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Have you ever noticed how most #FreePalestine social media activists are just absolute human garbage?
Hold on hold on, sorry. That was inappropriate.
Have you ever noticed how most #FreePalestine social media activists are irredeemable steaming heaps of shit?
Better.
If you think I’m being too hard on kind-hearted folks who just want to know what’s so funny ’bout peace, love, and understanding, I assure you those are not the people I’m talking about. (But also, a lot of them suck too.)
No, I’m speaking rather of the kinds of people who scream for a ceasefire in one breath and a globalized intifada in the next, who warn of the coming Marxist revolution (any day now!) but expect the grownups to deliver food and hygiene products to the administration building they’re occupying for their intermittent hunger strike, who are probably smart enough to avoid peppering their organic fair trade word salads with antisemitic slurs but just can’t seem to help themselves.
Exhibit A: In one of those weird convergences that could only occur in this dumbest of all possible timelines, the lead singer of a prog rock band dropped into the comments of an influencer-journalist’s Instagram post about the indictment of Hamas terrorists in order to—you guessed it—rant about the Jews.
The Justice Department announced on September 3 that it had charged six Hamas leaders for the October 7 attacks. Yashar Ali, a prolific social media user and overall colorful character who worked on Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign and briefly lived with Kathy Griffin for some reason until she kicked him out, posted the first page of the complaint with a caption laying out the basic facts.
So far, so boring. But as is so often the case these days, things heated up in the comments. “Im sure theyre quaking in their terror tunnels,” one user quipped, referring to the hundreds-of-kilometers-long underground network that honeycombs the Gaza strip and shelters Hamas’ leaders.
“the ones in New York? With the stained bed ? Are those the tunnels you speak of? Yeah absolutely horrifying,” another user shot back. For those not conversant in the arcana of online antisemitism, this user was alluding to an incident in January at the Chabad-Lubavitch headquarters in Brooklyn. I won’t rehearse all the details here, but the single tunnel (not tunnels) and a stained mattress found in it gave rise to a host of outlandish antisemitic conspiracy theories about child sex trafficking.
Social media comments sections, the sewers of the internet, swarm with rats diverse in shape and size, sloshing through clotted streams of their own verbal ordure. What made this particular contribution noteworthy was that its author was Cedric Bixler-Zavala, lead singer of The Mars Volta and At the Drive-In.
Another user, someone I’m in a group chat with who tipped me off to the exchange, took issue with Bixler-Zavala’s remark, as seen above. The singer and writer of dark and outré nonsense lyrics doubled down with this comment, since deleted:
Let’s review: Yashar posts about the charges against the October 7 terrorists. A random user makes a crack about them hiding in their tunnels. The lead singer of a well-known band invokes QAnon-esque conspiracy theories about sinister Jewish American pedophiles (as one does). When confronted, he concedes that terrorists are bad but equates them with all people who support Israel’s existence, and even gets in a dig at Jewish people’s “real estate tendencies” (a nasty stereotype he must’ve learned about from Jay-Z). He further accuses his interlocutor of making himself the “main character” for [checks notes] talking about terrorists in response to a post about terrorists, and about antisemitism in response to his antisemitism.
Hard as it may be to believe, I think the troubadour who penned such catchy lines as “the kiosk in my temporal lobe is shaped like Rosalynn Carter” might have gotten his brains a bit addled by whatever propaganda he’s been huffing like paint thinner from a paper bag. Let him raise his entrails as an offer on whatever altars run dry he likes. One day it’ll be his temple left in ruins, and his orifice icicles shall hemorrhage no more.
So much for Bixler-Zavala and his subterranean homesick Jews. But his antisemitism, somehow both knee-jerk and braindead, is vastly preferable to the more subtle and elegant anti-Jewishness that flows through another tunnel tall tale I had the misfortune of reading recently: A nasty bit of romantic myth-making by one Dima Srouji, an architect and artist who, according to her website, “looks for ruptures in the ground where imaginary liberation is possible.”
I can’t tell whether Srouji is sufficiently self-aware to see how perfectly that phrase relates to her article “Depth unknown: archaeology of resistance,” published in The Architectural Review on September 3.
In any event, her predilection for flights of fancy is evident from the very first paragraph. “It is troubling,” she writes, bemoaning uprooted Gazan olive trees, “to imagine where these trees might have ended up, possibly shading a pavement in Tel Aviv.”
Well then stop imagining it! The IDF is not sending its soldiers—hundreds of whom have been killed in action by terrorists—into Gaza to steal olive trees to provide shade for Tel Aviv sidewalks. The very idea is so breathtakingly idiotic that all I can think to say is thank you, Ms. Srouji, for letting us know at the outset that we shouldn’t take you seriously. Your Zionist treenapping brigades are just as imaginary as your ground-rupture-based liberation.
The tank tracks where the trees once stood are but one component of “the surface readings of genocide” beneath which lies “a complex and entangled subterranean web of time, memory, life and death.” Hundreds of archaeological sites overlap with excavations of a different sort: “For a Palestinian farmer in Beit Lahia, a stone that sticks out strangely in their field could either be the tip of a buried tomb thousands of years old, or the hidden entrance to a tunnel built in the last few decades.”
