacted about any of these, lemme know. You'd get 30% off for any of these if you already took a class with me.

• Postwar Hauntings: Modern Lebanon Through Its Cinema

• The Ghosts of Israel’s Future

• Against Multipolar Imperialism

• James Baldwin’s Radical Optimism

• Cancelling the Apocalypse

Episode

I recorded an episode of The Fire These Times in which I go through what you can expect from the class. Here’s the Spotify link (it’s on all podcast platforms)

https://open.spotify.com/episode/6ZtPEBJgruXo4ToiNFyxZ8?si=OG5KMPDgTJ-07rDPt2umyw

You can contact me by email at ayoub@thefirethesetimes.com or on Signal at @ ayoub.02

This was initially published in the book ‘A Region in Revolt: Mapping the Recent Uprisings in North Africa and West Asia‘ in June of 2020 and was co-written with Jade Saab. The below version is close to the finalized one available in the book.

Hauntologies essays and articles are mostly free but some are paywalled. To gain access to all of this websites’ archives, please consider a paid subscription. By doing so, you will gain access to all the archives.

Subscribe now

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On the night of 4 October 2025, at 9:50 pm, two men wearing balaclavas set fire to the Peacehaven mosque, the only mosque in the area. CCTV footage shows them pouring liquid at the entrance of the mosque as well as near a car, setting it on fire. A clear act of terrorism targeting a religious community at their place of worship.

Two Muslim worshipers were inside the mosque at the time of the attack. An ambulance was parked in front of the next door NHS Ambulance Community Response Post, in addition to a dozen or so cars in the garage next to the NHS post. Had things gone a little bit differently, we would have witnessed multiple car explosions and who knows how many civilian casualties. Luckily, the two Muslim men escaped in time, and no one was physically harmed. Most of the damage was contained to the mosque itself.

As of the time of writing, the two terrorists are still on the run. With both CCTV footage and the fact that one of the two men had badly put his balaclava on, it should not be too difficult to find them. (Edit: a man has been arrested.)

I went to the mosque the morning after the attack, and I left the scene feeling unsettled. Admittedly my journalism experience has largely been in Lebanon,1 but I was still surprised to see that only a handful of journalists were there. I somewhat naively expected this to be bigger news, if only because it would be an easy thing for the media to connect it to the attack on the Manchester synagogue on 2 October 2025 by a Muslim man that left two people dead and three more injured, an attack that has dominated media coverage, and understandably so.

Read: ‘Greatest tribute to victims is solidarity’: Manchester responds to synagogue attack

I would even describe the mood as calm. Too calm. It was a nice day outside, locals going on walks on the beautiful Peacehaven promenade and its undercliff path. Police officers were not in a hurry. One or two of their comms people were pacing around, answering the odd question from passers-by, but that was it. They had announced an investigation into a blatant act of terrorism but had quickly decided to qualify it as a “suspected hate crime” instead. When a Labour minister was asked about why the police is treating this as a hate crime instead of terrorism, she did not answer the question. There is no inherent reason as to why they couldn't call it “suspected terrorism.”

The police didn’t even cordon off the parking lot in front of the mosque, which belonged to the Peacehaven pub, or make space for the press and the few activists who came to cover the attack or support a traumatised community. The only way to interview the Muslim representative who volunteered to speak to the press was to stand awkwardly at the top of the parking lot, burned mosque behind him and pub-goers looking for parking spots behind us.

(Note: I decided not to share my photo of the representative as I don't believe it to be safe in this environment.)

Halfway through one of the interviews, someone from the pub came to complain about us making it harder for people to park, because we couldn’t all be squeezed in the allocated space at the top of the lot. Here we were listening to a man tell us about how his community is reacting to their only place of worship being attacked, and her concern was the parking lot. She had no problem with the half-dozen police cars also there. She even reminded the officers next to me that they could get drinks on the house. No words were offered to the handful of Muslims who had come to check on their mosque. No solidarity or shared grief, no coffee or drinks, no “you can use our parking lot because why the fuck would I care about my pub the day after the only mosque in the area was set on fire.”

It was all deeply uncomfortable. As I stood there, looking at a burned mosque and its worried community in front of me, and a pub that progressively filled up with joyful families behind me, I couldn’t help but know that this act of terrorism would not register the way it should, the way the Manchester synagogue act of terrorism did. Keir Starmer would not stop whatever he was doing to immediately come down to Peacehaven and offer words of support to a concerned community. There won’t be a photoshoot of him looking concerned as he walked towards a place of worship.

I came home concluding that an act of terrorism that nearly killed two men was primarily inconvenient because it occurred the day before Sunday brunch.

“Operation Raise the Colours”

One element of this story that I can confidently say will not be part of most media coverage is how the attack, while shocking, was also predictable. Just a week before, on Monday 29 September 2025, over 80 community groups, businesses and other organizations published a letter complaining about “Operation Raise the Colours” (ORTC) the Far Right campaign that saw hundreds of English flags raised throughout Brighton and Hove and beyond. The statement was also sent to Anita Grant, the assistant chief officer for trust and legitimacy at Sussex Police.

Note: I am keeping the rest of the article behind a paywall for now, as the story develops. This is to protect some potentially sensitive material.

The article ends with a list of recommended listens/reads on the UK Far Right so I'll post them above the paywall for now and eventually bring them back to the bottom of the article when I make it public.

Resources and Recs:

1. 12 Rules for What episode 107: Unite the Kingdom and the Apocalypse with Richard Seymour (Podcast)

2. My article for Shado Mag on “Rethinking the rise of the far right”

3. Pod Save the UK interview with Zack Polanski, leader of the Green party (Podcast)

4. People Just Do Something episode 13: Undercover in Reform UK with Sian Norris (Podcast by The Bristol Cable)

5. Article by Oreoluwa Adeyoola for The Tab: As a Nigerian living in England, the St George’s flag campaign makes me feel unwelcome

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As this was meant to be a public speech, I'm keeping it free here.

This is the speech I was meant to give at the Trump Not Welcome rally later today. I can no longer make it sadly, so I thought it a good idea to share my words here.

Please attend it if you are able to.

Trump coming to the UK is not just about one cynical politician welcoming another cynical politician.

Trump coming to the UK is about redefining which lives are worthy and which are not.

It is about telling all those who are already victims of that regime, trans people, people of color, immigrants, asylum seekers, neighbors, teachers, moms and dads, workers of all walks of life that they are worthless. It's about telling billionaires, big tech fascists and so-called right-wing populists that this country's resources and people are theirs for the taking.

How else would we explain the decisions made by this Labour government time and time again? A clear majority of this country demands more action to stop the genocide in Gaza and to stop the UK’s complicity in it. So what does Starmer do? He meets with Israel’s president while his government arrests hundreds of our elders who risk jail time for opposing this genocide. Violent fascists are given free reign on our streets while the police arrest nans and retired priests, including a wheelchair-bound blind elder, for holding up signs.

