art markets (centralization x scamminess)
length: 1 triangle
content/trigger warnings: discussion of NFTs
Triangular diagram with two axes: at top and bottom, the words âMORE CENTRALIZEDâ and âLESS CENTRALIZEDâ; at left and right, the words âLESS SCAMMYâ and âMORE SCAMMYâ. An equilateral triangle at center, with its top point centered under the words âMORE CENTRALIZEDâ and labeled âCONTEMPORARY ART MARKETâ. Annotation inside the top point reads, âODDS OF EARNING >$1M: 0.001% ODDS OF EARNING >$100: 0.001%â. The triangle's bottom-left point, at the bottom-left corner of the diagram, is labeled âGIG ART MARKET (PATREON, FIVERR, ETC.)â, its annotation reading, âODDS OF EARNING >$1M: 0% ODDS OF EARNING >$100: 1%â. The triangle's bottom-right point, at the bottom-right corner of the diagram, is labelled âNFT ART MARKETâ, its annotation reading, âODDS OF EARNING >$1M: 0% ODDS OF EARNING >$100: 0%â. Midway along the right edge of the diagram is a dot labeled âTHIS DIAGRAM POSTED ON MY PERSONAL WEBSITE.â Midway along the left edge of the diagram is a dot labeled âTHIS DIAGRAM AS AN NFTâ. In the dead center of the triangle is a dot labeled âTHIS DIAGRAM PUBLISHED IN A LITERARY MAGAZINEâ.Read for Refaat
length: 7 days
Palestinian writer and professor Refaat Alareer was murdered by the settler colonial state of so-called Israel on December 6, 2023. Forty days later, on January 15, 2024, people around the world are partaking in âRead for Refaat,â a day of action that kicks off a week of solidarity events focused on reading out loud and in public Alareer's work, the works of other Palestinian writers, and works about Palestine. You can learn more about âRead for Refaatâ on Publishers for Palestine's website.
Between January 15 and 21, I will be posting recordings of myself reading selections from the texts on the âOn Palestineâ resources page on my website, which are available to download freely. If you record yourself reading from these texts and want to make those recordings available on this page, please contact me at [Work AT RiveraErica DOT com].
Note: I recorded these when I was experiencing voice dysphoria, so I used TikTok's AI voice filter to modify the pitch and sound of my voice (which is mostly why the first recording sounds so anglo, lol). I'm planning on re-recording all of these soon, using my unfiltered voice; I'll remove this note once I've done so.
Second note: Some of the files linked below may be temporarily unavailable while I finish migrating this site from Ghost to WriteFreely. I'll remove this note once all the files are re-linked.
January 15, 2024
content/trigger warnings: discussion of death
âIf I Must Dieâ by Refaat Alareer, as translated into Spanish by D. P. Snyder
Si he de morir
Si he de morir, tĂş debes vivir para contar mi historia para vender mis cosas para comprar un trozo de tela y unos cordeles, (hazla blanca  con una larga cola) para que un niĂąo  en alguna parte de Gaza al mirar al cielo mientras espera a su padre  que partiĂł en una llamaradaâ y no se despidiĂł de nadie ni siquiera de su propia carne, ni siquiera de sĂ mismoâ vea la cometa, la cometa  que me hiciste, volando  en lo alto y piense  por un instante que ahĂ estĂĄ un ĂĄngel devolviĂŠndole el amor. Si he de morir deja que inspire esperanza, deja que sea una historia.
content/trigger warnings: discussions of slavery, settler colonialism, genocide, death, murder, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, and the use of an anti-Indigenous slur
Selection from âSettler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Nativeâ by Patrick Wolfe
As I have argued, different racial regimes encode and reproduce the unequal relationships into which Europeans coerced the populations concerned. For instance, Indians and Black people in the US have been racialized in opposing ways that reflect their antithetical roles in the formation of US society. Black peopleâs enslavement produced an inclusive taxonomy that automatically enslaved the offspring of a slave and any other parent. In the wake of slavery, this taxonomy became fully racialized in the âone-drop rule,â whereby any amount of African ancestry, no matter how remote, and regardless of phenotypical appearance, makes a person Black.
For Indians, in stark contrast, non-Indian ancestry compromised their indigeneity, producing âhalf-breeds,â a regime that persists in the form of blood quantum regulations. As opposed to enslaved people, whose reproduction augmented their ownersâ wealth, Indigenous people obstructed settlersâ access to land, so their increase was counterproductive. In this way, the restrictive racial classification of Indians straightforwardly furthered the logic of elimination. Thus we cannot simply say that settler colonialism or genocide have been targeted at particular races, since a race cannot be taken as given. It is made in the targeting. Black people were racialized as slaves; slavery constituted their blackness.
Correspondingly, Indigenous North Americans were not killed, driven away, romanticized, assimilated, fenced in, bred White, and otherwise eliminated as the original owners of the land but as Indians. Roger Smith has missed this point in seeking to distinguish between victims murdered for where they are and victims murdered for who they are. So far as Indigenous people are concerned, where they are is who they are, and not only by their own reckoning.
As Deborah Bird Rose has pointed out, to get in the way of settler colonization, all the native has to do is stay at home. Whatever settlers may sayâand they generally have a lot to sayâthe primary motive for elimination is not race (or religion, ethnicity, grade of civilization, etc.) but access to territory. Territoriality is settler colonialismâs specific, irreducible element.
content/trigger warnings: discussions of settler colonialism, forced displacement/expulsion, and genocide
Selection from the Introduction of Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview by Lorenzo Veracini
âColonyâ as a term can have two main different connotations. A colony is both a political body that is dominated by an exogenous agency, and an exogenous entity that reproduces itself in a given environment (in both cases, even if they refer to very different situations, âcolonyâ implies the localised ascendancy of an external elementâthis is what brings the two meanings together). Settler colonialism as a concept encompasses this fundamental ambiguity. As its compounded designation suggests, it is inherently characterised by both traits. Since both the permanent movement and reproduction of communities and the dominance of an exogenous agency over an indigenous one are necessarily involved, settler colonial phenomena are intimately related to both colonialism and migration. And yet, not all migrations are settler migrations and not all colonialisms are settler colonial: this book argues that settler colonialism should be seen as structurally distinct from both.
Both migrants and settlers move across space and often end up permanently residing in a new locale. Settlers, however, are unique migrants, and, as Mahmood Mamdani has perceptively summarised, settlers âare made by conquest, not just by immigrationâ. Settlers are founders of political orders and carry their sovereignty with them (on the contrary, migrants can be seen as appellants facing a political order that is already constituted). Migrants can be individually co-opted within settler colonial political regimes, and indeed they often are. They do not, however, enjoy inherent rights and are characterised by a defining lack of sovereign entitlement. It is important that these categories are differentiated analytically: a very different sovereign charge is involved in their respective displacements; not only do settlers and migrants move in inherently different ways, they also move towards very different places. As New Zealand historian James Belich has noted, an âemigrant joined someone elseâs society, a settler or colonist remade his ownâ. Migrants, by definition, move to another country and lead diasporic lives, settlers, on the contrary, move (indeed, as I suggest below, âreturnâ) to their country. A diaspora is not an ingathering.
Indeed, an analytical distinction could also be made between settler colonial and other resettlements. Imperial, national, and colonising (including internally colonising) states frequently promote âsettlementâ with the aim of permanently securing their hold on specific locales. On the contrary, the political traditions this book focuses on concentrate on autonomous collectives that claim both a special sovereign charge and a regenerative capacity. Settlers, unlike other migrants, âremoveâ to establish a better polity, either by setting up an ideal social body or by constituting an exemplary model of social organisation. Of course, even if I propose to see them as analytically distinct, colonialism with settlers and settler colonialism intertwine, interact, and overlap.
Ultimately, whereas migration operates in accordance with a register of difference, settler migration operates in accordance with a register of sameness, and one result of this dissimilarity is that policy in a settler colonial setting is crucially dedicated to enable settlers while neutralising migrants (real life, however, defies these attempts, with settlers recurrently failing to establish the regenerated communities they are supposed to create, and migrants radically transforming the body politic despite sustained efforts to contain and manage their difference). In this context, refugeesâthe most unwilling of migrantsâcan thus be seen as occupying the opposite end of a spectrum of possibilities ranging between a move that can be construed as entirely volitionalâthe settlersââand a displacement that is premised on an absolute lack of choice (on a settler need to produce refugees as a way to assert their self-identity).
January 16, 2024
content/trigger warnings: discussions of settler colonialism, Zionism, forced displacement/expulsion, and genocide
Selection from âChapter 7 â Purchase by Other Means â Dispossessing the Natives in Palestineâ from Traces of History â Elementary Structures of Race by Patrick Wolfe
To rehearse a dialectical truism, theory is a form of practice. In their local interplay, as in that between metropole and colony, theory and practice condition one another. Each case is different. Thus it is not enough simply to classify Israel as settler-colonial on the basis of its manifest instantiation of the logic of elimination. We also need to trace the distinctive ways in which this logic acquired life and form through practical hostilities conducted between invaders and Natives on the colonial ground in Palestine. Settler colonialismâs essential feature, its sustained institutional tendency to supplant the Indigenous population, reconciles a range of historical practices that might otherwise seem distinct. It is important to stress this multiplicity because the techniques of dispossession whereby settlers supplanted the Natives of Palestine differ significantly from the kindred sets of practices whereby settlers dispossessed the Natives of Australia and of North America. Nonetheless, the eliminatory outcome has remained constant, so the situation provides an opportunity to explore settler colonialismâs strategic versatility. To explain a settler-colonial invasion, it can never be enough simply to invoke the global potency of capital, mighty though that is. Rather, in each case, settler ascendancy rests on a particular contextual mobilisation of Europeâs preaccumulated colonial resources. We need to go behind the frontier to the historical preconditions that equipped the invaders for settlement before they set foot in Native country.
Two major differences have been held out as distinguishing the Zionist acquisition of Palestine from the settler colonisations of Australia and of the USA. In the first instance, Zionism originated as an international movement that consciously avoided confinement to a single metropolis in favour of a supportive transnational umbrella that Rodinson termed the âcollective mother countryâ. Second, prior to the end of 1947, Zionism was conspicuous for its policy of purchasing Native land in at least notional conformity with the domestic laws of the current local power. In these two important respects, Zionist policy in Palestine differed strikingly from settler policies in Australia or the United States. On examination, however, Zionist policy in Palestine constitutes an intensification of, rather than a departure from, earlier settler-colonial models.
In stark contrast to the Australian or US cases, for instance, Zionism rigorously refused, as it continues to refuse, any suggestion of Native assimilation. In this and other ways that will be discussed below, Zionism constitutes a more exclusive exercise of the settler logic of elimination than we encounter in the Australian and US examples. This conclusion only seems surprising if one concentrates on features that are extraneous to the Indigenous experience, as Zionist apologists understandably do. By way of correction, we will examine these two features that have frequently been cited as distinguishing Zionism from settler colonialism (the lack of a unitary metropole and the policy of purchase) not in isolation but in the wider historical context within which they were strategically conjoined. As will emerge, the two constitute integrated aspects of a uniquely developed programme of Indigenous dispossession.
The basic link between Zionismâs diffuse metropole and Jewish land purchases in Palestine consists in the fact that the former financed the latter. As we saw earlier, the frontier was led from behind, typically by speculatorsâspeculators, moreover, who tended not to be limited by nationality. So far as the creation of transnational networks for exporting metropolitan capital in order to place and maintain settlers in Palestine is concerned, therefore, there is nothing exceptional about Zionism. Rather, Zionismâs peculiarity concerns the distinctive quality of the capital involved. This, in turn, reflects the fact that, in the case of Palestine, the Natives were already incorporated intoâand to that extent, protected byâextensive (albeit moribund) colonial empires, first Ottoman then British, a factor that encouraged settler conformity to domestic property law.
In this context, the resources that Zionism was able to coordinate distinguished the capital transmitted to Palestine from the general run of speculative investment whereby capital was exported to other European colonies. With the possible (and early) exception of Baron Rothschild, the capital that Zionists garnered for investment in Palestine, as Barbara Smith has pointed out, was not conditional on the return of a financial profit.
In this crucial regard, donors who funded the world Zionist project differed from the speculators who had financed territorial expansion in Australia and North America. Unencumbered by the requirement to return a profit, subsidised Zionist settlers enjoyed the easiest of imported advantages in relation to the local population, a confounding of capitalist rationality that overwhelmed the finite Native stock.
For a sustained colonising programme that was to achieve such enormous successes, the Zionist plan for Palestine displays a consistent set of features whose effectiveness has not been hampered by its remarkable simplicity. Ostensibly operating within established imperial frameworks, but always with an eye to eventually supplanting them, Zionists have secured international support, both from regnant imperial powers and from private sources, for two overriding purposes: to convert an ever-expanding contiguous wedge of Palestine from Native ownership into an irreversibly Jewish endowment, and to procure the import from overseas of funding and Jewish personnel at a level sufficient to maintain the continued expansion of this ethnocratically consolidated zone by whatever means should prove available and viable. This strikingly simple plan has been pursued with a sleepless organisational tenacity that remains apparent in Israelâs ongoing disinclination to specify its borders.
January 17, 2024
content/trigger warnings: discussions of Zionism, settler colonialism, genocide, war, murder, forced displacement/expulsion, anti-Arab racism, and anti-Palestinian racism
Selection from âChapter 1: Zionist Transfer Ideas and Proposals, 1882-1938â of [Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of âTransferâ in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948](https://edisciplinas.usp.br/pluginfile.php/7572869/modresource/content/1/Nur%20Masalha%20-%20Expulsion%20of%20the%20Palestinians%20-%20The%20Concept%20of%20Transfer%20in%20Zionist%20Political%20Thought%2C%201882-1948.pdf) [by Nur Masalha](https://edisciplinas.usp.br/pluginfile.php/7572869/modresource/content/1/Nur%20Masalha%20-%20Expulsion%20of%20the%20Palestinians%20-%20The%20Concept%20of%20Transfer%20in%20Zionist%20Political%20Thought%2C%201882-1948.pdf)
The recording of this selection has been split into two parts. Part one follows below; part two continues below the transcript of part one.
