Friday essay: ‘A future of dust’ – Jeff Sparrow on Gaza and why, in evil times, writers have a responsibility to take sides

We must ask for no references to Gaza/Palestine/Israel as it’s a very sensitive topic in our area. If these topics are included it drastically changes our risk management plans for events. Thus for safety and harmony we kindly ask the guest speakers avoid these topics and any questions about it that come up.

Sam Wallman and I received this message from our publicist, one day before an event at a suburban library about our coauthored book.

“Did they even read the damn thing?” Sam joked, as we strategised our response.

Twelve Rules for Strife discusses grassroots social change. It celebrates the creativity of the people historian Studs Terkel described as the world’s “etceteras”. It contrasts the power of collective solidarity with what we dub “smug politics”: a liberalism that treats the masses as irredeemably backward, and so requiring careful management by the clever few on whom progress supposedly depends.

We had been invited to discuss the political agency of ordinary people – and then told our audience couldn’t hear about the world’s most significant crisis.

But Gaza is all I think about.

In January, six-year-old Hind Rajab fled the fighting in Gaza City alongside her extended family. An Israeli tank targeted their car, killing almost everyone inside. Amid the wreckage and the blood, Hind’s 15-year-old cousin, Layan Hamadeh, phoned the Palestinian Red Crescent, crying and pleading for help.

“They are shooting at us,” she said. “The tank is right next to me.”

The dispatchers heard Layan scream as a machine gun again raked the vehicle. When they rang back, Hind, the only person now alive, answered.

“I’m so scared. Please come. Come take me. Please, will you come?”

She stayed on the phone for three hours, while the Red Crescent transmitted her location to the Israeli army and dispatched an ambulance – and then the line dropped out again.

Twelve days later, Hind’s surviving relatives found the wreckage of a van with two dead paramedics sprawled inside. Nearby, they located the car in which Layan, Hind and their family lay. An investigation by the US-based Forensic Architecture team established that 355 bullets had hit the vehicle. The researchers concluded that the shooters must have realised the vehicle contained civilians.

“They were small,” writes W.H. Auden in The Shield of Achilles,

And could not hope for help and no help came: What their foes liked to do was done.

Safe spaces and moral seriousness

I mention Hind because our interaction with the library (“we are doing this for everyone at the moment”, its email said) echoed the decision by the State Library of Victoria to cancel workshops by pro-Palestinian authors Omar Sakr, Jinghua Qian, Ariel Slamet Ries and Alison Evans. Grotesquely, the library cited its fears for children.

Within the arts and elsewhere, sensitivity has been weaponised against Palestine. Sam and I were told we could not mention Gaza for “safety and harmony”, just as the State Library of Victoria explained that at a “time of heightened sensitivities” it needed to ensure “cultural safety”. When three actors wore keffiyehs for the curtain call of the Sydney Theatre Company’s performance of The Seagull, a subsequent letter accused them of using a “safe space, a theatre that is meant to bring communities together […] as a platform for a political stunt that sought only to divide and alienate”.

Ironically, Sam’s illustrations for the book we were invited to discuss draw on research I had done about the evolution of the “safe spaces” concept. The term emerged in the United States in the mid-1960s. It was first used by the gay and lesbian bars where patrons sheltered from homophobic police. Then it came to be used for the centres, shelters and bookshops in which the pioneers of women’s liberation organised.

The meaning of a “safe space” shifted during the mass movement against the Vietnam war. In 1972, the psychoanalyst Chaim Shatan wrote for the New York Times about attending a “rap session” with the activist group Vietnam Veterans Against the War. He coined the phrase “post-Vietnam syndrome” for psychic injuries inflicted on men “deceived, used and betrayed” by those who led them into a cruel and brutal conflict. The condition pertained not to combat per se, but the political context in which it took place.

When the anti-war movement declined, damaged veterans interpreted their suffering through less collective and more psychological narratives. In 1980, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual III included “post-traumatic stress disorder”, a condition stripped of the political specificity on which Shatan had insisted. The description related to any severe stressors, and so could be diagnosed away from the battlefield. The US Department of Veterans Affairs listed “natural disasters, serious accidents, assaults or abuse, or even sudden and major emotional losses” as possible causes.

