The Brooklyn labor ghetto at night smells like rum smoked chicken, like muscle cars and also like marijuana and or just a rotting refuse; the aura blown up into the heavens by the heating exhaust steams.
ADONAEV
On my 32nd birthday, everyone assumes I will soon die in the Syrian Civil War. So, my birthday is actually very well attended and unfolds with lots of cocaine, alcohol, and dancing over four venues well into the next day’s dawn. Everyone toasts to everything! Often to me! Often to whatever they warble! I wake up with Martina in Harlem.
It was by far the single largest birthday I have ever had and seems as though I had many friends and allies. But a year later, if I survived the war, none of these people would care or be around when needed. They had lives occupied with varying struggles that left no room for human solidarity. These friends are always there to drink my food and eat my wine, to hear about adventures but not really ever get involved for the most part. Having no real culture of my own, at some point I adopted elements of Trinidadian and Russian cultures, both which place tremendous value and veneration on the birthday ritual. I would even go so far to say that West Indians and Post Soviets treat the birthday as a sort of celebratory holiday, trumped only by weddings, funerals and for Trinidadian Carnivals. I had this feeling on my 33rd birthday, that very few people knew or cared if I was alive inside. Did not know how to react to my intention to head off to Syria. I had the feeling for my family any day in January could do, and that preparing a meal like any other meal, with a cake, was adequate. Now, were I a homeless drug addict, or a person of exceptionally low social and moral character, perhaps I should feel tremendous gratitude that I have a family, that I am being given some food and also a cake. I am a very ungrateful wretched person. However, my birthday is on the 30th not the 23rd, and to me it is offensive and borderline insulting that my family would sort of ambush me with a birthday eight days early largely based on my brother’s flight plans. Because that is exactly what happened, it was a Potemkin birthday for the sake of my brother who I had not seen in 2 years. As for most others, without social media I’m sure few really knew when it was. And so with the world’s smallest violin in my hand I undertook to spend it completely alone, or partially alone since both Alan and Martina had discovered it and in their own ways cultures and obligations understood the importance of a birthday ritual. Without any real plan the guest list ballooned to over fifty people. None of which approved of my upcoming travel plans. Martina was the first person to ever publish my writing, while perhaps a poem or short story or two had appeared in varying poorly circulated underground presses, this was not any more auspicious, but I was certainly more widely read. Martina is a Bulgarian journalist and real estate agent now. I see her once a year. There was nothing going on here except sympathy. Just before I drove back to my Brooklyn safe house at 5 am dawn, I was doing some coke off her inner leg.
Sometimes late at night from a safe house in the borough of Brooklyn Sebastian Adonaev will read from one of his manuscripts and post it to the internet, for whoever might be listening. Really no one was listening, maybe Polina, depending on what time of night. These were futile, desperate calls for attention. For validation. For reaction. Since, in the United States the cause of anti-capitalism was for the most part soundly defeated many decades in the past. The man had some relative sympathy, but not exactly a sympathizer base which he might have cultivated more effectively over the years. Which might have resulted in a short little burst of terrorism, truncated of course by the all-pervasive American security state. What held him back were all the repeated hospitalizations, which came nearly every year. Invalidating his mind and probably also his message. This never seemed to deviate from a meme of communism and human rights, but by the age of 33, he had only a few people willing to listen to even just 1 minute of his message. His few friends left take him in small smei-annual doses.
Sebastian Adonaev reads:
“Sometimes, old friend, I cry from my own weakness.” I bash my Jew face against various mirrors around town angered by my own lack of force, lack of seed, and lack of ability to carry my band more truly into glorious and successful battle. I beat my frail fists on concrete walls which always win! I ask my God why it entrusted me with anything at all. For I am so small and so unable it seems to be a good fighter, an adequate lover, or a good leader, or a good son, or a good husband to Adelina, a good much of anything. I started the game with such a strong position but have not leveraged that to advance my people and cause, even protect those I loved the most!
Then I remember my actual role, not the role my mad ego ascribes. I am but one single partial partisan. One isolated man with such true friends.
I am commanding, a funny word “commanding”, more appropriate term coordinating for can one even give orders to a volunteer? A force that numbers at any given time no more than ten to maybe twenty women and men. And no God nor man nor foreign government gave us marching orders; well at times a Russian woman gave me some directions, but only when at most desperate and bleak junctures, I had no counsel to turn to. But I brought almost all this chaos upon my house unaided! But this is hardly a wide conspiracy. But looking into my own soul I am not doing this for God or man, I am not simply avenging my losses, nor am I simply working off a duty to act. No, no; I am self-propelled and highly lucky. I am doing this because my eyes see fire. I am doing this because I have seen the view from the top of the Mountain, I have seen the killing fields too.
“I have a great empathy with my kind. I wish good to triumph over callous and well-planned evil!”
And the responsibilities that impressed me by the old leadership, they were small bits. And I say to myself that if our little band with no weapons and no training and no funding and the protection provided us only by our passports and various skin tones could do so much! Still, we did accomplish a range of small things in the Americas and beyond. We took over buildings, organized demonstrations, built unions, and operated a substantial underground press. If we could build youth brigades and lay cells across four continents; if we could operate clandestine supply chains, raise tens of thousands in equipment and supplies, conduct hundreds of underground political trainings, infiltrate major city civil service organizations, if we could smuggle activists and trainers into distant countries uninvited and opposed by the government. If we could do all of this with no outside support and do it with keeping all our partisans out of long-term prison and have only buried three men in seventeen years of war under questionable circumstances. Well perhaps we are all still young and the war shows no sign of being over. Perhaps we have a small latent talent for freedom fighting and if not killed or imprisoned could with a little guidance grow more professional.
And we have not killed one single person in seventeen years, in fact we have with our own hands saved the lives of thousands and counting.
“I’ve always said he has a fucking ton of potential! For good, for self or for evil, wherever his own heart sends him,” Goldy once declared.
So, really as was explained to me then in 2012 before the uprising in Brooklyn by my confidant Goldy Andreavna; I could either surrender, collaborate or be utterly destroyed. But as she gauged my nature was highly American, she guessed correctly I would never tolerate a life of collaboration, so thus death or some impossible victory were the only moves coming.
“I have been imprisoned twenty times.” My brothers and sisters have never allowed them to take me for long. Each time they have chained me to beds, administered electricity, loaded me with drugs, asked millions of stupid questions to attempt to make me alter my perspective, denounce my own logic. I have observed members of the band lose their very homes and their livelihoods and their freedom and their health. I have seen men thrown through Plexiglas glass windows. We have been held in cages and tortured. The deaths of Mcgaffey, Becker and Black were all sudden, violent, and unexplained. I remember little Paul behind bars, I remember harassment and humiliation of Comrade Vik, I remember how much was sacrificed vainly in the name of this struggle. This struggle which absorbs my beingness as though it were the love of a woman, but I am a zealot. I am not good at anything but this. I am in love with my entire people and I have resolved that it would be better to be killed, to lose my privileges of skin and class, than to live in a world where a tiny vile few make the lives of the many, the lives of all I know and love a wretched grinding torture. Truly a half-life.
“I cry sometimes, no longer in the presence of any others.” Goldy mocked me so each time I failed to be a man. I cry because the horror is so vast and the injustice so great. And I have but ten to twenty partisans, several with wives and children. I worry that I am not going to be able to shoulder this struggle, that I lead my closest to sedition and doom. I worry I do not have the moral fortitude, the calm patience of humble leadership, the organizational skills, the funds we will need, the weapons, the uniforms, the petrol, the Planes, the will. For I am a man, and I am seduced sometimes by wanting a good life, wanting to walk away. This is not your fight, she said, “no one asked you to struggle!”!
“Friends, they torture me once a year.” They tell me I have an unstable mind. They drag me away repeatedly. I am grateful for such friends as you, who refuse to accept surrender. Who knows that we can win the war! I wanted to tell you all, see what we do with just ten women and men. You have that many fighters too. Here we all are at the top of the mountain, assembled in the ghettos encircling the Isle of Man.
“I loved her so much. Maybe only one or two of you know what I am talking about. They took from me the only thing a man should care about.”
“I’m thankful for the resistance.” I am thankful for our little Otriad in Brooklyn. For the cells in Chicago, Philly, Baltimore, and DC. The underground in Moldova, Cambodia, Haiti and occupied Israel. I am grateful to Commander Saint Reed in Mosul, and Commander Bonhomie in Port Au Prince. Inspired deeply by the teachings of Solomon and DeBuitléirs. I love my family and my wife; I hope this is the year we go pro. She is a million miles away, but she can hear me. She can see me. She liked me better before I found Communism, liked me better before I rediscovered my religion. She even liked my used suits better than the battered blue uniform I wear now.
I raise glass to the East, for somewhere out there I hope she is waiting for me, waiting for us to win. I raise my glass, I look my men and women in the eyes when I toast, Long live the resistance, God protect the bloodline of the prophets and the Meshiaak84and the Mahdi. God keeps us moving along the straight path, not the path of those who are cowards, or those who have been lost and led astray.”
For those of you who are joining us from home, for those listening from the trenches, from the fields or from the big house, or as servants in the towers.
A trucker with a heart of gold clings to his worst memories to not fully lose his mind in pity and drink. He is paid to move some cargo from point A to point B, but it is a lonely and meaningless life. As though he is working to pay for moving himself as meaningless cargo.
HEVAL JILO
“Shipping out from Boston any day now,” I tell myself. I tell myself the pain will be over soon. I tell myself I’m just an ordinary New England Joe. You can call me Micky because it’s my born name.
I have a pretty gruff face. A New England working class disposition. I think it made a lot of the younger volunteers think I had some kind of training I didn’t have. Just a little bit of running and my knees would start to hurt. But they all ask me if I was in the military, even though I never ever was. Very few of the YPG volunteers have any useful training, besides from the leftists. They are self-trained to see things, imagine things that are probably not even there.
On my chest I am wearing a picture of my ex-girlfriend, about the size of a baseball card. That’s perfectly normal, right? But more on that later down the line.
I watched it on the news for several years before the cumulative effect took over me. By the time I was being struck by Turkish air force and artillery vollies, running through trenches and tunnels in Afrin Canton, called by the Hevals as Jilo Boston, well I used to drive a UPS truck. That was all the training for this I had. After that I installed solar panels. I had no other serious qualifications that made me ready for the war. Even a bit of light running makes my knees hurt.
Explains Heval Jilo from Boston: “I mean it’s really Mikey Mike or Michael, but they named me Heval Jilo from Boston.”
Now, strangely it seemed that in the Academy Hevals Zinar and Jansher, the two principal instructors and commanders of Western internationalists ended up sending people with no ideology to occupy Raqqa and those they somewhat ideologically trusted to fight in still raging battles near Deir Ez-Zor. But that wasn’t a hard fast rule.
They liked, but didn’t seem to trust me, well any of us. Some of the leftists like Kawa and Shoresh tried to buddy up to Cancer. Some of the military guys like Heval Ciya tried to buddy up to Zinar, but really, they didn’t seem to have favorites. We all looked good on our martyr posters and in death could bring the Kurdish cause to the front pages of our national papers.
I’m cynical about Zinar and Cancer, they were of course there just to figure out how to use us effectively as so-called ‘revolutionary militants.’ Most of the Academy, which lasted about six weeks, was all rhetoric and talk. I might have fired my AK, maybe 15 rounds worth. I held up well I think given my age! I hadn’t intended to join the Y.P.G. in the beginning, I tried to enlist in Sinjar first with the Y.B.S.83, but they had put a freeze on international volunteers for whatever reason. Eventually the P.K.K. smuggled me, a loud British Gypsy and a French aristocrat lawyer from Makumr Camps into Syria.
Around my neck is a picture of my ex-girlfriend. I’m sure it sends a more portrait of my mental health to the few who see it, but I don’t have to explain shit to anyone. I don’t want to say anymore, so I won’t. My name is to be Jilo Boston, or that’s what they plan to call me in Kurdistan. I enlisted via proton mail in a formation called the Y.B.S. and received permission to make the crossing.
I don’t have any formal military experience, though some people ask me about it, say I have that look. I’ve been watching the Islamic State terrorize the world on TV for about three years. After a while, I just came to accept that I would go be a part of it. Contribute in my little way. As several hundred had done before me and probably will do after.
My last job was to install solar panels on rooftops. My previous job before that was as a UPS truck driver. It is obvious I was lonely and felt that doing something heroic, even if I got killed, was tangible and important. I was supposed to fly to Slemani and then get smuggled over to the Shengal. The YBS were at that time fighting in Raqqa city. I had to close out my life part by part. There was no fear in my body, only excitement. No longer would I be an observer. This was going to be the highest stakes thing I ever did; I could only fantasize that someone would tell the woman on my chest I fell fighting heroically.
I can’t say that was all the motivation or even half. I cared of course that she knew about my contributions, should I end up making them. What did I feel like? Like shit. Like I did not have such an interesting or amazing life and that if I did this with honor, died or not I’d have some kind of redemption. What to say more? I do not know if I am not the one drafting this book. I will just say that I want my ex to be proud of me for what I tried to do, even if it was just to get blown up being somewhere I shouldn’t be in the Middle East. In the desperate trenches of Afrin, he would be known by my Kurdish name Jilo Boston. Man, we barely got out alive. I look back at it sometimes and I get this sad empty feeling like all these fucking people gave their lives for absolutely nothing. Because in the end, we did not really defeat I.S.I.S., we didn’t replace Assad, we did not stabilize Iraq or the oil, we did not curb Türkiye, we did not build so-called democracy, and everyone got killed for almost nothing.
They say the first stage of constructing a believable fictitious identity is to focus on one banal old job, knowing its most minute components inside out. Have one sad story, your sort of guarded reason to be and one good reason to not talk a lot. Primarily, do not tell stories about places you have never been to.
At the “House of Yes” pansexual Cabaret on a New Years Eve there is glitter fucking everywhere.
In an underground afterhours party, there is a young Peruvian girl with great big tits and a tramp stamp dancing on my face. Happy new year to me. Or to somebody with a better-looking life. Sure, better than any house of no! We ended up getting a room at the Standard Hotel. I fuck her as hard as I can for as long as I can, for as long as she will let me.
SEBASITAN ADONAEV
“NEWYORKGRAD- the “city that never sleeps”/ the Big Apple. What a city? What makes it such a hot commodity to be here? It can get as flashy, as artsy, as chic, or as truly ghetto, working-poor miserable as you want, or you let it. You can get anything here, they say. It can all be bought, sold, found, or obtained somewhere in all five boroughs of the ity for a price. And you and your sanity is the motherfucking price.
“IF YOU CAN’T MAKE IT HERE YOU CAN HOPEFULLY MAKE IT SOMEWHERE ELSE!”
“But nothing is ever real, or real enough for someone allegedly from here. It is a gathering point for people who have abandoned their old people. It’s a petting zoo for an Empire filled with hookers and administered by the cream of the Jews.”
Sebastian Adonaev “the paramedic adventurer,” watches over the Brooklyn Ghetto at night. Smoking a Newport from the rooftop. Recording his angry thoughts in a leather-bound journal. As is typical in my own fashion, I worked on a holiday that to me is a pagan aberration. Clearly, 2017 is not the actual year. Not at all. In the “Russian culture” which I have in some form absorbed into my own amalgamated creed, what you do and who you surround yourself on New Years Eve, is a sample of the year to come. This is like many Russian idioms, up “variable interpretation”. Variance in interpretation. The good old “cultural context.” Especially as Old Russian New Year is probably a couple weeks away, still in the future.
ADONAEV
I am playing a civilian and a transport paramedic in the age of near constant war. A serf, just a working class serf with no proerty, in the latest version of New-New-York-Fucking-City. Or NEWYORKGRAD; depends on if you know about “the occupation” or not. It depends on what papers you subscribe to. It depends on what languages you speak and what reality you sign up for.
My comrade Danny Hertz has a crazy looking hippy beard.
He throws me some nightlife work over the years. He offers me $250 for a 10-hour gig at the “House of Yes,” the artsy hipster performing arts multi-space. So, I take it, just like I did in 2016. The shortlist of the New Years variables. I came off from my real ambulance job. I slept 6 hours and had dinner with my aging parents. I took a cab to the House Of Yes. I made some new single-serving work friends. As usual got on well with security and took care of two intoxicated women, both who invited me into the cab I placed them in. Then a guy went briefly unconscious, I induced vomiting and cleaned him up, leaving him with the doctor’s friends. When the ball finally dropped, my two ambulance partners, Alisha and Jose, wished me well. lia the lawyer invited me for coffee in the New Year. Polina Mazaeva left me a voicemail. No one tried to kiss me. But that was way after midnight. And of course, I had a long conversation about not a lot with a gangster from East New York named Cyrus. I ran into my old volunteer and ffriend Jon Denby, who fought with us in Haiti, and eventually, Danny Hetz came at 9am to relieve me, as the party was to carry on until 6pm.
There is this Peruvian Italian chick who keep buying me drinks and making out with me. With enormous breasts, dancing near me, while I made sure the intoxicated people sleeping were dead. And I felt a kind of savage carnal lust, very different from that which I felt in a while. And I saw her look at me a,nd I knew she’d let me draw her something, but I didn’t do or say shit. And not new years or sleep deprivation or run changes all that. And the bartender offered me a drink, but I don’t let batti-man I don’t know give me drinks, no, it didn’t matter he was gay. I just didn’t really need or want a drink. Smoked some cigarettes, ate a complimentary egg and cheese. Texted Polina happy New Years and took the train home not an Uber. Like a worker. Because fundamentally, I have been a hard worker for a while. And fundamentally, I like trains. But not as much as I like to fuck that Italian with big tits like a savage.
I feel like 2016 was a year of incredible unmitigated defeat, near death and only partial recovery. So that would mean 2017 has the potential to be-anything. Since Russian idioms are about mind games and superstition, not about fate or destiny. But no matter how much I would like to say I’ve developed some real self-interest. It may be a year to stack cash and stabilize what’s left of sympathetic base and fee friends. A part of me wants to blow coke off her tits and ravish her in a way that my girlfriend can’t manage. The reality is that I must maintain my honor and my courage, my course. It is my destiny to be a guerrilla, not a reckless debauch. Not a scoundrel. Not a normal serf. I will use my time this year to be healthy enough to resume the fight, when I am ready to sustain it.
***
A few weeks before Sebastian Adonaev left New York for Cuba, then Russia, then Turkey, then Iraq for Rojava he gave a firebrand speech in front of nearly 40,000 people sometime in early April on Time Square at a large liberal solidarity pageant called “TODAY WE ARE ALL MUSLIMS”. His speech was just a 5-minute radical little foot note in an overall group hug of liberalism. Under five minutes in duration, its message to remember how all immigrants were treated when they arrived here was coupled with an extollation for the resistance to defend Muslim lives in America. This ‘resistance’ that the spoke of us was nebulous here in the U.S.A. Mostly it amounted to loud anti-Trump pageants. Freedom of speech is, almost, still without any limits.
He imagined while speaking that his on again off again, sometimes hot mostly cold muse, a debutante of Midtown, Russian courtesan ex-flame Goldy was watching it from the crowd, but that was improbable that she was. The speech called for the defense of Muslims amid the international genocide being perpetrated against them. It called on immigrants and descendants of immigrants to mount collective defense. My family came to watch, it was the very last thing they were ever proud of. Better to say it so others can do it, it seemed to be the family ethic.
His kid cousin Alexis came to watch him speak. She was into it, but also a bit chicken shit and American mentally at the end of the day. Also, something of a hipster. Not a bad kid, just high levels of probably not gonna make it in New York. But maybe she could still make it somewhere else? Eventually later when the art didn’t pay the bills, she turned to sex work.
After a fancy dinner, which was once a week normal for his upper middle class household, lots of bottles of white wine later; perhaps three, still in the dark blue rebel uniform of a G.C.C. a “staff medical officer”, he headed off to the fancy night club Le Bain on the roof of the Standard Hotel with Benny, his younger brother, Benny’s fiancé Nessa-Vanessa and little hipster cousin Alexis. They all rediscover old friend uncle Vodka, they all get fucking lit. In the glamour and chaos of the night, Sebastian Adonaev is to meet his future lawyer. Buxom and brilliant Ms. Chanie Chanel Rossi. His future lawyer.
Remembers Sebastian,
Out of my left eyes I saw an extremely attractive blonde in big glasses looking elegant and upper class but well intentioned. I saw her surrounded by tall dark and handsome men, wondering if she was an escort. Wondered what she charged. You see I’m not about that life because I can’t afford it sure, but not about that life because it’s so fucking degrading to all the women walking it. The woman who introduced herself as Chanel was happy and pleasant and gave me an email address and number to send her some of my work. My paintings.
It was all very businesslike, like a transaction. But she was filled with good happy energy, and I was about to fly off and possibly die for this cause! If necessary. Not ideally. Ideally, I’d come back and get the girl. Like in an American movie.
Remembers Chanel:
I think he wants to put me on my back for a very long time. I think I would be open-minded to it, except that I do truly love my boyfriend Mr. Charlie. So therefore, it actually barely doesn’t cross my mind. Charlie and I are made for each other, which is why I must be so careful with this older man writing to me. But if his cock was between my legs, even if Charlie finds a single letter; then I get off my master plan, which is Harvard and Law and a perfect husband. Charlie is actually nearly perfect, and we’ve been together seven years.
It’s safe to say I find Sebastian Adonaev more than a little attractive. And that has to do with what he is, a paramedic, and what he says he will do which is much more than regular people. Which is to say volunteer in Syria. Sebastian recounts:
If I told you that I was not hoping to have a lot of sex with this buxom stylish young woman, I would be a great big fucking liar. But it was all highly innocent talk. She admired my work and my lifestyle, and I admired her convictions. Her words you could say had pure and undiminished optimism.
Her body, I could spend days on, in one or many settings. But the opportunity would never present itself. In my culture you can marry women half your age plus seven, but it was not about that. She had a man. That never came to be an option for us as lovers, as she was very devoted to her boyfriend Mr. Charlie, a bit of a possessive psychopath if you ask me. He would later find the innocent letters and flip out. I suppose he was right that I would go to bed with his girlfriend, anyone might, if given the opportunity. As the story goes, he just left her in an airport and turned around.
But they were always off and on for as long as she ever wrote to me about magic and positive energy and hopeful living. He got her pregnant and abandoned her. She had an abortion; he took her back. That was her miserable lot, Charlie. But Sebastian neither passed judgement nor respected things without rings on fingers.
I never got the opportunity because of her morals and of course logistics, I met her about two weeks before deployment. She was up in Harvard, and I was down in Brooklyn. But she made quite an impression, he notes:
Let’s talk about Chanel Chantal Rossi, shall we. She’s a blonde bourgeoisie from the Caribbean Island of St. Martin. I met her only briefly, perhaps under a minute in a fancy supper club in the city. It was just long enough for me to take her information and strike up a correspondence based on her hippy views and happy optimism. I made her a rather beautiful sketch; she mailed me a book called ‘Mindfulness on the Go’ and we wrote to each other periodically throughout the war. Actually, she never got any of my letters until about half a year after I returned because the Special Forces were running a really special pony express from the front to her apartment near Harvard in Boston. By that time her boyfriend Charlie had found the letters and didn’t think very well of them at all. Really in the end Ms. Chanie, without engaging in a single infidelity, unleashed an incredible insecurity and rage. But at that stage, there was only light magic and enchanted optimism. She was delighted with the painting. She mailed him some candles and a small book called Mindfulness on the Go.
To Comrade Sebastian Adonaev,
I apologize for not responding sooner. As you can imagine, I was quickly drowned in work once I got back. Your letter touched my soul in so many ways. First, your awareness and choice of words and how you articulate them together, are mesmerizing. You are a truly gifted artist with strong depth.
The journey you are about to embark on is one of great respect and inspiration. I know you will touch many lives, however slight, but most likely grand as you have done so far, and I am sure of that. Without knowing you in a material physical aspect (as in only speaking with you for a brief 30 seconds), you have already impacted my life, which I will never forget.
With that being said, I would love to be your pen pal and hear all about the moments you experience. I have so much respect for you, people like you are those who make a difference in our world for the greater good. Even if it is to put a smile on a stranger’s face.
Send me your address. We will be hand-writing letters to each other very soon.
Yours truly,
Chanel
+++
Dear Ms. Chanie,
Such is the hard work of studying law, and surely it will be daunting, but you will persevere. Your words are quite kind and make me feel quite appreciated. It is a very complex task ahead and it makes me glad you will allow such correspondence. Although after 12 April I will be abroad more a year or more and with often an unreliable postal system, we can alternate pen and email as you see fit, and of the letters you send to the address below can be pony expressed or scanned and sent. Any art I make out there, same route. Cuba and Russia will be short, wonderful extremes before I get into Iraq in late May and soon after North Syria; a place called Rojava.
I make drawings, and paintings, I make long rhyming poems and I’ve written some novels, but I suppose it just makes me incredibly happy to have a chance to put my mind before a stranger and see yours as you reveal it. As said, the idea of you was strange magic, but I long to know the actual you as well and make you the subject of my art. It will also be surely relieving to sometimes hear of Boston, and your woes of scholarship, and your loves and losses and all. I thrive on the attention of strangers and can only be well informed via their impartial critiques. But, as stated, you were fascinating to me.
Best wishes, Happy International Women’s Day! I look forward to our next exchange.
+++
Dearest Sebastian,
Words cannot describe the appreciation I feel. I’ve always felt as if I was maybe underestimated by my looks and at times may be overestimated in this judgmental society we live in. Everything is based on how you look and not what you offer as a human.
Yet,
You made me feel like although that does come into play, you made me feel much more than that with eyes beyond the physicality of objects of this world with your attention to detail. It is not the mere creation of technique, but what it intends to portray with the story it wants to tell.
I am so thankful to the universe for that day, in so many ways, and one being our casual, brief and meaningful kindle.
Funny story; my overprotective brother thought I was giving you my phone number & got a little mad. I explained to him and told him it was okay; he trusts my judgment. And to be honest… it was your old-school way of a notepad and pen that really played well with my instinct. I am an old soul too.
I love candles, how did you know? I cannot wait and look forward to hearing about your future endeavors. You will be receiving something from me by early next week :) Again, Thank you!
“Yulia is dead,” Kreminizer wrote to me. Michael Kreminzer had done more to train me as a paramedic than anyone else. A horrible feeling, feeling someone strong buckling, being in the shadow of their dark feelings.
“She and I never had that great art and writing collabo moment we always talked about.”
“And now you never will. She died on Tuesday.”
She was one of the very few that had ever read deeply into any of my books. Kreminizer was one of the men who trained me as a Paramedic. Now his woman was dead from a cancer.
I was in Al-Brooklyn, U.A.S. The heart of a party and the very soul of New-York-Grad; “the big apple”. The “city that never sleeps” or “slept and now sleeps no more”. In a clear and well-furnished safe house abutting the J-M-Z line. I never want to go above $800.00 for a room at a safe house. Okay, I’ll rephrase that. $800.00 is the cap my budget can allow such a room. I always pay cash; I never sign anything. I always put down one month in advance. The people I must live with are all just as shady as I am. In terms of a safe house, what you’re basically trying to establish is secrecy and staging. You can’t have anyone in the security apparatus know where it is of course, you need it to be hiding in plain sight.
“Don’t bring your lovers to the safe house. Bring them to a fucking hotel,” is what Brit the German lesbian comrade always tells me.
There are a ton of women in my life, but they all do different very things, chemically electrically speaking. Without them, I would perhaps not have as much supporting strength to carry my beleaguered little projects out into the world in the face of great risk, there would also not be as much love or hope in me. Or as Kurds like to say, “Motivation.”
Broadly, I could say there are women I fuck and who I don’t fuck, love and who I don’t feel that much at all, but there is a lot more to it than that distinction. Friends with benefits competing with lovers who are impossible to win, buttressed by ex-girlfriends who still want to help the cause. I learned about Jinology in Kurdistan, but I’m not sure if it all stuck.
The “Science of Women” (Jinology) cannot be taught in two days and much of what it has to say is just a radical take on feminism. For instance, that for every position of power should be co-chairs; a male and a female running the show together. Women are not special, or complicated. In many ways they are just the same as men. I like listening to them more though, I appreciate the near constant feminine presence in my life. I take their advice and also their leadership.
Jineology—derived from the Kurdish word “jin” meaning woman, and “logos” meaning science—is a revolutionary concept born from the Kurdish women’s movement and shaped by the imprisoned thinker Abdullah Öcalan. At its core, it holds that the liberation of society is impossible without the liberation of women. In fact, it goes further: it sees the systematic subjugation of women as the first and deepest form of oppression—one that laid the groundwork for class domination, ecological destruction, and authoritarian state power. To confront this foundational injustice, Jineology proposes not only a critique but a new science altogether—one that reclaims knowledge, identity, and power from the ruins of patriarchy. Unlike many Western feminist theories, which Jineology respects but often views as too individualistic or bound to liberalism, this science of women seeks a collective, historical, and grounded approach. It emerges from the lived experiences of Kurdish women resisting war, colonialism, and male domination. It is not an academic discourse but a lived practice. In the villages, in the mountains, in the war zones, women gather to study, reflect, and lead. They do not just read about history—they rewrite it. Jineology teaches that before kings and borders, there were matriarchal societies; before property and state, there was communal life centered around women, the life-givers and caretakers of the earth.
This knowledge, long buried under the weight of conquest and empire, is being unearthed and revived. Jineology looks to the ancient goddesses of Mesopotamia, to Neolithic communities, to myth and oral tradition. It challenges the idea that science must be male, mechanical, and detached. Instead, it offers a science rooted in ethics, ecology, and freedom. A science that sees not control, but relationship. In this view, every system—whether economic, political, or social—must be measured by how it treats women. The revolution begins with the dignity of the grandmother, the autonomy of the daughter, the choices of the mother.
