Raqqa City, ISIS Controlled Territory, former Syria, 2016 ce
There remains an undisputed fact that from around the world many devout Muslims answered the call to raise the black flag and resurrect the caliphate. Some were devout and mentally ill, some devout and highly blood thirsty. Some were adventurers masquerading in devotion to a cause. Thus recounts the highly devout and sometimes decapitation look away prone mujahadeen Abdullah Shamil Abu-Idris. One of the over 45,000-50,000, maybe even 100,000 Sunni Muslim international volunteers to arrive in support of the Islamic State. The majority crossing from Turkey. Many with their families.
The City of Raqqa at the height of the S.D.F. Counter-Offensive had around half a million people living in it and under it. Raqqah was re-developed by the Assad regime as one enormous bunker complex, a fallback base for the regime if Damascus fell. Which it nearly did. The capture of either Baghdad or Damascus, historic centers of Islam would have triggered in the global Muslim community a surge of foreign fighters. It would have subconsciously triggered a mighty unstoppable influx of support.
ABU IDRIS
My name is Abdullah Shamil Abu-Idris, or ‘Shamil Basayev’ as my name of the war. I’m named after a famous Chechen Mujahideen, freedom fighter killed in the liberation and resistance wars that happened in the Caucuses between 1994 and 2004. He was killed in an airstrike to his phone in 2006. I am Syrian, but to us Shamil is a real Muslim hero. He took on the Russians after all, the same barbarians we fight now on our southwestern front. Well anyway, the Russians eventually martyred Shamel. Allegedly also they killed 1 in 7 Chechens and raped 1 in 3 of all Chechen women. Which perhaps is why such a large contingent of foreign mujaheddin as Chechens.
“There is a protracted siege now well underway of this Syrian Bunker Citadel, that historically changed hands many times; and it was clearly not going to end well. Not for the attackers, the defenders, or the 200,000 plus people trapped standing in between.”
Not every single so-called ‘Daesh’ is an intimately, innately miserable, and allegedly evil person. Some are also Turkish spies, the mentally ill, bandits, thieves, adventurers, believers or also rapists. Some are on drugs; some are sadists and people with identity crises. Some just wanted to fuck concubines. Or impose themselves upon others. For many of the ten million people who found themselves within the ISIS zone of control, an area around the size of Great Britain; it is in fact a matter of devotion to Islam and the innate desire to restore the Caliphate. It is now the lesser of many evils. That is why in virtually every city that initially encountered ISIS with all but a few exceptions, there was no resistance at all. Many Sunni Arabs or Iraq and Syria just went along with it.
“G-d is Great!”, but his actions are often not understandable! Everywhere on earth the Ummah55 was trampled, suffering, crying out for the righteous to stand up to these Crusaders, these Shiite Apostates and their Zionist allies. That is what the Baghdadi Caliphate was set up to achieve. The defeat of the Kafirs and the glorious triumph of Sunni Islam. Real Islam, not the Islam of reformers, collaborationists, idolaters, and innovationists. Embracers of Shirk. The inevitable return of the Mahdi our redeemer. But, things have again completely fallen apart. We’re barely holding on now, surrounded by a united cohort of enemies.” As explained by the Jihadi Abdullah Abu-Idris a Syrian Arab from Medayiin captured and interrogated during the gruesome 9-month battle for Raqqah City.
“At the height of the Caliphate following the death of the Prophet Mohammed, Abu as Salem, in 200 years our Ummah stretched from Spain to Indonesia, from the Balkans down to Africa. The Caliphate of Baghdadi, well it was allegedly the size of Great Britain, had some 12 million subjects and stretched from just west of Baghdad to just east of Damascus. The largest city, currently completely under siege was Mosul and the administrative capital also completely now surrounded by Kurdish hordes is Ar Raqqah.”
There are barren beige rocky, earth dunes in every direction. Alongside the Euphrates River it is lush and periodically scenic, but less than three kilometers out; dust and despair. Ramadan has begun, but the infidels bombard us day and night. We are in full retreat on all sides.
It is so hot, but of course I remember to make my prayers and keep my faith, because I am a Muslim first and foremost. I submit only to Allah, and I know the road I am on will lead me to paradise either in this world should we be victorious, or in the next should we fall as Martyrs.
There remains a deep vacuum in the depiction of the war to explain the motivation of the 40,000-50,000 estimated Muslim volunteers who crossed the world, infiltrated Iraq & Syria, to defend the radical Caliphate led by Baghdadi. Humanizing these people is essential to making any basic arguments that ISIS had real grievances and framed reality in a way that spoke and speaks to a whole generation of Muslims. However, as complex the span of motives might have been, but 2017 most of them were dead and the coalition had encircled both Mosul and Raqqa City their dual capitals. If a Mahdi was coming, he is extremely late in the game. As rapidly as “the Caliphate” had risen and marched in every direction, its forces were now obliterated. Of course, it was this hardcore of foreign fighters that held out the longest, with their families, with nowhere to run or hide.
Now, we fight the Russians and Hezbollah from the South and the Kurds from the North. In Mosul, the Shiites surround us. The American airstrikes have completely tilted the battlefield against us.
There are not that many of us left. Perhaps 5,000 fighters, in the beginning it seemed we were sanctified and invisible, mujahedeen arriving from around the world. There is a distinctive dread of impending defeat. The Kafirs56have bombed all out cities and given weapons to the Kurds and Shi’ites who are our resolute enemies.
“I never got much enthusiasm from a public beheading.” I’m a good Muslim, so I never got down on the excesses happening under the mantle of the Caliphate. I came with my wife and two children from Chechnya. Clearly the Ummah is under attack in every corner of the globe and the Caliphate here was such an obvious form of resistance. The endless be-headings, gruesome public burnings and sex slaves were a little much for me. Over tea, some of us would go so far as to say it was the actual undoing of the entire Islamic State project this very well publicized brutality. Throwing homosexuals off the roof tops, well everyone had a chuckle about it, but really, we should not have televised all that stuff.
Now, Mosul and Raqqa are completely besieged and we’re all going to fight to the death. Raqqah City was rather beautiful once. The Caliphate was nothing like all the slaughter and terrorism on the media, though we made that media, and we made that terrorism. What people will never understand, the Kafrs I mean, is that we all actually want a caliphate. We want women protected in the home. We want non-believers regulated paying the Demi tax57. We want alcohol and cigarettes banned. We want mandatory prayer five times a day. It’s Islamic to want these things. The Kurds are all secular communists, so we killed them. The Shi’a are treacherous hypocrites, so we killed them. The Yazidis are devil worshipers, so we massacred them in Sinjar and made their women sex slaves. I didn’t do any of that. I arrived in 2016. It was beginning to crumble apart, but I had faith in the Caliphate. Well of course I still do have faith that the will of Allah is highly complicated, and this grand setback is all part of a larger clash, a cosmic war. Of course, Islam will triumph in the end, because that is what the prophet declared. But, for now, things look bleak.
“I mean, how many generations of Muslims must fall to these crusaders before we restore the true religion of Islam? This is about resistance to the genocide of Muslims. Albeit strange that the leaders live in mansions and drive sports cars. Strange that none of the Imams are very learned. Strange that Turkish and Saudi money is all over the place in rumors, but all the ISIS leaders met in an American prison.”
Frankly, life here is not a lot better or a lot worse that in fascist Russia. I would say that for my family all things are comparable, or were until Raqqah was besieged. Now, I suppose we will all die here at the murderous hands of Kurdish communist armies.
I think it is good to die for Islam, but maybe for the sake of my family we will try and get through the lines and cross down the river to Al-Mayadeen. The last stand against the invading Kurdish army will be in the Deir-Ez-Zor Province, deep in the desert along the Euphrates River valley.
The Western Media dehumanizes Muslims and makes us look fanatical, but after our people are massacred in every single nation on earth and the West declares explicit war on our religion, what exactly is the moderate position? There isn’t one.
I was young when the towers came down, but it was appropriate. The C.I.A. and its Zionist allies have toppled the governments of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. They are remaking the Middle East for the good of Israel and oil corporations. The fact that their alliance against is one of Shiites and Kurds speaks to how they will stop at nothing, arm anyone to destroy Islamic law and governance. The great hypocrites are the Saudis for while they secretly send us money and clerics, they live off the glut of American petroleum trade.
This project, the Caliphate had contradictions of course. But it was popular to many and most under its rule. Sunnis welcomed a protecting force with so much instability in Syria and Iraq. Iraq has fallen to the Persian Kafirs who fight us with Iranian help in Mosul. We are better warriors than the Shi’a or Kurds, but we don’t have air power. This is why we are now losing the war town by town, street by street. I will likely not get out of Raqqah, but I will fight and die with the brothers for the Islamic State. I know that at least for me and my Muslim brothers, this is very historical and important. At least 40,000, maybe far more, of us came to support this, thus it is not the cult of Baghdadi or extremism. It is legitimate and essential to Sunni that this survives, whatever the odds.
I am of course willing to battle the Kafirs to protect true Islam! That is in the Qur’an. That is what Jihad is. War is terrible, the war in Syria is very awful. But we didn’t start the war. The war is a product of the big game between Russia and America. Everyone is clear on that. The Shiites side with Russia because of oil interests and politics. The Kurds side with America, because everyone hates their seditious plans.
Look, I am not so violent! I’m not so “radicalized”. I am against the traffic of sex slaves, the fast cars, and big houses of the nepotistic leadership. I would like to sometimes have a drink or two, sometimes. I had bacon in Russia, it was very tasty. You will never understand why this was important to us, but it was very important to us. For my generation it was almost cataclysmic. As if the Prophet himself might show up any day now. But in the end, he did not. And the coalition airstrikes took their bloody toll. The waves of Kurdish fighters ground down out defenses. Though I will meet a martyr’s death out here, I must say that the Caliphate and the rise of ISIS was enthralling to all the billion or more believers. Everywhere on earth Muslims are being massacred. Everywhere we are impoverished and abused. If like others I had sat this all out and watched, it on a TV screen, I would not have lived up to my own beliefs about Allah and my faith and my religion.
Later on, they beat me badly for many days. Then eventually I was executed in a ditch. I cannot really confirm or deny that there were any virgins where I went because I do not want to upset any of the tens of thousands of Islamic martyrs who resisted the Kurdish infidels, Shiite apostates, and Western Crusader forces. But when I died, I was just dead, with no bells, whistles, virgins, or rivers of milk, or of red wine. The only virgins were the Kurdish and Yazidi girls they all abused. And death came to most of us ether from the American planes above, or the pickup trucks of light infantry fighting under the banner of Abdullah Ocalan.
As of now in 2025, nearly 10,000 ISIS fighters are in custody with the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in northeast Syria. This includes approximately 5,000 Syrian fighters, 3,000 Iraqi fighters, and 2,000 foreign fighters. Additionally, there are about 60,000 mostly women and children in concentration camps under the care of the SDF.
The mountain was quiet that morning. Wind moved through the scrub and the olive groves in small, reverent gestures. A battered radio played a folk song in the kitchen of the outpost — the voice of a woman long dead, singing about apricots and exile. The fighters of the YPJ and YPG sat cross-legged on sandbags, smoking thin cigarettes, pouring tea into tin cups gone black with soot. Sarya, a woman of thirty-four, watched the sunrise with suspicion. Her eyes were hard, dark, cracked at the edges like drought land. She had fought at Raqqa, at Ras al-Ayn, at Sinjar. She didn’t smile anymore. She sharpened her bayonet out of habit, not need.
The radio signal broke at 05:16.
The first indication was not sound but absence — the birds stopped chirping. Then came the whistle. Not a missile yet. The jets — F-16s, likely from Incirlik — streaked overhead like gods with no face. By the time the fighters looked up, it was too late.
The first missile struck the communications tower. The sky turned white.
The second struck the armory. That was when the bodies began to fall.
Sarya was thrown backward by the blast wave. When she stood, her ears were full of cotton and the ground was singing. Smoke poured from what had once been the command hut. She could hear nothing but a high, constant ringing and her own heartbeat. She stepped over a corpse she didn’t recognize — it had no face. A girl with braids screamed for her leg, which was somewhere she could not see.
Another missile came, this one guided by heat. It found the generator station and split it open like fruit. Flames crawled up the cliffside. The olive grove lit like parchment. The air was thick with gunpowder, cordite, burned hair.
They fired back, of course — a Soviet-era anti-air battery that hadn’t worked since Afrin. It exploded after two minutes of trying.
Some ran for the tunnels. Some didn’t make it. Some simply lay down, face to the sky, and waited.
By 05:43, Mount Karachok was a crater.
The Turkish warplanes circled once more, as if admiring their work, then vanished east into the horizon, toward the steel dawn over Mardin. The silence that followed was unnatural. Not peace — just absence. Sarya found the radio again. It was melted. She sat down amid the rubble and lit another cigarette with shaking hands. The wind carried ash across the stones. Far below, in the villages, no one moved. They had heard the metal birds and knew better than to look up.
She smoked, and waited for orders. There were none.
***
Jansher is a mustached bear of a man, clad in a forest green multicam uniform gesticulating all his lessons with his animated hands. He is the Georgian born Kadro entrusted with ideological training of incoming foreign fighters aiding the revolution in Rojava. “A few hours ago, the Turkish State rocket bombed our training academy on the plateau of Mt. Qerechow.”
Eighteen Hevals perished then and there in the barrage, some of them newly arrived foreign volunteers. Five Peshmerga also died in the strikes. They were visiting us for tea. The training base has been moved down the ridge into the oil pumping facility. It is unclear what makes the new location safer. A new batch of internationals has just arrived from Sulaymaniyah. The lessons and training must continue.
