No Permanent Spring: Notes on War

Long memory, disbelief, and imperial inertia.

I.

What made you declare the dead body dead?
Did you declare the dead body dead?
How well did you know the dead body?
How did you know the body was dead?

Did you wash the dead body
Did you close both its eyes
Did you bury the body
Did you leave it abandoned
Did you kiss the dead body

– Harold Pinter, “Death (Births and Deaths Registration Act 1953)”

II.

The drones and missiles have, mercifully, been shot down. No deaths came from Iran’s retaliation against Israel. And yes, it was very much a retaliation. So much breath and ink are expelled on Israel’s right to defend itself, but what self-respecting government would allow another country to bomb its consulate? 

From the outside, it would seem that Iran’s response was more for show than a direct preamble to a wider war. That is still in the works. Everyone knows it. We may comfort ourselves with Biden urging restraint from Netanyahu, and this time around it may serve to temporarily cool tensions. Without a comprehensive political solution that centers the rights of the displaced and subjugated, the slow sleepwalk toward a wider conflict that engulfs the entire region is surely inevitable. 

Consider the long memory of this region. As the refrain from the Palestine solidarity movement has gone, the roots of instability go back well before October 7th. There are more than a hundred years of imperial meddling thrumming underneath the region: borders arbitrarily redrawn by colonial authorities, sectarianism stoked, undemocratic regimes propped up, democratic ones overthrown, power vacuums that have been filled by truly horrifying figures and political parties. 

Between Israel and Iran are at least two countries – Syria and Iraq – whose landscapes have been utterly ripped apart by civil strife and foreign intervention. As for Jordan, its own modus vivendi with Israel has never been particularly solid. A monarchy whose parliamentary powers exist on nothing more than paper can declare alliances with whomever it pleases, but this hasn’t stopped pro-Palestine sympathies from flourishing in the country. Particularly given the presence of at least 2 million Palestinian refugees within Jordan’s borders. 

Iranian officials had said that they would forgive the strike against its consulate if Israel withdrew from Gaza and put a permanent ceasefire in place. Who knows whether this was an offer made in good faith, but the refusal of Netanyahu to even countenance the offer is in keeping with his and Likud’s longstanding refusal to allow an independent Palestine. Such an independent state did not fit into Israel’s designs as part of a constellation of regimes rapidly developing and flush with oil money. The notion that this can be established on any kind of stable basis has always been fantasy. 

Funny thing about geopolitical fantasy: the more material force is put behind making it real — the more money and resources and bombs and bullets — the more vicious the reality that overtakes it. 

III.

When the rockets destroyed the world everything whistled
Every hard surface and hard edge whistled
Mouths of medicine bottles and whiskey bottles
Cornices of law courts and office blocks
Cracks in rocks
Whistled in derision
As the tyres stopped screeching the winds whistled in the broken windows
Doors and wheelchairs – some empty, others carrying sick and maimed – whistled as they flew high over the great plains
The mountains whistled
The last breaths whistled from dead mouths
And as the flesh burned from faces the skulls whistled
Surfaces too soft to whistle burned and the fires whistled
The heart leapt like a bird in its burning cage and the ribs whistled
The earth whistled in derision
In final derision at the lord of creation
In derision derision
That drowned the sounds of explosions and the last screams of the world’s masters
The whole earth whistled in derision against the lord of creation

– Edward Bond, The War Plays

IV.

When it first aired on the BBC in 1984, Mick Jackson’s Threads unsettled and disturbed audiences. This was the first film to realistically portray the immediate and long-term aftermaths of nuclear armaggeddon. Cities aren’t leveled so much as turned into mass warehouses of the dead and soon-to-be dead. People watch loved ones succumb to radiation sickness. Culture and government disintegrate, civilization is sent back to the Middle Ages. Survivors, staring into a bleak future, come to see those killed as the lucky ones. It is a devastating watch, graphic and unforgiving. 

One of the film’s often-overlooked strengths is in its first twenty-odd minutes, before the ICBMs launch. The film’s narrative in these minutes revolves around a young couple, Ruth and Jimmy, planning to marry after Ruth discovers she’s pregnant. The geopolitical tensions that turn the Cold War hot are told through cold title cards and news broadcasts. Interestingly enough, one of these catalysts is a Soviet incursion into Khomeni-era Iran, soon followed by a US occupation of the country’s southern region. 

What is so haunting about the domestic, kitchen sink plotline, however, is its illustration of how easy it is to push the run-up to apocalypse into the back of our minds, even as we grasp the essential danger of the situation. Powerless to change things in the immediate, we go about our lives as normal. Only in the final cataclysm does the impossibility of this clear. 

“How could it have come to this?” we ask. Actually, how could it not? Read the accounts of even the most politically savvy observers in the run-up to both World Wars, and you find a kind of double consciousness: a resigned understanding of all signs pointing to catastrophe, mixed with disbelief that it could really and truly happen.

