Prophetic

December 2023’s The Nation has a good Jeet Heer column addressing what from present perspective was then an only slowly gaining widespread clarity about Israel’s and Palestine’s new situation, a war of indefinite scope being waged by Israel at full military strength against the population of the Gaza Strip. Heer writes, here, in reaction to just-published NY Times reporting on the Israeli government’s relationship with Hamas before October 7’s ‘Aqsa Flood.’ Of NYT’s story he says:

Although informative, the Times article suffers from the historical amnesia and political myopia of the newspaper’s coverage of the conflict. The funding of Hamas is presented as merely a problem for Israel — as if the divide-and-rule strategy didn’t have dire consequences for Palestinians. . . . The article presents the policy as the fault of Netanyahu alone and ignores the ample historical record that the current prime minister was following a cynical strategy that is decades old.

He goes on to cite affirmatively some analysis common among critics in the war’s early phase, when few were ready to acknowledge the meaning of the scale of measures Israel’s leaders were demonstrating they would employ or to appreciate how far U.S.-led Western powers could be expected to persist in open extension of blessing. This sort of warfare never achieves stated security aims, Heer’s authorities on the subject say. Everybody knows, Nation readers are invited to agree, that unrestrained force against civilians ‘will bolster Hamas even more.’

‘Netanyahu and Hamas,’ Heer then turns to conclude,

are both merely symptoms of a deeper problem. The real source of endless war is the Israeli state’s long-standing goal of imperial domination over the Palestinians, toward which end the propping up of Hamas is merely a means. The only way to solve this problem is to realize that the goal of domination is itself unsustainable.

Which is smart, by no means incorrectly observed except in its suggestion that Israeli leadership might operate with an idea of the politically sustainable that we’d all be able rationally to embrace, one, and in its reliance on the standard story about Israel’s essential independence in goals of regional domination or preeminence, two. (On the latter area of error in Heer, there is a brief item posted here a few months ago.)

I’m drawn to thinking about a characterization of the Palestine situation two years ago such as this by Heer because of another, quite different, in the news last week following visa cancellation and arrest, in California, of the commentator who’d made it, British citizen Sami Hamdi. Hamdi is in U.S. custody now, his deportation pending. Legal effort for his release has begun meanwhile. The government’s basic position seems to be that he’s a supporter of terrorism.

For several days I’ve listened to a good deal of Hamdi’s recorded commentary, as I’ve been able, though hardly to all there is to be found. (It’s a lot.) I expect I’ll keep at this for a while to come. What he was saying about what Palestinians and a broader ‘Muslim world’ (as we of the West might put it) had to confront and make sense of in days and weeks after 7 October 2023 is to my ears remarkable for comprehension and incisiveness if not in every respect for wisdom or for the highest degree of regard for truth. To get some appreciation for this in its depth and complexity, in my judgment, requires absolutely, for a Western and non-Muslim person like me, listening at length.

My listening to Hamdi so far has not led me to think him a ‘supporter of terrorism.’ That a few particularly intense excerpted minutes from a two-hour address given to a group in London the week after October 7 have become focal and been understood as incendiary is anything but shocking, though. That an Israeli or friend of Israelis mourning undefended lives coldly snuffed out at Hamas militants’ hands would react to Hamdi’s words with horror and fury, moreover, must at very minimum be reckoned human, natural, basic to us all.

Nothing in this post should be read as attempt at defense of those words of the ‘celebrate the victory’ clip Hamdi is notorious for. That’s hardly to say, however, that seeking to understand these words should end where a mourning Israeli might for sanity’s sake find it necessary to stop hearing them.

The feds don’t care in the least to understand Hamdi, of course. Their interest is use, to make of him an example. He serves their purposes as figure of a certain class of ‘enemy of the people.’ This fact of what Vlad Vexler often shorthands as ‘fascization’ likewise is no stopping place for making sense of the case, though certainly it matters.

The present post is for recommending that you listen to Hamdi yourself, not for pressing some pretense I might make to capsule explanation of Hamdi’s person and words. A great place to go for listening to him is the Thinking Muslim podcast, where he’s often a guest and where the questions posed to him are often good.

I encourage this kind of listening especially, reader, if you’re a left- or ‘progressive’-identifying person alarmed, like me, at increasing suppression of political speech in the U.S. and Europe — suppression underpinned by open racialization-rooted and religious-identity-rooted bigotry. Only perhaps relatively infrequently will individuals who come to represent for us groups targeted for such repressions stand out from the growing list of (exoticizable foreign-sounding) names appearing in our newsfeeds and be realized with a degree of full-dimensional personality in our mental images of them. And Hamdi, often on camera or recorded speaking at length, is somebody whom in a sense everyone’s offered unusually generous opportunity to get to know.

You’ll only naturally find, listening, that Sami Hamdi is far from being interchangeable with, say, fellow federally-detained and -threatened advocate for Palestinian self-determination Mahmoud Khalil. One way Hamdi’s personality might sharpen in outline for you — especially if your experience of the world includes, as mine does, a lot of exposure to sermonizing and a lot of attention centered on persons (in my personal history, all of them cisgender men by strict rule) positioned to give sermons — is with recognizing that he is somebody who speaks extraordinarily confidently and compellingly in the mode of preacher. (This isn’t to say that Hamdi is trained or ordained for some form of service in religious community. He doesn’t appear to be.) That reflects not only a kind of innate giftedness with words but some considerable (self-)cultivation in religious thought.