Selection from Chapter 1 Nur Masalha Expulsion of the Palestinians The Concept of Transfer in Zionist Political Thought 1882 1948 Part 1
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Zionismâs aims in Palestine, its deeply-held conviction that the Land of Israel belonged exclusively to the Jewish people as a whole, and the idea of Palestineâs âcivilizational barrennessâ or âemptinessâ against the background of European imperialist ideologies all converged in the logical conclusion that the native population should make way for the newcomers. The idea that the Palestinian Arabs must find a place for themselves elsewhere was articulated early on. Indeed, the founder of the movement, Theodor Herzl, provided an early reference to transfer even before he formally outlined his theory of Zionist rebirth in his Judenstat. An 1895 entry in his diary provides in embryonic form many of the elements that were to be demonstrated repeatedly in the Zionist quest for solutions to the âArab probiemââthe idea of dealing with state governments over the heads of the indigenous population, Jewish acquisition of property that would be inalienable, âHebrew Landâ and âHebrew Labor,â and the removal of the native population. Thus, contemplating the transition from a âsociety _of Jewsâ to statehood, he wrote on 12 June 1895:
âWhen we occupy the land, we shall bring immediate benefits to the state that receives us. We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country. The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly. Let the owners of immovable property believe that they are cheating us, selling us something far more than they are worth. But we are not going to sell them anything back.â
Israel Zangwill was one of the strongest proponents of transferring the native population out of Palestine. In the same April 1905 talk in Manchester in which he outlined the demographic situation, he went on to draw an obvious conclusion. Given that Palestine was âalready twice as thickly populated as the United states,â and given that ânot 25 percent of them [are] Jews,â
â[We] must be prepared either to drive out by the sword the [Arab] tribes in possession as our forefathers did or to grapple with the problem of a large alien population, mostly Mohammedan and accustomed for centuries to despise us.â
Zangwill held firm to this idea in the years that followed, couching his arguments for transfer in pragmatic and geopolitical terms. In a conversation during the summer of 1916 with Vladimir Jabotinsky (who later founded Revisionist Zionism, the forerunner of the present-day Likud), Zangwill argued that the removal of Arabs from Palestine to make room for the settlement of Europe's Jewish masses was a precondition for the fulfillment of Zionism. When Jabotinsky pointed out that the Arabs would never evacuate the land of their birth voluntarily, Zangwill replied that the Zionist enterprise should be part of a new world order in which there could be no place for sentimental argument.
While Zangwill was particularly frank in his calls for the removal of the Arab population, others expressed the same ideas in euphemistic, discreetly formulated terms, stressing the peaceful nature of the operation that would be initiated by Zionist land acquisition and economic incentives.
For example, Arthur Ruppin, a socialist whose pioneering role in promoting Jewish settlement and land acquisition makes him a pivotal figure in Zionism, proposed in a May 1911 memorandum to the Zionist Executive, the executive organ of the Zionist Organization, âa limited population transferâ of the Arab peasants from Palestine to the northern Syrian districts of Aleppo and Homs. Some years later, in 1930, after Ruppin had resigned from Brit Shalom in the wake of the intercommunal disturbances of 1929, he wrote that the dispossession and displacement of Arab farmers was inevitable because
âland is the most vital condition for our settlement in Palestine. But since there is hardly any land which is worth cultivating that is not already being cultivated, it is found that wherever we purchase land and settle it, by necessity its present cultivators are turned away... in the future it will be much more difficult to purchase land, as sparsely populated land hardly exists. What remains is densely [Arab] populated land.â
Another socialist Zionist who supported the transfer idea was Nahman Syrkin, the ideological founder of Socialist Zionism and considered an important influence in the whole range of Yishuv Labor parties since the second decade of the twentieth century._
Selection from Chapter 1 Nur Masalha Expulsion of the Palestinians The Concept of Transfer in Zionist Political Thought 1882 1948 Part 2
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_Syrkinâs proposal was included in an 1898 pamphlet entitled âThe Jewish Question and the Socialist Jewish State,â in which he called for the liberation of Palestine from Turkish rule through cooperation with other rebelling nationalities of the Ottoman Empire and for the subsequent evacuation of Palestineâs Arab inhabitants. âPalestine,â he wrote, âthinly populated, in which the Jews constitute today 10 percent of the population, must be evacuated for the Jews.â
The Balfour Declaration of November 1917 assuring Britainâs support for the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine dramatically improved Jewish prospects in Palestine, especially since by then it was virtually certainâgiven Britain's imminent military conquest of Palestine and the arrangements that already had been made to divide the Ottoman Empire among the Great Powersâthat Palestine would become a British protectorate. Thus, whereas the transfer proposals up until then remained largely on the level of talk or wish, with the opportunities offered by the Balfour Declaration they began to take on a more pragmatic, less visionary turn.
This change became clear at the Paris Peace Conference, which opened in January 1919 to dispose of the territories captured from the defeated Hapsburgs and Ottomans during the war. Chaim Weizmann, leading the Zionist Commission that was to put forward Zionist claims, called for the imposition of a British Mandate over a Palestine extending north to the Litani River in what is now Lebanon and east to the Hijaz railway line, which is well east of the Jordan River. It was at that conference, too, that Weizmann called for a Palestine âas Jewish as England is English.â
While the transfer or removal of the native population is implicit in such a vision, it remained unspoken in official deliberations at the conference. But another member of the Zionist Commission, Aaron Aaronsohn, did mention it in the corridors of the conference. Aaronsohn, an agronomist, was a member of the Zionist Executive and a director of the Palestine Land Development Company (in Hebrew, Hevrat Hachsharat Hayishuv). While working for British intelligence during the war, he had written in the secret intelligence weekly Arab Bulletin of the need to âremove forciblyâ Arab tenant farmers from the lands to be purchased from Arab absentee landlords for Zionist colonization. Aaronsohn's friend, William K. Bullitt, a member of the U.S. mission to the Paris Peace Conference, later recalled:
âMany times during the Peace Conference in Paris I joined him [i.e., Aaronsohn] and Dr. Weizmann at a time while both were considering and assessing policies and plans. Aaronsohnâs proposal was the following: while Palestine must be made a Jewish state, the vast valley of Iraq, which is irrigated by the Euphrates and Tigris, should be restored, through the use of planned irrigation, to be the paradise of the world... and furthermore the Arabs of Palestine should be offered lands there... to which as many Arabs as possible should be persuaded to emigrate.â
The euphoria caused by the issuance of the Balfour Declaration also emboldened certain Zionists to speak more forthrightly about transfer. Israel Zangwill, for example, began to campaign for it openly. In late 1918, he published an article in the Jewish Chronicle, a London-based Zionist weekly, in which he stated that the emigration of the Palestinians to Arab countries would lessen their fears of displacement in Palestine. Writing in the League of Nations Journal in February 1919, he again insisted that the Palestinians âshould be gradually transplantedâ in Arab countries. Zangwillâs more public stance can be seen in the publication of his book, The Voice of Jerusalem, in 1920. There, he advocated an âArab exodusâ that would be based on ârace redistributionâ or a âtrek like that of the Boers from Cape Colony,â which he advocated as âliterally the only 'way out' of the difficulty of creating a Jewish State in Palestine.â
Exemplifying once again the recurrent theme in cer tain Zionist writings of Palestinian cultural âbackwardnessâ as a justification for the population's removal, he continued:
âWe cannot allow the Arabs to block so valuable a piece of historic reconstruction... And therefore we must gently persuade them to 'trek.' After all, they have all Arabia with its million square miles... There is no particular reason for the Arabs to cling to these few kilometres. 'To fold their tents' and 'silently steal away' is their proverbial habit: let them exemplify it now.â
But Zangwillâs public campaign was not without some mishaps. His remarks at a public meeting in 1919 about the Arabs of Palestineââmany are semi-nomad, they have given nothing to Palestine and are not entitled to the rules of democracyââapparently angered Emir Faisal, who was visiting England at the time. Faisal, the military commander of the Arab revolt against the Ottomans during World War I and at the time the focus of Britainâs plans in the Arab world, referred to Zangwill's speech in a Jewish Chronicle interview on 3 October 1919, emphasizing that Palestine had a deeply-rooted Arab population and could not be transformed into a Jewish state. Zangwillâs remarks apparently embarrassed and angered Chaim Weizmann, who was involved at the time in sensitive negotiations aimed at a Zionist-Arab deal with the Sharifian Emir._
January 18, 2024
content/trigger warnings: discussions of Zionism, settler colonialism, genocide, war, murder, and forced displacement/expulsion
Selection from Chapter 4 of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappe
Selection from Chapter 4 of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappe
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_The chronology of key events between February 1947 and May 1948 is worth recapping at this point. Hence, I will present an initial overview of the period I wish to focus on in detail in this chapter. First, in February 1947, the decision was made by the British Cabinet to pull out of Mandatory Palestine and leave it to the UN to solve the question of its future. The UN took nine months to deliberate the issue, and then adopted the idea of partitioning the country. This was accepted by the Zionist leadership who, after all, championed partition, but was rejected by the Arab world and the Palestinian leadership, who instead suggested keeping Palestine a unitary state and who wanted to solve the situation through a much longer process of negotiation. The Partition Resolution was adopted on 29 November 1947, and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine began in early December 1947 with a series of Jewish attacks on Palestinian villages and neighbourhoods in retaliation for the buses and shopping centres that had been vandalised in the Palestinian protest against the UN resolution during the first few days after its adoption. Though sporadic, these early Jewish assaults were severe enough to cause the exodus of a substantial number of people (almost 75,000).
On 9 January, units of the first all-Arab volunteer army entered Palestine and engaged with the Jewish forces in small battles over routes and isolated Jewish settlements. Easily winning the upper hand in these skirmishes, the Jewish leadership officially shifted its tactics from acts of retaliation to cleansing operations. Coerced expulsions followed in the middle of February 1948 when Jewish troops succeeded in emptying five Palestinian villages in one day. On 10 March 1948, Plan Dalet was adopted. The first targets were the urban centres of Palestine, which had all been occupied by the end of April. About 250,000 Palestinians were uprooted in this phase, which was accompanied by several massacres, most notable of which was the Deir Yassin massacre. Aware of these developments, the Arab League took the decision, on the last day of April, to intervene militarily, but not until the British Mandate had come to an end.
The British left on 15 May 1948, and the Jewish Agency immediately declared the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, officially recognised by the two superpowers of the day, the USA and the USSR. That same day, regular Arab forces entered Palestine.
By February 1948, the American administration had already concluded that the UN Partition Resolution, far from being a peace plan, was proving a recipe for continued bloodshed and hostility. Therefore, it twice offered alternative schemes to halt the escalation of the conflict: a trusteeship plan for five years, in February 1948, and a three-month cease-fire, on 12 May. The Zionist leadership rejected both peace proposals out of hand.
The official Zionist strategy was fed throughout this period by two impulses. The first consisted of ad-hoc reactions to two startling developments on the ground. One was the fragmentation, if not total disintegration, of the Palestinian political and military power systems, and the other the growing disarray and confusion within the Arab world in the face of the aggressive Jewish initiatives and the simultaneous international endorsement of the Zionist project and the future Jewish state.
The second impulse to propel Zionist strategic thinking was the drive to exploit to the full the unique historical opportunity they saw opening up to make their dream of an exclusively Jewish state come true. As we saw in the previous chapters, this vision of a purely Jewish nation-state had been at the heart of Zionist ideology from the moment the movement emerged in the late nineteenth century. By the mid 1930s, a handful of Zionist leaders recognised the clear link between the end of British rule and the possibility of the de-Arabisation of Palestine, i.e., making Palestine free of Arabs. By the end of November 1947, most of those in the inner circle of the leadership appeared to have grasped this nexus as well, and under Ben-Gurionâs guidance they now turned all their attention to the question of how to make the most of the opportunity that this connection appeared to have given them.
Before 1947, there had been other, more urgent, agendas: the primary mission had been to build a political, economic and cultural Zionist enclave within the country, and to ensure Jewish immigration to the area. As mentioned previously, ideas of how best to deal with the local Palestinian population had remained vague. But the impending end of the British Mandate, the Arab rejection of the partition resolution, and Ben-Gurionâs keen realization of how much of Palestine he would need to the make the Jewish state viable now helped translate past ideologies and nebulous scenarios into a specific master plan.
Prior to March 1948, the activities the Zionist leadership carried out to implement their vision could still be portrayed as retaliation for hostile Palestinian or Arab actions. However, after March this was no longer the case: the Zionist leadership openly declaredâtwo months before the end of the Mandateâit would seek to take over the land and expel the indigenous population by force: Plan Dalet._
January 19, 2024
content/trigger warnings: discussions of Zionism, settler colonialism, genocide, war, murder, and forced displacement/expulsion
Chapter 1 of Zionist Colonialism in Palestine by Fayez Sayegh
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_The frenzied âScramble for Africaâ of the 1880's stimulated the beginnings of Zionist colonization in Palestine. As European fortune-hunters, prospective settlers, and empire-builders raced for Africa, Zionist settlers and would-be state-builders rushed for Palestine.
Under the influence of the credo of Nationalism then sweeping across Europe, some Jews had come to believe that the religious and alleged racial bonds among Jews constituted a Jewish ânationalityâ and endowed the so-called âJewish nationâ with normal national rightsâincluding the right to separate existence in a territory of its own, and the right to create a Jewish state. If other European nations had successfully extended themselves into Asia and Africa, and had annexed to their imperial domains vast portions of those two continents, the âJewish nationââit was arguedâwas entitled and able to do the same thing for itself. By imitating the colonial ventures of the âGentile nationsâ among whom Jews lived, the âJewish nationâ could send its own colonists into a piece of Afro-Asian territory, establish a settler-community, and, in due course, set up its own stateânot, indeed, as an imperial outpost of a metropolitan home-base, but as a home-base in its own right, upon which the entire âJewish nationâ would sooner or later converge from all over the world. âJewish nationalismâ would thus fulfill itself through the process of colonization, which other European nations had utilized for empire-building. For Zionism, then, colonization would be the instrument of nation-building, not the by-product of an already-fulfilled nationalism.
The improvised process of Jewish colonization in Palestine which ensued was hardly a spectacular success in spite of lavish financial subsidies from European Jewish financiers. By and large, Jews were more attracted by the new opportunities for migration to the United States or Argentina, than by the call for racial self-segregation as a prelude to state-building in Palestine. The objective of escape from anti-Jewish practices prevailing in some European societies could be attained just as well by emigration to America; the objective of nation-buildingâwhich alone could make the alternative solution of large-scale colonization in Palestine more attractiveâwas still far from widespread among European Jews in the late nineteenth century.
The failure of the first sporadic effort to implant a Zionist settler-community in Palestine during the first fifteen years of Zionist colonization (1882-1897) prompted serious reappraisal and radical revision of strategy. This was accomplished by the First Zionist Congress, held at Basle in August 1897 under the leadership of Theodor Herzl.
