Here’s what matters: we are on day 266 of this new stage of genocide in Palestine, and while the official numbers of the death toll haven’t changed much—haven’t been able to change, due to the demolition of the healthcare system in Gaza—hovering still around 45,000, a new estimate suggests we are likely to be looking at half a million dead already.
In the debate between the self-proclaimed Zionist, Joe Biden, who has presided over the genocide of Palestinians these past nine months and the criminal con-man Donald Trump, one moment—since repeated—stuck out. The man so steeped in lies he cannot present even his own skin honestly, basting himself in an orange slather in the vain hope he will register as healthy on TV, said that his Zionist opponent has “become like a Palestinian.”
It is perhaps a fool’s errand to search for meaning in the confused babble of these two elderly racists, but I’ve been struck as much by the reception of this moment online as the phrase itself, and I want to untangle it for myself, so here we are. The comment in full is illuminating:
“Israel and Hamas - Israel is the one that wants to go. He said the only one that wants to keep going is Hamas, actually, Israel is the one, and you should let them go and let them finish the job. He doesn’t want to do it, he’s become like a Palestinian, but they don’t like him, because he’s a very bad Palestinian, he’s a weak one.”
One of the things that makes Trump so compelling is that amidst his outrage bait and sheer tonnage of bullshit, there is almost always something true, and what’s true here is that Biden repeated a lie that his administration has been pushing for weeks, which is that Hamas has rejected a ceasefire deal which Israel accepted, a categorically false statement that Israel has refuted numerous times. He follows this truth with outright genocidal incitement that Israel should be allowed to “finish the job” of the genocide, and the lie that Biden doesn’t want them to, when he has repeatedly given them the weapons and funding and political cover to do so to the wholesale detriment of his presidency, his legacy, America’s standing on the world stage and the integrity of international law (what little there was, anyway). Then we get to, “He’s become like a Palestinian…a very bad Palestinian, he’s a weak one.”
The primary response to this on social media - at least among Western progressives or those who see themselves as such - was one of outrage, “he’s using Palestinian as an insult, this is racist” and so on.
I think this is, at best, a superficial read that fails to meet the moment and Trump’s subsequent usage of Palestinian clarifies that a bit, but before I go there, I want to talk about the weirdness of the reaction. Or weirdnesses, even, as there are a few. The first weirdness among the reactions was the way Trump’s truth was ignored: that Israel is the aggressor refusing to stop killing and Biden lied about it. The second weirdness is the insistence that it was a racist insult (to me, to be called Palestinian would be an honour, for example), and in this instinctive reaction by Americans, I see a projection, an unconscious affirmation of the pejorative way Palestinianness is invoked in their culture. I call it a projection in part because it’s a leap that’s not entirely justified, for a quote and a clip that has gone viral no one seems to have actually examined the full phrase, the way he immediately qualified “like a Palestinian” with “a very bad Palestinian, a weak one,” which at least on the face of it negates a purely racist read, allowing as it seems to a spectrum of Palestinianness, from good to bad, weak to strong. The third weirdness is the non-engagement with Trump saying Israel should be allowed to finish the genocide, although perhaps this isn’t so strange given “the other side” is also going full steam ahead with it. The fourth and final weirdness is this particularly vile manifestation of necropolitics:
Let me say real quick a huge fuck you to the Onion, you ghastly pieces of shit. That said, I saw variations of this hideously unfunny “joke” or “take” from numerous people - again, mostly Americans - including from some who really should have known better. It’s particularly grotesque given the degree to which Biden is characterised as a corpse, the walking dead, on his death-bed, and so on. Still, he is impossibly alive - apparently - in contrast to the Western imagination of a Palestinian. I find this particularly haunting because it suggests that to the Western mind, all Palestinians are already dead, their murder a foregone conclusion, which maybe goes some way to explaining the lassitude, the passivity I and so many others have been banging our heads and hearts and bodies against for so long in confused agony, asking why, why aren’t you fighting this? And here, an answer offers itself: why would you risk yourself for the dead?
