Cultural Invasion

The middle prong of the triple-tine fork that's stabbing Palestine.

I wrote about Cultural Genocide in October 2023 for Middle East Eye. It looks quaint, reading it on the day that Hossam Shbat’s car has been targeted, and he’s dead on my social media feed, bleeding from his nose. Go read for yourself, what cultural genocide looked like back in 2023 in Jenin Camp, when my friends were ‘only’ rounded up at gunpoint and taken away, now still absent, incarcerated, and no doubt brutalized.

My feature had some annoying errors edited into it by a well-meaning editor sitting in London with a fleeting experiential understanding of the region, and zero knowledge of the cultural genocide that was being enacted specifically on Jenin Camp, where I was living in 2023. Despite this, the article stands up, and I’m proud of the piece.

Thankful that my phrase “it’s like Clockwork Orange, but Jewish” got into the feature. It’s the line I am proudest of, because a year and a half later, it’s hard to contest, even by actual Zionists. Broadcasting Jewish prayers on the tannoy system of a destroyed mosque is basic Jewish anarcho-terrorism 101, but I caught a lot of flack back then, and was called ‘antisemitic’ by a white lady in London who clearly didn’t get it.

Here’s the link to my article.

Cultural genocide is only one tool in a box of weapons to attack a culture and provide a foreign cultural invader with the means to exploit the locals, but there are other less obvious tools to ‘finish the job’ without their awareness that it’s even happening.

One such tool is cultural invasion. This can take many forms, including the Coca Cola logo on a local independent shop here in Ramallah al-Tahta, the shop’s owners fierce defenders of Palestine, proud of their Arabic heritage, active 5-times-a-day Muslims. You want Coke while they’re praying? You wait until the mat’s rolled up. But the logo persists because it’s easy money to rent their shopfront. It comes down to, why not?

And beyond this casual kind of entry-level cultural invasion are far more insidious and pernicious varieties than the logos and brands peppered in our peripheral vision as we hear the honks of Skodas, smell gourmands in labeled bottles that borrow rose, citrus and nuts from the region and sell them back to us in corporate newspeak, and as our sense of touch is muted by soft sneaker soles that we pad around the Land of Palestine, protected from fallen leaves and sacred earth, oblivious to the tiny rocks and sand in our mass-produced, branded and logo’ed shoes that send our cash from here to China in a steady stream.

I don’t want to highlight organic cultural bleed - stuff like challahs, freshly baked and proliferating in Ramallah by bakers formerly employed in ‘48. It’s a little weird, but it’s not not cultural invasion, and it’s not appropriation of Jewish bread either, for many many reasons, including the fact that challah bread never left the region, as eaten by Palestinian Jews reaching back as least as far as 2,000 years ago, when they were braided like today, but deep fried in olive oil. Back then and also today, challah-baking is not crafted by the settler-colonial state specifically to create fake cultural nodes for their fake state to do state-making things. It’s basically just the product of otherwise unemployed local Ramallah folks baking stuff they learned to do over in ‘48, but they’re no longer granted permits to do in Jerusalem; therefore, they’re innocently purveying these challahs here. An organic bleed of baked goods into the West Bank, sped up by the Occupation withholding permits for gainful employment in lucrative settler colonial markets, through the turnstile at Qalandiya. It’s basically harmless, because everyone can identify their own Palestinian breads, and like any other place, if they choose to eat a non-Palestinian food, that’s everyone’s right.

What I want to talk about here is the deeply intentional work of cultural invasion - that’s what we’ll be unpacking after I share one last essential contextual point, which I’ve garnered from devoting myself since the end of lockdown 2020 to learning - at the risk of my life often, and on both side of the Green Line, in addition to my decade in the UK, USA, Europe and Asia. These are my treasures, shared here with you for free. You gain these gems casually, on the internet, while I devoted myself for years to hard diplomacy both inside and outside Palestine, insane nil-sum investment of resources and time, and physical peril, building a grassroots voluntary organisation that’s taken over my career to a large extent (but not entirely), building an international team that’s frankly more effective at actually doing this work than the big guys with big donors.