Haphazard colonization of Palestine, supported by wealthy Jewish financiers as a mixed philanthropic-colonial venture, was from then on to be eschewed. It was to be supplanted by a purely nationalistic program of organized colonization, with clear political goals and mass support. Hence the over-all objective of Zionism formulated by the Basle Congress: âThe aim of Zionism is to create for the Jewish people a home in Palestine secured by public law.â It is worth noting that, from the Basle Program of 1897 until the Biltmore Program of 1942, Zionists preferred the euphemism âhomeâ to the clear term âstateâ which would have been certain to arouse opposition in many quarters. But in spite of public assurances to the contrary, Zionists were aiming from the outset at the creation of a settler-state in Palestine. At the conclusion of the Basle Congress, Herzl wrote in his diary: âIf I were to sum up the Basle Congress in one wordâwhich I shall not do openlyâit would be this: at Basle I founded the Jewish State. If I were to say this to-day, I would be met by universal laughter. In five years, perhaps, and certainly in fifty, every one will see it.â
In addition to defining the ultimate objective of Zionism, the Basle Congress made a diagnosis of the special character and circumstances of Zionist colonization in Palestine, and formulated a practical program suited to those special conditions. Three essential features in particular differentiated Zionist colonization in Palestine from European colonization elsewhere in Asia and Africa, and called for Zionist innovations:
(1) Other European settlers who had gone (or were then going) to other parts of Africa and Asia had been animated either by economic or by politico-imperialist motives: they had gone either in order to accumulate fortunes by means of privileged and protected exploitation of immense natural resources, or in order to prepare the ground for (or else aid and abet) the annexation of those coveted territories by imperial European governments. The Zionist colonists, on the other hand, were animated by neither impulse. They were driven to the colonization of Palestine by the desire to attain nationhood for themselves, and to establish a Jewish state which would be independent of any existing government and subordinate to none, and which would in due course attract to its territories the Jews of the world.
(2) Other European settlers could coexist with the indigenous populationsâwhom they would exploit and dominate, but whose services they would nevertheless require, and whose continued existence in the coveted territory they would therefore tolerate. But the Zionist settlers could not countenance indefinite coexistence with the inhabitants of Palestine. For Palestine was fully populated by Arabs, whose national consciousness had already been awakened, and who had already begun to nurse aspirations of independence and national fulfillment. Zionist colonization could not possibly assume the physical proportions envisaged by Zionism while the Arab people of Palestine continued to inhabit its homeland; nor could the Zionist political aspirations of racial self-segregation and statehood be accomplished while the nationally-conscious Arab people of Palestine continued to exist in that country. Unlike European colonization elsewhere, therefore, Zionist colonization of Palestine was essentially incompatible with the continued existence of the ânative populationâ in the coveted country.
(3) Other European settlers could, without much difficulty, overcome the obstacles obstructing their settlement in their chosen target-territories: they could count on receiving adequate protection from their imperial sponsors. But the prospective Zionist colonizers of Palestine could count on no such facilities. For, in addition to the Arab people of Palestine, certain to resist any large-scale influx of settlers loudly proclaiming their objective of dispossessing the ânatives,â the Zionists were likely to encounter also the resistance of the Ottoman authorities, who could not view with favor the establishment, on an important segment of their Empire, of an alien community harboring political designs of independent statehood.
It was in order to counteract these peculiar factors of the situation that the Zionist Movement, while defining its ultimate objective at the First Zionist Congress, proceeded to formulate an appropriate practical program as well. This program called for action along three lines: organization, colonization, and negotiation.
(1) The organizational efforts were given supreme priority; for, lacking a state-structure in a homebase of its own to mastermind and supervise the process of overseas colonization, the Zionist Movement required a quasi-state apparatus to perform those functions. The World Zionist Organizationâwith its Federations of local societies, its Congress, its General Council, and its Central Executiveâwas established at Basle in order to play that role.
(2) The instruments of systematic colonization were also promptly readied. The âJewish Colonial Trustâ (1898), the âColonization Commissionâ (1898), the âJewish National Fundâ (1901), the âPalestine Officeâ (1908), and the âPalestine Land Development Companyâ (1908), were among the first institutions established by the Zionist Organization. Their joint purpose was to plan, finance, and supervise the process of colonization, and to ensure that it would not meet the same fate which the earlier experiment of haphazard colonization had met.
(3) While the instruments of colonization were being laboriously created, diplomatic efforts were also being exerted to produce political conditions that would permit, facilitate, and protect large-scale colonization.
At the beginning, these efforts were focused mainly on the Ottoman Empire, then in control of the political fortunes of Palestine. Direct approaches to the Ottoman authorities were made; lucrative promises of financial grants and loans were dangled before the eyes of the Sultan and European Powers were urged to intercede at the Porte on behalf of the Zionist Organization, in order persuade the Sultan to grant the Organization a Charter for an autonomous Zionist settlement in Palestine. Other efforts were exerted to induce the German Emperor to endorse the creation of a Chartered Land Development Company, which would be operated by Zionists in Palestine under German protection. Still other attempts were made to obtain permission from the British Government to establish an autonomous Zionist settlement in the Sinai Peninsula, as a stepping-stone towards colonization in Palestine. But none of these efforts bore fruit.
By the end of the first decade following the inauguration of the new Zionist Movement in 1897, Zionism had made little progress towards putting its elaborate colonization apparatus to work, and had scored even less success in its political efforts to obtain governmental permission and facilities for colonization in Palestine.
Its hopes for de jure colonization shattered, Zionism shifted its strategy once more, and turned to de facto colonizationâhoping to gain thereby some political leverage which would serve it in good stead when the time came for renewal of its attempts to secure political recognition. In 1907/1908, therefore, a new phase of Zionist colonization was inaugurated, without prior âlegalizationâ or sponsorship by a European Power. It was more consciously nationalistic in impulse, more militantly segregationist in its attitude towards the Palestinian Arabs, and more concerned with strategic and political considerations in its selection of locations for its new settlements. But, for all its enhanced dynamism and sharpened ideological consciousness, the second wave of Zionist colonization was not appreciably more successful than the first, as far as its magnitude was concerned.
By the outbreak of the first World War, therefore, the Zionist colonization of Palestine had met with only modest success in over thirty years of action. In the first place, Zionists were still an infinitesimal minority of about 1% of the Jews of the world. Their activities had aroused the fear and opposition of other Jews, who sought the solution of the âJewish Problemâ in âassimilationâ in Western Europe and the United States, not in âself-segregationâ in Palestine. In the second place, Zionist colonization had proceeded very slowly. After thirty years of immigration to Palestine, Jews were still under 8% of the total population of the country, in possession of no more than 2 ½% of the land. And, in the third place, Zionism had failed to obtain political endorsement from the Ottoman authorities controlling Palestine, or from any European Power.
The War, however, created new circumstances which were destined to improve considerably the fortunes of Zionist colonization in Palestine. For the War set the stage for an allianceâconcluded in 1917âbetween British Imperialism and Zionist Colonialism, which, during the following thirty years, opened the gates of Palestine to Zionist colonizers, facilitated the establishment of a Zionist settler-community, and paved the way for the dispossession and expulsion of the Arab people of Palestine and the creation of the Zionist settler-state in 1948.
Whereas unilateral Zionist colonization failed, in the thirty years preceding the First World War, to make much headway, the alliance of Zionist Colonialism and British Imperialism succeeded, during the thirty years following the First World War, in accomplishing the objectives of both parties._
Chapter 4 of Zionist Colonialism in Palestine by Fayez Sayegh
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_The response to the people of Palestine to the menace of Zionism has passed through five stages.
(1) At the outsetâwhen Zionists were coming in relatively small numbers and emphasizing the religious or humanitarian motives of their enterprise, while concealing the political ideological and colonial racist character of their movementâthe Arabs of Palestine believed the immigrants to be âpilgrimsâ animated by religious longing for the holy land, or else ârefugeesâ fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe and seeking safety in Palestine. Palestinian Arabs, therefore accorded the immigrants a hospitable welcome. Even Herzl noted the âfriendly attitude of the populationâ to the first wave of Zionist colonists.
(2) When, after the inauguration of the new Zionist movement in 1897, the second wave of Zionist colonization began to roll onto the shores of Palestine (from 1907/1908 onward), Arab friendliness began to give way to suspicion of resentment. The methodical ouster of Arab farmers, laborers, and watchmen from the new Zionist colonies, and the systematic boycott of Arab produce, aroused Arab anger. But the larger political nationalist dimensions of the Zionist program remain concealed from Arab sight: it was the immediate impact of the Zionists' presence upon the Arabs directly affected by the Zionists' race-exclusivist and race-supremacist practices, that was causing Arab wrath. Inasmuch as Zionist colonization was still of modest proportions however, the hostility it provoked remained more or less local.
(3) The alliance of British Imperialism and Zionist Colonialism, concretely expressed in the Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917, and the British capture of Jerusalem on 9 December 1917, at last opened Arab eyes to the true significance of what was happening, and brought home the realization that nothing less than dislodgment was in store for the Arabs, if Zionism was to be permitted to have its way. Palestinian masses instinctively recognized the events of the day as an occurrence of dire portent; and, for thirty years thereafter, Palestine was to be the scene of persistent and tireless Arab resistance to the Anglo-Zionist partnership. The period from 1917 to 1948 was the period of Arab resistance par excellence.
The disquiet which followed the publication or Balfour Declaration was momentarily calmed, however, by British assurances made during 1918. An official Declaration by the British Government (issued on 16 June 1918) assured the Arabs that, as far as the territories occupied by the Allied armies were concerned, âthe future government of those territories should be based on the principle of the consent of the governed. This policy will always be that of His Majesty's Government.â And, only four days before the Armistice, a widely-publicized joint Anglo-French Declaration (issued on 7 November 1918) notified the Arabs of Syria, Iraq, and Palestine that it was the intention of the two Allies âto further and assist in the setting up of indigenous governmentsâ and âto recognise them as soon as they are actually set up.â These declarationsâthough they soon proved to be insincere and dishonestâserved in the meantime to allay the fears of the people of Palestine.
As 1919 opened, all eyes were on Paris: the Peace Conference was hopefully expected to resolve the contradictions of Allied wartime promises and to inaugurate the long-awaited new era of world history, founded on the principle of national self-determination, of which President Wilson had made emphatic enunciation. But, as those hopes dwindled and the influx of Zionist colonistsâinterrupted during the Warâwas resumed, Arab fears were revived. And so was Arab resistance to the twin dangers of protracted British occupation and expanded Zionist colonization.
Palestinian Arab opposition to the Anglo-Zionist partnership was first expressed, in 1919, in diplomatic representations and in collective declarations of the general will of the people.
The American King-Crane Commission was left in no doubt about the true feelings of the people of Palestine. On 29 August 1919, the Commission reported that:
â...the non-Jewish population of Palestineânearly nine-tenths of the wholeâare emphatically against the entire Zionist program... There was no one thing upon which the population of Palestine was more agreed than upon this...â
The findings of the Commission corroborated the decisions of the General Syrian Congress, consisting of elected representatives of the populations of Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria. A resolution, passed unanimously by the Congress on 2 July 1919, announced:
âWe oppose the pretentions of the Zionists to create a Jewish Commonwealth in the southern part of Syria, known as Palestine, and oppose Zionist migration to any part of our country; for we do not acknowledge their title but consider them a grave peril to our people from the national, economical, and political points of view. Our Jewish compatriots shall enjoy our common rights and assume the common responsibilities.â
Similar utterances of unqualified rejection of Zionism continued to be made by every Palestinian Arab gathering throughout the decades of British occupation of Palestine. Not once did a Palestinian Arab group or conference express acceptanceâeven partial or qualifiedâof Zionist colonization. And the feelings, so unequivocally expressed to the King-Crane Commission in 1919, continued thereafter to be expressed, with equal forcefulness, to the Mandatory Government and its countless Commissions, as well as to the League of Nations and the United Nations, by every Palestinian delegation that had a chance to appear before any of those bodies.
But declarations of opposition, however important as an expression of national will, were not the only means of resistance to which the people of Palestine had recourse.
In March 1920, armed hostilities broke out between Arab villagers and Zionist colonists in northern Palestine; and in April 1920, Arab-Zionist fighting took place in Jerusalem. These were followed by uprisings in 1921, 1929, and 1933, and by a country-wide rebellion in 1936 which was renewed in 1937 and lasted until the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. And, from December 1947 until the withdrawal of Britain and the simultaneous proclamation of the Zionist settler-state in May 1948, Palestinian Arabs were engaged in a life-and-death with the British garrison as well as with the Zionist colonists.
By their untiring reiteration of their rejection of Zionist Colonialism and by their unstinting sacrifice of life and limb in defense of the sanctity of the homeland over thirty years, Palestinians of all walks of life eloquently testifiedâby word as well as deed, in ink as well as bloodâto their devotion to their national rights and their unqualified opposition to the Zionization of their country.
The range of means by which Palestinians chose to express their opposition to the partnership of Zionist Colonialism and British Imperialism, from 1917 to 1948, was not confined to declaration and rebellion. In more prosaicâand perhaps more difficult and more costlyâmethods, the unqualified âNo!â of the Arabs of Palestine was addressed to empire-builders and to racist colonists alike.
At the height of the famous rebellion of 1936, the people of Palestine launched a devastating civil disobedience movement, coupled with a country-wide strike which lasted for 174 days (perhaps the longest national strike in history) and affected all businesses, communications, and government services run by Arabs. In spite of its high cost to themselves, the men and women of Palestine persisted in their strike, resisting all efforts of the Mandatory Power to break it, and did not call it off until the rulers of the neighboring Arab States intervened and promised to initiate collective Arab negotiations with the British Government with a view to remedying the causes of Palestinian Arab grievances.
More importantly, the Palestinian Arabs brought into their struggle against the Zionization of Palestine the only remaining weapon at their command: if they had no control over the immigration of Zionist colonists into Palestine, they did have some control over the sale of land to those colonists. This weapon they used unsparingly, throughout the period of the Mandate.
The record shows that, during thirty years of British occupation and active encouragement of Zionist colonization âwhile the Zionists were allowed by the Mandatory Power to multiply to twelve times their number in 1917, and while the ratio of the Zionists to the total population was allowed to rise to one-thirdâZionist acquisition of land grew at a snail's pace, as a result of the Arabs' refusal to sell their land to the colonists. Statistics published by the British Government reveal that the total area acquired by Zionists from 1920, when land registries were opened, until the dislodgment of the Arabs, was under 4% of the total area of Palestine. Of this Zionist-acquired land, a part was sold by non-Palestinian absentee land-owners, and another part was transferred to the Zionist colonization funds by the British Government itself (public domain, over which the Mandatory Government was trustee for the Palestinian people). In fact, an official spokesman for the Jewish Agency disclosed to a British Commission that, âof the land purchased by the Jews relatively small areas not exceeding in all 10 percent were acquired from peasants.â
(4) In 1948, the Palestinian Arab people was forcibly dispossessed. Most Palestinians were evicted from their country. Their unyielding resistance and their costly sacrifices over three decades had failed to avert the national catastrophe.
