Witches, capitalism and Palestine

Everything is connected

The below is a transcript of a speech I gave on December 15 at the Free Palestine march in Naarm/Melbourne. A good deal of this information was gleaned from the research I did for my book I Don’t: The Case Against Marriage, but I have also lately been inspired by India Rakusen’s podcast Witch on BBC Sounds. You can listen to that here.

If you are seeing my work for the first time, I am a feminist writer, performer and activist living on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation in what is called Australia. To receive more of my insights and analysis, subscribe to me here! A paid subscription costs less than the price of a weekly coffee, but goes a long way to helping me to remain independent - and independent media is increasingly crucial in these malicious times.

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Photo credit: Sermet Kilic (IG: @brissendenkilic)

For 76 years, the illegal state of Israel has brutalised the people of Palestine.

With the support of western “democracies” and self fancying “civilised” nations. white imperialism has ensured that Palestinians have been held under the iron grip of western powered Zionism, concealing its crimes within a media that has rarely been honest about the truth behind the illegal state of Israel.

But I don’t need to tell anyone here the details of Israel’s violence. We all know it. And if you didn’t before, the last year has certainly made it impossible for any rational, morally minded person to not have had their view of Israel - a view carefully cultivated by and enforced by those same “civilised” western nations and “free” media - completely upended.

We have seen the destruction. We have seen the bodies. We have seen the children, some of them alive, many of them dead. We have seen the mothers of those babies, screaming for them. We have seen their fathers frantically trying to pull them out from beneath collapsed buildings. We have seen so many people in the world turn away, because they are either too afraid to disrupt the security of their own lives, their own employment, their own relationships - or because they are simply too indifferent, their indifference enabled by decades of western racism and colonialism, and its grotesque appeal to white supremacists, closet or otherwise.

Through all of the horror, the violence, the depraved, brutal actions of the US funded state of Israel to dehumanise the targets of their colonial oppression, the murder of children, mothers, fathers, people, poets, journalists, teachers, students, artists, cooks, entire family lines - we have also seen the immense power of Palestinians. Their resistance has mobilised millions of people across the world, rallying us to stand up against the forces of evil that shield themselves behind words like ‘policy’, ‘freedom’ and ‘peace’.

We are the people. And there is nothing more powerful than a movement that will not rest.

As a vocal ally to the Free Palestine movement - and as someone who is not afraid to say loudly and plainly FUCK ISRAEL - over the last year, I have been told repeatedly by agitated Zionists that I shouldn’t speak about things I know nothing about. That I’ve OBVIOUSLY never been to Israel so I couldn’t possibly have any idea what I’m saying. As if somehow there could be any scenario in which the slaughter of children would be made understandable to me. That it could be made acceptable. This insistence on proximity to brutality in order to have authority to speak against it is strange - I have never needed to live in 1940s Nazi Germany to know that the pursuit of Jews and the horrors of the Holocaust were wrong.

But okay, let’s just say I stay in my line for a moment - and I’ll ask you to have a bit of faith and stay with me as I go somewhere seemingly far removed from the current assault on Palestinians and the illegal state of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. It will all make sense soon.

My ancestral lineage partly takes me back to Scotland. A good part of my research lately has involved looking at the European witch trials, which started in the early 15th century and lasted for roughly 300 years, the most intense period of which was betwen 1560 to 1630. It’s estimated that around 80,000 people were killed during this dark period in history, with the vast majority of them being women. Perhaps unsurprisingly given the country’s continued commitment to being on the wrong side of history, the majority of these executions were conducted in Germany. But in Scotland also experienced its own frenzy, prompted by the paranoia of Scottish King James VI, who believed a fierce storm during his new wife’s ocean transit from Denmark was caused by the work of witches. His obsession was so great that he wrote a book on witch hunting called “Daemenologie”. You might recognise him from his other commissioned work, The King James Bible, which can be found in the drawers of many motels across the world.

Under the direction of James VI (and with the support of England’s Withcraft Act of 1541, which defined withcraft as a felony punishable by death) an estimated 1500-2500 people were executed as witches, again, the vast majority of them women. The main method of execution involved strangling them, then burning them. Many more were accused and tortured, enabled by the Pope’s decree that Witchcraft was considered ‘crimen exceptum’ - a crime apart, and therefore not subject to normal laws around human torture.

Very few people protested against the witch hunts and the subsequent executions, I’m sure partly out of fear but probably mostly out of the selfish human instinct that if one sides with an enforcer, they can be spared the boot. What they did often do in Scotland was gather to watch the executions, as people did across Europe also…and as some people in Israel are doing today, congregating in parties to cheer on the dropping of bombs on Gaza.

In addition to watching the murder of innocent people, the attendees of the witch executions were occasionally also able to witness the punishment of their children. As the Italian scholar Silvia Federici writes in her book Caliban and the Witch, one method used to punish the accused was to tether their daughters in front of the murder of their mothers and whip them while they watched her burn. It was seen as a deterrent not just for them, but for anyone else who might be watching…which is also perhaps not dissimilar from the murder today of children caught throwing stones at Israeli tanks or militants, or even just playing in a way that seems to reflect a love for living.

The most concentrated violence of this regime continued for well over a century until a new Witchcraft Act was passed in 1735. This new law stated it was a crime to ACCUSE someone of witchcraft or of having magical powers, with the punishment a maximum sentence of a year in prison. They’d got it wrong! No biggie.

Now, one of the other drivers of the witch trials - at least in England - was something called “the enclosures”. Basically, the aristocracy (which included the Catholic Church) had always gobbled up all the resources of the land and exploited the labour of the common people. Once upon a time, the “common folk” had at least been able to live on common land, working together and operating communally with, yes, the little they had but also no monthly rent to pay.

But that wasn’t enough for an aristocracy creating a new society under “capitalism”, and who began to realise the value of the common land the peasantry was given permission to live on while they laboured for the king. If the nobility took the land, they could turn it into smaller plots and make more money from it! Progress! And who cares about the peasants, the oldest and/or poorest of which had nowhere to go?

Between 1604 and 1914, over 5200 individual enclosure acts were legally put in place, sectioning off almost 7 million acres of previously commonly held land and funnelling its resources and wealth capital back into what refer to today as the 1%. And of course, it wasn’t just on its own land that the English empire was doing this - we are standing on stolen land that has still never been ceded, and in which the most fervently Zionist of political leaders refuse to acknowledge the sovereignty of First Nations people and disrespect the rightful flag of this country.

When land is valuable - say, when it has a rich supply of gas offshore - the well being of its custodians is seen as insignificant by those who want to steal it for themselves.

It’s starting to sound a little familiar, yes?

Where do these laws come from? The laws that give permission to murder people under accusations of consorting with the devil, while also conveniently eradicating a population - in the case of witches, older women past reproductive age and with diminished physical capacity for farming - whose existence wasn’t seen as valuable? The laws that allowed for the creation of landlords, making what is a fundamental human right - the right to live without fear that shelter and safety will be removed - now something we accept as a privilege we must pay for?

These are fabricated “laws” that allowed for the theft of entire countries due to the greedy, colonialist whims of white supremacists; and we now see them extrapolated before us in the same public executions, the same burnings, the same tortures that characterised the same witch trials that we reflect on as an example of “the horrors of history”.

The “laws” that may soon enough declare it to be illegal to even criticise the illegal state of Israel. “Laws” that have already made it “illegal” to expose the duplicitous, punitive intentions of secret groups working together to harm the livelihoods of Palestinian and pro Palestinian activists - fierce warriors like Randa Abdel-Fattah, Sara Saleh, and our beloved Nasser Mashni.

The bitter pill of the witch trials was not that the law decided to officially declare it illegal to accuse someone of witchcraft - but that those responsible for murdering thousands in the name of crushing it were never brought to justice.

On that note: arrest Biden NOW. Arrest Netanyahu NOW. Arrest Albanese NOW.

Despite a modern movement in Scotland to officially pardon those accused and executed as witches, it remains to be done.

Does it matter, all of these years later? Yes, of course. Because as Natalie Don, author of the bill says, we need to put a marker in history that we, here, today, said NO. This was and is WRONG.

Because as she says, in 2000 or 3000 years time, people will speak about the period of the 16th-21st century as if it is one blob of time. If we do nothing now to challenge injustice, how is the future to know the difference?

The irony is that today, most people don’t believe in magic, even though it’s around us all the time. It’s here with us now. It lives on in the words of Refaat, it moves through the activism of Bisan, it’s in the photographs of Motaz. And it’s in everyone of us here, in the ritual chants of Free Free Palestine and From The River To the Sea!

Every time we say it, we believe more and more that it will come true. That is the power of magic, which has always been the collective power of the people.

And because I’m staying in my lane today, I want to leave you with the words of a land activist in England. This is someone who is part of a collective of people fighting against the ongoing land enclosures which still happen today, and still deny freedom and the right of shelter to the working class.

“What is a law, but a sequence of words under whose spell we are all beguiled?”

We have been beguiled by the spell of Zionism, and the laws - both social and soon to be legislative - that restrict us from challenging not just it but also white supremacy, the rule of the oligarchs and the suppression of humanity for the benefit of the ruling class.

But the only law that matters is the will of the people!

And WE say:

Free, free Palestine.

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