JANSHER
“People were being massacred and sold into sexual slavery. Gang rapes and decapitations were gleefully being streamed live. What exactly would you have done?” recounts Heval Jansher the intellectual Georgian Kadro responsible for the ideological and historical training of new Internationalist volunteers.
“We came down from the mountains in convoys of pickup trucks, semi-armored school buses and on foot. We moved in fearless columns, committing perhaps half of our remaining beleaguered armed forces. Tens of thousands of Yazidi men, women and children were huddling helplessly and exposed in the Shengal mountains. Without our intervention all their men would have been massacred and their women sold off in markets. In Kobane around this same time Daesh has surrounded our Syrian Kurdish brothers and sisters and were on the verge of wiping us off the ground in North Syria. At that time ISIS was 30 miles from Baghdad and 100 miles from Damascus. Everyday hundreds of foreign fanatics joined them. Entering easily with the help of the Turkish state.”
“We broke through the Turkish lines and along with American airstrikes saved Kobane from destruction. We literally saved the lives of over 50,000 Yazidis trapped in the Sinjar facing Daesh genocide. We took up positions in Kirkuk awaiting an inevitable Daesh or Iraqi Army attack.”
Sometimes we changed out of our baggy green guerrilla uniforms into those of local forces or simply took the uniform off. Without the Party, without the People’s Defense Forces which bolstered every Y.P.G./Y.P.J. position there would have been no one for the Americans to arm as it would have all been Islamic State territory.
It is possible that the P.K.K., the Kurdistan Workers Party did some very nasty things internally and externally during its forty-year war with the Turkish State. Certainly, there were both internal purges of real and imagined counter revolutionaries as well as deliberate attacks on civilians, but war is war, and war is very brutal on absolutely everyone.
The P.K.K. was trained in war by the Palestinians in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon in the 1970’s. There is a historic sympathy that the Party has to the cause of Palestine as a thankful result of this early collaboration. It is completely unacknowledged, and unsubstantiated that the Russians also trained the P.K.K. But that’s who was hanging out in the Bekaa Valley in the 1980’s. Palestinian guerrillas. Iranian special forces. Lebanese Shiite partisans. Russian spies.
The P.K.K. got openly involved in the fight against ISIS first in Kobane and then in Sinjar. It can be said in unambiguous terms that without the leadership of the Party, assisted by coalition air power the revolution in Rojava would not have survived the Islamic State onslaught. Abdullah Ocalan has been in prison since 1999.
A variety of tactical and ideological innovations have had to be made for us to survive. However, the adaptation of Democratic Confederalism is not a publicity stunt or mere revisionism. The Party has had to adapt; Ocalan has helped us find the context to adapt. Without his leadership, the P.K.K. would not have withstood the tumultuous collapse of global state socialism in the 1990s.
The Revolution in Rojava is of course a product of Party discipline and functionally speaking there is extraordinarily little difference between the Y.P.G./Y.P.J. and the People’s Defense Forces51 of the P.K.K., most of the Y.P.G./Y.P.J. commanders are P.K.K. cadres.
In the insurrection against the Turkish State which began in this phase in 1984, over 50,000 people died and most of them were Kurds. If nasty, brutal violent things such as burying people alive, executing busloads of Turkish civil servants, carrying out suicide bombings, periodically purging the ranks of real or accused counter revolutionaries.
But even though we are declared a terrorist organization because Turkey is so important to N.A.T.O. and the Kurdish issue is so intractable, the U.S. led coalition of course used the Y.P.G./Y.P.J. dressed up as the Syrian Democratic Forces to annihilate ISIS. The Turkish state had a daily telephone riot with their American counterparts. No one was stupid. Everyone knew every dollar, every rifle and every bit of training given to the Syrian Democratic Forces which was over 60% Kurdish Y.P.G./Y.P.J. anyway would be routed to the P.K.K. when the war with ISIS was over and the fighting resumed in earnest between the Kurdish allies and Turkish Army. But, in 2015 after Kobane there was no other reliable ally on the ground and the Turks had to wait for the dust to settle. In Kobane the tide was turned for ISIS and the S.D.F. became the default U.S. Coalition proxy in Syria. Between 2015 and 2018 the S.D.F. smashed ISIS towns and cities from the North and the Assad Regime aided by the Russians hit them from the West. With no friends, under attack in every direction the once seemingly invincible Jihadists of Daesh were defeated, falling back to Ar-Raqqah and holes in the desert to hide. The Regime forces, Hezbollah, the S.D.F., the P.K.K. the Coalition, the Iraqi Army, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and the al-Hashid ash-Sha’bi Popular Mobilization Forces52 we all ground them under our boot heels on all sides. Now only Deir Ez-Zor is left to liberate. But once these Cheta Daesh are temporarily defeated, isolated, trampled on and crushed in some shitty desert town that will change nothing. The Saudi funded and Pakistani spread Wahabbi-Salfist53 virus. By no means will this war be over any time soon.
By year 2014 around the time that the Y.P.G./ Y.P.J. militia, assisted heavily by the P.K.K.’s People’s Defense Forces, the K.D.P. Peshmerga and the Coalition airstrikes were battling their way out of the ISIS siege in Kobane, effectively cementing for five years an American led Coalition- leftist Kurdish alliance and changing the dynamics of the Civil War in the North of Syria completely. But no one was stupid, not Turkey, not Daesh not the American Special Forces sent to arm and coordinate airstrikes with us. There are acrimony upon acronyms, there were shells of meaningless letters to make the American Congress feel better about releasing military aid. No one Heval was completely stupid. We all knew that the very minute Daesh was defeated we’d be alone and that all these enemies and friends knew the truth. That nothing happening politically or militarily in North Syria would be decided except by the Party.
The P.K.K. Our Party, the Kurdistan Workers Party! To the Turks we are nefarious terrorists. They want to hunt us down and kill us all. For we are an existential threat to the Turkish State. All states, really Hevals. They convinced America and Europe to adopt that line. To the Kurdish people the premier Party of Resistance to oppression and total annihilation as coherent people. The very last defense against seemingly triumphant Capitalist Modernity. The only military force capable of defeating I.S.I.S. on the ground. An entity that is outside the immediate theatre of war, except for Russia and China, still very much considered a terror group by the West and N.A.T.O. forces of which the Turkish State contributes the second largest military force. Over 250,000 combatants.
No one in their wildest dreams can imagine that when the smoke clears and ash settles that the first Democratic Confederalist polity, safeguarding some 4-5 million people, will be allowed to survive. But for now, the total rubble of what was left from the siege of Kobane has in defiance been rebuilt in the sprawl of white brutalist two to six story dwellings, buttressing in defiance the long white wall and treacherous minefield the Turks built across the entire northern border.
Says Heval Commander Cancer, pronounced ‘Jansher’ the Guerrilla from his notes:
JANSHER
“Actually, I tried to prepare them for a lifestyle of revolutionary militancy. Kill the enemy. Kill the enemy before the enemy can airstrike, bombard, capture, execute, torture or disappear you and your friends. I don’t think they all got it. The training was just too short. They retained much of their Western bourgeoisie privileges. They thought it would maybe be like a movie. It’s a shame the British woman died, she was the one with possibly the very most revolutionary potential, for a foreigner excluding the Germans. That’s all I can say about that, Heval.” Heval is the Kurdish Kurmanji word for friend, or comrade. In case you had forgotten that. Sometimes I find it best to repeat myself repeatedly to make sure you’re paying attention. I was born in Georgia. I’m not even ethnically Kurdish, actually.
Within the Kurdish movement there is a tendency to imbibe a rather endless amount of black tea. A tendency to have poor sleeping habits. A tendency to chain smoke. But they also light their own cigarettes. To let another light your cigarette is ideologically suspect. Sometimes, the Party has debated on banning cigarette smoking, like it has alcohol, drugs, sex, romance, having kids, having a family, contacting your immediate family and acquiring any material things beyond what fits in a ruck sack, in service of the war effort. However, being a revolutionary militant is quite stressful actually. And there sure are a lot of things that can kill you faster than a cigarette. A whole lot of things, actually.
“The legend goes that in a meeting in a tea house in the village of Lice near Diyarbakir City, on November 25th of 1978 a group of young students lead by Abdullah Ocalan founded the Kurdistan Workers Party and launched a revolution unlike anything the world had ever seen before it,” explains Heval Jansher. A guerrilla in good standing with the Party. Good standing means trust. Good standing means not being a Pizkarek; a problem. They need to be platformed, as we say. Bad standing means re-education, prolonged isolation, or indefinite detention. Eventually, if nothing else seems to work, it means a bullet and an unmarked grave. We are not fucking around. There is a revolution to defend. When this is over, every sacrifice, every shahid will have allowed the birth of a new world from the ashes of the old. But if we fail, there is more at stake than the deliverance of Kurdish national autonomy. There is more at stake than redemption of a flailing old idea about liberty, equality, and democracy. If we survive in the coming years. If we finally secure the Rojava Revolution so many have died for as martyrs. These ideas will spread like wildfire. If we are vanquished, “human rights” will be buried here with us.
“It was only that we believed that in this transience, this short human life, it was preferable to die on one’s feet moving towards a just idea. Moving in solidarity, in defense of the powerless. Then it would be to die on our backs or our knees, half-lives, shuffling along like zombies. Always asleep. With meaningless, un-free lives wasted. Lives were spent like wallowing serfs and base slaves.”
Have you ever had an amazing noble idea in your head? That simply refused to translate itself or find traction in reality? Have you ever risked everything, sacrificed absolutely everything for such an idea? Myopically, almost psychotically pushing forward in the face of a stubborn, intractable cruel reality. When you can, bring yourself to do that. To engage in nothing short of overwhelming zealotry. Pursuing a new reality, a reality where the vast suffering of this world is mitigated. Where the chaos and carnage and daily humiliation that is the lot of most humans is undone by rights, by hope, by heroism. That is called the “motivation for the fight”.
It has been a very long hard bloody road to the mountains and back from them. From Manhattan to Jerusalem to Havana. All the trips to the City of Port-Au-Prince. To Greater Boston. Back to Brooklyn then to Russia. Across Russia on a train then into the Middle East to fight in Rojava27. Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Egypt and then back to the Big Apple again. Riding on the backs of armored trucks and flying carpets. On horses, on tanks, on airships. Over the great rivers and through the woods. Mountains beyond mountains beyond mountains. With stopovers where all civilization has come to a resolute end in the Fertile Crescent. Smoldering villages. Enormous cities razed to the very foundations. Once historic places, simply crushed and undone. Burning down river by river shore to deep sands of desolation. A revolution within a civil war within an endless third world war. A place called Kurdistan which exists not on maps but in the hearts and dreams of perhaps forty million stateless, long oppressed people. Engaged in a very long fight for their right to exist.
How do you make any sense of such carnage to people that were not there? How do you make an enjoyable narrative about bloody chaos? Articulate ideas that when they become facts on the ground, have vast contradictions. Have improbable capability to survive.
My name is Sebastian Adonaev, but the Kurds named me “Blacksmith Winter”, or Kawa Zivistan. The Arabs needed to name me too in a way familiar to them, so they called me “Abu Yazan”. Because my then-part-girlfriend, part-confident Polina has a son named Yazan. I was 33 when I was deployed but looked and felt a bit younger. I felt brave or stupid enough to volunteer for a war. At the most desperate heights of the conflict, which would end up killing over 500,000 people, there was a cry for some extra hands, some Hamsas. Every side called up all available reinforcements. Just before Baghdad almost fell, the mostly Shiite al-Hashid ash-Shabi Popular Mobilization Forces called up half a million Iraqis to hold I.S.I.S. back. The Assad Regime enlisted thousands of Russians, Iranian and Lebanese Hezbollah28 to fight Daesh and other Sunni rebel factions aligned with ISIS, Al Qaeda, the Free Syrian Army brands and the Al Qaeda reboot H.T.S. The so-called Islamic State took in over 40,000 foreign fighters and the mostly Kurdish forces in the “Syrian Democratic Forces” enlisted just 500. I fought alongside the Iraqi Special Operations Forces in Iraq and for the Syrian Democratic Forces, in the Y.P.G. Militia defending the idea of Rojava in Syria. I contributed very few bullets, mostly serving as combat medic during my time there. Mostly stopping hemorrhage and carrying the wounded to ambulances. Mostly trying to train people to save lives at a time when almost everyone wanted to kill.
“After defeating the so-called “Islamic State” as a force holding any territory, the United States military all but completely abandoned their Kurdish allies and Turkey invaded Rojava. Yet, she did not fall.” We who survived to talk about the Syrian Civil War, we often found there were not easy words to describe what we took part in. At least not in English. This is a story grounded in history and ideology. The tale of a stateless people spread over 4 nations, over 40 million strong. This is a love song after a series of hard fucks in Spanish and some love making in Russian. This is a Post-Soviet Lullaby, written in Imperial English about Western privileges. I have heard on the wire that the Turkish Army is fully mobilizing to crush Rojava. A fully modern army of well over 435,000 soldiers. That Anya is losing her mind in Baghdad and Anna Campbell, that optimistic young woman I once gave hand grenades to, well she died in an airstrike in Afrin29. Here I am in Capitalist Modernity’s very heartland and loving embrace. Doing nothing useful for Kurdistan. Just writing stupid love songs. Composing vain self-serving propaganda plays.
I am not sure exactly what I am supposed to hide and what I can give away.I’m very detached from Western thinking, so I don’t know what makes compelling propaganda in the West anyway. The sly and looming enemy knows most of our real names, and frankly there were many informants amongst us, it is simply a matter of sad fact that to get their passports back many of the French and British volunteers gave us away. Not to snitch jacket, but with a little lean on anyone can make a person flip. Really, there were not that many of us internationalists to keep track of. As the mad China-man Heval Andok said, “the hard drives containing our data were barely even secured and this place is awash in spies.” Our overall numbers were estimated to be around 500 strong of which around 50 later perished. Mostly in combat, some in a wave of alleged suicides. We were small enough therefore for the various security services to keep track of.
