A letter was written claiming that there needed to be a “left renewal”, it was published late last year on its own registered domain while genocide was being unfolded on my people. It gained both praise and notoriety on twitter. If Nuance is left renewal’s carrot then its stick is Deflection and Suppression via its desired self-centering algorithm. Not wanting to say any more about the letter lest I give it any more credence and exhausted with Zionism’s perpetual attempt to wedge itself inside left discourse, I decided the only way forward was mockery. I created fake personas attached behind long winded emails reinforcing the authors’ own warped view of the world, each masked behind a name or name(s) carrying an ideology of monomaniac anti-antisemitism and discrete islamophobia coupled with left-liberal talking points of which I knew to conform to the authors' warped and narrow worldviews, my creations were all of an ethnoreligious background, the perfect nonfungible
Tokenisms for liberal supremacism. As each email was received and each story incredulously accepted I grew more ambitious up until I was discovered by a curious twitter user after which my pseudonyms were removed over the next two or three days. They stood out not just because they were funny, not just because of their placement but because they were the only racially marked ones. If there are any lessons Palestinians can learn from our ancestors, as our history is fraught with hapless examples of trusting the colonizer, it is that we will never accept Zionism. This is embodied in daily colloquial speech when we refer to Israel, “the entry”, “48”, “through”. These are not prescriptive insertions but are descriptive manifestations grown from our lived experience and past, spend time with a Palestinian and the mockery seen here is not uncommon for whether our usurper comes in the form of bulldozers, bombs, bullets or babbling long-forms the satire comes naturally through our tongues. At the current time of writing, a new Arabic translation of the letter has been made available, I can think of areas in the coldest and darkest parts of our known universe that will see more light than that abomination ever will.

Digression: I have also included another round of signatures from a different letter in an Australian context (the letter, masquerading ‘across all political spectrums’ “https://www.jews4humanity.com/”). I came across this letter when viewing the now infamous Zionist “WhatsApp600” leak featuring some 600 academics and creatives in Australia, the majority of whom were Zionists, whose efforts expose, as Palestinian-Australian academic Randa Abdel- Fattah elucidates in a post on Feb 11 2024, the coordinated efforts of Zionists in academic and creative spaces working to silence Palestinian and other voices critical of Israel. (After the chat-group leak was made public, the controversy was not on the Zionists, but rather on the leak being made public, the perpetrator victim in perpetuity).On the signatory page, I threw in Dr Tooze Alekum as that has become my moniker of choice, however upon scrolling through the list of names last month I also came across another one, Deir Yassin. I had indeed forgotten I had even submitted that. There was something haunting about seeing the two words glare at me months after adding the signature. That it sat there, carelessly accepted, like a footnote to its own massacre among a list of proud beneficiaries of that massacre seeking to yet again obfuscate, broke me. My own deeds had come back to haunt not them, but me, their scene of crime laid bare, while I revisit my own innocent joke.

I should emphasize again, my focus here isn’t on left renewal, or the Australian jews4humanity letter specifically, or the plethora of other letters that have come and gone, instead they demonstrate the current vehicle through which Fascisms manifest and are articulated. I will let the spirit of Césaire speak through his Discourse:

And sweep out all the obscurers, all the inventors of subterfuges, the charlatans and tricksters, the dealers in gobbledygook. And do not seek to know whether personally these gentlemen are in good or bad faith, whether personally they have good or bad intentions. Whether personally — that is, in the private conscience of Peter or Paul — they are or are not colonialists, because the essential thing is that their highly problematical subjective good faith is entirely irrelevant to the objective social implications of the evil work they perform as watchdogs of colonialism.

Pattern recognition — we see these patterns with the same mechanical ease that a musician works through their maqams in practice, does muscle memory precede theory? (Of course, Zionists, as Palestinians know always act in bad faith) After my exposure, charmed by the responses, I made a twitter account and released a statement below. The Arabic lines at the end are a snippet from a popular poem by Mahmoud Darwish called “I love you more” (أحبك أكثر )and popularized in song form by Marcel Khalife and singer Omeima al-Khalil. I chose these lines, because it so happened that this song was what was racing through my heart as I was registering the emails, composing the signatory letter while on the bus headed to marches begging my government to call for a ceasefire. I translate the snippet as follows:

Your hands are trees

But I do not sing like all the other nightingales.

For these chains teach me to fight, to fight, to fight

Because I love you more.

