Our Dystopia Rings Hollow

Rafah, student protests, the Met Gala and Macklemore

Yesterday Israel officially began its invasion of Rafah. Just hours after Hamas accepted a ceasefire proposal Israel rejected the ceasefire, rejected peace, and launched a full-scale incursion into the Southernmost city in Gaza, the last refuge, the place where 1.3 million civilians are sheltering, mostly living in tents because of their prior displacement. There is no way to summarize how immoral, how malicious it is to attack people who are living in tents because you have already blown up their homes, to bomb people trapped with nowhere safe to go. While Israel has declared one safe zone after another, it has immediately proceeded to bomb each one, rendering all of Gaza a death trap. And Rafah is the end. Rafah was the last place. Just as Hamas accepted a ceasefire, Israel turned around almost immediately and began this attack. Now nowhere in Gaza is safe, and two millions people are at immediate risk of ethnic cleansing or death.

Unless the world intervenes. Unless the world, most especially the United States, cuts Israel off financially and militarily and brings the might of its economic and diplomatic might to bear. The truth is that the U.S. could have stopped this long ago. Israel has been isolated by most of the world for months now. Repeated votes at the UN confirm that only the United States has been shielding Israel from near-total ostracism by the world, even the several European powers that continue to militarily and economically support Israel abstained in multiple UN votes. Then America itself abstained in a key ceasefire vote, allowing the United Nations to formally call for a ceasefire, albeit a watered-down call. But what about the full pressure we could bring to bear? What about withholding billions of dollars and thousands of bombs and more?

Photo by Mohammed Ibrahim on Unsplash

For the first time, the U.S. paused a shipment of American-made ammunition to Israel two days ago. The reason isn’t clear, and the interplay between domestic politics at home, with the immense unpopularity of Israel’s genocide, and U.S.-Israel relations and the foreign policy surrounding them, is deliberately murky. Because while we’ve seen repeated leaks to the effect of “Biden is very upset with Netanyahu this time” for months, real change that can be quantified has been extremely gradual and extremely minor, at best.

Most important, the small shifts in approach from the U.S. government have failed to prevent genocide and ethnic cleansing. Estimates are that between 80,000 and 100,000 Palestinians have fled Gaza through the Rafah crossing to Egypt. This is the cleansing of people from their land. And now, as I write, reports are emerging that Israel will take over the Rafah crossing. The last exit from Gaza, which people have been raising thousands of dollars in bribes to use, will likely be closed by the time you read this.

That means the people in Gaza will be stuck in Gaza. Hundreds of civilians will almost certainly be killed today. Tens of thousands are already dead, and even more are buried beneath the rubble. Countless people have been maimed, orphaned, and traumatized beyond comprehension. Hundreds of thousands are being starved as we speak. And our tax dollars are playing a disproportionate role in all of it. This is the criteria that matters as we evaluate the U.S. role in Israel’s genocide.

Photo by Sophie Popplewell on Unsplash

At this moment in history the words of consolation, the statements and leaks saying that our ‘leaders’ are trying to facilitate peace are doubly, triply empty. It's even more than the refusal to use the power at their disposal to bring an end to this genocide, it’s the reaction to those who push for peace. Repeated declarations from countless politicians continue to call student protesters violent for camping on college greens, while these same politicians hand billions of dollars with no strings attached to a foreign government and military that’s in the midst of a genocide. It’s not just the naked hypocrisy that’s so frustrating here, it’s the consistent prioritization of violence, both at home and abroad, all while lying to us about it. We know that the genocide students are protesting, and that the U.S. is helping fund, is infinitely more violent than the most aggressive student protests. And it insults our intelligence to pretend otherwise. We live in an era where we’ve been able to see live streams of Gaza and live streams of campus protests, and when politicians lie to us about both they’re revealing more about our system and themselves than they are about the nature of these events.

Yesterday I saw snipers above the University of California San Diego, I saw armored cops with wooden batons beat students for protesting genocide, I saw students and journalists arrested at UCLA simply for being on their own campus. And I saw Israel commence an attack on over a million civilians living in tents. But it is, of course, the students who will again be called violent. The facade has fallen away, the mask has fallen off – which is why the continued emphasis on “business as usual” is so jarring. In particular logging on to social media and seeing Met Gala pictures and video from the red carpet interspersed with news of Rafah being attacked last night was so rattling, jarring, irreconcilable.