PTSD entered popular consciousness through depictions of veterans traumatised by backfiring cars or other noises resembling gunfire. By analogy, feminist commenters on the early internet began posting warnings before discussing sexual abuse, eating disorders or other topics that might “trigger” involuntary responses. The practice spread through blogs and then social media, and made its way to US universities in the 2010s.

Most campus trigger warnings simply replicated the journalistic convention of providing audiences notice before the display of disturbing content. Nevertheless, lurid – and sometimes entirely false – stories about safe spaces provided ammunition for the never-ending culture war in which right-wing populists denounced universities for indulging politically-correct snowflakes. It was that backlash, more than anything else, that brought the terminology into widespread use.

For a small number of radicals, trigger warnings and safe spaces became, in the absence of a mass student movement, a mechanism for shielding the marginalised and oppressed. To that end, activists looked to policies enforced by sympathetic student unions or university administrations. The reliance on institutional support gave the strategy a distinctly bureaucratic character, with “safety” defined and imposed from the top by a tiny and often self-selected minority.

The meaning of “safe spaces” evolved, in other words, from an adjunct to mass struggles to a version of the “smug politics” our book polemicised against.

That was why the term provided convenient cover for the opponents of Palestinian solidarity: the historical association with campus activism eased the conscience of “progressive” administrators, even as their bans received applause from the conservatives who had mocked and belittled safe spaces in the 2010s.

Consider how the organisers of Western Australia’s major arts festival prepared for discussions of Palestine. Under the heading “Perth festival fosters a safe and inclusive environment”, they explained:

there is great concern and distress felt by members of our community in response to the suffering and tragic loss of innocent lives in the conflict between Israel and Hamas. Our hearts are with all those who are hurting or have lost loved ones or friends.

Perth Festival seeks to bring people from broad backgrounds and perspectives together to embrace our shared humanity and foster understanding and compassion through a diverse program of artistic experiences. We believe art has the power to unite people and bridge divisions. […]

We all have a collective responsibility to engage with each other – including our audiences, artists, staff and volunteers – in a mutual spirit of safety, inclusivity, respect, courtesy and tolerance.

Fine sentiments, in the abstract. Yet conciliation is a virtue only in particular circumstances. People squabbling over a cake might, respectfully and courteously, cut it into halves. They couldn’t do the same with a disputed kitten – at least, not without covering themselves in blood.

The International Court of Justice has declared “plausible” the allegations that Israel is committing acts of genocide in Gaza. United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese says that there are “reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating the commission of the crime of genocide […] has been met”. Israeli Holocaust scholar Raz Segal speaks of “a textbook case of genocide”.

The University Network for Human Rights, the International Human Rights Clinic at Boston University School of Law, the International Human Rights Clinic at Cornell Law School, the Centre for Human Rights at the University of Pretoria, and the Lowenstein Human Rights Project at Yale Law School have collaborated on a report that concludes Israel has

committed genocidal acts of killing, causing serious harm to, and inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians in Gaza, a protected group that forms a substantial part of the Palestinian people.

How much less does festival etiquette matter than credible, serious claims about the worst crime known to humanity? A paternalistic injunction to “bridge divisions” displays a jaw-dropping lack of moral seriousness, as if artists and audiences should find middle ground between those opposed to genocide and those supportive of it.

For or against?

To illustrate the perversity of the safety trope, consider the literary response to a different war.

In June 1936, Nancy Cunard, the poet, shipping heiress and bohemian, circulated a document to her extensive network of writerly contacts asking about their attitudes to the Spanish Civil War. At the time, most of the left supported the Spanish republic against General Franco. Many on the right – particularly, the Catholic right – backed the fascists, presenting Franco’s insurrection as a defensive war against communism.

Countries like Britain and Australia maintained a purported neutrality, though, as historian Paul Preston explains, “everything was done in legal and financial terms to facilitate arms procurement by the [fascist] rebels while obstacles were repeatedly put in the way of the Republic purchasing arms and equipment”.

Despite the controversy, Cunard did not urge the community of writers to come together and embrace a shared humanity. She sought, rather, to widen its divisions: “now, as certainly never before,” she said, “we are determined or compelled, to take sides. The equivocal attitude, the Ivory Tower, the paradoxical, the ironic detachment, will no longer do.”