In the liberated zones of Rojava in northeastern Syria, Jineology is more than theory. It is curriculum. Every woman fighter of the YPJ learns it. Every commune discusses it. In the “Mala Jin”—the women’s houses where community disputes are resolved and education is shared—Jineology is the heartbeat of decision-making. It teaches that power is to be shared, not hoarded. That every leadership role must be held by one man and one woman. That self-defense is not only against bullets, but against the domination of mind and spirit. In refugee camps, in front-line towns, in classrooms lit by solar panels and hope, this science becomes not an abstraction, but a way of life.
To those who take up arms or pens in its name, Jineology is both shield and song. It says that women are not just half the sky—they are the foundation beneath it. For internationalist volunteers like Anna Campbell, who left the safety of Britain to fight and die alongside Kurdish women in Afrin, Jineology was not only an idea—it was her compass. It answered the question of what it meant to be free. Not just free from tyranny, but free to reimagine everything: justice, history, love. A revolution led by women, not as tokens, but as origin, principle, and future.
They all want something different, though, but the same. And it’s all built on the foundation of friendship, like any healthy relationship. The way they pity me is different. Very few admire me, well they do but the pity instinct is a greater driver of their behavior. Or the way my work inspires them.
Goldy Andreavna is no longer answering my calls or returning my letters. She had had enough. It sure is cold. And the worst parts of me just want to die. Life is thankless, and I am aware that it is also very cruel to most of my human people. That all makes me want to fight, but I’m sure I’ll just make myself into a new statistic. The train rattles by on the above ground track next to the room I’m renting. It doesn’t sound like the ocean at all. It sounds like living in poverty next to plenty. I worked 80 hours this week. I still can’t manage to sleep.
“A hero or a hooligan, well that part’s never clear.” I would have them put that Mighty Mighty Bosstones lyric on my tombstone if I believed they would ever find my body or figure out how to make me die. I lean towards Hooligan in depicting myself, “lower your flighty expectations”. I will not live up to your expectations for me and my agency, me and my powers. I am an easily broken man running from capitalist modernity into dreams, poems and the world beyond American reach.
It was the icy cold night of Purim in the Hebrew year 5777. Super fucking Futuristic. The full moon was huge, and it was brick as shit, it was Friday, everyone was drunk. But that had nothing to do with their silly drunk festival called Purim. The coldness goes right through his sheets, through his comforter, the space heater doesn’t start up right away. It’s a fire trap in here with all the subdivided dry walls. But it’s brick, as the brothers say, no matter how many layers I put over him. That means harshly cold in the Ebony peasant vernacular. He knew that were I so inclined there would be multiple places to fete and masquerade tonight, but I was conserving my finances. Hoarding up my comfortable sleeps on his big Queen-sized mattress made in Brooklyn that he’d lashed now three times to the roof of my civic and trafficked about the borough. Moving rooms in safe houses. Working everyday towards my next operation. Nothing is given to you in the movement. You have to earn or take initiative. That can appear attractive to women, sometimes, for a bit. But he’s basically broke as well as broken.
The safe house isn’t so bad. It has high ceilings. The train is obnoxious, and the neighborhood used to be a war zone. It’s still dirty. There are still robberies every day. But the rent was a square $800, which was reasonable. Things were gentrifying here in the Bed Stuy-Bushwhack area. Still looked and felt like the ghetto Adonaev worked the 37 Bravo unit in. It still looked like the dark place Rahula died in.
That was our first “American Martyr”, shot himself twice in the head. But now there were white hipsters and cafes. It was a cute place except for a couple little things. Like the no drinking rule which annoyed me and the German intelligence officer slash painter greatly.
Her name was Brit Tully, and we did time together in the camps a few years back. She never admitted to being such, but this is what my associate Alan Medved told Adon, and he knew about such things. Brit was a metal worker, glass worker and an introvert. Her square job was retail in a fancy SoHo denim outlet. We co-habited the domicile, a medium spacious loft on the third floor of Broadway across from the J & M above ground rail line and, I can’t say any more precisely where; I can’t tell you; it’s a safe house. It was Brit Tully in the small middle room, with my room to the right and Handler Hicks to the left. A fucking nut. We had all these hippy rules none of us followed and we both kind of hated him, he was a shifty fuck.
The man who set up this little shop was none other than the infamous small-time publisher and writer Handler Hicks, who for a lesser intellectual was wild eyed.
And somewhat muscular and vigorous looking from being straight edge, being Zen and believing that “God is Good!” He is a total nut who fixates on 9/11 conspiracy theories and has all the tendencies of being a junky off junk. His little boy, when custody allowed as always there every other weekend, looked feeble. Looking malnourished and unhappy to be there, yet chipper. Handler is an endless passive aggressive pain in the ass, but Brit and Sebastian Adonaev need a house for a cash and paper trail, and you get what you pay for in this city.
The handler took me in when the safe house just before it got too hot. Right before I skipped town to Baltimore to get my assignment from the local committee. A safe house falls apart for two main reasons; too much traffic or drama among spies. This place Brooklyn is infested these days with whores, with criminal scum, with sedition and with spies. It’s a good staging area for working in the city with no papers.
Natasha Salzano, which was just her passport name was a cold cunt. Natalia Chicherova, which was her name in Russia, had fled almost overnight back to Russian Federation and left me and poor confused student Tanya Drozdova, basically squatting a lovely grand place on Eastern Parkway with the rent supposedly 8,000 plus dollars in arrears. I made off with a fancy mirror and my gear in almost the dead of night.
A couple things about a good safe house, it’s hard to find. And frankly the Russians have too many rules and idiosyncrasies. Like if you live with a woman and you keep leaving the seat up, or water on the floor after you shower; a good fucking or not fucking or two, some talk it out and you can be socialized. In a safe house, whoever is on the lease is the boss.
Natasha’s whole thing was always “touching her stuff” which was all over the place, but even a slight movement of the cutting board, or moving the walk in storage closet around; she’d flip. She was tall and bleached, she was stern. She claimed she had gotten a master’s in international communications, but who knew. She left Tanya and I with a flat where the rent hadn’t been paid in months, the landlord was threatening to evict us; and she took off back to Russia. There was Mongol in her, I could sense it, and she never smiled but the now defunct safe house on Church & Eastern Parkway was quite luxurious for my tastes. She had basically turned the entire living room into my room and with it came really, nice stuff which incrementally she sold, and the Mirror well I guess I stole. Her last words in an email were, “calm the fuck down you’re acting like a stupid fucking American! Everything’s gonna be fine!”
I didn’t pay her last month’s rent because Tanya said she’d just rob it and leave us high and dry anyway. But if one day I bump into her in Russian and she has a tough guy kill me over $735, well, that’s life. I’d kill someone over no less than 5,000 and depend on what they’d done to deserve it.
Comrade roommate-sublessor Handler Hicks had written and gotten published two books on 9/11 Truth and was maybe the figurehead of that rabble band of conspiracy theorists and anti-Semites. Anti-Zionists, excuse me. His first book was that the government did it, the second was that the Saudis were in on it too and after a recent trip to Iran, well his third book is about the Zionist angle, which I’m sure will go over great here and get rave reviews. I guess he didn’t get the memo that the best way to be hated in America by everyone was to keep talking about 911 conspiracy theories. I know for sure I read that memo in 2001. Moving on, it got so damn suddenly cold. It had been jeans and t-shirt weather in March. It had been the most limp, listless winter ever, or maybe I was still traumatized by the two-year winter of Boston and the Blizzard of 2010. I had invested in a long heavy Soviet grey coat, and layers of thermal underwear as well as an Ushanka. The big furry hat everyone knows and loves. Fucking around with the contents of my desk I find some letters from Adelina Blazenaya, a lover long gone. She called me some time a year ago on the road to Washington D.C.
And really, I never heard from her again. Like someone with a better, more giving dick inside her or maybe her conscience ordered her not speak with ever me. I have three love letters she wrote me and I carry them around in the black leather party envelope I was issued in Haiti. I try quite hard to break that silence of hers. To get friendship or something more or less than that. No dice ever. Legally speaking, I’ve left her 33% of this new shell company if I’m killed in the coming deployment.
I’m rambling about nothing useful. My existential first world concerns my laptop; I’m comparing gear I need to procure. Bags, boots, and devices. I’ll expropriate them with a fabricated credit card. About 2,000 worth of kit. Maybe I’ll even get a new laptop. If anyone manages to rob me on the road from Havana to Qamishli, well it would be a damn good haul.
Comrade Handler is out first every night. He sometimes reads in the living room; we wait it out in our rooms. Brit and I are almost pure night creatures. Once I was fired from my slave job about three weeks ago, I immediately reverted to my preferred biological clock. I’d been waking up at 445 am all summer and fall to drive to the ambulance base in the Rockaways. Now I’d wake up at 1 to 2pm and go to bed at 5am to 6am. I just like working at night, less witnesses? I’m sitting at the big, long wooden table Handler built. It’s shoddy work like the bunk beds he builds. He’s a carpenter by trade, like my man Jesus was. But he’s chicken shit. This safe house is ok. Even if we can’t drink here. I think Brit does heroin in her room or at the very least smokes dope on the roof, she’s great though. Never emotional and always objective, she’s going back to Berlin soon, her casework never comes up and isn’t polite conversation.
We were imprisoned in a detention facility in 2013. Now the year is 2016. She had handed me her email address on a green paper with a Walt Whitman quote, something about nothing. Well anyway many years later, like six months ago I found it and when Handler subdivided the loft into three rooms I social engineered her in, but she was my second choice. I’d really wanted to live with my friend Erin Moore who is dark humored and funny and can cook her ass off. But frankly Handler sketched her out too much. The subdivide room was also not such a steal ever for $600 USD, and maybe a little firetrap hazardous.
I plan to drug Handlers and burn him still alive in his home the night after I leave the states. That’s not because he gets under my skin. It’s because he is working for the Iranians and that’s what Brit and I were paid to do. Burn him alive. Weird fantasies of murder still pop in and out of my head from time to time, but I’m a medical man in the emergency Pre-hospital health field.
The thing about a safe house is that you don’t tell anyone where it is, you don’t have your name on it, you pay cash and don’t sign anything, and everyone in it is a superhero in their own mind. And you don’t pick up a blonde bimbo hipster in a bar and bring her back there to savagely fuck her in every hole in her body with a belt around her neck. How do I say that again, the people living in a safe house are shady fucking gypsies? The people living in safe houses, like me, have something to perhaps hide? Or for people just too unstable in credit and finances to sign a lease. It could be a few factors.
Brit is supposedly “German intelligence”. Handler is a well-known brilliant crack pot being paid by the Iranians to enlarge the American propaganda base of Press TV. Also, the undisputed leader of a 16-year effort to uncover 9/11 Truth. Most things seemed to tick back to that. His father is a famous IMF economist. He single handedly helped push an unauthorized biography on George W. Bush to market via his printing house, and then that man “killed himself” and that seemed to weigh on Handler, and behind the hippy Zen retreats, the walls of books that he had in fact read, he was always reading, or pretending to be reading behind the chirpy banter was a killer. An Iranian propaganda asset. And I was going to dope him up with benzo sedatives and literally cook him alive.
I say that still having shared Rosh Hashanah with him, that means Hebrew New Years; and we cooked for each other the cuisine of vegetarian poverty goulash, and yes once he threatened to throw me out, and yes like Natasha he was a total tyrant, but I played several times with his dorky little scientist son, the fucker was so precocious. I don’t mean to talk so much shit; I’m working on it. I’m in shit talking recovery!
I am not a great person all of the time. I fucked that little hipster like a Ukrainian by the hour. Her face to the wooden floor and my cock up her ass. For something a lot like rape, she took it seven or eight times before I murdered Handlers and jumped country after Passover. Though those acts were perhaps not connected at all, in my mind they sort of connected to my own depravity.
Comrade Handler Hicks is a left-wing zealot; I respect him only for that. Shows some morale compass anyway. And about ten years my senior was in many ways what I worried a failed version of myself might look like complete with child and broken marriage. Fuck, I just did it again. I like him, he likes me, and he’s really not a bad guy in fact, he’s a lesser hero of this story I’m about to tell. But I will admit that I didn’t mind the idea of killing him. He was annoying and also human trash. Because the truth is Iran doesn’t have any shortage of agents in this city, and his theories on 9/11 aren’t that well received anywhere. And he’s big faggot dork; so why did a two-person hit team get sent to eventually cook him?
“Well, that’s because loose lips sink ships and traitors get put in the ground.”
I am one to think every other high-powered person living in the darkness is mental, a whore, a killer or a spy. It’s mostly true. It’s baseless. God only knows what they whisper about me back in the station or worse, the home office. They probably just say I’m crazy. But I am a paramedic, and it took me a while to reconcile that; helping and saving sometimes, murdering and torturing other times. But a man’s got-to-do what a man’s got to do.
So, this small plane is gonna take off from an airstrip on the south coast of Brooklyn near Queens Border and it’s gonna fly me low down the coast to Cuba. And pretty much I’m gonna sit on a beach and meditate with rum and pussy after a meeting with Cuban intelligence about my training system and how it works.
Then I’m gonna fly back to Brooklyn and trade tropical white linen clothes for Spring in Russia clothes and I’m gonna fly to Finland then Moscow and check into the hotel Metropole to meet my “new attaché” and confidant Ms. Polina Mazaeva, who I’ve never met but have corresponded with for about six months and seen naked many times, more on that later. Thanks to the internet. And she will take me by the trains to Nizhny Novgorod, check me into a hotel with an Irish Pub, a Sushi restaurant and Strip Club, all a New Yorker really needs, and we’re gonna be working on a few things. Getting some paperwork and concepts in order before I fly to Erbil, Iraq then infiltrate Syria to reach the Rojava Revolution sometime in the fall. But before I leave my city for a while, perhaps forever. Handler Hicks will die! If not by my hand, then his own. He’s a black hole or vile negative sucking energy.
Polina is a cozy, coy little red head doll. Died of course. She’s overly attentive to my interests and reads my work which is flattering since, honestly most Russian women take all my money and suck on my dick, try to rearrange my wardrobe and ride me for housing and good meals. That’s cheap, but no off. Polina is looking at editing my shortest book, which means she’s manipulating me for someone. She has a little kid, she lives in the fifth biggest Russian city Nizhny Novgorod, looks provincial and bleak. I’ve never been to the Russian Federation. It will not be hostile; well, it might be a little. It’s better when I don’t talk because vaguely, I look like them. That is what people say.
A translation of a book about Haiti into Russian, a collaboration called ‘Endless Walk’ which you are now reading; and how we can pose as a family with her seven-year-old son Yazan and secure work visas for Dubai, in the heart of the United Arab Emirates. And then, we fall in love. Or I’ll use her, and she’ll use me, and when it stops working, we can part as nothing.
But mostly my heart is cold, but I still know how to talk soothingly to a woman and I am governed by both the Code of the Haitian Gentleman, Hebrew tribal law and the desire to be a good communist; so whatever happens between is of course, or course based on consent and mutual admiration for the work of the other. She is a talented singer, a painter and really too much of an artist for Russia’s third to fifth biggest city. She should be in Moscow, London or New York; her son has her pinned down though and wages are low in Russia. She makes her pittances as a graphic designer. They pay her jackbumsquat, which is my gibberish for fucking less than nothing. She lives with her kid, her brother and her parents in what looks worse than an American housing project.
I’m looking forward to May Day in the Capital and Victory Day in Nizhny, which according to my research survived the Mongol horde invasions nicely, combatively speaking. Those savage fucking Mongols.
Then I’ll load into a plane at GOJ Nizhny, fly to Istanbul, then provided I am not arrested and detained, head into Iraqi Kurdistan as we like to call it; Erbil City. And wait for Demhat al-Jabari, my colleague and fellow card-carrying D/U associate, to arrive a week later so we get to Sulaymaniyah, contact the resistance and be smuggled into Syrian Kurdistan, over the border into the Rojava Federation. It’s very exciting to me anyway, I’ve wanted to see all these places for years, but for two years I’ve been an ambulance slave. My operational budget is a lot leaner than last time; I am trying to get a good price for my car, but all the prices have sucked; I did too much damage to it using it like an ambulance. $2650 is the best price so far for a no-frills 2009 Honda Civic with paramedic plates and 58,000 miles, which Brit says is low, like I only drive in circles in this dark city rat race, with a two-year little exile in Boston.
“I’ve been to Russia in a past life or been Russian in a past life either one”, which I hope to see again in my present and future. I spend most of my time in the Russian quarter on the Brooklyn coast. I like everything about them. I can go deep or very, very shallow on it. I have read several dozen pieces of Russian literature and deeply admire the effort of the Soviet Union. I was blowing the coke off a Bulgarian lady friend’s tit the morning after my 33rd birthday. I liked it a lot, but it felt also disgusting and cheap, and I couldn’t bring myself to fuck her, so I paid and left. I guess Comrade Malcolm Veshanti, one of our comrades who stayed up all night with us, I can’t confirm but I think she passed out there at the Harlem brothel, woke up and fucked her.
So there I was making a procurement list and seeing how I could raise a little cash here and there without breaking too many laws, and safe house, the high ceilings with pipes running across was so quiet only the pitter patter of my keyboard, and, Handler was asleep since 11:43pm and Brit was out not long after and I just felt compelled to get my inventory logs sorted, my deployment budge square, file the logs; transcribe some poems I found in a little notebook to Adelina, send them to her, no response. Svetlana, her confidant messaged me on the book face that she did wish me luck, I pretended Adelina was there with her watching me type.
Sveta says she had a man now and was surely happy. I hope she’s happy and motherfucker isn’t twice her age. It might seem like I have all these lovers laying around, or like I’m a cold confused whore mongering whatever I am; but no. That’s not true. Generally, I have a free life partner, she bares me and the movement for a year or two, and she tries to save or fix or improve me; get me out of the movement and into medical school; then ultimately breaks it off when I do some time. I’ve spent 2 ½ years of my life inside camps cells and involuntary detention.
I’m not a cheat; I don’t beat women up except when they like that in bed. Which seems like a lot, leading me to question my own sweetness. I paid for everything. I dress well, I’m smart and an artist. I’m a decorated hero paramedic. I’ve written 8 books. I’m just a little bit crazy. And I’m a communist. And I do think those things are fine in Russian Federation, no cause for alarm like here. I did bring not one but two pairs of handcuffs to put Polina in, which is kinky but also tasteless and savage.
Tonight, just after midnight the man who helped the most to train me as a paramedic Mikhail Kreminizer messages me. His wife, maybe just his longtime girlfriend, has just died, will be cremated in the morning. That’s the way poor people do it. Burying people isn’t cost effective. It can cost over forty grand.
You must understand this man is a tank. A big Russian (really Lithuanian) Israeli storm trooper who used to torture people, Palestinians specifically. May or may not be a Mason, definitely some kind of strange Q-ANON enthusiast. has killed men with his bare hands and now operates an ambulance in midtown Manhattan. Trying to save his own soul which he barely believes in? Not for money. No one gets saved on ambulances. It’s all a profiteering machine of mythology and greed.
After the secret police broke up our attempt to hold the 9th Congress of the Association & Union in North Brooklyn, after they raped my Polina Mazaeva and tortured me for 5 weeks until the underground could force my ransom; after we bombed the five Strip clubs on Victory Day, after we kidnapped the Satmar Rabbi, well I was too hot for a lot of people in 2016 and Michael had to distance himself from me and withdraw his orbit of protection, which was as vast as he is tall.
“Yulia is dead,” Kreminizer has just written to me. A horrible feeling, feeling someone who is very strong buckle, being in the shadow of their horrible feeling.
“She and I never had that great art and writing collabo moment we always talked about.”
“And you never will. She died on Tuesday.”
“Fuck. I’m so sorry.”
“Ain Davar.”
“No, that’s horrible. I’m so sorry Michael. I know how much you loved her.”
“Yup. I just came from New Jersey. She will get cremated tomorrow.”
“I remember it was two summers ago. Yulia and I were on the phone, and I was so manic, and we were talking about her illustrating my book.”
“Well. That won’t happen.”
“Not in this life, no.”
“Agree.”
“In the world to come maybe she will be willing. I’m so sorry.”
“I’m going to get some rest. Good night, buddy.”
I hate it when he calls me “buddy”, but his main chick is dead.
“Good night.”
“I’m leaving the States on April 12th for Adelina’s birthday. I’m sure you prefer to suffer in silence, but if you want to hang out. I’ll drive out your way. She loved you so much.”
“We will see how I feel in the morning. Where are you going this time?” he asks me.
“Cuba. Then Russia. Iraq and then Syria. I’ll leave the night after Passover.”
“Be careful. You were just lucky the last few times. Those are all more dangerous places than Haiti.”
“Yeah. But I’ve got more men and training now. A good team. A real fine outfit.”
“Only reason you’re still alive.”
“I’ll try and get to see you more than the one-year usual. I do not only feel your pain, but I know it like I know my own mask of a face.”
He doesn’t reply because he doesn’t have to pretend to be strong, but I felt a small cry in me, this man had patiently precept-ed and apprenticed into paramedicine, my secondary trade, but first love trade; he had shown me how to put IVs in the dark with feel, while in a moving vehicle at high speeds, he’d talked me through heart blocks, and my own blocked heart over Goldy, and always treated me like an Israeli, not an American even though I’m really from here, wink. He taught me how to interrogate traffickers with the EKG monitor, how to start or stop the human heart, he was patient with me, he didn’t have to take that time I was on the blacklist I’d never be allowed on a good truck, a 911 truck again.
I feel this great knot of sadness because Michael Kreminizer suddenly has nothing to live for and does not fear g-d or devils; his self-destruction is frankly inevitable.
You must always be ready for suicide watch dealing with our kind, dealing with high energy people, empaths, bipolar ones, bonobos, whatever. We feel too much and frankly get a little self-destructive which is why so many join the service and why so many die off the job where no one can see it happen. Michael is a hard man. And he killed so many people he had to stay working to balance it out, but I know, I know he loved her, loves her so much. And this could be one thing. I have to stop. Stop, the archangel won’t die tonight or tomorrow, and you haven’t even seen him in a year? Two years? Three years? Four years? Stupid time, like a lot of people he said he’d be my reference, but worried about me. And didn’t have time for the hootenanny I got into. He called me Chechen once, because he could read into me and see many of my past lives. I felt so sad, like I had not been sad in so long and I thought about Adelina. What would I do if she took me back and we made a life and then died?
Suicide rates are actual low in Israel. And I was allegedly born in Trinidad and Michael was born in Lithuania, USSR, but we’re both Ivory. We’re both paramedics. We’re both parapsychologists. We’re both a lot past crazy. We both love Russian women. He’s the size of a killer robot made of steel from the future, but this could kill him. If anything could, this could.
“One by one having fun tonight, if she only knew what I did for life, it’s an endless walk of dreams versus nightmare.”
“Don’t leave me alone,” the dancehall song says.
Late at night, I join Comrade Brit on the roof for a smoke. We were sure looking off the safe house roof, the city visible 5 miles out, the evil stack house of Woodhull hospital within rocket range and the tallest city project on Myrtle Ave, the sniper nest in days to come, we were sure it was jeans and t-shirt day, because Brit Tully and I were wearing jeans and t-shirt, well I was. Brit almost always wore black and on top a black overcoat which had seen its prime some time ago, like my ideals. We were smoking some of her American Spirit dark greens and I hadn’t slept in 24 hours. It was really nice out for mid-March; it had never gotten cold in December, January or even February.
“They are conserving the weather machine for when it matters,” Brit said, and I agreed.
She was so dark, introverted, and cynical, as well as a lesbian. We only went out together a handful of times, but we smoked on the roof together a lot and both hated the passive aggressive Handler. Brit would always say she’d leave for a lover in German, soon, I always said I’d leave for revolution in Syria, any day now. We were both suffering in the Brooklyn ghetto, in the loft of Handler Hicks the conspiracy theorist and Iranian puppet man. Who we had just been paid to rub out of circulation. But you can’t just kill a man and get away with it in the United States. You must be realistic about that. We weren’t really gonna light him on fire, nobody really paid us to kill him and neither of us were really intelligence agents. We were all just living in relative poverty of conscience and slight material poverty deep in the Brooklyn labor ghetto, where you lived paycheck to paycheck. Where your collar is blue shade.
“It was all just a transit point to death or possible greatness. But a pointless death is more likely to come first and make the second proposition meaningless. What use is greatness when you cannot see the results of it?”
“You sure make a lot of dumb American movie like inner monologues when you smoke,” says Brit the German spy.
But there was no need for presumption, and it was just a jokingly used phrase; the two of them had served in an international brigade before, 3 years ago, in Haiti.
ADONEAV
I have known Comrade Peter Saint Reed, the marine, since the long, sweltering summer of 2014. We served together for three months in Croix-Des-Bouquets, Haiti. Staffing a small fort where about forty Haitian patriots were being clandestinely trained as emergency medical technicians, community health workers, and combat medics. We were developing and implementing the fourth version of the remote EMT training program in Haiti on behalf of several underground Haitian political parties and their diaspora. I am unabashedly a fan of his work.
PETER SAINT REED
“We could liberate this whole damn country with less than 40 women and men,” he had once said about Haiti. “We could take the whole place over and end all the bullshit.”
ADONAEV
“Liberate” is very relative word, but what he meant to say in his own cowboy marine way was that the Haitian people could cast off foreign oppression with a relatively small armed force.”
PETER SAINT REED
“No. I meant we could just take over the whole country with 40 people.”
ADONAEV
But we wouldn’t be able to hold it. The Haitians have a lot of fight.
PETER SAINT REED
If ten of us are marines, we can fucking hold it.
Sometimes their world views were not aligned, but in general their hearts were in a good place. Only shortly after that 2014 training operation in Haiti, Saint Reed bought a one-way ticket to Erbil in the Kurdish region Iraq and subsequently enlisted with a group of Slovakian mercenaries. They were a Mottley group of foreigners, mostly former military, providing medical aid to the Peshmerga forces. It is widely understood that his bravery and EMT training saved many lives.
“I saw you again on the news,” Sebastian wrote to him at one point, “I envy you and think what you are doing is particularly important. I’ll contact you when my team is coming over the border to join up.”
The boy was bleeding again. His mother, Hamdiya, dragged him across the dust, one hand clutching a dirty IV bag, the other clamped to the arm of her nine-year-old son, Thanoor. His wound — a sliver of metal in the neck — throbbed with each step. It was morning in Mosul, but no one had seen morning in years. They had only seen light followed by war. The clinic was a ruin disguised as hope. Sandbags, burned tea, half-melted gloves. Two Americans — Pete Reed and Derek Coleman — sat against the wall, sweat streaking down their necks, waiting for the next wave of wounded. Reed had the look of a man who’d seen too much, and Coleman had the look of someone trying not to feel anything at all. Reed muttered. Now he patched necks and carried children across hell. They told Hamdiya to take her son to a real hospital. There was still shrapnel in him, and the clinic — held together by Iraqi medics, borrowed supplies, and the will of a Slovak-American NGO — was barely a dressing station. The journey should’ve taken an hour. It took five. Checkpoints. Ethnic suspicion. Kurdish soldiers telling her, “He looks fine.” At the hospital, they said: “You’re Arab. Why are you here?”
She returned to the clinic hollow-eyed, her son worse. The clinic had nothing left but apologies.
Reed and Coleman had come to fight. They stayed to save. They weren’t doctors — just men who couldn’t sit still while others bled. They worked with the Kurds until the war shifted and the front moved. They bluffed their way through checkpoints. They knew that many of the people they treated would die somewhere on the road to Erbil.
“We just try to give them more time,” said Coleman, looking at the blood on his boots.
Reed smoked and stared into the distance like a man already dead. “The waiting is the worst,” he said. “It gives you time to remember who didn’t make it.”
They stabilized patients. That’s all. The war did the rest. A Humvee skidded into the courtyard. Two brothers were dragged out, mortar wounds gaping. Ali Khalil died before they could even say his name. Umar lived — if one can call that living. “Where’s my brother?” he whispered.
“Don’t worry,” said the medic. “He’s fine.”
Outside, the neighbor wailed. They had to get Ali’s body back to Mosul, but checkpoints demanded papers, and the family had none. They wrapped the corpse in a blanket and left for the graveyard under gunfire. As they vanished into the horizon, the courtyard went silent again. A young soldier resumed mopping the floor. Another man was brought in. Shot in the spine, legs useless. “My legs… my legs,” he whimpered. The medic prodded his feet with scissors. No response.
“This is not good,” he said softly, to no one.
In Baghdad, there were forms. In Erbil, there were offices. None of them could help. Psychological care is a myth. Coordination — a joke. Supplies came late. Ambulances came later. Sometimes, not at all. “Even if ISIS doesn’t kill you,” someone said, “the inefficiency will.” Reed didn’t laugh.
Reported by Mr. Gareth Browne on 18 December 2016:
“Meet the U.S. volunteers treating patients at a front-line clinic in Mosul! Pete Reed, and Derek Coleman both 27, catch their breath during one of the many long waits at a frontline medical clinic in Eastern Mosul.”
“MOSUL, Iraq – Grasping her son’s arm in one hand, and a saline drip in the other, Hamdiya Saleh stumbled across the dirt. The 30-year-old Mosulawi had walked for several hours, her black abaya trailing on the ground, to the motley Al-Samah Clinic in the Al-Samah neighborhood of eastern Mosul. Just five days ago, her nine-year-old son Thanoor Saleh was caught in the blast of an Islamic State group mortar. Their home, in the now partially liberated neighborhood of Aden in eastern Mosul, is often the target of reprisal IS mortar attacks on as much as an hourly basis. While playing in the street outside his home, Thanoor took a piece of shrapnel to the neck. Despite receiving near immediate treatment, the injury is still causing him problems, and this clinic staffed by Iraqi special forces medics with the help of the Academy of Emergency Medicine, a Slovak-US NGO, is the only front-line clinic in the east of the city. It is the only help they can reach. Hamdiya and her young son, seeking follow-up medical treatment, are among the first to arrive at the clinic early that morning. Pete Reed, 27, from Trenton, New Jersey, is a bearded former US marine with two tours of Afghanistan under his belt and a commanding presence, now helping to run the clinic.”