Who is Labour for?

We’re still barely scratching the surface of the full extent of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes, so why did Keir Starmer appoint Epstein’s friend Peter Mandelson as UK ambassador to the US?

Why did this government hand over our NHS data and paid £330m of our money to Palantir as the British Medical Association warned that this would “undermine public trust in NHS data systems”? Palantir UK’s vice-president, by the way, is none other than Louis Mosley, grandson of Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists. Mosley is of course friends with Peter Thiel, the deranged billionaire who is obsessed with the figure of the anti-Christ who he genuinely believes to be Greta Thunberg. Greta is of course once again risking her own life with hundreds like her to break the siege of Gaza while this government’s friends in Israel starve children to death.

Again - who is Labour for?

Trump has made it clear that he will fight for the big tech CEOs that have paid a million dollars each to attend his inauguration as God Emperor. Meanwhile, Labour has made it equally clear who its enemies are. And its enemies are, not these criminal elites. Its enemies are not the far right or fascism or the fossil fuel lobby which funds the so-called Reform party. Its enemies are its own base. Its enemies are the people who voted for them. Its enemies are some of the most marginalised people in this country.

Once more - who is Labour for?

This is what the arrival of the fascist god king represents. It is a way for Starmer, the human rights lawyer who abandoned human rights, to bend the knee to Trump - in our name.

They want us, they need us to lose hope because only then would we accept this as the new normal.

Even if we don't succeed in stopping the Trump visit, we need to make it as costly as possible for this fascist, serial rapist, white supremacist to set foot in this country. And we need to make it very clear to this government that if they continue down this path, it can and will be the end of the Labour party.

Finally, I want to leave a message to the fascists who took over our streets last week, those who paused their English nationalism to have a curry or a kebab on their way home. To those who dare attack Muslims in the name of a Christianity that I condemn as hollow and blasphemous: I speak today as I am a Lebanese-Palestinian Christian immigrant.

That cross you fly is that of a brown Greek-Palestinian man named St Giorgios, who we call Mar Gerges. St George is our patron saint and our history with him is older than a country called England. The Messiah you claim is yours is a brown Jewish refugee from Palestine called Yeshua or Yasoo3. These co-called Christians would have terrorised Mary and Joseph themselves as they sought shelter in that manger. They would have let a baby Moses drown instead of rescuing him and sheltering him.

It is with that history behind me that I feel confident in telling the fascists of this country: you will lose. You will lose because you may be in denial of your own history, but we hold it on our shoulders. It is in the colour of our skin, in our languages, in the food that you eat and music that you listen to.

We are here and we’re not fucking going anywhere. Thank you.

Hauntologies essays and articles are mostly free but some are paywalled. To gain access to all of this websites’ archives, please consider a paid subscription. By doing so, you will gain access to all the archives.

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As this essay was already paid for by New Internationalist, I'm keeping it free here.

When US tech giant OpenAI released a new feature allowing users to turn themselves into Japanese anime characters in the style of Spirited Away creators Studio Ghibli, the backlash was swift. After all, Studio Ghibli’s co-founder Hayao Miyazaki is on record saying that AI tools are ‘an insult to life itself’.1 OpenAI’s blatant disregard for Miyazaki’s own wishes was part of the angry reactions, but it also proved, in the words of tech writer Brian Merchant, that ‘for the most adamant of AI advocates, “Ghiblification” is just more proof that they’ve won; that tech has conquered art, and that they can use and commodify it as they please’.2

Although the speed at which Big Tech is seeking to render art obsolete is very concerning and should be met with resistance, these attempts also reveal something unintentionally hopeful about current trends: they are dependent on the very artists they seek to replace. The development of tools like this ‘Ghiblification’ filter requires the theft of millions of frames of Ghibli movies made by artists who were neither asked, credited, or compensated for their work.

Colonizing imagination

This wasn’t the first time Big Tech has hijacked popular fictional universes for its own ends. Tech bosses have long fed off popular fictional worlds to legitimize their power. Billionaire Peter Thiel, for instance, has named his companies after Lord of the Rings references. Elon Musk has sought to associated himself with the Star Trek universe for many years, and has been partially successful,3 while the founder of virtual reality headset Oculus VR Palmer Luckey has been regularly referred to as ‘a real life Tony Stark’ – Marvel’s tech boss superhero – by his fans and uncritical tech commentators alike. Google even named its cluster manager after the Borg, the totalitarian cybernetic organisms in Star Trek. Zuckerberg’s ‘Metaverse’ comes from sci-fi film Ready Player One, a dystopia he took as a blueprint rather than a warning.

These are not just attempts by geeks paying tribute to fictional worlds they love, but part of an active effort in colonizing our collective imagination. Through science-fiction imagery and dystopian warnings, tech billionaires present themselves as visionary geniuses, the protagonists of their own heroic tales saving humanity from crises they are actively making worse. The Artificial Intelligence hype is a key example of this. By using fear as a marketing strategy, they try to sell AI as both an existential threat and a revolutionary solution, while being among its biggest funders and beneficiaries. Just a few months after Musk signed an open letter saying AI poses ‘profound risks to society and humanity’, he launched his own AI chatbot, Grok. OpenAI’s leaders, meanwhile, have repeatedly ‘warned’ about the dangers of AI while courting investors.

Fear is a powerful emotion to conjure up, especially as these companies regularly fail to provide real-life results or live up to the grandiose promises of what their tech can purportedly achieve. By exaggerating the existential threat posed by AI, tech execs can claim that they are the only people who can safely manage these tools and thus monopolize the booming industry.

A story is being told here, one which, crucially, does not require democratic intervention, and instils the myth that their dominance is inevitable. This far right vision imagines most humans on Earth as subservient to ‘the supremely wealthy, protected by private mercenaries, serviced by AI robots and financed by cryptocurrencies’.4 They are telling us to sit back and trust them, with each iteration resembling more and more the sort of blind faith required by cults and conspiracy theorists, such as QAnon supporters (see page x) who are told to just ‘trust the plan’.

This is what the fear-based approach favoured by these tech bosses relies on, and what it contributes to. And governments are buying into it. These conspiracy fictions are being normalized at the highest levels of governments around the world. Britain’s Labour government for instance recently announced that AI will be ‘unleashed’ and ‘mainlined into UK’s veins’.5 This goes far and beyond merely recognizing that AI tools can have certain uses. It is very much part of a broader effort to sell a story to increasingly sceptical populations.

The challenge we face today is to find ways to stop these bosses, drawn from a tiny elite, from causing additional harm.

