Words Cannot Express How Much I Love This Bird.

Headquarters of the French Communist Party, Paris. Oscar Niemeyer.

Le Corbusier, Palais des Filateurs, Ahmedabad, Inde, 1954. Photo: Ester Bruzkus.

The Hotel Añaza, whose construction started in 1973 and stopped in 1975.

Tenerife, Canary Islands - Spain.

© Roberto Conte (2023)

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you should be able to say “fuck if i know” to customers

Robert McCall, 1975

ilan pappé is so surgically precise in his criticism of zionist liberals and leftists and he has really highlighted what frustrates me the most about their allyship (which largely revolves around the sanctimonious stance of not wanting palestinians dead, otherwise known as the bare fucking minimum)

What is most illuminating – in the dialogue the liberal Zionists have with themselves on the pages of Haaretz – is their vicious attack on any one associating colonialism with Israel. [...] The Global Left is guilty of two ‘sins’, in the eyes of the liberal Zionists: one, it refers to Israel as a settler-colonial state and two, it provides a context for the Hamas attack on October 7.

There is no middle ground anymore. There is no way of supporting the liberal occupier, the progressive ethnic cleanser and the leftist genocider. The attempt to frame the stance I am calling for as racist or antisemitic will not hold water. It is a matter of where you would see yourself at this critical juncture in history, and how you value your own sense of self respect.

many of them are willing to criticize everything about israel but fall just short of admitting their role as settler colonizers or its existence as a settler colonialist state. its a very telling stance, because it keeps them defensive instead of apologetic. and i do believe the first step to any progress is real acknowledgement of what zionism has taken from palestinians and how to repair this. it's not tangential, it's central.

i also think without acknowledging or understanding the settler colonialism paradigm, any and all solidarity with palestinians is inherently frightening to them because they don't understand that all previously and currently colonized peoples see themselves in the palestinian struggle. instead they see solidarity with palestinians as anti-semitism (solidarity against israel instead of solidarity with palestine) because they misunderstand the palestinian cause and their role within it.

its an intellectual weakness that comes from either willful ignorance, brainwashing or a lack of real empathy. their allyship and their role will always be conditional until they fully understand this. until they do both palestinian resistance and solidarity will continue to feel more threatening to them than the violent apparatus of the israeli military state that is literally keeping them in a perpetual state of war. all their attempts to seek peace without confronting this are either naïve and ineffectual or serve to obfuscate their own brutal military regime even as it perpetuates horror in their name.

Israelism (Erin Axelman & Sam Eilertsen, 2023)

In '55, the Ford Motor Company, failing to divine a name for their new car, requested the help of prize-winning poet Marianne Moore. The resulting flurry of names, while all rejected, make for amazing motor-carriage titles.

The car, eventually, was christened 'Edsel' - it then flopped, and became a symbol of economic failure. Perhaps, while unsuccessful with Ford, Moore's names might have felt more at home with Coupris. A selection: