United Front Against Genocide

There is already a resistance to this genocide.  The only relevant question, it seems to me, is how to join it.

Since the Palestinian Holocaust began to unfold in October, I've mostly been trying to bear witness to the horrors through songwriting, because it seems to have the most impact that way.  This bit of prose won't stray far from that theme, since it's largely about songs as well.

To set the scene, for those who may be ignoring global news or reading this sometime in the future:  a big headline is Ukraine has suffered their biggest day of drone attacks for the past year, resulting in 17 people killed.  In Gaza, another estimated 200 people, mostly women and children, have once again been killed in Israel's relentless bombardment of this densely-populated, walled ghetto.  Almost every day for months there has been a similar death toll.

UNICEF reports that 40% of the people of Gaza are now starving.  The WHO says that people seeking care in Gaza's demolished hospitals are just "waiting to die."  Perhaps most shocking of all is the statistic being circulated by the UN that surgeons in Gaza have been forced by their IDF-besieged circumstances to perform over 1,000 amputations of the limbs of children without anesthesia.

The nation of South Africa has today invoked the Genocide Convention.  As I understand it, this now requires South Africa and other nations abiding by the convention to immediately try to put a stop to the genocide that they claim -- and that obviously is -- taking place.

Developments are fast-moving, who knows what may change by tomorrow.  But unless this effort by South Africa at resurrecting international law from its otherwise paralyzed state with regards to stopping this genocide is successful, the only real, three-dimensional opposition to Israel's relentless slaughter of Palestinian children taking place in the real world is coming from actors in Gaza, Lebanon, and Yemen, represented by popular movement organizations known by names like Hamas, Hezbollah, and Ansar Allah.

Like most of my typical readers, I suspect, I am from the atheistic western left orientation.  Saying this is itself a vast generalization -- what we might call "the atheistic western left orientation" could include under the same umbrella social democrats, Marxist-Leninists, and anarchists, among others.

In this left tradition of which I speak, many people are members of political parties with platforms that include talk of the potential need for violently overthrowing capitalism, though after centuries of the existence of some of these parties, the occasion has never arisen locally.

Many political parties in the west, particularly in Europe, still have a connection to Christian religious roots of one kind or another, and keep names such as "Christian Democrats" still today.  Their connection to Christianity in terms of how they govern or run for office might be hard to discern today, but they are at least tenuously connected with Christian churches whose roots often involved a belief that anyone who didn't practice their version of Christianity was a heathen who deserved to die.  Despite the presence of many Catholics in New England, there wasn't a Catholic church in Rhode Island for 200 years, because the Puritans in charge killed Catholics, along with Quakers and Indians.

I'm just talking smack here, not trying to concoct any academic theses or make direct comparisons between colonial New England and the modern-day Middle East, though I'd maintain the relevance of my historical observations here anyway, on some level.

Such as the way popular organizations evolve over time, just as religious movements have done so many times throughout the history of Protestantism.  

I reflect on this history because I'm reminded of it every time I hear the experts interviewed on any of the more serious news platforms, with regards to developments in the Middle East.  Unlike American, Israeli, and some European government officials or military generals, you will never find a serious expert in the field agree with the generals and the politicians when they make statements like "Hamas is the same as ISIS."

Whatever the similarities, the differences are as stark as, I don't know, pick your allegory.  Cyanide and orange juice are both acidic liquids, but they're different.

What the actual experts will always tell us, which often seems not to be what their questioners are hoping to hear, is that the groups in question are all very popular movement organizations that have evolved more and more in that direction over time, further and further away from religious or political sectarianism, and they have all over time been embraced by an ever broader cross-section of the local populations.  This has been true of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthi movement over decades.  It's well-documented.  

I won't repeat the stories we can hear any day from the experts on Al-Jazeera or BBC World Service about that well-known trajectory, but if you want a lot of relevant background, I highly recommend Robert Fisk's history of the twentieth century, The Great War for Civilization.

