abstraction in the genocide
it begins in the language
“You Americans, you are so naïve. You think evil is going to come into your houses wearing big black boots. It doesn’t come like that. Look at the language. It begins in the language.”
- Joseph Brodsky, as recounted by Marie Howe.
We’re eight months into the killing-fields stage of the Palestinian genocide, which has seen Israel and its Western allies murder an estimated 60,000-70,000 people, including at least 15,000 children, demolishing the healthcare system and deliberately starving a trapped civilian population to death.
Two days ago, 1700 Australian public servants signed an open letter calling on our government to obey international law and stop supplying Israel with any weapons or military equipment of any kind, which we are bound to do in the event of war crimes and or to prevent genocide. In response to this letter, the NSW Premier’s secretary sent an email to state public servants warning them not to sign on. The language used in this email is by now familiar, but no less wrong, no less farcical than when it was first employed, and I want to spend a minute pulling it apart.
“We understand that many people hold strong feelings on this matter and that the violence in the region has had a terrible impact on communities with connections to Israel and Gaza.”
From beginning to end, this letter employs language designed to obscure reality and attempts to equivocate between the Palestinian situation—occupied by an illegal, brutal apartheid state committing an ongoing genocide—and that of their murderous Israeli overseers.
First: the dismissive, patronising mischaracterisation of this being a matter of “strong feelings”, which is a conservative framework (think: “bleeding heart liberals”) that tries render injustice a matter of emotion as opposed to logic. We are bound—or meant to be anyway—by international law, to oppose genocide, and the government’s behaviour to date has been absolutely and horrendously criminal. Indeed, the open letter is starkly unemotional and factual in its text:
Aside from the dishonour of assisting what the Commissioner General of UNRWA has termed “a war on children” [1], Australia may now be violating international law and complicit in criminal warfare [2]. In February 2024 United Nations experts specifically called on Australia to stop military exports to Israel [3], and in April the UN Human Rights Council adopted this as a resolution, calling upon all states “to cease the sale, transfer and diversion of arms, munitions and other military equipment to Israel”[4].
Canada, Belgium, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands have already suspended arms exports to Israel.
The following sentence refers to “violence in the region that has had a terrible impact on communities with connections to Israel and Gaza.” This is a refrain the ghoulish parrots of the West have sung for months that grossly implies that Israelis and Palestinians are and have been equally affected—the former is committing daily massacres in a holocaust, burning and starving the latter to death in a mass disabling event unlike any other in human history. You could fill a stadium with murdered Palestinian children; you could also fill another with child amputees. You cannot suggest there is an equality of suffering here, not from a moral standpoint, nor from a legal one.
The power differential is so extreme that even in this statement, they refuse to say “Palestine”, let alone accurately describe the situation.
The letter then makes a token gesture to free speech, and how the government “respects” the views it is respectfully, as your employer, asking you not to express, before going on to say that it is a core public sector value to be impartial and apolitical.
Quite aside from neither word being a value, this is not true and even if it were true would be entirely irrelevant. Once again, there is a difference between “apolitical” and amoral—asserting that we should all be “impartial” to extreme crimes against humanity is unethical, dangerous, and reckless. This is not a political matter, we are not talking about public servants telling you which way to vote at the ballot, it is a legal and moral crisis which they are absolutely justified to address.
For the millionth time: we are not a neutral party here, Australia provides active military, political, and financial support to the Israeli murder machine. The state and federal government had nothing to say when Woollahra Council decided to fly the Israeli flag; no censure is ever given to anyone who advocates for Israel to be able to continue its systematic slaughter of Palestinians, no one loses their jobs, no statement is issued to remind or warn them of the necessity to be impartial. There is nothing “apolitical” about aiding and/or refusing to do anything to stop the systematic starvation of 2 million people, the indiscriminate bombing of a city, the mass murder and disabling of tens of thousands of children and tens of thousands more adults.
Meanwhile, to add insult to injury, our elected officials and media have been consistently and resolutely partisan in their coverage, their language, and legislative responses to this genocide. Even as we have had to watch the IOF sadistically mass murder kids and women and men every single day for eight months, in the most horrific manner, and laugh as they do so, and boast about it, and dance to genocidal songs; even as we’ve had to watch Israeli settlers blocking aid trucks to starving people, the establishment’s language and power has been consistently used to defend the indefensible and punish those who criticise them. This absurd, patronising lie about impartiality is completely grotesque.
“The reputation and authority of our public institutions cannot be used for political advocacy, lest trust in Government is put at risk.”
Again, take note of the way “political” is used in this rhetoric. This is a deliberate abstraction. Next time you see it, replace it with “justice” to make clear what is meant. This rhetorical sleight of hand is used constantly to make any attempt to agitate for equality and justice easily dismissible. It’s become ubiquitous: you’re just being political, I don’t do politics, etc., with the inference being that whatever you’re talking about is inappropriate outside of the ballot box, that you’re engaging in it cynically (like a politician, say, with the agenda of material reward i.e. votes), or that it is an activity separate to our lived experience, something done at a specific time. None of this is true.
Lastly, I would like to know where this statement of supposed impartiality was when the public institution that is the State Library of Victoria terminated my contract and the contract of several other authors, because of my advocacy for Palestinian human rights?
Several State Library staff, speaking anonymously because they were not authorised to talk publicly on the issue, told this masthead that Sakr’s social media commentary was specifically mentioned by library chief executive Paul Duldig as the reason for the cancellations in meetings with staff.
Two staff members who were in the room in one, and another staff member who heard it from people who had just left the meeting, said that when challenged about his looking at Sakr’s public commentary, Duldig allegedly responded: “You call it profiling, I call it risk management.”
Here’s the reality according to establishment figures: the only thing that counts as political is opposition to their policies. We are knee deep in a fascist moment, watching as Palestinians are killed every day with weapons we helped make, and fund, used by killers from Western nations who are defended at every turn by a media and political class utterly invested in white supremacy. We must oppose and resist this evil, this profound cowardice, in language and in politics, in our art and bodies, on the streets and in the markets. Protest. Commit to the BDS movement. And most of all, turn your back now and forever on any politician, any journalist, any person defending the monstrosity that is the apartheid state of Israel.
If you made it this far please go to Gaza Funds - every day they spotlight a single vetted fundraiser to help Palestinians escape the extermination camp that has been made of their homes.
Salaam,
Omar