Audio by Jules Keohane
There is a basic premise in unionism that mistreating an individual worker creates the possibility of mistreatment for every worker. Its slogan is ‘An injury to one is an injury to all.’
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A young woman from Israel is about to embark on student life. She comes from a mixed family of Jews and Christians, with a strong family background in social justice and reform. She has defied her country’s insistence on her Zionist loyalty at great personal cost. She has been arrested. She has spent a lot of her time working in solidarity with the Palestinian cause for freedom. Her faith in what she believes is right is unshakable, non-negotiable, impenetrable.
She is though, still a part of a group that is going to extraordinary measures to wipe out its enemies, even though ‘the enemy’ was on the land it occupies long before it arrived to lay claim. She cannot escape her identity as either an Israeli or as a half-Jew.
My parentage is mixed too.
I come from two groups of people who were champions of oppression and attempts to destroy in mind and body – even in existence per se – large groups of people they perceived as threats to their continuation. Furthermore, the colour of my skin is the same as those who, in recent centuries, were the tormentors, persecutors, killers, disruptors, movers, buyers, thieves and tramplers of people whose skin tones are darker than mine.
Neither this young woman nor I can escape what we are.
The only thing we can hope to escape is a compulsion to continue to harm.
I loathe and despise all the ways in which humans impose harm. The relentless, immoral and illegal ‘war’ tactics used by the army in Israel on the people of Palestine have sharpened my seething disgust for casual dehumanisation carried out daily by nice people.
I watched a video of a member of Knesset frothing against Arabs and felt revolted. Then I read a comment below in which someone said something about how ugly the Hebrew language was. It didn’t hurt as much as the fulminating freak-out I’d just witnessed, but it hurt too. If I can compare it to something, it might be the beginning twinge of pain in a tooth where root canal will later have to be performed.
Mocking, poking fun at, belittling, bullying, deriding, insulting and sneering at groups of people – their customs, their dress, their language, the looks – are the grim little goblins of genocide.
Jeering at all the people in one group means jeering at one.
An injury to one is an injury to all.
Even while I roll my eyes every time someone expresses dismay at the Zionist project’s outrages and is called an antisemite for it, casual hate speech towards Jews and Israelis as a whole makes my blood freeze. Well-meaning people, in their distress about what is going on in the Middle East, have also been spouting antisemitic nonsense that in some cases sounds demented and in others sounds ‘civilised’ and ‘rational’ because its delivery is calm and cerebral.
There was a news report about a fire in Cape Town last week that wiped out the homes of several shack dwellers. Someone had been arrested for arson. One commenter said some pretty nasty things about the alleged arsonist, a stranger to her no doubt, and used the words ‘these people’. Her underlying prejudices were clear to other readers, but not to her. She simply dug in when she was challenged.
Concepts of ‘these’ or ‘those’ or ‘you’ people drive negligent and then increasingly abusive language. They support prejudice, entrench stigma, cause separation and instil fear.
Anger at injustice and oppression are necessary and beautiful. I feel its purifying heat as an internal steadiness that leapfrogs the not-unimportant details of my identity and lands me in a place where I feel certain that stigma – no matter whether it is aimed at the overdog or the underdog – must always be resisted.
One person can be, but should never be assumed to be, representative of their group.
Group rights must be standard for all categories of persons. If that were so, JK Rowling would not, for instance, have to publicly wet her pants about women’s rights year after year by focusing all her feminist anxieties on trans women.
I am not simplifying, though it may sound like it.
For instance, while I understand that not all men are rapists – and try treat each man I come across as a new human who may well become a friend, an ally, a helper, a confidant until he proves that he is not these things – I keep myself safe through a certain wariness, a certain lack of trust of the group they belong to.
In psychology, there are three forms of trust most commonly studied:
Trust – the ability to be vulnerable even with someone who is trustworthy.
Trustworthiness – behaviours of one person that inspire positive expectations in another person
Trust propensity – the ability to make yourself vulnerable to others in general.
If trust is lost through the violation of one of these, it is very hard to regain. I read somewhere that there is ‘asymmetry in the building versus the destruction of trust’.
This makes sense to me. You can spend years trusting someone based on your experience of them, and one day they do something that shatters your sense of the relationship you had with them, putting all that went before on shaky ground.
Or you can spend years having been shown nothing but untrustworthiness from a group of people – say doctors, or hairdresser, or bankers – so it’s hard to trust them. But it would be irrational to decide that all doctors are assholes, all hairdressers are wilful and all bankers are thieves.
There is asymmetry in the building versus the destruction of trust.
Somewhere in all of this, I try to keep something alive in me for the individual, and for the individual’s experience within a group or place or time.
One of the only ways I can do this, for myself, is to try to always reject speech that arches towards stereotype and received ideas; towards pat formulae and inferred patterns.
No good lies in generalisation.
Loving to hate seems very common and very human to me. If we are built to hate, then I want to hate what is neither ‘one’ nor ‘all’, but is a tendency prevalent in all of us.
I want to hate hate.
I do hate hate.
With love and love and love and love,
K.
Tune in again next week for a nice fat list of recommendations of things I’ve seen, heard and read recently that I think you will like too. This week’s letter got a bit too long for that.
I have unlocked an older post about powerful people who bully trans people. Read it here.
Audio reading by Jules Keohane.
'These people' is such a red flag. It pushes all my buttons and immediately has me branding the speaker as prejudiced. Which makes me prejudiced too, I realise. But what I really want to say is thank you for speaking out about these things that aren't easy to discuss and can potentially put you in the firing line of those who love to label instead of listen.
I’ll read this again when I’m not in a pharmacy queue but this made me feel better about the world on a morning where I’ve been dealing with casual bigotry while seeking medical treatment - that there are other people who see people like me and Gabe as humans. I already knew that about you but it’s always good to be reminded why I love you.