V.

The difference between you and your government is much bigger than the difference between you and me. And the difference between me and my government is much bigger than the difference between me and you. And our governments are very much the same.

– Marjane Satrapi

VI.

Asaf Elia-Shalev’s recently-published Israel’s Black Panthers deserves to be widely read for a variety of reasons. It’s not just that the book tells a much-ignored story about a protest movement that was considered one of Israel’s worst enemies within during a key moment in its history. It’s that in doing so, Israel’s Black Panthers complicates the false binary between Jews and the “darker” countries Israel claims to protect them from. 

Israel has always conceived of itself as a project more European in nature than Middle Eastern. That most people in Europe and North America think of a white person when they think of a Jew is testament to how successful that project has been on an ideological level. That’s not to say that the modern state has been a bastion of raw Ashkenazi experience, lifted wholesale from the Pale of Settlement and transplanted into the desert of the Levant. Much of what characterized Eastern European Jewishness – speaking Yiddish, Bundism and socialist ideas, a prioritization of intellectual curiosity over physical toughness – had to be sidelined or purged from memory for modern Zionism to take root. At its core, the Zionism of Herzl and Jabotinsky was an attempt to save Jews from the worst of European imperialism by emulating it, proving that the children of Israel could dominate alongside rather than be dominated by. 

This meant that, in its earliest years, the Israeli state had no idea how to handle Jews that arrived from surrounding countries rather than from, say, Poland, Russia, or the United States. Frequently they were shoved into isolated camps, far from the major urban centers. Or they were housed in the poorest parts of Jerusalem, normally into neighborhoods that had until recently been predominantly Palestinian, where they could be easily neglected and deprived of basic education and even sanitation services. These Jews, now mostly referred to as Mizrahi, were viewed as at best a nuisance and at worst a menace to be put in their place by the authorities.  

Barely a decade into Israel’s existence, more non-white Jews were leaving the fledgling nation than arriving. Many were simply disillusioned, hoping to return to countries where, whatever faults and risks might await them, they would at least be able to find a Jewish community that accepted them as Jews, including in places like Iran.

We don’t hear about this often. Just as it’s rarely acknowledged that Iran contains the second-highest number of Jews in the Middle East to this day. Just as we so rarely hear about the history of Jews in Arab countries not related to their aliyah. Nor do we hear much about the treatment of Persian or Moroccan or Iraqi Jews after arriving in Israel: the racism and discrimination, the enforced poverty, the abject violence, the ghettoization. We certainly never hear of how, for a time, this meant that many Jews of non-European extraction felt more in common with the Palestinians, with Black militants in America, than with their Ashkenazi counterparts.

Why do you think that is?

VII.

Who’s going to mobilise darkness and silence? that’s what I wondered in the night. By the third day I could hardly walk but I got down to the river. There was a camp of Chilean soldiers upstream but they hadn’t seen me and fourteen black and white cows downstream having a drink so I knew I’d have to go straight across. But I didn’t know whose side the river was on, it might help me swim or it might drown me. In the middle the current was running much faster, the water was brown, I didn’t know if that meant anything, I stood on the bank a long time. But I knew it was my only way of getting here so at last I put one foot in the river. It was very cold but so far that was all. When you’ve just stepped in you can’t tell what’s going to happen. The water laps around your ankles in any case.

– Caryl Churchill, Far Away

VIII.

Spring has been slow to arrive in Los Angeles this year. When news broke that Iran had launched drones in the direction of Israel, the rain had become a chilly sluice, the kind that you expect to see making pulp of people’s newspapers in London in November rather than mid-April in Southern California. 

In the minds of most Angelenos, the rain should be done by now. And that’s only accounting for winters when there’s any rain to speak of. Most of us are used to the idea of only occasional blips in what is otherwise constant sun. Increasingly, though, the winter has gone from a short interruption of autumn-like mildness to a long reminder of California’s status as one of North America’s climate chaos bellwethers. The kind of place that can somehow be flooded, on fire, and in a drought all at the same time. 

In much the same way that it has become impossible to disentangle climate change from the machinations of capital, so too is it more and more difficult to avoid implicating imperialism, the crude violence and dispossession that allowed for resources to be extracted and markets to spread. It was at work when the west overthrew Mohammad Mossadegh after he dared to nationalize Iran’s oil in 1953. It is certainly moving and shifting underneath the current anxieties over how a new phase in this war might further impact the price of oil, this resource that probably should have never been siphoned from under the ground in the first place. 

Shifts in history are never fully foreclosed. They can, however, be minimized, made less plausible against other outcomes as certain phenomena move in a certain direction. The inertias of empire are quite real, and the longer they persist, the harder it is to see beyond a cold, bleak sky.