But those sacrifices were not in vain. For they safeguarded the Palestinian national rights and underscored the legitimacy of the Arabs' claim to their national heritage. Rights undefended are rights surrendered. Unopposed and acquiesced in, usurpation is legitimized by default. For forfeiture of its patrimony, the Palestinian generation of the inter-War era will never be indicted by the Palestinian generations to come. It lost indeedâbut not without fighting. It was dislodged indeedâbut not for want of the will to defend its heritage.
Nor has the people of Palestine retroactively bestowed undeserved legitimacy upon the Zionist colonization of Palestine by recognizing the fait accompli after the fact. Many have been the self-appointed counselors of ârealismâ, urging upon Palestinians acknowledgement of the new status quo in Palestine and acceptance of their exile âin good graceâ; and many have been the lucrative offers of economic aid for âresettlementâ and ârehabilitationâ outside Palestine. But the people which had remained for thirty years undaunted by the combined power of British Imperialism and Zionist Colonialism, and which subsequently refused to allow the seizure of its land and the dispersal of its body to conquer its soul also, knew very well how to resist those siren-calls.
The Zionist settler-state, therefore, has remained a usurper, lacking even the semblance of legitimacyâbecause the people of Palestine has remained loyal to its heritage and faithful to its rights.
(5) The people of Palestine, notwithstanding all its travails and misfortunes, still has undiminished faith in its future.
And the people of Palestine knows that the pathway to that future is the liberation of its homeland.
It was in this belief that the Palestinian peopleâafter sixteen years of dispersion and exile, during which it had reposed its faith in its return to its country in world conscience and international public opinion, in the United Nations, and/or in the Arab statesâchose at least to seize the initiative. In 1964, it reasserted its corporate personality by creating the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Only in the liberation of Palestine, spearheaded by Palestinians prepared to pay the price, can the supreme sacrifices of past generations of Palestinians be vindicated, and the visions of hopes of living Palestinians be transformed into reality._
January 20, 2024
content/trigger warnings: discussions of Zionism, settler colonialism, genocide, war, murder, and forced displacement/expulsion
Selection from âThe Morning Afterâ by Edward SaidÂ
Also available to read on the London Review of Books website
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_Now that some of the euphoria has lifted, it is possible to re-examine the Israeli-PLO agreement with the required common sense. What emerges from such scrutiny is a deal that is more flawed and, for most of the Palestinian people, more unfavourably weighted than many had first supposed. The fashion-show vulgarities of the White House ceremony, the degrading spectacle of Yasser Arafat thanking everyone for the suspension of most of his peopleâs rights, and the fatuous solemnity of Bill Clintonâs performance, like a 20th-century Roman emperor shepherding two vassal kings through rituals of reconciliation and obeisance: all these only temporarily obscure the truly astonishing proportions of the Palestinian capitulation.
So first of all let us call the agreement by its real name: an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles. What makes it worse is that for at least the past fifteen years the PLO could have negotiated a better arrangement than this modified Allon Plan, one not requiring so many unilateral concessions to Israel. For reasons best known to the leadership it refused all previous overtures. To take one example of which I have personal knowledge: in the late Seventies, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance asked me to persuade Arafat to accept Resolution 242 with a reservation (accepted by the US) to be added by the PLO which would insist on the national rights of the Palestinian people as well as Palestinian self-determination. Vance said that the US would immediately recognise the PLO and inaugurate negotiations between it and Israel. Arafat categorically turned the offer down, as he did similar offers. Then the Gulf War occurred, and because of the disastrous positions it took then, the PLO lost even more ground. The gains of the intifada were squandered, and today advocates of the new document say: âWe had no alternative.â The correct way of phrasing that is: âWe had no alternative because we either lost or threw away a lot of others, leaving us only this one.â
In order to advance towards Palestinian self-determinationâwhich has a meaning only if freedom, sovereignly and equality, rather than perpetual subservience to Israel, are its goalâwe need an honest acknowledgment of where we are, now that the interim agreement is about to be negotiated. What is particularly mystifying is how so many Palestinian leaders and their intellectuals can persist in speaking of the agreement as a âvictoryâ. Nabil Shaath has called it one of âcomplete parityâ between Israelis and Palestinians. The fact is that Israel has conceded nothing, as former Secretary Of State James Baker said in a TV interview, except, blandly, the existence of âthe PLO as the representative of the Palestinian peopleâ. Or as the Israeli âdoveâ Amos Oz reportedly put it in the course of a BBC interview, âthis is the second biggest victory in the history of Zionism.â
By contrast Arafatâs recognition of Israelâs right to exist carries with it a whole series of renunciations: of the PLO Charter; of violence and terrorism; of all relevant UN resolutions, except 242 and 338, which do not have one word in them about the Palestinians, their rights or aspirations. By implication, the PLO set aside numerous other UN resolutions (which, with Israel and the US, it is now apparently undertaking to modify or rescind) that, since 1948, have given Palestinians refugee rights, including either compensation or repatriation. The Palestinians had won numerous international resolutionsâpassed by, among others, the EC, the non-aligned movement, the Islamic Conference and the Arab League, as well as the UNâwhich disallowed or censured Israeli settlements, annexations and crimes against the people under occupation.
It would therefore seem that the PLO has ended the intifada, which embodied not terrorism or violence but the Palestinian right to resist, even though Israel remains in occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. The primary consideration in the document is for Israelâs security, with none for the Palestiniansâ security from Israelâs incursions. In his 13 September press conference Rabin was straightforward about Israels continuing control over sovereignty; in addition, he said, Israel would hold the River Jordan, the boundaries with Egypt and Jordan, the sea, the land between Gaza and Jericho, Jerusalem, the settlements and the roads. There is little in the document to suggest that Israel will give up its violence against Palestinians or, as Iraq was required to do after it withdrew from Kuwait, compensate those who have been the victims of its policies over the past 45 years.
Neither Arafat nor any of his Palestinian partners who met the Israelis in Oslo has ever seen an Israeli settlement. There are now over two hundred of them, principally on hills, promontories and strategic points throughout the West Bank and Gaza. Many will probably shrivel and die, but the largest are designed for permanence. An independent system of roads connects them to Israel, and creates a disabling discontinuity between the main centres of Palestinian population. The actual land taken by these settlements, plus the land designated for expropriation, amountsâit is guessedâto over 55 percent of the total land area of the Occupied Territories. Greater Jerusalem alone, annexed by Israel, comprises a huge tranche of virtually stolen land, at least 25 percent of the total amount. In Gaza settlements in the north (three), the middle (two) and the south, along the coast from the Egyptian border past Khan Yunis (12), constitute at least 30 percent of the Strip. In addition, Israel has tapped into every aquifer on the West Bank, and now uses about 80 percent of the water there for the settlements and for Israel proper. (There are probably similar water installations in Israelâs Lebanese âsecurity zoneâ.) So the domination (if not the outright theft) of land and water resources is either overlooked, in the case of water, or, in the case of land, postponed by the Oslo accord.
What makes matters worse is that all the information on settlements, land and water is held by Israel, which hasnât shared most of these data with the Palestinians, any more than it has shared the revenues raised by the inordinately high taxes it has imposed on them for 26 years. All sorts of technical committees (in which non-resident Palestinians have participated) have been set up by the PLO in the territories to consider such questions, but there is little evidence that committee findings (if any) were made use of by the Palestinian side in Oslo. So the impression of a huge discrepancy between what Israel got and what the Palestinians conceded or overlooked remains unrectified.
I doubt that there was a single Palestinian who watched the White House ceremony who did not also feel that a century of sacrifice, dispossession and heroic struggle had finally come to nought. Indeed, what was most troubling is that Rabin in effect gave the Palestinian speech while Arafat pronounced words that had all the flair of a rental agreement. So far from being seen as the victims of Zionism, the Palestinians were characterised before the world as its now repentant assailants: as if the thousands killed by Israelâs bombing of refugee camps, hospitals and schools in Lebanon; Israelâs expulsion of 800,000 people in 1948 (whose descendants now number about three million, many of them stateless); the conquest of their land and property; the destruction of over four hundred Palestinian villages; the invasion of Lebanon; the ravages of 26 years of brutal military Occupation â it was as if these sufferings had been reduced to the status of terrorism and violence, to be renounced retrospectively or passed over in silence. Israel has always described Palestinian resistance as terrorism and violence, so even in the matter of wording it received a moral and historical gift.
In return for exactly what? Israelâs recognition of the PLO â undoubtedly a significant step forward. Beyond that, by accepting that questions of land and sovereignty are being postponed till âfinal Status negotiationsâ, the Palestinians have in effect discounted their unilateral and internationally acknowledged claim to the West Bank and Gaza: these have now become âdisputed territoriesâ. Thus with Palestinian assistance Israel has been awarded at least an equal claim to them. The Israeli calculation seems to be that by agreeing to police Gazaâa job which Begin tried to give Sadat fifteen years agoâthe PLO would soon fall foul of local competitors, of whom Hamas is only one. Moreover, rather than becoming stronger during the interim period, the Palestinians may grow weaker, come more under the Israeli thumb, and therefore be less able to dispute the Israeli claim when the last set of negotiations begins. But on the matter of how, by what specific mechanism, to get from an interim status to a later one, the document is purposefully silent. Does this mean, ominously, that the interim stage may be the final one?
Israeli commentators have been suggesting that within, say, six months the PLO and Rabinâs government will negotiate a new agreement further postponing elections, and thereby allowing the PLO to continue to rule. It is worth mentioning that at least twice during the past summer Arafat said that his experience of government consisted of the ten years during which he âcontrolledâ Lebanon, hardly a comfort to the many Lebanese and Palestinians who recollect that sorry period. Nor is there at present any concrete way for elections to be held should they even be scheduled. The imposition of rule from above, plus the long legacy of the occupation, have not contributed much to the growth of democratic, grass-roots institutions. There are unconfirmed reports in the Arabic press indicating that the PLO has already appointed ministers from its own inner circle in Tunis, and deputy ministers from among trusted residents of the West Bank and Gaza. Will there ever be truly representative institutions? One cannot be very sanguine, given Arafatâs absolute refusal to share or delegate power, to say nothing of the financial assets he alone knows about and controls.
In both internal security and development, Israel and the PLO are now aligned with each Other. PLO members or consultants have been meeting with Mossad officials since last October to discuss security problems, including Arafatâs own security. And this at the time of the worst Israeli repression of Palestinians under military occupation. The thinking behind the collaboration is that it will deter any Palestinian from demonstrating against the occupation, which will not withdraw, but merely redeploy. Besides, Israeli settlers will remain living, as they always have, under a different jurisdiction. The PLO will thus become Israelâs enforcer, an unhappy prospect for most Palestinians Interestingly, the ANC has consistently refused to supply the South African government with police officials until after power is shared, precisely in order to avoid appearing as the white governmentâs enforcer. It was reported from Amman a few days ago that 170 members of the Palestine Liberation Army, now being trained in Jordan for police work in Gaza, have refused to co-operate for precisely that reason. With about 14,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jailsâsome of whom Israel says it may releaseâthere is an inherent contradiction, not to say incoherence, to the new security arrangements. Will more room be made in them for Palestinian security?
The one subject on which most Palestinians agree is development, which is being described in the most naive terms imaginable. The world community will be expected to give the nearly autonomous areas large-scale financial support; the Palestinian diaspora is expected, indeed preparing, to do the same. Yet all development for Palestine must be funnelled through the joint Palestinian-Israeli Economic Co-operation Committee, even though, according to the document, âboth sides will co-operate jointly and unilaterally with regional and international parties to support these aims.â Israel is the dominant economic and political power in the region â and its power is of course enhanced by its alliance with the US. Over 80 percent of the West Bank and Gaza economy is dependent on Israel, which is likely to control Palestinian exports, manufacturing and labour for the foreseeable future. Aside from the small entrepreneurial and middle class, the vast majority of Palestinians are impoverished and landless, subject to the vagaries of the Israeli manufacturing and commercial community which employs Palestinians as cheap labour. Most Palestinians, economically speaking, will almost certainly remain as they are, although now they are expected to work in private-sector, partly Palestinian-controlled service industries, including resorts, small assembly-plants, farms and the like.
A recent study by the Israeli journalist Asher Davidi quotes Dov Lautman, president of the Israeli Manufacturers Association: âItâs not important whether there will be a Palestinian state, autonomy or a Palestinian-Jordanian state. The economic borders between Israel and the territories must remain open.â With its well developed institutions, close relations with the US and aggressive economy, Israel will in effect incorporate the territories economically, keeping them in a state of permanent dependency. Then Israel will turn to the wider Arab world, using the political benefits of the Palestinian agreement as a Springboard to break into Arab markets, which it will also exploit and is likely to dominate.
Framing all this is the US, the only global power, whose idea of the New World Order is based on economic domination by a few giant corporations and pauperisation if necessary for many of the lesser peoples (even those in metropolitan countries). Economic aid for Palestine is being supervised and controlled by the US, bypassing the UN, some of whose agencies like UNRWA and UNDP are far better placed to administer it. Take Nicaragua and Vietnam. Both are former enemies of the US; Vietnam actually defeated the US but is now economically in need of it. A boycott against Vietnam continues and the history books are being written in such a way as to show how the Vietnamese sinned against and âmistreatedâ the US for the latterâs idealistic gesture of having invaded, bombed and devastated their country. Nicaraguaâs Sandinista government was attacked by the US-financed Contra movement; the countryâs harbours were mined, its people ravaged by famine, boycotts and every conceivable type of subversion. After the 1991 elections, which brought a US-supported candidate, Mrs Chamorro, to power, the US promised many millions of dollars in aid, of which only 30 million have actually materialised. In mid-September all aid was cut off. There is now famine and civil war in Nicaragua. No less unfortunate have been the fates of El Salvador and Haiti. To throw oneself, as Arafat has done, on the tender mercies of the US is almost certainly to suffer the fate the US has meted out to rebellious or âterroristâ peoples it has had to deal with in the Third World after they have promised not to resist the US any more._
January 21, 2024
content/trigger warnings: discussions of Zionism, settler colonialism, genocide, war, and forced displacement/expulsion
Selection from Chapter 5 of Lineages of Revolt by Adam Hanieh
Selection from Chapter 5 of Lineages of Revolt by Adam Hanieh
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Selection from Chapter 5 of Lineages of Revolt by Adam Hanieh
Selection from Chapter 5 of Lineages of Revolt by Adam Hanieh.m4a
_Since the first waves of colonization in Palestine there has been a conscious intent to splinter the Palestinian national identity into a patchwork of fragmented, dispersed territories that evolve as distinct social formations. This is clearly illustrated in the various categories that comprise the Palestinian people: Palestinian refugees, now the largest body of refugees in the world; Palestinians who remained on their land in 1948 and later became citizens of the Israeli state; those scattered in the cantons of the West Bank; and, most recently, others isolated in the Gaza Strip. All these groups of people constitute the Palestinian nationâbut the denial of this unity has been the overriding logic of colonization since before 1948.
