Somebody blew up America, & other poems¹

In the week which preceeded his overwhelming electoral victory as the new University Rector (a role previously occupied by none other than Arthur Balfour), plastic and reconstructive surgeon Dr. Ghassan Abu Sitteh was due to give a lecture at the University of Glasgow. In this speech, he argued: “Israel is just the tip of the genocidal project. The rest of the genocidal iceberg exists elsewhere.” Abu-Sitteh was referring to what has come to be known as the axis-of-genocide and what he describes as a system of genocide enablers; from NATO countries offering Israel unconditional military support, to universities profiting from arms exports, to editorial boards (from mass media to scientific journals) systematically barring the publication of any material constituting evidence of genocidal intent. “We need to dismantle the genocidal iceberg”, he asserted, “so that the tip of the iceberg remains unsupported.” 

The iceberg metaphor evoked by Abu-Sitteh (recently prevented from entering Germany to deliver a first-hand testimony of his time at Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital) lays bare the imperial ordering of the Zionist project and its global economy, and in doing so, highlights its many frontlines. We are reminded that as a settler colony and an extension to US/European imperialism, Zionism is a planetary enterprise that operates across various scales (geographic and otherwise). Reckoning with the many elsewhere(s) of empire has consequences for how we think militancy, internationalism and resistance in the wake of the Gaza genocide, and against the backdrop of a liberal world order best captured in the form of airdrops that kill and food aid as distribution of mass death. 

In this issue of Weird Economies, Lisa Minerva zooms in on Israel’s weapons suppliers across the imperial core, making the case for the dismantling of the Israeli war machine through tactics of sabotage and property destruction. The essay focuses on the experience of Palestine Action, a pro-Palestinian network committed to direct action against all operational facilities of the Zionist entity’s biggest arms firm, Elbit Systems, which supplies 85 percent of its military’s land and air munitions. Known for advertising its products as “battle-tested on Palestinians”, the arms manufacturer has been forced to shut down two of its factories in the UK and abandon its London headquarters due to a sustained sabotage campaign by the direct action group. Minerva outlines a strategy designed to bring up the company’s ESG risk ratings² and make Elbit (and for that matter, Zionism) a bad investment.   

Lama El Khatib initiates a conversation around the political economy of the prison industrial complex, connecting Gaza/Palestine to other global contexts. If the carceral is a site of value capture and value production, what economic interventions may interrupt or re-route the transnational channels of capital that produce/sustain it as it expands across border, siege, checkpoint, wall, surveillance technology, jail cell? How might this affect the ways in which we imagine abolition in Palestine and beyond? What lessons might it offer for internationalist solidarity today? 

Also in this issue, Adam HajYahia explores the imbrication of cultural workers and institutions with the wider political struggle. The past 6 months have further exposed an art economy and cultural terrain increasingly saturated with infrastructures of discipline, policing and punishment.  HajYahia asks: how can we build a materialist analysis of artistic and cultural work that doesn’t only operate at the level of critique, but also lays the ground for negative speculation? Building on the struggles of contemporary cultural movements, unions and worker coalitions, the essay proposes a framework grounded in labour politics and organization. It draws on recent cases in Germany, the UK, the US and Palestine in attempts to formulate a theory of labor in critique of culture. 

Through a close look at Yemeni militancy in the Red Sea, Ahmed Isamaldin offers a pertinent reflection on the specter of Third Worldism, maritime politics and asymmetric warfare. Delving into the economics of the Bab al- Mandab blockade, which has arguably set off a “pandemic-scale disruption” of global supply chains, the essay unravels a new horizon for militant action while also reminding us that maritime transportation is “not simply an enabling companion of trade, but central to the very fabric of global capitalism.”³ This timely analysis provides an account of Yemeni history and class relations focused on the years 1962-1978, a context largely absent from current global discourse on Yemen, yet key to understanding today’s Hodeidah movement and Yemeni-Palestinian solidarity.

We conclude by remarking here that such reckonings must always already recognise that all is secondary, however crucial, to the liberation battle being fought by the Palestinian resistance from within. We are always, already indebted, for everyday the future is being written in Gaza: in Jabalia, Khan Younis and Shuja’iyya. In the words of Ghassan: “tomorrow is a Palestinian day.”