So, what is the actual purpose of this little manuscript? It is certainly not to glorify or denigrate volunteers. I think it’s brave we went there but I don’t think we changed a single thing. Perhaps we were all only there to bear witness that the revolution had even happened. It is surely not my aim to give away military secrets and name names, because I am many things but not a Josh, a ‘donkey ass betrayer’. Suffice to say the CIA, MI630 and the MIT.31 have all our names.
HEVAL JANSHER
What is an Ideology?
SECTION (II)
A lecture delivered in Rojava, 2017
“An ideology is a body of theory explaining social, historical, economic and political relationships. Based on the writings of varying social theorists, philosophers and economists ideology establishes a paradigm of reality and change (a rationale for how change comes about in the world), advocates systems of governance (structures of rule both local and international), outlines social policy (specific laws that establish societal norms) and codifies relationships between individuals, societies, corporations, and states. An ideology explains, or tries to explain the chaos in the world of the real.”
“Everyone has some kind of Political Paradigm. Normally established by their parents, early education and religious values, or by the media sources of their state. An ideology is more scientific than a paradigm, more dogmatic than basic learned political values and beliefs. An ideology uses elements of history to establish a narrative. This narrative is then cultivated to introduce new values, new modes of behavior and new ways of understanding reality. By not having an ideology, or paradigm most people become frustrated, and then religious. Which is to say they absolve themselves of this world and imagine justice and peace only in another world, which absolutely no one has come back from to verify.”
“Thus all ideology relies on establishing its own “Subjective Version of History”, its own interpretation of largely unknown previous epochs, current events and future possibilities.”
“Those who control the past, control the future: those who control the present, control the past.”
Eric Blair (George Orwell), British Political Novelist, 1984.
HEVAL JANSHER
“I heard some comrades sang like little opera singers to get their European passports back. All speculation, no one can actually say. Americans, you have the easiest deal. After ISIS32 is finished, maybe it will not be so black and white, fighting a N.A.T.O. ally and what not.”
Assisting a revolution for stateless democracy, women’s emancipation and social ecology in the heart of the war-torn Middle East. ‘Heval Ciya’33 the Scotsman always used to say that the 231 Sniper Unit changed the entire game, but only the United States and the Coalition airstrikes probably, certainly did. When the last of the under 2,500 U.S. Special Forces leave the Turks will invade in force and try to undo everything. There’s a story we heard about a Y.P.G.34 Euro volunteer vacationing in Turkey immediately after his tour. He was of course arrested and will serve life in prison. He probably should have made better choices for leave and decompression. There are lots of crazy people here. You must be little crazy to travel halfway across the earth to enlist in a revolution inside a bloody brutal civil war amid a great power confrontation placing Russia and Iran directly against the United States and N.A.T.O35. I was told by ‘Heval Jansher’, pronounced” Heval JAN-SHER” the Georgian Y.P.G. guerrilla commander who helped train us that, if I survive the war I should “write something about Rojava that does justice to the over 12,000 martyrs. That does justice to the cause of Kurdistan36. Honors Abdullah Ocalan37 and upholds the values of the revolution.” That it should humanize this resistance struggle inside a revolution inside a civil war inside a great game for the Middle East. Speak knowingly in English about the solution process for a beautiful and liberated future time.
JANSHER
“Maybe Heval, just make it a kind of strange fucked up love story! Call it; A MIDDLE EASTERN WESTERN!Then allude to something grand and wholly revolutionary!”
Jansher joked with me over cigarettes and endless black tea. He probably would never have cursed publicly. As he was living a life of “unlimited modesty”. So, I hope this account manages some of that, compiling the oral history, experiences and many martyrdoms shared amongst the approximate 500-600 foreign Y.P.G./Y.P.J./I.F.B.38 Internationalist fighters. At the very least I’d like to capture what it was that made us enlist in this hell to take part, to fight and die and kill and try and help, to be less than a footnote in the epic tale of Kurdistan. But still a part, of a part, or something very epic.
JANSHER
“It must be a love story, or they will never make a movie about it, comrade! To the West without a Movie, it is perhaps like this struggle is not even happening at all.”
But he also said things like:
“A ‘real revolutionist’ has no love except for his or her people. Any romantic love, or sexual yearning is a bourgeois luxury. For civilians, actually. A Kadro moves beyond the physical temptations of life, not because they are sinful or weak. They are just weakening to a revolutionary militant. Distracting the focus, one must maintain motivation for our fight”.
“Our love story is for the Resistance of the Age” he used to say, but then Heval Jansher also laughed and noted that Heval Actor Jake Gyllenhaal was then already shopping around a script where he plays an anarchist falling in love for a beautiful Y.P.J. fighter and another action exploitation of the Y.P.J. was coming out soon in France.
JANSHER
“But that will likely not go anywhere useful. By the time it comes out we will all be dead, or have achieved victory, actually.” He always punctuates or punctuates his thoughts with “actually”.
JANSHER
You see Heval, in real life we would probably platform and deport this stupid volunteer and the Y.P.J. comrade, she would be shamed and sent briefly to prison” Heval Jansher told me. A famous saying states that the “Kurds have no friends besides the mountains.” Well, that’s no longer completely true. The 600 who served and the 45 who died besides the 12,000 Kurdish and Arab martyrs of the battle to defeat ISIS and defend the Rojava Revolution will live forever in the Kurdish tradition, since in Kurdistan ‘Martyrs never die’. Shahid Namarin.
These were the kinds of “little talks” we had at theQerechow Academy. Like a father and son seated on the floor of a small office, in a tiny outpost at the end of the world.
That said, this is not a love story at all. It’s not even “a Middle Eastern Western”. The revolution itself has hardly been secured. The struggle is hardly over. The iron heel and might of the Turkish army looms right over the border to the North. Ready to descend quickly and murder us all. Undo everything that has been fought for against the so-called Islamic State. The Forces of the bloody dictator Assad backed by the Russian army and Hezbollah dig into the south of the Euphrates River. The collaborationist Iraqi Kurdish K.D.P. Peshmerga, the Iranian supported Hashid Ashabi popular mobilization forces, the Shi’a dominated Iraqi Army and all manners of Iranian revolutionary guards to the southeast in Sinjar. To the West the Jihadists of Al Qaeda’s latest rebrand and Islamists of different types in Idlib.
ADONAEV
“Enemies of the revolution on every single side!”
In fulfilling my promises, I will present our little part of the story as the defense has only just begun. Everything might be wiped away before you even paid attention to the vastness and hope of it. I worry, no, sadly I expect that long before this manuscript is ever published anywhere, all will be lost. My remaining Hevals will all likely be killed. The Turkish Army will roll over the border and everyone will be slaughtered. This isn’t speculation, since it has happened many times before.
“It is said that the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians is inevitable to keep the Israeli and Palestinians working classes subjected; but the Turkish genocide of the Armenians and Kurds was/is literally so we do not exist.” Well, the Party put a stop to all those plans.
JANSHER
In fulfilling my obligations as your ideological instructor, not just in the pulling of a trigger or the flinging of a grenade the words of Abdullah Ocalan, from the pages of the Defenses:
Principles of Democratic Confederalism
The right of self-determination of the people includes the right to a state of their own. However, the foundation of a state does not increase the freedom of a people. The system of the United Nations which is based on nation-states has remained inefficient. Meanwhile, nation-states have become serious obstacles to any social development. Democratic confederalism is the contrasting paradigm of the oppressed people.
Democratic confederalism is a non-state social paradigm. It is not controlled by a state. At the same time, democratic confederalism is the cultural organizational blueprint of a democratic nation.
Democratic confederalism is based on grass-roots participation. Its decision-making processes lie with the communities. Higher levels only serve the coordination and implementation of the will of the communities that send their delegates to the general assemblies. For a limited space of time, they are both mouthpieces and executive institutions. However, the basic power of decision rests with the local grass-roots institutions.
In the Middle East, democracy cannot be imposed by the capitalist system and its imperial powers which only damage democracy. The propagation of grass-roots democracy is elementary. It is the only approach that can cope with diverse ethnical groups, religions, and class differences. It also goes together well with the traditional confederate structure of the society.
Democratic confederalism in Kurdistan is an anti-nationalist movement as well. It aims at realizing the right of self-defense of the people by the advancement of democracy in all parts of Kurdistan without questioning the existing political borders. Its goal is not the foundation of a Kurdish nation-state. The movement intends to establish federal structures in Iran, Turkey, Syria, and Iraq that are open to all Kurds and at the same time form an umbrella confederation for all four parts of Kurdistan.
The Crusadrers called this place the 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 up 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 had fallen 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. 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’d 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 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, 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.
“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.”
“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.
In the year 2013 Palestinian Yousef Bashir and Israeli American Sebastian Adonaev met at the Heller School outside of Boston. In the bleak boony, burnt out postindustrial river town called Waltham. By that time both had both American and Israeli passports. By that time both had been shot in the chest and eventually tortured at some point by the Israeli forces. Although wildly different men by temperament; they found a common voice in their joint writings. By 2015 they had called upon forty student delegates to hold a “Congress”, or Majlis, at camp in Western Massachusetts.
The objective;
To establish the infrastructure and draft the objectives necessary for an international clandestine movement to fight for human rights and defeat the Israeli Oligarchy with arms. Such was their prowess in organizing and zealous desire to see their people free from endless occupation and war.
In the heart of the dense forests of Western Massachusetts, hidden away from prying eyes, lies a secluded cabin compound. Surrounded by towering trees and shrouded in a veil of secrecy, it stands as a sanctuary for those seeking refuge from the outside world.
As dusk falls and shadows lengthen, a figure emerges from the depths of the forest, moving with purpose through the underbrush. Cloaked in darkness, they approach the cabin, their footsteps muffled by the soft carpet of fallen leaves. Inside, the cabin is bathed in the warm glow of flickering candlelight, casting dancing shadows upon the walls. A fire crackles in the stone hearth, sending tendrils of smoke curling into the night sky. The air is thick with the scent of woodsmoke and pine, imbuing the space with a sense of ancient mystery. Seated around a weathered wooden table, bathed in the soft glow of candlelight, are forty figures, their faces obscured by the shadows. They speak in hushed tones, their words laden with significance, as they discuss matters of great import. Outside, the forest watches silently, its ancient trees bearing witness to the clandestine meeting unfolding within the cabin’s walls. The night is alive with the sound of rustling leaves and distant whispers, as if nature itself is conspiring to keep their secrets hidden.
In this remote corner of the American world, far from the prying eyes of the university, the cabin hosts a congress which aims to become a beacon of hope for those who dare to defy convention and challenge the status quo. And as the meeting draws to a start and the delegates slip back inside, they take the batteries out of their phones and place them all in the trunk of a car; the cabin remains low tech and expedient, guarding its secrets from the world. The delegates sought to arrive at an analysis for the World System called “Democratic Confederalism”; and for the Middle East in Particular; a Confederation to emerge from a new kind of struggle.
The Russians called it “Truth serum”, but really it was just black tea, cigarettes, alcohol, anxiety, sleep deprivation, and prevailing sense of destiny, tempered with desperation, and even though more than half of the forty delegates were not supposed to be drinking by their religious law, most eventually partook in some version of the truth serum.
For truth into its innermost parts was perhaps the only the forty of us could craft a vision of the road to anywhere but mutual destruction.
Sometimes we met in apartments. Sometimes in a class or a cafe. Sometimes in prison. Sometimes in bunkers. Sometimes using fake names. Sometimes using only, a Kunya. It was untenable to spend extended periods of time together. The brutally imposed nature of our identities forced a divide that we felt somehow compelled to cross. The trust was just that low, at first. Who worked for who? Who would undercut whom; how much land was going to change hands. Who did it even belong to? What outside powers were manipulating us! This at first was a heavily tumultuous and relatively lubricated version of a series of meetings, which formed this unlikely, perhaps implausible treatise drafted (at first) by Israeli Zionists, Palestinian Patriots, and Kurdish rebels who wished all peoples to survive history and the endless war. As there was so little to agree on, all decided we all needed more time, more space, more land, more miracles really.
We needed more breathing space than a coastal ghetto the size of New Jersey. Or a sliver of land; a crushed open-air prison of varying dimensions. Less ghettos. Less tunnels. Less foreign arms. So, after 2014 we looked to the barricades of Rojava in Northern Syria where 4 million were fighting for their very lives surrounded by enemies. You could say stopped speaking about what was between the river and the sea; and looked to the vastness of the mountains.
The palavers between 1999 and today were little talks about our region’s destiny. A place where they say civilization began yet has never seen any peace since the first Ziggurats were erected on forced labor. At these many meetings an idea was developed for a Confederation of allied states and cantons across the Middle East and Maghreb. The vision we began to develop was that the state system had failed us all, the Europeans had divided us arbitrarily. The Chinese, Russians, and Americans all seek what is below our sands with no regard for our lives.
This vision was facilitated by copious amounts of tea. Endless cigarettes, Nagilah. Yelling, crying, fighting, making demands! And also, there was beer, rum, vodka, wine and liquor. There was screaming, fighting. Cutting each other off. Threats. There was death, there was dying, there was dancing in a circle.
SEABSTIAN ADONAEV
“And in many ways this entire idea is a type of madness. Crudely configured in this treatise, where dozens of factions scribble in the margins in over ten languages: we try to make the sound of a circle, we try to arrive at a united front. For if we do not there will be nothing left of us. We will quite literally kill and fight until the very end.