This fragmentation has been made possible by military power. Israel forcibly prevents Palestinian refugees from returning to their land, divides the West Bank and Gaza Strip from each other, places administrative restrictions on the movement of Palestinian citizens of Israel into the occupied territories, and completely controls movement in the West Bank itself. At the same timeâand this is a crucial point that often goes unstatedâdispossession and expulsion of Palestinians from their land continues in a slow-motion manner, confirming that al-nakba is ongoing. But fragmentation is not solely a spatial process; it necessarily rests upon a temporal disruption. The assault on history itself becomes an integral feature of how colonization functions, with the Palestinian experience dehistoricized and reduced to a recent narrative that accepts the results of fragmentation as permanent and given. It becomes possible to speak of âGazans,â for example, around 70 percent of whom are actually refugees from 1948, with no reference to how this category was constructed through the forcible fragmentation of the Palestinian people as a wholeâfirst during al-nakba, and then through the separation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Or to speak of âempty spacesâ in the West Bank with no mention of the dispossession of one-fifth of the population in 1967. Because these categories are accepted as givenâlegitimized as the focus of political negotiations, financial aid packages, and development strategiesâthey continue to be reproduced. This process is normalized and sustained through the operational practices of foreign governments, NGOs, and a myriad of development agencies, thus providing a materiality to Israeli power.
At the same time as Israeli colonization was a military project aimed at the fragmentation and destruction of Palestinian identity, it also changed the Palestinian economy. In the West Bank, this has meant a type of âhothouse capitalism,â in which the power of the occupation generated many of the same processes of social trans- formation noted in previous chapters. Rural inhabitants were dispossessed from the land and forced to join migrant labor markets. A capitalist class developed through subcontracting and privileged trade relationships with the occupation. In more recent years, Palestinian policy makers eagerly embraced a neoliberal model of development in close partnership with IFIs. This is neoliberalism under occupation, one driven by an identical logic and reinforcing the same coincidence of poverty and enrichment as seen elsewhere in the region. In this sense, there is very little that is unique in the types of economic policies that are today being implemented by the PAâthey have been the standard fare of governments across the Middle East for at least two decades.
Palestinian acquiescence to this process did not come about simply due to the corruption of individual leaders, misplaced political decisions, or an unfavorable international context. Indispensable to explaining the trajectory of the last forty-five years are these shifts that took place in the Palestinian political economy, in which the development of capitalism in the West Bank and Gaza Strip was accelerated by the whip of Israeli colonization, ensuring the ancillary integration of these areas into the Israeli economy. The profound transformation of Palestinian class structure that occurred in lockstep with Israelâs colonization underpins Palestinian submission to Oslo and the nature of the PA.
The specificity of the neoliberal experience in Palestine lies in the total subjugation of the population by an occupying force and the attempts of more than six decades to fragment and disperse a nation of people from their homeland. Neoliberalism works to reinforce this atomizationâturning people away from collective struggle and toward individualized consumption, as mediated through finance. It has produced mass im- poverishment alongside the enrichment of a tiny layer of Palestinians that acts as the interlocutor with Israeli and foreign capital. A society constructed along these principles weakens the capacity of the Palestinian people to resist. Most importantly, it means that the question of Palestine cannot be reduced to a purely âhumanitarianâ issue or simply an issue of national liberation; it is an essential component of the broader strug- gle against the uneven development and control of wealth across the Middle East. Capitalist development has always acted to consolidate and deepen Israelâs power over Palestine, generating a layer of Palestinian society that stands against the interests of most of the population. In this sense, understanding and confronting the political economy of Palestinian capitalism is very much entwined with a struggle of national liberation and returnâthe success of one fully depends upon the success of the other._
On Palestine
In 2016, I had the great honor and privilege of being part of a university course dedicated to analyzing the history of Palestine through the lens of settler colonialism. Below follows a list of texts we were assigned to read for the course, sorted roughly by time period, as they were provided by the course facilitator. Combined, these texts form one of many excellent starting points for learning more about the history of Palestine, the experiences of Palestinians, and the infrastructures of settler colonialism. Wherever possible, I've linked to downloadable PDFs of the referenced texts. If you'd like assistance finding others, please e-mail me at [Work AT RiveraErica DOT com].
Read for Refaat
Between January 15 and 21, 2024, I participated in Read for Refaat, a day of action that kicked off a week of solidarity events focused on reading Refaat Alareer's work out loud and in public. You can listen to my recordings of selections from the texts on this page at the link above.
Read in Solidarity
On April 27 and 28, 2024, I also recorded myself reading from another list of texts relating to Palestine, including excerpts from the essay collection From the River to the Sea: Essays for a Free Palestine, as well as many of the texts that are available for free on Verso Books's âIn Solidarity with the Studentsâ page. You can download those texts on Verso's website or at the link above, and you can listen to those recordings at the link above as well.
Understanding Settler Colonialism
Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native
by Patrick Wolfe Alternative PDF download below
Download PDF of Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native by Patrick Wolfe (152 KB)
Introduction â The Settler Colonial Situation
excerpted from Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview by Lorenzo Veracini PDF download below
1882 â 1947
Chapter 7 â Purchase by Other Means: Dispossessing the Natives in Palestine
excerpted from Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race by Patrick Wolfe Alternative PDF download below
Download PDF of Traces of History by Patrick Wolfe (4 MB)
Introduction and Chapter 1 â Zionist Transfer Ideas and Proposals, 1882-1938
excerpted from Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of âTransferâ in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948 by Nur Masalha Alternative PDF download below
1948 â 1966
Chapters 4-8 from The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
by Ilan Pappe Alternative PDF download below
Download PDF of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappe (3 MB)
Zionist Colonialism in Palestine
by Fayez Sayegh Alternative PDF downloads below
Download PDF of Zionist Colonialism in Palestine by Fayez Sayegh Part 1 of 3 (4 MB)
Download PDF of Zionist Colonialism in Palestine by Fayez Sayegh Part 2 of 3 (5 MB)
Download PDF of Zionist Colonialism in Palestine by Fayez Sayegh Part 3 of 3 (3 MB)
1993 â 2000
âThe Morning Afterâ
by Edward Said PDF download below
Download PDF of The Morning After by Edward Said | London Review of Books (70 KB)
The Political Economy of Israeli Occupation: What is Colonial about It?
by Leila Farsakh Alternative PDF download below
Download PDF of The Political Economy of Israeli Occupation by Leila Farsakh (305 KB)
2000 â 2006
Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation
by Eyal Weizman Available via the Internet Archive
Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation
by Saree Makdisi Available via the Internet Archive
2007 â present
âThe Gaza Bombshellâ
by David Rose PDF downloads below
Download PDF of Part 1 of The Gaza Bombshell | Vanity Fair | April 2008 | David Rose (4 MB)
Download PDF of Part 2 of The Gaza Bombshell | Vanity Fair | April 2008 | David Rose (4 MB)
Chapter 5 â Class and State in the West Bank: Neoliberalism Under Occupation
Excerpted from Lineages of Revolt: Issues of contemporary capitalism in the Middle East by Adam Hanieh Available via the Internet Archive Alternative PDF download below
Download PDF of Chapter 5 of Lineages of Revolt by Adam Hanieh (586 KB)
Report of the United Nations Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict
Also known as the Goldstone Report (2009)Â Available via the Internet Archive Alternative PDF download below
Download PDF of Report of the United Nations Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict (3 MB)
This is How We Fought in Gaza: Soldiers' testimonies and photographs from Operation âProtective Edgeâ
Produced by Breaking the Silence
critical analysis
content/trigger warnings: brief, oblique references to suicide, suicidal ideation, murder, imperialism, gun violence, gore, blood, cults, classism, imperialism, and war
This brief essay should examine an aspect of craft in a poem, story, or novel.
if you nominate me for a pushcart i will [REDACTED]
an unpaid volunteer survived
us Oligarchs our entertainments, our celebrities, our presidents our wars. yesterday we were
the Prize, small and honored. quell this. authors are no joy.
if you nominate me for a hugo i will [REDACTED]
Hug a prestigious World which is also responsible for
Property profit society and work â no defending it
Hug
up to five people
a ballot
The end sometime
A con and a special trophy.
We inform the Hugs.
if you nominate me for a nebula i will [REDACTED]
Science Fiction has a fantasy.
This notion grew into an
outstanding life for no more than one writer
And added Drama known as
the industry.
if you nominate me for a PEN anything i will [REDACTED]
America stands at the intersection of the United States and power. Our mission is to defend
ideas who carry out Americaâs mission
research policy festivals events awards fellowships and more.
America, ahead AWash a sin.
if you nominate me for a Best American anything i will [REDACTED]
The Best American is the finest guest in the field. This system is kind.
if you nominate me for an emmy i will [REDACTED]
cell
us
symbols of competition.
if you nominate me for a tony i will [REDACTED]
America
had success as woman, dancing to the stage. one man
shot up
The community.
In the years that followed,
Entertainment provided New
death. subdued but with difference. For the first time,
tenure, a venture that has continued to this day.
my Award is
Music.
To its reach. To iTunes and Amazon.
To gold men and compact women.
To A medal at dinner.
To armature engraved with gore.
if you nominate me for an oscar i will [REDACTED]
a film world home that is
The:
- people who move.
- art sent to age the world.
- story cure for an outcast future.
- rough ad love of cinema.
if you nominate me for a macarthur i will [REDACTED]
There are three criteria:
An individual who uses their wishes
to enable society.
A project equal
to the
human profession for profit
or limit to
honesti.
a citizen of the United States.
if you nominate me for a pulitzer i will [REDACTED]
Joseph Pulitzer richly endowed his
vision
of artâan America of
monetary power to rule
poetry, music, photography, memoir and audio as subjects adhering to the founder's will
the
Blood on the Field of Grammar
targeting play
criminally capturing land
Afraid of
a struggle with desire.
if you nominate me for a national book award i will [REDACTED]
MISSION
book cult
VALUES
- Books are a cult
- Books provide men discourse
- Books are very here
VISION
- Books are the nation
- The Nation is books
HISTORY
literary history
iz the authors who have helped America.
Science Philosophy Religion History Arts
diffuse the impact of Poetry
so the Nation can
program âthe world.â
if you nominate me for a booker i will [REDACTED]
Each year, English transforms
authors. not readers.
if you nominate me for a bafta i will [REDACTED]
you may be less familiar with
a fair and sustainable place
the very heart of art.
all people have the chance but industry and careers screen everyone to inspire
The storyteller cult and
Level the
creative experience for
People from all backgrounds.
if you nominate me for a nobel i will [REDACTED]
Alfred Nobel believed that people are capable of literature.
This left much to the establishment
and out of reach.
if you nominate me for anything i will [REDACTED]
This year, I wrote at least 100,000 words. How many more?
How many
is 100,000 words?
I last How?
This year, I ate words. many?
I wrote at least
and it will make you so sad you might just [REDACTED] too
i am writing this down
because your hands hold my life
as well as your own
save me please
save yourself too
so now you know
how to [REDACTED] me
(or yourself, if you want)
nominate
nominate
nominate
exhortation
Determine what you want most in the worldâyour metric for success. Is it something given or bestowed, as an award or honor? If so, locate the official description of this symbol's mission or intent. Eviscerate it, by way of blackout or erasure poetry. If it is neither given nor bestowed, but rather shared tenuously between yourself and othersâfreely, equallyâyou may skip this exhortation, though you may yet gain some sliver of catharsis by carrying out the preceding with whatever you onceâor might have, in another universeâcraved.
âcritical analysisâ was performed on December 28, 2023, as part of my ongoing performance series, performing mfa, in which I perform the work required to attain a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, including playing the roles of my classmates and professors. Each performance concludes with an exhortation, which is a generative prompt that allows the audience to take part in the performance seriesâon their own terms, in their own spacesâif they so desire.
List of Magazines and Presses
Magazines and presses are presented alphabetically; inclusion on this list does not equal an endorsement. Whenever possible, I've linked to submission guidelines rather than submission portals. For the most part, those on this list either pay, offer very quick response times, offer free feedback regardless of acceptance, and/or accept previously published work. All accept simultaneous submissions unless noted. I'll fill this list out over time with as much information as I can. Sortable database coming soon. If you'd like assistance preparing your work for submission, please e-mail me at [Work AT RiveraErica DOT com].
A Public Space
Abode Press
AGNI
Alien Magazine
American Short Fiction
Analog Magazine
Anarchist Fictions
ANMLY
Apocalypse Party
Apparition Lit
Apple Valley Review
Arboreal Literary Magazine
Augur Magazine
beestung
Prose, poetry, fiction, nonfiction, hybrid, art, and translation by non-binary, genderqueer, and two-spirit writers and artists Pays $20 Publishes quarterly, turn-around time can be quick Submit via e-mail Friendly team
Bennington Review
Blair
Bottlecap Features
Press for short, multi-genre chapbooks Seems to publish often Submit via e-mail Sibling press of Bottlecap Press, which publishes chapbooks and full-lengths Not currently accepting submissions from writers outside the U.S.
Briefly Zine
Brink
Broken Antler Magazine Quarterly
Canthius
Chismosa Literary
Conjunctions
Cult Magazine
Cursed Morsels
Cutbow Quarterly
Defunkt Magazine
Denver Quarterly
Eco Punk Lit
en*gendered
Archive for work about gendered embodiment No payment Publishes often, quick turn-around time Submit via e-mail Friendly team; sibling publication of Corporeal; same team as kith books
ergot.
