The Silent Satellite
Are we European artists, festivals, and cultural networks organising in the way we see colleagues from academia and history? It seems like we are following the Silent Satellite strategy.
Photo: Social Media
The Silent Satellite
I can only presume this image was taken from a satellite.
I can find no reliable information about it.
So, if it was by satellite, who owns the satellite?
Who owns the photograph?
What can it help us understand?
I ask again.
I ask, who owns this image?
The British intelligence services?
The US?
Musk?
Someone put that satellite up.
Someone knows.
Someone knows everything.
And they have always known what was going on behind that Israeli wall of silence.
The screams are, by definition, never silent.
But we can choose to believe otherwise.
Dear Clickbait Subscriber,
An update on matters regarding Clickbait Citizen.
In my last post, The Audience in the Era of Post Shame (a contribution I made at the Tomizza Forum in Slovenia) I suggested that,
Once Richard of Gloucester grabs power, after he murders everyone in his path to power, having shared those plans and ambitions with you, me and all in the audience before he enacts them, we ALL become co-criminals. When Richard no longer needs our silent, delicious acquiescence, or our complicity, guess what happens? Yes, the direct addresses to us stop. He stops addressing or acknowledging us. We become dispensable. We are his next victims.
In this respect, Shakespeare is predicting what we are now witnessing and in which we are now participating - the Gaza genocide. We all become co-criminals. And then we all become victims.
On June 11, Gideon Levi echoed my words when he wrote, “In Israel, all of us are now Ben-Gvir and Smotrich. All of us”. Not just Israel, Mr. Levi. The UK, my country of origin, is still providing an enormous quantity of military intelligence to Israel. Here is Levi’s full opinion piece from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz from a few days ago. It’s worth reading:
Alas and alack! Woe be unto us, for we have sinned: Five countries have imposed sanctions on Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. The war in Gaza will now stop immediately, and maybe the occupation, too, certainly the apartheid.
'I'm a journalist. I’ve run out of words to describe what we Israelis are doing to Gaza'.
Smotrich, who has devoted his life to studying Ibsen's works and loves to roam the streets of Oslo, inspired by the dramas, will no longer be able to visit Norway.
Ben-Gvir, the passionate birder, will no longer be able to track the kiwi, that fascinating bird whose sole habitat is New Zealand. Those two countries, along with Britain, Canada and Australia, have decided to impose on these two gentlemen a punishment that they, the government and the Israeli public will probably not be able to withstand. Naughty, naughty, Bezalel and Itamar, tsk, tsk, tsk! The two bad boys of Israel will stand in the corner.
It is hard to know whether these countries are being naïve or cowardly. Are they just paying lip service, or do they really believe this punishment will have some sort of effect on Israel's moves? In one regard, the move is definitely welcome. At long last, countries are taking concrete action, not just engaging in empty talk, which could hopefully signal more to follow.
Do Israelis really want to board Netanyahu's 'Pariah Express'?
Israel should extradite Netanyahu to the ICC for Gaza war crimes
Why sanctioning only Netanyahu's far-right ministers lets Israel off the hook
Perhaps this tiny, ridiculous step is meant only to be a wake-up call to a world that has been dozing peacefully amid the slaughter of Gaza, and in its wake will come the deluge. Yet from another perspective, one can't help but scoff. We deserve a lot more.
These countries' decision is based on a number of disgusting utterances by our two government ministers. They are careful not to punish them for their actual deeds. That's not nice, Bezalel, that you said Hawara must be wiped out. "Death to the Arabs," Itamar?
Besides these distinctions between the bad boys and the good government, everyone else threatening to impose sanctions is also careful to distinguish between the government and the people. It's all because of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government, not because of you, dear Israelis. We want to maintain with you the relations of "strong friendship" and "shared values." It's not every day that you get the only democracy in the Middle East with the most moral army in the world.
The five countries that have taken the baby steps have joined the United States of the previous administration, which imposed personal sanctions on two and a half violent settlers. That was the American contribution that preceded the war on apartheid. But apartheid looked straight into the whites of those sanctions' eyes – and has grown even stronger, along with settler violence.
So too is the determination that Smotrich and Ben-Gvir are the worst sinners. Four countries of the British Commonwealth and Norway have made life easy for themselves. What Israel is doing in the Gaza Strip is not happening because of Ben-Gvir and Smotrich. They aren't even the main culprits. Blaming them and only them is self-righteousness and hypocrisy.
Both the Gaza Strip and Israel are desperate now for international sanctions that will lead to an end to the slaughter in Gaza. We can't wait any longer, Mumbling like the five countries won't suffice. The slaughter will not stop without sanctions, and the slaughter cannot continue.
The sanctions must be directed at the entire government, from Netanyahu, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court, to the least senior government minister. Sanctions should also target the military officers and the bureaucrats who are carrying out the slaughter in Gaza.
A majority of Israelis, as public opinion polls indicate, support the slaughter and are even waiting for the population transfer that is to come in its wake. Therefore, the pressure and the punishment must be directed at Israel in its entirety.
And we can't move on without a comic interlude: The leader of the "Israeli résistance," Benny Gantz, head of the National Unity party, sees the decision on the sanctions against Smotrich and Ben-Gvir as "a profound moral failure on the part of the world."
Diplomats and decision-makers, do you get this? In Israel, all of us are now Ben-Gvir and Smotrich. All of us.
We awoke this morning to news that Iran’s emerging nuclear facilities had been bombed by Israel. What leaders in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt are not going to redouble, re-triple efforts to arm themselves with nuclear weapons as a result! We all remember that Gaddafi of Libya gave up his weapons in agreement with the UK and the West. Eight years later, he was dead in a ditch. The Northern Koreans have an enormous quantity of horrific missiles - and no one is thinking of attacking them. Is this the world we are planning for our grandchildren?
