Palestine In Scare Quotes

I averted my eyes, looked around, and stumbled through all the faces in the room till they finally rested on his. He was standing like a scared bird, waving one wing and using the other to hide his scar. Aya Rabah- Scars

Hana, the bravest wireless operator in the entire camp. No one is quite like her. She does the night shift in the wireless room, and goes with the girls to her military positions.” I looked at her. Her eyes were green, her hair was tied back in a pony tail. She had a feminine air despite the seriousness which her difficult assignments imparted to her. I asked her: “It’s unusual for a girl to be on duty at night all by herself!” “I’m not afraid of the night. Sometimes I used to be on duty at night, and I was not scared. The young men would be tied up along the combat lines and I would keep operating the wireless. At first, my parents wouldn’t agree to my work because they were worried about me. But I’ve done a three-month militia training course. I did it when the revolution entered the camp, and training began. They offered a course for girls. I was fourteen years old. It was a very strenuous course and I was in the third preparatory class at school.

There’s something I want to explain. And I want to be clear about it. You can spend your life being a humanist, a pacifist, a thoughtful person who does not even think about hating, or does not even know what it is to hate—that is to say, you can really and truly be a human being who is tolerant and open-minded and humane, judging people by how they behave toward you, and treating them the way you wished to be treated, but when you are being attacked, when bombs are falling around you, planes are hovering over your head, when your life is in danger and you are scared, It is so easy to look up to the sky and feel abject, boiling hatred for the people doing this to you, and curse them out. When you are fearful for your life, and you are being bombed by a certain group of people, you are not thinking, Oh, but I know that not all Israelis agree with this. There is no time for that. Just as there is no time for them to think that it is not all Lebanese attacking back. And there is no time to think about the Israeli pilot who wishes he weren’t in the plane dropping bombs on everybody. All you can think in these situations is, Fuck everyone. The summer of 2006 was the first time I had ever experienced this real, pure, true hate.

I lived in London for ten years and every time you saw a cop in the street you got scared. They are technically “civil servants,” but they do not fulfill this function. You talked about the US, the police being militarized—during the demonstrations for Gaza in France in Paris, it wasn’t civil servants in the streets, it was riot police. Robocop-looking kind of people. This by itself creates and implies violence. Precisely. That was the whole point. And also it might be important to point out that the Israeli police have been involved in the training of US police. So there is this connection between the US military and the Israeli military. And therefore it means that when we try to organize campaigns in solidarity with Palestine, when we try to challenge the Israeli state, it’s not simply about focusing our struggles elsewhere, in another place. It also has to do with what happens in US communities.

Chinese techno-authoritarianism scares the West. The language used is dystopian, and the fear heightened. Readers or viewers are meant to take away the idea that Beijing under President Xi Jinping is destined to create a global infrastructure of control, a unique threat to the world and incomparable to any other nation. Take a September 2020 article in the Atlantic in which journalist Ross Anderson painted a petrifying image of China wanting to have worldwide domination of artificial intelligence. “In the near future,” he wrote, “every person who enters a public space could be identified, instantly, by AI matching them to an ocean of personal data, including their every text communication, and their body’s one-of-a-kind protein-construction schema.” He noted that algorithms will soon be able to gather a multitude of data points, such as reading habits, purchases, travel records, and friends, as well as predict political opposition before it occurs.

I've forgotten how to breathe with my lungs I've forgotten speech I'm scared for my language Leave the rest and just bring back my language!

A Jew ain't only a religion, and it ain't a race. It isn't an ethnicity, and you aren't disqualified if you're good at spreading mayonnaise on white bread or bad at money or good at sports or bad at guilt. It ain't about whether your mother is Jewish or your father converted or both parents fasted on Yom Kippur. It don't matter if you were bar or bat mitzvahed, or if your grandma's recipe for chicken soup kicked Campbell's ass, or any of that. It ain't about a toe in Israel, or an opinion on Palestine, or an uncle who died of a heart attack in Brooklyn or Queens, or a family story from Ellis Island, or an aunt who was murdered by nazis or Russian pogromchiks, or whether or not three-fifths of your person is scared shitless of Auggie's "schvartzes," or at least the young bucks you see walking with guns out and half their pants down.