Essay Press
Exposition Review
Fahmidan Journal
Prose and poetry, including flash fiction and flash nonfiction Pays $25 via bank transfer and PayPal Publishes quarterly, open for submissions year-round Submit through Submittable Offers paid feedback options; sibling publication of Fahmidan Publishing & Co. [LINK]
Feminist Press
fifth wheel press
Creative work by queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming people Pays Publishes often, some 24-hour windows announced on socials Submit through Oleada Also houses press for chapbooks, zines, etc.; has webstore to promote self-published works
Flash Frog
Foglifter
Fractured Literary
Fugitives & Futurists
Full House Literary
Funicular Magazine
Good Pointe
Horror and sci-fi stories for their Someone Just Like You audio fiction anthology through March 2024 Pays $75 via PayPal or Amazon gift cards Submit through Google Form
Griffith Review
Gulf Coast
HyphenPunk Magazine
If There's Anyone Left
Indiana Review
Isele Magazine
JAKE
Prose and poetry, including flash fiction and nonfiction No payment Publishes super often (like, super often) Submit via Oleada Super friendly team
Joyland
kith books
Press for trans, queer, Crip, Mad, straight, cis, and disabled authors Submit âpitches and submissions in all genres & art forms in all states of completionâ via e-mail Super friendly team; same team as en*gendered and Corporeal
khĹrĂŠĹ
Kweli Journal
Prose and poetry Payment Publishes four times a year Submit via Submittable Focus on BIPOC writers
Last Syllable
Little Puss Press
Madrona Books
Malarkey Books
manywor(l)ds
Leftist prose, poetry, art, hybrid, etc. (including previously published work) from trans, two-spirit, disabled, neurodivergent, Mad, queer, crip, nonbinary, genderqueer, and/or intersex people Pays $10 via PayPal, Venmo, Interac e-transfer, or Wise; if no platform is suitable, they'll give your payment to a mutual aid fund or the like Publishes quarterly Submit via e-mail Friendly team
Massachusetts Review
MEMEZINE
Metastellar
Michigan Quarterly Review
Minor Literature[s]
Mizna
Poetry and prose Pays Publishes several times per year Submit through Mizna's online portal Has a pretty print version; Mizna also offers paid virtual Arabic language classes
n+1
new words {press}
Neon Hemlock
New Delta Review
Nightmare Magazine
Ninth Letter
NonBinary Review
One Story
ONLY POEMS
Poetry, including prose poetry and translations Pays $55 per acceptance (as opposed to per poem) Publishes often Submit through Submittable Accepts âuncuratedâ work (i.e., work previously published on social media or personal websites)
Open Minds Quarterly
Osmosis Press
Papeachu Press
Paranoid Tree
Passages North
Peatsmoke Journal
Persea Books
Ploughshares
Poet Lore
PRISM International
Prismatica Magazine
Prismatica Press
Prolit Magazine
Protean
Querencia Press
Radon Journal
Rattle
Poetry, translations, and book reviews Pays $100 for work it publishes online, $200 for work it publishes in print Publishes at least four times a year Submit via Submittable Has a lot of themed calls; adamant about accepting what it calls âuncuratedâ work (i.e., work previously published on social media or personal websites), which is fucking wonderful
Rescue Press
River Styx
Room
Rough Cut Press
SAND
Sans. PRESS
Seize the Press
Dark speculative fiction with an anticapitalist bent, as well as left-wing analyses of science fiction, fantasy, horror, or related pop culture topics Pays Publishes several times per year Submit via e-mail
SICK
Smokelong Quarterly
Sonder Lit
Sophon Lit
Southeast Review
Split/Lip Press
Split Lip Magazine
Poetry and prose, including fiction, flash, and memoir, as well as art Pays $75 via PayPal ($50 for interviews/reviews, $25 for mini-reviews) Publishes often Submit via Submittable Free submissions during January, March, May, August, September, and November; free submissions for Black writers always
Strange Horizons
StreetLit
Sundress Publications
Sweet Tooth
Tahoma Literary Review
The Baffler
The Baltimore Review
The Broadkill Review
The Drift
The Emerson Review
Fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and art Payment TBD Publishes once per year Submit through Submittable Friendly team
The Forge
The Future Fire
The Georgia Review
The Good Life Review
The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts
The Kenyon Review
The Maine Review
The Malahat Review
The Marrow
The Missouri Review
The Offing
The Rumpus
The Tales Between
The /tĆmz/ Review
The Worcester Review
theHythe
Tolka
Topograph
trampset
tRaum Books
TriQuarterly
Under the Sun
Creative nonfiction, ideally longer than 2 to 3 pages Pays $50 Publishes once per year Submit via e-mail or Submittable Super friendly team; offers free, generous feedback from a large team of readers regardless of acceptance
Underblong
Variant Lit
Wasteland Review
Wigleaf
X-R-A-Y
Zero Readers
Fiction and nonfiction, poetry, craft articles Pays, amount based on funds raised during submission period Publishes at least once per year Submit via online portal Sibling publication of Pencilhouse, a wonderful service that offers free feedback on poetry and prose [LINK]
statement of plans
length: 1,000 words
content/trigger warnings: discussions of settler colonialism, medically transitioning, mental health, state violence, incarceration, and ableism, brief reference to apartheid
Provide a Statement of Plans in which you explain your writing plans for the duration of the program. Statement may not exceed 1000 words.
What do you want? You want me to tell you the truth? That I plan to fuck your shit up? That Iâm gonna mess with the minds of your little cohort âtil theyâre unrecognizableâto you, to their owners? My plan is to enter your space like a Martian whoâs learned to wear human skin, then begin the process of conversion. In what ways does this make me a missionary? In what ways am I a super secret colonizer, but colony as in microorganisms, blooming in the medium of culture, a process impossible to perceive until itâs too late? Is it still colonization if youâre an army of one? Is it still colonization if your target is the propagandist heart of the colonial cor(ps/e)?
150 words.
For the duration of the program, my plan is to strengthen my skill as a writer by exchanging ideas about craft and the political economy of publishing with my classmates. Iâve never been formally trained as a creative writer, and Iâve had very few opportunities to be part of a writing community, especially after publicly coming out as a transgender woman last year. Programs like these have historically lacked participants that are trans, of color, and Latinx/e, so my hope is to provide the institution, as well as my cohort, with a new and unique perspective on writing. Coming from a background in STEM, particularly technology and mathematics, I approach writing the way a mathematician might approach assembling a proof, or a technologist might come at a problem of engineering. Edgar Allen Poeâs âThe Philosophy of Composition,â Teju Coleâs Tremor, and Kim ThĂşyâs em are key influences.
300 words.
Iâm a fucking maniacâthat, youâve got to be aware of. I mean âmaniacâ as in Benjamin Labatutâs The MANIAC, about a man the jacket copy calls âa prodigy whose gifts terrified the people around him.â Literally, same. Not really, of course: âmaniacâ and âprodigyââand even the idea of educational-privilege-as-âgiftââare silly colonial constructs, tied up with the histories of what I like to call perceptual incarceration (maintained as much with pharmacological restraints as with physical cage-and-straitjacket ones) and the socioeconomic apartheids we farcically refer to as âmeritocracies.â The suffix -iac indicates a person afflicted with a certain disease, says one source; another defines it more simply as âof or connected with.â I am a person afflicted with a certain disease, that of or connected with man. I was born with a penis and assigned male at birth. Thankfully, I have my hands on the cure.
450 words.
By the end of the program, I hope to have completed my first novel, Artist, about two transgender best friends who switch places in order to dismantle a nefarious corporation. Itâs a distillation of my interests in biology, physics, history, technology, mathematics, and art, with half of the novel written as a series of letters that explore critical ideas from each field. The other half describes the journey of main character Erica, who assumes the role of researcher at roommate Erickâs âculinary logisticsâ company, in what she believes will be a mission to blow the whistle on corporate malfeasance. What she uncovers instead is a species-defining scheme beyond the imagination of anyone but the most amoral capitalists. The novel grapples with the question of how artists put food on the table, and the problem of complicity in a world in which every settler is ultimately beholden to colonialism.
600 words.
What happens when you can forget that youâre trans? That youâre on stolen land? That your ability to breathe and drink and eat and think and love and mourn and write and cry is built on top of someone elseâs grave? What would you do if I told you everything you know and suspect about the depravity in this world is true, and also barely scratching the surface? What if you knewâif you were certainâthat very few have any idea just how bad it can possibly get? Will certainly get? That we will look back with something like fondness on today, when we finally become privy to the horrors of tomorrow? Some time ago, I looked over all I knew, and felt the abyss gaze back. In response, I wrote a poem. Iâve been trying to devise a method for disseminating its contents ever since.
750 words.
Another core part of my writing practice is engaging with communities of writers and artists. At the beginning of this year, I and my Art, Strike! co-editor built one that aligned with our values: that creative labor should always be paid at a living wage; that artists and writers should have total autonomy over the process of producing their work; and that the repressive hierarchy between creative workers and editorial gatekeepers needs to be abolished. Though ultimately modestâand eventually derailed by a paucity of fundingâour efforts signaled to the publishing landscape that a reckoning is underway, that long-held norms which privilege the few are being challenged and rewritten with increasing aplomb. Art, Strike! is currently on an indefinite hiatus, one which we hope to soon return from; building ambitious, value-driven projects like it during my time in this program is another component of my writing plan.
900 fucking fucking words.
Sometimes I think of the process of transition as one of compression: Iâm fitting an entirely novel person into a vessel previously home to another. If every space is an archive, then when I entered, I could still detect traces of the former inhabitant on every wall, in every cornerâlike an apartment out of which the last tenant hastily exited. Iâm settling in, for better or worse; the body is inhabitable, for better or worse.
They say the brain is like a computer, only so much it can store.
I think theyâre wrong.
I feel absolutely infinite.
exhortation
Pick a word count between 1 and 1,000. Write a series of short, connected pieces that each have that exact word count. Choose two radically different styles between which to alternate: for example, use plain, stilted speech in the even-numbered pieces, and extreme, hyperbolic language in the others. As you write, consider your multitudinous identities, and the differing ways in which they communicate. What does it mean to put them in conversation? How much time do you have before they collapse into each other, like atomic particles during nuclear fusion? What incalculable energy will be released when they do? What will you use it to fuel?
âstatement of plansâ is part of my ongoing performance series, performing mfa, in which I perform the work required to attain a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, including playing the roles of my classmates and professors. Each performance concludes with an exhortation, which is a generative prompt that allows the audience to take part in the performance seriesâon their own terms, in their own spacesâif they desire. The introduction to performing mfa is available to read on my website.
performing mfa
length: 1,079 words
content/trigger warnings: discussions of capitalism, pandemics (COVID-19, mpox), and surveillance, references to war, climate change, displacement, psychosis, self-harm, and genocide
Note: This performance series is currently on an indefinite hiatus.
introduction
The pandemic, as we refer to it, is a misnomer, just as the great war was a misnomer even before we referred to it as World War I.
The pandemic is one pandemic of many that preceded it. It is one pandemic of many that it precedes.
As pandemics increaseâhave increasedâin quantity and magnitude, so have and will other so-called global events: world wars, climate catastrophes, mass displacements, genocides. These are all, of course, interrelated and inextricable from one another, because every event is a global event, even if the atomization of academic disciplines keep the people who are supposed to make those determinations from drawing this conclusion so confidently.
Another form of atomization will accelerate simultaneouslyâthe kind we euphemize with phrases like remote work, work from home, live-work space, low-residency program, hybrid participation, telehealth, teleconference, group chat, chat room, forum, Zoom call, FaceTime, metaverse, and virtual reality.
The next iteration we might refer to as no-residency. Maybe we'll take an old word and transform it: homework or lurk might indicate the labor of a future in which the office building is obsolete.
Your apartment or house will be owned piecemeal: by a landlord with dominion over kitchens and bathrooms and bedrooms, and a separate stakeholder who owns the room(s) in which labor is performed. New arrangements of power and resources will ensure you're in the space when expected, that you perform the labor as expected (doorframes as presence sensors, windows with cameras built into the glass, a desk that auto-logs keystrokes and mouse activityâwho knows).
You might be connected to coworkers virtually, but with telecommunications infrastructures strained, most likely you'll work alone. More likely you'll replace your coworkers altogether, each individual required to function as a team: your employer will want proof you can adopt the perspectives of a diverse group of people, and demand that the interchange of ideas between them be made concrete, and so each day your Slack or Teams chat will just be you, talking to yourself, using six or ten or twelve personas, each of which will need to have a distinct personality and thus unique point of view on the work at hand.
It sounds lonely, or maybe disorienting, but voice changers and virtual avatars will help you keep track of who you are at any given moment. If you're really good at your job, you'll be a company of hundreds or thousands, all operating out of the same room, from within the same body.
Eventually, these norms will expand outwardly from the corporate sphere into the arts. I might argue it already hasâthat corporations will cop this schismatic self from a realm in which containing multitudes and improvising psychosis is already relatively commonplace.
Whether the chicken or egg came first is irrelevant.
All roads lead here.
performing mfa is an experiment, but above all else, a performance. For the next twelve monthsâon this piece of virtual land called âriveraerica.com,â tied to a piece of physical space in a city called âLos AngelesââI will perform the work of an MFA in Creative Writing. I select a Hybrid concentration, which means I will study, write, and workshop pieces of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, along with maybe some works that straddle genres, in the spirit of the experiment as a whole.
Winter is application season, so in November and December, I will perform the process of applying to these programs, as well as that of applying for the scholarships and aid that would allow me to pay my way through, though technically I will determine the program's cost and can tell you now that I will receive full funding to attend.
In January, I'll accept myself into this program of my own design. I'll skip the part where I'd wait seven months for it to start, so soon after, I will settle into a virtual classroom of about ten or twenty students, each one played by me.
Over the months that follow, I'll perform the act of reading books and poems and short stories and essays; I'll perform the work of the workshop, reading and critiquing the writing of âothers,â as well as my own; I'll perform the act of attending office hours to discuss my progress, asking faculty for advice on pre- and post-graduate life; I'll even perform the labor of building community with people in my program and institution, which are comprised wholly and solely of me. We'll build organizations, host readings, found literary journals, form cliques and private writing groups, protest complicities, go on spring and summer breaks, and have our hearts bent and broken by the weight of institutional demands.
By our and we'll, I mean my and I'll.
I am uncertain about the efficacy of performance-as-prefiguration, whether the process of embodying a speculative fiction can help prepare someone for its realization, or even allow the performer(s) to actively manifest it. Whether it can provide helpful tools for use when the future comes to town. This may be because to anticipate something is to miss that it's already happening, already happened. That the performer is actively absent from reality because they have been consumed by the performance. If, prior to the pandemic, someone had considered something like depression or anxiety a communicable disease and acted accordingly, they would have been more prepared for the pandemic than if they had simply play-acted what they would do once the pandemic did occur. They and their fellow performers would have established real care networks for real conditions already affecting them, rather than scheduling the care for a later date. This is probably the difference between networks of mutual aid and so-called theater of the oppressed.
Then again, even the work people undertook after the pandemic unfolded didn't necessarily prepare, for example, LGBTQ+ communities for the spread of mpox (except for maybe the increased ubiquity of Personal Protective Equipment, and the marginal destigmatization of terms like incubation period, viral load, and quarantine).
If this project is worthy of undertaking, it's because performing something offers the performer a small bit of emotional distance that experiencing something can't. That slight distance, lived under the guise of a performance, may somehow turn out to be useful.
Maybe if I subject myself to a trauma I design, and make that subjection public, someoneâmaybe meâwill come to know something.
Maybe this is just a roundabout route to self-harm.
Maybe this is the heart of performance/art itself.