Rejecting the logic of the “safe space”, Cunard demanded writers adopt a position:

Are you for, or against, the legal government and the people of Republican Spain? Are you for or against Franco and Fascism? For it is impossible any longer to take no side.

The Left Review published the responses as a sixpenny pamphlet, Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War. It remains a remarkable document, with 148 statements from some of the 20th century’s greatest writers – Aldous Huxley, T.S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett, H.G. Wells, W.H. Auden, Ford Maddox Ford, Christina Stead, Arthur Koestler – alongside many figures now entirely forgotten. Cunard divided contributors into three categories: “For”, “Neutral?” and “Against”.

She justified her project by taking seriously the claims artists made for their work. If poets were, as she said, “the most sensitive instruments of a nation”, their very sensitivity demanded a response to the war. As Thomas Mann argued, the artist “ever occupies humanity’s furtherest outposts” – and as such could not “be allowed to shirk a decision”.

By comparison, today’s safety rhetoric reveals a cruelly diminished understanding of culture and its role. When submitting applications for funding, event organisers celebrate the supposed propensity of creatives to speak the unsayable. They don’t describe their programs as “safe”. They invoke Kafka’s call for an art experienced like “a fist hammering on our skulls” and scour thesauruses for words like “challenging”, “provocative”, “brave” and “transgressive”.

Over Gaza, however, curatorial courage melts away faster than Kafka’s frozen sea, as if artists can shock and provoke only when absolutely nothing is at stake. The insistence on “safety” demonstrates that arts administrators understand culture as an umbrella full of holes – perfectly fine until actually required.

Individual responsibility

In June 1937, the singer and actor Paul Robeson addressed a fundraising event for Spain in London’s Albert Hall. “Every artist, every scientist, every writer,” he said, “must decide now where he stands […] The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or for slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative.”

Both Robeson and Cunard stressed individual responsibility in a moment of extreme moral crisis. But both also made a different, and apparently contradictory, claim. Invoking choice, they hinted at necessity (“I had no alternative”), implying that the war forced everyone, whether they liked it or not, to pick a side.

By then, the stakes were evident. A victory for Franco meant mass extermination: a program of reprisals Preston later called the “Spanish Holocaust”. It ensured the consolidation of fascism, not in a single country, but throughout Europe and the world. A global conflagration would follow, a crisis engulfing everything and everyone. Partisanship was inevitable because the catastrophe made every safe places deadly. We might say something similar today.

After the second world war, the victorious nations established various rules and structures designed to ensure that the horrors that began with Spain and culminated in Auschwitz never recurred. The norms and institutions so forged included the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, and the Geneva Conventions. All of them were flawed and partial, repeatedly used in the decades that followed to legitimate the powerful against the weak. Nevertheless, they at least symbolised an ideal of international relationships governed by something other than naked violence.

That model has now been shattered. The Gaza Strip – a territory only 41 kilometres long and less than 12 kilometres at its widest – houses nearly two million Palestinians, 47 percent of them children. Israel has dropped thousands of tonnes of explosives on that tiny area. The death toll is now more than 43,000. At least 31 of the 36 hospitals have been damaged or destroyed, with more than 800 health care workers slain. Over 130 journalists have been killed (only 69 died in the whole second world war), and 300 or more aid workers are dead. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the United Nations report the systematic infliction of torture.

As Amnesty International’s head Agnès Callamard argued, Gaza has revealed international law to be “frankly useless”. Israel has been accused of violating the Geneva Conventions – and been rewarded by Washington with US$17.9 billion in military assistance.

In an increasingly unstable geostrategic environment, marked by rising tensions between the US, China and Russia, all the historic mechanisms for governing and restraining conflict lie in ruins. “We are really as close to the abyss as we have ever been,” Callamard says – and the chasm extends beyond military conflict.

The international strategy for climate action depends, utterly and absolutely, on a liberal consensus now defunct. In theory, the 2015 Paris Agreement, by which nations agreed to limit emissions, mandates legally binding obligations. But given that Israel has simply ignored rulings by the International Court of Justice – and suffered no consequences as a result – who or what will compel recalcitrant leaders to fulfil climate pledges?