After leaving the marines, he spent time working as a ski instructor, but was drawn to Iraq late last year, originally to fight alongside the Kurds, but it quickly became evident that his skills as a combat medic were of far greater value. He instructs Hamdiya to take her son to the hospital. There is still shrapnel in his wound, and he requires treatment. The treatment may require surgery, and with those at the clinic only trained in basic trauma medical care, it goes beyond their remit. Iraqi army medics, with the help of medics from US-Slovak NGO, fight to save a young boy with shrapnel wounds from indiscriminate mortar fire carried out by the Islamic State.
The journey should take no more than one hour, but between these eastern outskirts of Mosul and Erbil there lie at least 4 checkpoints, some controlled by the Iraqi army, and beyond that by the Kurdish Peshmerga.
The journey via ambulance should be straightforward, but this is the humanitarian front line in the war against IS, and nothing is as it should be. Hamdiya returns to the clinic later that afternoon, just as the medics are packing up like shopkeepers after a long day of trade. She told of how she and her son were arbitrarily stopped at two Peshmerga checkpoints, and the journey took almost five hours. Some of the soldiers insisted that “there was nothing wrong with him”, and he did not need treatment. Then upon arriving at the hospital, Hamdiya was asked: “Why are you here? You’re Arab,” before being turned away.
Arab-Kurdish tensions have ratcheted up in recent weeks, and many Kurds are intensely suspicious of Sunnis fleeing the largely Arab city of Mosul. Following the liberation of Ramadi earlier in the year, ISIS attempted to use abaya-clad women to attack checkpoints, the explosive vests hidden away under their garments. Male fighters have also attempted to flee the embattled city, posing as civilians, making life even more difficult for those citizens genuinely trying to flee.
“We just do what we can to help win!” says Peter Saint Reed.
What happened to Hamdiya was not an isolated incident. First Sergeant Ghali, the mustached spokesman of the elite Counter Terrorism Unit’s medical corps unit in charge of running the clinic, says it is “happening every day,” adding “sometimes we have to send people to Baghdad [400 km away] for treatment.” The clinic is officially an Iraqi army installation, but the support of the NGO is both welcome and necessary. Iraqi army medics and the NGO staff – particularly Reed and Coleman – work hand in hand treating patients, maintaining the clinic and sourcing supplies. The two came to Iraq late last year with the vague notion of wanting to help in the battle against Islamic State. Instead, it was providing basic trauma medical care and training that they deemed the most effective means of helping. They worked initially with the Kurdish Peshmerga, and only in recent weeks joined up with Iraqi forces, sweet talking generals and hustling their way through military checkpoints as “Special Forces”. They openly admit they have been “blagging it.”
“This delay and sometimes denial of surgery and more advanced medical treatment is costing lives, as Reed acknowledges: “We know that a lot of people we patch up here die n route to the hospitals in Erbil, we just do what we can”. Saint Reed, a former US combat Marine, battles to stop a patient bleeding. This is just one of dozens of patients treated in the clinic every day.”
Reed’s colleague Derek Coleman adds: “The medical care after us is the weak link; all we can really do is stabilize people and give them a bit more time. The suspicion of IS fighters and supporters doesn’t help, nor do this part of Iraq’s long-standing Arab-Kurdish tensions.” Periods at the clinic consist of long waits – moments of reflection disrupted by a heavy influx of patients. It is during one of these interim periods that a macabre sense humor and deep conversation about what exactly is going on take place. As Reed says, dragging on a cigarette and sipping from a can of home-brand energy drink, “some days we’ll have 60 patients, other days it’s only 25, but that doesn’t make it any easier, because in the interim you just have more time to think about who you had today – the downtime makes it harder.”
“Reed’s colleague, Derek Coleman, 27, is a former machinist from San Diego, with only basic civilian medical training, but that hasn’t stopped him from trying to make a difference. Like Reed, he too initially came to Iraq to join the Kurds as a foreign fighter. But, he says, “I realized that was all bullshit, and this was a better use of my time.” The two are fiercely critical of the overall medical situation. “There is no coordination between the government and all the agencies, they all do their own thing,” says Coleman.”
It would be easy to dismiss the two as war junkies, and indeed some have. Coleman, however, seems to be a well-read and intelligent man. He tends to casually drop the likes of John Stuart Mill into the conversation and answers tough questions with reason, a far cry from the war junkie some have tried to paint him as being. Coleman recalls the case of a young girl he treated recently. “She didn’t make it,” he avoids eye contact, as his voice begins to break, “but I just remember trying to wash her blood off my hands; that was hard.”
Despite months of exposure to this suffering, he is anything but immune to the emotional effects. Similarly, it is clear that Reed is not just here for the ride. He has the sort of experience – providing critical care in conflict zones – that often makes the difference in tough cases where patients could go either way.
A conversation with Coleman about his favorite tanks is interrupted with the eerie sound of a Golden Division Humvee’s horn. Skidding to a halt, civilians drag two men from the vehicle – brothers, both injured in an Islamic State mortar attack. “Get him on oxygen,” yells Reed, seeing instantly that the first of the men pulled from the vehicle is in a critical state. Within minutes, the 27-year-old named Ali Khalil is declared dead, and focus switches to his brother Umar Khalil who lays on a stretcher in the building’s courtyard as his chest is bandaged. “How is my brother?” he asks repeatedly; “Don’t worry, he’s going to be fine,” whispers an Iraqi medic in his ear.
“But really we get almost no support from anyone,” Peter Saint Reed says.
Outside the clinic stands the brother’s neighbor, who is exhausted and covered in dust. With Umar stabilized, and Ali dead, they discuss what to do next. According to Islamic custom, after death a body should be buried as quickly as possible. “We can’t just bury him, his family must see the body,” shouts Ubay Abdel Basset, the neighbor who pulled Ali from the rubble. He explains that much of the family has fled Mosul to Erbil. But without identity cards, their car will likely be unable to cross checkpoints. They elect to return to Mosul, and with Ali’s body wrapped in a blanket, they board an Iraqi army Humvee and head for the family’s plot in a graveyard in the Mosul neighborhood of Qadisiya.
This is but one example of the logistical dilemmas friends and families increasingly find themselves facing as the civilian casualty rate climbs.
As the vehicle accelerates away, towards the sound of distant gunfire, Ali shouts: “Only God can help us. We will go back to Mosul. Maybe tomorrow we will die, but we will go back to Mosul.” And, as suddenly as they came, no more than 20 minutes after arriving, the patients are gone, and the clinic returns to a deathly silence, interrupted only by the slopping sound of a young Iraqi private mopping blood. Despite the great number of deaths, some of the toughest times ahead are for those that the clinic does manage to save. As the medics finish a lunch break, a middle-aged man is brought in, his arms slung over the shoulders of his father and a brother, and he is placed on the stretcher and whimpers a few barely audible words repeatedly – “my legs, my legs.”
Sami Abdul-Razaq has been shot in the back by an ISIS sniper while trying to flee the city despite carrying a white flag. An Iraqi medic frisks his pockets urgently searching for a key but settles on a pair of scissors sitting on the side. Using the sharp end, he prods the man’s feet searching for some sort of response but nothing. “This is not good,” he whispers to himself.
Psychological and physiological support for those who have survived serious injuries is not readily available in Iraq, and even where there is an NGO or government department in place to support patients, treatment is often delayed or incomplete due to a lack of coordination and bureaucracy. It is the same obstacles that often leave this clinic short on supplies or without an ambulance, and that leaves critically injured civilians stuck at army checkpoints for hours on end because of a lack of paperwork. As one ONG worker, who as usual declined to be named, said: “Even if the Islamic State doesn’t kill you, the chronic inefficiency in fighting them just might!” What a dumb fucking thing to say. But he is doing his all-American best to help defeat ISIS, and that is what counts.
“I am a comrade and have always been a comrade, that is that. That is all.”
My name is “the Tiger” or “Piling” in Kurdish. The Arabs have given me another name, but it is top secret. I later went on to kill many men in Deir-Ez Zor with the Dragunov sniper rifle I was given. I speak fluent Kurmanji so I was put in a Kadro unit. Party lifers who have sworn total allegiance to ‘the Revolution’ and Serok Apo. “Fanatics for the cause”, like me, actually. I grew up on the outskirts of Paris. In one of those “Arab ghettos”, you always see the riots happening in. I am of African descent thus I am not treated exactly like a French man. When I deployed to Rojava with the volunteers my family was harassed weekly. I was accused of joining Daesh and preparing for terrorism. The entire time I was there serving, I was stressed. So very stressed. The security service kept telling my Mom I was a “traitor to France”. France is one of countries with strict policies on entering the Y.P.G. as a volunteer. Like Britain they make your life a living hell and try confiscating your passport on reentry.
All people, in “La Resistance,” which is to say lePeople’s Protection Units (Y.P.G.) and Women’s Protection Units (Y.P.J.), will give you only a Kurdish guerrilla name,” says Heval Piling of Paris, France. He is the son of African immigrants that have settled in the outskirts of the French capital. Some are given their “heval name” by the P.K.K. cadros during the smuggle crossing from the base of the Qandil mountain over le Tigris River into northeast Syria’s Jazeera Canton. Others are given their nom de guerre in the first few days of their arrival at the guerrilla Academy near Qerechow. Some gain it beforehand through their affiliation with Kurdish Movement in Europe. There are probably under 100 names used. 20 of them are quite common and they are frequently recycled.
The training base is located amid the levers, pumps and minoring systems of the Ruemelin oil fields77, the original base and 22 foreign volunteers and Y.P.G./Y.P.J. fighters were incinerated in Turkish airstrikes which occurred in early May. You are given a first name and can choose your last name. And this is who you are while fighting for the “Revolution in Rojava”.
My code name means ‘The Tiger’. I heard a story before I left for Syria from a tall anarchist, code named HevalFirat. I am very paranoid about any press coverage or even photographs the French police are already harassing my family. I am a black so I will not be treated the same as other French. I am already under suspicion.
Heval Firat told me that after his first tour of six months he came back and held a small meeting of radicals. He told them of his time in Rojava and encouraged them to go experience the revolution themselves. He was arrested two days later. Clearly, an informant was in the meeting. He was charged with terrorism and recruitment of terrorists. His passport was confiscated, and it took him a year to travel to Rojava because getting it back was such meird. (Such shit).
Abdullah Ocalan’s face is absolutely everywhere in Rojava we have read. The sly, chubby brilliant revolutionary beaming out at us all from his prison cell in Imrili, should he still be alive. He is perhaps not alive. The Turkish fascists have held him hostage and tortured him since 1999. But this is his party and his revolution. One must accept the cult of Apo (which means uncle) because his leadership allowed miracles for the Kurdistan Workers Party (P.K.K.); yes ‘our P.K.K.’ survived the Cold War and is the last resistance movement left to challenge the West and its puppet Turkey. We are asked to read his books and understand his thinking before we enter the Y.P.G. because this is a revolutionary militia. We are fighting for far more than the destruction of Daesh!
I am an Anarcho-Syndicalist and a Platformist78. My group in France and Russian has sent to the Y.P.G. to make an assessment about its capabilities and Rojava’s potential for survival against the Turkish army once Daesh is eradicated. Groups like M.L.K.P.79 have for years used Rojava as a training ground and contributed hundreds of fighters to the cause. Not as many as the Jihadists certainly. But it is thought that more than half of the 500 volunteers were Turkish nationals with the M.L.K.P. I am to discover if my group can make a base here like they do. I am to discover if the Turks will just burn this whole revolutionary effort to the ground.
PILING
“I am very excited to join the armed struggle.”
It is inspiring what the Kurds have done since the Siege of Kobane when they were almost annihilated. Of course, the U.S. airstrikes saved them. Of course, as soon as ISIS is finished the Turks will sweep south to mop up this cordon of resistance the P.K.K. has built via its Syrian arm the P.Y.D. We are probably the last wave of foreigners that will go in. The logistics will get worse and the fight with Turkey will not be the same as the fight with Jihadists in Daesh.
I am good with a rifle. I know the language. They will respect me more because I have taken the time to learn Kurmanji, the other volunteers always complain how shut out they are by language. Firat managed to get his passport back and not be charged with terrorism. He arrived in Rojava a few months before me and went back to his Suikast80unit. Heval Firat encouraged me to come, though I was not at the fatefully infiltrated meeting where all the potential was discovered, charged and shook up to step down.
The number 500 is very small. Embarrassing even; the M.L.K.P. is a disciplined Turkish communist group who has taken on over 100 Shahids81. They have a deep alliance with the Party. But my structure has sent me to make the same deal. Can Rojava hold out long enough to export revolution? Can volunteers survive long enough to return to fight in the West? These are the questions I must answer. And while I’m away French police will make my mother very upset and afraid. They will basically terrorize her. Besides from Firat the Anarchist82 and Piling, the Tiger; there were several other French of note who prepared to cross into Rojava or were already inside. We know them only by their assigned Kurdish names. Heval Serhat was a lawyer and a petite aristocrat. Proudly French he prepared for adventure not revolution. He was there to kill Daesh-ISIS and avenge his terrorized homeland. France had over all endured the most of Daesh terror.
They sure underestimated what effect these well-choreographed executions would have on the hyper-plugged-in West. If anything, it got them invaded with greater speed.
Serhat was not named Serhat yet, nor was he even trying to join the Y.P.G. He was not a leftist and was hoping to link up with a famous Spanish fascist who had made a name for himself in Sinjar with the YBS. Unlike the YPG, he wouldn’t have to deal with all the ideological bullshit he was told. Serhat was a dandy; handsome and conservative. The struggle of his life before he got to the killing fields may have been the challenge of law school examinations. Some women may have broken his heart once.
A stranger to military or Islamist danger, Sher was “a Parisian waiter with socialist family values”. He had less qualms with the left being a leftist and was eager to join the YPG. His English was almost non-existent as was his Arabic and Kurdish, but he was eager to battle ISIS. Sher was a communist but not in any party. He had fired a rifle before and assumed he proved to be a good enough shot.
Neither Heval Sher nor Heval Serhat were eager to battle the Turks. They were aware that they were coming in on the tail end of the counter-ISIS operation. Raqqa, Mosul and the rest would all fall one after another by the wintertime. And after that all acknowledged the Americans would abandon its Kurdish and Shiite allies. The Turks would then move in to crush the revolution in Rojava and kill anything in their path. These were the discussed eventualities.
This was going to be the last time volunteers could get in easily, and fight ISIS, as they would be finished soon and the border sealed up for a time.
PILING
“After the struggle for Der Ez Zore and Raqqa, everyone will be fighting against Turkey.” What made the period of our deployment most uncertain was a combination of factors. First, ISIS was annihilated in Raqqa and on the run in Deir Ez-Zor. Second, the Russian Syrian-backed army and the Y.P.G. were racing on either side of the Euphrates River to seize more territory. So far most of the largest river cities were in the hands of the Syrian Regime and most of the oil was in our hands. Tension was building, sometimes erupting into firefights; since no one realistically believes the Assad Regime will tolerate Federal Rojava. At the same time, Türkiye is ready to attack Afrin Canton at any time, seizing the Western most Canton before we can fight our way through Syrian Jihadists in Al Qaeda to close the gap. And everyone knows our U.S. allies will abandon us as soon as ISIS is vanquished. Thirdly, the impending Kurdish referendum will provoke the Iraqi Army to seize border crossings in Sinjar and Northwest of Dokuk, making betting people and supplies into Rojava even harder.
The biggest uncertainty is what will happen when ISIS is inevitably defeated. But it’s not that uncertain really. Turkey, the second largest military in N.A.T.O. will immediately attack us and try and crush the revolution. Any of us are still here to face them. We will all most likely be killed. C’est la vie. This is the risk of real change. This is the Resistance of our time, so we say. The historic event that will shape the movement for real change for the next thousand years.
“Only a full coward would loudly profess these coffee house revolutionary views, these most noble of aspirations for the brotherhood of all mankind; then, when pressed to relinquish the luxury and safety of the West! They turn their back on defending a real revolution!”
Not I comrade, not I, No Pasdaran! “These Turkish bastards will not pass.”
In grim Birmingham, U.K. sometime in late of 2016, two British Hevals meet in a bleak coffee shop with no phones to say hello, goodbye, and hash out some final details for their upcoming deployment into Rojava.
“My government name is not relevant to you, Hevalin, as they say.” Havalin is the plural of Hevals, my man and multiple friends. Says Heval Erdal, a cheeky British Jew of left-wing leanings with many Kurdish friends. He sits with his old friend Ana Montgomery Campbell from Lewes, U.K. who later died a Martyr in the defense of Afrin Canton. The British pipeline begins in Birmingham. Actually, hundreds of ISIS Islamists had been recruited from Birmingham. Literally many hundreds.
“You may call me by my Kurdish guerrilla name, “Heval Erdal”. I’m lanky and have a highly disarming grin, so say the ladies. I’m just having a kid, which is to say a laugh; the ladies don’t say anything like that. I’m British clearly, but also a cheeky part Jew. It’s not a very well thought out part to be honest. Don’t practice any of it. I became active in the Kurdish movement protesting Turkish arms deals and attending cultural events at the centers. My working-class British city had literally hundreds of Jihadists who took off for the Middle East and joined Daesh. Fuck all mate, hundreds! They took wee kids and wives with them. They thought it was the end of times. Well, it had end of times properties, I’ll give it that.” So, I was always a ‘wee activist’ with politics of the progressive kind, but I love them Kurds man! They’re so awesome. Humble, principled mountain people. Leftists. Warriors. Love um! Sometime in August of 2016 I made up my mind to travel to Kurdistan and join up with the People’s Protection Units; the famous and glorious Y.P.G.71.
So, I worked a bit more than usual. I saved up about 2,000 quid and there I had a chance to ask the right questions about who to contact, literally just an email address called YPG REVOLUTION, and I answered a bunch of questions for them. Then I was approved to go. It didn’t take nearly as long as lots of chaps complained. Britain has the second largest contribution of foreign fighters to Y.P.G./Y.P.J. right after Turkish leftists.
But life happens, you have a girlfriend you can’t bring, and you have an apartment you can’t just leave. You also have a bit of fear in you. No one wants to die! Unless you’re one of these Jihadist tossers. You make various excuses. Well not me, I don’t worry about dying. I had a pretty boring apartment. My job was bullocks. We all have bollocksy jobs, so it made it easier to leave mine and go, knowing how much I hated my current situation in what Kurds call Capitalist Modernity. Also, there were brave Hevals who went in earlier, when things were more desperate and asymmetrical.
I had become friendly with Heval Helen Qerechow, whose British name was Ana Campbell via the various protests and Kurdish events. She was far more ideological than I was. She was what we called later a ‘true believer’, a highly committed young revolutionary. Me, I just wanted to kill Daesh, and the Turkish fascists. I wasn’t stupid to the politics mind you, but I was more of the fighterly mind set. I had set myself on a warpath. I grew up working class and I would die working class, and revolution would never come home to the U.K., but if I could contribute well to the Y.P.G. and aid the Kurdish resistance then I would feel like I was a man of my word. All these years yelling about arms deals and Turkish coups all didn’t ever do much, but it was how you made friends with Hevals and aspiring Hevals. Heval in Kurdish means comrade/friend. It’s what movement people call each other affectionately and ideologically.
They had met just one weekend before herself deployment to Syria. I went out with Ana, and we talked a little bit about what we were risking and why we were risking it. She went in to Rojava about five months before me. This was maybe on the eve of.
“I’m all in the game mate, I’m just all about it. As an anarchist and as a human, this is the real deal as I see it,” Ana declared.
“I mean eye to eye my sis, I agree,” I tells her.
“I mean as a woman and as an activist this seems so big, so important, how could we ever just go on and ignore this and act like we have and validity to our own fight?” Ana always talked in big questions, rhetorical like ones for circular thinking.
“I mean are you scared?” she asks me, “I’m not scared at all.”
“No, not scared to die. Maybe scared to be tortured or maimed, but all part of a revolution I guess,” I reply.
“You must be brave. Everyone is watching us. The Kurds and the vultures, you know they want to make up stories about why we went out there, going out there to die in a foreign war, a Kurdish war! It’s our war, it’s the last stand for idealism.”
“It’s pathetic so few leftists are going, have gone,” I say.
“No, it’s up to us to be an example of trustworthy European leftists and what we can contribute. Everything must be about possibility not fear!”
“You’re a shining star,” I tell her.
“Serok Apo72 says that Women’s leadership is what saved the P.K.K. in Qandil and has saved the Rojava revolution.”
“Well surely it has,” I just agree with her now because I’m not ever one to argue with her on either Feminism or what Serok Apo said. She’s very ideological and I am not, so it’s easy to avoid contentious bickering.
“I’m so happy we’re both finally going,” she says.
“Yeah, good times,” I reply.
“We probably won’t see each other that often. The Y.P.J.73 has its own separate structures. How do you feel about that? I think I prefer the old way when we were all together.”
“I think I read they need to be able to tell the conservative Kurdish village fathers their daughters aren’t getting banged out in the P.K.K., and also because Kurdish Women’s Movement wants their own self-governing spaces.”
“Yeah, both. But anyway, we will meet up for tea and have long fireside talks about ideology like you love so much,” she smiles.
So, I was scheduled to begin the Academy in Qerechow74 in August of 2017. I had booked a direct flight to Erbil from Heathrow. Ana was in the class before me for the Y.P.J.; Women’s Protection Units, the co-gendered women’s structure. We had both been arrested several times scuffling with the Turkish security service at this demo or that. Never had any challenging times either of us. Well, why should we have? We were fighting for Kurdish Freedom, for peoples’ freedom; against fascists and Islamic terrorists, the kind that lived in Birmingham and migrated to Syria with their families for the war.
Now my motives were pure, but they were not purely ideological. Apo did not make me do it! I just felt that Daesh was a heinous evil. I felt the Turks to be true aggressors. And I wanted to avenge the fact that so many people from my city had headed over to the enemy. An enemy which throws homos off roof tops. Kidnaps and sex enslave young women. Commits genocide! And until Operation Inherent Resolve75 I.S.I.S. was gradually taking over the entire Middle East into their “Caliphate”.
“So, I packed my bag and joined the international volunteers!” About five months later Anya went down to Rojava to join the Y.P.J. The proud, inglorious 500 or 600 so who ended up with the Y.P.G. and its various affiliated structures. The embarrassingly low turnout compared to the well over 40,000 Jihadists who turned out to join I.S.I.S. is a matter of leftist defeat, human cowardice, ineptitude of Kurdish propaganda, and the psychological barriers of joining a violent shit show that no one is clearly ever going to win. Her last words before she left England were the same last words, she said to me before she was blown apart on the Afrin Front. The phrase has a couple of meanings to the Hevals. “Onwards to invincible victory,” or “Victory is certain ”, or in Kurmanji, “Serkaften!”
To which I replied “Serchevan76.” On the eyes!
Within the next year Heval Errdal’s entire family would be arrested in the United Kingdom and charged with aiding terrorists financially and Anna Campbell would be dead, martyred in a Turkish airstrike.
➢ “Sometimes I think we have to get out of this place!”𝀓
The motherland calls,
And now we’re using a code.
The silence of touch, the science of mode,
The science of making one’s morals align.
With the cold things done-for-dollars, in the absence of ethics,
Or the g-d head the divine𝀓
Oh, the things I might do! Oh, things that you do.
An animal’s logic of rough-handled thrusting,
Subsumes the illogic, or basic desire to woe or to woo.
“If I get on my back for an hour ortwo”,
I see your face.
Security, obscurity, can you lick something magic?
“Man, how many times did you die in disgrace?”
Frail little humans, trying to see a plot through,
black breaded blue black sky where every single star is a blessing,
A promise of pity,
“I didn’t ask what you’ve done lately,
So I probably only muse partly, rip off your dress, and we forget second-guessing.
on the things you still have to do.
a breathtaking ode to the half-naked goddess that’s you.
The thrusting of my logic dare outpace.
In the lack of a life we had picked out in earnest,
Hinting the the hilt of a gentleman’s saber? You hand in my face?
➢ the back-breaking ease of the thing we call labor,
The belt on the neck of the thing we call grace.
Abhorrent! On whose horse did you rode?
Morse code on my back, your fingers play piano.
Let the skill of your ill masquerading, let it lighten the load.
Let the lust that men drown in make it a new home,
Make the world implode. Make a world where it’s up to a partner to lighten a load.
We both have nostalgia for things that ignite,
A lust for a new kind of rule?
A list of words for the way that the body can gyrate,
and mix to a perfect soundtrack of the sage house abide or abode.
“Man, pretty cool.”
and then all things can explode.
Explode into opportune living of life spent in terror,
Life spent lacking free life, like the fairy tale ritual error.
The first time.
It was always still the very best time, the first time,
So close to your body,
A Look in the mirror of the look in your eyes.
In rented safe house attics suited for stealing, the petty theft of posture passion and wiggle thrust rhyme, silhouettes forming fantastic formations of fondle,
Pausing the clock for a sensual mime.
Physically speaking,
It was something divine.
But the next second time,
“We spoke candidly about the feelings on not having feelings, and escapading in Europe, and the subtle sublime,”
What a terrible habit, paying on the record,
Transferring rebels to camps or rubies for illicit moments of the financial district down climb.
Wasting the very last moments,
“Wasting one’s absolute time.”
For in arrest, for is your work working off the world of stress,
A test of the blessed, a test of the rest of the lifestyle, the bondage?
The work of the night and the work of the question, the imagined, the partially guessed. for the guess of an intention to blow or to be or to bless!
To lay even one more hand on your most amble chest.
I close my eyes, and we kiss harder than the press will later confess.
I sought out your confidence, I seek out your most costly attention, I believe you think in Russian, but that’s a soft guess.
I seek out something between total lust and a loyal affection,
I seek out writhing inside you and placing a kiss on every speck of your being,
What and how much am I after?
I don’t ask you to fully undress.
My love is something absurd, the uses of my love are anyone’s guess.
I ask you to weigh.
Do I have the talent and useful out lie of skills to back up all of the ludicrous things I might say?
Will all of the laughter outlay?
All the past hardships and tears?
It doesn’t matter the plot points that set out the setting,
I want to use (and to know) and be used near on next to your body for years!
Not just mere hours, in a state of total erotic orgasmic undress.
Speaking of evil and speaking of stress, please use me for fucking,
Please use me for parts.
Or for evil Jew medical legalish arts.
Floor boards are now creaking,
Shall we try and proceed under such flagrant duress!
Rustling now in the attic,
Erotica is what one is perhaps seeking;
Also, are you waiting? Chandelier spills of
For the end to come,
In a visitation, we commit petty crime.
In downtime,
Surround sound to fondle around time.
in up time, in emotional downtime.
In the placement of dispondant downtime,
You stroke the shaft of midnight off the layers of lime.
You lay me down, my face into a hole like a waterboard, I’m dripping.
You lay me down, your reflection an erotic silhouette of starlight,
Lip service for a hardcore lash or lock of further lipping.
Dasha, can you trust me yet?
Have we made love in other lives?
Dasha, can you ever fully trust me, get you happy, get you fully unhinged in upset?
A tall tale of too much turmoil, a rare form of Amerkanski.
You are well armed with your curvatures, your lips tight.
A lusty lap dance for a lingering servitude,
I’ve been to your safe house in Midtown.
Your goddess naked, curving silhouette is etched in my mind at night,
At first sight.
I want to render you completely naked,
And work very my sex on your very soul, lie where you lie.
A ride or a grip; or die for a try, par to the part of the whole,
with the ink of my pen, or the typing of sonnets that preferably never will get old,
and preferably never quite die.
Make you call out for me,
like I call out for you,
in the bellowing evilish New York dusk twilight.
I want to kiss your lips forever, or just for the rest of right now, can we try,
I have a half of a plan and I will show you how, how the last of us cry,
for as many hours as it is possible to imagine them entertaining me.
I want to roughly take you,
There were sneaking, creaking footsteps toward the rented safehouse,
There were mechanical noises in the dark sky above,
But perhaps in reality, just make noble love.
My hands as they grip your hips,
My tongue, when it lashes out, sips of fortuitous trips down the small of your spine,
And the arch of your back when you moan out for me.
Make you drip, you make me drip, you make me melt, you make me sip,
On the very most waters of want, on the lustiest thirst, on the thrown.
On the edge of reality’s grip.
I can’t do this whole night of class war alone,
I can’t write you too well from an ambulance late at night,
from the glow of making us less smart phones.
I can’t make love when your body is still something to buy or to own.
Are words purely worthless?
Is their weight to a promise. Is there weight to a stone?
Are we still having fun?
I want you to think of me kindly when we are all done.
I want your lips on my lips, I want your hips on my hips, I want my whole flesh inside you, writhing naked right back to where the romance begun.
When the traps are reset, and the web is unspun.
Where do I know your naked body from?
Where do I imagine this whole tryst can go?
Do you think of me ever when my existence is gone?
Take you hard on a floor roughly, or a gentle, long kiss good night in a hotel bed, can you want me like a lover and still profit from a John?
Русский (рифмованный) перевод
«Иногда я думаю: нужно бежать отовсюду!» — Зовёт нас родная земля, Мы пишем шифром, в немом переулке у чуда, Где такт прикосновений заменяет слова.
Наука того, как мораль подчиняют расчёту, Холодным делам “за доллар”, без духа, без Бога в нутре. Что я бы сделал? Что делаешь ты в поворотах? Животная логика тел, уступающая логике тьме.
«Если лягу на час-другой» — вижу снова твой лик. Безопасность, туманность — лижешь магический штрих. «Сколько раз ты погибал позорно, до криков и рвот?» Хрупкие люди ловят сюжет, Чёрный хлеб, чёрный небосвод, Где каждая звезда — благословенье, Обет жалости, «Не спрашивала я, что ты делал вчера — Мне хватает лишь жеста, Рву твоё платье — и нет больше бегства, Есть только тела, и их высота, и последняя нежность».