KAREEM AL-KHALIDI
“The status quo of Israel in Palestine is not sustainable!” Kareem Al-Khalidi yells banging his fist on the table. While there is anger in eyes, it is soulful anger. Righteous anger. The kind of anger white graduate students with big breasts can get behind. There was rumor he was sleeping with the Polish attaché to the road map. The solution process. Whatever it was billed at.
Al-Khalidi continues, “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.”
“He’s going to call us a Jewish Military colony again,” predicts Amitai Ben-Gross Ben-Gurion, the great, great, great grandson of Israel’s foremost labor Zionist founding father. And Al-Khalidi does “many will object to us describing Israel as a “Jewish military Colony”, object to calling the separation barrier “Apartheid Wall” but linguistics and agreement of a shared paradigm are vital to the success out this unit’s objectives. We assure you the credentials of our core research team from Israel is 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.”
“None of us friends are very pro-peace, we are pro-survival!” Al-Khalidi notes adhesively.
Everyone clinks their tea glass to “fuck peace!”
“Labriut! Fuck your peace,” exclaims Nasr the elder statesperson. He never drinks. Well, he drinks with water anyway. He is wanted for terrorism and experienced torture in Jordan, Israel, and the West Bank.
“Fuck the stupid peace process up its tukass!” adds Sebastian Adoneav.
NASR YACUB
“Chaos and revolution are spreading while security, what little there was unraveling. All of this was acutely exacerbated by the 2001 & 2003 American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq; resulting in the virtual non-governance of both countries today,” says Adonaev.
“This treatise has been researched and written by a group of Israelis and Palestinians who are concerned with the collective survival of their respective peoples as they occupy and are occupied in the heart of this massive, un-ending conflict. There is extraordinarily 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.”
“The only way I can ever really bother to hang out with you is if the booze is flowing,” says Bashir to Amitai, “otherwise I would probably just want to shoot you, or blow you up. I wouldn’t kidnap you; you talk way too much. I’d cut off your tongue in under an hour dealing with you Habibi.”
Now it is Sebastian Adonaev’s turn to ramble on about Palestine with five or six shots of Vodka in him, the truth serum doing its decent work!
ADONAEV
“For the approximately 13-16 million humans living in Greater Israel/ historic Palestine; the 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 1-2 million Ashkenazi (European) Israeli Jews; which enjoy a standard of living inside the Jewish colony markedly different from the Jews of other ethnic backgrounds.”
The Palestinians distrust Adonaev the very most because he offers a lot. In terms of both game theory and alcohol. But he is the most eyebrow raising Israelite in the pile. “They say he is a hard man to disappear,” says Nasr.
“There has been ceaseless warfare in the Maghreb & Middle East since 2000. 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 of our specific peace. A peace that will never, ever be,” he says.
Bashir gives him a thumbs up.
“Thus, we concern ourselves in this 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 76 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.”
Time for another round is what Nasr’s eyes say. The elder statesman with graying hair smiles and motions for Al-Khalidi to take over reading.
AL-KHALIDI
“To stop the floodgates from opening, to address the broad systemic internal contradictions of the Israeli state and to secure the third Hebrew commonwealth, a radical policy of reorientation must begin with a realistic assessment of the only other three parties on the ground besides Memshala Yisrael59which can broker regional stability. Muslim Brotherhood-Hamas. Kurdistan. Iran, yes, yes, I said it; Iran.”
“The central thesis of this desperate drunken experimental treatise has two parts, as its authors are diametrically grounded in two opposing war camps; Political Islam and Zionism; both of which reflect deeply nuanced interpretations of their respective ideologies; but are wildly different in fundamental social policy.”
EMMA SOLOMON
Emma takes over reading, “Part One is that to safeguard Israel as a ‘Jewish National Home,’ some very fundamental assumptions on regional security and domestic policy must be altered to reflect new realities emerging on the ground.The most vital among them being recognition of the Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyah (Islamic Resistance Movement/Hamas), Kurdistan Workers Party and Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps as the only viable partners the State of Israel has to implement lasting détente, separation and a cessation to this prolonged conflict with an endgame result of peace.”
KareemAl-Khalidi reads Part Two; actualization of Palestinian human rights and opposition to occupation and apartheid is the only mechanism for survival that Jews, particularly non-white Jews must secure the survival of their people.
“Why did you have to make it all micro-ethnic and shit,” Amitai asks Emma.
“Because people need to stop lumping Israelis into one big bundle when it’s really the white Israelis and their relationships with the American Jews that make our work so impossible.”
“Onwards to hudna!” exclaims Bashir who is lit. Hudna means ceasefire.
Emma concludes the presentation, wine on her breathe, “this treatise is broken into nine Sections each with sub-segments utilized to illustrate the viability of the central thesis.”
“Section One is a brief synopsis of the diversity and contradictions within the Palestinians and Jewish narratives with a focus on linguistics.”
“That one is going to go well with red and white wine,” she says.
“Section Two is a baseline on Hamas’ tactics and beliefs to establish how they have developed as a movement in relation to the Muslim Brotherhood, and Sunni political Islam.”
“Section Three demonstrates Hamas’ evolution in response to failed Israeli tactics of counterinsurgency,” and “Section Four deals with the evolution of the Hamas’ military-political strategy over time.
“Section five explains how these evolutions can be interpreted as establishing Hamas as a reliable partner for separation and economic development60 & is a resistance strategy for the Jewish and Palestinian diaspora.
“Section Six outlines a strategy for bringing the long warring antagonistic protagonist factions to détente.”
“Section Seven is the case for full Palestinian and Israeli support for Kurdistan,” she goes on.
“Don’t forget to tell them about the Palestinian space program,” Sebastian notes.
“Section Eight is an outline of Iranian possibilities and their able proxy Hezbollah.”
“Section Nine is a listing of all known relative players that must be brought into coalition to support the aims of the treatise.”
“Sober and patiently,” says Nasr, “with some fear of Allah.”
“And section Ten is about the Palestinian space program and why the United Nations should pay for it,” Emma concludes, “no, actually no matter how drunk I get I don’t ever want them to have a space program,” exclaims Sebastian Adon, “but your rocketeering abilities as a nation are strong.”
SOLOMON
“Before we begin, I’m going to need to see Nasr take a sip of something,” announces Emma Solomon.
“I’m a practicing Muslim. I’m not drinking anything besides your water and tea,” he responds.
“I cannot believe that the only way to get any land out of you Jews was to ply you with liquor,” says M. Bashir shaking his head.
“Yes, deplorable,” notes reformed terrorist Anya Layla who now attends Columbia University.
“Are you really banging the UNDP attaché?” Amitai asks inappropriately.
“Yes. Without a doubt I am. My sad story made her feel close to me. I exploited it for boat loads of sex,” smiles Bashir.
“Well played. Shall we get to the manuscript then,” Sebastian suggests.
“Fire away comrade Abu Yazan,” Nasr smiles, calling him by his made-up Arabic name he acquired fighting in Syria.
Sebastian tilts back some red wine.
“Ok, so let’s make sure everyone takes this drunken rambling serious style! Where is your drink Muhammed Abu Muhammed!” He is calling M. Nasr by a more colloquial name to butter him up.
“Why do they call you Abu Yazan?” Anya Layla asks him.
“I volunteered with the YPG in Syria towards the end of the ISIS intervention. I was dating a Russian woman who had a son named Yazan, so I called myself Abu Yazan and it was catchier for them then my fictitious Kurdish guerrilla name or my Hebrew name clearly.”
“Interesting, so many names, like a devil.”
“He’s no devil, worse, he’s an articulate trilingual Zionist! Like the original pioneers who caused the catastrophe, he probably doesn’t even dislike us,” notes M. Baagral.
“It’s true, most of us don’t actually dislike any of you,” Amitai says.
“Well, even with six of seven glasses of wine in me, I don’t like or trust any of your delegation. You’re all plotting away with land your grandparents stole. You stole it all.”
NASR
“It is no longer a question of moralizing the conflict, obsessing over past failures or temporarily abating a cycle of degenerating violence. Or conducting expensive anthropological studies on identity,” reads Nasr sober.
“Both the Israeli Knesset, the Palestinian resistance factions, the various Persian & Arab power brokers and the para-state organizations on the ground (and in 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 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 of history and sound political science.”
“This treatise offers an objective analysis of the Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya in order to advocate for its recognition as a viable partner, not in immediate peace; but in implementation of separation, economic development and most importantly; Hudna61. It makes a fundamental case for supporting Kurdish national ambitions in Turkey, Iraq and Syria. We advocate for a full and lasting partnership between Israel and the revolutionary Shi’a government in Iran. These are all fairly radical steps.”
Emma pours Adon another glass of wine. She knows that he will give away too much if he isn’t counterbalanced by more hardline people. Sebastian reads,
“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 un-alterably changed and requires much 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 reoccurring 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 won’t render their own homeland a house of ash.”
“Surely whispered 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 Shoah62 cannot (yet) bring themselves to this, nor would international opinion condone genocide in the Holy Land now. 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.”
“Do you really think Hamas and Likud could ever possibly agree to any of this stuff, even one drop of it?” Malka Dror asks Amitai Ben Gurion.
“No. Not at all. We’re completely wasting our time even having a sandwich with them,” he replies.
“Is he about to make a big deal over low comparative body counts?”
“Yup, exactly what he’s about to do.”
ADONAEV
“There are over 1,400 years of precedent for relatively peaceful co-existence and less than 100 to the contrary63. Anyone telling you otherwise has a personal stake in your ignorance.”
“Even the death toll of the First Intifada (estimated at 421 Israeli/1,549 Palestinian64) and the bloodier melee of the Second Intifada, which included suicide bombers and collective punishment, cost only 1,062 Israeli and 5,500 Palestinian lives65. The invasion of the Gaza Strip in 2008 resulted in 13 Israeli and 1,417 Palestinians66. In the ongoing Gaza Wars in 2010-2015 an estimated 100 Israelis and over 5,000 Palestinians have lost their lives.”
“That means that in the entirety of the Palestinian Israeli conflict beginning in 1948; less than 50,000 people have cumulatively died, comparatively to virtually all other ethnic conflicts that is a foot note, a statistic.”
“The body count of the Palestinian Israel civil war is comparatively low when compared with almost any other global ethnic conflicts like those waged in Sri Lanka, Sudan, Burundi, Rwanda, Syria, Ukraine, and Chechnya.”
The entire sober room seems to gawk at this statement. Which loosely was translated into Arabic and Hebrew as; this whole conflict is lame because you don’t kill enough of each other.
Nasr sips his black tea with lemon. He was once poisoned by a Mossad cell about ten years ago with neurotransmitters. Had the Israeli commando cell not been arrested in Jordan he would never have gotten access to the antidote. Because Nasr and Sebastian are both cigarette smokers, the two of them have the most time to reflect on various things that emerge in drunken deliberation. Also, Nasr is completely sober, and Sebastian is impossible to get drunk. Especially since these sessions were his plot with Nasr’s approval and endorsement. The first rule and second rule of negotiate with Zionist terrorist club was to keep the talking going and allow the demographic realities to set in. These realities were accepted by both Sebastian and the progeny of the great Satan Amitai.
AMITAI BEN GROSS
“Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhoodmust be 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. The Kurdistan Workers Party must be supported aggressively by both people overtly and covertly. 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.”
One time in the not-so-distant pass Sebastian Adon, who Arabs call Abu Yazan announced that he was “very difficult person to disappear”. The Palestinian Nasr Yacub saluted that because he too was hard to disappear. Then Sebastian spent about six weeks in involuntary detention. So really you could get to anyone in America, thought Nasr.
Nasr is about twenty years older than the other delegates and, like Sebastian, took the whole process seriously, even if he objected to consuming alcohol. A lot of info on the delegates is unnecessary. Amitai was very well spoken for a 22-year-old and was biologically related to several Zionist heavy hitters. Emma was calm, cool and collective no matter how much she drank. Bashir really hated Jews no matter how much land they offered to give away because as a youth he was shot in the chest in Gaza. Emma had huge breasts, so no one wanted to offend her. Malka spoke with a Russian accent. Al-Khalidi came across like a spoiled diaspora intellectual. Anya and Baagral both looked like they were ready to take over an airplane on one hours’ notice.
Mostly they all spent time together like tragic exiles in Sebastian’s rented townhouse. And the booze kept flowing as they all spoke about options, solutions, and possibilities. You could say the situation couldn’t get any worse, but that’s not correct. The underlying reality was that demographically the Palestinians already made up more than 20% of the population of Israel proper. Combining everyone in imagined Palestine there were 16 million persons, just under half Palestinian Muslims. What was there to drink about, especially since more than half of the Palestinian delegates are practicing observant Muslims?
“I would have to be poisoned, then go completely mad before I gave away one inch of land,” states Nasr.
“We’re going to have to appear poisoned to not be killed by our own parties by giving away anything at all,” states Anya Layla.
“If I have to poison all of you to get you to agree to a deal, of course I’m trained to do it,” says Sebastian Adon.
“You sneaky Zionist dogs will pay for your crimes,” taunts Muhammed Bagraal.
“Just calm your pretty face and lean in,” Sebastian replies, “we’re not here to write a manifesto, we are here to plan an act of war.”
ADONAEV
Discussion 1: What Judeans & Palestinians Believe
“You don’t eat pork, and we don’t eat pork, we’ve both been not eating pork for as long as we can remember, let’s just agree to disagree on everything and just not eat pork together,” hums Sebastian Adonaev.
If all else fails that is the one thing historical and modern, they can agree to.
Malka Dror looks bored. She has a daughter and a son in Bat Yam. She has very little reason to believe these antics will result in anything useful for the future. She objected to them even including discussion of a Palestinian Space Program, as it made the rest of the well thought out proposal, well completely bat shit crazy. It was enough that Sebastian and Bashir were feeding everyone booze and making peace plans. It was a little in-dignified that so much wine and vodka was needed each night just to get them to agree to anything. That said, this proposal was very different from others. Not just because of the sauce.
