Unsettling Events by John Na’em Snobar – May edition

Since my last newsletter, more diplomats and public officials have resigned from their roles, citing their inability to continue to support a system which  is responsible for the genocide of the Palestinian people. These include US State Department Arabic spokeswoman Hala Rharrit, Jewish-American US Interior Department political appointee  Lilly Greenberg, and US Defense Intelligence Agency  Army Major Harrison Mann, and US State Department Official Annelle Sheline.  I am pleased to have also done this.

The most common reason provided by those who resigned from their posts and positions over Gaza was the morality of continuing to remain silently complicit in the genocide. This awakening within the Spirit is being experienced widely throughout international systems. It is a feeling. It is a sense.

Despite these resignations, Western State support for the State of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people remains steadfast. Although the people working within the systems themselves can divorce their feelings from their work in order to ‘remain calm under pressure’ (read: ‘remain calm under genocide’), many are feeling the moral weight of their own complicity. Indeed, in the case of Palestine, we are all complicit. 

As governments and institutions remain largely steadfast in their support of the State of Israel, students across the world continue to occupy University campuses, demanding an end to this support. For those of us who have visited the encampments, we have witnessed a future society that is kind, compassionate and empathetic. We have seen what a new system looks like: one that replaces globalism with localism.

Members of Parliament, diplomats, and policy-makers should take this opportunity to visit the University encampments, and understand what a compassionate future for the world looks like. It is there – and not in the foreign ministries or defence establishments – that the truly rigorous conversations about the future are taking place. I suspect that history will record the university encampments as the turning point – toward what however – remains a decision belonging to the elites. To help, I am pleased to present part two of the ‘Western diplomat’s guide to navigating decolonisation, below.

You might also be interested in reading my latest article in Jerusalem-based magazine This Week in Jerusalem, which touches on the International Struggle for Palestinian liberation. 

A Western diplomat’s guide to navigating decolonisation (part two)

Part of what is so ‘attractive’ to decision-makers about colonised structures is that they are ‘predictable’, and ‘stable’. This perceived need for stability underpins an economic structure which relies upon ‘return on investment’, as opposed to faith. This can be challenging concept for policy and decision-makers to understand. It’s okay – you will get there. 

In part one of this guide, I explained how ‘race’ is understood by Western diplomats: as way through which people advance their interests politically  (as opposed to any genuine engagement or reflection about the impact of white supremacy). Among many other things, white supremacy is an economic system, which requires us to lend our time, energy, and passion toward advancing the interests of whoever our boss might be (shareholder/supervisor). 

Colonised structures are structures that are built to create a sense of ‘stability’, through which investments can be made to extract a result. Cynics would say that humans have always worked, or been enslaved, to meet their needs so why is working through so-called ‘colonised structures’ so bad? What is the big deal? 

The question could also be asked in the reverse. Haven’t humans always had to rely on faith, that the rain will fall, or that the cast net would yield fish? Does the tree in your garden perform a means-test on your income, before deciding whether you are worthy of apples, this season? 

The real reason that working through these colonised structures is ‘so bad’, is because we have forgotten what life was like before these systems were created. Worse still, we are unable to distinguish between what we have agency, and decision over (the construct in which we participate), and what it is that we ‘must’ be a part of. The great awakening occurring within established systems, which has led to the resignation of an increasing number of public officials is itself a process of decolonisation. 

So what? Where does this leave you, as a Western diplomat, participating in a system that one way or another is supporting the bombing of children in their tents in Gaza, while gaslighting the world that this is not happening? How do you take the first jump from the stability of the system, into the discomfort of uncertainty? 

Faith.

Faith is what is largely missing from the current discourse in public policy, security, and diplomacy. Questions of faith are often dismissed with the usual (English-inherited) sense of cynicism. This cynicism seeks to dismiss any engagement with Spirit, that does not serve to extract a guaranteed outcome – even if that outcome means the death of your perceived opponent. I recall the words of native America leader of the confederacy, Wahunsonacock, who said to the English coloniser of his country, John Smith, in the early 1600s:

‘Why should you take by force that from us which you can have by love? Why should you destroy us, who have provided you with food? What can you get by war?… What is the cause of your jealousy? You see us unarmed, and willing to support you wants, if you will come in a friendly manner, and not with the swords and guns, as to invade an enemy’.’ 

I have heard these words uttered by my own Teta, who after the Nakba, often wondered how it is that the Jews who fled Europe for safety in Palestine, given the horrific crimes committed by other Europeans against them, had then turned on the indigenous Palestinians, and evicted them from their homeland? ‘There was always enough to share,’ my Teta would say. ‘Why they did that to us, I will never understand.’ John Smith was similarly responsible for massacres of Turtle Island’s indigenous tribes.  In all these cases, there was a recorded history of indigenous peoples expressing faith in their own generosity, even though it was their lands that were being colonised. 

Navigating decolonisation lies somewhere in the knowledge that existed prior to the structures of modern colonisation, in which we live and function today. That is – decolonisation exists somewhere between lost history, and ancestral memory. Accessing these memories, and lessons must start from a place of faith, that there once existed a different way of living, that was more kind, compassionate, and empathetic. You only need to visit a university encampment, to understand. 

Kind regards, John Na’em Snobar