Полунагую богиню продумывает мой стих, Дыханием споря с твоей красотой. Мы жили бы лучше — но путь был другой, нас увёл… Твой жест — будто эфес от сабли был поднят над мной.
Тяжёлое и лёгкое, то что зовётся “трудом”, Ремень на шее “грации”, Где потеряно всё. На ком твой конь взлетал галопом? Твой Морзе на моей спине — Ты играешь, как рояль в темноте.
Пусть ложь твоих масок хоть как-то снижает саван заботы, Пусть страсть, где мужчины тонут, Станет домом в сердечной пустоте.
Мы оба скучаем по искрам, что жгли до зари, По страсти, что строит законы и миры. По словам, что описывают танец тела, По музыке мудрых стен, что хранят ордена и тайны квартиры.
«Чёрт, круто же было». И всё может взорваться — Взрывом удачи, Жизни, где страх — и любовь, и попытки восстать.
Первый раз — Всегда лучший, Так близко к тебе — словно зеркало глаз. В мансарде секретной, где время крадут, Где позы, касанья — изгибы страстей, Где тени сплетают узор из тел, Где вздох — это музыка, Пауза — сонм нежных ролей.
Второй раз мы говорили честно О том, как не чувствуем чувств, О Европе, её авантюрном искусстве, О тонком, почти бестелесном «вдруг».
О, ужасная привычка платить, Переводить бунтарей и рубины За тайные встречи на дне делового квартала.
Тратили последние вдохи, «Тратили время — финальный товар».
Арест ли спасает? Работа ли держит нас в мире, где боли — товар? Ночные вопросы, оковы, догадки, Где благословляешь удар.
Положить бы ладонь На грудь твою — в пламени странных начал. Я закрываю глаза — и мы целуемся так, Как газеты потом не напишут.
Я искал твою уверенность, Прошу твоего дорогого внимания, Мне кажется — думаешь ты по-русски, Но это лишь нежное предположение.
Мне нужно меж похотью и верностью Узнать твой предел и твоё доверие, Обнять каждую точку тела, Не требуя даже раздеться.
Моя любовь абсурдна, Её смысл — загадка и жест.
Скажи, есть ли талант Удержать все нелепые фразы, что скажу я всерьёз? Перекроет ли смех Все прошлые слёзы и боль? Неважны сюжетные трещины — Я хочу быть с тобой Годы, а не часы, В оргазмическом, бешеном, нежном, Беспамятном наголо-снятом тепле.
Говоря о зле и о стрессе — Пользуйся мной, Пользуйся частями, Пользуйся “еврейской медициной и правом”, На полу скрипят доски — Но мы продолжаем.
В мансарде шуршат тени, Ищут эротики, Ждут конца, Как визита небесной беды.
В паузах — преступленья малы, В минуты простоя — Ласка, В часы разлада — Тоска по ударам судьбы.
Ты кладёшь меня вниз лицом, Как на водную пытку, — Струится пот. Ты кладёшь меня под свет звезды, И губы твои творят Служение боли и ласке сверх меры.
Даша, Ты мне доверяешь? Мы любили друг друга в иных мирах? Даша — Сможешь когда-нибудь верить, Сбывать мои страхи, Безумие вытравлять?
Ты — тень небесной работы, Американский мой миф и бред. И армия линий твоего силуэта В ночи гремит.
Я был в тайном убежище твоём, Где тело твоё — как статуя яркого тлена, Где я хотел снять с тебя всё — И душой, и рукой, И стихом, где ни строчка не стареет, Где слово не умирает порой.
Хочу, чтоб ты стонала так, Как я стону по тебе В злорадно-чудовищный сумрак Нью-Йорка.
Хочу целовать тебя вечно — Или хотя бы до утра. Есть план — и я покажу, Как плакать вдвоём, Как тянуть наслаждение часами, Как разгораться в безумных играх.
Хочу взять тебя грубо, Но в ту ночь Казалось — вокруг механический шорох, И шаги по лестнице, И звёзды гудят. Но на самом деле — Это была любовь.
Мои руки на бёдрах, Мой язык вдоль твоей спины — И мир тает, И таешь ты.
Я не выдержу этот классовый бой в одиночку, Не напишу тебя с “скорой помощи”, Где свет смартфонов гасит нас в ночь. Не могу любить, Когда тело — товар, Когда любовь покупают за наличный вздох.
Есть ли вес у слова? Вес у камня? Всё ли нам в шутку? Я хочу, чтобы ты вспоминала меня Добро — когда всё кончится вдруг.
Хочу твои губы на губах, Твои бёдра на бёдрах, И тело твоё вокруг — Как начало романа.
Когда ловушки сброшены, Когда сети порваны — Откуда мне знакомо твоё нагие формы? Куда ведёт эта связь? Думаешь обо мне, Когда я исчезну?
Взять тебя жёстко на полу Или нежно — Ждать рассвет. Быть любовником Или стать для тебя Очередным, кому платят за след.
A small place like this takes on fierce intensity. A pressure cooker of ethnic strife baked in varying religious modes. I have not seen the sun in over a week. I work from 9ish at night until close to 3 in the morning, chill by the beach, and then go back to Mughrabi to sleep. I’d walk past the Opera Towers, about a mile north on the tiyeled until I got to Mike’s Blues Bar. I’d shoot the shit with everyone’s favorite Russian-who-wanted-to-be-American Svetlana, drink a beer, eat a burger, pass out a shit ton of flyers to Americans and trash containers, then go back and have Alex buy me a shot while Canadian Dave the manager told me about being a sniper in the IDF. Turned out he and Maya, whom he also called Emma, were old lovers or something for a fleeting time. I really liked the guy. Once he took me to the roof of his building, a great crib on Ben Yehuda Street, and taught me about sniping with a broom. To exhale and then to fire. To always change positions quickly after firing. To wait for hours to get the most bang for your exposure. He told me that sniping is like ancient times when you must remember the face of each woman or man you kill. I told him I wanted to be a sniper in the army, and he just figured the army I meant was the IDF. Lessons were scheduled for once a week, but they only happened two more times.
I co-write a short manifesto with Maya and Avinadav an,d they turn it into Hebrew and Arabic. I didn’t trust any of my Russians to look at it and did not know any Arabs to trust either. We set up a timetable for me to set up cells in Haifa, Be’er Sheva, and Jerusalem. I spent about three days in each city recruiting. I was to attempt to be back at the Deep on Thursday to check in. Maya would set up a ‘unit’ in Tel Aviv and Avinadav would be the money and logistics man.
The Organization, as we soon took to calling the thing, was founded in Tel Aviv in late July of 2001. ‘A group without a name was formed to launch a movement without a color’ as our line went. The initial objective of our group was the resolution of the conflict between Israel and Palestine. It was believed that through the creation of a united front among the peoples of the region, a solution could be achieved that might serve as a springboard for a worldwide revolution against American hegemony and the cultural mentality it perpetuates. The principle on which this group was founded was that ‘we are in fact not an organization, but rather individuals becoming organized’ another line from our playbook. The Organization was to serve as a network through which quite different people could unite under common revolutionary goals. Our goals were to be better defined in a soon-to-be-written 10 Point Program for the Revolution in Israel and Palestine.
I was taking notes from Che Guevara’s manual on guerilla warfare and Mao’s Little Red Book. I was mixing it with populist Israeli rhetoric and Marxist overtones. We didn’t say proletariat. We just said we fought for the rights of the working class. I was getting my training on the fly. So were Maya and Avinadav. The Maya revealed no ideological leanings other than progressive feminism. She seemed left without needing to declare it. She was Spanish by passport and Canadian in upbringing, but she’d been in HaEretz a year and a half. As a club promoter she had half the basic skill set of a revolutionary anyway, the gift of random gab. She took the role of support and advice and begrudgingly accepted a title on our cabinet. She urged me to hammer out a ten-point program before she tried to recruit anyone she knew.
Andrew Manasseh Butler, aka “Andrew the Hustler”, whom no one seemed to call Avinadav except for me, not even Maya who quite a few men called Emma, told me one night over dinner that Maya and I could be the activists, but he had ‘keep the focus on the mission.’
Avinadav and I would talk all night. He lived in a sprawling penthouse near the outer highways and skyscraper towers of the Azrieli center at the edge of Ramat Gan. It was really near the Tel Aviv Light Rail Depot, so I’d crash with him once and awhile at his ‘House of the Rising Sun’ as Emma called it. There were always people crashing on the couches, on the floors and anywhere they could. There was a White rapper from the American hip-hop group Cyprus Hill who had been drafted to play for Maccabi Tel Aviv and then fucked it up somehow. Nice guy, but a huge show boater and big talker. One night he and I picked up these two Ashkenaz cuties and he claimed he was rapping at GSPOT, this huge hip-hop club and could get us all comped. I closed the stand and the four of us walked our asses north to the Sheraton and beyond, only for him to disappear into the club and ditch us outside.
I talked big too, but I prided myself on delivering what I promised with broads and bullets both. This guy was living on Avinadav’s couch indefinitely. Disrael, the partner at The Deep with the ice in his ear, which he declared ‘It’s a cubit diamond from the land of Zirconium, was the only other rent payer besides Yashara, Avindav’s Yemenite special lady who looked Dominican more than Arab or Jewish. At any given time, there could be between four to seven ‘community relatives’ who’d gotten exiled from Demona for this or that and were living with Avinadav until something came along, or they got forgiven.
“We are all in ‘back against the sea or a head to the wall country,’ some of us more than others. So when the honorable Prophet Ben-Ami led seventy-odd Black brothers and sisters in 1969 from Chi-Town’s Southside across Africa to build the Hebrew Israelite Community in the badlands of Southern Israel and then when your father gets into a fight with the Prophet over annulling a marriage and your whole clan gets tossed out of the community, but you and your brethren don’t have Israeli or American passports, well fuck the dumb shit, where we gonna go?”
“How many of you are there?”
“A couple thousand now. Not one is a citizen here. Ethiopians, they at least begrudgingly call them Jews. We do not even get offered real citizenship. If we the field Negroes, then you got some idea why it’s ‘Waleed and the Lethal Leisure Suite’ time for the Palestinians. It never comes down too hard on more than one demographic group at a time. The others make believe it won’t happen to them. Besides you Ashkenaz, everybody is shut out of something.”
“Just like in the States.”
“A microcosm of all the stupid suffering that the wretched of the earth are subject to because they refuse to fight back. I want you to dig inside, Zach. I want you to look into your soul and know that our struggle is doomed to fail like the thousands of other risings before ours if you can’t honestly see the soul you have is of the same worth as the one Hashem gave the Arabs and the Christians, the pagans, communists and atheists like Emma Solomon.”
“I thought she was agnostic like everybody else.”
“Nope. She just plays one on TV to get more answers out of you.”
“Ah. Answers about what?”
“To judge if we can trust you, a near total stranger, with our lives.”
“I’m not asking for that kind of trust. I’m asking for help printing propaganda, obtaining safe houses, and recruiting partners. What do my religious inclinations have to do with the mission?”
“What’s the mission then, Zachariah?”
“Empower the Israeli and Palestinian people to win a class war against the American backed proxy government of this country.”
“Which would take a miracle.”
“You’re not saying…”
“Who’s Mike Washington?”
“How did you….?”
“Emma says you ask him questions in your sleep. Lucky you.”
“It’s not like that.”
“I know it’s not like that. The girl’s a goddess, heavenly just to lie beside. But back to Mr. Washington.”
“I have an imaginary friend who’s a sort of fire walking paramedic with a handgun, something concocted in my head since I was 13 to shoot all the monsters when I sleep.”
“Gets um all doesn’t he? Shoots straight, never misses, reliable? Brotherly maybe?”
“Something like that.”
“You believe in your dreams, Zachariah?”
“I’d say they confuse more than guide me.”
“You don’t have a guide in the waking life to translate for you what It’s telling you.”
“Who? Mike Washington?”
“Mr. Washington is just a messenger. Your name in Hebrew means ‘G-d Remembers’ incidentally. You ought to toy with the notion of our meeting not being an accident but in fact providence. You ought to meditate on why you’re in the land so young and so early.”
“One should be careful in presuming their dreams have any more meaning than necessary.”
“Be as careful as you want. Emma and I are careful as hell. The road to Zion is paved in shit that can get you killed. And there are so, so many things worse than death in the world today. It makes hell quite superfluous to have a world like this.”
“I agree. Your allusions make me want a cigarette. I think I’m in love with Maya by the way.”
“With Maya or Emma?”
“Same person.”
“Are Sebastian and Zachariah the same person?”
“Emma told you my real name?”
“Yeah, but I learned it again going through your pockets when you slept over last time. We must ensure everybody is who they say they are. Got me?”
“Zachariah’s me trying to live up to the expectations of Mr. Washington.”
“Complicated. Sounds like programming. Being that you haven’t fucked her, but you guys have rolled up like kittens and cuddled three times in the past week on some pretext. You are in love with Emma. What is it to you to hold that girl?”
“It is to remind myself I’m a good man whenever I’ve been tested. Otherwise, she would not want me near her.”
“That’s part of it. What else you feel?”
“That I remember what love felt like the first and only time I felt it in my life.”
“Whatcha gonna do about it?”
“Why so you can tell her?”
“Information only flows one way around here.”
“Nothing at all. I can fall in love and have family in the world to come. I make a better fighter than a lover anyway even though I try and kid myself otherwise. I’ll tell her how I feel before I cross over to the other side.”
“That’s reassuring to hear. It’s not romantic or right, or fair because you very well might give her the love, she needs to restore her black heart. But I need two lieutenants who can be objective about what we have to do. You want to seize one of the most important spiritual hot zones of the planet there are some time-honored ideas about infrastructure and discipline you would do well to embrace.”
“Yeah. Go on.”
“The bottle makes you play the fool. The smokes make you sick and will kill you before their bullets do, and a revolutionary gets only one love, his people. Regulate your vices as soon as you are able.”
“You want me to quit smoking and drinking?”
“And stop being promiscuous.”
“You and Emma are gonna do that?”
“Of course not. Everyone gets to be a hypocrite except for you.”
“Why the fuck is that?”
“Because you’re gonna be a mouthpiece for something massive. If you’re willing to have a message, get you crucified, don’t let some run of the mill garden variety sin degrade your credibility.”
“You keep alluding to me on some God tip, but we don’t know if God wants any of this. You’re saying you think Hashem got me all the way to the Promised Land to help you and Emma form and lead a revolutionary army?”
“If I have to dignify that with a response, it is really gonna take eleven more years.”
“Eleven more years?”
“People think 2012 is when the world ‘ends.”
“The world doesn’t ever end.”
“If the masses were such great political scientists and theologians, we probably wouldn’t have left the gardens to begin with.”
“Why 2012?”
“It’s the Mayan calendar thing. It’s in the collective conscious.”
“You were quick to help me, Avinadav. Why is that?”
“Every community gets a few prophets right before tumultuous times. All the holy books say so.”
“I wouldn’t be so fast to construe dreams with prophesy.”
“I get dreams too. And so does Emma. So does everyone, but only some people get dreams that give um ideas about what Hashem has put them here to do. I believe in the things you say Zachariah; and your soul is eons older than your years of life. Let’s just hope Hashem sends some reinforcements because this plan of ours will not go unnoticed for very long.”
***
So, we built the thing, cobbled it together based on the various books we’d read and life experiences we’d had. The Organization, whom the Israelis called Ha Irgun, was structured to be a constantly evolving effort based upon an ongoing dialogue between Avinadav and me with Emma making corrections. It was the amalgamation of our three quite different viewpoints. Our goal was for the Organization to be composed of autonomous cells throughout the Middle East engaging in political work, community support, business and military operations, and whatever else proved logistically expedient to our ends. We had all done a bit of research on all this before we met. Avinadav made himself Chairman and Minister of Finance. Maya was appointed Defense Minister. I was elected to serve as the Minister of Operations handling logistics and recruiting. We set up a 12-person Cabinet that would command hundreds of 3 to 5-person cells in different communities across the country loosely organized around the Ten Point Program, under the leadership of the Cabinet. Maya and I authored the first statement that we would print glossy club flyers with a grey fist.
We selected the color grey as our standard because it was no color at all, but many shades of understanding and identity. We called our manifesto-in-progress the Little Grey Book. It began simply:
“The Organization will not stop fighting until all people on this Earth are free.”
“Go big or go home.” We argue about the name for a whole night then figured “what’s in a name?” We all had a couple of names, so why not the group? “We were organizing. It was an organization.” The word for that in Hebrew was Ha Irgun, which sounded officious enough to me and had been the street name for one of the original Israeli independence groups. So, we ran off stacks of these little grey cards with a black fist and a little call to arms.
Treatise on the Formation of a Middle Eastern Confederation
Preamble
Arabs, Persians (Iranians), Kurds (including Kurmanji, Sorani, and Zaza speakers), Turks, Azeris, Assyrians (Syriacs, Chaldeans, Arameans), Armenians, Circassians, Chechens, Druze, Yazidis, Bedouins, Berbers, Copts, Samaritans, Palestinians, Jews (Sephardic, Mizrahi, Ashkenazi, Beta Israel, Karaite), Maronites, Lebanese, Syriacs, Chaldeans, Mandaeans, Baháʼís, Alawites, Shi’a Muslims, Sunni Muslims, Turkmens, Baluch, Pashtuns, Lurs, Georgians, Greeks, Roma, Tatars, Shabaks, Mhallami, Dom, Nubians, Fang, Armenians of Cilicia and Anatolia, Kurds of Yazidi and Shafi’i traditions, Assyrian Christians of Nineveh Plain and Tur Abdin, Arab Christians (Melkite, Orthodox, Latin, Maronite), Samaritans of Nablus, Druze of Lebanon, Syria, and Israel, Circassian tribes of the Levant, Chechen communities in Jordan and Syria, Jews of Yemenite, Iraqi, Iranian, and Syrian origin, Baháʼí communities from Iran, Lurs of western Iran, Qashqai and other nomadic tribes of Iran, Baluch of southeastern Iran and Pakistan, Turkmen of Iraq and Syria, Afro-Arabs along the Arabian Peninsula and Egypt, various Bedouin tribes across the Arabian Desert, Aramaic-speaking communities in Syria and Iraq, Mhallami of Turkey and Lebanon, Dom and Romani groups scattered across the Levant, Nubians of southern Egypt and northern Sudan, and smaller scattered minorities such as the Talysh, Tats, Kurds of Kermanshah, Guran, and Feyli, Pontic Greeks, Assyrian Catholics, Armenian Catholics, and other historical or nearly extinct groups across Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, Egypt, Turkey, the Gulf States, and the Caucasus region.
None of us needs to be pro-peace on essentially unjust terms. We are pro-survival. Pro-stability. Pro-living our lives with dignity. We are invested in the possibility that the birth of the Confederation will stop the flow of blood throughout our lands. We have all been taught an endless amount of mythology, based on extraordinarily little tangible evidence. It suggests that what occurred between the Tigris and Euphrates, and what occurred down the Nile, was “progress”. It suggests civilization, and later religion, and even later science, all emanate from our peoples and our lands. Perhaps some of that is valid lore, but today in 2025, we are stuck in a period of perpetual war, state collapse, revolution, and widespread violence accelerated by foreign brokered weapons and aid.
Our many tribes, clans, confessional sects, our many peoples, are people who remember old ways and old customs back thousands of years. Peoples rooted in venerable traditions and lived religions. People who descend from the bloodlines of prophets, visionaries, and visceral authors of the word of God. With our stiff necks and incredible stubbornness to ever relinquish our sense of identity or core beliefs. We all live with memories and tribulations going back several thousand years. But atrocities are escalating, violence is accelerating, and we have gone from civilizational greatness to utter chaos, war, and genocidal practices.
It is not in our interests to keep fighting even if we have no will to make immediate peace. For we have no ability, or perhaps, actual willingness to completely destroy each other. But that assumption weakens each passing year. There have been atrocities in Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Palestine. There has been over a hundred years of continuous regional war. Between us and outsiders, between us and ourselves. Perhaps were are so wildy diverse as a region it is hard to accept who is ‘our people’, who is ‘a stranger’. Who is of the book, who is of the land, who has always been here, and who migrates, was removed, or came back. We must now find a completely new way to live on our wildly different terms and conditions. For thousands of years, our peoples, very different peoples, gathered at the crossroads of the world. Or were born here in the shifting sands of trade, or warfare, and of revelation. We all traded, we all intermarried, we have all made shifting alliances. We have raided, we have fled, we waged great and small wars. We conquered, converted, pillaged, assimilated, massacred, and made a total fitna of these lands. We have shared blood, overlapped our laguages, prayed one way then prayed another. But none of our differing peoples have killed in the numbers we now kill with weapons from outside our sphere. Weapons, technology, and funding that we have been granted by the great powers, who once sought to control our holy sites, now who seek our oil, our gas, and persue raw hegemony.
This is a treatise co-written by the People of the Book, but also those who came before these books, and after those books, and those who never believed in a religion at all. It is pieced together and translated differently by the Zoroastrians, and the Judeans; by the Persians, by Arabs, and Phoenicians, by the Kurds; by the Palestinians living as citizens in exile or in camps as refugees. By Assyrians and Druze, by Shi’a, by Sunni, by Orthodox and Latin Christians. By Yemenites, Chechens, Assyrians, Armenians, Maronites, Sunni and Shi’a Lebanese, Jordanians and Syrian Arabs, Alawites, and Georgians as well. All who wish to see lasting peace, and if not peace, a separation of belligerents, a tempering of state violence, the irons heels of dictators, and a long-term ceasefire. Where the region may trade, heal, and develop ourselves. If not peace, if not better understanding, then trade and normality. Civility in wildly diverse societies. All the people in our region have suffered enough. To survive the wars of the last four thousand years, to stop the wars of tomorrow from occurring: “Enough! Ceasefire.” But that must be a building block to confederation; courts, trade agreements, transnational civil service, and collective defense, not dictated or dominated by the foreign policy of the meddling great powers. We must build our long-needed confidence apart. Let us separate into our respective camps and return to our ancestral lands or be in those lands where we are welcomed. Let us confederate and forever defeat the meddling of outside nations that speak of “peace” but trade in arms, and reduce us to all barbarism!” These authors and practitioners of a fourth track diplomacy call for an end to false, wasteful ideas of Western or Eastern peace. An end to all outside invasions. If we cannot pray in the same ways or all speak the same languages, this is no actual impediment to declaring HOLLIS! HUDNA! From our many flags, let us become a Middle East Confederation from the Western Maghreb to the Indus River.
A Regional Framework Defined
The Middle East is a transcontinental region located at the junction of Western Asia and northeastern Africa, generally encompassing the countries that lie between the eastern Mediterranean Sea and the Persian Gulf. Geographically, it typically includes Western Asian countries such as Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Israel, and Palestine, as well as parts of North Africa, primarily Egypt. Some broader definitions also incorporate Turkey and Iran due to cultural, historical, and geopolitical ties. The region is characterized by its strategic position connecting Europe, Asia, and Africa, its arid and semi-arid climates, and its abundance of natural resources, particularly oil and gas reserves, which have made it central to global economic and political affairs.
A broader definition of the Middle East extends beyond the traditional core of Western Asia and northeastern Africa to include Turkey, the South Caucasus states of Armenia and Azerbaijan, and the countries of the Maghreb in North Africa—Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Mauritania. This expanded conceptualization reflects not only geographical proximity but also historical, cultural, and political connections, including shared experiences of Ottoman and colonial influence, Islamic heritage, and trade networks linking North Africa, the Levant, and the Near East. Under this definition, the Middle East becomes a strategically and culturally diverse region bridging three continents, encompassing a wider array of climates, ethnicities, languages, and religious traditions, and highlighting the interwoven nature of geopolitical, economic, and social dynamics across its extended territory.
If we divide the region into varying confessional or alliance blocks we arrive at:
The Maghreb states (Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Tunesia, Morocco, Mauratnaia)
Stateless Kurds (in Turkey, Syria, Iran, & Iraq)
Middle Eastern Christians in varying sects,
Turkey
Israel
In the Middle of what, East of who?
The Ziggurats of the Neolithic age tell a story. Civilization began with the creation of castes and the centralization of power into early state systems. The cradle of all civilization began with specializations of labor, chaining early humanity to useful trades, and the conscription of worker slaves. The appointment of Kings. It began with tributes to unseen Gods, all-powerful oligarchs, and eventually a cast of priests to preside over mythology, then later religions, and later still over since, and this all served one thing: to prevent us from rebellion. The unnatural subjugation of all humanity into productive labor is not a unique story to Mesopotamia. This book is not about insurrection or economic development. It is not a rejection of ethnic identity or the work of atheists. What is clear: the status quo is dangerous to states and people inside them.
It is chaotic uncertainty at best. The entire Middle East is awash in an endless war and has experienced every measure of barbaric atrocity. This state of modern warfare has proceeded without any actual peace since 1920, but the bloody chaos existed a long time before that. In perpetuity for as long as we have known.
Every nation is highly vulnerable; every nation is perhaps also complicit in the killing fields today. The Western powers and Eastern powers have used us. They have handed us sophisticated weapons to murder each other in varying combinations while the great transnational corporations harvest the energy supplies in the ground. This has nothing to do with civilizational clashes or the competing interpretations of the Abrahamic religion. That is just the framework for our terrifying division, but not the cause of it. The Modern Middle East must cast off its own oligarchy, jail its own collaborators, we must cast off foreign domination, cast off ethnic particularism, and embrace peace on its own terms.
It is not fully true that the tinderbox of the dying Ottoman Empire erupted in Palestine or can be cured from there. Nor can Turkey revive it. Or can Iran dictcate its Shi’a rivalist terms. Nor is it true that the roads to Jerusalem from Cairo, Damascus, Karbala, Najaf, Mecca, Medina, and Tehran are all guarded by the now-flailing American empire. The mulipolar world of rising China and reviving Russia will treat the region in a different, but not necessarily better way.
Not all our original sins of the region began with the Crusaders, the Mongols, the Ottomans, the Zionists, with meddling foreigners, and with our oil. Long before the Crusaders attacked from the West and the Mongols came from the East; we fought wars of the Ziggurats. We fought wars of city states. We fought wars against Romans. We fought wars between Sunni and Shi’a. We fought wars between rival Caliphs. We fought wars against unbelievers and true believers of esoteric sects.
The truth is that any so-called peace process is little more than a short-term buy-off if there is no structural framework to actually exist together. Allowing the hegemonic powers (American, the EU, China, and Russia) more time to take, to utilize what lies under our sands until it all runs out, and it will run out in the next several hundred years. We cannot and should not seek to perpetuate war on Israel; we should all be seeking to decouple the Jewish state from the foreign policy goals of the West. But also the Muslm states that are Western or Eastern semi-peripheral states; such as Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. We should take accountability for what we have done to and with Palestinians as a whole, both as Israeli occupiers and Arab state hosts. We should validate the Kurdish question and acknowledge the rights of 40 million stateless people, who have been massacred, particularly in Iraq and Turkey. We should acknowledge that the Sunni-Shi’a cold war is also quite violent and divisive to the region. We should prevent starvation, human rights violations, and genocide in Palestine, but also in Syria,Yemen,.and Sudan (which is not part of the Middle East but deeply affected by it). In short, we must be accountable for what is the violence inflicted by colonialism/ neocolonialism, and what is the violence we are self-inflicting. Violence baked into the fabric of our poltical consciousness as a region. In Islam, hypocrisy is a high level of contradictory sin; we must take stock of where the fault lies with foreign meddling and where it lies with our own leaders’ violent impulses and failed policies. Yet, the treatise does not reject states. But presupposes they are violent, inefficient, repressive, and prone to Oligarchic capture.
There are many failures of the modern state system. Innumerous failures and predations to indict. But these are the boundaries were working with, the confines of power we are conglamorating if this scheme might proceed, it is a balance of nationalism, an alliance of regional geographies, and has to balance the authoritarian nature of states and armies, with the civil society and constitutional rights entitlements of citizens organized into cantons.
What is a state in the Modern Middle East?
With the exceptions of Egypt, Israel, Turkey, and Iran (because they have certain historical permanence or at least longer periods of imagined identity); most states are modern inventions of Sykes-Picciot and nationalisms of convenience. Borders drawn up by foreign powers then codified in over 125 years of basically continuous warfare.
The Ottoman Turkish genocide of the Armenians, carried out by Kurds. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine carried out by Israelis. The Iraqi genocide of the Kurds carried by Saddam’s forces. The war between Iraq and Iran. The ISIS genocide on the Yazidis.
The Yemen civil war, the Lebanese Civil War, the Syrian Civil War, the Libyan Civil War.
The most deadly engagements fought between Jews and Arabs, Christian Lebanese and Muslim Lebanese, Shi’a Iran against Sunni and Shi’a Iraq, the war between Turks and Kurds, the modern conflagrations in Algeria, Palestine, Yemen, Syria, and Libya. The spill over of these wars, into Sudan and Afghanistan.
What is Federalism is the Modern Middle East?
It is to allow states greater regional autonomy in their governance by allowing for sub-unit/provincial governments where federal states can have their own civil administration, state laws, and state self-defense in the form of national guards.
In the Middle Eastern context, federalism refers to a system in which power is divided between a central government and regional authorities, such as provinces, emirates, or autonomous territories. Unlike in Western democracies, where federalism often evolves from voluntary union or constitutional design, in the Middle East it tends to emerge as a conflict-resolution tool—a way to manage deep sectarian, ethnic, and tribal divisions within states that were often shaped by colonial borders rather than shared identity. Federalism in this region is therefore less about political philosophy and more about pragmatic power-sharing in fragile or post-conflict societies.
Historically, most Middle Eastern states developed under highly centralized, often authoritarian governments that concentrated power in the capital. This structure marginalized peripheral regions and minority groups, fueling recurring tensions. When these centralized states fractured—through wars, revolutions, or foreign interventions—federalism was sometimes proposed as a way to preserve unity while granting autonomy. The most prominent example is Iraq, which adopted a federal constitution after 2003 that recognized the Kurdistan Regional Government as an autonomous entity within a single Iraqi state. This arrangement sought to balance power among Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites, though it remains contentious. Another example is the United Arab Emirates, a federation of seven emirates that maintains stability through monarchical power-sharing rather than democracy—making it a rare case of successful, non-democratic federalism. Proposals for federal systems have also appeared in Syria, Yemen, and Libya, where decentralization has been discussed as a means to end prolonged civil wars, though these plans have yet to take hold.