“So, to establish a bar lev line across some intractable things I’d like us to both draw out lines into the past. You must accept two things about our perspective. If you invalidate them then we have nowhere to stand even with the drink flowing!” Malka says.
“Ok, lay it on us,” states Bashir.
“First, we were here two thousand years ago. We built temples, we built roads. Maybe we took it from you when you were Caannities, or Philistines, or Phoenicians maybe it was a pricy swap. Maybe we should have stayed in Egypt.”
“I personally reject you ever being in Egypt at all,” Nasr says, “but for the purpose of framing irrational land grabs, fine you all built the pyramids, whatever,” says Bashir.
“Two, the holocaust actually happened. The Europeans actually tried to kill us all,” says Sebastian.
“Maybe also. I’ll give you 100,000 casualties though, not 6 million,” says Nasr. “Come the fuck on, really guys? We’re doing this again?” says Amitai.
“Ok 1 million tops. I’ve seen a lot of YouTube videos saying even that is inflated!” states Anya Layla who has attended multiple truth conferences in Tehran.
SOLOMON
The Grand Narrative of Jews (Holocaust)
“Alright, let’s be succinct. We all know the holocaust happened and how much you people love Hitler,” Emma says, “but let’s agree that it doesn’t matter whether it was 6 million people or 7 million people or just 10,000. Clearly, we Israelis want to count 8 million people as perished and clearly, we have a lot of good museums that substantiate that. The next time you guys go to your holocaust denying conference in Tehran, just remember we’re watching you. And we specifically frame it for you all to look fucking crazy and terroristical. That then aid, here is the grand narrative. The land is ours! We had it thousands of years ago and got booted by the Babylonians and then the Romans. We get that many of your descendants have been here for over 2,000 years farming olives and goat herding. We respect that your people were displaced in mass in the 1940’s and before that Jews and Muslims didn’t have any serious problems with each other. In fact, until we began re-settling Palestine, we appreciate that there were Jewish quarters in just about every Muslim city.”
“That then said. Once 6 million people died in the gas and fire of Europe, once our new born homeland fought basically and endless war with all its neighbors for 70 years, well it was us against you,” Emma continues, “But, can we just state that your Arab brothers weren’t really going to give you Palestine, they expelled and massacred you in just about every country you settled in and never ever even considered naturalizing you.”
“So, our perspective has three basic historical points; one, we had an empire here for hundreds of years. Two, the Europeans tried to kill us all and settling here was the direct result of that; we’re clearly not safe among white people. Third, no matter how much you or we drink, we’re not gonna get out of the ongoing war that we’ve been actively fighting since 1947. Just like you can’t lump us in with white colonizer movements we can’t lump you in with Pan-Arab national aspirations and armies.”
“I don’t find any of those three points super hard to accept even if sober,” states Nasr.
“I sure do,” mutters Anya Layla.
Anya Layla Shubar is best known as a revolutionary sex symbol. Her photo was plastered all over posters of college leftists and the internet when she and three German communists took over an airplane and landed it in Uganda. That happened a while ago, but she still seemed hip, articulate, dangerous and relevant.
“Yeah, I mean I can accept those three things with the unsaid caveat that clearly, we Palestinians are dealing with a sneaky, violent war like tribe called Hebrews. It seems to me that you have been trying to steal our land for like over 3,000 years!” says Bashir.
If Sebastian and Amitai had put their finger on it, Bashir and Bagraal led the delegation, Nasr was the shrewd always sober elder statesman and Anya traded on her notoriety. Al-Khalidi traded off his notoriously well published father, a professor at Columbia. Noha Abdullah was the most moderate and spoke the least.
By the Palestinian estimation clearly Amitai and Sebastian were in charge and Emma Solomon traded off her notoriety. Malka Dror was the least confrontational, but secretly most willing to place all Palestinians in concentration camps in Jordan. Sami Simonov never said much, it was assumed he was the agency man listening in on the monologues of war like factions.
While people like Nasr, Emma and Anya all probably should have been in Israeli prison, this was seeds of peace initiate to grant ten scholarships to Israelis and Palestinians at Brandeis University. The drunken peace process was wholly informal and non-binding, which is why people like Bashir, Khalidi and Nasr in particular were not worried about being assassinated over the contents of their “Plan for Separation and Sustainable Economic Development, i.e. the Annex Plan, or the Heller Accords” called such because as we shall see both factions shared a pretty maximalist vision of Pal-Isra, Israelistine, Palestine, Israel, Palestine-Israel, Israel-Palestine or whatever else you thought to label the lands between the Jordan River to the sea. “Surely not Zion!” exclaims Amitai who is going to run for Knesset on the Labor-Shenui list after graduation.
“Palestine. That isn’t for debate,” says Bashir.
“Agreed, we can’t just rename things to reflect realities on the ground,” interjects Emma Solomon. Emma is a uniquely Jewish terrorist. In previous years she had held much of the U.N. General Assembly hostage at gunpoint and been put on trial in Jerusalem for the latest dome of the rock bomb plot. She was a good-looking woman. Both she and Anya Layla were a package deal, both had been sitting in prison at the time of the dialogue deal. While not all delegates corresponded neatly to big factions, some did.
Amitai was in Shas; the Sephardic ultra-religious party. His decision to run on the Labor-Shenui List was purely because Shas was so intractable. His father was a big deal Jerusalem rabbi, and he had been ordained as a Hassidic rabbi prior to cutting off his beard and paias for graduate school. A product of his own calculations on perception, not any lull or lapse in religiosity.
ANYA LAYLA
The Grand Narrative of Palestinians (Catastrophe)
Anya Layla begins, “We consider ourselves the Canaanites, Philistines, Moabites and Phoenicians; two tribes or many more that have been invaded by your people for most of recorded history. It doesn’t matter to me whether you came out of Iran or came out of Egypt. All I can say with any certainty was to attempt to counter and compliment your three points of grand narrative.”
“The Nakba was a disaster manufactured amid the war like intentions of the Zionist cause. It robbed us of our historic land and established your Zionist entity in Palestine as boots on the ground.
“Before we can arrive at any solution points, or list out proximate causes here are our three bottom line narrative positions. First, this is our land. We have been here for over 4,000 years, before your people even came to war like monotheism manifest destiny. Second, the fact that there was never a kingdom of Palestine or commonwealth of Palestine does not invalidate our historic rights to land we lived on and farmed prior to the Hebrew Israelite invasion, and throughout the intermittent periods of your exile.”
“You were expelled multiple times, but we were not. Only in 1948 during the catastrophe did you manage to drive most of us into neighboring Arab nations. Third, never has one single so-called peace plan offered up a sustainable national territory. At the time of these deliberations, we control a shattered Bantustan of ghettoized cities and a bi-national Palestine; Gaza controlled by Hamas and West Bank administered by Fatah.”
“So, to repeat back the three narrative points; one, your tribe was always the aggressor, two we inhabited the land for thousands of consecutive years and three everything you offer us is insulting and incapable of being a suitable national homeland.”
“I remember when Mari Fitzduff of the Irish Republican Army taught us a well lubricated peace process was always required. But there is nothing subtle about the drinking happening amid the delegations,” states Malka Dror.
“Yes, just the mere sound of the English language makes me imbibe,” says Al-Khalidi, “I think it makes it easier for me to spend time with you all knowing what sinister interests you all represent.”
“You’re so fucking dramatic,” Emma Solomon replies.
“Pass the Rum,” demands Anya Layla, “so I can lay down some objective proximate causes.”
“The Nakba is our starting point, not the stupid Balfour Declaration. The catastrophe landed us into permanent exile and neutralized any viable territory for statehood. It also deeply traumatized us as a collective people and made resistance such a hardened part of our identity,” Anya explains.
YOUSEF BASHIR
Subjective Contrarian Logic
“Ok,” says Bashir opening a beer, “I don’t agree to let them claim their historical reality of archeological digs and biblical maps. Fuck that. I insist we begin the narratives in 1948 when the ruthless, Soviet supplied Israeli Hagenah committed ethnic cleansing.”
“Really, really?” Emma almost giggles.
It is clear now that not only Nasr is abstaining from drink. So is Bagrall, who is rumored to be the un-official Hamas delegate. And Anya Layla can dispose of a cocktail over several hours while drinking water.
In essence everyone is drinking, but no one is drunk. The alcohol is kind of this plausible deniability pretext, as if they couldn’t be there without a poison to clog their judgment.
“I think only 500,000 Jews died in the Holocaust,” declares Nasr, “that is the plausible maximum.”
“What,” Malka almost spits out her Rum and Coke.
“1 million tops,” Bashir says.
Part of Sebastian’s training as a negotiator is to agree with almost anything they say in the front load talks, to make sure they stay for the land deals. It’s a piece process really; a piece of this, a piece of that.
“Can we please just admit that Jews flip the fuck out when you deny the number of holocaust victims, that’s something you must realize right?” Malka demands, “Am I right? Am I right?”
“Sebastian doesn’t care I bet,” Emma accuses.
“I medium care. I do not lose sleep over Holocaust denying. Who cares if Bashir thinks its half a million and I think its six million when the Europeans, Germans included, would just do it again. All I can try, and stress is that the world doesn’t begin in 1948 for us. I will acknowledge that some of our friends overestimate the significance of the Balfour Declaration, but how many Jews did England take in during the World War? I don’t care about their Holocaust denying as long as we can all agree it happened,” Sebastian says.
“It happened because maybe, just maybe the Europeans were tired of your trying to control their banking sector and media?” Benny Bagraal asks.
And nobody could really dignify that kind of anti-Semitism with a response. So, it received an awkward silence.
“It’s because we murdered Jesus the Palestinian,” Emma finally says.
Another awkward silence.
“Ok, can we try and meet halfway on this?” Sebastian puts out there and Amitai, who is already dissociating from this whole debacle.
“No, we probably can’t,” states Anya.
“Can we all agree that Israelites conquered your land an exceptionally long time ago, held it for several hundred years, got exiled to Iran, then came back, then got fucked up by the Romans and exiled for nearly 2,000 years? Then the Europeans tried to kill a lot of us in the 1940’s so we returned to the Middle East and conquered your land again? After every Arab army in the vicinity of Palestine tried to ‘throw us into the sea’,” Sebastian suggests.
An awkward silence.
BENNY BAGRAAL
“Listen here Zionist,” Bagraal cuts in, “We don’t agree to any of that. You invaded us, you drove us into exile and forced us into open air prison ghettos. You kill our leaders. You murder our youth in the streets! You bar us from our holy sites! All you want to do is talk about the past but fuck the past. It’s all about the present for us. All about the last child you murdered or the newest settlement you’re putting up. Fuck you’re Romans, your Persians, your three-thousand-year history of land grabbing. How about those olives?”
“Enough of this forepay, let’s get into the Objective Proximate Causes then,” Emma says while fantasizing about summarily executing Benny Bagraal the Hamasnik in the head with a pistol.
Objective Proximate Causes
“Objective proximate causes are existential problems for both states and both peoples. As in for every square meter of West Bank territory absorbed into a settlement any future Palestinian state slowly ceases to lose ground,” explains Anya Layla.
LAYLA
“For every Arab Israeli (Palestinian) born inside Israel; the reality of the Jewish State begins to crumble. As revolutions break out all over the region the overall security situation is deteriorating. Even Jews took to the streets in large numbers during the Arab Spring Period. Peace must always take a back seat to security and has always been punctuated with a new round of violent engagement. The following causes are understood on both sides as the primary provocations which trigger violence in the conflict,” says Anya Layla, “if we can’t agree to these, I suggest we consider calling this whole initiative off. We must try and adopt these, or we will not even really be having the same drunken conversation. The same dance in a circle.”
SOLOMON
“We need to get these on the table to make sure that despite the drinks we’re still talking to rational people who can sign off on critical international proposals,” says Emma.
“Oh, trust me, we’re the sober ones most of the time,” says Noha Abdullah.
“Actually, none of your team are ever sober emotionally even without the drinks. I cannot say I’ve ever met a calm cool collected Palestinian who isn’t about to cry or write a Poem,” chuckles Samy Simonov, who rarely ever talks. Samy like Malka are hardline Russian Israelis from Avigdor Lieberman’s Israel Betanyahu Party. Famous for offering to trade Israeli settlements for Palestinian villages in a land swap.
NOHA ABDULLAH
Noha Abdullah finally cuts in, “ThePrimary Root:Physical integrity of bi-national territory.”
“This is clearly understood on both sides in relation to the highly limited size of territory both peoples lay their claim to. Pre-1967 Israel has a population of over 1.6 million Palestinian Arabs. East Jerusalem and the West Bank have been settled by over 650,150 Jews which hold an estimated 9% of West Bank territory. The issues most difficult to negotiate include not only Jerusalem; the capital claimed by both; or the ever-expanding settlements or the separation/apartheid barriers; but by where to draw borders so that a viable Palestine can exist alongside a secure Israel.”
Noha has pretty brown hair. None of the delegates wear hijab or makeup. Anya Layla has lipstick on.
“Let us stress what you all already know. Were we to make some kind of permanent settlement today and sign it, the land mass of Palestine as it is currently divided up into ghettos will never be acceptable to establish a Palestinian homeland on. It’s a hot mess.”
Primary Proximate Causes:
Noha continues, “Each side holds an intractable bottom-line perspective making their distrust grow even deeper as their leaders fail to deliver peace, security or economic development. These core provocation issues and the policies taken on them most harm the ability to hold any meaningful negotiations for peace. What follows are the ten primary proximate causes which require corresponding Benefit Harm indicators we advocate for to monitor their resolution or disruption. Symmetric Indicators as explained in more detail later are the agreed to measurement systems for a specific proximate cause where belligerent sides in a conflict lay out specific provocation parameters.”
