The Only Way to Believe

or: the Day the Invasion Began

I read the news today. Israel has murdered 22 more people in northern Gaza. They’ve publicly announced the northern half of the strip is an open fire zone, that they’re blocking all food and medicine to deliberately starve the hundreds of thousands of people who are still trapped there. They don’t face any consequences, except when people are brave enough to shoot back. All the humanitarian agencies agree that Israel’s military operation is blocking most of the evacuation routes, as though Palestinians had anywhere safe to evacuate to. The IDF is also shooting at people trying to evacuate. And the testimonies and videos and admissions are overwhelming: Israel keeps deliberately blowing up hospitals, torturing and killing doctors, arresting, disappearing, shooting, or bombing journalists they don’t like.

(From Al Jazeera: “Israeli forces have killed Palestinian journalist Hassan Hamad in an air strike on his home in northern Gaza’s Jabalia refugee camp, days after the slain journalist said he was warned by an Israeli officer to stop filming in Gaza.”)

I try to breathe. I look out the window just as a buck runs across the street, stopping a moment between duplexes to munch on some tasty leaves. By the number of points on his antlers, it seems like he’s been surviving in this city for at least four years. What will survival look like in another four years?

Numerous Israeli government ministers, politicians, and military figures have openly declared they are holding onto northern Gaza, as Zionist settlers take tour boats and watch the bombing like it’s fireworks, to cheer on the slaughter and imagine a hopeful future, a near future, in which the rubble becomes real estate. Meanwhile, they’ve found a way to break yet another treaty and snatch the Philadelphi Corridor away from the Egyptian dictatorship, ensuring that southern Gaza will be even more like a prison camp. Israeli troops in the bombed out ruins of Gaza proudly take photos, holding up banners that say, “Coming home” (to land they have never lived on) or more honestly, “Only settlement would be considered victory.”

We deserve this.

The only way to believe that Israel is not deliberately and consciously carrying out a genocide is if you are invested in believing.

I try to breathe. I go to our social center for a talk. Can I stomach people for a full hour? The presenter is on tour for her new book. She’s a great storyteller, sweeping her arms about, keeping the audience laughing, keeping her dog companion calm, telling us about greedy frogs and wry commoners humiliating bumbling aristocrats. It’s good to be able to imagine. In some essay or another I’ve gone so far as to argue that liberation is impossible if we can’t imagine it. Many days, lately, all that I can manage is to imagine some of these evil people getting killed.

Anyone who cares knows that Israel is carrying out genocide. They’re doing it with impunity. Major companies like Boeing and Tesla and Amazon and Google are profiting off it. Countries with left or centrist governments like the US, Germany, and Canada are funding it. Liberals in the US think that Biden blocked the export of the extremely devastating 2000lb bombs to Israel, bombs that are designed to kill large numbers of civilians. On the contrary, between October of 2023 and June, the US shipped 14,000 such bombs to Israel and many of them are now being dropped on Lebanon, where the Israeli onslaught has already displaced a million people. All that really happened is, over the summer, when Biden still thought he was facing an election in the fall, he temporarily paused the next shipment of bombs, a shipment that isn’t scheduled until 2025.

Coming home.

The only way to believe that the US and its major companies are not entirely complicit in genocide and mass murder, the only way to believe that left-leaning governments in other parts of the world actually give a damn about the mass murder is if you are invested in believing.

I try to breathe. R and I let ourselves sleep in a little before taking the car back to the mechanic. The “check engine” light came on the same day I brought it in to fix a broken exhaust pipe, price tag $500. It’s her car but we share it, do our best to get to our jobs and pay our rent amidst a cascade of health problems that are either slowly lethal or perfectly safe, just excruciatingly painful. We’re lucky to have friends to carpool with on days the car schedule doesn’t mesh. We’re lucky to have the privilege of being able to pay rent and we’re lucky no one is trying to blow up our house again and again.

The new problem is just a broken sensor, “just an EPA regulation” to check emissions, the mechanic says dismissively. I guess I feel dismissive, too, since the old car is a gas guzzler and nothing about the EPA regulation diminishes that, it just means we have to shell out 200 to get another sensor installed, more data to keep observing a problem they refuse to acknowledge the true nature of, like humanitarian monitors the UN sends to write up another report from “a conflict zone.”

At this point I’m fine when UN humanitarian missions get blown up by Israeli missiles. If your life’s work is to protect human rights by filing reports for the states that are the primary threat to our lives and well being, how do you expect anyone to take your life seriously? I try to breathe.

I don’t want to be sardonic about people getting blown up, even if these people are stupid. And let me be absolutely clear: no one is born stupid. It has to be a choice. I’m still trying to breathe.

I look for some good news. Here’s something. The UK is returning the Chagos Islands to the native Chagossians. First France and then the UK stole the islands back in the 1700s, when they were doing this kind of thing basically everywhere. But it was actually in the 1960s that the UK forcibly depopulated the entire archipelago, at the request of the US military and with the permission of the UN. In those same decades, the US and France were forcibly depopulating plenty of islands in the Indian and Pacific oceans to test nuclear weapons. In the case of the Chagos Archipelago, the purpose was to construct a massive military base for the US, destroying all the coral reefs and the entire island ecosystem to host an airstrip and naval refueling station to make sure the US would be able to rain down mass death on any part of the planet's surface whenever they wanted to (like the million plus people the US government murdered in Iraq), because that is their deal. That is their purpose, that is their desire, that is what they get off on.