Despite its appeal as a peace mechanism, federalism in the Middle East faces major obstacles. Deep sectarian mistrust, weak institutions, and the enduring culture of centralized authority make it difficult to implement effectively. Many political elites fear that federalism will lead to partition, while external powers—such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey—often manipulate internal divisions for their own regional agendas. As a result, federalism in the region is frequently perceived as foreign-imposed or a prelude to fragmentation rather than a step toward stable governance.
In essence, Middle Eastern federalism is less an ideological system than a pragmatic survival strategy. It seeks to balance competing identities and distribute power in states where national unity is fragile. While in theory it could promote local governance, accountability, and reduced conflict over resources, in practice it remains a contested and unstable experiment—a reflection of the region’s complex interplay between unity, autonomy, and enduring historical divisions.
What are Cantons?
A means to organize a more localized civil administration in highly diverse societies with a tendency to wage protracted civil wars. Which have come out of the many wars but do not need to wait for a war to form structures. In fact it is more desirable for the existing states to undertake federalism, then to dissolve into further warfare.
Cantons do not have to geographic they can also be communal; the main benefit of canton level sub-organization to the the federalized state is to allow community organization on civil society lines, allow for local decision making on community life, and allow peoples of common affinity to organize their lives on those traditions and values.
For instance, in Lebanon, the idea of cantonization became prominent during the 1975–1990 civil war, when the country effectively split into Christian, Muslim, and Druze-controlled territories. Although the Taif Agreement later re-centralized the state, Lebanon still operates through an informal sectarian power-sharing system that resembles a confessional version of cantonal autonomy. In Syria, after the 2011 uprising, the country fragmented into several zones of control: Kurdish self-governed areas in the north and northeast (often described as “cantons” by their organizers), Assad regime territory, and opposition or Islamist enclaves. The Kurdish-led administration explicitly used the term “cantons” to describe regions like Afrin, Kobane, and Jazira, which were united under the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES)—a model inspired by decentralized and participatory governance rather than ethnic nationalism.
In Iraq, the term is less commonly used, but the reality is similar: the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and Shi’a and Sunni-dominated provinces function as quasi-cantons within a weak federal framework. Similarly, in Yemen and Libya, ongoing wars have produced competing governments and territorial zones—effectively cantonized states divided by militia control, tribal loyalty, and external patronage.
Thus, in the Middle East, “cantons” are rarely peaceful administrative entities. They are instead manifestations of state disintegration or attempts to manage diversity through localized autonomy. While some scholars and diplomats propose cantonization as a conflict-resolution mechanism—for example, suggesting a canton-based solution for Syria, Yemen, or Palestine—risks entrenching division, legitimizing warlords, and formalizing partition. In essence, Middle Eastern cantons represent a hybrid between governance and survival, where local communities govern themselves amid the collapse or weakness of the central state.
Middle East (core countries – 20)
MASHRIQ
BILAD AL-SHAM (Egypt & Levant)
Egypt
Lebanon
Syria
Israel
Palestine
Jordan
BILAD AL-RAFIDAIN WA FARIS
Iran
Iraq
KHALIJ (Gulf States)
Bahrain
Kuwait
Oman
Qatar
Saudi Arabia
United Arab Emirates
Yemen
MAGHREB (Northwest Africa)
Libya
Algeria
Tunisia
Morocco
Mauritania
Total (core Middle East): 20 states
Middle East Semi-Peripheral
Turkey
Iran
Egypt
Israel
Saudi Arabia
Middle East Peripheral
Cyprus
Azerbaijan
Georgia
Armenia
Sudan
Afghanistan
Middle East Non-State Cantons
Kurdistan-Iraq (KRG-Bashur)
Kurdistan-Syria (Rojava)
Houthi Territories-Yemen
Palestine Gaza
Palestine West Bank
Druze in Syria
Hezbollah in Lebanon
= 27 countries total
Egypt, Jordan, and briefly the PLO were all bought off to make an awkward peace with Israel with American development aid dollars. In recent years, the UAE, Morocco, Bahrain, Sudan, and, one day soon, Saudi Arabia most likely are paid to recognize Israel because the Americans and Europeans use Israel in Palestine as a forward operating base.
They use it as a litmus test of their hegemony. Just as the Russians used Syria until its total collapse and still use Iran in some agreed to forms. The Iranians and Israelis have their specific confessional interests, and of course, they have their own regional goals; but without external arms and subsidies, they could not sustain such aggressive posturing and mount such an adventuristic foreign policy. The Israeli military machine is funded by the United States, and the Iranian one (and the Assad regime in Syria before it collapsed) partially by Russia and China, though to the same effect: perpetuating adventuristic and militant regional foreign policy.
The capital inputs for development or military aid allow the Saudi Arabian and UAE to sustain devastating intervention in Yemen. They subsidize Israeli hyper-militarization and the Palestinian occupation, but they also subsidize Hezbollah, Hamas, and Shiite militia forces. It is hard to imagine such horrific localized wars without the foreign powers subsidizing them.
The road between both halves of Jerusalem/Al-Quds runs in fact to the mountains of Kurdistan. To a people without a state, who by historical circumstance were in the last 40 years trained to fight by the leftist Palestinians and trained to reorganize by Zionists. Who, although speaking 11 dialects of Kurdish, are linguistically and culturally most like the Persian Iranians. The Iranians, who are the only existential threat to Israel, still have over 40,000 Jewish citizens and share a version of Shi’a faith with the Lebanese, Yemenis, Bahrainis, and Iraqis and a language with the Afghans; fight East and West via these proxies.
Finally, Egypt is a nation that subsists on Western aid, but revolution is always below the surface. Jordan is actually over 60-70% Palestinian, and without American and Israeli support, could not exist as a country.
So, it is not the coexistence of Israel in Palestine that is the linchpin of regional peace. Yet in warfare, they have drawn in all the actors that are needed to make a Hudna, or a lasting ceasefire for the Israelis to ally with the two other powers that ensure the Confederation can raise its flags; Iran and Egypt. Which is to say, the historic enemies of the Jews. Nations such as Egypt and the Babylonian and Assyrian Empires did attempt to obliterate the Jews, then the “Eivree” or Hebrews. “Jews’ is a word invented by Romans, as there is no J sound in Hebrew or Aramaic.
Although all our people learn and think in several thousand-year segments. Although we find almost unceasing war records no matter what empire or confederation was in power. The point of unity for the nations of this proposed Confederation is the historical legitimacy and self-awareness of monotheistic, desert tribes that absolutely no outsider or insider to the region could subjugate completely. This does not make an argument that Palestinians are Canaanites, the Lebanese Phoenicians, or that Jews should not be called Jews but are the 20-30% intermixed survivors of the Israelite tribes Dan, Yehuda, and Levy; Eivri, or Yehudeans. Or that of the 13 million worldwide population of descendants of the Jews, as few as 5 million are remotely even practicing the religion. Which is speculated.
Palestine is an open wound. It is with the latest round of fighting in Gaza evidently a genocide. Over 65,000 people have died so far. It shall be remembered to all that over 4 million have died in Sudan, so far. Over 630,000 were killed in the Syrian Civil War (mostly by the Russian-backed Assad regime), and the war between Saudi Arabia and the UAE and the Houthis has led to the deaths of over 377,000 people, that we know of.
It is a wild deception that the so-called Islamic State (ISIS), Daesh, has its origins in any normally accepted version of Islam. Its goals were allegedly divinely inspired in prophecy. Its defeat will be no means bring an end to this type of Wahabi Salafist insurgency, exported in petro-dollars from the Gulf. ISIS was an entity controlled by, supplied by, and supported by Türkiye, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Pakistan’s intelligence services. That is one theory, another that was Ba’athist intelligence and varying Al Qaeda offshoots, using messianic fervor and rhetoric. If not for the Coalition forces, particularly the US, the French, the British, the Kurdish SDF, Iran, Russia, Hezbollah, and Iraqi PMF, they very well might have conquered the entire Middle East. How close they came is understood only by those who were there on the ground.
It is time now for the coming generation of the Middle East to take steps to prevent the interventions of all types of foreign power, the meddling of the great powers, as well as to contain the regressive impulses of our varying theocracies. In short, the road to an actual long-lasting peace is not through the conquest of states, the dispersion of the Jews yet again, or doubling down on depper religious zeal and fundamentalisms!
The road to peace is in fact not peace; it is instead about ceasefire, and separation into stable units, but not embracing the chauvinistic nationalism of outsiders, particularly the meddling of the East and the West: NATO-aligned neocrusaders, Russian-aligned neocrusaders, and rising China hungry for all resources of all types. We do not have to commit to anything with these actors. But we must enter a confederation strong enough to repel foreign aggression, stamp out internal fundamentalism, stamp out ethnic conflicts, and secure the ceasefire. Secure a framework of civil and human rights acceptable to the diversity of religions, and of course, prevent the indefinite traffic of weapons and currency for access to the finite resources of gas and oil. The Muslim world is obsessively fixated on Palestine because it is an open wound, it is a blatant ongoing human rights violation, a violent occupation, and because it instills a crusader-like, colonial force in our midst that is not fully Western, but also not fully Middle Eastern. As long as Israel has no alignment in culture, trade, and security, it will remain a destabilizing entity. One that, in any projection of isolation, resistance, demographic shift, BDS, international divestment/ shaming, has 200 nuclear missiles. Its Jewish population in religious identity and political imagination is indigenous to the Middle East. Removing it, secularizing it, demilitarizing it, or refusing to deal with it is political imagination. The highest level of human rights and civil rights safeguards one can deliver to Palestinians is an Israel and Palestine fully integrated into the region. The Western media and the Muslim streets obsessively focuses on Palestine because:
It is an open wound with ongoing human rights violations that antagoize and grieve the very heart and soul of the region.
(a) The Israelis, despite being mostly Jewish, are at least half European or Slavic in roots and appearance (approx. 2 million are Ashkenazi/ European and 4 million are Sephardic/ Mizrahi), so aesthetically it triggers the latent crusader imagination. Were their no real and imagined Arab enemy the Jews might fight yet another civil war for the soul of thier state. It is deeply baked into Chrisitian theology the Jews must gather again in Israel before their Christian messiah returns. The war in Palestine-Israel is thus deeply and subconsciously understood by Western minds as theological and geostrategic.
(b) Israel is, without a single doubt, is a manifestation of several thousand years of collective trauma experienced by the Jewish people into being a modern Outremer: a military colony that Europe and America rely on for regional control. There is not a realistic scenario where the Jews will lose a military confrontation. They will not pack up and leave. There is a highly realistic scenario they will lose lose a demographic one. The birthrates of Palestinians already place them above 20% of Israeli passport holders.
It cannot be denied that both the West and East have not been short on Muslim proxy clients. Pahlavi Iran until 1979. The U.S. bases in Qatar, the UAE, Kuwait, and Turkey. Russia once heavily invested in Egypt until it went to America, and also Syria until the Assad regime fell in 2024.
The abomination of Wahabi Salafist extremist Saudi Arabia, as well as each of the Petro-States of the Gulf. Unique in a world where race is the most essential passport to privilege, of 8-9 million Israelites, 3 million look fully European. For the greater part of 800 years since being butchered by Crusaders, culminating in the holocaust, the Jews have, or at least the Ashkenazi in charge of Israel, decided they will collaborate with Christian Europe against their Semitic cousins, the people of the region they were expelled from by the Romans 1,900 years ago.
The Shi’a also know a great deal about enduring persecutions. Iran and the Shi’a have many characteristics developed adjacent to the Jews. Particularly, a feeling of their backs against a wall, then the sea. A feeling of a need for a vigilant ethno state. The world’s oldest groups of Christians, the Armenians, Assyrians, and Maronites, have survived endless wars by retreating to the mountains. The Sunni are being held hostage between secularism and regressive fundamentalism; Egypt, Türkiye, and Pakistan are caught between those feelings. The contradictions of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States are lost on no one.
The three intrinsic imperialists are external profiteers who secure themselves from endless war. They steal resources and direct efforts toward maldevelopment: USA-NATO, the Russian Federation, and eventually the People’s Republic of China. (Though their imperial footprint is still light).
The initial geography behind which a Middle Eastern Confederation can be birthed, formed, and fortified. Broken into federal units within exisitg states, then administered by canton level governance.
Lebanon- 4 cantons
Sunni
Shi’a
Christian
Druze
Palestine-Israel- 2 cantons
Judean
Palestinian
Jordan-2 cantons
Hashimite
Palestinian
Syria- 4 cantons
Kurdish (SDF)
Sunni Arab
Alawite
Druze
Iraq- 3 cantons
Shi’a Arab
Sunni Arab
Kurdish (PUK/KDP)
Iran- 5 cantons
Shi’a Persian
Azeri
Kurdish
Baloch
Lur
Second Phase
Turkey, Armenia, Kurdistan regions.
Gulf States & Saudi Arabia.
For the skeptics let us draw on the fact that America is under 300 years old. The complete reliance on fossil fuels for transport and trade is less than 200 years old. All of Europe exhibited mass violence and religious atrocity for around 2,000 + years, and the nations of the Middle East have produced all Western religions, writing, science, and literacy dating back perhaps 3,000 years. Essential to this document is an understanding that we are proposing the confederation of peoples who have lived beside each other in relative non-violence for as long as recorded history existed, and only the interventions of Crusaders, Mongols, and European imperialists have escalated conditions to perpetual war and genocide.
Realignment is suggested. Five pillars, keystone nations if you will, that if realigned, restore the Palestinians and also the Israelis to their lost homeland indefinitely and return the Jews to being a people of the Middle East. With the realignment of Israel away from her European mixed tribes, abusers of over two thousand years back to the tent of her blood; then there are only four nations left that can sow widespread death, extremism, and disorder, and they, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Türkiye, will have to be managed one by one. The five intrinsic incubators of regional instability and endless war behind which the Middle Eastern resources are divided up and plundered: Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, and Pakistan. Each with an external pipeline of funds and trade linking back to a hegemonic power. The semi-peripheral powers of the Middle East.
We, the peoples of the Middle East, comprising all peoples listed above and all indigenous communities acknowledge the history of millennia-long coexistence, conflict, trade, and cultural exchange. The region has endured cycles of war, conquest, displacement, and foreign interference. It is the imperative of survival, dignity, and justice that motivates this treatise.
Chapter I: Principles of Survival and Peace
Principle of Non-Annihilation: No party possesses absolute capacity to destroy another; hence, the continuation of conflict is neither inevitable nor desirable.
Principle of Diverse Society: Peoples must establish arrangements permitting ethically and religiously divergent communities to coexist while preserving autonomy, identity, and historical heritage.
Ceasefire Imperative: Immediate cessation of hostilities is mandatory. External actors benefiting from ongoing conflict must be neutralized in policy and practice.
Chapter II: Recognition of Indigenous Sovereignty
All peoples retain sovereignty over ancestral lands or lands where they are received. Their civil, poltical, economic, culturalm and social human rights will be affirmed in the formation of governance cantons in federalized states.
Political and territorial arrangements must respect cultural, ethnic, and religious distinctions.
State boundaries will be altered to reflect demographic realities and avoid further armed conflicts.
State governance will be remodaled to a Federal system of sub units called Cantons, inside Federalized States, bound in a Confederation.
Historical grievances shall not preclude functional coexistence; legal recognition of past injustices shall guide reconciliation mechanisms.
Chapter III: Formation of the Middle Eastern Confederation
Structure: The Confederation shall comprise autonomous cantons existing inside the state frameworks, each preserving ethnic, linguistic, and religious governance within a shared federal framework.
A Federal structure for existing states will be established on regional or confessional lines to propagate the terms of the Confederation.
Cantons can form based on shared ethnicity, religion, or logical geography
Cantons have a civil administration and a series of democratic term based councils that sent delegates to a Federal State level Assembly.
Like an American state with a national guard and its own constitution and taxation powers.
The elected leadership of several cantons form a Federal State Assemby of a geographic unit of the country (nation state).
The nation State will have a unicameral Congress/Parliment/Majalis which in turn elects Confederation level Reprentatives (like representatives to the EU).
The Confederation is a voluntary association of existing states that share a framework of free travel, free trade, triparte taxation, a Confederation wide civil service, and miliary security cooperation agreements.
A referendum of cantons can asl to withdraw from the Confderation obligations
The target goal is ten years to integrate all the miliary forces
Each State wiil adopt a Federal framework transferring certain civil administration and taxation responsibilities to a Canton Administation.
One or several Cantons will comprise a Federal unit of an existing State.
Each State will adopt constitutional amendments enshrining a civil code of the cantons, the availability to seek justice under that code or religious courts
Cantons can propagate a Modal Civic Code with variations for local religious law
Human rights law shall supersede all local or religious law where conflict arises.
Human rights law shall be derived from existing Human right treaties.
Citizens retain the right to relocate between cantons or exit the Confederation entirely by a popular vote.
Cantonal legislation may govern internal religious matters provided compliance with federal legal standards.
A unified supreme judiciary shall arbitrate disputes between cantons and states.
Chapter IV: Governance and Civil Service
Rotational Leadership: Leadership positions across cantons shall rotate to ensure equitable representation.
Civil Institutions: Shared civil services shall administer education, healthcare, and infrastructure.
Defense and Security:
A coordinated defense council shall maintain sovereignty and internal stability.
Military and police forces shall operate under confederal oversight while respecting cantonal autonomy.
No foreign powers will be allowed miltarya bases in the region.
The Confederation will draft an collectively maintain a unified multinational defense force.
Chapter V: Engagement with External Powers
The Confederation shall maintain non-alignment with foreign powers.
No external power shall dictate domestic policy, supply advanced weaponry, or manipulate regional conflicts.
Strategic self-reliance shall be developed in energy, defense, and civil administration.
Chapter VI: Strategic Objectives
Arrest cycles of conflict across the region through structured separation and collaboration.
Priorities include pacficiaiton of protradcted conflicts in Yemen, Syria, Libya, & Israel-Palestine
Secure survival and autonomy of all indigenous peoples.
Establish a legally binding and historically informed framework for peace and cooperation through a regiona Human Rights Court.
Prepare for post-conflict sustainability: energy, economic stability, and civil resilience.
Chapter VII: Immediate Measures
Initiate a region-wide ceasefire framework within six months.
Convene representatives from all states, militai, cantons, and indigenous communities to formalize governance structures.
Draft a constitution codifying rights, responsibilities, and federal oversight.
Establish mechanisms for dispute resolution and conflict prevention.
FRAMEWORK This treatise is not a theoretical abstraction. It is a practical, legally grounded roadmap for survival, dignity, and justice in the Middle East. It acknowledges history, respects diversity, and insists on immediate action. The formation of a Middle Eastern Confederation is the sole viable mechanism to halt ongoing cycles of destruction and secure the future of its peoples.
A confederated alliance of states and self-governing cantons that must find a common cause for separation and economic development, intrinsically linked to a series of strategic agreements between Arabs, Persian, Judeans and all of all religious confessions, and Kurds of all political types. Not factoring in whether they have states or are not recognized by the world state system.”
The Confederation shall be founded by the peoples of nations, not by states. The geographic boundaries are contingent upon the peoples who reside in the Maghreb, Middle, and Near East. Specifically, the fertile crescent with geopolitical implications from Tunisia to the west, to Kashmir in the East, to Sudan in the south, and the Caucuses. But rooted deeply in accords between Israel, Palestine, Shi’a Iran, Lebanon, and the Parties of the Kurds.
The Confederation shall be based on ethnic cantons that will be self-governed by religious law, civil law, or tribal custom but all cantons must be Universal Human Rights law-abiding; which is to allow the exit from any community of those that wish to live under secular civil law.
The Confederation shall be based on democratic autonomy; thus, a co-gendered leadership, a census, and a system of voting and elections must be in place to implement religious laws that are binding throughout a canton.
The Confederation shall conscript and maintain a unified Defense Force and Civil Service that, through 3 years of military or civil duty deploy diverse forces amid the Confederation to foster shared values in a complex and diverse society.
The ethno-civil administrative capitals of the Confederation pending cessation of military conflict shall be Cairo, Jerusalem-Al Quds, Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad, Mecca, Diyarbakir, Istanbul, and Tehran.
The Israelis and Palestinians are not the key elements of actualizing the Confederation, but they are capable of indefinitely destabilizing the effort to form the alliance and must be specifically managed.
The Israeli, Iranian, Saudi, and Turkish agreement is the only way to militarily secure the confederation.
The Kurds (in civil society/ ideology), Shi’a (in security), Lebanese (in trade), and Israeli (in technology, but certainly all sectors) have specific developmental technology as well as governance systems that are integral to this project.
The Confederation shall pursue non-alignment.
The Confederation shall enshrine into law and fiercely defend universal human rights, and all other canton level legal configurations will be subordinate to that code.
There are critical security, international relations, and domestic crisis issues that threaten the very existence of the Israeli and Palestinian peoples much more so than the ongoing, comparatively low-intensity occupation of the Palestinian zones of control in the West Bank and blighted Gaza. The region at large is in an acute state of political and social unrest; the governments of Somalia, Afghanistan, Tunisia, Libya, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and Yemen have fallen resulting in foreign occupations, civil wars, and general anarchy. Shi’a Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia are at proxy war throughout the Muslim world.
Many will object to us describing Israel as a “Jewish military Colony”, and object to calling the separation barrier the “Apartheid Wall” but linguistics and agreement of a shared paradigm are vital to the success of this committee’s objectives. We assure you the credentials of our core research team from Israel are sufficiently grounded in lived experiences of both the intelligence service and defense forces; while our Palestinian team’s Jihadist and patriotic background would be of little question.
Chaos and revolution are spreading while security, what little there was, is unraveling. All of this was acutely exacerbated by the 2001 & 2003 American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq; resulting in the virtual anarchic non-governance of both countries today. And of course, the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians is an open wound that festers, then bleeds out.
This treatise has been researched and written by a group of Judeans, Arabs, Israelis, Palestinians, and Kurds concerned with the collective survival of their respective peoples as they occupy and are occupied in the heart of this massive, unending conflict. There is very little hope of this macros-regional war or micro-peace settlement between Israel and Palestine being resolved on the level of government. Palestinians have two competing governments; Hamas and Fatah; Israel has a coalition government but is controlled as a military oligarchy on the behest of Ashkenazi Judaism and the foreign policy goals of the United States of America.
For the approximately 16 million humans living in Greater Israel/ Historic Palestine; the varying scenarios are not optimistic in the slightest.
Peace is improbable, demographics are not favorable to the 5-6 million categorized Jews and beyond the religious overtone of the landmarks described by three world religions as ‘holy land’; Israel is also a nuclear-armed semi-peripheral power aligned completely and dependent on financially a Jewish Lobby and interest in the United States which cultivates the specific and direct interests of two intractable groups; the US military-industrial complex and the 2-3 million Ashkenazi (European) Israeli Jews; which enjoy a standard of living inside the Jewish colony markedly different from the Jews of other ethnic backgrounds.
There has been ceaseless warfare in the Maghreb and Middle East since 1920, shortly after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. The false consciousness of the invented Nationalism. All the scenarios discussed in the treatise are inseparable from the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians, but it is naïve and European to link the peace of the region to our specific peace. A peace that will never be under the dynamics of the current situation, the minuscule size of the land, and endless regional intrigue. Arms and aid money, for control of energy resources.
Thus, we concern ourselves in this first manuscript with Israelis (of all religions and ethnicities) and Palestinians (of all demographics). We are concerned with the broader course of humanity, but this has been authored to ensure that regardless of humanities general course; there will always be Palestinians, and there will always be Jews; and if there are to be “Israelis” an identity that is less than 85 years old; we must engage in radical steps to subvert the course of the mainstream Zionist project; delink ourselves of Euro-American hegemony and stop the inevitable slaughter of our collective peoples.
“A new level of atrocity is coming; in fact, it has very much arrived.”
Between October 7th, 2023, and the January 2025 ceasefire the Palestinians killed around 1,700 Israelis, the Israelis killed around 75,000 Palestinians (and counting) and over 5,000 Lebanese. Some portions had weapons, and many did not.
Palestinian demographics will increase to above 50% inside the green line which they trend toward (currently the reality is something like 7 million Arabs to 8 million Jews + others), and or if Israel uses a nuclear weapon of which it has over 500. Or Israel is sucked into or provokes a war with Iran. Or any number of scenarios with state collapse, proxy war, Saudi and Iranian warfare, and further misadventures with enormous cost in-human life. To stop the final floodgates from opening, to address the broad systemic internal contradictions of the Israeli state and to secure a viable Middle Eastern Confederation, a radical policy of reorientation must begin with a realistic assessment of the only other three parties on the ground besides Memshala Yisrael3which can broker regional stability. Israel must deal directly with Hamas, Fatah, Kurdish Parties, and most importantly the Islamic Republic of Iran. Only an uneasy truce and alliance of this kind can focus policy and praxis on awakening the consciousness of the Sunni Arab majority.
“It is no longer a question of moralizing the conflict, obsessing over past failures, or temporarily abating a cycle of degenerating violence. Or conducting more banal and expensive anthropological studies on identity.”
In the Israeli Knesset, amid the Palestinian resistance factions, among the various Persian & Arab power brokers and the para-state organizations on the ground (and in the Diaspora) all realize that neither by sheer will nor by force of arms can they destroy one another. Blame for the modern quagmire that is the Middle East may fall squarely on the post-colonial powers of Europe and the United States for the proliferation of arms without stipulation or control. However, the new reality is that if the third Hebrew Commonwealth of Israel is to survive; if a Palestinian State is to be brought into being; as well as if any measure of regional stability is to be achieved, radical and unorthodox steps must be taken to close the breach. The breach is not simply a result of Israeli defense against Arab aggression, or vice versa; it is a breach in the foundation of the modern security calculus. All parties involved must become more attuned to the heightened stakes via lessons in history and sound political science.
This treatise offers an objective analysis of the Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyah to advocate for its recognition as a viable partner, not in immediate peace; but in implementation of separation, economic development, and most importantly; Hudna4. It makes a fundamental case for supporting Kurdish national ambitions in Türkiye, Iraq, and Syria. We advocate for a full and lasting partnership between Israel and the revolutionary Shi’a government in Iran. But we envision and call for something much more powerful.
To claim that Memshala Israel has secured its borders, or contained conventional military threats to its existence is to say that glass is made from sand. The process by which glass is made from sand renders the base substance unalterably changed and requires the release of energy through fire and heat to yield something far more unstable than its original form. While the cousins of Ishmael and Yitzhak, the Israelis, and Palestinians, are indeed two peoples intractably bound to a single, tiny piece of land, they are met with a recurring problem. The Israeli public and government (currently) lack the will to commit genocide. The Palestinian Resistance factions cannot (currently) procure or introduce a means to mass murder that will not render their own homeland a house of ash.
Surely whispered even openly said in both camps is the notion that it would not be ‘objectionable’ for the other and their kind to be ‘pushed into the sea’ or ‘dumped on the other side of the Jordan.’ The survivors of the Shoah5 cannot (yet) bring themselves to this, nor would international opinion condone genocide in the Holy Land today. As for the Palestinians, pushing the Jews into the sea has more to do with rhetoric than ability, conscience, or even intention. The ancestors of both races defended the holy land against the Christian Crusaders locked arm in arm.
There are over 1,400 years of precedent for relatively peaceful co-existence and less than 100 to the absolute contrary6. Anyone telling you otherwise has a vested interest in your ignorance. Even the death toll of the First Intifada (estimated at 421 Israeli/1,549 Palestinian7) and the bloodier melee of the Second Intifada, which included suicide bombers and collective punishment, cost only 1,062 Israeli and 5,500 Palestinian lives8. The invasion of the Gaza Strip in 2008 resulted in 13 Israeli and 1,417 Palestinians9. In the ongoing Gaza Wars in 2010-2015, an estimated 100 Israelis and over 5,000 Palestinians have lost their lives. Approximately 1,300 Israelis and 50,000 Palestinians have died in the latest war.
Between 2015 and 2023 multiple rounds of fighting in Gaza killed several thousands of Palestinians and a few dozen Israelis. In the same period, the Syrian Civil War killed over 500,000 people. That means that in the entirety of the Palestinian Israeli conflict beginning in 1948; less than 50,000 people have cumulatively died, comparatively to all other ethnic conflicts that is a footnote, a statistic. The body count of the Palestinian-Israel civil war is comparatively low when compared with other global ethnic conflicts like those waged in Sri Lanka, Sudan, Burundi, Rwanda, Chechnya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, and Ukraine.
Then in under two years the Jewish State killed over 70,000 Palestinians in retaliation for the brutal killing on October 7th of 1,200 Israelis.
Hamas must be directly engaged as the only viable partner capable of securing Palestinian temporary acceptance of the third Hebrew Commonwealth and thereby securing the Jewish National home by buying both sides more time for ultimate reconciliation before more desperate measures are introduced. (Most no longer believe that is the truth on the ground, as of July 2025 Hamas is reeling).
The Three Parties of Kurdistan (PKK, PUK, KDP) must be supported aggressively by both people overtly and covertly. Shi’a Iran is the only semi-peripheral power both sides can count on, as all other states besides Egypt are European inventions; and Egypt is an incredibly unstable place locked between a US-backed military dictatorship and the Muslim Brotherhood. The road to peace does not run through Jerusalem/ Al-Quds, but without a full ceasefire between the Judeans and Palestinians no other keystone ally, tribe, or faction can be aligned to the program to build up a Middle East Confederation in our lifetimes.
“The window of achieving political and military victory within our lifetimes is an ever-narrowing window. If we falter, if we squander possibility in the name of imagined identity and unseen gods; all will be lost. All our people no matter what they pray to, will be facing annihilation together.”
