Complicity
Seeing Everything but Palestinians
Mary turfah
Initially the problem was thought to be a lack of awareness. If people knew, really knew, what was happening, what Israel was doing, which is to say, if people trusted any of many Palestinian accounts from any day over the last many decades or, short of this (we had to be realistic), heard the right testimony from a distraught non-Arab-appearing doctor (considering foreign journalists had been barred entry into Gaza), or watched the right video (taken from an expansive collection rich in its diversity) of Israeli soldiers savoring in their brutality, or of Israeli government officials underlining in biblical speech the absolute necessity of showing no mercy or squeamishness regarding the task at hand (total extermination), surely then something would switch. Or shift. Or give. Something.
Well. Colleagues, acquaintances, talk show hosts, reporters in the West saw the same things we did, and in our presence (or imagining a certain audience) performed distress wide enough to envelop us all. Things were complicated, yes, but wasn’t it just terrible, everything that was happening to our world. (To, as though a superimposed supra-human force were careening us into the abyss.) After words to this effect came clasped lips, wrinkled chins, eyebrows furrowed to signal moved affect. And then, after a few breaths, the moment of silence made way for thoughts and prayers for peace in the Middle East.
Later, when more than enough time had passed, one could say without worrying about sounding unreasonable that virtually all of us had seen what all of us had seen. And after, if there remained “complexity” it was a tangle to be worked out between a person and themselves or their employer, one that had nothing to do with reality.
For many the right testimony or confession never came. After some days or weeks or months of waiting to witness a switch or shift, what sunk in instead was a sinking feeling that a lot of people had no issue continuing to look away, followed by a come-to: they had been doing this for years already. Or they weren’t looking away exactly, we shared a present and a world, in the literal sense, and as such their heads faced the same directions as ours as they went about their lives. They were seeing what the rest of us saw and looking beyond it, locking eyes with only the people in whom they recognized themselves.
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Israel has unleashed a “hell plan” on Gaza, to, per The Independent, “force Hamas to release more hostages,” or per The Guardian, “to pile pressure on Hamas.” Pressure is force applied over a unit area: here the so-called hell plan involves deliberately starving nearly two million people, turning off their electricity and water, and keeping them trapped in an enclosed space as various infectious diseases spread— and as most other forms of illness requiring medical intervention remain untreatable because things like replacements for the basic medical equipment destroyed by Israel over the last several months continue to be denied entry.
“They weren’t looking away exactly, we shared a present and a world, in the literal sense, and as such their heads faced the same directions as ours as they went about their lives. They were seeing what the rest of us saw and looking beyond it, locking eyes with only the people in whom they recognized themselves.”
This is certainly a plan, “pressuring” or “forcing an enemy’s hand” convenient euphemisms for something like “threatening collective extermination.” The cliché goes that words matter, and whether you call it “hell” or genocide is a choice, one that depends
on whether you see in genocide the potential for strategic gains (this discernment inversely proportional to how human you see your enemy), which is to say, whether you condone genocide as a legitimate means to a desired end: here, ethnic cleansing.
At the same time, Israel and the United States air talk of the day-after and invite the world to listen in. We should understand this as psychological warfare, disseminating a vision for the future as though it’s an inevitability, to sow helplessness in people who might wish to see things differently, who have the means to make the future different.
Where the previous American president was able over the course of many months to bring into being some of his revenge dream against Palestinians, the current president’s term has only just begun; his dream world remains largely in his head. Joe Biden enacted a genocide, and Donald Trump’s task is to pick up where his predecessor left off. In February 2025, alongside Israel’s prime minister, Trump presented his next steps. One could practically see the developer gears in his brain turning as Trump explained his plan to turn an ethnically cleansed Gaza owned by the United States into an “international, unbelievable place . . . the potential in the Gaza strip is unbelievable.” Everyone, including Palestinians, could live in what would be “the Riviera of the Middle East.”
Where in the past rendering a vision for an audience required recruitment of more of the latter’s imaginative faculties, today we have assistive technologies that manifest with more fullness (and however poorly) the speaker’s dreams, while also blunting our own. To see through Donald Trump’s eyes, with our own, all we do is sit back and watch. Not long after the president offered his vision of a future Gaza, two Israeli American filmmakers materialized this future in the shape of an AI-generated video posted to Instagram. The video was picked up by Trump and shared to his account on Truth Social, a social media site he owns.