“That’s technocratize for; these are 10 immediate causes of the warfare which are measurable and outside the stumbling points of historical narrative,” says Nasr, “According to a report by B’TSELEM (Sept., 2008), Access Denied, Israeli Measures to deny Palestinians access to land around settlements:
“Israel has created in the Occupied Territories a regime of separation by discrimination, in which it runs separate legal systems, one for Israelis and the other for Palestinians, and under which the scope and nature of human-rights violations vary based on nationality. This system has led to the theft of hundreds of thousands of dunams of land to benefit the settlements and their residents”.
AL-KHALIDI
“First, let’s measure and address structural apartheid. While it has been useful rhetoric to compare Israeli policy with South Africa, the setup is slightly different,” Al-Khalidi explains.
Structural Apartheid: “Israelis are very loathed to be equated with South Africa and deeply fear the long-term ramifications of the nascent boycott, divestment, and sanction movement. Apartheid which is a crime against humanity is also the basis of the Israeli Arab conflict; structural attempts in Israel and the occupied territories to maintain Jewish privilege, especially Ashkenazi Jewish privilege over all other ethnic groups. Apartheid is measured and understood as explicit and implicit structural division for the purpose of fortifying ethnic privilege. The most obvious extensions of this Apartheid are the checkpoints, ethnic identity cards and the Security Barrier Walls,” explains Noha.
“I object to using the term Apartheid,” Amitai states emphatically.
“I do not,” says Emma, “clearly, we have a sophisticated system of separation in place. What is as interesting to me is the cultural-ethnic apartheid between Jews inside of Israel proper.”
“Of course you would say something like that,” Anya notes, “I’m interested in dismantling your white settler apartheid state.”
SOLOMON
2. Jerusalem/Al-Quds Holy Sites: Both Israelis and Palestinians view Jerusalem/Al Quds as their capital. The Old City holds the most holy site to Judaism (Ha Kotel/ Western Wall of destroyed second temple) and the Dome of the Rock; the third holiest site in Islam. A periodic flashpoint for violence, Jerusalem/ Al Quds highlights a major issue between both sides. The Palestinians want full control of East Jerusalem, which was occupied by Jordan prior to the Six Day War in 1967. Israel has actively worked to expand the Jewish presence in East Jerusalem and environs to make its division impossible. All West Bank Palestinian Muslims under age 35 are restricted from entering the Dome of the Rock except on major holidays with permits. All Palestinian Israeli Jerusalem residents have access. All attempts to expand Jewish presence represent an explicit arena of contention. As do Arab or Jewish desecration and neglect
LAYLA
3. Settlement Expansion: Israeli settlements in the West Bank according to Israeli NGO B’Tselem occupy on 3% of West Bank territory but via security barriers and jurisdiction extend to a full 42% of administrative control (Yesha Council disputes this and states that the settlements take up 9.2 %, arguably on some of the best lands). This issue is one of the most glaring issues on the table as most international human rights bodies have repeatedly ruled that the Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territories have no legal basis and must be removed to pave the way for a viable Palestinian state to emerge. Despite such obvious refusal of the settlements Israel has ignored all UN resolutions and recommendations and planned for more settlements to be built on Palestinian lands. Israel unilaterally dissolved and destroyed its Gaza Strip settlements in 2005. There are currently upwards of 600,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
SOLOMON
4. Access to Water: As of today, Israel has access to all the major water resources in the area some of which are in the Palestinian Territories. Most of the natural resources that go into the Palestinian areas are only allowed to go in under Israeli control and monitoring and this would be essential to be removed to allow the state of Palestine to grow and enjoy full and real sovereignty.
LAYLA
5. Refugees/Right to Return: in 1948 over 711,000 Palestinian refugees decided to flee their homes thinking that they could return in a matter of weeks or months after Israel’s defeat by the Arab armies. Others were forced out of their homes by the advancing Israeli army which forcibly evacuated of 500 villages. By leaving their homes they paved the way for the actual establishment of the state of Israel and paved the way for almost never returning to their homes. A sizable number of Palestinians did not flee and became the so-called “Arab Israelis” and today they are part of the Israeli society albeit as fourth-class citizens. Today the Refugees issue is being used for political use only as most of the Arab countries to refuse to give Palestinian refugees and rights or citizenships in order to support “the right of return” and Israel will never allow Palestinian to return as this would mean that the Jewish people would become a minority in their own Jewish land that they have fought so much in order to have. On the Jewish side, persons with one Jewish grandparent are covered under the existing right to return and are given an extensive benefit basket. Today there are an estimated 6.9 million Palestinians living in some 60 refugee camps.
LAYLA
6. The Borders/ Palestinian State Recognition: The Israeli government has repeatedly stood against any idea of a true sovereign Palestinian state due to proclaimed existential security risks. According to Israel any Palestinian state will not be connected in terms of geography with limited air space and sea freedom making the idea of a state hopeless in the eyes of many Palestinians. In addition, there many Israeli restrictions relating to any future state for the Palestinian people such as any state would need to be without any army and even the polices forces would need to fully report its use of weapons. The state would also be forced to rely on Israeli utility companies, water works and be economically dependent for some time.
SOLOMON
7. US Military Aid: Israel was the recipient $2.775 billion in 2010, $3 billion in 2011, $3.07 billion in 2012 (and $3.15 billion per year from 2013-2018) while Israel’s defense budget is today around $23.5 billion. The United States and Israel engage in extensive intelligence sharing and defense research. The US also has the largest community of Jews outside of Israel. AIPAC, the Israel lobby in the United States has a disproportionate amount of influence over U.S. policy and the notion of the U.S. as an independent outside arbiter is naive. This military aid is seen as a major obstacle to negotiations and emboldens Israeli militarism.
SOLOMON
8. Demographic Changes: Israelis are acutely worried about demographic changes inside of Israel that will affect the state’s “Jewish Character” overall. 2 million Israeli citizens of Arab, Bedouin, Druze and Palestinian descent make up currently over 20 % of the population. Equally worrying is that out of an estimated 12 million people in greater Israel/ Palestine (Israel, Judea & Samaria/ West Bank/ Gaza), under Israeli jurisdiction (including 2.2 million in Gaza/2.7 million West Bank) only 5.6 million are classified as being fully Jewish.
LAYLA
9. Regional Instability: As various Arab governments erupt in civil strife and internal conflict Israel continues to worry about its own security in an environment rife with revolution, civil war and arms proliferation. Egypt’s 2011 revolution and subsequent coup brought Muslim Brotherhood in and then out of power; Hamas is the Palestinian branch of Muslim Brotherhood. Jordan, which is over 70% Palestinian, is Israel’s only remaining regional ally besides Türkiye which is growing also increasingly hostile.
SOLOMON
10. Bi-Partisan Palestine: Since the Palestinian civil war in 2006 Gaza Strip has been controlled by Hamas and the West Bank Palestinian Authority by Fatah. Hamas does not recognize Israel’s right to exist, and Fatah is viewed as corrupted. This has created two Palestine’s only one of which is willing to negotiate anything with the State of Israel and neither of which can enforce policy on the other.
“These are the serious issues are the grievance that both sides hold against one another. This is a major point that can be far more important than Jerusalem, water, or even refugees. The hatred that both sides have for one another and the pain that each side caused the other are so deep that they cannot simply make any future agreements because of a true lack of any sense of trust or sincerity. There must be a true healing process to be formed that involves both sides with the focus on those who suffered because of the Israeli existence or the Palestinian presence in the Territories.”
When these delegates had said their pieces, the Kurdish delegate Roj Zalla raised his hand to speak.
ROJ ZALLA
“Let me just say this. You all have your grievances; we also have grievances too. These grievances are all valid. They are intertwined. We all have spilled blood, and it has gone on for generations now. More blood will be shed. But what each delegate must convince their faction or party of; go back to your bases and capitals when this is done; We shed blood with weapons that the foreigners sell us. We are pitted against each other based on religions that all come from the same source. The belief in confederation; in democratic confederalism; is not about new states; it is about free life for all out peoples and the removal of the mechanisms that beget all the killing and wars.”
“For this to all work you must think beyond religions, you must think beyond states.”
Jansher is a mustached bear of a man, clad in a forest green multicam uniform gesticulating all his lessons with his animated hands. He is the Georgian born Kadro entrusted with ideological training of incoming foreign fighters aiding the revolution in Rojava.
“A few hours ago, the Turkish State rocket bombed our training academy on the plateau of Mt. Qerechow.”
Eighteen Hevals perished then and there in the barrage, some of them newly arrived foreign volunteers. Five Peshmerga also died in the strikes. They were visiting us for tea. The training base has been moved down the ridge into the oil pumping facility. It is unclear what makes the new location any safer. A new batch of internationals has just arrived from Sulaymaniyah. The lessons and training must continue.
JANSHER
“People were being massacred and sold into sexual slavery. Gang rapes and decapitations were gleefully being live streamed. What exactly would you have done?” recounts Heval Jansher the intellectual Georgian Kadro responsible for the ideological and historical training of new Internationalist volunteers.
“We came down from the mountains in convoys of pickup trucks, semi-armored school buses and on foot. We moved in fearless columns, committing perhaps half of our remaining beleaguered armed forces. Tens of thousands of Yazidi men, women and children were huddling helplessly and exposed in the Shengal mountains. Without our intervention all their men would have been massacred and their women sold off in markets. In Kobane around this same time Daesh has surrounded our Syrian Kurdish brothers and sisters and were on the verge of wiping us off the ground in North Syria. At that time ISIS was 30 miles from Baghdad and 100 miles from Damascus. Everyday hundreds of foreign fanatics joined them. Entering easily with the help of the Turkish state.”
“We broke through the Turkish lines and along with American airstrikes saved Kobane from destruction. We literally saved the lives of over 50,000 Yazidis trapped in the Sinjar facing Daesh genocide. We took up positions in Kirkuk awaiting an inevitable Daesh or Iraqi Army attack.”
Sometimes we changed out of our baggy green guerrilla uniforms into those of local forces or simply took the uniform off. Without the Party, without the People’s Defense Forces which bolstered every Y.P.G./Y.P.J. position there would have been no one for the Americans to arm as it would have all been Islamic State territory.
It is possible that the P.K.K., the Kurdistan Workers Party did some very nasty things internally and externally during its forty-year war with the Turkish State. Certainly, there were both internal purges of real and imagined counter revolutionaries as well as deliberate attacks on civilians, but war is war, and war is very brutal on absolutely everyone.
The P.K.K. was trained in war by the Palestinians in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon in the 1970’s. There is a historic sympathy that the Party has to the cause of Palestine as a thankful result of this early collaboration. It is completely unacknowledged, and unsubstantiated that the Russians also trained the P.K.K. But that’s who was hanging out in the Bekaa Valley in the 1980’s. Palestinian guerrillas. Iranian special forces. Lebanese Shiite partisans. Russian spies.
The P.K.K. got openly involved in the fight against ISIS first in Kobane and then in Sinjar. It can be said in unambiguous terms that without the leadership of the Party, assisted by coalition air power the revolution in Rojava would not have survived the Islamic State onslaught. Abdullah Ocalan has been in prison since 1999.
A variety of tactical and ideological innovations have had to be made for us to survive. However, the adaptation of Democratic Confederalism is not a publicity stunt or mere revisionism. The Party has had to adapt, Ocalan has helped us find the context to adapt. Without his leadership the P.K.K. would not have withstood the tumultuous collapse of global state socialism in the 1990s.
The Revolution in Rojava is of course a product of Party discipline and functionally speaking there is extraordinarily little difference between the Y.P.G./Y.P.J. and the People’s Defense Forces49 of the P.K.K., most of the Y.P.G./Y.P.J. commanders are P.K.K. cadres.
In the insurrection against the Turkish State which began in this phase in 1984, over 50,000 people died and most of them were Kurds. If nasty, brutal violent things such as burying people alive, executing busloads of Turkish civil servants, carrying out suicide bombings, periodically purging the ranks of real or accused counter revolutionaries.
But even though we are declared a terrorist organization because Turkey is so important to N.A.T.O. and the Kurdish issue is so intractable, the U.S. led coalition of course used the Y.P.G./Y.P.J. dressed up as the Syrian Democratic Forces to annihilate ISIS. The Turkish state had a daily telephone riot with their American counterparts. No one was stupid. Everyone knew every dollar, every rifle and every bit of training given to the Syrian Democratic Forces which was over 60% Kurdish Y.P.G./Y.P.J. anyway would be routed to the P.K.K. when the war with ISIS was over and the fighting resumed in earnest between the Kurdish allies and Turkish Army. But, in 2015 after Kobane there was no other reliable ally on the ground and the Turks had to wait for the dust to settle. In Kobane the tide was turned for ISIS and the S.D.F. became the default U.S. Coalition proxy in Syria. Between 2015 and 2018 the S.D.F. smashed ISIS towns and cities from the North and the Assad Regime aided by the Russians hit them from the West. With no friends, under attack in every direction the once seemingly invincible Jihadists of Daesh were defeated, falling back to Ar-Raqqah and holes in the desert to hide. The Regime forces, Hezbollah, the S.D.F., the P.K.K. the Coalition, the Iraqi Army, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and the al-Hashid ash-Sha’bi Popular Mobilization Forces50 we all ground them under our boot heels on all sides. Now only Deir Ez-Zor is left to liberate. But once these Cheta Daesh are temporarily defeated, isolated, trampled on and crushed in some shitty desert town that will change nothing. The Saudi funded and Pakistani spread Wahabbi-Salfist51 virus. By no means will this war be over any time soon.