These men, or ‘broligarchs’, are increasingly tied up with far right politics, underlined by the presence of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Apple’s Tim Cook, and Google’s Sundar Pichai alongside Musk at Trump’s inauguration. They are putting their corporations at the service of supremacist and authoritarian projects, from facilitating ethnic cleansing of people of colour by United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, passing by helping Saudi Arabia become ‘a global hub for AI’ and the Chinese Communist Party identify ethnic Uyghurs.6^,7^, 8^, 9

Storytelling against the fantasy of inevitability

If we’re to confront the tech oligarchs and the reactionary politics they are enabling, what we need is to overcome the ingrained cynicism and nihilism of capitalist culture. We need to give people the opportunity to experience what it’s like when people come together and change the world together. These worlds are already being explored through fiction. What may seem like escapism is in fact an important first step towards building the worlds we want.

Narratives have always shaped what people believe is possible. Scholars call this ‘transportation’, the ‘integrative melding of attention, imagery and feelings, focused on story events’. This is key to understanding how it shapes how we perceive the world, and what we perceive to be ‘realistic’ or ‘unrealistic’ in it. Indeed, research suggests that those who are ‘transported’ can find themselves integrating elements of the story and turning them into ‘real-life beliefs’.10 This is part of the reason why, when confronted with the very real existing and eventual harm caused by AI, many have internalized the story that these tools will nevertheless fix almost everything.

Meanwhile, researchers at MIT found that ‘brain connectivity systematically scaled down’ with the use of AI.11 The very products being wielded to concentrate profits in the hands of a smaller and smaller elite are also limiting our ability to imagine alternatives. Which underlines the urgency of fighting back while we can, with a tool in dire need of reclaiming: storytelling.

Dream big, kid

What we need isn’t more critique. We have seen the AI industries not only able to ignore but even integrate them into the hype they rely on to keep investments pouring in.

Instead, what we need is a real vision of change. Instead of constantly reacting, the left must be part of a wider effort to push the boundaries of what’s considered possible – of imaging a world beyond billionaires, borders and capitalism.

This isn’t utopian naivety, but a recognition that we are all affected by what Mark Fisher called capitalist realism, namely the sense that “it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to [capitalism],” and that this limitation affects how we interact with one another, and how we build movements together. If we collectively feel that overcoming capitalism is ‘unrealistic’, we act accordingly.

It is that sentiment that the writer Ursula Le Guin challenged when she famously said that ‘we live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings’.12 Our task today is to make capitalism’s rule seem less and less inescapable – and ultimately as abolishable.

One of the ways to do this is to harness the power of storytelling, to create, share and popularize stories that can uplift one another and defeat those that know nothing more than to plunder this world’s resources to pursue the shallowest of lives.

Examples already exist. Margaret Killjoy’s A Country of Ghosts envisions the anarchist ‘country’ of Hron, a society under threat from a colonial empire. Through the eyes of a journalist embedded in Hron’s people, we see how he begins to question many of his engrained colonial beliefs, assumptions that many readers may have themselves.

By transporting the reader to Hron, Killjoy invites them to reorient what feels ‘normal’, a feat only possible through a suspension of disbelief wherein we allow ourselves, for a period of time, to be outside the boundaries of the many realisms governing our own world.

Fiction in this sense is more than just escapism – imagining something different is the first step toward building it.

Reopening the future

In recent years, we have seen a culture of despair set in, and we can see it in the ongoing dominance of post-apocalyptic films as well as in phenomena like ‘doomscrolling’.

But we have also seen a surprising resurgence in radically hopeful stories reach the mainstream, with Star Wars Andor an obvious name to mention here. Leftwing commentators and analysts have been surprised that a story as radical as Andor was approved by the very mainstream Disney+, which is a priority boycott target of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement targeting Israeli apartheid. The series drew inspiration not just from the anti-Nazi resistance prior to and during World War II, but also from the Algerian National Liberation Front and the Irish Republican Army, and it would not be lost on any Palestinian viewer that the most prominent uprising in Andor, the Ferrix uprising, would be called an intifada in Arabic.

The widespread critical acclaim that Andor has received speaks to an opening amid the many crises of the modern world. There is an appetite for more daring stories, those that centre mutual aid and community organizing among segments of the population that would otherwise shy away from such seemingly radical ideas. The ongoing resistance against ICE immigration raids in the US also demonstrates this. The number of people being radicalized for the first time at the sight of state-sanctioned kidnappings of their neighbours could reasonably reach the millions, especially as the Trump regime shows no sign of slowing down. The job of radical storytellers is to make it easier to imagine not just the end of authoritarian structures like ICE, but also to imagine a world where their very existence would be rendered obsolete.

1.

In The Lord of the Rings, my favourite historical documentary, a group of Ents and Huorns rise up against Saruman's Isengard. The Uruk-hai had left for Rohan, you see, so all that was left protecting Saruman were Orcs. And Orcs kinda suck. Saruman the tree killer, as one of the Ents called him, had left a major vulnerability unattended. In his arrogance, he did not take into account the fact that the great big dam nearby, the one holding back the river Isen, could very quickly become an ex-dam.

In one of the coolest scenes of the mov… I mean, documentary, Treebeard orders the rest of the leafy gang to “break the dam, release the river!” Just like that, Saruman the White, he who used to be important, he who was the first of the Istari/Wizards, the first emissary of the Valar sent to Middle Earth to help the Free Peoples of the World to counter Sauron, he who turned his back on the entire point of his existence, was defeated.

Saruman the White became nothing more than Saruman the tree killer.1

2.

The thousand year reich lasted 12 years.

3.

Dam-related metaphors and images have been with us for as long as we've had dams. Tolkien obviously loathed them. So do I. I wrote an entire chapter - and an article, and another one - on the successful attempt by activists in Lebanon in stopping the Bisri dam. They tend to be very bad at what they do, and one of the most inspiring moments in recent years has been witnessing the global indigenous-led efforts in releasing the rivers - like the Klamath.

4.

Dams have had this additional layer to them, one which we've seen manifested in the cultural sphere. They represent this need to stop the flow of something that feels inherently chaotic, out of control. Rivers are in flux. They're always changing. We tend to fear change.

5.

God is change. Octavia Butler said so, and Octavia Butler was always right.

6.

I don't know the history of dams everywhere, but I suspect that they have followed the same trajectory as the one I was involved in opposing in Lebanon. States like the USA and the USSR believed them to be a great way to store water and generate electricity. They also look big and impressive which must have felt appealing for the manly men who toxic-masculinity-ed the fuck out of the 20th century. My dam is bigger than yours.

7.

Back to the cultural sphere. This fear of change takes multiple forms. Crucially, change doesn't even have to be on the horizon for us to fear it. We may fixate on perceived changes as a way of avoiding real ones. For example, and this is totally unrelated to anything that is addressed in the points below, we may (fever) dream up an invasion by Radical Islam as a way of avoiding dealing with our own culpability in, say, a genocide or, say, our historical role in genocides or, say, us being cowards.

8.

Suzanne Schroter is the “founder and director of the Frankfurt Research Center on Global Islam.” She posted this meme on the Nazis’ favourite website, X.

We see a dam called Israel protecting Europe from Radical Islam.

9.

