Survival Possibilities
A Student Artist’s Reflections on Ceasefire
by Griffy LaPlante, artisan-organizer in New York & Minneapolis
So much has been said about the ceasefire in Gaza, and there is so much still to be said.1 We know the ceasefire announcement was met with street celebrations across the world; we also know it is tenuous, and even if some of its terms are met, it does little or nothing to change the technocratic and political power imbalance that has been wielded so viciously by Israel.
And still—those street celebrations.
Israel has used its stated intention—safety for Jews, achieved by extinguishing the threat of Hamas—to justify its actions, including murdering Palestinian civilians, destroying infrastructure and food supplies, and blocking cross-border aid. Since October 7th, 2023, Israel has also detained without charges thousands of Palestinians, including children—an egregiously asymmetrical response underscored by the fact that there are approximately a hundred-fold more Palestinians held by Israel than there are Israelis held by Hamas.2 Not to mention that Israel has been killing and detaining Palestinians without cause since decades before October 7th.
Israel’s guiding principles in these actions, recent and otherwise, seem to be:
Jewish safety will be achieved through oppressing Palestinians and other Arab people.
An escalating campaign of brute force will eliminate the threat of guerrilla dissent against Israeli authority once and for all.
In pursuit of such outcomes, civilian casualties are acceptable, as long as measures are taken to minimize them.
The ends will justify the means.3
I am hardly the first to point this out, but the idea that an authoritarian regime could eliminate guerrilla dissent forever is laughable, given that authoritarianism is what gives rise to guerrilla tactics in the first place. But I’m more hung up on a different question: How are we supposed to measure the cost-benefit analysis of risking civilian lives? Civilian deaths should be “minimized” according to what calculations, and whose? I’m thinking now about Paul Atreides, the antihero of the Dune series, allowing religious warfare to be waged in his name because he’s “seen,” in visions he claims to be real, alternate futures where the absence of warfare in the present leads to worse suffering down the line. Netanyahu is Paul Atreides in this analogy, but so is Biden. So was Obama. So are the people in our lives who say that murdering civilians is a fair trade-off for “peace.”
It’s wartime rationing writ large, but instead of sugar and eggs it’s human life. But as Americans, it’s not our lives we’re being asked to sacrifice, but the lives of people far away. The only thing we have been asked to sacrifice is the ethical consistency that comes along with refusing to accept the intentional killing of even a single life as a reasonable result of any action at all.4
In terms of short-term survivability, the loss of this ethical consistency pales wildly in comparison to the daily terror and grief experienced by Palestinians since long before October 7, 2023. But it is not nothing. It’s a cavern too horrific to look into, juxtaposed by a ledge of culpability, which we find increasingly acrobatic ways to avoid falling from. I do not exempt myself from such avoidance—I haven’t looked directly into that abyss, either. I’ve glanced, that’s all, which is partly why I’m documenting my dissent by writing this essay instead of setting myself on fire.
Prints by the art action collective Spill Paint Not Oil (spillpaint.org).
I recently found myself on an airplane—a fraught place to be, given the aerospace industry’s intrinsic ties to war—reading a 1991 essay by Umberto Eco called “Reflections on War.” Eco, who died in 2016, was an Italian novelist, professor, and democratic thinker, and in this essay he writes about the need for his fellow “intellectuals”—which I take to mean all manner of artists, writers, and teachers—to make the case against war. Eco sees this as the intellectual’s duty, a duty which, in his eyes, most of his contemporaries shirked.
The case for war, at least when it has been made to me, usually relies on the claim that war is strategic from a utilitarian perspective—that it can be a tool of ushering in a greater good for a greater number of people.
I believe this to be a lie. War does not clear a path to peace; war obscures that path, strewing it with land mines and toxic rubble. War forecloses lifeways and possibilities. Any one possibility opened up by an act of war comes at the expense of more, and more promising, possibilities that existed before that act.
I’ve been thinking a lot about such possibilities—which of them might remain to us in this time of ceasefire, and what we can do now to help actualize the best of them.
