A Year of Denial
This Christmas, Christ is still under the rubble.
“One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” - Omar El Akkad
“Your charity and your words of shock after the genocide won’t make a difference. Words of regret won’t suffice for you. And let me say it: we will not accept your apology after the genocide."” - Rev Dr Munther Issac
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2024 was a year of denial.
In Aotearoa, we witnessed the denials of a coalition government hell-bent on undermining our fragile social contract, making a series of coordinated, outrageous attacks on Indigenous rights, the last shreds of public good, and the very whenua itself.
We saw the denial of churches to face up to the Royal Commission into Abuse in Care, the denial that abuse and coercion was and continues to be instrumental to our practices of ministry and care.
Yet 2024 was, more than anything, a denial of genocide: an unspeakable denial of the intentional, explicit, out-in-the-open, genocidal violence of the State of Israel to exterminate, cleanse, and collectively punish Palestinians living in Gaza. The very integrity of our world order—the legitimacy of the claims the West makes about itself as a harbinger of freedom—these have crumbled amidst the ruins of Gaza, buried by not just silence and cowardice but active endorsement, immunity, and support for the genocidal Zionist project.
This horror deserves no words. As the Irish novelist Sally Rooney comments,
I’m at a loss to understand this. Nothing can make sense of it … And I think of everything I’ve written to you until now, about geopolitics, about public opinion in the west, and I think: how pointless! … When every time I pick up my phone I’m seeing footage of destroyed neighbourhoods, grieving mothers, mass graves. It makes everything I have to say feel absurd and disgusting. In these moments I lose faith in language, in conversation, dialogue, everything. The only word that means anything to me at such a moment is the word: No. And all I want to do is repeat it to myself again and again, seeing these images of devastation and suffering. No, no, no.
Language failed and fails. The very minute by which I write and speak, Israel eliminates more Palestinian life (feel, even, the paralysing horror of this very sentence). Language itself becomes part of this violence, part of the erasure of Palestine. A “bullet found its way,” “a group of children have died,” “an explosion occurred in a neighbourhood”—these noxious formulations have become commonplace in our newspeak. 2024 was a year of denial.
At the very same time, within these denials were revelations. In Gaza, the truth of the West is laid bare, the truth of a system designed to conceal and veil the violence upon which our prosperity is built.
In denial, explicit and implicit, we witness to what Isabella Hammad observes as “an abundance of proof that [the] colonial principle of selective humanity has never gone away”—the power of the West to dehumanise those outside its racial boundaries. “International law,” she writes, “the law and language of human rights—has never been applied equally.” Yet it has taken a year of genocide to “see clearly what we are up against.” Hammad reflects: “Others understood this better and faster than I did … To face a reality that on some level I knew all along, but that I did not want to know.”
This loss of faith, however, comes too slowly for others. I am sick and tired of Christians’ callous appeal to hope, to do away with the horror which we have created. I am sick and tired of those who seek to walk a “middle ground,” those who see “both sides.” This is the most documented genocide in human history. There is no dearth of information. What impedes your ability to see Christ under the rubble is the same cause that impedes your ability to recognise the disease at the heart of our system: a refusal to see the human outside of the European, a refusal to see the “native” from the “civilised,” a refusal to see Palestinian and Arab life.
Hammad again: “Do not give in. Be like the Palestinians in Gaza. Look them in the face. Say: that’s me!”
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Mostly, I’m furious. Somedays, I’m tired. I am angry at a future denied and deferred, subsumed to the capacious greed of our current order.
And yet, the mask is off. Make no mistake: Palestine will be free. The martyrs will be avenged. Yes—we wait in the “long middle” of our emancipation, in timeless anticipation. The Palestinian American artist Fargo Tbakhi writes,
The long middle is not a condition of time; we might be nearer to the end of revolution than the beginning, we might be nearer liberation than defeat … Liberation is the end, but it is a geographical end rather than a temporal one, a soil and not an hour. We move towards it—sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, but always. It is the location by which we orient our movement. We know it because it gets closer, not necessarily because it comes sooner …
The long middle, then, is the affective experience of moving inside the dailiness, inside the structural and therefore constant violence that forms the machinery of genocide and greases its wheels. Yet this affective experience also is, or might be, one of a counter and opposing dailiness: the dailiness of resistance and unrelenting struggle. This counter-dailiness is modeled by Palestinians, whose struggle within the long middle takes an astonishing diversity of forms—forms of care, of tenderness, of violence, of ingenuity, resource, and survival.
Peace and grace,
Andrew
More thoughts/books/links
This interview with Sally Rooney and Isabella Hammad, published just over one year ago, bears reading again.
This call to arms by Fargo Tabkhi, published just over one year ago, bears reading again.
This Christmas sermon from Munther Issac ought to haunt every Christian and Christian leader who continues to ignore this genocide.
I’ve also been reading Edward Said’s Freud and the Non-European and Hammad’s Recognising The Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative.
Let us pray next Christmas we can read something else (though I do not hold out hope).