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Israel has owned the word "terror" for the last 30 years.
Anyone who goes against them, gets swiped with it.
Palestinians are "terrorists." Cordon them off. Jail them. Assassinate their leaders. Take their land.
Israel has convinced news organizations in the Western world to set the narrative with that word. This has allowed Israel to expand settlements, build walls, steal water, raze homes, flout laws, and now, to rip apart the bodies of over 20,000 children.
The time has come to reverse this narrative. Boomerang that savage word. Use it to describe not just the terror of Oct 7, but also the terror that Israel has perpetrated on the Palestinians for 75 years since the Nakba.
Every revolution, every authentic revolution, promises to redeem the failures of its predecessors. This is what Walter Benjamin thought — or at least, this is what Slavoj Žižek says Benjamin thought at the end of The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012). Paraphrasing Benjamin, Žižek says in the film that all the unsettled ghosts of the past will at last find rest in the new freedom born out of the true revolution to come.
Yet he warns the path to this freedom comes with no guarantees. There is no train of historical inevitability that can be ridden to the safe harbour of emancipation. Getting there all depends on a fickle crowd of free riders, a ragtag huddle of the flighty and the faithless. They should be a familiar bunch because, it turns out, they are us.
Our liberation rests on nobody’s shoulders but our own.
Lend your ear for a moment to the strain of Judgement Day that sounds through Benjamin’s thinking. What ghosts haunt our present? What injustices await deliverance from the purgatory of lost causes? Following Benjamin’s logic, if we want our fight — for a better world, for a livable world, for life itself — to be a successful fight, we had better make sure we know what undead armies stand behind us. Without setting their struggles to rights, they will remain our curse. Plus, there is always the risk that we might fail, and in failing join their ranks, dooming ourselves to wait for the next righteous heave to drag us out of the boneyard and into the future. That is, if a shred of hope for any kind of future — indeed, if the planet itself — survives us.
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