“We ask you to read these documents carefully and go back to your factions, parties, organizations, armies, and places of worship to testify on the nature of this plan.”
By the best calculations of our Party, we have a window of less than 200 years before the oil reserves run out, but under 40 years to achieve the Confederation on the terms of the many peoples of our nation. There is nothing in anyone’s scripture that calls for this endless warfare. There is nothing that tells us there must be homogenous practice or uniform belief.
The road to peace is in fact not peace; it is instead about ceasefire, and separation into stable units but not embracing the chauvinistic nationalism of outsiders; particularly the meddling of the East and the West: NATO aligned crusaders, Russian aligned crusaders, and rising China hungry for all resources of all types. We do not have to commit to anything with these actors. But we must enter a confederation strong enough to repel foreign aggression, stamp out internal fundamentalism, stamp out ethnic conflicts, and secure the ceasefire. Secure a framework of civil and human rights acceptable to the diversity of religions and of course, prevent the indefinite traffic of weapons and currency for access to the finite resources of gas and oil.
The academia, the media, and the West obsessively have focused on Palestine, because:
(a) The Israelis, despite being mostly Jewish are at least half European or Slavic in appearance (approx. 2 million are Ashkenazi/ European and 4 million are Sephardic/ Mizrahi) so aesthetically it triggers the latent crusader imagination.
(b) Israel is without a single doubt a manipulation of several thousand years of collective trauma experienced by the Jewish people into being a modern Outremer: a colony that Europe and America rely on for regional control. But while accepting or refuting that statement; it cannot be denied that so was Pahlavi Iran until 1979. So has been Jordan and Egypt, and the abomination of Wahabi Salafist extremist Saudi Arabia; as well as each of the Petro-States of the Gulf. Unique in a world where race is the most essential passport to privilege; of 8-9 million Israelites: 3 million look fully European. For the greater part of 800 years since being butchered by Crusaders culminating in the holocaust; the Jews have, or at least the Ashkenazi in charge of Israel decided they will collaborate with Christian Europe against their Semitic cousins, the people of the region they were expelled from by Romans 1,900 years ago.
The Shi’a also knows a great deal about enduring persecution. Iran and the Shi’a have many characteristics like the Jews. Particularly a feeling of their backs against a wall, then the sea. The world’s oldest groups of Christians; the Armenians, Assyrians, and Maronites have survived endless wars by retreating to the mountains. The Sunni are being held hostage between secularism and regressive fundamentalism; Egypt, Türkiye, and Pakistan are caught between those feelings. The contradictions of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States are lost on no one.
Thus, an unusual realignment is suggested. Five pillars, keystone nations if you will, that if realigned restore the Israelis to their lost homeland indefinitely and return the Jews to being a people of the Middle East. With the realignment of Israel away from her European mixed tribes, abusers of over two thousand years back to the tent of her blood; then there are only four nations left that can sow widespread death, extremism, and disorder and they; Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Türkiye will be managed one by one.
The five intrinsic incubators of regional instability and endless war behind which the Middle Eastern resources are divided up and plundered: Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, and Pakistan. Each with an external pipeline of funds and trade linking back to hegemonic power. The semi-peripheral powers of the Middle East.
The three intrinsic imperialists are external profiteers who secure themselves from endless war. They steal resources and direct efforts toward Maldevelopment: USA-NATO, Russian Federation, and eventually the People’s Republic of China. (Though their imperial footprint is still light).
The initial geography behind which a Middle Eastern Confederation can be birthed, formed, and fortified: Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, Sudan, Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Türkiye, Armenia, Kurdistan, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Kashmir.
For the skeptics let us draw on the fact that America is under 300 years old. The complete reliance on fossil fuels for transport and trade is less than 100 years. All of Europe exhibited mass violence and religious atrocity for around 2,000 + years and the nations of the Middle East have produced all Western religions, writing, science, and literacy dating back perhaps 3,000 years. Essential to this document is an understanding that we are proposing the confederation of peoples who have lived beside each other in relative non-violence for as long as recorded history existed, and only the interventions of Crusaders, Mongols, and European imperialists have escalated conditions to perpetual war and genocide.
The road between both halves of Jerusalem to Al-Quds runs in fact to the mountains of Kurdistan. To a people without a state, who by historical circumstance were in the last 40 years trained to fight by Palestinians and trained to organize by Zionists. Who, although speaking 11 dialects of Kurdish, are linguistically and culturally most like the Persian Iranians. The Iranians, who are the only existential threat to Israel, still have over 40,000 Jewish citizens and share a version of Shi’a faith with the Lebanese, Yemenis, Bahrainis, and Iraqis and a language with the Afghans; fight East and West via these Proxies. Finally, Egypt is a nation that subsists on Western aid, but revolution is always below the surface. Jordan is over 60-70% Palestinian and without American and Israeli support could not exist as a country.
So, it is not the coexistence of Israel in Palestine that is the lynchpin of peace. Yet in warfare, they have drawn in all the actors that are needed to make a Hudna, or a lasting ceasefire for the Israelis to ally with the two other powers that ensure the Confederation can raise its flags; Iran and Egypt. Which is to say the historic enemies of the Jews. Nations such as Egypt and the Babylonian and Assyrian Empires did attempt to obliterate the Jews, then the “Eivree” or Hebrews. “Jews’ is a word invented by Romans, as there is no J sound in Hebrew or Aramaic.
Although all our people learn and think in several thousand-year segments. Although we find almost unceasing war records no matter what empire or confederation was in power. The point of unity for the nations of this proposed Confederation is the historical legitimacy and self-awareness of monotheistic, desert tribes that absolutely no outsider or insider to the region could subjugate completely. This does not make an argument that Palestinians are Canaanites, the Lebanese Phoenicians, or that Jews should not be called Jews but are the 20-30% intermixed survivors of the Israelite tribes Dan, Yehuda, and Levy; Eivri, or Yehudeans. Or that of the 13 million worldwide population of descendants of the Jews as few as 5 million are remotely even practicing the religion. Which is speculated.
“Essentially speaking we are talking about a confederated alliance of states and self-governing cantons that must find a common cause for separation and economic development intrinsically linked to a series of strategic agreements between Judeans, Persians, Arabs of all religious confessions, and Kurds of all political types. Not factoring in whether they have states or are not recognized by the world state system.”
The Confederation shall be founded by the peoples of nations, not by states. The geographic boundaries are contingent upon the peoples who reside in the Maghreb, Middle, and Near East. Specifically, the fertile crescent with geopolitical implications from Tunisia to the west, to Kashmir in the East, to Sudan in the south, and the Caucuses. But rooted deeply in accords between Israel, Palestine, Shi’a Iran, Lebanon, and the Parties of the Kurds.
The Confederation shall be based on ethnic cantons that will be self-governed by religious law, civil law, or tribal custom but all cantons must be Universal Human Rights law-abiding; which is to allow the exit from any community of those that wish to live under secular civil law.
The Confederation shall be based on democratic autonomy; thus, a co-gendered leadership, a census, and a system of voting and elections must be in place to implement religious laws that are binding throughout a canton.
The Confederation shall conscript and maintain a unified Defense Force and Civil Service that through 3 years of military or civil duty deploy diverse forces amid the Confederation to foster shared values in a complex and diverse society.
The ethno-civil administrative capitals of the Confederation pending cessation of military conflict shall be Cairo, Jerusalem-Al Quds, Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad, Mecca, Diyarbakir, Istanbul, and Tehran.
The Israelis and Palestinians are not the key elements of actualizing the Confederation, but they are capable of indefinitely destabilizing the effort to form the alliance and must be specifically managed.
The Israeli, Iranian, Saudi, and Turkish agreement is the only way to militarily secure the confederation.
The Kurds (in civil society/ ideology), Shi’a (in security), Lebanese (in trade), and Israeli (in technology, but certainly all sectors) have specific developmental technology as well as governance systems that are integral to this project.
The Confederation shall pursue non-alignment.
The Confederation shall enshrine into law and fiercely defend universal human rights, and all other canton level legal configurations will be subordinate to that code.
There are critical security, international relations, and domestic crisis issues that threaten the very existence of the Israeli and Palestinian peoples much more so than the ongoing, comparatively low-intensity occupation of the Palestinian zones of control in the West Bank and blighted Gaza. The region at large is in an acute state of political and social unrest; the governments of Somalia, Afghanistan, Tunisia, Libya, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and Yemen have fallen resulting in foreign occupations, civil wars, and general anarchy. Shi’a Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia are at proxy war throughout the Muslim world.
Many will object to us describing Israel as a “Jewish military Colony”, and object to calling the separation barrier the “Apartheid Wall” but linguistics and agreement of a shared paradigm are vital to the success of this committee’s objectives. We assure you the credentials of our core research team from Israel are sufficiently grounded in lived experiences of both the intelligence service and defense forces; while our Palestinian team’s Jihadist and patriotic background would be of little question.
Chaos and revolution are spreading while security, what little there was, is unraveling. All of this was acutely exacerbated by the 2001 & 2003 American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq; resulting in the virtual anarchic non-governance of both countries today. And of course, the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians is an open wound that festers, then bleeds out.
This treatise has been researched and written by a group of Judeans, Arabs, Israelis, Palestinians, and Kurds concerned with the collective survival of their respective peoples as they occupy and are occupied in the heart of this massive, unending conflict. There is very little hope of this macros-regional war or micro-peace settlement between Israel and Palestine being resolved on the level of government. Palestinians have two competing governments; Hamas and Fatah; Israel has a coalition government but is controlled as a military oligarchy on the behest of Ashkenazi Judaism and the foreign policy goals of the United States of America.
For the approximately 16 million humans living in Greater Israel/ Historic Palestine; the varying scenarios are not optimistic in the slightest.
Peace is improbable, demographics are not favorable to the 5-6 million categorized Jews and beyond the religious overtone of the landmarks described by three world religions as ‘holy land’; Israel is also a nuclear-armed semi-peripheral power aligned completely and dependent on financially a Jewish Lobby and interest in the United States which cultivates the specific and direct interests of two intractable groups; the US military-industrial complex and the 2-3 million Ashkenazi (European) Israeli Jews; which enjoy a standard of living inside the Jewish colony markedly different from the Jews of other ethnic backgrounds.
There has been ceaseless warfare in the Maghreb and Middle East since 1920, shortly after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. The false consciousness of the invented Nationalism. All the scenarios discussed in the treatise are inseparable from the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians, but it is naïve and European to link the peace of the region to our specific peace. A peace that will never be under the dynamics of the current situation, the minuscule size of the land, and endless regional intrigue. Arms and aid money, for control of energy resources.
Thus, we concern ourselves in this first manuscript with Israelis (of all religions and ethnicities) and Palestinians (of all demographics). We are concerned with the broader course of humanity, but this has been authored to ensure that regardless of humanities general course; there will always be Palestinians, and there will always be Jews; and if there are to be “Israelis” an identity that is less than 85 years old; we must engage in radical steps to subvert the course of the mainstream Zionist project; delink ourselves of Euro-American hegemony and stop the inevitable slaughter of our collective peoples.
“A new level of atrocity is coming; in fact, it has very much arrived.”
Between October 7th, 2023, and the January 2025 ceasefire the Palestinians killed around 1,700 Israelis, the Israelis killed around 75,000 Palestinians (and counting) and over 5,000 Lebanese. Some portions had weapons, and many did not.
Palestinian demographics will increase to above 50% inside the green line which they trend toward (currently the reality is something like 7 million Arabs to 8 million Jews + others), and or if Israel uses a nuclear weapon of which it has over 500. Or Israel is sucked into or provokes a war with Iran. Or any number of scenarios with state collapse, proxy war, Saudi and Iranian warfare, and further misadventures with enormous cost in-human life. To stop the final floodgates from opening, to address the broad systemic internal contradictions of the Israeli state and to secure a viable Middle Eastern Confederation, a radical policy of reorientation must begin with a realistic assessment of the only other three parties on the ground besides Memshala Yisrael3which can broker regional stability. Israel must deal directly with Hamas, Fatah, Kurdish Parties, and most importantly the Islamic Republic of Iran. Only an uneasy truce and alliance of this kind can focus policy and praxis on awakening the consciousness of the Sunni Arab majority.
“It is no longer a question of moralizing the conflict, obsessing over past failures, or temporarily abating a cycle of degenerating violence. Or conducting more banal and expensive anthropological studies on identity.”
In the Israeli Knesset, amid the Palestinian resistance factions, among the various Persian & Arab power brokers and the para-state organizations on the ground (and in the Diaspora) all realize that neither by sheer will nor by force of arms can they destroy one another. Blame for the modern quagmire that is the Middle East may fall squarely on the post-colonial powers of Europe and the United States for the proliferation of arms without stipulation or control. However, the new reality is that if the third Hebrew Commonwealth of Israel is to survive; if a Palestinian State is to be brought into being; as well as if any measure of regional stability is to be achieved, radical and unorthodox steps must be taken to close the breach. The breach is not simply a result of Israeli defense against Arab aggression, or vice versa; it is a breach in the foundation of the modern security calculus. All parties involved must become more attuned to the heightened stakes via lessons in history and sound political science.
This treatise offers an objective analysis of the Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyah to advocate for its recognition as a viable partner, not in immediate peace; but in implementation of separation, economic development, and most importantly; Hudna4. It makes a fundamental case for supporting Kurdish national ambitions in Türkiye, Iraq, and Syria. We advocate for a full and lasting partnership between Israel and the revolutionary Shi’a government in Iran. But we envision and call for something much more powerful.
To claim that Memshala Israel has secured its borders, or contained conventional military threats to its existence is to say that glass is made from sand. The process by which glass is made from sand renders the base substance unalterably changed and requires the release of energy through fire and heat to yield something far more unstable than its original form. While the cousins of Ishmael and Yitzhak, the Israelis, and Palestinians, are indeed two peoples intractably bound to a single, tiny piece of land, they are met with a recurring problem. The Israeli public and government (currently) lack the will to commit genocide. The Palestinian Resistance factions cannot (currently) procure or introduce a means to mass murder that will not render their own homeland a house of ash.
Surely whispered even openly said in both camps is the notion that it would not be ‘objectionable’ for the other and their kind to be ‘pushed into the sea’ or ‘dumped on the other side of the Jordan.’ The survivors of the Shoah5 cannot (yet) bring themselves to this, nor would international opinion condone genocide in the Holy Land today. As for the Palestinians, pushing the Jews into the sea has more to do with rhetoric than ability, conscience, or even intention. The ancestors of both races defended the holy land against the Christian Crusaders locked arm in arm.
There are over 1,400 years of precedent for relatively peaceful co-existence and less than 100 to the absolute contrary6. Anyone telling you otherwise has a vested interest in your ignorance. Even the death toll of the First Intifada (estimated at 421 Israeli/1,549 Palestinian7) and the bloodier melee of the Second Intifada, which included suicide bombers and collective punishment, cost only 1,062 Israeli and 5,500 Palestinian lives8. The invasion of the Gaza Strip in 2008 resulted in 13 Israeli and 1,417 Palestinians9. In the ongoing Gaza Wars in 2010-2015, an estimated 100 Israelis and over 5,000 Palestinians have lost their lives. Approximately 1,300 Israelis and 50,000 Palestinians have died in the latest war.
Between 2015 and 2023 multiple rounds of fighting in Gaza killed several thousands of Palestinians and a few dozen Israelis. In the same period, the Syrian Civil War killed over 500,000 people. That means that in the entirety of the Palestinian Israeli conflict beginning in 1948; less than 50,000 people have cumulatively died, comparatively to all other ethnic conflicts that is a footnote, a statistic. The body count of the Palestinian-Israel civil war is comparatively low when compared with other global ethnic conflicts like those waged in Sri Lanka, Sudan, Burundi, Rwanda, Chechnya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, and Ukraine.
Then in under a year the Jewish State killed over 75,000 Palestinians in retaliation for the brutal killing on October 7th of 1,200 Israelis.
Hamas must be directly engaged as the only viable partner capable of securing Palestinian temporary acceptance of the third Hebrew Commonwealth and thereby securing the Jewish National home by buying both sides more time for ultimate reconciliation before more desperate measures are introduced. (Most no longer believe that is the truth on the ground, as of July 2025 Hamas is reeling).
The Three Parties of Kurdistan (PKK, PUK, KDP) must be supported aggressively by both people overtly and covertly. Shi’a Iran is the only semi-peripheral power both sides can count on, as all other states besides Egypt are European inventions; and Egypt is an incredibly unstable place locked between a US-backed military dictatorship and the Muslim Brotherhood. The road to peace does not run through Jerusalem/ Al-Quds, but without a full ceasefire between the Judeans and Palestinians no other keystone ally, tribe, or faction can be aligned to the program to build up a Middle East Confederation in our lifetimes.
“The window of achieving political and military victory within our lifetimes is an ever-narrowing window. If we falter, if we squander possibility in the name of imagined identity and unseen gods; all will be lost. All our people no matter what they pray to, will be facing annihilation together.”
“We ask you to read these documents carefully and go back to your factions, parties, organizations, armies, and places of worship to testify on the nature of this plan.”
By the best calculations of our Party, we have a window of less than 200 years before the oil reserves run out, but under 40 years to achieve the Confederation on the terms of the many peoples of our nation. There is nothing in anyone’s scripture that calls for this endless warfare. There is nothing that tells us there must be homogenous practice or uniform belief.
“We are going to use thin, durable, and yet fully understandable code.” We are going to use metaphors inside the allegories. We will fight on the low roads and high roads and from the mountains. We will not contradict myths or religious tenets; we will not offer science as a new kind of positivist God. “We call on all patriots to mount a defense of our realm. The barbarians are not just inside the gates; they have taken over most of our states and their governments.”
“You like your hopeless losing battles? You want to get killed fighting for nothing? You get off on all that hopeless shit,” Yelizaveta once mocked him, mocks him still. “You always have.”
On the way back the Jew stops to have some deep thoughts with a cigarette and look at the sea near the Raoche; the Pigeon Rocks that rise out of the sea. The Corniche continues to hustle and bustle with all faces of Beirut. Sometimes you must fight a lost, if not unwinnable battle. That is basic Shi’a philosophy. But not so alien to the Jews either.
The Battle of Karbala stands as a defining moment in Islamic history, a tragic and pivotal event that has reverberated through the centuries, shaping the beliefs and practices of millions of Muslims around the world. It unfolded on the arid plains of Karbala, in present-day Iraq, on the 10th day of Muharram, in the year 61 AH (October 10, 680 CE). At its heart lay a struggle for power and legitimacy within the nascent Muslim community, following the death of the Prophet Muhammad. The conflict pitted the forces of Yazid I, the Umayyad caliph, against a small band of followers led by Imam Husayn ibn Ali, the grandson of the Prophet and the son of Imam Ali and Fatimah, Muhammad’s daughter.
Imam Husayn, revered by Shia Muslims as the third Imam and a symbol of resistance against tyranny, had refused to pledge allegiance to Yazid, whom he saw as a corrupt and unjust ruler. Instead, he chose to confront Yazid’s forces head-on, even though he was vastly outnumbered, and his followers were suffering from thirst and deprivation due to a siege imposed by Yazid’s army.
On the fateful Day of Ashura, the 10th day of Muharram, the two sides clashed on the battlefield of Karbala. Imam Husayn and his companions, numbering around 72, faced off against a much larger army of several thousand soldiers. Despite their valiant efforts and unwavering resolve, the forces of Imam Husayn were gradually overwhelmed by the sheer numbers and military might of Yazid’s army.
The battle was marked by “acts of extraordinary courage and sacrifice on both sides”. Imam Husayn’s companions fought fiercely to defend their leader and uphold the principles of justice and righteousness. One by one, they fell on the battlefield, martyred in defense of their faith and beliefs. In the chaos and carnage, Imam Husayn emerged as a beacon of resilience and steadfastness. Despite knowing that he faced certain death, he refused to compromise his principles or bow to tyranny. With his family and companions by his side, he stood firm in the face of overwhelming odds, embodying the highest ideals of sacrifice and martyrdom.
The Battle of Karbala then culminated in a most brutal massacre, with Imam Husayn and his followers slain on the battlefield. Their bodies were left to lie unburied for several days, a stark reminder of the brutality and inhumanity of war. Yet, despite the tragic outcome, the legacy of Karbala endures as a powerful symbol of resistance, courage, and unwavering faith. For Shia Muslims, the martyrdom of Imam Husayn is commemorated each year during the month of Muharram, as they mourn his death and honor his sacrifice through rituals of mourning and remembrance. The lessons of Karbala continue to resonate across generations, inspiring believers to stand up against oppression and injustice, and to uphold the values of truth, justice, and righteousness.
On the 10th of October, 680 CE Husayn ibn Ali picked a battle he would certainly lose. The battle of Karbala70pitted about 70 fighters and family members of the grandson of the prophet Muhammed Husayn against 30,000 soldiers loyal to the pretender to the Umayyad Caliph Yazid I. Or, maybe, depending on what side you believe Sunni or Shiite; Husayn led an ill-prepared uprising to die for absolutely nothing important in an illegal insurrection. That interpretation of the alleged usurpation is the root of the schism of Sunni and Shiites today; who did the Prophet Muhammed intend to have led his movement? The Shi’a believe in the blood line and say it is through his son in law Ali, and through Ali’s children Hassan and Husayn the prophet’s grandchildren, or righteously guided califs. The Umayyad Caliph Yazid that sent his army to massacre the prophet’s family and then paraded the survivors though the streets are today accepted by 85% of the Muslims; the Sunni. For many centuries Sunni rulers zealously persecuted the Shi’a.
The Shi’a, however, zealously follow the bloodline of the prophet, venerating the martyred Husayn and his last stand at Karbala. His band of companions (including many blood relatives of the Prophet Muhammed) were slaughtered with him in the dunes of Karbala and the female survivors were force marched, humiliated, and tortured. The surviving women and children were paraded and stoned on the way to Damascus. The centrality of Ali and his blood line is rejected by the Sunni. This is 85% of all Muslims. The Sunni rejects this whole story as adventurism and the Shi’a make it the most central event of the religion just second to Muhammed’s sayings and doings (Hadith). From his bloodline come a lineage of Imams; and the Shi’a (the second biggest branch of Islam) follow 12 of these Imams. They venerate those from the profit’s line the Sayyids.
The Shi’a rule only in true majority in the nation of Iran. Iran became Shi’a around 400 years ago and today following the revolution of 1979 is a Shi’a Theocracy. They have significant plural majorities in Azerbaijan and Iraq. Following the American invasion of Iraq the Shi’a dominate the central and south of the country. The Shi’a have large plural majorities in Yemen, Bahrain, and Lebanon. They found are in significant numbers in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Syria. Today, there is only one Shi’a State and that is Iran, and it takes on the role Israel takes for Jews; a safe haven and protector for its Confession.
Some might say the Jew did not care whether he lived or died, as long as one or both were glorious. Others might say he was “squandering his blessings all the time” and insulting his Yahweh even being out here.
Why would you deliberately go somewhere you might die? Why fight a battle that is inevitably going to be a disaster. And unlike the venerable Husayn ibn Ali, there was nothing riding on his participation in this plot until he fully brought himself to ignore how loved he was by little Karessa back in New York City. How under the normal trajectory of events he might have good comfortable American life as a paramedic or later still as a lawyer. Yet that was not true because his investment in the plot we have not yet fully revealed was quite extensive. It was as if Bashir wrote one phrase in Arabic, and he wrote another one in Hebrew and they invited many others to check the plot points, copy edit the manuscripts, distribute the pamphlets; and sign the declaration of a war to the death.
***
Little Karessa Abe is the Secretary General of the movement in New York. She is probably the second most important leader right after her boyfriend/ partner the President Sebastian Adonaev. She lays out the newspaper, runs the cadence of social media, designs all the flyers and graphics, and keeps peoples’ male ego from flying off the handle. Which in turn has kept the group alive for about 4 years. All of 4 and a half feet tall the little Philippina was the fourth person to join a group that now was now over 1,800 EMS workers. Karessa begged him not to go to Beirut and cried and begged and cried and begged that he does not leave on this journey. But she did not understand the depth of the plot.
Probably none, or all but none of his many ambulance comrades understand the degree to which the Jew is a Jew before he is a New Yorker, a paramedic, or a future lawyer. They do not understand the sheer loyalty he has to his people, his blood, his promised land. Because he has not made that known in the nine years since his return from Heller near Boston.
Now, of course the Jew is not a Shiite and his knowledge of the battle of Karbala is primitive and highly limited, but perhaps he can gleam some truth from the basic idea. It was not ever about a victory, inevitable or possible; it was truly more about a bloody statement being made with one’s life that future generations would not be able to ignore. He felt in his heart that Israel and Palestine were on the very brink of total self-destruction. The body count was rising every day in Gaza, and it was only a matter of time before Israel turned North to Lebanon. Which would then suck Iran, Syria, America, and Russia into direct confrontation. Was this different than the Isis Wars of 2014-2018? In some regard it was. The Islamic State was an enemy of all people that would not submit to the Wahabi Salafist vision they carved out. Israel has over 200 nuclear weapons and Iran has 5. The daily rocket fire between Israel and Hezbollah is limited. It is choreographed. But the closer Israel and Hezbollah get to another full-blown war the clock tick faster.
“We just want an excuse to drop an electromagnetic pulse over Tehran and send them back to the Stone Age,” Marty was always fond of reminding him. This was in fact it seems Marty’s top policy recommendation on the strife in the region.
***
On the way back, the Jew stops to have some cigarette and look again at the beautiful blue sea meet the beautiful blue skies. The Corniche continues to hustle and bustle with all faces of Beirut. Everyone doing their best to avoid Syrian gypsy tricks. Women in Iranian Chadors, women in miniskirts; modern and the deeply oriental feeling all are taking a long walk in time of great uncertainty. Some are swimming in the sun and dashing for cover in the hard rain. What strange weather. Like it cannot decide what kind of weather patten to be. Like it cannot decide what kind of country to be as well.
I am standing there when a burly red bearded Shi’a comes up to me. Right on time. They told him to meet near Pigeon Rocks in the derelict restaurant cafe with its windows bashed in from last year’s rioting and protesting.
“I am called Majid Mousli Al Sury,” he says, “welcome to Lebanon.”
“Thank you,” the Jew replies, “I am a called Sebastian Robertovivh al-Newyorki.”
“You look like you’ve been here before,” Majid says.
“Yes, I come every year. At least in my mind.”
“Judging from your suit you must be the Jew of Beirut.”
“That is me.”
“Well, what’s the story this year?”
“I’m looking for a woman.”
“The Jew is always looking for a woman, you think with your, you know, you people like to fuck all the time.”
“Everyone likes to fuck all the time.”
“So, what’s the new part of the story besides you’re looking for a woman?”
“I’m looking for two women actually.”
“Your decadence should show no sign of abatement in light of our squalor!”
“Majid, I’m looking for a way to liberate Palestine.”
“Well, isn’t everyone!”
“Well, I’m looking for a way to empty the 12 camps and create a movement to march right down into the Galilee with everyone; and invade the State of Israel before they can invade you.”
“Have you spoken directly with Hezbollah?”
“Not yet directly. My two partners will in town in a few days.”
“There’s a lot of jurisdictions you’d have to override to move all those Palestinians across everyone’s turf. No one wants those people running amuck freely. They are confined to camps for good reason.”
“What reason is that?”
“Palestinians are troublemakers, everyone knows that.”
“What let you know I’m the Jew of Beirut?”
“I saw you on social media speaking about Zuckerberg’s aquarium. I guess you’re not working low key this year.”
“The CIA will throw my girlfriend out of a plane over the Atlantic if I don’t do what I’m supposed to do.”
“What are you supposed to do?”
“I can’t tell you everything on the first date my friend.”
“But I thought the Jew of Beirut never works for agencies.”
“The CIA wants Israel “re-destabilized”. And they have my girlfriend, so I’m following the orders to the letter this time around.”
“Why does the CIA want Israel restabilized?”
“Antisemites have taken over? Who knows.”
“I don’t think it’s as simple as that. No one hates Jews because they are Jews, people hate Jews for interfering in world events.”
“I think the war in Gaza is dragging and they want to suck in Iran before it’s too late.”
“So, you think the CIA wants to bring us World War three then?”
“I think Hezbollah and Iran have an aggrandized version of themselves if they think they are enough to kick off a World War Three.”
“What about Russia?”
“We are already fighting Russia in Ukraine.”
“Well Hezbollah is not Hamas. No paper tiger. You upset things at the border and a real war might break out, not this Palestinians in a barrel stuff like in Gaza.”
“Enough fun and games you Shiite tricker,” says the Jew, “what say the Party.”
“So, the Party says they are open minded to this plan your Hareekat has come up with as long as you really think the magic is gonna work.”
“Magic, eh?”
“Yes, a Jew magic. They can get you permission to open camp doors and lend you tons of trucks for a southern migration, but they can’t use purple blue smoke to block out Israeli drones and can’t really stop a massacre when you try and cross. The Revolutionary Guards are optimistic that you have brought serious magic this time, being, shall we say a little compelled.”
“The CIA wants chaos on the border, not an all-out World War three. If we keep that in mind all the better.”
“They say you people serve no one but your own plan.”
“Were my girlfriend not a hostage, that would usually be mostly true. Though the more you come to know me, you will see that my plan is not based on ethno-nations, land rights, or the great will of the long unseen.”
“What if your plan has very negative effects for the people of Lebanon? What if we are putting all our trust in the wrong Palestinians and Jews?”
“Then I couldn’t be doing any worse than the combined weight of all your parties and politicians. When the ground shakes in Jerusalem it shakes also in Beirut”
And that was still mostly true. The money was mostly valueless. No one had a good job at all. The Southern border seemed just a few more missile strikes away from World War Three. Iran was trying to take over the country, the Maronites were plotting with the Israelis again. Tourism was a wash. The weather was being more weird than usual; what’s the worst this Jew could do?
“What can you do with this magic of yours that has so impressed the Palestinians, Iranians, and Kurds to sheishbeish with you?”