By 2014 around the time that the Y.P.G./ Y.P.J. militia, assisted heavily by the P.K.K.’s People’s Defense Forces, the K.D.P. Peshmerga and the Coalition airstrikes were battling their way out of the ISIS siege in Kobane, effectively cementing for five years an American led Coalition- leftist Kurdish alliance and changing the dynamics of the Civil War in the North of Syria completely. But no one was stupid, not Turkey, not Daesh not the American Special Forces sent to arm and coordinate airstrikes with us. There were acrimony upon acronyms, there were shells of meaningless letters to make the American Congress feel better about releasing military aid. No one Heval was completely stupid. We all knew that the very minute Daesh was defeated we’d be alone and that all these enemies and friends knew the truth. That nothing happening politically or militarily in North Syria would be decided except by the Party.
The P.K.K. Our Party, the Kurdistan Workers Party! To the Turks we are nefarious terrorists. They want to hunt us down and kill us all. For we are an existential threat to the Turkish State. All states, really Hevals. They convinced America and Europe to adopt that line. To the Kurdish people the premier Party of Resistance to oppression and total annihilation as a coherent people. The very last defense against seemingly triumphant Capitalist Modernity. The only military force capable of defeating I.S.I.S. on the ground. An entity that is outside the immediate theatre of war, except for Russia and China, still very much considered a terror group by the West and N.A.T.O. forces of which the Turkish State contributes the second largest military force. Over 250,000 combatants.
No one in their wildest dreams can imagine that when the smoke clears and ash settle that the first Democratic Confederalist polity, safeguarding some 4-5 million people will be allowed to survive. But for now, the total rubble of what was left from the siege of Kobane has in defiance been rebuilt in the sprawl of white brutalist two to six story dwellings buttressing in defiance the long white wall and treacherous minefield the Turks built across the entire northern border.
Says Heval Commander Cancer, pronounced ‘Jansher’ the Guerrilla from his notes:
JANSHER
“Actually, I tried to prepare them for a lifestyle of revolutionary militancy. Kill the enemy. Kill the enemy before the enemy can airstrike, execute, torture or disappear you and your friends. I don’t think they all got it. The training was just too short. They retained much of their Western bourgeoisie privileges. They thought it would maybe be like a movie. It’s a shame the British woman died, she was the one with possibly the very most revolutionary potential, for a foreigner excluding the Germans. That’s all I can say about that, Heval.” Heval is the Kurdish Kurmanji word for friend, or comrade. In case you had forgotten that. Sometimes I find it best to repeat myself repeatedly to make sure you’re paying attention. I was born in Georgia. I’m not even ethnically Kurdish, actually.
Within the Kurdish movement there is a tendency to imbibe a rather endless amount of black tea. A tendency to have poor sleeping habits. A tendency to chain smoke. But they also light their own cigarettes. To let another light your cigarette is ideologically suspect.
Sometimes, the Party has debated on banning cigarette smoking, like it has alcohol, drugs, sex, romance, having kids, having a family, contacting your immediate family and acquiring any material things beyond what fits in a ruck sack, in service of the war effort. However, being a revolutionary militant is quite stressful actually. And there sure are a lot of things that can kill you faster than a cigarette. A whole lot of things, actually.
“The legend goes that in a meeting in a tea house in the village of Lice near Diyarbakir City, on November 25th of 1978 a group of young students lead by Abdullah Ocalan founded the Kurdistan Workers Party and launched a revolution unlike anything the world had ever seen before it,” explains Heval Jansher. A guerrilla in good standing with the Party. Good standing means trust. Good standing means not being a Pizkarek; a problem. They need to be platformed, as we say. Bad standing means re-education, prolonged isolation, or indefinite detention. Eventually, if nothing else seems to work, it means a bullet and an unmarked grave. We are not fucking around. There is a revolution to defend. When this is over, everything sacrifice, every shahid will have allowed the birth of a new world from the ashes of the old. But if we fail, there is more at stake than the deliverance of a Kurdish national autonomy. There is more at stake than redemption of a flailing old idea about liberty, equality, democracy. If we survive the coming years. If we secure the Rojava Revolution. These ideas will spread like wildfire. If we are vanquished, human rights will be buried with us.
A begrudging Russian sympathizer to our cause now held in a small, electrified cage in Midtown West. A gated community for the ultra-rich. A place called the Hudson Yard. They call her “Goldy the very expensive goldfish.” Of course that is not her real name at all. Her name at the agency is Sussudio. Her real name in Russian, it means “rich soon”.
“All of the buildings appear to be very, shall we say, forever. Permanent. Almost invulnerable, blyat. These elegant high towers of blue and black, glass and steel, towers built in defiance of gravity and common sense. Like mega sculpture, like a love song to the invisible hero called American Capitalism. You look down at all the city, even all Downtown and Midtown and imagine all the utter debauchery other people are having at your expense. Well anyway I have my name on my own little cage here. So, I too can say “I have made it in New York City.” “So maybe I’ve made it here in America!” In the background a saxophone cacophony erupts! There are more brothels than bars and coffee shops in all Newyorkgrad, but the quality and the pricing vary markedly. Sex work is hard work. It may not be the world’s oldest profession as they say blyat, but it is the oldest trusted way to get information from one’s enemies.
And she states in letter:
“I live in a tall residential tower complex in Western Midtown in a costly new development named the Hudson Yards. Right in the very heart of success. A tower complex built in recent years above the train yards of west 34th street. I work my sweet ass off to keep that apartment rent free. The game I am playing with this chubby Indian Brahman venture capitalist roommate, is eating off his plate without him imagining he’s becoming my patron. Drain the clock, not his cock as they say. But really, he annoyingly proposes marriage as often as my Sergei had. And the others. And the other. I am waiting for a Russian Jewish doctor. He will love me again. I know it. The stars say as much. As for Sebastian. I think he’s calling himself Kawa now.” We all have all kinds of names.
“He mostly writes to me. I mostly do not write back to him very often,” I would later tell the FBI, or the CIA, or the Police Dept. and the Department of Homeland Security or whoever else I was being forced to talk to. But I, of course blyat, I do write him back, I’m his muse. He creates well, though most of it is chaos. Much of it very much misses the mark, as it were.
I once remarked to Oleg the Bear, a common friend;
“A relationship with Comrade Adonaev is like a roller coaster. Extremes of up and down, drama and thrills. But like all such thrill machines. You can tolerate it only in increments, you must step off and stay off. Sometimes for many years.”
My blonde hair is convincingly dyed from light brown. I told Sebastian that once and he said I was beautiful either way but should try brown hair like him. I don’t actually hate him, though he has cost me time. I just prefer not to have him around, thinking he can save me, heal me, change my life. No working woman ever needs that shit. Get me to higher ground on his terms. I told him go to law school and stop fucking helping the Kurds. I just don’t like giving him hope that we have a future of any kind. I’ve always been adamant about that. Sometimes against my better judgment, I’ve kissed him, and those kisses gave him way too much hope. He in fact wrote me over 100 poems of Russian theme and a door stopping nearly 800-page novel. Which is kind of about me, but also about terrorism being justified. Or so my friend Alana interpreted. That he can save money up, get it together in the brain, and “save me”, he just can’t. I’m a kept woman now. That comes with a price tag and comes with responsibilities. Like sex on demand. I’ve told him that, but I’ve told him many also not so true things so maybe he can’t put it all together. He thinks it’s love. It’s maybe some kind of fucking weird 18th-19th century muse lust love, blyat, but it’s really a product of his mental illness, not my encouragement. His writing is prolific. To be fair. Some of his paintings are very unique. Overall, he is impressive as an American, just not the horse I need to bet on right now. He’s not patron or paperwork marriage material, as he is always nearly broken, or often fully broke.
But like it or not an artist gets only one truly great muse, and I am his. Russians, we are known for our loyalty and being indomitable. Putin says we also make the best whores. Well anyway, I know what I came for when I arrived in Newyorkgrad lost lonely and lethal at age 19, and I am a full-grown asset, a woman with expensive tastes. Not that into long board walk walks and art making and picnics with stupid couscous and over spiced chicken blyat with no value. The long long book and paintings he has made for me do not help my mom immigrate to the U.S.A. Or get me a euro passport, for that matter, now that it is looking like my special marriage hasn’t resulted in anything useful for papers.
“Let me roll up my sleeves and my skirt, a little! Look at me in the eyes! I have all my teeth to bite. So sexy and educated and multilingual. What a catch to catch if you can. I am a wild debutante, elusive and amazing. I am a graceful fighter of course, forced to pour men off shots in a tavern downtown.”
“Zdrastvistia! The purpose of my sponsor is to buy and sell luxury carrots. Also, a flying carpet to get you home after all the bullshit we will make you sit through telling Russian American tales. Also, to warn you about Chechens and to distribute out a phone number where slaves with abused lives can get J 1, S 1 or go to college. There is so little time for singing and poems. We will try and pour you things called Vodka, but it’s not Vodka. To us it’s like water for wound care.”
“Good and bad men went to war and women also went to war, and Americans and Russians watched out of the corner of the newspaper or on the telescreen. And of course, we both supplied the arsenals and the airstrikes to our proxies. But ultimately it was a faraway spectacle happening far from both empires. At least until Ukraine.”
“The papers called them “the New Chechens” because when the war kept going, people came back trained in G-d-only-knows how much carnage capability. The war I’m referring to is the Syrian Civil War/ the Revolution in Rojava which was a phantom menace to all. But it was more a dark dream based on improbable odds. Chechens are in fact a very real jihadist menace that fought us to the last bullet in Mosul, Raqqa and Deir-A-Zor. They brought their whole families into their fun little Jihad. These re-moniquored “Chechens” aren’t like them. They were secular and young, and mostly on the Kurdish or Shi’a side, or the Peshmerga. They all left our families at home. There were plenty of war path teams and factions, mine/ ours was the most moral, but lived in a state of total delusion. They were following a pudgy faced aging man in Turkish solitary confinement. We thought breaking rocks was a useful form of soliloquy.”
My latest “patron” is in his mind a Brahman, which is something pretty fucking fancy in India. He’s a tech guy but looks and acts more like a Wall Street guy. He’s just too fucking rough on me. It has a lot in common with rape in my own home. He goes deep up my ass too often. He is pulling my hair and slamming me against the bar. He punches me in the head as hard as he can. He gets what he pays for. He slams me for about five minutes until he cums. Like a Quisling, snorting pig. I am the star of a very private show! Recently, I fell down some stairs. He paid for surgery. I don’t remember things like I used to.
Sebastian wrote to me the other night to go down memory lane and formally tell me he is off for Syria soon. Well, this is the end of him finally. I do not feel that bad, or much of anything. He wants to end it like this anyway. He is living up to his expectation to die a martyr, that is up to him. In my mind, somewhere, is the understanding that if I had given him more rope, he could have hung himself here, but who doesn’t like a motherfucking show. Am I right.
My patron climbs off me eventually. Eventually, they all must.
A lot of meat to him, I will need to stretch it out. Jon isn’t just a Jon; he’s unfortunately often my roommate too. He’s the one paying me to live somewhere nice with him. A Brahmin. They do what they want. Including fuck my asshole on a Tuesday afternoon. Am I fucking to not pay my rent? Yes, that’s exactly what I’m doing. I wish I had something better, someone better to do but I don’t. The Russian doctor, well he said I was “a little too high maintenance.” Sergei flipped his shit when he found a pile of Sebastian’s letters. Poor form on my part, perhaps, too sentimental. No, I will just say lazy.
I have not seen Comrade Sebastian Adonaev since the end of the summer. The time when we gave it another sad go, the poetry making for some kissing. The hopeless romanticism in him. Well anyway he’s the exact same man and I’m the same old gal. He’s still broke and still just a shiftless adventurer, romanticizing the Chornay. He once wrote an 800-page book for me, yet I’ve only read the first couple chapters. He wrote me over 100 poems, but they all sound about the same. Words rhyming about love, hate sex and devastation in Angliski. He painted and framed a painting in Brighton and bought a gold frame for it. It’s still up. I was dating a doctor, but he left me, as I said. I was dating a corporate lawyer, but it was never so serious. My original patron cut me off over my first Adonaev affair. Now I’m fucking the so-called roommate to cut down on my business here expenses. Well anyway “my roommate” has a big Indian style Xanny Kama sutra cock. He manages some tech finance derivatives schemes in L.A., which could be anything. I must disassociate a lot. What was I saying, that’s right, something about my mother getting her paper. Something about the mark.
Later, in around a year when I am arrested by the secret police and they demand that I tell them about what Sebastian was actually doing in Syria, honestly, I didn’t even know that much. I wasn’t that interested or directly invested. He is climbing a moutnain, to prove himself to himself to win me, that sounds like a good take.
He periodically would send me all these highly miserable looking, often bloody war photos, but I didn’t want to see any of them. He would beg to be allowed to see me. But in reality, I wanted very little nothing to do with him. I live my own life. It’s mostly mine. I chose it and made all the bad decisions! Later on I’d sometimes message his WhatsApp and tell him to ‘Come home now please’. But I didn’t, mean, to me. He would probably survive the war. He has strong luck. He is tough in his own way. Incredibly lucky. The roommate, comrade Brahmin patron, he likes to choke me. I need a new living situation. Or should I just pay cash, every hole is too many holes. I’m working on a possible new patron with a place by the beach in Miami.
I wasn’t raised stupid, or lacking morales. So how have I gotten stuck here in this loop? I should move to Miami, where it’s warmer. I remember thinking only a little bit about his strange Syria objective.
What I failed to see, through Sasho, our old boss and roof explained it to me, was that he was actually going to Syria to impress me. How ludicrous, nothing could be further from impressive to me. He was going to live, I was fairly sure. But to do what? Live to be a mentally broken person that I could never imagine how to heal. From Miami, it will all take the form of more of brightly colored dream.