So please listen when I say I know something. It’s diamonds and pearl, friends, from a cultural bridge that’s a unique - literally unique - vantage point here in the West Bank. Don’t forget, I am a unicorn.

Here’s the thing - Palestinian cultural workers have been raised since the Oslo tragedy with one directive for their work, and one directive alone - advocacy.

Palestinian workers are indoctrinated, or to use a more kind word, encouraged. They are educated and inspired - exclusively - to advocate for Palestine.

No other place is this the case. There’s a SYSTEM of arts orgs and teachers, and every kind of interaction that drums the same message into every cultural worker here - to create work for Western audiences that does advocacy. This is a basic fact of life here, so prevalent it’s invisible to the people swimming in these waters.

It’s the job of artists. They have a job, and that job is advocacy, period.

And I understand why this is, as someone who was motivated to come here to literally do advocacy work. I want to free Palestine. But - later we’ll unpack why Palestinian cultural workers may not be using their cultural skills in the optimum way due to the heavy emphasis on advocacy. First, I want to return to the idea of cultural invasion.

Think advocacy, but for the overlords instead of the underdogs. Same same - just as considered as when a Palestinian creative person considers how they can pitch their creative mind to reach ‘the world’ about Palestine. Like that, but in reverse, and with wads of cash and R&D to back you up. From America to Palestine.

A case in point is Cards Against Humanity, pulled out last night at a small gathering, our group of friends breaking the fast with a culturally-celebratory iftar of musakhan, shorbet ades, hummus, falafel and genuine local Palestinian dates from a collective in Jericho the likes of which are beyond your experience, gentle reader, unless you’re not only here in Palestine, but also have a farmer friend who’s shared the secret stash they set aside for their own family.

We needed a moment of joy, a mental health break from the carnage on our phones, as well as our own day-to-day experiences of life under Occupation, from the settlements surrounding us, the respiratory issues and skin rashes we’re increasingly getting from the casual dispersal of heavy military chemicals everywhere, the endless wasted hours spent in traffic because of the checkpoints, and specifically - my friend’s dad’s stroke last night, that’s linked to all of this, as our bodies age faster here, from the stress.

So, someone pulled out Cards Against Humanity, and the room erupted in laughter about piss porn, Confederate flags, poor people, Auschwitz, and “not giving a shit about the Third World.”

Alone, isolated in a room of ‘never been to America’ assorted humans, I clearly heard the cultural invasion of neoconservative USA in the flip of every black and white card. The dulcet tones of Ron Paul and his Libertarian cavalry. The freedom to enjoy it all, no bounds or ethics, nothing too gross or weird or dark. A kind of freedom that erodes ancient culture as we let our guards down, and don’t want to seem like a prude, or like someone with values or decency. No fuddy-duddy. We’re modern - an experience of what Yeats called ‘the click of a well-made box.’ The cards make a ‘click’ as dopamine floods our system, and we show we are in the loop, we understand the joke. We are in the know when it comes to American references and American values, and we want to laugh about porn, Black people, and massacres because, we are not sticks in the mud.

But while there’s a lot to be said for dark humor in a time of genocide, behind closed doors and in the safety of friends, this is the chink that Max Temkin knowingly built his Cards literally Against Humanity to leverage, a system of Libertarian propaganda to crawl, worm-like, into this tiny crack. The outlet of humor becoming a chimney in which his evil Santa Claus crawls down, bringing smut back into homes and hearths as a display of peer pressure and public perusal of porn poems infects Muslim minds with germs of American political philosophies, direct to our brains.

The worm is in. It came through my eyes, reading the cards, and ears, listening to our shared laughs. Through our skin, as warmth of community. But the Wittgenstein and Ron Paul political philosophy is foreign, and it’s not accidental. Max Temkin made his product to do this. It’s a fun and freedom delivery system for free market capitalism, a tool of propaganda that’s more effective than it’s been given credit, even in the States.

