On the Gaza War and What Could Be

Notes towards an Islamo-futurist vision of neo-anarcho-pacifism

I will not dwell on the horrors of the Gaza War. Others far more qualified than I have documented the facts on the ground. The whole world is watching, and it does not care for what it sees. I do not care for what I see, and yet I cannot look away and I cannot be silent and I cannot work a corporate job in the country that builds the bombs that are dropped on Gaza. For the moment, I retain my nominal employment, and yet I find myself drawn to anti-war activism like a moth to a beautiful flame. Perhaps when the bombs stop falling I will be able to concentrate on making my boss richer than the dreams of avarice; perhaps I will find something better and more noble to occupy my time.

I was talking to a high school teacher on LessWrong, the home of effective altruism’s intellectual core, the rationality movement. I am, to say the least, unpopular on LessWrong, at least for the moment. Life has dealt me too many bad hands for me to be considered any sort of rationalist. But Mencius Moldbug is highly regarded in some quarters of LessWrong, so it is perhaps not an honor I seek to be top dog in such a community. If nothing else, no person of faith can properly be considered a rationalist, and I find myself drawn to faith more and more every day. Not faith in this God or that God, but faith in humanity, in our common dreams of peace.

But back to the high school teacher. He told me that, after thinking about the problem for almost two decades, he has come to the conclusion that the only workable solution is to rename what remains of Palestine to “the Free Lands of Palestine”, and hope for the best. I think this solution is beautiful in it simplicity and its humility. It is simple; there can be no peace until there is justice, and there can be no justice until the Palestinians are free to live in the rubble that remains of their beautiful homeland. Free from the daily and well-documented horrors of the occupation. Free from the anti-Semitic gangsters who currently rule Gaza on Israel’s behalf, and the impotent sell-outs of the Palestinian Authority. Free, above all, from the charity-with-strings of the United Nations. Free to work, and to rebuild, and to dream. Free even to defend themselves from aggression, as any sovereign nation-state must do from time to time.

And so, as the world mourns the dead, as I mourn the loss of Twitter celebrities who died in Israeli airstrikes before I even learned of their existence, as Christmas approaches (for Christmas is a Muslim holiday as well as a Christian one), I ponder: what will the world’s gift be to the ashes that remain of Gaza? What is an appropriate christening gift for the newborn, fledgling nation that struggles to survive. Born too soon to have any chance of surviving, and too late to matter. What will the world give to Israel at the baby shower of the nation it has forged through genocide, just as it was forged in the fires of an even larger and more devastating genocide. For, like kids having kids, like the abused becoming abusers, Israel has betrayed every last one of the lessons it was taught in the school of hard knocks.

For Israel, the only appropriate gift is a new Prime Minister, and the wisdom to safely dispose of their old one in line with the constitutional principles that the current one has shredded to bits. Perhaps a subscription to Haaretz, one of my own little gifts to myself that my enormous corporate worker bee salary affords me. Perhaps, simply, an assurance that there will be no vengeance commensurable with the scale of the carnage they have unleashed in Gaza. Perhaps, dreams of a future Hanukkah unscarred by war crimes. Next year, in Jerusalem, there will be peace. It is a fool’s hope, and I am a fool, and yet I hope it with all of my heart. If you will it, it is no dream. The Jewish people will always have a homeland in the Middle East, and it will be at peace. Not for all time, perhaps, because who can say. But it will be at peace with the Free Lands of Palestine for as long as it chooses to be.

And what shall the gift be for the newborn nation? For Gaza has never received a gift before that did not come with strings. Iran’s use of them in its proxy wars with the United States is as grotesque as the events of October 7, and the rumors of what has followed. The United Nations has used them as a prop in its propaganda dedicated to maintaining the current imperial order for the benefit of the Illuminati, or whatever the fuck you call the combined intelligence agencies of the Global North. The United States has used them as test subjects to test out the latest work of its military contractors.

If a true gift comes without strings, perhaps it also comes with a curse. So let us lay out first the curse that we have bestowed upon Gaza. The residents of Gaza (those who survive) will never in a million years be able to commit their own genocide. A nation forged in a second-generation genocide cannot have any stomach for imperial ambitions. It cannot look its people in the eye and encourage them to commit the atrocities that they studied in school for generations. At least, I do not think it will be able to pull of the trick that Israel pulled off. We have created the perfect victim, a society of pacifists. We have carefully organized the extrajudicial killing of any bloodline that is inconsistent with pacifism, and yet Gaza resists still.

For we have also created a society ripe for anarchism. A society with deep and abiding wounds caused by the oppression of its leaders, complicit in the Israeli occupation and in the crimes of October 7. A society with a deeply inconvenient mix of religious faiths, but certainly one that includes Islam. A society where each individual knows truly the pain of being under the surgeon’s knife of empire.

And so, we have created a temporal paradox. There can be no peace with Israel until Gaza is a paradise, but there can be no Gaza that is not some sort of anarcho-pacifist wonderland. The only resolution to the constraints of the current moment is to invent an anarcho-pacifism that can power an Islamo-futurist paradise capable of defending itself, and do so with a genocidal neighbor armed to the teeth by the richest kids on the block. We must win the Spanish Civil War, not for the Republicans, and not for the Soviet Union, and certainly not for Franco. We must win it for the Catalonia to which Orwell paid homage.

And make no mistake, Gaza has no need of foreigners to martyr themselves on Gazan soil. It would be like bringing coals to Newcastle. The supply is nigh-infinite, and the demand among the Israeli public slakes every day. What Gaza needs, most of all, is friends in high places. For Israel has plenty of those.

And who would be so foolish and so naive as to befriend the people of Gaza? Who could believe in the possibility of anything good and noble rising from the ashes? Who indeed? Perhaps that notorious purveyor of pie in the sky, Silicon Valley. For, as Elizabeth Holmes sits in her jail cell and dreams of freedom, I am sure that somewhere out there, there are a dozen well-received pitch decks to take her place.

In the world as it is being reshaped, Silicon Valley is perhaps the highest place left. Silicon Valley becomes, every day, less and less of a place name and more of a frame of reference. What, then, is the ideology of Silicon Valley, of Y Combinator, of Paul Graham? It speaks in no uncertain terms of a prophecy, that we can all Do What We Love and Love What We Do. That we can all Be Our Own Boss, or at least be on a first name basis with him or her or them or it. That we can, in a word, be both free and prosperous. It is the ideology of anarcho-capitalism in the heart of the American imperial project. It has facilitated and designed and even built the bombs that tore apart the Gazan academics of yesterday. Perhaps, as penance, it can be induced to educate the Gazan academics of tomorrow.

And so, with a deep shame that I have paid my taxes, but a deep hope that my future taxes will no longer fund such horrors, I call upon the world to search its pantries for aid to the Gazan people. To search its bookshelves for wisdom to share with the streetwise orphans we have made. To, above all, REFLECT ON WHAT WE HAVE DONE.

And I call upon the reader to visit https://pledge.thegazapledge.org. And to search their own hearts for a christening gift to the new homeland of the Islamo-futurist paradise of tomorrow, the anarcho-pacifist Caliphate that Saladin himself would be proud to defend with his life, and his honor. To the Free Lands of Palestine, may they ever be Free, and may they ever be Palestine.