Issue 33: A bag in the apparatus

Dearest reader,

In the summer of 2018, I was standing in a security line at the Ben Gurion airport. I was watching a handful of security staff, all of whom were white, as they harassed and mocked an unaccompanied black man trying to get through. The man being harassed had on a blue button-up shirt, wore dark slacks tightened at the hip by a leather belt, and carried an old-fashioned dark briefcase that had clearly lived through no shortage of airport security apparatuses. He looked as though he had just been arriving from or was on the way to a professional engagement of sorts.

They asked him a lot of questions. I don’t know about what, exactly, but the questions seemed to be inquiries into the man himself, where he was going, what was in his bag, why he was standing where he was standing, why he wasn’t standing where he wasn’t standing, why his briefcase carried—as the guards pulled the items out one-by-one—each object it carried, and why, ultimately, the man possessed the apparently hilarious audacity to travel at this particular time, through this particular passage, on this particular morning of summer.

The man spoke in what sounded to me like flawless Hebrew, and I observed him as the subject of the guards’ collective attention and entertainment for the better part of an hour before they finally seemed no longer entertained and waved him through.

I don’t know the story of this unaccompanied traveler. I don’t know who his family is, which parents he came from, which, if any, God he believes in, what dreams he dreams of, what fears interrupt his sleep at night, or what awaited him beyond that passage of our intersection. But at that particular moment, on that particular morning of summer, I remember noticing how this particular scene was marked by a visceral familiarity.

The scene I observed felt familiar because it’s a symptom of a culture I know and, in many ways, come from—a culture marked by relentless protection of mercantile interests, marked by white supremacist doctrine so deeply entangled with the systems of society and order—or, rather, systems of society and illusions of order—that it does not seem unreasonable to imagine that it may live on for as long as the systems themselves. A culture of colonial expansion and apartheid separation commingled with the relentless spinning of an infinitely verbalistic web of so-called “complexities” and “nuance” masking ethnic displacement and genocide. A culture marked by the weightlessness of its promises—all made with the cynical inevitability of being broken—seeped in delirious claims of moral righteousness and divine providence to justify chauvinism and territorial expansion.

I’d like to leave you today with a quote from the great James Baldwin, in an open letter published by The Nation in September of 1979, almost forty-five years ago.

But the state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews; it was created for the salvation of the Western interests. This is what is becoming clear (I must say that it was always clear to me). The Palestinians have been paying for the British colonial policy of “divide and rule” and for Europe’s guilty Christian conscience for more than thirty years.

James Baldwin in Open Letter to the Born Again. Published by The Nation on September 29, 1979.

That’s all I have for you this week. Thank you for reading, and I hope you’re safe.

Love,
Reef