It’s impossible to quantify how useful Cards Against Humanity was to Trump or Elon, but with my American eyes, I see the full-throttle attack on Palestinian cultural values from this weapon of propaganda, built by a Zionist who has been accused of rape. His radical acts of freedom are wrapped up in words to be said aloud, in front of others. A psychological tool of persuasion more intimate than sex. Groupthink. Fuck Max.

“Lightly lived, and easily forgotten,” as the admittedly Australian, but no less settler colonial, Wittgenstein encouraged, his language games theory creating the foundation for the concept of these stupid, toxic cards. The philosophy graduate, Max Temkin, and former presidential political strategist clearly understands that cultural export, as well as internal US cultural dominance, can be wrapped up and spread via these little culturally-specific memes of USA reference points, bringing chess pieces whole and intact to the MENA region ready to make a chess board out of this valuable piece of non-American land. Also the ‘Riviera’ that’s only 80km away from where I’m sitting.

The philosophy is the opposite of Mohammed’s, peace be upon him, or Socrates even, who believed that the considered life brings meaning. These Cards Against Anything are the opposite of local to this ancient region.

It’s idiocracy, not ‘edgy,’ despite its reputation.

Nothing cool about being a dick. Especially being a dick while removing your internal filters about what’s possible to say in public, and distorting your own mind with porn imagery, and normalization of all of the above.

But let’s not get too wrapped up in this one example of cultural invasion. Instead, let’s consider Palestine’s cultural movers and shakers, and the broader strokes of what this fragment of the American cultural portfolio means to Palestine, as we brace ourselves to fight by revising our own cultural strategy in the face of cultural invasion tools like this one, which is only one of many.

There’s a cultural genocide - an active cultural genocide - happening right now, mass killings and incarcerations of cultural workers, mass destruction of cultural buildings and places, whether it’s Gaza’s mosques, museums, ancient cities, galleries, libraries, universities, studios and screens, or the carving up of the West Bank’s bantustans and squatting of theatres and bookshop spaces, internet access blocked by a digital wall, and the looming threat of our communication devices exploding, which nobody says out loud.

This is also why there’s a cultural exodus, with many of Palestine’s most beloved and exceptional artists, musicians, theatre-makers, and cultural intelligentsia seeking out residencies or tours overseas, sitting this genocide out while they focus on advocacy internationally, and the ability to get paid for their creative labor - both.

Totally understandable why anyone would do that, given the chance, which cultural workers often have, as the West reaches out to invite these creators to entertain and create for them, their appreciation and desire to help manifesting in invitations that import Palestine’s most talented creatives to the West in a mass exodus, pretty much.

But, it’s the combination of cultural genocide, cultural exodus, and cultural invasion that creates the triple-tined fork of cultural erasure. Of colonial conquest. Of hearts and minds being weakened, and cultural imperialism gaining a lasting foothold, and the memes of America worming their ways into Palestinian grey matter, and winding up this 6,000-ish years culture of localness with a Bud Light and some pretzels.

While Palestine’s cultural workers are almost universally fixated on advocacy - on art for the Western gaze - as urged and encouraged by every Palestinian arts institution, pretty much, and the funders thereof - they are leaving a gaping cultural whole to be filled by smart and savvy cultural invaders.

Chimneys are everywhere, waiting for evil Santas.

Many American artists are devoid of intentional desire to export American values to the East on the back of their labor. Billie Eilish is not trying to sabotage the MENA region when she’s in her room with Finneas making rhymes, any more than the Coke logo designer whose iconic logo is across the street, in the corner of my eye as I type in the shade of this balcony, the Palestinian spring air laced with cedar pollens, and microscopic molecules of genocidal chemical waste. Who knows, maybe a trace of white phosphorous, too, as the sound of F-16s pierces the sonic airspace above now as I type, laden with more bombs on their way to meet Gazan concrete and flesh.

But the SYSTEM is certainly created with export in mind, the Hollywood machine is a purveyor of cultural dominance, and some of the leading minds are indeed intentional in their creative process, willing participants of filtered, highly-nuanced propaganda. Not everyone is as innocent as Finneas.

