In my case, Israel/Palestine, in the column I penned for the better part of six years, the appropriately-titled Despite All the Amputations.
A line borrowed from my favourite Velvet Underground song, “Rock and Roll”, I came up with the name after watching footage on CNN of an Israeli artillery strike on a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon. Back home from school in Tel Aviv at the time, I was having a hard time devising something punk-sounding, and the grisly scene on TV made me think of the Velvets song.
The columns and articles I wrote over the next six years served as an outlet for my anxiety about the decline of the peace process under Benjamin Netanyahu’s first government and the Al-Aksa Intifada, years during which I frequently returned from the United States to see my ageing father. The veteran security official was understandably upset by the violence.
Publishing these pieces in a magazine that often featured figures like Fugazi’s Ian MacKaye, producer Steve Albini, and riot grrrls Sleater-Kinney on its cover felt genuinely revolutionary, as critical writing on Israel was still in its infancy in the American press. There were few outlets to publish it outside an independent magazine, where punk served as a vehicle for leftist politics.
Although Punk Planet is not as well remembered as it should be, it remains a common point of reference for American journalists I work with today, several of whom contacted me because of what I wrote about Israel in its pages. The most important of these individuals is longtime Battleground contributor Ari Paul, who recently launched his Ruthless Cosmopolitan newsletter.
An undergraduate at the University of Michigan, Paul looked up my phone number in the San Francisco telephone directory and called me in the summer of 2004, shortly after I had resigned from Punk Planet to take the managing editor’s position at Tikkun, the now-defunct, leftist Jewish bimonthly. Ari told me how much he appreciated my writing, and we became fast friends.
Unsurprisingly, Israeli and Jewish topics have always been high on our list of concerns. We’ve often discussed ways to do a better job of covering them in The Battleground, without replicating the efforts of Israeli publications like Haaretz and 972, and Diaspora platforms such as Jewish Currents, Mondoweiss and Vashti.
There are only so many ways to innovate on the topic in a smart scene like this, which we’ve taken much inspiration from over the years. While it won’t be Paul’s only beat in Ruthless Cosmopolitan, it will undoubtedly be a high-profile one, particularly as we try to localise it for our European readership. There is no Jewish work in the EU press like this except ours.
Enter Ari Paul and the exceptional pieces he’s written for us over the past few weeks, highlighted by his blistering analysis of Tommy Robinson’s visit to Israel. Nothing upends discourse about Israel/Palestine in the Brussels Bubble, as locals like to call it, quite like this, and we can’t thank Paul enough for leading the way.
A regular contributor to FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), which commissions the best political writing about the news media in the US, with bylines in Haaretz, The Forward, Jacobin and The Guardian, among others, Ari Paul has an enviable résumé. We’re honoured he’s chosen to get closer to The Battleground. As his pal of two decades and his editor, I couldn’t be more gratified.
Please consider subscribing to The Battleground to support Paul’s work and the pioneering journalism he’s bringing to European media. It’s a big deal. In the meantime, I’ll savour the irony that I get to collaborate with someone I met half a lifetime ago through a DIY punk ‘zine in Chicago.
Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.
