“Hi everyone, this is Bisan from Gaza, I’m still alive.”
Over 24 months of murder, one voice has consistently and continually carried the distress signals from a civilisation under threat of erasure to the denizens of those nations complicit in her suffering.
Bisan Owda, or Wizard_bisan, is the 28 year old Peabody and Emmy award-winning journalist and filmmaker whose digital dispatches from Gaza have helped to inform and inspire millions on both the horrors of the occupation and the indefatigable spirit of resistance synonymous with Palestinians.
Her vlogs and calls to action have inspired activists across the globe to mobilise, to protest, to disrupt, to bang pots and pans in the name of famine and hunger, to boycott, and to demand divestment from the Military-Industrial Murder Machine.
Bisan’s tenacity, tenderness, and professionalism have emerged, for those who have chosen not to ignore the terror of our time, as a totem of humanity and resilience. Through tears, despair, frustration, and the rare fragments of beauty still found in a land annihilated and a people annulled, Bisan has embodied everything that is broken in the modern world and everything still worth living for.
One would assume that this icon of female courage would find enduring support, especially from those loud crusaders of sex-based rights. Sadly, this is not the case. The fact that Bisan is a woman only exposes the racism inherent in Western feminism. Women’s rights are universal, except when those women are Palestinian.
The Consumer-Left
My desire to focus on Bisan stems not from culture-war conflicts but from the failure of “the left” to challenge the structural forces that fund the genocide and dominate our existence as citizen-consumers under a neoliberal firmament.
For socialists like myself, the last decade has been one of bewildering despair, as we came to realise that the noisiest opponents of Capital’s ruthless market forces were, in actuality, the selfish identitarian products of those very same forces.
For those of us castigated as racists, fascists, and transphobes by political embryos draped in anarcho-socialist branding, the realisation that “the left” had become a rotten husk of class-devoid liberal interests became the central theme of “old left” wound-licking.
Yet no events in neoliberal history have done more to crystallise the failure of the contemporary left than the genocide of the Palestinian and, by extension, Sudanese peoples. And on 31 October, Wizard Bisan, the liberal-left’s Palestinian voice of choice, condemned her global audience of activists for this catastrophic failure.
Cold Brew Boycott
“Today I read this news about Starbucks.
Starbucks announced that finally after two years sales are increasing per 1 percent.
What? How you, how you, how you give up?
How can you forget and forgive these complicit companies, individuals and governments in two genocides, actually, in Sudan and in Gaza?
They are not separated at all.
The people moving and supporting the genocide in Gaza are the same doing it in Sudan.
You are feeding the killing machine.
Come on guys. Come on guys.
If we are not able to unite against, against the habit… please, this is so shameful.
The genocide is not over.”
The “neoliberal left”, as I call them because they emerge from neoliberalism and depend upon it, could not have found itself more discredited. What is this supposed oppositional force that cannot convince its own class contemporaries to give up their pumpkin spiced lattes in opposition to Zionist infanticide?
Apartheid Lessons Forgotten
The last two years have been punctuated by the futility of resistance to the slaughter. The UK media: assimilated with Zionism. The PMC neoliberal Labour Party: assimilated with Zionism. The online reactionary right: goes without saying. The neoliberal culture merchants, actors, writers, musicians, performers, poets, filmmakers, indeed anyone who earned a crust over the sanitised counter of commercial culture, assimilated or, at the very least, tantamount to Zionism.
As a small child I recall vividly a babysitter denying me the sugary joy of Rowntree’s Jelly Tots. Sweets and chocolates did not feature regularly in my week, and such treats could only be acquired from an uninformed guardian. I was surprised to learn that I was not being halted entirely in my quest for saccharine fulfilment so long as an alternative brand, not complicit in the racial apartheid of South Africa, was selected. A lasting lesson that informed me both of the existence of racial apartheid and a place called South Africa. Quite what impact my non-purchase of sugar-coated gumdrops had upon the Afrikaans Nasionale Party cannot be accurately deduced, but the racist regime is now a matter for history and the accepted consensus is that consumer sanctions are an effective tool against tyranny.
And yet now, in the face of the worst atrocities imaginable, amidst a daily diet of destruction, the live streamed eradication of innocence and ethics, the western left cannot adequately undermine a coffee chain. Starbucks’ celebration of rising profits should be carved into the tombstone of the contemporary left.
Liberal pressure is as threatening as it sounds
“What’s your issue with the Greens?”
“Give the Greens a chance, man.”
“Why do you hate Polanski!!?”
Just a sample of my Instagram DMs from those convinced that Polanski’s genial, bland-brand of “progressive politics” is the answer to the jungle drums of neoliberal fascism. Let me be absolutely clear. Corbyn and Sultana’s cut-and-shut clown car, and Polanski’s musical theatre troupe, truly are the grand finale in the liberal left’s classless circus. For those of us plugged into a world beyond the campus and the “community” croft, the reanimated remnants of Momentum, alongside the Tories with Bikes rebranding as “socialists”, truly is a spectacle to behold. That neither of these faux socialist organisms can show solidarity internally with themselves or externally with each other, miles from an election, is all the evidence required. But the key factor is, quite simply, once again, the absence of class.
Noam Chomsky long since stated the obvious, that the Palestinians, devoid of wealth and power, have no rights. “Your rights correspond to your power and your wealth.” In this context, Gaza is the crystallisation of the class war.
And thus, as we edge ever closer to the authoritarian precipice of surveillance capitalism and digital citizenship, the immortal and seminal words of Mark Fisher ring ever truer: “A left without class is just a liberal pressure group.”
A liberal pressure group that cannot even pressure consumers to abandon their Zionist lattes.
