In 1973, a British parliamentarian named Christopher Mayhew promised a £5,000 reward to anyone able to prove that Egypt’s second president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, had indeed declared his intent to “drive the Jews into the sea.” Mayhew then expanded his criteria to include any documentation of genocidal statements made by a responsible Arab leader. Whatever quotations he received he deemed inauthentic. It was not long before one claimant, a 22-year-old Jewish student, sued Mayhew and their dispute went to the High Court. The case was dropped after the student’s lawyer admitted that the statement his client provided, a quote from the first secretary general of the Arab League, “was not genocidal.”
Mayhew called the trope “apocryphal.” Still, apocryphal as it may be, I am often asked if I want to throw Israelis into the sea. This question has persisted for decades, leveled as an accusation against Palestinians and allies of our cause. Almost every time, anywhere I take the stage, it is an expected though unwanted guest. Whether I am singing my usual nagging refrain about Zionism or talking about the “creative process” (i.e., stimulants and sedatives), someone will spring from their seat, tripping over themself to ask that million-dollar question. More accurately, I am asked why I want to throw Israelis into the sea, not if. That I possess such genocidal intent is already assumed. It is an attempt to implicate me in the inquisitor’s worldview. A worldview where I am a savage, pathologically murderous Arab.
“Israelis” and “Jews” are usually used interchangeably by those posing the question and understood, irrefutably, as interchangeable. The responsibility to then make a pristine distinction between the two falls on me. The burden of pedagogy. But none of those words—“if,” “why,” “Israelis,” “Jews”— interest me the most. It is the word “want” that is most telling. Wanting is neither policy nor procedure, neither present nor material. Wanting is hoping, longing. Colonial logic says that if I were to have that mere desire within my heart; if I am fantasizing about cartoonish revenges, that alone negates my claim to justice. Thus, any testimony of the injustices I have witnessed and endured is unreliable. The brutality of colonialism, the very brutality that is institutionalized and legalized, can then be excused or even warranted, if I were to want such a turn of events. Such desires, according to mind-reading critics, linger deep within our psyche and should discredit the Palestinian. Our yearnings impugn our plight. The trouble here is not that our enemies employ this illicit tactic (that is what enemies do) but that we submit to it. We attempt to refute defamation instead of repudiating it. We placate this fallacious logic instead of saying: Even if—even if!—my dreams were your worst nightmares, who are you to rob me of my sleep?
To simply imagine Palestine without settlers, to simply imagine a sky without drones—that, in the Zionist imagination, is genocidal. If you stick with the “want” of the charge, the notion that Palestinians want to kill all Jews, you find that Zionism is at war with our future. It is at war with our ability to articulate, even if only through poems and protest chants, a future in which Zionism does not reign. For in the past 100 years, Zionism has situated us in a condition of constant dispossession and premature death; our Nakba remains and renews. We are besieged in an inescapable, eternal present tense.
Yeah can't disagree with that. The only reason I responded to it is because unlike the Epstein list they didn't just dream up the laptop (though they did exaggerate stuff) and I wouldn't compare the two.