Perhaps to preempt any accusation of hostility to Jews, Srouji invokes the writing of Eyal Weizman,1 one of the good ones, in her paean to Hamas tunnels. In “Tunnel Vision,” a 2021 article in The London Review of Books, Weizman
describes how Gaza’s first tunnels, dug in 1982 to connect two parts of Rafah after the city was divided, have since been used for the flow of medical supplies, food and weapons into the strip. For the last 40 years, tunnels have been destroyed and redug, expanded, extended and redirected. This infrastructure for movement, built over many years, is an architectural feat. Palestinians use the tunnels to travel from Gaza to Egypt, to receive an education in Cairo, or from Egypt to Gaza to visit their families and deliver medicines to their grandparents. The tunnels serve not only the militants who have one idea of Palestinian liberation, but also Palestinians who exercise liberation through the right to movement.
Yes, there are weapons being brought in by terrorists, but also: humanitarian stuff! medical supplies! grandparents! liberation! Of course, no smuggling of anything would be necessary if the terrorists would end their continuous efforts to kill Israeli civilians, but hey, then we wouldn’t have this great architectural feat! Then again, the architectural feat is currently being demolished by the IDF, taking civilian infrastructure down with it, but, um . . . did I mention liberation?
Srouji rather clumsily attempts to weave the terror tunnels and Gaza’s rich archaeological record into a single unified tapestry of Palestinian history and culture. The result is predictably contrived, the rough edges of her logic smoothed over with pseudo-spiritual gobbledygook:
It is not unlikely that the process of digging the tunnels of resistance led to the accidental excavation and exhumation of some of our ancestors and their goods. The tunnels themselves are accidentally archaeological in their depth and entanglement with the other strata. The ground acts as a complex field of contestation, resisting occupation and genocide; remnants of Palestinian ancestors interlock with excavated tunnels that provide Gazans with access to medicine and strength.
Naturally, the history of archaeology is rife with racism, colonialism, and exploitation. Europeans are incapable of understanding the artifacts on the same level as the revered ancestors (and, one supposes, diaspora Palestinians like Srouji, who are mystically imbued with the same wisdom). After removing the artifacts to their white people museums, they categorize and list them, instead of just like, I dunno, communing with them or whatever. Thus British archaeologist Flinders Petrie in the 1930s made a “morbid list of grave goods and human remains” which was “not unlike the recent list of tens of thousands of names released by the Palestinian Ministry of Health, naming the Palestinians who have been killed since October 2023.”
I would posit that Petrie’s inventory was in fact very unlike Hamas’ casualty list. For one thing, fewer entries were made up to inflate the numbers.
Srouji bemoans “Zionist archaeologists in Palestine” who only look for biblical artifacts and (she says) destroy everything else. I’m not sure she’s really in a position to be condemning agenda-driven archaeology. I also doubt she’s half as concerned with ongoing Palestinian efforts to destroy archaeological evidence of the Jewish historical narrative.
She finishes her piece with more praise of the “hundreds of kilometres of subterranean resistance infrastructure” that make the earth “both a battlefield and a sanctuary—an architecture where the struggles of the past and present converge, and where the seeds of future liberation are sown.” The ground and everything in it represents the “resilience and tenacity” of the Palestinians, their “vibrant, enduring culture that refuses to be extinguished.”
But that hopeful message simply doesn’t comport with the rest of the article. What you actually seem to be saying, Dima, is that Gaza is destined to be an eternal graveyard, and that you prefer that to compromising for a functioning society run by sane people. Surely there are people in Gaza—not off pondering a fetishized ideal Palestine from the safety of London, not waxing poetic about crumbling bones and Astarte figurines as they prepare for their next gallery opening—surely there are Palestinians who want to live now, rather than be martyred so that one day an echo of humanity might be retroactively breathed into them by future starry-eyed poet-scholars who will likewise consecrate their lives to death (or move to the UK, as the case may be).
Enough of this romantic bullshit. Gaza could have been built up into a flourishing Mediterranean statelet if it hadn’t succumbed to the psychopaths you’re determined to launder as brave resistance fighters, the terrorists who squandered billions of dollars on mostly ineffective weaponry to try to murder Jews rather than improve their own people’s lives. Shame on you for exalting a vision of Gaza as a glorious necropolis, a massive Jonestown forced into a suicide pact with a gang of Hamas thugs. And shame on The Architectural Review for the willful stupidity it took to not only swallow your bullshit but smear it on the page for the whole world to see.
Cedric Bixler-Zavala is a moron who’s either not educated enough or not intelligent enough to know better. He practices a form of activism that consists of rhetorically bashing one’s opponents with a blunt object.
Dima Srouji, a successful artist with a masters from Yale, is a moron with no excuse. Her activism takes a more passive form, requiring only that she luxuriate in the warm glow of Western left-wing pity and cultivate her precious sense of righteous victimhood, while suffering none of the consequences incurred by attitudes like hers.
Neither one has done a damn thing to free Palestine.
Weizman, a British Israeli, is the head of Forensic Architecture, a group that begins its investigations by forming a conclusion (Israel is deliberately, genocidally, murdering civilians in Gaza, say) and then sets out to collect and curate evidence to “prove” that conclusion, while suppressing any trace of exculpatory evidence or context. Their March 2024 report on Gaza does not contain the words “Hamas,” “terror/terrorist/terrorism,” or even “militant.” The word “fighter” appears once, but only to cast doubt on an Israeli claim.
The authors want their readers—people like the editors of The Architectural Review—to believe the IDF is a modern day Einsatzgruppen randomly massacring innocent people. This is textbook blood libel, and Europeans in particular eat it up. If the Jews are the Nazis, there’s no need to feel bad about the Holocaust anymore.
It is especially perverse that a Jew should so despise his people, his history, and himself that he would descend to this.
But I digress.
That Architectural Digest article is so horrendous you should consider adding a trigger warning.