I have to confess, a little shyly, my loyalty to an old idea: that the opposite of war isn’t love, but art. Which isn’t to say that I think of these things (war, love, art) as natural or fixed; they’re constructs, given meaning by the frameworks we develop to understand them. Here’s my proposed framework: Seeing acts of art and war as reversals or inverses of one another, even when operating on hugely different scales. This framework makes the phrase “the art of war” a contradiction in terms; war cannot be art because it destroys far more than it creates, if it creates anything; because, in Eco’s words, it “annuls all human initiative”; because it makes immutable and totalizing decisions (life, death, mercy, revenge) on other people’s behalf. Whereas art, at least theoretically, reminds people of the decisions that are authentically theirs to make. It seizes and returns agency to the people. As engines of generating or destroying possibilities for collective, long-term survival, art opens up what war closes down. Art resurrects, or at least it can. At least it can some of the time. To use metaphysical rock musician Nick Cave’s metaphor, art is “the Jesus idea” (“Shimmering softly among all the deficient ideas, gently but persistently tugging at your sleeve—the Jesus idea”5), in addition to being an exercise of human creativity that creates new Jesus ideas. Art contains within it a holy sort of spirit, but only if it leaves the solitude of its maker and walks itself over to the neighbor’s house. Only if it travels.
This ceasefire was once just a longed-for possibility in our imagination; now it is a reality being lived out by living, breathing humans, some of whom would have been killed by now if this moment of de-escalation, no matter how limited it is, hadn’t been reached. Such a de-escalation owes nothing to the conscience of global power brokers, in Israel or elsewhere. Truthfully, I don’t know what to attribute the ceasefire to, aside from the peoples of Palestine’s unruly refusal to fall away quietly from the face of the Earth. It certainly does not signify Netanyahu’s willingness to listen to reason or righteousness. But it does revive possibilities that were, just two weeks ago, nonexistent or extinct.
For those of us living far from zones of active conflict, I don’t think we can shy away from this moment of rapidly expanding possibilities. We have to respond to it in our lives and in our work—in our printmaking, pottery, theater, and whatever else our work is. I don’t just mean redirecting our energy into signs or murals, though there will likely be times for that. I mean that we should make art that breathes to the rhythm of ceasefire—lasting, irrevocable, everywhere. We should take seriously the democratizing, imaginary-making, dissent-fomenting capabilities of art—even if we struggle, as I do daily, to trust that our craft carries even one of those capabilities. And we should stop acting as if our alternative lifestyles exempt us from participation in the war economy.
Through no fault or virtue of our own, we American-born are in a singular and exorbitantly disproportionate position of responsibility. Although we may lose our jobs or institutional affiliations, we can speak, write, and make art without significant threat of being assassinated or imprisoned, at least for now. We live in a deeply and ever-more corrupt democracy, but a democracy nonetheless—again, at least for now. And our country is in a strange marriage with Israel, which can only wage war if the U.S. government allows it to. And the U.S. government will only allow it to if we Americans don’t threaten to tear out our government’s throats with our teeth if they do.
“It is an intellectual duty to proclaim the inconceivability of war,” writes Eco, “even if there were no alternative solutions.” This, I believe, is also the artist’s duty. To lend images and melodies to the case against war. To make pacifist work that is far from passive.
May the spirit of ceasefire possess our work, give it clear eyes and fangs.
Including about the IDF continuing to kill civilians in Gaza and Lebanon, as recently as January 26th.
Conversations in Israel and the U.S. have centered the Israeli hostages while mostly ignoring the Palestinian detainees (notice there who counts as a “hostage” versus a “detainee”). Some might perhaps explain this by articulating their concern that the conditions faced by the Israeli hostages are more life-threatening. But Palestinians are dying in Israeli custody—at least 54 since October 7th, according to a recent statement by the Commission of Detainees’ Affairs and the Palestinian Prisoner Society.
“But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
I do not deny the occasional legitimacy of violence used for the defense of self or other. But I reject the terms of the conventional argument that positions mass, politically-sanctioned murder as self-defense.
From Issue #130 of Nick Cave’s blog, The Red Hand Files.
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Yes, so well said in so many ways. Thank you for your inspiring analysis and calls to action!