Don't think too much about what that actually looks like. You might conclude that slaughtering toddlers and starving them to death in Gaza doesn't feel very heroic.

Stick to the meme. Yell Deus Vult or something at your screen. There's plenty of German phrases you can use too if you're not one of those people pretending to know Latin.

10.

Replace ‘Global Islam’ with ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’, ‘Israel’ with ‘the Reich’ and ‘Europe’ with… actually you can keep it as ‘Europe.’

This starts feeling like something else we've seen.

10.

The book of the founder and director of the Frankfurt Research Center on Global Islam doesn't have correct Arabic on it. The letters are broken up, which is famously not how Arabic is written.

Germany has high standards for its experts.

11.

Eichmann liked to portray himself as an ‘expert’ on all things Judaism.

He was paid as the ‘expert.’ Other Nazis often sought his advice.

12.

Back to dams. We've seen these images before.

Europe is an island, a fortress, a little ol’ village in the mountain where Heidi lives with her heterosexual family and goes to church every Sunday while dancing with all of her neighbours because they're all on good terms with one another and they don't have Je.. I mean Muslims/Arabs/Africans ruining that idyllic picture that people like Susanne (fever) dream of.

13.

It's so annoying how untermenschen like the brown globalist man writing these words keep on ruining things.

14.

Why is Europe so barren in that image?2 Why is it that so many of Europe's self-appointed ‘defenders’ these days have such an ugly image of Europe?

They think they're imagining Europe as the Shire, but they act like it's Isengard.

They are in that tower. They imagine that the hoards are on their way.

What they've done instead is destroy the forest. If we destroy the forest, maybe the hoards won't come anymore?

Europe the White? Europe the tree killer.

15.

It's ironic, deeply ironic, but it remains true: the world's self-appointed Jewish state, Israel, is providing the easiest get out of jail free card for the Susannes of this world, with the ‘jail’ here being the duty to remember one's history and responsibility, the ‘jail’ Germany built for itself.

16.

They don't need to deal with the Jewish Question - European antisemitism - that they invented to deal with their own identity crisis, their own cowardice. They can just project all their traditional European reactionary impulses ‘over there,’ where that Palestinian baby lives.

17.

The baby's existence is too inconvenient. The baby must die.

18.

Transferring antisemitic conspiracy theories about some kind of globalist movement or cabal unto anything else is still antisemitism.

Painting the Israeli genocide as a fight against Muslim globalists is still antisemitism.

19.

Why is it that all globalist conspiracy theories, no matter what they're about, almost always go back to blaming a Jewish man, Soros?

Let's write ‘Soros’ after Susanne's handle on X and see what comes up.

Shockingly, she seems to be attracting quite a few people who seem to be saying the quiet part out loud.

Oh look:

20.

“A network of left-wing NGOs” is a nicer way of writing that other phrase.

21.

Let's see what Susanne called her other book. Mein, dein, unser kulturkampf.

22.

Ok that's enough.

I for one am not going to let any German who supports the Israeli genocide in Gaza pretend like I don't know what they're doing here, like it wasn't their precious state that sought to perfect the industrialisation of mass murder, like it wasn't their glorious political culture that nearly eradicated a 1,000+ years of Jewish history in a few years.

23.

Germany needs to prove that it can last a couple of generations before doing or being involved in a genocide before it can be.

24.

The Israeli state is 77 years old. My Haifa-born grandfather died in his 80s.

The blockade of Gaza is 17 years old. Israel has killed on average 28 Palestinian children a day since the beginning of the genocide.

The genocide is 22 months old. The genocide is older than thousands of babies that Israel has already killed.

25.

Part of why this genocide is not being read as a genocide by too many self-styled intellectuals is that it upends decades of European talking points designed to self-sooth.

26.

I repeat what I wrote in 2020: Europe can be a Fortress or it can be a Union. It cannot be both.

I'll add another layer. Fortress Europe can never exist. It is physically impossible. Therefore, the most immediate end result of the ongoing attempts to build it - with culture, with language, with guns, with robots - is the destruction of the European project itself.

Its defenders ought to realise that the enemy is not over there. The enemy is not those racialised untermenschen whose lives are flattened to fit a convenient story. The enemy is the people who insist on making that Europe's central story.

27.

A dam is destroyed from dry land.

The Israel dam in that meme can only be taken down by Europe because Europe is the one who built it.

28.

Beware. If the dam breaks a whole bunch of questions will have to be asked, and I know how scary those are.

29.

Fuck the reich

1.

I'd like to address something that I’ve seen even good friends do, which is to concede that Assad apologists have ‘good politics on Palestine’ despite having horrible politics on Syria. It's a concession that is meant to contrast two positions that ought to be contradictory: how could they say they oppose Israeli oppression of Palestinians while downplaying or even denying the Assad regime's decades-long oppression of Syrians and Palestinians? The question is well-intentioned, but the framing it uses is misleading.

Assadists were never ‘good on Palestine.’ The only way that statement is true is if we strip away the meaning of ‘pro-Palestine’ from anything remotely meaningful.

2.

Palestine without Palestinians

The Assad regime deployed multiple discourses in its 54-year-long reign from 1970 until its collapse on the 8th of December 2024. One enduring discourse, particularly when addressing their own supporters, was their supposed crucial role in resisting the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Over the past several years, I've made a number of interventions1 on the role of the Assad regime in crushing the Palestinian and Lebanese resistance to Israel years before ‘the resistance’ would become dominated by the likes of Hezbollah. That these interventions are backed by a ridiculous number of sources has evidently made no difference to those who are already committed to that Assadist discourse on Palestine.

One thing that has become clear to me over these same years is that discourses can be resilient. Not only do they sometimes continue to exist despite evidence to the contrary, but often do so because of the lack of evidence. The reality gap that results from a lack of evidence creates an incentive for all those who were already invested in a given discourse to double down. And the wider that gap, the more it require conspiracy thinking to fill it in, for reality alone could not provide a satisfying story as it contains too many inconvenient details that are better off left out.

3.

This is what the Assadist apologist’s relationship to Palestine was from the beginning. It required adapting to a reality that contradicted what they often claimed to support. For decades, the Assad regime, first father and then son, actively crushed Palestinians, including Palestinian-Syrians. As I wrote in a recent piece here, one of the first things Hafez Assad did just six years after coming to power was invade Lebanon in 1976 with the stated purpose of protecting the rightwing Phalangist militias against Palestinian militias and their Lebanese allies (the LNM - won't get into it again here). It was the LNM that publicly supported the Palestinian cause while also calling for the creation of a secular Lebanese state.

4.