And the only way to believe that the governments and the militaries of the US or France or the UK or Russia or China or Israel or India or any other group of powerholders that has coveted the power of mass annihilation – the only way to believe they have any scrap of decency, is if you are invested in believing it.

By the way, the Chagos news: it’s not so good. The UK left one island out of the deal with Mauritius. The largest island. The one occupied by their joint military base with the US.

I take a deep breath.

If it feels like this entire fucking system has no problem with genocide, with ecocide, with causing mass suffering for their own power… it’s because they don’t. It’s because the system is founded on genocide and ecocide and cannot exist without continuing genocide and ecocide. And anyone who does not see this, especially on a day like today, it’s because they are choosing not to see it.

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October 12. The longest and largest genocide in human history began today, 532 years ago. It’s still ongoing. The Invasion provided a vital impetus for what today we just call reality. The enslavement and murder of hundreds of millions of people on every continent, the destruction of countless cultures and communities and ecosystems, the conversion of the entire living planet into property, the unmitigated plunder, is the foundation of our global society and all the institutions that rule us today. Institutions we consider normal, even inevitable, were developed as tools to manage plunder, to manage enslavement, to manage genocide.

The whole motor of global capitalism has been the theft and enclosure of shared lands, forced labor, religions and sciences that put us outside of ecosystems, sexual violence, commerce down the barrel of a gun. Colombo, that mercenary who happily trafficked in child sex slaves (and gloated about the prices one could fetch in his diary), put it plainly: “Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.”

Columbus quickly instituted what would become a widespread practice: forcing Arawaks to mine gold and silver and chopping off the hands of those who did not meet their quota.

US jurisprudence is equally blunt. As all the legal and military might of the United States was accelerating the next phase of genocide against the Piankeshaw, the Miami, and the Cherokee, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Marshall reaffirmed the same doctrine articulated by the English crown and ruled, “However extravagant the pretension of converting the discovery of an inhabited country into conquest may appear; if the principle [of conquest] has been asserted in the first instance, and afterwards sustained; if a country has been acquired and held under it; if the property of the great mass of the community originates in it, it becomes the law of the land, and cannot be questioned.”

So people don’t question it. They choose to believe it. And they pretend the Piankeshaw and the Miami have disappeared, they pretend 1492 or 1948 is in the past, and when they do that, they’re carrying out the cleaner half of genocide.

The primary drive of all these institutions is to protect the foundation they are built on, to never give back a single dead scrap, to never allow anything to exist outside of and free from their rule. They can turn Columbus Day into Indigenous People’s Day as long they still have the power to kill or imprison anyone who shoots back, who takes the land back, who chooses life over law. We want to change what a particular law says? We jump through enough hoops, they might change it for us, as long as we validate their power to do so, as long as we never try put a crack into the foundation it’s all built on.

The only way to believe in this system, to believe we can negotiate with it and come out as whole people, to believe it can get better and we can get better with it, to believe it can amend itself, is if you are invested in believing.

Sometimes the investment is an inheritance. A small one, like the inherited pride of believing you deserve a house and a job and a car and the peace of mind to never ask the land its history. Or the inheritance can be a big one, like an apartheid diamond mine you turn into a billion dollars that you use as a platform to spew your narcissism all the way to the moon.

Sometimes you invest in belief because you found other drugs before desperation drove you to imagine something truly different. Sometimes you invest in belief because every ounce of your energy goes into trying to breathe, because this violence goes so deep you can’t contemplate the dimensions of it you just need to breathe, you can’t look back at the long path travelled and how much it resembles the path ahead because all you have the capacity for is putting one foot in front of the other, because if you lie down you will not get back up.

Sometimes you invest in belief because you found a little bit of safety, a little bit of comfort. Maybe you’re pulling in six figures working as a director for the Highland Center, making money teaching people how to make the world a better place, and you’re doing it on stolen Cherokee land, and that’s great for a land acknowledgment but since you really deserve that comfort but you know where your funding comes from and you know your hard won safety is gone the moment you question the ground you’re standing on, the moment you chip away at that foundation… you start telling lies you should know are lies.

Whether you’re a human rights advocate sending torture reports to the UN or you’re an environmental scientist sending emissions data for your colleagues to present at the next COP summit in Azerbaijan or you’re a decolonial lecturer at the Highland Center pulling in six figures on stolen land telling people the lie that we need this system to change this system, making your money on stolen land where people lived without the state, making your money telling the lie that we can’t abolish the state because we need it… at that point the only true thing about you is the paycheck and that fragile bubble of safety, but what good is it for when you’ve sold your soul to a machine that is going to kill us all?

You’re not unique, at least. Didn’t Arendt say it after the Holocaust? Evil is banal. Most of us invest in belief if we’re given the chance. Hell, plenty of Cherokee gave it a try, thinking that if they owned land like white men and if they enslaved Africans like white men, maybe they’d get some of the safety, the progress, those rights the white men promised.

But it turns out, the courts of the conqueror cannot reverse the conquest their authority is founded on.

Today, if just for one day, let’s remember that.