Thinking of Iran. As I saw the missiles hitting Tehran an hour ago, I could not help but think of the imprisoned filmmaker Navid Mihanoust and his film Café. I saw the movie as part of the Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival in 2023 and listened to his sister make a post-screening address to the audience about the arrest and detainment of her brother. The festival notes summed up the film perfectly:
A paroxysmal dream emerges from the depths of Kieslowski's filmography and awakens the doomed Iranian director Sohrab who, banned from making films, spends his days in a neighborhood cafe. However, the request of a young woman to present her performance in the store will mean new troubles, both for his already troubled marriage and for his strained relations with the authorities who are pressuring him to give "juicy" information if he wants to fall into the limelight. Through an imaginative attempt at autobiography, the director invites us to sample a new and undoubtedly unusual blend of Iranian cinema, leaving an aftertaste of sardonic civility of his homeland's deeply regressive and illiberal regime. Incurably cinephilic chamber drama, centered around a zen and uncompromising hero reminiscent of Nani Moretti, and spearheading humor against what is systemically absurd.
Do take a look at this snippet if you are unable to find the full movie itself:
In recent weeks, I have been participating in meetings of an international network of historians called the Genocide and Holocaust Studies Crisis Network. I am learning so much from this group of highly skilled academics and researchers, and I will discuss how this is impacting my thinking about art, culture and propaganda and Clickbait Citizen over future posts. While I have made a decision not to physically join the Global march to Gaza I fully support this peace initiative. One way of supporting them is to work with projects such as GHSCN:
Genocide and Holocaust Studies Crisis Network
Who We Are
We are a network of scholars who have come together because our field and our institutions are in crisis. We work in a variety of disciplines in the field generally known as Holocaust and Genocide Studies and have expertise in histories, theories, and contemporary cases of racism, antisemitism, fascism, and political violence, and in the study of genocides and mass atrocities in different parts of the world. Members of the group have affiliations in related fields such as Human Rights, International Law, Jewish Studies, Memory Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Settler Colonial Studies, Migration Studies, and Peace and Conflict Studies.
In the United States and globally, far-right forces are dismantling the institutions of democratic life; threatening basic human rights; demonizing immigrants, racialized minorities, and queer and transgender life; and attacking freedom of speech and assembly along with academic freedom. Over the last year and a half, we have witnessed the weaponization of Holocaust memory and accusations of antisemitism to justify genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing throughout Palestine — not only by state actors but also by institutions and scholars in our field. In the US, this same weaponization has resulted in the violent suppression of the right to free expression and protest and now in the arrest and threatened deportation of non-citizen students. The campuses where we work are subject to extortionate demands from a government that openly advertises its intent to destroy higher education, civil rights protections, scientific inquiry, and intellectual life.
Such events require an urgent examination of our field’s frameworks, priorities, and investments, and we commit to respond to this crisis in productive collaboration. Our expertise helps us to recognize and understand the erosion of democracy and the unfolding of political violence that we see all around us. Our study of histories of genocide and mass atrocity gives us insight into the rise of authoritarianism and ethnonationalism; the processes of dehumanization, ethnic cleansing, and genocide that accompany it; and the urgent need for civil society resistance. As we face this alarming authoritarian and nationalist turn, we come together in a joint commitment to mobilize our work in the interest of social justice and equality for all.
Points of Unity
Our network grows out of a series of shared commitments and beliefs:
Academic freedom, free speech, and the right to non-violent protest at colleges and universities are essential to the defence of human rights and resistance against political violence. We vigorously support freedom of inquiry and expression in the face of a rising repression that threatens pluralistic and inclusive scholarly discourse.
Our scholarship and activism must work to counter structures and practices of racism (including but not limited to antisemitism, anti-Blackness, anti-Palestinian racism, and anti-Muslim racism), ethnonationalism, misogyny, queer and trans exclusion, ableism, and red-baiting, among other forms of social exclusion and political authoritarianism.
It is necessary to refuse and contest the increasing instrumentalization of antisemitism accusations, including through the IHRA Working Definition, which wrongly equates critique of Israel’s policies with antisemitism. Such instrumentalization silences political dissent, enables deportations and firings, serves as a vehicle for advancing authoritarian and nationalist agendas, and exploits feelings of vulnerability. It also endangers Jews, cynically divides the Jewish community, and drives a wedge between Jews and other minority and civil society groups.
We believe historical analogy and collective memory are powerful resources for understanding and mobilizing opposition to persecution, war, forced population transfer, and genocide against anyone, yet we remain vigilant about the ways they can be deployed to justify violence and reproduce forms of ethno-nationalism and racial supremacy.
We recognize the Nakba as a mass atrocity crime that demands both scholarly attention and justice. Scholars in Holocaust and Genocide Studies should engage with Palestinian scholarship and perspectives on the Nakba, as well as broader global conversations around violence, displacement, and their legacies. As scholars and teachers, we unconditionally oppose the destruction of educational institutions, archives, cultural heritage, and memory; and we believe all who live between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea—Palestinians, Israelis, and others—deserve justice and equality.
My question is the following: Are we European artists, festivals, and cultural networks organising in the way we see colleagues from academia and history? Because it seems to me that we have decided to follow the Silent Satellite strategy.
Chris
For more information on GHSCN, visit https://www.ghscn.org/about
More on Navid Mihanoust (who, I believe, remains in prison):