The dual nature of their cause is precisely what threatened the Assad regime and revealed a truth that would be repeated time and time again in the years to come: a movement can call themselves pro-Palestine, as long as they sided with the status quo. That was the Assadist playbook under Hafez, later replicated by Bashar, which is why they preferred to have a fractured and sectarian Lebanon that scapegoats Palestinians and was more vulnerable to Israeli invasions and occupations than a pro-Palestine one that offered some kind of alternative, regardless of what that alternative was. This was always the Assadist playbook. You pay lip service to the Palestinian cause while making sure to keep it as vague as possible - you talk about the cause ‘over there’ (Israel-Palestine), not here - while also making sure to silence those who rejected the Assadist compromise. The only way Palestine was tolerated as a political topic of discussion in Syria was by removing any actionable elements from it. Wave the flag? Sure, sometimes. Insult Israel? Sure, that's easy. Take to the streets and demand that the regime redirects its tanks to liberate the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights instead of shooting Syrian and Syrian-Palestinian protesters? That was a one way ticket to the Saydnaya ‘human slaughterhouse’ prison for many protesters, followed by the siege and destruction of Yarmouk, the rebellious Palestinian camp.

5.

To say that Assadists are ‘good on Palestine’ is to conflate rhetorical opposition to the Israeli state and its genocidal and apartheid project with concrete support for Palestinians who resist that project. Conflating the two is a concession to the Israeli obsession with denying exiled Palestinians their ties to the land as it effectively concludes that one can be pro-Palestine while supporting the crushing of Palestinians, as long as it occurs outside of Israel-Palestine. It creates a hierarchy of worthiness, one which the Israelis have themselves been perfecting for decades.

6.

This brings me to Yarmouk, the Palestinian camp near Damascus and, until Assad destroyed it, the largest Palestinian camp outside of Israel-Palestine. As it happens, Nidal Betare, whose grandfather's house served as the launching pad of the Syrian Baath party, was on The Fire These Times in 2022 to talk to me about how his upbringing in Yarmouk shaped his worldview on both Syria and Palestine. There is something specific about such an upbringing, especially if you commit to a vision of liberation. It necessitates coming to terms with the fact that Israel and Syria under Assad have always had more in common than not, from their mutual rejection of a Lebanon that sympathised with the Palestinian cause to their massacres of Palestinians and/or the Lebanese and Syrians who rejected Zionism and Assadism. It requires a refusal to only recognise the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre, committed by Israeli-backed far-right Christian militias, while ignoring the 1976 Tel Al-Zaatar massacre, committed by some of the same actors, and which was made possible by the Syrian intervention in Lebanon on the side of the far-right Christians.

7.

Assadists could never afford that complexity. To ignore, downplay or justify what Assad did to Yarmouk, as Assadists have often done, is to place the torture and murder of Palestinian bodies as a necessary evil for the liberation of Palestinian lands, furthering separating body from land. This violence runs parallel to Israeli practices of separating Palestinians from their lands as a precondition to colonising those lands and redirecting the stolen resources for their own state-building project.

8.

What's more, to deterritorialise Palestine is to act as if Assad turning the Palestine Branch, initially set up for the regime to liaise with the Palestinian groups they approved of, into a center of torturing Syrians and Palestinians can ever be justified ‘for the greater cause.’ It's to also ignore the fact that the Assad regime, under Bashar, even turned the Palestine Branch into a torture site on behalf of the actual CIA, who abducted people ‘suspected’ of terrorism and sent them to torture sites to countries such as Assad's Syria (look up Maher Arrar's story). I can go on. After the initial invasion of Lebanon in 1976, the Assad regime went after Palestinian factions once again between 1985 and 1988. This was after the Israeli occupation of Lebanon had started, and after the Israelis exiled the Palestine Liberation Organization from Lebanon to Tunisia in 1982. Hafez Assad found the perfect opportunity to get rid of the Palestinians he did not like, so he funded and armed the Amal movement to force Palestinian camps into submission. This was only possible in coordination with the Israeli occupation so as to ensure that Syrian and Israeli troops don't overlap in what would end up being their decades-long co-occupation of Lebanon. There are many more points of comparison that could be made between Assad's Syria and Israel: In 2018, the Assad regime passed Law No. 10 to allow itself the right to designate “land anywhere in the country for redevelopment.” This was quickly used to dispossess and forcibly displace populations deemed undesirable and engineer their replacement with those deemed more desirable, often following a sectarian logic. This followed the 2012 Decree No. 66 passed by the regime which, among other things, gave themselves the right to remove any ‘rubble’, which was effectively used to argue that undesirable residents were living in areas that could be demolished. It bares more than a little resemblance to the Israeli absentee law of 1950 which defined the Palestinians ethnically cleansed by Zionist militias in 1948 as ‘absentees’ with the newly formed Israeli state giving itself the right to their lands and properties. It also echoes the ongoing Israeli practice of destroying undesirable Palestinian homes in the occupied West Bank to make way for the more desirable population of Jewish settlers.

9.

To call such a regime ‘pro-Palestine’ is to argue that Israel's theft of ‘absentee’ property was morally evil in a way that Assad's similar politics could never be. This is a conclusion that is only possible if we concede that the forced displacement of civilians could be rejected or accepted depending on who is doing the displacing rather than the act of forcibly displacing civilians being itself inherently wrong. It is to withdraw the right to narrate from those victimized by such systems and give it instead to such systems’ perpetrators. Zionism could not ask for a better gift than that given how it has always relied on painting Israel's decades-long violence against Palestinians as part of a necessary ‘right to self-defense.’

10.

The similarities between Gaza and Syria, including Yarmouk, are made even more obvious by the fact that so many people have shared videos of Syria thinking they’re from Gaza (not that there aren’t plenty of those). Even people who claimed to support Assad while condemning Israel could not tell the difference between a bombed out neighbourhood in Gaza and one in Yarmouk, Homs, Idlib or Aleppo. Instead of this leading to an obvious conclusion, namely that both Israel and Assad’s Syria enact a policy of collective punishment, which is illegal under international law, apologists for either regime find ways to support one while condemning the other.

11.

To ignore this reality is to argue that the problem with Israel’s genocide in Gaza isn’t that Palestinian children are being murdered but that the ones murdering them are Israelis. Centering civilians is to recognise that the act of killing them - the act in and of itself - is what’s wrong, and that it’s just as wrong when Assad besieged Palestinian camps as part of its war of extermination to crush the rebellion that rose up against it in 2011.

12.

The way Palestine has been turned into metaphors upon metaphors can be useful in understanding how it feels be colonised, or trying to in any case. It is useful to turn places, through the power of language, into abstractions as that can facilitate connections between different contexts. The problem comes when those metaphors take over from the hard realities of the land and its people. The Israeli settler colonial project derives a great deal from metaphors and stories, but it cements its gain through physical violence on both land and bodies. The Assad regime did the same thing, including through forced Arabization of Kurdish lands and bodies, and through the ‘de-Palestinisation’ of Palestinians, both attempts at rendering undesirable subjects into more desirable (read: submissive) ones. The Israelis have had their fair share of similar ‘successes’ over the decades, from the forced ‘de-Arabization’ of those who would later be called Mizrahi Jews to the violent rejection of Yiddish and the diasporist experience, passing by the active separation of non-Muslim Arab populations, most notably the Druze, from the Muslim Arab Palestinian majority. Albeit with some differences, we can also name the similarities in how Palestinian Christian citizens of Israel and Syrian Christians have had to navigate questions of belonging to the land and state based on sectarian calculations imposed by the Zionist and Assadist states respectively.

