Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

I haven’t written much about Gaza since the war started, for two main reasons. One, because everything is already so clear. Britain, America, Israel and their allies have decided to try to eliminate a resistant population in a strategically crucial region, and the rest of the world is either participating, acquiescing or wringing its hands. Everyone can see what is happening; what can I add of any value that is not already entirely obvious? And secondly, because attempts to impose sense on such a senseless situation feel crass. The situation is so intensely disturbing, even the simple act of putting it into words seems already to trivialise it. As the Chicago-based Palestinian journalist Ali Abinimah of Electronic Intifada put it early on in this latest phase of the war, “People come to us for analysis. I don’t know how to analyse this. I don’t know what to say to people.” Because the annihilation of Gaza is also a war against meaning.

Our ability to make and tell stories is what makes us human. That’s also how we deal with suffering and pain and loss. But stories have an arc; there is a return from the abyss. Terrible, tragic things happen, even things which we might never heal from, but people change and adapt and weave the terrible into the story of their life. People die, but their influence lives on, their memory is celebrated and valued by those who knew and loved them. People suffer but they learn something and grow from their experiences, somehow, however awful they are. ‘Your gift will come from your wound,’ as the storytellers say.

But the sheer relentless nature of the holocaust in Gaza means there is no story arc. There is no return from the abyss. The abyss just grows and keeps growing. People are killed but before they can be grieved or celebrated or woven into a story, everyone who knew them is slowly (or quickly) killed as well, whilst anyone left is focused on survival. There is no time to make sense of anything, and no sense to be had anyway. There is no ‘personal growth’ to be made from this horror.

Ahmed Alnaouq, founder of the Palestinian group, We Are Not Numbers, lost his father, five remaining siblings and all fourteen of their children to an Israeli airstrike on his father’s home two weeks into the war. A year later, he was commissioned by the New Arab to write an article about it. He later told the Electronic Intifada about the process of writing this article: “Ten years ago, Israel killed my brother, my older brother, and that was the first time I lost a family member. But writing a story about my brother back then, it was much easier than writing this story about my family.  And I think it’s because when you lose only one brother, when you only lose one family member, you know that your sadness, your agony, your pain is focused, is concentrated, you know what you are lamenting for, you know what you are crying for. You know what is very deeply painful to you – it is a brother. Ten years ago, when Israel killed my brother, I couldn’t forget about my brother: I imagined, I remembered all the stories that we had together, all the memories, all the pictures: and for me that was a relief, because I knew who I was sad for. But when you lose twenty-one members of your family ..  you could not know who you cry for. I didn’t know to think about my father or my brother or my other brother or my sisters or my nieces and nephews, the fourteen kids who I raised some of them. I was very distracted for the past year. And because I was very distracted I couldn’t think of one specific person, I couldn’t dare to think of one of them for the past year, I would always avoid talking about them, I would avoid going to whatsapp messages that I shared with one of them. It was very difficult and I purposely tried to avoid remembering them because if I remember them I will be one hundred times more depressed than I am.”

And this is part of the intention. Resistance movements are built on stories: of repression and suffering and heroism. Refaat Alareer understood this very well (see his beautiful Ted Talk, ‘Stories Make Us’, here). He was perhaps the single most important figure in terms of bringing Gazan voices to the English-speaking world, and had educated and inspired a whole generation of English-language journalists and authors in the strip. In one of several books of Gazan writing he edited, he wrote that “Sometimes a homeland becomes a tale. We love the story because it is about our homeland and we love our homeland even more because of the story.” Israel wants to eradicate not only the Palestinians’ resistance and nation but also their ability to make sense of their situation. Hence the relentless killing of Gaza’s storytellers. Over 200 journalists and media workers have been killed by Israel in the past fifteen months, many in openly targeted attacks. Just last week, a clearly marked press van was hit by an Israeli missile, burning alive all five of its occupants. Refaat Alareer himself was hunted down and killed along with several members of his family in a targeted strike on his sister’s apartment on December 6th 2023 (perhaps not coincidentally, just three days after the British RAF began flying surveillance flights over Gaza for the IDF). It was the third attempt on his life: his own apartment and University had both been hit earlier in the war.. Famously, his last poem, written to his daughter Shaima, began ‘If I must die, you must live, to tell my story.’ But she too was killed, along with her husband and their baby son, in an airstrike on their home a few months later.

Think about the alcoholism rife in aboriginal communities in Australia and North America. This reflects not simply degraded material conditions and opportunities, but the transformation of a worldview rich with deep meaning into one rendered senseless through colonial erasure.