Gal Gadot comes to mind, a person absolutely aware of the messages she creates with her skill, connections and beauty, not to mention her deep, continuously strengthened communications work for Zionists such as Sara Greenberg, the Mossad spy, and Gilad Erdan, the Israeli Ambassador, plus of course, her own husband, Ynon Kreiz, who is a real estate developer with properties on stolen land.

Many of the finest minds, from Spielberg on one side, to Tilda Swinton on the other, are absolutely savvy adults crafting their craft specifically and intentionally to sway cultures, and potentially, to culturally invade - Spielberg weaving narratives from the threads of emotion mixed with politics, such as 1941, Lincoln and War Horse, and my personal heroine, Tilda, presenting her political advocacy on behalf of Palestine in her genius Berlinale lifetime achievement award acceptance speech. Worth your time.

Artists are philosophers. Philosophers are politicians. There’s a strange and pervasive idea that artists should stay out of politics, but it negates cultural work to the minstrel-ing of entertainment. And let’s face it, entertainment is also often built from politics, as we engage with considered ideas and handiwork of intelligent adults, intentionally creating diversions for our pleasure, and sometimes in order to slip in a meme or two, like the repulsive Cards mentioned above.

Artists do politics, we always have, from Mozart, to the Sex Pistols, to Dorian Electra, the philosophy major / pop musician, seen here in conversation with Aaron Moulton.

The antidote to cultural invasion is not cultural advocacy, despite the policies of most mainstream Palestinian cultural leaders and institutions, cajoling Palestinian cultural workers into making work again and again to advocate to audiences in the West. It’s a legacy that’s understandable, but nonetheless, no longer the best approach, suggested mostly from the top down, by bureaucrats and NGO workers, as opposed to artists.

I mean, how many times do Palestinians have to advocate until the guy at the back has a chance to figure out there’s a f’n live-streamed genocide going on?

The military strength of the American / European/ Israeli combined military machine is much stronger than the resistance fighters’ arsenal of rockets, and likewise, their cultural machine is far superior to Palestine’s in terms of generating content.

They make cultural genocide big-time - and cultural invasion big-time - and the result is cultural exodus, and that is ramping up and accelerating big-time, also.

So how do we fight this triple-tine cultural attack, if not with advocacy?

Strengthen local culture. Protection via strengthening locals here - not by making culture for Western audiences (for sure, ALSO making stuff for Western audiences, but not exclusively, which is basically what Palestine is doing now).

Make stuff for local eyes, by local people.

More and better stuff, by locals, for locals.

And P.S. maybe for young Palestinians, especially, if kids inspire you. Just a thought.

Delegate advocacy *mostly* to diaspora Palestinians because, they’re better at it. They straddle both worlds, and understand the nuance of the Empire’s cultural lexicon and references. They have a hyphen, and can use it for advocacy far better than the average Palestinian-born, Palestinian-bred local. Their advocacy art hits home far harder.

Why the small PS suggestion to focus on making stuff for younger audiences inside Palestine? Amer Shomali, the Palestinian artist and cultural leader, suggested that cultural lineages are broken in 15 years. A gap of 15 years is enough to damage culture because that’s the length of each cultural generation.

We can see what this looks like via the Palestinian diaspora; their cohesion, tenacity and sumud are undeniable, but the effects of skipping one cultural generation inside their land indelibly made its mark. 30 years later, diasporic individuals born outside have hyphenated national identities that are generally switched - the primary being the one influenced by the place where they pay rent. Palestinian becomes more of a culinary identity in the generation after that - the loss of their culture being a gain for comfort foods, as Palestinians born in diaspora cling to tubs of hummus, or made in their own kitchens from canned chickpeas, bottled lemon juice, and canola oil. This is obviously not true for everyone, but there is a massive tendency for diasporic people to lose more and more cultural cohesion with every 15 years.