13.

This is also why the co-occupation of Lebanon by Israel and Assad’s Syria is so instructive, and I suspect this is why it tends to be ignored. It resembles in more ways than one the way apologists of Stalin have never been able to provide a convincing argument to explain why his regime teamed up with the Nazis to invade Poland together. More often than not, it is those sacrificed zones, the Polands and Lebanons and Palestinian refugee camps of this world, that reveal the true nature of authoritarian regimes.

14.

Where do we go from here?

The sheer scale of Israeli barbarism in Gaza today, combined with the downfall of the Assad dynasty, may well flatten the details presented above. It could reasonable be argued now that this just doesn’t matter anymore. That is understandable of course. The situation in Gaza is simply more urgent, ending the genocide should remain our priority. The sectarian nightmares in Syria are another priority problem to tackle, with decades of Assadist sectarianisation fracturing Syrian society into more self-contained and mutually-exclusive sectarian identities, and now being consolidated by the post-Assad Sharaa regime (although there are more complexities to this story that are for another time). With such catastrophes facing our peoples, I don’t expect an intervention such as this text seeks to do to matter that much.

15.

One thing I will say though is that the de-Palestinisation of the Palestinian cause, through the whitewashing of ‘pro-Palestine’ regimes like Assad’s, has a long history of facilitating discursive captures that erase Palestinian agency, most notably Zionist ones. The case of Lebanon is a clear example of this, and the Yarmouk camp even more so. The latter case became an easy card to use by pro-Israel apologists who could comfortably point the finger at a Palestinian camp being destroyed by a state (Assad’s Syria) that is not their own favored genocidal state (Israel) and accuse their critics of anti-Israel bias and antisemitism. While Israel’s apologists do not need facts on their side to create a convenient narrative that exempts them of any responsibilities for the horrors they inflict on the Palestinians, Assadist apologia certainly makes their job much easier than it has to be.

16.

To reject the Assadist discourse on Palestine is to also reject the Zionist one. Both were and are violent projects that stripped people’s basic human rights. The Assad regime learned pretty quickly that it could get away with exterminating the social fabric of Syrian (including Kurdish, Armenian, Alawite, Druze etc) and Palestinian-Syrian lives in an attempt to flatten the many worlds contained within Syrian lands into one that, as the slogan ‘Assad or we burn the country’ perfectly exemplified, subjugated them and moulded them into something more acceptable. The difference with the Israelis is that they have had a longer history of doing just that, and with greater success, owing presumably to the seemingly endless resources that Western nations have been willing to spend on their favourite genocidal state. Unlike with Assadist sectarianisation, which mostly found support in the Western Far Right and the endlessly delusional Tankie Left, Israeli sectarianisation has been able to utilise existing islamophobia and racism in the West to paint the Zionist project as a civilisational necessity, a making-the-desert-bloom compromise that also conveniently offers a blueprint for ethno-supremacist fascists in the West who dream of Zionist-like projects of their own against what they perceive to be their own multicultural societies. That old antisemitic tropes around ‘globalist plots’ have been recycled and thoroughly normalised in societies like the US, the UK, Germany, France, and Hungary, among others, has done nothing to stop the process of priming entire segments of Western societies to enact or at the very least tolerate, if not support, mass violence against racialised and gendered bodies. If anything, this pre-existing blueprint, adapted to modern contexts, has served as a accelerant for fascism.

17.

A lesson we can draw from the Assadist attempt at co-opting the Palestinian cause is that authoritarianism leaves its mark even when it is defeated, depending on the type of defeat. That Assad ultimately lost has led to some of his apologists to abandon ship onto their next grift, while others have since doubled down into interpreting anything that happens in Syria today as part of a grander Israeli plot. Many others, including more passive supporters and even many non-apologists altogether, have inherited the cynicism that dominated Syria for decades. While understandable, it remains as damaging, disarming the potential for organizing for a better world before even starting the process of doing so.

18.

A similar process could happen, and is probably likely to happen, if the Israeli genocide is allowed to be blamed solely on a few individual actors like Netanyahu, rather than as symptomatic of wider societal failures that run deep in Israeli society. In the Syrian case we saw Assad’s extermination campaigns - virtually identical to genocidal violence - normalised in the West, especially after the rise of groups like Al-Qaeda and ISIS and Assad’s ability to portray himself as the secular ‘defender’ of religious minorities (just as Netanyahu is the ‘defender’ of religious minorities, like the Druze, when it suits him.) This normalisation worked perfectly with the demonisation of Syrian refugees, most of whom are Sunnis (because most Syrians are Sunnis), as trojan horses for Jihadism. That’s a big part of how the Far Right ended up admiring Assad. In that way, the Assad regime also provided a blueprint for segments of the Far Right: the undesirable populations, those you loathe with every fiber of your being - well, what if you can just kill them all? It also served to facilitate the normalisation of far right and fascist rhetoric across the political spectrum, shifting the overall overtone window to the right. What used to be the relatively fringe politics of the Far Right is now the norm in Europe, even where the Far Right does not hold power. The speed and apparent ease with which entire states abandoned pretending to care about ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘diversity’ is indicative of that. This is the ‘Syrianisation’ of the world that the Syrian intellectual Yassin Haj Saleh once described.

19.

The impulse to adopt the violent answer to a violent question is one which we are now seeing at an even wider scale with the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Unless Israel is crippled with sanctions, we are likely to soon mark two years since the genocide started, and the fact remains that it would have never been possible without Western complicity. The accomplices are not all equal. The Americans, first under Biden and then Trump, are by far the most culpable, so much so that it would be accurate to describe them as co-génocidaires with the Israelis in this genocide. The Germans have, once again, proven their inability to not commit or be involved in a genocide for more than a generation or two for virtually their entire history as a nation. The Brits, those who most directly led to the creation of Israel itself, have proven themselves cowards in the face of overwhelming evidence, almost reluctantly remaining complicit in this genocide to avoid their seemingly eternal fear of being held accountable for anything they’ve ever done to this world. I can go on. It is accurate to call this genocide as being primarily by the Israelis, but it would not be possible without the West (or Arab states like Egypt, Jordan or the UAE, for that matter).

20.

We may very well see, as France is currently doing, more attempts by many Western governments to apply some of the levers of international law and diplomacy, such as recognising a Palestinian state, to put pressure on the Israelis, or at the very least reputation-launder their own complicity in this genocide. It is still ‘good’ that this is happening, if only because it could increase the cost on the Israelis. But these steps also serve as distractions from the obvious steps that can be taken. Slovenia has become the first EU country to ban all weapons sales to Israel. This is good of course, even though it is largely symbolic as Slovenia doesn’t sell weapons to Israel anyway. The vast majority of weaponry comes from the White supremacist and Christian Zionist USA, with ‘de-Nazified’ Germany in second place. Germany is still able to claim leadership in the EU despite being the most blatant accomplice in the genocide.