And they want to do that to the rest of us as well; they don’t want anyone to be able to imbue the story and concept of ‘Palestine’ with any meaning. And it is not easy to see a way to resist this – attempts to render meaning to the struggle, in the midst of a senseless holocaust, come across too often as crass denials of reality, using Palestinian suffering as a raw material to fuel our own pontifications.  Even as I write this now, it feels like that.

The tragedy is, Israelis are committed to this path because of their own need for a sense of meaning. The Nazi Holocaust had this same effect on many Jews, destroying their ability to make meaning of their individual and collective lives. But Israel was presented as their happy ending, one that made sense of the Holocaust and finally gave it meaning. It provided a final act that transformed that senseless event into a story. It was always a fiction of course; Amos Oz talks in his memoir about his mother’s suicide as a result of her inability to find meaning in her life after the horror of the Holocaust; for her, the mere concept of the state of Israel could not – despite (or perhaps because of) actually living there – help her overcome this.

To admit the failure of the project now would put Israelis right back face-to-face with the senselessness of the Holocaust. The final act was a myth. There never was any happy ending.

There is a way out of course, and it’s one Jews are increasingly taking – to embrace the fact that the struggle for justice is universal, and meaning comes from committing to that struggle, whatever the costs, with no exceptions. This means a decisive rejection of Zionism. But that is where meaning is to be found, even in the Holocausts and the Nakbas – for Palestinians, for Jews and for all of us.

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Putin meeting with Bashar al-Assad. Photo: Valery Sharifulin, TASS.

The lightning collapse of the Assad government in Syria in recent weeks made it clear that pretty much no one, inside Syria or out, considered this to be a state worth fighting for. It also seemed pretty clear that Turkey (with the probable backing of Israel and the US) had taken the opportunity to use the forces it had been training in Idlib for some years to make a serious power play. The west have long sought to turn Syria into a ‘failed state’ on the Iraq-Libya model, and the new situation has allowed Israel to destroy, almost overnight, the vast bulk of the country’s military installations, and expand its occupation in the South. This is what they have all been working for for thirteen years. What is less clear is the extent to which Russia was in on this move.

The mainstream interpretation is essentially that the latest turn of events is a major blow to Russia. Syria was Russia’s only solid Arab ally, home to its only warm-water naval base (Tartus) as well as a huge airbase (Hmeimim) crucial for its operations in Africa in particular. The ‘loss’ of Syria was therefore a crippling blow to Moscow; a consequence, supposedly, of the Russian army being bogged down in Ukraine and thus unable to commit the necessary military resources to put down the insurrection in Syria.

Combined with the fact that Iran and Hezbollah were also both recovering from Israeli attacks, this created a window of opportunity for the insurgents and their backers to make their move. And it was a window that might have been very brief: Hezbollah could regroup quickly and, if Trump were to honour his promise to immediately impose a peace deal on Ukraine on coming to office, large numbers of Russian forces could be again free to operate in Syria, perhaps within a couple of months.

This is obviously part of the picture. Russia’s options were clearly limited. Any deal it cut would have been made from a position of weakness, at least relative to its position in, say, 2018. But that doesn’t mean no deal was made at all. It is incredibly unlikely, in my view, that Putin would not have been consulted in advance.

Firstly, the risk of large swathes of Turkey’s carefully groomed insurgents being simply wiped out by Russian airstrikes was serious, and both Erdogan and HTS would have sought to avoid this eventuality if at all possible. Even if Putin lacked the capacity to ultimately defeat the uprising, they would certainly have attempted to convince him not to try rather than simply cross their fingers and hope that he didn’t.

Secondly, although it is easy to say in hindsight, this takeover was clearly in the cards for some time. All the fighters from former opposition-held territories retaken by government forces during the war had been pushed into Idlib. There they were joined, in March 2020, by over 20,000 Turkish troops, including special forces, armoured units and light infantry including the 5th Commando Brigade which specialises in paramilitary operations and mountain warfare. They were not there for a picnic; for four years they have been, in plain sight, training and consolidating the insurgent forces to relaunch their insurrection. Russia was obviously aware of this and would have planned for it.

Furthermore, although Russia might have found it difficult to commit large numbers of its own troops to Syria, it could certainly have subsidised the salaries of Syrian army soldiers, which could well have gone some way to mitigating the mundane bread-and-butter defections and passivity within the Syrian army. It chose not to do so, presumably for a reason.