I understand that not everyone will drop everything to protest. That’s not how our society works, and as much as I wish it was I believe in dealing with reality as it is, not as I think it should be. But the art world, the world of celebrity, has been so painfully quiet on the defining moral issue of our time that seeing them dress up in outfits that cost more than most people’s rent, especially at the very moment Israel began to invade Rafah, was too much to bear.

The world of arts and culture has so much to offer protest movements, resistance movements, any movement for a better world. But that presence has been so conspicuously absent, especially compared to the powerful music and art of the ‘60s and ‘70s when countless major artists were consciously counter-culture, political, and inspiring to a generation pursuing change. But today we find ourselves in a nearly opposite situation, where the celebrities willing to speak out for peace and justice feel like the brave few struggling against the current. And even when a growing number signed onto the call for a ceasefire, so few took more substantial action. 

Photo by Malicki M Beser on Unsplash

At the same time as the hollow glamor of the Met Gala flooded media and social media feeds everywhere, rapper Macklemore (who you may not know, but he had several big hits 8-12 years ago and has been very outspoken about a ceasefire) released a single entitled Hind’s Hall, named after six-year-old girl Hind Rajab who was murdered by Israeli forces in Gaza. She had been the sole survivor of Israeli tank fire on the car she and six relatives were fleeing in, and was then murdered herself. After her death Hind became an avatar of the movement to Free Palestine and end the genocide, and the students at Columbia named an occupied building Hind’s Hall. And just as the bravery and clarity of the student protesters make the words of politicians feel as empty as they truly are, the clarity of Macklemore’s words made the fashion show on the red carpet of the Metropolitan Museum of Art feel hollow, weightless in the worst way.

I think you may want to listen to Macklemore’s lyrics for yourself. He lays a lot out very clearly, and what he may lack in skill as a rapper he makes up for many times over in his clear call for justice. His track opens with: 

“The people they won’t leave, what is threatening about divesting and wanting peace?

The problem isn’t the protests, it’s what they’re protesting

 It goes against what our country is funding

Block the barricade until Palestine is free.”

And it keeps going from there. It’s a protest anthem. It contains a clear respect for the students and others fighting against genocide, and a clear respect for the liberation struggle of the Palestinian people. It isn’t perfect, but it has weight. It has gravity, it has significance. The song is grounded in real values and the importance of fighting for the lives of real people. Next to it so much of the culture being produced right now is revealed to have nothing within it, is revealed to be a pretty skin over a body of vacant space, vacuous and hollow.

Photo by Abdullah Aslam on Unsplash

One song is just the barest beginning, just as the multitude of protests that have erupted across the country and the world are just the beginning. The ideological wins of exposing the flimsiness and substancelessness of our dystopia are just the beginning. We can no more be satisfied with symbolic victories than we can be satisfied and placated by the symbolic gestures of those in power. But these victories matter. Divesting ideologically from the materialism and violence and glitzy show that capitalism puts on to distract us from its nature, that the ruling class puts on to distract us from their nature, matters. It is a step in the right direction.

Now that we see the emptiness of the facade we have to build something better. There are people, powerful people, many with big platforms, who are heavily invested in telling you it’s not possible. They’ll say we have to spend a trillion dollars on war, they’ll tell you it’s not pragmatic to feed and house and clothe everyone, they’ll tell you it can happen, just not right now. But their words too ring hollow. Their facade of pragmatism and reasonableness often belies a material investment in the status quo, a nice paycheck for saying change isn’t possible, a hefty investment in the violence of the current order.

I think the merchants of moderation, the agents who bolster the status quo no matter the cost, forget one thing. While we may have been promised wealth and technological advancement and pretty toys as kids, we were also promised freedom and justice and basic decency. To grow up and to have one ideal after another punctured, to see the promise of a fundamentally good country and a fair world broken so thoroughly might lead some people to collect a check and resign from the fight, but millions more either don’t have that option or refuse to take it. The promise of decency has been broken in that people cannot afford to live. It has been broken in that we see our country shield, enable, and fund genocide before our very eyes. And masses of people will not take it. Masses of people are no longer just willing to have shiny objects waved in front of us to distract from atrocities beyond measure. Masses of people will no longer ogle at the distractions – we are determined to look past them and build a world of substance rather than attempt to enjoy the empty, shallow air we’ve been told to tolerate. We’re seeing this truth manifest all around us in a crucial moment, and those who are deeply invested in a better, fairer society that values life know that this is just the beginning. We’re just getting started. 

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