Speed Of Violence
I originally laced this piece with more narrative around the impact of slow violence (the subject of this writing) on my life. There were sections discussing my relationship with decolonization that has been at times internal, at times external. As a Bangladeshi and Muslim American, I was raised by the fear of and fascination for these given identities. Fear and fascination sent me on a lifelong quest to learn the right combinations of words when doing any sort of advocacy work; the right volume for saying them, the right places to say them. Maybe I’ll make the business case! Maybe I’ll soften my tone. I’ll pad it with other ideas that feel safe. I’ll swallow the occasional comment or six if there’s a pathway for change ahead.
While I have intellectually decided to express more freely, my way of working and being is deeply entrenched in this constant fear-based editing cycle. I often write academically in an attempt to have my thoughts perceived as legitimate. Facts, balanced analysis, caveats, citations. All good things to have, but also play into multiple falsehoods. Firstly, that if I polish challenging words enough, they will be received. Secondly, that the tropes and misconceptions one might have about me or my beliefs are in my power to change.
I removed those sections and am too tired, mentally, to find a way to fit them back in such that these words carry the balance, nuance, and exact right level of emotion that I’m trained to uphold. Times like these are a reminder of how effective our systems are at silencing. Sometimes in specific instances, and so often, over time within us. Slowly. For anyone else looking for that right combination of credentials and words to challenge authority without challenging authority, you will hit a wall.
I found an old collection of letters I rallied my friends to write in November 2008. I had founded an Amnesty International club in my high school and organized a letter writing campaign to Israel’s Minister of Health demanding that six children - Sami Atwa Abu Ishaq, Ahmed Nahid Mohsin, Soheb Wael Alqasas, Hamza Hassan Abu Habel, Ahmen Talat Abu Omar and Mohammed Ashraf Abu Ajwa - be permitted to leave the Gaza Strip with their parents or grandparents to receive necessary medical treatments. I certainly was naïve about what a well-intentioned high schooler could achieve, but my belief in collective change and expression of right and wrong was clear in a way I mourn for myself.
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The pain that Jewish people experienced on and since October 7th is profoundly gut-wrenching and real. The impact of this attack on the state of Israel reverberates as pain for the global Jewish people whose collective trauma has been activated and deepened.
It is important to be clear about the source of that pain: Hamas, a militant resistance group that was originally a non-governmental group literally created to defy occupation and since 2006 has somewhat governed a subset of Palestinians due to decades of political fragmentation and chaos. Democratic choice is an illusion when the people inhabiting the space in question are unable to exist freely, and the political vacuums created by occupation are filled by desperate (often violent) actors whose primary political goals revolve around resistance and existence. A 2023 poll of Gazans show 73 percent believed there was corruption in Hamas-run institutions in the Gaza Strip, and 59 percent of Gazans said they could not criticize Hamas authorities without fear.
Permeating every aspect of daily life, governance and the constraints in which Palestinian representation must try to operate, occupation has been the painful reality upheld by the state of Israel - funded by the United States - leading to violence and pain that affects innocent people living in both the occupying and occupied regions. October 7th is one horrific example of this.
Many, many years of examples: U.S. taxpayer-dollar-funded denial of rights, death, spread out over time such that the public is unable to understand, process or effectively counter. Our psyches don’t have bandwidth for gradual destruction, which allows many types of violence to flourish without effective resistance: police violence, the murder and disappearing of Indigenous peoples in the Americas, civilian gun violence and climate change, as notable examples.
There’s a concept called “slow violence,” which is in many ways a sister concept to structural violence. Rob Nixon describes slow violence “a phenomenon that is not limited in terms of space and time, extending beyond the spectacle of direct violence. If direct violence is an act of high visibility, limited in terms of time and space, slow violence is an invisible violent imposition in the making, attritional but exponential in its consequences, incrementally unfolding over time. [He] stipulates that what makes slow violence unique is the fact that it is rarely perceived as violence at all since it lacks the spectacle of direct violence.”
Slow violence desensitizes us to the increments within. Decades of murder are simply harder for us to process and prioritize until it accumulates into something larger - often, a heinous period of intensified violence. The Holocaust is one of the paramount examples of slow violence that escalated. Decades of dehumanizing, subjugating and demonizing Jewish people that built up to a horrifyingly efficient period of state-sponsored murder.
It started with false accusations of Jewish responsibility in World War I - designed to deflect, scapegoat and confuse. Questions of belonging within the German state led to forced emigration. The use of physical space to separate made brutality in ghettos, enslavement in camps and extermination en masse easier to ignore and conduct.
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Zionism is a diverse movement that reckons with the slow violence inflicted upon Jews: a quest for home and safety in a world that failed them. As real as the pain felt by our Jewish sisters and brothers for millennia, and on October 7th, is the pain felt by the other survivors of slow violence: Palestinians. To see this vantage point, there needs to be an understanding of Israel as a settler colonial state - and that is not an indictment on the Jewish people and what Israel represents symbolically, but rather on the state.
We must all be able to criticize states in full: they are constructed agents of power that can create massively different life realities for people. The protection, safety, liberties, economic prospects and social order upheld by states are not a given - and they are not a given for occupied Palestine. There is a wealth of research and analysis that offers evidence for this position.