It opens with grey skies and rubble, clips of parents holding children’s hands as they brace these ruins with sunken shoulders. A child dressed in rags sprints toward us and away from something, EDM building a sense of beginning. Two men in anonymizing head wrappings walk through a tunnel that is notably above ground, their backs facing us. Next clip, the men are swapped for a woman and two boys, and now through the tunnel instead of destruction we see what looks like any beach in the developer paradise Dubai. The sky is blue, and against sand and palm trees and sun, high-rises glint. A few shots of some streets, children running—now playfully, their backs still to us. And then a face we recognize: Elon Musk smiling and eat- ing a bowl of something on the beach. Then, bearded belly dancers on the beach, Donald Trump and a not-bearded belly dancer at a nightclub, children jumping under cash raining down from the sky, a building with a porte-cochère that reads “Trump Gaza,” Musk eating again, a gold market, and finally, Trump and Netanyahu in swimsuits, lounging poolside at the former’s hotel. A song rings in the background, Trump Gaza shining bright, a golden future, a brand-new light and every now and then a child, presumably Palestinian, wanders the street, balloon in hand.
The video, the filmmakers claimed, is satire. It takes a certain kind of person to think up this kind of joke. One of them asked hypothetically in a conversation with The New Yorker, “What if Trump really will take over Gaza? I mean, it’s not such a bad thought. I’m not totally against it.” He then added the politically correct caveat: the Palestinians. “I think it’s not realistic unless he includes them in it.” The problem, for him, is logistical.
The video went viral and was met with widespread and strong-worded condemnation from the liberal press. CNN called the video “bizarre, some would say outright offensive.” The BBC noted that “thousands of people have been killed [in Gaza], and this video shows it transformed into a holiday resort. It sparked a huge reaction online. Outrage, upset, confusion, incredulity, and some people who think it is a funny form of trolling or political satire.” The New Yorker called the day-after it envisions “grotesquely slick.” The urgency of their response can’t reflect concern for Palestinians: each of these outlets has carried water for genocide, and each of us carries an archive of much worse things we’ve seen—things that actually happened to or were done by people—since the start of the acute phase of the genocide, and after. A photo taken from Khan Younis or Jabaliya today evidences what might have warranted a wagged finger, if the concern had been these people. Instead, it seems liberals took the video as an affront to themselves.
Many of those who denounced the Trump Gaza video spent the Biden years demanding civility at home, respectful debate, appropriate tone. They condemned college student protesters’ tactics and especially their word choices. An illustration accompanying “Shibboleth,” an essay in The New Yorker by the writer Zadie Smith in May 2024, depicts a missile that appears to be shedding various banners that read things like “terrorist,” “colonialist,” “existential threat,” “Zionist,” as it follows a trajectory to who knows where. In the essay, Smith takes issue with students’ use of “‘Zionist’ as if that word were an unchanged and unchangeable monolith, meaning exactly the same thing in 2024 and 1948 as it meant in 1890 or 1901 or 1920.” The steady, beating heart of Zionism is religious supremacy, one that necessarily justifies the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the whole of Palestine, by whatever means Zionists (Israelis and their colonial sponsors) deem necessary. Zionism also means that other Arabs must be killed as the Zionist state’s borders expand at a tempo that changes depending on which Zionists are in power. The national make-up of the non-Palestinian Arabs killed by Israel today—mostly Lebanese and Syrians—is different than it was in 1901, although these aren’t the sorts of fluctuation in meaning or people Smith had in mind. Instead, she is interested in what Zionism has meant and means to Zionists (akin to asking us to consider what Operation Iraqi Freedom means to American soldiers, or what slavery means to a slave owner—not an entirely useless path of inquiry, were the goal, say, to make sense of the psychology that lubricates atrocity).
Smith writes in “Shibboleth” that “language and rhetoric are and always have been weapons of mass destruction.” I can’t imagine she didn’t know what she was doing with that phrase. Maybe she and her editors read the line as cheeky, the intended American reader’s conscience unburdened today as then by the murderous consequences of their country’s false pretexts. The essay—the ending of which elaborates her brave refusal to take a material side (imagining condemnations, she dares the affronted, “Put me wherever you want: misguided socialist, toothless humanist, naïve novelist, useful idiot, apologist, denier, ally, contrarian, collaborator, traitor, inexcusable coward”)—was written during the Biden administration. Devoted liberal that she is, it makes sense that it does not mention him at all. It also makes sense that in her March 2025 essay for the New York Review of Books, “Trump Gaza Number One,” about the Trump AI video and its ramifications, she mentions the current president by name several times.