“They think I can bring back the dead. They think I can turn water into wine. They think I can stop time and rearrange bullets. You all are protecting the blood line of Muhammed, but my people are capable of just as much.”
“So, you think you’re an Isa?”
“Not an Isa, just a Jew from New York Grad, backed into the corner by his government, with nothing left to lose.”
“You people are dangerous. You have wild ideas about your capabilities, about everyone’s dependance on your prophesies and God.”
“I don’t need them to vouch for me. I know my powers.”
“Fine, then let’s rob a bank on Christmas. Show us you’re Lebanese now. Show us you’re the Jew of Beirut, not the Jew of the CIA or Mossad.”
“You get the getaway car, pick the beneficiaries in al Dibaya and I’ll show you something special for the Christ Mass.”
“Yalla.”
“Yalla.”
“Let me ask you a question bro?” he says to me, “is it true that 50% of America’s billionaires are Jewish?”
“It is more like 8%. Only about 25% of the richest Americans on the Forbes list are Jewish. Jews are 1-2% of the American population. So, I think you are exaggerating the numbers a little friend.”
“Why are your people so powerful over there. Christians hate you all. Thy think you killed their Messiah. You think you are safer on the Christian side, but they hate you more than we do.”
“Why are allegedly running America? I don’t know if we are. We made ourselves very useful over there. Because Jews have been bred and raised to be entrepreneurial for thousands of years. They were barred from owning land, from trade guilds, from professions. All we could do was be money lenders, peddlers, and merchants. The dumb ones were either killed in pogroms, or the Holocaust, or they were very poor and had only one or two kids. The smart ones prospered and had more kids. Jewish tradition always emphasized the importance of “the book”, study and learning, and getting a good education. So there was a bit of evolution whereby Jews ended up having a disproportionate number of their people good at business. Also, since we were the last to be hired and the first to be fired, we lean towards being independent. Which meant owning our own business. It’s easier to get rich if you own your own business.”
“I cannot believe anyone is trusting you people to be part of this plan.”
“Unless it was all our plan all along,” I continue, “Since we Jews suffered so much in pogroms, slaughters of Jews at the hands of Muslims, Christians, etc., we became somewhat immune to ordinary reactions to risk. If taking on a risky investment didn’t mean that you were going to be killed, we weren’t scared. So, Jews were attracted to riskier newer fields of business activity. We invented Hollywood and the searchability of the internet, i.e. all stored information. We invented smart phones and sophisticated weapons. It’s risky to make a movie or build a rocket. We took the risk. It used to be very risky to develop real estate, putting up big bucks before you knew if it was going to rent and you wouldn’t get caught in a slump, or by higher interest rates by the time you finished your buildings. We took the risk. Jews are disproportionately represented in business that pay off bigtime, such as hedge funds. There’s high risk, high reward in hedge funds. Jews are disproportionately represented in the successful poker players. Where else: high tech Software. Google and Facebook and Oracle are all Jewish owned. Tech pays off bigtime, but it does have high risk.”
“I knew all of this stuff Mr. Jew of Beirut; I am just pressing your buttons.”
“We like to talk. We like to tell people about ourselves.”
“Everyone knows that you are big talkers. Will you be buying any land here should this whole operation not blow up in your Jew face?”
“A little. Jews are also overrepresented in real estate development. You get big payoffs because it is highly leveraged by way of mortgages. So, you get a very big bang for your buck. I’m not sure if I’ve had enough fun yet here to start buying up your property.”
Majid Mousli Al Sury chuckles.
“They said you were a big shot from New York Grad; you’re not such a bad guy. I will make a good report about you to my people.”
“What does your Amal say about this operation?”
“Amal does not belong to anyone buy the working people. Those who strive and struggle.”
“What is you read on what Amal might say about all this, in the name of the working man?”
“That you will get many Palestinians needlessly killed, if not fully massacred at the border. That it might kick off World War Three, and we are not fully sure why we are trusting Kurds and Jews to begin with.”
“What does Hezbollah say?”
“That they don’t know if they trust a traitor.”
“I’m no fucking traitor. When this done Israel will be right where we found it, just with easier borders to cross.”
“As you say!”
“Have you read any of Yousef Bashir’s work?”
“I’ll be honest, we trust Palestinians as little as we trust Druze, Kurds, Christians and Jews.”
“This plan will work. It’s an exceptionally good plan.”
“As you claim. Studies by non-Jewish sociologists and psychologists on global intelligence found that the highest IQ among humans on the planet were: 1) Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe; and 2) South Koreans. I however as a Syrian, think we Syrians are clever too. Right not 2 million of my country people have settled here in Lebanon. We will not leave. I am very aware of what your American backed YPG has done in Syria, is doing in Syria. I may not have the so-called highest IQ to invent Marxism, Freudian analysis, the Atom Bomb! What great things! But I do know we Syrian will come out on top.”
“But high IQ isn’t enough. It’s the motivation, creativity, fear of persecution, that are factors that create the overrepresentation of Jews among billionaires. Among the drivers of change. I personally feel that it’s also a matter of attitude and belief. Because of the Torah, and the unique relationship between Jews and God, I feel that we Jews believe that they have a destiny in the world. It is to survive, thrive, and to heal the world (“Tikkun Olam”).
Majid Mousli Al Sury chuckles.
“Whatever you say to feel valuable! To survive in this world today takes money. To thrive certainly does. To heal the world takes money too. Jews are overrepresented in philanthropy. Well so are the Shi’a. Accordingly, Jews feel that they have a high probability of succeeding. Well so do we. They are also, historically, a “stiff-necked people”, stubborn. That means that they persist. They don’t quit. So, Jews start a business, and they stubbornly persist until it’s successful, partly because they feel that they have a destiny of success which is mandated by a higher power. Is that true Jew of Beirut, Abu Yazan?”
“I will persist until the operation is successfully carried out.”
“I think sometimes we underestimate your people, but Amal does not, and Hezbollah does not. Things are bad now. Any day it could all explode far worse than any time before. Our missiles will rain down on Tel Aviv and Haifa. Your people will have no peace.”
Majid Mousli Al Sury hands Sebastian a Cedar.
Sebastian says, “The late evangelical pastor Robert Schuller, of Hour of Power and Crystal Cathedral fame, once asked: “What could you accomplish if you knew you could not fail!”. I think that that applies to a certain extent to we Jews. Our expectation to succeed helps make that a self-fulfilling prophecy.
“So, CIA will kill your girlfriend if you help us, will kill your whole family, will take away your citizenship, end your whole ass American dream?”
“Something like that. Something along those sorts of lines.”
“I have always wanted to go to Newyorkgrad. It looks like a great place. Tons of fun opportunities. After the Operation you think I can get a VISA?”
“Depends on lot of factors.”
“Such as?”
“Does Iran have a nuclear weapon for instance? How close can we get it to Jerusalem without being intercepted, tortured, or killed? How many people will the Israelis kill at the border during the distraction? Do I have magic powers, advanced spy weapons, or am I just bluffing you all and just fucking out of my mind.”
“I think you have some powers. Being smart alone would not be enough to get you this far. Still might get you tortured though.”
The Crusaders called this place Outremer. Between 1095 and 1250 there were eight major crusades and dozens of lesser ones. Somewhere in between, Constantinople was sacked by the Christians. A territory twice the size of the current state of Israel was carved out brutally, then crumbled apart in a Jihad of attrition.
Incidentally, they say Abraham settled here from Iran. Joseph dreamed here. Moses evacuated his entire people here from out of Egypt to here. The Phoenicians launched a trade empire from here. Jesus was born here. Died here, maybe came back. Rome occupied and fought three wars here. Mohammed spent the night here. The Turks occupied it for 500 years and the British for 50. The Levant is the crossroads of the old world. A place of miracles. A place of Canaanites and Philistines, of real and imagined Israelites. Judeans, Samarians, Palestinians, Israelis. Sand people, desert people, people of trade, scrolls, war and identities inscribed in the blaze. Identities, pluralistic identities that are stiff necked, fanatical, and zealous.
This place is furnace those forges religions. It cooks the brain and browns the body. It puts G-d’s words in the minds of believers. It bakes belief. It festers fervor. The Levant and Mesopotamia have been the homeland of every major world prophet besides Buddha and the mouthpieces of the Hindus.
If Hashem, if Allah, if the Godhead, if the singular divine, or perhaps the pagan Gods, the Hindu Gods, the lesser prophets and the spirits; may guide and speak to the world of man; here, they speak far louder. Here they etch the word of G-d on the tongues of men; then unleashes the into inglorious combat.
It is getting about as hot as I am told it gets out here. The place is violent pressure cooker for prophets and ultra-violence. Bet Ashanti was keeping food in my belly and providing me a cot near a fan. If things went missing at least they did not go missing with a knife to my throat. My CD player, my belt, and some loose shekels all seemed to disappear down a black hole of faceless theft. My inner Jewish accountant said the meals and cot were worth it and to ride it out a few more weeks. It was just so fucking hot outside.
Those weeks in July of 2001 were a loud bang killer on all. There were more bus bombings, more mass shootings, more reprisals, and more death on the public transit. The Europeans were condemning the Israelis because they kept taking out little kids in their not that smart bomb attacks. Americans condemned “the terrorists” while doing nothing more than keeping the money spigot flowing. That blank check on aid, well it goes to more guns, tanks, and rockets used on the Palestinians.
I hustle my art seven days a week in front of the Opera Towers. A mall slash condominium complex on the sea. On the tiyeled and against the beaches. On the boardwalk. I was selling my art faster than I could restock by redrawing it to be fair, though not selling it for very much. I was turning out sketches on demand. It was hotter and hotter by day and the Zachariah show was going strong. Then, every other day, something blew up somewhere. Usually there was rock throwing, and ball bearing vest blasts, there were tanks in the streets there was death and occupation, but not in Tel Aviv for the most part. The whole country is a small place, as said, like New Jersey, like two hours across and eight up and down, and each day, death in the blazing heat, the iron heel of occupation versus the defense of the nation. Two very palpable narratives, under pressure, then a bang. A protest and a bellow in a megaphone in Arabic or Hebrew, in Russian. A bang, a ratatatatatat. Maybe from the outside it all looks like fitna. Like occupation. Like a holy war. On the ground, a pressure cooker.
I made a day trip to Pardes Hanna to bring Anya some flowers against my better judgment. She is a dead ringer for Izzy Vitz’s part Lithuanian part Japanese ex Jackie Niche back in New York, but with bigger tits. She wasn’t just a leisure agent. She was also an emergency medical technician for the Sheroot Leumi, which was a sort of do-community-service-from-home-to-stay-out-of-the-army jump off for females and the patriotic religious.
This was hardly a leap into monogamy. What in the world does a seventeen-year-old know about that. We’re little animals. She didn’t seem to want more of me than I could give. Anya didn’t speak enough English to get deep about it, but she’d bat her eyes and ask me to take her to New York one day soon. This giving her flowers thing was a madhouse idea after a month of dirty drunk sex. Some nights we sat on the boardwalk with piles of stacked beach chairs. Whenever I was up her way, we promptly fucked all over her ever-absent mommy’s house. Made love rather, if I had not been doing so much vodka drinking.
I haven’t kissed a girl sober in a very long time. Not Daphne Collins or the other one in England, not Hadas and certainly rarely ever Anya. In less than a week she fell for me. So, I feigned some lovemaking, some ‘slow fucking’ as Izzy once had called it. I came three times that first night. On her breasts and in her mouth and in a condom. I moaned ‘suck my dick’ and some dirty-talk language getting head in the big steel bathtub. The girl lay with me in the dark at her mother’s small apartment in Pardes Hana and she begged me to take her to New York once her time in the national services was completed. She showed me a pistol and a ton of ammunition her ex had stolen for her.
She has great breasts. Which is very important. I’m socialized like that I suppose. And if I am the American pretending to be an Israeli, she was certainly doing a bang-up job working to not be from here. She had come here from Karaganda by way of Tashkent in 1990. Often, she practiced reducing her accent to nothing with the TV and mail order accent-reduction tapes. She wasn’t Russian but wanted to model there. She was cute enough, but she didn’t have the starvation frame. She is a curvy little former Soviet. In America, you’d call her a ‘Russian.’ Here too, maybe, but she was half Kazakh, half Uzbek. Unlikely any part Jew.
I told Bet Ashanti’s madam that I was meeting an uncle in Haifa for the weekend. I hitchhiked up to Pardes Hana to get with Anya instead. She had quite a few boyfriends bopping around to stare me down, but that didn’t stop us from kissing and fucking all night and whispering things about running off country. We filled her ashtray with three packs of butts, and I got so caught up in the moment that I failed to see how quick this girly had taken to me. She is my comfort girl, and I am her golden ticket out of this military colony should I ever choose to leave. Under pressure, like everything else.
***
I meet people quickly and develop intense relationships in my line of work. If it really works at all. It’s a sad little hustle. Maybe on a busy Saturday night I can make 200 shekels; that’s barely $50 US. It’s called hustling art on the street in a foreign war-torn colony.
You take an intelligent person, and they see this big art stand with pictures filled up with Commie imagery, carnal orgiastic renditions, biblical allegories, and current events. You break into some topic a picture you like alludes to, only to meet a young kid who defies every idea you have about Americans. That sort of explains how I was getting down.
I took a whole lot more numbers than I called. Numbers to get fed, to get fucked, to finish a good conversation, and even offers to take the Zachariah Artstein show on the road to quaint and quieter inner country locals like in Ashdod, Acho, and well healed Herzliyya. The American Jewish colony, in the colony. There were also young kids my own age that wanted me to paint murals in their bedrooms and rap in English for their friends.
“What are you doing here man! No one wants to be here. Everyone wants to live in New York!”
I never did as well sell as when I worked the tiyeled. It was July 4th and the masses were out in force. Bands played salsa music on small bandstands set up on the boardwalk. Street hustlers worked on games of Three Card Monty. Teenage girls looking for a quick summer buck sold all sorts of glowing toys to small children passing by as little boys hustled couples with flowers and Polaroid pictures. There was a whole culture of street hustlers that worked the tiyeled. I was one of them. I had been in Tel Aviv about a month since leaving the Ein Dor kibbutz and moving to Bet Ashanti, home for runaway teens. I sold my art every night. Five shekels here, twenty shekels there. It was just enough to eke out a desperately thin existence on ice cold Mayim, crunchy falafel, Zaatar cakes, and Noblisse cigarettes.
My new business partner, the half Russian boy named Ditri Massoud, would watch the stand as I worked the crowd. I mingled in and out of the great crowds shouting in Hebrew,
“Bo tista-clu al omanute sha-li!” or “Come look at my art!”
Ditri is twice my size and had lived in the desert town of Be’er Sheva. He had borrowed the equivalent of nearly a thousand dollars from the local Romanian mob to finance and stock his stall in the market. The enterprise had been less than successful, and he had fled to Tel Aviv to avoid the consequences of owing dangerous people too much money. It is a very, very small country so they’d catch him eventually. He didn’t speak English so that our communication in my garbled Hebrew was limited, to say the least. His English was limited to “Yes,” “No” and “You are friend of Ditri”.
Ditri owns two pairs of clothing. He slept in the sand under one of the many beach pergolas. He was barred from Bet Ashanti for a reason that was never really explained to me. Greek mentioned that he was violent and crazy. Ditri was a bulky kid with curly blond hair and Mongoloid features. He was very loyal. Whenever someone tried to steal from our collection plate as the gangs of arsim often did, Ditri would chase then down and clobber them something awful. Maybe he is really violent, but it all works to my advantage.
During the heat of the day, we share a bottle of Coke-A-Cola and watch the waves crash gently on the beach. We spaced out slightly because of the heat exhaustion. I don’t know if I would call Ditri my friend per se, for I know precious little about him, but he serves nicely in our new symbiotic relationship as street hustlers.
My best customers are the American and English tourists vacationing in Israel for the summer. That’s because ‘the ZA show’ works best when your English is good. Most of them stay in Jerusalem, hyped up on some propaganda-induced spiritual experience. Jerusalem is the brainwashing capital of the world as far as I am concerned. I haven’t even stepped foot in it since I’d arrived back in the country. Secular Jews visiting for a week always run into some Dos or Hasid who will give them a crash course in the workings of the Old Testament and get them hooked.
The religious Jews, the Dosim and Hasidim, are on the national dole. These two groups are more offensive than the other groups of religious Jews because of their penchant for rock throwing and religious rioting. They neither pay taxes nor serve in the IDF. Most importantly, they never buy art. They don’t even stop to look. It’s good they don’t look because the Tetranomogram, the ‘Yod Hei Vav Hei’ gets incorporated quite bit and they flip shit over that.
Israelis do not have any true or actual need for a thing like pity, or street art.
It’s not that they don’t like art, but they really need some persuading to buy it from a street vendor. To make a living from a street stand, one must know how to work the crowds, create a market, and deliver a desirable product. This country has little time for charity cases, which is what I get perceived as most of the time.
My best sales pitch is to young girls who are fascinated with the American expatriate who loves a country no one seems to want to live in. Maybe that is a misinterpretation on my part. It just seems that each Israeli I talk to dreams of living in New York. While many people stop to examine our goods, the bulk of our money comes from the tourists and from the regulars. A regular is someone who lives or works by the tiyeled and will drop money anytime they see us out. To survive in this game, you need your regulars.
Ms. Svetlana Tchaadaev is perfect example of a regular. She’s an American-educated Russian trust-fund baby, which is just a code word for her daddy being a Russian mobster-robber baron. Ms. Tchaadaev carries on romantic flings with the artists and bohemians of the Tel Aviv subculture. Despite the fact that she is independently wealthy, she works as a flyer girl for Mike’s Blues Bar just up the beach. I’d been doing the same thing for Mike’s the night the Pasha club blew up.
Ms. Svetlana normally shares her beers and meals with me and always buys a picture. We try to steal yellow beach chairs from the lock up on Jerusalem Beach before they are chained together for the night. She sits with me and helps me in the hustle. She is shady as hell. Ditri never seems to like her. She always tries to get me to sell her my passport.
There are other far less problematic regulars, like curly, blonde-haired Ethiopian Lina, who even though she was born in village without running water or electricity seems more Americanized and hipper in fashion and sensibility then most Ashkenazi Israelis. Abby and Rachel are the ‘two birds’ from Golder’s Green, students of Rabbi Akiva Tatz. They bring young men from Jerusalem to meet with me to spar on issues of Talmud and religion. These are the people that keep Ditri and me in water, meal money and smokes. I am the sale-man, and he is the strongman. It is like any Russian business except in ours the salesman gets to call the shots.
Although I consider myself a Resistance Artist, the truth is I am barely making ends meet. On a terrific evening, generally a Friday or Saturday, I might bring in close to 200 shekels, the equivalent of fifty dollars. The money I save is earmarked to take my girl Anya out to dinner when she comes into the city to visit me. You might say I am becoming like a normal person. Bit by bit by bit, less like street trash. Anything left over is earmarked toward pens, sketchpads, vodka, ice-cold mayiim and some more cheap Noblisse cigarettes.
It is necessary to keep yourself looking presentable when you hustle. You can’t have the buyers think that you are begging for the money. It is important to communicate that you are a skilled artisan, a poor and hungry skilled artisan, but nonetheless incredibly talented. When I feel humorous, I compare my art to Van Gogh and Picasso when they traded paintings for food. I convince my customers they are making a serious investment and that one day these sketches I make will be worth a small fortune on the art market when I cut off my ear for a woman or go out against fascism in a hail of bullets.
My art stock consists of three types: political cartoons, dream-based consignment pieces, and commissions. “Give me any idea you have an I’ll draw it in 5 minutes.”
My favorite works are the political cartoons surrealistically drawn with black Uniball pens on 8 ½ by 11 papers. Normally they start with a cartoon version of myself blowing away the ‘pigs and capitalist traitors of the Iron heel.’ Then with that image somewhere in the page I drop in any number of red flag hammer and sickles, bare-naked women engaged in carnality or war or both. Then with a slightly finer pen, normally a Uniball Fine Point, I stencil in the message of the day, which could be anything really, but is normally anti-war, anti-state, anti-religious and Israeli issue themed. Finally, I write bold needlessly proactive messages. The phrases are always in English, but sometimes in a, shall we say artistic, rendition of the phrases in Hebrew, Russian, or Arabic.
There is little color in any of my work and the sketches take on a variety of subjects, but generally they were quite dark and violent in their depictions of Israeli or American social ills. Lots of ‘Join or Die’ type themes with the 14 big Israeli ethnic groups. If color does get used its either black or red Sharpie fill-ins, highlighter color-ins of people’s eyes, or gold etched inlay on edges to simulate shadow.
The lowest I go on these pieces is 20 Shek a pop, although Ditri made a bunch of Photostat copies one day from my archive sketch book, and I loosely colored a few in. These we sell for just 10 Shek, or a comparable offered price, because frankly, a photocopy costs Ditri only 10 Agarot to bang off.
My dream-based work is all in pencil on thicker matte paper far larger in size. These sketches are from the vivid dreams I used to have about Mike Washington and the Pale City. The gun battles against the screaming Zombie hordes, the underground railroad, the flying machines, the redheaded girl, the Old Man and his game. All of these take at least a day to render. Since traffic is so slow during daylight, I fashion most of these pieces then.
These sell almost right away for 100 Sheks or more. I can crack out the political stuff on demand, but these take longer as I have to remember them. Most of the customers fixate on the controversial statements of the political work. It takes a while, an hour even of conversation before a customer turns their attention to the dream pieces. If it was a good conversation and the offer price exceeds 100, I never haggle hard over the sale. It’s all just small talk.
What were all these so-called good conversations about? Well, I guess they were kind of about philosophy, or politics, or theology, or vibes, because what I knew about any of those things. Maybe they were also about art and making art, in a sense about freedom. About so much carnage in such a small place. About Judaism, maybe the heat and pressure were speaking for me a lot of the time.
It would have been impossible to be talking that summer with all that Intifada going on unless we were also speaking about the future of Jews and Palestinians.
I don’t think whatever I learned, I didn’t then bounce off someone else later in the day. I think maybe all the cigarettes, all the heat, all the violence was bearing down on us. I felt that maybe they all said things to me in English, they wouldn’t say to others in Hebrew, Arabic, or Russian. I was the perfect outsider. A young, skinny vagabond totally out of place, yet, with the passport of the empire. From the economic capital of the world. Speaking in Amerkanski. Speaking in tongues. Speaking behind art, so none of it was real enough to fear entrapment, but it was so novel, it could be harbored, it could be trusted. These perfect strangers went to bed with me, they put me on their couches, they brought me to their villages and military outposts. They invited me into their homes. Perhaps, because I am not threatening. Perhaps, because I am like a lion cub, you just don’t feel alarmed. The Resistance Art stand circulates all over, and with these little talks, these little one night all night conversations; I develop a primitive analysis of the nation I seek to be a part of. Then, I repeat the analysis back to more strangers. I sell a few more sketches, I sleep around. I move from place to place, with Tel Aviv as my base. Sleeping and eating in what is little more than a youth shelter. When they cry, I cry, when they smile, I smile, I smile and laugh along with all these different strangers. And the pressure builds, the heat builds, the pressure and heat and make 5,000 years of imagined identity speak though me: and I end up saying, we have more in common with the Arabs than the Americans. We have more in common with the Persians than the British. We are not colonists; we are from here. We are not Europeans; we are from these lands. If we continue to war with the Palestinians, we war with our selves. This place is a dangerous war colony, based on how it was designed. How it mutated with American money and ideas. Our solution is to be confederated with the Arabs and Persians; our only salvation as a people can come by an identity, a consciousness that is rooted in our Middle Eastern Judean soul. Reject that soul, we are a war base for the empire. We are only serving New Rome. I sometimes I talked about other things, well maybe often I made small talk. I do not speak Hebrew and Arabic, or Russian. I try and speak from my soul. I try and reflect on the enormity of my people’s history; we cannot win the war we are fighting; we war with our own people. The Palestinians are our people. You cannot win a war against yourself.
I make and sell Art, and it’s the way I sustain these kinds of conversations.
I have other artists work too. The twenty odd pieces always on display are generally half mine and half consigned stock, other things give me to try and sell. The consigned pieces are from a variety of young Israeli artists who admire my tenacity at salesmanship and are curious to see what prices their work might fetch on the open market in Israel. They were generous enough to let me keep 30% of the sale, for they could see I was destitute. Most of them go to art school in Haifa and my trade inspires them of the future they hope for in Williamsburg and DUMBO once their Sheroot Lummi commitments are finished. Just under half my earnings come from selling the Israeli’s their own children’s art. By the end of June, I was representing over twelve Israeli artists, one Ethiopian, three Arabs, two Russians, three Mizrahi, two Ashkenazim, and one dos, the derogatory word for the religious now added to my vernacular.
Commissions are where my living truly comes from. Most of the time it is a goods-for-services swap situation. I paint a small mural for a haircut or charcoal portrait for a bath when I am hitchhiking about Galilee. I am just ‘eking out a very base existence, but Bet Ashanti put a roof over my head and two meals a day in my belly.
The staff there thinks that I work as an overnight busboy; otherwise, I’d have to be in by midnight. Because the other kids are such freeloaders, they appreciate my working and let me slide. My entire cycle has been reversed. It’s too hot to do anything during the day and I can’t stand the sun anyway.
I sleep on the bottom bunk in one of the two boy’s rooms along with about twelve other kids. Most of them don’t speak too much English. Those that do hold day jobs and I rarely see them.
Bet Ashanti is a place for runaways, misfits and ghetto trash. It has been associated with a series of scandals over the years involving, but not limited to accusations of drug dealing on behalf of the residents, accusations of child molestation on behalf of the residents, high rates of Army desertion on behalf of the residents upon reaching age 18, and it had recently been in the papers when its owner and founder was accused of raping a 17 year-old female resident. That most of the boys are in street gangs, that no one goes to school, and that the mayor of Tel Aviv was under some public pressure to shut the operation down, nothing seemed any worse here than say, sleeping on a street while hungry.
As far as I can tell there are a lot of rules, but only three that truly matter. The first is no substance abuse, at least not on the premises. No drugs or drinking anywhere near Bet Ashanti. But these kids are all drug addicts and smoke hash all day on the beach. The second rule is-no fighting. No one is allowed to fight anywhere near the Shanti House. But that’s also a stupid rule for kids who are members of street gangs and all manner of shady shit. I watched the Greek break some guy’s jaw in a prizefight he took me to a day ago. The last rule is-no stealing. People are not allowed to take stuff belonging to Bet Ashanti or the kids that live there. One would think these rules sort of go without saying, but in fact there is seldom a time when these kids aren’t doing drugs, fighting, and stealing.
By evening I had only seen a few of my regulars. Greek, the Russian kid from Bet Ashanti had dropped by to show me his new girlfriend. Svetlana had passed by on a flyer run. There were other familiar faces, but no regulars. It is very cool for an evening in mid-July. Business has been good, and the collection pot is up to about 90 shekels. I had made an additional 100 shekels yesterday that I hadn’t gotten to blow yet on one of my girls and the still water. The colorful paper notes were tucked neatly in my billfold. New Israeli shekels, the good old ‘N-I-S’ currency looks like fucking monopoly money to me.
***
The evening is coming to a near close, as far as any so-called “working” is concerned. The bands have stopped playing and the crowd has thinned out to a trickle. Drunken revelers are dancing in the moonlight. There is a fight going on across the street. As it nears 2 am, I begin to consider closing the shop. I have close to 150 shekels in my pocket, a small comparative fortune. I stand up to stretch. My hands are sore from the non-stop drawing I had been doing all evening. I pop my knuckles and light up a Noblisse. This is perhaps my thirtieth stoag of the day. I tend to smoke I great deal when I am on the job. Placing the crumpled green packet into the cargo pocket of my ripped and baggy khakis, I palm Ditri a fifty note for his troubles.
“Thank you, Ze-Hariah,” said Ditri, for to him this was a great deal of money.
“You are friend of Ditri.”
“Take it easy, big guy.”
The big oaf gives me a hearty pat on the pack that almost knocks me flat on my face.
“Ditri now to sleeping,” he says. I had to hand it to him. His English is improving, as is my Hebrew. I was starting to understand phrases and bits of conversation and could get my point across if I had to. Most Israelis learned English in high school and could hold a conversation. It was the Arabs and the Russians who refused to learn English. There were exceptions but few that I encountered could understand what I was saying. Ditri bargained for me in Russian, but Arabic was lost on both of us, which is odd him being half Bedouin. I had recently considered doing the sign in Arabic and Russian to broaden my clientele but kept forgetting to ask someone to translate it. Ditri was virtually illiterate and could neither read nor write in Hebrew or Russian.
Svetlana could do it for me in Russian, but she despised anything that revealed her actual and not imagined heritage. She would feign ignorance to not speak or write her native tongue. She had invited me for late night drinks at the Blues Bar and I had made enough money to easily cover my expenses for the week, cigarettes, vodka, and more art supplies.
I am quite proud of myself for making so much money and decided to celebrate at the Blues Bar over a pint of Maccabi, which isn’t as good as the piss water Gold Star and can’t hold a candle to a Stella, but I guess I want to be down with the tribe. It is close to 3 in the morning. Ditri has found some corner to fall asleep in. I am just putting some last touches on a large pencil sketch.
I make a final count of my money and start packing up the pieces into my bag. I start with the 8 ½ by 11’s, peeling the tape off the back that hold them to the enormous tabletop I use as a display board. I have neatly inserted three of the pieces into my binder when I hear a voice behind me.
“So, what exactly are you selling these people?” Her voice sounds like old Brooklynese.
“I make and sell Art,” I respond without looking up, “the finest street art in Tel Aviv if not the entire Western World. Except for maybe Barcelona where the street art is well, fucking good also.”
I turn around to face her and lord, is she beautiful with long flowing brown hair and a smile to disarm any man. I catch her chest like a second later, but that smile caught me off guard for a minute, because I just don’t really look at that in a girl ever.
