XPost: uk.legal, soc.culture.jewish, comp.misc   
   XPost: alt.politics.democrats, alt.atheism   
   From: MEjercit@HotMail.com   
      
   NefeshBarYochai wrote:   
   > Dear students,   
   >   
   > What an honor it is to stand with you all, and to stand with you not   
   > as teacher or writer but shoulder-to-shoulder as comrade and   
   > accomplice. What an honor to witness this courage and this clarity, to   
   > be just a small part of the life-affirming time you have opened-up in   
   > this asphyxiating genocidal present.   
   >   
   > Our liberal ruling class is fond of platitudes about being on the   
   > “right side of history.” But these always come long after that history   
   > has been made and tamed. Let them keep their platitudes. One day they   
   > will, no doubt, turn them on this moment too; but today it is you, in   
   > the largest student movement for generations, that are making history.   
   > Today it is you who teach, today it is you who educate, today it is   
   > you who lead. And what you’re teaching and learning and enacting in   
   > these spaces is worth a million classrooms.   
   >   
   > You know as well as I do that this struggle is long and will remain   
   > fiercely contested by the powers that be. They will keep coming for   
   > you, first with their overseers of “civility,” those purveyors of   
   > “complexity and nuance,” then with their goons and thugs — uniformed   
   > and un-uniformed.   
   >   
   > In the dead of night, they will come for you, they will tear gas you,   
   > pepper spray you, shoot you with rubber bullets. They will try to   
   > silence you, smear you, arrest you, scare you. Worse still, they’ll   
   > patronize you, and talk about your misplaced enthusiasm or abused   
   > privilege, or how you need to read a bit more history, or how you’ll   
   > one day outgrow this naivety; they’ll send out their entire gaggle of   
   > authorized stenographers to “advise” you, to “counsel” you on the   
   > timbre of your rhetoric or the militancy of your demands (lest you   
   > alienate the “community”), or, to “teach” you about the myriad   
   > complexities of modern financial investments that couldn’t possibly be   
   > divested from things as mundane as genocide or apartheid. But they can   
   > never take away what you and your comrades across the globe have   
   > already achieved, the future you’re already engendering in joining the   
   > struggle for Palestinian liberation.   
   >   
   > If Palestine has ignited our planetary consciousness once again, it is   
   > your movement that insists on rising to the moment at the very core of   
   > the imperial world. It is you who have refused to let genocide become   
   > our normal; you who have refused to accept “business-as-usual” in the   
   > shadow of the mechanized slaughter of thousands of children. You who   
   > have refused complicity in a genocide effectively administered by the   
   > world’s most powerful states in the advanced capitalist west, a   
   > genocide the liberal democracies of “the free world” fall over   
   > themselves to arm, finance, rationalize, and abet. And in doing so,   
   > you have refused our collective gaslighting; you remind us that we’re   
   > not actually going insane, that this sense of madness is the only   
   > human response to this global choreography of carnage, to image after   
   > image after image of ashen lifeless children being pulled out of the   
   > rubble in the name of “western civilization and values.”   
   >   
   > It is you who remind us that we revolt not because we have a choice,   
   > but because we can longer breathe. When Aaron Bushnell, whose act of   
   > self-sacrifice in opposition to this genocide remains entirely   
   > incomprehensible to our political order, charged that “this is what   
   > our ruling class has decided is normal,” he could not have asked for a   
   > more worthy response. You have picked up Aaron’s mantle, and you honor   
   > it. As you honor the martyrs of Gaza and Palestine in Hind’s Hall,   
   > Shireen Abu Akleh Hall, the Lama Jamous Center, and the Refaat Alareer   
   > Encampment.   
   >   
   > To the cynical weaponization of identity politics and discourses of   
   > safety, you have enacted spaces of love and comradeship across   
   > difference; the beautiful scenes of Passover celebrations in   
   > encampments under a sea of protective Palestinian keffiyehs have on   
   > their own shattered the racial-colonial common sense and aesthetic   
   > order of Euro-American Zionism. But you have also done this with a   
   > clarity that continuously foregrounds the Palestinian struggle and   
   > rejects the demonization of Palestinian resistance, including its   
   > unequivocal right to a war of national liberation. In doing so you   
   > help us rediscover the language, historical literacy, and courage of   
   > the Left we still hope to become.   
   >   
   > You know that the fight for Palestine, like the fight for Black lives,   
   > indigenous sovereignty, socialist futures, and open borders, is a   
   > fight for us all. And you also know that the slaughter of Palestinians   
   > today is prefiguring the slaughter that awaits millions on a burning   
   > planet tomorrow.   
   >   
   > I see in your uprisings the cumulative knowledge that you have   
   > cultivated over years of organizing, study, and labor, in meetings and   
   > classrooms, on the streets and behind barricades. Your urgency and   
   > militancy grow organically from this knowledge. You know that the   
   > fight for Palestine, like the fight for Black lives, indigenous   
   > sovereignty, socialist futures, and open borders, is a fight for us   
   > all. And you also know that the slaughter of Palestinians today is   
   > prefiguring the slaughter that awaits millions on a burning planet   
   > tomorrow, that the algorithmic killing sprees of AI-powered drones and   
   > quadcopters are already making their way across the earth’s surface,   
   > that the homicidal sadism of a humiliated Zionism lurks in every   
   > frustrated supremacist project. You know that the systems of   
   > surveillance, incarceration, and segregation over there are at work in   
   > the border regime and carceral state over here.   
   >   
   > In this, you remind us that Palestine condenses our struggles.   
   > Palestine is the name of an inassimilable excess that can’t be   
   > captured in late capitalism’s regime of signs; it can’t be captured   
   > because class power — that self-conscious power of capital’s ability   
   > to command and that runs between the boards governing our academic   
   > institutions and the corporate-financial world — remains an imperially   
   > derived power, still entirely contingent upon war and plunder. And so,   
   > we — we the exploited, the looted, the dispossessed, the racialized,   
   > the illegalized, the wretched — see ourselves in Palestine.   
   >   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)