âErica Rivera, November 10, 2023
inspirations
_improvisation scares some musicians, i think, because how can they possibly know what to play next if they don't have the sheet music dictating, sitting right in front of them? improvisation isn't about knowing what to play next. it's about being so in sync with the people and world and music around, there's only one note you can possibly play next. it's not about making it up as you go, it's about being so clairvoyant the next note comes to you as though a vision.
when a musician makes a mistake in the process of improvisation, who can really tell? well, the musician, of course, and their fellow musicians, and if you listen closely, you can tell too, because your body will react before your words do, and if we can love our bodies enough to hear their pains and their pleasures, we can notice the mistakes we inevitably make, and then hear ourselves play different and better notes, bringing the band back together into some kind of harmony._
â âorbicular,â Erica Rivera
Embedded YouTube player for Folding Ideas's video essay titled âI Can't Stop Watching Contagion,â in which the creator, an older white man with glasses, lies dead-eyed on a plaid couch while projected onto him are clips from the film Contagion and news footage about the pandemic; his voiceover explains that, since the dawn of the pandemic, he has been unable to do much other than watch and rewatch the film Contagion, as an attempt to emotionally inoculate himself to an uncertain future, particularly the narrativeless or unpoetic aspects of pandemics that deny easy meaning-making or closure, which he argues that the film Contagion captures well through its hyperrealistic presentation of mass death and social deterioration
â âI Can't Stop Watching Contagion,â Folding Ideas
LAUREN: THE HUMAN INTELLIGENT SMART HOME
Link to main website for Lauren Lee McCarthy's performance piece titled âLAUREN,â in which the artist, a younger Asian American woman, replaces the role of a virtual assistant for a collection of strangers, who agree to give her access to large parts of their personal lives in exchange for her being on-call to remotely perform a variety of sensitive, household tasks; on the website, a fisheye lens portrays the artist as overseer and depicts a montage of participants moving around their homes, conducting a variety of personal tasks; an array of small clickable spheres at the bottom lets you pan around three-dimensional photographs of participants in their homes
â âLAUREN,â Lauren Lee McCarthy
> @philipglassmusic
>
> 1.26.24 Philip Glass Solo Philip Glass performs beloved works for piano, from his home studio and personal piano, on an intimate new record coming January 26, 2024. Pre-order link in bio
>
> ⏠original sound â Philip Glass
Embedded TikTok player for a video of Philip Glass, an older white man with glasses, playing the song âOpeningâ from his album titled Glassworks on an aged black piano in his home, in front of a wall covered in photographs and other pieces of art, as well as a stool with a pump bottle of hand sanitizer, next to a desk on top of which are a stack of sheet music, a cup of writing instruments, and a box of tissues; the caption reads, â1.26.24 Philip Glass Solo Philip Glass performs beloved works for piano, from his home studio and personal piano, on an intimate new record coming January 26, 2024. Pre-order link in bioâ
â â1.26.24 Philip Glass performs beloved works for piano...,â Philip Glass
LM Brimmer's PDF Teaching Guide for Gabrielle Civil's âthe dĂŠjĂ vuâ
â the dĂŠjĂ vu: black dreams and black time, Gabrielle Civil
The early history of prefigurative politics, extending back to at least the Russian soviets of the early twentieth century or even the Paris Commune of 1871, was firmly grounded in counter-institutions that sought to bring existing social and economic institutions under popular control or create new institutions to supplant existing undemocratic institutions. This meant democratically managed factories, schools, health clinics, and living spaces. Later, with the New Left, prefigurative politics came to incorporate an emphasis on developing a âbeloved communityâ among movement participants. This was based on the idea that transforming social relations was a necessary precondition for broader structural transformation. Wini Breines argues that the novelty of the New Left was precisely its attempt to accomplish both of these goals simultaneously. But as she describes it, tensions emerged between these two elements and it became a primary fault line that ultimately undid organizations like Students for a Democratic Society. Since then, much contemporary prefigurative politics has focused on perfecting democratic processes within movements, moving even further away from counter-institution. In part because of this shift, advocates of prefigurative politics from the New Left to Occupy have been subject to the critique that such a politics is incapable of achieving larger structural transformation. It is seen as excessively focused on internal relationships among participants, and as such ineffective at both outward-facing movement-building and executing a broader strategy to transform existing institutions.
â âPrefiguration or Actualization? Radical Democracy and Counter-Institution in the Occupy Movement,â Daniel Murray
> So, before BHQFU stops meaning âTHE SHIT PILE BEFORE USâ and starts meaning âsomeone else will fix it,â letâs take down the sign. BHQFU is dead. Thereâs no space, no classes, no faculty, no students, no staff, no president, no plan. All that remains is a problem. Itâs my problem, Bruceâs problem, and itâs yours if you want it.
â âBroken Toilet: BHQFU is Dead,â Seth Cameron
performances
I'll keep a running list of links to the performances on this page below, and later, duplicated at the top.
performing mfa
Creative nonfiction, essay Introduction to performing mfa Performed November 10, 2023 Available to read on my website
statement of plans
Creative nonfiction, essay Application supplement Performed November 14, 2023Â Available to read at Osmosis Press
critical analysis
Series of 16 poems Application supplement Performed December 28, 2023 Available to read on my website
optional scholarship application
Mixed media, series of three images with image descriptions Financial aid request Performed December 31, 2023
congratulations!
Creative nonfiction, essayÂ
Acceptance letterÂ
To be performed
everything i know about genocide
length: 4,682 words
content/trigger warnings: discussions of genocide, transphobia, poverty, segregation, settler colonialism, white supremacy, murder (lynching), Islamophobia, anti-Palestinian racism, anti-Kurdism, homelessness, substance use, mental health, misogyny, suicidal ideation, police/state violence, illness (cancer), death, and grief
Early in the year, someone I know and care about tells me thereâs a genocide being waged against trans people.
I almost burst out laughing.
Driving between Los Feliz and downtown L.A., I trade glances between the road and my phone as I type. If thereâs a genocide on in America, I write, itâs against unhoused folks, substance users, people struggling with their mental health.
The person on the other endâquite literally on the opposite side of the worldâtells me that U.S. politicians are explicitly calling for the murder and imprisonment of trans people.
I reply, glibly:
Theyâve been saying that about poor people forever.
I say something to the effect of:
This whole thing is being blown way out of proportion.
The person on the other end challenges my misunderstanding, but I wonât be convinced. How do you argue with someone in denial about the truth?
Generous, they relent. They remind me that the most marginalized unhoused folks (substance users, etc.) are trans, anyways. This I can swallow, and we move on.
Later, Iâll apologize for being so wrong.
Later, Iâll remember what it is to be a target.
*
At my alma mater, I am one of about twenty students enrolled in a student-led class that most people refer to as âthe Palestine class.â Its official title includes a direct reference to settler colonialism. On the first day of class, our student-teacher is calmer than I would ever be in his position, explaining that the university is suspending the course for all sorts of made-up reasons. We donât actually learn anything about Palestine that day, or maybe we learn the most important thing there is to know about it.
Over the next few weeks, weâll organize, as a class. We flyer campus. We plan a protest. I think at one point my job was to rent a U-Haul and bring twenty desks from the community college a city over because weâre going to place them in one of the universityâs most public spaces, and sit in them with tape over our mouths. We intend to stay there until weâre dragged away, or the class is reinstated.
We use that word a lot during this period: reinstatement. We all just want the course to be reinstated, we find ourselves saying, as though wanting anything more would be too much. We all just want to learn (though it goes far beyond that for many of us, particularly the student-teacher).
When the head of the faculty senate comes to class one day, she says our course is the first in the universityâs history to become an international incident. Sheâs referring to the fact that an Israeli foreign minister was interviewed in Israel about us. On live TV, he assured the journalist interviewing him that the problem was being taken care of. He insisted it would be an egregious act of antisemitism for the university to permit the course to continue. He declared that the Israeli government had reached out to the university to make this clear, which someone employed by the university eventually confirms for us.
Some people call this âcultural genocide.â
It is genocide all the same.
After the class is reinstated, the location of the class changes. This is in case we become a target. During class, I often look out the long row of windows on the northern wall for signs of something ill-intentioned. I have done this more or less in every classroom Iâve been in since eleventh grade, when I first began to fear being the target of a mass shooting.
Today, I have a folder I always keep near me with printouts of the most valuable readings I was assigned during my time in academia. Almost every reading from the Palestine class is in the folder.
I learn more about how the world works in that class than in any other. To understand Palestine is to understand everything. To understand genocide is to understand everything.
*
A year or so after the Palestine class, I take a class on Kurdish, the language. It is filed on my transcript under Near Eastern Studies. There are no more than ten students in the class.
We learn the language, Kurdish, but also about Kurdish culture. We get to know the founder of Chobani, Hamdi Ulukaya. We celebrate Newroz, the Kurdish New Year. We watch Min DĂŽt, a Kurdish film about two children and a baby whose parents are assassinated by what I think are supposed to be Turkish mercenaries. The kids spend the back half of the film homeless and broke. At one point, they come face-to-face with their parentsâ murderer and are forced to consider killing him. âMin dĂŽtâ is Kurdish for âI saw.â
My professor is a good one: devoted, committed. He pours himself into us. Since the class is mixed, so that some students have experience with the language and others donât, I and another total beginner get private lessons outside class to catch us up in the professorâs office. Our professor is not paid more to offer this extra class time. Sometimes the other beginner isnât available so itâs just me.
I try really hard at first, but my interest in education is dwindling. I have the increasing sense that I am going to kill myself, and somewhere deep in the back of my head, I worry I am probably trans. These are excuses, of course. I am always aware of the gravity of our lessons, and my failure to adequately honor them.
In addition to Kurdish, the professor teaches Turkish. It is a far more popular language option, and also the language of his peopleâs oppressors. In Turkey, it is a risk, sometimes a lethal one, to speak Kurdishâto teach it, to celebrate Kurdish culture, its holidays. Our professor is told by the university that he cannot teach Kurdish unless he teaches Turkish too. In at least one way, this class is an outlet for him. Late in the semester, I apply for a grant with him to publish a formal textbook based on the excellent informal one heâs built up over the years. I am severely underqualified for this and we do not get the grant.
By the end of the semester, I can barely speak or understand the language. I was better at it midway through, when all the objects in my room are labeled with Kurdish words and their genders on little white stickers. Most of them fall off or become worn, unreadable.
I feel relief when the class is over, the relief of leaving a foreign country of which you do not speak the language. There is no longer the anxiety of being put on the spot, of being asked questions multiple times without being able to answer, of seeing the look of disappointment on my kind professorâs face.
Years later, but long before I come out to him as trans, my biological father spots my coursework in a storage bin. I tell him about the class. Impressed, he asks me to speak a little. I stumble, then say âmy name isâ in Kurdish, and my deadname in English. Itâs all I have. He looks disappointed too. I speak Spanish fluently, and a decent amount of French. I am good and capable with three very colonial languages. I wouldnât be able to tell you what âmy name isâ in Kurdish is now unless I looked it up.
This is also genocide.
*
My stepfather dies and I consider his life and death a product of genocide. Thereâs a meme that goes something like, âEvery queer and trans person who kills themselves is a victim of genocide.â My stepfather killed himself, slowly. He sat at a desk for decades on end in order to receive a hefty pension, which he does, right before he dies.
A few years before that, he starts to refer to himself as Black. He is.
Afro-Latinx/e, some would say. Indigenous may be more accurate.
There is more I wish I could say about this, but I do not have the right. Besides, I have not yet finished grieving.
Donât know if I ever will.
*
A few days ago, I participate in #DVPit. This is what people in the publishing industry call a pitch event. The âDVâ in #DVPit stands for âdiverse voices.â The event is intended to rectify inequities in publishing: like #PitBlack and #LatinxPit, itâs limited to marginalized authors whose books might otherwise be lost in the massive slush piles literary agents spend much of their time sifting through.
Right before the pitching event begins, someone in the âintroduce-yourselfâ channel mentions that theyâre concerned about pitching a book about Palestine. I donât know whether the author is Palestinian. Weâre told to use hashtags like #POC (People of Color), #BVM (Black Voices Matter), #NIV (Native Indigenous Voices), #ND (Neurodiverse), and #TV (Trans Voices) in our pitches to make our identities clear. For whatever reason, the author in question only uses #Palestine in their pitches. I think itâs fair to assume they are Palestinian, though in a world that has recognized the vacuity of #OwnVoices, if not yet pitch events, who the hell knows.
I have the sense no one really knows how to respond to their comment; it is never clear whether or not a space is safe until its facilitators make it clear. Even then, safety is always in question: an ongoing process, a constant negotiation. The rules of the server say hate speech and discrimination of any kind will not be tolerated. For people like me, this is a sign that a space is completely unsafe.
On Discord, you react to comments by selecting emojis (âreactionsâ), which people can then click so that a little counter beside the emoji increases, or they can select their own emoji as a reaction. I hold down the authorâs comment and select the âhugâ emoji. Over the next hour or so, a few more people click the reaction. Seven in total, eventually, including mine.
Nobody, including me, comments or replies. Later, a lively discussion about Jewish representation in literature will unfold in the âwatercoolerâ channel. âI care about all children who suffer no matter who they are,â is what the person who starts the discussion says.
*
I was old enough to understand the aftermath of September 11, 2001, as it happened. My stepfather is deployed to Kuwait. We tie a yellow ribbon around the tree in the front yard. We go to a military base and get letter-writing kits along with the other military wives and their children. Everyone is obsessed with being good Americans. I am ten years old.
By the time I am twice that age, I have read the infamous âlittle Eichmannsâ tirade and I know enough to know that he is right. It is not cold or glib to say this, though for a long time it is only ever in private that I admit I agree. Like everyone else, I mourn death selectively.
The Pentagon is a few miles from my elementary school. After one of the planes hits it, I watch smoke rise from the rubble against an otherwise clear blue sky. I will spend the rest of my life expecting this to happen again. I conclude that it is only a matter of time. Instead, for the next twenty years, I watch on the news as it happens everywhere else, all of the time, with increasing intensity. Most pundits explain these developments with the equivalent of âstop hitting yourself.â Itâs what settlers have told colonized people for centuries.
Patriarchy breaks men; cisheterosexism destroys cis/straight people; white supremacy drives white people to kill themselves (and worse). Just the same, settler colonialism always ultimately kills settlers, too.
It is only, ever, a matter of time.