In reporting about his case in the past week, Hamdi is widely referred to as a journalist. And yeah, he’s sort of a journalist, but it’s sloppy usage. (I much prefer ‘commentator.’) To call him a preacher, as I’d like to, is of course if anything sloppier yet. I don’t wish to overstate what the word connotes. I do mean to say, though, that if you take time to listen to him, you should stick with it to the point — the closing minutes of his long Thinking Muslim interviews, for instance — where the flow really builds. It’s powerful stuff — powerfully resonant for me, anyway, even as a non-Muslim listener.

To cultivate one’s religious life and / or to become cultivated in religious thought is risky business, I think it important to appreciate. I hint above at what I regard as deficit of wisdom in Hamdi’s talk around what Palestinians face. Elsewhere, in private and public conversation, I’ve a couple of times this past week called him a fool.

I call Hamdi fool particularly where, in those days soon after 7 October 2023, you can find him spinning a lot of not necessarily mutually coherent predictionistic accounts of an alteration of popular consciousness and transformation of state-power dynamics in the region, turns he imagines to be inescapable consequence of Al-Aqsa Flood’s bold stroke. I call him fool most of all as I hear him implying that of all the extraordinary life-work of Gazan Palestinians realized in sustaining, under Israel’s constant intensive strangulating pressure, a society with universities and hospitals and marketplaces and mosques (and indeed churches) &c., it’s this exploit with arms, this military spasm, this doomed-in-conception offensive spent in a few days, which the world (but in Hamdi’s view Muslims worldwide, obviously, first and most) now have to regard as signal historic manifestation of Palestinian determination to overcome and to live — that even if that desperate and necessarily futile military gesture should put at risk of erasure all the other living and overcoming Gazans have so long been about, nevertheless of its own intrinsically heroic character this action of arms now surpasses and goes before, the one true and validating tragic fleeting triumph, the hinge on which all other meanings of the phrase ‘Palestinian agency’ now turn.

Well. A lot of religiously-formed minds, especially those of young men, see in military heroics what Hamdi seems, or two years ago at any rate seemed, ready to see in Aqsa Flood. This confusedness, insofar as it’s religion-tethered at root (a path of question I don’t mean to diverge on), is of course hardly a phenomenon special to one religion — or certainly is no less to mine than to Hamdi’s.

What I do not say of Hamdi, it should be clear here, is that he’s stupid. He’s a person of great gifts, unquestionably of greater intellectual gifts than a guy like me. But you can be plenty smart and still a fool.

The unpleasant truth is that Hamas, heretofore Israel’s behind-the-back instrument for maintaining greater-Palestinian political instability and division, in mounting this attack with its sting of actual threat helped current Israeli leadership to a new opening, a new gambit, in which Gaza might in effect be simply exed-out in Israel’s field of long-span conflict, even as progressive tearing of West Bank territorial fabric was already powerfully accelerating, repeatedly greenlit by Trump- and Biden-led Western powers. Hamdi is exceptionally well educated and informed, travels all over the region, talks first-hand to all kinds of people. If Heer in Canada can see what’s in fact going on with Israel-Palestine in the moment of sudden October 7 conflagration, Hamdi can see it as well. Does Hamdi want to see? Maybe the problem with a guy like Hamdi is seeing too much at once, though, rather than too little or too selectively.

edit (nov 3)A different version of this post might have been written with care to argue that Heer’s and Hamdi’s understandings in speaking e.g. of eventual victory for Hamas, as they do both do in late 2023, aren’t the same. It’s a version of the post that didn’t and I’m afraid won’t come to be. But I am conscious of having left holes.

And — before I tumble into pointless snark — the unpleasant truth again considered is that here the whole is always too much for anyone to see with a clear sense of its meaning.

I’m a bit sorry that it’s taken this provocation of the Hamdi case — this latest chaos-politics move by current U.S. government, outrageous in disregard for the man’s rights as human being and as peaceable citizen of a country with which ours pretends, at least, to be on peer terms in tight international alliance — to knock my thoughts sufficiently into focus that I could get down a few words responding to the ongoing degradation of U.S.-Israel-axis affairs, heart of modern ‘liberal order.’ Interesting a figure as Hamdi is, genuine though my appreciation for much about him is, there are others in the struggle for Palestinian recognition and liberation, resistance to liberal-order domination, whom I’d wish instead to give attention like this.

One of these, I hint above, is Mahmoud Khalil. That this government wants to represent to us Khalil, too, as dreadful terrorism-backer says all we probably need to know for gauging with what kind of seriousness we should regard the charge as applied to Hamdi. But more significant for me here: Khalil’s is a voice we ought to hear in answer to Hamdi the overzealous fabricator of victory legend. Not that Khalil is anything like the compelling speaker Hamdi is or that he would likely be very impressive opposite Hamdi in direct dialogue. He isn’t very impressive opposite e.g. Ezra Klein! But he is someone in whom hard-won wisdom is much in evidence — and who seems genuinely to understand one or two things about political hope in meeting with great loss, sorrow, and doubt.