This does not mean, of course, that the whole thing was a Kremlin plot all along, as some are now trying to suggest. One theory claims that Putin, by allowing the Syrian government to fall, has cunningly set a trap for the west, who will now be bogged down trying to stabilise Syria for years to come, just as the Soviets were bogged down in 1980s Afghanistan. But this suggestion makes no sense – the transformation of Syria into a ‘failed state’ has always been the west’s aim, which is why they have backed the most sectarian forces to accomplish it. They achieved this in Libya without getting ‘bogged down;’ they hoped to repeat their success in Syria, and they have now done so. This theory seems to be a desperate clutching of straws by people who simply cannot interpret any event as anything other than a genius plan by the Grand Master.

The truth, I suspect, is rather more nuanced. Here is a  working hypothesis: the basic parameters of the HTS takeover of Syria were worked out and agreed in advance by Erdogan, Netanyahu, Putin and Trump. I suspect Trump offered Putin a straight swap – Syria for eastern Ukraine; with the caveat that Russia could keep its Syrian bases. This was acceptable to Putin for several reasons.

Firstly, obviously, eastern Ukraine is his priority. Secondly, his only real concern in Syria was those bases, anyway. He may well have come round to the west’s ‘Divide and Ruin’ strategy – essentially, that it is easier and cheaper to secure your specific assets (bases, mines, oil wells etc) in a failed state using local militias, private security and/or your own armed forces than it is to secure an entire state to do so for you. Thirdly, Assad had, by all accounts, not been fully playing ball with Russia, and had been unwilling to turn Syria into the pure vassal state that Putin was demanding, making himself less valuable and more expendable in so doing. Fourth, Russia’s ultimate goal to take over patronage from the US of its Middle East client states can only be done by demonstrating Russia’s usefulness to Turkey, Israel and Saudi Arabia. In facilitating the fruition of those states’ thirteen-year regime-change operation in Syria, he has certainly done that, paving the way for (and perhaps already part of) future collaborations and deepening alliances. Fifth, just because Iran is an ‘ally’ of Russia, does not mean Russia wants it to be strong and autonomous. Quite the opposite. Like any imperial power, what Russia seeks are not allies, but dependencies. This latest move has gone a long way to transforming Iran from a Russian ally to a Russian dependency.

Cutting off Iran from the resistance in Lebanon and Gaza is no bad thing from Russia’s point of view: partly because Iran’s patronage of those groups acts as a source of power and autonomy for Iran, giving it some kind of ‘deterrence’ independent of the Russian defensive umbrella. If the resistance is cut off and neutered, Iran’s only source of deterrence (other than its own, admittedly formidable but nonetheless heavily Russian-reliant, defences) is Russia. And popular, autonomous, working-class resistance militias (such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis) are a nuisance for any imperial power anyway, a constant potential spanner-in-the-works to any colonial carve-up agreed by the Big Men.

And finally, of course, as discussed above, Putin’s options were limited; he could certainly have slowed the rebel advance but it is unclear whether he could have defeated it, and even the attempt to do so would have entailed some, potentially quite significant, diversion of manpower from the war on Ukraine. With limited options available, a deal that allowed him to keep eastern Ukraine and his Syrian bases would have likely seemed like the best available.

Claims that the latest events are a huge blow to Russia are therefore overstated. In strategic terms, if the bases are maintained, nothing has really been lost, other than a tedious responsibility to maintain an unpopular and disobedient client. And, in the longer-term, regional picture, much may have been gained, as suggested above.

The other argument often made is that this is a blow to Russian ‘prestige,’ that its ‘stock’ as a power willing and able to defend its allies will have been reduced significantly. A report from the Institute for the Study of War published shortly before the fall of Damascus, for example, claims that “Assad’s collapse would damage the global perception of Russia as an effective partner and protector, potentially threatening Russia’s partnerships with African autocrats and its resulting economic, military, and political influence in Africa.”

That’s possible, of course. But Putin’s ditching of Assad might in fact send a different message to Putin’s new African friends: “Don’t think you can just do whatever you want and still expect to be protected. Remember you are expendable. We can throw you to the dogs at any moment. And without our support, you won’t last five minutes. Never forget you are not an ally, but a client.” African leaders contemplating any resistance to the full integration of their armies under Russian tutelage may well be chastened by this message, and in a way entirely beneficial to Russian interests.

And whilst it is true that EU leaders are now demanding that HTS kick out the Russians, the truth is that it is not really the EU’s opinion that matters, but Trump’s. Let’s see what he says on the matter; and more importantly, what he does.