Another example of this self-fulfilling prophecy of futility I’ve warned against previously can be found in the repetition of the phrase, “history will condemn this”, or “be on the right side of history” etc. I’ve been on this beat for a while:
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Forgive me for the screenshots, it’s 10:30pm, I’m exhausted and still haven’t gotten to where I want, which is the latest use by Trump of “Palestinian” against someone he is targeting, in this case, Senator Schumer, another avowed Zionist. “He’s become a Palestinian, he’s Palestinian now. Congratulations. He was very loyal to Israel, and to Jewish people - he’s Jewish - but he’s become a Palestinian because they have a couple more votes or something, nobody’s quite figured it out.”
While this is a more clear cut example of implied racism, it’s equally clear that there’s more going on, not least because of the obvious impossibility to claiming these white men can be or become Palestinian. So what is he actually saying? He is not saying they are secret Arabs - he is saying they are his/America’s enemy - while also playing into the necropolitics from earlier, who Americans designate as living or dead, as worthy of life and fighting for, in their warped imaginary. Judging from America’s actions, and from the commentary I’ve highlighted, can we say that he’s wrong?
This, ultimately, is why I’m writing this tonight: for the past 75 years and nine months, America has been mass slaughtering Palestinians every bit as much as Israel, and it’s never been more odiously obvious the degree of support Israel has from the American establishment for its genocidal project. All Trump has done is pinpoint that to the powerbrokers in America, nothing is more killable or paradoxically already dead than a Palestinian, and so he is using that in his typically demented, dementia-fuelled style of ad-lib public speaking to threaten his opponents and perform the utmost transgression of likening a killer to his victim.
Earlier this evening, before seeing the above tweet, I watched a video of an injured and orphaned Palestine baby, one eye ripped out by Israel, being rocked by a woman described as their caretaker, and I fucking bawled. Every single day for the past nine months I’ve seen horrors and gore enough for a thousand lifetimes, all perpetrated and facilitated by American money and American weapons and American politics and American soldiers, and I just don’t understand how it is that Americans want to be outraged by Trump calling his opponents Palestinian. Even among his extensive history of racist remarks, this surely ranks low.
There are few creatures on Earth as psychologically, spiritually, and intellectually hideous as this man, but his hideousness is entirely and 100% authentically American. The disgust, the fury, the outrage if outrage there must be - though I have yet to see its value, truly - is not that he said his enemies are Palestinian, or that it hasn’t registered on mainstream media or that it won’t stop him from being re-elected, the horror is what has been done to the Palestinian people, what their lives and histories have been so cruelly rendered into in the bullet barrel of American culture. Not that this is a surprise, not that it is even unique, given the devastations of Iraq and Afghanistan and Yemen, the mass murders of hundreds of thousands, the more than 500,000 kids starved to death due to forced famines, which, as Madeline Albright once put it, was “worth it”, according to the American government. And not once has anyone been held accountable for the innumerable crimes of USrael, and the West more broadly. The thing about Trump is that he honestly reflects the American condition and it’s clear that American progressives haven’t figured out why he actually horrifies them, or how to prioritise what’s worthy of their outrage, but for those of us who are used to being openly gaslit by the Bidens of the world, the stark ugliness of Trump’s mirror is not so much frightening as it is accurate and even to some degree, a relief, in the same way that a nightmare’s power can be diminished when seen in the clarifying light of day.
I keep thinking about the protest chant, “in our thousands, in our millions, we are all Palestinian”, this aspirational solidarity that has graced so many mouths, and how so much of the commentary I’ve seen over the past day makes a lie of that, how cheaply and easily people use the name, the insistence on its usage being an insult and insult only, the insult of this being an outrage over the systematic nearly year-long ritualistic mass murder of over 100,000 Palestinians, a death toll Palestinian writer Susan Abulhawa recently estimated was likely between 194,768-511,824 with over 221,000 injured.
In our thousands, in our millions… if only this were true, ya Allah, if only we had the same measure of strength, of resistance, of furious and loving and beautiful and brilliant refusal to submit to oppression or give in to cruelty as Palestinians have demonstrated time and again. I don’t know if I’m making any sense here, I’m just sad and angry to be honest, and I wanted to say to my Palestinian kin, there is only honour in your name and not a fucking one of us in the wretched West is worthy of it.
Salaam,
Omar