21.

I believe that the infrastructures that Israel is relying on are more fragile than they may appear. Israel’s cynical weaponisation of antisemitism and the memory of the Holocaust has shown more cracks in the past couple of years than was ever the case beforehand. Its monopoly on memory is over, and that is something we cannot ignore. This is why, or partly why, I think Germany is in a more precarious position than even its leaders care the admit. This doesn’t mean that accountability is inevitable, but it does mean that we are in a position to enact more and more costs on genocidal nations. We can withdraw Germany’s social license, its claims to being a post-Nazi and ‘reformed’ state can be more readily debunked, not just in the halls of academia but at the popular level too. What this would leave Germany with is a more naked reality, namely that its past is not past, that its annihilation of the Warsaw Ghetto could haunt it once more due to its complicity in the annihilation of the Gaza Ghetto. In other words, as witnesses to the destruction of the Gaza Ghetto, we can reclaim the Warsaw Ghetto as ours. Germany can no longer pretend to have learned from the savagery it inflicted, but we can learn from its hypocrisy, and that makes us stronger. The génocidaires are the same. Different generations, different nations even, but fundamentally the same. The Germans were allowed to paint themselves in a new brush after World War II, but we know enough now to reject whatever attempt they may or may not do in the future to distance themselves from the annihilation of Gaza.

22.

Fascism thrives on disorientation, as my co-conspirator Daniel Voskoboynik put it in a recent episode, and the good news is that we already have the tools to help one another not go mad with the false belief that we are the only ones unable to live our day-to-day pretending that any of this is normal. I can tell you that I have felt this when Israel was bombing Gaza in 2014, and whenever the Assad regime launched its own campaigns of extermination against Homs, Yarmouk, Aleppo, Daraya and so on. If you think it cannot be normal to starve children, you’re not mad. You’re the sober one here, and we need to keep finding one another to remind ourselves of just that.

23.

The act of remembering does not only uplift us as individuals, but it also empowers us to see what is obviously true. It is obviously true that nothing can ever justify starving children. Nothing. There are no exceptions to this. That the world we live in has powerful actors actively seeking to distract us from that brutal fact is indicative of a moral and intellectual rot that runs deep within and throughout our institutions. I see these people for who they are. Cowards, liars, fakes, and they will continue pushing that reality away by making more and more people’s lives miserable. They would rather let the Palestinians of Gaza starve to death than face their own demons, but we can make sure that they are forced to face them.

24.

The hauntings that result from the breaking of humanity in Gaza are ours as well, and we can let them remain front and center in everything we do. It is this anti-memory that I am interested in, a rejection of the relegation of ‘past’ horrors unto illegible language. This is why I said on a podcast a couple of years ago that I am still angry about the Holocaust. The breaking of European Jewry continues to haunt us all today, and I am angry at the fact that ‘post’-war Europe gave itself the permission to abandon its responsibilities towards Never Again, promises that were clearly made with the knowledge that they would never have to be respected as the Holocaust was allowed to become final through the attempted translocation of the Jewish Question in Palestine.

What the cowards do not understand is that the Jewish Question - in other words, European antisemitism - is still with us today. It has just morphed into a dual Jewish and Palestinian Question, two questions in one, inseparable. One thing this means is that just as European Jewish intellectuals were particularly well-suited to understand and expose 20th century fascism, we the Palestinians, the Arabs, their Jewish allies and all racialised untermensch are today particularly well-suited to do the same for the 21st century version of it.

25.

It is up to us to decide how to broaden this ‘we’ as much as possible because we are more interconnected and interdependent than we were in the 1930s and 1940s.

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The walls are closing in on the Israeli génocidaires, and this is just the beginning. Two IDF soldiers were briefly arrested in Belgium after the Hind Rajab Foundation filed a report documenting their roles in war crimes. While nowhere near enough, the precedent this is setting should not be underestimated. The higher the cost on the Israelis with blood on their hands, the better our chances at bringing that genocidal regime down.

There can be no normality with a state committing genocide, and its citizens who take part in the genocide cannot get away with it.

We have moved beyond the stage where the fact of genocide in Gaza is debatable. As I'm writing these words, Israel's two most prominent human rights groups, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel, have also declared it to be a genocide. Israel is committing a genocide right now and has been committing a genocide for nearly two years. That's it. Any attempt to ‘debate’ this is nothing less than complicity in the genocide. End of.

While our energies right now should continue to be on stopping this genocide, it is just the first step. It will be up to all of us to make sure that the ‘normality’ associated with Israel is relegated to history, much like how Russia is talked about in the West today, mostly in relation to Ukraine, with Ukraine being the actual center of the story most of the time. Putin has been relegated to the dictator who invaded another country.

But here's the problem: the West's complicity in Israel's genocide is even more blatant than their complicity in Russia's genocide1 because virtually every major institution, from universities to Eurovision to FIFA to most politicial parties, has supported or excused Israel in one way or another since the genocide started.

At least with Ukraine they have tried to ‘compensate’ for their complicity. Where Israel is concerned, we have instead seen nearly two years of dishonesty and cowardice by countries that have spent my entire life telling people like me that they're better than us because they uphold some kind of international norms. Their supposed universality has been proven to be anything but, and the consequences of such a revelation is something we're only starting to understand.

The Netherlands’ intelligence agency has recently declared Israel to be among the threats to the international legal order, “citing disinformation campaigns endangering the lives of Dutch citizens.” That's where The Hague is located remember, where the International Court of Justice will spend the next few years taking in the mountain of evidence, which continue to pile-up on a daily basis, of Israel's genocide.

While I'm the last person to suggest that these steps are or will be enough, we shouldn't downplay their significance either. Instead, we should be treating these small and at times ‘symbolic’ victories as if they were bigger, if only to motivate us to keep going. It is our task to make sure that any child or adult starved to death by the Israelis are turned into political hauntings, into living nightmares to all those who have taken part in this most savage of crimes against humanity.

They have made themselves traitors to the human race and we must not shy away from what that means. The appropriate response to a state that is committing genocide is to wage a war against it. While we cannot compete with the Israelis on weapons of mass destruction, there is one terrain where we have the upper hand, assuming we're organised enough to wield the resulting power it comes with: culture.

The Israelis wouldn't be spending so much of their resources making sure that they get to sing at Eurovision2 or play football in FIFA matches if it did not matter. I would even argue that they rely on these more than, say, how many French or British MPs rhetorically oppose them (unless words turn into action of course).