Some translations: most of the words are colloquial Levantine Arabic swearwords. Where diacritics exist it’s because these pseudonyms were part of a Balkan Anarchist collective.
Ajna Tyouzna: “Where art our arses” (preposition has formal connotations) Kharatužfik,: “Shit and Screw you”
Dartafiwižjhak: “Fart in your face”
Idi Biteezi: “My hand is up my arse”
Tooze Alakum: “Screw you all”, spelling chosen so that it looks like a normal English name after the great Adam Tooze.
Yikhráb Baytak: “Wreck your home”
Abakus Ömmak,: a play on abacus (but “a” to be listed first): It can translate as father of your mothers ***. Umlaut after Abdullah Öcalan

And so it is, on the 29th December 2023 we were outed.
{Dr. Abakus Ömmak,
Dr Tooze Alekum,
Comrade Ajna Tyouzna,
Comrade Aljoša Kharatužfik, Comrade Sladjana Kharatužfik, Comrade Mojsije Naseljenik, Comrade Božidarka Zločinački, Comrade Yikhráb Baytak,
Comrade Slobodan Dartafiwižjhak and
Professor Idi Biteezi,}

Their exiled names stripped bare here will never elicit the same kind of childish convulsive laughter as was the case when assigned in their rightful place, alphabetized by first name, in Times New Roman, separated by commas, each self-important signatory next to the other, curator carefully pasting the name from the long-winded preachy email he’d just received making sure the orthography retains the diacritics. We’ve gone from the immediate glee a child might feel in their first encounter with the thrustful force of the commodity object, having just consumed a Kinder Surprise chocolate, having just assembled its toy (whatever the order), to the hour after, the void. Left with nothing but a carcass, once a voluminous alluring piece of marketing genius reminding the child to beg their carer for another the next time they visit the shops are now nothing but a crumpled 12um thin Aluminium foil, some chemical primer to help bind ink to metal, the orange ‘surprise yolk’ shell probably made from PET and likely injection moulded (and not extrusion moulded) and a toy that has outlived its already short use-value. The yolk having housed and protected the impermanency of surplus is now discarded and forgotten, or, becomes a poor child’s NERF blaster, fired from the mouth using the tongue to elastically assist in propulsion as the saliva drenched case, flying across the living room, hilariously hits the child’s younger sibling in the forehead becomes the last extracted piece of joy from this carcass – this post can be thought of those last fleeting moments. (The Kinder analogy is coincidental and not inspired by Žižek. The irony however, is not lost on us).

It was of course, also, in ordering. Dr. Abakus Ömmak, like the resplendent Sun rising from the barbaric East, unbeknownst to Whitey-on-the-moonists that wrote the letter, led some to spit their tea as they parsed through the names, perhaps it is in this subliminal (sublingual?) space where we find the essence of what it means to resistantly "ridicule" that contrast between those that "get it" and those that "don’t".

It was Slavoj Žižek eclipsed by the celestial bodies of Slobodan Dartafiwižjhak and Sladjana Kharatužfik. Word in the faculties has it that it was thanks to this very moment of rare orbital precision that helped restablish harmony between between physcists and philosophers as it has left Žižek finally performing the caricature of himself on a stage in total darkness, disturbing no one, not even his non-existent shadow. The speed with which we conjured old /slôbodan/ and /sla:dʒjanə/ was quicker than it takes an average human to articulate from the alveolar fricative /s/ to voiced alveolar lateral /l/ forming the common consonant cluster /sl/. These Balto-Slavic phonemes lived up to their purpose as Trojan Horses for their Arab surnames. Therein lay the artistic expanse of resistance in contrast to the hapless denseness of the authors.

It was Idi Biteezi, camouflaged behind other names like the peppered moth oft used as an example for high school instruction in demonstrating Darwinian natural selection in action as a consequence of the industrial revolution. Perhaps it was due to this that Prof Biteezi was the last to survive the purge (30-12-23), perhaps it was due to the fact that his hand was hid up so far his arse in stark contrast to the ideology behind “look-at- me” liberalism: everyone, raising their hands up in the air begging to be seen and to show the world the extent of their cognitive capacities and their morality which they feel ought to covet to us like the firmament. Or, perhaps it’s the writers, whose heads were even further up their own arses that it took more time to find Prof Idi Biteezi– but it is all conjecture from here.

Cotyledons are what biologists use to refer to the leaves that first grow when a seedling sprouts. The life of our pseudoheteronyms can draw similar analogies from this. The battle was short and spontaneous, If we’re to dare compare ourselves to the likes of a Fernando Pessoa or a Flann O’Brien to which we ourselves are not even seedlings then these beings were newly sprouted pseudoheteronyms in the truest sense of the word.

As has been mentioned in the twitter thread and as is obvious – that we got away with this is testament to Zionism’s inveterate modus operandi: exclusion, isolation, and omission.

This post is dedicated to their short fictional memories and the laughter they have brought to the masses as we remind ourselves that resistance can take all forms. It was fun while it lasted.This post is not a response to anything, for if it were, it would place some value on that which it claims to respond to, to which nothing could be further from our aim. It is merely a brief cathartic attempt to deal with fascism in its most liberal phase while anyone dares to confound our struggle with false conciliation, with even more words while our amputated children scream in pain without anesthetic.

Most fundamental of all is the cessation of the genocide, attainment of justice, the liberation of Palestine and the right of return, from the river to the sea. We will not let others speak for us, we will not let their ideology manage our struggle for us, or speak for our struggle on their terms with their chains of obfuscation, misinformation or relentless, boring, drivel.

Yours Tuzly – the Arachnospindicalist Palestinian Collective.