As well as can be expected

a not so regular update from Alana Lentin

Covid, genocide and gaslighting

Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman in The Gaslight (1944)

I went to a meeting at the University and caught Covid because the room it was held in was too small and airless, and anyway Covid now is just a matter of personal responsibility. People asked me how I was, as they do. I answered ‘as well as can be expected in the midst of a genocide,’ and watched their faces contort into something between surprise and realisation, that maybe the normal is not.

These two things may appear disconnected, but from the vantage point of this bedroom and its slender view of the balcony and the sound of the passing tram, they are not.

We are being gaslit on a mass level: about Covid and about genocide. Neither of these things - the ‘organised abandonment’ that constitutes what is laughably referred to as post-Covid, nor waking up in the morning to watch a population being bombed, displaced, then starved to death in an endless stream of images - is normal.

I mean this not in the sense of ‘habitual’. Yes, these atrocities have recursively defined the modern-colonial era. But the entire reason why fighting for justice in Palestine and crying for an end to genocide is experienced by so many of us as gaslighting is that we are endlessly told that what we can see is happening is actually something else. We are told there was only ever one genocide, one Holocaust; that to dare compare, to relate, to build a picture more complex, more accurate than the singular tale of a solitary aberration that official accounts force down the necks of children held captive in education systems so far from being decolonised that the attacks on ‘woke schools’ is a bad joke, or dystopian nightmare, is a blood libel.

Of all things. A blood libel.

Well, yesterday I watched a video of blood running down the streets of Gaza and being swept into the drain. So this is about blood. And there are spaces where mentioning that too close to also mentioning the Holocaust would have me accused of libel. So blood, and libel.

On that, my friend and collaborator the brilliant decolonial scholar Jairo Fúnez-Flores has been suspended by his university, Texas Tech, which appears to have accepted the word of a white supremacist Texan lobby group that Jairo’s solidarity with Palestine is a case of antisemitism. Please sign the open letter in support of Professor Fúnez-Flores. White supremacist alignment with Zionists poses one of the greatest threats to education for social justice.

The manipulation of antiracism by forces whose sole interest is the maintenance and extension of white settler colonial power must be fought with everything we have. Standing in the way are the institutions on which we are dependent under capitalism which caution us against ‘inciting hate’, when what they mean is do not make things complicated by talking about the genocide happening before our eyes.

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But this newsletter was supposed to contain some updates…

Gaza, Solidarity, and the Right to Protest

I helped co-edit a blog series over at the Identities blog on Gaza, Solidarity and the Right to Protest. The series brings together five posts by Ronit Lentin, Clive Gabay and Rachel Solnick, Waqas Tufail and Sherene Fernandez, Tom Six and Anna-Esther Younes. 

You can access each of these fantastic contributions on the Identities site. Thank you to editors Aaron Winter and Nasar Meer for their support.

Reading Cedric Robinson At a Time of Genocide

My pinned tweet.

I published an article in Black Agenda Report based on the talk I gave to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the publication of Black Marxism: The making of the Black radical tradition by Cedric J. Robinson. I hope to share a redcording of the event at which I was honoured to join Robin D.G. Kelley and Joshua Myers, hosted by the International Centre on Racism.

No number of Palestinian deaths will be too big for Israel, Joe Biden, Marine Le Pen, the entire German state and almost all its intelligentsia, or The Jewish Chronicle. Writing in that newspaper, the British far-right ideologue, Douglas Murray, made this plain: ‘the civilised world should seek revenge’ and ‘back Israel and back the destruction of Hamas.’ It is right to do so because ‘nothing could surpass the barbarism of what Hamas did’ on October 7; certainly not the murder, at the time of writing, of some 20,000 Palestinian people…

Read on at Black Agenda Report

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Action

I was invited to join the Founding Committee of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism and have begun to get active in the Zionism and Race and the Ethnic Studies working groups with some absolutely amazing scholars and activists. Please read our points of unity if you wish to get involved.

I am active with Tzedek Collective in Sydney. We are a collective of anti-Zionist Jews working for anticolonial liberation on unceded Indigenous lands and in Palestine. Read our points of unity in Overland Journal. A video of a recent event we organsied with critical Muslim scholar and psychologist, Yassir Morsi, and South African scholar, Steven Friedman, the author of Good Jew, Bad Jew: racism, anti-semitism and the assault on meaning will be shared soon.

At Western Sydney University we have also established a Collective of staff and students WSU4Palestine and are planning a range of actions for 2024.

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Upcoming

I will be speaking at the Teaching Peace in Higher Education conference at the University of Postsmouth (via zoom) on April 11.

and I am sure some other things that my Covid-addled brain has forgotten about.

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