In another book, my friend Tommy Sands' memoir, The Songman, Tommy recounts the time when in the wake of the Bloody Sunday massacre in Derry, he thought he wanted to join the Irish Republican Army.  He went to meet with a recruiter for the IRA, who ultimately dissuaded him from joining, arguing that Tommy could serve the republican cause better through his music and his advocacy for reconciliation.  But in the process of the meeting Tommy would learn that these much-vaunted militants he had heard so much about in the news were none other than his neighbors.  People he had known for years, sometimes since childhood, most of whom are now dead.

My personal experiences with "meeting the militants" in my own travels in Ireland, Lebanon, and the Occupied West Bank have been completely evocative of Tommy's story from 1970.  In the context of all of these places, the militants in question are your neighbors down the street.  They're likely also your college professor as well as your plumber.

In Ireland, a very few of the militants smoke cannabis, but not publicly.  In Lebanon, some of them drink a beer now and then, but not outside of Beirut.  Views about religion, economics, and social mores are all over the map within all of these movements, but there is a strong tendency to unite around the common goal of ending the occupation, and a widespread desire not to have conflicts around unrelated issues.

For many, the religiosity of the movement is about as relevant as Christianity was to the average American socialist a century ago.  That is, it was very relevant, in the sense that the two concepts were considered to be completely, naturally intertwined, given that Jesus Christ was obviously a socialist.  By my observation, the membership of groups with names like the Party of God or the Army of God in the Middle East today includes a lot of Muslims like that, along with a lot of folks much more committed to religious practice.

Fundamentally, we're talking about groups whose purpose is to resist an unjust and brutal US-backed occupation of various lands in various countries, most especially the historic land of Palestine.  Today, despite the invoking of the Genocide Convention and many words of outrage and solidarity from regular people, political leaders, and others around the world, it is the social movements/political organizations/militias of Hamas, Hezbollah, and those popularly known as the Houthis, primarily, that are actually resisting the campaign of genocide Israel is carrying out in Gaza right now.

In the most obvious united front that ever could exist, a united front against genocide, whoever is fighting against it should presumably be supported, if the concept has ever had any relevance whatsoever.

This is obvious, and so it's equally obvious to supporters of Israel and its genocide that those who are opposing it must be vilified as "the same as ISIS" or "the same as the Nazis."  It is vital to uncritically spread disinformation derived from Israeli military propaganda about what happened on October 7th as fact, while calling out for more censorship of voices critical of Israel.  Vital to paint reality in black and white, good and evil, in order to provide yourself with a fig leaf for genocide.

Vital to demonize those so dedicated to the cause of the liberation of an occupied people, to spread the notion, as a genocide is underway, that it is in fact these "terrorists" who are the ones who want to commit genocide.  The "evidence" for this being intentional misunderstandings of political slogans, or the least charitable interpretation of the wording of an outdated version of a group's charter.

I've been to Lebanon and Palestine and had lots of direct and warm interactions with these apparently scary types of people, as I mentioned.  I've never been to Yemen.  But last week, after seeing the footage of Yemeni helicopters painted with Palestinian flags boarding ships bound for Israel and playing such a profound role in disrupting business as usual on the high seas in protest of the bombardment of Gaza, I wrote a "Song for the Houthi Army" -- to thank them for their tremendous efforts, and to do so publicly, for the benefit of anyone who might be listening, in case it might help encourage others to stand with them in many different possible ways as well.

I was happy to find that so many of "the usual suspects," like those who subscribe to me on Substack, were thinking the same things about what Ansar Allah has been doing off the coast of Yemen.  Thank goodness someone is doing something, other than more words. 

A minority of my subscribers on Substack reacted with horror that anyone could say nice things about a group that, according to Wikipedia, doesn't like Jews.