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Aja Monet by Fanny Chu.

“Who’s got time for poems when the world’s on fire?” asks Aja Monet in the heart-achingly beautiful and gut-wrenchingly honest ‘For Sonia.’ Her answer, it becomes clear, is that it is precisely when the world’s on fire that the movement, such as it is, needs the nourishment and meaning and soul that poetry provides more than ever. But Monet will not offer words to comfort and soothe at the expense of truth. “These days it hurts to write,” the track continues, “Every sentence is a false promise.”

Her debut album, 2023’s outstanding ‘When the Poems Do What They Do’ is a phenomenal emotional journey through what it means to be a human struggling to remain human in today’s confusing and collapsing world. Joy, pain, celebration, grief, triumph, bewilderment, love, disappointment, hope, and the struggle against hopelessness: it is all there, over an intricate soundscape that in turns rises, throbs and challenges like its subject matter.

Monet, who hails from Brooklyn, NYC but now lives in LA, was in Britain earlier this year to perform at We Out Here, the jazz festival founded by Gilles Peterson. I caught up with her shortly afterward.

Monet describes herself as a ‘surrealist blues poet,’ and when I ask about her influences, she explains that the blues is the thread running through all of them: “I grew up in the nineties so of course hip hop was a huge cultural phenomenon for my generation and in the streets that I lived and walked through in NYC. My mum was an avid listener of Soul and R and B, so that was huge for my family, and reggae was also a major part of my upbringing. But I would say that all of it stems from the blues. You can find traces of the blues in all of that music, it’s what connects it all; the connective tissue for African music on these shores and beyond. The blues is an African tradition, and we can hear traces of it in every genre of music. So it is what informs me, it’s what I am listening for in any song and is at the core of all my major influences.”

Certainly, Monet’s music has the healing quality that comes with the blues: expressing the pain in order to move through it. But for me, Monet’s performances with her band often evoke the call-and-response relationship between a Baptist preacher and their congregation, and I wonder whether the church had any influence on the young Monet: “As I became a teenager, I spent a lot more time in the church. I was grappling with some of the issues in my life and in my family – and church, and the relationship to God, was the place that I needed to go to to resolve things that did not make sense or that felt unjust. The church was a cornerstone for so many reasons.”

In terms of her art, however, the influence related more to honesty and integrity than to any particular style or form: “One of the things about the church is that when you go to praise and worship, you can’t lie in the music, because you are playing for God. It’s one of the few places where music is potent in terms of the truth and the authenticity of the expression – it’s not about bravado, or ego, or how cute you look, or how well you’re speaking, or how amendable you are to people’s feelings. It’s about conveying the depth and the full expression of God and all of its complex sentiments and realities. And that is something you can find in every walk of African life. African spirituality is crucial to who we are and how we make music and what we do; when I think of the church, and my time in the church, I think of African spirituality.”

Part of this spirituality, to my mind, is the collective participation in cultural and artistic expression – breaking down, that is, the barriers between ‘creators’ and ‘consumers’ of art. Monet suggests that “the first responsibility for all people is to themselves and to their self-determination – and the process of art is part of that process of self-determination. Art should be democratized; all people should find themselves living and moving in the world as artists or creators and innovators of their own conditions and their own realities. We will always need meaning-making, and we will always need value-making, and that is cultivated in the creative process and in how one arranges or approaches their imagination. There is a lot of work to be done in the psyche and the cultural imagination of our people, so this is literally the organizing space of the heart, of the mind, and of the spirit. When I sit down to create, the most transformative part of creating art is not the product that people consume, or the peace that people receive, it is the actual process and where one goes and how one delves into that process. That, I think, is the true test of the value of art. Democratizing the creative process for the people is part of what one would hope to do.”

This does not mean, however, that there is no such thing as an ‘artist’, characterized by their distinctive contribution to the field of cultural creation: “There are people that are gifted and are called upon to create in ways that are transcendent of role or title or marketing or capital, and there is no study, no amount of technical skill that will ever amount to some of the ways that gifts are poured into people who are born with those gifts. There are people that are born with a voice and you don’t know why or how and it will stop you in your tracks and there is nothing you can do about it; they couldn’t be doing anything else, and everything else in their life continues to return them back to that gift and to that craft. There are things that one can study and things that can never be taught.”