The absentee property law by the Knesset in 1950 designated the label “absentee” to any resident of Palestine who left their homes due to the resolution of 1947 - including those who remained within the state. Those within the state were subjected to British-inherited “Defence (Emergency) Regulations” - which were repealed when the British withdrew, and reinstated as law upon Israel’s establishment. They are in effect still today, and include permissions for the destruction of property, detention, extensive search and seizure, territory control and curfews.
The status of the West Bank as occupied territory is upheld by the International Court of Justice, and even Israel’s Supreme Court refers to their rule over the West Bank and Gaza as “belligerent occupation” in the 2004 Beit Sourik case. “The UN Security Council from the outset in 1967 has asserted the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip as occupied territory to which the [Geneva Conventions] apply, a position it has reaffirmed in numerous subsequent resolutions.” The withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza did not mean the end of occupation, as the control over borders, coastline, airspaces, the flow of goods, water, telecoms, electricity and sewage all remain under Israeli control. It is why that 16-year-old version of me wrote letters in 2008 responding to this Amnesty International call to action. That is how, on October 9th, Defense Minister Gallant was able to order a complete siege on the electricity, food, and fuel flows to Gaza.
Palestinians do not currently have the resources to live, yet alone advocate for their losses. In the aftermath of October 7th, the power differential and level of threat to Palestinian existence became immediately apparent to anyone who understood patterns of violence. The period of mourning that innocent people have been robbed of is a byproduct of the Israeli’s state’s role and power as a “belligerent occupier,” in their own Supreme Court’s words. This does not mean the killing by Hamas is “justified”, but it means that Israel’s promise to enact vengeance through state-sponsored violence - and its incredibly powerful ability to do so - has to be treated seriously. That is because time and time again, we have learned that those with power do not respond to violence with contextualization, reflection, nuance or measure; they respond with swift vengeance. The slow violence now has the go-ahead to speed up.
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On April 6th, 1994, the assassination of Hutu president Habyarimana accelerated years of slow violence between Hutus and Tutsis - slow violence that was directly linked to power imbalances also born of colonial decision-making. After a major incitement, a timer begins: a messy interaction of military power, public opinion, and propaganda all create a fog while people die. In just 100 days, 800,000 people perished as the world watched and waffled.
In Bangladesh, the killing took 8 months. Millions dead, millions raped; most say 3 million. The numbers are contested because people need to care to count. Colonial decisions, slow violence: another conflict where a glance at a map will tell you much of what you need to know. Years of deprivation, starvation, dehumanization. The Pakistan Army launched their attack on Bangladesh via Operation Searchlight. The next day, Archer Blood wrote on March 27, 1971:
“Our government has failed to denounce the suppression of democracy. Our government has failed to denounce atrocities. Our government has failed to take forceful measures to protect its citizens while at the same time bending over backwards to placate the West Pak[istan] dominated government and to lessen any deservedly negative international public relations impact against them. Our government has evidenced what many will consider moral bankruptcy,... But we have chosen not to intervene, even morally, on the grounds that the Awami conflict, in which unfortunately the overworked term genocide is applicable, is purely an internal matter of a sovereign state. Private Americans have expressed disgust. We, as professional civil servants, express our dissent with current policy and fervently hope that our true and lasting interests here can be defined and our policies redirected in order to salvage our nation's position as a moral leader of the free world.”
The telegram was ignored and the killing continued.
Of course all of these examples are different, but understanding violence inherently demands the comparison of whatever examples we have. Some people are more equipped than others to do so. Those of us who have studied the world, its conflicts, our histories, our systems: we have a responsibility to be vocal. Not everyone has the bandwidth, access, empathy or capacity to understand or call out the history and patterns at play, but many of us do and it requires our noise to combat the simplistic, distracting binary narratives that allow violence to flourish.
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The notion that not condemning something means you actively support it is, frankly, bizarre and applied very selectively. There are heinous acts of violence ocurring regularly, slowly and quickly, towards lots of people. With our finite energy, we condemn the ones that hit closest to home, emotionally and literally. It is easier to discount someone’s opinion if you deem them heartless, complicit or “other” from you. Equating a lack of condemnation with support for violence is harmfully simplistic and dismissive.
Many of us have wondered time and time again - when the pain is real for us - where are people’s voices? Where is the condemnation? It is extremely human to reinforce that feeling of abandonment with disapproval of the other. Some people experience this pain in moments and waves, in the aftermath of horrific violence like on October 7th; others feel it constantly if they are living in a state of perpetual devaluation. Both are real and need to be seen, but the latter - slow violence - is where advocacy needs to be focused because it’s inherently easier to ignore before it’s too late.
There is a lot for the Jewish community to hold right now. There is the pain of what happened on October 7th and the surge of anti-Semitism that affects minds and lives. The volume of noise that I wish was infinite to mourn everyone’s pain and mitigate everyone’s fear simply has to go towards the pressing, time-sensitive reality of genocide. Calling for ceasefire is not anti-Semitic. It is not being a “keyboard warrior,” it is not ignoring October 7th: it is a world of us who see, feel, and mourn slow violence begging for it to end.