I was reminded in these reactions of the Israelis and Israel-supporters who tried to scare me out of visiting the Occupied West Bank when I was first going to do a concert tour there, almost two decades ago.  Cities like Nablus or Jenin were not safe places for an American of Jewish background like you, they told me.  Also they don't like musicians, I was told, preposterously.  My experiences in reality were that every new town I visited in the West Bank was more welcoming than the last one, and if the young Palestinian men with heavy, long guns slung over their shoulders patrolling the streets in some cities knew one word of English, it was "welcome."  The one time a young man whistled at my English girlfriend, he was immediately told by an elder to knock it off, and he did.  Music, and musicians, and people who loved music and art of all kinds, were everywhere.

Music continues to be everywhere in society and within social movements around the world, and this very much includes Yemen today.  The journey I've taken, largely through clicking "translate" on Arabic-language posts and comments on X over the past few days, since the first prominent person in Yemen shared my "Song for the Houthi Army," has been both humbling and educational.

The song has been shared many thousands of times, by people at every level of Yemeni society -- soldiers, students, scholars, government officials, TV producers, and so on.  The praise for the song and the songwriter has been effusive and eloquent, often with religious overtones -- "sometimes Moses grows up in the house of the Pharoahs" being my favorite comment.

Among the hundreds of comments I've translated, a few have been from trolls who are just taking the opportunity to criticize the person making the post, having nothing to do with the actual content of the post.  Otherwise, aside from a few that Google could not successfully translate for me in any way that made sense, it's all been nothing but praise, thanking me for the song.

This deluge of praise was very reminiscent of my experience after writing "Children of Jerusalem" in September of 2000.  A week or so after it had begun to circulate on the internet, it caught hold among the Palestinian diaspora, and the hundreds of emails began to pour into my inbox (before that sort of thing was largely replaced by social media posts and comments).

In both cases what was abundantly clear is these are the words of people who have a very righteous cause and would like other people to recognize that.  They want to be understood, and they know that they are often not understood at all, and often deliberately misrepresented, particularly by pundits and politicians in the west, and by extension, by western society in general.

As a citizen of the country that provides the bombs that have allowed the Saudi air force to lay waste to Yemen in recent years, a citizen of the country that provides the military aid and diplomatic cover to Israel as it commits genocide against another Arab nation -- and a US citizen of Jewish lineage at that -- one might expect among all of these posts and comments someone to say something at least vaguely anti-Jewish.  But no -- not one, even from the trolls.  Only effusive praise and expressions of appreciation, along with some good-natured challenges to Yemeni musicians to write more music for the cause, instead of just love songs.  

Through other comments I learned about a well-known Yemeni singer named Issa Al-Laith, who writes uplifting, militant songs and is frequently censored from platforms.  A name that can be added to a spectacular list of others writing songs to rally the cause -- and the troops, quite literally -- across the Arab world and far beyond it as well, now and throughout history.

I'm humbled to have had the chance to let a few people in Yemen know that there are those in the west who appreciate the giant efforts of Ansar Allah in the struggle against the Gaza genocide in recent weeks.  And I'm glad to see that my usual circles online appear to be on the same page I'm on with concern to that appreciation for the Houthis.

But it's all the others, those who express outrage at the idea of being in alliance with people some would just dismiss out of hand as antisemites of some kind, who I would most like to reach.  You don't get to choose who steps up to the plate during an existential crisis, first of all, and secondly, you shouldn't believe the propaganda about Arabs and Muslims that is the default setting for the western media and other western perspectives we in the west have all grown up surrounded by.

People fighting for human dignity and against the slaughter of civilians come in all shapes and colors, from all religions, all nations, and a wide variety of political stripes.  This is a time for alliances, and solutions, not for bickering about what's in some party's charter from the 1980's or what so-and-so said at a political rally during the last savage Israeli bombing campaign.  And it's always the time to show gratitude to those who are taking action, when just such action is what is so desperately needed, in abundance.  And to figure out how to join them in doing much more.