She is just a little shorter than me and looks like a natural hustler. She looks elegant and she can hold her shit down hard like a killer. Like a stripper putting herself through law school, things aren’t always what you degrade them to be.
“It is pretty good, kiddo. You’re wasting time being in Tel Aviv, but you knew that of course.”
“I was about to close! You’re lucky you caught me. I wouldn’t want a girl like you going home without a piece of Resistance Art.”
“I bet, you say cheesy shit like that to girls all night and they throw their phone numbers at you because the color of your passport is dark blue.”
“Actually, I leave for Cairo in the morning, and this might be your last chance to buy one.”
“Right. Cause it’s not like you’re here every single night of the week,” she responds smugly, “and incidentally the Taba border crossing with Egypt is closed at the moment because they found four tunnels across Rafah, they were carting rockets in through.”
I laughed with her for a second. At each other and ourselves. “You’re just really, really absolutely charming miss what can I call you?”
“Maya. You may call me Maya Soriya Rose.”
“Is Rosen short for Rosen?”
“It’s just Rose.”
“Zachariah Artstein, is what I call myself.”
She looks dead at me and smirks, “I don’t think that’s your real name at all.”
“I don’t think you really told me yours.”
A pause between us.
“What’s in name? Buy some fucking art,” I laugh.
“How much for that one?”
She points to a pencil sketch of 40 rebels holding the walls of Jerusalem with swords and rifles and spears against a massive army of the undead. At the center of the drawing stands a bloodied fighter waving a grey banner as he empties his pistol into swine depicted police forces attacking the rebels within the city.
“That one’s called ‘The Tragic Little Hero’s Last Stand at the Golden Gates’.”
“You made that name up just now on the spot.”
“No, I swear I put a lot of thought into naming them because of how, truly deep they really all are.”
“No, you just made that name up now. I mean it’s good. I’ve seen your work before, but I never got a chance to get close enough to look and talk to you about it.”
“Yeah, the crowds are getting bigger and bigger these days.”
“Crowds? I was referring to your seemingly constant flirtation with mindless frekhot.”
“Flirtation? I just want them to feed me and fuck me.”
“If you were just a little prettier, I’d swear I met a long-lost brother,” she laughs.
“Quite. It’s a smallish tribe though. I’ll tell you what, you tell me your real name and I’ll give you the piece for any price you declare.
“My real name eh, for a discount? I thought you were a businessman, Zach.”
“I’m in the business of telling people things they only thought they’d get to hear in movies and romantic novels.”
“Where does the resistance come in?” she says noticing my sign.
“I’m resisting starvation.”
“So, what you’re selling is communist-propaganda-meets-an-elaborate-pick-up-line?”
“Yeah, that sums it up if you wish to cheapen and devalue nearly everything, I believe into a sound bite.”
“I see you have this speech carefully worked out.”
“Maya, you don’t spy on me, do you?”
“Someone as ravishing as me gets spied upon but does not spy on people herself. I’m just acutely honed at deductive reasoning.”
“So, you’re a psychic detective moonlighting as a stripper, eh?”
“Maybe I’m just a law student moonlighting as psychic detective who likes to take my clothing off.”
“Yeah, so what’s your real name, Maya Rose?”
“A better question is what you’re really doing in Tel Aviv. You know, when you’re not being a hipster.”
“Darling, I’m glad you asked. I think that there is no such thing as the devil, but if there were, and the devil was the head of a large, militarized state, his greatest trick would be making people believe they had something other than themselves to blame for the evils of the world. The wool pulled over our eyes and iron heel upon our necks are kept there by our belief that we shouldn’t do anything; that the fault lies with some huge and powerful other and not in our own lack of will.”
“Spoken like someone with soft, soft American hands. I don’t know what any of that means. Give me something more definitive, Zachariah, ‘cause I’ve heard this shpiel before. It’s 3 am and you’ve got only a couple minutes to make this sale.”
“One need not make the masses aware, nor arm them nor give them doctrines on dreams that do not feed their children. The working people who have long been taught to hate and kill each other over skin tones, invisible friends, and flag patterns don’t need to feel unity beyond the communities in which they live. But if these could see such a stand and a story demonstrated for their children’s children to remember and repeat; then they would have that one crucial thing the workers republic will be founded on.”
“Controlling the means of production?”
“No. The new republic is a thing to be founded on autonomy and hope.”
“I assume this is where you hope to make your little stand.”
“Here’s what I know. Give these Palestinians a little land. Re-absorb the Palestinian Diaspora into a combined Jewish-Arab nation andseparate our shul from our state. No Rabbis and Imams allowed in Knesset. Accept that being America’s whore is far worse than failing to retain the ‘Jewish character’ of this nation. Since the Palestinians are a political football, the other Arab states use to keep us weak and the other Arab states hate the Palestinians anyway, a Pal-Isra solution makes sense since all Christians basically hate Jews So in a nutshell, I’m here ready for the revolution.”
“First off, my Zachariah, you’re damn well divorced from the political reality of the world in which you live. But that I can dig. Israel can barely support those living here now. There isn’t enough land and there isn’t enough water.”
“Propaganda dear.”
“Second, this is the JEWISH homeland. We can’t just turn it into another secular country ‘cause we’d lose the one place Jews can turn to escape persecution.”
“Rhetoric.”
“Third, what makes you think these people actually want to share the land in the first place?”
“Because in the end they’ll realize that it’s better to live side by side than to keep killing each other’s children in a turf war no one cares about but your average New York Times reader.”
“It’s been over sixty years of war, and no one seems to have learnt that lesson yet.”
“This can’t go on for much longer.”
“I beg to differ. We can kill each other indefinitely. The US will never turn off the gun spigot and the Palestinians can hold their asymmetric war another couple hundred years unless the Israelis do something to make them look like Germans, which they won’t.”
“My Kazakhi girlfriend advocates gassing them all at camps in the Negev.”
“Says something about your tastes in women.”
“Listen, I came to Israel to start a new life. I believe that in the end there’s got to be some way to make peace in this land. If I didn’t believe that then I would have to leave.
“There are other reasons to be here like fast girls, nice beaches and a good hustle. How can you be so naive about the world and live in Israel, the most divided nation on the planet? Not exactly the best place to demonstrate peace and tolerance. If ya’ had not noticed, we live in a state of constant and unending war.”
“Where better for me to be? In America people don’t understand the concept of fighting for an ideal. They’re fat with the glut of their own apathy.”
“Fair enough, but enough people want war in Israel to make this conflict go on for decades more. There’s never been any actual peace in this country. It has been a big non-stop war for the last sixty odd years. We’re sitting on the wall of a war field, a vast experimental powder keg upon which our kind gather half their number.”
“And one day it’ll explode.”
“Explode? Maybe you do not watch the news, but it explodes nearly every day.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I’m not sure I do.”
“Before there can be peace, there needs to be a conflict big enough to show these people why they shouldn’t fight indefinitely. Most Israeli kids don’t want to dress in a uniform and impose curfews and checkpoints on the Palestinians. I find it real hard to believe that every Palestinian wants to be a brick thrower or a shahiid. Everyone wants peace, but all the leaders can think of is how to get a bigger piece.”
“The Jews never went out and deliberately murdered civilians.”
“Except in the case of Baruch Kappel Goldstein, Sabra and Shatilla. OR Deir Yassin! Suicide bombing is counter-productive to the Palestinian cause, but it’s the only method they feel that works. They have ten thousand rocks for every Merkava Tank we have. For every ten thousand trained soldiers in the Tsvah they have one young person willing to blow themselves up as a martyr.”
“And you want to give in to them. You want to hand then the keys to the temple and expect them to let us live here.”
“I didn’t say we give the land away. I said, we share it because it’s not fully anymore ours than it is theirs.”
“Ha. Priceless American idealism. I agree with you, Zachariah in my heart and principles, believe me I do. I just don’t see a possibility of hope for these people.”
“We are these people.”
At that moment she looked at me and smiled again like when I first saw her. There was a moment of silence as we stared at each other anticipating each other’s response. She reached into her pocket and took out a purple NIS fifty note.
“I don’t know if you’ve completely sold me, but here are some props for having the right ideals. The real name’s Emma but don’t call me that in front of other people when and if we hang out again.”
I removed the piece from the display board. I handed it to her and her eyes ran the gamut of its details.
“I know I’m giving you far less than it might be worth.”
“Throw your number in and I’ll pretend I’m not disappointed.”
I rolled it up and handed it to her. She smiles and hands me a business card and writes a cell phone number on the back of it. I look over the card Emma called Maya Rose handed me which looks like a club flyer, laminated small blue and white. It said in English: -THE DEEP-.
“What’s The Deep?”
“It’s a nightclub. Drop by on a Thursday and we’ll make sure to sort it out.”
“Sort what out?”
“If we are working for the same side of the problem and the cause. It was nice to meet you, Mr. Adonaev.”
What a lady. How did she know me by my government name?
***
I have a three-day rule when I get a girl’s number. It’s from the movie Swingers. You can’t seem eager. So, there went Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. I sold every piece I had that weekend. I hung out in a café in Yaffo with Anya all day Tuesday and called Emma that night. She told me she was running around promoting at a ton of parties and could not give me any attention. She said it was best for me just to come to the Deep alone on Thursday at about midnight-thirty. Then she could hang out with me all night.
I had made plans to move out of Bet Ashanti. I wanted to see more of the country, and the terms of the bread and a bed were constraining logistically. And I was tired of the war of attrition going on to keep my property from being stolen. So, I said good-bye to Gilead and the Greek and packed up all my gear and left. I moved into a room at the Mughrabi Hostel on Allenby Street five blocks from the Opera Towers. I rented a cot for 33 NIS sheks a night, which was manageable.
I closed early that Thursday night so I could make it to the club at some reasonable hour. For me closing early was closing any time before 11. No one even hits the clubs until around midnight in Israel. In New York you’ve done three bars already by this time. I suppose it’s the heat that keeps the nightlife hard, cool and strictly nocturnal.
The Deep is in the heart of Tel Aviv near the monolithic white tower of the Ministry of the Interior. It was an underground hotspot nestled on a dark side street. It was known for its wild queer after hours parties but was now run and operated by Black Israelites. Emma worked as a promoter and a partner. For every 25 people she brought to the club, her boss Andrew put five hundred shekels in her pocket. Apparently, Miss Maya was the top promoter. She was able to bring in roughly 125 people every Thursday. As I arrived at the entrance, a well-dressed Israeli Ashkenazi stood at the door with the guest list. A group of drunken Russian frekhot was trying to get into the club free of charge. They argued in Hebrew, as I waited behind them to get in. The street was empty besides the girls, the gatekeeper and me. A Black male with a diamond earring in his left ear emerged from behind the red curtain. At first, I assumed he was Ethiopian, until I heard him talk.
“WHAT the hell are these trifling bitches goin’ on about now?”
It was the first time I had heard a trace of an Ebonics accent in over a year.
“Excuse me,” I interject.
“Can I help you, cracka?” says a young black thug with the enormous diamond earring from the land of Zirconium.
I hadn’t heard that since New York.
“I’m looking for Maya Rose, she said I was on the list.”
Like a fabulous ghetto St. Peter this Middle Eastern gangster looks at his list scornfully. He shakes his head looking tired. And then Maya emerged from behind the curtain.
“Dizzy, this one’s with me,” she says to him and takes my hand. Past the black velvet rope we go down into a catacomb below the streets into a place that was once a blast shelter. The cavernous basement is packed wall to wall with Israelis who are black and brown. This bunker is dimly lit with red lights and strobes flashing to the beat of the music. There are huge black couches against the walls and white swings installed at the edge of the dance floor. The DJ is spinning Old School American Hip-Hop music.
I take a seat at the bar with the young woman allegedly named Maya Rose. Other than her I’m the only alleged Caucasian in the place.
“What are you drinking?” she asks me.
“Gold Star.”
She waves down and whispers something to the bartender. I try to pass her some NIS shekel ten spot coins, but she looks at me like I’m crazy.
“Beers on Andrew,” she says.
“Andrew is the guy who runs this place?”
“Indeed.”
“An American?”
“Israelite. Andrew, and half the other people who work for this club are Black Israelites from a little city in the Negev named Demona where they keep the nuclear weapons.”
“You mean the Ethiopian Jews.”
“No, there’s an enormous difference between an Ethiopian and a Black Israelite. One’s humble and from Africa and one will call you a cracker and has a nasty jump shot.”
“Where did they come from?”
“Chicago mostly. That was about forty years ago. There’s maybe a couple thousand of them
living in Israel now. Some like Andrew have neither Israeli nor American citizenship. The state of Israel still doesn’t believe they are in any senses actually the Jews.’
“State of Israel doesn’t believe a lot of people are Jews.”
“It deports them whenever it can. Andrew built up the Deep’s rep for the past year or so as a haven for Israeli Blacks who want to rock out. Ethiopians don’t have too many of their own places and I’m sure you’ve seen what happens when a Black guy dances with a White or Russian girl.”
We drink and dance a bit more and I call her Maya in front of couple dozen ‘Black Israelites’ I get introduced to. She introduces me to everyone as Zachariah. I was thrilled to see something like this here. I’d seen some racist shit in the past few weeks of Tel Aviv nightlife.
I finally get introduced to “Andrew the Hustler”, the man behind this little operation who introduces himself as Avinadav. In a manic little rant about names while rolling up a spliff, he tells me ‘Everyone calls him Andrew, but he’s been thinking, dreaming really, that it’s better to use his ‘Hebrew name’ and not his ‘Babylon slave name.’ He is related to a good many people here. He is the big brother who came to the big city and made good for the rest of them. He comes across as generous, maybe to a fault.
It was really after hours now, like 5 am, when very few people can be coherent; when Maya and Andrew called Avinadav, and this Jamaican Rasta guy Bradshaw and I are hanging out in the courtyard across from the club as Andrew rolls up another spliff. It was the first time I’d seen weed being smoked in Israel.
“I mean, I’m not saying that a Black guy can’t go to the GSPOT or the GAT RAMON or any other jump off rave psyche trance party. It happens; it does. BUT, if they wanna kick game to some Ashkenazi or Russia sister then its problems nine of ten. I mean shit, this Eretz isn’t South Africa or Southside bad, I mean it’s not legislated. I’m just sayin’ all my girlfriends not from the community in Demona are Yemeni girls. They know about being Black before the Ethiopians and us got here in the 70’s. Shit, they think of themselves as Black. I think of um like Puerto Rican actually. I mean the Black man will always be everybody’s favorite nigger. But the Palestinians are givin’ us a run. I mean racism ain’t shit next to holy war. I want chu’ to know I’m not fucked up and high and I’m just wired a bit ‘cause I couldn’t sleep last night. I mean I talk, talk, talk but I feel like you got some shit to say kid.”
Both Andrew and Maya call me kid or kiddo, but neither is much older than me. Maya is 18 and Andrew is 26.
“There’s hate based on race and a hate based on religion, but those are just pretexts for political leaders to consolidate powers. Likud and Avodah and the governing coalition can play ball for years by keeping everybody divided. I mean the Russians, Yemenis and Ethiopians all live in the same shit neighborhoods and go to same run-down hospitals, but they can’t wait to fight each other over any stupid thing. The Palestinian Christians, Palestinians in Gaza, Palestinians in the West Bank and the so-called ‘Arab Israelis’ are not even different peoples, and they can’t even work together on the uprising. Bedouins and Druze are Arabs but have more in common with the coalition government than with each other. For a nation of eight million there’s quite a bit of disunity.”
“We unified over beatin’ back the other Arab states. Even Palestinians true hate the other Arabs. The Jordanians butchered um in ’71. The Lebanese butchered um in ’83, and any person with a brain knows they aren’t gonna give the Palestinians a country once the Jews get ‘driven into the sea’. Egypt would take the Negev and the Coast until Ashkelon. Jordan would take the West Bank to the Sea, and Syria would swallow up what was left. Like a football those Palestinians get thrown around to be a thorn in our side. Fools.”
“Nu, you consider yourself an Israelite then?” I ask him.
“Even if they don’t consider me one. I mean I ain’t even got US citizenship. I grew up in Demona. I was born in Demona and I ain’t even got a valid todat zeeoot. I’m a resident alien. Don’t even get me started on our troubles. It was worse before. The state has at least somewhat accepted we ain’t goin back to America.”
The brother with the diamond earring and black suit whose name I didn’t catch joined us. He was one of Andrew’s partners and also a cousin. He’d called me cracka when I arrived. They looked alike, same build and complexion. His name was Disrael, Dizzy for short. Andrew kept with these manic, politico-spiritual rants and his cousin looked tired and wanted to cash out. The Jamaican; Ian Bradshaw and Maya barely said a word. They just listened. I guess she was sizing things up. Andrew was both articulate and wildly knowledgeable about theology and political science. Maya never got drunk even though she never stopped drinking.
By sunrise Andrew, Maya, and I are having breakfast at dawn in an outdoor café on lower Allenby Street.
“So, are you a change maker then? That’s a damn good thing ‘cause I’m a change maker too. Something has to give or break because it can’t be like this much longer. To fathom one day one of us bringing a kid up in this balagan. Unthinkable. I mean the three of us, we ain’t gonna see change. We’ll see some fight, see a lot of death, but nothin’ we can believe in. But you gotta lay a foundation for the future generations, gotta give your kids something better to reach from if they weren’t born that tall.”
Andrew chuckles, “But really now, both of you need to try and call me Avinadav even if the others won’t.”
I nod and light one of Emma’s cigarettes. Did I call her Maya in front of ‘Avinidav’ even when he called her Emma? Like me she responded quickly enough to both.
“So, what brought you back to Israel, Maya?” I asked her.
“I’m not sure really. People are obsessed with this notion that God has the power to dole out property rights,” says Maya, “but I’m mostly hear for the beaches and nightlife.
“Sure-as a pillar of salt once was a woman, God willed this land to us,” interjects Avinadav, “If you ask some Israelis, they’ll tell you that God promised us this land. Ask a Muslim they’ll say they’ve always been here, and it is Allah’s will that they remain. Christians want to take the whole planet anyway. Muslims too, but pay attention, God gave us this stretch to be for the Hebrews.”
“Hebrews?” I ask.
“The title of our twelve tribes taken collectively.”
“You mean the Jews?” questions Maya.
“That’s not the proper way we’re called,” he retorts.
“I don’t get it. It’s semantics. Jews, Israelites, Hebrews. What’s the difference?” she says.
“When the tribes came back from exile in Babylon there were only three tribes left, Judah, Levi and Benjamin. The rest were lost in Babylon, which means they intermarried, got inter-raped, converted or never came back. Judah, which is also the tribe that Yeshua the messiah and King David come from, rose to prominence. Levi was the priestly tribe and Benjamin, they all had red hair and now they look Ethiopian. When the Romans fought the Hebrews around 60 CE in the Bar Kokhba Revolt and wiped out twelve Roman legions, the Romans knew these weren’t a people to fuck around with. Judah was the largest tribe so when Masada and later Betar finally fell and the raping and second temple burning and Diaspora all began, they derogatorily called our proud Hebrew people the ‘Yahuds’ or Jews. It was like nigger, a slur imposed in bondage. Now think about the etymology. ‘ISH,” is kind of like. “ChildISH”, kind of like a child. “JewISH”, kind of like a JEW. I’m a Hebrew. You two are Hebrew. Not only is Jewish a watered-downdegrading title, but it also implies that we are all from the tribe of Yehuda. But we could be from Gad, or Manasseh, or Ephraim or Asher or any of ‘um. It’s like the Nigerians. WHERE THE FUCK DID, THEY GET THAT NAME FROM, I WONDER? The damn ever-colonizing Europeans. The Romans gave us that name. But it is not our true name.”
“I don’t really care whose land G-d says it is as long as the violence eventually stops,” cuts in Maya.
“Do you still believe in a G-d, Maya?” Avinadav asks her point blank.
“Every other Friday, I reconsider the matter.”
“Pardon my candor, but what has G-d done lately for us?” I mutter.
“That’s a loaded question if I ever heard one,” she says.
“Yeah, but let’s answer it anyway,” Avinadav says.
“Well Zachariah, I suppose not a whole lot. But if there is a G-d, who are we to interpret Its actions?” Maya puts in.
“Its?” I ask.
“Hey, if you guys wanna rename whole religious ethnic groups, I feel free to de-masculinize the almighty.”
“That’s fine, fuck the dumb shit” smiles Avinadav.
“Look, to me G-d isn’t like a be-all-end-all safety net. You don’t get blessed by just believing in him, It. You must trust Hashem works through the actions of good people more than miracles,” Maya responds.
“AND surely there will be more miracles coming!” declares Avinadav banging on the table.
“I’m not ruling out the existence of a G-d. All I’m saying is that maybe It’s given up on us,” says Maya.
“How do you figure?” Avinadav demands again attracting the attention of other people in the café more for being Black and loud than for just being loud.
“What if G-d decided humanity just wasn’t worth all the grief we cause. What if it looks at us as a failed experiment and stopped devoting time to divine interventions and the like?” Maya says.
“I’m with that opinion,” I say, “I don’t find it so hard to believe.”
“So, you think G-d has just bailed on us?” Avinadav asks us.
“Yep,” she smirks.
“Don’t blaspheme and sound ridiculous at the same time,” Avinadav mumbles in a grin.
“Well let’s not hold our breath on that one. I’m just doing my part working on that miracle in case God holds out.”
“What kind of miracle, kid?” Avinadav asks.
“The miracle of a revolution done right.”
“I like that. The kid’s articulate and totally insane,” Avinadav weighs in.
“I like that about Zach, too,” she says.
“Most people do I bet. Do you ever wonder the purpose of it all, Maya?” Avinadav asks.
“The purpose of what?”
“The purpose of G-d sending this kid our way?”
“Guys, I’m really not that much younger than either of you.”
“It’s totally random. He just wants to nail me,” she smiles, “There’s no purpose, Andrew.”
“Avinadav.”
“Sorry.”
“Guys, I’m sitting right here.”
“If there is no purpose and there’s no greater meaning to it all, it is pointless to be alive. I mean the things he says are the things this country needs to hear right now,” Avinadav says to Maya.
“He’s just young and you believe in Hashem too aggressively. I’m a cynic, from Spain by way of Montreal. I like watching you two talk though.”
“Cynics are fallen idealists frustrated with the failure of their original ideals,” I interject.
“Excuse me?” she utters, “I would like to say I still believe in the potential for a better world, but lately I’ve begun to doubt whether humans would actually tolerate a better world.”
“Our kind is pretty fucked,” Avinadav reflects openly.
“Only mostly fucked. There’s always a potential for change making,” I say.
“I’m not discounting the fact that there are a few good people out there, but certainly not the majority. And few like less than a dozen in the country that would join what you are talking about. Most people just want to go about their lives and not have to think big thoughts about brave new worlds and the governing factors behind the human nature and if God taps people to participate in history or a higher plan. You’re making demands that never get answered, Zach. Sure, people come up with relatively comprehensible concepts explaining certain things about our existence, but even Socrates was working in the shadows of a cave,” Maya responds.
“What’s your point?” I ask.
“It’s hard to keep the attention of the masses. There is something wrong with the world, but the good people, the rebels you hope to find aren’t interested in employing the right tactics for change,” Maya continues.
“What tactics would you employ?” Avinadav asks me.
“The most radical ones I could find,” I retort.
“Such as?”
“You know, something that tells the people that the rebels aren’t fucking around. Like kidnapping the representative or majority shareholder of the McDonald’s corporation in Israel and blowing his brains out on national television.”
They stared at me for a second, then at each other and then they went on.
“Spoken like a true fucking zealot,” Avinadav states.
“And what the fuck would that accomplish,” she asks me.
“It would tell Israelis we won’t eat the processed-treif shit America sends us to chow on,” Avinadav chimes in coldly. Maya takes off her glasses and gives us both a ‘you’re both talking like terrorists’ look as she lights another cigarette.
“And then for your second little miracle?” she says under her breath.
“We’d take the old city of Jerusalem with a few hundred fighters then proceed to blow up the Kotel, Dome of the Rock, and Church of the Holy Sepulcher so nobody had any misconceptions about how unholy this war was gonna get,” I say coldly.
“That one I like more,” Maya says, “And for a grand finale Jesus could back with a fleet of gold-plated tanks to relieve your hunted and abandoned fighters?”
“We’d retreat into the Negev, then deeper into Sinai to regroup, unite with the million Bedouin in the desert and capture the major southern cities with the aid of Iran. Then via a coordinated general strike and massive defection within the army, we’d take the central districts and cut the country in half before closing in on the capital.”
“Ah, well Mr. Hubert, what would you do about the Palestinians and other Arab states that would love to hit us while we fight amongst ourselves,” she chuckles, “Aided by the Islamic Republic of Iran, of course.”
“Who’s Mr. Hubert? I’m quite insulated from Western pop cultural references,” says Avinadav glibly.
“She’s mocking me again. He wrote Dune.”
“Dune?” he shrugs.
“Islamic Star Wars,” she says, “He’s American after all..”
“Oh. Missed that entirely,” he responds, “Go on.”
“Well, it wouldn’t work unless Palestinians were involved from the beginning within the rebel leadership. We’d have to smash Fatah and their Al ’Aksa Martyrs Brigade because they’re secular, corrupt puppets. We’d have to eliminate Islamic Jihad because they’re too fundamentalist or at least drive them into merging with Hamas.”
They are both staring at me speechless.
“Our obvious ally the socialist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine would help us hem in Hamas. Hamas, who will soon emerge as the premiere representative of the Palestinian Intifada will have to be brought to the bargaining table by pressure from a revitalized Popular Front and their patron, the Islamic Republic of Iran. Hamas, ironically enough, will be our closest ally, the only Palestinian player to fully mobilize their people for this endgame.
“When we ‘smash’ the IDF, Knesset, and American interests, of course,” utters Maya.
“As I said, after the south and the Sinai are in the hands of the rebels, much of the IDF will desert to the confederated rebels after the general strike. The Knesset and their American supporters will order the IDF to end the strike, which will seal the fate of the Jewish State, America’s 51st.
“How the hell could you even dream of allying with Hamas! They want to kill us all.” Maya scoffs
“Because they’re led by Muslim fundamentalists, which means they won’t be co-opted by the secular Arab dictatorships that are American proxies. They hate the leaders of Iraq, Egypt, Syria, and the Emirates more than they hate the Israelis,” Avinadav cuts in.
“And that’s sort of my point. “You want to unite a lot of people who are fundamentalists about what they believe,” I say.
“Then like magic, and a lot of miracle magic is involved in your plan, these groups fall in line into a leadership council, then a governing body called Pal’Israel?” Maya scowls in disbelief.
“Well, it would be ‘Pal’Isra’ if you wanted to be more unified in the national title,” states Avinadav, “but everyone knows that’s just called Zion anyway. That will never fly with the Arabs though, calling it Zion I mean.”
“Then it will be called the Confederation of the Middle East,” Avinadav declares.
“What’s in a name?” Maya smirks, “When we have such wild imaginations and so much unused magic.”
“Well, anyway whatever you build on the Hebrew side you gotta build in Gaza and the West Bank as well as anywhere with large Palestinian and Jewish Diasporas like New York, Baghdad, Paris, Dearborn and Tehran. When the revolution comes it will begin with direct action, proceed to a general strike, a revolt in the defense forces and then a rapid move to realign the new nation with Iran, China, and Latin America.”
“So, like Beirut in 82?” she says.
“More like Tehran in ‘79 but replace Shi’a fundamentalism with populist nationalism founded in human rights and democracy.”
“I think it’s sexy when he says violent radical shit, don’t you?” Maya says to Avinadav.
“Real sexy,” Avinadav says.
Andrew the Hustler is thinking hard watching a younger whiter version of himself talk dangerously. Maya has put back on her huge black sunglasses and is sipping on her coffee while smoking a Marlboro menthol cigarette. A waiter brings out a large platter of hardboiled eggs, a pitcher of orange juice, another of Turkish coffee and something sort of like hash browns and Israeli salad, which is diced cucumbers, tomatoes, and onions. We’d all be eating from the same plate.
“What’s the plan then, boys? You’ve fallen in love. I can see it in your eyes,” Maya says to us.
“Well then, Zachariah. You got some big crazy fucking ideas. G-d sent you to us. That I know. I got the means! She has got the will when she’s willing. We can talk all morning but fuck the dumb shit, as I like to say. What you playin’ with here?”
I am smoking deeply from one of Emma’s Marlboros. Just like London, ain’t no Newport pleasure in the Holy Land.
“I’ve been dreaming for a long time about making a stand, about a small group of people showing the world that we need not live our lives like slaves lashed to a rolling engine of war. This I know in my heart. If we can rally the wretched of this broken land behind a banner of unity, then a land of tears and blood will yield the milk and honey promised.”
“Bottom line. What’s step?” Avinadav asks.
“I don’t follow.”
“What’s the first course of action that might involve us and what’s your final objective?” she asks.
“I need unrestricted access to the Deep for meetings and storage of equipment. I need multiple safe houses around the country to recruit from. And your help designing and translating a basic manifesto into Hebrew, Russian, and Palestinian Arabic.”
“You can have meetings in the club, just do not run up the bar. We can get your places to stay in every major city as long as it’s short term,” says Andrew.
“But what do you want long-term, Zachariah? What are we conspiring to do? I want you to say it a simple sentence so we three can digest the severity of what we plan to set in motion.”
“Say it once and never again ‘til it’s all made real,” Andrew says.
I smother my cigarette butt in the cheap grey plastic ash tray.
“Our aim is to overthrow the government of Israel. Then liberate the entire Middle East from its Oligarchy.”
“Why stop there,” Maya smiles.
“Right on. I’m in,” Avinadav says his eyes never blinking.
“Well, somebody’s gonna have to make sure women don’t get cut out as usual when the freedom starts getting handed out,” Emma grins darkly, “I hope you got some good magic, kid.”
“Or someone’s on our side that’s proactive with the miracles,” I say. But what Maya is thinking, is that that then was the very morning they all signed up to be killed.
WALTER SEBASTIAN ADLER 