I Don't Need Your Sympathy

...says Bilal Khbeiz in e-flux. His points, in sum and therefore in caricature, are:

Westerners sympathize with victims in Gaza and Beirut at a mediated remove; this depersonalizes the conflict, and occludes, for example, the feelings of superiority that survivors of the shelling feel;

Sorrow, like Nietzsche says, is the crocodile tears of the mighty thanking their stars that they were not born weak. Removed from the conflict, the Western Left's compassion is worthless.

The various forms of "courage" displayed in the conflict are something the victims of the conflict never asked for. Ditto the sympathy.

Offhand, this strikes me as the kind of abstract, hair-splitting, namby-pamby, criticality-for-its-own-sake that is bound to land you a spot curating the Lebanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. But that's not really fair, and I like the piece...

To begin, false consciousness / white left guilt / "catastrophe tourism" is the least of Gaza's concerns, isn't it? In America, as Khbeiz surely knows, sympathizers -- even we false-hearted colonialist sympathizers -- are hard to come by. Would he prefer to deal with bloodthirsty backwoods reactionaries? Perhaps; perhaps he's on a "radical honesty" therapy regimen. So, imagine a world without Left guilt checking, via the media, America's insane preoccupation with the preservation of Israel. Imagine the New York Times rooting Israel on. Would we have had Nicolas Sarkozy in country negotiating a cease-fire? Would we see George Mitchell as special envoy? I hate to sound like these measures are cure-alls; I know they're not. But imagine nothing at all happening. You don't need white guilt; fine, we'll just spend our time and money liberating something else. Zimbabwe, for instance. Or Sri Lanka.

Also, I'm waiting to see what benefit "survivor's glee" has brought to Palestinians. What is the political role of selfishness and opportunism? The man who happily clears the rubble of his neighbor's house is the one to be bombed next. What stops that? Show me the next ten words, beginning with Selfishness and Opportunism.

The false-hearted Western sorrow that Khbeiz so laments -- and which is so omnipresent in the States, or plain ubiquitous outside of Paris -- is you know a problem insofar as it exists. Khbeiz' problem here is that he caricatures the entire West as a (what, slightly more muscular, and frumpier?) version of the international art-fair jet-set. This is the same kind of myopia that obscures real people's suffering/joy from our Western eyes, and that Khbeiz is so eager to denounce. The West does not sit in committee at Art Basel Miami Beach. A joke/sham version of it does perhaps.

Returning to the point above, there are plenty of different kinds of Westerners, and lots of them would permit a completion of the Palestinian naqba as surely as the sun rises in the East.

Again, I'd like to stress that I find it hard to argue with a man who is in theater right now (I assume; maybe he's in Geneva and has mooted his own argument thereby). And the "catastrophe tourism" of the West, our occluded understanding, the scandals (in the Greek sense, lit. "a stumbling block") to our intellect, the glee of survivors, the pompous "courage" of Hamas' leadership chilling in Syria...all true, too true.

But people asked for this. Palestinians put Hamas in charge via free and fair elections. Hamas withstood Fatah storm troopers busting down people's doors in the night and regrouped in Gaza, only to find all trade blockaded, fuel held to a trickle, etc. Someone asked for an end to the siege: Hamas built tunnels; Hamas opened the border with Egypt via sledgehammers; Hamas got itself some human bargaining chips. All these things demand temerity at least. American politicians in the same circumstances would get themselves a sweet bribe from Israel and haul ass to Marseilles, on some shit like "Stopping those missiles. That's worth a lot of fuckin' money." You know, like Arafat did.

Hamas is responding to its constituents' needs, as any political party must. Their constituents need not to be bombed -- thank you Mr. Khbeiz for stating the obvious as if it were a revelation; what I've heard called "flipping the script" -- this is true. But their constituents also need not to live in a permanent penal servitude, and if that sounds familiar, it's because it's Isaac Babel, describing, obliquely, what it's like to be a Jew under the Czar.
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ds