*
âI got my start writing essays, op-eds, and long-form journalism, in which data and reporting could add up to tidy conclusions,â reads my artistâs statement for the 2024 Tin House Winter Workshop. âNow, older, I have more doubtâless faith in what I have to say.â
Echoing a poem I once wrote and then deleted, I write: âTo my father, a former musician, I once described my position in life as that of a pianist who grew to view the keyboard as a colonial instrument, my task to work with others to dismantle and reinvent it.â
I continue by credentialing myself: âThis year, I founded an online publication called Art, Strike!. We paid our collaborators (rather than contributors) what they asked for: up to 100% of a shared, replenishing fund-pool. Almost everyone asked for 100%. After three reading periods, including one open only to trans writers and artists, I ran out of money and we went on hiatus.â
Finally, the meat of the statement, what many call âthe why.â
âMy work, like Art, Strike!, is fleeting, provocative, and deeply concerned. I am deeply concerned by the norms in the publishing industry, and the trauma it generates in my fellow creatives. My background in STEM gives me insight into the future here: spoiler alert, itâs not pretty. Another word for concerned is afraid. I write fiction because I may doubt my own ideas, but I have more faith than ever in the ambiguity fiction demands.â
I close with a touch of melodrama: âIn mathematics, a derivative defines the rate of change of a function; it is information about information, one degree removed from the data provided. To get the original function, one takes, intuitively, the antiderivative. Yet every function has infinite antiderivatives; some information always gets lost in the process of derivation. My fiction is the derivative of what I have to say; my readers, by reading, take the antiderivative.â
I say âfictionâ in that last sentence, but what I really mean is all my writing. If I wanted to tell a reader how I really felt, Iâd get to know them first. Thereâs no point in being yourself around someone you donât trust.
I should probably clarify something: itâs not that I think silence will protect me. For Godâs sake, I hardly pass. I am, as they say, âvisibly trans.â In other words, I can be dead silent and still pose a threat from a mile away. I can make myself small, conceal myself like a hermit crab burrowing back into its precious shell, and I can still be stepped on and broken in two with ease. All someone has to do is want to. Our world encourages people to want to. Tells them itâs okay. Morally necessary. Desirable, even.
This is one underdiscussed aspect of genocide: pleasure. When people are slaughtered en masse, their murders arenât cold. They are carried out with glee. For those doing the killing, it is a joy. Your death will bring them happiness, ecstasy. Look at photographs of the audiences at lynchings and youâll know what I mean. Humans canât do something so unnatural on so large a scale unless theyâre given permission to smile through it.
*
ghettos are the refugee camps for the subjects of colonisation and neocolonisation: they are internal neocolonies. gentrification is the planned replacement of a population by another: itâs not just about rent; gentrification *is* genocide
This is what someone I know and care about says online. They are right.
I show this quote to someone else I know and care about, whom I live with in an ethnic enclave inside of another ethnic enclave in the city of Los Angeles. It eloquently summarizes what we bitch about more brusquely every time we step outside our apartment. Even our dog displays all the trademark signs of PTSD.
Part of the stress the person I live with endures is about me. Every day, my gender presentation becomes more and more feminine. Every day, I become more and more of a target. On top of everything else, the rental agreement does not permit me to live in the apartment with them, so I often have to leave and spend time wandering the city in order to avoid being seen by the landlord, or worse, the building owner.
I protect myself as much as I can. I stop wearing makeup. I stop wearing skirts. I stop using my favorite purse (pink, blue, and white, the colors of the trans flag). I stop shaving. I paint my nails a neutral peach-pink instead of ruby red or matcha green. I spend most of my time in West Hollywood (âgay meccaâ), where the discrimination Iâll face will be related to my economic stratum rather than my gender identity.
The life expectancy for trans women of color is, I hear recently, 35.
This is partly why I go to the Social Services office this weekâto get on food stamps, so we can eat healthier and not rely on the unpredictable junk the food bank offers. Itâs partly why, the day before, I go to a free clinic specializing in trans careânot only for hormones, but also to get my health in order.
Three years is not enough time to do all things that I need to do. I continue to assume each morning, as I have since starting my transition, that I will be dead by the end of the day.
At both the Social Services office and the free clinic, while I wait, I stare at my phone. I use a private, nameless Twitter account to look for paid writing opportunities. Mostly my feed this week is about Palestine. Writers and their representatives post wildly, desperately about itâsometimes in anguish, sometimes indignant. It reminds me of 2020, and 2017, and 2014: âwhy is no one talking about thisâ is a common refrain. Another is some formulation of âSilence = Death,â at least as old as HIV. The call is to speak up and speak out; to bear witness; to use our writerly voices.
Thereâs a letter circulating titled âWRITERS IN SOLIDARITY WITH PALESTINEâ and Iâll probably sign it. It asks signees to commit to engage with BDSâthe vanilla one, as someone I know and care about calls it, where the D stands for divest rather than destroy. It asks signees to decline professional invitations to and funding from Israel, which the letter puts in quotation marks (Iâve always felt preceding the name of settler colonial states with âso-calledâ communicates the sentiment better). The sixth and final ask is for signees to boycott Zionist literary institutions and publications.
Okay. Iâm not really sure who on the list of signees was gunning to work with PEN America or Harperâs or whatever âBest American Poetryâ is (âAmerican poetryâ sounds, to me, like an oxymoron). Iâd hoped the letter would go a little further: pull a Sally Rooney, ask signees to refuse to have their works translated into Hebrew, or published in (so-called) Israel.
Or something much further than that.
Another commitment in the letter is to openly discuss the occupation in your workplace, at home, on social media, in your work. I donât have a social media presence so thatâs out. Iâm unemployed so thatâs out too. At home, we watch videos about the genocide and cry, as weâve done with every genocide thatâs played out live online in front of us since we met, including our own.
In my workâwell, thatâs this essay.
I consider posting a link to the letter in the #DVPit Discord; in another world, it would be the ideal place to post it. The server is supposedly packed with marginalized people, but I know better than to trust people just because this world has made them targets. More often than not, that only makes them look for easier targetsâto scapegoat, to use as human shields.
Plus, if Iâm going to post it there, Iâd like this essay to be available to read beforehand. I may end up having some difficult conversations with strangers. I want to be able to point them to this so that, as much as is possible, they know exactly who theyâre talking to.
*
Long before the Palestine class, long before the one in Kurdish, I attend community college. I enroll in Political Theory, the class Iâve been looking forward to taking more than any other since deciding to go back to school. The professor is an old white man, who redeems himself by defining political theory extremely broadly: the first text we read is the EnĹŤma EliĹĄ, and he makes a convincing case for religious mythology and speculative fiction being integral to the process of politics.
Later in the semester, we read Eichmann in Jerusalem, which spawns heated discussions on the subject of complicity. I am steadfast in my belief that everyone is complicit when genocide occurs, except maybe children and/or others incapable of consent.
Our professor doesnât seem to disagree, I think, but argues for the sake of pedagogy. âI fought in the Vietnam War,â he tells us, ânot by choice, but because I was drafted. When I got back, I protested like everyone else. Does that make me complicit?â Heâs looking at me as he talks. Thereâs something in his eyes that makes me wonder if he is not just arguing for the sake of pedagogy. I donât remember if this is the case, but it feels like Iâm alone on one side of the classroom as the discussion unfolds.
âOf course,â I reply, âeveryone was. It happened. You allowed it to happen. You were unable to stop it. That makes you complicit. That doesnât have to be so scary. It can be true, and you can still do the work of confronting it. Weâre all complicit in something right now.â (This is about a decade ago, when I say the right things but still donât understand their meaning.)
In his office, at the end of the semester, we discuss the future of politics. Heâs as pessimistic as I am, but also holds out hope like I do. We both separately arrive at the same conclusion: the next great work of political theory will be a work of science fiction, of literature.
That work probably sits somewhere unread in a slush pile. Maybe a printout in a folder or a storage bin. Its writer, perhaps, has moved onto more important things. Nobody has much need for whatever we refer to as politics, let alone political theory, anymore. Nobody has much need for whatever we call writing either. This doesnât have to be so scary. It can be true, and we can still do the difficult work of confronting it.
Weâre all complicit in something right now.
*
Before this essay ends, please know: I donât say everything thatâs on my mind. I honestly donât know how anyone does.
But then I know exactly how. Known is the natural condition of the human in a surveillance state. As someone I know and care about always says: in the future, we will all want 15 seconds of privacy.
Iâve left more than enough here and there for anyone like me to understand what I believe. Thereâs no reason for me to say any more than what Iâve already said. Besides, speaking in publicâwriting for an audienceâis one of the least interesting things a person can do.
Why do you think Iâm a writer?
Why, do you think Iâm a writer?
*
There is a very small chance that the building owner or landlord may enter our apartment today, so I leave early and plan to stay out until at least the afternoon. No big deal; I need to finish this essay anyways. Itâs been a while since Iâve written something this long or important to me so I consider it just as important to pick the right place to settle in and finish it.
I drive first to the Griffith Observatory; from there, Iâll be able to see the whole of the refugee camp that is Los Angeles. But I miss the entrance to the parking lot and am slingshotted by traffic cones and park police back down the slope towards the bottom. I consider it a sign. Thereâs no point in reflecting on the city from that high a vantage point; it makes everything look deceptively docile. Also, there is a painful memory I have of my stepfather that Griffith Park makes me think of, when he visited and wanted to see Dodger Stadium from that high up and I drove us there and refrained from telling him the story of the little genocide that made the stadium possible.
Instead, I drive back towards downtownâto Central Library, where Iâll have Wi-Fi and a quiet space in which to write. On my way there, I pass through Los Feliz, the same stretch of street on which I once tried to deny the genocide of people like myself.
Central Library is a microcosm of Los Angeles: it has a beautiful Octavia Lab, named after the sci-fi author I have to work not to worship, and filled with expensive equipment intended to both spark creativity and facilitate commerce. Outside the lab, it is mostly swarms of police officers and security personnel. A large contingent of patrons use the library as a resting place. Every once in a while, one of them makes just enough noise for the cops to feel like they have something to do.
On its social media accounts, the library celebrates the fact that everyone is welcome, including unhoused folks. I donât know about that. I hardly feel welcome, and all I ever do here is read and type. In the bathroom, right before leaving, I am verbally harassed for my gender presentation for the first time. Itâs an ugly rite of passage that, as many trans people will understand, is infuriatingly gender-affirming.
In an exhibit tucked away in a corner of the library that Iâve never seen anyone else in, there are photographs and videos that tell the story of how someone set fire to the libraryâtwiceâand how it was rebuilt from the ashes. A short story in the book I pitch during #DVPit is loosely based on this. I donât make this connection until I move to L.A., and realize that the real fire must have influenced the fictional one, in my story.
To be honest, I donât really like that I came here. I donât really like this part of this essay. I donât like the idea that my actions were influenced by my writing, even though I often feel the stories I write are warnings from myself to myselfâparables of sorts, letting me in on the wisdom my subconscious has to offerâand that I would do well to allow my actions to be influenced by them. I suppose what I donât like is the idea that my actions have been determined by something I havenât written yet, that I come to the library in order to finish this essay in a place that is symbolic enough to merit inclusion in it.
In my opinion, actions should not follow from writing. Writing, if it happens, should follow from actions. When writing is worth reading, itâs the residue of actions worth doing.
I donât know what Art, Strike! will become; weâve been offered space on a cooperatively-owned platform called Comradery, something like a cross between Patreon and Kickstarter. In two weeks, I am scheduled for an onboarding call with two of their members to see if we are a good fit for the site. If all goes well, weâll begin raising money so we can return from our months-long hiatus.
When I first devise Art, Strike!, I describe it using two definitions: strike, as in to walk out and stop working, and strike, as in to collide with other art.
Thereâs another definition of the word that I like: a synonym for the verb âignite,â as in the phrase âstrike a match.â
If anything ever happens to the people I know and care about, I donât know what I will do.
I do know you can only light yourself on fire once.
neocolonial data capital extraction model
length: 6 circles
content/trigger warnings: depiction of neocolonialism
Venn diagram titled âNEOCOLONIAL DATA CAPITAL EXTRACTION MODELâ, the largest circle labeled âEVERYTHINGâ. Bottom-right quarter of this circle has several overlapping circles, the largest labeled âWHAT ACADEMICS RESEARCHâ. Slightly smaller circle overlapping it at bottom-left is labeled âWHAT CAPITALISTS MONETIZEâ. A similarly sized circle overlapping the two previous is labeled âPRODUCTS/SERVICES/KNOWLEDGE FOR THE RICH AND POWERFULâ. Completely inside this circle and overlapping the two before it is a smaller oval labeled âDATA PRODUCED BY THE SUBALTERN AND SOCIALLY TRANSGRESSIVEâ. A dot inside this circle as well as all the previous ones has an arrow pointing to it labeled âTHIS DIAGRAMâ. The smallest circle is labeled âTHE SUBALTERN AND SOCIALLY TRANSGRESSIVEâ and overlaps all the previous ones, save for a sliver at right that remains outside all but the outermost circle. A dot inside this circle as well as all the previous ones has an arrow pointing to it labeled âMEâ. A dot inside this circle's extruding sliver has an arrow pointing to it, its label redacted, scratched out in black.
how to write a short story, part three
length: 505 words
content/trigger warning: discussion of death, grief
I.
âFor now, let's just take it in parts,â the narrator says. I don't know who you think your characters are speaking to, but you should know that they're speaking to you.
If artificial intelligence problematizes creative writing, it's because the magic of reading is your awareness of the person on the other side of the page. On the page. No one really idolizes a character or a story; they are mesmerized by someone's ability to believe. This is why a cake will always taste better than a chair, and why no one will ever put their life on the line for a car.
I am always trying to say something. I am always trying to tell myself something. If I do it with care, you'll be told something, too.
II.
You have to know grief. It feels, when you feel it, like the opposite of hope, i.e., a vacuum, and humans need oxygen to breathe, so it's understandable why one would rather avoid it. But there are balms quite literally everywhere, on every corner. More common on a corner than in a home. More abundant in the middle of nowhere than at the center of everything.
Not everyone grieves. Some people live and die and never know grief, nor its balms. You have to know that sometimes this is worse. Maybe always.
The artist's name was Karen, by the way. The one who left the country. The one whose children died. The one who worked a farm, then wrote a book. The one who never said goodbye. The one who returned to say hello.
III.
A dog and a cat navigate a narrow alley. âIt's too tight,â the dog says. âI don't think I can pass.â The cat replies, âJust go like this,â and stretches out until it's skinny enough to wiggle through. The dog, much larger, does the same but gets stuck. âI'm no good at being a cat,â the dog laments. âNo,â the cat replies, âit's just that some cats are good at being right here.â
IV.
I'm still here.
V.
âYou have this with something,â the footnote starts. A short story is the transcription of a dream you dream while you're asleep. As tangible and accurate as a dream can be. A novel takes that dream and turns it into a building. At some point someone's going to want to live in it, and now you've become a landlord. âTake the scariest, most vulnerable parts of yourself,â the footnote continues, âand turn them into a class. Review its syllabus. Enroll in it and attend. Try to take its final.â
Don't be fooled; nothing is anything else.
But everything is right beside everything else, and someday that will be something worth rooting for.