This is increasingly true of Palestinians inside Palestine too, maybe just the evolution of an ancient culture during this era of capitalist takeover, poverty, and urbanization.

But that’s kinda the point.

Empowering local Palestinians inside Palestine, as primary guardians of a culture that the Empire is intentionally working on erasing, and keeping our fingers crossed not to spend massive amounts of time aiming to please international audiences but instead, to build cultural work for folks who are here.

This is how we protect Palestine from cultural invasion, whether intentional or casual. We create cultural cohesion - cultural protection via lowkey cultural engineering, with Palestinians here doing the cultural engineering via creating stuff for their own. Yes, if you’re a Palestinian cultural worker, please go on tour and do stuff overseas, please do enjoy cultural exchanges with creative peers, and earn cash over there. But don’t do everything always for advocacy. Stay focused on audiences here.

Let’s empower Palestinian creative of all kinds to bring their gaze back inward - back to their audiences inside Palestine, as the primary audience for the arts they create. Not advocacy as the primary cultural activity, which is where we’re at right now, for sure. But for the population who never left - fortifying them against cultural invasion that’s coming in drips, streams and torrents. In Cards Against Them.

We utilize the same subtle tools for this work as the cultural invasion - meaning, fun and laughter, cool stuff, and joy. We are allowed to make serious and sincere content, but cannot neglect the local cultural need to let of steam and have fun, which Cards Against Humanity seemingly uniquely services at this time of genocide.

We need a laugh. We need local Palestinian creatives to create local pressure valves.

This is how we create cultural resilience, and protect Palestinian culture from erosion, invasion, exodus, and the fourth tine - appropriation.

When Palestine’s cultural workers again turn the gaze to local audiences, locals will be better equipped to resist appropriation also, as the advocacy lands on local ears. These appropriative acts of cultural theft (such as the little Israeli flag that spears the falafels inside the Zionist state, that you see below) will lose any semblance of reality for the people that matter - Palestinian guardians of this ancient culture here in Palestine. The zombie population over the Green Line are already a lost cause, and if they’re not, they’re much likelier to respond to advocates from their own communities.

For Israeli Jews struggling to understand what’s wrong with the photo below, please go ahead and ask folks like Becca Strober, a brilliant educator for this segment of the global population, with her insights addressing their specific questions and needs.

For the general American population, I suggest Mohammed El-Kurd - my favorite go-to Palestinian-American poet and pro-Palestine advocate, he inspires me daily, and I do suggest you make a habit of listening to his informed, clear voice that’s been advocating since he was a child of 9 years old, when he was living in his family home, and it was invaded and occupied by soldiers. He knows his stuff, and is now sharing nuggets of pure brilliance from his current apartment in New York.

Feeling pride and knowing the intricacies of all of the Palestinian ancient dishes will help Palestinians in Palestine to feel pride. And likewise, every other part of their new and ancient experiences of their living, breathing culture, somehow still intact with an unbroken lineage over millennia in a way that’s hard to fathom for Americans unless they’re indigenous tribal members. If you yourself are a settler colonizer, even if you’re swimming in your waters without any awareness of being one, well - I do suggest that you listen up.

Look at Sean Sherman. Note how he shares his culinary culture with people outside of his target audience, but 80% of his work is aimed at his own people.

Likewise Palestine. We need Palestinian Seans, and Palestinian creatives in every act of culture-making. Every medium of art, music, digital design, etc etc.

This is how we get free.

This is a key for survival.

Let’s free Palestinian cultural workers to do the cultural work needed for Palestinians living in Palestine. If you want to support this work, I know of only one organization that’s exclusively doing this, and that would be my own org. Learn about our work, and keep the lights on by donating, or subscribe to this SubStack and like, share, all the good things… We welcome exceptional mentors to contact us also, and to join our robust support network of cultural workers in the West for peer-to-peer interactions, while understanding their international knowledge is often inapplicable to Palestinian creatives, who are not the same as folks from the West.

Different culture, and that’s why we provide cultural ‘translation’ and - a bridge.

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