We had some fun but also some very messy history Sebastian Adonaev and I, blyat, but I think going to this evil little war was the stupidest thing he ever did, far worse than the exploits in Haiti, worse than loving me. It was hard on me anyway. I will certainly not be meeting him at the airport, should he survive the war. I am tougher than he, but it’s still not nice to make a person watch unwillingly your attempt at self-murder. Functionally speaking that man is dead to me. I have to insulate myself from mad men seeking high publicized means for suicide. The man just wants to die in a meaningful way, but that doesn’t help my situation at all! Yet, I still have all his letters, I still have the two published books about me. I still have the gold framed multi-color pornograph on the wall.
When the secret police dragged me in to find out where Sebastian went, I told them:
“He is probably still in Havana…”
“He’s definitely not in Havana, toots.”
“Don’t call me toots, blyat.”
They then did pretty nasty stuff to me just to punish him. Or maybe just because I don’t have any actual papers? Or maybe because degrading a Russian blonde is as American now as apple pie. They eventually bent me over and just took turns fucking me on the interrogation table. Good times. It’s really not that free a country. Once the surface gets scratched enough. Eventually, my Brahman patron bails me out, somehow. He lectures me about “pussy footing around with terrorists that don’t have my best interests at heart.”
“Well where is that fuck? Where is your useless Jew Chechen now?” my patron asks me.
“He is climbing up a Holy Mountain, blyat. In his mind anyway. Thinking of me the whole entire time.”
“But here you are.Locked in a fishbowl with no passport. With one to help you besides me and your Serge,” the patron replies, “And like a goldfish, I can do whatever I want, and you will not remember it 8 seconds later. He punches me in the face and rapes me on the table.
“Dumb bitches always thinking things are free,” he says.
But nothing in Russia or America is free. Old Russian saying, “The only free cheese is in a mouse trap.”
At the Green Village Outpost contact line our tabor is told to dig in. So, for a few days we helped sandbag and fortify what appears like the accommodations of long fled oil workers. Something green and modern looking in the bleak oil lands of Der Ez Zor province. Oasis in the Wastelands north of the Euphrates. The Turkish Army is coming.
SEBASTIAN ADONAEV
“Sometimes I close my eyes and remember your lips.” Late into the long trips home. I have no home; it was your home only. Only my ugly little flats around the Brooklyn Soviet. Rented in desperation, vulnerability, an admission of poverty. And I will never go back to that humiliating life. I will never see you again, or see Russia, or Cuba, or Mehanata or any other type of slavery life. Your lips and whispers are still lingering Goldy. It forever remains.
Now deployed about ten days ago to the Southern front near Omar Fields. Daesh is nearly finished they say. Assigned first to Tabor Shihad Lawrence, five quickly died by snipers and mines in the first night of the operation.
The twenty international volunteers are all drifting in different directions. They prefer we not all die at the same time. There are supposedly around 500 international fighters in Rojava, mostly from the U.S. and Europe, also Türkiye. But numbers and time to the Kurds mean absolutely nothing. So maybe there are 500, or maybe just 50. Who knows Heval, who knows!
“Daesh is nearly defeated.” The Islamic State once size of Great Britain at its maximal, poised to take Baghdad and Damascus is reduced to the wastelands of the deep desert and a strong of indefensible towns along the Euphrates River southeast. From the North the Syrian Democratic Forces supported by the Western Coalition advance. We are part of that force. On the other side of the Euphrates the Russian Army, Lebanese Hezbollah, and the Syrian Army advance. We all try and not shoot at each other, at least until ISIS is finished. Over the border in Iraq ISIS has been largely crushed; the Shi’a Popular Mobilization Forces, the Iraqi Army, the Iranian Pasdaran, and Western advisors and Special forces have all but driven ISIS from Iraq to the Syrian border.
The name I have been given is Heval Kawa Zivistan which means “Comrade Black Smith Winter.” I am a Paramedic in civilian life and therefore one of the highest medically trained foreigners in the brigade. Heval Shoresh from Brooklyn, I have known him since childhood. He has a child back in America. And I judge him for being here were it my right to judge. But this palace and this revolution is irresistible to us both. He is a gardener back home. Here he carries a heavy-duty long-range, high-power rifle called a Dastun which is about twice his size. Hard to aim.
There is Heval Sasson from Austria. He was an EMT who once travelled with his girlfriend all over Africa on a motorcycle. He is quiet, ideological, principled and socialist in disposition. With also is Scottish Heval Ciya a former British solider. Also, the mad man possible career criminal kicked out of the French foreign Legion called Heval Sivan, who although he claims he was also a British solider can’t hit a target with an AK to save his reputation. He hasn’t let up for many days talking about the Order of the Knights Templar, talking about the Knights of Malta; actually, engaged in an unending pressure of speech manic diatribe about the new crusades, that we are allegedly in. There’s also Heval Azad from Albania, something of a gypsy, a bespeckeld intellectual; an anarchist of course.
There is also a French Legionnaire of enormous size, almost a giant. He is called Heval Gabar and speaks only of the Legion, reveals nothing of his life. He isn’t very well liked by the other internationals. There is also a young kid who looks not more than 16 but is allegedly 18 his name is Max. One of the few held back in the Academy because of minor injury. He is dubbed “Heval Maslum”, but everyone just calls him Max. And that is how he introduces himself. He’s allegedly from Salem, Oregon. No matter what sems to happen he just repeats, “I don’t care.”
After the 5 Arab conscripts were blown apart the first night, they broke the internationals nto smaller groupings. Ciya and Sivan were sent to a YPG Cadro Tabor based on being British military they were sent to the front. Soresh, Maslum, Gabar were merged into an Arab unit and sent to the front. Sasson and I were attached to Kurdish Red Crescent outpost in the Naqta in Omar Fields. Gabar and Maslum dubbed “pizkereks” or problem makers were sent to guard a fox hole on the edge of some useless “liberated village”. No one knew where Heval Azad was sent, but Albanians are very tough crafty bunker people.
“He will turn up and be just fine!” Heval Sasson says, ever an Austrian optimist. “But he just as easily could have stepped on a mine and blown off a leg or been hit by sniper bullet.
***
Then night came and Sasson and I were quartered in a farmhouse. The commander invited us over to the field command for tea. The mood was the war with Daesh was almost over and very soon we would all be fighting Turkey in the north and or Assads forces right over the river.
The Commander is named Heval Azadi. They basically cycle out the same 50 Kurdish code names for everyone seems like. The commander in very broken English invites us for black Tea in one of the many pillow rooms they like to build.
“Trump say, no more guns for YPG,” he tells us the SDF is the brand the YPG uses to appear more inclusive, a little less Apoist, a little more not the PKK, but the commanders almost always say YPG or PKK, there’s a lot of little acronyms for small armies out here. The YPG, or the People’s Defense Forces make up 80% of the SDF; the Syrian Democratic Forces. All the best commanders are Turkish Kurd PKK trained.
“Daesh done in Iraq. Two towns left,” Azadi tells us.
“24 little Gundes to take along the river,” he says. A Gunde is a village.
“In Moscow, the PKK make a deal with regime,” he says, regime meaning Assad and Syrian Army, “Iran, regime, Russian make deal on autonomy and oil rights.”
We are engaged in an operation to seize Syria’s oil fields, Sasson had explained. There were not many ISIS fighters left after Mosul and Raqqah fell. This is all now about who can take as many oil fields as possible to negotiate the final settlements. This seems to discourage Heval Sasson.
“Really all that is left now, “says Commander, “NUSRA Front and HDS in Idlib.”
“Al Qaeda’s Syrian brand,” Sasson tells me.
“The PKK make a deal in Moscow; we will end making terms with Assad. The HDS, the Nusra, the Deash all the Islamist proxies in Idlib, Bab and Jarabulus City they must be eliminated to close the gap.”
“Closing-the-Gap” we learned in the Academy was about pushing through the Islamists into Turkish Hatay Province to gain sea access for Rojava. The Gap also being closing the lines between Afrin and Kobane. Afrin Canton is hard to resupply and will be the first thing the Turks attack.
“As soon as Deash war is over Turkey will attack, you will fight with Turkey?” They all wanted to know that. Would we all stay and fight the second biggest army in Nato.
“Of course we will,” Kawa claims, but Sasson knows suicide is also problematic when they return to their homelands. In fact, it is well known that many of the prior volunteers, of which there were only maybe two thousand over the past ten years; they didn’t adjust well here or there. But this was an antidote. Some did multiple tours, others died in other foreign lands for lesser causes.
“When Daesh is done there will be no ceasefire. Turkey will attack immediately. 45% of call Syria now in Rojava. In SDF hands. Turkey will waste no time,” says Heval Baran from Germany. Baran had set out to join the PKK, but after 6 months on the mountain they sent him to the YPG. The Germans apparently are the best suited of the internationals to adjust to Kadro life, but Baran said simply; “I don;t really want to give up women.” The life of a Kadro is one without any material things, no attachments, not sex no marriage. Life of total dedication to the struggle.
We all speculated about “Fighting the Turks near Afrin” while in the Academy. It will be slaughtered. A cadro boasts that “We have peace deals with USA and with Russia maybe also China!” But the dependency on the U.S. airpower is real.
“The Regime will not ever accept Rojava in any form, it is just too weak to defeat it right now.”
“Russia will never abandon the regime,” someone says in Kurdish.
“It is like America and Israel; you have Syria and Russia. The Regime gives Russian Mediterranean Seaport access, the Regime is only alive because of Russia and Iran.”
“There are many factors. Russian is loyal, America is not. When Daesh is over there will be no more guns, no more air support.”
“How many Western volunteers do you think are still in Rojava,” Sasson asks the commander.
“40, maybe even much less,” the Commander says. “50,000 came to fight for Daesh, maybe over time 2,000 came to help the SDF. 1,500 leftists from Turkey and 500 from the West. Now, in country still, 50 maybe.” “The airports in Erbil and Slemani are still shut down because of the independence referendum. For now, you are here to stay. Who knows what will happen. PJAK is now fighting in Iran again. Maybe soon more fighting between Iraqi Army and Pesh Merga. And Turkey! They are coming trust me heval.”
Goldy wrote that she might have to marry her rich ugly patron. Polina wrote she is leaving me since I am “on the other side of the planet now” Chanie is “back with Charlie”, so probably I will never hear from her again. Anya Noori, my attaché, sent me some news from Baghdad. “They are arresting Western volunteers without good paperwork coming back from Rojava. Slemani and Erbil airports are down everyone must go out from Baghdad.” But I have good paperwork. I called my parents the other day. An Arab had sold me a Syrian SIM card. They seem proud that I am there. I hope I can hold it together and reach ‘the mountaintop.’ There, if I am open-minded, I will finally understand the truth; into its innermost parts.
Like in my dreams, the EMT Program of Kurdistan is just a means to an end. And after thought, the G.C.C. is barely useful or functional any more out here. My so-called partners Andrew, Forti, Jessica, Matthew Smith, Ovid all have defected and left me out here with no help. Can I count on David Smith, Kaveh, Jonah, or Dr. Wagner, probably not or only for a little.
Everything here is an assault on my senses! Daily, I must learn ideology, discipline, war, Arabic, Kurmanji, keep Sasson and I from stepping on mines, dying in airstrikes, getting enough water. Sasson has said he is willing to help me run the EMT program if only we can get authorization to do so. The Kurds do not believe in time, they do not believe in space, and they do not believe in relying on foreigners. They do seem to believe concurrently in American led coalition airpower.
The others we trained with, the twenty, are all dispersed to different positions. Ten to Afrin and ten to Der Ez Zore. They must choose their own adventures in Rojava. I do hope that Soresh stays alive for the sake of his 6-year-old child and young wife. Ciya and Sasson signed the G.C.C. paperwork, the cover contracts that they will claim later to the government of Austria and Scottland that when they did out here was purely medical. But it’s not so much will they stay 6 months to train in an EMT program it’s more will the war ever actually end to allow the time and space to justify one.
It’s impossible to know how far up the mountain any of us will really ever go. Heval Barron was there almost a year. The German heval said little good or bad about it, he barely said much.
So many ways to die out here. We or most of the 2,000, or 500, or 50 shared a noble goal. Defeat Daesh, defend the Revolution in Rojava. In the meantime, Sasson and I have been training Arab fighters in life saving skills. We try and stay sane. I am sure I will have to use this AK-47 before this is all over. The thought does not bother me, but I do not delight in the thought of any killing.
Today, a villager “gundi” handed me their sick infant and I listened to its lungs and heart, and helped prepare some Pedialyte mix. The child was sick but dehydrated and stable, the Arab comrades keep telling people an American doctor is in the camp. But even in Syria I am still just a a paramedic not a doctor at all.
So much responsibility is on my shoulders. They all have varying medical issues. Infected toes, rotting death, abdominal pains. I do what I can. The Party purchased me a huge rolling duffle bag of medications and medical supplies. So, we stay as busy as we can.
I daydream, and hope Goldy thinks about me more than sometimes, but probably only Chanie does when she is allowed to. Goldy sometimes WhatsApp’s me cute photos and sometimes Anya, the attaché flirts from Baghdad. I have been sending Chanie letters via the U.S. Special Forces were run into coming through the camps.
I realize that G-d or no G-d, Abdullah Ocalan is writing about a universal truth. This is the last stand. The last chance we will ever have or get again.
“Deash is all wiped out,” the Commander repeats, “BUT THE TURKISH ARMY IS COMING FOR SURE. To burn all we have built to the ground,” he sighs, “Serkaften, we will fight them too!”
We all probably have a lot more bleeding left to do no matter what happens.
WALTER SEBASTIAN ADLER 