Over time, Monet discovered that there were some questions that the church could not answer: “As I became older I became more politicized and I learned that the things I was going through, and my family and community was going through, weren’t problems for just me or us and that, whilst, yes, God could help with problems at school or with rent or whatever, there were systemic things that were put into place to make it impossible for us to take care of those things. So whilst we were looking for some lofty figure in the sky spiritually to come help us solve our problems, we learned that there were authoritative figures that made policies that impacted our communities. So then one becomes transformed by that education – it is no longer just you and your problem; now it becomes a collectivized issue that we must organize around and learn the ways that we can combat it and shift and change it. At least that was my hope.”

From an early age, Monet began to throw herself into that organizing. She has a long-standing connection with the Haitian community in Miami and organized artists and cultural workers whilst still at College to raise funds for water filtration systems following the Haitian earthquake of 2010; the cultural connections made through that project made ripples that are still manifesting today.

She is also a long-term participant in the Palestine solidarity movement. I ask her about the deep historical and ongoing connection between the Black Radical tradition in the USA and the Palestine liberation movement, but the question seems to trouble her: “There is a real strange obsession with romanticizing oppressed people’s connections within our struggle. These connections are wonderful, I think we ought to tell those stories – but the reason it is important to be in solidarity with Palestine is not because I’m a Black person in America that knows what it is like to deal with oppression – it is just what is decently humanly right. This isn’t a discussion about perspective; there is no angle other than the truth, and the truth is, people deserve basic human decency and shelter and education and protection and the right to self-determination and to their land. I don’t see it any other way. It’s not about being white or Black or Palestinian or African; it’s just right or wrong. I get a little annoyed that we continue to try to use identity politics to pull people in because I just don’t know how the human heart will survive that sort of insult to character and to common sense. I am disgusted with the fact that people are clinging to their flags, their skin color and their tropes around who they think they are and who they want to be – in spite of,and at the expense of, the genocide that’s taking place, not just in Palestine, but in the Congo and in Sudan. It’s just preposterous, it literally disgusts me. Am I part of my tradition and part of the legacy of the African people who have tried to stand up and to do what’s right? For sure. But at this point – come on now.”

It feels to me like the current moment is very much one of demoralization, at least for those who have (or had) hopes for a world based on equality and justice. The collapse of the movements around Corbyn and Sanders (in which Monet was actively involved) have left a program of annihilation of surplus populations abroad, and persecution of the survivors and their relatives at home, as seemingly the only political game in town in both the USA and Britain, and increasingly the rest of the world also. I ask Monet where she sees hope today, and whether there are any movements from which she takes inspiration. Her answer is – as they all have been – unexpected: “I don’t know if I am inspired by much of anything by humans of late. I love people, don’t get me wrong. I’m not so pessimistic that I do not believe in the power of people to organize and change the conditions of their lives – but I feel less entitled to believe that it is just humans alone who will shift the conditions of our reality. There are other kinds of intelligences, other kinds of information that we must listen to and adhere to and that’s what is inspiring me: the invisible, the unlanguageable, the things that are not so much about our ego and who we are and what we are going to do to change it.

“Nature has the wisdom. The land, the earth, the air, the water, the wind, the sun, the sky – those are the places that I have seen the most change that has inspired me. When the lockdown happened, and everybody had to sit the fuck down and contend with themselves, more change took place across the globe than years and years of organizing by humans who thought that they were the greatest agents of change. The water cleaned up, the air cleaned up – it’s fascinating what humans not doing human shit can mean for the world.

“I’m learning and I’m growing because I age and I lose people and I watch the shifting of conditions in light of losing people. I understand things different than I did when I was younger; and death and grief have an incredible way of teaching you some of the most invaluable lessons. I don’t have the answers, I’m not so easily inspired these days – but music and art has kept me going. And some of the artists and cultural workers that I love inspire me because of the ways they are tapping into other realms and forms of information – and the better one can get at listening to, harnessing and facilitating that, the better we can get to be as people. So we’ll see.”

Monet’s commitment to authenticity–to calling it as she sees it, and not just as she thinks she is supposed to see it – seems to me to be exactly what we need in these times. We need to acknowledge the bleakness of our situation, and the limits of our ability to change it, to get to the place – intellectually, emotionally and spiritually – where we can begin to chart a way forward. It seems to me that the politics her analysis is pointing towards is that of a more holistic – more nature-centred and less anthropocentric – form of Marxism, freed from the shackles of colonel modernity and human entitlement. A Marxism infused with African spirituality – and the blues.

An edited version of this piece originally appeared in the Morning Star 

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