It helps that Trump has a gift for making things about himself. He’s about as good at it as liberals are at making Palestinians about themselves. The NYRB essay’s subtitle reads, “the AI-generated vision of postwar Gaza that Trump posted on social media was only thirty-three seconds long, but it spoke volumes about how his administration sees the world.” Since before his inauguration, liberals have been clear in saying that Trump neither speaks nor acts on their behalf. Yes, Biden committed genocide—or something akin to this that they insist on calling something else—but he wasn’t so crass or insensitive. “The pressing job of the left right now,” Smith writes in her more recent essay, “is to expose” the “illusion” that the wretched of the earth live apart from us. The task of the “left” is “to insist that this is in fact one world we are living in.” For this, “we need transnational institutions which—however imperfect—persist through time, and can’t be unilaterally destroyed by the group of ideological gangsters presently occupying the White House.” We might recall that the Biden administration—by insisting on providing cover for genocide and turning the United Nations into a stage for Israel to flout its impunity—did more to undermine the sanctity of international law than perhaps any other government since the body (which, anyhow, created Israel and has virtually always protected colonial interests against the global south) was established.
The principle issue for Smith is that “a general concept of the human does not exist for this White House. There are Americans and then there is everybody else.” This isn’t a problem specific to the Trump White House, nor is the primary binary American/non-American. What moves Trump is the same supremacy that allows one to call a genocide a “hell plan,” to nod cleverly at “weapons of mass destruction.” Trump’s version is simply more eager. Self-image motivates these essays against him: for much of the world, especially the global south, Trump lays bare a version of the West that liberals don’t want to see.
“It helps that Trump has
a gift for making things about himself. He’s about as good at it as liberals are at making Palestinians about themselves.”
Smith’s essay ends with the same ‘neither East nor West’ refusal to take a position: “Not us, not them: humanity.” Which is funny because the entire piece argues for taking a stand against something: Trump. She understands that taking a side, when something wrong is happening, is good. And she would likely be the first to say that she isn’t dehumanizing Trump and his supporters by doing so—that taking sides isn’t an issue of ‘us’ and ‘them,’ not in the ontological sense. Sides can emerge through actions taken and she is responding to the Trump administration’s actions, to which she is morally obligated, on humanity’s behalf, to say no.
Our problem with Zionists isn’t that we don’t see them as people, but that they subscribe to a supremacist ideology that premises self-worth on denigration and dehumanization of an Other, here Palestinians. Materially speaking, Zadie Smith has defined a ‘them,’ and against it, an ‘us.’ The problem is that she wants to include in her ‘us’ both an oppressor and the people they’re oppressing. Which is up to her—until she presents this as a morally superior position, one we should feel compelled to take.
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No Other Land, a documentary about the ongoing ethnic cleansing of a constellation of Palestinian villages in the West Bank, was produced by a pair of Israelis and a pair of Palestinians. The film recently won Best Documentary Feature Film at the Oscars. Two of its co-directors, one Palestinian and one Israeli, spoke on behalf of all four when accepting the award (which makes sense: the two, Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham, are also the film’s protagonists). On stage before a crowd of American celebrities, Adra, the Palestinian, went first. He spoke against the “ethnic cleansing” of his people, and against what is happening to Palestinians in Gaza. He did not use the word ‘genocide,’ perhaps because he’d been instructed not to, or because he felt he could get his message across without language that might alienate his audience. Abraham, the Israeli, went next. He too condemned what his country is doing to Palestinians, along with other things social media has done a good job of dissecting. I am interested in the part of his speech where he repeats for his audience the liberal (Zionist) line that Israel can’t have security if Palestinians don’t have freedom.