The willingness of Western nations to privilege strategic interests over the lives of Palestinian children raises obvious questions about what or whom might be sacrificed as the environmental emergency intensifies. The profits from fossil fuels – a staggering US$2.8 billion dollars every day for the last 50 years – provide a substantial incentive for the wealthy to continue with carbon business as usual. They know that rising temperatures disproportionately affect the poor and the brown – and Gaza has shown such people can be disposed of with impunity.

The time is short

In the 1930s, the Spanish writer Miguel Hernández warned:

A future of dust advances, A fate advances In which nothing will remain; Nor stone on stone nor bone on bone.

So too today. The horrors of Gaza will resonate for decades to come.

Paradoxically, the very scale of the crisis makes worthwhile even the tiniest gesture of solidarity. When Sam and I said that we would not speak at a censored event, we received, almost immediately, an apology from the organisers. The directive, they explained, had not originated from the staff, but had been circulated without their knowledge by someone in management. We should ignore the ban, they said. We could discuss whatever we wanted. They really hoped we would speak.

We did, and I’m glad that we did.

It wasn’t a huge event: perhaps 30 or so people around a makeshift stage and a dodgy speaker system. The participants were, like most attendees at literary events today, old, even frail, determinedly rugged up against a cold winter night. But they raised Palestine before we said anything.

“I feel like I’m going mad,” a woman in her seventies told me:

Like there’s something wrong with me. All these dead children, and we’re supposed to think it’s all right, that it’s normal. But it’s not! It’s not!

She was almost crying. I doubt she cared very much about our book of cartoons about political organising. She came to a public event because she sought human connection, looking, in her anguish, for others who shared the sense of profound moral injury.

And there are lots of us. If any good can be salvaged from this evil time, it is the solidarity of ordinary people, the crowds assembling again and again and again at events at which noisy contingents of Jews and Palestinians stand side-by-side. Auden described how, in the struggle for Spain, “our moments of tenderness blossom”. So too in the movement for Gaza, which brings together a kaleidoscope of identities, ethnicities and genders: refugee families alongside delegations of lawyers, Queers for Palestine next to pious Christians, Indigenous leaders on almost every platform.

I have never experienced an Australian writers’ festival or cultural event that manifests anything comparable to the diversity of Palestinian solidarity, nor one in which the same youthful idealism dominates. A literary culture that, in the name of safety, guards itself against the world will, almost by definition, descend into sterility. By taking their place in the fight for Palestine, writers might, perhaps, play some role in reorienting a literature seemingly determined to pursue its own irrelevance.

But, really, that’s not what matters. Journalist Alex McKinnon has written about the experience of social media in a genocide, the cascading images of children burned and broken among their bombed-out homes, each clip or picture a unique obscenity, a pornography of violence that degrades us all by its existence.

You try and look away when you realise what you’re looking at but by then it’s too late, you put the phone down or turn it off or fling it away from you like a spider crawling on your hand but the image is already in your head along with all the other ones, filed away for when you’re in a Zoom meeting or meeting someone for coffee or rocking your daughter back to sleep in the middle of the night.

Many of us know what he means. Roland Barthes described photography in terms of the “punctum”: the accidental aspect of a particular scene that reaches out and pricks a viewer. I scroll, more or less unscathed, past a man flattened by an Israeli tank or a journalist sobbing as he learns his wife and children are dead, or a woman lying on a gurney with her brains leaking out and, for no obvious reason, it’s the cheap plastic necklace around the neck of a little dead girl that unexpectedly brings me completely undone.

“I don’t know if ‘radicalised’ is the right word,” McKinnon concludes, “but I’m a different person now than I was at the start of October. I’ve changed in a deep and fundamental way and I don’t see myself ever changing back.”

I don’t either.

In the 1930s, Auden expressed the nature of the obligation we now face:

The stars are dead. The animals will not look. We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and History to the defeated May say Alas but cannot help or pardon.

Writers – and everyone else – must take sides, irrespective of the sensitivities they offend. We have no choice. Gaza is not safe, and neither is the world that allows Gaza to happen.

This essay was shortlisted for the 2024 Melbourne Prize for Literature.

Jeff Sparrow has signed a statement of solidarity with Palestine from academics in Australian universities.