And, just to be clear once more, I am not suggesting that the cultural terrain is sufficient.3 I am merely suggesting that anyone who says there is nothing they can do is simply wrong. That's just not true. There is always something that can be done, and something small is not as important as something bigger, but it is more important than nothing at all. Apologies for dropping a cliché here, but I've seen a lot of people conclude that nothing can be done, and I wish we could instead push one another - with periods to recuperate as needed - to do better.

There are good reasons to argue for (re)valuing the cultural terrain. We don't need to overstate its importance to recognise that the génocidaires themselves have long viewed it as an important battlefield. This is why, when deciding on our next moves, it is important to assess two things, among others: 1- what do they, the génocidaires, care most about and 2- of these, where can we be most impactful?

Let's take another example. It's the only other one I promise, but it's a big one.

It has become increasingly normal to compare Israel to the Third Reich.

Miriam Margolyes, who is Jewish (and one of my favorite actors), made it as explicit as it gets:

“I cannot bear to think that my people are doing exactly the same thing to another nation [...] and so my heart is broken and […] the terrible thing I have to face is that Hitler won. He changed us, he made us like him.”

Now, I actually don’t agree that this is a particularly Jewish problem. Of course, that aspect is inevitable given that Israel claims itself to be the world's only Jewish state and sees any Jew in the world as potential Israeli citizen.4 I've previously written about how the dominant form of Zionism today is actually Christian rather than Jewish, but most importantly, I simply refuse, as a non-Jew, to accept Israel's claim of representing a global Jewish nation. I don't want to cede the ground to any state claiming to represent any religion. Margolyes’ positionality is her own of course, and it makes her intervention all the more powerful as a result.

Regardless, what it does tell me is that the taboo is finally gone, once and for all. I used to be hesitant about these comparisons, but the truth is that comparing Israel to the Third Reich has been made much easier by the words and actions of the Israelis and their apologists themselves. The Israelis have weaponised the Holocaust for so long, and with such an obsessive regularity, that they even risk weakening the very field of Holocaust and Genocide studies (unless scholars in that field wake up faster.)5 At the very least, they have proven themselves to be shameless, willing to use and abuse the memory of the dead, including in many case their own parents/grandparents, to justify or excuse a genocide done, at least partly, in their names.

We have known that the taboo was on its way out for a good year or so, maybe more. Let's not forget that Jonathan Glazer, who directed the most acclaimed Holocaust film in years, The Zone of Interest, explicitly said in March 2024 that he refuses to have his "Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation.” In response to the controversy that followed, he was defended by over 150 Jewish creatives (while over 450 Jewish creatives condemned him.)6

My sense with this is that I am not convinced that such a ‘controversy’, which in my opinion was largely manufactured anyway, would have the same potency today.

To his credit, Glazer made that statement in the ‘early’ months of the genocide, long before the footage of emaciated corpses of babies, toddler and children have become rootine.

Perhaps there is something particularly haunting about these images. I suppose that they do bring up a certain reaction in those of us who have a functioning conscience, a sort of nothing can ever justify this reaction needed to overcome the pro-Israel filters that many Westerners have grown up with.

There will always be those who will defend/downplay the genocide for decades to come, just as deniers of other genocides continue to persuade themselves that they're right. I'm not as preocupied with that group of people as much as I am with those who can sense in themselves that there's something wrong with what they’re supporting.

The more we make it easier, culturally, to be pro-Palestine, to be anti-genocide, the more difficult it is for the génocidaires to operate in this world without thinking twice and more about where they could be met with individuals or groups who will make sure that they cannot get away with starving children.

Only then would Never Again, which has been rendered hollow by the Israelis, Germans, Americans and all those who insist on protecting the génocidaires, actually mean something.

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This will be a quick one.

• The thing about monopoly of violence is, well, that the state has the monopoly on violence.

• Journalism can be better at recognising that fact instead of wasting time talking about ‘violent protests'.

• Civilians never have the monopoly on violence. The state does.

• The same goes with unseen versus seen violence. You may think that some person with a rock at a protest is the violent one, but to do that you need to erase the daily mass violence inflicted by the state on citizens and non-citizens.

• You need to be able to compare a rock thrown by a protester with tanks and jets and mass incarceration and ICE kidnapping children and border cops letting innocent people die of thirst and teargas and torture and more. If you erase the latter and only look at the …

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1. If you stop thinking that Germany's response to anything Israel is about Holocaust guilt and instead about rewriting German history, you'd understand German politics better.

2. The overwhelming majority of antisemitic attacks on German soil are from the Far Right, but these are rendered illegible because it does not fit with the White supremacy that continues to define a lot of German politics.

3. Germany is invested in the notion that because they are responsible for the Holocaust, they are also best suited to understand what antisemitism is. The idea that antisemitism is 'our' problem is inconceivable to German politics today. It is much easier to scapegoat foreigners instead.

4. Add to that the redefining of antisemitism as opposing Israel's actions and you get a German state that is fine with prosecuting Jews and non-Jews alike in the name of 'fighting antisemitism.' The most mundane of pro-Palestine events are thus turned into an existential crisis for the state.

5. Germany has been cracking down on civil liberties to make sure that no nuance is allowed in public discourse. They have cheapened the Holocaust itself by proving that it can be used to silence opposition to an ongoing genocide.

6. Germany's complicity in the Israeli genocide of Palestinians has nothing to do with its Holocaust guilt. It has everything to do with maintaining a sense of the past that allows them a way out of their role in the Holocaust. They want it to no longer be a German problem.

7. By acting as if all one needs to do to atone for the Holocaust is to be pro-Israel one is essentially saying that the Holocaust is no longer a German problem, that they can atone for their crimes in Europe by backing a state in the Middle East committing genocide.

8. Incidentally, this is itself antisemitic. If they can erase the Holocaust by backing Israel, then were the European Jews they murdered in the Holocaust ever really European? Or were they always foreigners, waiting for a Jewish state in the Middle East to be created for them?

9. They can't have it both ways. If the Holocaust was wrong because genocide is always wrong then backing Israel's genocide is unjustifiable. If the Holocaust was wrong but also it allows Germany to displace their antisemitism problem unto 'foreigners', well that's quite convenient isn't it.

10. That way the Holocaust is no longer entirely rooted in European antisemitism and colonialism. It's a win-win for the German state: they get to displace their role in historical and modern antisemitism unto a population of 'foreigners' that have very little political capital in German politics.

11. By doing so they get to both demonise the Other - an old German tradition - while also downplaying and erasing the very real rise of the neo-Nazi and fascist Far Right, some of whom include pro-Israel actors who are envious of Israel's ethno-supremacist state and wish to replicate it at home.

June 11 2025 Update:

Another example has since come up:

• A groundbreaking report by Israeli journalist Itay Mashiach exposes how Germany’s antisemitism monitoring mechanisms are being exploited to stigmatize migrant communities, minimize the threat of the far-right, & delegitimize human rights activism. I would like to also note the cruel irony in the fact that Jews are the ones doing the work to expose Germany's cynical weaponization of antisemitism.

Initially a Bluesky thread.