It sounds nice, if you don’t think about it. As soon as you do, the formulation doesn’t work. First, Israel and Palestine are not parallel realities; Israel is mutually exclusive to Palestine, and exists on top of it. Israel can’t exist if Palestinians have freedom, because Palestinian freedom would require that Israel first recognize Palestinians as human beings. One cannot justify ethnic cleansing or land theft against those one sees as people, and Israel must justify these things in order to exist. And if we have learned anything from history, it is that Israel has shown that it is not, has never been, and will never be interested in Palestinian freedom. Again, it cannot be: Israelis measure their own sense of freedom against Palestinians’ un-freedom. (Imagine an Israeli arguing instead that Israelis won’t have freedom until Palestinians have freedom. Now ask yourself why that will never make sense, and what it says about the possible terms of solidarity between us and them, between the neck and the sword.) To allow Palestinians aspirational human values would be to empty Zionism of its sense of superiority. Supremacy also happens to source the statement’s appeal. Israeli security is conditioned on Palestinian freedom (never the liberation of Palestine) and Palestinians, their rights, are a means to that desired end: Palestinians are about Israel. And, to other ends: at the Oscars, liberals used the award to mediate their distance from Trump, and to signal via this distance their goodness. That the award went to a film critical of the current Israeli regime (not Zionism) is a ‘fuck you’ to Donald Trump, the Palestinian on that stage a literalization of the middle finger. After the gesture’s catharsis, you put it away.
In response to the acute phase of the genocide, people have tried to pursue meaningful action, as with the student-led protests on college campuses (the Biden administration-led crackdowns, escalated by this new administration, reflect these movements’ significance). The willingness of Palestinians and others to work through Zionist institutions is shrinking as they come to terms with the futility of this approach, and build their own institutions and power instead. All of this—a world that doesn’t imagine the West as its center—is threatening. The Oscar for No Other Land was offered as a liberal carrot (student protesters get the stick).
The win is not about Palestine. We see it in the celebrity audience’s reactions. They clap more for the Israeli because they see themselves in him. The Oscar goes to the Palestinian for choosing, in the face of aggression, nonviolence, and for collaboration with an Israeli. The Oscar goes to the Israeli for using his powers for good. The audience, in clapping, is thanking the Israeli for helping the Palestinian. And they are thanking the Palestinian for granting them an opportunity to signal their own goodness. “Not us, not them: humanity.”
“What is equally true is that I shouldn’t need to make Palestinians about anything else, to recognize that there is something very, very wrong, not about where we’re headed, but about where we are. Who is it for, I’ve wondered, the ‘after they’re done with them, they’ll come for you’?”
A short time after the Oscars cere- mony, Hamdan Ballal, the Palestinian director of No Other Land who didn’t appear on stage, was attacked and beaten by Israeli settlers in front of his home, in front of his wife. The settlers had arrived to attack his village and Ballal had pulled out his camera, to document the aggression. Soldiers eventually arrived to defend their co- nationals. “After (shooting) in the air, I will put the shot in your body,” Bellal said a soldier said to him, gun to his leg. The soldiers arrested Ballal and two other Palestinians. In military detention, Ballal was blindfolded and beaten in standard Zionist fashion. “Things looked quite different for the award-winning director just weeks ago,” CNN reported on the event, as though this, things as they had always been for Palestinians, were the aberration, as though anyone could have expected an Oscar to fix anything—for Palestinians in Palestine, that is.
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Sometime after the shift or switch did not come, and before the come-to, people started writing things like, “what happens in Gaza won’t stay in Gaza,” often to try to shake the apparently unmoved. The boomerang effect: fascism always comes home. It’s true that Gaza is a laboratory, and that Israel treats its enemies—within and without Palestine—like lab mice. It experiments torture techniques on prisoners, trials biological weapons and security technologies over agricultural fields and residential neighborhoods, engineers new ways to make body and earth break. It is true that the environmental toll of Israel’s genocide will not respect borders. What is equally true is that I shouldn’t need to make Palestinians about anything else, to recognize that there is something very, very wrong, not about where we’re headed, but about where we are. Who is it for, I’ve wondered, the “after they’re done with them, they’ll come for you”? Who looks at a Palestinian child and needs to hear that theirs could be next? Those for whom children are not enough.
A more useful frame, if this isn’t about others as a means to an end: “if we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own—which it is.” James Baldwin wrote these words in his “An Open Letter to My Sister, Miss Angela Davis,” first pub- lished in November of the year of her arrest, in the New York Review of Books. “If we know,” Baldwin writes, “and do nothing, we are worse than the murderers hired in our name.” Something tricky about the murder committed in our name by this same government abroad is that the dis- tance makes it harder to see ourselves as implicated. But we are, and this distance doesn’t lead to any sort of absolution, least of all when we know. If we know then we must fight, Baldwin continues,
And render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.
“As though it were our own—which it is.” Baldwin’s concern is not the boomerang effect: if it is there, it is already here. On the day they take his sister, they take her brother. Ψ